Test ScribeFire

Charlemagne piše o EU enlargement:

Croatia is not really ready to join, says one official (organised crime
remains a big concern). But it will probably get the nod by 2010 or so,
thanks to its friends in the Habsburg club of countries formerly in the
Austro-Hungarian empire.

Iraq's oil | That long-awaited share-out | Economist.com

Iraq's oil
That long-awaited share-out

Mar 1st 2007 | BAGHDAD
From The Economist print edition
A deal has been done, but there are still some worrying ambiguities

A NEW oil law, apparently agreed upon at last by Iraq's politicians, should prompt a gush of much-needed foreign investment to reach the country with the world's second-biggest petroleum reserves. The law's passage was delayed for over half a year by a row between Iraq's federal government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government, which runs much of the north-east, including some of Iraq's richest oilfields. Yet the law is still not quite complete.
AP So who gets the cash?

For instance, regulations for the distribution of revenues must still be drafted. Then the entire package has to go to parliament. Nonetheless, for all Iraq's main factions to have endorsed a detailed document governing an industry that produces oil worth $70m a day is a big step forward. “This is the first time since 2003 that all major Iraqi communities have come together on a defining piece of legislation,” says America's ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad.

The government's main factions all agree that they need such a law to get the wells pumping again. Poor management and 12 years of UN economic sanctions had left the industry decrepit, even before the American invasion. Since then it has been hit by sabotage, corruption and administrative chaos. At the last count, in December, Iraq was producing only 2.1m barrels a day; the pre-war peak was 2.5m.
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But political agreements in Iraq tend to contain a lot of vague language that opens the door to future disputes. The delay in passing the oil law is largely caused by the new constitution of 2005, because it fudged the division of authority between the federal government and regional governments, crucially that of the Kurds.

The constitution gives the federal government control over fields already in production, and says that all powers not given to the federal government should go to the regions. But it does not specify who should control the exploration and development of new oilfields. Officials of the oil ministry in Baghdad say it is they who should handle all exploration. The Kurds interpret the constitution differently. They are willing to concede the management of new fields, but claim the right to negotiate contracts of their own with firms willing to exploit new fields in their territory.

In theory, that should not affect the division of earnings. Everyone seems to agree that the central government should run the existing fields (including those around the disputed city of Kirkuk, now controlled by the Kurds) and distribute the revenue evenly across Iraq. The Kurds accept that oil from fields in their area will flow into federally-run pipelines and will be sold by federal marketing bodies, with the ensuing revenue shared by all Iraqis.

But the Kurds insist that the central government should not be able to veto contracts. One reason they give is that Baghdad's ministries are so lethargic that plans to develop new fields would take too long to bear fruit. They complain that the central government already owes them several hundred million dollars of revenue. What they almost certainly think is that a locally-run oil industry would be vital if the Kurds ever won full independence.

The oil-law draft is not yet public, but the two sides appear to have compromised by letting an international panel of experts look at contracts and reject any that do not meet certain standards. In exchange, say the Kurds, they will be guaranteed a share of pooled revenue proportionate to their population. Both sides have grumbled about the compromise.

But at least the politicians seem to have sorted out some bits of the law that had stirred much debate abroad: the drawing up and regulation of the production-sharing agreements that international exploration and production firms love. Foreign drillers will, in certain fields, be able to keep a share of the oil they find, and not just be paid for their services. Some say this is fairly rare in countries with oilfields as big as Iraq's, and have accused Iraq's government of “giving away the store”.

Iraqi officials are at pains to say that the big fields will stay fully state-owned; production-sharing agreements will be dangled only as incentives to explore areas where oil is hard to find or exploit. The oil minister, Hussein al-Shahristani, says the law must be as flexible as possible to let the ministry do what is best for the country as a whole. Though Iraqi oil has been extracted for more than 70 years, parts of the country are still remarkably unexplored.

In some areas oil may exist but will be hard to extract: for instance in the western desert province of Anbar, in the oil-poor Sunni heartland. If it could be found and fully exploited there, the Sunni Arabs' bitter opposition to a federal Iraq, favoured by Kurds and many Shias, might fade.
No, we're all patriots for now

Iraqi officials say they hope a final version of the law can be passed by the end of May: a big challenge. Drafting the annexes, which include allocating specific fields to the Kurdish regional government, the central oil ministry and the national oil company, will be contentious. So will drafting a law to distribute revenue. The Kurds say the oil law is incomplete because deadlines were foisted on them. The American ambassador insisted that a new law be written and even, say the Kurds, took part in the bargaining on Baghdad's side.

This sort of pressure also helped produce Iraq's constitution, which is why the final wording was fudged and the federal issue flared up again. Were it not for such flawed agreements made under outside pressure, Iraqi politicians might produce no agreements at all. Yet if there is too much vagueness, the rows will revive all over again. It is unclear yet whether Iraq's emerging oil law will do the trick.

Iraq's oil | That long-awaited share-out | Economist.com.

Largest library closure in U.S. looms / Federal funding dries up, leaving 15 branches in Oregon county on brink

Largest library closure in U.S. looms
Federal funding dries up, leaving 15 branches in Oregon county on brink

Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, March 4, 2007

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Marvin Rosenberg worked with his wife on a mural at the e... Gary Stensrud with Jackson County Facilities Maintenance ... Miranda Canfield, 13, volunteers at the Central Point Lib... The new main library in downtown Medford, Ore., features ... More...

(03-04) 04:00 PST Medford, Ore. -- Pat Hardy hefted two book bags stuffed with "cozy murder mysteries" through the snow to Ella Fitzsimmons' front door at the Blue Spruce Mobile Estates trailer park.

"I brought you extra, because this will be your last delivery," said Hardy, who has been bringing the bloodless whodunits to the homebound 78-year-old every month for the last several years.

Fitzsimmons' literary lifeline will be cut April 7, when Jackson County in southern Oregon shuts down its entire public library system.

The 15 libraries serving this rural forest community lost $7 million in federal funding this year -- nearly 80 percent of the system's budget.

[Podcast: Kids: We like our libraries ]

[Podcast: The Breakfast Club at Sally's Kitchen in Medford, Oregon, on the merits of a sales tax and whether libraries are worth saving]

Now, not long after all 15 branches were rebuilt or remodeled, every one will be shuttered in what's being called the largest library shutdown in the United States. The crisis in southern Oregon can be traced not only to changing funding priorities on Capitol Hill, but also to crooked railroad deals in the Wild West, a spotted owl and a shrinking timber harvest.

Struggling library systems have come close to extinction in Salinas, Merced County and Niagara Falls, N.Y., but they pulled back from the brink, said Leonard Kniffel, editor of American Libraries magazine.

Nothing, he said, compares to the scope and severity of the pending closure in Jackson County, where about 100 library employees will be laid off.

Although the Bay Area is on a library high, having just opened four state-of-the-art libraries in Alameda, Belmont, Hercules and San Mateo, book lovers like Fitzsimmons in rural areas are getting left in the dark.

"I am very ticked!" she said. "Something screwy is going on."

Her sentiment is shared throughout southern Oregon, where the library crisis has stirred accusations of county mismanagement, children's protests in the streets, and a backlash against a proposed property tax to keep the libraries open.

An otherwise quiet collection of former timber towns, Jackson County has drawn national attention as librarians and book lovers lament in the blogosphere about the demise of a society that can't find a way to safeguard the citizenry's right to stay informed.

"I wish we could call FEMA; this feels like a natural disaster to me," said Ted Stark, interim library director for Jackson County.

"Libraries are so much more than just libraries in rural areas. This is where all the town meetings are held, where all the kids come after school, where everything -- everything -- happens," he said. Indeed, today;s libraries have evolved from merely loaning out books to providing Internet access, reading hour for babies, community meeting centers and art galleries.

Last fall, Congress failed to reauthorize a $400 million annual subsidy to 41 states to help rural counties prop up their local economies. Oregon took the biggest hit -- $150 million. Jackson County lost $23 million and had to slash everywhere, from reducing jail beds to cutting search and rescue teams.

That meant some hard choices, said Jackson County Administrator Danny Jordan.

"Losing libraries is a huge business deterrent -- who wants to move to a city that doesn't have libraries?" Jordan said. "But we decided we had to maintain public safety, which is already taking a $3.5 million cut. We won't be able to monitor misdemeanor sex offenders anymore. The hard reality is that libraries are not an option for us."

Jordan says Congress broke a promise when it cut off the funds -- the money was supposed to be in exchange for land taken away from Oregon by President Theodore Roosevelt.

In the early 1900s, Roosevelt took 2.4 million acres away from the Oregon-California Railroad, which was accused of swindling land deals in exchange for building the railroad. When the federal government reclaimed the land, Oregon lost half its property tax base.

To make up for it, the federal government agreed to split timber revenues on the acreage with Oregon. Over the next 50 years it was a lucrative arrangement, and timber money was used to build courthouses and jails, pave roads and free Oregonians from having to pay sales taxes.

The good times petered out in the early 1990s, when the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, all but shutting down large-scale logging. Today, just one large sawmill remains in Jackson County, compared with 91 in 1954.

While promising to come up with rules for a more ecologically friendly logging method, Congress agreed in 2000 to continue "safety net" payments to rural counties for six more years. But no one did the hard work of figuring out how to balance the timber industry with nature. So the checks stopped in December 2006.

"The federal government stopped making money off of Oregon trees, so they stopped sending money to us -- it's that simple," said Leonard Kranenburg, a retiree who meets his "breakfast club" buddies every morning at Sally's Kitchen in Medford for coffee and conversation.

In November, Jackson County residents voted down a property tax levy that would have generated $9 million a year to keep the libraries open. It was the third time since 1984 that voters were asked to bolster the library budget, but the first time they said no.

"Back in November, the feds had not cut us off yet, and the possibility they'd continue to fund us was still there, so people didn't think the libraries were really going to close," said Margaret Jakubcin, a regional manager for the Jackson County Libraries.

Library supporters are trying again. They put an identical property tax levy on the upcoming May ballot. But in order to pass, 50 percent of the registered voters have to participate in the election, and a majority of them have to vote yes.

While Kranenburg's breakfast companions Sixto Rodriguez and Joe Camp say they will vote for it, Kranenburg sees a moral imperative to say no.

"The government broke their promise to Oregon," he said. "I see this as our way of fighting back. We can't give in. If we do, that's like taking away our guns."

Librarians have become political lightning rods in Jackson County.

"Some people come into the library and cry when they find out; others yell at us," said Luke Kralik, who just earned his master's degree in library science so he could work in the new Medford Central Library.

The contemporary 83,000-square-foot stone and concrete building has enormous glass panels on the second floor, children's gardens, bronze sculptures in the reading room and a computer network that allows librarians to answer instant message reference questions.

"There's something magical about the public library -- those moments when you help a kid find a book on wolves, or someone comes in with a family member whose just been diagnosed with something and they need help finding information," Kralik said. "I can't imagine what it would be like if that were gone."

Joy Davis, who has been blogging about the impending closure of her branch in the small town of Phoenix, said she's been getting sympathy worldwide in response to her posts.

"When I first heard the library is going to close, I almost passed out -- I had to sit down," said Davis, who checks out about 30 books a week to research her writing projects. Currently, she's interested in pinpointing the source of the conflict between creationism and evolution.

"I have a set of Britannica books, but that's not really a replacement," she said.

Despite her Internet savvy, Davis doesn't trust online information and depends on the library for solid data.

Kniffel, the American Libraries magazine editor, said most people feel the same way, and despite the advent of electronic information, library visits nationwide increased 61 percent between 1994 and 2004.

"Say you search something online and get 550,000 hits. How do you know which one is the right one?" he said. "You need a knowledgeable navigator to help you."

Miranda Canfield, 13, worries she will get F's on her essays if she can't rely on the librarians at Central Point Library in Jackson County.

"All my friends at school are talking about the libraries, and we were thinking of collecting cans or cleaning up yards to raise money to keep them open," she said.

While libraries have become the most contentious political issue in southern Oregon, everyone can agree that a long-term funding solution is needed.

"We're tired of begging Washington for money," said Jackson County Commissioner C.W. Smith.

There's talk in Jackson County of bringing back sustainable-yield logging, cities running their own libraries, and even mention of the unmentionable -- instituting a sales tax. Local politicians are pressuring Congress for a one-year rural funding extension.

Smith has two suggestions. He wants the government to keep half the Oregon timber lands as wildlife habitat but allow the state to sell the other half so the land could go back on the tax rolls.

While the spotted owl's listing "has been tied up in courts for nearly two decades, the trees didn't stop growing," said Smith, pointing to a map of forest fires in his office. The red blotches on the map indicate a steady increase in forest fires since 1980.

"In some areas, the Forest Service is paying $400 an acre just to thin it," he said.

Smith is also talking to school superintendents and city mayors about pooling resources to keep the libraries open.

"Whether we could make it work would vary from community to community," he said.

In Talent, a town of 20,000 halfway between Medford and Ashland, residents shared cake Monday at the grand opening of their new public library. The foyer was decorated with a neighbor's collection of gleaming pink conch shells, each one the size of a football.

Three times the size of the old library, the new 7,000-square-foot branch has a teen room with a graffiti wall, a Spanish-language section, and floor-to-ceiling windows in the children's area that allow parents to read on indoor couches while keeping an eye on the playground outside.

"We're trying to be upbeat, but how ironic is it to celebrate an opening that's going to last six weeks?" said branch supervisor Laurel Prchal.

If the property tax proposal on the May ballot fails, she fears the libraries are sunk.

"In 2000, when Congress started paying the timber subsidies to Oregon, we were in a surplus. We weren't at war. We didn't just have a massive hurricane in New Orleans," she said.

Prchal raised the new flag for the first time outside the Talent Library. But its first trip to the top of the mast was a short one. Prchal waited a few seconds, then lowered it halfway -- an Oregon soldier had been killed in Iraq.

At the Ruch Branch, a 30-minute drive east of Medford, artist Marvin Rosenberg lovingly pointed out the ceramic pieces of the library's mural. Residents of all ages made the pieces and pressed them into a cement backing: There were black bears, covered wagons, Canada geese, salmon, lumberjacks, even Bigfoot peeking from behind a tree. The fire chief had pressed his badge into the mural.

"This place is our home. This is our community center. This is where we problem-solve. They can't take this away," Rosenberg said.

Largest library closure in U.S. looms / Federal funding dries up, leaving 15 branches in Oregon county on brink.

Talijanska obitelj bijesna zbog ocjena pretukla ravnatelja škole

BARI - Pripadnici jedne obitelji u južnoj Italiji pretukli su ravnatelja škole, bijesni zbog loših ocjena koju je njihov potomak donio kući kao i zbog zabrane korištenja mobitela tijekom nastave u toj školi.

Tri muška rođaka, među kojima otac, djed i stric, tako su izudarali ravnatelja lombardijske srednje škole u Bariju, Uga Castorina, da je morao potražiti pomoć u bolnici.

Obitelj je bila pogođena slabim ocjenama koje je njihov izdanak dobio na polugodištu, ali vrhunac poniženja doživjeli su kad je Castorini zabranio korištenje mobitela za vrijeme nastave, a posebno pisanja testova, u školi. Muški dio obitelji odlučio se to raščistiti izravno s ravnateljem Castorinijem u školi.

Castorini je u trumatološkoj klinici tretiran zbog kontuzija i lakših ozlijeda, a u školu se vratio u pratnji policije.

"Nekim ljudima se to možda ne sviđa, ali ako želimo da škola funkcionira, moramo nametnuti neke standarde i poštivati čvrsta pravila", komentirao je izgred za lokalni tisak Castorini koji je ravnatelj srednje škole već 22 godine.

www.vecernji.hr.

Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein | Chicago Tribune

Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein

By Associated Press
Published March 2, 2007, 7:44 AM CST

ZURICH, Switzerland -- What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

"We've spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it's not a problem," Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident.

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. "It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something," he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn't have an army.

Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein | Chicago Tribune.

How a lottery winner spends his multi-million-dollar jackpot - Feb. 21, 2007

Ne bi čovjek vjerovao, ali evo izgleda ima i takvih ljudi. Nakon onih silnih priča o kretenima koji nakon što dobiju 100 milijuna dolara na lutriji bankrotiraju u roku od dvije godine, ova priča je pravo osvježenje.

Taking home the jackpot
Here's how one lucky winner spent his new-found fortune.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Ellen Florian Kratz, Fortune writer
February 28 2007: 7:46 AM EST

(Fortune Magazine) -- Brad Duke, 34, a manager for five Gold's Gym franchises in Idaho, pocketed a lump sum of $85 million after winning a $220 million Powerball jackpot in 2005. He spent the first month of his new life assembling a team of financial advisors. His goal: to use his winnings to become a billionaire. Here's what Duke has done with his money so far.

* $45 million: Safe, low-risk investments such as municipal bonds
* $35 million: Aggressive investments like oil and gas and real estate
* $1.3 million: A family foundation
* $63,000: A trip to Tahiti with 17 friends
* $125,000: Mortgage retired on his 1,400-square-foot house
* $18,000: Student-loan repayment
* $65,000: New bicycles, including a $12,000 BMC road bike
* $14,500: A used black VW Jetta
* $12,000: Annual gift to each family member

Did you often buy lottery tickets or was this a one-time thing?

I played the lottery often when I won. I had developed a little numbering system. Since I've won, there's been a lot of numbering systems for lotteries all over the Internet. Before that, there weren't any. I really thought I was going to win. I even wrote it down in my journal in 2002.

How did you develop your system?

How to choose my lottery numbers started through a trial and error process. I just started playing number games with myself about how to capture the most diverse numbers. Then I looked at the most recent Powerball numbers over the last six months and took the set of 15 numbers that were most commonly coming up. My Powerball numbers were going to be those 15. So I starting messing around with it, and my number games got a little more complex and a little bigger. I was starting to win smaller amounts like $150 and $500.

So many lottery winners have sad endings. Did you worry about that?

I've always handled responsibility well. If you accept that check, you accept an amazing responsibility to yourself and whomever you decide to include in it. I was quiet about winning for a month before I decided to come out. During that time, I was getting as much research as I could on existing lottery winners and what their stories were. Most of them lose all the money within a short amount of time. I'm looking at statistics where people in ten years have nothing. In ten years, I wanted to be worth about ten times as much. I think a lot of people who play the lottery are people who live on hope.

What was your first major purchase?

A trip to Tahiti for me and 17 of my friends. At the same time, I paid off my mortgage and student loans. [What was your biggest purchase?] The family foundation was the biggest allotment of money. $1.3 million.

What else did you do with your money?

I wanted to make the most of the opportunity that was given to me, so I put together a team with the intent to reach and maintain a $1 billion status over a particular period of time. I wanted to do it in 10 years, which I knew was aggressive. My team talked me into looking at 15 years. But it looks like we're on track for 12 years. When you do something like that, the more you become worth, the quicker your growth curve is. My total net worth right now is at an unofficial value of $128 to $130 million. We've done very well for the first year and a half.

What about a big new house or a fancy new car?

I guess I'm more worried about spending time on my investments and helping my consulting company along and doing fun things with my family and friends. I will have a new home and a great car at some point, but just not now. The great thing about the lottery was that I get to experience amazing things with people I care about. I started up a consulting company and am employing some people that helped me along the way with my employment. I took my family on a cruise.

You had to have treated yourself to something.

I bought bicycles. I'm probably own upward of 17 bikes. I also bought a 2002 Jetta. I gave my 2005 Jetta to my nephew. So it's the exact same car except for his is white and mine is black.

You had a newer car that you gave to your nephew and you bought an older car?

That's correct. I wanted a black VW Jetta with a black interior. Believe it or not, those are really hard to find. I went to the local dealership and had them track one down for me. They had to go to Texas to get it. It fit my bicycle rack really well.

What happened to your job at Gold's Gym?

I still teach a spinning class there twice a week. I took some time off after the whole thing because everybody had investment opportunities that were the greatest thing since sliced bread, and there were 100 of them every day. So I had to get out of there for a while, but when I went back, the people I'd been teaching for the last 8 years were still the same people, and I was still the same instructor.

Have you given money to members of your family?

One of the first things I did was give everyone in my family the maximum amount without tax consequence. I have all of my nieces' and nephews' college funds set up, and they're set. And there's no debt for anyone anymore. Everybody is happy.

Are you happier since you^(1)ve won the money?

Absolutely. When it comes down to it, I get to do the things professionally that I've always wanted to do. I get to invent a piece of equipment that I've always been thinking about doing. I get to give back to some people that have given to me over years.

How a lottery winner spends his multi-million-dollar jackpot - Feb. 21, 2007.

Bosnia | Where the past is another country | Economist.com

Odličan članak o presudi Međunarodnog suda pravde i općenito situaciji u Bosni

Bosnia
Where the past is another country

Mar 1st 2007
From The Economist print edition
Three big decisions about Bosnia's past and future

SOMETIMES the response to a judgment is more predictable than the judgment itself. When the International Court of Justice ruled on February 26th that Serbia was not responsible for genocide in Bosnia during the war in 1992-95, newspapers in the Bosniak (Muslim) and Croat region of Bosnia called it a “fraud”, an “insult” and a “disgrace”; those in the Serb part of Bosnia talked sanctimoniously of the “truth”.

Bosnia launched the case in 1993, when the situation in the Balkans was different from today. Hundreds of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats had been ethnically cleansed by Bosnian Serb forces; Sarajevo and other cities were under siege; and the Serbian flag flew from the coast of Croatia to the southernmost tip of Kosovo. Now Bosnia is an uneasy federation of two autonomous bits, one Serb and the other Bosniak and Croat.

The judgment did not go wholly the Serbs' way, because it declared that genocide had indeed taken place in Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, in 1995. It also reprimanded Serbia for failing to stop it. But to Serbia's relief, it added that Bosnia could not demand reparations.

Conspiracy theorists think the ICJ delivered its verdict under political pressure. The argument is that Serbia, which faces the loss of Kosovo, its southern province, had to be appeased in some way. A bigger question concerns the evidence before the court. Serbia had to give incriminating transcripts to the United Nations war-crimes tribunal, which like the ICJ is in The Hague—but it did so only on condition that cases were heard in camera, to stop the evidence falling into the ICJ's hands.

Two other decisions this week may prove as important for Bosnia's future as the ICJ judgment is for its past. On February 27th the European Union confirmed its provisional decision to cut the size of its peacekeeping force. At the end of the Bosnian war, 60,000 NATO-led peacekeepers went in. In 2004 they were replaced by a 7,000-strong EU force, the biggest the union has ever deployed. That force will now be cut to 2,500 by the end of the year.

Does that mean that Bosnians can on their own sustain the peace and rebuild their country so that it one day joins the EU? Not quite, apparently. For the other decision was to extend the office of the high representative in Bosnia. This job, which carries powers to sack elected political leaders and impose laws, was due to be wound up by the end of June 2007. But it will now go on for another 12 months.

The present high representative is a German, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, who came to office determined that Bosnians must soon run their own country. But he has now changed his mind—or at least decided that it is too early to give up the job's powers. The question is whether all Bosnians will agree. Bosnian Serb leaders are hinting that they may not. They are talking rather of holding a referendum on independence, if and when Kosovo gains its own independence from Serbia.

After the ICJ judgment one commentator argued that Bosnians had to find a common history, otherwise they would have no common future. Today Bosniaks, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs teach children radically different stories about the war. Yet fate has decreed that they must share their state. Bosnia has made great progress over the past decade. The trick will be to get its citizens to co-operate, and not let the past rob Bosnia of a future.

Bosnia | Where the past is another country | Economist.com.

America's next president | Waiting for Al | Economist.com

Asti sto !!!

Ovaj članak mi je stvarno dao misliti. Ala Gore-a se dobro sjećam iz predsjedničke kampanje 2000, i tada mi nije izgledao kao netko ko bi ikad mogao dobiti moje povjerenje. Međutim, čovjek je u zadnjih 7 godina pokazao prokletu naviku da uvijek bude u pravu (Irak, globalno zatopljenje), a i malo je poboljšao personality (još ako dobije Oscara za svoj dokumentarac …)

Stoga je Zvone Radikalni podesio svoja ticala na svako spominjanje Gore-a u medijima a vidjeti ćemo hoće li od toga što biti …

America's next president
Waiting for Al

Feb 22nd 2007 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

As voters weary of the front-runners, what a chance for Al Gore

ENOUGH already. The primaries are 11 months away and the race is already growing stale. The citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire are longing for the day when they can visit Denny's without having to meet Hillary or Rudy. And the press is busy recycling the same old stories. Can Barack Obama run for president and give up smoking at the same time? Will Hillary hand her Senate seat to Bill if she wins? Is America ready for a Mormon president? Or a black? Or a woman? Or a man who once dressed as Marilyn Monroe?

There is no shortage of money or ideas: the candidates' treasure chests are overflowing and the think-tanks churn out policy papers. But there is a severe shortage of attention. People will not be able to watch the same soap opera, endlessly repeated on 24-hour cable news and pored over in the blogosphere, for months on end without getting sick of the main characters.

Which means that there is a huge opportunity for somebody to arrive late and steal the show. The late entrant will not only have the advantage of being a fresh face. He or she could also change the whole dynamic of the race, gaining enough momentum to storm through Iowa and New Hampshire.

Step forward Al Gore. Mr Gore has enough of a national profile to command instant credibility. He has rich friends to finance him. He will also command plenty of attention in his own right over the next few months: his film “An Inconvenient Truth” could win an Oscar for best documentary on Sunday, and he may be up for the Nobel peace prize in the autumn.

Mr Gore is the ideal candidate for the Democratic stalwarts who turn out to vote in the primaries. He came out strongly against invading Iraq. He has spent the past six years warning the world about global warming. And he was robbed of victory in 2000 by the man whom the Democrats loathe above all others. What better way of wiping out the Bush era than replacing him with the man who should have been president?

Mr Gore is adamant that he does not want to run again. But will he be able to resist? It would be one of the great dramas of American political history. And James Carville, keen observer of politicians, says that, for them, running for president is rather like having sex for normal people: it is not something that you do just once if you have any say in the matter.

America's next president | Waiting for Al | Economist.com.

Lexington | Pelosi rides high | Economist.com

Sjećam se kako su nakon pobjede Demokrata u američkim mid-term izborima mnogi (uključujući i Economist :-) bili puni sumnji da li će se Nancy Pelosi snaći u ulozi speaker-a (što bi mi rekli, presjednika Sabora).

Izgleda da joj za sada jako dobro ide (što su odlične vijesti za Ameriku :-)))).

Lexington
Pelosi rides high

Feb 22nd 2007
From The Economist print edition
Madam Speaker is turning out to be one of the Democrats' best assets

SO FAR, the record has been impressive. Give or take a few fumbles—notably her doomed campaign to make her crony, John Murtha, majority leader—the successes have far outweighed the failures. Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the House of Representatives, has pushed through a popular raft of reforms in double-quick time. She has masterminded a vote of no confidence in George Bush's new Iraq policy, allowing her troops to vent their anger without cutting off funding. And she has done all this while looking cool and stylish.

But can she keep it up? Life at the top of the greasy pole is going to be a lot harder from now on. She began her new career in the best possible circumstances, with her party cock-a-hoop to retake Congress after a decade in the wilderness. Her party's policies, too, were all poll-tested crowd-pleasers. A higher minimum wage! Cheaper student loans! Better health care! Who but a Scrooge could oppose them? The minimum wage has not been raised for a decade (many Republicans voted for the measure). Cheaper student loans are always a winner, though they will encourage colleges to raise their fees.

Now Ms Pelosi will have to deal with much thornier issues, such as immigration reform: issues that divide the Democratic base and require tough choices rather than generous gestures. If she co-operates with Mr Bush in dealing with these thorns, she risks handing him domestic victories that could help revive his flagging presidency. If she fails to co-operate, she risks becoming the do-nothing head of a do-nothing Congress. One of the clearest messages from the November elections was that the voters want Congress to solve pressing problems rather than engage in partisan point-scoring.

The issue of the Iraq war is also going to get much trickier. Ms Pelosi faces relentless pressure from her base—and from many of her colleagues in Congress—to confront Mr Bush head-on. But it is one thing to engineer a symbolic vote of no confidence in an unpopular policy, and quite another to start tying the hands of a president during wartime.

Mr Murtha—in many ways Ms Pelosi's right-hand man on Iraq—has suggested that the Democrats will finesse the problem by pursuing what critics call a “slow bleed” strategy. They will avoid a head-on confrontation but will, instead, slowly limit Mr Bush's options—for example, by linking support for funding to strict standards for resting, training and equipping combat forces. But this is a dangerous strategy: doubly dangerous now Mr Murtha has been fool enough to spell it out. It risks the charge that Congress is trying to micromanage the war (conservatives say it is the most meddlesome attempt to tell the president what to do since the civil war). It also risks the even more damaging charge that it is trying to make Mr Bush's policy fail.

Ms Pelosi's circumstances will also get a lot more difficult. The party will find it harder to maintain its lustre as it starts handing out pork to Democratic interest groups; Democratic lobbyists are swarming over Capitol Hill like locusts at the moment. It will also get more fractious as strains grow between blue-state liberals (who want to destroy Mr Bush) and blue-dog Democrats (who represent districts where there is still residual respect for the president). The press will tire of writing stories about Ms Pelosi's dress sense and her taste for chunky pearls.

She will see her power diminish as attention shifts towards the presidential race, and eventually to the party's new champion. She will also discover—as Newt Gingrich did before her—that it is much more difficult to assert power from Congress than it is from the White House. Congress is a potentially unruly rabble. The White House has a unified power structure and a powerful megaphone.

These problems will certainly batter her image. But it would be a mistake to assume that she will be crushed by them. Ms Pelosi's most notable achievements over the past few months have been behind the scenes, not on the national stage—and these have laid the foundations for a successful speakership.
The Gingrich model

Since the 1970s the congressional Democrats have been dominated by powerful committee chairmen who did pretty much what they wanted when they wanted. Ms Pelosi has brought these barons under control. She has imposed six-year term limits on them. She has forced the likes of John Conyers to button their lips about impeaching Mr Bush. And she has eaten into the chairmen's prerogatives, notably by creating a select committee on climate change that will inevitably trespass on the turf of the energy committee.

All this suggests political skills of a high order: the chairmen had been biding their time in the wilderness in order to resume their jobs for life. It also suggests that Ms Pelosi is thinking of the long term. She can now impose a much more unified message on her party than any previous Democratic speaker, and can use her patronage to advance a younger cohort of chairmen.

It is true that many of these ideas, including term limits, were pioneered by Mr Gingrich. But if Ms Pelosi can imitate Mr Gingrich's successes without emulating his failures, that will be no bad thing. She lacks Mr Gingrich's personal foibles as well as his eccentric genius (though her reliance on Mr Murtha is troubling). She also lacks his raging ego. Mr Gingrich failed in his battles with Mr Clinton because he saw himself as America's first prime minister—a man who could rule Washington from Congress.

Ms Pelosi has Mr Gingrich's example to contemplate if she is ever tempted to over-reach. She also seems to have an instinctive understanding of the limits of her role. She knows that history will judge her not merely as the first female speaker of the House. It will also analyse how well she prepared the ground for the Democrats to retake the White House in 2008.

Lexington | Pelosi rides high | Economist.com.

The world economy | Switching engines | Economist.com

Po Economist-u, izgleda da se bliži kraj ere u kojem su američki potrošači vukli svjetsku ekonomiju :-))).

The world economy
Switching engines

Feb 22nd 2007
From The Economist print edition
Global economic growth has become less dependent on American spending

David Simonds

IN RECENT years the American economic locomotive has pulled along the rest of the world, while frugal firms and households elsewhere have preferred to save not spend. So, at least, goes the popular wisdom. Signs that America's boom may be fading have therefore caused concern around the globe. Typically in the past, when America's economy has weakened, the rest of the world soon flagged. But this time—so far, anyway—looks different. The rest of the globe has speeded up even as the American engine has lost steam.

The figures are striking. The annual rate of growth of America's real domestic demand dropped from 4.4% in 2004 to only 1.9% in the second half of last year. The main culprit was the sickly housing market: although consumer spending has held up better than expected, the construction of homes has collapsed. So is the rest of the world also wobbling? On the contrary, many other economies have put on a spurt. Japan's GDP grew by 4.8% at an annual rate in the fourth quarter, mainly thanks to stronger domestic demand. Granted, Japan's GDP figures are notoriously erratic, and this jump follows a poor third quarter. Even so, it was much stronger than expected and gave the Bank of Japan the confidence at last to raise interest rates by another quarter of a percentage point (see article). Equally surprising was the euro area's annualised growth of 3.6%. GDP per person is now growing faster in the euro area than it is in America. Domestic demand is also booming in emerging economies in Asia, the Middle East and Russia.

All of this is helping America to sell more abroad. In the year to the fourth quarter, its merchandise exports rose by 15% in value, their fastest pace since 1988. By contrast, import growth slowed to only 4%. In 2006 as a whole, America's sales to China rose by a third, almost twice as fast as its (admittedly larger) imports from that country. Last year was the first since 1997 in which America's exports rose faster than its imports. America's trade deficit is still huge, but it began to narrow at the end of last year, amounting to 5.3% of GDP in the three months to December, down from 6.1% in the same period of 2005. Indeed, by the fourth quarter net trade with foreigners added to America's GDP growth rather than pulling it down.
A reason to be cheerful

The idea that the world economy was being pushed along in an American supermarket trolley was always an exaggeration: the $500 billion increase in America's current-account deficit over the past five years may seem huge, but it is equivalent to an annual increase of only 0.2% of global GDP. The difference now is that the rest of the world is doing more of the carrying.

Of course, countries like Japan, Germany and China still run large trade surpluses, which means they are producing more than they buy. But it is the change in a country's surplus, not its absolute size, which adds to its growth. For example, China's current-account surplus hit a new record of around 8% of GDP last year. But according to Goldman Sachs, the increase in China's net exports accounted for 2.2 percentage points of the country's 11% GDP growth last year, down from 2.7 points in 2005. The investment bank thinks this contribution will shrink to 1.6 points this year. Most of China's growth comes not from exports but from domestic demand—and consumption is stronger than the official figures suggest (see article).

These are early days, so don't get carried away. The real test of the rest of the world's stamina will come over the next year, as the negative wealth effects of falling home prices start to weigh on American consumer spending. But also take some confidence from the evidence thus far: the world economy may be able to cope without American shoppers.

The world economy | Switching engines | Economist.com.

Religious mergers | A marriage made in heaven? | Economist.com

BRILJANTAN osvrt na mogućnost spajanja Katoličke i Anglikanske crkve (u tipičnom Economist-ovom stilu :-)))

A marriage made in heaven?

Feb 21st 2007
From Economist.com

Amid talk of a merger between Catholicism and Anglicanism, a look at how the two businesses might fit together


SCEPTICS are already casting doubt on suggestions, spread this week in parts of the British press, of a massive remerger in the global communications industry. But the prospect of a tie-up between a vast, Rome-based corporation, and a smaller rival with headquarters in southern England, has sent some analysts into a speculative spin. Early discussions are said to have taken place between representatives of two long-established groups. If successful, the deal would see a parent company rejoined with a unit that separated from it, somewhat acrimoniously, in the 16th century.

Some observers suggest that this deal may be at least as significant as the split and subsequent remerger of parts of the AT&T, a telecoms company that held a monopoly position in America until the 1970s. As with AT&T, the break up of a once-dominant organisation inevitably leaves deep scars. But over time, as new competitors with new ideas change the business landscape, the abuse of monopoly power and the pain of parting may be forgotten for the sake of mutual gains. AT&T’s eventual remerger in 2006 with BellSouth, a branch of the telecoms giant snapped off in the reformation of America’s telecoms business, was acknowledged by most as a sensible reaction to the changing competitive landscape.

That may also be true for the two dominant forces in Christian communications. Christianity still claims consumers representing roughly a third of the world’s population. Of these the Catholic brand, with its headquarters in Rome, boasts 1.1 billion adherents. The Anglicans also have global reach, but would bring around 80m adherents to the united corporation. Still, at a time when Christianity is suffering from sluggish growth rates, expansion through mergers seems to be the only means of gaining market share. Traditional worshipping establishments have seen serious competition from Evangelicals and Pentecostalists operating from out-of-town megachurches. Older forms of Christianity, rather like print newspapers, are also losing out as elderly customers fail to be replaced by younger ones and as occasional consumption—rather than traditional, regular use—becomes the norm.

Both churches have sought to downplay talk of a merger. And, evidently, several obstacles remain. As with any merger, knitting together rival management teams could prove tricky. Each disagrees on the nature of the eucharist and the ordination of women. Recognising the pope as the boss of a merged corporation might also prove a sticking point. The Anglican brand also looks troubled. It lacks a clear business model and suffers from open divisions among top managers who have far more devolved authority. Many managers are engaged in a bitter dispute over the hiring of homosexual staff in its American subsidiary. In contrast the Catholic church has a clear line of command between its chief executive, its 4,700 senior executives and 400,000 line managers around the world.

Yet potential synergies abound. Combining workforces could allow for significant cost savings, though job cuts might prove unpopular. Buoyant property markets mean that a merged church could profit handsomely by selling surplus assets, many of them in prime city-centre sites. As the two organisations would not benefit equally—the merger would in effect be a Catholic takeover of its smaller rival—Anglicans may prefer a looser bond, perhaps hiving-off some assets into a joint-venture or even, looking to the heavens, embracing something akin to the code-sharing agreements between big airlines. Whatever form the merger eventually takes, if any, at least the two groups have shown they are serious about getting the mass-communication business in shape for the 21st century.

Religious mergers | A marriage made in heaven? | Economist.com.

To valjda ima samo u Srbiji :-)))

Preneseno iz današnjeg Večernjeg:

Srpski kirurzi se potukli, ostavivši djevojčicu usred operacije

Rutinska operacija slijepog crijeva gotovo se pretvorila u katastrofu kad su se dvojica kirurga u beogradskoj Sveučilišnoj dječjoj klinici posvađala, izašla iz operacijske dvorane i potukla, ostavivši 12-godišnju djevojčicu na stolu usred operacije, objavio je u ponedjeljak dnevnik Politika.

Slučaj je postao javan nakon što se našao pred Općinskim sudom u Beogradu, kad se iz izjava sudionika i očevidaca doznalo što se doista dogodilo.

Anesteziologinja Ninoslava Ilić objasnila je kako je tijekom operacije slijepog crijeva koju je vodio Spasoje Radulović u dvoranu u jednom trenutku ušao Dragan Vukanić koji je te noći bio vođa ekipe.

"Obratio se Raduloviću na ponižavajući način, profesionalno ga je omalovažio. Radulović mu je odgovorio na isti način, pa je došlo do svađe, tijekom koje je Vukanić prišao Raduloviću, povukao ga za uho i opalio mu pljusku", rekla je Ilić.

Potom su obojica izašli iz dvorane, u kojoj je na operacijskom stolu ostala 12-godišnja pacijentica, pa je završetak operacije na sebe preuzeo specijalizant koji je do tog trenutka samo asistirao Raduloviću, pojasnila je.

Dvojica kirurga u hodniku ispred operacijske sale upustila su se u pravu uličnu tučnjavu u kojoj je lošije prošao napadač Vukanić. Iako tjelesno mnogo snažniji od Radulovića, kako piše Politika, Vukanić je iz sukoba s kolegom izašao s podljevima na glavi, puknutom donjom usnicom, rasklimanim zubima i prijelomom kažiprsta lijeve šake, zbog čega je protiv Radulovića podnio tužbu za nanošenje teških tjelesnih ozljeda.

Braneći se od optužbi, Radulović je na sudu rekao kako je, kao kirurg koji je vodio operaciju, morao regairati, jer je Vukanić u dvoranu ušao potpuno nepripremljen, bez sterilne opreme i ometao tijek operacije, ugrožavajući tako život pacijenta.

"Potpuno je neverojatno, ali istinito, da si je Vukanić dao za pravo usred operacije ući u dvoranu i udariti kirurga. Radulović je bio primoran braniti sebe i dijete koje je bilo na operacijskom stolu. Nije sporno da je on Vukaniću rasklimao nekoliko zuba, napravio nekoliko posjekotina na ustima i hematoma po licu, no to je učinio u nužnoj obrani", rekao je Radulovićev odvjetnik Veljko Delibašić.

No, dodao je kako nije točno da je Radulović Vukaniću slomio ruku, ustvrdivši kako je Vukanić "priložio lažnu medicinsku dokumentaciju o toj ozljedi", te da mu je otprije poznat kao "liječnik koji izdaje lažna uvjerenja".

Radulović je u međuvremenu u bolnici kažnjen jednomjesečnom zabranom obavljanja operacija, dok je Vukaniću, uz novčanu kaznu, određena i zabrana dežurstva u idućih godinu dana.

www.vecernji.hr.

The Dragon In My Garage

Carl Sagan je LEGENDA. A ova priča, naravno, uopće nije o zmajevima :-))).

The Dragon In My Garage
by Carl Sagan

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

The Dragon In My Garage.

Can't fuckin believe it

A što reći na ovo :-(

Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime for Body Armor?
by Kevin Jon Heller
Honestly, it's things like this that explain why I sometimes fail to choose my words carefully when I'm criticizing the Bush Administration. From the Sparta Independent, courtesy of Americablog:

To the Editor:

I have a son going to Iraq this summer. I was able to afford to buy state-of-the-art body armor for his protection. Unfortunately there are many parents that are not able to afford this body armor.

My son’s outfit has 24 Marines. Two parents, including myself, have purchased this armor. Five others have been sponsored. The families of all the Marines in the unit have banded together to raise the additional money for the other 17 Marines.

The military has body armor available, but it’s heavy and not state-of-the-art. There is a company called Pinnacle Armor, out of California, that sells armor called Dragon Skin. This is what we have chosen for our sons. We need to raise $102,000 to outfit these 17 Marines. It’s approximately $6000 per Marine.

Any and all donations are welcome.

For more information please call _________ at _________.

For a disturbing story about the substandard body armor the government has been purchasing, see here.

Opinio Juris -.

Što kaže rektor Bjeliš o školarinama ?

Skrenuta mi je pažnja na članak u Jutarnjem (link) u kojem rektor Bjeliš (“u kratkom telefonskom razgovoru”) potvrđuje da se razmišlja o uvođenju školarina u sljedećoj akademskoj godini.

I, što se kaže u članku ?

U biti ništa. Ili, preciznije rečeno, ništa konkretno. Ali ipak, idemo redom.

Najprije kaže (u “dobroj” novinarskoj tradiciji da početak mora biti bombastičan kako bi se zaokupila čitateljeva pozornost):

Ostvare li se ambiciozni planovi zagrebačkog rektora prof. dr. Alekse Bjeliša i njegovih najbližih suradnika, svi studenti koji će se ove godine upisati na studij plaćali bi školarinu! Obveze plaćanja školarine bili bi izuzeti samo oni najbolji te socijalno ugroženi studenti.

Kao početak, zvuči dosta obećavajuće :-). Međutim, uskoro slijedi i određeno razočarenje:

Među ostalim, dogovoreno je da školarine u ukupnom iznosu ne smiju poskupjeti za više od 15 posto, kao i to da novi model školarina prije svega mora poticati izvrsnost.

Ja svakako jesam za vezivanje izvrsnosti uz uvođenje školarina, ali ovih 15 % neće (skoro) ništa promijeniti u pogledu iznosa financiranja naših fakulteta. Osim toga, pitanje je i što se misli pod “ukupnim iznosom školarina”.

Ajmo dalje. Kaže se:

Ekonomski fakultet u Zagrebu predložio je takozvani gradualni model školarina prema kojem bi prvih 310 studenata na rang-listi (od 1510, koliko ih je lani upisao taj fakultet) studiralo besplatno (uz potporu ministarstva), a za svakih sljedećih 200 studenata školarina bi se stupnjevito povećavala. Ima i prijedloga da student koji je bio najuspješniji na prijemnom plati simboličan iznos, recimo jednu kunu, dok bi zadnji na listi plaćao puni iznos školarine

Ovakav model, iako na prvi pogled ima neke logike, odmah pada u propast. Zašto ? Jerbo, po nekim procjenama (a nedostatak pouzdanih i javnih podataka o tome je još jedan simbol lošeg stanja u visokom školstvu) troškovi po studentu na Zagrebačkom sveučilištu se kreće u rasponu 20–40.000 kn !!! Moš’ mislit kako bi to netko platio :-))). A ukoliko bi, što je puno puno vjerojatnije, školarine pokrivale samo dio troškova studiranja (što znači da bi MZT i dalje u značajnom iznosu direktno financirao fakultete po “nekim” kriterijima), dobri efekti uvođenja školarina se gube.

Da ne bi stalo na tome, kaže:

Kako studiranje ne bi postalo privilegija samo bogatih, država paralelno s novim modelom školarina mora razviti sustav stipendiranja i kreditiranja studenata koji je također najavio Primorac. 

ODLIČNO !!! Međutim, raznoraznih najava od ove političke garniture smo se već naslušali, a uzimajući u obzir kako su “uveli” Bolonju, mislim da je opravdano strepiti nad onim što nas čeka prilikom uvođenja takvog sustava.

I na kraju, što je ujedno i osnovna zamjerka:

Istaknuo je kako o detaljima za sada ne može govoriti jer se najbolja rješenja još traže. Bude li sve teklo prema planu, Bjeliš je najavio da će sveučilište s konkretnim prijedlogom izaći u ožujku ili travnju kako bi studenti na vrijeme znali što ih očekuje.

Odnosno, ništa se još ne zna. Evala. Da li je ovo samo “ispitivanje terena” ili postoji neka radna skupina koja će dogledno vrijeme pred javnost izaći s elaboratom o uvođenju školarina, vidjeti ćemo, ali, kao što rekoh na početku, ništa nam ova vijest u stvari pametnoga ne govori.

Kad se još uzme u obzir da su SDP i DC promptno reagirali protiv uvođenja bilo kakvih školarina (očigledno po principu, “opozicija je uvijek protiv”), evidentno je da političkim elitama u ovoj državi još nije doprlo niti do malog mozga da ozbiljno sjednu i razmisle o tome kakvo visoko obrazovanje želimo. Kad se tome još doda skromnost i potpuni nedostatak ambicije (ovako nepotpunog) programa, ne vidim neke mogućnosti za značajan pomak naprijed.

McCain says Roe should be overturned - Politics - MSNBC.com

Toliko o Johnu McCain-u :-((((.

SPARTANBURG, S.C. - Republican presidential candidate John McCain, looking to improve his standing with the party’s conservative voters, said Sunday the court decision that legalized abortion should be overturned.

“I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned,” the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.

McCain also vowed that if elected, he would appoint judges who “strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States and do not legislate from the bench.”

McCain says Roe should be overturned - Politics - MSNBC.com.

Što će biti s Kinom ?

Jagdish Bhagwati reviews Will Hutton's The Writing on the Wall: Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy:

Made in China, by Jagdish Bhagwati, NY Times Book Review: It is only 20 years since Japan was getting under the skin of many Americans. They feared that the 21st century would be Japan’s, as the 19th had been Britain’s and the 20th America’s. ...America near the end of the 20th seemed to be in the grip of what I have called a “diminished giant syndrome.” These worries appear astonishing now. For well over a decade Japan has been deeply mired in macroeconomic failure, its feared dominance having dissolved into dreary ordinariness.

Is China now poised to turn the 21st century into its century? Or will it, despite its phenomenal nearly two-digit annual growth over the past 15 years, rejoin the human race with a slower economy? Or is it possible that its powerful locomotive will, as Japan’s did, shift into reverse gear?

Certainly, any number of popular writers believe China will only continue to go up and up, turning into a gigantic power. Some economists, like Richard Freeman and Alan Blinder, agree. Will Hutton, the former economics editor of ... The Guardian, calls this the prevailing view, and in his interesting book “The Writing on the Wall,” he seeks to overturn it.

He is hardly the only one. ... Signs of looming difficulties are not hard to find. Standard economic analyses indicate that China is likely to face problems with its exchange-rate policy, its financial sector and the inefficiency of its state-owned enterprises. Hutton certainly knows his economics... But his central thesis is that China’s main problem is not the inadequacy of its capitalist economics, but the limitations of its Communist politics.

Indeed, it’s true, as Hutton shows in great detail, that China faces a number of critical economic difficulties that are directly traceable to its lack of democracy. He mentions ..., for example, .. environmental destruction... [T]he Chinese experience shows dramatically, as the Russian experience did, that environmental damage is likely to become ever more crippling in the future because there are no democratic institutions like public opposition and a free press to countervail and contain it.

Similarly, because China has an authoritarian regime, it cannot fully profit from the information revolution, thus inhibiting the technology that is at the heart of growth today. The PC (personal computer) is incompatible with the C.P. (Communist Party). So India ... has moved dramatically ahead of China in computer technology. ... Hutton ... points out, too, that China damages itself by seeking to control and stifle what its citizens can learn and disseminate. “Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are part of the cultural yeast of globalization,” he says, “yet each has been at the receiving end of China’s Internet firewall of censorship.”

And it’s not just growth prospects that are handicapped. China’s authoritarianism creates political uncertainties that are equally problematic. Democratic governments facilitate orderly change; Communist regimes do not. ... Asked many years ago by the economist Robert Heilbroner how China would evolve, the Sovietologist Padma Desai answered: It all depends on whether Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai dies first.

What’s more, China’s authoritarianism is a breeding ground for corruption. As Hutton says, “The morality of revolution — that the end justifies the means — becomes a morality that justifies corruption.” Consider how the phenomenon of “takings” — commissars and their cronies appropriating land from peasants — has led to numerous disruptions. In a political system lacking the essential attributes of a functioning democracy, social groups can’t turn to a free press to take up their cause, or an independent judiciary to appeal to, or opposition parties to embrace their complaints. Revolts are what they have left.

All of these are problems within China. But the lack of freedom is likely to affect its trade strategy as well. As its flood of exports leads to ever increasing fears of job loss and reduced wages in the United States, there will be a strong temptation on the part of the American government to exploit human rights violations as a way of rolling back Chinese goods. When Japan was the perceived threat, those who feared competition, like the carmakers in Detroit and the chip manufacturers in Silicon Valley, had no convenient basis for their complaints and were forced simply to demonize Japan as a wicked trader. In China’s case, the protectionist critics can credibly assail its lack of democracy and human rights abuses.

The question, then, is whether, the Chinese Communists will be able to make the necessary accommodations... Or will China’s leaders dig in their heels, suppressing dissent and opposition and possibly precipitating political and economic chaos? It’s anybody’s guess; and Hutton is not particularly helpful on this matter.

He does think, however, that the West can actively help the Chinese make the wiser choice, and a major part of his book ... is devoted to arguing for engagement rather than confrontation. So he supports China’s participation in the World Trade Organization and opposes protectionism. But the question, frankly, is: How does one make an 800-pound gorilla move in the right direction? Offering it Jessica Lange isn’t going to make any difference; and kicking it in the rear, a course Hutton rightly counsels against, will not accomplish much either.

In the end, no matter what the West does, China is going to make its own choices, the way it did when, after nearly three decades of really bad economics, it turned to reforms under Deng Xiaoping. The giant everyone had expected to rise up in the 1950s continued snoring until the 1980s. Now it has awakened, and all the rest of us can do is watch as it takes its own faltering steps.

Economist's View.

Opinio Juris Forgotten Japanese Latin-American Internees: The Long Reach of Justice

Forgotten Japanese Latin-American Internees: The Long Reach of Justice
by Peggy McGuinness
Today is the anniversary of a shameful event in US history: the 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of German-, Italian- and Japanese-Americans during World War II. Two House Representatives from California, Xavier Becerra and Dan Lundgren are today introducing a bill in Congress to bring attention and some small amount of justice to the survivors of a group of Latin American Japanese who were also detained by under that Order. I was completely unaware of this stunning aspect of the internment programs of the US government -- which included forcible removals of nationals and residents of Latin American countries to internment camps in the US. As Becerra and Lundgren explain in today's WaPo:


Art Shibayama is an American who served in the Army during the Korean War. Like many veterans, Cpl. Shibayama was not born in the United States. He was born in Lima, Peru, to Japanese Peruvian parents. Until 1942, Shibayama, his two brothers and three sisters lived comfortably with their parents and grandparents, all of whom had thriving businesses. However, after America entered World War II, his family was forcibly removed from Peru, transported to the United States and held in a government-run internment camp in Crystal City, Tex.

Like many Japanese American families, Shibayama's family lost everything they owned. But the greater injustice occurred when his grandparents were sent to Japan in exchange for American prisoners of war. Their family never saw them again.

Shibayama and his family were among the estimated 2,300 people of Japanese descent from 13 Latin American countries who were taken from their homes and forcibly transported to the Crystal City camp during World War II. The U.S. government orchestrated and financed the deportation of Japanese Latin Americans for use in prisoner-of-war exchanges with Japan. Eight hundred people were sent across the Pacific, while the remaining Japanese Latin Americans were held in camps without due process


This article by Roger Daniel provides an excellent summary of the social history of Exec Order 9066.

As with the dark history of Exec Order 9066, it may take time and distance from the events before we have the complete story of what has been done and is being done with respect to detainees in the GWOT. But it is a relatively safe bet that the full arc of the redress narrative -- law suits, official acknowledgment, political apology, compensation -- will eventually emerge. The current extraordinary rendition case against CIA officials in Italy and the well-publicized apology and compensation recently paid by Canada to Maher Arar (wrongfully detained and sent by the US to Syria where he was tortured) suggests that the process has now gone transnational, and considerable pressure will be brought from outside the US for some amount of redress to begin.

Opinio Juris Forgotten Japanese Latin-American Internees: The Long Reach of Justice.

Free exchange | Economist.com

Kad smo već kod Valentinova …

And, of course, remember that money isn't everything. The most romantic thing I've ever heard of was the broadway producer who, when he was poor and starting out, gave his future wife a bowl of peanuts, which was all he could afford. "I wish they were emeralds," he told her. Thirty years later, when they were rich, he gave her a bowl of emeralds.

"I wish they were peanuts," he said.

Free exchange | Economist.com.

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