From Haiti’s ruins, a chance to rebuild a nation
By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Even as rescuers are digging victims out of the rubble in Haiti, policymakers in Washington and around the world are grappling with how a destitute, corrupt and now devastated country might be transformed into a self-sustaining nation.
Development efforts have failed there, decade after decade, leaving Haitians with a dysfunctional government, a high crime rate and incomes averaging a dollar a day. But the leveled capital, Port-au-Prince, must be rebuilt, promising one of the largest economic development efforts ever undertaken in the hemisphere — an effort “measured in months and even years,” President Obama said Saturday in an appeal for donations alongside former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. And those who will help oversee it are thinking hard about how to use that money and attention to change the country forever.
Flight 1549: A toast to the kindness of strangers
By Mark Washburn | The Charlotte Observer
NEW YORK _ On their big day, they remembered little things.Reunited in New York to mark the first anniversary of bellying into the Hudson River, passengers of Flight 1549 told tales Friday of small favors from strangers that they will never forget.
Beth McHugh of Lake Wylie remembered the woman she encountered on a ferry after being plucked from the icy water.
“My feet were blue. I had little nylons on and this young woman said, ‘Take those off. You have to.’ She took off her boots and gave me her socks. They were still warm. They were like a million dollars to me.”
McHugh still has those socks. And probably always will – she has no idea who the woman was.
USA
In Massachusetts, voters’ discontent threatens Democrats
A special election Tuesday to fill the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s seat has turned into a closer contest than expected, as disaffected party members and independents lean toward the GOP contender.
By James Oliphant
January 17, 2010
Reporting from Boston – Steve Giosi and Liam Foley have been known to tip back a few pints on adjacent stools at the Galway House in this city’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. But on Tuesday, they’ll part ways — at least politically.“I’m leaning toward him,” Giosi said one recent afternoon, nodding at the TV screen, which had been playing a seemingly continuous loop of ads both promoting and denigrating Republican U.S. Senate candidate Scott Brown.
“I’m a Democrat. I always have been,” said Foley, 55; to demonstrate his sense of loyalty, he pointed to his Tiger Woods cap. “I’m voting for Martha Coakley. I think she’s good.”
US waves white flag in disastrous ‘war on drugs’
After 40 years, Washington is quietly giving up on a futile battle that has spread corruption and destroyed thousands of lives
By Hugh O’Shaughnessy Sunday, 17 January 2010
After 40 years of defeat and failure, America’s “war on drugs” is being buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure of billions of dollars and the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people, a suitable epitaph for America’s longest “war” may well be the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be given the right to grow coca in its own backyard.
Asia
Why is China so terrified of dissent?
The last year has seen an escalation in the harassment of dissidents by the Chinese authorities, leading some to claim that there is less freedom than before the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989
Peter Beaumont, Foreign Affairs Editor
The Observer, Sunday 17 January 2010
There is an expression in China: “Kill the chicken before the monkey.” Target the weak and vulnerable, it means, to frighten the strong and many.Last week, it was the turn of writer Zhao Shiying, secretary-general of the Independent Chinese Pen Centre, which campaigns on behalf of imprisoned writers and in favour of free expression.
Zhao was a signatory – along with Liu Xiaobo, a leading dissident jailed for 11 years on Christmas Day – of Charter 08, a document that called for political reform of China’s state institutions. Police went to his home in the southern city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, on Monday to take him away, along with his computers, books and other documents.
Sri Lankan election: the warrior with the president in his sites
As tropical lightning cracked across the night sky and fireworks exploded over nearby palm trees, General Sarath Fonseka strode purposefully onto a makeshift stage.
Nick Meo in Colombo
Published: 7:30AM GMT 17 Jan 2010
He threw his arms high in the air as the crowd cheered wildly; they hadn’t minded being drenched by a downpour as they waited for his rally to begin on the outskirts of Colombo. They didn’t mind, either, that he was five hours late.
The general is the army hero whose unexpected intervention has electrified Sri Lanka’s presidential election, being held just nine months after the defeat of the violent separatist movement known as the Tamil Tigers.
When the campaign began in November the re-election of Mahinda Rajapaksa, the victorious war president, was regarded as virtually inevitable.
Middle East
Iranian dissident Masoud Ali Mohammadi ‘killed by Arab hitman’
From The Sunday Times
January 17, 2010
Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv
An Iranian university professor killed last week by a blast from a remote-controlled bomb strapped to a parked motorcycle may have been the victim of an Arab hitman, according to opposition groups.The murder of Masoud Ali Mohammadi, 50, a supporter of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader, has been blamed by the Tehran regime on “mercenaries” financed by Israel and Washington because of his role as a nuclear physicist.
However, opposition groups who monitor Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese movement, in Tehran, claim that a member of the group, known by his pseudonym “Abu Nasser”, was photographed at the scene of the explosion in Tehran’s affluent Gheytarih suburb.
Europe
Bloody letter shows Van Gogh’s turmoil
From The Sunday Times
January 17, 2010
Richard Brooks, Arts Editor
LETTERS in which Vincent van Gogh confesses to crippling doubts about himself as a man and an artist are to be displayed alongside his paintings. Now, 120 years after his suicide, the artist’s “worthless” paintings on show are all valued at a minimum of £25m.The letters, previously unseen outside Holland, include a blood-spattered note to Van Gogh’s brother Theo. It was never sent, but Theo found it on his brother’s body after he had shot himself in the chest. In it Vincent writes: “My reason has half-foundered in my work.”
Van Gogh’s letters, seen alongside the paintings in a preview given last week to The Sunday Times, also include one to Theo in which he writes that he is “trying to do as well” as other painters.
Lazy, arrogant cowards: how English saw French in 12th century
A twelfth-century poem newly translated into English casts fresh light on the origin of today’s Francophobic stereotypes.
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones
Published: 7:30AM GMT 17 Jan 2010
Although it is meant to be an ‘entente cordiale’, the relationship between the English and the French has been anything but neighbourly.
When the two nations have not been clashing on the battlefield or the sporting pitch they have been trading insults from ‘frogs’ to ‘rosbifs’.Now the translation of the poem has shown just how deep-rooted in history the rivalry and name-calling really is.
Written between 1180 and 1194, a century after the Norman Conquest united England and Normandy against a common enemy in France, the 396-line poem was part of a propaganda war between London and Paris.
Africa
Thousands face agony or death after Zulu king’s circumcision decree
Health campaigners say the traditional manhood ritual, which carries HIV risks, should be replaced by operations in hospital
Alex Duval Smith
The Observer, Sunday 17 January 2010
An edict by the king of the Zulus to bring back circumcision for thousands of teenage boys is causing alarm in South Africa, amid record numbers of deaths from the traditional manhood ritual.On Tuesday, at a meeting called in Durban by the government of KwaZulu-Natal, traditional leaders in the province will outline how they wish to implement King Goodwill Zwelithini’s decision to reintroduce circumcision 200 years after it was scrapped by King Shaka. But health officials working with South Africa’s second largest tribe, the Xhosa – who never gave up the practice – say the move could put thousands of lives at risk.
Songs of praise: How Rwanda got its groove back
In 1994, Africa’s worst genocide was conducted to songs exhorting the Hutu majority of this small African country to murder 800,000 of their Tutsi neighbours. Today, the sound of peaceful music – traditional and gospel, hip-hop and reggae – has returned to the streets and fields of Rwanda. And one young producer from Sussex wants to turn the volume up…
By Adam Stone Sunday, 17 January 2010
A decade and a half after the genocide that decimated Rwanda, the country appears quite peaceful; prosperous, even. Aid workers in shiny 4x4s may still be conspicuous on the streets of its capital, Kigali, but more cheerful are the guys in bright-yellow tabards flogging pay-as-you-go airtime on the street corners, cashing in on Africa’s mobile-phone boom. And, if you listen closely, there is another hopeful sign that this small east African republic is attempting to put the horrors of 1994 behind it: the sound of choirs and the inanga, the region’s zither-like instrument; of hip-hop and rootsy reggae.
Latin America
Chile race reflects Latin America’s growing preference for free-market centrists
By Juan Forero
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Whether a billionaire businessman or a former president wins Chile’s presidential election Sunday, the outcome will reflect a broader trend in Latin America — the rise of the pragmatic centrist.After years of victories by leftist candidates, market-friendly moderates are gaining ground in the region.
Some are emerging from the right, such as Sebastian Piñera, 60, an airline magnate who has held a razor-thin lead in the polls ahead of Chile’s runoff vote.