Time For Love in Kosova

5 Years On

To my noisy Kiwi friends.

Polish re Police

Tortures

Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it's just the earth that's grown smaller,
and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall.

Nothing has changed. It's just that there are more people,
besides the old offenses new ones have appeared,
real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
but the howl with which the body responds to them,
was, is and ever will be a howl of innocence
according to the time-honored scale and tonality.

Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances.
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away,
its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds.

Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of its own.

by Wislawa Szymborska

We Love You, Michael

Marie Smith

Marie Smith, the last speaker of the Eyak language, died on January 21st, aged 89

BEYOND the town of Cordova, on Prince William Sound in south-eastern Alaska, the Copper River delta branches out in silt and swamp into the gulf. Marie Smith, growing up there, knew there was a particular word in Eyak, her language, for the silky, gummy mud that squished between her toes. It was c'a. The driftwood she found on the shore, 'u'l, acquired a different name if it had a proper shape and was not a broken, tangled mass. If she got lost among the flat, winding creeks her panicky thoughts were not of north, south, east or west, but of “upriver”, “downstream”, and the tribes, Eskimo and Tlingit, who lived on either side. And if they asked her name it was not Marie but Udachkuqax*a'a'ch, “a sound that calls people from afar”.

Upriver out of town stretched the taiga, rising steadily to the Chugach mountains and covered with black spruce. The spruce was an Eyak dictionary in itself, from lis, the neat, conical tree, to Ge.c, its wiry root, useful for baskets; from Gahdg, its blue-green, flattened needles, which could be brewed up for beer or tea, to sihx, its resin, from which came pitch to make canoes watertight. The Eyak were fishermen who, thousands of years before, were thought to have crossed the Bering Strait in their boats. Marie's father still fished for a living, as did most of the men in Cordova. Where the neighbouring Athapaskan tribes, who had crossed the strait on snowshoes, had dozens of terms for the condition of ice and snow, Eyak vocabulary was rich with particular words for black abalone, red abalone, ribbon weed and tubular kelp, drag nets and dipping nets and different sizes of rope. One word, demexch, meant a soft and treacherous spot in the ice over a body of water: a bad place to walk on, but possibly a good one to squat beside with a fishing line or a spear.

This universe of words and observations was already fading when Marie was young. In 1933 there were 38 Eyak-speakers left, and white people with their grim faces and intrusive microphones, as they always appeared to her, were already coming to sweep up the remnants of the language. At home her mother donned a kushsl, or apron, to make cakes in an 'isxah, or round mixing bowl; but at school “barbarous” Eyak was forbidden. It went unheard, too, in the salmon factory where Marie worked after fourth grade, canning in industrial quantities the noble fish her people had hunted with respect, naming not only every part of it but the separate stems and shoots of the red salmonberries they ate with the dried roe.

As the spoken language died, so did the stories of tricky Creator-Raven and the magical loon, of giant animals and tiny homunculi with fish-spears no bigger than a matchstick. People forgot why “hat” was the same word as “hammer”, or why the word for a leaf, kultahl, was also the word for a feather, as though deciduous trees and birds shared one organic life. They lost the sense that lumped apples, beads and pills together as round, foreign, possibly deceiving things. They neglected the taboo that kept fish and animals separate, and would not let fish-skin and animal hide be sewn in the same coat; and they could not remember exactly why they built little wooden huts over gravestones, as if to give more comfortable shelter to the dead.

The end of the world

Mrs Smith herself seemed cavalier about the language for a time. She married a white Oregonian, William Smith, and brought up nine children, telling them odd Eyak words but finding they were not interested. Eyak became a language for talking to herself, or to God. Only when her last surviving older sister died, in the 1990s, did she realise that she was the last of the line. From that moment she became an activist, a tiny figure with a determined jaw and a colourful beaded hat, campaigning to stop clear-cutting in the forest (where Eyak split-log lodges decayed among the blueberries) and to get Eyak bones decently buried. She was the chief of her nation, as well as its only full-blooded member.

She drank too much, but gave it up; she smoked too much, coughing her way through interviews in a room full of statuettes of the Pillsbury Doughboy, in which she said her spirit would live when she was dead. Most outsiders were told to buzz off. But one scholar, Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, showed such love for Eyak, painstakingly recording its every suffix and prefix and glottal stop and nasalisation, that she worked happily with him to compile a grammar and a dictionary; and Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker was allowed to talk when she brought fresh halibut as a tribute. Without those two visitors, almost nothing would have been known of her.

As a child she had longed to be a pilot, flying boat-planes between the islands of the Sound. An impossible dream, she was told, because she was a girl. As an old woman, she said she believed that Eyak might be resurrected in future. Just as impossible, scoffed the experts: in an age where perhaps half the planet's languages will disappear over the next century, killed by urban migration or the internet or the triumphal march of English, Eyak has no chance. For Mrs Smith, however, the death of Eyak meant the not-to-be-imagined disappearance of the world.

Stasi (II)

The pretence of oversight has been ripped aside by the Khan bugging affair: the security apparat has become a law unto itself

by Simon Jenkins

The machine is out of control. Personal surveillance in Britain is so extensive that no democratic oversight is remotely plausible. Some 800 organisations, including the police, the revenue, local and central government, demanded (and almost always got) 253,000 intrusions on citizen privacy in the last recorded year, 2006. This is way beyond that of any other country in the free world.

The Sadiq Khan affair has killed stone dead the thesis, beloved of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, that any accretion of power to the state is sustainable because ministers are in control. Whether this applies to phone tapping, bugging devices, ID cards, NHS records, childcare computer systems, video surveillance or detention without trial, it is simply a lie. Nobody can control this torrent of intrusion. Nobody can oversee a burst dam.

Khan, an MP and government whip, was allegedly targeted by the police for having been a "civil rights lawyer" and thus a nuisance, though the recording of his meetings with a constituent in prison was supposedly directed at the inmate. Either way, the bugging destroyed the "Wilson doctrine", that MPs cannot be bugged. It appears that they can if ministers, or the police, so decide.

Security machismo claims that in the "age of terrorism", real men bug everyone and everything. The former flying squad chief and BBC dial-a-quote, John O'Connor, implied this week that it would be negligent of the police not to bug anyone they - repeat they - thought a threat. The Blair thesis that "9/11 changes everything" has been a green light to every security consultant, surveillance salesman and Labour minister wanting to flex his - or her- muscles in the tabloids.

Years ago a lawyer gave me unassailable evidence that a call with a client had been tapped by the police and handed to the prosecution. Such tapping allegedly required a personal warrant from the home secretary who, when tackled on the subject, flatly denied it could have happened without his approval, which he would never give in such a case. I checked back with a police chief, who roared with laughter. "The home secretary is absolutely right. He must authorise all taps sent to him for authorisation. But not, of course, the rest." Orwell's cuttlefish were squirting ink.

The grim reality of the past week alone is that it has seen a substantial section of the British establishment allowing itself to believe that private dealings between lawyer and client, and between MP and constituent, should no longer be considered immune from state surveillance. A cardinal principle of a free democracy is thus coolly abandoned. It is not a victory for national security. It is a victory for terrorism.

The monitoring organisation Privacy International now gives Britain the worst record in Europe for such intrusion, indeed the worst among the so-called democratic world and on a par with "endemic surveillance societies", such as Russia and Singapore. The Thames Valley policeman, Mark Kearney, who bugged Khan's conversation in Woodhill prison, claims to have protested that it was "unethical" but was overruled and placed under "significant pressure" from the Metropolitan police. He has since had to leave the force. The saga reads like a script from the film about East German espionage, The Lives of Others.

Britain's poor record is the result of government weakness towards the security apparat. Even among supposed liberals, the response is to demand not less surveillance but more oversight. David Davis, the Tory spokesman, said yesterday: "It's got to be controlled; it's got to be accountable." Civil rights champion Liberty wants "simpler and stronger surveillance laws, with warrants issued by judges, not policemen nor politicians".

People have been saying this for years. Britain has a Kafkaesque oversight bureaucracy ranking with the one it purports to oversee. Some six separate surveillance monitors trip over themselves. All operate in secret and appear to be one gigantic rubber stamp. The distinction drawn by the justice secretary, Jack Straw, between "intrusive" and "directed" bugging, illustrates the prevailing mumbo-jumbo. The chief surveillance monitor, Sir Christopher Rose, has been asked by Straw to investigate the Khan affair, which appears to be a failure by the chief surveillance monitor. Is this to be taken seriously?

When the council can bug you for fly-tipping, when prisons can record conversations with defence lawyers, when any potentially criminal act can justify electronic intrusion - and when ministers resort to the dictator's excuse, "The innocent need not fear" - warning bells should sound.

There is no "balance" to be struck between civil liberty and national security. Civil liberty is absolute, security its handmaid. Measures are needed to protect the public, but a firm line needs to be drawn round them. The line must accept a degree of risk, or a police state is just around the corner.

A quarter of a million surveillances in Britain are beyond all power of politicians or overseers to check. It is state paranoia, justified only by that catch-all, the "war on terror". In truth it is not countering terror, but promoting it. Mass surveillances one of the poisons that the terrorist seeks to inject into the veins of civil society.

It is clear the overseers have gone native. Even the "independent" security watchdog, Lord Carlile, has bought 42-day detention. More oversight will not cure surveillance but mask its spread. The extension from terrorism to benefit fraud, fly-tipping and trading standards demonstrates how the official mind flips to Stasi mode at the least excuse.

To claim that Britain is a police state insults those who are victims of real ones. But I have no doubt that feeble ministers are slithering down just this road, pushed by the security/industrial complex. It is not oversight that must be increased, but rather the categories and boundaries of surveillance that must be drastically curbed.

Of course there are people who want to explode bombs in Britain. Taxpayers spend a fortune trying to stop them. But how often must we remind ourselves that the bomber need not kill to achieve his end when we appease his yearning for the martyrdom of repression? The amount of surveillance in Britain is grotesque. It is a sign of the corruption of power, and nothing else.

Waitangi Day in Aotearoa

From Super Bowl to Super Tuesday

Stasi, We Miss You

Our state collects more data than the Stasi ever did. We need to fight back. To trust in the good intentions of our rulers is to put liberty at risk. I'd go to jail rather than accept this kind of ID card.


by Timothy Garton Ash

This has got to stop. Britain's snooper state is getting completely out of hand. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, and we must wake up. When the Stasi started spying on me, as I moved around East Germany 30 years ago, I travelled on the assumption that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world to one of the least free. I don't think I was wrong then, but I would certainly be wrong now. Today, the people of East Germany are much less spied upon than the people of Britain. The human rights group Privacy International rates Britain as an "endemic surveillance society", along with China and Russia, whereas Germany scores much better.

An official report by Britain's interception of communications commissioner has just revealed that nearly 800 public bodies are between them making an average of nearly 1,000 requests a day for "communications data", including actual phone taps, mobile phone records, email or web search histories, not to mention old-fashioned snail mail. The Home Office website notes that all communication service providers "may be served with a notice by the secretary of state requiring them to maintain a permanent intercept capability. In practice, agreement is always reached by consultation and negotiation." How reassuring.

The fantastic advance of information and communications technology gives the state - and private companies as well - technical possibilities of which the Stasi could only dream. Most of your life is now mapped electronically, minute by minute, centimetre by centimetre, through your mobile phone calls, your emails, your web searches, your credit card purchases, your involuntary appearances on CCTV, and so on. Had the East German secret police had these snooping super-tools, my Stasi file would have measured at least 3,000 pages, not a mere 325.

We therefore need to strengthen the protection of data, privacy and civil rights simply to remain as free as we were before. As technology lifts the sea level of information flow, we have to build up the dykes. To a limited extent, this has been happening; some legal data protection safeguards have been improved. Our stalwart information commissioner, Richard Thomas, has fought a valiant battle to protect what the Germans call, with portentous profundity, the right to informational self-determination. A valiant battle, but a losing one - as the commissioner himself acknowledges. The warning that we are "sleepwalking into a surveillance society" comes from him.

For even as he tries to strengthen the dykes, more powerful arms of government are busy tearing them down: in the name of fighting terrorism, crime, fraud, child molestation, drugs, religious extremism, racial abuse, tax evasion, speeding, illegal parking, fly-tipping, leaving too many garbage bags outside your home, and any other "risk" that any of those nearly 800 public (busy)bodies feels called upon to "protect" us from. Well, thank you, nanny - but kindly eff off to East Germany. I'd rather stay a bit more free, even if means being a bit less safe.

Yes, I recognise that the threat from homegrown suicide bombers - like those who struck London on July 7 2005, and extremists who have been picked up since, including the recently convicted would-be beheader of a British soldier - is particularly difficult to detect. I accept that it requires some extra surveillance and prevention powers. The balance between security and liberty needs to be recalibrated. But in the last decade the British government has erred too far on the side of what is alleged to be increased security.

An over-mighty executive, authoritarian busybody instincts at all levels of government, a political culture of "commonsense" bureaucratic judgments, rather than codified rights protected by supreme courts and, until recently, a gung-ho press forever calling for "something to be done": this fateful combination has made Britain a dark outrider among liberal democracies.
The birthplace of laissez-faire liberalism has morphed into the database state. We have more CCTV cameras than anyone. We have the largest DNA database anywhere. Plans are far advanced to centralise all our medical records and introduce the most elaborate biometric ID cards in the world. All this from a government which, having collected so much data on us, goes around losing it like a late-night drunk spreading the contents of his pockets down the street. Twenty-five million people's details mislaid by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs; at least 100,000 more on an awol Royal Navy laptop; and so it goes on.

Meanwhile, the government has just laid before parliament its latest counter-terrorism bill. Besides the notorious proposal to increase the period of detention without charge to 42 days, this includes provisions that, as the attached official notes explain, allow anyone to give information to the intelligence services "regardless of any duty to keep the information private or of any other restriction" (other than those mentioned in a pair of elastic subclauses). Such information can then be shared or disclosed by that service more or less at will.

This will not do; and even the staunchest supporters of the smack of firm government are beginning to say as much. The Daily Mail, that prince of firm-smackers, yesterday ran a leading article which concluded that "Under this government - of whom the Stasi would have been proud - the balance between state power and individual liberty has been outrageously skewed. It must be restored." This is something on which press and politicians of left and right are beginning to agree.

Of course that flourish about the Stasi is hyperbole. As someone who actually lived under the Stasi, I know we're nowhere near that. But the amount of information collected and shared - not to mention lost - by the British government far exceeds the Stasi's modest 160km of paper files. The potential for it to be abused, in the wrong hands, is simply enormous. Liberty is not preserved simply by putting our trust in the good intentions of our rulers, civil servants and spooks. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

My sense is that the tide is just beginning to turn in British public, published and parliamentary opinion. I hope the Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, Labour backbenchers and the House of Lords will between them give the new bill the roasting it deserves. Some of our watchdog commissioners and more independent-minded judges are already sounding the alarm. If the government were still to be so foolish as to try to introduce the new ID cards before the next election, it could be to Gordon Brown what the poll tax was to Margaret Thatcher.

Comprehensive, compulsory ID cards would directly impinge on every single citizen; this is just the kind of thing the British like to get bloody-minded about.

The Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has said he would go to jail rather than accept an ID card of this intrusive kind. So would I. And so, I believe, would many thousands of our fellow-citizens. (There's a good website called NO2ID where you can join the fray.) Which is why, I suspect, the government won't be so foolish. But we need to draw the line well before ID cards. There are liberties that we have already given away, while sleeping, and we must claim them back.

The Magnet European Union

The empire strikes back

While Britain frets about EU expansion, Europe is overtaking its rivals to become the world's most successful empire. US scholar Parag Khanna on the rise of the new Rome

by Parag Khanna


Kiev, Tbilisi and Baku neither look nor feel like the grand European capitals of London, Paris and Rome. Littered with the hulking architectural and mental debris of the Soviet Union, these cities - and the countries of which they are the capitals - are in serious need of an overhaul. The trouble is that this requires political stability, economic investment, and most of all a counterweight to Russia, which is still manipulating borders, pipelines and markets to pull them back into its orbit.

"It's fairly simple: We hate Russia," said an Estonian diplomat in Tallinn, bluntly capturing a problem that is at once emotional and strategic. Of course, this is not a new challenge for Europe's east, where western Christendom, Slavic Orthodoxy and Turkic Islam have clashed for more than a thousand years. But the European empire is a new solution.

These days it is not fashionable to speak of empires. Empires are aggressive, mercantilist relics supposedly consigned to the dustbin of history with Britain, France and Portugal's post-1945 retrenchment from the African and Asian colonies and the 1990s collapse of the Soviet Union. Rather than empires, many predicted that ethnic self-determination would drag the world into a new era of political fragmentation, with every minority getting its own state, currency, and seat in the United Nations.

But for thousands of years, empires have been the world's most powerful political entities, their imperial yoke restraining subjugated nations from fighting each other and thereby filling people's eternal desire for order. Empires may not be the most desirable form of governance, given the recurrence of hugely destructive wars between them, but humankind's psychological limitations still prevent it from doing better. Big is back. It is inter-imperial relations that shape the world. Empires, not civilisations, give geography its meaning.

The mental journey of Europe's imperial expansion begins on a map, as one traces a finger along the L-shaped path from the chilly Baltics downwards through Ukraine, Romania, the central European countries, the former Yugoslavia and the southern Balkans, then eastwards along the Black Sea through Bulgaria, Turkey, and the Caucasus to the oily shores of the Caspian Sea. This contested zone - the original "second world"- was, except for Turkey, once coloured red to signify the Warsaw Pact. Today the European Union is painting it blue, indicating the region is ready to ascend into the first world.

The actual journey through this new European east, however, is extremely bumpy and filled with unpredictable delays and all the anxieties of people liberated less than a generation ago from totalitarianism.

For all the post-communist soul-searching afflicting the region in the 1990s, the EU has already won the easiest fights. Since the Soviet collapse, on average one country per year has been absorbed into the EU. On a single day - May 1 2004 - over 100 million citizens in 10 countries officially became European.

For over half a century, European nations have been pooling their power, eventually giving small and shattered post-second world war countries a new lease on life. Though EU members remain distinct nations, their greater meaning now comes from being part of the world's only superstate. War between any two countries within the EU's dense institutional nexus has become impossible, and the promise of greater security and wealth has largely succeeded in aligning the foreign policies of its members. "Our biggest logistical exercise since the second world war was not military," an official in one of the EU's shiny, postmodern edifices boasted, "but the circulation of the euro currency in 2002."

Europe has its own vision of what world order should look like, which it increasingly pursues whether America likes it or not. The EU is now the most confident economic power in the world, regularly punishing the United States in trade disputes, while its superior commercial and environmental standards have assumed global leadership. Many Europeans view America's way of life as deeply corrupt, built on borrowed money, risky and heartless in its lack of social protections, and ecologically catastrophic. The EU is a far larger humanitarian aid donor than the US, while South America, east Asia and other regions prefer to emulate the "European Dream" than the American variant.

The US and the EU increasingly differ about both the means and ends of power as well. For many Europeans, the US-led war in Iraq validated their view that war is not an instrument of policy but a sign of its failure. The al-Qaida attacks on European soil served to heighten this disdain. It is often said that America and Europe make a strong team because America breaks and Europe fixes, but this cliche has long begun to grate on Europeans, who would rather spread their version of stability before America destabilises countries on its periphery, particularly in the Arab world.

As the most highly evolved form of interstate governance, the EU aggregates countries in a manner more resembling a corporate merger than a political conquest, with net gains in both trade and territory from north Africa to the Caucasus. In Europe's capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European parliament, calls it "European patriotism". The Europeans play both sides, and if they do it well, they profit handsomely.

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury - carrying a big wallet. The EU's market is the world's largest, and European technologies more and more set the global standard. If America and China fight, the world's money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Arabian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that Opec no longer price its oil in "worthless" dollars. With London taking over (again) as the world's financial capital for stock listing, it's no surprise that China's new state investment fund is to locate its main western offices there instead of New York. Model Gisele Bundchen demands to be paid in euros, while rapper Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

And Europe's influence grows at America's expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many of the foreign students shunned by the US after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the US.

EU expansion is a gamble more expensive than America's war in Iraq, but one that is actually paying off. "We purposely make the EU poorer each time we expand," a Eurocrat from Lithuania explained in a Brussels pub crowded with multilingual Europhiles. "But the stability we spread can hardly be measured." The EU spends over $10bn (£5.07bn) a year just to resurrect the physical infrastructure of its new east, accelerating its recovery from decades of communist negligence. This strategy, which lifted Ireland - the "sick man of Europe" a generation ago - and post-authoritarian Spain and Portugal, is now working its magic in the east. Rather than the decades many predicted it would take to catch up to the west, Hungary has already become the regional corporate off-shoring hub, with 80% of its production led by European multinationals and 80% of its exports going back to the EU.

EU expansion has become a virtuous circle of tapping new markets to decrease reliance on exports to the US - a crucial step in building an independent superpower. The fresh blood of the EU's new members has generated a competitive federalism that boosts the European economy as a whole. The model of the Baltic countries - entrepreneurial freedom, open competition and flexible labour laws - has begun to seep back via central Europe into the laggards of western Europe.

The EU is easily the most popular and successful empire in history, for it does not dominate, it disciplines. The incentives of Europeanisation - subsidies from Brussels, unfettered mobility, and the adoption of the euro currency - are too great not to want. Brussels today rivals Washington with its swarms of lobbyists, including dozens of public relations outfits hired by Balkan and post-Soviet countries actively vying for EU admission. To qualify for accession, however, the still-ruined, post-communist countries must do more than just burnish their image. They have to follow concrete steps toward internalising EU laws and rules as called for in the New Neighbourhood Strategy, which locks together military, economic, and governance issues.

Europe's growing diversity makes European-ness a gradually attainable ideal rather than a mythical Platonic form, transforming Europe's identities from tribal to cosmopolitan. Even as some west Europeans fear the dilution of their elite brand, Europe's evolution is giving the term European a positive meaning. Europe is already partially Islamic, with growing Muslim populations in Britain, France and Germany and almost 100 million Muslims from Albania, Bosnia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan in the European diplomatic and strategic space via the Council of Europe or Nato.

European has become an identity as strong (or as weak) as American or Chinese. As life imitates art, all countries participating in football's European Championships and the Eurovision Song Contest consider themselves - and are increasingly considered - European. Most importantly, an entire post-cold war generation of students, called the Erasmus generation after the EU's exchange programme, is transcending the national identities their elders fought to establish, all for the sake of European stability. These "post-national" European youth now travel virtually visa-free from Belfast to Baku, speak multiple languages, study in exchange programmes and vote in European parliamentary elections.

As with all empires, the EU rubber band will stretch until it no longer can, growing until it has fully replaced the dismantled Soviet Union across Europe's east, creating a borderless and contiguous "Pax Europea" of about 35 countries, an imperial blanket covering close to 600 million people. But the Europeanisation of the L-shaped zone is far from complete. Balkan and Caucasus countries are still fragile post-conflict regions and have become a convenient crossroads for trafficking in weapons and women; Turkey has a mind of its own, and will not be easily subdued; and, of course, no country presents a bigger obstacle to Europe's ambitions than Russia.

Pretty Eyes

Happy Day

For The Children

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

by Gary Snyder

Back To The Future?

I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee, I'm the leader
I'm the leader

OK what shall we do?

by Roger McGough

Gaza Today: Some Facts

* Over 80% of people in Gaza now live below the poverty line.
* Israel impossed fuel sanctions in Sep 07 and local electrical infrastructure can provide only 35% of Gaza's needs. The cutting-off of the electricity hampers hospital operating, water supply and sewage systems.
* In Oct 07, the public provider of water and sanitation services received just 50% of the fuel it needs to operate its wells, pumping stations and treatment plants. 210,000 people are now able to access drinking water supplies for only 1-2 hours a day.
* 1.2 million Gazans are now dependent on food aid. Only 41% of Gaza's food import needs are currently being met.
* The closure of borders has led to price increases, shortages of basic commodities and reduced purchases of meat (98%), dairy products (86%) and fruit (99%).
* There are no stocks left of 85 essential medicines, including chemotherapy drugs, strong antibiotics and several psychiatric drugs. For a further 138 drugs there are only stocks for three months at most. Supplies of nitrous oxide for surgical anaesthesia will run out in two weeks.
* 17.5% of patients who have requested access to East Jerusalem, Israel or abroad for emergency or chronic medical treatment have been denied permits since June 07.

DM for PM?

Let's De-Tech A Bit

It is being said in some trend-sniffing quarters that this is a year in which cutting-edge people may attempt to go without so much technology for some of the time. To 'de-tech' their lives a little. Being billed as 'de-techers', such people - weary in their eyeballs, or having just received an outrageous credit-card bill, or finding themselves momentarily intrigued by face-to-face conversation - will begin to 'manage their relationship with gadgetry' in a slightly firmer manner. Perhaps switching off their laptop while eating. And, before too long, even going without any technology for a brief part of the evening.

Already there are confirmed reports of at least seven people in the north London area leaving their Blackberries behind while going out on dates, of a married couple in Derbyshire hanging a sheet over the HDTV screen in their bedroom for almost a week (although possibly because the bedroom was being decorated) and of a mother in Chislehurst not topping up her children's T-Mobiles until the weekend because her offspring wouldn't help load the dishwasher despite being asked repeatedly. In Wolverhampton, a man running a media course left his iPhone at a friend's house and didn't go back for it for 36 hours.

By the time trend-sniffers say the de-teching trend is expected to really take hold, in 2011, large numbers of people will need to be showing the resolve to take regular 'data sabbaths' as part of 'de-tech diet plans' so as not to be completely spellbound all day and night by the touch-sensitive screens on their walls. On which they could so enjoyably be 'bringing up' and 'dragging' things around in the manner of a weather girl, Pentagon-briefing major, musical conductor, dervish and starship helmsman all rolled into one.

By John Hind

State Brutality

Another Day...

...another "legal" killing in Palestine.
And no-one says a thing.
Except this woman, today:

Your story (Israeli troops kill 19 in Gaza Strip incursion, January 16) has inevitably been followed by another Israeli atrocity yesterday, with three Palestinians, including a 14-year old boy, killed by an Israeli air strike on a car in Gaza City. The Israeli military have admitted they were all civilians. How much more killing and collective punishment are we expecting the Palestinians in Gaza to take? Israel is restricting the Gazans' access to food, fuel, electricity and water, ensuring all entry and exit points are closed to them, and forcing Palestinians to watch family and friends dying because the Israeli authorities are preventing them from leaving Gaza to access medical treatment. President Bush's visit has clearly emboldened the Israeli government to escalate its military assault on Gaza. The government must call for the siege to be lifted. A protest against the crime being perpetrated on Palestinians is planned for January 26.

Sarah Colborne

Chair, Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Hero Of The Day

His name is Dan "Cheeky" Watson and until today I had no idea who he was. Just two notes: he was a rugby player and he is from South Africa. A free coffee to anyone who writes clues about his life.

A Friar

The Small Has To Justify Everything

Language sparks debate in Kerry

By Diarmaid Fleming

BBC NI Dublin correspondent

The status of the Irish language in Northern Ireland has prompted bitter debate in the assembly after Culture Minister Edwin Poots said he would not introduce an Irish Language Act.
But in one of the few remaining Irish-speaking areas in Ireland, there's another debate, this time demanding that more English and less Irish be spoken in a new secondary school in Dingle.
The Kerry Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking area, is one of the few places left where Irish can be heard in the street.
But in the capital, Dingle, or in its official Irish title, Daingean Ui Chuis, English is widely used.
Two secondary schools recently merged into a new one, Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne.
But the school's policy of teaching all lessons through Irish has led to protests by some students who say they cannot understand what they are being taught.
Sam Spinn was one of the students who left classes to protest against the all-Irish policy.
"A lot of students can't learn through all Irish - there are some who can but a lot of them can't and it's just not acceptable that people have to go through school in which they don't understand the classes at all," he said.
"People just begin to hate a language if it's forced on them so it will flourish under encouragement, but if it's forced on people, people will just reject it and they'll go against it."

Fluent

But speaking in Irish is fundamental to an Irish-speaking area.
Here, a group of fluent speakers meet to bring on others keen to improve.
Some who have come from outside or abroad say they have learned Irish out of respect for the Gaeltacht tradition and its people, and want their children to learn it too.
Lone Ui Raghallaigh comes from Denmark. Married and living in the Kerry Gaeltacht, she has learned to speak Irish.
"When we moved here we knew we were moving into a Gaeltacht and to me it is very important not to water down the beautiful language they have in this area," she said.
"So we are very conscious of trying to do the best ourselves to learn the language and of course we took it for granted that the children would be taught through Irish.

"It's part of living in a Gaeltacht."

Maire Ui Shithigh and her family speak Irish at home.
She argues that if English is introduced into the school, then Irish will end up not being used.
"If you have Irish and English, then everything moves over to English because English is the global language," she said.

Educational

"English is the language of youth and minority languages are dying out all over the world and unless we take very serious steps to prevent it, the Irish will be gone and I think we will hugely regret it."
But parents of students without fluent Irish, say that it's an educational rather than a language issue.
Cyril Harrington, from a group calling itself the Concerned Parents for Education, moved into the area from Dublin, and feels strongly that Irish should not be imposed in the school.
"This is not about language - this is about every student's constitutional right to a viable education," he said.
"For the last 20-odd years, the medium was through Irish and English.
"Suddenly pupils who've done four years of secondary school like this are now having all-Irish imposed on them.
"There are people sitting in classrooms and they don't know what's being said and that is unfair and unacceptable and it cannot go on."
But for others, replacing Irish with English would have a disastrous impact on the language in the Gaeltacht.
Native speaker and former Kerry All-Ireland gaelic football winning captain Dara O Cinneide is on the board of management of the new school.
He says extra help in Irish for those needing it - rather than abandoning it for English in the classroom - is the solution.
The school is looking for further help provided under a scheme by the Ireland's Department of Education to give assistance to students needing help in the language.
"We are aware that there are challenges being posed to a certain group of students in the school," Mr O Cinneide said.
"We have put extra supports in place to counteract this challenge and we are looking for even more again, so I think anybody who will have a difficulty learning their subjects through Irish will be catered for."
He says it is accepted that some older students in the school who may not have learned Irish from a young age may need help, but said that throwing out Irish as the spoken language in the area's secondary and replacing it with English would be devastating for the future of the language in the Kerry Gaeltacht.
He added that the children of many new immigrants coming into the area have little difficulty learning Irish, and have no issue with it.
"We just have a love of the language, we feel it's very important for us and for the next generation and generations to come to have that language preserved as well as educating our children to the highest possible standards."
With English the dominant world language, those fostering the Irish language in Kerry say that like other minority languages, it is threatened, even in the area where it should be strongest.

But just as north of the border, the Irish language seems to provoke plenty of debate - in English.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

I discovered Kapuscinski just when I saw his obituary in The Economist. I didn't have a clue who he was so tried to find something written by him and I ended up with a book called "The Shadow of the Sun - My African Life" in my hands and... I discovered an entire new world.

I saw this guy was for a while in the right place at the right time in Africa's political life. A kind of George Steer of the second half of century. And I also discovered an attitude I like and even admire: humble but curious, analitical but respectfull with local history, traditions and logic, trying all the time not being "the white man looking down to all black persons".

A hero of paper and ink.

Miss USA Doesn't Speak English?

Belgium's political tensions entered the glamour stakes after it was revealed that the new Miss Belgium does not speak Dutch.
Alizee Poulicek, who comes from the country's French-speaking region, was booed by some of the 4,000 audience when she admitted that she could not understand a question put to her in Dutch at the contest on Saturday night in the main Flemish city of Antwerp.
Poulicek, a 20-year-old language student, speaks French, Czech and English, but Flemish tabloid daily Het Laatste Niuews headlined its Monday edition with: "Miss Belgium does not speak Dutch".
The paper underlined that the "community crisis in our country" -- where there is no government six months after general elections amid bickering between leaders of the main French and Flemish parties -- "has insinuated itself into even the lightest sector."
Poulicek's victory "is not going down well," the daily said.
She said she had been taking Dutch lessons before the contest and has pledged to improve her standard in one of Belgium's three official languages, along with French and German.
The incident did not hurt her image with television viewers who voted for her, but Flemish journalists assailed her with questions at a press conference, highlighting her deficiencies in their tongue.
The Flemish community accounts for 60 percent of Belgium's 10.5 million people. A further 3.5 million live in Wallonia and one million in the largely Francophone, but officially bilingual Brussels.

Local Accents

More than half of British parents discourage their children from speaking with their local accent for fear of harming their life chances, according to a survey.

The research showed 51% actively discouraged their youngsters from using an accent while 33% encouraged them to speak "the Queen's English".

The firm Combined Insurance asked a sample of more than 2,300 parents about the importance of keeping local accents and how this impacts on the community.

The respondents were asked whether they would encourage their children to speak with their region's local accent and what impact they thought this would have on their child's future.

They also indicated which accent they would most like their child to speak with.

One in five (20%) parents were worried their children might find it harder to get a well-paid job if they spoke in their local accent and more than one in six (17%) thought their child would be perceived to have a lower level of intelligence.

Almost one in 10 (8%) feared local accents would mean they would not be taken seriously in life.

Among the regional findings of the survey were that 27% of parents living in the West Country were worried their child might be teased and bullied in their future job for having a local accent and 26% thought their child might be considered to be not very bright.

And 14% of parents living in the Midlands believe their child might not be taken seriously in life because of their accent.

Across the UK, the Birmingham accent was the one parents would least like their child to use. In Birmingham, only 8% of parents said they would encourage their children to use the local accent.

Hope Ahead

Raymond Carver - To My Friend

October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad Beer.

In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
Wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.

But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either,
and don't even know the places to fish?

Tue Poem

The rain it raineth every day
Upon the just and unjust fella
But mostly on the just because
The unjust hath the just's umbrella.

by Baron Charles Bowen

Free Kosovo

How To... Lick

by Guy Browning

The Guardian

The modern tongue is virtually a prisoner in the mouth. That's why sticking out your tongue is very rude but also rather saucy: it's a kind of entry-level flashing. Tongues are extremely sensitive and can determine thousands of different flavours, including the three used in British cooking.

What food, sex and envelopes used to have in common was that they all involved licking. With self-seal envelopes we are now down to just food and sex, which is a shame because licking a letter before you sent it added an interesting sensual angle to your correspondence with the tax authorities. Self-adhesive stamps have added to the precipitous decline in licking. To be fair, they do make sending your Christmas cards easier because in the past licking 80 stamps was an absolute nightmare unless you had a handy labrador or French boyfriend.

One of the main attractions of ice cream is that you can lick it. People who eat ice cream with their teeth and chew it are slightly missing the point. An excellent training aid for licking is the jam doughnut as it's impossible to eat one without licking your lips and fingers afterwards. Some people cheat and lick the sugar off first but then the doughnut ends up looking like a hairless chihuahua.

Licking has very little place socially and the rule is never lick a person you haven't already kissed on the lips. Similarly, never lick somebody in the office unless you are on an advanced team-building course. Licking people reveals the wide range of flavours they come in: there's sweet, salty, cheesy, BBQ and prawn cocktail. Or, if they've had a bath recently, mango, pomegranate, seaweed and strawberry. Licking someone after a bath is the equivalent of one portion of fruit and veg.

Before wet wipes, the tongue acted as a mobile cleaning unit. The tongue would be applied to the hanky and the hanky applied to the mess/baby. Even now, a thorough beauty regime can be carried out using nothing more than finger and tongue. Licking is still very important in love-making but you should use moderation. Attempting to lick someone's entire back, for example, especially if they're a large person, will just make you dehydrated, and make the recipient feel as if you're doing some kind of minor paint job.

FF - The Super Hero

To My Friend A

Tovarich 1 - 0 Amigo

Vladimir Putin secured a landslide victory in yesterday’s Russian election. His United Russia party won 306 seats (64.1%) out of 450 in the Duma or the lower house of parliament. The Communists would have 57 seats, or 11.6% of the vote. The Liberal Democratic party (nationalists) won the 8.2% of the vote and the populist Just Russia, 7.6% - the threshold of 7% has left many critic voices out in the political cold. And, as you know, Russia is extremely cold, in all the senses.

The turnout was about 62%, up from 56% in the last parliamentary elections four years ago.

According to Russian constitution, Putin has to stand down after two terms as head of state (like in United States) - but now, with this spectacular victory he wants to become a “national leader”. What does this mean? No-one knows.

From the Siberian tundra to lake Maracaibo.

Hugo Chavez lost very narrowly his try to make substantial changes to the Venezuelan Constitution. So he will stand down in 2013 once his term expires. The opposition won the 51% of the vote and the Government position, the 49% - I call this a Quebec-style result… Chavez called it a “photo phinish” with a “microscopic” difference – but, hey, that’s democracy, pure maths, at the end of the day.

It seems that the apathy and some disillusion of “softer” chavistas is partly to blame for the unexpected result (remember this is the military man- changed in politician who has won 10 elections in 8 years, almost all of them by landslide). The turnout of 55%, low by Venezuelan standards, showed that many stayed home.

“Abstention defeated us” said Chavez, “it’s a lesson for us”.

“He has woken us up, the poor”, says Oscar Olachea, a member of an agricultural co-op.

So here we have, a victory and a defeat. But, paradoxically, Putin looks more like a dictator after his rigged farse and Chavez looks since yesterday more a democratically elected leader who recognizes electoral defeat and less the strong man than some western media tries to suggest he is.

The West Banksy

The Sunday Pic

Sat Poem - To My Father

Missing Things

I'm very old and breathless, tired and lame,

and soon I'll be no more to anyone

than the slowly fading trochee of my name

and shadow of my presence: I'll be gone.

Already I begin to miss the things

I'll leave behind, like this calm evening sun

which seems to smile at how the blackbird sings.

There's something valedictory in the way

my books gaze down on me from where they stand

in disciplined disorder and display

the same goodwill that well-wishers on land

convey to troops who sail away to where

great danger waits. These books will miss the hand

that turned the pages with devoted care.

And there are also places that I miss:

those Paris streets and bars I can't forget,

the scent of caporal and wine and piss;

the pubs in Soho where the poets met;

the Yorkshire moors and Dorset's pebbly coast,

black Leeds, where I was taught love's alphabet,

and this small house that I shall miss the most.

I've lived here for so long it seems to be

a part of what I am, yet I'm aware

that when I've gone it won't remember me

and I, of course, will neither know nor care

since, like the stone of which the house is made,

I'll feel no more than it does light and air.

Then why so sad? And just a bit afraid?

By Vernon Scannell

The World's Real Colours

Looking Around

Howard’s End

Good news from the Southern Hemisphere. After 11 years in office John Howard has been defeated by the Labor party and it seems that Kevin Rudd is going to be the next PM in Canberra. The Liberal coalition got 58 seats while Labor (not Labour, in this case) won 80 seats.

A couple of comments: first, significantly, like in almost all Anglo-Saxon countries, the Greens have zero seats – there is always a pocket of votes for them but it seems that they are not taken seriously enough in these business-minded societies. Second, about ideological profiles: if Howard is a “Liberal”, my god, what will a conservative be in Australia? The other day I read in a European paper the best description of the former PM: the clone of George Bush in Southern Pacific.

Now let’s hope Rudd keeps his promises and signs the Kyoto agreement (relatively easy) and pulls troops out of Iraq (easier said than done). G’day! to him.

Identity Socialism

Plenty of what is happening in Latin America, in my opinion, can not be understood without the parameter of identity. Formally the debate keeps being between the Right and the Left but then when you scratch just a bit the social surface of any of these countries, what do you see, historically? Very white people in parliament and business, marching in favor of Pinochet, defending the infamous Honduras Contra against the Sandinistas and backing the mafiossi-style Cuban exile community in Miami. And in the other side? Dark skinned people, Aimaras, Quechuas and other indigenous people (more numerous than we think) supporting Evo Morales in Bolivia, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and marching with the pictures of their relatives, kidnapped, tortured and shot by Pinochet’s Death Squads. There is a racial and ethnical cleavage that cannot be ignored. The current trend in Latin America is the Pay Back Day by the masses of poor and the invisible, the ones until recently ignored (if not massacred) hordes of humble but resilient peasants (and no-peasants, of course).

In this context, let’s see what happens in Venezuela this 2^nd of November as they are holding a referendum about constitutional changes. Chavez has won ten elections in eight years… if there is someone popular right now in his country, this is the Bolivarian leader.

Last night I saw with a very good friend of mine a documentary called The War On Democracy, by John Pilger. The director was there and made an intro about the film, with several questions afterwards. I really recommend to anyone who feels a bit interested in another point of view about Latin America, to see this piece of art. Impressive.

The Bull… or the Bully?

Spain will hold next March their next general elections. The Southern European country has been thru 13 years of Gonzalez (LOAPA, economical reform, NATO, EU, GAL and corruption) then 8 years of neo-totalitarian Aznar (the short guy with the moustache in the Azores island with Dubya; the guy who closed newspapers and radio stations, magazines and banned political parties in Europe in the XXI century but, hey, who cares – they are just crazy Basques!) and the last 4 years with Zapatero and his “talante”. The politician from Leon has showed that you can be as Spanish nationalist as any right winger… but with a smile. Now, after the collapse of the so-called peace process in the troubled northern provinces the socialist (Labour) party is trying to show to anyone who wants to see that they can be as tough as the populares (Conservatives) arresting people and banning political meetings and peaceful demonstrations. Let’s hope this craziness will change after March.

But who knows?

Film? Real?

Sunday Pic

A Red Rose

Luck in Sarajevo

In Sarajevo
in the spring of 1992,
everything is possible:

you go stand in a bread line
and end up in an emergency room
with your leg amputated.

Afterwards, you still maintain
that you were very lucky.

by Izet Sarajlic

She Asked You

A girl asked you: What is poetry?
You wanted to say to her: You are too, ah yes, you are
and that in fear and wonder,
which prove the miracle,
I'm jealous of your beauty's ripeness,
and because I can't kiss you nor sleep with you,
and because I have nothing and whoever has nothing to give
must sing...

But you didn't say it, you were silent
and she didn't hear the song.

Vladimir Holan

The Last Supper

Snow

It began to snow at midnight. And certainly
the kitchen is the best place to sit,
even the kitchen of the sleepless.
It's warm there, you cook yourself something, drink wine
and look out of the window at your friend eternity.
Why care whether birth and death are merely points
when life is not a straight line.
Why torment yourself eyeing the calender
and wondering what is at stake.
Why confess you don't have the money
to buy Saskia shoes?
And why brag
that you suffer more than others.

If there were no silence here
the snow would have dreamed it up.
You are alone.
Spare the gestures. Nothing for show.

by Vladimir Holan

Bank, all change

"A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it starts to rain".

Robert Frost