Obama to visit Gulf, defends oil spill response

President Obama is expected to visit Louisiana on Friday to observe cleanup efforts and speak to local officials about capping the undersea oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico.His visit will be the second to the region since the spill occurred on April 20. His visit also comes amid criticism that his administration has been slow in its response to the environmental disaster."I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down," Obama said Thursday at a White House news conference. "That doesn't mean it's going to be easy. That doesn't' mean it's going to happen right away or the way I'd like it to happen. That doesn't mean we aren't going to make mistakes."
Obama insisted that the federal government was fully engaged, adding "and I'm fully engaged."
The president even said his 11-year-old daughter, Malia, weighed in on Thursday.
"You know, when I woke up this morning and I'm shaving, and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, 'Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?'" he said.
New federal estimates Thursday determined the spill is likely the largest in U.S. history, with oil already coating parts of the Louisiana coast and the eventual impacts still unclear.BP announced Thursday that it had suspended its "top-kill" procedure for more than 16 hours before it was restarted later that afternoon.
The "top kill" involves pumping heavy drilling fluid into the head of the leaking well at the sea floor. The manufactured fluid, known as drilling mud, is normally used as a lubricant and counterweight in drilling operations. Officials hope the drilling mud will stop the flow of oil. Cement then would be pumped in to seal the well."When we did the initial pumping (Wednesday), we clearly impacted the flow of the well. We then stopped to monitor the well," said Doug Suttles, the company's chief operating officer. "Based on that, we restarted again. We didn't think we were making enough progress after we restarted, so we stopped again."
"I probably should apologize to folks that we haven't been giving more data on that," Suttles said when asked why it took so long for BP to announce it had suspended the top kill. "It was nothing more than we are so focused on the operation itself."
The revelation that the procedure had gone on a break angered local officials and observers. Neither President Obama or Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is leading the government's response to the oil spill, appeared to be aware of the break when they addressed reporters at separate news conferences Thursday.
Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, who has been extremely critical of the federal response to the spill, said the delay in information from BP was "par for the course."
"We've been dealing with this from day one, and the information has not flowed on anything," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper.
A White House official told CNN that people inside the White House knew about the temporary delay in the "top kill," but it wasn't clear if Obama was aware of it.
The official said the president wouldn't micromanage every decision made by BP and government officials working the disaster site. The White House didn't announce the break because it didn't seem to be a major issue -- the operation had continued throughout the delay and the pumping of the liquid resumed later in the afternoon, the official said.
"It would have been a bigger deal if the entire operation stopped -- and they want to make that distinction," CNN Senior White House Correspondent Ed Henry reported.
BP officials say the procedure could take another 24 to 48 hours to complete, though whether the top kill will successfully stop the flow of oil is uncertain.
The spill claimed a job in Washington on Thursday as Elizabeth Birnbaum stepped down as head of US Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling. However, two Obama administration sources told CNN that she was fired.

50,000 Afghan refugees return home so far this year

ince January 2010, some 50,000 Afghan refugees have returned home from the neighboring states of Pakistan and Iran, a statement of United Nations Refugee Agency ( UNHCR) said Sunday.
"Two months after the UN Refugee Agency resumed its 2010 voluntary repatriation program in Pakistan and five months since return started in Iran, 50,000 Afghan refugees have returned home with UNHCR's assistance," the statement said.
Of these, 48,000 refugees have returned from Pakistan and some 2,000 others from Iran, the statement further said.
The UNHCR-assisted repatriation program from Pakistan, according to the statement resumed on March 22; while from Iran early this year.
Each Afghan returning with UNHCR assistance receives a cash grant averaging about 100 U.S. dollars, depending on the distance to their area of origin. The grant is given out to returning refugees at one of the five UNHCR encashment centers in Afghanistan.
There are still some 2.7 million registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran many of whom have lived there for over two decades.Over 6 million Afghans had left their home country due to three decades of war and civil strife.
More than 3.6 million Afghans have returned home from Pakistan and 865,000 others from Iran with UNHCR's help since 2002, the UN Refugee Agency stressed in the statement.

Conflict injuries stretch Afghan health services: ICRC

KABUL — Health services in Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries, are being strained by a rising number of people injured in the escalating insurgent war, the Red Cross said Tuesday.
Southern provinces Helmand and Kandahar, where fighting between Taliban and US-led NATO and Afghan forces is intensifying, were the most troubling areas, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a statement.
"Fighting, mines and road blocks are preventing many people in the conflict-affected areas of Afghanistan from getting to hospital," it said."The armed conflict is taking a heavy toll on health services around the country. Even basic first aid is often lacking, let alone advanced war surgery. And when health care is available, it is not always easy to get it," it said.
This has been the case in Marjah, a poppy-growing district of Helmand where international and Afghan forces launched a major operation in mid-February.
Insurgents planted booby-trap bombs, known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), throughout Marjah, impeding the progress of military and civilian efforts to re-establish government sovereignty, the statement said.
Mines planted on roads around Marjah made it difficult for residents and injured Taliban fighters alike to leave.
"Even after the fighting is over in a particular area, we're having difficulty transporting patients to doctors," the statement quoted a volunteer with the Afghan Red Crescent Society as saying.
"Mines, checkpoints and general insecurity stop us getting through safely," the volunteer said.
The ICRC said it was seeing a similar situation emerge in neighbouring Kandahar, which has become the latest focus of the war and regarded by the Taliban as their fiefdom.The ICRC said its operatives had tracked a "worrying" trend in Kandahar with "a substantial increase in the number of patients injured by improvised explosive devices and other weapons".
Attacks against international forces are also on the rise as US, NATO and Afghan forces put the squeeze on the insurgents with the aim of eradicating the Taliban threat from the province before elections set for September.The United States and NATO are ramping up their overall deployment in Afghanistan to 150,000 troops by August. Most of the thousands of extra troops will go through Kandahar as part of the operations underway there.Health facilities are woefully inadequate in Afghanistan, which has been in the grip of war for the past three decades.
Hospitals and clinics, along with education and power generation, top the wish lists of Afghans but despite billions of dollars in aid since the Taliban regime was overthrown in 2001, health remains poorly under-resourced.
The ICRC said it was training Afghan doctors, as well as providing first aid training and equipment to "arms carriers and to civilians living in conflict areas".

More Workers Start to Quit

As the job market begins to loosen up, human-resource managers might increasingly be surprised by an announcement from employees they haven't heard in a while: "I quit."
In February, the number of employees voluntarily quitting surpassed the number being fired or discharged for the first time since October 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Before February, the BLS had recorded more layoffs than resignations for 15 straight months, the first such streak since the bureau started tracking the data a decade ago. Since the BLS began tracking the data, the average number of people voluntarily leaving their jobs per month has been about 2.7 million. But since October 2008, the average number dropped to as low as 1.72 million. In March, it was about 1.87 million.And recent sentiment indicates that the number of employees quitting could continue to grow in the coming months. In a poll conducted by human-resources consultant Right Management at the end of 2009, 60% of workers said they intended to leave their jobs when the market got better. "The research is fairly alarming," says Michael Haid, senior vice president of global solutions for Right Management. "The churn for companies could be very costly."

Adecco Group, a world-wide staffing firm based in Zurich, has seen several of its clients ask for candidates for key positions after employees made surprise departures, says Vice President Rich Thompson. Although so far there haven't been widespread departures, Mr. Thompson says his company is readying itself for large-scale changes within the next few months. "We're preparing for a massive reshuffling of talent at all job levels in all industries," he says, noting that the recession earlier this decade was so short and shallow that the turnover this time around is likely to be much greater.

Recruiters and human-resource experts say the increase in employees giving notice is a product of two forces. First, the natural turnover of employees leaving to advance their careers didn't occur during the recession because jobs were so scarce. This created a backlog of workers waiting for better times to make a move to better jobs. The median monthly voluntary turnover rate in 2009 was 0.5%, half of the rate in 2008, according to the Bureau of National Affairs, a specialized news publisher for professionals.
During the recession, even if they heard of an opening, employees were reluctant to switch employers, says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. "The idea of moving when the world was already in uncertainty was quite scary," he says. But those hang-ups are disappearing, and employees are becoming more receptive to recruiter calls and beginning to tap their networks again for signs of opportunities, he says.

Another factor making it harder for companies to retain employees is the effect of the heavy cost-cutting and downsizing during the downturn on workers' morale. A survey conducted last summer for the Conference Board, a management research organization, found that the drivers of the drop in job fulfillment included less satisfaction with wages and less interest in work. In 2009, 34.6% of workers were satisfied with their wages, down more than seven percentage points from 1987. About 51% in 2009 said they were interested in work, down 19 percentage points from 1987.

"Employees feel disengaged with their jobs, which is going to lead to a lot of churn as we come out of the recession," says Brett Good, a district president of Southern California for Robert Half International (NYSE: RHI - News), an executive recruiting firm.

Mr. Good, who worked for Robert Half in the San Francisco Bay Area earlier this decade,says his company saw a "tremendous amount" of departures from technology companies that needed to be refilled when the dot-com recession ended. Already, Mr. Good says he's received calls from executives who nine months ago felt trapped because of economic conditions and didn't want to lose sure-thing positions, but now feel they're able to move on. "They feel like 'a bird in the hand' isn't good enough anymore," he says.

An increase in turnover can be costly for companies. It typically costs a company about half of the position's annual salary to recruit a person for that job, but the cost can run up to several times that if the position requires rare skills, says Right Management's Mr. Haid. Convincing employees to stay might not be cheap either. Nearly 5,400 members of TheLadders.com, a job board for positions that pay $100,000 or more, responded to an April survey that asked how much more money it would take to convince them to stay if they wanted to leave. More than 20% said it would take a raise of more than $25,000. In all, about 50% of respondents said it would take more than $15,000.

To re-engage employees, Robert Half International is advising clients to hold town hall meetings and one-on-one sessions with employees to hear grievances and try to rekindle interest in the company among workers, Mr. Good says. Some clients had made broad-based cuts in departments based solely on salary or without regard to employee tenure, damaging the trust of the employees who survived, Mr. Good says.

Florida Hospital Flagler, an 850-employee hospital in northern Florida, faced a 30% turnover rate in 2008, almost double the average for area hospitals, says Alyson Parker, director of human resources. That dipped to 20% in 2009 as the economy suppressed voluntary departures, but the hospital still spent $3 million in 2009 on covering open positions, and finding and training new employees. The average search for a new nurse, for example, costs the hospital between $52,000 and $60,000, Ms. Parker says. This year, the hospital implemented regular town hall and department meetings, and one-on-one "stay" interviews for employees to air grievances and give ways to improve the work environment. So far, the measures have helped the hospital to lower its turnover rate by about 2 percentage points. "We're trying to catch people before they even start looking for a new job, which will become even more important as the economy improves and more opportunities at competitors open up," Ms. Parker says.

Human-resource managers often have trouble getting resources from top management until employees actually start to leave, says Mr. Cappelli. In the late 1990s, companies that were losing employees started to offer concierge services, discounted lunches, and hiring bonuses in a mad scramble to keep employees and recruit new ones, a trend Mr. Cappelli says could come back if the job market continues to improve. But this time around, Mr. Cappelli says companies might try to deal with more nuanced employee requests, such as lowering stress at work, improving work-life balance, and creating more opportunities for career advancement within the company.

For some employees, it might be too late. Dice.com, a job board for tech professionals, asked members what could persuade them to stay in their jobs if they found another opportunity. More than 57% of the 1,273 surveyed said nothing could persuade them to stay. Of those who said they could be persuaded, 42% said they wanted a higher salary and 11% wanted a promotion.

Swat - regained Paradise Lost, welcomes once again

Once falling under the reign of terror, facing the largest displacement after military operation, the breathtaking valley of Swat - ringed by Hindu Kush mountains, once again invites its beloved nature lovers to flock to its scenic treasure. Located about 250 kilometers away from Islamabad, a valley - ‘regained paradise lost’ comes in the mountainous region to the north of the Peshawar plain; it includes the main valley of the upper course of the River Swat, for a length of about 200 km from the source.

After restoring peace, the valley seemed tranquil. Stores were opened and streets were bustling. Merchants, children, shoppers, bicyclists, goats, donkey carts, rickshaws and tractors jostled for space in the narrow roadways.
Efforts to promote tourism of Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation (PTDC) at Swat valley of course weigh a lot. To accomplish the goal, it offered attractive package to foreigners for Udyana and Suvastu- an ancient sources for Swat because of the scenic beauty of the valley and the name of the river respectively.
Apart from its fascinating landscapes, crystal clear water torrents, diverse flora and fanna, mesmerizing lakes, there are some ‘installations’ although to be ‘overlooked’ yet widely observed by visitors.
Factually, the spectacle role of Pakistan Army made possible the ‘densely forested valley’ peaceful for the survivors. It owes responsibility to continue safeguard ‘the beauty of nature’ through stalling its troops for lasting peace in the area.
People on their visit to Swat come across sprawling troops at different check posts to the valley, alarming the visitors of the residue of the past. The troops’ deployment is a part of long term strategy for durable peace, but it instilled a premature caution of the presence of relics of past for all.
In addition, another factor which reduces visits of tourists at the valley is presence of stinky atmosphere that surrounds the area. Rather, worth seen places have been abused by the people having least concern about beauty of nature.
“Worse” because for the most part, the quality of that local room, food and health products are unreliable and probably unregulated. And whose fault is that - the tourist’s?”, said a visitor staying at common and a low-paid motel. He added the motel management probably don’t filter their drinking water (forcing each and every guest to buy bottles of water, don’t provide garbage and bin and don’t ask guests if they’d be willing to have their sheets washed every other day.
It is not a matter of local business, some tourists and inhabitants of the locality were noticed throwing their garbage on the ground without even looking for a garbage bin - someone will deal with it, sometime. “I saw a lot of garbage on the way from Islamabad to here,” said a local journalists on trip to Swat.
It’s overwhelming issue, not to be overlooked, if we really want to revive the old era in the valley, to make it a ‘tourists heaven. What to be suggested, it should be taken at earnest level, for nature attracts people through its cleanliness.
Upon that critical situation, spokesman of Ministry of Tourism, Joint Secretary Muhammad Yasin Janjua described the issue as ‘very important’, but passed the buck to Tehsil Municipal Administration of Swat.
He said that it should at least be given training to the locals to save the environment, for it would boom business in malls of the city, causing prosperity to the local people. He assured to convey ‘the observation’ to concerned authority soon.
Answering the general impression after deploying the security forces at place to place in the area, the spokesman told APP that the matter had already been taken up in meeting with the military officials deputed in the locality.
“We told them to remove security check or at least lower down upto remarkable extent”, he said.
The cheered Moulana Atta-ur-Rehman after restoration of peace in the scenic valley, by using this medium of agency urged countrymen to visit Swat, assuring of complete security in the area. He added the provincial and federal governments were making efforts to revive tourism in the picturesque Swat valley.
He owed important role to the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to revive Swat, once a tourist hub. To conclude, it is certainly a paradise for nature lovers where they can feast their eyes on the diverse bounties of nature ranging from the densely forested.

Moderate Drinking May Protect Brain From Alzheimer's

Moderate drinking may help protect against the onset of Alzheimer's disease among otherwise healthy people, a new Spanish study suggests.
Women who don't smoke appear to gain the most benefit from alcohol consumption, according to the research team, from the University of Valencia, the Valencia government and the Municipal Institute of Medical Investigation in Barcelona.
"Our results suggest a protective effect of alcohol consumption, mostly in non-smokers, and the need to consider interactions between tobacco and alcohol consumption, as well as interactions with gender, when assessing the effects of smoking and/or drinking on the risk of Alzheimer's disease," the study's lead author, Ana M. Garcia, from the University of Valencia's department of preventive medicine and public health, said in a news release.
"Interactive effects of smoking and drinking are supported by the fact that both alcohol and tobacco affect brain neuronal receptors," Garcia explained.
The findings, published in the May issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, are gleaned from a comparative analysis of both the medical background and the smoking and drinking habits among people with Alzheimer's disease stacked up against a group of healthy individuals.Both groups were similar in age and in gender breakdown.
Smoking appeared to have no impact on Alzheimer's risk, the authors found. However, moderate drinking did seem to reduce risk for the disease, particularly among non-smoking women.

Paul McCartney to be honoured by Barack Obama at White House

The ex-Beatle will appear next week, with the show being broadcast in the US over the summer.
The president and first lady are hosting the show in the East Room on June 2 for an event at which Sir Paul will receive the third Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.

Last year the prize - awarded to musicians for a lifetime of songwriting - went to Stevie Wonder.
Sir Paul hinted at the appearance when he took part in a live webcast last week in which he mentioned the White House.
He told fans: ''If there is an announcement, remember where you heard it first.''
The prize commemorates George and Ira Gershwin, the legendary American songwriting team whose extensive manuscript collections reside in the Library of Congress.
The prize is awarded to musicians whose lifetime contributions in the field of popular song exemplify the standard of excellence associated with the Gershwins.

US troops in Afghanistan surpass number in Iraq

American forces in Afghanistan have surpassed those in Iraq for the first time since Saddam Hussein was ousted as the struggle against the Taliban-led insurgency intensifies. Troops are continuing to flood into Afghanistan as part of Barack Obama's surge, while the United States is rapidly withdrawing from Iraq.
The most recent Pentagon figures show 94,000 US personnel are now in Afghanistan compared with 92,000 in Iraq. Mr Obama was elected on a pledge to pull US troops from their unpopular involvement in Iraq as soon as possible and instead focus on the "necessary war" to prop up Hamid Karzai's regime.
He said at the weekend: "As we end the war in Iraq ... we are pressing forward in Afghanistan." "There will be difficult days ahead. We will adapt, we will persist, and I have no doubt that together with our Afghan and international partners, we will succeed in Afghanistan."
US numbers in Afghanistan are scheduled to peak later this year at about 98,000 as the final detachments of 30,000 reinforcements ordered by Mr Obama in December arrive.
Britain currently has 9,500 troops in the international coalition.
Mr Obama has given his senior commander, Gen Stanley McChrystal, until July 2011 to turn the tide of the insurgency and bolster the Afghan forces. He has vowed to begin withdrawing US troops next summer.
This summer is expected to see continued heavy fighting in southern Afghanistan, particularly around Kandahar, as Gen McChrystal pushes into Taliban strongholds.
A total of 4,400 US troops have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion compared with just over a thousand in Afghanistan since 2001.
All US combat forces are scheduled to leave Iraq by September and the Iraq government has agreed the US military should leave completely by 2012.

Afghans accuse Defence Secretary Liam Fox of racism and disrespect

Liam Fox was under attack last night for damaging Britain’s relations with Kabul after he described Afghanistan as a “broken 13th-century country”.
The Defence Secretary’s comments, made in an interview with The Times published on Saturday, provoked fury from the Afghan Government and media with officials calling the claims racist.According to senior Afghan officials, Dr Fox’s characterisation of the country was raised at a meeting with President Karzai on Saturday. The President expressed his deep displeasure at the remarks, they said.In his interview Dr Fox said that there must be a distinction between military and humanitarian goals. “We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened.”A senior Afghan government source said: “His view appears to be that Afghanistan has not changed since the 13th century and it implies that Afghanistan is a tribal and medieval society.“Despite the sacrifices of British soldiers and the massive support of the British Government we do not feel that there is a mutual respect. His remarks show a lack of trust.”The source added: “We see Britain as still a colonial, orientalist and racist country that they should have this view. Dr Fox really believes what he said, and he is not alone. London and Kabul must move on or things will be more difficult.”The issue provoked furious editorials in the Afghan press, with the daily Arman-e Melli publishing a leading article yesterday with the headline: “We don’t need Britain in Afghanistan”. At a press conference at the British Embassy in Kabul yesterday Dr Fox said: “Of course, what I was pointing out, and I welcome the opportunity to amplify it, is that the primary reason for sending our Armed Forces to Afghanistan was one of national security.“But clearly if we are to make the long-term gains that will provide the stability to maintain the momentum when our Armed Forces eventually hand over to the forces of the Afghans, we will require a long period of development in concert with the international authorities, the NGOs and our and other countries’ aid programmes.”Dr Fox was returning home last night with William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, and Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, after meeting British Forces in Helmand province. A Ministry of Defence spokesman denied that there had been any confrontation and said that the allegations were “groundless and without truth”.Mr Mitchell said yesterday: “You can’t get a cigarette paper between Liam Fox’s views and mine on the importance of joining together better and more effectively defence, diplomacy and development.”
Liam Fox office said: “Hamid Karzai has used similar words himself, describing what the Taleban left behind as 13th or 14th-century.”
The visit was intended to display unity within the coalition British Government on what is regarded as the most important foreign policy issue.
The Defence Secretary got off to a controversial start, however, when he told The Times that Britain was not a “global policeman”.
He added that he wanted to “reset expectations and timelines”, a hint that he wanted to use the trip to accelerate the return of some of the British contingent.
Last night General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan, who also met Dr Fox, said that he was confident that the British would continue to serve in Afghanistan.
“British support is absolutely rock- solid — nobody has told me anything differently,” he told journalists at his headquarters in Kabul.
Davood Moradian, a senior policy adviser to the Afghan Government, said that the new Defence Secretary’s view contradicted Britain’s stated position, which committed Western nations to the pursuit of a “comprehensive approach” to Afghanistan’s problems.

Russia gives U.S. Afghan drugs data, criticizes NATO

Russia's top drugs official gave a list of Afghan and Central Asian drug barons to U.S. anti-drugs tsar Gil Kerlikowske Sunday, but criticized U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan for failing to stem opium output.Russia is the world's biggest per capita user of heroin -- all of it flowing from Afghanistan -- and President Dmitry Medvedev has called drug abuse among the country's youth a threat to national security.
"I handed him (Kerlikowske) over a list of nine ... people living in Afghanistan or elsewhere in Central Asia and involved in drug trafficking by supplying wholesale batches of narcotics," Russia's drug enforcement chief Viktor Ivanov told a news conference.Moscow is willing to prosecute the suspects.
Ivanov said he met Kerlikowske, director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, at a Moscow airport during Kerlikowske's stopover en route to Stockholm -- their fourth meeting in less than a year.He said Russia had earlier supplied the names of around 25 other people involved in drug trade, as well as data on 175 drug laboratories operating in Afghanistan.
"To destroy these drug laboratories is the most urgent task, because these are already well-established cartels, with a stable hierarchy and structure, funding sources and technological equipment to produce narcotics," Ivanov said.Ivanov said Russia annually consumed 35 metric tones of heroin alone. If counted with other Afghan-made opiates, Russia's per capita consumption of opium was the biggest in the world.
CRITICISM
However, while praising Moscow's cooperation with Washington in some aspects of the anti-drug fight, Ivanov criticized the U.S.-led coalition of NATO states fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for failing to eradicate opium output there.
He said Afghanistan accounted for 95 percent of the world's heroin output. The country now produces each year twice as much heroin than the entire world produced 10 years ago, he said.
In March, NATO rejected Russian calls for it to eradicate opium poppy fields in Afghanistan and urged Moscow to give more assistance against the insurgency.
NATO spokesman James Appathurai said at the time that it was impossible to remove the only source of income for Afghan farmers without being able to provide them with an alternative.
"Where is the logic here? To destroy a plant is much cheaper than ... catching it later on the streets of Berlin, Rome, London, Moscow and so on," Ivanov said.
Opiates flow to Russia across Central Asia's often porous borders. Up to 2.5 million Russians are drug addicts, and some 90 percent of them use heroin. Each year 30,000 Russian drug users die and 80,000 people try narcotics for the first time.
Ivanov said Russia accounted for a fifth of the world's market of opiates estimated at a total of $65 billion.
He said Moscow would host an international forum on June 9-10 sponsored by the Kremlin where Russia would raise its concerns and call for the creation of an anti-drug coalition.

Billions needed to end US child hunger

US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Monday urged Congress to plow billions more dollars into programs to end the twin scourges of child obesity and hunger, which impact children, the economy and national security.With some 17 million children living in households that have to sometimes skip meals to make ends meet, and with a third of US children obese or on the road to becoming so, Vilsack called on lawmakers to "appropriate one billion dollars a year more into programs" aimed at ending the two crises.President Barack Obama in his budget proposal for 2011 set aside an additional one billion dollars a year over 10 years for the child nutrition bill, which Congress is set to re-authorize this year.Childhood hunger and obesity should be made national priorities, said Vilsack, speaking at the launch of a report on child hunger at the Center for American Progress.Not only was it morally wrong for so many children to be going hungry in the world's richest nation, but hunger and obesity also impact the economy, US competitivity and even national security, Vilsack argued."Research shows that youngsters who are either obese or who are hungry simply do not learn as well as they ought to," said Vilsack."Youngsters who are obese take chronic disease into adulthood which substantially reduces their productivity as individuals and causes our health care costs to escalate," he said.
And with so many American children obese, military leaders have voiced concerns that not enough youngsters are fit to serve in the army, marine, navy and air force, which could impact US national security, he said.
The report says that child hunger costs the US economy at least 28 billion dollars per year "because poorly nourished children perform less well in school and require far more long-term health care spending."Further, food insufficiency severely hampers children?s emotional, intellectual, and physical development, and it strongly hinders the upward mobility of their parents," it says.

China drives world wine market

The fourth Asian Vinexpo featuring 840 exhibitors from 32 countries opened Tuesday in Hong Kong as the global economic crisis pushed exporters to focus on the world's most promising market: China.
"A little like 2009 vintage Bordeaux, this Vinexpo is exceptional. There are more exhibitors and we expect more than 10,000 professionals, including a large number from China," said chief executive Robert Beynat.The annual wine and spirits fair is key to Hong Kong's bid to turn itself into a wine trading centre that sits on the doorstep of the vast Asian market with Chinese consumers showing a growing demand for foreign products.French wines occupy almost half the 8,500 square metre site, confirming their place as a favourite among Chinese consumers."China and Hong Kong are the most dynamic Asian markets with per capita consumption rising and strong import growth (8.7 million cases in 2008)," Beynat said."European and US producers are turning towards these markets to recover from the (economic) crisis."Italian, Spanish and German wines round out Europe's offering at the fair, with the US doubling the number of its exhibitors and Australian and New Zealand vintners boosting their presence by 30 percent.Asia-Pacific accounts for 50.6 percent of world spirits consumption with an expected 4.7 percent increase between 2009 and 2013.Although Japan remains the region's biggest wine importer, China will have nearly caught up in the next three years, according to Vinexpo.China is expected to be the world's seventh-largest wine consumer by 2013, it said."There are 100 to 150 million people in China who can afford to drink wine. It is these people, and not only millionaires, that we must reach," said Alain Vironneau, president of the Bordeaux Wine Council.Added Beynat: "Our challenge is to explain to Chinese consumers that there are good wines at all prices and they're not reserved just for the elite".

Clinton and Geithner Face Hurdles in China Talks

New York Times
China and the United States opened three days of high-level meetings here on Monday meant to broaden and deepen the ties between the world’s largest developed and developing economies. But the opening session instead laid bare a recurring theme between Beijing and Washington: the United States came with a long wish list for China on both economic and security issues, while China mostly wants to be left alone to pursue policies that are turning it into an economic superpower.

President Hu Jintao, welcoming the 200-strong American delegation in the Great Hall of the People, praised the “mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation” between the United States and China. Such coordination, he said, had helped speed the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.

On the crucial issue of China revaluing its currency — something the Obama administration had pushed for — Mr. Hu repeated China’s past promises to make its effectively fixed exchange rate respond more to the market, but the fact that the country’s top leader mentioned reform at all suggested it is on the leadership’s agenda.

Still, Mr. Hu also repeated that Beijing would move “under the principle of independent decision-making, controllability, and gradual progress.” Translation: China alone will determine the timing of any such move.

Economists said the deepening debt crisis in Greece, which came up immediately in the discussions on Monday, would make Beijing more reluctant to allow its currency to appreciate in value in the immediate future.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner did not mention China’s currency in his opening remarks, though he did allude to it in subsequent sessions. The administration has decided not to prod Beijing at this meeting, officials said, concluding that it would resist outside pressure.

The United States is hitting similar hurdles on security issues. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pressed China to support measures against North Korea following the strong evidence that it torpedoed a South Korean warship in March. But China has been skeptical of North Korea’s role and is reluctant to punish the North, with which it has close ties.

And while China agreed to a watered-down United Nations resolution on Iran’s nuclear program, it has not signed off on amendments against specific Iranian citizens and companies. With big planned investments in Iran’s oil and gas industry, China may well be in business with some of them.

In her speech to the opening session, Mrs. Clinton cited Iran and North Korea as issues in which Beijing and Washington must find common cause. “Today, we face another serious challenge provoked by the sinking of the South Korean ship,” she said. “So we must work together, again, to address this challenge and advance our shared objectives of peace and stability.”

A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Ma Zhaoxu, was noncommittal, saying of the Korea crisis, “We hope all the relevant parties will exercise restraint and remain cool-headed.”

Some of this is cultural, to be sure. Chinese officials tend to speak far less directly than Americans. Mr. Hu did not mention Iran and North Korea, referring to regional “hot spots.” The fact that he frankly addressed the exchange rate of China’s currency, the renminbi, surprised some observers, and lent itself to varying interpretations.

For some experts, Mr. Hu’s pledge to “steadily advance the reform mechanism of the RMB exchange rate,” without repeating his previous references to the rate being “basically stable,” was a sign of conciliation. “It’s important, the fact they haven’t mentioned it,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, the China economist for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

But others interpreted it as a pre-emptive move to take the issue off the table. Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University, noted that the crisis in Greece had rattled the Chinese on two levels. It was likely to curb their exports to Europe, and it had strengthened the renminbi relative to the swooning euro, which makes Chinese goods more costly in foreign markets.

“That double hit on China’s exports almost certainly means that they’re not going to move forward unless there is evidence of stabilization in the euro and stabilization in Europe’s recovery,” Mr. Prasad said.

A senior Chinese official said that Beijing would keep a “high alert and attention on the euro zone sovereign debt crisis.” He noted that it could affect not only Europe’s economic recovery but also Chinese exports. China exports more to the European Union than to the United States.

The United States needed a 48-vehicle motorcade to ferry its delegation to this second round of the so-called strategic and economic dialogue. Among the prominent names: the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, the commander of the military’s Pacific Command, Adm. Robert F. Willard, and the secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius.

Some of the topics under discussion veered far from economics and security. Mrs. Clinton singled out Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s ambassador at large for women’s issues, who is meeting with Chinese women’s groups to discuss their progress in women’s rights.

Mr. Geithner lobbied against Chinese government procurement rules giving preference to products with intellectual property developed in China. American businesses, particularly in technology, say this handicaps them and deprives China of state-of-the-art products. “Innovation flourishes best when markets are open, competition is fair, and strong protections exist for ideas and inventions,” he said.

The Chinese have their pet issues as well: Beijing is pushing Washington to loosen controls on exports of high-technology equipment with potential military applications. A raft of questions from reporters for state-run Chinese media organizations suggested a coordinated campaign.

If American officials seemed likely to leave China with many of their wishes unfulfilled, there was one notable difference in this year’s meeting compared to the one last year in Washington: the American economy is growing again, which gave Mr. Geithner a rare chance to crow a bit.

Rather than identify the United States with the troubled economies of Europe, Mr. Geithner said the United States was holding its own with emerging economies like Brazil, India, and China.

“Economic growth in the U.S. and China is broader and stronger than many had anticipated, even a few months ago,” he said.

Peshawar fears influx of Taliban militants

PESHAWAR: There is growing concern by residents and tribal lashkars that militants have reached the suburbs of the provincial capital.
The concerns heightened after attacks on a girls school and a security checkpoint in Sherakera village, on the outskirts of Peshawar, close to the border of semi-tribal Darra Adam Khel region. The attack came following reports that militants fleeing security operations in tribal regions have started patrolling some villages in Frontier Regions (FR) Peshawar. “The movement of Taliban militants has increased in the region over the past few weeks,” a member of a tribal lashkar told The Express Tribune on conditions of anonymity.
He added that the operation in February in Frontier Regions Peshawar was not successful because most of the militants had fled the area before paramilitary troops had moved in. The elders said that militants had also warned tribal lashkars not to confront them. “We cannot challenge the powerful Taliban militants in the absence of support from the government,” he added. Dilawar Khan, head of the Adezai Qaumi Lashkar, told The Express Tribune that militants had come to the FR Peshawar areas of Bora and Pastowana from Tirah Valley of Khyber Agency, Orakzai and Darra Adamkhel.
He added that local residents have shifted to safer places. Khan said that their lashkars had controlled the movement of militants till Adezai village. Peshawar’s Superintendent Police Syed Abdul Kalam said that policemen have been deployed in all areas and they are continuously monitoring the situation. “Tribal lashkars are also cooperating with the police and we will not allow militants to enter Peshawar,” he added.
On February 24, the paramilitary Frontier Constabulary (FC) had launched an operation, codenamed “Spring Cleaning”, in the remote FR Peshawar area. Until March 4, when the operation was wrapped up, 38 suspected militants had been killed. The FR region has a strategic location from where it is easy to approach Nowshera, Kohat, Peshawar and Darra Adamkhel.

Pashto Cultural Museum inaugurated

PESHAWAR: Vice-chancellor of the University of Peshawar Prof Dr Azmat Hayat Khan on Monday formally inaugurated the Pashto Cultural and Heritage Museum at the university.
The remaining part of the museum would be established at an estimated cost of Rs24 million in three years. Funds for the project have been provided by the Higher Education Commission, said Prof Dr Salma Shaheen, project director of the museum.
The writer said that the museum was aimed at preserving the Pakhtun culture and heritage so that people from abroad as well as locals and students could understand the way of life of Pakhtuns in the region. “We are on our way to gather the best material for the museum. For the purpose a special committee has been formed,” she said.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr Azmat Hayat said it was a matter of pride for the university to have a museum that was the first of its kind in the country. “This museum is also aimed at providing the visitors a platform to understand our culture and way of life,” the vice-chancellor said. He appealed to the literati, poets and intellectuals of Pashto language to contribute their ideas for the betterment of the museum.

A leader of the ruling Awami National Party, Hashim Babar in his speech said it was dilemma that the world knows very little about Pakhtuns. He said the main reason behind this was that the Pakhtuns had not been able to project their true image.

He said the heroes of this region were not mentioned in history because the Pakhtuns had not been able to project them in different eras. “Pashto Museum is a very good initiative and the building needs to be transformed into a world class structure with brilliant collection so that we can inspire those who visit it,” he remarked, announcing Rs0.5 million for the museum.

Clinton Sees U.S. Pavilion at China Expo

nytimes.com
By all accounts, the United States would have been a no-show at the Shanghai Expo had Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton not opened her Rolodex and raised about $60 million in private cash to finance a pavilion here. So it seemed fair that Mrs. Clinton got a rousing cheer from a group of Chinese children when she visited the building on Saturday.
But the house that Hillary built is unmistakably the house that corporate America paid for.
After touring the pavilion — with its Citibank- and Pfizer-sponsored theaters, gauzy eight-minute videos featuring representatives from Chevron, General Electric, and Johnson & Johnson, environmentally friendly features sponsored by Alcoa, and a gift shop with licensed merchandise from Disney — Mrs. Clinton seemed less inspired than relieved that the project was done.
“It’s fine,” she said to a reporter asking her what she thought of the pavilion. “Can you imagine if we had not been here?”
With its gunmetal-gray walls and convention-center aesthetics, the pavilion hardly stands out in a fairground studded by beguiling structures like Britain’s Seed Cathedral, a cube with 60,000 sprouting transparent rods that make it look like a dandelion ready to be scattered to the winds.
Still, the American organizers say the pavilion has drawn long lines and 700,000 visitors since the Expo opened May 1, which attests either to the enduring attraction of the United States or the wisdom of Woody Allen’s observation that 80 percent of success is showing up.
For Mrs. Clinton, scratching together the money for the project was a simple matter of avoiding a diplomatic snub. The Chinese government spent $45 billion buffing up this glamorous but gritty metropolis to play host to a world’s fair, and it is treating the six-month-long event with almost the same importance it attached to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
America’s participation was in jeopardy because Congress restricts the spending of public money on world’s fairs, and under the Bush administration, the project had virtually no private financing. On Mrs. Clinton’s first visit as secretary of state last year, Chinese officials implored her to do something.
“It’s like a coming-out party for countries and cities,” Mrs. Clinton said, referring to world’s fairs of the last century in Chicago and St. Louis. “There’s a real historical significance to this.”
To avoid violating federal rules, Mrs. Clinton assigned most of the one-on-one fund-raising to two longtime Clinton fund-raisers: Elizabeth F. Bagley and Jose H. Villarreal, both of whom were on hand.As she walked in this morning, Mrs. Clinton greeted Indra K. Nooyi, the chief executive of PepsiCo, and senior executives from Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric, each of which kicked in $5 million. She met major sponsors again at a dinner on Saturday night.Mrs. Clinton also toured China’s pavilion, a monumental deep-red building with a traditional Chinese inverted roof. “It would have to be very big to fit all the provinces of China in it,” she told Shanghai’s mayor, Han Zheng, who thanked her for making sure the United States had a presence.
Nearly 200 countries are represented at the Expo, which stretches along both banks of the Huangpu River. Two countries branded as rogue nations, Iran and North Korea, are conveniently located next to each other.
Among the North Korean attractions is a video of a rocket launching intercut with pictures of children in a classroom.Iran has gathered examples of its technology, including a primitive satellite and a stuffed goat, which was identified as the country’s first cloned goat. “Only a few countries such as the U.S., U.K., Canada, and China have a cloned goat in their list of achievements,” a placard said.Neither country made any mention of its nuclear program, which in both cases is fueling tension with their neighbors and the United States. But then, the U.S.A. Pavilion does not mention the American political system, the Constitution or the founding fathers.Instead, visitors are treated to a video of Americans struggling to speak Chinese, testimonials about sustainable energy, water conservation, and family values — each presented by a corporate sponsor with interest in those areas — followed by a video about a young girl planting a garden in a garbage-strewn lot. At one point, the seats shake and the audience is sprayed with mist.The highlight at the pavilion is 70 student ambassadors, drawn from universities around the United States, who speak fluent Mandarin, and entertain the long lines of visitors.
Franklin L. Lavin, a former American ambassador to Singapore who is the chairman of the pavilion’s steering committee, said the organizers stayed clear of messages about free speech or democratic institutions in favor of the simple virtues of civic-mindedness.
“We wanted to talk about what works in American society, not what doesn’t work in other societies,” Mr. Lavin said.

Pakhtuns killings a conspiracy

MARDAN: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Ameer Haider Hoti Saturday condemned target killing of Pakhtuns in Karachi and termed it a conspiracy to widen the gulf of differences between Hazarawals and Pakhtuns.
“Hazarawals are our brothers, we are living in one province and there is no issue between Hazarawals and Pakhtuns that could pit them in an armed action against each other,” said the chief minister while talking to journalists during inaugural ceremony of several projects and a function arranged by Malik Saad Sports Trust at Mardan Sports Complex.
The chief minister distributed sports prizes among players and also announced Rs50 million fund for the sports complex.
Haider Hoti said some people declared the Karachi killings an issue of Hazarwals and Pakhtuns, but said it was a wrong notion.
He said that on the one hand target killings of Pakhtuns continued in Karachi, while on the other some elements were defaming Pakhtuns through various tactics.
Haider Hoti said police played a key role by maintaining peace in province as they rendered sacrifices, which would be written in the Pakistani history in golden words.
Strict security measures were taken in Mardan city during the chief minister’s visit. Vehicles were banned on some roads being used by the chief minister’s cavalcade. During his visit, he inaugurated several schemes including Bank Road.

Egypt and Pakistan to boost trade

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Sunday that his country plans to boost trade with Egypt, during a visit to Cairo where he met with President Hosni Mubarak.Qureshi, who was accompanied on his trip by several ministers and a large delegation of businessmen, praised the "excellent" relations between Pakistan and Egypt, the official MENA news agency reported.During talks with his Egyptian counterpart Ahmed Abul Gheit on Saturday, the two diplomats agreed to set up a ministerial level committee to oversee bilateral trade that would meet every two years, Qureshi told MENA.
The two countries would also hold political consultations once a year, Qureshi said.
The talks focused on "exploring new trade opportunities between the two countries, including exporting Pakistani wheat as well as medical and surgical equipment to Egypt," MENA said.
The two sides also looked into exporting Egyptian goods to Pakistan, including fertilizers," it said.
The annual volume of trade between Egypt and Pakistan currently stands at four million dollars, according to MENA.

Germany's Birth Rate Hits Historic Low

Germany is shrinking - and fast. New figures released on May 17 show the birth rate in Europe's biggest economy has plummeted to a historic low, dropping to a level not seen since 1946. As demographers warn of the consequences of not making enough babies to replace and support an ageing population, the latest figures have triggered a bout of national soul-searching and cast a harsh light on Chancellor Angela Merkel's family policies.

According to a preliminary analysis by the Federal Statistics Office, 651,000 children were born in Germany in 2009 - 30,000 fewer than in 2008, a dip of 3.6%. In 1990, German mothers were having on average 1.5 children each; today that average is down to 1.38 children per mother. With a shortfall of 190,000 between the number of people who died and the number of children who were born, Germany's birth rate is well below the level required to keep the population stable.
"The German birth rate has remained remarkably flat over the past few years while it has increased in other low fertility countries, like Italy and the Czech Republic," Joshua Goldstein, executive director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, tells TIME. "Women are continuing to postpone motherhood to an older age and this process of postponement is temporarily lowering the birth rate." According to Goldstein's research, Germany has the longest history of low fertility in Europe.
To explain Germany's low reproduction rate, Steffen KrÖhnert, a social scientist at the Berlin Institute for Population Development, points to a number of factors. Many German women decide not to have children because of poor state-run childcare facilities. Most schools in Germany finish earlier than in other parts of Europe - some as early as 1pm - leaving parents struggling to find and afford sufficient day care. And often women who take up part-time jobs to try to juggle work and family life end up paying a high financial price. "Many German women have to stop work and end their careers if they want to have kids," says KrÖhnert. It doesn't help that German mothers are still often branded RabenmÜtter - "raven mothers" - a pejorative label that accuses them of being bad mothers if they decide to put their children in nurseries and continue working.
As Germany feels the demographic crunch, the country's plummeting birth rate has become a contentious political issue. Over the past few years, Chancellor Merkel has introduced a number of family-boosting incentives, including a new parental allowance for couples which pays a parent who chooses to stay home 67% of his or her income for the first year after their child is born (with a cap of $2,300 per month). The measure is aimed at encouraging fathers to take a more active role in raising their children and, in that respect, it appears to have paid off. One-in-five fathers now stays home to look after the kids.
Merkel's new center-right government has also pledged to expand the number of nursery school places, setting itself the ambitious goal of providing one-in-three children under 3 with state-funded childcare by 2013. But it remains to be seen whether that new initiative will motivate Germans to make more babies. "There are many reasons why couples don't have children," said Family Minister Kristina SchrÖder in a statement. "The economic crisis and job fears play a role. We have to help people combine work and family, especially in these difficult economic times."

And that help has to come soon; the predictions of Germany's demographic future make for uncomfortable reading. The Federal Statistics Office says Germany's population of 82 million could drop by up to 17 million over the next 50 years. Demographers fear a shrinking workforce will stymie growth and struggle to foot the bill for a rapidly ageing population. "Germany's working age population is likely to decrease by 30% over the next few decades," says KrÖhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. "Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear - Germany will become a weak economic power in the future."
KrÖhnert says that while society has become more modern and more women are choosing both career and kids, German politicians have reacted too slowly to the country's falling birth rate. With the recent multi-billion dollar bailout for Greece and the euro-zone rescue package straining Germany's already stretched public finances, Merkel is coming under increasing pressure from within her own conservative party to make cuts. The powerful governor of the state of Hesse, Roland Koch, recently suggested the government could save on education and childcare, although Merkel quickly distanced herself from his remarks, insisting that those areas would be spared the axe. But the Chancellor was elected last September on her promise to reduce taxes, a pledge she has been forced to put on ice for the next few years. As Germany battles to bring its spiralling budget deficit under control, it may have trouble convincing its citizens to add to the family for the good of the country.

Moscow furious, says US not pushing drug war in Afghanistan

Moscow's new drug czar, Viktor Ivanov, claims Russia is being flooded with cheap heroin and charges that the US and its NATO allies in Afghanistan are reluctant to pursue a drug war that could drive poppy farmers into the arms of the Taliban.
A gruff and graying veteran of the Soviet Union's disastrous military intervention in Afghanistan, he recently made his first return visit to that country. When he came back to Moscow, he had harsh words for the Western alliance, charging that it is enabling a drug-fueled hurricane of destabilization that is now sweeping across former Soviet Central Asia and Russia.
He wants the war in Afghanistan to be a proper drug war. Why?
Mr. Ivanov says the flow of narcotics from the fields of Afghanistan into Russia has increased by 16 percent in the past three years alone, spiking urban drug addiction. He alleged in a March press conference that drug barons are uniting with Islamist militants to seize power in vulnerable Central Asian states – and that the North Atlan­tic Treaty Org­ani­zation's (NATO) failure to deal with Afghan­istan's burgeoning drug production threatens to create a security nightmare for Russia and its regional allies.
"We do not believe the principal aims of the NATO security operation in Afghanistan have been achieved," Ivanov said at a press conference. "Of course the struggle against terrorism should take precedence, but what about liquidating drug production? How does it happen that almost 10 years after NATO occupied this country, Afghanistan is not only the world's largest producer of opium, but also of hashish, surpassing the traditional global leader, Morocco?"
In recent years, Russia and NATO have run a school for Afghan antidrug police in the Moscow-region town of Domodedovo, turning out hundreds of graduates. But despite that cooperation, experts say Moscow is increasingly dubious about NATO's ability to impose order in Afghanistan, and may be seeking ways to expand its influence in Central Asia against the day the United States decides to leave. Some analysts suggest that the Kremlin's recent backing of a coup in Kyrgyzstan could be a sign of more assertive behavior to come.
"The former Soviet states of central Asia are our own backyard," says Tatiana Parkhalina, director of the independent Center for European Security in Moscow. "Moscow doesn't want to stand by while the Taliban and terrorist networks convert the financial resources from drug trafficking into arms and political influence... There is a practical alliance taking shape between drug traffickers and terrorists, and it is a very big threat."
More heroin addicts?
Ivanov says there are now at least 2 million heroin addicts in Russia, but other experts claim the number is higher. "The inflow of drugs from Afghanistan via Central Asia into Russia is increasing exponentially, as is consumption," says Stanislav Belkovsky, president of the Kremlin-connected Institute of National Strategy. "The only thing Ivanov exaggerates is the will and ability of the state to struggle against this threat."Yevgeny Roizman, a former Duma deputy who founded an independent drug treatment center in his Ural hometown of Yekaterinburg, claims Russia has as many as 6 million drug addicts. "Drugs are coming into the country in huge bulk, from Afghanistan via the gateway states of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan which, to this day, have no visa regime with Russia. I have the deepest sympathy for the US and its goals in Afghanistan, but there is no doubt this problem for us has multiplied ... since they arrived" in the region, he says.Russian analysts allege that NATO turns a blind eye to Afghan poppy production as part of a strategy to keep the loyalty of local warlords and win over peasants who depend on the crop for income.US destroys coca, not poppies?
"We have sent requests to the US, asking them to intensify the struggle against drug production, but they respond that they are still analyzing their options and worry about driving the peasants into the arms of the Taliban," says Viktor Ilyukhin, deputy chair of the State Duma's security commission. "Their excuses are very slim indeed."
Ivanov told journalists that he can't understand why the US advocates destruction of coca plantations in Colombia, but seems reluctant to take the same measures in Afghanistan.
"OK, we differ over whether to destroy poppy plantations," Ivanov says, "but why doesn't NATO target the laboratories? There are more than 200 giant laboratories in the Afghan mountains, which produce more and more concentrated drugs, and they are not touched. Our conclusion is that there is no struggle against drug production going on at all."
The issue could portend trouble for the fledgling "reset" in US-Russia relations, say some analysts. "There is a suspicion in Moscow that the lack of interest in fighting drugs in Afghanistan is connected with the US strategy of creating safe conditions for withdrawal from the country before the next US presidential elections in 2012, and not in permanently resolving the problems," says Dmitry Suslov, who is with the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies, an independent Moscow think tank. "This naturally creates anxiety over what kind of Afghanistan NATO will leave behind, and how big a problem it is going to be for Russia."
But a few Russian experts say the Kremlin is hyping the drug issue as a pretext for becoming more assertive in Central Asia.
"The Russian state drug service tends to overestimate drug consumption in Russia; there is no independent confirmation," says Andrei Sol­da­tov, editor of Agentura.ru, an on­line journal about security issues. "All of a sudden we hear a lot of declarations about how the threat is dire, and growing, and something has to be done. But it looks to me like conven­ient political theater, and I find it very difficult to trust all these claims."

Obama says diplomacy, military go hand in hand

The U.S. must shape a world order as reliant on the force of diplomacy as on the might of its military to lead, President Barack Obama said Saturday as he outlined a foreign policy vision that repudiated the go-it-alone approach forged by his predecessor, George W. Bush.Addressing nearly 1,000 graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy, many of whom will likely head to war in Iraq and Afghanistan under his command, Obama said all hands are required to solve the world's newest threats: terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons, climate change and feeding and caring for a growing population.The U.S. military is the "cornerstone of our national defense," but Obama said the men and women who wear America's uniform cannot bear that responsibility by themselves. "The rest of us must do our part," he said."The burdens of this century cannot fall on our soldiers alone. It also cannot fall on American shoulders alone," the commander in chief told graduates in gray and white uniforms seated on the field at Michie Stadium.Diplomacy and muscle must work together, he said in calling for "renewed engagement" from diplomats, along with development experts, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and first responders.
Obama acknowledged that the U.S. is "clear-eyed" about the shortcoming of the international system, but he said America had not ever been successful by "stepping out of the currents of cooperation."
"We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face the consequences when they don't," the president said.
Bush's "my way or the highway" approach alienated some allies and damaged U.S. standing around the world. Obama has promised to restore America's reputation, and he said Saturday that he aimed to do that by forging new alliances, maintaining old ones and helping to shape stronger international standards and institutions.
At the same time, Obama said the U.S. will fight to protect "those universal rights that formed the creed of our founding" and will lead by example by staying true to the rule of law and the Constitution, "even when it's hard, even when we're being attacked, even when we're in the midst of war."
"We should not discard our freedoms because extremists try to exploit them," he said in an apparent reference to policies sanctioning torture and domestic spying that Bush adopted after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Nearly the entire graduating class of 2010 became second lieutenants in the Army, with most expecting to serve eventually in Iraq or Afghanistan, a fact that Obama said "humbled" him.
"I assure you, you will go with the full support of a proud and grateful nation," he said.
Noting that he came to West Point in December to announce his military policy in Afghanistan, Obama told the cadets "a long and hard road awaits you. ... Your service is fundamental to our security back home."
Despite that warning, the newly commissioned officers said they were ready to serve.
"This is the reason I came here," said Bradley Marren of Charlotte, N.C.
Annie Odom, of Ware Shoals, S.C., said she was following in her father's footsteps. She said he was sent to Iraq in 2003, and now it was her turn.
"My father did it ... and I want to do my service for my country," Odom said. "When that day comes, when I have to go to combat, I'll be ready and God will be on my side. That's all I have to know."

N.Y. bomb plot probe shows radicalism might be on the rise among Pakistani elite

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- A crescendo of violence has steadily cramped the lifestyles of well-heeled Pakistanis and expatriates in this tidy city by targeting elite hotels and eateries. Now militancy may have infiltrated one remaining social reserve of those groups: private, canapé-laden parties in manicured compounds.
A Pakistani intelligence official said Saturday that the U.S.-educated co-owner of a catering firm to swanky events, including American Embassy functions, might have given money to the suspect in the Times Square bomb plot and been asked to aid attacks on diplomats' gatherings. Salman Ashraf Khan, 35, is among several detained in a widening Pakistani probe into the attempted bombing in New York that has netted a former army major, a computer salesman and other professionals.
Khan's suspected involvement prompted the U.S. Embassy to warn Americans to avoid the catering company. The arrests added to evidence that the terrorism threat in Pakistan emanates not just from cave-dwelling radicals but also from the Western-oriented upper crust -- and that those groups might overlap.
"It's not just an individual pulling strings," a Western official said on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "There are an awful lot of people connected."
The precise ties between those recently detained in Pakistan and Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani American accused of the New York bomb attempt, have not been established, and the intelligence official said none had confessed to roles in the bomb plot. But Khan and at least two of them knew Shahzad -- a product of Pakistan's urban elite -- and all had lambasted "anti-Muslim" U.S. policies during interrogations, the official said.
In the United States, investigations of Shahzad, an American citizen, and other terrorism suspects have prompted concern about extremism among "assimilated" middle-class Muslims. Muhammad Amir Rana, a terrorism researcher in Islamabad, said his recent surveys indicate that radicalization is rising among privileged Pakistani youth, who relate neither to the West nor to Pakistan's impoverished masses.
"They feel alienated," said Rana, director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, who added that such feelings have rarely led to violence. "So they try to identify themselves through religion."
Combating Islamist radicalization is a focus of a new surge in U.S. aid money to Pakistan, where polls repeatedly reveal deep anti-Americanism.
The Pakistani intelligence official said Khan and Shahzad were friends and probably met during Shahzad's trip to Pakistan earlier this year. Another man detained, Shoaib Mughal, owns a small computer-sales firm in Islamabad and is suspected of linking Shahzad with the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas. A third is Khan's business partner; the two provided food to the cafeteria of the headquarters of Mobilink, a cellphone company, according to Khan's father.
The official said a former army major was also arrested on suspicions of links to the plot. But another senior intelligence officer, echoing military statements, said that arrest was unrelated to the Shahzad probe. The senior officer played down the Islamabad detentions, saying investigators were questioning and releasing many people.
But the rare U.S. alert on Friday about terrorists' ties to Hanif Rajput Catering Services, Khan's firm, indicated that investigators were looking at him more seriously. The family business caters more than 200 events a month for military, government and diplomatic circles in the Islamabad area, and the intelligence official said militant organizations might have sought to "use" Khan for access to them.
In an interview Saturday, Khan's father, Rana Ashraf Khan, called that idea "absurd." He said it was possible that his son, who graduated from the University of Houston in 2001, met Shahzad in the course of business. The elder Khan said his son was religious but displayed no extremist tendencies, nor did he have any connections to the Western regions populated by militants.
He said his son, who lived at his parents' home with his wife, also had no relationship with Mughal, the computer shop owner whom the Pakistani intelligence official said was the key focus of investigators. Merchants near the shop, Infinix Quality Services, described Mughal as devout but gentlemanly.
"He is a regular prayer-offering guy," said one business owner, who said he feared being quoted by name. "To me that doesn't suggest he is a militant."
Salman Khan vanished on the morning of May 10, and his father said the embassy alert confirmed the family's suspicions that he had been picked up by security agencies. The father said Khan's business partner "disappeared" the same day.
Rana Ashraf Khan said his son occasionally expressed a belief that American policies in Pakistan caused "suffering," but that he was "full of praise" about his five years in the United States and enjoyed Western movies.
"We are educated people. Not extremists. Not fanatics," the elder Khan said of his five children, who include two physicians living in the United States. "There was nothing in Salman that could have tempted him to even be sympathetic to people bent on the destruction of the United States."

Kandahar offensive may affect future U.S. moves

www.washingtonpost.com
The Obama administration's campaign to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan's second-largest city is a go-for-broke move that even its authors are unsure will succeed.
The bet is that the Kandahar operation, backed by thousands of U.S. troops and billions of dollars, will break the mystique and morale of the insurgents, turn the tide of the war and validate the administration's Afghanistan strategy.
There is no Plan B.
The deadline for results is short: Administration officials anticipate that the operation will form the centerpiece of a major strategy assessment due in December and will justify the first withdrawals of U.S. troops from elsewhere in Afghanistan in July 2011. Although operations initiated last winter in southwestern Helmand province will continue, and new troop deployments are scheduled this year for northern and eastern Afghanistan, little else will matter if the news from Kandahar is not good.
The urgency and the difficulty of the task were illustrated Saturday when the Taliban launched an unprecedented rocket and ground attack against the Kandahar air field, NATO's largest installation in southern Afghanistan and the headquarters of the upcoming offensive. Several coalition troops and civilian employees were wounded when rockets sailed over perimeter fortifications, but gunmen who tried to fire their way inside through a gate were unsuccessful, the U.S. military said.
Officials have described the offensive's blend of civilian and military operations as the first true test of the counterinsurgency doctrine adopted five years ago on the eve of the 2007 surge in Iraq, but since only imperfectly applied. As troops battle insurgent forces entrenched among the population on the outskirts of the city, the birthplace of the Taliban movement, U.S.-mentored Afghan police will establish a presence in the relatively secure center.
There will be no "tanks rolling into the city," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said May 13, adding that care will be taken so that the effort "doesn't destroy Kandahar in the effort to save Kandahar."
A delicate balance
"Shaping" operations for the offensive began late last winter as Special Operations forces began killing or capturing insurgent leaders. The Taliban has also begun an assassination campaign against people working for foreigners or the Afghan government. U.S. civilian officials are simultaneously trying to wrest control from local power brokers and to correct imbalances that favor one tribal group. They plan to set up 10 administrative districts, each with a representative council and money to spend.
Success has been only vaguely defined, and progress will be monitored through what the military calls "atmospherics reporting," including public opinion polls and levels of commerce in the streets. A senior military official said the central question, which the administration will pose and answer for itself, is: "Are we moving toward a solution in Kandahar that the people support?"
Public descriptions of the balance between the offensive's military and civilian aspects have fluctuated in response to Afghan sensibilities in a region that is arguably more hostile to foreign intervention and the government in Kabul than to the Taliban.
Senior U.S. military officials briefing American reporters in Kabul early last month described extensive "clearing operations" planned in the outlying Kandahar districts of Zhari, Argandab and Panjwai, where the Taliban is entrenched.
But Afghan President Hamid Karzai said last week that military force would be used only "if and when and where needed . . . in consultation with the community." Although the administration has pledged to consult with Karzai every step of the way, and Karzai with Kandaharis, it remains unclear whether consultation equals a veto. "It's not a military operation in the normal sense of the word," an administration official said. "Maybe they just should have done it," and not talked about it first, "but you couldn't . . . bring so many troops in" without an explanation, he said, referring to the 10,000 additional U.S. troops that have begun to flow into the Kandahar area.
The name of the offensive -- Hamkari Baraye Kandahar, or Cooperation for Kandahar -- was carefully chosen to avoid the word "operation," which suggests violence. The administration official described it benignly as a "military presence" and Karzai has defined it as a "process." Last week, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, called the offensive "a unique challenge."
"I actually think the U.S. military would love to find an enemy that was dug in on a piece of terrain, that we could establish a D-Day and we could attack with no civilians around," McChrystal said, "because that would play to every strength that the coalition has."
Instead, the Kandahar operation might highlight areas of traditional U.S. and Afghan government weakness. Avoiding the civilian casualties that have plagued U.S. operations elsewhere will be particularly difficult in and around Kandahar, an urban and farming area of 2 million people.
The offensive requires Afghan police to demonstrate, arguably for the first time, competence and integrity. It assumes that Americans, both military and civilian, can sort through complex tribal politics to ensure that power and funding go to the right people, and that Kandahar's chieftains will relinquish some control and support U.S. aims.
The perils underlying all these assumptions, and the pitfalls of getting it wrong, were outlined in an 80-page, unclassified analysis prepared this spring by McChrystal's command as a sociological primer on Kandahar.
"Of all the districts and cities in Afghanistan," the March 30 analysis said, "none is more important to the future of the Afghan government or the Taliban insurgency than Kandahar City."
'Significant risks'
Despite initial indications that the Taliban would not challenge the U.S. troop buildup and would lie low until the withdrawal begins, the analysis said, "There are signs the Taliban leadership believes it cannot afford to remain idle as a surge of foreign troops and the largest influx of development aid in modern Afghan history are focused on establishing governance in the Taliban's birthplace and former capital."
Military and civilian momentum in Kandahar, it concluded, "will probably compel the Taliban to make a political compromise with the Afghan government or to wage a climactic campaign of violence in Kandahar City (or perhaps even both)."
Statistics in the analysis are grim. Of 784 uniformed police in Kandahar city and the surrounding area, only 25 percent to 30 percent have been trained, although new forces are scheduled to arrive for the offensive. Of 87 slots for local judges, nine are filled. Saraposa prison, the main detention facility in Kandahar, is overpopulated and is considered less than secure, and the offensive is expected to produce "far more" prisoners than it can handle.
Among the "significant risks" the strategy poses, the analysis said, huge U.S. expenditures in Kandahar -- including 80 percent of U.S. Agency for International Development resources designated for Afghanistan this year -- could "undermine, rather than create, stability." Citing the "unsettling" results of research being conducted at Tufts University, it noted that little link has been established between aid and stability, and that most Afghans think more aid would simply contribute to the corruption seen as the primary fuel for insurgency.
The strategy envisions quickly "wrap[ping] Kandahar City in a circle of assistance and development projects," some of them up and running by June 1, "followed by an influx of new projects in the city itself," the analysis said. But, it said, "There is a risk that ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] will exacerbate the popular perception that powerbrokers are the only real beneficiaries."
Finding Afghans to run new development projects, it said, is problematic: "An ironic side-effect of the U.S. civilian surge in Kandahar is that, because we have hired many of the best educated and motivated Afghans to support us, fewer talented Afghans are available to work for the Afghan government itself in Kandahar City."
The influence of Kandahar's chief power brokers, presidential brother Ahmed Wali Karzai and former governor Gul Agha Sherzai, far exceeds the portion of the region's tribal makeup they represent, yet their competition is the dominant fact of political life there. Early this year, the two separately approached the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team, the U.S. civilian headquarters, "to promote themselves as the preferred figure to bring the Taliban to the table to strike peace deals," the analysis said.
Rather than directly challenge them, U.S. planners will try to boost more representative alternatives appointed to district councils. That, too, presents a significant risk of failure, the analysis said. "The problem is that the Afghan central government . . . wants to nominate the district positions and staff from Kabul," the report said.
"Experience suggests this will not work," it said.

Peshawar's Youths Plot Their Future Amid Violence

In an area of Pakistan that has become synonymous with Islamist militants, a mural on a wall speaks of the other side of ethnic Pashtun culture: "Welcome to the Northwest Frontier Province, the home of hospitality."The mural is out of date -- the province was just renamed Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa. And while the snarl of traffic at the entrance of Peshawar gives the impression of life humming normally, this thousand-year-old city is under siege.It is the capital of the restive province and gateway to Pakistan's lawless tribal belt. Suicide bombers have attacked the city nearly 40 times in the past 14 months. The famous market of the Old City is a favorite target -- and is considered too dangerous to visit.Talk of terrorism now dominates conversations in the city.

At the University of Peshawar, Qassim Kahn, 23, says because of the violence, "we can only dream about our plans, but we can't give them shape."Some of this region's young people are pessimistic that their lives will improve anytime soon.
Annan Saeed, 21, is studying economics at the Institute of Management Sciences in Hayatabad, an affluent suburb of Peshawar. She doesn't see things getting better.
"You might see that in Islamabad or Lahore," she says, "but Peshawar, basically it's not. It's not getting better at all."
Asked what effect the threat of violence has had on her daily life, Saeed says, "Totally ruined actually. ... Because you're fearful about your life the whole time. You're going out, you're not so sure you're going to come back home or not."
Music offers a means of expression for two young men in Peshawar who are rebelling against the claustrophobic atmosphere. They've formed a band that blends Western music with traditional Pashtun songs -- a risky thing to do here.

One of the defiant musicians, Mohammad Ameer Khan, taught himself to play guitar over the Internet and by mimicking what he saw on MTV. The other, Dilawar Qazi, 21, is a rapper.
"I remember people saying, 'Oh, Pashtun music and rock -- Oh my God, are you sure you're going to be taking that risk?' So I was like, yeah, why not?" Khan says.
Kazi says he wants to get his college degree and get out of Pakistan.
But other young people manage to maintain their optimism. Instead of letting their situation make them depressed, they insist that their country can have a bright future.
"Good pictures are developed in dark," says Fatima Khan, 20, a student at the Institute of Management Sciences. "Similarly, I'm optimistic about one day I'm going to get my prosperous country back."
Another student, Jawad Zeb, says the turmoil has made his generation's members strong enough to improve their lives.
"We are still carrying on our fight," says Zeb, 22. "We know that we can come out of it as a strong nation.""We're no different from the youth" anywhere in the world, Zeb says. "We've just evolved our lives according to the situation."

Russian president adds enduringly sinister Soviet-era ZiL limo to wish list

They were the ultimate symbols of Soviet power, used to whiz politburo members through snowy Moscow streets to the forbidding walls of the Kremlin. The ZiL limousine was the favoured mode of transport for a succession of leaders. Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev all had one. After communism collapsed, however, Boris Yeltsin got himself a Mercedes.

Now, President Dmitry Medvedev has decided to trade in his Mercedes and bring back the ZiL, in what appears to be the latest attempt by Russia's nostalgic leadership to turn the country into a Soviet theme park. Medvedev has asked aides to examine whether the austere and enduringly sinister limousine can be brought back into production.

"There is a presidential order to explore this … We are currently discussing this with factories," Vladimir Kozhin, the head of the presidential property department, told Ekho Moskvy radio station. He added: "I do not exclude that in the medium term we will again see old but modern ZiLs."

Until now, the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has expressed a preference for German vehicles – a love affair that may have begun when he was a KGB spy in east Germany. He has been keen to restore the emblems of superpower status, including the Soviet national anthem and showing off tanks and intercontinental missiles at the annual Red Square parade.

Today Dmitry Lomakov, who runs a classic car museum in Moscow, welcomed the ZiL's comeback, two decades after the Soviet Union's demise. "If it depended on me our leaders would already be driving them," he said. "The car of a leader is a symbol of the state, a bit like the tsar's orb and sceptre. We are a great power. We have a great history of automobile industry. We are not Botswana or Uganda."

The ZiL was one of the best cars in the world, Lomakov added, superior in every respect to the Rolls Royce. "I've driven a ZiL. It's a much more contemporary vehicle," he said. "We are capable of producing a real presidential vehicle as we have done in the past."

The gas-guzzling ZiL was modelled on the sleek American Packard. The Moscow automobile factory that built the limousine was founded in 1916 and is Russia's oldest. It initially churned out ZiSs, named after Josef Stalin. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev renamed the plant the Zavod imeni Likhachova – the Likhachev factory, after its director – with the cars given the distinctive ZiL initials.

Although production virtually halted after 1991, the Kremlin appears to have ordered at least two cabriolets for Red Square troop reviews. Earlier this month the defence minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, managed not to fall out of the back as his ZiL rolled across the cobbles.

The parade – which also featured British and US troops – was an unashamedly theatrical event that included Russian soldiers in historical uniforms carrying red communist banners. Although the Kremlin scrapped an earlier proposal to display portraits of Stalin, Lenin made several guest appearances. The Bolshevik leader and his mausoleum were tactfully hidden by a VIP tribune, however.

Today ZiL produces trucks and armoured fighting vehicles, though two luxury cars – a ZiL 41047 limousine and ZiL 41041 sedan – appear on its website.

A spokesman told the Moscow Times yesterday it was ready to restart production, if the investment was there. "We are always ready for new work," the spokesman said.

Obama Hails Breakthrough on Wall Street Reform

The Wall Street reform bill - the biggest shakeup since the 1930s - was passed late last night. Here are some of the key measures:
What we know
• There will be a new consumer financial protection bureau set up within the Federal Reserve, but independent from the central bank. It will tackle "abusive" mis-selling of mortgages, credit cards and other loan products. Banks and other financial institutions worry that reporting standards will become a burden, and that certain credit products could be banned.

• Most of the $600 trillion derivatives market will be forced through central clearing houses to increase oversight and to reduce the risk of one counterparty going bankrupt. There will be exemptions for non-financial companies using the contracts to hedge risk. Banks will be forced to spin off their derivatives dealing businesses.

• Government will be able to seize and wind up a large financial institution if it runs into difficulties and poses a risk to the wider financial system. It will be able to wipe out shareholders and fire executives. Creditors will be paid by the government upfront but those payments would be recouped later from levies on the industry.

• There will be a new multi-authority oversight body to identify risks in the financial system – the financial stability oversight council of regulators chaired by the treasury secretary. Companies considered systemically significant will face stricter capital, leverage and liquidity requirements and will have to draw up a "living will" to ensure an orderly wind-down should they fail.

And what we don't

• Will deposit-taking banks have to to spin off their proprietary trading arms and sell stakes in hedge funds and private equity firms? This is the Volcker rule, named after former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, who has argued for a complete separation of banks' risky "casino" activities from their commercial operations. Obama wants the Volcker rule implemented, but the Senate bill states that regulators will write the precise detail of the rule in the future.

This suggests that it could be watered down, although Democrats are still pushing for stricter controls.