Category: Current Affairs

Tornado II

It was raining hard and I was stocking up at the video store with my kids. Coming out of the store I was shocked to see a soot-black, swirling cloud, full of malice not far away. I bundled the kids into the car and headed home! My house was fine but tornadoes touched down throughout the area ripping roofs off homes and in one amazing Washington Post picture (not online) impaling a wooden fence-post through a wall.

Tornado

Arrival

I am enjoying my first day in Paris, and tomorrow I start a five-day stint for the State Department. The Star Wars DVD set is advertised more heavily here than back in Virginia. (Remember the Australian who said something like “Any country that makes a movie like Star Wars deserves to rule the world”? I once cited this and many readers did not realize it was meant ironically, both by him and me.) The French have the new Che Guevara movie, but not yet the delightfully retro Sky Captain. The new Philip Roth novel appears to have been translated into French already. You will continue to hear from me and Alex, and to make up for the trade imbalance we are importing a European guest-blogger…stay tuned…!

Markets in everything, the saddest installment you will likely see

A thousand rubles, or about $34, was enough to bribe an airline agent to put a Chechen woman on board a flight just before takeoff, according to Russian investigators. The agent took the cash, and on a ticket the Chechen held for another flight simply scrawled, “Admit on board Flight 1047.”

And this was not the first time:

Authorities have acknowledged that a similar group of gunmen paid off police in 2002 as they transported a virtual armory of assault rifles, hand grenades and explosives all the way from the south to Moscow, where they seized a theater filled with patrons. The subsequent standoff left 129 hostages dead. “They admitted it,” Satarov said. “But it was two years ago, and nothing has been done.”

And it has been nine years since Shamil Basayev, the Chechen guerrilla leader, led an assault force that took over a hospital with more than 1,000 people in the southern city of Budennovsk. That attack ended with more than 100 civilian deaths. Basayev later told an interviewer that he had gotten past police road stops with $10,000 in bribes and had intended to go all the way to Moscow but stopped in Budennovsk because he ran out of money.

Here is the full story.

New currencies around the world

With paper bills so rancid even beggars hate to touch them, French-speaking West African gets down to serious money-laundering today. An eight-country campaign aims to retire more than $1 billion in decaying currency seen as much as vectors of disease as units of exchange…

The old ones, they are just disgusting,” merchant Mohamed Hussein said at his wood-shelf storefront in Dakar. “NInety-five percent of people who fall sick are because of filthy money,” he said, pulling out a bottle of liquid soap he keeps under the counter for every post-purchase scrub-down.

That is from the 15 September USA Today, p.14A, not currently on-line. Here is a related story, here is another.

Closer to home, the new look to the U.S. nickel makes Jefferson look like a cadaver; click on “Gallery,” through the link, for a clear view.

News roundup

Test of Missile Defense System Delayed Again is the headline in the Washington Post but don’t worry, “The Air Force general in charge of the program said the setback will not affect plans to begin operating the system in the next month or two.”

$3 Trillion Price Tag Left Out As Bush Details His Agenda but don’t worry, Bush-Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt says “the president remains committed to cutting the budget deficit in half over the next five years.”

How can politicians get away with crazy policies like this? Explanation here.

What do you give the man who has nothing?

Looking to aid the homeless? Voice mail is one good way to start.

Here is some explanation:

“It just makes people feel a lot better about themselves,” said Larry Sykes, Community Voice Mail director at The Stewpot, which hopes to offer more than 2,500 voice mail lines in Dallas within three years. “Unless they tell somebody they’re eating at The Stewpot or sleeping under a bridge, nobody knows it.”

In Cornelison’s case, Goodwill Industries was aware of his plight when it used the voice mail system to contact him and offer him a job at one of its warehouses at $5.68 an hour.

For now, the 40-year-old Dallas man still lives on the street. “But once I start getting paydays, I’ll be able to not do that anymore,” said Cornelison, who hopes to move into a motel, if not a more permanent home.

If Mexico can do it…

Mexico’s Treasury department submitted a tight budget for 2005 to Congress yesterday, calling for the public sector deficit to drop to 0.1 per cent of gross domestic product, down from 0.3 per cent this year…

However, there has been cross-party consensus on the need for a tight budget, and the deficit has fallen as a proportion of GDP each year. Francisco Gil Diaz, the Treasury minister, also retains powers to make spending cuts during the year if there is a risk that the deficit target will not be met.

Note that these budgets are based on the assumption of a steep drop in oil prices, which for Mexico is not a “rosy scenario.” Here is the full story.

Secrets and Lies

I argued earlier that good intelligence requires more dissemination of information. But the CIA and other agencies are classifying more documents than in the past. The purpose it seems is often to cover up for mistakes or even to censor things that the authorites simply don’t like rather than to hinder terrorists.

Remember those aluminium tubes supposedly intended for use in Iraq’s secret weapons program? A Senate report on prewar intelligence quoted the CIA as saying “their willingness to pay such costs suggests the tubes are intended for a special project of national interest.” The CIA, however, classified how much the Iraqi’s paid as secret, deleting the number. How much did the Iraqi’s actually pay? About $17.50 a piece.

A possible solution to this problem is to create an independent board. Surprise, we have one already! According to J. William Leonard, director of the National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office, “a 2000 law created a public interest declassification board to recommend release of secrets in important cases, but the president and Congress never appointed members.”

De Gustibus…

A Malaysian woman is trying to reclaim the world record for the longest stay in a room full of scorpions, news reports said Sunday.

Nur Malena Hassan, 27, moved Saturday into a locked glass box where she plans to live for 36 consecutive days with more than 6,000 of the poisonous arachnids in a shopping mall, the Malay-language Mingguan Malaysia newspaper reported.

Scores of people watched as Nur Malena stood fearlessly in a red sweater and jeans with scorpions crawling up her head, chest and legs in Kuantan, a city about 350 kilometres (160 miles) east of Kuala Lumpur, a photograph published by the newspaper showed.

Nur Malena set a world record in 2001 by living for 30 days with 2,700 scorpions. She was stung seven times, fell unconscious and almost gave up the attempt.

Her record was shattered a year later by Kanchana Ketkeaw, a woman in neighbouring Thailand who lived in a similar glass room for 32 days with 3,400 scorpions.

Under self-imposed rules, Nur Malena is expected to leave the glass room just once a day for 15 minutes at a time. She will sleep, eat and perform Muslim prayers in the room.

The woman gives herself a 50-50 chance of making the record. She claims that the nighttime is worst, since scorpions are especially active then. On the brighter side, scorpions rarely sting unless disturbed, so a quiet posture yields dividends. Furthermore she has built up immunity over the last six years by allowing herself to be stung repeatedly.

No doubt her fear will be more impressive than that of the previous recordholder: “Having 6,000 scorpions is different from 3,000 [TC: hey wasn’t it 3,444?]. It’s just worse.”

When bored during her ordeal, she watches DVDs; her current favorite is Spiderman.

Here is one account, I have drawn further information from the Mexican edition of the Miami Herald.

And why is she doing it? In her own words, “I want to show that Malaysians are capable of world-class efforts.”

Jeffersonians vs Hamiltonians

Entering Monticello,Thomas Jefferson’s home, you are flanked by two busts, Jefferson on one side and Alexander Hamilton on the other. Since the two were political foes it’s a surprising choice. But the busts were placed there by Jefferson himself who said, “we were ever-opposed in life and now we shall be ever-opposed in death.” The Jefferson-Hamilton battle continues to this day (read the link for more and don’t miss the many interesting comments.)

JeffersonHamilton

Addendum: Brad was perhaps fooled by the name of this blog but then there are two of us.

Back to the Future of Iraq

In the weeks after the Iraq war “concluded” there was lots of discussion about reforming the economy. But the opening of the second front pushed those plans into remission. I hope that it is not yet too late to leave Iraq with better economic institutions. Yet as we seek a way out, our influence diminishes and the chance that the war was fought for nought increases. I was pleased, therefore, to see Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development and Arvind Subramanian, a division chief at the International Monetary Fund try to push reform back onto the agenda.

As the United States, the United Nations, and the Iraqi Governing Council struggle to determine what form Iraq’s next government should take, there is one question that, more than any other, may prove critical to the country’s future: how to handle its vast oil wealth. Oil riches are far from the blessing they are often assumed to be. In fact, countries often end up poor precisely because they are oil rich. Oil and mineral wealth can be bad for growth and bad for democracy, since they tend to impede the development of institutions and values critical to open, market-based economies and political freedom: civil liberties, the rule of law, protection of property rights, and political participation.

Can Iraq avoid the pitfalls that other oil-rich countries have fallen into? The answer is yes, but only if it is willing to implement a novel arrangement for managing its oil wealth with the help of the international community…. the Iraqi people should embed in their new constitution an arrangement for the direct distribution of oil revenues to all Iraqi households — an arrangement that would be supervised by the international community.

The article is in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, it is well worth reading but if you don’t have a subscription you can find a more succint version of the argument here.

Thanks to Dave Meleney for the pointer.