Catching Up with the News

La Republic bananier: Jean Sarkozy, the French President’s 23-year-old, undergraduate son is appointed to a powerful post as the head of the Epad, the public agency which runs La Défense, the big business district on the west side of Paris. (An internet petition is calling on Jean to get his degree before rising to high responsibility.) La Défense is the heart of Sarkoland, the President’s fiefdom. His son was elected to a seat on the notoriously sleaze-ridden departement council there last year. The president also orchestrated a public media trial of his bitter rival, former Prime Minister Dominic de Villepin for allegedly abetting an amateurish and ineffective scheme to smear Sarkozy Also, the fact remains that Sarkozy appointed (and stood by) a senior minister who had written about his exploits as a Bangkok sex tourist. Gay activists are also angry, because the minister in question, Mitterrand has tarnished homosexuality by at least appearing to associate it with paedophilia and prostitution.

IndeoChinese Cold War: Beginning in August, stories about new Chinese air incursions into India have dominated the news: China claims some 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory–around Tibet, and of semi-independent kingdoms that paid fealty to Lhasa. Ever since the anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet last year, progress toward settling the border dispute has stalled. To add to the drama, many yonger Tibetans, many born outside Tibet, are growing impatient with the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” approach—a willingness to accept Chinese sovereignty in return for true autonomy—and commitment to nonviolence. If these groups were to use India as a base for armed insurrection against China, as Tibetan exiles did throughout the 1960s, then two nuclear powers will be brought to the brink of war. (Beijing will at least seize important Tibetan Buddhist monasteries that lie in Indian territory close to the border).

Beijing has launched a diplomatic offensive aimed at undercutting Indian sovereignty over the areas China claims, particularly the northeast state of Arunachal Pradesh and one of its key cities, Tawang, birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama in the 17th century. Tibet ceded Tawang and the area around it to British India in 1914. China has recently denied visas to the state’s residents; lodged a formal complaint after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the state in 2008; and tried to block a $2.9 billion Asian Development Bank loan to India because some of the money was earmarked for an irrigation project in the state. In India’s 1962 war with China, the latter launched a massive invasion along the length of the frontier, routing the Indians before unilaterally halting at what today remains the de facto border, known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC). They are fearful of China’s expanding naval presence in the Indian Ocean. Bharat Verma, editor of the Indian Defence Review, predicted in a widely publicized essay this summer that China would attack India sometime before 2012.

Give Nukes a Nobel: The world wars were the hideous expression of what happens when the human tendency toward conflict hooks up with the violent possibilities of the industrial age–the Nazi death machinery, and assembly line murders. The truth is that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I; by World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million, or 78 million — somewhere in there. Then came a world with nuclear weapons. As bad as they are, nukes have been instrumental in reversing the long, seemingly inexorable trend in modernity toward deadlier and deadlier conflicts. Major powers find ways to get along because the cost of armed conflict between them has become unthinkably high., and thus began the age of globalization and global economy. If a world with nuclear weapons in it is a scary, scary place to think about, the industrialized world without nuclear weapons was a scary, scary place for real. But there is no way to un-ring the nuclear bell–instead of fantasies about a nuke-free planet where formerly bloodthirsty humans live together in peace, what the world needs is a safer, more stable nuclear umbrella.

Haut-Karabagh Question: Azerbaijan is the only country criticiseing an agreement to normalize relations between Turkey and Armenia, saying it raises doubts about regional stability.The Azerbaijani foreign ministry said Turkey should not have normalised ties without a deal over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. During the war there in 1993, Turkey closed its border with Armenia out of solidarity with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s government wants Armenia to withdraw troops from Nagorno-Karabakh, the Aremenian enclave in Azerbaijan, and return land. (There was a chance that the Turkish-Armenian protocols might never be ratified by Turkey’s parliament). A timetable for normalising relations between Turkey and Armenia was agreed in April, after a century of hostility between the two neighbours.

News Roundup 18/09/09

Controversy over the Thames: ‘Furious’ London Mayor Boris Johnson has ordered the River Thames to be reinstated on the London Underground map after Transport for London decided to redesign it. Tfl’s decision to remove zone boundaries will also now be reviewed. The redesign caused so much outcry from politicians and passenger groups and fears that people could end up paying higher fares by accident. Tfl decided to remove the fare boundaries and river because it said some passengers had complained that the map, based on Harry Beck’s 1933 design classic, had become ‘too cluttered’. However, the Harry Beck map has been voted a British design icon alongside Concorde and Spitfire. ‘TfL treated it as an operational decision but clearly it’s much more significant than that,’ the City Hall announced. [Many people in London, this author being one, still use the Thames River to get their bearings]. One of the latest revisions also is that passengers entering Zone 1 – which covers much of central London – pay premium fares, while those who use circle line that circumvent the area gets a cheaper fare.

Berlin Wall, 20 years on, Divided They Stand: Twenty years on, there has been no grand new mission, no ambitious vision of remaking Germany — or Europe, or the world. As the continent’s largest economy, Germany could have taken a lead to ensure that the European Union came together to weather the worst economic downturn in 70 years; it did not. Germany has contributed 4,000 troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, but there is deepening unease in Germany about the nation’s involvement in the war there. The strongest impulse in German politics is to avoid big changes, to hold the country steady as she goes. The electoral system supports this by producing consensus-driven coalition governments.  Ossis — Easterners earn less, produce less and have higher rates of unemployment than Wessis — Westerners . One in every 10 Ossis wishes he or she were still living in the G.D.R., something that will be reflected in the rise of Die Linke, a hard-left party formed by Western socialists and remnants of the G.D.R. communists in the East. This division that Germans call “a wall in the head” is more evident outside Berlin, where the physical Wall has been all but expunged.

There’s also been a striking geographical reversal–the poorly paid, the unemployed, the migrated East Berliners were shunted into the high-rises of West Berlin while the rich West Berliners swooped on the elegant 19th century housing of Prenzlauer Berg, left to crumble in the East during the Cold War. Today East Berlin is cooler than West. That’s where people with money want to live. After World War II, both the G.D.R. and West Germany resisted serious examination of their collective culpability for Nazism–denial infused Germany’s student and counterculture movements with an anger not matched in other countries. A similar failure to confront the truth about the G.D.R. — its violent repression and the extent to which East Germans accepted and sometimes aided the regime — expresses itself in ostalgie, the rose-tinted nostalgia for a G.D.R. that never was. Ostalgie inspired the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin! and underpins the renaissance of iconic East German brands. [There used to be a blank space on maps of East Berlin where the Hohenschönhausen jail stood. Germany's secret police, the Stasi, employed one officer for every 180 G.D.R. citizens and had a network of 180,000 informers..]

If that why Thatcher opposed German Unification? A strong unified Germany looks where??? Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. She asked that her remarks should not be recorded,  and the part of the conversation is reproduced from memory. She assured Mr Gorbachev that President Bush also wanted to do nothing that would be seen by the Russians as a threat to their security. The same assurance was later spelt out in person to Mr Gorbachev at the Soviet- American summit off Malta. Back then, the French were also puzzled at Moscow’s refusal to intervene in East Germany and questioned whether “the USSR has made peace with the prospect of a united Germany and will not take any steps to prevent it. This has caused a fear approaching panic.” An adviser to social President Mitterrand noted “France by no means wants German reunification, although it realises that in the end it is inevitable,” and that he would “fly off to live on Mars” if this happened. Gorbachev’s relaxed attitude to reunification later hardened. At his summit with Mr Bush,  he accused the West of trying to “impose” Western values on Eastern Europe, and launched a ferocious attack on Helmut Kohl,the German Chancellor, for hurrying the unification.

News Round-Up

How Berlusconi survived his scandals: “In some ways, Berlusconi is the Italian political equivalent of Bank of America or AIG: he is simply too big to fail. Too many who have carved out their slice of power would risk losing it all in the monumental shakeout that would follow Berlusconi’s exit from politics. And even in that unlikely scenario, the Prime Minister would have his ownership of the nation’s major private television networks to fall back on” [We doubt his statement that he is the best Prime Minister in Italy's 150-year history, but we have to agree that he is the most influential Italian of his generation.]

Tom Friedman is (again) on alternative energy: Applied Materials is one of the most important U.S. companies you’ve probably never heard of. It makes the machines that make the microchips that go inside your computer, and it maintains a real-time global interaction with all 14 solar panel factories it’s built around the world in the last two years, none in the U.S.: five are in Germany, four are in China, one is in Spain, one is in India, one is in Italy, one is in Taiwan and one is even in Abu Dhabi. Germany now generates almost half the solar power in the world today and, as a byproduct, is making itself the world-center for solar research, engineering, manufacturing and installation. With more than 50,000 new jobs, the renewable energy industry in Germany is now second only to its auto industry. AM’s biggest U.S. customer is a German-owned company in Oregon. [Usual Friedman Soundbite: So, if you like importing oil from Saudi Arabia, you’re going to love importing solar panels from China.]

…meanwhile, environment gets ignored (again): Carbon cap-and-trade bill, the legislation to limit national greenhouse-gas emissions, passed the House in June. However, Senate majority leader Harry Reid told reporters that the Senate might have to wait to act on cap and trade until after tackling health care and banking reform. Given how controversial cap and trade remains (the bill was weak but a bill nonetheless) even among many Democrats in the Senate — Republicans remain almost unanimously opposed — action in the election year of 2010 might be even tougher. The White House has taken  unilateral steps— like the move to place the first-ever national limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles — but that might not be enough.

Why the Illegal Immigrants should have healthcare: Insuring undocumented workers is ethically murky and politically impossible. If we’re hiring illegals, we have a moral obligation to care for them. Given that illegal immigrants have broken our laws, it makes sense that large numbers of upstanding citizens oppose any measure that would encourage more foreigners to sneak into America or make their lives easier once they’re here. However, American Journal of Public Health, contends that immigrants typically arrive in America during their prime working years and tend to be younger and healthier than the rest of the U.S. population. As a result, health-care expenditures for the average immigrant are 55 percent lower than for a native-born American citizen with similar characteristics. So if you add cheaper people to cover to the pool, you reduce the average cost. If illegals were covered, this hidden tax (on free emergency and charitable care) would decrease. Employers  have an incentive to hire undocumented immigrants because they don’t require coverage, thus giving illegal immigrants an unfair advantage in competing for jobs. Also, many undocumented workers leave the country before they’re old enough to require much medical care.

A Hope for Peace in Somalia? President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who became president in February, is a former high school teacher, who became president in February. His moderate Islamist government is widely considered to be Somalia’s best chance for stability in years, which included 21 years of dictatorship and the 18 years of chaos that followed. Ahmed has both widespread grass-roots support inside the country and extensive help from outside nations, who are counting on Sheik Sharif to tackle piracy and beat back the spread of militant Islam. After years of ambivalence about Somalia, the United States is playing an increasingly active role here, and recently shipped 40 tons of weapons to Somalia to keep Sheik Sharif’s government alive. This week, American commandos killed a Qaeda agent in southern Somalia in a daylight helicopter raid. However, Ahmed has a disarrayed armed force–many of his commanders still have ties to the Shabab, the Islamist insurgents working with Al Qaeda. If not for the 5,000 African Union troops guarding the port, airport and Villa Somalia–the presidential villa–his government would quickly fall. (The Shabab and their insurgent brethren now control most of Mogadishu and much of the country).

Meanwhile, we continue to exploit Africans: A British oil trading giant, Trafigura, has agreed to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge damages claim from thousands of Africans who fell ill from tonnes of toxic waste dumped illegally in one of the worst pollution incidents in decades. Trafigura, one of the world’s largest oil traders, allowed contaminated sludge from a tanker ship was fly-tipped under cover of darkness near Ivory Coast in August 2006. The incident caused at least 100,000 residents from the west African country’s most populous city, Abidjan, to flood into hospitals and clinics although Trifigura has always insisted the foul-smelling slurry, dumped without its knowledge by a sub-contractor, could not have caused serious injury or illness. [Trafigura, a privately-owned multinational which has 1,900 staff working in 42 offices around the world, last year claimed a turnover of $73bn (£44bn), a figure double the entire GDP of Ivory Coast]. Internal Trafigura emails, obtained by Greenpeace, show that Trafigura struck a series of bargains on the international markets in 2005 and early 2006 to buy cheap and dirty petroleum, called coker gasoline, and rather than send the oil to a refinery, Trafigura used a tanker as a floating processing plant creating toxic sludge on the high seas.

And the French won the Cold War for us? In new documentary movie, L’Affaire Farewell, the French claims that a French mole in the KGB leaked information so devastating that it hastened the implosion of the Soviet Union. The CIA’s website still carries a compelling essay, declassified in 1996, by Gus Weiss, who wrote, “[The] Farewell dossier… led to the collapse of a crucial [KGB spying] programme at just the time the Soviet military needed it… Along with the US defence build-up and an already floundering Soviet economy, the USSR could no longer compete.” The French taupe, or mole, was Colonel Vladimir Vetrov of Directorate T (codename Farewell), the industrial spying arm of the KGB. In 1981-82, he gave French intelligence more than 3,000 pages of documentss, the names of more than 400 Soviet agents posted abroad and the successful Soviet strategies for acquiring, legally and illegally, advanced technology from the West. His expose of the abject failure of the Communist system to match rapid Western advances in electronic micro-technology influenced President Ronald Reagan’s decision to launch the “Star Wars” programme in 1983: a hi-tech bluff which would drag the USSR into an unaffordable, and calamitous, attempt to keep up with the democratic world. Vetrov never asked for money or for a new life in the West. He was an “uncontrollable man, who oscillated between euphoria and over-excitement”,  who was later executed for stabbing his mistress and killing a policeman in a Moscow park in February 1982.The detractors, however, say that the whole affair, they said, had been concocted by the CIA to test the loyalty to the West of the Socialist president, François Mitterrand, after he was elected in May 1981 and to sound out jealousy among competing French spy services. Farewell was “run” – at the mole’s own insistence – by a relatively small, French counter-espionage agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which was not supposed to operate abroad.

Debutantes debut again in London: For the first time since 1997, young women dress in virginal white, curtsey to a minor royal and partake of a giant cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball. Queen Charlotte’s Ball – originally started in 1780, as a birthday whim for George III’s consort – acted as the starting point of the Season for centuries. Once held in May, it began the Season, a six-month whirl of parties and events to launch young ladies, aged 17 to 18, of certain wealth and/or breeding on to the marriage market. Before 1958, the debutantes (debs as they were called) were presented to Buckingham Palace too, but Queen Elizabeth halted the practice not because it was anachronistic but because, as Princess Margaret put it, “every tart in London was getting in.” Today, the ball is held in September, rather than May – which is considered too close to exam time, but it, as it always has, now raises funds for the west London maternity hospital and research centre that bears Queen Charlotte’s name.