Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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The link above is to a small, downloadable version of a forthcoming book about Kyoto by Stuart Isett.
I know this work for having pored over it, in rapture, and for having traveled a fair amount with Stuart on assignment.
This is sublime photography and black and white at its best.

Posted at 2:04 AM · Comments (0)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a warning
about a new virulent strain of Sexually Transmitted Disease. The
disease is contracted through dangerous, high-risk behavior. The
disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim and pronounced “gonna re-elect him.”
Many victims contracted it in 2004, after having been screwed for the
previous four years.

Cognitive characteristics of individuals infected include: anti-social
personality disorders, delusions of grandeur with messianic disease
overtones, extreme cognitive dissonance, inability to incorporate new
information, pronounced xenophobia and paranoia, inability to accept
responsibility for own actions, cowardice masked by misplaced bravado,
uncontrolled facial smirking, ignorance of geography and history,
tendencies towards evangelical theocracy, categorical all-or-nothing
behavior. Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed at how this
destructive disease originated only a few years ago from a bush found
in Texas.

Posted at 10:25 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
Published: April 28, 2006
EVER since Chad gained independence 46 years ago, it has been a world-class model of political dysfunction. In the 1970’s, Chad’s president, François Tombalbaye, compelled civil servants to renounce Western customs, undergo a tribal initiation rite known as yondo and profess belief in a nationalist creed he called Chaditude. He was executed in 1975. In the 1980’s, a rebel leader named Hissène Habré led an army to the presidential palace and seized power. He became known as the “African Pinochet” and murderously pursued opponents for nearly a decade.

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Sam Weber
In 1990, Mr. Habré was chased out by an armed faction led by Chad’s current president, Idriss Déby. Now Mr. Déby is facing his own rebellion.

Americans might dismiss this numbing cycle of coups as esoteric history belonging to a troubled and distant country. They shouldn’t. The C.I.A. armed Mr. Habré for years, and since 2003, the United States military has been training and equipping Mr. Déby’s army, making his fight to stay in office our fight, too.

Last year, Chad took part in a vast, international military exercise organized by the United States — the largest exercise of its kind in Africa since World War II, according to the Defense Department. This summer, American forces will continue to advise Chadian soldiers, and Congress is expected to allocate $500 million for a five-year program to train and equip several Saharan armies — including Mr. Déby’s.

The military hopes these initiatives will help contain the threat of terrorism by bringing order to the Great Desert and its borderlands. For centuries, the Sahara has been a lawless realm, and with millions of Muslims living across the region in isolated communities, counterterrorism officials fear that Islamic militants may seek sanctuary there.

But dispensing military aid to Chad now — with Mr. Déby fighting hundreds of rebels backed by Sudan — seems reckless. It puts American military equipment and expertise in the hands of a desperate dictator. Worse still, it risks pouring additional fuel into the human furnace of Darfur, and it may well come to impede the careful diplomatic work required to solve that crisis.

So far, American officials have made much of Sudanese assistance to the rebels, framing the recent conflict in Chad as an outgrowth of the tragedy in Darfur. There is some truth to this. But the violence in Chad also has its own political narrative. During his 16 years in power, Mr. Déby has ruled Chad brutally. His security forces have committed torture, rapes, summary executions and mass killings.

Mr. Déby is a member of the Zaghawa — a northern tribe making up roughly 5 percent of Chad’s population — and last year the State Department described his regime as a Zaghawa oligarchy shielded by a security and intelligence apparatus that violates human rights with impunity. In 2004, Mr. Déby altered Chad’s Constitution to grant himself another term in office. Elections are scheduled for next Wednesday. There is little likelihood they will be fair.

Only one compelling argument exists for giving Chad military aid, and it follows from the logic of lesser evils. Many of the refugees fleeing Darfur are Zaghawa, and Mr. Déby has taken them in. If his regime collapses, tens of thousands of people will once again be at the mercy of Sudan’s janjaweed marauders, and the genocide may spread.

This argument, though, is complicated by another unsettling development. In recent months, scores of Chadian soldiers have defected to the rebel militias. If the defections continue, they raise the horrific possibility that American military equipment and expertise could end up going to men aligned with the janjaweed. In that case, our military assistance to Chad, far from containing political anarchy, would only add to it.

Raffi Khatchadourian traveled to Chad in 2005 for the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Posted at 10:45 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Boston Globe

THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 2006

BOSTON Last year in Britain I went to hear Simon Schama of Columbia University lecture about his book, “Rough Crossings,” which has just been published in the United States. The British-born professor’s tale was music to British ears, but could make an American a little uncomfortable.

His story is the story of thousands of blacks in the 13 American Colonies who rallied to the British lines during the Revolutionary War because they believed that is where freedom lay. It is a tale not often told in the United States, where, if blacks are mentioned at all, it has most often been in the context of blacks and whites together fighting against the tyranny of King George.

In America, Crispus Attucks, who fell to British bullets in the Boston Massacre of 1770, is celebrated here while Newton Prince, a Boston barber who testified on behalf of the British soldiers who shot Attucks, is not. The “redcoats” were acquitted, with the help of their lawyer, John Adams. Prince, however, was tarred and feathered by indignant Bostonians.

When the war came, Prince, not surprisingly, joined the British side. Later, when the British began to actively recruit blacks by promising them freedom, thousands followed Prince into the king’s service - not only slaves, but freed men too.

The Continental Congress was ambiguous about blacks on the American side, even though many African-Americans had died for the American cause at Bunker Hill and in Rhode Island. General Washington said he needed all the men he could get, but in 1776 Congress told him that although he could keep the freed blacks he already had, he could not recruit any more. Slaves were to be excluded altogether.

Although it was mostly in the slave economies of the South that whites objected to black soldiers fighting on their side, Northerners were not much better. New Hampshire excluded “lunatics, idiots, and Negroes” from their militias. In contrast, the British offered unambiguous freedom. As a result, hundreds of American blacks fought to keep America British.

While the Patriots’ rhetoric railed against the sins of George III, many American blacks decided that the English king, as Schama put it, was their “enemy’s enemy, and thus their friend, emancipator, and guardian.” For blacks, our “vaunted war for liberty was… a war for the perpetuation of servitude,” Schama said.

One can say that the offer of freedom was a cynical move to undercut the American cause, and that slavery still existed elsewhere in the British Empire. But when the British lost the war, and the Americans demanded their slaves back, the British lived up to their obligations and evacuated the black men, women, and children who had rallied to their side - along with white loyalists - to resettle them in Canada. One black man even changed his name to “British Freedom.” But the blacks who sailed away with the American “Tories” didn’t find the promised land in Canada.

Later, the British would take many of those who wanted to resettle in Africa to Sierra Leone, where their descendants live to this day.

The Founding Fathers of the United States knew well the double standard embedded in the liberty they preached. Patrick “give-me-liberty-or-give-me- death” Henry admitted that he might be against holding slaves in principle, but “I’m drawn along by the general inconveniency of living without them.”

Schama wondered aloud how his book would be received in America. For although there are plenty of books critical about this or that aspect of American history, by in large the Founding Fathers have been deified in this country. Schama joked that he would not look good in an orange Guantánamo jumpsuit.

Do we Americans glorify our Founding Fathers too uncritically? Certainly, a great many biographies have been worshipful. Thucydides and Herodotus, the fathers of history, did not “whitewash the past,” Schama said. The story of the Peloponnesian wars “is the story of a cock-up,” he said.

Do we, as a nation of immigrants, need whitewashed founding legends to unite us? Do Americans, in these morally ambiguous times of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and the secret prisons into which our prisoners disappear without trial or hope, long for heroes and heroic times? Perhaps Americans feel a need to hang on to the glory days of our national youth, when all our leaders were brilliant, brave, and beyond reproach, even if it is not always entirely true.

(H.D.S. Greenway’s column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.)

Posted at 4:55 PM · Comments (0)

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - Copyright Slate

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, 89, died Tuesday. She was born in Scranton, Pa., but she’s best associated with New York City, where she worked as a journalist, and later, with her adopted home, Toronto (she became a Canadian citizen). She was an activist, a widely published writer, and an original thinker. In the weeks to come, much will be written about her central role in shaping our ideas—and our ideals—of urbanism. The praise will be deserved. During the 1960s, a time when the reigning orthodoxy was urban renewal, which generally took the form of urban demolition, she championed a more evolutionary, humanist, and small-scale approach to city planning.

Though neither a designer nor an urban economist, Jacobs wrote what is undoubtedly the most influential book on city planning of the second half of the 20th century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The first sentence is characteristically direct: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” Jacobs criticized what she considered the utopian and misguided theories of Modernism, and she also rejected the other chief urban theories that had influenced 20th century planning: the monumental City Beautiful and the countrified Garden City movement. She was not nitpicking. This was a frontal attack on the idea that cities could be designed at all.

Jacobs’ own prescription, inasmuch as she had one, was based on an appreciation of the vitality of traditional urban neighborhoods, in particular Greenwich Village in New York, where she lived. Lively and interesting street life, a diversity of uses, residential areas intensified by parks and squares and public buildings, a mixture of old and new buildings, and the importance of what she called districts—areas with a functional and recognizable identity—these were the ingredients of successful urban neighborhoods. Compared with the ambitious and innovative ideas of architects and planners, it sounded ridiculously simple, not to say simplistic.

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When The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961, the professional urbanists were not amused. In his New Yorker column, titled “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” Lewis Mumford, a chief spokesman for the importance of planning, called the book a “mingling of sense and sentimentality, of mature judgments and schoolgirl howlers.” Even seven years later, the leading architectural and urban academic of that time, John Burchard, would condescendingly refer to Jacobs’ book as an “entertaining expression of a point of view [that] had a transitory acclaim.”

Transitory? Death and Life, which is still in print, went on to change the way that succeeding generations of architects and planners thought about cities. “Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration,” she wrote, “with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.” The second half of her statement never quite came true—the suburbanization of America, which she chose largely to ignore, was too advanced and too powerful. But the current revival of many American downtowns, the converted lofts, the restored historic districts, and the residential real-estate booms in cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco attest to the essential correctness of her vision.

That vision of the urban good life had wide appeal, but the supply of old cities that offered the requisite mix of street life, architecture, and diversity was limited. The lively city districts that Jacobs championed, including her beloved Village, have become exclusive enclaves, closed to all but the extremely wealthy. She always considered the amenities of city life to be everyday and widely available goods. Little could she have imagined then that they would become luxuries instead.

Witold Rybczynski’s last piece for Slate looked at the new generation of skyscrapers. Andrew Blum visited malls designed to look like vibrant, Jane Jacobs-esque city streets.

Posted at 9:18 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Boston Globe

| April 23, 2006

THREE YEARS OF FIGHTING in the Darfur region of Sudan have left an estimated 180,000 dead and nearly 2 million refugees. In recent weeks, both the UN and the US have turned up the volume of their demands to end the violence (which the Bush administration has publicly called genocide), but they’ve been hard pressed to turn their exhortations into action. The government in Khartoum has scuttled the UN’s plans to take control of the troubled peacekeeping operations currently being led by the African Union, and NATO recently stated publicly that a force of its own in Darfur is ”out of the question.” Meanwhile, refugee camps and humanitarian aid workers continue to be attacked, and the 7,000 African Union troops remain overstretched and ineffective.

But according to J. Cofer Black, vice chairman of the private security firm Blackwater, there is another option that ought to be on the table: an organization that could commit significant resources and expertise to bolster the African Union peacekeepers and provide emergency support to their flagging mission.

A few weeks ago, at an international special forces conference in Jordan, Black announced that his company could deploy a small rapid-response force to conflicts like the one in Sudan. ”We’re low cost and fast,” Black said, ”the question is, who’s going to let us play on their team?”

Private security companies like Blackwater have thrived in Iraq, where the US military has relied on them for everything from guarding convoys to securing the Green Zone. But these companies recognize that the demand for their services in Iraq will eventually diminish, and Blackwater, for one, is looking for new markets. It’s not alone in seeing peacekeeping as a growth area. Competitors such as Aegis and Dyncorp have also realized that while conflicts like the one in Darfur may not bring them profits on the order of Iraq, there’s no shortage of them. And if such companies are able to help the international community succeed in peacekeeping, it could improve the image of an industry that hasn’t enjoyed much support from the press or the public.

Private military companies have had a hard time convincing the international community that privatizing peacekeeping would be as good for Darfur, and for the rest of the world, as for their industry. In part that’s because of the mixed reputation their work in Iraq has earned them and because the explosive growth of the industry has raised fears that security contractors working for the US government in Baghdad (and post-Katrina New Orleans) could become bona fide armies for hire. But the discomfort also has deeper roots, in the complicated history of private intervention in these kinds of conflicts. When Kofi Annan was UN undersecretary general for peacekeeping, he explored the option of hiring the South African private military company Executive Outcomes to aid in the Rwandan refugee crisis. He ultimately decided against the option, declaring that ”the world is not yet ready to privatize peace.”

The world still appears to be unready-and representatives of private military companies believe that’s shortsighted. ”When traditional peacekeepers can’t provide an adequate response because of their home country obligations, there’s an alternative that should be openly and frankly discussed. And that’s a private professional group,” says Chris Taylor, Blackwater’s vice president for strategic initiatives. As he sees it, his company could provide the necessary security inplaces like Darfur ”so that traditional NGOs and aid agencies could do the work they can’t do [now].”

The UN and others clearly have legitimate questions about whether private military companies can do what they claim. But the industry, agitating to led a hand where the international community has dragged its feet, has raised some legitimate questions of its own. When the world’s governments and multilateral organizations have proven as ineffectual as they have in Darfur, should they turn to the private sector for help? In the absence of a viable alternative, is the international community’s aversion to what some call ”mercenarism” stronger than its will to fight genocide?

Private contractors have been providing logistics in low-intensity conflicts in African nations for years, and conducting training operations as well. Dyncorp, for example, is currently involved in what is by most accounts a very successful mission in Liberia, helping train the army and national guard in the aftermath of Liberia’s long and bloody civil war.

Indeed, while the industry has grown and matured in Iraq due to the US military’s unprecedented reliance on contractors there, it’s actually in Africa that early private military companies first did significant work.

In the mid and late ’90s, the South African firm Executive Outcomes and British firm Sandline International offered direct combat support to the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone. In Angola, 500 ex-special forces officers working for Executive Outcomes conducted sophisticated airstrikes and commando operations to help the Angolan military retake its diamond mines and oil fields from the rebel group UNITA. In Sierra Leone, Executive Outcomes and later Sandline were hired to combat the RUF insurgency. With targeted helicopter attacks and ground assaults, both firms dominated tactically, but fighting broke out soon after their respective contracts ended.

The legacy of these operations, as a result, is mixed. On the one hand, the firms’ tactical prowess efficiently and effectively stopped the fighting, saving thousands of lives and leading to the return of over a million refugees. But the benefits were not long-lasting.

What companies like Blackwater are proposing to do in Darfur today is very different from the combat missions of a decade ago. ”We have no interest in offensive operations,” says Taylor flatly. Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, the industry’s trade association, agrees: ”[Executive Outcomes] and Sandline were supporting offensive combat operations. I don’t think that’ll happen again, and certainly not that way.”

Today, private military companies are offering defensive services-they propose to secure refugee camps and vulnerable villages, guard humanitarian aid agencies and NGOs, or, depending on the requirements of the contract, assist peacekeepers like the African Union troops in Darfur. ”Security work is more about avoiding violence, it’s not about inflicting violence,” says Joe Mayo, formerly with the security and training firm Triple Canopy, and now an independent consultant to the industry. ”A good day for a security guy is when nothing happens.”

Aid agencies and NGOs in Darfur haven’t had many good days lately. The beleaguered African Union peacekeeping force has few resources to spend defending an NGO like Save the Children, and the ability of such organizations to continue working in the area is very much in question. ”You can’t expect people to work in conflict zones without protection,” says Christopher Kinsey, a scholar with the Joint Services Command at King’s College London and author of the forthcoming book ”Corporate Soldiers and International Security” (Routledge), ”especially as noncombatant immunity is no longer respected.” Kinsey believes there’s a legitimate role for private military companies in humanitarian operations.

There’s little question that companies like Blackwater could be more effective operationally than the African Union, which has been hampered by its peacekeepers’ lack of command and control experience. Private military companies boast a roster of former special forces officers and law enforcement officers who are accustomed to volatile conflict and post-conflictareas like Sudan.

Blackwater also subjects all of its personnel to an impressive array of extra training-whether they’re training to work in Baghdad or the firm’s North Carolina headquarters. They take classes in international humanitarian law, leadershp, ethics, regional awareness, and ”customs and traditions.” They’ve recently approached Amnesty International about teaching human rights education classes. And the International Peace Operations Association boasts that its code of conduct was written by human rights lawyers.

The industry also claims that it’s far cheaper than its multilateral or military counterparts. ”We offer the ability to create a right-sized solution-which creates a cost savings right off the bat,” says Taylor. By contrast, Brooks notes, ”NATO is insanely expensive; it’s not a cost-effective organization. Neither is the [African Union]. Private companies would be much, much cheaper. When we compared their costs to most UN operations, we came up with 10 to 20 percent of what the UN would normally charge.”

But while many would agree that there’s an enormous need for the peacekeeping services that companies like Blackwater are willing and able to supply, that does not mean there’s a market. ”The question isn’t their operational ability,” says David Isenberg, senior analyst at the British American Security Information Council, ”they’ve demonstrated an ability at least equivalent to a decently run UN operation. It’s a question of political will.”

As the industry is the first to admit, this political will remains elusive. ”The political dimension to this discussion is far more difficult than the tactical dimension,” says Taylor. In 2003, a consortium of for-profit companies was formed to try to supplement the UN mission in Congo with everything from aerial surveillance to ”armed rapid deployment police.” It was never adopted. Asked whether the UN’s official position on using private security contractors has changed, UN spokesman Farhan Haq replied, ”The one-word answer is no.”

Such an answer may suggest a reflexive discomfort with privatizing force. But it also represents some nuanced, widely shared concerns. The first, and most common, is accountability. And it isn’t merely hypothetical, considering the alleged involvement of private contractors in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the recent conviction of the military contractor Custer Battles for government contract fraud in Iraq, and earlier, in Bosnia, the involvement of Dyncorp contractors in a forced prostitution ring.

”There are some legitimate reasons to be skeptical,” allows Isenberg. ”How do you ensure oversight, compliance with international humanitarian law, follow the rules of warfare, rules of engagement, comply with the Geneva Conventions, and the whole bureaucratic panoply of rules that come into play?” Particularly when you’re trying to preserve fast, flexible, and inexpensive deployment.

Compounding the problem of accountability is the fact that private companies are of course not just out to save the world, but to make money. Assuming an industry made up of rational actors, eager to maximize profits, can loyalty to a particular firm-or a particular client-be maintained? Can standards? What happens when there are conflicts of interest? The industry claims that it would only accept contracts from legally recognized bodies, but what if this body were an unsavory regime?

Without uniform regulation of the private military industry, the answers to these questions largely depend on one’s faith in the market’s power to encourage good behavior. As Kinsey sees it, the industry actually takes corporate responsibility quite seriously. ”It’s not because the companies are being altruistic,” he says. ”It’s beneficial in the long term for them to conduct themselves responsibly.”

More fundamentally, many believe that the international community has a special responsibility to take on problems such as Darfur-and that outsourcing humanitarian interventions to the private sector is just another way of sidestepping the hard political debates that should take place in public.

But the abstract ideal of an engaged international community might seem a rarefied consideration in light of the realities on the ground.
<>”This came up a long time ago. People were saying that if we use private sector in the Congo, the international community will never get its act together,” says industry spokesman Doug Brooks. ”But that was 3 million dead Congolese ago. The international cmmunity isn’t going to wake up no matter how many people you kill. I think that it would be a good idea for the international community to get its act together. But we’ve got to find another way.”

Rebecca Ulam Weiner is a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted at 12:42 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate
Posted Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Hey, Johnny and Joan Deadline: Are you paranoid that grand juries will demand to see your notes? Just a little wiggy about lawyers in civil cases subpoenaing the paper trail you assembled for your last big story? Fretting over the possibility that the NSA or other government snoops might have placed you under surveillance? Frightened that a court or agency will discover the identities of your confidential sources after obtaining your phone log or your e-mail?

Then you’ve come to the right column.

The man can’t subpoena that which does not exist. So, as long as you’re prepared to defy a court order and go to jail on a contempt charge, here are some privacy techniques proven in the field by mobsters, spies, al-Qaida, and tobacco companies.

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Don’t Write Down Anything: Anything committed to paper or to a computer file can 1) end up out of your legal control; and 2) be subpoenaed. When your source ventures into sensitive national-security areas, think about putting your pencil down and learn to rely on memory. Or take cryptic notes that won’t identify your source to any outside reader and won’t help the prosecutor narrow his subpoena list.

Destroy Your Notes After Publication: If you can’t break yourself from taking copious notes, burn them the day your story appears. This tip will not necessarily improve your journalism. For instance, I’ve been saved countless times by ancient notes at the bottom of a drawer in my home office, and I continue to drop my notebooks there in hopes of writing the n + 1 story based on them. Notes also help protect you in libel suit defenses. If you decide to destroy your notes, make sure to 1) do it before the subpoena arrives so you can’t be charged with destroying evidence; and 2) be consistent, as a judge may decide to make your life miserable if he learns that you destroy notes about national-security stories on a tight schedule but preserve notes from other stories willy-nilly.

Use the Company’s Computer System Selectively: If you intend to protect your notes, don’t use your publication’s computer system. Just as Time Warner surrendered e-mails in the Plame investigation after exhausting all legal appeals, your boss will do the same. Keep your notes to yourself, and don’t compose early drafts of your story on the company’s computer or e-mail system, because those drafts might contain information you want to keep from the government. Give your editors your final draft of the story.

Encrypt Your Files: If you must keep voluminous notes, encrypt your files and then delete them with an industrial-strength program after publishing (the ones other people use for porn). Because you never know when a subpoena for your computer’s hard disk might be served, and nobody knows for sure whether the NSA can break commercially available encryption, the ultraparanoid may want to encrypt and save all files to an external thumb drive and destroy them upon publication. Imagine how smug you’ll feel when the IT police cart your computer away and all your sensitive data are safe in your pocket.

Use E-mail Judiciously: Unless you’ve encrypted your e-mail or use some anonymizer software, assume that everything you send can be intercepted and read. Some ISPs have been known to surrender e-mail without a search warrant, so don’t expect them to protect you. If you must use e-mail to contact sources, make sure to use e-mail accounts that don’t scream “MEMBER OF THE PRESS.” You don’t want your White House or Pentagon source to be reading his BlackBerry in close quarters where somebody might spot that he’s just gotten e-mail from the nytimes.com or newsweek.com domains. Don’t be lulled into using your office or home computer to send e-mail from your “secret” e-mail as records of all your Web activity are routinely saved to the system for the government’s prying eyes.

Beware of the Office Telephone: Prosecutors and defense attorneys love to subpoena phone logs to establish that a source and a reporter have conversed. There’s no law that says that a company must set up its phone system so that every incoming and outgoing call is perfectly logged, so news organizations should disable this function on their phone systems if they haven’t already. If your source must call you, have him cover his tracks by dialing the switchboard number and asking to be transferred to your extension.

Use Prepaid Cell Phones: If you must make phone calls, do like Tony Soprano and use a prepaid cell phone purchased with cash. If prosecutors succeed in subpoenaing your sources’ phone logs, the logs won’t automatically identify you as the sources’ contact. Destroy the phones after a decent interval. Given al-Qaida’s affinity for prepaid cell phones, they might not be 100 percent secure. For all we know, the cell-phone companies may share information on these with the government or otherwise crimp their security. Beware. (If you can’t afford prepaid cells, try pay phones.)

Get a Skype Account: If you desire 256-bit encryption protection for your phone conversations, get a VOIP phone system such as the one offered by Skype. Make sure your source does, too. But remember: While these calls may be extraordinarily difficult to tap, they do generate easily subpoenaed phone logs.

Skulk Around: Never meet a sensitive source at a location where you must sign in or show an ID. How stupid are you? Try underground parking garages at night.

Practice the Art of Conversation: The modalities of language are such that your source can tell you valuable things without actually saying them, which means he’ll be able to defeat the polygraph at Langley (if it comes to that), and you’ll be able to give truthful testimony to a grand jury if you agree to testify and outwit the prosecutor. Cough once for yes, twice for no, three times for maybe. In the overkill department would be a veiled message that states: “Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers.”

Write in a Stealthy Manner: Obviously, the more sources on the record, the greater the reproducibility and reliability of a story. But reporters on the national-security beat could give sources better cover by writing in an oblique manner. The current American Journalism Review quotes Washington Post reporter Sue Schmidt as saying that at the Post, “now we might not say something is classified information or [from] a State Department source” when it is. Alas, taking the word “classified” out of a story is sort of like dressing Halle Berry in an awning: Will anybody want to look at it? Another way for reporters to protect sources is to write from assertion rather than citing current and former intelligence officials. I acknowledge that most of the “remedies” in this article will dilute quality journalism, but what else are you going to do?

You’re Only As Good As Your Source: If preserving a source’s anonymity is the reporters’ goal, it makes no sense for the reporter to take care in his tradecraft while the source stumbles around like Homer Simpson. FBI official Mark Felt, who was recently outed as Bob Woodward’s “Deep Throat,” was a remarkably self-protective source whose cagey leaks advanced Woodward’s reporting but didn’t lead back to the source (see the previous discussion of the art of conversation). Distribute this article to naive sources.

Create Diversions: Think Ocean’s Twelve.

A Manhattan Project To Create a Neuralizer: “Nothing can expunge knowledge from a journalist’s mind,” says attorney Bruce Brown of Baker & Hostetler. After all the documents and notes are destroyed and all the phone calls and e-mails are adequately masked, a subpoenaed reporter’s brain will still contain the information the prosecutor wants. If the American Society of Newspaper Editors would only fund the development of a “neuralizer,” such as was used in the movie Men in Black, reporters could reliably shed every memory about sources after the story goes to press.

Posted at 10:24 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

April 24, 2006; Page A14

Before and after each Sino-American summit, Beijing offers a triple
spin: China is an equal of the U.S., the U.S. needs China even more than
China needs the U.S., and the two powers are fundamentally like-minded.
Left out are a few points. Chinese come to the U.S. and read scathing
criticisms of President Bush in American newspapers. Americans go to
China and never read a word of criticism of President Hu Jintao in “China
Daily.” The Chinese state creates a lock-step view of events within
China and the world that is completely different from our own marketplace
of ideas.

Asymmetry marks access and availability of information in the U.S. and
China: 100,000 Chinese students are on our campuses (enormously more
than the Americans on Chinese campuses), and they have extraordinary
access to information, whereas many sensitive materials are withheld from
Americans in China. Hundreds of prominent Americans who know a lot about
China are pro-Beijing and are publicly critical of U.S. policy toward
China. That is their right. But there is no equivalent community of
specialists in China that is pro-American and criticizes Beijing’s policy
toward the U.S. — nor could there be.

The professions in China are not autonomous: Journalists, professors,
most lawyers and clergy for licensed religious organizations are all
beholden to the party-state. Hence many cultural exchanges between China
and the U.S. are flawed projects since Chinese journalists, judges and
other professionals are not independent.

Time and again an American leader speaks in China after a promise from
Beijing that his remarks will be transmitted unaltered to the Chinese
public, only to find sensitive parts have been cut. “People’s Daily,”
reporting the joint press conference between President Clinton and
President Jiang Zemin in 1998, omitted Mr. Clinton’s words on freedom, Tibet
and the Tiananmen tragedy of 1989. Vice President Cheney’s speech in
Shanghai in April 2004 was gutted of key passages about democracy after a
promise to transmit it in full. And so on. The Chinese people cannot
know what they do not hear. And they are unaware of how much they do not
know.

Just as Beijing uses divide-and-rule at the national level to try to
split Japan, Australia and other allies from the U.S., it does the same
at the level of the individual writer, journalist or academic. The
Chinese try to pick favorites and isolate critics of Beijing. They dangle
access (as they do with businessmen); they intimidate potential critics.
In the mid-’90s, National Geographic invited me to write an article on
the Three Gorges Dam project. Some months after the photographer and I
began, Beijing refused me a visa to travel to the dam area. National
Geographic was in a bind; inevitably, they chose another writer to whose
views Beijing would have less objection, a quiet victory that remained
unknown to readers of the published article.

Another Chinese method is to plant themes in American minds by
repetition and infiltration. “The U.S. is trying to hold China back” says
Beijing. Taking 25% or more of its exports is a strange way of holding China
back. “A Cold War mentality in the U.S. is damaging U.S.-China
relations” says Beijing. In truth, North Korea, China’s only ally, is the
conspicuous Cold War relic that is gravely unsettling to northeast Asia.
“Japanese militarism is the great danger in Asia” says Beijing. Never mind
that China has fought wars on four flanks in the last half-century,
during which Japan’s military has killed not one non-Japanese in combat.

To help plant these themes, Beijing draws into its sphere Americans
with good knowledge of China and readiness to agree with Chinese policies.
All the statements listed above are embraced by prominent business,
media and academic figures involved with China. New is the amount of money
China has available for its manipulation. The corruption of power was
familiar in earlier years of the PRC; the corruption of money becomes
evident today. Beijing is bold with its open wallet. It is true that
Beijing’s behavior in the face of the international flow of information has
improved in the post-Mao era. But the Leninist basis of the Chinese
regime remains. President Clinton, while in office, twice referred to
China as a “former communist country.”

This only sets us up for disillusionment. Far from being like-minded,
China fends the U.S. off, undermines it across the globe, and desires
its decline in East Asia. Beijing will not “help” Washington over North
Korea since its interests (propping up Pyongyang) differ from U.S.
interests (solving the nuclear weapons issue by reunification of Korea under
Seoul).

What should we do about the situation? Our overall China policy can
(and does) blend full engagement with participation in preserving an
equilibrium in East Asia that discourages Beijing from expansionism. No
contradiction exists between these twin stances. There are two Chinas,
after all: a command economy that sags, and a free economy that soars; a
Communist Party that scratches for a raison d’?re, and 1.3 billion
individuals with private agendas. Being wary of authoritarian China while
engaging with emerging China is a logical dualism.

Beyond that strategy, we should, above all, avoid wishful thinking
about the Chinese state. We should be aware of the asymmetry in cultural
exchanges. We should resist the Chinese divide-and-rule policies by a
stance of solidarity with those whom Beijing singles out for attack or
exclusion. We should talk back every time the Communist Party mocks the
freedoms of the U.S. or denies the repression of its own rule.

Far better to have cordial relations with Beijing than the
confrontations of the ’50s (Korean War) and ’60s (Indochina Wars). But in the
absence of a common enemy and with a yawning gap between democracy and
dictatorship, the relationship cannot be cozy. “Avoid politicizing the
issues” between the two countries, Hu Jintao said last week, but the
fundamental issues are political. It is good that Beijing finds common ground
with Boeing and Microsoft; but less common ground exists between
Beijing and the American democracy. One worries at times that authoritarian
China has an advantage over the U.S. It can take the long view, hide
plans it does not want revealed, pull the strings of Chinese public
opinion, set the agenda of international organizations while doing little to
implement their decisions, win access to American society while closing
doors within China, and deceive non-Chinese about all this by its
political theater. Yet ultimately an authoritarian regime is not stron!
g. China today is no match for the U.S. in any realm except
population, and as long as it remains a dictatorship it will never equal the U.S.
as a power and influence in the world.

The average life span of the European Leninist regimes that collapsed
between 1989 and 1991 was only a few decades; the Chinese communist
regime is now 57 years old, 17 years short of the Soviet Union, the longest
running authoritarian regime of modern times. Democracies sound
raucous, but the U.S. and Australia, to take two, have been stable for a
period that runs into centuries. The oxygen of freedom prevents many evils.
Our quarrel over the manipulation of news and views is not with Chinese
culture or people, but with the Communist Party state. It manipulates
because that was its political upbringing. It strokes the feathers of
sycophants and ditches independent spirits because that has been the
Leninist way in every country where a Communist Party has held a monopoly
of power.

Political systems do matter. Washington and Beijing could hardly be
more different on the fundamental issue of freedom.

Mr. Terrill, associate in research at Harvard University’s Asia Center,
is the author of “The New Chinese Empire” (Basic Books, 2004).

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Posted: 2006-04-23
Within the past few weeks two of America’s leading newspapers have watched staff-written blogs blow up in their faces. First, Ben Domenech left Washingtonpost.com after outside bloggers uncovered numerous examples of plagiarism in his past work. And last week, the Los Angeles Times suspended the blog of Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Hiltzik (interviewed by OJR just before the scandal broke) after he was discovered to have posted comments under false identities on his and other blogs.
Can newspapers do blogs right? I e-mailed that question to several prominent online journalists. All have experience with “traditional” media and either blog or oversee bloggers in their work. Their edited responses follow:
Anthony Moor, OrlandoSentinel.com

I’m not sure we know yet what “right” is when it comes to blogs. We’re in an R&D phase here, for lack of a better term, when it comes to incorporating blogs into our “traditional” Web content. There are going to be missteps. We know that blogs are a powerful software tool for self-service, instant publishing with a built-in tagging capability that plugs us into the conversation online. We also know that blogs are fostering a new kind of editorial voice in our writing: intimate, off-the-cuff and breezy.
Now, how that powerful new force on the Internet intersects with our mission to provide accurate and credible information to our audience is what we’re figuring out. We don’t have to do what bloggers v.1.0 are doing now to incorporate blogs effectively into what we do, and I think we shouldn’t try.
What makes us journalists is our ability to gather facts, synthesize, and write about the world around us — and those are not necessarily the requirements of blogging. As long as we couple our essential skills as journalists with this new medium, I think we CAN shape blogs into a valuable new asset for newspapers.
Look, the analogy is this: When software became widely available to easily manipulate photos into photo illustrations, the public-at-large found a myriad of uses for it. And news organizations suffered some notable missteps as they began using it too. Now, however, we’ve learned how to incorporate this power into our journalism without giving up the essential things that make what we do journalism.
Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing.net and National Public Radio

Newspapers will get it right when the people responsible for designing and launching blogs for them take the time to understand the culture, the process, the dynamics and the sociology of blogs. It’s important that newspapers not launch blogs for the sake of launching blogs. There had to be a purpose to other than to have the ability to tell the world that you have a blog.
What’s the point of interacting with your audience? Is the point just to leave snippy comments on the blogs of your critics? Or is the point of interacting to provide bits and pieces and nuances of information that traditional newspaper reporting doesn’t lend itself to?
I feel like way too often it is done as a gimmicky thing. Not to name names, but some companies launch blogs because there’s someone at the company who monitors search engine traffic, and one day that person recognizes, “Hey there are a lot of people searching about babies — I think we need to have a baby blog.”
Just because the traffic shows a lot of traffic, and potential for advertising revenue, they lanuch a blog and hire some inexperienced copy writter to fill it with stuff. It’s just an excuse to have something to sell ads against. I don’t think the Los Angeles Times created its blogs as an excuse to sell banner ads against, but too often in situations like this there’s disjointed thinking. There’s this idea that you stick a blog up there, you stick unmoderated comments up there, you don’t give your reporters who are totally unfamiliar with this medium any guidance, and you’re going to expect it to turn out well?
I think the fact that people make such an unnatural distinction between blogging and writing for a newspaper is part of the problem. Behave in your blog as you would in the paper.
Lisa Stone, BlogHer.com

Of course they can. Blog, wiki and audio technologies are just like the printing presses used to publish newspapers — tools that a broad spectrum of thinkers are using to get their word out. Period. Just like in traditional newspapering, some of these blogs, wikis and podcasts are superior, others are bird-cage liner.
Newspaper blogs that work are carefully planned, openly executed exercises in public conversation about news and information. These blogs allow comments and turn into 24/7 townhall meetings about everything from the headlines to how well the paper is doing to deliver and discuss the news. Newspapers that blog well embrace the community and use the blogs as an extension of their op-ed pages. There are dozens of examples, from MSNBC’s oft-ignored Bloggermann (one of the national media’s best blogs) to brave local daily sites taking important baby steps such as Madison.com and FresnoBee.com.

Newspaper blogs that don’t work tend to dismss blogs as, in Alex S. Jones’ famous words, the sizzle rather than the steak — as useless chatter rather than as an extension of the newspaper’s journalism that deserves the same care, feeding and standards of accuracy and ethical behavior. How can newspapers expect to survive if they keep mooning their readers like this? Answer: They won’t.
The problems of failing standards of accuracy and ethical behavior among the nation’s leading newspapers are not limited to blogs. As someone who grew up on newspapers and will never give them up, the past five years have been agonizing to behold, from Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg, to Ben Domenech and Michael Hiltzik. America’s newspapers have the opportunity to leverage blogs as credibility-building exercises — but the first thing we need to do is to stop architecting our own demise. To avoid meltdowns like this, newspapers need to do exactly what exceptional blogs do: For God’s sake, assume the position of the reader and behave accordingly. Readers want to know what they’re getting, who they’re getting it from and how, so that they can trust their sources — that’s you. Here are two easy steps:

Step 1: No more rookie maneuvers. Call in a blog expert with a journalism background and have this outside person walk you through community scenarios to test what your newsroom (and management) can tolerate and what you cannot. If nudie pictures on your wiki are a no-no, you have a choice to make: (a) Don’t publish the wiki, and/or (b) Don’t publish the wiki without human and/or technical filters. But you have to have someone advising you who knows how wikis behave. Or, say, if you don’t want a blogger to violate fair use acts on this blog or in previous blogs, (a) Check out their personal records, and (b) Say so and sign them to agreement that says so.

Step 2: Repeat Step 1 in an open conversation with your readers and ask them to behave according to these guidelines too. Publish your community guidelines and ask readers what they want and why. Edit your guidelines accordingly.

Step 3: Integrate blogs into the newsroom’s efforts. Starting slow is fine — but the best blogs are a team effort. In a newsroom unused to community conversation, to groaning when readers write and call-in, is to make it part of the journo’s job description — and their editor’s too. That means a conversation with the community via blogging (including Steps 1 and 2) needs to be embraced by the people at the top of the newsroom hierarchy.
Bob Cauthorn, CityTools.net

I think it’s going to be difficult for newspapers to do blogs right because their DNA continues to be trapped in the “we talk, you listen” mode. Fundamentally, staff-written blogs are nothing different than what newspapers do now — simply spilling more of the same voices onto the public streets.
Sure, staff-written blogs have a fragile patina of interactively because some accept comments. Scuffing off that patina doesn’t take much.
1) Under the best case, newspaper blog comments are enfeebled interactivity. Only fractional percentages of readers comment on staff-written blogs. Maybe the public has simply given up on the idea of newspapers listening or caring. Consider the case of the Guardian’s staff blogs. The Guardian is one of the best online newspapers in the world and its commitment to the staff blog borders on the fanatical. They throw substantial resources at it. And yet, if you look closely at the number of comments per post (realize in many cases comments are more than a week old) and then you consider the total traffic on the site, you must conclude that the supposed interactivity of the Guardian’s blogs has failed utterly. I mean we’re talking less that 1/10 of one percent of all readers who are moved to comment! (FYI, I did a quick study of this last fall because the Guardian folks had a hissy over my post attacking the concept of staff blogs.)
2) Even if you get a few comments, the moment they turn hostile to the newspaper, suddenly the commitment to interactivity wavers. It’s happened a number of times. And indeed, the Hiltzik incident specifically highlights this. Today’s newspapers are sufficiently thin-skinned that the idea that people might use comments to attack the writers doesn’t go down well. So you either stop comments, or you remove the accounts of critics, or — as in the case of Hiltzik — you create deceptive online personas to respond to the attacks. It’s the “we talk, you listen” attitude taken to the extreme: Even if the public talks back, the media requires the last word! It’s a fatal appetite on the part of the modern newspaper. Some sociologists have pointed out that modern America can exert power on the global stage, but it no longer exerts authority (for authority comes from the nexus of wisdom, restraint, morality and cleaving to higher purposes). Newspapers are in a similar boat — they’re still powerful institutions but their authority is in shambles. OK, let’s get this straight: So we let the public speak and when a tiny number do we come rushing in with fake personas to defend the paper against attacks. We never let anyone else get the last word. That’s wrong and it’s stupid and it’s going to kill papers. Instead of stifling criticism, newspapers should embrace it and learn from it and grow wise.
(Incidentally, The fact that the LA Times perceives the Hiltzik’s actions as a violation of ethics is a *very* good thing. One of the dirty little secrets of newspaper blogs is that many, many of the comments come from unidentified staff members. I applaud the LAT for this move. It’s high time to stop this deplorable practice.)
So if newspapers blogs are not *really* about interacting with the community — and I challenge anyone to demonstrate they’ve been successful at that goal — what makes them different? They just offer the same voices you read all the time.
This is *exactly* what my beef with staff blogs is about and why I’ve been trying to get newspapers to change the approach. Jon Stewart put it nicely when he said mainstream media blogs “give voice to the already voiced.”
Look, it’s easy to get this right: don’t have staff members blog and instead bring in the legitimate outside voices. There are many ways that a mainstream media organization can do this — make a blog about *outside* blogs, point some of your traffic to outside voices (even those who, gasp, criticize you!), invite some of the best outside bloggers in your community to post right on your pages. Give selected bloggers early access to your stories — particularly enterprise stories — so that they can have same-day reactions. (Make sure these are bloggers you can trust not to jump the publication, obviously.) In other words, genuinely and sincerely embrace *outside* voices. Allow the community to have a stake in what you are doing once more.
As stand it stands right now, newspapers keep shouting louder in a room that, increasingly, is emptying around us. Maybe, before the last reader departs we can convince people to stay by letting them know we want to talk *with* our community, not *at* them.
Chris Nolan, Spot-On.com

This is a pretty big set of issues that really, I think, go to the heart of what’s wrong with newsroom culture these days. Suffice it to say that the contempt that a lot of folks on the floor feel for people working online really has to stop. The problem is that guys like Ben Domenech and Michael Hiltzik aren’t exactly helping to make that argument. I’m not entirely sure that’s anyone’s “fault” as much as it is the result of having the news business open up to its audience at a time when newsrooms are in crisis and readers are better informed than they’ve ever been — thanks to the Internet.
The idea that the Post of the L.A. Times have somehow screwed up royally by hiring folks who cut corners isn’t the end of the world as we know it. It’s a series of mistakes. It’s done. We’ve learned a few things — among them, there should be an intermediate step between running your own website and writing for a big newspaper.
Newsroom editors and writers need to spend a lot more time reading and watching the talent that’s out here on the Web. Lots of folks sitting in newsrooms are going to have to get over the fact that people outside the building really do know what they’re doing much of the time. Just as online folks are going to have to stop cutting corners and claiming that they represent a new form of “media” free of all basic rules and constraints that’s some how superior to what’s being done in the ink-and-paper format. The way you produce your story has nothing to do with what the story says to the reader.
Fundamentally, the rules of the reporting game — be fair, be honest, represent the reader as you do your job, limit the harm you do as you do it, and always be aware that there’s someone on the other side of the story — are not going to change. Part of what’s going on with Domenech and Hiltzik is that those lessons are being meted out in a very public fashion. This, by the way, is how those things used to get taught by foul-mouthed city editors who thought nothing of yelling at new reporters. I knew a few of those guys … didn’t you?
Nick Denton, Gawker Media

Reporters, trained to put aside opinion, make uninteresting bloggers. And it’s notoriously hard to manage, in parallel, a daily news cycle and regular updates for breaking news.

Posted at 8:40 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Wired

A light snow is falling outside the windows of Cyrus H. McCormick School in southwest Chicago, but the second graders in Room 203 are not distracted from their lesson. May Cheung, an energetic teacher from Hong Kong, holds a cup to her lips and asks, “Wo he shemma?” (What am I drinking?) A forest of arms go up. “Cha! Cha!” (Tea!) An hour later, Cheung has kindergartners counting to 27 in Mandarin as she hands out Chinese New Year hong bao, the red envelopes that promise wealth, abundance, and good fortune. For most of the kids in this Mexican-American neighborhood, Mandarin is their third language - after Spanish and English.

The children at McCormick are part of the largest grade school Chinese program in the US. Seven years ago, after a post-college stint teaching English in China, Robert Davis wandered into the offices of the Chicago Public Schools and convinced the director to start a comprehensive Chinese language program and hire him to manage it. Now 3,500 Chicago kids, from kindergartners to 12th graders, learn Mandarin. “The days of everybody trying to be American are over,” Davis says. “When you do business with or go to other countries, be prepared to work on their terms.”

Far from Chicago - 6,597 miles to the west, to be exact - Ma Jianfei is pointing at a huge map on the wall of a plush meeting room in an otherwise dreary building in Beijing. Ma is the deputy director general of the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, better known as Hanban, and the map chronicles his success exporting Mandarin around the world. The map shows that the hottest markets for Mandarin are Thailand and South Korea, where all elementary and middle schools will offer Chinese by 2007. Europe, particularly France and Germany, is also doing well, thick with yellow circles (teachers), red triangles (test facilities), and blue squares (language centers).

There aren’t many shapes in the US yet, but Ma is working on that. For the past two years, Hanban has been collaborating with the College Board, the nonprofit that runs the SAT and the Advanced Placement program; in 2007, high school kids across the US will be able to take the first ever AP exam for Chinese language and culture (this year they’re prepping for the test in new College Board-accredited classes). In October, Ma was in the American heartland, inking an agreement to open a Confucius Institute, a center for Chinese language learning and cultural studies, at the University of Kansas. It’ll be the sixth in the US, the 41st in the world. Soon there will be 100 such institutes worldwide.

Mandarin Chinese is already the most popular first language on the planet, beating out English by 500 million speakers. And it’s the second-most-common language on the Internet. Now, just as China requires students to learn English, Beijing wants to make Chinese the must-take language for English speakers - and everyone else. Ma figures there are currently 30 million people around the world learning Chinese as a second language. Hanban aims to increase that to 100 million over the next four years.

It’s an audacious goal, and the government is backing it by funding - to the tune of nearly $25 million a year - the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language. Last year, Hanban sent 1,042 volunteer teachers to France, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Mauritius, Nigeria, Colombia, and 16 other countries. This year, it will top that number.

Hanban provides schools, centers, and Confucius Institutes with seed money, textbooks, and game-based learning software. College kids and adults play Great Wall Chinese, while middle school students get a game called Chengo Chinese, which Hanban developed through a partnership with the US Department of Education. Nearly 15,000 American kids in 20 states helped beta-test the game, and it’s now used in Mandarin classes offered through the accredited Michigan Virtual High School.

Beijing isn’t doing anything different from what the British or the Americans or the French have done - sending emissaries abroad to spread its language and culture. It’s not the first time the Chinese have pushed their native tongue, either: In the 17th and 18th centuries, imperial China brought several Chinese languages to much of Southeast Asia. But this 21st-century push is more global in scope, as befits an emerging world power. “This is the linguistic equivalent of sending a person to the moon,” says Oded Shenkar, a professor at the Ohio State University and author of The Chinese Century.

Chinese bureaucrats take their evangelism seriously. The country is “merging into the world,” Zhang Xinsheng, China’s deputy minister of education, explained to reporters before the first World Chinese Conference last June. The event attracted diplomats and teachers from 65 countries - all there to partake in China’s efforts to export Mandarin. “China, as the mother country of the language, shoulders the responsibility of promoting [the language] and helping other nations to learn it better and faster.”

Chinese authorities also see spreading Chinese as an important part of the country’s “peaceful rise,” says Elizabeth Economy, the director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York foreign-policy think tank. This was the philosophy articulated in 2003 by China’s president, Hu Jintao. China wants to emerge as a global power without threatening global security. “I think the Chinese have been very careful and thoughtful about assuaging the fears of the rest of the world,” says Economy. “There’s a benign element of the language work: to help educate.”

One of the people most responsible for providing that help is Zhang Yi. Over the past three years, she’s been to South Africa, Thailand, Japan, and Canada on business - not bad for a 24-year-old government employee. Trained as a lawyer, she coordinates Hanban’s volunteer teacher program, selecting, training, sending, and supporting the agency’s pool of 10,000-plus volunteer instructors. Like missionaries, these full-time teachers receive no pay, only a small stipend from Hanban. Most are young women who sign on to see the world - and sow the seeds of Chinese along the way.

As a young cosmopolitan Beijinger, Zhang Yi celebrates Christmas and prefers coffee over tea, so when we meet one frigid evening in Haidian (China’s Silicon Valley), she picks Starbucks. Zhang marvels at the remarkable popularity of her native language outside China - it’s something European newspapers like to call “Chinese fever,” or hanyu re. Zhang sees evidence of Chinese fever all the time. In Bangkok, her waiters spoke Chinese. In Jakarta, she helped a Korean traveler who couldn’t speak Indonesian or English, only Chinese. She recently had dinner with three professors from Beijing who had just been in Cuba, where they met students who were learning Chinese. Zhang is delighted to see the language taking hold in all these places. “That’s why we are feeding the fire,” she says.

Back in Chicago, Robert Davis is fanning the flames, but he isn’t asking for volunteers. He wants teachers who’ll stay, not leave after a year or two. So Hanban gave him $70,000 to build a Confucius Institute at Walter Payton College Prep; it also sends him free software and books. This spring, the new institute will begin providing grade school instructors with teaching materials and lesson plans, and it will offer how-to seminars for parents who want to help their kids with Chinese homework.

If Hanban exports Chinese around the world, then the main American importer is Gaston Caperton. He looks like Bill Clinton - though thinner - and speaks, once he gets talking, with an unchecked southern accent.

Caperton caught his own version of Chinese fever on his third visit to the country in 1994, when he was governor of West Virginia and traveling to China as part of an international trade mission. Expecting to return to the raw, poor country he’d seen in the 1980s, he instead found people drinking Coca-Cola and using com puters, and the hotel was as lavish as any in the West.

Normally you’d find him in New York at the College Board, where he’s president and unofficial promoter for Chinese-language education. But ever since the AP Chinese course was established, he’s been on the road, trying to solve the shortage of qualified Chinese teachers in the US by prodding American universities to offer certification programs and persuading elementary schools and colleges stateside to offer more Chinese language classes. He’s recently been in Beijing, meeting with Hanban officials about their volunteer-teacher program. But today he’s in Shanghai with his wife, Idit Harel Caperton. She spent the fall teaching software engineering at a university here and is a consultant and major investor (along with MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte) in a language software company based in China.

The College Board is among the few organizations that can have national impact in a public school system where most decisions are made at the local level. So Gaston Caperton hopes that the Chinese AP will spur interest in the language in high schools - and even trickle down to elementary schools. “The future is in Asia, and we have to know Asian languages,” he says. The point is to keep the US competitive. Learning Chinese isn’t just a way for Americans to get jobs in China, but for them to do business with Chinese companies and compete with Mandarin speakers from other countries.

Hanban contacted Caper ton in 2004. At first, the Chinese government was frustrated by the fragmented US public school system. “They said to me, ‘In China, we made English the second language,’” Caperton says. “‘So why don’t you just make it happen in the US?’”

Caperton is working to spread Chinese however he can. After becoming president of the College Board in 1999, he urged the organization to offer courses and exams in more languages. Given the importance of standardized tests, decisions by the College Board inevitably filter down to high schools and even elementary schools. Hanban also wanted to import the curriculum they’d developed directly into US schools. But Caperton persuaded them to abandon their one-size-fits-all approach. The Chinese were “aggressive” about helping, he says. After speaking for a few moments, Caperton backtracks and changes aggressive to progressive. What’s the difference? “Progressive is moving forward and up. Aggressive is simply getting what you want.”

Alexander Feldman saw this behavior firsthand when, as the US government’s coordinator for international information programs, he was touring a new library at the State Institute for Islamic Studies of North Sumatera in Indonesia. On the third floor, an “American corner” was stocked with books, magazines, and computers with Internet access. Feldman suggested to the university’s chancellor that videoconference equipment be installed in the empty space next to the corner. That’s a good idea, the chancellor said. But about a month after the American corner was built, the Chinese were here and proposed a Chinese corner, which would sit right next to yours and have more resources than yours, he said. “There is a bit of friendly competition,” Feldman mused later. “Competition is a good thing, both in business and in public diplomacy.”

Michael Erard (erard@lucidwork.com) wrote about kosher tech in issue 12.11.

Posted at 4:40 PM · Comments (0)

This is a very well written and entertaining look at the work of the master. Highly recommended.

Posted at 12:03 PM · Comments (0)

Book Reviews

Monday 24th April 2006

A S Byatt on a brief and bleak morality tale for our times

Everyman
Philip Roth Jonathan Cape, 182pp, £10
ISBN 0224078690

Philip Roth is the great recorder of Darwinian Man - “unaccommodated man”, who is no more than “a poor, bare, forked animal”, as old King Lear observed. Roth has understood what it means to be a conscious creature, driven by sexual desire towards the death of the body, nothing more. He called an earlier novel The Dying Animal, taking his title from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, in which the poet describes his soul as “sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal …”

Roth’s characters inhabit a truly post-religious world, in which we do not have immortal souls, only sick, lively desire, and the dying of the animal. The title of this new, bleak tale is taken from a mediaeval morality play in which Everyman, the human soul, is called by Death to appear before God’s judgement seat. He is deserted by his strength, discretion, beauty, knowledge and five wits, leaving only his Good Works to speak for him at the end. Hugo von Hofmannsthal reworked the play in 1911 for the Salzburg Festival, where it is still performed. Timor Mortis conturbat me is an ancient cry, but it sounds different in a world where the Four Last Things - death, judgement, heaven and hell - have been reduced to one, or maybe one and a half. Roth’s characters are defensive and defiant of possible judgement of their manifest failings. Saul Bellow’s Herzog was in an agony of despair at the meaninglessness of a world without a spiritual dimension, where only human feelings were available in the face of human cruelty and decay. An earlier Roth character, David Kepesh, hero of The Professor of Desire and of The Dying Animal, is apparently more robustly grim. He sees sex as “the revenge on death” - desire as a confrontation of mortality. If there is no more, he will not try to make up more. Desire and death is what we are.

Roth’s Everyman is a brief and uncompromising account of one man’s death. He is nameless, though his family, wives, children and lovers are named. The book opens with his funeral, and ends with the moment of his death on the operating table. In between, with a blunt and steady progress, the reader sees through his eyes the slow dissolution of his body, marked by a series of increasingly drastic and invasive surgical “interventions”, starting with a boyhood hernia and moving through bypasses and prostheses, patchings-up of his heart and veins. It is not told in a straight line - his three marriages, his rejecting sons, his kind-hearted daughter, his bouts of sick and violent desire are woven backwards and forwards, so that the description of his love for his wise and good second wife, Phoebe, comes much later in our reading than his betraying of her trust, and her honest anger. He follows his instincts, which lead to entanglements (and a third marriage) with impossible women. He is self-justifying - he sees his conduct as that of a normal human being, an everyman, which perhaps it is. The nearest he comes to judgement is a summing-up of himself, early in the book: “He was not claiming to be exceptional. Only vulnerable and assailable and confused. And convinced of his right, as an average human being, to be pardoned ultimately for whatever deprivations he may have inflicted upon his innocent children in order not to live deranged half the time.”

Pardoned by whom, in a Darwinian world? By himself, or his messed-about family? Does the word have any meaning? Is there a judge? Are the readers judges? We do judge, irascibly even, and then are made to feel an undignified pity.

The body - his body, everyman’s body - is the solid certainty in the story. As an old man in retirement he goes to live in the Starfish Beach retirement village on the Jersey coast. He tries to become the painter he thinks he has always wanted to be, and teaches art to a class of retired people. He thinks that if he should ever write an autobiography he would call it The Life and Death of a Male Body, and gives the title to a series of his own abstract paintings. But the class is full of bodily pain in the elderly, and painting comes to lose its meaning. He broods on his own youth, “the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves … ” - and so on for a perfect, lyrical passage on healthy naked skin and the “advancing, green Atlantic”. This vision of youth comes late in the book and is moving because so much thick and obtrusive pain and mess has preceded it and surrounds it.

Roth’s writing looks uncompromisingly straightforward but is subtle and clever. Consider the sentence describing Every-man’s idea of the suicide of a member of his class, in unbearable arthritic pain. He imagines her swallowing the pills, “slowly swallowing them with her last glass of water, with the last glass of water ever”. Her last glass, and then the last glass. The end of a person, the end of the world. The end of the tale is also completely imagined. Roth has earlier described the ante-room of the operating theatre, full of human beings in flimsy gowns and paper slippers, reading newspapers and gossiping about the news, facing perhaps the last breath.

Roth works with things, not with symbols or metaphors, but he chooses them craftily. Everyman’s father is a diamond merchant, and takes pleasure in a woman’s finger, slipped into a ring with a bright stone, an earthly thing that is “imperishable”. Quick visions of these imperishable stones are set against the crumbling flesh and bones all the way through the tale, and at the end, as the unhero goes into unconsciousness, he has a vision of the planet - “the billion-, the trillion,- the quadrillion-carat planet Earth”. His desire is renewed, he is ready to set off again, but that is the end. He does not wake. A human story for our times.

A S Byatt’s most recent book is The Little Black Book of Stories (Vintage)

Posted at 11:55 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The San Jose Mercury News
April 7, 2006

A recent report from Duke University that critiques
the supposed gap between the number of American
science and engineering (S&E) graduates and those of
merging economies — especially China’s — has led to
false reassurance that the U.S. lead in science and
technology is not under threat from China. It would be
a grave mistake to drop our concerns about China’s
competitive challenge.
First, the Duke report simply claimed that China’s
true number of science and engineering bachelor
degrees was 351,000, rather than the widely reported
600,000. Coupling this with an upward adjustment for
American graduates still left China producing 214,000
more such degrees than the United States.
Moreover, undergraduates are only part of the concern.
China’s production of those with doctorates has
increased rapidly. By 2003, China’s homegrown science
and engineering doctorates numbered almost half of the
U.S. total.
Chinese were also earning large numbers of doctorates
abroad. In 2001, the number of Chinese S&E doctorates
earned in Japan, the United Kingdom and the United
States equaled 72 percent of the total of S&E
doctorates earned by American citizens and permanent
residents.
Since 1975, China has increased its global share of
S&E doctorates from zero (courtesy of the Cultural
Revolution) to 11 percent, not counting doctorates
earned overseas. During the same three decades, the
U.S. global share has fallen from half to roughly 22
percent.
More worrisome than the aggregate numbers is American
universities’ reliance on foreigners who earn
doctorates. In engineering, foreigners account for
over half of America’s doctorates, and in computer
science just under half.
If foreign-born holders of doctorates continued to
stay in the United States, we wouldn’t have to worry.
Unfortunately, there are many signs that it is
becoming much harder to retain them.
One need only look at the flow from Taiwan, one of the
former main sources of American S&E doctoral degrees,
to see what could happen. Up until 1994, Taiwanese
earned more science and engineering doctorates in the
United States than members of any other foreign
nationality. By 2000, their numbers had plummeted
because economic and educational opportunities at home
were more appealing.
The Taiwanese didn’t just stop coming to America. They
also began to leave. As Taiwan’s tech sector boomed in
the 1990s, huge numbers of Taiwanese technologists
(estimates range as high as 100,000) left America for
home and took their technical skills with them.
Our two current biggest foreign sources of
technologists, China and India, appear to be following
Taiwan’s path. China has begun to lure back large
numbers of technologists. China’s central and local
governments offer free office space and other benefits
to attract technologists home. These inducements are
working. A 2005 survey of the Chinese American
Semiconductor Professionals Association’s members
showed that the vast majority regard China as the most
likely future work destination, and they rated
Shanghai higher than even Silicon Valley on career
potential. India’s recruitment efforts have also
started to bear fruit.
The challenge is not simply keeping up the numbers of
technologists in America. China by many measures has
improved its technological capabilities. On the
Georgia Institute of Technology’s Index of
Technological Capability, China has more than doubled
its index score over the past decade. China now ranks
fourth behind the United States, Japan and Germany.
This rapid ascent is not surprising given China’s
increasing investments. China’s research and
development spending as a percentage of gross domestic
product has tripled to 1.3 percent in the last decade,
even while its GDP has ballooned. Few emerging
economies spend even 1 percent of their GDP on
research.
U.S. patents invented in China are also on the rise.
Information-technology patents from corporations’
Chinese technologists have risen from 134 in 1997-2001
to 482 during 2002-04. As a first step to meet this
challenge, we should increase federal spending on
basic and exploratory research. Our R&D spending has
been flat at 2.6 percent of GDP for four decades, but
the share of federal spending has declined from
two-thirds to one-quarter.
Given that corporations now de-emphasize basic
scientific research, the federal government should
further support the basic research that could maintain
our lead at the cutting edge of technology.
Increased federal funding would also address the issue
of the falling share of investment in certain
disciplines. With spending flat, the rising share
commanded by biomedicine has meant a falling share
spent on engineering and physics.
Federal support may also play a direct role in
increasing interest in pursuing a science education.
Since the 1950s, the number of undergraduate S&E
majors in America has risen and fallen in line with
federal research funding, as Professor Henry Rowen of
Stanford University has pointed out.
Before meeting China’s challenge, we first must
recognize it. Complacency in reaction to “good” news
that China is producing fewer S&E graduates than
commonly thought is not the answer.

Douglas B. Fuller is a postdoctoral fellow at the
Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and
Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) at Shorenstein APARC.

Posted at 11:21 AM · Comments (0)

In a money game, men who were shown pictures of lingerie or sexy women accepted disadvantageous deals more often than did men who were shown nonsexual pictures. Men with higher testosterone levels, inferred from ring fingers that were long relative to their index fingers, did worse on the test. Interpretations: 1) Duh. 2) This is what evolution designed men to do. 3) Nevertheless, we can struggle to overcome it. 4) Researchers are having trouble finding images that mess up women the same way. What does that tell you? (For Human Nature’s take on male-female differences in a punishment game, click.

Posted at 6:03 AM · Comments (0)

I’ve been on a real Cormac bend for the last year. This is the fourth of his books I’ve read during that time, having admittedly discovered him late. The first part of the novel, involving Billy and the wolf, constitutes some of the best Cormac work I’ve read, and some of the best modern prose I’ve read.
The rest of the book is first rate, too, although it can’t quite sustain the exalted high of the first 100 or so pages.
I’ll provide a sample when I’m back home. Highly recommended.

The briefest of passages, just to give you a sense of the great and delicate care with language here:
“Gray sky, gray land. All day he slouches north on the wet and slouching horse through the sandy muck of upcountry roads. The rain went harrying over the road before him in the gusts of wind and rattled over his slicker and the hooftracks oozed shut behind him. In the evening he heard again the cranes overhead, passing high above the overcast, balancing beneath them the bight of the earth’s curve, earth’s weather. Their metal eyes grooved to the pathways which God has chosen for them to follow. Their hearts in flood.”

Posted at 1:08 PM · Comments (0)

April 19, 2006
Hundreds of Solomon Island rioters targeting Chinese
businesses in an angry reaction to the election of a new government
have
left the business district of the capital Honiara in ruins.
As Chinatown in central Honiara was destroyed the new
government of Prime Minister Snyder Rini was in hiding.
”It’s very very sad,” leading Chinatown businessman John
Lamani told Fairfax .
“This is the backbone of the government’s money. People who
didn’t go looting are saying ‘well, where will you buy your next bag of
rice, or food or sugar’. It’s all gone, looted, burnt.”
A 110-strong detachment of Australian soldiers and police
were
expected to be flown in from Townsville last night and government
sources told Fairfax that Governor General Nathaniel Waena would
declare
a state of emergency once they had arrived.
A platoon of 46 New Zealand soldiers are already there
guarding ex-militants serving murder sentences. New Zealand has 35
police with a regional police force.
In the rioting two New Zealand police officers, five Solomon
Islanders and 17 Australian police were hurt in the rioting. None
suffered life threatening injuries.
A New Zealand police spokeswoman Sarah Martin said one of the
New Zealanders needed stitches over his right eye and was under
supervision in hospital for concussion. The other had glass fragments
flushed out of his eye and had suffered minor cuts.
The New Zealand High Commissioner, Brian Sanders, said
yesterday he could see smoke still billowing over Chinatown .
“That reflects that a good part of Chinatown has been
destroyed last night and a good part of it is still burning this
morning. A lot of looting is still going on in Chinatown .”
Hotels owned by leading Chinese businessman Sir Thomas Chan,
the Honiara and the Pacific Casino, were targeted. He is president of
Mr
Rini’s political grouping.
Mr Sanders visited the Pacific Casino Hotel where about 150
guests were staying.
“Some of them ( New Zealand guests) were at the hotel when it
got trashed which was not a good experience at all. They’re pretty
exhausted after getting woken up in the middle of the night with people
coming down the hall trying to break open your room.”
Auckland businessman Ray Vuksich was in the Pacific Casino.
“It was unbelievable. They were trying to get up the stairs
with machetes and batons,” he told NZPA.
The downstairs rooms were gutted, some burned, others simply
trashed.
“It was terrifying. They were waving their machetes around.
Women
were screaming.”
He said there appeared to be real hate of the Chinese.

“They’ve totally burned down Chinatown . There’s
nothing left.”
A joint Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Island military
and police force Regional Assistance Mission in Solomon Islands (RAMSI)
occupied the Solomons in August 2003 in a bid to end ethnic conflict
which drove the country to bankruptcy.
Many RAMSI vehicles were destroyed in the rioting.
Solomon Islands Police Commissioner Shane Castles told state
broadcasting that 120 police and armed military personnel would fly in.
Mr Castles said Mr Rini was being kept under maximum
security.

“In terms of the security of the prime minister and the
former
prime minister, they are being kept at a secured location, and I am
satisfied that adequate resources and sufficient security is at their
disposal,” Mr Castles said.
The Solomons held general elections earlier this month and on
Tuesday its 50 member Parliament met in secret session to elect a new
prime minister after incumbent Sir Allen Kemakeza said he did not want
a
second term. The post instead went to his deputy, Mr Rini, 57. He was
implicated in the collapse around the ethnic unrest in the late 1990s
when he approved up to SI$80 million in remissions, giving Asian
logging
firms tax breaks while allowing tax free entry on beer, cigarettes and
vehicles for people linked to militants.
As news of the result got out of the building, protesters
tried to storm Parliament, prompting police to fire tear gas at them.
Speaker, and founding prime minister Sir Peter Kenilorea, was
critical later of the use of tear gas.
”They should (have) allowed time for us to keep talking to
the protesters at the parliament house and not to use tear gas on them,
because it would simply aggravate the situation and it would simply
take
the parliament situation, or scene, out to the streets,” he told ABC
Radio.
Mr Lamani, who publishes the daily Solomon Star, was
emotional
saying the old town had gone, and for the first time ever his newspaper
had not appeared yesterday. He never missed an issue through the ethnic
conflict.
“The Old Chinatown area has been put up in flames. They burnt
all the Chinese buildings, the shops. And they are still doing it now.”
He watched as people deliberately went at the Chinese
businesses.
“They were saying the Chinese were the ones who financed the
politicians… people do not want the last government, they wanted
change….
“A lot of children and a lot of women were present. What they
did was that people would walk up and smash the doors and windows, open
up the shops and let people walk in and loot the place.”
Mr Lamani said the crowd was united in opposition to Mr Rini:
“they hated this man, they wanted somebody else.”
Solomon Government spokesman Johnson Honimae estimated up to
90 percent of Chinatown had been destroyed, although he said the
looters
cashed in on the political turmoil.
“They had no political interests whatsoever, they just took
the chance.”
Mr Honimae agreed that the bulk of the looting was aimed at
the around 1000 Chinese living on Honiara .
“It’s this new wave of Chinese that have really agitated the
situation.”

Posted at 1:02 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Howard W. French
THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 2006

SHANGHAI During his visit to the United States, China’s Hu Jintao will work hard to convey a message that is emerging as a central theme of his presidency: His country is not a threat to the United States; indeed, it doesn’t even wish to be seen as a challenger.

In the recent past, China’s leaders have struggled over how best to convey this thought, issuing tortured slogans like “peaceful rise,” for example, that are adopted and dropped with equal ambivalence.

The message coming from Beijing these days is that the country’s leadership is so preoccupied with domestic problems that it has neither the time nor the inclination to challenge America’s lingering pre-eminence.

A word to the wise: don’t believe it.

It is absolutely true that China’s own problems consume most of its energy, and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

Whether the country’s rickety system can muddle through is anything but a foregone conclusion. It is increasingly outpaced by change on the ground, and by colossal problems of every kind - from the