Islamophobia in Europe

BY TALHA ZAHEER 

A few months ago, I came across a (now infamous) YouTube video about changing demographics of the Muslim population in Europe. The tone was ominous as it warned of the dawning of an Islamicised Europe. In 39 years, the video claimed, France will be an Islamic republic. In 15 years, half the population of the Netherlands will be Muslim. In 2050, Germany, too, will be a Muslim state.

Although I was a bit skeptical about the authenticity of the statistics presented, I basically bought into the video’s premise – that a higher birth rate among Muslim immigrants would cause a marked shift in Europe’s demographics, making it predominantly Muslim. I’ll even admit a part of me swelled with pride at the prospect.

Even though I was aware that a Christian group had produced the video, I do not recall being offended by that initial viewing. But then the rebuttals and clarifications began. A new YouTube video put out by BBC’s Radio 4 titled ‘Muslim Demographics: The Truth’ exposed the alarmist agenda of the first clip by pointing out its liberal use of inaccurate data. And when the BBC news service evaluated the inauthenticity of the statistics, my eyes were fully opened to the strong Islamophobic message of the original video.

The growing problem of Islamophobia in the West is being increasingly documented. The trend is more pronounced in Europe than across the Atlantic, where it is thought that Muslims assimilate more readily. The demographics video may have been an amateur venture, it has coincided with the release of several bestselling books that implore Europeans to wake up and do something to save their culture and their continent. Interestingly, these pseudo-academic attempts have mostly emanated from American authors, apparently discontent with their own incursions into Muslim territories in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One such attempt by Christopher Caldwell titled Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West has received considerable attention in both the American and British media. It is startling to see how reviews of the book from across the pond could be so divergent. While The New York Times claims it is a balanced, thoughtful effort, the Guardian lambasts its unambiguous racial bias.

The contrast between North American and European perceptions of Islam has several explanations. The Europeans are a lot more sensitive and fidgety about the subject, with sentiments in Britain being especially volatile.  The British National Party (BNP), for example, advocates for a return to the good old pre-1948 whites-only days and only falls short of calling whites a superior race. The party actively promotes alarmist views about the spread of Islam in Europe and calls for the deportation of Muslim subjects to their homelands, regardless of whether those subjects – many of whom have been born in Europe – had ever set foot outside the continent.

Parties like the BNP have started gaining impetus throughout Europe with their lightly veiled hatred towards the ‘other’ seeping into passive locals and manifesting itself towards Muslims, effectively making Muslims the Jews of this century. Antediluvian theories advocating social homogeneity have resurfaced as insecure Europeans are manipulated into thinking they must cling on to the last remnants of their dying culture through propagandist videos and literature that wouldn’t be out of place in Nazi Germany.

BNP-type, far-right groups are openly asking to repeal laws that make equal opportunity mandatory, effectively promoting discrimination. Even more alarming is their popularity. In recent elections, the BNP won three seats for the first time.  With such open hostility towards Muslims, albeit in small segments of the population, what measures are European governments taking to allay fears within the Muslim community? The concept of second-rate citizens, after all, runs counter to fundamental western values of equality.

And while the debate within white-Europe rages, what of Muslim European sentiments? What of those who are being forced to decide between a religious and national identity in secular countries such as France? Nikolas Sarkozy, who claims to be a ‘demanding friend of Muslims,’ has proven to have littley sympathy with the concept of pardah. His latest battle is against body- and head-covering swimming attire for women – God forbid a woman should go for a swim in anything other than a bikini.

These strange reactions to Muslims in Europe make me reminisce about my days in primary school in Wales. Once a girl named Catherine called me a ‘Brownie’ in a conversation to a third person that I wasn’t even privy to. Within minutes, I had my whole class rally around me, giving me their support and completely shunning the girl for being racist. At the time, I myself never realised what the big deal was. But my 12-year-old friends were incensed. And if that’s how youngsters from a remote area where a non-white was an anomaly used to react a decade ago, how has the European landscape come to face such a regressive crisis?

On my recent visit to Manchester, I saw mosques with windows smashed in. Previous riots in Bradford, now popularly called ‘Bradistan’ for its large proportion of desis, may not have merely been racial in nature and may also have been fueled by Islamophobia. If Europe does not address these issues quickly and sensitively, this may well be the beginning of a slippery slope. With persecution, discrimination and racism to deal with, just how long will Muslims remain tolerant? How long before they start to flee? And who’s really to blame if they opt for the radical alternative?

Going over the evidence in search of a holistic perspective, I still fail to see how three per cent of the populace could threaten a whole people by their mere existence in the same geographical space. Let’s not forget, it’s not like Muslims forced their entry into mainland Europe. They came as legal immigrants because Europe needed their labor. Through citizenship, they have earned the right to better treatment.

Toronto-based Talha Zaheer blogs about diaspora-related issues for Dawn.com.
He is also the Toronto FC correspondent for Goal.com.

ON 08 18TH, 2009

Source : http://blog.dawn.com/2009/08/18/islamophobia-in-europe/

Pakistan - Diplomatic Corruption

Official given £6,000 to join golf club

By Khawar Ghumman 
Wednesday, 01 Sep, 2010

ISLAMABAD: The Public Accounts Committee of the National Assembly was informed on Tuesday that a bureaucrat posted at the country’s consulate general in Manchester had used official funds to secure the membership of a local golf club in 2007. 

The membership cost the public exchequer 6,000 pounds. 

Mr Hamid (his full name was not mentioned at the meeting) not only managed to win the post of commercial secretary, but also got approval for his club membership from then commerce minister Humayun Akhtar Khan whom he had earlier served as staff officer. 

Documentary evidence placed before the PAC by the audit department revealed that the club membership fee had been paid out of the Export Market Development Fund (EMDF) primarily meant to finance projects and activities aimed at promotion of exports. 

Commerce Secretary Zafar Mahmood opposed recovery of the amount from the official, although he conceded that using government funds to secure membership of a golf club was unprecedented. “He is a good officer and I don’t think he would be able to pay this amount,” he said. 

The secretary’s statement appeared to be in contradiction of the stance he had taken at a departmental accounts committee meeting in May when he said the amount should be recovered. 

Mr Hamid is about to complete his three-year term in Manchester. 

MNA Yasmin Rehman, who was presiding over the meeting in the absence of PAC chairman Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, asked the secretary to make the recovery as soon as possible. 

Khwaja Asif of the PML-N said: “The money should be recovered from the minister who endorsed the expenditure.” 

Members of the committee unanimously called for recovering the amount. 

During scrutiny of the accounts of the commerce ministry of 2008-9, audit officials also discussed wasteful expenditures of around Rs50 million by the finance ministry in 2007-8 on conducting several studies for promoting exports. They said the studies had been conducted in a highly suspicious manner; open bidding had not been held for selecting consultant firms and the then commerce secretary had made payments in contravention of his financial powers. 

Mr Zafar Mahmood said the expenditures had been approved by the then commerce secretary, Tanvir Ali Agha, who is currently the Auditor General of Pakistan. 

The PAC said the ministry should hold another meeting of the departmental accounts committee to determine whether the objectives of the studies had been achieved. 

Another case of waste discussed at the meeting was an unauthorised expenditure of Rs2.406 million on mobile phones calls. The chief executive of the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan exceeded his approved ceiling. Most of the calls took place during foreign visits by the official. The committee ordered recovery of the amount. 

When contacted, Mr Humayun Khan confirmed Mr Hamid’s foreign posting during his stint as commerce minister. “Yes, I also approved payment of 6,000 pounds for his golf club membership fee and that was absolutely within my purview,” Mr Khan said in reply to a question. 

Source : http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/front-page/official-given-6,000-to-join-golf-club-190

The worst of times

BY SAIMA SHAKIL HUSSAIN ON 08 30TH, 2010

To paraphrase Charles Dickens’ opening line in A Tale of Two Cities quite heavily, this is the absolute worst of times –  full stop. There is no qualifying ‘best of times,’ no ‘age of wisdom,’ no ‘epoch of belief,’ ‘season of Light or ‘spring of hope.’ In fact, this is the ultimate pits of times. There is no other way to say it. It’s quite simply a very, very bad time all around.

Apart from causing millions to become internally displaced, the flood water has exposed the gaping trust deficit that exists both within the country and outside of it. International donors are hesitant, not sure if the funds and goods that they do contribute will end up with those who deserve them. It is difficult to blame them when Pakistanis themselves, rather than depending on the federal or provincial governments to do anything, seem to have devised a sort of ad-hoc adopt-a-village programme whereby private citizens and student groups are gathering goods and delivering them to the victims themselves. Or least to the ones they are able to reach.

And while all this is going on in the homeland, in a far away land, New York City to be precise, the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ controversy is in full swing. The fact that the proposed project is not a mosque but rather a cultural centre, and is to be built on private property a few blocks away from that hallowed ground is being ignored. Indeed, the term ‘Islam Free Zone’ is being used in association with lower Manhattan.

Choosing to downplay the facts that an estimated 60 Muslims also died in the attacks and that there had existed a Muslim prayer hall inside the fallen World Trade Centre, rabid right-wingers have whipped up anti-Muslim sentiment to the extent that even President Obama felt pressured to temper the supporting comments he had made at the annual White House iftaar a day earlier.

The demonisation of Islam has reached such a feverish pitch that American Muslim leaders have become markedly anxious that this year Eid ul-Fitr will fall around September 11. They are concerned that those Americans who are ignorant about Islam – sadly they number very many – will choose to interpret it as a celebration of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Finding the right balance between showing respect for the victims and not giving into fear is the very tough task ahead for America’s Muslim communities.

While contemplating these turbulent times, I could not help but think of the trials faced by the first Muslim community in Madinah. I was especially reminded of the following passage from Martin Lings’ monumental workMuhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (1983) which gives a detailed account of the incredible odds that faced the small and impoverished band of believers who struggled to build a new life while also defending themselves against their many enemies:

“Before the Prophet (peace be upon him) set out [for the Battle of Khaybar], one of the men of Awas known as Abu Abs came to him with a problem. He had a camel to ride, but his clothes were in rags and he had no means for procuring any provisions to take on the march and nothing to leave for the upkeep of his family, let alone buying himself a new garment. There were many others in similar circumstances, though this was an extreme case. But much had been spent on the Pilgrimage, and everything that had been gained so far in the way of spoil was outweighed by the increasing number of poverty-stricken converts who came to Madinah from every direction.

The Prophet gave Abu Abs a fine long cloak, all that was available for the moment; but on the march, a day or two later, he noticed that he had on a much poorer cloak and he asked him: ‘Where is the cloak I gave thee?’ ‘I sold it for eight dirhams said Abu Abs. ‘Then I bought two dirhams worth of dates as provision for myself, ad I left two dirhams from my family to live on, and bought a cloak for four dirhams.’ The Prophet laughed and said: ‘O father of Abs, thou and thy companions are poor indeed. But by Him in whose hand is my soul, if ye keep safe and live yet a little while, ye shall have abundance of provisions and leave abundantly for your families. Ye shall abound in dirhams and in slaves; and it will not be good for you!’”

Dr Martin Lings (1909-2005), or Abu Bakr Siraj Uddin as he was also known, earned acclaim throughout the Muslim world for his book which was proclaimed to be the ‘best biography of the prophet in English’ at the National Seerat Conference in Islamabad.

Combining simplicity with grandeur, he has narrated events from the Prophet’s life that are familiar to many, but what make his telling of them stand apart are the Arabic sources of the eighth and ninth centuries – Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa’ad and Al-Waqidi – whom he has quoted extensively.

Thus from the men and women who heard the Prophet speak and witnessed for themselves the events of his life the reader learns of the monumental challenges he and his followers faced time and again. In a society that was staunchly tribal and allegiance to lineage was deeply entrenched, they emigrated from their ancestral homeland – something had never been imagined before – and laid the foundations of an egalitarian society in a peaceful oasis.

That our society today is neither peaceful nor egalitarian while a sizable number ‘abound in dirhams’ bears witness to the prophecy which was made so long ago.

Saima Shakil Hussain is the editor of Dawn’s ‘Books & Authors’ magazine.

Source : http://blog.dawn.com/2010/08/30/the-worst-of-times/

How News is Created and Shared

What the Steven Slater Story Says about How News is Created and Shared

Posted by Steve Myers at 12:57 PM on Aug. 23, 2010

When Flight 1052 went wheels-up on Steven Slater's (presumably) last flight with JetBlue, he was just a man. Hours after he took the evacuation slide, he was a legend. 

How we got to this point -- in which this JetBlue flight attendant has 213,000 fans on Facebook, a Hollywood agentand perhaps a reality TV show -- tells us some things about how the media, social media, the Web and the public amplify, consume and share the news.

The buzz around Steven Slater stemmed from the initial story of him blowing his cool after being wronged by a passenger. Coverage quickly shifted from the event itself, to his elevation to instant hero, to what that popularity means. 

Meanwhile, over the next few days, as the story crested, some news outlets tried to see whether the facts supported the picture of Slater as a modern folk hero. Those facts may yet emerge; as with many stories that blow up so quickly, the facts have a hard time catching up to the legend. 

Popularity is a self-fulfilling news story.

This was one of those stories that you want to share as soon as you hear it. That popularity fueled more stories, which added to the buzz, which in turn fueled more coverage.

Slater made his dramatic exit -- entrance, really -- on August 9. The initial reports were all pretty similar, describing an altercation between a rude passenger and Slater after the plane landed, which put him over the edge. Slater was seen as both victim and the hero.

People don't just talk about the news now, they create in response to it. So they created Facebook pages, wrote parody songs, and set up sites to sell T-shirts and solicit fantastic quitting stories. 

Soon enough, the coverage shifted from what had happened to how popular Slater was becoming. And the coverage increased. According to Google Trends, media coverage trailed search traffic for "Steven Slater," with search traffic peaking on Aug. 11 and news coverage peaking on Aug. 12.

To some extent, popularity has always been a measure of newsworthiness. What's different is that popularity is out in the open and easy to measure. It's hard to know how many people are talking about a story on the phone or e-mailing links; it's easy to see how many people "like" a Facebook page.

And companies can do sentiment analysis on all the discussion online; The New York Time cited Zeta Buzz, which noted that online comments about Slater were 93 percent positive. 

Any of these things can be the hook for a follow-up story, even if they're not particularly meaningful. Sure, someone setting up a site to sell some T-shirts indicates some measure of popularity, but who's buying? 

At one point, a news story noted that four people had joined a "Steven Slater for president" group on Facebook and that 30 people had joined a legal defense fund group. (Both have more members now.) In comparison, there are 88 members of a Facebook group to organize a convention of people named Phil Campbell (or Phyllis, Philippe or any other variation) in the town of Phil Campbell, Ala. Which is more newsworthy?

The media is the meta.

A few cracks appeared in the initial account the day after the incident, but by then, much of the coverage was one step removed from what happened on the plane, focusing on Slater's popularity.

And then it shifted again, to an examination of how this gay flight attendant in New York became a hero of the working man. What did our response mean about our culture, aboutthe recession, about air travel, about how we admire scofflaws? A USA Today story hit many of these themes:

"That a flight attendant has become an instant folk hero for allegedly telling off a passenger and abandoning his duties speaks not just to the frustration many people feel about a travel experience that has become riddled with inconvenience and rudeness. It also casts a spotlight on a broader anger felt by many workers who are fed up with jobs in which pay raises, if they exist at all, are smaller or less frequent than they were a few years ago and with the threat of layoffs looming constantly, some workplace specialists say."

Some of these stories relied on experts and university professors, who are often willing to engage in high-level discussion of an event. As a journalist, I'm not immune to this, so I spoke with Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia University in New York, who had already been quoted in a New York Times story. 

"The fact that the story took off in the form it did, with weak sourcing," he said, "to me says something about the strength of the fantasy that he was in a sense conscripted into enacting as a character in our collective life."

I couldn't have said it better myself. In fact, I needed him to say it so I didn't have to.

Journalists gravitate to such stories; they enable us to use the events at hand to craft a view of the world around us. Slate's Jack Shafer loves to expose "bogus trend stories," those thinly reported stories that rely on anecdotal evidence. When presented with a story like Steven Slater, we need just one really, really good anecdote.

Done well, such "meta" stories help us understand the world around us, why some things matter and others don't. Done poorly, they're creative writing exercises, with quotations by real people offering a flavoring of journalism.

This is what sparked Howard Kurtz' mini-tirade at the end of his "Reliable Sources" show on Aug. 15. "News outlets are taking a colorful incident," he said, "and inflating it into a cosmic, cultural protest because that gives them an excuse to keep pumping it up."

Legend travels faster than facts.

While much of the media used this incident as a hook to write about airline travel, politeness or folk heroes, some local media treated this as a hard news story. The New York Daily News was one of the few. 

"We covered this as if we were doing an investigation," said Daily News reporter Richard Schapiro, who started working on the story from the second day. "We were really going at it as, 'What actually happened on this plane?' "(Novel, isn't it?)

Reporters started looking for passengers who could corroborate Slater's story. They got the plane's passenger manifest and were able to reach about 40 of the 100 passengers. 

Schapiro described a winding path of reporting that at firstseemed to contradict Slater's story and later appeared to confirm that something indeed set Slater off on that plane.

The facts are more complicated than what most of us heard. According to some passengers, Slater already had a cut on his head when they boarded the plane in Pittsburgh, and he struck people as unhinged during the pre-flight safety routine and the flight. 

But another passenger told Schapiro that he was one of the first people on the plane, and Slater was uninjured. Moreover, he said he heard (but didn't see) an argument of some kind that involved a woman who wanted to put an oversized bag in an overhead compartment.

Still, there are some uncertainties. Schapiro said he hasn't been able to find this phantom passenger who didn't want to check her bag. He hoped that she would speak up when other passengers described Slater's bizarre behavior and sentiment seemed to turn against him, but that hasn't happened.

These days, who has time to substantiate the narrative?

While it would seem natural to spend the time reporting this story out, these days it's not a given. It made sense for New York media, for whom this was a sensational, local story. (In fairness, not all of the local coverage was exactly substantive.)

A reporter or editor, Gitlin said, has to decide "how many working minutes are available to run after this, trying to catch this and stuff it back in its factual container as opposed to moving on, doing something else."

In some cases a reporter or a news organization is rewarded by doggedly pursuing a story that runs counter to the grain of the media at large. Gitlin noted, for instance, thatMcClatchy's Washington bureau did not fall for the Bush administration's arguments that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. 

Yet no matter what you think of flight attendants, Steven Slater is no Saddam. And so when the spotlight shines elsewhere, there often isn't much incentive to follow up on such stories.

Slater's story shows how similar journalists are to those who read and watch their stories. We love unexpected results, compelling characters and searing irony. If we're biased for anything, we're biased for a good story, like people at a ballpark root for a home run. 

That doesn't absolve our duty to verify and to report out the story. It doesn't give us a pass when we extract five rash minutes from one man's life to make sweeping conclusions about the nature of life in our democracy. But it does show that we're all part of the same system of talking, sharing and reacting.

"There's a place for stories that are quirky," Gitlin said, "but they should still be true -- as true as one could make them."

That's exactly what I was thinking.

CORRECTION: Richard Schapiro's name was misspelled in the original version of this story.

Source : http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=136&aid=189218

Emmy Awards 2010 - Best Supporting Actress

British actress wins Emmy Award

30.08.10

It was left to Archie Panjabi to fly the flag for British acting talent at this year's Emmy Awards.

The London-born actress picked up best supporting actress for her role in the The Good Wife as the US honoured stars of the small screen at a lavish LA ceremony.

But elsewhere it was disappointment for thespians hailing from this side of the pond.

Michael Sheen, Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench were among the high profile nominees who failed to take to the stage and pick up a coveted gong.

Panjabi, who made her name in British hit films East is East and Bend It Like Beckham, won an Emmy for her role as a law firm's in-house private investigator in her hit TV show.

The 38-year-old triumphed over fellow The Good Wife actress Christine Baranski and Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss.

Sheen was nominated for best actor in a miniseries or TV movie for The Special Relationship, a film in which he reprised his role as Tony Blair.

But he lost out to acting great Al Pacino, who won a rare TV gong for You Don't Know Jack. Sir Ian also missed out to Pacino in the category.

Maggie Smith and Dame Judi were both nominated in the female equivalent section. But they lost out as Claire Danes who was given the nod for her performance in Temple Grandin.

Hugh Laurie missed out yet again on an Emmy. The comedian turned actor went home empty handed as Bryan Cranston took the title of outstanding actor in a drama for his performance in Breaking Bad.

Source : http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23872159-british-actress-wins-emmy-award.do

Amjad Khan to leave Kent

27.08.10

Fast bowler Amjad Khan will leave Kent when his contract expires at the end of the season.

Leaving: Amjad Khan has so far taken 248 wickets in first-class cricket

The 29-year-old Copenhagen-born player burst onto the county scene in his first full season with Kent in 2002, claiming 63 wickets, and made his Test debut for England against West Indieslast year.

Kent chief executive Jamie Clifford said: "Amjad has been with the club for nine seasons and we are very sorry to see him leave. These are financially difficult times for the club and sadly we are not currently in a position to make Amjad a meaningful offer.

"This has been a very hard decision; however we believe that it is the right one given the financial context. I am sure the club's members and supporters will join me in thanking Amjad for all his efforts and wish him the very best as he moves on."

Khan, who has so far taken 248 wickets in first-class cricket, said: "I am sorry to be leaving having been with the club since 2002. Ideally I would have liked to have continued my career with Kent but it is not to be.

"I sympathise with Kent's off-field financial pressures and know that that the key people wanted me to stay. I look forward to new challenges with renewed vigour and believe I have what it takes to put myself back in the England frame."

Source : http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-sport/cricket/article-23871549-amjad-khan-to-leave-kent.do

London gears up for two-wheeled revolution

Alice Ritchie

July 30, 2010

The sprawling, congested city of London speeds towards a greener, nimbler future Friday with the launch of a new bike hire scheme aimed at kick-starting a cycling revolution ahead of the 2012 Olympics.

Commuters and tourists infuriated by heavy traffic and often overcrowded, unreliable public transport finally have a two-wheeled alternative, similar to schemes already in place in Paris, Shanghai and dozens of cities worldwide.

From Friday, they can pick up one of 6,000 bicycles from 400 docking stations in central London -- including at the British Museum and Buckingham Palace -- then pedal to their destination and drop it off, all for a small fee.

At least that's the plan. In Paris, a similar scheme is hugely popular but has also been marred by vandalism and theft, with organisers having to replace the entire bike fleet just two years after its launch.

Introduced by Mayor of London Boris Johnson, a keen cyclist himself, the project is intended to boost the number of bicycle journeys ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games in the capital.

"It's part of a programme of things that are going to change the urban landscape, what it's like to live in and move around in London," Johnson told reporters earlier this month.

"In the run-up to the Olympics, it's part of our vision of a cleaner, greener, safer city, where you have a cycling revolution."

The London 2012 organisers want 100 percent of the spectators attending the Games to arrive having taken public transport, walked or cycled, and are investing heavily in the subway network and trains to make it happen.

A congestion charge introduced in 2003 has helped ease the pressure on city roads, but International Olympic Committee official Denis Oswald warned this month that despite progress in preparations so far, "traffic is an issue".

Introduced alongside the new cycle scheme will be a spider-like network of "superhighways" to carry cyclists safely in and out of central London from the suburbs. The route that will pass the Olympic site is due to open next year.

The programme has been dubbed the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme after its main sponsor, but organisers hope the city's residents will come up with something a little more imaginative when it gets going.

More than 10,000 people had signed up for a subscription to the bike hire scheme before it went live, and the mayor's transport advisor, Kulveer Ranger, told AFP: "We think the scheme is going to be very popular."

The mayor wants to increase the percentage of journeys made by bicycle in the city from the current level of about two percent to five percent, and cycle campaigner Tom Bogdanovicz said this was easily achievable.

"There is an appetite out there, it's just the conditions need to be right," Bogdanovicz, campaigns manager at the London Cycle Campaign, told AFP.

Surveys have suggested a third of Londoners would like to try cycling, he said, adding that they just needed a push -- the new scheme was "a great step".

Customers can chose from either a daily, weekly or monthly subscription, costing one pound (1.5 US dollars, 1.1 euros), five pounds or 45 pounds respectively, and the first 30 minutes of any journey they make is free.

Thereafter they will be charged on a rapidly increasing scale, while they must leave a deposit in case they do not return the bike or they leave it damaged -- a problem that has hit the Paris scheme.

Advertising giant JCDecaux, which runs the Paris scheme along with more than 60 across the world, was forced to replace 16,000 bicycles after they were returned with twisted handlebars, torn baskets and crushed wheels.

Another 8,000 disappeared, some of them turning up in Eastern Europe.

© 2010 AFP
This story is sourced direct from an overseas news agency as an additional service to readers. Spelling follows North American usage, along with foreign currency and measurement units.

Source : http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/london-gears-up-for-twowheeled-revolution-20100730-10yar.html

Tea Party Movement

The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party


August 28, 2010

By FRANK RICH

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Obama’s Failure in Sudan

August 28, 2010

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

When President Obama was seeking the White House, he criticized Republicans for not doing enough on Darfur and insisted that he would make Sudan a priority.

“What we have done has not been enough,” he told me in a 2006 interview when I was guest host for a “Charlie Rose” segment on Sudan. He added that Washington needed “a sustained diplomatic effort to put pressure on Sudan.”

Yet these days, Mr. Obama is presiding over an incoherent, contradictory and apparently failing Sudan policy. There is a growing risk that Sudan will be the site of the world’s bloodiest war in 2011, and perhaps a new round of genocide as well. This isn’t America’s fault, but neither are we using all of our leverage to avert it.

Granted, Mr. Obama has a multitude of other priorities. Granted, Sudan is a mess with no perfect solutions. Nobody expects Mr. Obama to devote much time to Sudan. But the problem isn’t that the administration is too busy to devise a policy toward Sudan but that it has a half-dozen policies, mostly at cross-purposes.

As first reported by Foreign Policy, competing recommendations on Sudan are on Mr. Obama’s desk, reflecting dissent within the administration. One recommendation, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama’s envoy for Sudan, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, apparently focuses on continued carrots and engagement. The other, calling for a tougher approach, comes from the American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, who has by far the longest experience dealing with Sudan.

Some 68 organizations have sent a joint letter to Mr. Obama, calling on him to work more energetically to prevent another round of war in Sudan. But so far he has been unengaged, and his administration has been less successful than the last Bush administration in getting Sudan to alter its behavior.

The upshot: Sudan’s on-and-off north-south civil war could resume soon. How bad could it be? Well, the last iteration of that war lasted about 20 years and killed some two million people. Mr. Obama’s former head of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, warned this year that the place facing the greatest risk of genocide or mass killing is southern Sudan.

Regular readers know I was not a fan of President George W. Bush. But one of his signal accomplishments, against all odds, was a 2005 peace agreement that ended the last round of that war. That agreement provided for a referendum next January in which southern Sudan can choose secession.

Southern Sudanese are expected to vote overwhelmingly to secede. But the region has most of the nation’s oil, and the north is determined not to lose the oil wells driving the nation’s economy.

The Obama administration has tried a carrots-rather-than-sticks approach to Sudan, and it has been right to engage Khartoum. It restored the issuance of American visas in Sudan, and at first this engagement led to some successes. For example, some aid groups that had been expelled from Darfur were allowed to return in a different form. And for a time, Darfur became calmer.

But in recent months Sudan has been hardening its positions, perhaps because it sees that it pays no price for misbehavior (and also because it sees that there are limits to the rewards it will receive for improved behavior). Sudan has cracked down on dissidents and journalists, steamrolled over an election, and for the last few weeks has restricted humanitarian access to Kalma, a huge camp of Darfuris. It has also curbed the ability of United Nations peacekeepers to protect themselves or others.

Most ominously, Sudan’s government has been stalling in preparations for the referendum in the south, and it may have been channeling weapons to disgruntled factions there. No one expects restraint from President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is facing charges of genocide from the International Criminal Court.

For all his faults, President Bush inherited a war in Sudan and managed to turn it into peace. Mr. Obama inherited a peace that could turn into the world’s bloodiest war next year.

The Obama administration has just dispatched a talented former ambassador, Princeton Lyman, to lead a team on the ground in Sudan. That’s useful, but Washington could do much more. It could support United Nations peacekeepers, and it could work at the highest level with China, Britain, Egypt and others to avoid a new war. A useful step would be to put Vice President Joseph Biden in charge for at least the next six months.

The United Nations General Assembly also needs to take up Sudan when it meets next month. That will be the last chance for high-level involvement before the referendum.

There are plenty of bogus reasons for criticizing Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, but this is a legitimate one. And in a place like Sudan, American diplomatic malpractice could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29kristof.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print