A panel in Washington has discussed viral videos, empowering local activists and setting international moral values as means to prevent future mass atrocities against civilians.
Photo: AP
A box full to the brim with KONY 2012 campaign posters are shown Thursday March 8, 2012 at the Invisible Children Movement offices in San Diego.
The panel called "The Responsibility to Protect" was organized during the two-day Clinton Global Initiative University Meeting, and attended by dozens of students from across the United States, many of them foreigners. Former President Bill Clinton launched these programs in 2007 to engage the next generation of leaders.
Drawing on current violence taking place against civilians in Syria, international relations professor Amitai Etzioni called for urgent action when what he called a moral minimum is under threat.
"If you stand by and allow a government to take its tanks and shell civilians and then go and pull people out of hospital beds and knife them, then what are we standing for? So there I would say all pragmatic considerations have to be set aside, and I don't think we always have to have a national interest. I think we have some moral duties which even if they conflict with our national interests, there is a level, a Holocaust, where we cannot just stand by," he said.
Etzioni called on the international community to have standby troops to quickly intervene in such situations.
But Michael Gerson, who works for the One Campaign which aims to improve international aid, warned that any multilateral solution, even if essential, can quickly get bogged down.
"It is not possible just for one country to come in and take care of all these problems, but multilateral institutions are not designed for speed. And we find that again and again and again, when it comes to the United Nations Security Council, which we have seen with the role of Russia and China, when it comes to organizations like NATO which we tried to get involved in Darfur," he said.
Despite massive attention to the problems in Sudan's Darfur region, the violence there, which began nine years ago, continues.
In such situations, Juliana Rotich, the executive director of Ushahidi, a non-profit technology company managing crisis information, recommended empowering local activists.
"It takes the involvement of the local activists who know the situation best to make the recommendations that fit the issue. Our part as a technology provider is to provide the skeleton on which they can flesh out the issue that they care about, and they can put in place the processes that fit that particular issue," she said.
Also on the panel was U.S. film actress Kristen Bell, who defended her involvement with the controversial but hugely successful online video against the roving Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony by the U.S. group Invisible Children.
The LRA has been maiming and abducting children across Central Africa, as well as killing civilians for over two decades, something Bell said she wanted to use her fame to fight against. "Listen, I am not a foreign policy expert. I do not know a ton about government. But I do know that I care about people, and I do not really care what country they live in because technology has given me the ability to look into someone's face and see them across the world," she said. "And I just want to be able to say, 'hope you are doing well. I am here if you need me.'"
The video was again criticized by panel members, as it has been previously for being too simple and aimed too much at a U.S. audience. But since being viewed tens of millions of times, the "Kony 2012" video has been followed by a new U.S. Congressional resolution backing U.S. military efforts to help eradicate the LRA, as well as a decision by the African Union to send 5,000 troops to find Kony. The elusive LRA leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity.
This week"s strong earthquake that shook Japan, one of the best prepared Asian countries for natural disasters, was a stark reminder of the value of readiness in a region disproportionately targeted by the forces of nature.
Photo: Reuters
Students cover their heads after they ran out of the school building during an earthquake drill at the Baclaran Elementary School Unit-1 in Paranaque city, metro Manila, the Philippines, February 7, 2012
While Japan continues to dig out from last year's triple disaster, Thailand is scrambling to avert a repeat of last year's historic floods.
Since then, Thai authorities have set aside billions of dollars for a long-term water resource management plan that they say will ensure that the disaster will not be repeated.
Bangkok resident Suthi Sun remembered the floods like a bad dream. When the waters reached his residence, he said in an e-mail interview that "this was the first time I found the high level of flooding. The highest level was 1.5 meter[s]. Meanwhile my ceiling is about 2.2 to 2.5 meters."
Sun said the Thai government tried to do its best but had no "clear or certain policy." Ruengrawee Pichaikul , Senior Program Coordinator for the Asia Foundation in Thailand, agreed, saying in an e-mail interview that some believed the scale of the flooding was beyond the government's capacity.
When responding to similar charges leveled against the government during the flood, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said, "I tell you the truth, we have done everything to the best of our ability."
"We are facing the most severe flooding ever. We need encouragement, support and cooperation from all sectors and from all the people as well," she said.
Thai authorities have also set up a disaster fund to compensate victims and are struggling to provide affordable insurance to vulnerable citizens. Similar efforts are underway in the Philippines to provide victims of a recent earthquake with insurance and compensation.
USAID 's Principle Regional Advisor William Berger underscored the importance of disaster preparedness, particularly building resilient infrastructure, which can be costly. "It pays to invest in disaster risk reduction. Having...buildings built to a code that meets the threats that the country is facing is absolutely critical."
Reuters
An aerial view of Namche Bazaar, the last town before the Everest region in Nepal, December 2009 file photo.
Nepal sits on the collision point of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates that created the Himalayas. Cornell University 's Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Larry Douglas Brown said major earthquakes will re-occur there "because the two plates are continuing to come together."
"The fact that they occur close to the population centers puts them at risk," he said. "And I say that also the complicating factor is that the resources are either not available or have not been applied to protect the infrastructure that exists there against these large earthquakes.
One possibility, said Steven Rood , the Asia Foundation Country Representative for the Philippines and the Pacific Island Nations, is to turn Nepal's historical structures into tourist attractions and use those revenues to retrofit them to withstand seismic activity. That is the approach USAID has used since 1995. The U.S. agency has helped build government and community capacity to reduce disaster risk and foster public partnerships to reconstruct old buildings and turn them into tourist attractions.
Japan, meanwhile, has invested heavily in being ready for the worst that nature can offer up. Berger was in Tokyo 24 hours after the March 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck.
"I sat in those buildings in Japan. And they swayed and they rocked, but they didn't fall down. A lot of other countries in Asia, if you were in a building, it would have fallen down," Berger said. "So Japan is invested and understands that these things are important. And … they're wealthy enough that they can construct buildings in a seismic-resistant fashion."
But public awareness is also key to limiting casualties. "Part of the reason why the Japanese came through it so often is they all know what to do when an earthquake happens," Rood said.
Reuters
Officers of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department take part in an earthquake disaster drill in Tokyo, Japan, September 1, 2011
Brown added that Japan's response earthquakes was good, keeping casualties and damage to a minimum. He said its state-of-the-art warning systems worked very well. Until the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Brown said Japan knew there was a tsunami risk, but did not know it was going to be as bad as it was. That information had "simply not worked its way through the system from scientific observations into practice early enough," he said.
That learning process cost thousands of lives in the case of Indonesia, which was the hardest-hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami .
Hawaii's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center sent an early tsunami warning to Indonesia, which was then passed it down the official channels. But the entire region, according to the center, did not have warning systems in place that might have spared some of the more than 200,000 lives lost to the disaster.
"Indonesia is a little more prepared for a repeat because they have set up an early warning system," said Rood. "Now that early warning system doesn't work all the time...but other times it has actually produced a good warning so that when the earthquake happens and a tsunami threatens, the people are getting some warning."
Arshinta , the Director of YAKKUM Emergency Unit in Yogyakarta, Indonesia said in an email interview that the trend shows a decreased casualty rate since 2004. In 2006, about 6,000 people died in a magnitude 6.3 earthquake compared to 704 deaths in a 2009 magnitude 7.6 tremor, she said. And according to an Indonesian National Disaster Management Agency report, 1,711people died in 2010 due to natural disasters, compared to 2,620 deaths in 2009.
While much has been done to empower communities, Arshinta said the capacity of Indonesian disaster agencies remains low.
But some problems "require long-term systematic changes to the way society is configured and the way it uses the landscape," said Brown. "If you don't build to reduce the casualties, you lose lives. If you do build to reduce the casualties, you lose money because all of that investment and infrastructure is lost to the disaster," he said.
The point, according to Tom Murphy , Senior Research Fellow at the Urban Land Institute , is "to understand that you need to not act like it's never going to happen again."
Murphy, a former Pittsburgh mayor who coordinated rebuilding efforts in U.S. states ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said people in parts of New Orleans built 15 feet below sea level. "So you could stand in your front yard and watch a ship go by 15 feet above you in the Industrial Canal." He said the lesson there is that "countries and regions need to be very careful about how they permit people to develop in the areas that are at risk of disaster."
Reuters
A May 2008 file photo shows an aerial view of a flooded village near an airport in Rangoon after Cyclone Nargis slammed into Burma's main city, ripping off roofs, felling trees and raising fears of major casualties
This is also true of Bangladesh, a South Asian country typically vulnerable to storms and floods by virtue of being situated on the Ganges Delta and its tributaries.
When a cyclone struck the country in 1991 , nearly 139,000 people perished, mostly by drowning. But the next same-size cyclone in 2007 claimed 4,000 lives - a significantly lower number of casualties. In contrast, Burger said Burma lost over 100,000 people to Cyclone Nargis the following year, even though both storms were of the same size.
"A lot of contributions and investments have been made by the international community and the government of Bangladesh in improving their response. And unfortunately, that hadn't been done in Burma," said Berger.
Even countries typically in the path of storms are caught unprepared. That was the case with the Philippine's Mindanao region, an area unaccustomed to typhoons, which recently encountered Typhoon Sendong .
Reuters
A resident carries items he salvaged from his damaged shanty after flash floods brought by Typhoon Washi (Sendong) hit Iligan city, southern Philippines, December 18, 2011.
When the storm struck, for example, Rood said tree logs that were stacked came down with the flood and battered houses. "And because they were so unprepared, more than a 1,000 people died," he said.
Rood said there is a tendency in disasters - not just in Asia – to respond rather than prepare. But as natural disasters increase in frequency, he said many people are beginning to understand that disaster risk reduction is a long-term concern. "Even the current levels of…natural disasters leave a terrible human toll," said Rood. "And as the world gets more crowded with people, that human toll will only increase," said Rood.
"You can't put a price on the lives saved when we invest in disaster risk reduction," Berger said.
The United Nations and the African Union are reducing the size of their hybrid peacekeeping mission in Darfur, known as UNAMID. Conditions in the western Sudanese region are said to be improving, even as tensions flare along the Sudan/South Sudan border.
Photo: AP
Jordanian peacekeepers of the United Nations African Mission In Darfur, UNAMID, patrol the refugee camp of Abou Shouk at the outskirts of the Darfur town of el Fasher, Sudan (File Photo)
Sudan, the African Union and the United Nations Wednesday agreed to reduce the UNAMID force. With its authorized force of 28,000, the Darfur mission is currently the largest peacekeeping operation in the world.
It was not immediately clear how large the cutback will be. Officials say that decision will be made by the UN Security Council over the next few weeks.
AU Political Commissioner Julia Dolly Joiner said the cuts reflect improved security conditions that are prompting Darfur's refugees and internally displaced people to return home.
"There has been significant progress in the peace process in Darfur, which is evident in an increase in voluntary returns of IDPs and refugees back to their places of origin," said Joiner.
UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous noted a marked decrease in the organized violence that raged in Darfur from the outbreak of civil war in 2003 through early 2005. But he said rising crime rates in the region had increased the need for a new type of force capable of rapid reaction.
"Certainly there is an increase in common criminality and that is a threat to the safety of civilians, which is one of the main concerns, but much less organized violence, and we have to account of this new situation and we will do that by making it so that UNAMID will be made more agile, more responsive, more mobile," said Ladsous.
Ladsous said the force reduction would be accomplished over an 18 month period.
News of the improvement in Darfur came as officials from Sudan and South Sudan are due to meet in Addis Ababa to avert an all out war following days of airstrikes and border clashes. The African Union expressed deep concern Wednesday at what it called an "escalating security situation" along the border, and called on both sides to pull back 10 kilometers from the disputed frontier.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week said the Khartoum government bore the brunt of the responsibility for the renewed hostilities.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy says more suspected Muslim extremists will be rounded up, following a series of arrests Friday in operations around the country. The arrests are part of a larger crackdown against radical Islam following a string of killings by an al-Qaida-inspired gunman.
Photo: AFP
Policemen (GIPN) take part in a search in Coueron, western France as part of dawn raids in several French cities, March 30, 2012.
Interviewed on France's Europe 1 radio Friday, President Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed police commandos had staged a series of early morning raids around the country, rounding up 19 suspected Muslim radicals.
Mr. Sarkozy said police had seized a number of weapons, notably Kalashnikov rifles. He said more operations will continue and some people will be expelled from the country.
Mr. Sarkozy's interior minister, Claude Gueant, provided more details, saying those arrested embraced an extremely violent, jihadist and combat ideology.
Speaking to reporters following a meeting with Muslim associations, Gueant says the government and the Muslim groups are united in fighting against radical Islam. He says the laws of the French Republic must protect Islam, which is the faith of about 5 million people living in the country.
Gueant says those arrested include the head of a banned Muslim group called Forsane Alizza, or "Knights of Pride." The group is known for having called for a boycott of McDonald's in the French city of Limoges, on grounds of serving Israel.
In a radio interview, French journalist Mohammed Sifaoui, who has penetrated the group, describes Forsane Alizza as an activist organization that has harassed a number of secular personalities in France. He says they could just be considered bearded people trying to disrupt things - but he says this also fits the background of terrorist groups.
The arrests are part of a larger crackdown against radical Islam following a string of killings this month by Islamist Mohammed Merah.
Separately, the government has banned six Islamic preachers from entering the country to participate in a Muslim conference in Paris next week. It said some had called for hate and violence and risked upsetting public order. Those barred include prominent Egyptian preacher Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi.
Merah was buried Thursday in Toulouse a week after he died in a firefight with French police following a shooting spree in which he shot dead seven people, including two Muslims and four Jews. Just what kind of terrorist ties he has remains unclear, but his older brother, Abdelkader, has been charged with complicity in the attacks.
The Toulouse killings have shaken the nation. Muslim and Jewish leaders organized a joint march to commemorate the victims last Sunday.
MIAMI — Angela B. Corey, a Republican state attorney with a reputation for toughness, has decided not to seek a grand jury review of the Trayvon Martin shooting, keeping the resolution of a case that has transfixed the nation solely in her hands.
Ed Linsmier/Reuters
A protest over the Trayvon Martin shooting in Miami on April 1. Many people are angry that no charges have been filed yet.
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ and JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: April 9, 2012
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Angela B. Corey, the prosecutor, has taken more cases to trial and won more convictions than her predecessor, a study found.
Ms. Corey, 57, who was appointed special prosecutor in the case by Florida's governor and attorney general, must decide herself how to proceed with the particularly difficult case, in which many facts are in dispute and no witnesses have come forward publicly. She alone must determine whether to file charges against George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch coordinator who shot and killed the unarmed Mr. Martin, or to drop the case.
The decision on Monday about how to proceed puts Ms. Corey not only at the center of a national discussion of race and violence — Mr. Zimmerman, 28, is Hispanic; Mr. Martin, 17, was black — but also of the finer points of law. The fact that no arrest has been made nor legal action taken in the Feb. 26 shooting has enraged many people across the country and has led to angry marches and protests.
The pressure to bring charges is "unbelievable," said Tor J. Friedman, a criminal defense lawyer in Tallahassee. "We always talk about a rush to judgment in other cases," he said, but in this case the question is more like, "Why wasn't this person taken to the town square and flogged in front of everybody?' "
But legal experts say the need for caution over speed is especially great in a case like this one. Mr. Zimmerman said he acted in self-defense, and law enforcement officials chose not to charge him under Florida's lenient self-defense law, known as Stand Your Ground. Under the law, anyone person who perceives a threat to his life is not required to attempt a retreat and has a right to use a weapon. It requires law enforcement officials to prove that a suspect did not act in self-defense, and sets the case on a slow track.
Unless investigators find witnesses or direct evidence of the confrontation preceding Mr. Martin's death, such as signs of a struggle, prosecutors would have to build a circumstantial case, often the hardest to make. In high-profile cases, the constitutional principle of the presumption of innocence can be especially strong — another reason to proceed with care, according to legal experts.
Florida criminal law, like most states, does not require a rush to file charges in such a case, Mr. Friedman said; the statute of limitations in manslaughter cases is measured in years, not weeks. Mr. Friedman, a former prosecutor, said that it served no one to take a defendant to trial before the evidence for a conviction could be collected; a prosecutor, he said, has "an ethical obligation" to build and believe in a case that can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Once the evidence is in hand, Ms. Corey will have to determine not just whether to file charges but if so, which ones. By stating that she will not be using the grand jury, she has signaled that charges of first-degree murder are not on the table. In Florida, those charges can be issued only by a grand jury, and require a finding that the act was premeditated. A more likely charge under Florida law is manslaughter, but lesser charges like aggravated battery with a firearm are also a possibility, Mr. Friedman said.
Ms. Corey's decision to forgo a grand jury is not unusual. Like other chief prosecutors in Florida, she typically steers clear of grand juries, unless required as in requests to try juveniles as adults.
Jeffrey S. Weiner, a criminal defense lawyer in Miami, said, "This is a courageous decision, no matter what she decides to do. A grand jury would have been a cop-out."
While Ms. Corey's office cautioned that bypassing the grand jury should not be interpreted as an indication of how she would decide to handle the case, she is widely considered one of Florida's most aggressive prosecutors. When she first ran for state attorney in 2008 , she joked that she was so tough on crime that she would throw her own mother in jail if she broke the law.
"I don't play," she said, "even when it's people in my own family."
The Spanish airline Iberia grounded 150 flights Monday as pilots struck to protest the start-up of the low-cost carrier Iberia Express.
Photo: AFP
Planes of Spanish airline Iberia are parked at the Madrid's Barajas airport, at the start of a series of one-day strike by Iberia pilots, April 9, 2012.
The Iberia pilots say they plan to strike 30 times - every Monday and Friday between now and July 20. The pilots said the start of the new airline is a threat to their jobs and working conditions, and violates labor agreements forged when Iberia merged with British Airways.
Low-cost Iberia Express started operations late last month. Its shorter routes to Spanish cities and some European destinations are designed to supplement Iberia's longer flights to other locations.
The owner of the airlines, International Consolidated Airlines Group, said it had to create the low-cost carrier to increase its profitability.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.
The Amazon region of South America, the largest tropical rainforest and river basin on Earth, is disappearing at a rate of around 800,000 hectares a year, but a new study finds one possible strategy for reversing this trend in ancient Amazonian farming methods.
Photo: Stephen Rostain
Unaltered agricultural raised fields in French Guyana that remain much as ancient Amazon farmers left them. The simulated background flames represent the European slash-and-burn agriculture that came afterward.
Analysis of a 1,000-year-old ecological record in the Amazon provides a rare glimpse at early farming practices before European explorers began arriving in the Americas more than 500 years ago.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , finds the ancient farming methods could slow the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
The rapid expansion of agriculture and cattle ranching, road and dam construction, and illegal logging are the biggest drivers of this massive deforestation.
Lead author Jose Iriarte , a paleoethnobotonist at the University of Exeter in England, focused on a coastal wetland savanna in present-day French Guyana, on South America's northeastern coast, where ancient farm beds and canals remain, unaltered, on the landscape. In pre-colonial history, Iriarte says, this was a period when farmers "reclaimed these seasonally flooded savannas into raised-field agricultural landscapes."
A sediment core from the site provided the team with an unusually intact archive of how farmers farmed these fields. It shows pollen, plant species and charcoal before and after the European colonization in the late 15th and 16th centuries.
Geographer Mitchell Power , curator of the Natural History Museum at the University of Utah, studied charcoal in the core. He says while evidence shows that naturally-occurring fires began decreasing globally around 1500 - a period of documented climate cooling - that's not what they saw in the Amazonian record.
"When we went to the French Guyana site to try to understand the record, the most surprising thing to me was that it was the opposite trend. Fire was very low and then after 1500, fire increased," he said. "That was contrary to what 90 percent of the rest of the records around the world are telling us."
Stephen Rostain
Before European settlers arrived, farmers on the rainforest savanna grew crops in raised beds, a practice which would be forgotten for 500 years.
Iriarte says the farmers understood how fire could harm the land and agricultural production.
"We know that fire results in the loss of crucial nutrients for crops, [and that] fallows without fires are most effective in restoring soil organic matter and preserving soil structure," he said. "So we interpreted that they were limiting fires because it was better to grow crops in these raised field systems."
Iriarte says use of this fire-free method by the pre-Columbian farmers helped them transform the seasonally-flooded savanna into productive cropland.
"Raised fields provided better drainage, soil aeration, and also moisture retention during the dry season. These raised fields were constructed mainly with the muck from these seasonally flooded savannahs," he said. "So they are really fertile and they can be recycled every season."
Mitchell Power says this labor-intensive approach ended abruptly when as much as 95 percent of the indigenous population died from a variety of Old-World diseases brought by the European settlers.
"Once the Columbian encounter happens we don't see that type of agriculture any more," he said. "We start to see increased burning and a shift toward dry land farming. So people were then clearing forests and making their raised beds in the forests. And what we think is happening was a huge demographic collapse in this region."
Slash-and-burn agriculture - introduced to the Amazon not by the native farmers but by European colonizers - remains today a major threat to the rainforest. Experts say if such practices continue at the current rate, more than half of the Amazon's tropical rainforest could be gone by 2030.
Iriarte says pre-Columbian farming methods offer a tried-and-true alternative.
"It has the capability to help curb carbon emissions and at the same time provide food security for the more vulnerable and poorest rural populations of rural Amazonia," he said.
The authors say bringing back these labor-intensive but productive farming systems to serve today's - and tomorrow's - food needs will require extensive farmer re-training - and the political will of the region's governments. And they believe that if the Amazon's current stewards can reclaim the wisdom of their ancestors, the damage to the world's greatest rainforest can be slowed.
A triumph at every level — reporting, tone, perspective — I couldn't recommend it more. And though [Nathaniel] Rich doesn't directly address it, beneath the surface looms the bigger issue — the recovery of the land is not going to take good and competent managers but something more transcendent: the "big idea" that no one has come up with yet. Who knows if that will happen.
Jungleland
Published: April 6, 2012
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For those who say that the Lower Ninth Ward shouldn't have been rebuilt, Lakeview is probably the more dangerous area to live in, as it's several feet lower than the Lower Ninth — really is below sea level. But I don't hear anyone saying it shouldn't have been rebuilt. Because Lakeview is more affluent (and almost entirely white), it has had more opportunity and resources to rebuild and therefore looks quite nice these days.
A calligraphy exhibition featuring excerpts from late President Ho Chi Minh's Prison Diary, opened on April 9 at the Suncheon National University's museum, in the south Jeolla province in the Republic of Korea.
On display at the event, which marks the anniversary of President Ho Chi Minh's 122 nd birthday, were 45 calligraphic works by 23 calligraphers from Gwangju and south Jeolla provinces.
Addressing the event, the Rector of the University, Song Yeong-moo, said the exhibition is taking place at the same time as the two countries are celebrating the 20 th anniversary of their diplomatic ties and preparing for the 2012 Vietnam-RoK Friendship Year.
He expressed his hopes that the exhibition will help the students and local people understand more about President Ho Chi Minh's life and Vietnam 's revolutionary cause.
According to Vietnam 's Ambassador Tran Trong Toan, the Prison Diary was first translated from Vietnamese to Korean for the first time in 2003 and made a huge contribution to helping Korean people understand more about Vietnam and President Ho Chi Minh.
The exhibition, which will run until April 25, once again expressed Korean people's interest in and respect for President Ho Chi Minh, he said.
He also expressed his hope that the event will help consolidate Vietnam-RoK friendship and strategic cooperation.
According to the organising board, all the works of art will be transferred to two RoK cultural centres in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and put on display to mark Uncle Ho's birthday on May 19.-VNA
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David Alan Gore, 58, was put to death Thursday, nearly three decades after the murder of 17-year-old Lynn Elliott, one of several killings that shook the quiet coastal town of Vero Beach. In all, Mr. Gore killed four teenage girls and two women, authorities say. Ms. Elliott's 1983 murder was the only one for which he was sentenced to death.
Iran has confirmed it will meet with Western powers in Istanbul Saturday but is urging them to take pre-conditions off the table ahead of the nuclear talks.
Iran's Supreme National Security Council confirmed Monday it will meet with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council -- the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France -- plus Germany. Iran wants a further round of talks held in Baghdad at a later date to discuss its controversial nuclear program.
There was no immediate response from the world powers. Iran has been balking at holding talks in Istanbul because it says Turkey has turned against its ally, Syria.
World powers say the talks, the first since January 2011, should bring a curtailment of Iran's high-level uranium enrichment and the closing of an underground nuclear development site,
But Iran's Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi told Iranian media Monday that pre-conditions on the talks are "meaningless."
Western powers suspect Tehran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Iran denies the allegation and maintains its nuclear activities are purely for power generation and medical research purposes.
Iran's nuclear chief Fereidoun Abbasi told Iranian media Sunday the country may scale back production of highly enriched uranium. Abbasi said Iran may eventually reduce production of 20 percent enriched uranium to 3.5 percent enrichment levels -- the purity needed for power generation -- once enough fuel is created to keep its research reactor going.
Iran's uranium enrichment lies at the heart of the dispute between Tehran and Western powers. Uranium enriched to 20 percent could be turned into weapons-grade material within months.
Earlier this year, Iran confirmed it had started enriching uranium at an underground facility near the Shi'ite holy city of Qom. The Fordo complex is beneath a mountain and is better protected from potential air strikes by nations suspicious of the intent of Iran's nuclear program.
Some information for this report provided by AFP and Reuters.
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The police at the University of Pittsburgh have arrested a New York man on charges of making terrorist threats to four professors, but he was not charged with making more than 60 bomb threats that have caused major disruptions across the campus since mid-February. The man, Mark Lee Krangle , 65, of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., a graduate student at the university in the mid-1970s, was arrested as he stepped off a plane at Pittsburgh International Airport on Wednesday, university officials said. The bomb threats, however, continued Thursday morning, causing hundreds of students to be rousted from dormitories, libraries and classrooms. No devices have been found.
President Obama accomplished two things when he made the case on Tuesday for the so-called Buffett Rule, which would require millionaires to pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes. He persuasively argued that it would be a step toward fairness in a tax code tilted in favor of the wealthiest Americans. Not incidentally, it allowed him to take an implicit shot at his virtually certain opponent, Mitt Romney, both personally and politically.
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Mr. Romney disclosed in January that his tax bill last year came to about 14 percent of his $21 million income, roughly the same percentage faced by middle-rung taxpayers. Even more important, Mr. Romney is determined to continue slashing taxes for the rich, starving the nation of needed revenue, while deepening the deficit.
The Buffett Rule, which would raise an estimated $50 billion over 10 years, would not make an appreciable dent in the deficit or provide a lot more for essential programs. By comparison, letting the Bush-era tax cuts expire for taxpayers making more than $250,000 a year, as the president has also called for, would raise $800 billion over 10 years.
Mr. Obama must ensure that the Buffett Rule does not become a substitute for ending those tax cuts.
The president is right that income inequality is a serious and growing problem and should be a central issue in this year's campaign. On Tuesday, he said the big question for Americans is, can "we succeed as a nation where a shrinking number of people are doing really, really well, but a growing number are struggling to get by? Or are we better off when everybody gets a fair shot?"
Unfairness in the tax burden is one important example and driver of that divide. The White House released tax data showing that the average federal tax rate of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans has fallen from 51 percent to 26 percent over the last 50 years. At the same time, the middle-class tax burden was basically unchanged or slightly higher, with those taxpayers paying 16 percent of their income in federal taxes in 2010, versus 14 percent 50 years ago.
What Mr. Obama did not say, but which must be part of a serious tax debate, is that the main reason for the low tax rates on the wealthy is the preferential treatment of investment income. It is taxed at a top rate of 15 percent, versus top rates between 25 percent and 35 percent on wages and salary for many working Americans. Applying the same tax rates to all forms of income would be a more direct way to address tax inequality.
The Buffett Rule is a compelling symbol, but it comes with policy risks. After setting the standard for wealth at $1 million in annual income, Mr. Obama will now have to vigilantly fend off lawmakers, from both parties, who will be eager to preserve the Bush-era tax cuts for everyone making less than that. The $250,000 threshold is not only fair, it is essential for raising substantial and much-needed revenue.
The discussion of inequality must not end with a debate on taxes. To ensure that the benefits of economic growth are shared among all Americans, Washington must do a lot more to strengthen the institutions that foster broad prosperity. Those include public education, universal health care, Social Security, affirmative action, financial regulation and the minimum wage.
Mr. Obama has set his campaign in the right direction. But it is only a start.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus spent much of her childhood in and around Washington, D.C. But when she returned last September to shoot HBO's new comedy "Veep," in which she plays Vice President Selina Meyer, decked out in a power bob and important-Washington-lady stockings, she got used to something new about the city: traveling by motorcade. She also noticed some curious overlaps between her life as a highly recognizable celebrity and the lives of highly recognizable politicians. Occasionally, for instance, a group of people on the street would see her emerging from the motorcade and react to her; she'd respond in character as Vice President Meyer, pantomiming the exaggerated greeting a famous actress might bestow upon fans. "It was worlds colliding in ways I hadn't anticipated," she says.
Photo illustration by Zachary Scott for The New York Times
Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
By CARINA CHOCANO
Published: April 12, 2012
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Photo illustration by Zachary Scott for The New York Times
This interplay between politics and show business has grown increasingly strange and tangled. There has been a profusion lately of celebrities portraying real-life female politicians, from Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on "Saturday Night Live" to Julianne Moore's more sober (or, rather, sobering) treatment of Palin in "Game Change," to Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady." As for Louis-Dreyfus as Meyer, the pairing of her sex and her office might seem like yet another allusion to Palin. But Meyer is an entirely fictional, even chimerical, creation. The central joke of "Veep," in fact, is that Meyer, whose party affiliation is never revealed, is far from an ideologue; rather, she is a political animal struggling for survival in an alternately hostile and indifferent environment. Unlike Palin, who seemed to come out of nowhere, the very point of Meyer is that she's a consummate insider. She knows exactly how the Washington sausage is made. She knows because she is the sausage.
There's something about Selina that's also inescapably familiar. It has to do with her combination of intelligence and petulance, self-confidence and neuroticism, narcissism and charm. In many ways, Selina is the quintessential Julia Louise-Dreyfus character: a power-suited version of Elaine from "Seinfeld."
Louis-Dreyfus, however, turns out to be distinctly un-Elaine-like in person. Not only is she much more stylish than the characters she usually plays, but she's also considerably sunnier. And unlike her perennially single or prolifically divorced characters, she has been married to the same person for the past 25 years, the writer-producer Brad Hall (with whom she has two sons, Henry, 19, and Charlie, 14).
There is one way in which Louis-Dreyfus is like her new character: She curses like a sailor. "I'm a big swearer in my life," she says. She sees it as a way of keeping the private self separate from the public, and of releasing some of the tension that builds from being constantly on display. The proclivity comes in handy for "Veep," where characters' frustrations tend to culminate in soaring arias of profanity so ardent and genuine and unguarded that they can only be described as life-affirming. What better way to purge the phoniness from your system, Louis-Dreyfus says, "before you end up eating your own arm off, you know?"
Every decade gets the political show it deserves, or thinks it deserves, though some decades are pretty disingenuous. "The West Wing" gave us an idealized account of the Clinton era, with a saintly president and high-minded pols. In the '00s, "24" offered an ultraparanoid version of the Bush era that legitimized torture as the primary means of dealing with a world in a constant state of crisis.
"Veep," by contrast, comes not to justify Caesar but to goose him. It captures our post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news and Internet-haterade dystopia, and reflects our collective queasy ambivalence toward a political system that we fear simply reflects our own shallowness back at us. If "The West Wing" was a fantasy of hyper-competence, "Veep" is its opposite: a black-humor vision of politics at its bleakest, in which both sides have been co-opted by money and special interests and are reduced to posturing, subterfuge, grandstanding and photo ops. Naturally, it's hilarious.
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Carina Chocano is a writer in Los Angeles. She last wrote for the magazine about '' Downton Abbey .''
The leaders of Burma"s longest-running insurgent movement met Sunday with democracy leader and newly elected parliament member Aung San Suu Kyi at her home in Rangoon.
Photo: Reuters
Karen National Union (KNU) General Secretary Zipporah Sein (R) speaks to reporters after meeting with Myanmar pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (front L) at Suu Kyi's home in Rangoon, April 8, 2012.
The Karen National Union delegation, led by General Secretary Zipporah Sein, said in a statement that they discussed in detail a cease-fire that was negotiated last week with the government. Aung San Suu Kyi told reporters that a cease-fire is just the first step on the road to peace.
"As we all know, a cease-fire is just the first step," she said. "We can't have peace without cease-fire. So we are on the first step now, we all need to wait for this step to be concrete, after that we will go for the next step."
Zipporah Sein said the two sides also discussed the needs of other ethnic groups.
"Today we, the Karen National Union, discussed our plan for progressing the development of peace in the country," she said. "We discussed what we need, how we can achieve a real cease-fire process, not just for the Karen but for the other ethnic groups."
The meeting took place a day after the KNU delegation met with President Thein Sein in the administrative capital of Naypytaw. KNU officials said that the president told them the government is making its best efforts to remove the group from its list of outlawed organizations as soon as possible.
The talks, which lasted more than an hour, marked the first time the president had talked with rebel leaders since he issued a call for dialogue in August.
The KNU delegation began their diplomatic mission Friday by meeting with a 19-member government peace delegation in Rangoon. The KNU said the two sides signed a 13-point agreement on how to move a peace process forward.
The KNU's armed wing has been waging war against Burmese authorities since 1949. Western nations have demanded peace with rebel groups as a condition for easing political and economic sanctions against the Southeast Asian country.
PARIS — "La Sainte Anne, l'ultime chef-d'oeuvre de Léonard de Vinci," on view at the Louvre through June 25 is one of those rare art historical undertakings that turn a rigorous academic exposé into an admirable art show.
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Its stated purpose is to demonstrate that Leonardo began around 1501 to work on the famous Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, called for short the "Sainte Anne," and had not fully finished the picture at the time of his death, in 1519.
All documents relating to the composition of the painting, including some recent discoveries, are carefully reviewed by the Louvre curator Vincent Delieuvin who staged the show. Together with the scientific examination carried out in 2008 before the restoration of the picture, they build up a compelling case. The exhibition book edited by Mr. Delieuvin, who also contributed essential parts of it, will remain as a landmark in Leonardo studies.
To art lovers unconcerned about the minutiae of scholarly studies, a better knowledge of the genesis of a specific picture may not be hugely exciting. Sure enough, that is not what makes the show and the book truly remarkable. Its irresistible albeit unintended appeal lies elsewhere. The great revelations of this show are all about the limitations of our perception in art, its variations from one period to another and the changes these trigger in the hierarchy of our artistic values.
It was only by the late 19th century that the "Sainte Anne" came to be recognized as Leonardo's work. Unlike his other two major paintings in the Louvre, "La Vierge aux Rochers" — a Virgin and Child with the infant Saint John the Baptist — and "La Joconde," alias Mona Lisa, the "Sainte Anne" was not ensconced in the French Royal Collection since the early 16th century.
The circumstances of its undertaking remain unknown. The earliest mention of the picture only occurs in 1651. It is made by Raphaël Trichet du Fresne in his biography of Leonardo that serves as an introduction to the Italian edition of the "Treatise on Painting" published that year.
By the time the "Sainte Anne" entered the newly founded Musée du Louvre in 1797 with the other Leonardos seized from the French Royal Collection, the art world was barely aware of its existence. It did not arouse much enthusiasm in the next few decades. The painter and art critic Gabriel Laviron considered the composition to be "singular rather than original" while the writer Louis Viardot admired its refined craftsmanship, but thought that the style was not high-minded enough.
The catalog of Old Master paintings in the Louvre published in 1849 echoed divergent views. To explain the doubts voiced by some regarding the autograph character of the "Sainte Anne," it cited what was thought to be the poor condition of the work and took for granted that studio assistants had taken a substantial participation in its execution.
Luckily, compelling beauty in those days gained the upper hand over scholarly opinion. The "Sainte Anne" was hung alongside other pictures seen as the most important masterpieces in the museum.
The discussion of the picture in relationship to full-scale preparatory cartoons and to small sketches of details then began. Soon, scholars realized that there were distinct stages in Leonardo's approach to the subject.
An admirable large-scale cartoon had been rediscovered in the National Gallery in London in the 1830s by two great German connoisseurs, Johann David Passavant and Gustav Friedrich Waagen, and was hailed almost unanimously as a major work from Leonardo's hand. At first, however, the discovery of the London cartoon did not strengthen the case for the authenticity of the "Sainte Anne," quite the contrary.
Kenneth Libo, a historian of Jewish immigration who, as a graduate student working for Irving Howe in the 1960s and '70s, unearthed historical documentation that informed and shaped "World of Our Fathers," Mr. Howe's landmark 1976 history of the East European Jewish migration to America, died on March 29 in New York. He was 74.
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: April 8, 2012
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Paul Duckworth
Kenneth Libo
The cause was complications from an infection, said Michael Skakun, a friend and fellow historian.
Mr. Libo's contribution was acknowledged by Mr. Howe and the publishers of "World of Our Fathers," who listed his name beneath the author's on the cover of the book: "With the Assistance of Kenneth Libo."
Scholars familiar with his archival work credit Mr. Libo with adding a level of emotional detail, and a view of everyday life in the teeming tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, that the book might have lacked without his six years of work. "I don't think 'World of Our Fathers' could have been written without the spade work done by Ken Libo," said Jeffrey S. Gurock, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University. "He had a certain researching genius, a feel for visceral detail."
Mr. Libo worked with Mr. Howe on two more books and shared billing on both as co-author — "How We Lived," a 1979 anthology of pictures and documentary accounts of Jewish life in New York between 1880 and 1930; and "We Lived There, Too," an illustrated collection of first-person accounts by Jewish immigrant pioneers who moved on from New York to settle in far-flung outposts around the country, like New Orleans; Abilene, Kan.; and Keokuk, Iowa, between 1630 and 1930.
He became the first English-language editor of The Jewish Daily Forward in 1980, lectured widely, taught literature and history at Hunter College, and later in life helped several wealthy Jewish New York families research and write their self-published family histories.
But throughout his life, Mr. Libo was known best for his involvement in "World of Our Fathers," a best seller that Mr. Howe, a socialist and public intellectual, once described in part as an effort to reclaim the fading memory of Jewish immigration from the clutches of sentimental myth, Alexander Portnoy and generations of Jewish mother jokes.
The book was a large canvas — depicting a lost world of tenements, sweatshops and political utopianism — written with elegiac lyricism.
By most accounts Mr. Howe gave the book its vision, its voice and its intellectual legs. Mr. Libo gave it people and their stories.
He mined archives of Yiddish newspapers like The Forward, Der Tog and Freiheit; the case records of social service organizations like the Henry Street Settlement House; the letters of activists like Lillian Wald and Rose Schneiderman; memoirs by forgotten people whose books he found in the 5-cent bins of used bookstores. He interviewed old vaudevillians like Joe Smith of Smith and Dale (the models for Neil Simon's "Sunshine Boys") for the story of Yiddish theater.
In an essay about the book, published in 2000 in the journal of the American Jewish Historical Society, Mr. Libo wrote that in the summer months "Irving did the bulk of the writing while I remained in New York with an assistant to run down facts."
Kenneth Harold Libo was born Dec. 4, 1937, in Norwich, Conn., one of two sons of Asher and Annette Libo. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Russia, his mother American-born. His parents operated a chicken farm, friends said.
He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1959, served in the Navy and taught English at Hunter College of the City University until he began work on "World of Our Fathers" in 1968 with Mr. Howe, who died in 1993.
He received his Ph.D. in English literature from the City University of New York in 1974. He never married and no immediate family members remain.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 9, 2012
An earlier version misspelled the name of a newspaper whose archives Mr. Libo used for his research. It was Freiheit, not Freheit.
