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Too much money and time invested to give up now – the United Nations has confirmed it is pushing ahead with plans for a“global governance”institution to regulate the lives of all people in the fight against climate change.

Even though a controversial clause ushering in

a new global “government” was dropped from the failed Copenhagen Accord at the last minute as negotiations collapsed, the UN is refusing to take no for an answer, and has named 2012 as the date the new world control agency will be launched.

The deal, which should have been signed off at Copenhagen if things had gone according to plan, has now been rescheduled to coincide with a new

summit at Rio de Janeiro – scene of the big Earth Summit in 1992 – scheduled to take place on the 20th anniversary of that event in 2012. Capitalising on the symbolism, UN documents call the event Rio+20.

A UN Environment Programme briefing paper put together for a conference of world environment ministers in Bali, Indonesia this week, suggests the UN is perfectly placed to capitalise on a perfect storm: “Over the past two years the world has witnessed the emergence of multiple global crises related to food, fuel, freshwater and ... a financial and economic crisis whose recessionary impacts continue to be felt in most parts of the world.Adding to the situation’s complexity is climate change, a phenomenon that is exacerbating the impact of each global crisis.”

The UNEP document goes on to say that these events present the opportunity for“a dramatic shift” in the way the world is governed.

“While it is clear that Governments and the international community face multiple and serious challenges, the situation also presents genuine opportunities for a dramatic shift from what can be termed ‘business as usual’.

“While our current dominant economic model has clearly improved the well being of many societies over time, its operations have also created significant negative externalities in the form of global environmental risks (eg, Climate Change).”

The UNEP says countries are too focussed on old style indicators of progress such as gross domestic product (GDP), which the UN claims is“unsustainable”and“risks perpetuating and exacerbating persistent poverty and distributional disparities”– UN codespeak for wealth redistribution from first world countries to the third world.

The UNEP, working with Helen Clark’s UN Development Programme, is proposing a new world order that fundamentally breaks the existing world economic model of free market capitalism, in favour of a world economy essentially controlled by a UN environmental treaty.

Continue reading

Bernanke confirms probe of Goldman Sachs’ role in Greece fiscal woes

WASHINGTON – Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has confirmed that investment titan Goldman Sachs is under investigation for use of exotic financial instruments to profit from the deepening debt problems of Greece and other European nations.

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| 26 February 2010

Major US banks under investigation

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UN: Still pushing for global government

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A separate Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into the “destabilizing effects”of Wall Street’s use of derivatives also appears certain to include Goldman’s dealings.

The revelations came as Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, questioned Bernanke during a hearing on monetary policy. Bernanke said

that Goldman and other banks are being looked at for their use of insurance-like contracts called credit-default swaps to profit when foreign governments slide toward defaulting on their debt.

Investors used these swaps, which were like gasoline on fire during the near meltdown of U.S. financial markets in September 2008, to hedge against the risk of losses from a debt default. For countries

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such as Greece, however, they also raised borrowing costs, making it harder to prevent a default.

“Since there is no requirement that purchasers of credit default swaps actually own any of the underlying debt, we have a situation in which major financial institutions are amplifying a public crisis for what would appear to be ... private gain,”Dodd told Bernanke.“I want to ask you here whether or not you think there ought to be limits on the use of credit default swaps to prevent the intentional creation of runs against governments.”

“I just want to say first of all that we are lookContinue reading

NEW ZEALAND

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off BEAT WORLD’S DUMBEST BURGLARS DAYTONA BEACH, FLA., FEB. 26 (UPI) – Police in Florida said two burglary suspects were arrested after they apparently dialled 911 accidentally while going through the pilfered goods.

Daytona Beach police said dispatchers listened Sunday afternoon as Stefanie Vargas, 19, and Kristian Amezquita, 13, burglarized a car and discussed the crime while in the process, WFTV, Orlando, Fla., reported.

“You gotta break that SIM card. Take that SIM card outta there. They can trace it,” one of the suspects, apparently referring to a cellphone, said during the call.

Police said they traced the accidental 911 call and quickly arrested Vargas and Amezquita, who allegedly still had the stolen items with them at the time of their arrests.

The teenagers were each charged with one count of burglary of a conveyance and Amezquita was released into the custody of a parent. Vargas was held in lieu of $5,000 bond.

CAT ‘SCAN’ AN AIRPORT SECURITY RISK NEWARK, N.J., FEB. 26 (UPI) – Officials at a New Jersey airport said a security checkpoint was closed temporarily when a 10 kilo cat crawled under an X-ray machine.

Newark Liberty International Airport said passengers in Terminal A were redirected to different checkpoints and the woman who owned the cat missed her flight after the heavy tabby crawled into the 10-cm gap between the machine and the floor and refused to come out at about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, The (Newark) New Jersey Star-Ledger reported.

Port Authority police said the cat was let out of its carrier so the container could be screened, but the startled cat got away from its owner and hid under the machine.

The officers said they used a hydraulic device to lift the CTX explosive-detection machine and free the cat about 20 minutes after the start of the incident.

The officers said the owner of the cat was grateful for the rescue and rescheduled her flight for Wednesday.

POLICE WANT CHARGES FOR NUDE PEACE SIGN DELRAY BEACH, FLA., FEB. 26 (UPI) – Police in Florida said they were recommending charges against 10 naturists caught making a peace sign with their naked bodies on a public beach.

The nine men and one woman said they were making the symbol, which was about 3 metres in diametre, on public sand in Delray Beach for an aerial photo, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.

The group said the photo shoot was for the Feb. 11-16 Mid-Winter Naturist Festival at the Family Naturist Resort in Loxahatchee Groves, Fla. Police said they recommended indecent exposure charges against the group and have passed the case on to the prosecutors.

45 POUNDS OF POT DELIVERED TO WRONG HOME SALISBURY, N.C., FEB. 25 (UPI) – Police in North Carolina said a woman opened a package she believed to be her new computer and discovered 45 pounds of marijuana.

Lt. Rodney Harris, acting chief of the Salisbury Police Department, said Sarah Howell Leach believed the package she received Tuesday morning was the computer she ordered, but instead she found the stash of pot brought to the wrong address by a UPS driver, The Salisbury (N.C.) Post reported Thursday.

Harris said the package, sent from McAllen, Texas, was meant for another address in Leach’s mobile home park. He said officers set up surveillance at the apparently vacant address but the intended recipient did not show up to claim the package when it was left outside the door.

The acting chief said the marijuana had an estimated street value of $35,000.

Leach said a FedEx driver delivered her new computer later in the day.

26 February 2010

Key watches Heatley spending developments WELLINGTON, FEB 26 – Prime Minister John Key says he will not prejudge an investigation into his former minister Phil Heatley after it emerged he had been warned about misusing his taxpayer funded credit card.

Mr Heatley resigned yesterday as minister for housing and fisheries because he had inappropriately spent money on his ministerial credit card and signed a claim for a dinner when he actually spent $70 spent on two bottles of wine at a National Party dinner.

He has paid the money back and said he didn’t properly study the rules covering ministerial credit cards.

It was the claim for dinner that led to his decision to resign his portfolios despite earlier controversy over his spending which included taking his family on a trip to the South Island.

A Department of Internal Affairs letter dated September 8 told Mr Heatley he had not provided all receipts required.

It adds:“Due to the scrutiny that credit cards attract we would like to remind you that all records are open to review and should comply with the five

expenditure principles in clause 3.1 of the Ministerial Office Handbook.”

Cards are only meant to be used for ministerial purposes and have to be properly documented.

The Ministerial Services manager then suggested Mr Heatley call her if he needed anything clarified.

The spending on Mr Heatley’s card markedly dropped off after that letter. Previously he used it to pay for personal expenses and then paid them back, but that was against the rules.

Earlier, on March 11, one of Mr Heatley’s staff wrote to Ministerial Services to explain the reason family tickets on the ferry to the South Island were put on the card. The staff member said the card was used to secure cheap fares because the Interislander’s computer was down and because of Mr Heatley’s travel warrant.

Mr Heatley took his family on a work trip and paid for fares and meals on the card. He paid back the $1000 spent this week.

Yesterday Mr Key questioned why Mr Heatley’s bad spending habits were not picked up by Ministerial Services, but now it appears they were.

Mr Heatley’s spending habits markedly improved after the letter with only a $69.95 wallet included with legitimate spending on luggage in November.

He paid that back.

Asked today about the warnings and whether Mr Heatley abused the system, Mr Key said:“There’s no point in me prejudging that.The whole purpose of getting the Auditor-General in is to get a considered opinion on all his expenditure. If I was to embark on my own commentary of that, that would be unhelpful to the process. The Auditor-General is the best person to get in there and look at the whole thing”.

It was a fact that Mr Heatley had signed a document that was incorrect, but a mistake like that was not a sacking offence, Mr Key said.

“In the case of Mr Heatley, he actually chose to resign. I would be more than happy for him to step aside while the Auditor-General came through and had a look. Ministers will make mistakes, if the paperwork isn’t absolutely perfect that’s not a reason for a minister to go specifically.What Mr Heatley decided was the right course of action.”

Mr Key said there was no need for the AuditorGeneral to go through all ministers’accounts.

Labour has questioned why Mr Heatley resigned when Mr Key was happy with a stand down period.

Mr Heatley will remain on the backbench as MP for Whangarei.

– NZPA

NZ won’t let father donate liver to junkie daughter

By Matthew Backhouse of NZPA

WELLINGTON, FEB 26 – An Australian heroin addict who was refused a second liver transplant because of her continued drug use is unlikely to get another chance through the New Zealand public health service.

West Australian health authorities said 24-yearold Claire Murray was ineligible for a second transplant because she had continued to take drugs after her first transplant, which she received to treat acute liver failure caused by 12 years of amphetamine and heroin addiction.

Her father Michael has offered to donate a third of his own liver, if he is compatible, to save his daughter from dying within an estimated three to six months.

The West Australian government has also offered its support, agreeing to fly Ms Murray and her father to New Zealand for assessment at Auckland Hospital, which has the only adult-to-adult live donor liver transplant unit in Australasia.

But Auckland Hospital transplant consultant

and chairman of the Liver Transplant Standing Committee, Stephen Munn, said Ms Murray was unlikely to be eligible for the operation here.

“The criteria for acceptance for live donor liver transplants are the same criteria for acceptance for a deceased liver transplant,and those standards are set right across Australia and New Zealand,”he told NZPA. “If she did not meet criteria for a deceased donor liver transplant in Western Australia, she would be very unlikely to meet them here.”

Patients with persisting alcohol or drug abuse problems were ineligible for liver transplants on both sides of the Tasman, Prof Munn said.

While New Zealand hospitals did accept foreign transplant patients in certain rare circumstances, they first had to ensure New Zealanders were not bumped down waiting lists.

“The only place that it could take place would be in the public sector, and there would be problems with that in terms of not displacing any New Zealand patients,”he said.

“They’re not insurmountable, because we do do a small number of foreign national patients ... but it’s not an easy business.”

The surgery would have to be paid for by private insurance or the West Australian government, which has considered stumping up some of the estimated $A230,000 ($NZ296,000) cost.

New Zealand taxpayers would not have to contribute, Prof Munn said.

It was unclear if Ms Murray, who had been due to arrive in Auckland yesterday, still planned to undergo the assessment, he said.

News of Ms Murray’s transplant woes has caused controversy across the Tasman, with some expressing outrage that she should be given another chance.

Others have expressed their sympathy for the a mother of two, saying nobody should have to miss out on a chance to live.

Nearly 2000 Australians are on waiting lists for organ donations.

– NZPA

Proposal: No consents needed for DIY WELLINGTON, FEB 26 – The Government has released a discussion document outlining proposals for amending the Building Act. The Act has been reviewed, and Building and Construction Minister Maurice Williamson said today the proposals were open to debate and change.

“While the Building Act review has found that the system is not broken, and quality is improving, it is still more costly than necessary and less efficient than it could be,”he said.

“I’m convinced there is room for improvement and consistency across the country...I have an open mind on the best way to achieve this.”

Mr Williamson said the discussion document and consultation were part of the Better Building Blueprint, a series of measures that would make it easier and cheaper for New Zealanders to build good quality homes.

“The public must be able to have confidence in the system which is why I want their input into any proposed change,”he said.

“We want to make sure we get the right balance

between risk, regulation and skills and this consultation will help us do that.”

The key proposals include: • Lowest risk building work, such as a basic shed or a low deck, would not need consent; • Low risk building work, such as a simple house, would go through a quicker, simpler consenting process; • High risk, more complex houses would continue to go through the current approval and inspection process; • Complex, major commercial building work would go through a simpler process than it currently does, recognising the experience and skills of the professionals involved; • Building professionals and trades people would take more responsibility for making sure their work meets Building Code requirements. Licensing of builders will identify those with the relevant skills; • Homeowners would be better equipped to hold builders to account,with mandatory written contracts.

– NZPA

NEW ZEALAND

26 February 2010

3

Super GST compo combo promised

The Government is considering lifting GST from 12.5 percent to 15 percent and cutting property tax deductions to fund across the board tax cuts

WELLINGTON, FEB 26 NZPA – If GST rises in the upcoming budget then superannuation payments would immediately rise by 2 percent in addition to any tax cuts that would apply, Prime Minister John Key said today.

The Government is considering lifting GST from

12.5 percent to 15 percent and cutting property tax deductions to fund across the board tax cuts.

Mr Key made the announcement at a speech to a Grey Power meeting in Auckland today.

“Superannuitants would get an income tax cut, which would apply both to superannuation pay-

ments and to any other income they receive from interest, dividends or part time work,”Mr Key said in speech notes.

“In addition to their tax cut, superannuation payments would be increased up front, by just over 2 percent, to reflect the general rise in prices. The increase in super payments would be immediate from the day GST went up without waiting for the usual annual inflation adjustment.”

In addition tax cuts would mean a lift in the after-tax average wage, raising the floor for superannuation payments, which are linked to the average wage.

Super payments to married couples can not drop below 66 percent of the after-tax average wage, so this increase would flow through to super.

The Government has slowly been releasing its thinking on a tax package since the Tax Working Group made recommendations for changes to the system earlier in the year.

Recently Finance Minister Bill English indicated that aligning the top personal, trust and company tax rates is still on the table, though a need to reduce the company rate even further than the current 30 percent might not make that possible.

Mr English said any drop in Australia’s company tax rate would have to at least be matched by New Zealand Mr Key also gave another hint in his speech that the second highest tax rate of 33 percent taxed on income

between $48,000 and $70,000 could drop to 30 percent.

He argued that cuts would help people save and pay off a mortgage.

“A reduction in the second-highest tax rate from 33 percent to 30 percent would represent around a 4.5 percent increase in the return to savers.That sort of increase is in additional reason to favour saving over spending,”Mr Key said.

Labour has been campaigning hard against the planned tax package, arguing it will hurt the least well off the most and reward the wealthiest.

Responding to Mr Key’s speech, Labour leader Phil Goff said the prime minister was doing the “bare minimum”to ensure the elderly did not suffer from the tax changes.

“The elderly have every right to be sceptical that they will not fall behind as a result,”he said.

“For many their income is already stretched – the bulk of which has to pay for everyday essentials which are subject to GST.” Mr Goff said the“real sting”would be in National’s proposed income tax changes.

“The winners will be the highest earners, the losers will be those on middle and low incomes.”

Mr Key said Mr Goff should say whether a Labour Government would reduce GST from 15 percent and raise income taxes to fund it.

Labour has not taken a position on that.

– NZPA t

US approves kiwi clean coal experiment WELLINGTON, FEB 26 – American regulators have approved an experimental North Dakota coal drying plant which has imported over 400 tonnes of New Zealand lignite to test in the hope the same process can be used in Southland.

But the processing of the coal has been put back to late March or early April, after delays to construction of the plant by a fierce winter, said a Solid Energy project manager, Greg Visser.

“There have been days of minus-40degC where workers were able to throw a glassful of water in the air and see it freeze before it hit the ground,”Mr Visser said. Ice and snow storms had stopped the workers getting to the site for four or five days at a time.

GTL Energy USA Ltd is building the plant to test a process called beneficiation that removes water and pollutants from low-quality lignite coal -- a low-grade brown coal, also plentiful in western North Dakota and Wyoming.

Solid Energy sent its trial shipment of Southland lignite to see whether the process can be used here to start exploiting its $100 million worth of land with access to about two billion tonnes of lignite.

The plant’s developers say the mechanical technique, which produces chunks of coal the size of charcoal briquettes, decreases the coal’s weight, increases its energy value and allows it to burn more

cleanly.The coal is first finely ground, and the process will work regardless of whether the water in it is frozen, Mr Visser said.

North Dakota regulators said the coal drying plant did not require a state mining permit, the Seattle Times reported.

Lignite coal contains 30 percent to 60 percent water, which degraded its energy value and made it too expensive to ship -- unless the water could be removed.

GTL Energy USA, a subsidiary of Australian coal mining company GTL Energy Ltd., began building the plant in October 2008.

Solid Energy hopes the process will remove enough water so the low-quality coal can be shipped back to New Zealand as briquettes, and has a joint venture with GTL Energy Ltd to investigate building a briquetting plant at the former paper mill at Mataura, 10km east of its New Vale coal mine in eastern Southland. The plant could create about 10 jobs and process an estimated 100,000 tonnes of lignite a year.

The North Dakota plant is expected to produce 280 tonnes of briquettes which will burn cleaner and more intensely than the brown coal, said Mr Visser.

Nearly 200 tonnes will be sent back to New Zealand for trials in the boilers of potential clients, and

Kiwi dollar firms slightly WELLINGTON, FEB 26 – The New Zealand dollar firmed slightly today after falling to its lowest level in more than two weeks against the greenback and yen overnight.

The NZ dollar dropped to around US68.45c but by 8am was back up to US69.37c by 5pm, above the US68.85c at 5pm yesterday. It traded as high as US69.60c during the domestic session.

“Trade data today was good and building data was weak so it was net nothing,”said Imre Speizer, currency strategist at Westpac.

Indicators that US equity markets would be firm on Friday were also seen as a positive during the session.

The NZ dollar is expected to continue reacting to global events with a light economic calendar in this country ahead of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand monetary policy statement on March 11.

The Reserve Bank of Australia gives its view on

interest rates on Tuesday next week.

Greece’s debt concerns continue to overhang the market and be a source of support for the US dollar and yen.

Worries of a sovereign debt default in the euro zone grew after ratings agency Standard and Poor’s said it may cut Greece’s rating one or two notches within a month.

The NZ dollar was at 61.96 yen at 5pm from 61.64 yen at the same time yesterday.

It was at 0.5106 euro from 0.5108 euro yesterday.

Against the Australian dollar, the NZ dollar hit its lowest level in nearly 10 months around A77.30c shortly before yesterday’s local close but was US77.96c by 5pm today.

The trade weighted index was 64.37 from 64.05 yesterday.

– NZPA

the remainder will be tried out in American boilers which are similar to those used in this country.

A decision on whether to go ahead will be taken after the company has trialled the briquettes in commercial boilers. Small amounts of NZ ignite have already gone through a pilot plant in Denver.

The company has said it will also look at the potential for trucking briquettes to the closed Ohai Mine, to be bagged for the household market, which

Solid Energy has plans to eventually quit.

Separately, Solid Energy is investigating a $1.4 billion joint venture with farmer-owned fertiliser company Ravensdown to convert two million tonnes of lignite each year to urea fertiliser.

This plant could create 500 new jobs and produce enough urea to supply a $1 to $2 billion export industry in five years,but it would not be built until after 2014.

– NZPA

NEW ZEALAND

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26 February 2010

Police, Telecom launch inquiry into 111 failure WELLINGTON, FEB 26 – A software failure preventing South Auckland callers connecting to the 111 emergency telephone system in the early hours of this morning has sparked an inquiry by police and beleaguered operator,Telecom.

About 30 calls were missed in the failure, which lasted about two hours from 3.30am.

Police superintendent Andy McGregor said though he was not aware of the detail of those calls, no serious incidents were missed by police because of the fault.

“There’s no doubt we were very lucky,“ he told Radio New Zealand.

“The type of calls we do get at that time of the morning may be prowlers, disturbances, traffic-type incidents; they may be burglars, that may be suspicious people.”

When people called the 111 number, they connected to a Telecom-operated call centre.They then requested which emergency service they wanted – police, fire or ambulance – and they would then be put through to them.

“In this case... the people couldn’t get through to the exchange and Telecom couldn’t answer their calls.”

Telecom was already under fire after the Monday failure of its mobile phone network XT , its fourth failure since its launch in May. The telephone operators then got back to all of Company spokesman Mark Watts said the first the callers within minutes, he said. alarm alerting call centre staff to a missed call went “If you make a call and it doesn’t connect with a off at 3.57am.

111 system, that sets off an alarm and we react to

that as soon as we can,”he said.

Why police were not immediately informed of the outage and what exactly failed in the system would investigated in coming weeks, he said. Tel-

ecom believed the issue was software-related.

“It worked as it should in the very rare occurrence of an intermittent outage – and that’s what we saw today. Most of the time, in fact 99.999 percent of the time, calls go through.”

Prime Minister John Key said today it was“crucially important”to find out what went wrong.

“At the end of the day, we’re a first world country that needs a 111 system that works 24-7, 365 days of the year.Today it failed and that’s unacceptable and we’re going to find out what went wrong.”

Earlier Communications Minister Steven Joyce said Telecom could face financial penalties over the failure.

Telecom has agreed to pay $15 million in compensation after its flagship XT cellphone network repeatedly failed.

Mr Joyce said the Government was also looking at a financial penalty under the Telecommunications Service Obligations (TSO) Deed which gave Telecom a down time on the 111 emergency telephone network of only two hours a year.

“But I would stress that it has yet to be established whether they haven’t met the actual agreement made many years ago in terms of the reliability of that service and on what basis, so it is early days to make any suggestion about what might happen there,”Mr Joyce said.

“It would be a financial penalty under the deed if there was to be a penalty.”

– NZPA

Truckie killed in ‘freak’ mirror accident WELLINGTON, FEB 22 NZPA – A truck driver has died following a freak accident in which a large piece of timber hit his wing mirror, causing it to swing around and strike him in the head.

His quick-thinking passenger grabbed the wheel to steer the truck to safety when the accident happened on State Highway 1 at Pukerua Bay, north

of Wellington, about 6.50am today. The driver, a 36-year-old man from Paraparaumu, was airlifted to Wellington Hospital in a critical condition by the Westpac Rescue Helicopter. However, he died from his injuries later in the morning.

His name has not yet been released.

It was a “really freak accident”, said Sergeant

Martin Tunley of Porirua police.

The 50kmh section of road was narrower than normal because of road works.

The 3m long, 100mm by 50mm piece of dressed timber had hit the south-bound truck’s sizeable wing mirror, causing it to swing round at speed and strike the driver in the head.

Police are appealing for information about a white Nissan single cab ute, seen beforehand driving in Pukerua Bay and then heading north on SH1 with a length of timber protruding over the driver’s cab on a strange angle. They would also like to talk to anyone who witnessed the accident or who was travelling on SH1 around the time.

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Air NZ flies into profit during recession WELLINGTON – Air New Zealand, the state-controlled national carrier, said Friday that its net profit in the six months ending December 31 more than doubled from the same period a year earlier, despite extremely difficult operating conditions.

The company reported an after-tax profit of 56 million New Zealand dollars, a rise of 133 per cent on the same period in 2008.

Chairman John Palmer said it was a good result given lower passenger numbers, cargo volumes and yields, due to the global financial crisis, which saw revenues cut by 15 per cent. He said the balance sheet was helped by fuel prices returning to more stable levels following unprecedented volatility in the 2008-09 fiscal year.

Operating revenue fell 15 per cent to 2.1 billion New Zealand dollars as passenger demand dropped 4.6 per cent.

Chief executive Rob Fyfe said:“We worked hard to adapt the business to reflect the lower revenue

base.As a result, we achieved an 11-per-cent reduction in non-fuel operating costs, with all operating costs reduced.”

He said the next 12 months would be“one of the most defining in Air New Zealand’s history”as the company implements measures to ensure the airline, which is 75.5-per-cent owned by the government, could compete effectively against both budget and full-service carriers.

“There is no question the next year will set the direction and identity of our airline for the next decade,”Fyfe said.

Palmer said the airline expected to remain profitable in the second half of the current fiscal year despite indications that, based on current exchange rates, it faces a 20-million-New-Zealand- dollar foreign-exchange loss, after a 24-million-NewZealand-dollar gain in the first six months of the budget year.

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– DPA

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EDITORIAL

26 February 2010

5

Family Matters “A green economy implies the decoupling of resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth,”says the UNEP,pitching for a massive investment instead in green technology and green living systems which will “provide the mechanism for the reconfiguration of businesses, infrastructure and institutions, and for the adoption of sustainable consumption and production processes.”

The UNEP says getting agreement for the new “green economy”from world leaders will “provide an opportunity to re-examine national and global governance structures,”– an apparent reference to the reality that implementing such a global policy would require a global agency to ensure compliance and sanctions against countries that failed to meet their targets.

The briefing document acknowledges that in the new world system, environmental and economic policies will be intertwined:

“Environment and economic policies are complementary: we need to use regulated market mechanisms to promote new and innovative investments in green technology... linkages between environmental sustainability and the economy will emerge as a key focus for public policymaking and a determinant of future market opportunities.”

Those“mechanisms”are certain to include massive taxpayer-funded subsidies for multinationals to develop UN approved green-tech systems.

Meanwhile, UN Development Programme boss Helen Clark, who’s been in New Zealand for her 60th birthday today, was “ambushed” by an independent video news crew who challenged her on whether the UN was pitching to become a“world government”.

“If you didn’t have the UN,”Clark told interviewer Will Ryan,“you’d have to invent one because you have to have some way of getting countries talking.”

For the record, the UN plan to get a global gov-

ernment set up to control the regulation of world climate change and economic policies in the Copenhagen Accord was contained in Annex 1,Article 38 of the Draft Accord: “The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism.

“The government will be ruled by the COP [Conference of the Parties] with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies.The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.”

Related content: Read the UNEP document here

Read Fox News coverage of the global governance story Back to the front page

Walker’s World

Australia avoids regional visa row

By UPI Special Correspondent

MELBOURNE – Australia may have avoided a major diplomatic row after media reports say the government excluded Indonesia, India and Pakistan from its tougher visa regime.

The three countries aren’t believed to be among the 10 unnamed countries in the government’s counter-terrorism white paper. The long-awaited document outlined plans to, among other things, detect terrorists traveling to Australia.

It sets out a controversial $61 million fingerprint and facial data program for people seeking visas to visit Australia.

Initial media reports quoted unofficial sources as saying that, apart from India, Pakistan and Indonesia, the list of countries to which the program will apply includes Somalia and Yemen.

Critics are saying the tougher visa application program could have complicated already delicate relations with India whose Tourism Minister Kumari Selja cancelled a visit to Australia last June.

A report by the BBC at the time said she put off the July visit because of the prevailing atmosphere in Australia. Indians in Australia had suffered several attacks that the government denied were race-based.Australian police called the crimes opportunistic and Indian students were seen as soft targets.

There is no confirmation by the Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of which countries are on the so-called visa black list. But The Australian newspaper said it has learned that the three countries are not on it.

This is despite those countries being the sites to a number of terror attacks,The Australian’s report said.“Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, is the site of more Australian deaths at the hands of terrorists than any other country.”

Yemen and Somalia, identified in the paper as the emerging centres of radical Islamic terrorism, will be included.

But the white paper fingers migrant-based homegrown extremists – as opposed to groups such as al-Qaida that are mainly based overseas – as the main terror threat confronting Australia.

The prime minister warned the threat from terrorism was now permanent and persistent and could happen at any time, he told reporters in Canberra at the release of the document.

Prior to the rise of jihadist terrorism, Australia was not a specific target. Now Australia is, said Rudd who noted there had been some success with counter-terrorism efforts in other countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The government wants to build on these existing counter-terrorist agreements with other countries in Asia, including the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Brunei, East Timor and Bangladesh.

The 83-page Securing Australia, Protecting our Community, accessible on the Web site of the

By Bob McCoskrie

-Violence growth parallels fatherlessness The violence in our community and towards people of authority such as the police will increase as long as we downplay the significance and benefits of strong marriages and committed fathers.

The response of governments has been more money and more laws. Yet this fails to deal with the root causes of what is happening. Fatherlessness is a major contributor to increasing rates of juvenile violence.

Scientific research is unanimous on a number of conclusions regarding family structure – that strong marriages increases the likelihood that fathers have good relationships with their children and lowers the risk of alcohol and substance abuse, domestic violence and child abuse.

Conversely, parental divorce or non-marriage appears to increase children’s risk of delinquent and criminal behaviour, amongst other factors. One only needs to observe proceedings at the Youth Court to see the effect of fatherlessness.

According to The Heritage Foundation, an influential US research institute, an analysis of social science literature over 30 years shows that the rise in violent crime parallels the rise in families abandoned by fathers. A 10% increase in the percentage of children living in single-parent homes lead typically to a 17% increase in juvenile crime.

Research has shown time after time that the father’s authority and involvement in raising his children are great buffers against a life of crime.

Violent crime ��������������������������������������������� will ���������������������������������������� continue to increase as long as we downplay the importance and significance of having two parents, a mum and a dad, committed to each other and to their children.

-Govt praised for strong stand on drug laws

Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, singles out the South Asia-wide group Jemaah Islamiyah and its offshoots such as the Abu Sayyaf group.This is the most prominent terrorist group in South East Asia since the late 1990s with its roots in Indonesia, the white paper states.

Jemaah Islamiyah is held responsible for major anti-Western attacks affecting Australians. Since 2001, more than 100 Australians have been killed in terrorist attacks overseas, the document noted.

These include the October 2002 Bali nightclub bomb that killed 202 people, 88 of whom were Australians; the September 2004 bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, which killed 10 people; and the July 2009 bomb in the bombing of Jakarta’s Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels that killed three Australians.

The white paper said that in Australia 38 people have been prosecuted or are being prosecuted as a result of counter-terrorism operations and 20 people have been convicted of terrorist acts.Also, more than 40 Australians had passports revoked or passport

applications denied for reasons related to terrorism.

The recently announced Counter-Terrorism Control Center, within the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, will be the focus of antiterrorist activity. The document also promises to ensure intelligence is shared among such organizations through the National Intelligence Coordination Committee which is led by the government’s national security adviser.

Apart from the recently announced $178 million investment in aviation and border security operations, including body scanners at airports, the government will start the four-year, $61 million investment in a bio-metric based visa system for certain non-citizens.

This will mean gathering fingerprints and facial data from potential visitors, a controversial move according to some media reports. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith acknowledged that there may well be a diplomatic effort required in respect of some of those countries as you would expect.

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The Minister of Justice Simon Power is to be congratulated for rejecting the Law Commission’s proposals to soften the laws around drugs.

The harm minimization message on drugs has been short-selling our young people and families and sends a confusing message. The government has responded to a suggestion of liberalizing the enforcement of drug laws with a resounding no – the same message we need to give to people considering using drugs.

This is the exact message that parents are also trying to give their children.

The Law Commission would be well aware through the recent review that a liberalized approach to alcohol over the past two decades has had huge social ramifications. Yet here they are now pushing a liberalized approach to other drugs.

They are completely out of step with public sentiment and research to suggest that the harm of drugs is ‘overblown’.

Research by the Drug Foundation in 2007 found that just 19% wanted cannabis laws liberalized. 46% of the population wanted no change to cannabis laws, and 34% wanted laws to be made tougher.

It is correct that there should be more emphasis on rehabilitation and drug education, but to soften the approach to enforcement will send the completely wrong message.

We need to focus on the effects on health of using drugs, links with mental illness, high use by school pupils, driving under the influence of cannabis, and the progression from lesser drugs to more dangerous drugs like P. The government is to be congratulated for sending a strong unequivocal message against liberalizing drug laws.

-Glassie family must attend inquest The upcoming Coroner’s Inquest into the death of Nia Glassie must tackle the issues of family breakdown and dysfunction and for that reason the Glassie family must be ordered to appear.

According to Rotorua’s Daily Post, the Glassie family does not want to be involved in the inquest and wants to put it behind them. But the level of family dysfunction and breakdown is a key factor in the case and preventing further cases like this.

There are many questions to be asked including the responsiveness and actions of government and local agencies working with the family leading up to the death, whether the family had actively sought help, the role of substance abuse, possible welfare dependency and fraud, insufficient post-natal care and monitoring, and other factors.

The Glassie family can’t be allowed to hide from this process. And the Coroner should subpoena all members of the extended family to give evidence.

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ANALYSIS

6

26 February 2010

Outside View: NATO needs backbone

By Harlan Ullman

WASHINGTON – From its creation in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO in English and OTAN in FreAnch, nicely reflecting long-standing and often-competing views within the alliance – has faced one perilous crossroads or another.

The raison d’etre for NATO’s first 40 years was countering the Soviet Union’s military threat, an unambiguous and unarguable objective. Since the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1989, NATO has been searching for a rationale to meet today’s challenges, threats and dangers.

To rewrite NATO’s strategic concept approved

in 1999 and in part to fulfil this quest, a group of 12 experts was formed last summer to provide for NATO’s secretary-general, former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a construct from which he can fashion and submit to heads of state, a 21st-century update of the strategic concept at the alliance’s Lisbon summit next fall.

The GoE has made the rounds in Europe in three seminars designed to solicit input and generate consensus about the fundamentals to be contained in the new strategic concept.

This week, the fourth and final seminar was at Washington’s National Defense University. Attending were the members of the GoE; the North Atlantic Council, consisting of permanent representatives

from each of the 28 member states, i.e. ambassadors to NATO; the Military Committee, consisting of the chairman and three-star representatives from each member state; the two strategic commands (Allied Command Transformation and Allied Command Operations); and several hundred experts and observers.

The fundamental issue that casts a dark shadow on this massive effort can be put in the form of a simple question raised before in this column: Is NATO relevant or is the alliance a relic?

The easier political course is to assume the former.

Unfortunately, merely assuming that the alliance is as or even more relevant to the future security needs of its members will not sit well with a public that is sceptical and even cynical about the need for NATO in the light of Afghanistan and so-called out-of-area operations against enemies that possess no armies, navies or air forces.The decision by the Netherlands to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan this summer underscores these reservations.

Whether relic or relevant very much depends on whether NATO can continue as a military alliance conceived to counter a military threat that no longer exists or whether it will expand further to conform with security threats and dangers that exceed these traditional military boundaries.

Given the current economic crisis that now must deal with possible financial insolvency in Greece, Spain, Portugal and perhaps Italy, defense is not the first priority of NATO’s members.And, as some members fear Russia above all, NATO must reconcile often powerfully conflicting and opposite perceptions of threat that make gaining consensus very difficult.

Hence, the absence of an agreed-upon threat such as the old Soviet Union greatly confounds and impedes winning consensus among each member state required for approval by the alliance as a whole.

The Strategic Concept must deal with Afghanistan – the first sustained ground war NATO has waged.There, NATO can ignore or defer; confront; or finesse Afghanistan.

The argument for deferral is that NATO must look beyond Afghanistan as it defines its future.

The countervailing case is that NATO has bet its future on success in Afghanistan and to ignore it is irresponsible.

Finally, the path of least resistance could be to finesse by accepting lessons learned from the conflict in Afghanistan as input to the strategic concept and not taking on the central issue of whether outof-area roles are central to the safety and security of the alliance.

The four seminars were meant to provide raw material to be turned into a final product by Rasmussen.

Here, one reality obtains: NATO is at a profound crossroads.

It can therefore deal directly and frontally with the challenges it faces along with strongly held differences of opinions on a future course. Or it may not. Either choice could weaken or rejuvenate the alliance. To resolve this dilemma, strong leadership among the heads of government is essential to demand the direct approach wins out, softened perhaps on the margins but only the margins.

Otherwise, in all likelihood, the Strategic Concept will become milquetoast and paper over these powerful, centrifugal forces that left unchecked will weaken and possibly collapse the alliance.

Hence, at the very least, the strategic concept must take on this matter of relevancy or relic and explain in understandable language how and why NATO is relevant and crucial to the future security of the Atlantic community.

If the concept cannot do that, NATO tragically will become moribund and even a relic. If it can, NATO’s best days lie ahead but backbone is needed to make that happen.

Harlan Ullman is senior adviser at the Atlantic Council and chairman of the Killowen Group, which advises leaders of government and business. He was co-chairman of the group that created the doctrine of shock and awe. His newest book due out this year is A Modern Version of the Emperor’s Handbook for CEOs and Leaders: 12 Principles to Avoid the Pitfalls and Traps That Have Nearly Ruined America.

– UPI

Walker’s World

My big fat Greek spending

By Martin Walker

WASHINGTON – This week is likely to decide whether the Greek debt problem is contained or whether it starts to spill over to topple other European dominoes, such as Portugal and Spain, and trigger a much wider currency crisis.

The Greek government, with a gross domestic product of just more than $300 billion, has to repay some $70 billion in debt this year and more than $20 billion is due within the next 10 weeks.

To pay those debts, it has to sell new government bonds, and it hopes to sell $5 billion in 10-year bonds this week. The first question is whether it can sell them at all and the second is how much interest will Greece have to pay.

The first question should not have to be asked.

Greece is a sovereign country with a massive shipping and tanker industry and a huge tourist trade.

Its partners in the European Union and in the euro currency zone have made vague if sonorous pledges of support. It ought to be able to sell its debt.

But this week will also see a general strike, called by the labor unions, against the austerity measures the Greek government has imposed. They include wage freezes, pay cuts for public employees, higher retirement ages and cuts in social security and the military budget. Spasmodic strike action has hit the Finance Ministry, among the very civil servants meant to administer these cuts.

Opinion polls suggest that the government of George Papandreou still has majority support in the country. So long the government keeps its nerve and the police and military remain loyal and maintain

order, the government should be able to ride out the general strike.

But the international markets – which include hedge funds and short-sellers as well as investors – will be watching the strikes carefully as they decide whether to buy Greece’s new bonds.And they have two good reasons for caution.

The first is that the EU’s promises of support for Greece have been so imprecise. The German government Friday formally denied a report in the weekly Der Spiegel that a $30 billion support fund was being mobilized among EU partners to buy Greek bonds.

The (German) Finance Ministry has taken no decisions in this regard, ministry spokesman Martin Kreienbaum said in an e-mailed statement.

The second reason for concern is that Greece’s last bond auction, in January, seemed to succeed in selling more than $10 billion in 5-year bonds. But the bonds nosedived in the secondary market.The bonds’interest rate was initially priced at 3.82 percent higher than equivalent German bonds; but in the secondary markets, the rate rose to 4.62 percent above German bonds.

In short, these who bought the last Greek bond issue lost money fast. They will not be eager to be burned a second time. Even without this week’s inevitable TV images of strikes and demonstrations in Athens, investors would be looking for interest rates of at least 7 percent and probably more.

Of course, this could be easily resolved if Greece’s EU partners were prepared to buy or guarantee the current bond issue, or if the EU were to set up its own internal version of the International Monetary

OPINION POLLS SUGGEST THAT THE GOVERNMENT OF GEORGE PAPANDREOU STILL HAS MAJORITY SUPPORT IN THE COUNTRY. SO LONG THE GOVERNMENT KEEPS ITS NERVE AND THE POLICE AND MILITARY REMAIN LOYAL AND MAINTAIN ORDER, THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE ABLE TO RIDE OUT THE GENERAL STRIKE

Fund to help bail out member states in trouble. But the politics of this seem close to insuperable, with the key state, Germany, facing massive domestic opposition to a Greek bailout.

Germany’s top policymakers also worry that helping Greece could set a precedent that would leave them with open-ended commitments to other EU states such as Portugal, Spain and Italy.When Germany joined the euro, it insisted on legal rules to prevent any one state from being responsible for the sovereign debts of other euro members.

There is a loophole, allowing special aid for a member state in extraordinary circumstances.And the (still remote) prospect of a Greek default setting off a chain of dominoes and a systemic crisis for the euro could yet force the EU and eurozone members to use it.

But for the moment, the German view is firm; Greece must be seen to pay a stiff price for its years of profligacy. Under Greece’s latest austerity plan, the country is going to lose 10 percent of GDP over the next three years,a price steep enough to jeopardize the current government and probably lead to a crisis election and the formation of a government of national unity with a mandate to impose the level of suffering the bond markets (and Germans) require.

Anything less, in the German view, would open the floodgates of moral hazard and encourage other highly indebted member states to spend and borrow,knowing that a rescue would eventually come.And how,exactly, does a German finance minister explain to a highly taxed and still-working 67 year-old in Munich why his hard earned money should go to subsidize a Greek civil servant who retires at the age of 58?

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WORLD

8

update

in 60 seconds U.S. STOCKS SLIDE AMID CONCERNS OVER JOBS, GREECE NEW YORK – U.S. stocks closed with moderate losses today, hurt by investors’ worries about the U.S. jobs picture and sovereign debt in Europe.

The major indexes recovered from a deeper swoon after the euro rose against the dollar, encouraging some traders to take on risk in stocks and commodities. But the trading session’s overall tone was bearish, with weak jobless-claims data renewing worries about the pace of the U.S. economic recovery, while comments

by Moody’s Investors Service kept long-term concerns about Greece’s creditworthiness alive.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended down 53.13 points, or 0.5 percent, at 10,321.03. At its late-morning low, it was off more than 188 points.

STAR TREK’S KOENIG SAYS SON KILLED HIMSELF VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, FEB. 26 (UPI) – A body found this afternoon in Vancouver, British Columbia’s Stanley Park is that of missing actor Andrew Koenig, his father said.

Koenig, who lived in Vancouver from 1989 to 1992, arrived in the Pacific Northwest city Feb. 10 to visit friends and had not been seen since Feb. 14. He was booked on a Feb. 16 return flight to California, but he never boarded the plane, The Vancouver Sun reported.

Koenig, most famous for his role as Richard ‘Boner’ Stabone in the ‘80s TV comedy Growing Pains, had a history of depression and had stopped taking his medication about a year ago, his father, actor Walter Koenig who played Chekov on Star Trek, told CNN. Walter Koenig told a news conference in Vancouver today the body had been identified as that of his son, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“My son took his own life,” Walter Koenig told reporters at a news conference.

Walter Koenig and his wife Judy joined several of their son’s friends earlier today in a search for Andrew Koenig, splitting into two teams. One of the teams found the body, the Times said.

The family discovered in recent days that Koenig had sold most of his belongings and moved out of his Venice, Calif., apartment before boarding his flight to Canada.

SHARK TANK CRACKS IN DUBAI MALL DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, FEB. 26 (UPI) – A 40 million-litre aquarium in a Dubai mall filled with hundreds of sharks cracked today, sending shoppers fleeing for safety as water gushed around them.

Stores were closed and security personnel were issued life jackets after the rift was exposed in the 75-cm wall of acrylic that separates hundreds of sharks, stingrays and other sea animals from the public, The Sun reported.

Video shot by a visitor at The Dubai Aquarium & Underwater Zoo showed panicked shoppers running from the gushing water.

Mall officials said the rupture was fixed later in the day but they would not allow anyone access to view the damage.

“The leakage did not impact the aquarium environment or the safety of the aquatic animals,” said Mohammad Alabbar, chairman Emaar Properties, the company that owns the mall.

The aquarium, one of the largest in the world, opened in 2008 at the base of the Bhurj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper.

26 February 2010

Obama faces going it alone on health

By Noam N. Levey and Janet Hook Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – Facing unbending Republican opposition to a sweeping health care overhaul, President Barack Obama confronted a stark reality this afternoon as his extraordinary televised summit ended: If he and his Democratic allies in Congress want to reshape the nation’s health care system, they will have to do it by themselves.

Washington’s most powerful Democrats and Republicans gathered for a remarkably sustained, detailed and deeply felt debate on one of the most important and complex issues facing the country.

But what emerged with crystalline clarity were two parties with an unbridgeable disagreement over how to deal with the nation’s health care crisis and help Americans get the medical care they need.

Republican lawmakers remained staunchly against the Democratic bid to use the federal government to regulate health insurance, subsidize coverage for tens of millions of Americans, and reshape the nation’s health care system.

“There are some fundamental differences that we cannot paper over,”Assistant Senate Minority Leader Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., told the president.

Obama acknowledged as much as he wrapped up the 71/2-hour summit today.“I don’t know frankly if we can close that gap,”he said.“We cannot have another yearlong debate.”

By underscoring the ideological chasm separating the two parties’ approach to health care, Obama’s summit set the stage for Democrats to pursue a go-it-alone endgame strategy without any pretence of bipartisanship.

“If nothing comes of this, we’re going to press forward,”Assistant Senate Majority Leader Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., told reporters during a break in the summit.

“We just can’t quit.This is a once-in-a-politicallifetime opportunity to deal with a health care system that is really unsustainable,”he said.

Obama now faces head-on the challenge of cementing Democratic support behind the health care blueprint he unveiled this week and rounding up the votes to push a legislative package through the House and Senate by the end of next month.

That process is expected to begin in earnest in a matter of days.

Even if it produced no breakthrough to bipartisanship, the summit brought out onto the public stage a policy debate that for months had been taking place in the corridors, chambers and backrooms

of Capitol Hill – and in sound bites from both sides that were designed in large part to score political points.

The meeting was held in the historic Blair House across the street from the White House. It is an elegant building that is often used to house visiting foreign dignitaries, but White House aides said it has never before been used for a meeting like the summit.

The event was widely derided in advance as political theatre, pre-scripted as an infomercial and drained long before it began of any hope of producing substantive agreement.

But it marked the first time since the debate began that the endgame was in sight.

In the absence of any significant concessions by either side, Democrats are preparing to use a partisan fast-track procedure.They believed the summit would convince the public that the controversial strategy is a last resort.

For Republicans, the summit was a forum to cast their opposition to the legislation not as partisan obstructionism but as prudent policy.

As they have for months, they tapped into fear of big change by calling for a step-by-step approach and warned of a “tyranny of the majority,”as Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said, quoting Alexis de Tocqueville.

Throughout the day, Obama and other Democrats described their health care initiative as a reasoned, ideologically centrist effort to solve one of the nation’s most pressing problems.

“We all know this is urgent,” Obama told 21 Democrats and 17 Republicans squeezed around a square-shaped table.

“Unfortunately over the course of the year ... this became a very ideological battle. It became a very partisan battle.And politics I think ended up trumping practical common sense.”

Obama and other senior Democrats ticked off a list of provisions in their legislation that have been backed by Republicans, including initiatives to combat Medicare fraud, to allow the interstate sale of health insurance and to help small businesses provide their employees health benefits.

The centrepiece of Democratic proposals to expand coverage – a new marketplace, or exchange, where commercial insurers would compete for business – hews to GOP principles of preserving private health insurance rather than replacing it with new government programs.

And at a time when Republicans are demanding greater fiscal responsibility, the Democratic health

OBAMA NOW FACES HEAD-ON THE CHALLENGE OF CEMENTING DEMOCRATIC SUPPORT BEHIND THE HEALTH CARE BLUEPRINT HE UNVEILED THIS WEEK AND ROUNDING UP THE VOTES TO PUSH A LEGISLATIVE PACKAGE THROUGH THE HOUSE AND SENATE BY THE END OF NEXT MONTH care bills are projected to reduce the federal deficit over the next two decades, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

In contrast to the Democratic legislation, House Republicans have put forward a health care bill that does not set minimum national standards for health plans, does not require all Americans to buy coverage and does not provide subsidies to help them.

As a result, the bill is substantially less costly than the Democratic plans and does not include the tax hikes and Medicare cuts that Democrats are proposing to offset the cost of expanding coverage.

The GOP legislation, which many Republicans have touted as a more reasonable, incremental approach, also would insure only 3 million additional people over the next decade compared with more 30 million in the Democrats legislation, the Congressional Budget Office has found.

Secular army, Islamic government face off in Turkey ANKARA, TURKEY, FEB. 26 – Turkey’s political leaders met with the head of the armed forces today over what is considered the biggest test for the government’s authority over the military.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President Abdullah Gul and Gen. Ilker Basbug, the head of the Turkish military, met in Ankara after the arrests of 20 senior military officials in connection with an alleged plot to overthrow the government.

Gul after the meeting said in a statement that the conflict would be solved within the framework of the constitution. He urged all parties involved to act responsibly “to prevent harm to our institutions”.

In an operation unprecedented in the country, anti-terror units this week detained dozens of top military officials, including former commanders of the air force, the navy and the army.

Twenty of them remain in jail and face further questioning for allegedly being involved in a plot to bomb Turkish mosques and to provoke Greece into shooting down a Turkish jet – moves intended to stir up public unrest and eventually enable the armed forces to overthrow the government.

The so-called sledgehammer plot reportedly decades-long influence on the country is waning. dates to 2003, shortly after Erdogan’s AK Party The conflict between the governing AK Party,which came to power and began reforms that weakened is rooted in hardline political Islam, and the military, the military. which sees itself as a protector ofTurkey’s secular tradiThe government has detained dozens of people, tions, has divided the country for many years. including academics and Government critics say IN AN OPERATION journalists, in connection Ankara with the court prowith the investigation UNPRECEDENTED IN ceedings is trying to silence that has been ongoing its opponents to continue THE COUNTRY, ANTI-TERROR its secret course to transsince 2007.

The military denied UNITS THIS WEEK DETAINED form secular Turkey into involvement in such an Islamic state. a plot, admitting that DOZENS OF TOP MILITARY The government has some of the strategies OFFICIALS, INCLUDING denied such allegations, had been discussed but arguing it wants to modFORMER COMMANDERS only in a seminar for ernize Turkey to bring the OF THE AIR FORCE, THE young officers. country closer to European While the military has NAVY AND THE ARMY Union membership. helped overthrow four “Transformations may governments since 1960, it has pledged it will no sometimes be painful”, Economy Minister Ali Babalonger resort to coups.After the recent police opera- can was quoted by BBC Online as saying.“We are tion, which could lead to major court proceedings trying to make Turkey’s democracy first class.” against top soldiers, the military is worried that its – UPI

WORLD

26 February 2010

9

Killer whale pulled in trainer by ponytail

By Anika Myers Palm and Walter Pacheco The Orlando Sentinel

ORLANDO, FLA. – Orange County Sheriff’s Office investigators said SeaWorld Orlando trainer Dawn Brancheau died Thursday from“multiple traumatic injuries and drowning” after a killer whale pulled her underwater by her long pony tail near the theme park’s Shamu Stadium.

Investigators released a statement shortly after an official at SeaWorld Orlando said the killer whale Tilikum is still being evaluated but that the theme park will keep the five tonne dominant male animal.

Brancheau, 40, was “interacting” with the killer whale in knee-deep water“when the animal grabbed her by the hair, said to be in a long pony tail, and pulled her underwater,” the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said.“Rescuers were not able to immediately jump in and render assistance”to Brancheau because of Tilikum’s“aggressive nature.”

Tilikum pulled Brancheau, into the orca’s tank about 2 p.m. EST Wednesday. The attack – the third human death linked to the killer whale since 1991 – made international news. Investigators said SeaWorld staffers recovered her after Tilikum“was coaxed into a smaller pool and lifted out of the water by a large scale/platform that lay on the bottom of the smaller tank,”the statement said.

“While this incident remains the subject of an ongoing death investigation there are no signs

of foul play. All evidence and witness statements indicate that the death was a tragic accident,”the statement added.

Investigators said rescue workers originally thought Brancheau had “slipped or fell into the orca’s pool but, after witness statements were taken and reviewed by homicide investigators, it became apparent that the whale had, in fact, pulled Brancheau into the pool and was the cause of her fatal injuries,”the statement said.An autopsy by the Orange-Osceola Medical Examiner’s Office concluded Brancheau, a veteran trainer at the park, died of traumatic injuries. Details of her injuries were not released.

The autopsy won’t be final until toxicology tests are completed. It will take several weeks to get those results, according to a spokeswoman for the Medical Examiner’s office.

Chuck Tompkins, the corporate curator in charge of animal behavior for SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment, said that he expects SeaWorld to be taking care of Tilkikum for a long time.

He said doesn’t think the animal could survive in the wild.

“I think it’s unfair to do that to an animal,” he said, adding that SeaWorld employees also continue to mourn Brancheau, their longtime coworker and friend.

“This has been extremely difficult for us. ... Every animal loved working with Dawn,”Tompkins said.

used another derivatives product, called currency swaps, to help Greece hide the size of its debt in 2001, and then allegedly used credit-default swaps to bet that the country would default.

Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally said today that Goldman managing director Gerald Corrigan notified the regulatory agency Eurostat“in principle” of the firm’s plans to assist an unidentified European government with currency swaps before executing the transactions and received no objection.

Published reports have quoted Eurostat, based in Luxembourg, as saying that it was unaware of Greece’s arrangement with Goldman.

DuVally denied that the firm’s bets comprised a major portion of the outstanding swap bets on Greece’s debt, a figure that stood at $84.8 billion in February, according to data from the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., which monitors the private, unregulated trades.

“Conspiracy theories or reports that suggest Goldman Sachs is engaged in trading activities to ing into a number of questions related to Goldman massively short Greece’s sovereign debt are misSachs and other companies and their derivatives guided and just plain wrong,”DuVally said. arrangements with Greece and on this issue as well,” Sylvain Raynes, a frequent Goldman critic who said Bernanke, who’s attempting to show Congress is an expert on swaps, said that by assisting Greece that the central bank can be an effective regulator. in hiding its debt, Goldman behaved like the fam“Using these instruments in a way that intention- ily of an alcoholic concealing his addiction while ally destabilizes a company or a country is – is coun- simultaneously obtaining “inside information on terproductive, and I’m sure the SEC will be looking what’s going to happen.” into that,”he said.“We’ll certainly be evaluating what Raynes, who worked briefly for Goldman, called we can learn from the activities of the holding com- the Greece episode “a repeat of Goldman betting panies that we supervise here in the U.S.” against its customers” in the subprime mortgage Goldman is under fire because of disclosures, ini- market while becoming the only major Wall Street tially in the German magazine Der Spiegel, that it firm to make a tidy exit before the U.S. housing

Spain may test EU’s currency MADRID, FEB. 26 (UPI) – Spain could prove to be the litmus test for the common currency in Europe, the euro, which is being tested by government debts, analysts said.

After Greece, which the European Commission is pushing to reduce its debt, Spain, Ireland and Portugal could also face pressure to lower their debt ratios, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

Debt has reached 12.7 percent of the gross domestic product in Greece. But the budget gap in Spain reached 11.4 percent last year, the Journal reported.

Spain is the real test case for the euro, said Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Insti-

tute in Washington.

Analysts at BNP Paribas put the concept in raw figures. It would take $68 billion to bring Greece’s debt into line, $47 billion to do the same in Ireland and $41 for Portugal.The same confidence-restoring measures in Spain would cost $270 billion, the Journal said.

While faced with rising debt, Spain is unable to detach a currency of its own from the euro. That means, while Germany and France remain competitive in the world market, Spain cannot lower its currency value to make Spanish exports more attractive to other countries.

– UPI

File

crash.“Nothing is perfect, but we have to stop the boundless volatility possibilities of the creditdefault swap market,”Raynes said.

McClatchy first reported in November that Goldman had sold more than $40 billion in risky mortgage securities in 2006 and 2007 while secretly betting that a sharp downturn in the housing market would cause their value to plummet.

Goldman has said that it made the vast majority of its swap trades on behalf of its clients, but has never spelled out how much it reaped from proprietary bets.

SEC spokesman John Nester said that he could neither confirm nor deny a formal investigation.

However, he said that various kinds of swaps are under scrutiny.

“As an agency, we have been examining potential abuses and destabilizing effects related to the use of credit-default swaps and other opaque financial products and practices,” Nester said.“Chairman (Mary) Schapiro has advocated closing the current regulatory gaps and bringing these instruments under the regulatory umbrella.”

McClatchy reported in December that the SEC was investigating Goldman’s securities sales in the Cayman Islands.

As part of a broader revamp of financial regulation being debated in Congress, legislation is expected to force credit-default swaps and other so-called derivatives transactions onto exchanges or clearinghouses where there would be greater transparency and recognized procedures for settling exotic bets in an unregulated global market that is valued at $50 trillion.

“Due to the potential cascading harm that these instruments can inflict upon financial systems, we continue to work with Congress to pass strong comprehensive over-the-counter derivatives legislation,” the SEC spokesman said.

WHAT ARE CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS? Few areas in finance are as complicated as derivatives, which are private bets between two or more parties that aren’t carried out on a public exchange as stock or bond transactions are.

Credit-default swaps involve an investor paying a trading partner for “protection,”or insurance against default and receiving a large payoff should a bond issuer default on payment. Part of what the Fed and SEC are looking at are “naked swaps,” when a bet is made that a company or country may default on its debt even though one or both parties have no stake in the underlying asset. In this case, the investors wouldn’t actually own bonds issued

by Greece, but only would bet on their performance.

Reports of Goldman’s maneuverings with Greece have put the spotlight on four high-debt European governments – the so-called PIGS: Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain.

“You can describe it as ‘creative accounting’ or ‘cooking the books,’depending on which side you are on,”said a Greek diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the affair.

In February, outstanding credit-default swaps totalled $230.8 billion on Italy’s debt, $109.7 billion on Spain’s and $64.1 billion on Portugal’s, according to the DTCC. Back to the front page

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SPORT

26 February 2010

Australia’s Mitchell Johnson snares the wicket of New Zealand’s Peter Ingram for 2 in the twenty/20 international cricket match, Westpac Stadium, Wellington /NZPA / Ross Setford

Aussies dominate shaky Black Caps

By Mark Geenty of NZPA

WELLINGTON, FEB 26 – Australia flew out of the blocks as a sluggish New Zealand cricket side spluttered into gear in a one-sided trans-Tasman series opener here tonight.

Before a Westpac Stadium crowd of 21,364 who flooded in late on a balmy Wellington night, the

tourists cruised to a six-wicket victory with four overs to spare in the opening Twenty20 match.

New Zealand’s total of 118 was never a challenge after they opted to bat first but were dismissed off the final ball of the innings.

With the Shaun Tait-marshalled pace attack on song and openers David Warner and Shane Watson flaying away, it left New Zealand needing a big

Two more Warriors join Manly trial WELLINGTON, FEB 26 – Centre Brent Tate and fullback Wade McKinnon were both added to the Warriors’ line-up after their final training session today ahead of tomorrow’s National Rugby League trial against Manly at North Harbour Stadium.

Tate hasn’t played since a season-ending knee injury against his old Brisbane club in the third match of the club’s 2009 campaign.

Earlier this week the 27-yearold was confident he would be able to have time on the field against the Sea Eagles and, after training well this morning, he was added to an enlarged bench.

Joining him is experienced fullback Wade McKinnon, who had seemed likely to miss the last two trials after rolling his ankle in training ahead of last weekend’s clash against North Queensland in Cairns.

However, McKinnon, 29, recovered well early in the week and ran freely in training today to claim a spot on the bench tomorrow.

Manly coach Des Hasler has named his firstchoice side to start the trial, which will be played in two 40-minute halves rather than 20-minute quarters as has been the case in each of the Warriors’ previous trials against the Sydney Roosters (26-8) and North Queensland (28-6).

Included in the team are outstanding fullback Brett Stewart and his back rower brother Glenn while Anthony Watmough is in the second row.

turnaround on the short AMI Stadium boundaries in game two on Sunday, before the five-match Chappell-Hadlee Trophy series opens in Napier.

The victory made it four Australian wins from as many Twenty20 internationals against New Zealand, and also four in a row this summer after they swept aside Pakistan and West Indies.

David Hussey led the way home in the run chase

11

with 46 off 36 balls before his skipper Michael Clarke (18 not out) finished the job.

Warner (19) and Watson (19) blasted 38 off the first three overs before a rare high point for the hosts as the tourists lost three for one in nine balls.

Shane Bond (2-32) steamed in with the crowd roaring, reaching 150kmh in removing Warner and the promoted Mitchell Johnson.

Captain Daniel Vettori (1-13) slammed on the brakes but Hussey and Clarke added a calm 67-run stand on a surface which prompted New Zealand to rest Tim Southee and use spinner Nathan McCullum alongside his captain.

It was Australia’s pace battery that did the damage with Mitchell Johnson taking three for 21 and Tait, left-armer Dirk Nannes and Watson all snaring two wickets apiece.

It was ominous early on for New Zealand as Tait charged in,reaching 155kmh in his opening two-over spell and removing dangerman Brendon McCullum, fourth ball to a brilliant Brad Haddin catch.

A shaky New Zealand middle order never really recovered, reaching 49 for three after 10 overs.

Peter Ingram (2) swung without moving his feet and New Zealand’s big hope Ross Taylor (9), after being nearly run out by Michael Clarke, was given a poor lbw decision by umpire Billy Bowden as Johnson’s delivery looked to be clearly missing off stump.

Martin Guptill, who with Taylor had several anxious moments between the wickets, cracked 30 off 29 but when he became Johnson’s third victim, a sub-100 total looked on.

Franklin, with a topscore of 20 from 11 previous T20 internationals, sent two deliveries into the stands in a breezy 43 off 42 balls, before Tait returned to chop him down short of a half-century.

Franklin and Gareth Hopkins (21) added the only decent partnership of the innings, 50 off 5.1 overs for the fifth wicket.

Watson and Franklin exchanged heated words, but the Aussie allrounder had the last laugh as he removed Hopkins.

Just as something close to 150 looked on, no one else stepped up as the final six wickets fell for 14 runs in the space of four overs.

– NZPA

Team NZ to switch to multihulls?

By Robert Lowe

Kiwi internationals Steve Matai and Kieran Foran ware also in the run-on side. Foran, the newest Kiwi test player, is at halfback in place of the departed Matt Orford, now with Bradford in the English Super League.

Among the bench players is former Kiwi back rower Joe Galuvao, now with yet another new club after previous stints with the Warriors, Penrith, South Sydney and Parramatta.

The team is: Lance Hohaia, Kevin Locke, Joel Moon, Jerome Ropati, Manu Vatuvei, James Maloney, Brett Seymour, Sam Rapira, Aaron Heremaia, Russell Packer, Lewis Brown, Ben Matulino, Micheal Luck. Interchange:Alehana Mara, Jeremy Latimore, sione Lousi, Patrick Ah Van, Shaun Johnson, Jesse Royal, Jacob Lillyman, Bill Tupou,Wade McKinnon, Brent Tate.

– NZPA

AUCKLAND, FEB 26 – Team New Zealand boss Grant Dalton is confident his syndicate can make a successful switch if the America’s Cup’s future lies in multihulls yachts.

The cup has traditionally been raced in monohulls, but this month’s one-on-one duel between Swiss holders Alinghi and American challengers Oracle featured a giant catamaran against a giant trimaran.

Oracle’s trimaran ended up turning the series off Valencia into a mismatch, easily winning 2-0 to return the Auld Mug to the United States.

The next regatta is expected to revert to its normal format of having several challengers.

However, Oracle, owned by software billionaire Larry Ellison and with New Zealander Russell Coutts as chief executive, have so far given no details about where or when it will be, or what type of boat will be used.

Dalton said today that Team NZ’s strength lay in monohulls, but multihull racing, if a box rule were to be brought in to contain costs, offered an exciting challenge.

“We are a team that can adapt really quickly and just change direction, whereas a lot of teams would struggle to do that, or do it quickly,”he said.

“If it went to multihulls, we would be into Extreme 40 sailing and that sort of thing instantly.

“There’s a side of me that says it would be quite good because it would be exciting. Our strengths lie in monohulls, but we could adapt.”

Dalton had no inside information on when Oracle and Italian syndicate Mascalzone Latino, who as challenger of record represents all challengers, would confirm the protocol for the next America’s Cup.

At the same time, it wasn’t something he was worrying about.

“We could easily get ourselves tied up in thinking about it,”he said.

“It will happen, just like it did the last time and the time before that.

“What type of boat is an issue. It will make us go one way or the other.We’re just making sure we’re ready to go either way.”

Team NZ’s immediate focus is on the Louis Vuitton Trophy event in Auckland next month, in which eight syndicates will take part.

Before then, skipper Dean Barker will be engaged in the Auckland match-racing regatta, which begins next Wednesday.

That event features a high-quality field including a host of America’s Cup skippers as well as the new world match-racing champion, New Zealander Simon Minoprio.

Meanwhile, Louis Vuitton spokesman Bruno Trouble believed a move to multihulls would be detrimental to the America’s Cup as a spectacle.

A former cup skipper, the Frenchman feared it would lead to too many one-sided contests.

“In a monohull, the difference between two boats is five or 10 percent of a knot,”he said.

“In Valencia, we saw a difference of between two and four knot, so I don’t believe match-racing in multihulls is a good solution.”

What Trouble did say was good news was Oracle’s defeat of Alinghi.

“We really believe the Americans will respect the America’s Cup traditions and history, while we were not really confident with the Swiss,”he said.

“So I think the Americans’winning the America’s Cup is a good event, that’s for sure.”

– NZPA

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WEEKEND

26 February 2010

13

TV & Film

The Good Guy

0Cast: Alexis Bledel, Bryan Greenberg, Anna Chlumsky, Andrew McCarthy 0Director: Julio DePietro 0Length: 90 minutes 0Rating: R (for pervasive language and some sexual content)

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Shutter Island is a great big bucket of creepy, so steeped in strangeness that if it was any weirder it would be listed by the government as a Class 1 controlled substance.That is not to say it is a good movie. It falls far short of that. But its overripe atmospherics put it in that rare class of failures that can only be made by talented people falling on their face while reaching for the moon.

Based on a mind-bending book by Boston noir specialist Dennis Lehane, the film takes us into the deepest abyss of Cold War paranoia and long-buried psychological secrets.The year is 1954 as U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner, Chuck Aule, arrive at fogbound Shutter Island off the Massachusetts coast. It’s home to

Ashecliffe Hospital, a federal facility for the criminally insane where multiple murderess Rachel Soldano has vanished from her locked room. As they investigate her disappearance, the mainland cops find the staff and physicians obstructive.Teddy, who is prone to migraines, begins to suspect that Dr. Cawley, the enigmatic asylum director, is spiking his aspirin with psychotropic drugs.

The story crosses the boundary from dark detective fiction to gothic horror as the marshals find hints of grotesque psychological experiments and a hurricane kills the power to the security system.The violent patients riot and Teddy is tortured by apparitions of his dead wife as he begins doubting his partner, his memory, even his own grasp on reality.

Director Martin Scorsese is aiming to create a journey into madness,but the result is a pastiche of artfully composed shock effects set to dissonant,avant-garde music.

The film is constructed around a twisteroo that any fan of TheTwilight Zone,“Alfred Hitchcock Presents”or even The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari will see a mile off.

Scorsese is a psychologically astute filmmaker. In Taxi Driver and Cape Fear he opened a trap door in the civilized forebrain and threw a bucket of bloody

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0Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow 0Director: Martin Scorsese 0Length: 138 minutes 0Rated: R (for disturbing violent content, language and some nudity)

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Shutter Island

Avatar Crazy Heart Dear John From Paris With Love Percy Jackson Shutter Island ValentineÕs Day The Wolfman © 2010 MCT

meat to the hungry crocodiles writhing in the sewer below. But in sticking close to Lehane’s bestseller he creates technically sophisticated melodrama instead of conjuring nightmares. Between the taut first reel and strong finale, the film drifts and dithers.

For the first time ever in a Scorsese movie, I found myself glancing at my wristwatch impatiently.

DiCaprio, a sublime actor, offers a performance that is a series of variations on the theme of nervous tension. From the opening scene, when Teddy is nauseated on the voyage to Shutter Island, he seems more or less queasy. He doesn’t descend from a self-assured, square-jawed lawman to a basket case. He seems all too visibly damaged from the outset. Scorsese’s jittery camerawork cuts away from him elliptically, and the dank lighting obscures him, undermining DiCaprio’s ability to engage the viewers. Not until a humanizing 11th-hour return to daylight and everyday reality does he have a chance to fully touch our emotions.

There are some fine supporting actors at work here. Ben Kingsley is formidable as Cawley, the mental hospital’s sinister-seeming chief psychiatrist.

Emily Mortimer makes a fetching young psychopath, and Patricia Clarkson registers powerfully in a single scene as a hermit who lucidly explains the insanity rampant on Shutter Island. Secondary characters can’t carry a film, alas.

Perhaps recognizing the central story line’s weakness, Scorsese decorates the film with symbolic tableaux – hypnotically rotating phonograph albums, leaping flames, flashbacks to Teddy’s role in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. These details are visually striking and might have worked if they grew organically out of the material, but they feel artificial, over-calculated and portentous. Light bulbs crackle to life with a sonic sting worthy of an electric chair; at other times ambient sound drops eerily out of the scene altogether. Characters in Teddy’s increasingly baroque visions crumble into dry ash or gush blood like hemorrhaging hemophiliacs.

Because the main narrative isn’t strong enough, audiovisual flourishes become the dominant aspect of the film. Instead of a relentless buildup of claustrophobic terror, we get eruptions of rats, World War II massacres and naked madmen leaping out of the dark.There’s plenty of method in Scorsese’s approach, but too little true madness.

Watch the trailer

– By Colin Covert

If you’ve ever wondered whether it is possible for a fast-track Wall Street player to have a heart, The Good Guy makes a run at answering that question, spending some quality time at the intersection of stock traders and romantic bonds.

The result is a more-clever-than-most window into modern urban yuppie mating rituals, tracking just how tough it is to keep a grip on love and the corporate ladder at the same time.

The film stars Alexis Bledel as Beth, the good girl stranded on that dangerous corner. Scott Porter, excellent as the paralyzed former football star in Friday Night Lights, is her hot broker/hot boyfriend Tommy, and Bryan Greenberg, who was adorably sexy as Uma Thurman’s young lover and Meryl Streep’s son in the little-seen Prime, portrays the new guy on Tommy’s trading team who might be falling for Beth too.

Drawing on his stint at a Chicago investment firm, writerdirector DePietro creates characters, dialogue and situations that feel authentic, which makes the film relevant in unexpected ways, though not as deeply as you hope he’ll do in the future.

The filmmaker’s better with the boys, capturing Wall Street life as a macho blood sport with its win-at-all-cost mind-set, whether it’s a dart game after work or a multimillion-dollar deal.

One of the more unsettling moments is a game the guys play, a sort of high-tech musical chairs, in which the last to press the buzzer when the music stops gets hit with an electric jolt. It’s tough to decide what’s worse, the pain of the shock, the perverse pleasure everyone else gets watching or that it’s absolutely believable.

Shot for about $10 million, the film’s extensive use of locations around Manhattan, mostly begged and borrowed, gives it a richer look than you might think given its modest means. That DePietro takes his time letting us get to know the characters comes as another unexpected pleasure, staying with a defense of “Pride and Prejudice” at Beth’s book club for example, rather than hurrying off in fear of boring us with a brief philosophical excursion.

The film is interested in that slice of the city that is young, affluent, but not yet rich, a world in which the more serious and the shallow are still figuring each other out. Tommy is the kind of guy for whom success comes naturally. He always seems to know just how to play the moment, whether he’s undertaking a Pygmalion transformation of Greenberg’s Daniel into a player, or sleuthing out a secluded garden that feels like Tuscany to soften Beth’s disappointment that a trip to Italy’s been canceled.

Since this is about Wall Street and love, there’s more than one roller coaster to ride, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell which one DePietro favors. The movie opens as Tommy’s hit bottom on the love front. He’s outside Beth’s apartment, drenched by a downpour, trying to talk his way back into her building, and her heart. From that point, we flash back six weeks as pieceby-piece the filmmaker plays around with how Tommy turned up all wet and whether he is a good guy or not.

Bledel, best known for her bookish goodness in “The Gilmore Girls,” is never asked to step outside of that comfort zone, which leaves the love story in need of some edge and the rest of us wondering if she’ll ever be able to step into more grownup roles. The better triangle turns out to be Porter, Greenberg and Wall Street, where much more than other people’s money is always on the line and someone is sure to get hurt.

Watch the trailer – By Betsy Sharkey

REVIEWS

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26 February 2010

Music

Johnny Cash: The Hospice Sessions

By Ann Powers Los Angeles Times

Let me tell you a story about my dad and Johnny Cash. Many American music lovers of a certain age could spin out such a connection; Cash is primary among artists who represent the tough psyche of the post-war patriarchal male, his music exposing the connections between empowerment and violence, pride and repression, that defined an ideal still romanticized long after it became dated.

Frank Sinatra did it, tux tie loosened, with a Scotch in his hand. Muddy Waters shouted about it in a sharkskin suit before the folkies persuaded him to put on overalls. Cash wore black, keeping everything primal even when he was playing a role or just goofing around. He was the ultimate father figure, King James biblical in proportion, showing how deep a baritone voice and a limited color wheel could go.

My father, also named John, was never a Cash fan. His taste ran more to the big bands and sentimental singers like Mario Lanza. But when he died of pancreatic cancer at 82, John T. Powers did so in a way that John R. Cash’s late-period music perfectly describes. Exiting this world, the imperfect patriarch of my family was forced to reach for the essence of dignity in a way that both called upon and challenged him as a traditional American man, which is what Cash does on the album that producer Rick Rubin gives us now.

Drawing on my experience with my dad, I’d call “American VI: Ain’t No Grave,” due out Tuesday, Cash’s hospice record.The singer lost his battle with diabetes and asthma months after he recorded these songs; during the sessions, his wife and primary support system, June Carter Cash, unexpectedly succumbed after heart surgery. Though he wasn’t formally in end-of-life care, it’s clear that when he selected and interpreted these 10 songs, he was closing his life’s book.

Taken as a whole, the six-part American Recordings series offers a striking portrait of an artist confronting physical decline. The word “physical” is important here. Cash’s late-coming sobriety and Rubin’s ability to get the old showman to take himself seriously again, combined with the singer’s natural tendency toward minimalism, produced a remarkable clarity.

There might be hokum on these albums – as the critic Jody Rosen pointed out in a 2006 Slate essay, Cash going Goth with covers of Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode was “both great art and shameless kitsch”– but there is no fat.Adopting Trent Reznor’s angst, applying his own writing talents to old folk forms like the murder ballad, or simply praising the God who helped him get through, Cash unadorned every lyric, exposing the dumb phrases as well as the gems.The musicians Rubin enlisted to embellish the work, many of them famous but obviously all hushed by the legend’s presence, listened and gave him room.

Cash’s legend grew exponentially, because while Americans have heard many men in their prime declare themselves tough or wounded or murderous, we’ve been less open to the voices of the old or the vulnerable.The sound of Cash in decline was a powerful shock that reminded listeners of the breadth of every human life.

At first, it was also something of a show. Like most chronic drug users, Cash had many health struggles, but in 1994 he was in vigorous voice, and you can hear a chuckle behind the spooky tone of his first recordings with Rubin. It’s there in the swing he gave the tale of mayhem “Delia’s Gone”and in the droll croon he applies to his former son-in-law Nick Lowe’s dissection of the id,“The Beast in Me.” Holding onto that chuckle was a key part of the remarkable feat Cash and Rubin accomplished over the ensuing decade. Loving the work, Cash recorded all kinds of songs – funny ones, familiar ones, some he’d recorded before and others he never would have heard if not for his hip younger friends.

MANY OLDER SINGERS JUST SOUND BAD BECAUSE THEY’RE STILL TRYING TO PRESENT THEMSELVES AS TOTALLY MASTERFUL. CASH DIDN’T DO THAT. HE LET IN THE CRACKS AND THE SHORTNESS OF BREATH AND THE FLATNESS The material matters; it was a blessing that Rubin kept Cash away from the soft rock of contemporary Nashville, and occasionally, the hipster connection worked magic. But the greater value of the American Recordings emerges through Cash and Rubin’s unflinching attention to the details of his slowly failing instrument.

Many older singers just sound bad because they’re still trying to present themselves as totally masterful. Cash didn’t do that. He let in the cracks and the shortness of breath and the flatness.That’s when the chuckle comes in, often silent but always pushing against the inherent drama of the songs and the moment.“Oh, well,” you can almost hear Cash say,“I’m still singing.”

The recordings leading to Cash’s last sessions, which resulted in both“Ain’t No Grave”and the preceding posthumous release“American V:A Hundred Highways,”constitute this public display of a man’s man coming to terms with his own vulnerability.

Those final efforts, however, are different, and“Ain’t No Grave” especially captures Cash’s final mood.

It’s more private, not as overtly “heavy,” but in its humility and inward-turning spirit it profoundly completes Johnny Cash’s gift of a good death.

Here’s a vivid memory I have from my dad’s first days in hospice.We’d just found out that this cancer, one of several serious diseases that plagued him during his last decade, was inoperable. My Uncle Bill, his older brother, brought my Aunt Joyce over for a visit.We settled into my parents’living room and exchanged meaningful pleasantries. My dad sat in his special chair; my mom served hors d’oeuvres.The knowledge that my father was dying took up plenty

of space in the room, but for that afternoon, we tried to simply live with that knowledge, incorporating it into the day-to-day.

The earliest volumes of the American Recordings remind me of that visit. In both cases – my family in the living room, Cash and his collaborators in various studios, together or alone – everyone involved applied great energy to the act of relaxing into the total ambiguity that takes over when death is in the room. There was a sense that public gestures still mattered.

That feeling is gone on “Ain’t No Grave.” Rubin has told interviewers that after he lost June, Cash lost his motivation to live, beyond making music.

Think of that: For Cash, at the end, recording the vocals captured here was the reason to fight for life.

Yet they’re not full of blood and thunder. Partly because of failing strength but also maybe because he no longer felt any need for bluster or any other kind of show, Cash melds with these melodies, not so much interpreting them as letting them support him, gently.

There’s plenty here for the morbid to mine. Still, Cash refuses to be overly somber. Rubin’s production on the title track is ominous, with banjo and foot-stomping from his proteges Scott and Seth Avett to give this old hymn a freak-folk edge, but Cash’s vocal has the punch of an old fighter.“Cool Water”is more characteristic; in Cash’s hands, the well-known cowboy song of fatal thirst becomes positively soothing.

“1 Corinthians 15:55,”Cash’s sole writing contribution, better captures the overall mood of acceptance and even some small joy in the face of insur-

mountable loss. Based around St. Paul’s rhetorical question “O Death, where is thy sting?”it’s a waltz that trips lightly along in an old-timey parlor music arrangement.The song pairs beautifully with folk singer Tom Paxton’s existential blues,“Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound,” which in Cash’s wavering but calm voice becomes a mantra of selfacceptance.

“Ain’t No Grave” is governed by that spirit, the feeling that comes to the dying once they’ve absorbed the real meaning of the euphemism“making peace with death.”You make peace with life, with what you have left.You take whatever tiny pleasure remains.You try to love the ones losing you.

At least that’s what my dad did, even in the last few weeks of hospice. One song on“Ain’t No Grave” made little sense to me until it triggered another memory of his final days. Near the end, he was confined to his bed. Only immediate family came to visit. We had entered a private space in which no one tried to be particularly upbeat, but the mood in the house wasn’t heavy. My dad was ready to go, and we were ready to let him.

One afternoon I walked into my dad’s room, and music was playing. It was an easy-listening record, probably one by Jackie Gleason and his orchestra.

Lying semi-conscious, my father lifted his hands like a conductor and waved them. That corny, beautiful sound had gone right into him and carried him somewhere.

When I hear Johnny Cash singing“Aloha Oe,”the Hawaiian song of goodbye, I see my dad, almost gone but still with us, simultaneously sustained and transported by music.

“Aloha Oe”is a song easily pegged to airline commercials and luau-themed patio parties. But as Cash imparts it in a tone that deserves to be called“dulcet,”that baggage slips away.“Aloha Oe”becomes as basic as life itself is at the end. Just another lovely melody, there for Johnny Cash to sing, while he still could.

The Beast in Me

REVIEWS

26 February 2010

NEW CD RELEASES

Books

Johnny Cash

0American VI: Ain’t No Grave 0American Recordings/Lost Highway This one feels like a gift. Johnny Cash died in 2003, and a flurry of posthumous releases immediately followed, including the 2003 box set “Unearthed” and 2005’s “American V: A Hundred Highways,”all drawn from the ongoing “American Recordings” sessions with producer Rick Rubin, which typically found the imposing and iconic master of American vernacular music singing accompanied by little more than an acoustic guitar.

But there had been nothing since until“American VI,”a 10-song collection said to be the final installment in that series, recorded mainly in the months between the death of Cash’s wife, June, in May 2003 and his own in September of that year. Cash’s still resonant voice may quiver, but his spirit is strong, and the spare arrangements, which feature ace players such as Mike Campbell and Smokey Hormel, are elegant in their simplicity.“Ain’t no grave can hold my body down,”Cash sings on Brother Claude Ely’s title song, and six years after his death,“American VI”finds him singing out, sure and true, with undiminished, heart-wrenching power.

15

Patti Smith’s memoir of pre-fame life with Mapplethorpe Just Kids

0Patti Smith 0Ecco (304 pages, $27)

There’s a passage in Just Kids, Patti Smith’s tender coming-of-age memoir of her love affair and enduring friendship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, in which the aspiring rock ‘n’ roll – Dan DeLuca poetess sits in on the recording of the Band’s album “Stage Fright” in 1970, in Woodstock, N.Y., with Daniel Merriweather Todd Rundgren as the studio engineer. oLove & War “Mostly everyone drifted off to some hard-core oJ-Records partying,” Smith writes.“I sat up and talked with Todd until dawn, and we found that we both had Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, roots. My grandparents Great artists often have a go-to- had lived close to where he was born and raised. guy they use repeatedly when We were also oddly similar – sober, work-driven, they need to show off. Martin judgmental, idiosyncratic wallflowers.”

Scorsese has Leonardo DiCapAll those self-aware descriptors are precisely rio. Seth MacFarlane has himself. dead-on and borne out throughout Just Kids. The And producer Mark Ronson has book is an utterly charming, captivating, intimate Daniel Merriweather.The Australian vocalist with portrait of a late 1960s and early 1970s period of the soulful, airy pipes graced Ronson’s little-heard intense artistic ferment in downtown Manhattan 2003 effort “Here Comes the Fuzz.”On the smash- significantly shaped and keenly observed by rock ing “Version” (2007), where Ronson had inventive firebrand Smith, who was born in Chicago and singers Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen by his side, raised in South Jersey before boarding a bus to Merriweather reigned with a coolly emotional“Stop find her future in New York.

Me” medley of the Smiths’“Stop Me If You Think It’s a wonderful book that, in many ways, recalls You’ve Heard This One Before”and the Supremes’ Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles,Vol. 1.”Like Dylan’s 2004 “You Keep Me Hangin’On.” memoir, Just Kids presents a poet-rocker recounting Merriweather’s gusty winds are designed for the salad days in a clear, commanding prose voice R&B-flavored melodies like “Water and a Flame,” that’s recognizably her own, but not quite so mysa duet with smoky diva Adele. His voice is huffy at terious and mystical as the one heard in the music. every slow burn. But the nicest thing about this CD That’s fitting, since Dylan looms large in Smith’s is how Merriweather proves he’s no one-trick pony. narrative. She describes how she and her friend Sure, there’s plenty of acrobatic leaping about from Janet Hamill waited in line at Sam Goody’s in Philathe 27-year-old, but he pares down nicely on the delphia to buy “Blonde on Blonde” (and searched folkie ballad“Red”and the singsongy“Change”for for a scarf to match the one their hero wore on the music tender and low-key. album cover). And how, a decade later, the Bard – A.D. Amorosi himself walked into one of her early gigs after her artistic peregrinations finally found her fronting a Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate rock ‘n’ roll band at CBGB’s.

0Ali & Toumani Dylan is one of many demigods that populate 0Nonesuch the universe of Smith and Mapplethorpe, a pair of confidants and ambitious soulmates born weeks apart in 1946. They meet shortly after a penniless This is the third collaboration Smith arrives in New York, and live the artist’s life between guitarist Ali Farka together, first in Brooklyn and later at the Chelsea Toure and kora player Toumani Hotel in Manhattan.

Diabate, both from Mali, ending Smith and Mapplethorpe remain intensely loyal to a process that began with 2005’s each other even after the photographer, who would Grammy-winning“In the Heart later inflame conservatives such as North Carolina of the Moon.”It’s the final recording for both Toure, Sen.Jesse Helms with his sexually explicit sadomasowho died in 2006, and the great Cuban bass player chistic imagery, comes to realize that he’s gay.

Orlando“Cachaito”Lopez, who died last year.

As they encourage one another – she urges him Full of slow-paced grooves and subtle modal melo- to focus on photography, he nags her to speak her dies,“Ali & Toumani”balances Toure’s deep, bluesy poems out loud – the frequently flat-broke bohemiacoustic guitar with Diabate’s trebly,pointillistic harp ans remain sure of their artistic vision. on a set of traditional African melodies. It’s a quiet, “Nobody sees like us, Patti,”Mapplethorpe says. moving, peerlessly beautiful album. While many And when they live at the Chelsea, they mingle with tracks include bass, percussion and/or brief vocals, a fairly impressive coterie of artists and musicians. it comes across as an instrumental duo recording.

At one time or another, that includes Jimi Hendrix – Steve Klinge and Janis Joplin, William S. Burroughs and Allen

Ginsberg (who tries to pick her up, thinking she’s a boy), playwright Sam Shepard (with whom Smith has an affair) and legendary folklorist Harry Smith (no relation).

Throughout, Smith is funny and compassionate, uncompromising in her artistic principles and grounded by her working-class roots. Early on, she reveals that in the days she worked in a bookbinding factory in Philadelphia, immortalized in “Piss Factory,” she became pregnant as a teenager and gave the baby away.

Later,in NewYork,she’s the arty chick who doesn’t smoke pot and is as much a fan of Johnny Carson and Frank Sinatra (whom she mimicked in Mapplethorpe’s famous cover shot for her first album,Horses) as she is of Jim Morrison and Arthur Rimbaud.

To find her voice, she“listened to Oscar Brown Jr. and recordings of beat poets, and studied lyric poets like Vachel Lindsay and Art Carney.”She hangs out with Jim Carroll and Johnny Winter, listens to Lotte Lenya, and dances the “Bristol Stomp.”

Not finding poetry to be“physical enough”on the page, she vows to“infuse the written word with the immediacy and frontal attack of rock- and-roll.”

That leads Smith to achieve a measure of mainstream success – she scored a hit with a reworked cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Because the Night” in 1978. With a touch of envy, Mapplethorpe says, “You got famous before me,”confident that his ship would soon come in.

It did, as he would become celebrated – and, in some eyes, infamous – in the years before he died of AIDS in 1989. She believed in him completely, in the beginning and the end.When his early work is rejected, she compares him to“a young Jean Genet, showing his work to Cocteau and Gide.They knew he was great, but they feared the intensity of his gift, and also what his subject matter might reveal about themselves.

“Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art. ... He was not looking to make a political statement or an announcement of his evolving sexual persuasion. He was presenting something new, something not seen or explored as he saw and explored it. Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism.”

The book takes its title from a remark a woman made upon seeing Smith and Mapplethorpe together in Central Park in the 1960s.“Are they artists?” she asked her husband.“No, they’re just kids,”he replied.

In Just Kids, Smith and Mapplethorpe are just that. Smith does skip ahead to record her experiences with Mapplethorpe as he neared death, but she leaves out her years of rock-star successes.

Instead, she’s concerned with the process of becoming, and Just Kids is a sweet story of two luminously talented outsiders awkwardly finding their way, together.

– By Dan DeLuca

Lingering spirits of love and loss Apparitions & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories

0Thomas Lynch 0W.W. Norton (216 pages, $24.95) “Stuffing the open cranium with cotton, fitting the skullcap back in place and easing the scalp back over the skull, thereby restoring the facial contours, and minding the tiny stitches from behind one ear to behind another was only part of the process of embalming. ...”

In the world of Thomas Lynch, time stands still for particulars like these, unhampered by context or meaning. Particulars: street names, species, the names of flowers and all other fixed coordinates are the provinces of the living. Apparitions, spiritual belief, faith, regrets, hopes, love and all things

ephemeral are those of the dead.You’d think it was the other way around, but it turns out the dead have no use for particulars after all.

Lynch has deep roots. He is an undertaker, the son of an undertaker, and he has been the funeral director in Milford, Mich., the town in which he grew up, since 1974. He has written about his work in three collections of poems and three books of essays. He has also written about his family’s Irish roots in County Clare.You might guess, and you would be right, that he is a careful writer. He takes his time.

He creates his characters thoroughly, with much detail and background (more background than foreground). In this way, he cares for his reader by taking the guesswork out of the fiction. He wants you to know exactly where you are in time and space.

He is more interested in truth than speculation, substance than mystery.

Suffering may be swift and deep, but Lynch does not linger on it.Where another writer might savor the drama, he washes it down with more life, more suffering. Body and blood. Suffering is ordinary, which does not render it undeserving of compassion. In his poetry collection,“Still Life in Milford,” Lynch wrote of a bereaved mother’s anguish that her scream wouldn’t “rhyme with anything.”Here, in the story “Bloodsport,”we get a view of Martin, the town undertaker, preparing the body of a young woman shot by her cruel husband.We see him help the woman’s mother through the funeral, and we feel his shame for the way men treated her. People pass through an undertaker’s life in times of great sadness.They come and they go.

What’s left are the apparitions, the traces. In “Catch and Release,” Danny, a fishing guide in western Michigan, takes his father’s ashes out one October morning to scatter them in a place where father and son once fished together. He mixes a portion of the ashes and eats them, an act that strikes a reader in all the right places. Living and dead, all in one body.

While Danny’s coordinates are the names of streets and rivers, fish and flies, Harold, in“Hunter’s Moon,”uses the names of the caskets he sells for a living to navigate his world – the“Clarksville Princess Mahogany with a tufted dusty rose velvet interior,” for example, or the“Autumn Oak Ensemble.”There is too much suffering in Harold’s life. He becomes an apparition. His life is“void as that darkness was of any place names he could recognize; he feared the point of no return.”

“Matinee de Septembre” is Lynch’s version of “Death in Venice.”A middle-aged professor takes a vacation at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.

She becomes obsessed with a beautiful young Jamaican girl, a waitress at the hotel. Her certain decay and the young girl’s rising beauty meet in the middle. She receives – in the Christian, ecstatic, sense – a revelation. She becomes an“acolyte to the incarnate beauty.”

In the novella,“Apparitions,”Adrian, a Methodist minister, struggles with the sadness of his failed marriage. He is haunted by his memories; by the hopes he had for a family; by guilt that he could not keep a home together for his two small children.

He writes a self-help book about divorce that is an overnight success, but still, he cannot shake off his regrets until, one day, midsermon, he stands at the lectern singing “Let It Be”and is joined by the misfits of his community.“It was an apparition,” he tells his friend Francis later.“They looked like innocents, Francis.Angels – every one of them. I tell you, I could see their wings. ...They just all looked so lovely to me – these people whose people I’ve been burying and marrying and baptizing. ... And all I wanted was to tell them that everything was going to be all right.”

This is Lynch’s pulpit, his runway, his perspective.

Souls on their way, somewhere.The names, addresses, certificates and mortgages all falling from their pockets as they take off, leaving us, his readers, back on the ground, digesting ashes and watching carefully for sources of light.

– By Susan Salter Reynolds

HEALTH

16

26 February 2010

Steam baths & saunas have little medical benefit

By Cynthia Billhartz Gregorian St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS – Sweat lodges, saunas, steam rooms and plastic sauna suits are all designed to do the same thing: make you sweat without exercising. But to what end?

Jon Schroeder sits in the sauna at a St. Louis-area YMCA for 10 to 12 minutes a few times a week after working out.To him, it just plain feels good.

“In the winter especially, it’s nice to work up a sweat,” said Schroeder, 68, of St. Louis. He says he has no idea whether it has any benefit beyond that.

Web sites and spas insist that sweating rids the body of toxins. Native Americans and New Age disciples believe that visions during sweat lodge ceremonies lead to enlightenment.

Four months ago, self-help guru and best-selling author James Arthur Ray led more than 50 people into a makeshift sweat lodge near Sedona,Ariz., for a ceremony that he said would cleanse their minds, spirits and bodies.

By the end of the ceremony people were vomiting and passing out. Three of them died and 19 were treated for burns, dehydration, kidney failure and respiratory arrest. Recently, Ray was arrested and charged with three counts of manslaughter in connection with the deaths.

Medical experts stress that there’s a lot of misinformation about the benefits of sweating.

Essentially, its function is to cool the body and that’s it, they say.

“Don’t believe everything you read or hear,”said Dr. Dee Anna Glaser, professor of dermatology at St. Louis University. She’s been studying sweat for years and chuckles when asked about the benefits of spending time in a sauna or spa.

There really are no medical benefits, she said. She added that the liver and kidneys do such a good job of ridding the body of toxins that there’s almost none left for the sweat glands to purge.

“I think people find it relaxing because it causes you to sit for a moment, and the heat feels good and relaxation is not a bad thing,”said Glaser.“But there’s not a specific health benefit.You could probably sit on a couch in a nice quiet room and get the same benefits.”

For people with certain skin conditions, sitting on a couch and chilling may be preferable to sitting in a sauna and sweating. Glaser discourages anyone with broken capillaries, melasma (discolored skin patches) and some types of acne to stay out of heat because it exacerbates those conditions.

“It also can break down collagen which gives skin

thickness and fullness,”she said.

Dr. Rob Poirier, clinical chief of emergency medicine at Washington University, hasn’t seen any cases of heat exhaustion, heat stroke or death from steam rooms or saunas recently. Most people, he said, know when to get out.

But he believes sweat lodges should be regulated and required to have on-site medical personnel monitoring ceremonies like the one near Sedona.

“They want people to feel better and have periods of enlightenment and they do, they have visions,” Poirier said. “But that’s probably hallucinating.

There’s a very fine line between when you can bring them back.You need to have someone with a good understanding of heat exhaustion and heat stroke to know when to pull them out.”

WEB SITES AND SPAS INSIST THAT SWEATING RIDS THE BODY OF TOXINS. NATIVE AMERICANS AND NEW AGE DISCIPLES BELIEVE THAT VISIONS DURING SWEAT LODGE CEREMONIES LEAD TO ENLIGHTENMENT People will use saunas and steam rooms for years with no problems, because, like Schroeder, they use common sense. But, Poirier notes, steam rooms can pose a higher risk of dehydration than saunas, which provide dry heat.

“The more humid it is, the less you sweat,” says Poirier. “Sweat evaporates to cool you. When it doesn’t evaporate, such as in a steam room, there’s no cooling going on.”He adds that people who take diuretics, such as Lasix, to treat high blood pres-

sure, are more predisposed to dehydration and, in extreme cases, heat exhaustion and heat stroke. So are people who are hungover from drinking too much alcohol.

“People who drink heavily the night before can be slightly dehydrated which is why you feel hungover,” he said.“Anyone with not a lot of fluid in their body will be more prone to going into heat exhaustion or heat stroke. Plus you won’t necessarily feel your body getting sick as quickly as it’s experiencing it.”

Healthy Living

A better slice

A group of pizza-loving chemists has discovered how to boost disease-fighting antioxidants in a slice.

The recipe • Instead of all-purpose flour, use whole wheat flour, which is higher in antioxidants – substances that counteract the damaging effects of oxidation in our bodies

Chronic health problems increase among children

• Let the dough rise for about 18 hours in the refrigerator, in a pan loosely covered with plastic wrap; the longer rising time can double the dough’s antioxidants

By Harry Jackson Jr. St. Louis Post-Dispatch

• Bake the pizza at 500 F (260 C) for 6-8 minutes; antioxidants increased by 82 percent when baked at a higher temperature Source: University of Maryland; MCT Photo Service Graphic: Pat Carr

© 2010 MCT

Childhood rates of chronic health problems, including obesity, asthma and learning disabilities, have doubled in just 12 years, a new study reports – to 1 in 4 children in 2006, up from 1 in 8 in 1994.

The New York Times reports that while the researchers did not study the reasons for the

increases, they suggested several possible factors: improvements in screening and diagnosis that led to more reporting of the chronic conditions; the rise in childhood obesity, which can lead to other problems; and the increasing survival of premature babies and children with cancer and other diseases, who are more likely to have chronic health problems.

The study appeared in the Feb. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

SCIENCE/TECH 17

26 February 2010

Bloom unveils combustion-free fuel cell

By Tiffany Hsu Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES – After nine years of research shrouded in secrecy, a Silicon Valley tech firm Wednesday took the wraps off a fuel cell that it says can generate energy by combining air and a wide range of fuels without going through the process of combustion.

The firm, Bloom Energy, said the solid oxide fuel cell – resembling a Polaroid snapshot both in dimension and thickness – could be a game-changer in the clean technology industry because it can be powered by either fossil fuel or renewable sources in an electro-chemical process that is both cleaner and more reliable than current options.

In the company’s plans, thousands of fuel cells would be crammed into a box about the size of a refrigerator called the Bloom Energy Server, each capable of producing 100 kilowatts of electricity, or enough to power 100 average-size homes or a small office building, Bloom said.

Unlike solar and wind power, which can be intermittent, the technology can run all day, and customers can earn back the system’s $700,000 to $800,000 cost within a few years through utility bill savings,

the Sunnyvale, Calif.,-based Bloom claimed.

Several major companies, including FedEx Corp., Google Inc., Staples Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., have already begun testing the technology or signed on as customers.The trial runs have so far produced more than 11 million kilowatt-hours of energy while cutting 14 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, Bloom said.

At the Coca-Cola Co.’s Odwalla plant in Dinuba, Calif., a 500-kilowatt fuel cell installation from Bloom is expected to use biogas to supply 30 percent of the facility’s power needs while reducing emissions by 35 percent.

Last year, eBay Inc. set up a 500-kilowatt system powered by biogas outside its San Jose, Calif., headquarters, taking 15 percent of the campus’ energy needs off the electrical utility grid. The fuel cells, which eBay dubbed “skinny batteries,” were officially introduced at the company’s site Wednesday with Calif. Gov.Arnold Schwarzenegger and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on hand.

Bloom Chief Executive K.R. Sridhar, a former NASA scientist, described the technology behind the fuel cell in a statement as potentially having “the same kind of impact on energy that the mobile phone had on communications.”

Google Buzz – ‘danger zone’ for children in response to parents’privacy concerns. In a statement, spokesman Scott Rubin said:“We designed Buzz to make it easy to have conversations with your friends about the things that interest you.

Keeping kids safe online is very important to us.”

It can also be tricky. Privacy watchdogs have successfully hounded social networks in the past for not taking sufficient steps to protect kids from predators and other dangers. By adding Buzz to its popular e-mail service, Google has brought new attention to how kids use Gmail and raised questions about how they may use it.

Google, like the social networking site Facebook, does not permit kids younger than 13 open Gmail accounts.That complies with the Child Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires Web sites that collect information from children under age 13 get consent from a parent.

By Jessica Guynn In addition, law enforcement officials have Los Angeles Times pushed social networking sites to confirm the identities and ages of young users.

SAN FRANCISCO – Parents and privacy watchdogs University of Maryland law professor Danielle are sounding the alarm that Google Inc.’s new social Citron said Google, itself, is not legally required to networking tool, called Buzz, may put children at confirm the ages of Buzz users, but should. risk.

Citron’s two kids, 9 and 11, became fascinated by The concern came home in a personal way for Buzz during the recent snowstorms.“It was utterly technology analyst Charlene Li. On Sunday night amazing how they had no idea what they were sharshe discovered that her 9-year-old daughter had ing,”Citron said. publicly shared a private conversation on Buzz Like many other Internet savvy parents, Citron without intending to. Li grew even more troubled said she is vigilant about keeping her kids off Facewhen she spotted her daughter’s fourth-grade class- book and MySpace, and having frequent conversamates chatting with strangers. tions with them about the risks of exposing too She turned off Buzz and alerted other parents much personal information online. and her child’s school, which is in turn alerted other But Citron said she was unprepared a few weeks parents. Then Li, an analyst who tracks Google as ago when Buzz popped up in her children’s Gmail well as other Internet companies, took to the Inter- accounts.“This is foisted on children and they love net to spread the word. it,”Citron said.“And it’s really dangerous.”

“These are 4th graders who have no clue,”Li wrote Li said she also worries that even if parents disin a blog post.“Imagine parents (and kids) checking able Buzz, kids can turn it back on. And they may out their Buzz accounts to find that ‘iorgyinbath- not understand how to manage the privacy settings rooms’is following them, which is exactly what hap- to stay safe, given that adults have been confused pened with my child’s account.” by the settings.

Google had already drawn sharp criticism from She wants Google to add parental controls to privacy watchdogs for the way it rolled out Buzz in Gmail. And she is urging parents to discuss Buzz millions of Gmail accounts. Privacy expert Kathryn with their kids because she fears the predators are Montgomery, a professor at American University, already lurking there. urged the Federal Trade Commission to address “I just want the kids to be safe,”she said. the potential risks to kids.

Google said it has the same goal.“We think it’s “Google Buzz is a new danger zone for children,” important to remember that there’s no substitute Montgomery said. for parental supervision to keep kids safe on the Google said it had no specific plans to tweak Buzz Internet,”Rubin said.

Fuel-cell technology has been in development for decades, with hydrogen as the usual fuel source.

But Bloom’s flat ceramic squares are more versatile, the company said.

“There are probably another 100 companies that are working on something very similar,”said Jack Brouwer, associate director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center in Irvine.“But the key thing is that Bloom has an integrated system and package ready for commercial sale that puts them ahead of the pack.”

Bloom was founded in 2001 after Sridhar and his team conducted research for NASA’s Mars exploration program on using solar energy and water to produce air and fuel.The company raised $400 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Morgan Stanley.

Brouwer said that for now the technology is probably better suited for powering entire neighborhoods rather than individual homes.And, while the individual cells seem to have a robust lifespan, the full system’s long-term reliability has yet to be proven, he said.

Still,“it’s one of the best ways to introduce more renewable power and support the grid, and it does so in a very environmentally sensitive way,”he said.

Science Matters

Heart repair from inside Researchers are testing a new, less invasive way of repairing a failing heart valve that does not require open heart surgery.

Aorta

The aortic (tricuspid) valve

Valve

Left ventricle

When heart’s pumping chamber (left ventricle) contracts, valve closes to keep blood from flowing back from aorta

Percutaneous heart valve

Insert catheter 1 Flexible wire inserted into artery in groin

Heart Aorta

is threaded into heart

Push diseased valve aside 2 Small balloon inserted into heart along wire

1

expands and crushes damaged valve outward

Aorta Artificial valve (expanded)

2

Insert artificial valve 3 Cage-like valve is inserted

along wire, expands and locks into valve’s space

3 Left ventricle

Remove catheter 4 Wire removed; expanded artificial

4

valve begins to work in heart

Cost vs. benefit

+

Valve replaced without open heart surgery

Source: Edwards Lifesciences, Medtronic

–

Valve costs $30,000, versus current $5,000

Graphic: Helen Lee McComas

© 2010 MCT

021616643 info@identit.co.nz

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Mistral Software

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September 2008

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TECHNOLOGY 19

26 February 2010

The vinyl album is getting its groove back

By Glenn Gamboa Newsday

NEW YORK – Don’t bury the album just yet.

Yes, it’s struggling, with album sales down by half since the historical high it set in 2000 – sales dropped another 8.5 percent in 2009 to 489.8 million, even as overall music sales climbed 2.1 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Album-buying havens, such as the Virgin Megastores and the Tower Records chains, vanished, and music industry and technology leaders have been trumpeting what they see as the more attractive profit margins of single sales and $1.29-a-pop downloading for years.

That death knell sure is getting pretty loud. Or maybe it’s just a wake-up call.

Britt Daniel – whose band, the indie-rockers Spoon, recently enjoyed commercial success with its first Top 5 album“Transference”– says, regardless of industry hype, the album will continue to validate both artists and music fans.

“It’s certainly the test of a band’s mettle,” says Daniel, whose critical success was cemented when Spoon was named Artist of the Decade by Metacritic for the Austin, Texas, band’s consistently praised albums in the 2000s.“It’s hard to make an

album’s worth of songs and do it well.The ones that do occupy a higher place in mind and in psyche. ... Live shows can be wild and fun, life-changing if done really well. But a great album has always meant the most to me.

“Albums are what fans get into when they really get serious about a band,”Daniel continues.“That’s when they are finding something that means something to them, something that they feel is worth spending time with, that they will get to know what an album really is by listening the whole way through. Until they do that, they’re just a casual listener, not the most passionate fan.”

Daniel isn’t alone in his vocal defense of the album. More and more artists and fans are banding together to support the album as an art form and as a way to distribute music. Independent record stores around the country have united to create Record Store Day, which takes place April 17, to “celebrate the art of music.”Digital retailer eMusic has launched an “Embrace the Album” campaign on Facebook and Twitter, as a “place to highlight records that are best consumed whole.”

“I do think there’s still value in 11 great songs packaged together, flowing from start to finish,”says J. Edward Keyes, eMusic’s editor-in-chief (and an

occasional Newsday contributor).“I think that’s a testament to an artist’s time and vision,and those are the kinds of things that will be a longer relationship.

Marvin Gaye had a string of great pop singles, but ‘What’s Goin’On,’the album, is what people respond to. The Beach Boys had a string of unbeatable pop singles, but ‘Pet Sounds’is what set them apart.”

These campaigns may be having some effect.

Though it’s still a small fraction of the overall market, vinyl album sales were up 33 percent last year, to 2.5 million, the highest sales level since SoundScan started keeping records in 1991.And eMusic reports that about 72 percent of its sales are now full albums.

For more concrete proof, look no further than Long Island Vinyl Exchange in East Northport, N.Y. There under one roof, in all their touchable vinyl glory, are 250,000 albums – some vintage and some freshly pressed last week. Owner John DeSimone happily gives newcomers a tour of the store, which opened in November, and its treasures, before pointing out the recent shift in the album’s fortunes.

“This is something I haven’t been able to do for 20 years,”says DeSimone, who is planning to open three more record stores this year.“Things are really changing.”

Among the old standbys – Beatles classics,

Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” a shelf-full of Billy Joel albums – are the newcomers, Lady Gaga picture discs, and new releases from Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective.“I can’t keep enough Animal Collective albums in the store,”he says.“I order all I can, and they’re gone just as fast.”

All those Animal Collective sales are a sign that a new generation has“embraced the album,”especially now that turntables are once again easy to find, including stand-alone models that will convert vinyl albums to MP3s that can be played on iPods and computers.“What the kids know today is that they get a piece of art when they buy an album – it’s a tangible thing, it sounds better, it’s different than downloading something,”DeSimone says.“They own a piece of music.”

Spoon’s Daniel says artists get energized by crafting albums for that kind of audience. Even after completing the recording, artists are once again taking a great deal of care in sequencing, deciding what order works best for the songs.“Sequencing is always open for vigorous debate,”Daniel says.“A song or two generally stands out as a good opener or a good closer. For ‘Gimme Fiction,’‘The Beast and the Dragon, Adored’ was a pretty obvious opener.

On the last record, ‘Black Like Me’ was a pretty obvious closer.”

All of it was in mind when Daniel was working on“Transference.”“I just wanted it to feel like something like all of our records and have it take some left turns that you weren’t expecting,”he says.“What I hope you will find is that it hangs together.”

Keyes says that kind of care is a road to longterm success.“How many people are going to keep going to see a band live if they only have three good songs?”he says.“Especially with indie bands, I feel like it’s about a whole body of work that they are now selling out shows, that they are so in-demand.”

Not everyone is sold, though.

Parts of the music industry are experimenting with configurations that are somewhere between the single track and the full-fledged 17-track album.

In March, instead of releasing a full album, Blake Shelton will release a “six pak” on Warner Music Nashville, a six-song collection called “Hillbilly Bone” that will be followed by another six-song grouping scheduled for August.

“I talk to my fans every day, and the first question they ask me is,‘When are you going to release a new record?’”Shelton said in a statement.“I want to give my fans new music more often, and at a lower price.The fact that people will be able to get the new music for less money is a gift to my fans who have been behind me every step of the way.”

Though much of the industry will always be focused on building flashy new acts like Ke$ha or Justin Bieber, Keyes says music fans may stop trying to follow all those twists and turns.

“I have to believe there is a point at which people are going to get tired of having to keep up with a new artist every 15 minutes,” Keyes says.“I think they’re going to want someone who’s going to be around a little bit longer, with a little more substance to it.”

“I think you can still make new music fans, who want albums,”Keyes continues.“I think a big part of the industry’s problem is people aren’t hearing music that resonates with them.”

TRACKING THE TOP 10 ALBUMS & ARTISTS OF ‘09 According to Nielsen SoundScan, 2009 was the biggest year for vinyl album sales since they started keeping records in 1991.Here are the vinyl albums and artists that topped their charts last year: TOP ALBUMS 1. “Abbey Road,” The Beatles 2. “Thriller,” Michael Jackson 3. “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” Animal Collective 4. “Wilco,” Wilco 5. “Fleet Foxes,” Fleet Foxes 6. “Backspacer,” Pearl Jam 7. “Veckatimest,” Grizzly Bear 8. “Appetite for Destruction,” Guns N’ Roses 9. “Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King,” Dave Matthews Band 10. “In Rainbows,” Radiohead

TOP ARTISTS 1. Radiohead 2. The Beatles 3. Michael Jackson 4. Metallica 5. Wilco 6. Bob Dylan 7. Animal Collective 8. Pearl Jam 9. Bon Iver 10. Iron & Wine

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