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DARFUR NEWS - Google News

2010-03-10 02:57:12 GMT

Scarce water the root cause of Darfur conflict?
FinalCall.com News
By Jehron Muhammad | Last updated: Mar 9, 2010 - 4:50:03 PM If one looks to the Council on Foreign Relations to define the tragedy that has been Darfur you ...

craigslist | all jobs in washington, DC

2010-03-09 15:42:33 GMT

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals seeks a Media Liaison to represent PETA campaigns to media outlets and to supervise all correspondence with media representatives.

Term of Employment:
Full-time

Primary Responsibilities and Duties:

Represent PETA to national media representatives and outlets

Monitor the climate of local and national media and work to secure speaking engagements in order to ensure that PETA's message reaches national audiences

Proactively research current events and designate appropriate spokespeople to complete media interviews

Establish and maintain professional relationships with media contacts

Write and edit official media statements and send them to appropriate media outlets

Handle after-hours and weekend media requests

Manage media databases and the media FTP site and assist in the creation of new database systems

Liaise with and advise foreign affiliates on PETA's campaigns and requests from media outlets

Manage news releases on PETA's Web site

Perform any other duties assigned by the supervisor

Qualifications:

Degree in a related field or equivalent experience

Minimum of two years of experience working directly with all forms of media

Excellent working knowledge of common media language and procedures

Thorough knowledge of animal rights issues and PETA campaigns

Proven excellent written and verbal communication skills

Proven excellent editing skills

Proven excellent relationship-building skills

Proven organizational skills and the ability to work under tight deadlines in a fast-paced environment

Ability to maintain strict confidentiality at all times

Willingness and ability to be on call during weekend and evening hours

Professional appearance and adherence to a healthy vegetarian lifestyle

Support for PETA's philosophy and the ability to professionally advocate PETA's positions on issues

Commitment to the objectives of the organization

We offer competitive benefits. Please apply online at: https://home.eease.com/recruit2/?id=169587&t;=1

White House.gov Press Office Feed

The White House — 2010-03-09 16:31:00 GMT

12:36 P.M. (local)

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: Vice President Biden, Joe, welcome to Israel and welcome to Jerusalem. We’ve been personal friends for almost three decades. Can you believe it has been that long?

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: No. You’re getting older, Bibi, I don’t know how.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: But you remain younger all the time. (Laughter.) And in all that time, you’ve been a real friend to me, and a real friend to Israel and to the Jewish people. And you’ve come to Israel many times since you came here first on the eve of the Yom Kippur. But now, you’re coming as the Vice President of the United States of America. And this is deeply appreciated and, for me, deeply moving.

President Obama has said in Cairo, and he has repeated this many times since, that the bonds between Israel and the United States are unbreakable. And he has shown that in the last year in things that are known to the public and some things that are not known to the public. In pursuing, for example, the joint military exercises for military defense between the Israeli army and the American military; in securing Israel’s qualitative military edge; and in many other activities along the world’s scene, including the battle against the infamous Goldstone report. I think that the bonds -- exactly as President Obama has said, the bonds are unbreakable. And your visit demonstrates how strong they are.

I think this unbreakable bond will help our two countries meet the two historic challenges that we face today in the Middle East. The first and foremost among them is the need to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and the second is the need to advance a secure peace between Israel and our Palestinian and other Arab neighbors.

I very much appreciate the efforts of President Obama and the American government to lead the international community to place tough sanctions on Iran. The stronger those sanctions are, the more likely it will be that the Iranian regime will have to choose between advancing its nuclear program and advancing the future of its own permanence. I think that the international community and the leading countries in the international community have to join the American effort. And Israel has been helping out with key countries and continues to do so.

I also appreciate the administration’s effort to advance peace in the region. I know that this has been difficult and has required a great deal of patience. But I’m pleased that these efforts are beginning to bear fruit. And we have to be persistent and purposeful in making sure that we get to those direct negotiations that will enable us to resolve this conflict.

I look forward to working with President Obama, and with you and your entire administration, to forge a historic peace agreement in which the permanence and legitimacy of the Jewish state of Israel is recognized by our Palestinian neighbors, and in which Israel’s security is guaranteed for generations to come.

Again, Vice President -- my friend, Joe, it’s a pleasure to welcome you to Jerusalem. Welcome.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Thank you very much. Mr. Prime Minister, it’s a pleasure to be back. It’s been too long between visits here. And it is true that you and I have been friends a long, long time. And as a matter of fact, when each of us were in the minority, we’d -- occasionally, I’d find -- get a phone call at home and I’d call you as well to get a sense of what’s going on. Our friendship is real, but it is -- what’s even deeper is the relationship between the United States and Israel.

But Prime Minister, I’m sure you’d agree we’ve had a -- we had a very productive discussion spanning a wide range of issues that affect both our nations. The relationship between Israel and the United States has been, and will continue to be, a centerpiece -- a centerpiece of American policy. And it’s been that way since Israel’s founding in 1948. And, quite frankly, it was a major focus of my work for all those years as a United States Senator and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Our two countries are bound by historic and cultural ties, and so many shared interests, that it would take too long to enumerate, and also by a wide range of deep-seated personal relationships and friendships that span the time even before 1948. Our ties have been strengthened by our deep cooperation in many fields including science and economic development, and a range of other policy areas as well.

But the cornerstone of the relationship -- the cornerstone of the relationship is our absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security. Bibi, you heard me say before, progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the United States and Israel. There is no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security. And for that reason, and many others, addressing Iran’s nuclear program has been of -- one of our administration’s priorities.

We’re determined -- we’re determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And we’re working with many countries around the world to convince Tehran to meet its international obligations and cease and desist. Iran must also curb its other destabilizing actions in the region, well beyond their desire to acquire nuclear weapons. And that is their continued support for terrorist groups that threaten Israel, and I might add, our interests as well.

President Obama and I strongly believe that the best long-term guarantee for Israel’s security is a comprehensive Middle East peace with the Palestinians, with the Syrians, with Lebanon and leading eventually to full and normalized relationships with the entire Arab world. It’s overwhelmingly in the interest of Israel, but it’s also overwhelmingly of interest to the Arab world. And it’s in our interest, as well.

And so, Mr. Prime Minister, toward that end I am very pleased that -- that you and the Palestinian leadership have agreed to launch indirect talks. We hope that these talks will lead, and they must lead, eventually to negotiations and direct discussions between the parties. The goal is, obviously, to resolve the final status issues and to achieve a two-state solution with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace and security. And historic peace is going to require both parties to make some historically bold commitments. You have done it before, and I’m confident for real peace you would do it again.

Over the last year, Mr. Prime Minister, you have taken significant steps including the moratorium that has limited new settlement construction activity. And you have significantly increased freedom of movement across the West Bank. Palestinian leaders are beginning to make progress on their determined willingness to -- especially in their efforts to reform their institutions of government and with their security force -- their security forces becoming much more reliable.

It’s easy to point fingers, particularly in this part of the world, at what each side has not done. But it’s also important to give credit where things have been done in order to be able to move forward. Mr. Prime Minister, the United States will always stand with those who take risks for peace. And you’re prepared to do that. And I am hopeful. And I’ll be having discussions with Palestinian leaders. It is my hope and expectation that they will be prepared, as well.

The proximity start -- talks are just that, a start. They’re not designed to finish the process. And so, Mr. Prime Minister, I thank you for all the time you have given me. And it’s just, quite frankly, good to be back in your company and see you again.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: Thank you. Thank you, Joe. I have one thing to offer you right now, and it’s broken glass. (Laughter.) So what I’m going to do is I’m going to sign -- but I need a pen. Thank you.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Don’t cut yourself.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: Now, this is a significant piece of paper. I will say that agreements are dependent on the arrangements not on paper but on the ground. Here is a piece of paper that reflects an arrangement on the ground. We have planted a circle of trees in Jerusalem in memory of your mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, because you have said many times that she was a source of immeasurable strength, which I recognize in you, Joe. So we planted a tree to serve as a tribute -- a circle of trees next to the leaders of the nations. We have a forest of the leaders of the nations, and right next to it are the trees that we have planted in memory of your mother as a tribute to her immeasurable strength. And I want to offer it to you on your visit to Israel.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, thank you very much. If you don’t mind my saying, Mr. Prime Minister, my love for your country was watered by this Irish lady, who was proudest of me when I was working with and for the security of Israel. So that’s a great honor. Thank you very much.

END
12:50 P.M. (local)

FT.com - US

2010-03-09 20:46:28 GMT

Analysts say Beijing has few choices on where to invest its foreign exchange reserves and does not have the option of wielding purchases as a weapon in bilateral relations

kuwait news - Google News

2010-03-09 22:37:47 GMT

Arab Times

Meeting between Bahraini and Kuwaiti Foreign Ministers
Bahrain News Agency
Kuwait, March 9 (BNA) Foreign Minister Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa has described the importance of the visit being currently paid by His ...
Bahrain PM starts 3-day Kuwait visitArab Times
BAHRAINI PM”S UPCOMING VISIT TO KUWAIT REFLECTS DEPTH OF RELATIONS: AMBASSADORBrunei News, Brunei Headlines from Brunei fm
Local News KEY VISITGulf Daily News
Bahrain News Agency -Bahrain News Agency -Bahrain News Agency
all 20 news articles »

Panorama.am

2010-03-09 22:15:00 GMT

Namik Tans return to Washington is questioned, Sabah says. Panorama.am recalls that the Turkish Ambassador to the US Namik Tan was recalled after the US House Foreign Relations Committee endorsed ...

OPEN SOURCE NEWS - Google Blog Search

PF — 2010-03-09 12:50:08 GMT

OSINFO - Open Sources Information. Crime, Intelligence, Terrorism, Foreign Affairs, Technology, Defense & Security. Search Site · Search. Subscribe: by email or Podcast. Enter your Email to Track Changes in OSINFO Powered by FeedBlitz ...

openDemocracy

openDemocracy — 2010-03-09 13:29:09 GMT

Author:

Robert G Rabil

Summary:

A shifting balance of calculation in the middle east makes Lebanon’s Hizbollah movement more confident in its strategy of “deterrence-by-terror” vis-à-vis Israel, says Robert G Rabil

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, standing alongside his counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, made a notable remark at a news-conference in Damascus on 25 February 2010 where the deepening of the two countries’ relations was celebrated. "We hope others will not give us lessons when it comes to our region and history...We know what is our interest...We thank them for their advice."

The reference to the Barack Obama administration's attempt to lure Syria from its alliance with Iran - reaffirmed only the day before by secretary of state Hillary Clinton at a Senate hearing - was unmistakable. For his part, Ahmadinejad addressed the backdrop of escalating rhetoric between Israel on one side and Syria and Hizbollah on the other; he warned the "Zionist regime" against any military operation, which would spell out "its end forever." Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah’s secretary-general soon joined the two leaders in a show of solidarity, which in the Arabic world was referred to as "the nuclear meeting".

The strategy

These statements and displays of solidarity should extinguish any wishful hope that Damascus is prepared to steer away from Iran in return for peace with Israel and recovery of the Golan heights. This, however, does not mean that efforts at peacemaking are stillborn. Rather, they reflect the near-completion of the Iranian strategy to realign the forces in the middle east, especially those confronting Israel. Lebanon and Syria are the main pillars of this ambitious and dangerous strategy whose real objective is the disruption of the Arab-Israeli politico-military balance in favour of an Islamist-nationalist resistance led by Iran and spearheaded in action by Hizbollah.

The Iranians appear to believe that by transforming the longstanding Arab-Israeli balance of power in the region into an asymmetrical balance of “deterrence-by-terror”, they can deepen the impotence of the Arab moderate countries of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan into a complete paralysis - and thus press their claim to lead the Muslim populations of the region. This belief carries the implicit assumption that these Arab states will avoid becoming complicity with any attempt by Washington or Jerusalem to punish Tehran (militarily or economically) for its alleged pursuit of an armed nuclear capability.

The roots of this Iranian strategy lie in the events of 2000, a seminal year in the region’s history. Three events - the collapse of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, the military withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon, and the death of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad - changed the political dynamics. Damascus came under pressure to redeploy in Lebanon and Hizbollah moved to become the real supporter of the Syrian regional order.

This shift in regional dynamics intensified with the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the reluctant evacuation of Syrian troops from Lebanon in 2005. These events deepened Damascus's embrace of Tehran and Hizbollah as a means to bolster the Syrian regime at a time of domestic and regional uncertainty. It was under these conditions that the Syrian regime parted from its policy of circumscribing Hizbollah's power and conversely began to act both as a conduit and supplier of sophisticated weaponry to the Islamist party. The elite contingents in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards - the Jerusalem Force - trained Hizbollah's militants (then commanded by Imad Mughniyeh, assassinated by Israel on 12 February 2008) in preparation for a future war with Israel (see Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, “The Hizbollah project: last war, next war”, 17 August 2009).

This war took place in July-August 2006, following a Hizbollah raid across the “blue line” into Israel's territory. Despite the heavy damage (human and infrastructural) Israel inflicted on Lebanon in the thirty-three-day war, Hizbollah proclaimed the conflict its “divine victory” (see Zaid Al-Ali, “'Whatever happens, Hizbollah has already won'” (9 August 2006). The sheer fact that Jerusalem was unable to cripple Hizbollah or stop it from firing rockets into Israel proper only hardened the will of Hizbollah and its Iranian sponsor to forge ahead with their plan to change the balance of power in the region (see Nadim Shehadi, “Riviera vs Citadel: the battle for Lebanon”, 22 August 2006).

Lebanon was a focal point in this strategy.

The shift

In the aftermath of the war, Hizbollah - shrewdly, gradually but forcefully - reduced the power of the opposition March 14 forces in Lebanon. In May 2008, the movement effected a military takeover of Beirut; this led the March 14 leaders and vocal anti-Syrian figures, Saad Hariri and Walid Jumblatt, to rethink their position regarding Damascus and Hizbollah (see Zaid Al-Ali, “Lebanon: chronicles of an attempted suicide”, 20 May 2009).

Saudi Arabia had set an example for Hariri by beginning a rapprochement with Syria, which culminated in a visit by King Abdullah to Damascus. The Saudi initiative - itself following diplomatic outreach to Syria in September 2008 by France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy - paved the way for Hariri's own visit. The end of the Washington-led policy towards Syria was reflected in the remark of the state department official Jeffrey Feltman: "It was no longer Syria being isolated. It was the United States that was being isolated" (see “Israel and Syria Threaten War”, Middle East Alliance, 4 February 2010).

The dramatic political realignment of Walid Jumblatt - from staunch opponent to defender of the Syrian regime and Hizbollah, all in the name of Arab nationalism - was a further severe blow to the March 14 forces. The Druze leader’s shift was a mark of his disillusionment and disappointment with the west as well as with March 14.

Jumblatt had overestimated both the George W Bush administration's eagerness to remove the Assad regime from power, and its readiness to use force to aid Lebanon’s anti-Hizbollah, anti-Syrian political alliance. His bitter volte-face was catalysed during Hizbollah’s seizure of Beirut, when militants of the movement put him under house-arrest. The response was resounding by its absence: no American jet whizzed over his palace, no allied force came near his doorstep, no Lebanese Christians mobilised in a show of support. Jumblatt’s frantic calls to the Lebanese-American lobby were followed by a realisation that his political survival (and that of his son and political heir Taymour) necessitated a complete reversal of roles.

In this decisive moment, Hizbollah both acquired a veto in Saad Hariri’s cabinet and managed in the accompanying ministerial statement to have its role (and weapons) legitimised as a "resistance".

Hizbollah's evolving project was expressed by Hassan Nasrallah in a speech commemorating Hizbollah's “martyrs” on 16 February 2010, which drew the qualifying framework for any future confrontation with Israel. He introduced the deterrent equation where Hizbollah would retaliate proportionally to any Israeli aggression: "Tel Aviv for Beirut, and Ben Gurion international airport for Beirut international airport”.

The purpose of this strategic-parity deterrence - or deterrence-by-terror - goes beyond altering the balance of power between Hizbollah (and by extension Iran and Syria) and Israel. It widens the theatre of operations between Israel and Hizbollah, highlighting the effectiveness of retaliation and including Syria in the potential calculus of destruction. It is significant here that Syria’s foreign minister Walid al-Moallem has confirmed that in the event Lebanon was attacked, Syria would not stand by.

The choice

The retired Lebanese brigadier-general Amin Hoteit, commenting on Hizbollah's new strategy in the party's newspaper, stated that it faces Israel with two options: either use force and commit suicide, or don't use force and lose the military spinal-column. Hizbollah, it seems, is confident about withstanding Israel's initial strike, trapping Israel in Lebanon and launching destructive missiles throughout Israel (see David Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, Faber 2010).

What Iran and Hizbollah - and by extension Syria - are excluding is a pre-emptive devastating Israeli strike on all three of them. And if Iran is using Hizbollah as a deterrent-force against Israel, then, given the heightened tension in the region against a backdrop of failed peace negotiations and frustrated talks with Tehran to resolve the nuclear standoff, Israel would have more incentive to strike at Iran (see Paul Rogers, “Israel’s shadow over Iran”, 14 January 2010).

More specifically, the Iranian strategy - as embodied in Hizbollah's deterrence-by-terror - is a recipe for a regional conflagration. In this respect, it would be foolish to think that Israel would either commit suicide by using force or relinquish its defence strategy and appear weak. That is why a clash between Israel and Hizbollah is inevitable.

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox:

Robert G Rabil is assistant professor of middle-east politics and director of graduate studies in the political-science department at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel and Lebanon (Lynne Rienner, 2003) and Robert G Rabil, Syria, United States and the War on Terror in the Middle East (Praeger, 2006)

----------

David Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East (Faber, 2010)

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizb'ullah: Politics and Religion (Pluto Press, 2001)

YaLibnan

Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Alex Klaushofer, Paradise Divided: A Portrait of Lebanon (Signal Books, 2007)

A Nizar Hamzeh, In the Path of Hizbullah (Syracuse University Press, 2004)

Sidebox:

openDemocracy writers analyse Lebanon’s politics and conflicts:

Hazem Saghieh, "Rafiq al-Hariri's murder: why do Lebanese blame Syria?" (21 February 2005)

Roger Scruton, "Lebanon before and after Syria" (9 March 2005)

Zaid Al-Ali, "Lebanon's pre-election hangover" (27 May 2005)

Hazem Saghieh, "Lebanon's election, no solution" (20 June 2005)

Roger Scruton, "Lebanon: the missing perspective" (20 July 2006)

Paul Rogers, "Lebanon in the wider war" (25 July 2006)

Zaid Al-Ali, “'Whatever happens, Hizbollah has already won'” (9 August 2006)

Nadim Shehadi, “Riviera vs Citadel: the battle for Lebanon” (22 August 2006)

Paul Rogers, "Lebanon on the edge" (31 August 2006)

Paul Rogers, "Lebanon: the war after the war" (12 October 2006)

Carsten Wieland, “Syria's quagmire, al-Assad's tunnel” (9 November 2006)

Alex Klaushofer, “Lebanon’s two futures” (11 December 2006)

Hazem Saghieh, “Lebanon's internal struggle: two logics in combat” (19 December 2006)

Mai Ghoussoub, “Beirut and contradiction: reading the World Press Photo award” (13 February 2007)

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, “Washington in Lebanon and Palestine: fatal manipulation” (6 August 2007)

Zaid Al-Ali, “Lebanon’s Palestinian shame” (19 June 2007)

Fred Halliday, “Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq: three crises” (22 June 2007)

Vicken Cheterian, “Lebanon: short memory, system failure” (25 September 2007)

Hazem Saghieh, "Lebanon's '14 March': from protest to leadership" (1 April 2008)

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, "The Israel-Hizbollah prisoner-deal" (14 July 2008)

Zaid Al-Ali, “Lebanon: chronicles of an attempted suicide” (20 May 2009)

Hazem Saghieh, "Hizbollah's ‘divine victory': three years on" (20 July 2009)

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, “The Hizbollah project: last war, next war” (17 August 2009)

oD-wide classification

Country:

Lebanon

Israel

Topics:

Conflict

International politics

openDemocracy

openDemocracy — 2010-03-09 13:31:19 GMT

Author:

Oliver Brock

Summary:

openDemocracy author Heather McRobie speaks with Oliver Brock about her upcoming novel where she looks at both Radovan Karadzic – who is standing trial for war crimes during the Serbian genocide of 1994 – and 19th-century philologist Vuk Karadzic

Heather McRobie won the Helene du Coudray Undergraduate Novel Prize for her first book, Psalm 119. It tells the story of three very different students whose efforts to bring aid to the Middle East - by setting up a library in Palestine – are marred by their complicated relationships with each other. It is cynical in its condemnation of ‘conflict tourists’. The book is also laced with quotes from the Song of Songs, and passages of the Persian poet Rumi. One or two critics found the novel over-ambitious, but McRobie shows no sign of lowering her sights. She is now in Sarajevo, at work on book number two: a novel that will take in both Radovan Karadzic – at present desperately postponing his trial for war crimes during the Serbian genocide of 1994 – and his namesake, 19th-century philologist Vuk Karadzic.

Why these two figures, and why now? It turns out that Vuk Karadzic, while not related to Radovan, is not unknown to him. As well as consolidating the identity of the Serbian language by bringing it more into line with popular speech (and further from Church Slavonic), Vuk Karadzic standardised Serbian Cyrillic and translated the New Testament into Serbian. A champion of folklore, he also compiled songs, stories and proverbs. Singlehandedly, he gave the new Serbian nation a much-needed linguistic signature. And the importance of national identity in Radovan Karadzic’s killing sprees hardly needs stressing. He would recite poetry to is troops before they began – poetry that drew on those same folk myths which Vuk Karadzic had inadvertenty helped to revive.

Philology, nationalism, poetry and massacre. A rather heavy load for a novel? What is the focus? “The theme I guess I’m trying to draw on is myth-makers, self-mythology and the potential abuse of myth,” says McRobie. “Vuk Karadzic is really fascinating, as he was involved in everything from the rebellion against the Ottomans to the pan-Slav/Croatian Illyrian movement. He’s a mix of a Balkan Goethe with Byron and the Grimm brothers.”

Vuk Karadzic was part of the great spread of nation-building in Europe in the 19th century – a movement in which cultural claims were as important as birthplace. National borders, those shaky political pencil lines, were to be reinforced with incontestable proof of nationhood after the Ottoman Empire fell. And history couldn't be clearer on the fact that claims over territory are highly subjective. The historian Norman Davies goes some way further in his landmark book, Europe: ‘Where facts could not be found, recourse had to be made to myth or to downright invention [...] Anything of universal interest was ignored. Anything that reflected discredit on the nation, or credit on its foes, was passed over.’

Rebuilding a continent would certainly require creativity, and perhaps this explains the overlap with the arts. McRobie finds it “compelling - if disturbing - that Radovan Karadzic was first known as a poet. He's won some of the Soviet Union's and Yugoslavia's highest poetry prizes, and he's a bestseller in Greece! He always romanticised himself as a poet-warrior – there is some very disturbing footage of him and the Russian ‘poet’ Limonov reciting poetry between rounds of firing onto Sarajevo in 1992.”

As in Psalm 119, McRobie wants to shock us out of a comfortable assumption. In the first book, supposedly intelligent characters are exposed as selfish, with bogus politics. They relish conflict, in fact: ‘They were frivolously happy in a peaceful country, despite all their best efforts to the contrary.’ The myths and histories of foreign cultures are appropriated and abused. “In modern & post-modern literature, we get very cosy with the idea of ‘myth’ as something to celebrate, as though it is an antidote to patriarchal or western historical ‘fact’, and dead-white-man history.” McRobie calls this a “comfort zone”, something we need to get away from in favour of those historical facts. “Srebrenica is a fact, the Holocaust is a fact; maybe 'myth' is just a quaint word for ‘lie’.” She is studying for her third degree while writing this book, and one gets the impression that she has heard one too many over-intellectualised abstractions about conflicts that are all too real, and far from academic.

McRobie sidesteps the idea that she might have a ‘project’, but to me it seems focussed and highly developed. She wants an end to lazy pluralities of meaning – to do away with supposed debates around what are in fact incontestable truths of history. Hence her hatred of post-structuralism, with its rejection of direct interpretation – it has landed the generation now in their twenties (hers) with “sacred cows who are still allowed to position themselves as cow-slayers.” This has left young writers “paralysed” – “it’s hard to watch the most intelligent people I know spend their twenties and thirties just riffing endlessly on 25 year-old melodies”, she says. Literature is not an abstract art form, and cannot excuse itself of meaning for that reason. The challenge she makes to herself and her stumbling peers is to “recognise the new cliches, the cliches we still pretend are subversive.” She is more optimistic than she perhaps realises, though: when asked directly what she thinks is missing from the literary landscape, she says she doesn't know, because she always finds too many things she wants to read. So perhaps even the clever-clever post-structuralists can take a breath. “There's still much more to love than to rant about.”

oD-wide classification

Topics:

Culture

True/Slant Network Activity

Caitlin Kelly — 2010-03-09 14:17:40 GMT

[1]Image via Wikipedia I took a wrong road last week and, seeing a particular corner I used to turn left at for 18 months 10 years ago, my heart hurt. It was the street that once took me to a battered, crowded house whose tiny front yard was always bare dirt. Sometimes there was a bike lying in the dirt, usually broken. It was a small house filled with people who yelled at one another as normal behavior. A house jammed with an ill grand-mother, a morbidly obese daughter and her live-in boyfriend, a nine-year-old boy and his 13-year-old sister -- a girl who was, for a while, my "little sister", paired with me through the Big Sister program. Her mother, ten years younger than I, had simply disappeared years earlier. She showed up, out of the blue, a month after her daughter and I were matched. But we rarely spoke. She was usually in the basement, playing video games and watching television. I had never before encountered poverty, and such family dysfunction, in the U.S. so intimately; I had lived in Mexico and traveled to many developing nations, where huge income inequality remains endemic. Here, a 15-minute drive across 287? That was a shock. No longer. My "little sister" would now be 23 or 24. Is she alive? Healthy? Did she -- as her grandmother kept asking her in front of me, poking at her belly -- become a teenage mother instead? Dare I drive back to their house and knock on the door and ask to see her again? Our relationship, initially warm and mutually enjoyable and something we both deeply valued, ended abruptly, with deception on her part and deep disappointment on mine. It was an instructive experience. I had brought to it absurdly idealistic notions of what was possible, of what she might achieve, of what I might be able to give to her to help even the score between her world and mine, to help her level a playing field so tilted it's a wonder any one of us can get up each day and walk across it. Growing up in Canada, where the very best university, my alma mater, University of Toronto, still only costs $5,000 a year, I could not conceive of a place where she was simply, very likely, to be left behind. Without an enormous boost --- from whom? how often? from her family? -- it would not be a reasonable hope, no matter how desireable, that she flee a chaotic life of junk food, all-night videos and tightly curbed notions of what is possible. College, for my little sister -- and we talked about it -- was some gauzy fantasy, a glimmering, glittering theme park sort of like DisneyWorld, a place she'd heard of and wanted to go to. But had no idea how to get there. I doubt she ever did. I had tried to get her into a local private school, $25k a year, on a full scholarship. Schools like that love to add a few underprivileged kids to their mix of lawyers' daughters. She never showed up for her appointed day and that was our last contact. Yet I still think of her, often. I live in Westchester County, north of Manhattan -- a county of 1 million people that stretches from the Hudson River to Long Island Sound on its eastern edge. Within it lies a microcosm of the U.S. in 2010, with staggering, Third World-ish income disparities. It contains elegant, manicured towns like Bedford, Scarsdale, Chappaqua, Bronxville and Armonk, where a house easily costs $5m or more, up to $20 million. This is where wealthy and powerful people like Martha Stewart and the Clintons live, on enormous estates with wooden rails and paddocks and stables for their horses. David Rockefeller, now 90, lives a 10-minute drive from my home -- and every morning I am reminded of his wealth and power as his private helicopter clatters just above my top-floor balcony on his way to Manhattan. Our apartment building, constructed in 1960, was re-designed because -- in its original tall, narrow form -- it would have impeded his view; it is a wide, flat, six-story version instead. I read in this month's issue of Westchester magazine [2] an interview with an SAT tutor who charges $175/hour [3], with most of her students coming twice a week. That's a cool $1,400 a month, $16,800 a year, to prep your kid(s) for the Ivies. The nation's most expensive college, Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, is now $54K a year; I have a book on my desk right now borrowed from their library through our county's great inter-library loan program. I get to keep it for a month. I have lived in this county since 1989, when I moved to New York and bought an apartment. I was, then, married to a doctor, and assumed we'd have a Westchester life -- a house, maybe a bigger house, nice car(s.) Whatever. But the marriage was brief and he remarried; he and his wife now earn $500,000 between them, an amount so staggering I can't even picture bringing in $30,000 a month. A man in my church wrote a personal check for $250,000, which bought a beautiful new organ. I sometimes feel like I live in a foreign country. I don't recognize a place where such wealth exists beside such struggle. And, in this county, are poor and working-class towns -- Mt. Vernon, Yonkers, Ossining, Port Chester -- where affordable housing is a constant battle [4]. Anyone earning even $40,000 would find it difficult to obtain safe, clean housing, let alone afford a reliable vehicle and its insurance. You don't know how bad a bus can be until you need it; I tried to get to my church in Irvington, NY by bus once when our car was being repaired and I did not want to pay $12 cabfare to get there. There is no bus service there on Sundays. What an invisibly effective way to keep poor(er) people out of our parish. From an editorial in The New York Times: When one thinks about segregation, the suburbs of New York’s Westchester County don’t immediately come to mind. Unless, of course, you’re a minority resident searching in vain for an affordable place to live. Westchester County has now announced [5] an agreement to spend more than $50 million to build or acquire 750 affordable housing units — 630 in towns and villages where the black population is 3 percent or less, and the Latino population is less than 7 percent. The agreement [6], which needs to be ratified by the county Board of Legislators, settles a 3-year-old federal lawsuit, filed by the Anti-Discrimination Center, accusing the county of taking tens of millions of dollars in federal housing grants while falsely certifying that it was living up to its legal requirement to provide affordable housing without reinforcing racial segregation. At the time, the county called those accusations “garbage,” and said it was powerless to force communities to integrate. But in February, Judge Denise L. Cote ruled that between 2000 and 2006 the county had, indeed, misrepresented its actions and had made little or no effort to place affordable homes in overwhelmingly white communities where residents objected. Those objections have been fierce. And we fear the battles are far from over. In the 1980s, Yonkers nearly bankrupted itself trying to fight a federal judge’s order to integrate public housing. There are currently 120,000 acres of land in Westchester where integration is lagging, including in Bedford, Bronxville, Eastchester, Hastings-on-Hudson, Harrison, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, New Castle, Pelham Manor and Scarsdale. Do you see this in your life? How does it make you feel? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Westchester_County_Flag.png [2] http://www.westchestermagazine.com/ [3] http://www.westchestermagazine.com/Westchester-Magazine/March-2010/All-of-the-Above/ [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/opinion/11tue3.html [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/nyregion/11settle.html?hp [6] http://www.antibiaslaw.com/sites/default/files/files/SettlementFullText.pdf

RIA Novosti

2010-03-09 12:44:00 GMT

A resolution on the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, passed by the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Relations, has raised a real storm in international diplomacy.

Breaking News

2010-03-09 10:29:26 GMT

Source: Telegraph (UK) (3-8-10)

The Foreign Secretary told Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the war that Britain’s willingness to follow through on threats of military force had made some Arab governments more willing to “do business” with the UK.

Accepting that “a lot of people” strongly opposed the 2003, Mr Miliband said that Britain’s reputation had actually been strengthened in some parts of the Middle East.

“People in the region do respect those who are willing to see through what they say [they will do],” Mr Miliband said.

“Even people who disagreed with it say to me, ‘You’ve sent a message that when you say something, you mean it’.”

He added: “In the Arab world today, I don’t believe that the Iraq decisions have undermined our relationships or our ability to business. Some of our ambassadors say we are in stronger position.”

Mr Miliband also said that Britain is popular with many Iraqis, who voted in a general election on Sunday.

Georgia News

2010-03-09 08:11:21 GMT

Georgia, Tbilisi, March 9/ Trend News, N. Kirtskhalia /

In 2010, Georgia established diplomatic relations with eight states, Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Nino Kalandadze said at the traditional Monday briefing.

georgia - Google News

2010-03-09 15:39:39 GMT

Trend News Agency

Georgia ready to restore direct air flights with Russia, MFA says
Messenger.ge
By Mzia Kupunia Georgia is ready to restore direct air flights between Tbilisi and Moscow, Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Nino Kalandadze said on Monday, ...
Georgia looks to bring unique cuisine to world's tablesSin Chew Jit Poh
Seeking Ally, Putin Meets Georgia Opposition LeaderThe Moscow Times
Georgia establishes diplomatic relations with eights states in 2010Trend News Agency
St.Petersburg Times.ru -Al-Jazeerah.info -The Moscow Times
all 27 news articles »

Panorama.am

2010-03-09 19:29:00 GMT

Turkeys FM Ahmet Davutoglu referred to the Armenian-Turkish rapprochement process, particularly the passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution N252 by the US House Foreign Relations Committee, at a joint press ...

Armenian Issues

Ara Ashjian (ara_ashjian@yahoo.com) — 2010-03-09 14:57:00 GMT

By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier

It was bad enough that Pres. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had failed to keep their campaign pledge to reaffirm the facts of the Armenian Genocide. They sunk to a new low last week, when Mrs. Clinton announced that she and the President opposed adoption of the Armenian Genocide resolution by the full House, following its passage by the Foreign Affairs Committee.

When asked by journalists why she and the President have reversed course on this issue, Mrs. Clinton unabashedly replied: "Well, I think circumstances have changed in a very significant way…. We do not believe that any action by the Congress is appropriate and we oppose it." She added that the administration does not believe the full House "will or should" vote on the resolution. How can the facts of a genocide that took place 95 years ago change overnight? In reality, nothing has changed except Secretary Clinton’s moral compass, assuming she had one to begin with!

It is shameful that the Obama administration is caving in to threats from a third world country that needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs it. As Aram Hamparian, the Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of America said last week: "Turkey does not get a vote or a veto in the US Congress!" Neither does the U.S. President nor the Secretary of State, on a non-binding congressional resolution.

A White House spokesman announced last week that the presidents of Turkey and United States had spoken by phone on the eve of the Committee vote. Soon after, Mrs. Clinton warned Committee Chairman Howard Berman that "further congressional action could impede progress on normalization of relations" between Turkey and Armenia. Strangely, Mrs. Clinton seems to have appointed herself as supreme arbiter of what’s in Armenia’s best interest, while Armenian-Americans and Armenia’s leaders have repeatedly declared that they support the adoption of the genocide resolution. Indeed, Mrs. Clinton has put herself in the ridiculous position of knowing better than Armenians what’s good for them!

After claiming for months that the Armenia-Turkey Protocols have no preconditions and not linked to any other issue, Mrs. Clinton now asserts that the Protocols pave the way for a commission that is supposed to study the facts of the Armenian Genocide. "I do not think it is for any other country to determine how two countries resolve matters between them," she stated. This confirms the worst fears of Armenian opponents of the Protocols. Clearly, the Secretary believes that ratification of the Protocols would prevent consideration of the Armenian Genocide issue by third parties. This is precisely what the Turkish side had been stating, to the dismay of most Armenians. Interestingly, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made a similar announcement last week, expressing his surprise that the Armenian Genocide resolution is once again on the agenda of the U.S. Congress. All along, the intent of Turkish leaders has been to stop third parties from raising the Armenian Genocide issue, as they drag out the Armenia-Turkey reconciliation process.

It was no accident that almost all Congressmen, who spoke against the genocide resolution in the Foreign Affairs Committee, used the lame excuse that their opposition to this bill was prompted by a desire not to undermine the Protocols which ostensibly would bring Armenian-Turkish reconciliation. Despite their sugar-coated rhetoric, those who opposed the resolution and supported the Protocols were in fact acting against Armenia’s best interests on both counts. The Protocols are now dead and buried anyway, thanks to Turkey’s refusal to ratify them, unless Armenia accepted extraneous preconditions.

While Armenian-American voters cannot settle their score with Pres. Obama this year, since he is not on the ballot in November, 18 of 22 opponents of the resolution are! Armenian-Americans should do everything in their power to prevent the re-election of all those who voted against the genocide resolution on March 4: Russ Carnahan (D-MO), Gerald Connolly (D-VA), Michael McMahon (D-NY), Mike Ross (D-AR), Brad Miller (D-NC), David Scott (D-GA), Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Ron Paul (R-TX), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Mike Pence (R-IN), Joe Wilson (R-SC), Connie Mack (R-FL), Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), Michael McCaul (R-TX), Ted Poe (R-TX), Bob Inglis (R-SC), and Dan Burton (R-IN). Bill Delahunt (D-MA) and John Tanner (D-TN) are retiring from Congress. Gresham Barrett (R-SC) is running for Governor, while John Boozman (R-AR) is a candidate for the U.S. Senate. The latter two should be opposed in their new campaigns.

In addition, Armenian-Americans should campaign against the re-election of Steve Cohen (D-TN), Ed Whitfield (R-KY) and Kay Granger (R-TX), for sending a joint letter to Foreign Affairs Committee members urging them to vote against the genocide resolution. All three are members of the congressional Turkish Caucus.

The next culprits are CEO’s of five major American aerospace and defense companies: Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co., Raytheon Co., United Technologies Corp., and Northrop Grumman Corp. They sent a joint letter to the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee urging him to reject the Armenian Genocide resolution, in order not to jeopardize their sales to Turkey. These CEO’s have committed not only an immoral act by placing a higher premium on profits -- blood money -- over human rights, but also ignored the fact that Turkey cannot forego its purchases from their firms, because by doing so it would only weaken itself. Armenian-Americans should counter these firms by staging demonstrations in front of their headquarters and factories. Those employed by these firms should communicate their anger to the CEO’s of these firms. Stockholders should go to the next annual meeting of these companies to make their concerns known and seek removal of the CEO’s. Similar protest actions should be taken against the Aerospace Industries Association, which represents more than 270 member companies. The AIA sent a separate letter to Congress against the Armenian Genocide resolution.

The Congressmen and companies who opposed the resolution on March 4 should pay a heavy price for their immoral act. Ignoring their negative votes and letters would encourage them to oppose the resolution again, when it reaches the House floor. If Armenian-Americans could cause the defeat of just one of these scoundrels in November, the rest of them will get the message that voting against genocide recognition can cost them their political careers. They will then think twice before casting such a vote.

As far as Pres. Obama and Secretary Clinton are concerned, Armenian-Americans should not allow them to dictate to the U.S. Congress. Given the fact that most Americans are disillusioned with the failed policies and unfulfilled promises of the Obama administration, all elected officials nationwide are seriously worried about their re-election. This is the perfect time to demand action from politicians and punish those who do not cooperate. Armenian-Americans should contact their representatives in every congressional district throughout the country, even in remote areas, and tell them that unless they support the genocide resolution, they will not get their vote in November. Politicians would rather listen to the voices of their constituents than to Pres. Obama who is the main cause for their seats being in jeopardy. Therefore, the fate of the resolution is ultimately in the hands of Armenian-Americans. If they work hard and get enough congressional supporters, Speaker Pelosi would have no choice but to bring the resolution to the House floor, regardless of what the administration tells her to do. Otherwise, voters who are angry on many other issues could toss out of office the incumbents, jeopardizing her own speakership!

Armenian-Americans should not forget to express their profound gratitude to Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) and 22 other Congressmen who voted for the resolution on March 4. They are: Gary Ackerman (D-NY), Eni Faleomavaega (D-American Samoa), Donald Payne (D-NJ), Brad Sherman (D-CA), Eliot Engel (D-NY), Diane Watson (D-CA), Albio Sires (D-NJ), Gene Green (D-TX), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Shelley Berkley (D-NV), Joseph Crowley (D-NY), Jim Costa (D-CA), Keith Ellison (D-MN), Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), Christopher Smith (R-NJ), Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Donald Manzullo (R-IL), and Edward Royce (R-CA), Elton Gallegly (R-CA), and Ron Klein (D-FL). The Armenian community should enthusiastically support their re-election.

Finally, some Turkish circles are consoling themselves simply because the resolution was adopted by a difference of one vote. Since House Committee members who opposed the resolution for unrelated reasons explicitly stated that they did not dispute the facts of the Armenian Genocide, the vote could have been 45 to 0, not 23-22, in terms of genocide acknowledgment -- a great victory for the truth and a major defeat for Turkish denialists and their backers. No one should be surprised therefore, if in the coming days Turkish leaders cancel the multi-million dollar contracts of their failed lobbying firms!

Arkansas Online stories: Opinion and Letters*

WASHINGTON POST — 2010-03-09 10:14:33 GMT

President Barack Obama has so far made foreign policy priorities out of turning the tide of the war in Afghanistan, “resetting” relations with Russia, stopping Iran’s nuclear program and relaunching the Middle East peace process.

Armenia News

2010-03-09 08:02:51 GMT

Turkish foreign minister on Monday said his country would not bow down to any pressure over the course of relations with Armenia after a U.S. House panel had adopted a resolution over the tragic events of 1915 -- shortly before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Anadolu Agency reported.

The New Republic - All Feed

Francisco Toro — 2010-03-09 05:00:00 GMT

What were two members of a violent Basque separatist group doing with 11 members of Colombia's narco-Marxist insurgency in a remote corner of southwestern Venezuela in August 2007? According to a blockbuster indictment handed down by a Spanish judge last week, they were participating in a kind of intercontinental terrorist training camp held under the aegis of the Venezuelan military.

More specifically, the two members of ETA, or "Basque Homeland and Freedom," were teaching the rebels from FARC, or "Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia," how to use plastic explosives and urban guerrilla tactics, such as rigging cell phones to work as bomb fuses. This unlikely alliance between FARC, a peasant-based Marxist movement financed by a massive drug-trafficking operation, and ETA, a nationalist group that specializes in shooting Spanish policemen, civil servants, and local politicians in the back of the head, dates back as far as 1993. According to the indictment, beginning in 2000, ETA plotted with FARC to murder a range of leading Colombian political figures when they traveled to Spain, including sitting president Alvaro Uribe.

But it's Venezuela's alleged involvement with two of the Spanish-speaking world's most notorious terror groups that has set off a political firestorm in Spain, where the center-left government enjoys a close relationship with the Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chávez. The indictment, which is the culmination of several years of investigation by Spanish and Colombian police, claims that Chavez's soldiers and a military intelligence officer escorted the FARC members to their August 2007 training site. What's more, among the seven FARC and six ETA members charged with conspiracy to murder and holding explosives in collaboration with a terrorist group is Arturo Cubillas Fontán, a longtime ETA leader who emigrated to Venezuela in 1989. According to El Pais, he works as head of security for Venezuela's ministry of Agriculture. (Venezuelan government sources have refused to clarify his position.) And his wife has worked in a variety of public roles throughout the Chavez administration including, currently, as head of public relations for the Agriculture ministry.

By exposing a possible link between the Chávez government and an international terror conspiracy, the indictment is a particularly hot potato in the lap of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose warm relations with Venezuela's strong man have yielded invaluable commercial advantages for Spanish multinationals. As U.S.-Venezuelan ties have worsened over the past ten years, Spanish firms have swarmed to do business in Venezuela. Today, 55 percent of Venezuela's third-largest bank is owned by Spain's sprawling BBVA bank; the country's leading mobile phone network is owned by Telefónica, Spain's privatized telecoms giant; the largest of its new electric power plants are being built by Spanish energy companies Iberdrola and Elecnor; and some of its biggest new oil contracts are going to Spanish oil giant Repsol.

Additionally, in a quirk of timing, the Venezuelan Navy received the first of four military patrol ships from Spanish shipbuilder Navantia just one day after the ETA-FARC indictment was handed down. In effect, Spain is now selling military hardware to a country whose government allegedly sponsors a terrorist group plotting aggression against the Spanish state.

No issue is as politically sensitive in Spain as Basque terrorism, so it's hardly surprising that opposition conservatives have wasted no time slamming the Zapatero government. Jorge Moragas, foreign affairs spokesman for the conservative People’s Party, decried the “excessive closeness between” Venezuela and Spain, and the party’s secretary general has called on Zapatero to consider breaking diplomatic relations with Venezuela.

But such a move would likely spur Venezuela to expropriate Spanish investments, which would freeze the profits of Madrid's multinationals (we're talking billions of euros) in Caracas. It wouldn’t be the first time Chávez has muscled his international business partners: Two years ago, his government shut down most commerce with Colombia over Uribe’s allegation that Venezuela was funding Marxist guerillas, and launched a wave of expropriations against its neighbor that continues to this day. In other words, Chávez has leverage with Spain, he knows it, and he's not afraid to use it.

This might explain why Madrid has treaded so carefully on the indictment crisis. Zapatero has mildly said he would seek “explanations” from the Venezuelan government and proceed accordingly. But even that formulation drew an angry response from the bombastic Chávez. He blustered in a recent speech, "I don’t have to explain anything, not to Zapatero or anyone!”

In response, Spain’s foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, hurried to note that Spanish authorities were merely seeking “information” in the case, not “explanations.” But this deference left Zapatero's government exposed to fire on the domestic front. Conservative leader Mariano Rajoy called his country's virtual apology to Chávez “absolutely grotesque.”

This paints a vivid picture of the political corner Zapatero’s government has backed itself into: Protect Spanish investment in Venezuela, and you’re soft on ETA, but make a principled stand, and you put hundreds of Spanish jobs at risk. Signs so far indicate the government will swallow hard and continue to placate Venezuela. But what happens if, next week (or next month, or next year), a high-profile Colombian public figure takes a trip to Spain and gets shot in the back of the head?

Francisco Toro blogs about Venezuela in the Chávez era at Caracas Chronicles.

For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

craigslist | all jobs in new york city

2010-03-09 05:16:06 GMT

At BoConcept, we're looking for Sales Consultant who understand and have a passion for Interior Design. We provide an exciting and rewarding work environment for those who like to work hard and play hard. There is also tremendous growth opportunities for those who excel in their jobs.

As Denmark's largest furniture retailer, BoConcept is rapidly expanding in the US and has significant brand presence in the market.

Responsibilities
• Greet and assist our customers in selecting home furnishings
• Provide the highest level of customer service
• Build quality customer relationships that result in increased sales and repeat business
• Ensure the successful delivery of merchandise by following up with customers and the BoConcept Distribution Center
• Become an expert in our products, tools and concepts

Qualifications
•Enthusiasm and desire to learn
•Passion for people and retail
•Strong communication skills
•Proficient in Microsoft Excel and Word
•Excellent interpersonal skills
•Must be able to work on the weekend
•Prior Sales experience and ability to speak a foreign language is a plus

Benefits
• Medical Insurance
• Paid Vacation
• Paid holidays
• Employee Discount
• Profit sharing
• Paid training
• Opportunities for career growth

Current Opening Locations
• Boconcept Edgewater @ City Place

resume@boconceptny.com

Rock

glenn — 2010-03-09 01:29:05 GMT

International (and N American) licensing consultant for various companies.

Do you believe your music should be sold worldwide? Do you know someone whose music should be heard around the world? Are they stuck on a slow moving treadmill going nowhere ?

We do not only brick and mortar ( retail distribution) but internet and digital music rights also negotiated for our clients with cool companies all over the world, including ones here in the States.

This is the fastest growth of my company as the contacts and relationships are increasing each year.

After securing deals , we work with local foreign promoters to insure a successful " first " tours of the country, which will support the release of the music. Sub publishing deal are also arranged usually inconjunction with licensing deals.

There are many well financed companies who represent tremendous talent that are not getting seen or heard . We can help expose them because of our 30 years of experience and relationships.

This is a modest fee based part of the company. The fee based on first if we love what you or your friends or client's music is all about, and the amount of services involved with client. References will gladly be furnished upon request.

Thanks for checking us out here and on other on line sites

glenn friedman
CEO/ President
The Music Umbrella
themusicumbrella@yahoo.com

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner — 2010-03-08 19:40:56 GMT

The International Studies Association (ISA) has just released the online version of the International Studies Encyclopedia (ISE), an outgrowth of the ISA Compendium project. The ISE is, apparently, "the most comprehensive reference work of its kind for the fields of international studies and international relations." ISA members have free access to it. The rest of the world will have to gawk and stare, or, perhaps, join ISA.

There are a lot of international relations encyclopedias, and to be blunt, most of them are a bit dodgy. What's in this encyclopedia? Why is this one different from all other encyclopedias before it?

Robert A. Denemark, the general editor, offered this explanation for the what and the why:

Over 400 issues of scholarly interest are reviewed in this Compendium Project, which consists of both hardback and online versions. The review essays are designed to serve bright undergraduates with a thirst for knowledge, graduate students charged with learning huge amounts of material in a short time, more senior colleagues who want to introduce new subjects to their students or explore questions outside their traditional areas of expertise, or other professionals who want to see what academics have been up to. The average length of these review essays is about 10,000 words. Authors were asked to provide a long-term sense of a given topic's intellectual and social context. The review essays in this project should begin with the earliest treatments, and include as comprehensive a consideration as possible. We were looking for wide coverage, and not simply the historical roots of recent trends. Review essays also cover the most current literature....

The scholarly literature has exploded. Not so long ago it was easy to stay current or learn about new areas of scholarship. If you read the latest monograph or the last few articles in an issue area, reviewed the bibliographic material, and read a few of the important published works suggested, you would become conversant. That is no longer the case. The scholarly explosion, especially in the number of journals, has made it impossible to even find all the relevant work, much less become familiar with it. Graduate syllabi have become (necessarily) narrower, making it hard for new scholars to become familiar with efforts that are even just a few decades old. When a graduate student came to see me about a “new” idea that I vaguely recall being considered in the journals in the 1970s I was happy to provide several citations. The student was embarrassed by an apparent lack of due diligence, and I was left to wonder how contemporary graduate studies might inform bright young scholars of what they need to know in the context of rapidly growing material (and declining resources for pursuing graduate work that result in a push to spend less and less time with more and more literature). How can we avoid an inevitable narrowing of our vision, and an increased tendency to reinvent the wheel?

FP clearly has the realist entries covered: Stephen Walt wrote the entry on realism and security, while your humble blogger drafted the entry on mercantilist and realist perspectives on the global political economy.

OK, by this point in the post, I'm pretty sure I've driven away all casual readers of the blog. So, let's get to the fun part!

Beyond the geek thrill of rooting around in the myriad entries, the release of the ISE offers us IR types another opportunity to measure the coin of the academic realm -- the influence of particular international relations scholars. Presumably, the more wide-ranging a scholar's work, the more entries that should cite that scholar (either because the scholar wrote one thing that got cited by everyone or wrote on myriad different topics).. Therefore, as an exercise, I searched on the names of the twenty scholars "whose work has had the greatest influence on the field of IR in the past 20 years," according to the 2008 William and Mary Teaching and Research in International Politics (TRIP) survey.

The result? It's Bob Keohane's world -- we just live in it.

Keohane was cited in over 100 encyclopedia entries, the only person who cracked triple digits. Only three other IR scholars were featured in over 70 entries -- Kenneth Waltz, James Rosenau, and Stephen D. Krasner. The ~~cursed young Jedi~~ eminent scholar-practitioner Joseph Nye rounds out the top five.

Three other interesting facts emerge from this exercise:

1) You can't say that feminist scholatship was neglected or marginalized in this encyclopedia -- both J. Ann Tickner and Cynthia Enloe were cited in more entries than either Robert Jervis or John Mearsheimer;

2) Despite Denemark's hope that the entries would emphasize historical antecedents, it's far from clear whether that injunction held up. For example, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Peter Katzenstein are great IR scholars, but I'm not entirely sure if either of them should appear in more entries than Thucydides, Machiavelli, or Sun Tzu.

3) To pre-empt the commenters: looking strictly at Foreign Policy bloggers, I must report that Steve Walt absolutely crushed me, appearing in more than twice as many entries as your humbled-yet-again blogger.

ISA members are encouraged to take a look at the encyclopedia and report back their own interesting findings.

armenia news - Google Blog Search

Asbarez Staff — 2010-03-08 20:03:04 GMT

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday warned that a US resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide Monday, endorsed by the House Foreign Affairs committee on March 4, will seriously damage US Turkish relations.

Culture | guardian.co.uk

Paul Owen — 2010-03-09 00:15:00 GMT

SPOILER ALERT: This weekly blog is for those who have already seen the show in its entirety. This week: contributor Andy Bullock looks at what The Wire has to say about the run-up to the Iraq war

The Wire: the book

The Wire Re-up: The Guardian Guide to the Greatest TV Show Ever Made is out now from Guardian Books, and available in all good bookshops. The book features blogposts on every episode from all five seasons, plus interviews with the cast and features on the show – as well as many, many of your comments, which have made this blog the great forum it is. Buy the book by clicking here.

Season five, episode four

This week commenter Andy Bullock takes over the blog to explain what The Wire has to say about the run-up to the Iraq war.

In series five David Simon decides it's time to get political – really political. Never mind Tommy Carcetti and his gubernatorial ambitions or the rise and fall of Cedric Daniels, hidden beneath the surface of series five Simon describes how the American neoconservatives and Tony Blair manipulated their way to war in Iraq.

Without overlaying the timelines of political events with the writing of series five, we can't know to what extent one informed the other, though it is clear – in the subtext and structure – that Simon was mindful of both recent and contemporaneous events and intended the serial killer plot to warn of exactly the kind of inherent dysfunction in public institutions exposed by Blair and George Bush in 2002-03.

Indeed, so tight is the fit between fiction and what we later came to know as fact, it's possible to see McNulty's bogus serial killer as a metaphor through which Simon deconstructs the biggest political story of the 21st century. If not, then at the very least we are taken through the general principles.
Let's take a look at a couple of structural clues: does, for example, series five need Falluja vet Terry Hanning? As Templeton chances across Hanning we already have - contributing to or confirming Templeton's economy with the truth - the story of "EJ" the disabled boy outside the Orioles game, the complaining friends of the dead crab-meat lady, and an upset Daniels who didn't stab Burrell in the back (as Gus confirms with Nerese Campbell). So why waste any of the 10½ valuable hours on Hanning's story, something that adds little yet consumes so much screen time?

In addition, Robert Ruby – recently returned from the Baltimore Sun's London bureau - is already looking into Templeton's work on behalf of city editor Gus Haynes, yet Gus – in the middle of a national breaking story – takes a day out to visit Walter Reed veterans' hospital in DC to check something Ruby is already working on. It's unnecessary.

Also, from a structural perspective, there is little relationship between what Simon calls the "main theme" of season five - a newspaper so eviscerated it fails to cover the important stories in its own city - and the "overt plot" (the bogus serial killer). When we look closely, the two are as estranged as Jimmy and Elena McNulty and, instead, the "do more with less" theme is informed by a series of missed important news stories and financial cutbacks; how does this speak to the serial killer plot?

When something isn't clear the Simon maxim "The Wire is always about subtext" encourages the viewer to retrace their steps, in this case to the photocopier-lie detector scene that opens the first episode of series five. Simon always offers a clue early and there were two slightly off-key remarks in that scene: first Ed Norris's "Americans are a stupid people by and large; we pretty much believe whatever we're told", then Bunk's "The bigger the lie, the more they believe". These were our signposts.

In fact the big lie is a unifying theory; it explains why season five sometimes feels different to the preceding seasons, perhaps even like a bizarre tragic-comedy as Jimmy and Lester race around after the recently deceased armed with red ribbons and a set of false teeth. On one level, Simon is the white rabbit leading us to a mad tea party with Dr Strangelove, Bush, Blair and those non-existent WMDs. We're led to a world in which a respected public servant has created an enormous lie, manufactured entirely bogus, disparate evidence, produced that evidence to an unquestioning media and prosecuted that lie at huge cost. In the eighth hour Dick Cheney is incongruously inferred, jokingly, to be "a psychopath" by City Hall reporter Jeff Price in what must be the most carefully crafted dialogue ever written by HBO's lawyers.

The big lie doesn't, of course, become a populist reality by McNulty handing Jay Landsman a dossier or by repetition. To succeed it must be embraced and amplified by mainstream media. Having taken advice from Lester, Jimmy understands the need to "sensationalise it" so he can, as Freamon says, "win over the hearts and minds". No wonder McNulty sometimes skulks around like a pantomime villain.

A theme often explored by Simon is that of the individual diminished by institutions. In series five, we see Gus repeatedly forced to compromise his professional values, and even morality, by senior managers Klebanow and Whiting. Indeed, in the first 40 minutes of the season we witness four examples of pressure being put on individuals to compromise by the hierarchies within which they work.
In terms of David Simon's theme, it is as interesting to consider the choices made by characters like Gus, Alma, Klebanow and Whiting as it is to note those made by Professor Elizabeth Wilmshurst and deceased former foreign secretary Robin Cook - both of whom took one course of action, and attorney general Lord Goldsmith and (another) former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who chose another. Many might agree with Hanning's view that "A lie ain't a side of the story. It's just a lie"; some might prefer Carcetti's observation that "there's the short con, and there's the long con".

What we learn in season five is that institutions aren't concerned with the merits of an initial proposition, that institutions are validated by their responses to the proposition, and also that hierarchies within institutions – including senior public servants – treat institutional responses as opportunities, sometimes as a "career case".

And what of the media; did they ask the right questions? If the serial killer is using a mobile phone to send images why would he call Templeton from a payphone? Why is there no record anywhere of a previous serial killer having a similar profile? Why were seven years of successful inspections by Unscom - and ongoing verification by Unmovic and the IAEA – so easily ignored? Why were basic questions not pressed until answered?

At the meeting in the Sun's offices at which McNulty realises Templeton is a charlatan, much is made not of the Sun's right to protect its sources, but rather of the information resulting from those sources – the notebook. After all, if you control the information itself, the basis for your decision-making can't be questioned. In this way the public didn't know the origin of Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein could use WMDs within 45 minutes may have been an Iraqi taxi driver. Nor did Colin Powell mention that fact in his presentation to the UN security council. Templeton's protected notebook was, of course, empty.

Is Simon really discussing the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq? As series five was written – three and a half to four years after the invasion – the Iraqi insurgency still dominated the news (the 3,000th US death was reported on 3 January 2007). We know it was on Simon's mind because in the third episode Detective Barlow is seen reading Generation Kill at his desk. Also, in Benjamin Busch (the actor playing the uncompromising Officer Colicchio) David Simon had on set not just an old friend from Homicide: Life on the Streets and future star of Generation Kill but also an army major and recently returned second tour veteran of Iraq. You can imagine Baltimore was just what he needed after that.

It's also difficult to ignore the great irony of series five; Simon belatedly explaining to TV reviewers and Wire pundits that they had all missed his main theme – which was about the media missing the main story.

At one point, Carcetti borrows the Quaker call "Speak truth to power" and in series five Simon does just that by critiquing the most significant event in US politics in over 30 years; why else include the parade of lost limbs, close-ups of $80,000 prosthetics, the cheerful chat of young, uncomplaining men living shattered lives? It's a manifestation of the same anger and dissent that drove David Simon to create The Wire in the first place.

Quote of the week

Prop Joe: I treated you like a son.

Marlo: I wasn't made to play the son.

Running totals

Murders: up two to 76: Proposition Joe and Hungry Man.

McNulty giving a fuck when it's not his turn: up one to 37, as his fake murder scam continues, with Freamon as a willing accomplice. Drunk: up one to 23. Dubious parenting: steady on seven.

Bunk drunk: nope. Steady on 10.

Herc fuck-ups: none, although two of his previous ones are rehashed: the missing camera and letting down Randy. Steady on 20.

Omar stick-ups: none, but he's back and after revenge. Steady on 13.

Bubbles attempting to get clean: no Bubbles. Steady on seven.

Paul Owen

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

DENMARK NEWS - Google News

2010-03-09 00:44:24 GMT

Baltimore News Net

Nuclear technology is not a threat: Danish scholar
Tehran Times
TEHRAN – Abdul Wahid Pedersen, the foreign relations manager of the Muslim Council of Denmark, says “nuclear ...
US says happy to work with Iran on tackling drugsReuters
US/Iran envoys agree there could be common ground on drugsTurkmenistan News

all 56 news articles »

craigslist | all jobs in SF bay area

2010-03-08 18:41:18 GMT

The Westin San Francisco Market Street Hotel is now looking for vibrant guest-focused professionals to join our team at Highgate's world-class premiere location. The Westin Market Street Hotel is a luxurious 676 room hotel located in the Financial District adjacent to Yerba Buena Gardens and the Moscone Center. Be inspired to be your best. Be Westin.

We are now seeking a Front Desk Agent.

JOB OVERVIEW:

Greet and welcome guests upon arrival. Check-in/check-out hotel guests in a caring, efficient, and genuine manner; process all payments according to established hotel requirements. Provide personal, instinctive, and renewal service to all guests and visitors.

Essential Qualifications:

1. High school graduate or equivalent vocational training certificate.
2. Compute basic arithmetic.
3. Fluency in English both verbally and non-verbally.
4. Provide legible communication and directions.
5. Ability to:
• perform job functions with attention to detail, speed and accuracy.
• prioritize and organize.
• be a clear thinker, remaining calm and resolving problems using good judgement.
• follow directions thoroughly.
• understand guest’s service needs.
• work cohesively with co-workers as part of a team.
• work with minimal supervision.
• maintain confidentiality of guest information and pertinent hotel data.
6. Ability to input and access information in the property management system/computers/point of sales system.

Preferred Qualifications:

1. Some college or training in Hospitality Industry.
2. Previous experience as Front Desk Agent.
3. Previous cashiering experience.
4. Fluency in a foreign language.
5. Ability to suggestively sell.
6. Certification in CPR.
7. Previous guest relations training.

The Cable

Josh Rogin — 2010-03-09 00:36:07 GMT

When top Obama administration officials went to Beijing last week, they had a broad agenda for discussion, including Iran, climate change, and North Korea. What did the Chinese want to talk about? Taiwan, Taiwan, and Taiwan.

Several China experts close to both sets of officials said that Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and National Security Council Senior Director Jeffrey Bader went to China with the understanding that they would have substantive discussions on some key issues of U.S. interest, but the Chinese side used the opportunity to try to bargain for an end to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, something Beijing has wanted for decades and now feels bold enough to demand.

"It was all about Taiwan," said Bonnie Glaser, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), who got readouts of the meetings from Chinese sources in the know. "The message that the Chinese are giving us is ‘We've had enough; we're fed up. We've been living with this issue of U.S. arms sales for too long and it's time to solve it.'"

The Obama team has been noticing increased confidence on the Chinese side when dealing with the United States, and some officials see that as partly a result of the rise of hard-liners within the Chinese system who advocate a tougher stance toward Washington.

But asking the Obama administration to end Taiwan arms sales shows a profound misunderstanding of U.S. foreign-policy decision making, several experts said.

"Do they really think they have a chance in hell of ending our arms sales to Taiwan? I find that shocking, but that's what they're telling us," Glaser said of the Chinese. "I can't imagine why they think that U.S. interests have somehow changed on this issue. Ultimately that's why we sell them, because it's in our interest, not to piss off China."

Charles Freeman, who holds the Freeman Chair (no relation) in China Studies at CSIS, said the Chinese are trying to raise the price of their cooperation on Iran and other issues by bringing up their long displeasure over the Taiwan arms-sales issue.

"There is a strong push from Beijing to get that core issue as their big ask and there's a desire to reopen discussions about what a plan to eliminate arms sales to Taiwan would look like," he explained. "There is some sense that we can trade Iran for Taiwan, but that's a non-starter for the Obama administration. The Chinese don't seem to understand that."

Meanwhile, although the Obama administration moved forward, eventually, with the Bush administration's left over deal to sell Taiwan some arms, the White House declined to see Taiwan any F-16 aircraft as part of the recent $6.2 billion arms sales package.

Some China watchers fear that the Obama administration is cementing a custom by which the U.S. continues to sell some arms to Taiwan while simultaneously ignoring the ongoing decline of the island's actual defense capabilities in the face of massive and increasing Chinese deployments across the Taiwan Strait.

That's the implication of this recent unclassified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency to the Office of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, which outlines how Taiwan's air defenses, which are dependent on U.S. equipment, are old and eroding quickly.

Of course, it was the Bush administration that first decided to remove the F-16s from the package of arms being sold to Taiwan and actually refused to accept a letter requesting the planes, experts note. But Obama's decision to continue the practice is seen by many as directed more at maintaining a delicate relationship with mainland China than it is on any analysis of Taiwan's security posture.

"Decisions are being made solely on the basis of what would least provoke China, not on the basis of what Taiwan would actually need to defend itself," said former Pentagon China official Dan Blumenthal, now with the American Enterprise Institute. "In deciding in effect that Taiwan does not need the aircraft, they are deciding Taiwan doesn't need an air force, which puts both U.S. and Taiwan air defenses at greater risk."

Taiwan is nowhere close to ending its lobbying effort to buy the newer F-16 planes. Defense News¸ which first highlighted the DIA document, reported today that Taiwan's defense ministry is releasing a new study claiming Chinese fighter superiority. Several Taiwanese lawmakers wrote to House and Senate foreign relations leaders to ask for a follow-on sale of F-16 fighters.

"If America softens its support for our country at this critical time we believe it will have an adverse effect on cross-Strait relations as Taiwan's negotiating position is weakened and the PRC may then seek to capitalize on our situation," the letter stated.

The sale of newer F-16s to Taiwan, the "C" and "D" versions, is also part of a larger drive to keep the production lines open for the plane. The major advocates are from the Texas and Georgia delegations, whose states stand to benefit most. Since the F-16 is also in the hunt for new sales to India, those with an interest there would also be inclined to make sure the line doesn't close.

"At some point this year, the F-16 supply chain will begin to shut down as there are no new orders and the U.S. and its allies switch to the F-35," said one Washington Asia hand. "Once this happens it is cost-prohibitive to restart the line. This industrial time constraint will force the political decision either to sell the aircraft to Taiwan or not. If no, for all intents and purposes the island will have no real means of defending its airspace."

Politics4All Latest Blogs

2010-03-08 21:30:33 GMT

Foreign policy can be a minefield. Worse there is no choice but to tap-dance your way through it. Take the case of Turkey and Armenia. During the run up to World War I the Ottoman Empire (the predecessor of the modern Turkish state) killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 of their Armenian subjects. This, by any standard you would like to name is a genocide.

The current Turkish government, like all the previous ones, is not willing to call it that. They say it was not nearly the numbers; that there were many Turks killed as well; that even if the numbers are right it was never the policy of the government to do it. All these are pretty weak excuses, but they are what the Turkish government gives.

This leaves the United States is a bit of trick bag. Turkey is a an ally, during the Cold War their presence in NATO was a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union. On the other hand the United States has a moderately good record of at least calling genocide for what it is (when it comes to acting on that acknowledgment, we have a far worse record).

This makes recognition of the Armenian genocide a really touchy issue. We want to have some kind of credibility in the world when it comes to genocide, but sticking our thumb in the eye of a valued ally for acts committed nearly 100 years ago is not exactly the way to keep that ally well disposed towards us.

Over the last few years, the Turks and the Armenians have been moving towards normalized relations. This is a big step, since once they recognize each other as something other than a hated enemy, they can start to talk about what each others great grandfathers did. It is not an ideal situation, but it is better than nothing.

Still, domestic politics can screw up your foreign policy, if you are not on top of things. American Armenians have been agitating for years to have the Congress pass a resolution declaring what happened in and around WWI was indeed a genocide. For years various administrations have leaned on the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees to not hold such a vote, lest it get to the House or Senate floor and well and truly set the cat among the pigeons in our relationship with Turkey.

That is why it is so frustrating that the State Department and the Obama Administration dropped the ball and let exactly that vote happen in the House Foreign Relations Committee last Thursday. Laura Rosen is reporting in Politico today that no one from the National Security Council or the State Department talked to the Chair of the committee until the day before the vote was scheduled. This is dispute the fact that the mark up of the resolution was scheduled a month prior. From the article:

“My impression is that State weighed in [Wednesday] but that with the Armenia resolution, as with all other things, White House/NSC legislative affairs was completely asleep at the wheel,” one Hill staffer said. Consequently the White House ‘discovered’ the problem yesterday when call slips started finding their way to higher-ups.”

So if it is important that we don’t piss off our Turkish allies (who have called their new ambassador home for consultations) why did the ball get dropped? Rosen makes the case that it is an issue of understaffing. In the Clinton administration the NSC had a fairly large legislative affairs staff to make sure that what went on in Congress did not run afoul of the policies of the administration was pursuing. The Bush administration cut this group down to two people, since their foreign and domestic policy were essentially the same.

The episode demonstrates the need for beefing up the NSC legislative affairs shop, the Democratic sources said. The Democratic foreign policy hand said the NSC legislative affairs shop in place during the Clinton administration had basically been done away with during the George W. Bush administration, and hadn’t been fully restaffed in the Obama NSC. Two military officers, including Navy Capt. John Beaver, and a civil servant are currently fulfilling the role in the Obama NSC. But "they’ve been under-staffed for ages thanks to the set-up they inherited from the Bushies … that left NSC resource-poor," a second Hill staffer said.

Now we find ourselves in a pretty crappy situation. We need Turkey as a strong ally, they are a Islamic democracy and a long time NATO ally. They have acted a back channel peacemaker for Israel and Syria on more than one occasion. Now they are going to be pretty pissed that one of the Houses of Congress has said something they have denied for the whole of their existence is true. It is going to put a strain on both the normalization efforts between them and Armenia and our own relationship with them.

Is this the end of the world? Hardly. This nonbinding resolution is never going to see the floor of the House. The leadership is now aware of the problem and will be on guard to keep it from growing. What it does highlight is the need to be constantly coordinating our foreign policy efforts with the relevant committees in Congress. The job of action on constituents concerns and the larger policy objectives of the United States is not one that happens on its own.

The floor is yours.

Army Strong Stories

2010-03-09 02:28:00 GMT

(All information posted below is publically available and unclassified) “…if we had better understood the Iraqi culture and mindset, our war plans would have been better than they were, [and] the plan for the post-war period and all its challenges would have been far better..We must improve our cultural awareness…to inform the policy process. Our policies would benefit from this not only in Iraq, but…elsewhere, where we will have long-term strategic relationships and potential military challenges for many years to come.” -Ike Skelton, in a letter to Donald Rumsfeld, October 23, 2003 (An expert in cultural awareness speaking to a student at the Functional Area 30 Qualification Course during their two-week multi-echelon at the Battle Command Training Center. Click on the picture to view the website and learn more) Cultural Awareness is a hot topic in today’s Army, but are there any more effective ways of learning about foreign cultures rather than “death by power point” or a long fact sheet such as the one below published by Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)? FA 30 (Information Operations) personnel in the picture above attended classes, but what about mobile training for all MOS's and the troops on the ground? Arab Cultural Awareness: 58 Factsheets The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) G-2 Intelligence Support Activity (TRISA) in conjunction with the University of Texas at Dallas has developed a virtual Iraq cultural awareness simulation. (This simulator uses the same engine used for America's Army, but is no video game. Click on the picture to visit the website and learn more.) The above picture was taken during the early stages of development, and complexity and the graphics have improved. The entire program can fit on a single DVD, which will allow for mobile training for troops "downrange". Not only is the system mobile, but it is comprehensive and up to date. Dr. Marge Zielke, the professor leading the student development team states, “Much of the cultural data is being developed in real time by the military. By having it in a systems-based approach that is composable — in other words, we can generate culture in certain aspects of the game on the fly — we can respond to the data as soon as it becomes available. We could change it overnight if we needed to.” The effectiveness of such simulators still lack substantial studies, but virtual training is employed in many commercial sectors, and has effectively reduced training time in Wall Street from 2.5 years, to 1 year. No classroom or simulator can substitute first hand, real world experience, yet the very point of training is to provide a mock environment to safely demonstrate key principles that may be "fine tuned" out in the field. There are ways to potentially increase effectiveness even further through technological means. (Transcranial magnetic stimulation can temporarily knock out a brain function or artificially stimulate one, and has recently been FDA approved. Click on the picture to visit the website and learn more.) Learning performance enhancing drugs such as Adderall, are legal with a prescription, but may contain adverse physical affects for the general populace. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a safe, non invasive means of affecting the brain. While the technology has not yet sufficiently progressed to specifically target all the areas associated with learning, exciting the frontal cortex causes the patient to feel more intense about their current experience. In fact, there are many investigations currently studying the use of TMS in depressing the frontal lobe to treat veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). Though there are currently no such plans to compliment virtual simulators with TMS, such a combination might increase effective training by making the experience seem that much more, "intense, realistic, or memorable." Virtual Environments and Brain Computer Interfaces are a growing field so expect to see more of their use in the future in both the military and commercial sector (and in this blog).

Brian in Jeollanam-do

Brian (noreply@blogger.com) — 2010-03-09 09:00:00 GMT

I wanted to get something dirty in the headline but couldn't think of anything, and I also couldn't find any bizarre cartoons to include. The local papers have "hot seat" and "hot water" locked down in their coverage of a series of questions asked of Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun about Korea's room salon culture and what that means for women in the workplace. Here's an excerpt from the JoongAng Daily:

In a question-and-answer session during the event, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Ramstad asked Yoon a question about the after-hours “room salon” culture prevalent in the Korean business community, where some male workers gather at upscale nighttime establishments with clients or colleagues to down alcoholic drinks alongside women who work there.

Ramstad asked whether this culture makes it more difficult for Korean women to survive and thrive in the workplace.

The reporter also asked whether the ministry - which supervises the nation’s private-sector industries - has any policies on this practice covering its officials.

Korean officials were taken aback. Yoon shot back by saying that more than half of the recently appointed public prosecutors are women.

He then added that women have more economic power at home than they do in other countries, according to the Finance Ministry spokesman Kim Young-min.

And here's some from the Korea Times:

Evan Ramstad of The Wall Street Journal asked Yoon whether it was difficult for Korean women to be hired as executives of major business groups because male executives enjoy room salons and would not be able to visit them if their colleagues were women.

Room salons are drinking establishments where men partner with hostesses who serve drinks and sometimes perform "other" services.

. . .

CBS Radio reporter Don Kirk then said executives and employees of Korea's large businesses group were the main customers of room salons, insisting the government should bar companies from deducting such expenses from their taxable income.

Minister Yoon responded that there was an upper limit on how much entertainment-related expenditure businesses can deduct from taxable income, adding that beyond the legally allowed limit, there were no tax incentives.

Senior ministry officials, who declined to be named, said the reporters asked the minister "silly" questions on purpose to humiliate him in public.

Ramstad said, according to the article, he asked the questions because Monday was International Womens' Day.

"Statistics show that Korea has the lowest female employment and widest pay gap between genders among OECD countries," he said.

He asked Yoon about whether he thought the male-only room salon culture was a factor in the low female economic population.

The Times doesn't follow up on that, but finishes by mentioning the cool relationship the Finance Ministry has with foreign journalists, demonstrating it's not only amateur bloggers who get hit with "you don't understand Korean culture":

Since the onset of the global financial crisis, government officials have claimed that foreign media have written negative reports about Korea because they lack understanding, a charge that correspondents for the latter, most of whom are Korean, have rejected.

The Marmot's Hole posted on this when it was confined to the Korean press, citing a Korean-language article:

One Korean attendee — and mark this down, children, because it’s truly golden — said there are some journalists who, claiming they’ve worked in Korea a long time or know Korea well, insult not only ministers or institution heads but also the entire Korean people. He said if you get to know these reporters, many don’t do their homework, so they don’t know well Korea’s history, culture or economy, or have racial biases.

One Finance Ministry official, who requested anonymity, complained to Yonhap that since 1997, when foreign speculator attacks led to a financial crisis, the ministry has strengthened its briefings of foreign journalists, but poor questions sometimes come up. He said he often feels skeptical as to whether to continue these meetings with foreign journalists.

If foreign correspondents in Korea weren't paid to cover it, you'd think they'd often feel skeptical as to whether to continue these meetings with government officials, considering how often they get a talking-to.

The two English-language articles, as well of course as the Korean-language ones, don't provide exact quotations from Kirk or Ramstad, nor do they provide any context for the questions. They appear indelicate at first glance but certainly wouldn't be out-of-place in a discussion on International Women's Day about women in the workplace. Government officials have certainly proven themselves touchy about what foreign correspondents write about them, so we shouldn't automatically believe two experienced reporters were being crass or made n00b mistakes.

News: Main section | guardian.co.uk

2010-03-09 00:05:16 GMT

Marcel Berlins (Writ large: Genocide vote is an ignorant stunt, 9 March), in criticising the US foreign relations committee vote to recognise the Armenian genocide, says the word and its definition were crafted by Raphael Lemkin in 1944: in fact Lemkin began his campaign to criminalise the murderous repression of racial and religious groups much earlier, in 1933, always by reference to the Ottoman slaughter of the Armenians which he regarded, until the Holocaust, as the clearest and most recent historical example of genocide.

Marcel fails to provide readers with a full statement of the convention definition, which includes "deliberately inflicting on the (racial or religious) group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" – a precise description of the conditions deliberately inflicted on the Armenian deportees, who in consequence were starved or killed in their hundreds of thousands. He begins his column by admitting that he "does not know enough" to decide whether the US decision was right, but goes on illogically to assert that it is "open to debate". No serious genocide scholar doubts it, and nor did the Human Rights Commission's special rapporteur on genocide (Ben Whittaker) in his 1985 report. My own opinion, published last year, may be found at www.geoffreyrobertson.com.

"What business is it of theirs?" asks Mr Berlins of the US congressional committee. At a time when Turkish writers are prosecuted under section 301 of the penal code for alleging the Armenian genocide, its recognition might be thought to be the business of all who care for freedom of speech. Moreover, as Judge Balthazar Garzón declared when opening investigation into Franco's mass murder during the Spanish civil war, perpetrators of crimes against humanity should not have posthumous impunity. The same might be said of the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide.

Geoffrey Robertson QC

London

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

craigslist | all jobs in new york city

2010-03-08 20:37:01 GMT

We are Gallant FX. a FX/Technology company that works in the field of online currency trading services for retail and institutional traders.

We are looking for a Junior sales associate, who's responsibilities will include (but not limited to):

* Conducting sales calls and responsible for bringing new Retail Forex traders to the company.

* Processing incoming account applications, account maintenances

* Providing support for FX clients from all over the world

* Assisting customers with account inquiries

* Speaking about our trading platform and the FX market with prospective clients

* Following-up with demo users and persuade to open account -- No Cold calling

* Building and maintaining relationships with clients through phone, email and Live Person

* Following financial markets and understanding what is occurring and be able to relate them to FX movements

Qualifications:

+ Must be eligible to work in the USA legally (1099 or W2)

+ Bachelors degree (BA/BS/etc.)

+ Proficient PC skills with an emphasis on online platforms (web based)

+ Must have a strong interest in financial markets, international affairs and geopolitical events.

+ Write and speak persuasively and clearly;

+ Think quickly and problem-solve in real-time;

+ Strong work ethic;

+ Basic technical knowledge and experience in the financial markets a plus.

Change.org's Women's Rights Blog

Aimee Sea — 2010-03-08 19:39:00 GMT

Here's your history lesson of the day: International Women's Day was conceived in 1910 at a Denmark conference on working women. On the first IWD in 1911, Denmark was one of only four countries celebrating it. Today, IWD is celebrated all over the world and is an national holiday in 15 countries, including Russia, China, and Vietnam. A quick look at the IWD website shows nearly 700 events ranging from protests to film festivals. Woot.

Clearly there's no one right way to mark the occasion, but I encourage you to take action in support of the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA). Alex DiBranco told you a month ago about IVAWA, and Meredith Slater in Global Health has also written about the importance passing this act. Amnesty International, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, and Women Thrive Worldwide are all mounting campaigns in support of IVAWA.

At the moment, the bill has been referred to the relevant committees in both houses of Congress. Over 25% of the Senate are cosponsors, including 9 of the 11 majority members on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (what's up with Feingold and Webb?). In the House, the bill has been referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs (chaired by cosponsor Howard Berman) and has cosponsoring committee members on both sides of the aisle.

It's not law yet, and we have got a ways to go -- so please take a minute to help. You can sign a petition to Congres right here at Change.org. Is there a better way to honor the women of the world than helping stop violence against women? Tell Congress to Pass the International Violence Against Women Act.

Photo from International Women's Day

Asbarez Armenian News

Asbarez Staff — 2010-03-08 20:03:04 GMT

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday warned that a U.S. resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide Monday, endorsed by the House Foreign Affairs committee on March 4, will seriously damage U.S. Turkish relations.

Politics news, UK and world political comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk

Simon Tisdall — 2010-03-08 18:30:00 GMT

The US and Japan are going through a rocky patch but mutual fear of China makes their relationship too precious to wreck

A long-running row about relocating a US Marine Corps base on Okinawa is threatening to boil over, with Yukio Hatoyama, Japan's prime minister, admitting at the weekend that failure to resolve the dispute could force his resignation. Given that his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) swept to a watershed election victory only last August, such an outcome could be deeply embarrassing for the US and deeply resented in Japan.

Despite its stated intention to pay greater attention to Asia, the Obama administration is making a hash of relations with Japan. Its insistence that Tokyo's new centre-left leaders honour a 2006 deal on the Futenma base between George Bush and their long-entrenched conservative predecessors looks like an attempt to ride roughshod over Japan's democratic process.

Blame for rising bilateral strains also lies with Hatoyama, who seems to have promised more than he can deliver. Shigeru Ishiba, a senior Liberal Democrat party opposition leader, openly mocked the prime minister last week for supposedly making an election pledge he had "no idea" how to fulfil."

The Okinawa dispute reflects broader differences. Hatoyama's view that Japan needs a more "balanced" relationship with Washington after 65 years of polite subservience in the security sphere, and his related interest in developing an EEC-style east Asian economic community including China, have produced sharply critical reactions in Washington.

"The relationship between the US and Japan is in its worst state ever," said Hisahiko Okazaki, a former ambassador, in the daily newspaper Sankei Shimbun. "The Japan-US alliance is too valuable an asset to lose," he wrote.

Despite such dramatic huffing and puffing, the bottom-line reality, say senior foreign ministry officials, former and serving ministers, and leading commentators, is there is not the remotest chance that the security alliance will be "lost". It may be adapted or modified. It may evolve. And for its part, says former deputy foreign minister Hitoshi Tanaka, Japan "needs to think seriously about how it can better contribute to international security" and "to consider if it is still right to stick to the existing interpretation of the constitutional prohibition on the use of force".

But the official consensus is firm that the US relationship will continue to form the "cornerstone" of Japan's defences, as foreign minister Katsuya Okada put it – a position shared by Hatoyama.The main reason behind this confidence that, despite all the stresses and strains, the alliance will endure is not hard to discern: growing mutual fear of China.

If Obama has mismanaged ties with Japan, his problems with China are infinitely greater by comparison, ranging from security issues such as Iran, Taiwan, North Korea and Tibet to fair trade, currency valuations, human rights and climate change. Obama wants to befriend China and work with it. But if China chooses a diverging path, as it often appears inclined to do, the help and assistance of Japan in containing it will be indispensable to the US – and vice versa.

Underscoring this point, last week's exchanges over Okinawa coincided with the latest, unsettling broadside from the People's Liberation Army that, according to some Japanese analysts, calls the shots in Beijing. "China's big goal in the 21st century is to become world number one, the top power," wrote PLA senior colonel Liu Mingfu. China, he said, was determined to become the "global champion" while conflict with the US over "who rises and (who) fails to dominate the world" was inevitable.

This may be bluster. But it is safer to assume it is not. With this unruly giant bellowing on the doorstep, Japan and the US need each other more than ever. What they lack is new thinking about how to make their relationship work better.

Simon Tisdall

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World news : Middle East roundup | guardian.co.uk

Stephen Kinzer — 2010-03-08 18:42:43 GMT

Amid the finger-pointing, let's recall how Turkey helped push the US Congress committee toward its vote on Armenian genocide

When a committee of the US Congress foolishly voted last week to brand as genocide the 1915 slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, there was plenty of blame to go around. Ethnic lobbies, big-money politics and narrow-minded congressmen all played their part. Together they poked a gratuitous stick in the eye of a valuable friend. Once again America repeated its classic foreign policy blunder: do something that makes you feel good now, but that in the long run actually undermines American security interests.

Amid all this finger-pointing, however, it is only fair to single out one other culprit for this misguided vote: Turkey itself. After the vote, which was broadcast live on Turkish TV and followed as passionately if it were a World Cup match, thousands of Turks took to the streets in protest. They were right to be angry. As Turks try to figure out who brought this insult upon them, though, they should pause before a mirror.

Turkey has done three things that helped push the House foreign affairs committee toward its vote. First, despite signing a highly promising accord with Armenia last year, it has failed to close the deal. Relations between the two countries remain frozen, partly because of Turkey's insistence on tying normalisation to a withdrawal of Armenian troops from disputed Nagorno-Karabakh. The deal was to have included a clause assigning questions about the 1915 massacre to a committee of historians. If it had been signed and ratified, the genocide issue would be off the table – and probably off Washington's agenda.

Second, Turkey suffers from a creeping image deterioration in Washington. Some feel that Turkey has become too close to Iran, and resent the vigour of Turkey's opposition to sanctions on the Iranian regime – especially important since Turkey holds a rotating seat on the UN security council. These doubts might not have become as powerful if Israel, Turkey's old friend, had come to its rescue with lobbying help on Capitol Hill, as it has in the past. But Turkish leaders have sharpened their criticism of Israel lately, and the Israelis, seeking to show that they too have cards to play in this game, did not rush to help Turkey this time.

In considering not just the substance of its Middle East policy but the style in which it is presented, Turkey would do well to balance its relationships with Iran, Israel and the US more deftly.

Third and perhaps most profoundly, Turkey has brought itself to this point by its refusal to confront what happened to Ottoman Armenians in 1915. One reason Turks are so outraged at accusations made against their ancestors is that they have little access to the historical truth. Textbooks are distorted and politicians whip up nationalist fervor for votes. "Why are we trying to cover up this horrible crime, why are we trying to defend the murderers, to disguise their crimes, why are we squirming to keep truth buried, even at the risk of being humiliated?" the Turkish commentator Ahmet Altan asked in a column after the vote in Washington.

"If you feel humiliated, you should take a hard look at yourself and what you hide."

In the last few years, Turkey has emerged to play a new and highly promising role in the Middle East and beyond. As a successful Islamic democracy allied with the west, it can be a powerful force for regional peace – and, not incidentally, a uniquely valuable partner for the US. For Turkey to play the role it seeks as a broker and conciliator, though, it it must continue to mature politically and diplomatically. The vote in Washington should lead Turks to reflection. A final accord with Armenia, a more elegant way of balancing relations with Iran, Israel and the United States, and an end to denial of what happened in 1915 would dramatically improve both Turkey's global stature and its ability to help stabilise the world's most volatile region.

Stephen Kinzer

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Ethan Epstein — 2010-03-08 18:34:58 GMT

[1]Image by Getty Images via Daylife Reuters reports [2] this morning that Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi has declared that US/China relations have been "severely disrupted" in the past year. Yang is simply forwarding the fallacious notion [3] that the Chinese government is a perfect representation of the Chinese people, and that the American government is a synonym for "America." For it is preposterous to assert that ties between "China" writ large, and the "US," writ large have been "severely disrupted." (Yang's assertion is "ridiculous," writ large.) In truth, ties between the US and China have never been stronger. Disregard for a moment the tensions between the tiny clique of people that govern the two countries, and consider the unprecedented interaction now occurring between hundreds of millions of Chinese people and hundreds of millions of their American counterparts. In 2008, the United States imported [4] $337.8 billion worth of goods from China. This means that Chinese people are now interacting with American people in a most concrete of ways: they are manufacturing the things that Americans touch, play with, wear, and, if you happen to shop at Trader Joe's, eat. At the same time, this has amounted to a huge transfer of money from the coffers of Americans to Chinese people: hundreds of millions of them have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the past few decades, thanks in no small part to the American habit of buying things made that were made China. While the decline in American manufacturing has undoubtedly had some serious negative consequences for millions of Americans, it is worth noting that commercial relations between Chinese people and American people have also been a boon to the people of both countries: Americans have been showered with affordable goods, and Chinese people are now rushing headlong into modernity. Chinese people and American people are also now interacting on a personal level far more than they used to, as well. In the past few years, restrictions on flights between the two countries have been eased [5], meaning that on each day, thousands of people are flying across the Pacific to the US or China. More and more young Americans are skipping more expensive destinations like Japan or Western Europe, and electing to visit China instead. And, according to an (admittedly, rather anecdote-heavy and evidence-free) New York Times article [6] from last year, Americans are going to China to find work in unprecedented numbers. I've noticed this myself: when I first visited in China in 2002, Beijing locals expressed astonishment at my caucasian features - going so far as to harass me on the street about them. When I worked as a journalist in Shanghai in 2009, nobody seemed to give a damn about my blue eyes. Ultimately, even if relations between the Chinese government and the American government really been "severely disrupted," as Beijing's foreign minister claimed yesterday, then that's a credit to the Obama Administration. So long as the commercial relations that have been so beneficial to the two nations remain open (and there's nothing to suggest that that they won't), it is indeed heartening to see the American government exert some moral pressure onto a regime that imprisons journalists, tortures its citizens, suppresses minority groups, props up Kim Jong Il's holocaust state in North Korea, and refuses to hold elections. Only a cold-hearted proponent of amoral realpolitik (which is to say, a contemporary American liberal [7]) would hope that our relations with a government like that would not be disrupted. Don't fret about relations between the US and China. The Great Wall the used to separate the two countries has all but collapsed. [1] http://www.daylife.com/image/0eM6fp8bPP2uR?utm_source=zemanta&utm_medium=p&utm_content=0eM6fp8bPP2uR&utm_campaign=z1 [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62605720100307?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22&sp=true [3] http://trueslant.com/ethanepstein/2010/02/16/naming-names-when-it-comes-to-foreign-news-the-media-is-confused/ [4] http://www.uschina.org/statistics/tradetable.html [5] http://www.chinadaily.net/china/2007-08/08/content_5449391.htm [6] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/business/economy/11expats.html [7] http://trueslant.com/ethanepstein/2010/02/19/get-realist-on-china-american-liberals-embrace-realpolitik/

Asian Correspondent: Global Feed

41 — 2010-03-08 18:13:33 GMT

South Korea has been given a stamp of approval for its green commercial plans from the influential Cleantech Group. Money is there to be made and the government is looking at easing regulations on private equity investors in spite having of dubious relations with the foreign PE industry in the past. In a new report, 'The rise of Cleantech in South Korea', the Group concluded that the market offe...

Politics4All Latest Blogs

2010-03-08 15:00:00 GMT

"Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said on Sunday that relations with the United States had been "seriously disrupted," after a rise in friction between the two big powers." (Reuters Article)"Urgent warnings have been circulated throughout Nato and the European Union for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China." (Times Online

"BARACK OBAMA" - Google News

2010-03-08 22:40:46 GMT

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... than Iraq's 2005 election but still more than the 56.8 percent of Americans who turned out for the 2008 showdown between Barack Obama and John McCain. ...
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2010-03-08 22:38:31 GMT

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Ray Odierno, said President Barack Obama's plan to remove combat troops from Iraq by Sept. 1 is proceeding on schedule. He told MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' that, ...
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George Papandreou — 2010-03-08 17:08:39 GMT

(This is the transcript -- from Zerohedge -- of Greece PM Papandeou's speech this morning at the Brookings Institute.)

Fifty-three years ago this week, on March 12, 1947, President Truman rose before a special joint session of Congress.

He was there to warn America of a looming new crisis. A crisis that revolved in part around Greece, but was in essence a European crisis. One that directly affected America’s interests.

In that speech, President Truman introduced a vision and laid down the sturdy foundation for policies and institutions—such as the Marshall Plan and the Bretton Woods arrangements—that enabled our two continents to rise above the crisis and build an unprecedented era of shared peace and prosperity.

Today, I have come to Washington this week to speak about another crisis in Europe. This crisis, too, revolves in part around Greece. This crisis, too, very much involves America’s interests. And as in 1947, if we act with sufficient foresight, I believe this crisis also contains opportunities to strengthen our respective countries and our shared interests for decades to come.

What is this crisis?

I would call it a crisis in global governance.

As we basked in the triumph that the end of the Cold War symbolized for the West, we forgot three important elements.

First of all, the world's problems were not over.No, history had not ended. New conflicts, new issues, and new complexities of a globalizing world arose.

Secondly, we underestimated our own dogmatism.

While those on the other side of the Iron Curtain worshiped state-run economies as a god, we had created our own god. The free market.

And gods are not to be tampered with. They rule.

Forgetting that, in democratic politics, god is the people. Both the state and the market are there to serve them.

Thirdly, we neglected our transatlantic relationship.

Either by paying lip service to it as something 'matter of fact'.

Or as something irrelevant to the new challenges of the times.

So off we went with our respective narrow politics, as the world was changing and as the balance of power was shifting.

That has undermined the extent to which our common values remain a dominant force in the shaping of this new globalizing economy and society.

Values such as democracy, the protection of human rights, the rule of law.

The core of the crisis is that today the international community seems impotent. Impotent to deal with the complexities of an interdependent market. Or the new threats of global warming and competition for energy resources.

Or the spread of violence, terrorism, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Or our inability to solve protracted conflicts such as the one in the Middle East.

My conclusion is that cooperation between Europe and the US must be revitalized.

To empower our countries, societies and citizens so we deal with these issues effectively and democratically.

How does this relate to my country, Greece?

You are all aware of the financial crisis Greece has faced in recent months—the crisis that confronted me when I became Prime Minister last October.

After we took office, we discovered that the budget deficit was actually double—double—what our predecessors had told us, European authorities, and the Greek people.

Our announcement of this discovery rocked investor confidence—not only regarding the finances of Greece, but also the soundness of the currency we share with our European neighbors.

All of you understand that this crisis, like Wall Street’s original crisis in 2008, risks spreading more widely. Many worry it could reignite the global financial crisis—and produce a Crisis 2.0.

That is why, in the past five days, I met with Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, and previously visited with Gordon Brown and Jose Luis Zapatero, to convey my ideas on how to resolve this on-going crisis and how to prevent it from spreading.

And that is why I will meet tomorrow with President Obama—not only as a Greek leader, but also as a European leader—to discuss the important role I believe the United States can play to ensure that Greece, Europe, and America remain strong, healthy partners.

I want to describe for you the steps we and our European partners are taking to address this crisis, and the lessons that it holds for Europe’s and America’s shared efforts to build a far stronger economic order for generations to come.

A Moment that Demands Change

I stood for election last fall before a country that was demanding deep changes. During the preceding five years, our public had grown increasingly alienated as Greece’s national deficit ballooned, wasteful expenditure mushroomed, and our GDP shrank.

During our election campaign, we promised to tackle head-on the chronic problems at the heart of Greece’s economic woes—structural problems that Greek politicians had avoided addressing for far too long.

Our goal was – and remains – to transform Greece into a thriving economy driven by green technology and investment in our natural and human resources.

So when my party won a resounding electoral majority, we knew our mandate—like the mandate of your own new President—was to bring deep changes, even at a time of great economic challenge.

Now, I am used to change. I was born in Minnesota and raised in California, before eventually moving to Athens. And then, when my family was forced to flee Greece during the dictatorship, we lived in exile in Canada, and then Sweden.

And throughout my political career, I have often taken office during times of crisis. I became Education Minister during a teachers' strike. I became Foreign Minister just as Greece was entering one of its most fraught stand-offs with Turkey. I took over as leader of my party in 2004, just a few weeks before an election that we were certain to lose. And now I have become Prime Minister during the gravest economic crisis Greece has faced since the Second World War.

So confronting upheaval and the need for big changes has been an integral part of my life. Even so, that does not make change any easier.

Yet the enormity of Greece’s deficit made the imperative of deep changes absolute.
And now the changes are under way.

To restore confidence in our country and stability to our economy, we pledged to bring the 12.7% deficit down to 8% this year, and to EU-mandated levels of 3% by 2012.

To meet those targets, the Parliament has adopted the toughest austerity measures in Greece's modern history. The third round of those measures passed just last week.

We know Greece faced not only a fiscal deficit, but also a credibility deficit, as a result of the fabricated budget figures our predecessors had published. The EU was understandably skeptical about our promises to rein in the deficit and crack down on corruption. But we are demonstrating Greece’s decisiveness.

Public sector salaries have been cut, retirement ages raised and taxes have increased.

These are painful choices that come with high political and social costs.
We take them not only to rescue our own economy and prove our own credibility. We do so also because we are part of a genuine community, the European Union.

All of these measures reflect our commitment to protect the stability of our common currency.

This medicine may be bitter, but it is only an immediate remedy. We must also cure the core problems that have prevented Greece from reaching its great economic potential for far too long.

So I have told the people of Greece that 2010 must be and will be a year of drastic reforms across all levels of government: changes to our tax system, our social security system, our public administration, our education system, and our development model.

At the top of the list is tax evasion.

To give you just one measure of the scope of that problem: Fewer than 5,000 Greeks declare incomes of 100,000 euro or more. That pattern ends now.

We will be prosecuting offenders—no matter how rich or powerful—to show that we mean business.
The rule of law means that the law applies to all.

Such changes will bring in billions in unpaid taxes, and help underpin our return to fiscal health.

We are also tacking the challenge of corruption head on.

Within the first weeks of my administration, I dismissed a deputy minister and friend who was trading in minor favors for voters.

Corruption is hardly unique to Greece.

But it is a problem we are determined to address as part of our broader reforms.

To usher in a new norm of transparency, we are televising our cabinet meetings; we have launched an open, online application process for public-sector jobs, and passed a law so that every government expense will be published online—a first in Europe.

We post all our proposals on the web to allow for deliberation and participation – in a Web 2.0 application – which empowers our citizens, puts a check on lawmakers, and strengthens the quality of our policies.

Building consensus for long-term change

These are among the changes my government has made and will pursue in response to this crisis.
I am confident that Greece will very soon be a paradigm for open government, a leader in green development – as Greece has great, untapped potential for renewable energy – and a real magnet for new business investment.

But there are two other seminal points I want to stress today—ones that touch on our longer-term challenges, and our shared responsibilities for building a stronger global economy.

The first point is that while we must all respond with urgency today, we must also plan for the long term. The architects of the post-war recovery of Europe and the trans-Atlantic community—leaders like Adenauer, Schuman, and Truman—had an eye on what made sense, not only for next week, but for next year, and the next generation.

So it must be today. The crises the world has faced over the past few years should alert us to the fact that we need more cooperation, regulation and foresight.

My own people understand this. The majority of Greeks recognize that the very difficult changes I have enacted are in their own long-term interest.

This is why Greek public support for my government’s reforms is higher than many observers expected.
I see this every day. People stop me on the street to say they are willing to make sacrifices if it can help our country. Others have volunteered to give their pension back to the state. One of them is the well-known singer Nana Mouskouri – who spoke about the Greek ‘filotimo’ – a word that is difficult to translate – but means a sense of pride in giving to the common good.

Europe needs to recognize that the measures we have put in place, and those still to come, need time to take effect.

Countries are not like financial markets. Social change cannot be executed as swiftly as credit default swaps.

You cannot sell short on social commitments and political responsibilities.

Although there are great risks in the current crisis, there are equally real risks in unrealistic expectations and inflammatory impatience. It is dangerous to push people too hard, too fast.

Greece already has some of the lowest wages in Europe. The average wage in Greece is just under $24,000, compared to just over $40,000 in the US.

We intend to reform our economy with the help of our citizens, not in spite of them.

Europe needs to join us in taking a longer view. Savage budget cuts will not necessarily lead to sustainable economic growth.

If we’re not careful, higher taxes coupled with lower revenue could actually slow down our recovery.

And that would be unjust. It could also trigger severe social unrest. Deflation is a genuine risk, too, if we don’t take parallel measures to kick-start productivity and create jobs.

This is not about asking Europe to rush to the aid of a reckless country. On the contrary, standing by Greece, as it makes deep and responsible reforms, is in the interests of Europe as a whole.

The price of not acting together will be higher taxes, higher unemployment, and a slower economic recovery for all of Europe.

Addressing the threat of speculation—for Greece, Europe, and America

Greece may be doing all the right things to revive our economy. But not everyone may want us to succeed.

This brings me to my second point: the need to address the threat of speculation and ill-regulated financial markets—a threat that imperils not only Greece, but the entire global economy.

I see that threat every day as we manage this crisis, for the immediate problem we face is not dealing with the recession, but in servicing our debt.

Despite the deep reforms we are making, traders and speculators have forced interest rates on Greek bonds to record highs.

Many believe there have been malicious rumors, endlessly repeated and tactically amplified, that have been used to manipulate normal market terms for our bonds.

Partly as a result, Greece currently has to borrow at rates almost twice as high as other EU countries. So when we borrow 5 billion euros for five years, we must pay about 725 million euros more in interest than Germany does.

We will have a very hard time implementing our reform program if the gains from our austerity measures are swallowed up by prohibitive interest rates.

This whole affair has a horrible sense of déjà vu.

The same financial institutions that were bailed out with taxpayers’ money are now making a fortune from Greece’s misfortune—while those same taxpayers are paying the price in deep cuts to their salaries and social services.

Unprincipled speculators are making billions every day by betting on a Greek default. All this may sound a bit familiar to American ears.

Yet unlike the bankers, Greece isn’t asking for a bailout—let alone a bonus.

Indeed, we have slashed the salaries of every single government official. I myself have taken a significant pay cut. And we have slashed bonuses in Greek banks by up to 90%.

The global economy is interdependent. We all suffer or advance depending on how well we deal with these risks.

There are both immediate and long-term steps we can all take to counteract the forces that are profiting off self-fulfilling bets on failure.

In our modern global economy, and particularly in crises, expectations play a powerful role. Many real numbers are shaped by what happens in people’s minds—or ‘Animal Spirits,’ as Keynes called it. This is why friends can and should help in a crisis.

To me this is a challenge to our democratic institutions.

An elected government, making huge changes with the consent of its people, is being undermined by concentrated powers in an unregulated market – powers which go beyond those of any individual government.

It is true that Greece accounts for just 2% of the European Union’s GDP.
But our economic conditions can have a far larger impact than that figure implies.

An ongoing Euro crisis could cause a domino effect, driving up borrowing costs for other countries with large deficits and causing volatility in bond and currency rates across the world.

A small problem could be the tipping point in an already volatile system.

We should remember that the Great Depression in the US was followed by a second recession in 1937-38 that derailed the world’s recovery and prolonged that crisis.

If the European crisis metastasizes, it could create a new global financial crisis with implications as grave as the US-originated crisis two years ago.

For America, a weak Euro means a rising dollar. That, in turn, means a rising US trade deficit—which will not help America’s economy rebound. If the EU—still America’s biggest trading partner—should falter, the consequences here would be palpable.

That is why Europe and America must say “enough is enough” to those speculators who only place value on immediate returns, with utter disregard for the consequences on the larger economic system—not to mention the human consequences of lost jobs, foreclosed homes, and decimated pensions.

These market manipulations—which were at the heart of the banking system’s collapse—are still legal practice. It is hard to fathom that we have allowed this to happen.

It is common sense, enforced by insurance regulators, that a person is not allowed to buy fire insurance on his neighbor’s house—and then burn it down to collect on that insurance. Yet that is exactly what is done in the market for credit default swaps. It is the scourge that has led banks to foreclose on the homes of millions of Americans. It is the scourge that haunts Greece and all of us.

But if Europe and America jointly step in to shore up global financial regulation—and to finally ensure enforcement of regulations—we can curtail such activities.

It is an encouraging sign that the American authorities have ordered some speculators not to destroy records of their trading in euros. I would encourage US authorities to continue these investigations.

Since the 1980s, we have witnessed a succession of global financial crises—the Third World debt collapse, the US Savings and Loan debacle, the Asian financial crisis, the high-tech and housing bubbles, and now the worst global recession since the 1930s.

Globalization—which promised so much, and opened so many doors to those of us with the good fortune of advanced educations and careers—has also brought new inequalities and new risks.

This crisis is an opportunity to correct many of the excesses of globalization.

It calls for deep structural changes to our global institutions and our system of global governance.

At the G20 and in Copenhagen, we fell short of our citizens’ expectations. We fell short of our own rhetoric.

We cannot afford to squander another opportunity to make the critical changes that our current reality demands.

Decisive and collective action and regulation is urgently required if global economic growth is to be sustainable. We need global coordination of monetary policies. If we let market forces alone dictate the terms, our economic recovery will almost certainly slip into reverse.

I have just arrived from Paris. Before that, I was in Berlin and Luxembourg. Together with my European partners, we have taken a common initiative to strengthen financial regulation, particularly vis a vis speculation.

We need clear rules on shorts, naked shorts, and credit default swaps.

I hope that there will be a positive response from this side of the Atlantic to bring this initiative to the G20.

Some fear the word regulation. They claim regulation curtails our freedoms.
That is like saying we should go without traffic lights as it slows down our cars.

So let's make the markets work for us.

Conclusion: Trusting our Partners

All of this is possible if we—Greece, Europe, America—have confidence and trust in each other as partners.

There was a debate for some time about whether the EU would work, and then whether it was better for it to be weak or strong. Even now, there are debates about whether the new Europe is a force to be reckoned with, its global role strengthened by our new President and High Representative. Or whether it is a nonentity of a continent disappearing off the map, as Time magazine would have us.

My view is that the world needs more Europe today, not less.

The EU is a hugely ambitious and complex project. We are a political Union of 27 nations and a monetary union with 16 members. Each of us brings our own experience and idiosyncrasies, even our own language—imagine uniting America if a different tongue were spoken in every state.

But sealing our fates together has undeniably been a catalyst for great progress.

With a whole raft of global crises urgently calling for closer global cooperation, we in the EU have pooled some of our national sovereignty to become more effective in protecting our common interests.

Creating our common currency—a currency shared by 328 million Europeans and backed by an economy larger than America’s—is perhaps Europe’s greatest achievement.

The Euro has been called “a post-modern or post-sovereign currency.” Whatever we call it, we European leaders must show real leadership to prevent unbridled market forces from hijacking this success story for their own ends. I am confident that we will succeed, because we cannot afford to fail.

There is reason to have confidence in Greece as well. Nobody should underestimate our determination to overcome our current challenges.

The truth is, if I had a Euro for every time outside observers have underestimated Greece’s determination—well, our fiscal problems would be solved.

A decade ago, when I launched the process of Greek-Turkish rapprochement as Foreign Minister, everyone said it was doomed to failure; but our countries are closer than they have been in centuries—and there is no better symbol of that than the fact that my good friend Kemal Dervis is moderating this discussion.

I look forward to Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's visit to Athens in the coming months. I believe we can make new breakthroughs in our relationship and become a symbol of stability in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Prior to the Athens Olympics, so many voices said Greece would fail—but we pulled off one of the most secure and successful Games in history.

Today we will be using this legacy to revamp Athens and our public administration. And so we will overcome this new challenge. And we will do it with the cooperation of our partners in Europe and America who have stood with us on so many vital tests.

For this new crisis is a moment of great opportunity—for Greece, the chance to modernize and revitalize its governance and development model. For Europe, a chance to become more fully integrated. And for the world, this is the moment to move toward greater democratic cooperation at a time when, once again, the global power of poorly regulated markets is proving dangerous for us all. Yet well-regulated markets can truly lift our people to new heights.

At its heart, our very modern global economy faces a very ancient challenge. Before the advent of democracy, Greece’s city-states were ruled by rich and ruthless oligarchs who belonged to powerful, interrelated clans—not altogether unlike the mergers between powerful financial institutions that dominate today’s global market.

Plato made a critical remark about a system controlled by the vested interests of a minority elite: And he characterized such a system as one where " 'just' or 'right' means nothing but what is in the interest of the stronger party."

We have a shared responsibility to create rules and institutions that can provide a more satisfying and sustainable answer.

So let me take you to the Parthenon as I finish my speech.

If one stands by the Parthenon and looks down on Athens, you will not only see the new Acropolis Museum waiting for the return of the Parthenon marbles. To the other side, you will see the ancient market, or 'agora' in Greek. Agora in Greek has two meanings. It means marketplace, but it also means public speaking. A place of politics. The market is and must be part of the realm of our political decisions.

If you look over to a hill on the other side you will see the Pnyx. There each and every citizen could stand on a rock, speak and be heard. Politics in ancient Athens was participative. Everyone had the power to be heard. So we must use the new means we have in our globalized society to empower our citizens and give them a real voice in politics.

As you look towards the sea, you will see islands of the Aegean. In ancient Greece, every island was a country unto itself. A city state. Yet they all were aligned to a common purpose: the protection of democracy and common values.

So let us see our countries as a vast sea of diverse islands linked by a common set of values. This is what Europe is striving to be.

The ancient philosopher Isocrates said: 'being Greek is partaking in Greek education.'
Meaning sharing in our common values.

Greece has long been America’s partner in values and in history. We are determined to be an ever-stronger partner for the US in world affairs—in commerce, in culture, in security. Now, I ask you to stand with us and work with us again—as we each confront our own challenges of change, and as we work together to realize our shared interest in a strong Europe and a sound global economic system.

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Shadow Government

Peter Feaver — 2010-03-08 12:02:20 GMT

In today's Washington Post Jackson Diehl writes about something that has puzzled me for a while: President Obama has not cultivated the close working relationships with other world leaders that previous presidents have.

This is triply paradoxical. On the one hand, Obama is exceptionally popular abroad with elites and the general public. Leaders pay relatively little political cost in working closely with Obama, unlike, for example, the abuse Prime Minister Blair suffered for his close relationship with Bush.

On the other hand, to the extent that Obama has put his own stamp on American grand strategy so far it has been in the extraordinary lengths he has gone rhetorically to accommodate the complaints levied against the United States. Indeed, the heart of Obama's first year strategy has been restoring the "soft power asset base" of the United States by conceding many foreign critiques, clearing the decks for leaders to start anew with America if they want to. This may help explain the first hand, Obama's general popularity.

And on the third hand, the dictates of international diplomacy inevitably focus on the personalized diplomacy of the top leaders. This was true even when communications technology frustrated the effort; consider the risks President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill ran to hold a secret summit in the North Atlantic. This is even more true today when the communications/transportations costs of close contact between global leaders approaches zero. The president's time is still a scarce and precious resource, sought by far more global demandeurs than the White House can satisfy. But beyond this constraint, there is practically no limit to the closeness of the personal relationship that the president can build with other leaders -- if he wants to.

And there is the rub. President Obama has not made developing those relationships a priority, not yet anyway. Such relationships usually develop with our closest national allies and great powers, but relations with those countries have all suffered over the past year or so. Russia is the only great power whose relations with the United States have arguably improved over the last year and so it is no accident that Medvedev is the first name to pass the laugh test of those that White House handlers floated to Diehl when he asked for an example of a close partner. If Medvedev does deliver strong Russian support for a top U.S. foreign policy priority like Iranian sanctions, then this may be an important exception -- but even then, it will be an exception that proves a more general rule of distant relations, and there is a good chance that it is not even the exception.

Close personal relations are hardly a panacea. They do not guarantee global support in the abstract, as measured by opinion polls, nor in the concrete when measured by foreign governments' willingness to make politically costly moves that bolster U.S. foreign policies. But bad relations do complicate foreign policy, as Bush discovered when the fractious relationship with Chirac and Schroeder contaminated efforts at coercive diplomacy with Iraq in 2002-2003. And so he went to great lengths to forge a closer personal partnership with the successors in Paris and Berlin in part because of the painful experience. In doing so, he followed a pattern discernible in every presidency in modern times. And the priority presidents assigned to developing those relations has only intensified in recent decades.

Did they err in doing so, or is Obama erring in breaking the pattern? Or has Obama found a new way of personal diplomacy that we in the bleachers are missing?

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner — 2010-03-08 17:04:51 GMT

I can't believe I watched the whole thing -- the 2010 Academy Awards show made Avatar seem tightly paced. Seriously, the show went downhill the moment Neil Patrick Harris left the stage. To be fair, there were no real surprises among the actual winners, draining any suspense from the proceedings.

Of course, this is a Foreign Policy blog -- so are there any lessons that can be drawn about world politics from such a pop culture phenomenon? Actually, yes:

1) Clearly, security studies trumps international political economy when it comes to the Academy Awards. I noted yesterday that Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds were all about war and resistance. Those films received ten academy awards. The only nominated film that addressed IPE was Up in The Air, and it got shut out.

2) That said, the awards also suggest that in Hollywood, Thucydides' dictum that "the strong do what they can, the weak do what they must" does not entirely hold. Despite being the highest grossing picture in history, Avatar got clobbered by The Hurt Locker. So much for financial power translating into prestige. That said, I'm pretty sure Kathryn Bigelow could take James Cameron in a fight, so maybe there was a differnt kind of power at work here.

3) Hey, that was some hard-core bargaining going on between Disney and Cablevision as the awards show was beginning. 4) The person with the greatest amount of "soft power" in Hollywood? Tina Fey. The woman could be paired with an eggplant and she'd get the eggplant some laughs.

5) Clearly, the Academy Awards has problems dealing with asymmetric threats. How else do you explain a three-minute homage to horror films in which the entire zombie genre gets less than a second of screen time??!!! Hello?! Chucky from Child's Play got a longer shot, for crying out loud!

Fools -- they clearly haven't thought this through. I mean, based on the John Hughes tribute, Judd Nelson is already a member of the living dead.

One final thought: if there was any justice in the world, the Best Visual Effects Oscar would have been a tie between Demi Moore and Michelle Pfeiffer. In general, I found a rough but direct correlation between age and fashion sense. The older the actress, the more chic they looked.

Post your own thoughts in the comments.

Planet MySQL

Robert Treat — 2010-03-08 16:20:56 GMT

Before all my fellow DBA's heads explode, let me just say that I am a relational guy. I like the relational model, think it's the best tool for the job, and think every programmer (not just DBA's) should aspire to be as familiar with it as they are with AJAX, MVC, or whatever other technology pattern you think is important. I'll even take that a step further; I think the NoSQL movement is mostly a re-hash of failed technologies from the last century. Object and document databases had their run in the market (some might say "they had their time"), and they were pretty thoroughly beaten by the RDBMS; that some people have reinvented that wheel doesn't change the game. That said, I find the recent comments from Jeff Davis on the relational model and scalability to be overlooking some things. The state of computing tasks has changed over the past two decades, and what we know about computer engineering has also changed. Working on highly scalable systems like we do at OmniTI, you can't escape some of the inherent problems that you face when working in these types of environments. As much as I'd like the answer to every problem to be "just use an RDBMS", Brewer's CAP theorem just isn't something you can ignore. When most people think about the relational model, they think of it in terms of parent-child relationships between tables. Without getting too deep in the details of it, I think it's pretty fair to say that Primary Keys and Foreign Keys are very large part of any relational implementation, and that pretty much all RDBMS strive to allow you to add these constraints to your model; it's what helps keep the data consistent. But there's the rub. CAP theorem points out that as we strive for tighter and tighter consistency, we are pulling away from availability, and sacrificing partition tolerance. Two theoretical systems that run smack dab into each other in the real world. This isn't really something new; if you have ever de-normalized, dropped a foreign key, or split data across multiple nodes, you've run into this before. Now, where CAP theorem falls on it's face (imho) is that it also ignores another holy trinity of software development; Cheap, Fast, and Good. The size of your problem is dictated by the resources you have available; if you can afford decent tools (and let's be clear, decent is not your web dev throwing up MySQL on an EC2 instance) it is quite likely that the stressors of the relational model will never impact you in a way that most CAP folks are worried about. This is also one of the places the NoSQL movement fails; by throwing the baby out with the bath water. Giving up your data integrity before you have scalability issues is a form of premature optimization. The trick, as Theo would say, is having the experience to know when such optimizations are and aren't premature. So what's the take away? I like to say that you use the relational model because it is best, and you use something else because it is necessary. Most SQL implementations can scale very well, and they should be your first choice when starting a new project. But we also can't pretend that there aren't inherent problems as these systems grow larger; let's understand the trade-offs and engineer appropriately.

Wikio - Beijing

2010-03-08 15:30:00 GMT

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi has called for joint efforts to promote a return to better relations with the United States, Xinhua reported on Monday.

Source : Ria Novosti (subscribe)

Explore : Asia, China, Russia, World

The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com

Ziad J. Asali, M.D. — 2010-03-08 16:47:46 GMT

TESTIMONY OF DR. ZIAD J. ASALI President, American Task Force on Palestine U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) March 4, 2010 Mr. Chairman,...

craigslist | all jobs in seattle-tacoma

2010-03-08 15:44:59 GMT

Share Your America & Be a Mentor

Serve your community and make a global difference by becoming a friend and mentor to international exchange students from across the globe.

EF Foundation for Foreign Study, a non-profit organization, is seeking local representatives to coordinate our international student exchange program in Washington. Many of our coordinators enjoy planning activities with the students such as holiday parties, movie nights, pizza parties, going bowling, or taking trips to different areas of the states.

By joining the leading organization in high school exchange, you will receive a number of benefits unique to EF Foundation, such as training at both the local and national level; domestic and international travel; reimbursements for necessary expenses; on-going support provided throughout the year both locally and nationally; and 24-hour emergency support.

Other responsibilities include: supporting host families and exchange students throughout the year by maintaining regular contact; networking throughout the community to find host families and help match them to students who share common interests; and developing positive relationships with your local high schools.

This volunteer opportunity is flexible as you decide your level of commitment with the number of students to mentor and which hours/days to devote. Many of our coordinators have full time jobs, are stay at home parents, or are retired. All coordinators must be at least 25 years of age, live in the continental United States, and be eligible for work in the United States.

The best reward is sharing in the exchange students’ discovery of America, making friends from around the world, and creating memories to last a lifetime! So get involved this holiday season and make a lifelong impact!

For more information, please visit us on the web at www.effoundation.org or contact Shaun at 1.800.447.4273, or via email at Shaun.Seaman@ef.com

RIA Novosti

2010-03-08 15:30:00 GMT

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi has called for joint efforts to promote a return to better relations with the United States, Xinhua reported on Monday.

Newsvine - politics

IndependentVoter — 2010-03-08 15:59:22 GMT

I recently asked several senior administration officials, separately, to name a foreign leader with whom Barack Obama has forged a strong personal relationship during his first year in office. A lot of hemming and hawing ensued.