International news – Bladsy 13

Israeli racism row

Israel’s interior minister faces accusations of racism after he suggested suspending the policy of allowing Ethiopians with Jewish ancestry to move to the country.

While rabbinical authorities judge the so-called Falash Mura to be sufficiently Jewish to qualify for Israeli citizenship, Meir Sheetrit said they were not really Jewish and had been let in only because of "political correctness".

In remarks that incensed the large Falasha community already in Israel, he implied that Ethiopians were fleecing the state by leaving the economic hardship of their birthplace and enjoying comfortable new lives in Israel.

"Who needs them?" he said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. "They are all Christians. We need to take care of the future of Israel and this immigration will never finish."

His comments were denounced as racist by senior members of the Falasha community who pointed out that Jews from white countries were allowed into Israel without any question from the authorities.

"The way he is expressing himself has a smell of racism about it because he would not say such statements to any other immigrants from America or Russia," said Avraham Neguise, chairman of the Representatives of Ethiopian Immigrant Organisations in Israel.
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"His remarks are unacceptable and irresponsible. The state of Israel is the home for every Jew and is it not the minister’s private home.

"These people have been described and identified as part of Jewish Ethiopian community by the chief rabbinate. They are our blood, our flesh and our bones."

Ethiopians who come to Israel often complain of not being able to find good jobs and experiencing discrimination.

Some claim that Israel imposes a quota of 600 Falasha being allowed into Israel each month.

Others complain that Israel used the Falasha cynically to boost the population as part of the demographic battle with the Palestinians, who have a high birth rate.

The Falasha are said to be the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel that trekked south and set up home in the Horn of Africa.

The claim was strong enough to convince Israeli rabbinical authorities in the 1980s and 1990s when 90,000 were allowed into Israel.

The first Falasha to move to Israel were unquestionably Jewish. But a new group calling themselves the Falash Mura emerged.

They were Ethiopians living a Christian lifestyle but who claimed to have been forced to convert to Christianity from Judaism.

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Iran makes major concessions

In major concessions to international demands, Iran has agreed to answer lingering questions about its nuclear experiments and will let U.N. inspectors return to a plutonium-producing reactor it is building, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday.

The decision to cooperate more fully with the U.N. nuclear agency appears designed to weaken a U.S. push for tough new Security Council sanctions over Iran’s nuclear activities, which Western countries suspect are cover for a weapons program.

Iran, which says it only wants peaceful nuclear energy, promised the concessions in a meeting this week between Iranian officials and a senior IAEA delegation, the agency said.

Iran also has scaled back its enrichment of uranium, IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei said Monday, although it is still refusing to freeze that enrichment, a key international demand.

The IAEA has been concerned about indications that Iran could be pursuing a nuclear weapon, indications that include traces of enriched uranium found at a military site, and Iranian diagrams the IAEA has seen that explain how to form uranium metal into the shape of a warhead.

Iranian officials have refused to answer questions about those findings for years, leaving the IAEA unable to determine the nature of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s refusal to cooperate prompted U.N. Security Council to become involved last year. The Security Council has imposed two sets of sanctions on Iran over the nuclear standoff.

Access to the heavy-water research reactor outside the industrial city of Arak is key to any IAEA review of Iran’s nuclear activities, because the reactor will produce plutonium once completed sometime in the next decade.

The Security Council has demanded that Iran stop construction at the Arak project, as well as halting uranium enrichment, because both plutonium and enriched uranium can be used in the fissile core of a warhead.

Iranian officials and IAEA Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen agreed this week that agency inspectors would visit the Arak reactor by the end of July, the IAEA said. That concession follows an Iranian ban on such visits imposed earlier this year.

The two sides also agreed on how "to resolve remaining issues regarding Iran’s past plutonium experiments," which include the traces of enriched uranium at the military site as "well as studies related to specified projects" _ agency shorthand for nuclear work that could have military applications.

Iran has refused to answer questions about secret plutonium experiments in the mid-1990s and IAEA findings that Iran has not accounted for all the plutonium it has said it possessed. IAEA experts also want to know more about unexplained traces of plutonium and enriched uranium found last year at a nuclear waste facility, and about the so-called "Green Salt Project."

Diplomats told The Associated Press last year that the agency was trying to follow up on U.S. intelligence that described the project as linking uranium enrichment-related experiments to nuclear-related high explosives and warhead design. Iran dismissed that intelligence as "based on false and fabricated documents."

The IAEA and Iran also agreed that new inspectors would replace more than a dozen who were banned by Iran this year.

At Natanz, site of Iran’s enrichment program, IAEA inspectors have been allowed fairly broad access to approximately 2,000 centrifuges set up to spin uranium gas into enriched uranium. But the IAEA statement suggested Tehran was ready for more concessions there as well, saying a new meeting was planned in early August on "the finalization of the safeguards approach" – formal language for specific inspection and monitoring rights at the facility.

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The dark continent

It is not that Jacob Mwale minds irrigating the 11 acres of land he farms just east of Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. It is irrigating his 11 acres in the dead of night that angers him.

Two or three times a week, the Mwale farm abruptly loses power, like the homes and businesses of some of Zambia’s 300,000 other electricity users. When the power returns, sometimes late in the evening, Mr. Mwale’s farmhands work overtime, watering the fields by moonlight.

“If they shut down the whole day, I have to work nights, and pay extra,” Mr. Mwale, 39, grumbled. “It’s killing us.”

Power blackouts — “load shedding,” in utility jargon — are hardly novel in sub-Saharan Africa, where many electricity grids remain chewing-gum-and-baling-wire affairs. Even so, this year is different. Perhaps 25 of the 44 sub-Saharan nations face crippling electricity shortages, a power crisis that some experts call unprecedented.

The causes are manifold: strong economic growth in some places, economic collapse in others, war, poor planning, population booms, high oil prices and drought have combined to leave both industry and residents short of power when many need it most.

“We’ve had no significant capital injection into generation and transmission, from either the private or public sectors, for 15, maybe 20 years,” said Lawrence Musaba, the manager of the Southern African Power Pool, a 12-nation consortium of electricity utilities at the continent’s tip.

The implications go beyond candlelight suppers and extra blankets on beds. The lack of reliable power has already begun to hamper the region’s development, clipping more than 2 percent off the annual growth rates of the worst-hit African economies, according to the World Bank. Some nations, like Ghana, have tried to deal with their power crises by leasing huge teams of gas generators, producing emergency power at exorbitant rates until power plants can be built.

In Nigeria, Angola and some other nations, virtually all businesses and many residents run private generators to supplement faltering public service, saddling economies with added costs and worsening pollution.

“I’ve been on the 20th floor of an apartment building in Luanda, and there would be generators on all the verandas, with the racket, the fumes,” said Anton Eberhard, a former electricity regulator and an expert on power at the University of Cape Town. “And the lift isn’t working, because the main power supply is off.”

In normal times, South Africa’s muscular chain of power plants fills the gaps of its neighbors. But South Africa now could experience up to seven years of its own electricity shortages. Rolling blackouts blanketed parts of the country in January, and sporadic power failures have persisted since.

The gravity of this year’s shortage is all the more apparent considering how little electricity sub-Saharan Africa has to begin with. Excluding South Africa, whose economy and power consumption dwarf other nations’, the region’s remaining 700 million citizens have access to roughly as much electricity as do the 38 million citizens of Poland.

Much goes to industry: a single aluminum smelter near Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, gobbles four times as much power as the entire rest of Mozambique. On average, the World Bank says, fewer than one in four sub-Saharan Africans are hooked to national electricity grids.

Moreover, some grids are so poorly maintained that electricity suppliers get paid for as little as 60 percent of the power they generate. The rest is either stolen or lost in ill-maintained networks.

For decades, the region had enough generating capacity — and few enough customers — to tolerate such waste. No more: sub-Saharan nations are adding about a thousand megawatts of generating capacity each year, World Bank experts say, but need up to twice that to keep pace with demand.

Some governments privatized chunks of their power industry in the early 1990s when free-market solutions to public-sector problems were in vogue, leaving it unclear who is ultimately responsible for providing power.

Other governments, as in South Africa, failed to build power plants that experts warned were needed. The government monopoly Eskom, the world’s fourth-largest power utility, was advised in a 1998 report that it would run short of power in 2007, but planning and financing problems — not all within the utility’s control — stalled upgrades. The forecast was actually optimistic: Eskom began running short in 2006.

Yet South Africa’s woes pale beside those of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Only 19 of 79 power plants work, the government said in April. Daily electricity output has plunged 60 percent from its peak, and blackouts cost the economy $1 billion a year, the Council for Renewable Energy in Nigeria says.

Poor management is but one problem. War has devastated the power grid in Congo, in Africa’s heart, and stalled plans to develop its vast hydroelectric potential. In Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and parts of West Africa, drought has shrunk rivers and slashed the generating capacity of hydroelectric dams. Drought in Ghana, for example, has crippled gold and aluminum production and set off blackouts in Togo and Benin, which buy power from Ghana.

Once a major power exporter, Uganda now blacks out parts of its capital, Kampala, for as much as a day at a time and has leased two 50-megawatt generators, burning diesel at a time of record oil prices. The demand for hydropower in Uganda and its neighbors, with drought, is blamed by some for a steady reduction in the water level of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest.

Uganda’s gas stations are now short of diesel for vehicles — in part, paradoxically, because power shortages are shutting down a pipeline from Kenya. News reports say the nation has spent enough on diesel-fueled power generation to build two hydroelectric dams.

Zambia, where power to customers like Mr. Mwale is rationed almost every day, is a template for such problems. Barely 20 percent of households are wired for power — only 3 percent in rural areas — but the Zambia Electricity Supply Company, known as Zesco, is signing up 10,000 new customers a year, said Christopher Nthala, the utility’s transmission director.

Now Zambia is getting a push: a global commodities boom has jolted its moribund metals industry to life. Investors are building two smelters, and doubling the capacity of another, to handle the boom in copper, nickel and other metals, taxing the nation’s power supply.

“We’ve never seen this kind of growth before,” Mr. Nthala said.

Once the utility could make up shortfalls by buying power from other utilities in the Southern Africa Power Pool. But today, Mr. Nthala said, neighbors have little surplus to hand out. “Sometimes we get it,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t.”

None of that mollifies customers, who say blackouts are so common that service in much of Lusaka has become totally unreliable.

Many power failures seem to hit Matero, a poor township that is home to maybe a million of Lusaka’s estimated three million residents. “Every day — it’s either in the morning, when people are going to work or preparing to cook, or in the evening, the prime time when I’m tired and I need to go home and listen to the news and cook my supper,” said Bishop Peter Ndhlovu, who leads the 250,000-member Bible Gospel Church, an evangelical movement.

Nighttime prayer meetings in his corrugated-roof chapel have been canceled. Bishop Ndhlovu and others say they lave lost refrigerators, televisions and DVD players to the utility’s blackouts and surges.

Most of the township’s residents have adapted by turning away from their stoves and instead cooking outdoors, village-style, with homemade charcoal. “Charcoal is going very fast, because they’ve found out that Zesco is cutting power unpredictably,” the bishop said.

On Lusaka’s eastern outskirts, Mr. Mwale, the farmer, also has laid in a stock of charcoal — not to cook, but to warm his stock of newborn chicks, which must be kept at a constant 90 degrees for the three weeks after hatching.

He said he worried about the environment. Charcoal production is a major contributor to deforestation in Zambia and nearby nations. But the alternative is to take a loss on his poultry business.

“When they make a loss, they just raise their tariff,” he said of Zesco. “When I make a loss, I have to make it up myself. Is that fair?”

Zambia’s plan, like the plans of dozens of other nations, is to build its way out of the power crunch. Zesco plans $1.2 billion in generating upgrades and new capacity, financed mostly by China and India. South Africa plans more than $20 billion in upgrades; Congo is contemplating a hydroelectric station that by itself would increase capacity outside South Africa by 50 to 75 percent.

The World Bank says its financing of power projects in sub-Saharan Africa is ballooning, from $250 million five years ago to $660 million last year to $1 billion in 2007.

But many plans remain just that. Issues like creditworthiness, lax regulation, domestic politics and the sheer difficulty of sending power over rundown grids to the customer make outside investments in power stations tougher than they appear, said Tore Horvei, the chief operating officer of CIC Energy Corporation, which is based in South Africa.

The best answer, most experts consulted agree, would be for nations to cooperate on regional power solutions. One or two large regional plants, they say, could supply power more cheaply and efficiently than dozens of smaller ones.

But while that may be logical, Mr. Horvei said, “it’s very challenging in practice to do so.”

“National pride and everything else comes in,” he added.

There is an alternative: saving energy. Namibia plans a wind farm on its southern coast, while in South Africa, Eskom has handed out five million fluorescent bulbs and 140,000 insulating blankets for water heaters, and has paid industrial customers to switch off equipment during periods of high demand.

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British teenagers badly behaved, dangerous

A recent report indicates that, apparently, British youngsters and more violent, dangerous and promiscuous than anywhere else in Europe.

It’s official! Britain has the most badly behaved, promiscuous and dangerous youngsters in Europe. That is the general opinion of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think tank whose recent investigation into British teenage culture worrying concluded that: ‘Commentators fear that British youth is on the verge of mental breakdown, at risk from anti-social behaviour, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse. These concerns are, to an extent, borne out.’ This news had prompted a flurry of media attention and has caused many to question and hypothesise why exactly our youngsters are so bad.

The statistics are certainly damning:

– 38% of British 15-year-olds have tried cannabis (compared to 7% in Sweden and 27% in Germany)

– Britain’s teens are the third worst binge-drinkers in Europe (after those heavyweights from Ireland and, somewhat surprisingly, Denmark)

– One in ten teenage girls has self-harmed

– British teens have more sex than their counterparts in Germany, France and Italy, while the country also has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe

Anecdotal evidence is not hard to come by either, with many Britons in a flurry over the hoodies, yobs and gangstas hanging around on street corners and making mischief. In fact, the IPPR report reveals that 1.5m Britons have considered moving house to get away from loitering youngsters and 1.7m admit to avoiding leaving the house after dark because of worries over youths in the street. While 65% of Germans, 52% of Spaniards and 50% of Italians would be prepared to intervene if they came across a group of 14-year-old boys vandalising a bus shelter, only 34% of Britain’s fearful population would be prepared to help.

These figures have helped highlight what is certainly a growing problem in Britain. Recent years have seen an increasing number of incidents of violent crime involving teenagers (with a worrying trend towards the use of knives and guns), while Britain’s deeply entrenched drinking culture also means that underage drinking is commonplace. The government has of course been doing its best to tackle the problem, for example introducing anti-social behaviour disorders (better knows as Asbos) to punish and restrain trouble makers. Worryingly though, recent research by the Youth Justice Board shows that many young people view these Asbos as a ‘badge of honour’.

Many commentators appear to be of the opinion that it is a breakdown of traditional family life and values which is depriving Britain’s children of a normal upbringing and therefore driving them onto the streets to ‘hang out with their mates’. It is alleged that Southern European countries, with their Catholic traditions, place greater emphasis on the family unit, while in Scandinavia a strong welfare state and sense of civic duty keep children in line. The IPPR’s results do confirm this opinion to some extent, revealing that 45% of English 15-year-old boys and 59% of Scottish ones spend most evenings out with friends, while in France only 17% do. Meanwhile, 93% of Italian teenagers claim to regularly eat with their family, but just 64% of Britons do. It could though be argued that British youngsters don’t eat with their family and choose to spend time on the streets because they are troublesome rather than blaming the disappearance of the nuclear family for causing these social problems. It does though seem fair to conclude that greater contact with and respect for adults can help foster more mature and civil behaviour amongst children, and changes in Britain’s social structure undoubtedly are not helping this. There are also many who blame the poor standard of state education in Britain, particularly in the poorest areas, for helping to create and perpetuate these groups of anti-social youngsters. Certainly compared to the Scandinavian nations, Britain’s schools leave a lot to be desired ,and the worst-performing institutions can become part of the self-perpetuating cycle of kids who are under-educated, violent and inadequately prepared to enter society.

While the debate rages over the roots of this anti-social behaviour, just as importantly many are discussing exactly what should be done to help. Mark Eaton, BBC News’ home affairs editor, is firmly of the opinion that sports and activities are the way forward. Apparently kids attending sports schemes and community centres are 3% less likely to be depressed, 5% less likely to end up single, separated or divorced, 3% less like to later live in social housing and 2% less likely to obtain no qualifications. Although Eaton claims that ‘the conclusions are obvious’, these percentages seem far too low to be of real significance, and while it is desirable for children to get involved with social and sporting activities, forcing little Kevin to join the badminton club does not provide a satisfactory answer to these problems. The IPPR does though generally agree with the idea of stimulating youngsters and helping them to develop, concluding rather scientifically that: ‘Young people who do not have access to the factors that develop their non-cognitive abilities are increasingly vulnerable to failure, while their better socialised peers will increasingly succeed.’

Some other voices though claim that this is all just a case of media manipulation, with the press choosing teenagers as their latest target to demonise and blame for crime. Pam Hibbert from the children’s charity Barnardo’s cites the fact that ‘young crime in itself has remained fairly static in the last 10 years.’ She blames the media and politicians for highlighting and exaggerating violence involving youths to ‘breed fear’. This of course is not a new accusation, and it is well documented that the number of media reports of certain types of crime often does not correlate with the actual events on the street. It also must be pointed out the record numbers of teenagers are leaving school with good qualifications and more are choosing to go to university than ever before. This might though worryingly indicate a social gulf appearing between a successful, well-adjusted majority, and a dangerous, neglected minority ignored and left behind.

Whatever the reality of the situation on our streets, it is obvious that the British public are feeling more scared of and less connected with a younger generation who are increasingly viewed as dangerous and violent and who appear not to really care about others, and often themselves. However big this anti-social section of society really is, there are undoubtedly social and perhaps cultural reasons for the way they have ended up. Tackling these will be as big a challenge for Britain’s government as any they face. Tony Blair’s Asbo scheme appears not to have had much effect, while David Cameron’s calls to try to sympathise with and relate to youngsters (his media-labelled ‘hug a hoodie’ approach) remain unheeded. Either way, it seems something must be done.

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Russian complains about censorship

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov did not manage to publish his article in the leading American journal The Foreign Affairs. The article was designed to be a response to a one of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, that had been published in May — entitled "Containing Russia." After negotiations with the magazine Sergey V. Lavrov has pulled his article “because of the censorship.”

In the statement issued by the RF Foreign Ministry it is said that the Minister wanted to address directly to the audience of the magazine “in order to explain Russia’s Foreign Policy, its view of today’s international relations and ways to ensure a positive development of US-Russian relations, including interaction in international affairs.”

The Foreign Affairs is an influential American magazine devoted to foreign relations. It is issued every two months by the Council on Foreign Relations and designed to explain and comment the USA international policy.

“The Editors, with reference to their own standards, substantially edited the article, if not censored it. It was cut by 40%, losing a considerable part of its original meaning. Some editing even meant that Sergey Lavrov was to subscribe to certain Foreign Policy positions of the present US Administration, to which Russia objects on grounds of principle.” – it is said in the statement of the Foreign Ministry.

Besides that the editors required to supply the article with a subtitle which read “averting a new Cold War” or “a conflict between Russia and America”, whereas Moscow insists that any return to the Cold War is out of the enquiry.

“As a result of the excruciating and sluggish exchanges with the Editors, the likes of which could only be found in diplomatic history, it was decided to give up trying to place Sergey Lavrov’s article in Foreign Affairs. This tough experience reminded of the worst features of the Soviet censorship past, which it appears some in the US would like to repeat.” – the Ministry reports.

It is a pity, indeed, that in parts of US media there exists a trend of “state protection”, which narrows intellectual resource of America. We are convinced the USA deserves better. Lavrov’s article was to be published in May, but now it is available in English on the site of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Head of the Russian Foreign Ministry wanted to answer the article signed by Yulia V. Timoshenko published in the magazine in April. It was entitled “Containing Russia. The Sources Of Russian Conduct”. The title refers to the famous "Long Telegram," penned by an American diplomat George Kennan, who later was named one of the main ideologists of the Cold War. Timoshenko’s article was issued just by the sixtieth anniversary of Kennan’s essay.

Having made a reservation that she does not believe in a new cold war, Timoshenko claims that after the wreck of Communism the West has not still elaborated a realistic policy concerning Russia, which “straddles the world’s geopolitical heartland and is heir to a remorseless imperial tradition.”

“Accordingly, instead of drawing Russia into a network of dialogue and cooperation when it was weak — and thereby helping it form habits that would carry on when Russia regained strength — the West ignored Russia” – it is said in the article. Properly speaking, the core statement of the former Ukrainian premier is that Russia will never lose its imperial ambitions, no matter how it will develop. “The West must seek to create counterweights to Russia’s expansionism and not place all its chips on Russian domestic reform.” Support of the reforms “cannot substitute for a serious effort to counter Russia’s long-standing expansionism”, Timoshenko reckons.

“If there is one country toward which Europeans — and, indeed, the entire West — should share a common foreign policy, it is Russia.” Timoshenko considers that immediate actions are needed, inasmuch as “dependence on Russian energy supplies will only continue to grow.” She reckons that over the increasing oil and gas income Kremlin acquires an exaggerated idea of its power. The only thing that could sober it up is a coordinated policy of the West in all fields, beginning with problems of democracy, Chechnya and Kosovo and finishing with the Energy Charter Transit Protocol, Iran and relations with neighbor countries. “Indeed, Russian reform will be strengthened if Russia is encouraged to concentrate — for the first time in its history — on developing its national territory”, – Timoshenko says.

The article is written in good literary language and it is very American stylistically that allowed observers to suppose that Americans had participated in its writing. In any case it is obvious that Timoshenko is not the only person who shares statements expressed in the article. After the famous Putin’s speech in Munich there are growing harsh statements concerning Russian authorities amid American politicians and experts. The USA president George Bush who had never criticized his “friend Vladimir” before began speaking that Russia backslides on democracy, abuses dependence of the West countries on its energy supplies and all that sort of thing.

There was quite a significant interview of an American Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos given the Reuters Agency not long before Putin’s visit to Kennebunkport, Maine. Lantos, famous for his tough statements about Russia, compared Putin with the cartoon character Popeye, saying, “They’re eating the spinach of petroleum revenues, and the billions are flowing into the Kremlin, and with every billion … Putin’s muscles bulge more powerfully.”

Jule 19 the most popular Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published an interview with a famous Americal historian and political scientist Richard Pipes who claimed that relations between Russia and the West are extremely bad and that can result in a new form of a cold war. Moreover, Pipes went even farther and compared Russia not with Popeye the Sailor but with bin Laden. “For Europe, Russia could be even more dangerous than the threat of Islam, more hazardous than bin Laden”, he said. The reason is tha same: Russia strives for becoming a superpower again in order to put pressure upon European and even world economy.

“When I come to Russia I’m always stricken with hostility of the country towards the West. Containment policy with regard to the country is necessary as well as it was with regard to the Soviet Union. That concerns first of all the economy, that is West oil companies are to stop making contracts with Russia, while the banks should cut off investments.” – the scientist argued.

As for the most painful problem, American antimissile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, Pipes said “We need to settle it, otherwise Russia will think that all countries of the former socialistic camp are still within its sphere of influence”.

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Pentagon whistleblower paying the price

From a cramped motor home in a Montana campground where Internet access is as spotty as the trout, Richard Barlow wakes each morning to battle Washington.

Once a top intelligence officer at the Pentagon who helped uncover Pakistan’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, Barlow insisted on telling the truth, and it led to his undoing.

He complained in 1989 that top officials in the administration of President George H.W. Bush–including the deputy assistant secretary of defense–were misleading Congress about the Pakistani program. He was fired and stripped of his security clearances. His intelligence career was destroyed; his marriage collapsed.

Federal investigations found Barlow was unfairly fired, winning him sympathy from dozens of Democratic and Republican lawmakers and public interest groups. But for 17 years, he has fought without success to gain a federal pension, blocked at every turn by legal and political obstacles also faced by other federal intelligence whistle-blowers.

“This case has been put before the Congress to right a wrong, and for various reasons, they’ve failed to do it,” said Robert Gallucci, dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and an expert in nonproliferation. “It’s infuriating.”

Barlow, 52, and his supporters want funding added to the defense authorization bill to be debated by the Senate when it returns from recess next week. The mechanism Barlow hopes to use–a private relief bill that benefits a specific individual–is increasingly rare and, in his case, still faces hurdles.

Gallucci has known Barlow since the late 1980s, when Barlow was tracking the work of A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist amassing materials to produce nuclear weapons. Some of the men setting policy at the Defense Department at the time of Barlow’s firing–Stephen Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney–resurfaced in the current Bush administration, which Democrats and others have accused of shaping intelligence on the Iraq war to fit political goals.

Barlow’s intelligence work began at the CIA, where he analyzed nuclear programs in other countries. He contributed to the National Intelligence Estimates and presented findings to national security agencies, the White House and congressional committees. He received the CIA’s Exceptional Accomplishment Award in 1988.

The next year, he became the first intelligence officer for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, charged with analyzing nuclear weapons developments involving foreign governments. He answered to Gerald Brubaker, the acting director of the Office of Non-Proliferation. Supervising Brubaker was Victor Rostow, the principal director. Rostow reported to Deputy Assistant Secretary James Hinds, who reported to Assistant Secretary Stephen Hadley.

At the time, the government was poised to sell $1.4 billion worth of new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan to help the mujaheddin fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. But Congress, through two laws passed in 1985, had forbidden the sale of any equipment that could be used to deliver nuclear bombs.

Barlow wrote an analysis for then-Secretary Dick Cheney that concluded the planned F-16 sale violated this law. Drawing on detailed, classified studies, Barlow wrote about Pakistan’s ability, intentions and activities to deliver nuclear bombs using F-16s it had acquired before the law was passed.

Barlow discovered later that someone rewrote his analysis so that it endorsed the sale of the F-16s. Arthur Hughes, the deputy assistant secretary of defense, testified to Congress that using the F-16s to deliver nuclear weapons “far exceeded the state of art in Pakistan” –something Barlow knew to be untrue.

In the summer of 1989, Barlow told Brubaker, Rostow and Michael MacMurray, the Pakistan desk officer in charge of military sales to Pakistan who prepared Hughes’s testimony, that Congress had been misled.

Within days, Barlow was fired.

“They clearly didn’t want the nonproliferation policy to get in the way of their regional policy,” Gallucci said. “They were worried someone like Rich (Barlow), in his stickler approach, would insist that if there’s going to be testimony on the Hill about the F-16 aircraft, that the answers be full and truthful. He was a thorn in their side, and they went after him. And they did a very good job of screwing up his life.”

In a 2000 deposition provoked by Barlow’s subsequent lawsuit, Hadley said he remembered underlings proposing to terminate an employee in August 1989 but did not recall “someone named Richard Barlow.” In a separate deposition, Wolfowitz also testified he could not recall Barlow. But Wolfowitz told Congress in 1990 that the retaliation Barlow faced was wrong and the government was legally obligated to keep Congress informed about Pakistan’s nuclear capability.

“There have been times on that issue when I specifically sensed that people thought we could somehow construct a policy on a house of cards that the Congress wouldn’t know what the Pakistanis were doing,” Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

After a 1993 joint probe, the inspector general at the State Department concluded that Barlow had been fired as a reprisal, while the inspector generals at the CIA and the Defense Department maintained that the Pentagon was within its rights to fire Barlow. Congress directed the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) to conduct its own investigation, which was completed in 1997 and largely vindicated Barlow.

Barlow’s security clearances were restored, but he was unable to get rehired permanently by the government because of the cloud over his record, he said. Instead, he has worked as a contractor for a range of federal agencies, including the CIA, the State Department, the FBI and Sandia National Laboratories.

That left him without the $89,500 annual pension and health insurance that Barlow believes the government owes him.

He faces no organized opposition now but has so far been stymied by government inertia, the passage of time, congressional procedural errors, and endless debates over how much money he’s due and the proper legislative vehicle for his pension.

Twenty Senators and eight legislative committees have considered his case over the years without resolving it, suggesting a larger dilemma: No process exists to compensate fired whistle-blowers in the intelligence field, and those who retaliate against them face no criminal penalties.

A 1998 law instead allows employees of the CIA, parts of the Defense Department, the FBI and the National Security Agency to notify their agency’s inspector general that they intend to disclose a matter of “urgent concern” to congressional intelligence committees. But there is no remedy if they suffer retaliation for using this legal channel.

“There just isn’t a venue for someone like him,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit organization that investigates and exposes corruption. “He was trying to prevent lies to Congress about something of global importance. And he didn’t even go to Congress–all he did was suggest that Congress not be lied to.”

Brian and Gallucci believe that had Barlow’s alarms been heeded in 1989, Khan might have been deterred from building the world’s largest atomic black market–a network that has since supplied nuclear weapons technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea.

Some Hill staffers say they worry that granting Barlow a pension will cause hundreds of other injured whistle-blowers to demand similar treatment. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a known champion of whistle-blowers who supports Barlow’s quest, is contacted each week by four new whistle-blowers looking for help, said his spokeswoman, Beth Levine. But Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., is considering sponsoring legislation providing Barlow a pension or a lump-sum payment, a staffer said.

Bingaman attempted to sponsor a private relief bill for Barlow once before, in 1998. But another senator persuaded colleagues to refer it to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which hears lawsuits that seek money from the federal government in excess of $10,000. During the case, which lasted four years, the Justice Department invoked a “state secrets” privilege to block the court from seeing most of Barlow’s evidence, according to Barlow’s pro bono lawyer, Joseph Ostoyich.

In 2002, the court found that Barlow was not entitled to protection under whistle-blower laws. “It was a galling situation,” Ostoyich said. “There was plenty of evidence … and all of (it) … was taken out of the court’s hands. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Barlow’s original pro bono attorney, Paul Warnke, who was President Jimmy Carter’s chief arms-control negotiator, died in 2001.

An attempt several months ago by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., to sponsor a private relief bill for Barlow encountered resistance from House Armed Services Committee lawyers who said there was no precedent for it, according to her staff. Next, she tried to offer a simple resolution stating that Congress supported Barlow in his efforts, but that was thwarted by the Rules Committee, which was juggling more than 100 other requests deemed more pressing.

Since his most recent employment contract at Sandia ended, Barlow has been living in a motor home that he parks in Montana during the summer and drives to Arizona or California in the winter. Most of his possessions, including 200 pounds of documents related to his fight, are sitting in a storage locker he rents for $100 a month.

Most weekdays, he pushes his cause in cellphone calls and e-mails to Washington from his motor home, dogging Hill staffers with a tenacity that seems bottomless and can be off-putting. “This is such an extraordinary case,” Brian said. “He was trying to say `Wait a minute, Congress needs to be told the truth because they’re making important decisions about nuclear proliferation,’ and the guy is living in a trailer.”

Tintin’s racist past

When British lawyer David Enright opened the pages of a comic book entitled Tintin In The Congo while in a shop with his wife and two young boys, he was probably expecting a benign adventure story full of fun for all the family.

Instead what he found was a "highly offensive" collection of racist caricatures of Africans, from superstitious natives to incoherent simpletons, and in a letter of complaint he demanded that the Borders bookstore in his hometown of St. Albans stop selling the comic book.

Tintin is Belgium’s most famous export, with over 200 million copies of his adventures sold worldwide. In May Variety even reported that co-founder of *DreamWorks* Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson were planning a Tintin trilogy, no doubt tempted by the $3 billion gross raked in by Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. Could one angry British lawyer derail the reputation of a true comic book hero?

The incident has snowballed into a very British scandal, with the Commission for Racial Equality backing Enright and demanding that all Borders stores take Tintin’s Congolese adventures off their shelves. Now even the police are involved, with the Hertfordshire police deciding to record Enright’s complaint as a "racist incident."

Borders’ response has been to move all copies of the comic to the "adult graphic" section of the store from the childrens’ section, but the book seller refused to stop selling it outright.

It’s not the first time accusations of racism have been leveled against Hergé, the late Belgian cartoonist who created the iconic orange-haired reporter known as Tintin. When the character first appeared in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets at the end of the 1920s, he stood for conservative, Catholic values, showing up the godless credo of communism. It is no accident that in his second adventure in 1931, Tintin In The Congo, the intrepid reporter is saved from the snapping jaws of angry crocodiles by a bearded Catholic missionary dressed in white.

But Hergé himself regretted his early work, as well as his personal attachment to a Catholic abbot with fascist sympathies called Norbert Wallez. In an interview released in 1983, the artist said: "The fact is that while I was growing up, I was being fed the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me. It’s true that Soviets and Congo were youthful sins. I’m not rejecting them. However, if I were to do it again, they would be different."

Tintin In The Congo did not even make it to the U.K. until 2005, over 70 years after its first appearance in French, because of the controversy surrounding it. When the publisher Egmont finally released the English version, it billed it as an "essential volume for collectors," making sure to wrap a label around the comic that warned readers of its potentially "offensive" content.

And the huge divide between post-colonial Britain and Belgium in the 1930s, when the kingdom still owned the Congo, adds to the shock of today’s reader discovering Tintin’s adventure for the first time. The story is filled with witch doctors, lazy natives who need to be put to work and over-the-top violence against animals.

According to Mark Rodwell, representative of Moulinsart–the firm that manages Hergé’s estate–this explains why children ignorant of the past don’t have the same reaction.

"The criticism is that it’s not suitable for children," he told Forbes.com. "But it’s the adults that have the problem with it. It’s a book of its time."

подвесной светильник Фільчаков прокурор

Israelis seeking German citizenship

The number of Israelis who obtained German citizenship rose sharply last year in a sign that a younger generation of Jews is shedding an aversion to the country where the Holocaust was masterminded.

According to figures published by the Federal Statistics Office this week, 4,313 Israelis received citizenship last year, an increase of over 50 percent compared to 2005, and the largest total since German records began a quarter of a century ago.

German law makes it easy for former citizens who fled the country during Nazi rule to regain their citizenship and offers the same chance to their descendants.

But few Israelis took advantage of this until recently — a shift experts attribute to rising political instability in the Middle East, opportunities within an enlarged European Union and new attitudes towards Germany of a younger Israeli generation.

The Nazis killed an estimated six million European Jews during their 12-year rule.

"The grandparents did not want to be German for obvious reasons. They taught their children that being German was a bad thing. But this is the first generation which thinks differently," said Katy Elmaliah, whose law firm in Tel Aviv helps young Israelis get German passports.

Candidates are seeking better educational and work opportunities in the 27-nation EU.

"They know it opens the door for the EU and offers many opportunities," she told Reuters.

Estimates show that some 300,000 Israelis may be eligible to become German citizens.

There are now an estimated 100,000 Jews in Germany compared with 600,000 before the war. At the end of WWII only 12,000 Jews remained.

A flood of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s led to a rebirth of Germany’s Jewish community.

Lothar Schulz, from the federal authority which deals with granting citizenships, said renewed violence between Israel and its neighbors was a factor in the rise in applications from Israel.

"They can come here and their doors are open to most countries in the world," he said.

An Israeli man in his 30s who recently obtained citizenship but did not want to be cited by name said being German opened up new horizons for him and his family.

"For my mother and my father the memories of the past are too hard. They would never want to be German but for me it is important that I can have a European passport," he said. "I have no problem being German."

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Boer roar

The voice rolled through the night with the force and timbre of a highveld storm. The crowd listening clearly rejoiced to hear their beloved Afrikaans sung with such passion and power. It was hard to be sure in the flickering light of the candles, but there must have been at least 600 people under the stars in a grassy primary school arena in Krugersdorp, outside Johannesburg – all gathered to hear a young rock musician, the latest idol of Afrikanerdom, perform.

One by one they got to their feet as the concert reached its climax. Matrons in floral print dresses, students, barefoot children and civil servants all started swaying to the music. A few had tears in their eyes. Some wore the uniform of the South African farmer: khaki shirt, shorts and long socks. A couple of jokers had dressed up in the regalia of the Boer war of 1899-1902. But most were middle-class Afrikaners – the sort who had once supported the National party, apartheid’s creators.

It was like stepping back in time to the jittery last months of white rule in early 1994, which I covered as a correspondent. After 45 years of Afrikaner domination of South Africa, apartheid, imposed in 1948, ended far more smoothly than many had predicted. There were some sabotage attempts: white rightwingers set off bombs, killing more than 20 people. But most Afrikaners were too affluent and too sensible to flirt with extremism. They took a deep breath and opted, however uncertainly, for the new era.

Since democracy came to South Africa, the Afrikaner volk has been largely out of the spotlight. The National party dissolved itself. Four years ago a far-right group called the Boeremag (Boer force) attempted a bombing campaign in Soweto, which resulted in one death and the arrests of the alleged conspirators, who are still on trial for treason. But the great majority of Afrikaners, many of whose forebears fought the British in the Boer war and then supported the imposition of apartheid on the country, have quietly got on with their lives.

But the Krugersdorp concert, at the Protea Ridge primary school, was part of a new stirring in Afrikanerdom. The performer, a young folk-rock singer called Bok van Blerk, strummed his hit song: an elegy to Koos de la Rey, a daring general whose guerrilla campaign infuriated the British and helped to delay their ultimate victory by more than a year. The song shot to the top of the Afrikaans music charts, the compact disc on which it appeared swiftly becoming the second bestselling Afrikaans album of modern times. (The bestseller was a compilation for the 1995 Rugby World Cup.) As Bok’s fame spread via the radio and the internet, he crisscrossed the country, performing to packed audiences in theatres, school playing fields and stadiums.

The English translation of the chorus may sound banal: “De la Rey, De la Rey, will you come and lead the Boers? General, general, we will fall around you as one.” But when delivered in that gravelly voice, with its martial lyrics and its military beat, Afrikaner pulses start racing. Rugby crowds began bellowing for it to be played before matches.

Commentators agonised over what it meant. Was it a sign of renewed Afrikaner confidence? A paean to white rule? Or a reminder of a happier and simpler time when Afrikaners did not have to feel guilty about their past? Sympathetic voices in the media suggested that the song had tapped into a feeling of alienation creeping over some white South Africans in the 14th year of majority rule. Others retorted that the lyrics oozed rightwing revanchism and implicitly challenged the legitimacy of the ruling African National Congress. Whatever his intentions, young Bok had clearly roused a grassroots Afrikaner populism.

In the days of apartheid Krugersdorp was the ultimate bourgeois Afrikaner suburb, a repository of contented National party values. The neat suburban houses with their swimming pools mirror the environment that Bok, whose real name is Louis Pepler, was born into 29 years ago. His father was a civil servant working for the National Productivity Institute – part of the sprawling state bureaucracy which the National party used to provide jobs for thousands of Afrikaners. It was an affirmative action policy not dissimilar to the one the ANC today uses to promote black employment – and which cost Bok’s father his own job in 1995.

Before the concert, a tubby Afrikaans policeman waved me past a melee of Bok fans barbecuing their supper. I walked into the band’s changing room, vaguely expecting to find a khaki-clad throwback to the past. Instead I met a young man who looked like he could have been a Scandinavian entrant in a 1970s Eurovision Song Contest.

Bok is tall, with short-cropped hair and a little goatee beard. He was wearing bracelets, a crisp white T-shirt and ripped designer jeans. His chirpy band members were clearly bemused by all the attention. In late 2006 they were just one of many South African bands hoping to surf a new wave of interest in Afrikaans music. Now they were preparing to embark on an international tour, first in Namibia, then in London, to play for expatriates at Canary Wharf.

Bok happily concedes that his career exemplifies a flowering of Afrikaner culture. While Afrikaans has lost its predominance – it is just one of 11 official languages and no longer the language of government it was under apartheid – Afrikaner literary and music festivals are thriving. Websites testify to the emergence of a zappy new urban Afrikaner set. Many of the old Afrikaner corporations, which were founded by the Nationalists to take on the English speakers who traditionally dominated business, have modernised and prospered since sanctions fell at the end of white rule.

I asked Bok what his song was about. “It’s funny,” he says in slightly halting English. “The song wasn’t written for [a political] reason. I’m a singer, not a politician. I wanted to create something for people to be proud of. It’s like ‘Flower of Scotland’. There’s a warm feeling inside and it’s got that feel to it. My generation of Afrikaners wants to be proud of who we are, and where we come from, and our language, this whole Afrikaans thing. We grew up with the guilt of apartheid, being told, ‘You are wrong – apartheid is on your heads.’ We don’t want to say sorry any more. This is a democratic South Africa and we have moved on. We keep on being told that if we have a white skin, we can’t get a job. You walk into an interview and are told, ’Sorry’. People are fed up. The younger generation says ’enough’.”

Those who think there is a secret message in his choice of de la Rey, a bitter-einder who fought the British to the bitter end, are wrong, he insists. The reason he chose de la Rey is that it is easier to find words that rhyme with the name. The song wouldn’t have worked with Boer war generals such as de Wet, Botha or Smuts. “We wanted to write a song of the Anglo-Boer war. It is a very important war in the history of South Africa. We wanted to sing a song about history and the general, to be proud. De la Rey did not want to go to war. He stood up for the right things, for freedom, and he even said you should not discriminate because of the colour of your skin.”

To present de la Rey as a champion of a multiracial South Africa is a stretch. He was, it is true, a reluctant warrior; he argued against the push for a pre-emptive strike against British troops. But black South Africans were in those days seen by both armies as little more than hewers of wood and drawers of water. Yet Bok’s account of the song’s origins – and the reasons for its success – had a convincing ring. Clearly it appeals to rightwing racists and old-style Nationalists clinging to the past and despairing of the future. But he has also tapped into a hankering among Afrikaners – in particular of his own generation – to be allowed to shed their past and speak their minds.

As I wait for the concert to begin I join a queue at the makeshift bar. Kyle Esterhuyse and Shawn Luppa, both in their last year at high school, are in line to buy drinks for their girlfriends. They are Generation Bok. They were small children when white rule ended. Liberated from the stigma of apartheid, they can travel abroad without facing the hostile questions their parents used to endure. Indeed, like many of the generation, they are looking forward to what has become a young Afrikaner rite of passage – a stint working in London.

Cheerful, they exude the good health that comes from 18 years of growing up in relative affluence under Johannesburg’s diamond-bright skies. Far from hankering for the old days, they describe the end of apartheid as the best thing that ever happened to South Africa. But as happens in so many conversations with white South Africans (and not just Afrikaners), their attention soon turns to crime and affirmative action.

“The blacks at our school act as if it’s apartheid in reverse,” says Kyle. “My girlfriend’s aunt used to be a chartered accountant and they gave her job away because she was white.”

Shawn breaks in to tell of being held up the other day when he was on his way home from the local shop. He had to hand over two boxes of cigarettes and all his cash – 20 rand (£1.50). Kyle adds: “Two days ago our neighbour pulled into the yard. They tied him up. I was checking on my rabbits when I came upon him. They took his car and television. Police said they were planning on shooting him but they must have heard me coming.”

By now Bok is on stage. His warm-up songs are hardly the material of irredentist fantasy. They included a tribute to Bryan Habana, the Springboks’ black rugby wing; a jaunty number entitled “Girls in Bikinis”, and then one of the highlights, a riff mimicking Nelson Mandela’s high-pitched tone: “I would like you to welcome my favourite singer of all time: Bok van Blerk…viva Bok viva!” The tone is affectionate; there is no edge.

But the audience has come for one song, and when it comes, at the very end of the show, they explode into life, belting out the chorus as if singing an ancestral tribal anthem. Watching from the fringe is Kobus Koekemoer, a former civil servant turned businessman, and Conrad, his 23-year-old son, a recent tourism graduate from Potchefstroom University. “The Zulus have their leader,” Conrad says, referring to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the leader of the mainly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party. “Where is the Boer leader? We need a leader. It’s not political. We just want someone to stand up for us.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s vision of a “rainbow nation” clearly holds little appeal for Conrad. Looking at the orderly, all-white stream of people leaving the concert he rolls his eyes. “If this were a black crowd leaving, it would be chaos. People would be drunk and shouting.” His father is more guarded. “It doesn’t mean anything, this song,” he says. ”It just gives you a warm feeling in your heart.”

A month or so later Bok and his band played a gig in Sasolburg, a drab industrial town south of Johannesburg. They were due to perform at the Etienne Rousseau Theatre, a soulless brick monolith typical of the totalitarian architecture of the Nationalists’ days in power. As Bok’s minibus rolled into the car park a group of young white girls, barefoot and in sundresses, rushed over to hug him. Fifty yards away, a solitary young black man sitting on a patch of public grass looked on expressionless, resting in the last of the evening sun.

Mohapi Sekeleoane works part-time at the local council. He lives in the township on the edge of Sasolburg. He had never heard of the de la Rey song, still less Bok. He also had a jaundiced view of the state of race relations in South Africa. “Apartheid is finished as a signature on paper,” he said. ”But in all our minds it is still there. Whites here still treat you the same.”

His view was a reminder of the chasm that still separates the races in South Africa outside the wealthy metropolitan areas. It was also a counterpoint to the victim mentality of some Afrikaners. Crime is appalling, and affirmative action is driving numbers of Afrikaners abroad in search of employment, but white South Africans do have a tendency to forget how relatively little they have been expected to pay, or do, to reverse the injustices of apartheid.

This clearly irks the ANC and it worries Carl Niehaus, one of the ruling party’s most prominent Afrikaners. “Bok has obviously touched some chord,” he said. “Part of it relates to a lack of understanding from young Afrikaners of where we come from. They somehow feel they are the victims of the sins of their fathers. It’s indicative of a dilemma. How do Afrikaners define themselves? Do they see themselves first as South Africans and then Afrikaners, or first as Afrikaners and then as South Africans? They are right: there is no strong Afrikaner leader. But should there be? My own belief is that they are extraordinarily fortunate to be in a society that has worked through the ravages of apartheid and hasn’t turned on the white community.”

Afrikaners need to learn some important lessons from Zimbabwe, Niehaus adds. White Zimbabweans stood apart from the rest of their society, which made it easier for President Robert Mugabe to turn on them. “No one can be forced to be part of the mainstream, but I would prefer to see Afrikaners involved in the mainstream of South Africa,” he says. Niehaus grew up in the small conservative town of Zeerust. He broke with his tribe to join the ANC in 1980. Convicted of high treason in 1983, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He served seven and a half years before being released with the unbanning of the ANC and went on to become Nelson Mandela’s spokesman. Niehaus is startled that the de la Rey song has become so popular – not just in conservative rural areas but also in the “higher end of the Afrikaner community”, in affluent university towns such as Stellenbosch in the Cape.

One Stellenbosch Bok aficionado is Hermann Giliomee, professor of history at the university and one of the most renowned conservative Afrikaner academics. Sitting on his stoep in a woolly tanktop, he says that a good 50 per cent of Afrikaners have done “fairly well” in the post-apartheid era. He is certainly prospering. His latest work, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People was expected to sell about 4,000 copies. Instead it sold 20,000 – a runaway bestseller by South African standards. But he regards the furore over the de la Rey song as reflecting a clash between the need of Afrikaners to assert their identity and intolerance on the part of the ANC.

“The froth of the miracle has disappeared and those Afrikaners who have decided to stay have said, ’I need to know my roots or I will get swept aside.’ They must know their history because the ANC’s version is one of guilt and shame.”

Giliomee sees himself as being on the frontline in the defence of Afrikaans and Afrikaner culture. He is deeply concerned by the ANC’s move to rename a number of Afrikaner towns and streets. His is one of several traditionally Afrikaans universities and schools embroiled in a bitter fight over what their language of instruction should be. Five years ago, in a bid to encourage more black students to apply for places, the authorities at Stellenbosch University agreed that English could be taught in the first year of undergraduate courses. Now there is pressure for this to be extended throughout the university. Of the 1,396 schools that taught solely in Afrikaans in 1993, fewer than 60 per cent are left, mostly in the Western Cape. This reflects the government’s attepts to redress the inequalities of apartheid and open up formerly white schools to black South Africans, but many Afrikaner leaders, including F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, are worried that the very survival of Afrikaans is at stake.

In the frontispiece of his book, Giliomee quotes the author and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel: “To live without a past is worse than to live without a future.” His concern for the survival of Afrikaans intensified recently when the police chief in Western Cape province said police statements should be in English. For Giliomee, the de la Rey song came at the right time. “When I first heard this CD, I said it was like 9/11, a bolt from the blue. It was for us a unique stroke of luck. It hit just the right note.”

Four months after that Krugersdorp concert, the Bok phenomenon has slipped from newspaper front pages. The ANC has wisely decided to play down the controversy. Bok is planning to release another album. The Canary Wharf gig was a success, although it took place in a pub rather than a stadium. Bok seems relieved he is no longer a political football.

Yet when the histories of the immediate post-apartheid era are written, the de la Rey affair will almost certainly be seen as a milestone for Afrikaners. Possibly the most acute commentary came from Antjie Krog, a prominent Afrikaans poet and author of Country of My Skull, a haunting account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the body set up to address South Africa’s troubled past.

In an essay in Johannesburg’s Mail & Guardian newspaper she suggested that the de la Rey brouhaha had been fuelled by the desire of some non-Afrikaners, white and black, to revive the traditional apartheid-era notion of the wicked rightwing Boer. The song had given people a chance to say, “Wow the Afrikaners are at it again,” she wrote. She said people needed to distinguish between two very different types of Bok fans: a minority of rightwingers, and a far larger number of middle-of-the-road Afrikaners who were unsure of themselves and their future and felt unable to shed their past.

A scene I recently witnessed in a small house on the outskirts of Ladysmith, in KwaZulu-Natal province, lent credence to her theory. Renee Human, a keen amateur historian whose forebears fought against the British forces, and her 48-year-old son, Jan, a farmer and businessman, were discussing the de la Rey phenomenon. For his children, who are in their late teens and early twenties, the Boer war is ancient history, Jan says. They have not been to the nearby battlefields. Yet they have heard and like the de la Rey song.

“It seems to have filled a void,” he ventures. “My 16-year-old went to a rugby tournament. They had songs to fit all cultures. The Afrikaners played the de la Rey song.” His mother had never heard the song before. As she listened to it on her CD player, a dreamy look crossed her face. “It’s like a waltz…” she said, and she sashayed across the room.

“It’s the sort of song that wouldn’t have been written in 1994,” Jan said. “Everyone was that much more careful then. Young Afrikaners don’t feel the same reticence now. They don’t see why they can’t express themselves. Our children feel baffled that they have to put up with the problems that we caused.”

Фильчаков прокурор

This is how Empires end

Responding to the call of Pope Urban II at Claremont in 1095, the Christian knights of the First Crusade set out for the Holy Land. In 1099, Jerusalem was captured. As their port in Palestine, the Crusaders settled on Acre on the Mediterranean.

There they built the great castle that was overrun by Saladin in 1187, but retaken by Richard the Lion-Hearted in 1191. Acre became the capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the stronghold of the Crusader state, which fell to the Mameluks in a bloody siege in 1291. The Christians left behind were massacred.

The ruins of Acre are now a tourist attraction.

Any who have visited this last outpost of Christendom in the Holy Land before Gen. Allenby marched into Jerusalem in 1917 cannot – on reading of the massive U.S. embassy rising in Baghdad – but think of Acre.

At a cost of $600 million, with walls able to withstand mortar and rocket fire, and space to accommodate 1,000 Americans, this mammoth embassy, largest on earth, will squat on the banks of the Tigris inside the Green Zone.

But, a decade hence, will the U.S. ambassador be occupying this imperial compound? Or will it be like the ruins of Acre?

What raises the question is a sense the United States, this time, is truly about to write off Iraq as a lost cause.

The Republican lines on Capitol Hill are crumbling. Starting with Richard Lugar, one GOP senator after another has risen to urge a drawdown of U.S. forces and a diplomatic solution to the war.

But this is non-credible. How can U.S. diplomats win at a conference table what 150,000 U.S. troops cannot secure on a battlefield?

Though Henry Kissinger was an advocate of this unnecessary war, he is not necessarily wrong when he warns of "geopolitical calamity." Nor is Ryan Crocker, U.S. envoy in Iraq, necessarily wrong when he says a U.S. withdrawal may be the end of the American war, but it will be the start of bloodier wars in Iraq and across the region.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari also warns of the perils of a rapid withdrawal: "The dangers vary from civil war to dividing the country to regional wars … the danger is huge. Until the Iraqi forces and institutions complete their readiness, there is a responsibility on the U.S. and other countries to stand by the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people to help build up their capabilities."

In urging a redeployment of U.S. forces out of Iraq, and a new focus on diplomacy, Lugar listed four strategic goals. Prevent creation of a safe haven for terrorists. Prevent sectarian war from spilling out into the broader Middle East. Prevent Iran’s domination of the region. Limit the loss of U.S. credibility through the region and world as a result of a failed mission in Iraq.

But how does shrinking the U.S. military power and presence in Iraq advance any of these goals?

Longtime critics of the war like Gen. William Odom say it is already lost, and fighting on will only further bleed the country and make the ultimate price even higher. The general may be right in saying it is time to cut our losses. But we should take a hard look at what those losses may be.

It is a near certainty the U.S.-backed government will fall and those we leave behind will suffer the fate of our Vietnamese and Cambodian friends in 1975. As U.S. combat brigades move out, contractors, aid workers and diplomats left behind will be more vulnerable to assassination and kidnapping. There could be a stampede for the exit and a Saigon ending in the Green Zone.

The civil and sectarian war will surely escalate when we go, with Iran aiding its Shi’ite allies and Sunni nations aiding the Sunnis. A breakup of the country seems certain. Al-Qaeda will claim it has run the U.S. superpower out of Iraq and take the lessons it has learned to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. The Turks, with an army already on the border, will go in to secure their interests in not having the Kurdish PKK operating from Iraq and in guaranteeing there is no independent Kurdistan. What will America do then?

As for this country, the argument over who is responsible for the worst strategic debacle in American history will be poisonous.

With a U.S. defeat in Iraq, U.S. prestige would plummet across the region. Who will rely on a U.S. commitment for its security? Like the British and French before us, we will be heading home from the Middle East.

What we are about to witness is how empires end.

America’s Germ-Warfare Rash

In his bellicose Cincinnati, Ohio, speech of October 7, 2002, President George W. Bush warned that Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten America with "horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons." While Iraq’s possession of these weapons later proved to be unfounded, the president’s charges did point to a certain germ of truth: they neatly described his own operations.

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has spent at least $44 billion on biological "defense" without ever making made a true needs assessment. In the early 1990s the Kremlin shut down their huge, Soviet-era germ warfare operation and, while Israel, Iran, and North Korea are known to have biological weapons research facilities and India, China, and Cuba are said to be building high-security labs to study lethal bacteria and viruses, these initial or potential programs are disproportionately behind the massive efforts underway in the United States. In the words of Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, an Austin, Texas-based group that tracks research involving biological agents: "Our biowarfare research is defending ourselves from ourselves. It’s a dog chasing its tail."

Milton Leitenberg is an arms control authority and a member of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and UM’s Center for International and Security Studies. In his 2005 book, Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat, Leitenberg writes that the risk of terrorists and nonstate actors using biological agents "has been systematically and deliberately exaggerated," particularly after the 2001 anthrax attacks on Congress and media outlets. He contends that U.S. officials undertook a concerted effort to promote their view on the international stage and that an "edifice of institutes, programs, conferences, and publicists" continues to spread what he calls exaggeration and scare-mongering.

What’s more, while floating extravagant tales of terrorists planning to launch deadly germ attacks on the United States, the Bush administration has been diverting dollars from urgent medical research against real threats, such as avian influenza, to the creation of new strains of extinct killer diseases like Spanish flu. Upon his retirement in December 2004, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson cited pandemic flu as the greatest threat to the nation. Yet according to Leitenberg, Washington policymakers instead have focused on bioterrorism and biodefense.

Leitenberg posits it might take just such a pandemic to demonstrate to the public that Washington "has been using the overwhelming proportion of its relevant resources to prepare for the wrong contingency." From 1977 to 1999, he notes, flu killed 788,000 people in the United States, about 36,000 a year. Even if there is no outbreak of pandemic flu, one could project 360,000 American deaths from flu over the next decade. When these figures are contrasted with the five deaths from the 2001 anthrax attacks, it is little short of amazing that in fiscal year 2006 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) received $1.76 billion for biodefense but only $120 million to fight influenza.

If taxpayers are slow to recognize that billions of their tax dollars are being poured into hundreds of biological cesspools, some scientific bodies are not. According to the nonprofit Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (CAC) in Washington, DC, in 2001 the U.S. government spent $1.6 billion to address the threat of biological weapons. By 2006 total spending had reached $36 billion, with a record $8 billion more earmarked for FY 2007. As noted, one of the leading agencies allocating such funds is the NIH, billed as "the steward of medical and behavioral research for the Nation." Two years ago, the growing slice of the NIH budget being shifted to biodefense research–money that has traditionally gone to fighting diseases such as cancer–prompted 750 of the 1,143 NIH-funded scientists studying bacterial diseases to write an open letter to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni charging that the research center’s emphasis on biodefense had diminished their efforts to achieve basic research breakthroughs.

The public has good reason for concern. In the introduction to Francis Boyle’s 2005 book, Biowarfare and Terrorism, MIT molecular biology professor Jonathan King writes: "the Bush administration launched a major program which threatens to put the health of our people at far greater risk than the hazard to which they claimed to have been responding." Bush’s policies, he continues, "do not increase the security of the American people" but "bring new risk to our population of the most appalling kind."

From Washington State to Florida and from Massachusetts to California, the United States has broken out in a rash of federally funded biological warfare operations with as many as four hundred labs involved in research related to pathogens that could be used as bioweapons agents. According to the Sunshine Project, most states have a facility of some sort, ranging from an open-air testing location to aerosol test chambers to Biosafety Level 3 or Level 4 operations, the latter being one in which the pathogens being tampered with are deadly, easily transmissible, and have no known cure. Additionally, there are laboratories in a number of states whose activity is classified as secret. Beyond the NIH, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the military are heavily engaged in such work, some of it conducted abroad, such as the Navy’s labs in Egypt, Peru, Indonesia, and Germany.

Biological warfare involves the use of living organisms for military purposes. Such weapons can be viral, bacterial, and fungal, among other forms, and can be spread over a large geographic terrain by wind, water, insect, animal, or human transmission. Among the most dangerous pathogens under study are anthrax, tularemia, plague, and ebola virus, as well as toxins (living organisms such as fungi). Using genetic engineering, U.S. government scientists are purportedly concocting new strains of lethal microbes for which there are no cures. Bacteria, for example, can be made resistant to vaccines. Indeed, they can be made more virulent, easier to disseminate, and harder to eradicate. Some pathogens are even being injected with genes to make them resistant to antibiotic drugs.Words fail to describe this "achievement," coming from the same country that gave the world the Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin polio vaccines.

As part of its buildup, in January 2005 the Army authorized construction of a new facility at the already sprawling U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. According to a July 31, 2006, report in London’s Guardian, Fort Detrick’s National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC), due to be completed in 2008, "will house heavily guarded and hermetically sealed chambers in which scientists simulate potential terrorist attacks." The scientists will dress in full-body spacesuits and use aerosol-test chambers to expose animals to deadly pathogens. To do so, the Guardian reported, the world’s most lethal bacteria and viruses would have to be produced and stockpiled. Questions of international law violations and the hastening of a biological arms race persist.

In December 2006 Battelle National Biodefense Institute hooked the $250-million, five-year DHS contract to run the NBACC. According to the Washington Post, much of what transpires at that center may never be known as the government intends to operate the facility largely in secret. In its July 30, 2006, article, the Post reported:

The heart of the lab is a cluster of sealed chambers built to contain the world’s deadliest bacteria and viruses. There, scientists will spend their days simulating the unthinkable: bioterrorism attacks in the form of lethal anthrax spores rendered as wispy powders that can drift for miles on a summer breeze, or common viruses turned into deadly superbugs that ordinary drugs and vaccines cannot stop.

University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle charges that the Bush administration is spending more money in inflation-adjusted dollars to develop illegal, offensive germ warfare than the $2 billion the United States spent on the Manhattan Project to make the atomic bomb. That weapon’s development was, at least, driven by the realistic fears that Nazi Germany might develop it first. Today, no comparable enemy exists.

Peculiarly, the only significant deadly germ warfare attack on the United States appeared to have come from the government’s own Fort Detrick site. A month after 9/11, the mysterious anthrax attacks killed five, sickened seventeen, and alarmed the nation. The perpetrator was never found (a poor showing for a country that spends $40 billion a year on intelligence), but the anthrax-laced letters to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) prodded Congress to rubberstamp an expansion of spending for biological defense through the Patriot and Project BioShield acts.

Project BioShield is a $5.6-billion plan under which the Department of Homeland Security is stockpiling vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox, and other germ warfare agents. There is considerable dispute as to whether the plan’s activities open the door to aggressive use of such agents. According to Boyle, pursuant to two national strategy directives adopted by Bush in 2002, the Pentagon "is now gearing up to fight and ‘win’ biological warfare without prior public knowledge and review." The Pentagon’s Chemical and Biological Defense Program was revised in 2003 to implement those directives, endorsing "first-use" strike of chemical and biological weapons in war. Boyle calls the directives the proverbial smoking gun and further points to President Bush’s Homeland Security Presidential Directive, HSPD-10, of April 28, 2004, which states:

We are continuing to develop more forward-looking analyses, to include Red Teaming efforts, to understand new scientific trends that may be exploited by our adversaries to develop biological weapons and to help position intelligence collectors ahead of the problem.

"’Red Teaming’ means that we actually have people out there on a Red Team plotting, planning, and scheming how to use biowarfare," says Boyle. The Army has stated its work is, and will continue to be, solely defensive in nature. But when it comes to biowarfare and the agents involved, how do you prepare to defend against such threats without developing them?

According to Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Biotech Century, "it is widely acknowledged that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between defensive and offensive research in the field." Still, as a signatory to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (entered into force in 1975), the United States is officially bound to the treaty, the scope of which is defined in Article 1:

Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain: (1) Microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes; (2) Weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.

University of Maryland’s Leitenberg, a long-time authority in the arms control field, contends the government is not developing germ warfare weapons. However, in a monograph published by his organization, he does question whether ongoing research crosses the line:

There is no such thing as ‘defensive’ biological weapons. Whatever military doctrine may say regarding distinctions between offensive and defensive conventional weapons, this does not apply to biological weapons. Article 1.1 of the BWC allows the growth of laboratory quantities of pathogens (agents) for defensive purposes, that is, in order to develop vaccines and pharmaceuticals, test rapid detection systems, masks, decontamination systems and so on. However, even the ‘development’ of the pathogen is explicitly forbidden–"never in any circumstances"–as is production and stockpiling.

Boyle, who drafted the 1989 federal law enacted by Congress that criminalized BWC violations, sees it more definitively; he contends the government is creating a killing machine. Fort Detrick’s activities betray aggressive intent, he says, and should be shut down and those responsible jailed. Others also apparently believe the line has been crossed. Commenting on Fort Detrick, Mark Wheelis, a microbiology professor at the University of California at Davis, told the Global Security Newswire in June 2004 there was no question that the activities underway there mirrored how offensive biological weapons capability would be developed. "We’re going to develop new pathogens for various purposes. We’re going to develop new ways of packaging them, new ways of disseminating them," Wheelis outlined. "We’re going to harden them to environmental degradation. We’ll be prepared to go offensive at the drop of a hat if we so desire." And on July 30, 2006, Leitenberg told the Washington Post, "If we saw others doing this kind of research, we would view it as an infringement of the bioweapons treaty. You can’t go around the world yelling about Iranian and Korean programs, about which we know very little, when we’ve got all this going on."

As for whether there truly is an aggressive intent behind the government’s biological warfare research, one clue is that in February 2003 the United States granted itself a patent on an illegal, long-range bioweapons grenade in clear violation of the BWC mandate that prohibits such delivery devices. U.S. officials equivocated they never intended to use the biogrenade as described in their patent. Ironically, as Hammond pointed out in a news statement of November 30, 2004, "The United States invaded Iraq in pursuit of phantom bioweapons yet, here at home, it brazenly develops them."

The Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) has warned that the United States has progressively undermined international efforts to abolish biological weapons, noting that at the November 2001 Fifth Review Conference in Geneva, the United States rejected a "verification protocol for legally binding international investigations and inspections of all parties." CRG pointed out that to create vaccines or antiviral agents against many of the most dangerous pathogens and toxins, researchers must first produce such agents in sizable quantities, and that, in the name of vaccine development, as many as twenty laboratories in the United States handle, manipulate, and in some cases weaponize, one of the most lethal strains of anthrax. Prominent among these facilities, CRG identified Dugway Proving Ground in Salt Lake City, Utah; the U.S. Army Medical Research Unit in Fort Detrick, Maryland; the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC; the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio; the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia; and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland.

Critics of the biodefense building boom contend that increasing the number of high-containment labs around the country that will handle potential germ warfare agents only increases the likelihood of accidental (or intentional releases) that ultimately could threaten public safety. Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University chemist who tracks arms control issues, told the Baltimore Sun that the government’s tenfold expansion of Biosafety Level-4 laboratories raises the risk of spreading dangerous organisms. "If a worker in one of these facilities removes a single viral particle or a single cell, which cannot be detected or prevented," he cautioned, "that single particle or cell can form the basis of an outbreak."

Just recently, the Sunshine Project learned that for fourteen months, Texas A&M University concealed an incident in which a student researcher fell seriously ill from undulant fever. In March 2007 hundreds of people were evacuated from Boston University’s ten-story biomedical research building after white smoke wafted through a laboratory containing tularemia bacteria. Exposure to the bacteria can produce sudden chills, fever, pneumonia, and can even prove to be fatal. Meanwhile, the metal frame of another large BU biolab is rising nearby at a cost of $178 million where, the Boston Globe reported in March, "researchers would work with the world’s deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and anthrax." Anthrax, the nation learned in 2001, subjects its victims to breathing difficulties and wracking coughs as it starves the body of oxygen, often leading to death.

Despite the hues and cries of individuals interviewed or otherwise quoted here, the biowarfare buildup is getting an enthusiastic response from academia, which sees new funds flowing from Washington’s horn of plenty. "American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agenda, researchers, institutes, and laboratories to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the Pentagon and the CIA," Boyle writes.

More than a dozen universities and private consortia are currently vying to win the DHS contract for its own new biodefense research center tagged at roughly $450 million. The proposed 520,000 square-foot main building of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) will be the nucleus of a complex liable to exceed one hundred acres. Although advertised to replace an aging facility at Plum Island, New York, the DHS recently announced plans to spend $30 million to expand that lab. NBAF bidders include state universities of Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.

According to DHS literature, the NBAF complex will fill a critical void in responding to "high consequence biological threats involving human, zoonotic and foreign animal diseases." While DHS advertises it as a response to "threats," the Council for Responsible Genetics notes that because efforts to diagnose and treat exposure to biological weapons necessarily involve their production and dispersal, transparency measures must be enforced to verify the defensive intent of such efforts. CRG laments that the U.S. rejection of the BWC inspection and verification protocol undermines that obligation.

On the contrary, many university NBAF project bidders have a history of operating in secret, and this has in no way barred them from applying for new operations. Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) disclosure is vital, Sunshine’s Hammond says, for protecting against the human health and environmental risks of biotechnology research. Instead of making its IBC records public as required by NIH guidelines, the University of Maryland, for example, has refused to provide any significant information to the Sunshine Project. "It has lost requests for records, refused them, delayed its response, and when it has replied, provided useless paperwork from which it has redacted all meaningful information," Hammond contends. Scores of other universities are no more forthcoming.

Many big pharmaceutical houses and biotech firms that have received NIH dollars also conceal their operations from the public. Among those, Sunshine identified: Abbott Laboratories, BASF Plant Science, Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont Central Research and Development, Eli Lilly Corp., Embrex, GlaxoSmithKline, Hoffman-La Roche, Merck & Co., Monsanto, Pfizer Inc., Schering-Plough Research Institute, and Syngenta Corp. of Switzerland. Of the top twenty biotech firms, only Genzyme and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, both headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, complied with NIH guidelines–likely because reporting is mandated by local law. This illustrates the massive failure of voluntary compliance. Only 8,500, or 16 percent, of the 52,000 workers employed at the top twenty U.S. biotech firms work at an NIH guidelines-compliant company, Sunshine estimated.

Here and there, concerned citizens are speaking out. Private and government groups around the nation are protesting the bid for the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility: In Dunn, Wisconsin, the Dane County Board is opposing the University of Wisconsin’s idea of building the NBAF complex on their turf; in Tracy, California, the city council voted against allowing an NBAF facility at Lawrence Livermore, while more than 3,000 people paid to wire DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff opposing the bid and 2,000 more sent e-mail messages in opposition; in Seattle the city council forced the University of Washington to withdraw its bid; at the proposed NBAF site in Leavenworth, Kansas, residents voiced concern over lab safety, the impact on property values, and the potential to make the area a terrorism risk; in Mississippi, opponents posted "No Bio-Lab" signs; and Kentucky residents greeted federal officials making a visit to a proposed site with posters reading "Hal! No! We won’t go!" in a reference to Representative Hal Rogers (R-KY).

In Boston, neighbors of the new BU lab under construction have convinced the Massachusetts Supreme Court to hear their objections. In Maryland, area residents are objecting to the enlargement of Fort Detrick. And when the Army announced plans this past March to reopen the Baker Laboratory on its Dugway Proving Grounds (eighty miles southwest of Salt Lake City) for the purpose of testing anthrax, the Salt Lake Tribune recalled years ago when 6,000 sheep grazing near Dugway were killed, likely by nerve gas. "The Army is working on the deadly pathogens for classified defense purposes. That’s scary," the Tribune editorialized. "It’s no wonder we’re concerned."

An editorial of this sort is a rarity. Apart from coverage in the Washington Post and New York Times, major media has done little investigation into the underlying reasons for Bush’s biodefense buildup. For that matter, Leitenberg says, "not a single member of the House or Senate has questioned that expenditure or called for its reduction or basic redirection."

More questions must be asked. In its news release of August 16, 2001, the Department of Health and Human Services–laying out its plan to combat a possible bioterrorism threat–said it was increasing its support for research related to "likely" agents. If so, what is the point of regenerating an extinct 1918 killer flu virus? The same release warned that "large numbers of people might be directly exposed to an agent released in a dense urban environment." If so, why entertain bids for new facilities in such areas? Deadly pathogens are the last thing the world needs. And yet what we have taking shape in the United States today is the costliest, most grandiose germ warfare research program ever attempted. It involves developmental work with the deadliest and most loathsome pathogens capable of triggering plagues and epidemics. It is being conducted in good part in secret without adequate oversight and in violation of the NIH’s own rules and treaty requirements for transparency. It is being lavishly funded while urgent biological research to combat imminent health threats is delayed or denied. It’s not only a staggering waste of taxpayer treasure and a perversion of scientific ingenuity but it needlessly puts Americans, and all humanity, at risk.

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Brussels alarm at porous borders

People smugglers are turning the European Union’s south-east frontiers into a hotspot for illegal migration, the EU’s security chief has warned.

Franco Frattini, EU justice and security commissioner, said growing numbers of illegal migrants were arriving via the western Balkans or the Black Sea region from Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.

The Mediterranean is the most visible route for unlawful entry to the union, with thousands of Africans undertaking risky sea crossings each year in an attempt to reach southern Europe.

But Mr Frattini warned that undocumented entry through the east was a further worry. “The illegal migrants coming from the east are very often victims of sexual exploitation, trafficking and forced labour,” he told the Financial Times.

His comments highlight the challenge confronting the EU over migration, with a fractious debate about whether it can manage entry while also filling labour market gaps. About 500,000 undocumented migrants are thought to arrive each year.

Mr Frattini pledged to try to bolster security in the western Balkans through a deal to make it easier to receive EU work visas and measures to allow for repatriation of illegal migrants. An accord should be concluded by the year end.

The move aims to spur documented entry, encourage reform to fight organised crime and strengthen borders. Brussels said the union would only move towards a visa-free regime if the western Balkans acted against trafficking.

At the same time, Mr Frattini will explore opening channels for legal entry from African nations from which people travel to the EU in the hope of finding work.

For example, the EU could offer to make it easier for students from Morocco and Tunisia to receive visas. This and other sweeteners would be offered in return for a reciprocal deal to allow the EU to repatriate illegal migrants.

The EU has yet to forge such a “return” pact with an African nation to take back citizens who are illegally in the 27-country bloc, the European Commission said.

Mr Frattini said: “There is a very reluctant stance by African countries taken vis-à-vis Europe. I can understand perfectly. They have to show their public that the rich Europe does not want only security, only protection. But we are ready to offer something. Legal migration, for example, or visa facilitation for students.”

The EU’s fledgling border control agency, Frontex, is running operations in southern coastal waters this summer as part of efforts to control migration from Africa.

Mr Frattini said the patrols were having an effect, despite some member states failing to meet commitments to provide equipment. The operations were likely to become permanent there, he added.

Since Frontex missions began in the Mediterranean in June, flows of illegal migrants had dropped by 40 per cent. People smugglers were worried about the agency’s patrols, he said.

But critics question whether the operations simply push would-be entrants to try other routes. They also say that on the patrol near Malta, anyone rescued by Frontex would be taken to Europe for humanitarian reasons in any case.

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Two legs better than four

Walking upright required considerably less effort of early man than "knuckle-walking," according to research to be released this week explaining why humans today, unlike most other primates, walk on two legs.

The new study, "Chimpanzee locomotor energetics and the origin of human bipedalism" hypothesizes that walking on two legs, or bipedalism, evolved because it required less energy than scampering on all fours.

The study is to be made public this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"For decades now researchers have debated the role of energetics and the evolution of bipedalism," said David Raichlen, an assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Arizona, who was one of the lead scientists on the study.

The researchers wrote they used "biomechanical modeling" to simulate the primates’ gaits. Scientists studied the gaits of four adult humans walking on a treadmill, and also studied five chimpanzees who were trained to walk quadrupedally (on four legs) as well as bipedally (on two legs.)

Raichlin and his colleagues found that humans walking on two legs used just one-fourth the energy that chimpanzees who knuckle-walked did.

Raichlin and his colleagues said biomechanical modeling found that on average, chimpanzees use the same amount of energy on two legs as on four, but said there was variation from animal to animal. Chimps who took longer strides were more efficient when walking upright that those who took shorter steps.

"We were able to tie the energetic cost in chimps to their anatomy," said Raichlen. "We were able to show exactly why certain individuals were able to walk bipedally more cheaply than others," he said.

Bipedalism is seen as a critical evolutionary difference between humans and apes.

Scientists theorize that the reduced energy expended in walking upright would have provided evolutionary advantages by allowing early man to forage for food more easily.

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Stuck with debt

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the rest of Wall Street are stuck with at least $11 billion of loans and bonds they can’t readily sell.

The banks have had to dig into their own pockets to finance parts of at least five leveraged buyouts over the past month because of the worst bear market in high-yield debt in more than two years, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Bankers, who just a few months ago boasted that demand for high-yield assets was so great that they would have no problem raising debt for a $100 billion LBO, are now paying for their overconfidence. The cost of tying up their own capital may curb earnings and stem the flood of LBOs, which generated a record $8.4 billion in fees during the first half of 2007, according to Brad Hintz, the former chief financial officer at New York-based Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“The private equity firms, being very tough negotiators, are unlikely to let the banks off the hook,” said Martin Fridson, chief executive officer of high-yield research firm FridsonVision LLC in New York. “They’ll say that’s your problem and that’s why we’re paying you: To take risk.”

As the market began to turn sour last month, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup Inc., Lehman and Wachovia Corp. had to buy $725 million of bonds that Goodlettsville, Tennessee-based Dollar General Corp. was selling to finance Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. purchase of the company for $6.9 billion. All of the securities firms are based in New York, except Wachovia, which is located in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Bonds Tumble

Those bonds are probably worth 94 cents on the dollar, or $43.5 million less than when they were sold on June 28, according to Justin Monteith, an analyst at high-yield research firm KDP Investment Advisors in Montpelier, Vermont. KKR completed the acquisition of Dollar General on July 9.

Bear Stearns Cos. strategists estimate that about $290 billion of deals still need to get funded, including those of Greenwood Village, Colorado-based credit-card processor First Data Corp. and energy company TXU Corp. of Dallas.

The question is “how much yield are the brokerage firms going to have to eat,” said Hintz, who is now an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. “What they’ve committed to is not current trading rates in the market. If I have a problem it doesn’t mean I can’t place the problem, but it’s going to cause a mark-to-market loss.”

Record Sales

Acquisitions by private equity firms such as New York’s KKR and Blackstone Group LP helped push sales of high-yield bonds and loans worldwide up more than 70 percent during the first half of the year to a record $708 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. High-yield, or junk, bonds are those rated below Baa3 by Moody’s Investors Service and BBB- by Standard & Poor’s.

The investment banking fees generated by LBOs in the first half amounted to almost two-thirds of the $12.8 billion paid by LBO firms to Wall Street in 2006, data compiled by Freeman & Co. and Thomson Financial show. In the race to win deals, the five largest U.S. investment banks more than tripled their lending commitments to non-investment grade borrowers during the past year to $174 billion, according to their regulatory filings.

KKR co-founder Henry Kravis in May called it the “golden era” of buyouts at a conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The extra yield investors demanded to own junk bonds rather than Treasuries shrank to a record low of 2.41 percentage points in June from the peak of more than 10 percentage points in 2002, according to index data from New York-based Merrill Lynch & Co. The spread has since widened to 3.07 percentage points.

No Escape

For loans rated four or five levels below investment grade, the spread over the London interbank offered rate shrank to 2.12 percentage points in February from more than 4 percentage points in 2003. It has since widened to 2.72 percentage points.

Some bankers even speculated that $100 billion LBO was possible, a scenario that is now “definitely” off the table, said Stephen Antczak, high-yield strategist at UBS AG in Stamford, Connecticut. Wall Street’s confidence in its ability to finance just about any deal led buyout firms to remove clauses in their purchase agreements that would allow them to back out if their banks couldn’t come up with the financing.

Just three of the 40 biggest pending LBOs have an escape clause that lets the buyer back out if funding can’t be arranged, said Mike Belin, U.S. head of equity derivatives strategy at Deutsche Bank AG in New York. A couple of years ago, a majority of deals included a financing contingency, Belin said, based on his research.

“If you were a credit officer or a risk manager who said `No’ to virtually anything over the last few years you were wrong,” Hintz said. “So did they take it too far? Well, yeah. But that’s part of any cycle. The issue is did they take it too far and is it going to hurt their earnings.”

Tribune Clause

Tribune Co.’s agreement to be bought by billionaire Sam Zell is one of the three acquisitions with an escape clause. Zell or Tribune can back out of the purchase if funding can’t be obtained “on the terms set forth in the financing commitments” or on similar terms, according to regulatory filings.

Zell agreed to pay $25 million to Tribune, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, should the financing fall through. Tribune spokesman Gary Weitman said banks have “fully committed” to the deal.

The market for high-yield bonds and junk-rated, or leveraged loans began to crack in June as concerns that LBOs were becoming too risky coincided with a slump in the market for subprime mortgages that caused the near-collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds.

Junk Losses

Junk bonds lost 1.61 percent last month, the most since March 2005 when General Motors Corp. forecast its biggest quarterly loss since 1992 and the debt lost 2.73 percent, according to Merrill Lynch.

Investors refused to buy bonds to finance purchases of companies including Dollar General and ServiceMaster Co., forcing bankers to either buy the bonds themselves or extend a loan to make up for the securities that weren’t sold.

In most deals, investment banks promise to provide loans to the buyer. They then seek other lenders to take pieces of the loans and find buyers for bonds. When buyers vanish, the banks must either buy the bonds themselves or provide a bridge loan to the borrower, tying up capital that would otherwise be used to finance more deals. The banks typically parcel out portions of bridge loans to reduce their risk.

Lending Commitments

Citigroup, the biggest U.S. bank, reported that its securities and banking division recorded an expense of $286 million in the first quarter to increase loan-loss reserves to account for higher commitments to leveraged transactions and an increase in the average length of loans.

Lehman reported on July 10 that its commitments for “contingent acquisition facilities” more than doubled in the quarter ended May 31 to $43.9 billion, exceeding its stock market capitalization of $39.1 billion. Lehman said its commitments contain “flexible pricing features” that allow it to charge more if market conditions deteriorate.

Goldman Sachs more than doubled its lending commitments to non-investment grade borrowers to $71.5 billion in the year ended May 31.

Citigroup spokeswoman Danielle Romero-Apsilos, Lehman spokeswoman Tasha Pelio and Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael Duvally, either declined to comment or didn’t return phone calls.

ServiceMaster Bonds

JPMorgan failed to sell $1.15 billion of bonds for Memphis, Tennessee-based ServiceMaster on July 3. The banks provided ServiceMaster, the maker of TruGreen and Terminix lawn-care products, with a bridge loan to make up for the failed bond sale. ServiceMaster is being bought by private equity firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice Inc. for $4.7 billion.

KKR and New York-based Clayton Dubilier this month completed their $7.1 billion purchase of Columbia, Maryland-based US Foodservice, a unit of Dutch supermarket company Royal Ahold NV, even though junk bond investors refused to buy $1.55 billion of bonds and $3.37 billion of loans to finance the deal, according to estimates from New York-based Bear Stearns.

Deutsche Bank led the bond offering, which included $1 billion of “toggle” bonds that would have allowed US Foodservice to pay interest in either cash or additional debt. KKR and Clayton Dubilier relied on loans to complete the deal, according to S&P’s Leveraged Commentary and Data unit.

`Beyond Our Risk’

“Many of these things are beyond our risk desires,” said Bruce Monrad, who manages $1.5 billion of high-yield bonds at Northeast Investment Management Inc. in Boston.

JPMorgan spokesman Adam Castellani, Deutsche bank spokesman Scott Helfman and Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Jennifer Sala either declined to comment or didn’t return calls. All the banks are based in New York, except Deutsche Bank, which is in Frankfurt.

Banks can always sell the debt if demand increases. Meanwhile, they may have to report a loss from the decline in value of their holdings, a process known as marking to market.

Banks could also lose money should they have to offer discounts on loans in order to syndicate the deals, said Tanya Azarchs, a banking industry analyst at New York-based S&P.

“I don’t think it’s going to cause banks to fail or even lead to downgrades,” Azarchs said. “But I do think there will be a little indigestion and lower earnings.”

The biggest concern is “hung deals,” where a lender is left holding a large loan to a single borrower, said Azarchs. “Those traditionally in all the prior credit cycles have caused the greatest amount of grief for the large syndicating banks,” Azarchs said.

In 1989, First Boston Corp., now part of Credit Suisse, made a bridge loan for a buyout of Ohio Mattress Co., the predecessor to Sealy Corp. The junk bond market collapsed before First Boston could refinance the loan, and the securities firm ended up owning a big stake in the bedding manufacturer.

The deal became known as “Burning Bed.”

TXU, First Data

“The thing about this business is memories are two seconds long,” said James Schell, a private equity attorney in the New York office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP.

Banks led by Citigroup committed to extend $37.2 billion in credit to fund the purchase of TXU by a group that included KKR, Fort Worth, Texas-based TPG Inc. and Goldman Sachs’s private equity group. The financing will comprise $25.9 billion of term loans and $11.3 billion in an unsecured bridge loan.

Credit Suisse, based in Zurich, is leading banks in the U.S. that have agreed to provide KKR with $16 billion of loans for its $26.1 billion takeover of First Data. The plans include an $8 billion bond sale, which is scheduled for August or September, according to a Banc of America Securities LLC research report.

For firms such as KKR or Blackstone, both based in New York, the tighter credit environment may make their acquisitions less profitable and even change the way they go after future targets. Mark Semer, a spokesman for KKR, declined to comment.

“The underwriters are going to be forced to provide bridge loans and it’s getting pretty ugly, but Wall Street deserves to get smacked around a little,” said William Featherston, managing director in high-yield at J. Giordano Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “It’s been easy for so long.”