Singapore’s democratic opening

Image via Wikipedia
Bridget Welsh | May 6, 11 1:54pm
Malaysiakini

COMMENT

Singapore’s 2011 general election campaign has been historic, and signals a major transformation in the country’s political landscape. The intensity and tone of this campaign has been unprecedented as the ruling PAP’s (People’s Action Party) record has come under attack.

Given the impressive management of the 2008 global financial crisis and record GDP growth of 14.5% in 2010, this election should have given Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (left) a strong mandate and seen as a celebration of Singapore’s success.

Instead, from the first day of the campaign when thousands thronged Hougang Stadium to attend an opposition rally organised by the Worker’s Party, the PAP has been on the defensive.

A few days ago, the Singaporean premier, in a brave and unprecedented display of humility, apologised for the mistakes of ministers and failings of his government – repeatedly. This move represented an acknowledgment that all is not right in Singapore and that the concerns of many Singaporeans are not been adequately addressed.

In fact, the mood on the ground in Singapore has been one of angst, sometimes anger, as this general election campaign has stirred a revolutionary outpouring of open criticism towards the PAP.

Bold opposition campaign

As the campaign began, the focus initially was on the credibility of the opposition. The opposition – comprised of a handful of parties – is unified in their focus on the PAP, with only one of the contests a three-cornered fight. The minimal infighting bolstered the opposition’s chances.

All the seats were contested, except for the group representative constituency of Tanjong Pagar, the constituency of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. There, the opposition candidates were disqualified for filing their papers 35 seconds late.

Singapore’s opposition has made a bold move to move its old stalwarts Chiam See Tong and Low Thia Khiang from single-member constituencies – single candidate contests have been whittled down in size through the repeated gerrymandering that happens before every election and is announced only a few months in advance – to the larger group representatives constituency (GRC) where there are four to five representatives contesting.

The opposition fielded arguably its strongest slate in Singapore’s history, featuring the talented Chen Show Mao (left), a lawyer of international fame, and former private secretary to Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong, Tan Jee Say.

While many of the opposition teams are not even and there is considerable variation in the candidate caliber nationally – which is also the case for the PAP – the opposition has neutralised the PAP claim that it is the only one capable of representing Singaporeans.

The focus has centred on the ‘A Team’ contest in Aljunied (a GRC that represents the heartland of Singapore), which was won narrowly by the PAP in 1997, and is seen as the strongest possible chance for the opposition to break the monopoly of the PAP on GRCs, which comprise the majority of seats and essentially assure the PAP a two-thirds majority.

From the onset, the opposition presented the majority of Singaporeans with an alternative choice. In giving more Singaporeans real choices at the polls this election, the opposition has helped expand democratic space.

Seeking voice and representation

Time and again, the opposition used the analogy of the “co-driver”, calling for the need to have more review of the single dominant party to check mistakes and share alternative views.

Speakers at rallies have pointed to the need to “slap the driver if he falls asleep and talk to him when he is awake”, to open up dialogue with different perspectives and stop the government from going in the wrong direction.

This image – which captures the experience of many ordinary Singaporeans who feel that they have not had a seat in the car, let alone the front, has reinforced a key theme of this campaign – is used to illustrate the need to have a genuinely representative opposition.

To neutralise this, the PAP changed the composition of the Parliament before the polls to include more nominated members of Parliament (NMP), to allow for approved and chosen alternative voices.

With the driver analogy, the opposition has attacked this practice, pointing to the need to have voting members on all matters involving governance. This idea of having a check on power has taken root, with calls for a First World Parliament with different perspectives, and more openness in dialogue.

At the core of the opposition calls for a stronger watchdog role are real concerns about the lack of adequate consultation on policies, such as the construction of two casinos over considerable protest and lingering anger, and need for more transparency in the PAP government.

The attitude that “government knows best” is being fundamentally challenged by the demand for the government be more accountable and consultative. There are real questions being raised by the failure of some PAP ministers to be accountable for mistakes in areas such as the escape of suspected terrorist Mas Selamat, for example.

The high salaries of PAP ministers (and bonuses) have continued to come under attack. Underscoring concerns about accountability is a perceived growing distance of PAP leaders from the concerns of ordinary public. Many speak about the first visit of a PAP member of parliament in their lifetime during the campaign, revealing the lack of connection to local communities of many ruling elites, especially to those living in the government HDB flats.

The recent Facebook chat by PM Lee shows how disconnected the PAP has been from online social media, which has expanded discussion and engagement in Singapore.

Issues and governance

The opposition has tapped into the perception of PAP elite distance effectively in its messaging.

Firstly, the opposition as a whole, led by the popular Workers Party and newcomer Reform Party, has come to the centre, appealing to the middle ground. Traditionally the opposition in Singapore has been marginalised and discredited, and often painted as existing on the fringe.

The surprising dimension of this campaign is how the opposition as a whole has unified under a more inclusive group, capturing the concerns from bread-and-butter issues to political freedoms, all under the “opposition umbrella”. This unity and shared message has minimised differences among the component parties.

Where the opposition has hit hardest is by tapping into the struggles of ordinary Singaporeans. The dominant concerns have been the high cost of living, affordable housing and accessible healthcare. These issues have become common rallying cries for the opposition, and forced PAP ministers to go on the defensive.

The intensity of the public response to these issues highlights the shortcomings the PAP has faced in policy-making. Behind these issues is a reality that not all Singaporeans have shared equally in the success of the country.

Singapore – along with Malaysia – has one of the highest levels of inequality in Southeast Asia. Today there are homeless on the streets of Singapore despite its impressive economic growth, and many hardworking families are being squeezed by inflation – especially those taking care of elderly parents and children.

From a policy perspective, Singapore has to face the reality that its social welfare system is not working and that many of its people are falling through the cracks. And, everyone in the small country like Singapore, sees it.

Personally, I have seen the struggles of the elderly in hospital grappling with unmanageable health costs, as the refrain that is commonly stated in Singapore is that you can die, but you cannot fall sick in Singapore.

This problem by the way is not unique to Singapore as the recent health-care debate in the US has shown. The ability to live a life with dignity and basic affordable health-care is a demand worldwide and developed countries are being called on to provide better policies.

What has happened in this campaign is a questioning of the narrow economic focus of policy for the elites and a challenge to the development model of trickle down benefits without an adequate social safety net. So many people talk about the “pressure” of living in Singapore, which has been tied to intense competition to perform in a system where there is no protection for the weak and diversity in performance.

No matter what happens in the final results tomorrow, Singaporeans have unselfishly called on the government to look out for everyone, not just the few.

Immigration a hot-button issue

Most of the media attention this election has centred on the issue of immigration. In some ways, it ties into the pragmatic concerns of Singaporeans, who are concerned with competition with jobs and the increased demand on services that have strained quality output.

Civil servants who have traditionally operated with personal care and attention have been overwhelmed by the level of new demands in recent years. This is most obvious in public transportation, but extends to all walks of life.

Yet, as a foreign worker in Singapore who fondly remembers the Singapore of old, there is more going on than pragmatic concerns. The entire demographic of Singaporean society has changed, and many Singaporeans feel that they are being left out. They resent the perceived favouritism given to foreigners, who are not asked to make the same level of sacrifice in the form of National Service for example to the country.

In this deeply proud country, the influx of foreign workers has fostered a sense of displacement and in some ways been seen to undercut national identity. This was captured by the commentary of 24-year-old opposition candidate, National Solidarity Party’s Nicole Seah (left), who remarked that she was “living in a foreign country”.

This is not an easy task for the PAP to manage the need for labour and investment with changing identity and interests. The speed at which the demographic change has occurred without adequate appreciation and acknowledgment of the important role of Singaporeans from all walks of life has made this issue very real.

This election campaign points to the need to move beyond thinking about governance in economic terms, but moving toward a broader sense of humanity and inclusion.

Engaging the new media

All of this has played out on the social media. As the campaign has been scheduled during student exams, it has been less viable for many working families to attend rallies. Instead, many have turned to Facebook and YouTube, as speeches have been shared and discussed.

PAP leaders, such as George Yeo and Vivian Balakrishnan, have made personal appeals to voters, especially younger voters who will be decisive in this election as they comprise 25% of the electorate. This is Singapore’s first ‘new media’ election and the level of engagement is unprecedented. Even the mainstream media have adopted more new media tools.

While many continue to rely on the Straits Times and other arms of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) for news, the level of dialogue has deepened. What is important that much of this dialogue has largely focused on real issues rather than character assassinations, although there has been a fair amount of “he said, she said”.

The real change is that Singaporeans – largely seen to be apathetic politically – have stepped up and shown that they are attuned to developments politically in their country and they care. Across the political spectrum and backgrounds, Singaporeans have been shown that they care about the country’s future.

By law, they are required to vote and more and more are going into the voting booth having experienced a broader range of debate.

Obstacles and political opening

The obstacles to winning seats for the opposition in Singapore are high. These are well-known – constituency delineation, media control and lack of resources.

In this campaign, the opposition has defined the debate and provided a real challenge to the government. The issues are now on the table and will have to be addressed, from inequality and inclusion to policy reevaluations, irrespective of the final outcome in seats.

Minimally, the PAP faces a likely loss in popular support and will not emerge with as strong as a mandate as the past. As to how many seats it will lose, it is too hard to call but chances are we shall see the strongest opposition gains since the 1991 election.

The main groups that will determine the election are younger voters, middle-class voters who comprise the silent majority that largely did not attend rallies and importantly, the Malay community, which has traditionally voted for the PAP in recent elections and been decisive in hot seats in the past.

The PAP’s initiatives in the last stages of the campaign – the Facebook appeal to younger voters, the repeated apologies and more frequent speeches in Malay – reveal how close some of the contests are. They have embraced humility as a tactic, combined with the reminders of their successes and a call by minister mentor not to have to “repent” by voting for the opposition.

Today is the cooling-off period – a day for reflection. In this campaign, Singaporeans have shown confidence in themselves by allowing and encouraging discussion. This has been led by both sides of the divide as democracy is expanding in Singapore through dialogue and greater political engagement.

Voters in Singapore will decide tomorrow whether to continue with the incumbent dominance – to reward the ruling party for the impressive economic gains and management of financial crisis – or to opt for diversity and change, a stronger check on the monopoly of power.

The global and regional trends toward democratic openings suggest that even Singapore is not immune from change. They have already shown that even in arguably one of the most successfully governed states in the world, the demand for greater representation and better governance lives on.

DR BRIDGET WELSH is associate professor of political science at Singapore Management University and she can be reached at bwelsh@smu.edu.sg.

Jeff Ooi takes ‘Christian conspiracy’ to police

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Susan Loone | May 8, 11
Malaysiakini

Jelutong MP Jeff Ooi has lodged a police report against Umno-linked Malay language daily Utusan Malaysia and a blogger BigDog.com, for what he described were “malicious” articles alleging he was involved in a purported Christian conspiracy to change the country’s official religion.

Ooi, who is DAP central executive committee member, wants the police to investigate Utusan over its front page articles on May 7 entitled ‘Kristian Agama Rasmi’ (Christianity the official religion?), ‘Dua halaman blog dedah ikrar paderi seluruh negara’ (Two blogs expose pledge by pastors nationwide), and ‘Jeff Ooi nafi anjur majlis’ (Jeff Ooi denies organising seminar).

On page five, Ooi noted two other articles on the same matter entitled “Malaysia negara Kristian? Dua blog dedah pertemuan paderi bincang agenda jadikan agama rasmi” (Christianity the official religion? Two blogs expose meeting between pastors discussing making Christianity the nation’s official religion).

He also said he wants the police to investigate another blog, called ‘Marahku’, that carried a similar allegation in his blog posting entitled ‘Agong under threat? DAP wants to make Christianity the official religion of Malaysia?’.

Though conceding that he did not have much information about the blogger, Ooi said the articles suggested that Ooi had attended a meeting of Christian pastors in Penang on Friday, where the group had prayed for Christianity to be the official religion of the country and for a Christian to be prime minister.

Utusan Malaysia had based its articles on a blog posting by yet another pro-Umno blogger, Zakir Mohammed, titled ‘Making Christianity the official religion’, which alleged that Ooi had organised the meeting.

Zakir and anonymous blogger Marahku had carried a photo in their blog featuring a group of people in a circle praying with their heads bowed.

At a press conference at the Jalan Pattani police station, Ooi urged Zakir and Utusan Malaysia to apologise to all Christians within 24 hours for the said allegations.

“Apologise in 24 hours or else I will explain the matter to all Buddhist and Christian groups and ask them to vote wisely against extremism in the next election,” he told reporters.

He said that although Utusan Malaysia had quoted him as saying that he was merely a guest at the closed door dinner meeting, the daily had concluded that DAP was involved in a very dangerous act.

“(They accuse us of) bringing the Chinese chauvinistic political strategy to a very high and sensitive level,” he added.

Meanwhile, Ooi took Zakir to task for saying in his post that “The level … is thought to be much higher as compared to the post May 1969 general election where victorious Chinese chauvinists (from) DAP trotted around strategic places in Kuala Lumpur with brooms asking the Malays to ‘Balik Kampung, Tanam Jagung’ (Go home and plant corn).

“That sparked the bloody racial riot of the evening of 13 May,” Ooi cited Zakir as saying.

Ooi felt this was the blogger’s attempt to stir anti-Chinese sentiments among Malays although not everyone in the Chinese community are Christians.

“I deny all the allegations by Utusan Malaysia and BigDog but I believe (in) the coincidence that as May 13 draws nearer, the duo has (tried to) spark these anti-Chinese sentiments by bringing up the issue of May 13 and by hurling accusations that my party is Chinese chauvinistic.

“(They are) malicious and should be investigated under Penal Code section 499 (for defamation)”.

Ooi expressed hope that all religious leaders would appeal to their believers to stay calm, while urging pro-Malay rights pressure groups like Pembela and Perkasa to “stop playing with fire”.

He said Umno should take action against irresponsible editors in the newspaper who play up racial or religious sentiments.

“But would they take action since they dared to expel their own (dissenting) journalist?” he asked, referring to sacked journalist and National Union of Journalists chief Hata Wahari.

The articles has created waves, with Home Minister Hishamuddin Hussein joining in the fray and expressing worries about the seriousness of the allegations were true.

Information, Communications and Culture Minister Rais Yatim has said the bloggers’ allegations should be referred to the Malaysians Communications and Multimedia Commission.

These happened even after a strongly-worded denial by the organisers of the pastors meeting, the National Evangelical Christian Fellowship (NECF), together with partners Global Day of Prayer, Marketplace Penang and Penang Pastors Fellowship.

The group described the articles as being “unfounded and totally untrue aimed at creating division and social disharmony in multi-ethnic society of Malaysia and appears to be seditious”.

NECF said the so-called special convention was in fact an unashamedly ethical marketplace seminar organised to discuss and address the issue of bribery and corruption in the marketplace and the Christians contribution in addressing such issues.

“It has nothing to do with political succession,” they said.

Novel rejected? There’s an e-book gold rush!

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Washington Post
By Neely Tucker, Published: May 6 | Updated: Wednesday, May 4, 11:03 PM

Sonoma, Calif. — In the winter of 2010, the cheerfully effervescent romance novelist Nyree Belleville suffered the same fate as many a scribe — she was dropped by her publisher. The most any of her 12 spicy romances, penned under the name Bella Andre, had earned was $21,000.

She was, in her Cali-girl vocabulary, “bummed.” She was 36. She had two young children, a husband and a little house in the hills above this picturesque wine-making region.

A thin, pretty brunette who majored in economics at Stanford, Belleville had been a singer in her 20s, but that career died, and now her writing career was so flat line that one of her old publishers had even given her the rights to her first two novels.

So, out of sorts and feeling blue, she sat down one morning and figured out how to self-publish one of those novels, “Authors in Ecstasy,” on Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle, just to see what would happen. It was a pain. She had zero graphic-arts skills. She had to create a cover, write her jacket copy, figure out formatting and set a price. She did it and forgot about it.

A few weeks later, she checked her account. She had sold 161 copies. She’d made $281. She was astonished.

She rushed to a lunch with three writer friends, with the numbers scrawled on a sheet of yellow paper, and slapped it down on the table. “That moment is burned in everybody’s mind now,” she says. “It was not a tipping point. It was a turning point.”

She put her other old book online and figured out how to place both on other e-readers — the Nook, the Sony Reader, the iPad, Kobo. The next month, her royalties bumped to $474. Giddy, she self-published a new e-book in July. She made a jaw-dropping $3,539. It was like the best thing ever!

“Every day, as the numbers ticked by, my husband and I were floored,” she says.

She got the rights to two more old novels. She feverishly wrote another e-novel, “Game for Love,” about a bad-boy pro football player and his unexpected marriage. She popped it online Dec. 15.

Earnings for that month? $19,315.

In January and February, she e-published a trilogy of young-adult novels she’d written years earlier. She called the first one “Seattle Girl” and chose a new author name, Lucy Kevin, to distinguish it from the sexually explicit Andre books.

Here’s what her first quarter looked like: 56,008 books sold; income, $116,264.

Perched on the edge of a couch in her tiny writing office, which doubles as a playroom for her kids, Belleville says: “Isn’t this just awesome?!”

Self-publishing frontier

There is no good comparison for what’s happening in the frontier world of self-published e-books, because there has never been anything like it in publishing history.

Since Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press in the 15th century, publishers have pretty much owned the presses, the means of mass production and, therefore, of distribution. Save for tiny “vanity” printings, for the intervening 500 years or so publishing houses have controlled who was able to publish, how many copies were printed, the price and the percentage of profits paid to writers (in modern America, usually about 10 to 15 percent of the list price.)

But riding the crest of the digital revolution, powered by blogs and tweets and social media, and delivered by the explosive sales of e-readers in the past two years, some authors are sidestepping that business model.

They can write, publish, advertise, create covers, set and change prices — and haul in up to 70 percent of the sale price. It is possible for writers marketing a $4.99 self-published e-book to make more per copy than authors with a $24.95 hardcover.

It’s gold-rush crazy, and it has exploded in the past 12 months, the past six months. It’s happening right now. You hear wild stories about novelists — who are supposed to be enduring lives of artistic gratification but monetary penury — blowing past your tax bracket.

Amanda Hocking, a 26-year-old assisted-living worker and fantasy novelist in Minnesota, has made more than $1 million from self-publishing e-books about vampires and trolls and the like. In March, she signed a $2 million, four-book deal with St. Martin’s.

Going the other way was Barry Eisler, a former CIA covert agent and thriller author, who turned down a $500,000, two-book deal from St. Martin’s imprint of Minotaur to self-publish e-books.

Joe Konrath, a 41-year-old thriller and horror writer out of Chicago, started self-publishing his books online at cut-rate prices in the spring of 2009. That April, he made $700. In April 2010, he made about $4,000. A screen shot of his Kindle account for a period ending in late April of this year showed him netting $78,231.16 in six weeks.

“What’s happening now, with authors able to go directly to their readers without the approval and support of a large publishing house, is a huge game-changer, which will weaken corporate publishing dramatically over time,” says Scott Waxman in an e-mail. Waxman, a literary agent in New York, created Diversion Books, an online e-publishing house, to help self-published writers navigate the cyber market. “In the short run, the change is going to happen quickly but not at all painlessly.”

“The world is changing in interesting ways,” says Jeff Belle, Amazon’s vice president of books. The company has set up three imprints to promote and e-publish writers. “We’re very flexible in the way we work with authors.”

The explosive growth, so far, has primarily been in commercial fiction — particularly such genres as romance, thrillers and horror — but Seth Godin, a New York-based marketing guru, is doing well with “Poke the Box,” his latest business book.

He eschewed traditional publishers to set up his own publishing venture, the Domino Project, and partnered with an Amazon imprint, Powered By Amazon, to sell the book in digital and print editions.

“Self-publishing used to be for folks who were going to spend their own money to bring a book that no one else believed in to the world,” he says.

“Now it’s an appropriate economic response to a changing landscape, particularly considering publishers who are stuck in 1995.”

A word of caution

WE NOW INSERT THIS PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT BECAUSE WE DO NOT WANT YOU CALLING US WHEN YOUR e-BOOK TANKS:

Don’t sprint to e-pub that novel you wrote on vacation that time but never sent to anyone because your wife said it stinks and what does she know? Well, maybe a lot.

The overwhelming number of self-publishing e-authors are consigned to the same fate as their print counterparts: oblivion.

“We have less than 50 people who are making more than $50,000 per year. We have a lot who don’t sell a single book,” says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, a Web site that helped launch indie publishing.

“When I load all our numbers on a spreadsheet, it’s the typical power curve,” he says. “On the left, there’s a skinny area of the chart where people are knocking it out of the park. And then we have a very, very long tail off to the right, where some titles sell very few at all.”

Belle, the Amazon veep, adds,“There are a lot of books, even low-priced, on Kindle that are not selling at all.”

Also, even the most successful of indie authors will say they have discovered that publishers do a lot of stuff that isn’t much fun to do yourself. Designing covers, solving layout problems, finding freelance copy editors, contacting umpteen hundred bloggers, looking up ad costs on Facebook: You know what all that is? Time away from writing.

Hocking, the self-pub phenom, signed a deal with a mainstream publisher because, she wrote on her blog, “I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling emails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc.”

END OF PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT.

Market share

If you’re looking for one of the epicenters of the indie-publishing earthquake, you might go just south of San Francisco, to Smashwords’s offices. Smashwords is run by Coker, a Silicon Valley techie. His 2008 start-up was one of the first to format raw copy for an array of e-readers, as well as publish and sell works from the site. He also decided to give writers a wildly rich share of the wealth.

By the end of 2008, he had 90 authors and 140 books.

By mid-March, he had 16,000 authors and 40,000 titles. The company’s “meatgrinder” formatting technology could publish a book in five to 10 minutes last year. Submissions are coming in so fast that there’s an eight- to 10-hour backlog, Coker says.

The company reached profitability last September, he says.

Barnes & Noble set up its self-publishing e-venture, PubIt!, on Oct. 4. The site has 14,500 authors and 90,000 books (some are duplicates from Smashwords and other sites). That’s the equivalent of half its bookstores’ stock — created out of a void in seven months.

No one expects digital books to do anything but multiply, but they are still a very small part of the overall market.

E-books were .05 percent of the trade-book market in 2002 and 3.2 percent in 2009. Last year, they shot up to 8.3 percent of the $5.3 billion market, according to the Association of American Publishers, totaling $441.3 million in sales.

But online, e-books are taking charge. Amazon sold more digital copies than hardcovers in July. In February, digital copies passed paperbacks on the site. (There are no comprehensive statistics for self-published digital books.)

That e-books are going to change the publishing industry is a foregone conclusion, says Thomas Allen, president and chief executive of the AAP.

“How,” he says, “is what remains to be seen.”

Transition to e-books

On a soft spring morning in March, Belleville is sitting at a spindle-legged writing table with a laptop and some papers atop it. It’s in the back corner of the family’s playroom/office. There’s a window facing a front yard with a white picket fence and a gravel driveway.

Her husband, Paul Andre Belleville (she used his middle name and a slight corruption of his last for her pseudonym), is a consultant for semiconductor companies. He works at home, on a laptop at the kitchen table. Hunter, 6, is at school, and Julia, 4, is at pre-kindergarten.

This morning, she’s doing everything publishing houses usually do for writers.

She’s come up with a marketing idea — repackaging the Kevin trilogy (“Seattle Girl,” “Falling Fast” and “Sparks Fly”) as a digital boxed set, hoping to lure readers into to buying three books with a single click of the mouse. She decided to call the set “Love Love Love” and list it at $4.99, cheaper than if readers bought all three individually.

She is making the cover on her computer and is toying with colors and fonts, trying to get the look and attitude she wants. She is talking about raster graphics editing systems and open-source office software suites and things like shutterstock.org.

She is slightly obsessed with these covers because she is at a loss to explain how the books took off. “Falling Fast” reached No. 4 on Barnes & Noble’s Web site. “I have no idea how people found them,” she says. “My guess is that the cover brought them in.”

The trick to the cover, she thinks, is to remember that you’re not creating a standard hard-bound copy. The digital image that readers see on bookselling sites is tiny. So that blip has to really pop, she says, with bright colors and big, sparse type.

When the cover for “Seattle Girl” worked — a flirty, girly sketch of a heroine in a short skirt and high heels, rendered in bright colors — she decided to make that the visual theme for the trilogy.

For this new cover, she picks the same bright orange background she used on the cover of “Falling.” She picks a saucy drawing of a young woman in a short white dress, high heels and an anklet, her skirt billowing up a la Marilyn Monroe, from a stock-image Web site.

Such considerations are not what most novelists picture as part of their job description. For years, she didn’t, either.

She grew up on the campus of Stanford University in a house where everyone read lots of books. Her father, Alvin Rabushka, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and is widely recognized as a pioneer of the flat-tax concept. Her mother, Louisa, was a homemaker. She majored in economics.

Naturally, she became a sensitive singer-songwriter.

That dream lasted half a dozen years (you can find her album “Bare” on iTunes). She had always been a big fan of romance novels, so, in 2003, when a college roommate invited her to a regional Romance Writers of America conference, she went on a lark.

She met authors she’d read for years and was astonished at how lucrative writing could be. “I had just been to Nashville, where even No. 1 songwriters were struggling to pay the rent . . . but there were a good 10 to 20 women in that room who were making phenomenal livings,” she says.

A writer at the conference mentioned a digital publisher of erotica, called Ellora’s Cave. Though she was “absolutely shocked” at how explicit the genre was, she went home and, encouraged by her husband, sat down to see whether she could write the stuff.

“And I wrote three chapters!” she says. “They just like flew from my fingertips! The ideas just came to me!”

She wrote “Authors in Ecstasy,” now just named “Ecstasy,” all 40,000 words (that would be about a 130-page book) in a week. Its digital-only edition got the highest possible rating from Romantic Times, the genre’s trade magazine.

She started writing at a finger-numbing 20 to 30 pages a day. She discovered that she wrote well about action, emotions and sex. She wrote four books for Ellora’s Cave, and then got a series of contracts with big-time print publishers, including Simon & Schuster. She wrote steamy novels about alpha heroes and the women who loved them. “Take Me.” “Candy Store.” “Wild Heat.”

She was having “super ridiculous” amounts of fun, but sales were flat, and flat is not good (except, perhaps, for taxes).

So, last winter, when she proposed a three-book series set in the Adirondacks with a softer, small-town theme, her publishers rejected it.

She tried not to be depressed. Then, that day in March, she roused herself to make the first book she wrote, “Ecstasy,” available on the Kindle.

Dynamics of book-buying

E-readers have been around in early formats for nearly two decades, but they have been drastically dropping in price and improving in quality during the past 36 months.

One of the first groups to embrace them were readers of romance fiction. These books were part of larger genre-based markets, such as thrillers and horror, that were populated by avid readers who chain-read books. They were avid fans, communicating with one another in any number of ways, including blogs and book clubs. Romance was tailor-made for the webs of social media.

“Romance novels are leading the way in e-publishing because romance readers are incredibly prolific,” says Malle Vallik, Harlequin’s director of digital publishing. “They understood [e-readers] immediately: ‘Oh, my God, in my purse, I can have 50 books.’ You like one writer, you can get their complete backlist immediately.”

New marketing patterns of lower online prices and impulse buying created a perfect dynamic for authors like Belleville: Genre authors who were prolific but who had not been too successful. This peculiar level of accomplishment meant they had written books for print publishers, seen sales vanish and had the rights revert back to them, and even had completed manuscripts that publishers had rejected.

This left with the writers with just the right recipe: a small but devout core audience; a readily available backlist for new readers to discover; a knack for writing fast; and an inherent appeal to a fan base that read voraciously.

Meanwhile, online booksellers were changing the dynamics of book-buying.

Algorithms that track customers viewing and buying habits (“Customers who bought this book also bought . . .”), the explosion of bestseller lists in specific categories (history, biography, thrillers, sports) , online reader reviews, the catologues that enable readers to see an author’s other books — all began giving readers more options and information than they ever had before.

And many indie authors started doing something publishers would never do: Giving books away for free in an effort to lure readers to check them out. “They know once they get readers hooked, they’ll pay for the rest of their books or the rest of a series,” says Coker at Smashwords.

That pricing has been crucial to the explosion in sales, indie authors say.

Readers may balk at shelling out $23.95 for a hardcover or even $12.95 for a trade paperback. But, it has turned out, mid-list authors who don’t have success at those prices may be runaway bestsellers at, say, $2.99.

Because royalties paid for e-books range from 35 to 70 percent (compared to 15 percent or so on paperback and hardcover titles), and because self-published writers don’t have to pay an agent (typically another 15 percent bite out of their profits), these little-known but self-published writers can take home about $2 on that $2.99 title — nearly double what they would earn on that $12.95 paperback.

Think price and format don’t matter?

Konrath, the guy knocking down $78,000 in six weeks, wrote a techno-thriller in 1999 called “The List.” No publisher wanted it. He self published it in 2009, in print and digital editions.

At 2:45 p.m. March 24, the e-book was at No. 50 on the Kindle paid bestseller list, selling at $2.99, with 28 days on the list. His Kindle account shows he sold 3,771 copies that week at that price.

On the same day, the same book was offered in paperback at $13.95 on Amazon’s books page. It was ranked 102,526.

Eisler, the thriller writer who turned down the $500,000 contract, is another convert to digital indie publishing.

The dynamic of book purchasing is proving to be vastly different for e-readers than it is in the bricks-and-mortar world of bookstores, he says.

Eisler’s theory, which is widely shared in the field, holds that a typical bookstore browser might pick out six or seven books they want, but the sheer weight and the price of such purchases causes them to winnow their selections to one or two. There’s also the mental block of having stacks of unread books at home.

But digital sales are convincing him that online purchasing behavior is different — people can buy six books for, say, $20, and have nothing to weigh them down while shopping in the mall or getting on a plane.

“The price is so low, the gratification is so instant, and there no ‘to be read’ pile about to tip over on your night table,” he says. “The limiting factor isn’t time or cost. It’s interest. In a paper world, shelves can only hold so much, towns can only support so many bookstores.”

“Low-priced digital,” he says, “is just a completely different animal.”

Godin has been in publishing and marketing for two decades. He’s sold on the idea that digital is the new frontier. But, he says, the success stories — Hocking, Konrath, Belleville — have spent years writing, blogging, communicating with readers online and building their audiences one painstaking member at a time. “You have to earn [an audience],” he says. “You can’t buy it. It’s not for sale.”

Belleville, for example, had saved every piece of fan mail from readers who liked her most popular book, “Take Me.” When she wrote the digital-only sequel, “Love Me,” last summer, she wrote the news to every person who had written her about the original. Then there was the blogging, the newsletter on her Web sites, her Facebook pages, her Twitter accounts and so on.

In between, she writes as much as 6,000 words per day for her novels. That’s nearly 20 pages in standard hardcover format.

“I am working,” she says, “harder than I ever have in my life.”

A good story is key

The day after putting together her latest book cover, Belleville gets up just after dawn to drive an hour and a half to Berkeley to speak to the local chapter of the Romance Writers of America.

Despite her wild success in the past year, she doesn’t think that print publishers are going anywhere, and she doesn’t want them to. Last spring, while her digital books were beginning to take off, she got word from her agent that her Adirondacks trilogy under the name “Bella Riley” had sold to a new print publishing house — for a modest $7,500 per book. She was geeked out about that, too.

Meanwhile, the grand dame of her pseudonyms, Bella Andre, has been dramatically rescued from an untimely demise, even without an alpha male in sight. She’s selling terrifically online, and Belleville has mapped out an eight-book Andre series.

The Romance Writers meeting is a loud, spirited talk shop of about 25 women in an upstairs room of the Pyramid Breweries Alehouse. Writers announce their latest adventures in publishing, and Belleville and two friends give a short workshop on creating alpha male heroes.

There’s the swashbuckling alpha, the wounded alpha, the bad-boy alpha, the extreme alpha, the chief alpha, the gentle alpha and, of course, the warrior alpha. Your alpha can be a dominant guy, they say, but his love interest has to be a strong woman, too, or else he’d just be overbearing. The heroine, in fact, is almost always the one chink in his armor.

“One thing alphas do not say,” Belleville says, “is ‘I don’t know what to do.’ ” To connote her heroes’ take-charge manner, she’ll cut the first word or two out of his dialogue; “Are you going to town?” becomes “Going to town?”

It’s an odd little moment in the breakout days of one of the hottest digital writers in America: During her presentation, there was almost no talk about digital publishing. The discussion was just about stories and why readers like some characters and don’t like others, the dynamics between men and women, and what they find moving and worthwhile in literature.

It was almost like 1995.

Singapore Loosens Grip on Internet

Image via CrunchBase
May 7, 2011

By SETH MYDANS

SINGAPORE — The tightly controlled city-state of Singapore took a step into the unknown in advance of its parliamentary elections on Saturday, loosening its grip on political discourse in the unruly world of the Internet, where Facebook, Twitter and other social media have amplified a clamor of voices and points of view.

In a nation where government opponents are often sued over defamation and where carefully vetted public speech has been permitted only in a little park called Speakers’ Corner (which has been shut down during the campaign), experts say the new opening, if only in the virtual world, appears to be a redefinition of what are known here as “out-of-bounds markers.”

Following recent changes to the Constitution and election laws, campaigning is now permitted throughout cyberspace — in podcasts, videos, blogs, instant messaging, photo-sharing platforms like Flickr, social networking sites and electronic media applications like those found on cellphones.

For the first time, campaign recordings can be posted as long as they are not “dramatized” or published “out of context.” Video taken at an election rally can be uploaded onto the Web without being submitted to the Board of Film Censors.

“Social media have lowered the barriers of entry into political discourse everywhere,” said Mark Cenite, an assistant professor of communication and information at Nanyang Technological University. “But that’s particularly significant in Singapore because here the barriers to entry into political discourse and the accompanying risks have been so high.”

Despite the changes to Internet regulations, demonstrations and public speech still require permits. Political speech is restricted to candidates. Opposition politicians and the news media face the possibility of defamation suits. The mainstream news media are tightly controlled and have not acted as a check on the government, experts say.

During the last parliamentary campaign, in 2006, a small number of current-events blogs were the main forum for online citizen participation. Political speech was technically illegal and demanded a greater level of risk and commitment.

“Now that the barriers to entry to political dialogue have fallen, the effect has been electric,” Mr. Cenite said. “Government critics are able to easily identify and support one another without making a headlong commitment to politics and take the accompanying risks.”

All of this has contributed to an intense campaign in which opposition parties — which now hold just 2 of 84 elected seats — are drawing bigger crowds to rallies, fielding more candidates and, in contrast to the past, contesting all but one constituency. In the last election, opposition parties contested just half the constituencies.

Analysts say it is impossible to know whether this enthusiasm will translate into votes against the People’s Action Party, which has governed Singapore since 1959.

But the campaign itself has been transformed as social media give smaller, poorer parties a wider audience, bringing greater inclusiveness and competitiveness to political debate.

Rather than trying to suppress online political organizing, as China and Vietnam have done, Singapore is taking a gamble on making it part of the legal campaign system.

“I don’t think they had a choice,” said Kin Mun Lee, known on his blog as Mr. Brown, who said he skirted the law in the last campaign by avoiding explicitly political comments. “Before, it was a very limited kind of provision for online speech. Definitely they had to change the rules because of the proliferation and availability of options.”

Opposition Web sites and Twitter accounts are being used to urge people to attend election rallies. They also send out streams of comments from rallies, hugely increasing their audience. The site Gothere plots out the locations of rallies on a map.

The site Party Time aggregates conversations about the elections and graphically represents who is getting the most buzz online.

Facebook is estimated to have up to three million members in Singapore, whose population is more than five million. All seven competing parties have their own sites, as do many of the candidates.

By one estimate, there are 900,000 local users of Twitter.

Online coverage has pushed the main pro-government newspaper, The Straits Times, to publish fuller and not always critical news and photographs of opposition campaigns, said Alex Au, a prominent blogger.

“In the present era, with the ubiquitous cellphone camera and rapid distribution channels that are well beyond blogs, the old editorial policy is no longer viable,” he said on his blog. “If the newspaper does not publish such pictures, others will, and its credibility can only suffer.”

The Straits Times has dedicated a portal on its Web site to extensive electronic election coverage, and it is now aggregating online comments from the social media on a page it calls Buzz, which gives a flavor of some of the newly energized online commentary:

“The opposition can make ferocious speeches, but can they deliver?”

“Is it true that civil servants will be ostracized if they vote for the opposition?”

“If the opposition is sincere in serving the people, it would have been on the ground in the last four years, not starting their engines only when the whistle is blown.” “Why must we be so dogmatic about democracy and stability being mutually exclusive?”

Implications of Bin Laden's Death for Indonesia

Image via Wikipedia
Sidney Jones, The Jakarta Post | 4 May 2011

Osama bin Laden is being hailed as a hero and martyr by radical groups around the country, with the Islam Defenders Front (FPI) holding a program of “gratitude for service” later today at its headquarters. Demonstrations against the US by other groups are planned. The question is whether there will be more serious consequences, and three come to mind.

One: a temporary shift back to foreign targets. For the last two years, Indonesian extremists have moved away from attacks on the West, symbolized by iconic brand names of American hotels and fast food chains, to hits and attempted hits on local targets, especially the police.

This was a direct result of anger at Detachment 88 for arresting and killing so many mujahidin after a training camp in Aceh was broken up in February 2010, but it also reflected recognition that international targets had no general recruitment value: Few Indonesians saw the logic of killing foreign civilians to avenge Muslim deaths in Iraq or Gaza.

Bin Laden was such a powerful symbol and so revered in the extremist community, however, that calculations of costs and benefits may be overridden by a felt need to respond somehow to his death. The ubiquitous television images of cheering Americans may strengthen that resolve.

As we wrote in a Crisis Group report last month: “No one should conclude that targeting of foreigners is gone for good. One lesson from this report is that there is a constant process of adaptation, and developments in the Middle East and Pakistan, as well as within Indonesia, could produce new strategic directions.” Bin Laden’s death could be one of those developments.

Two: possibility of revenge attacks. While the possibility of revenge attacks is real, it is not a simple matter to pull them off. Planning an attack takes time, so the danger is less likely to be in the coming days than in the coming months or longer, giving police more time to get wind of a plot. Indonesian extremists also do not have a successful track record in this regard.

Police operations in Poso, Central Sulawesi, in January 2007 killed 14 local fighters and led to demands within the movement for retaliation, but no group had the capacity to respond. The execution of the Bali bombers in November 2008 led to massive demonstrations at their funerals, but no counter-attacks, despite widespread fears.

The fastest retaliation thus far was the Sept. 22, 2010, attack on the Hamparan Perak Police station, North Sumatra, in which three policemen were killed.

It came only three days after police killed three suspects they were hunting for the Medan bank robbery. But the fugitives already had arms, motive, target and opportunity. Putting all that together for a response to Bin Laden’s death may not be so easy.

While that may be somewhat reassuring, it is also true that there are five or six constellations of possible perpetrators, and only one of them needs to be successful.

Three: Strengthened attachment to al-Qaeda. Another possible consequence of Bin Laden’s death is a strengthened attachment of Indonesian extremists to al-Qaeda, both to the idea and to specific parts of the network.

A succession of Southeast Asia extremists have tried to set up local affiliates of al-Qaeda, based more on shared ideology than direct institutional linkage. At the time of the second Bali bombing, Noordin M Top called his group al-Qaeda for the Malay Archipelago.

By 2009 and the Jakarta hotel bombings, he was calling it al-Qaeda for Southeast Asia, even though a Malaysian named Mohamad Fadzullah Abdul Razak (since arrested) was using the same time a year earlier for a completely different group that wanted to send fighters from Malaysia to southern Thailand.

In early 2010, the alliances of extremists that set up the camp in Aceh began calling itself al-Qaeda for the Verandah of Mecca, a common term for Aceh.

By the admission of one participant, the name was in recognition of Bin Laden’s leadership of the global jihad rather than anything more concrete. Finally, only a few days ago, a statement appeared on radical websites here, again in the name of al-Qaeda for Southeast Asia, praising the April 15 suicide bombing at a police station mosque in Cirebon, West Java.

Obviously the idea of al-Qaeda still resonates, to the point that most self-respecting jihadi groups want to identify with it.

But there are also more substantial links. On Jan. 25 this year, Umar Patek was arrested in Abbottabad, the same town where Bin Laden was living. It was probably not a coincidence (indeed, may have been part of the same operation).

Indonesian authorities need to be asking Patek, who remains in detention in Pakistan, exactly what the nature of his communication was with the al-Qaeda organization and who else from Southeast Asia is actively working with al-Qaeda in propaganda, training, or even operations.

In his desire to work with Bin Laden, Patek, a former Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) member who was one of the original Bali bombers, follows in the footsteps of Hambali, the JI leader detained in Guantanamo whose relationship with al-Qaeda until his arrest in 2003 is outlined in a recent WikiLeaks document.

But he is not the only one. Muhammad Jibril, founder of the ar-Rahmah publishing company and arrahmah.com, was in regular communication with al-Qaeda’s media outlet in Waziristan.

And other parts of the radical network in Indonesia are in communication with the radical Yemen-based preacher, al-Awlaki, who is active in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The death of Bin Laden could lead to a renewed push to bolster these ties or to an intensified propaganda campaign based on al-Qaeda materials, especially from AQAP, translated into Indonesian.

There is thus no reason to believe that the security situation in Indonesian has in any way been significantly improved by the killing of al-Qaeda’s founder.

The good news, if there is any, is that none of the groups that have emerged over the last two years have shown the kind of technical capacity that Noordin M Top used to such devastating effect. No one, however, should be celebrating the end of terrorism in Indonesia.

Sidney Jones is senior adviser to the Asia program of the International Crisis Group.

Thailand’s benevolent army

May 4th, 2011 by Aim Sinpeng, Guest Contributor · 5 Comments




The media coverage, particularly on television, of the Thai army has been peculiarly extensive in recent weeks. Most notably is the fact that the army is being portrayed in an almost exclusively positive light, doing all sorts of public service for the Thai people. Last night, for example, I watched the evening news on Channel 9 and the entire domestic news was focused on the “good deeds” the army was doing all over the country. This included rescue missions in flooded areas of the upper South, security work in the deep South, evacuation and emergency shelter preparation for border-town residents of Surin Province, patrols along the Thai-Cambodian border…the list goes on. I flipped over to another channel and it was the same story.

The army has long been part of the daily life in Thailand. It is indisputable that the main responsibilities of the Thai army stretch far beyond protecting sovereignty and national security to include functions such as natural disaster relief, internal security and animal rescue. While fewer young, educated people join the army today than in the past, being in the army still carries significant prestige among Thais. In fact, the notion that the presence of the army – or its militant culture – has penetrated Thai society in a variety of ways is truer than many would like to admit. Those following Thailand’s entertainment industry would know that the actor who plays King Naresuan in one of Thailand’s most popular (and most expensive) epics – The Legend of King Naresuan – is himself a lieutenant colonel. Scores of contemporary Thai lakorn and movies, such as Wanida, Legend of Suriyothai, Sam Pan Boke, Cha-leu Sak, just to name a few, continue to romanticize men in uniform.

This recent string of “positive” media coverage of the army’s various missions sits uncomfortably with a rumor of a possible coup that is spreading among close observers of Thai politics. Although the army still maintains a good grip on the media in Thailand, in general, it still strikes me as eerily odd that the army seems to be “everywhere” on the news. The seemingly one-sided story of the army’s work stands in sharp contrast to the violent and deteriorating situation between Thailand and Cambodia as well as the continued explosive situation in southern Thailand. I’m not disputing that the Thai army is “doing something”, but why the positive spin on everything they do (despite the outcomes)? Is the army trying to rally public support, via the media, before the election? Why? I fear we may already know their “hidden” agenda.

 

US Census Reports 17.3 Million Asians in America

Author Grace Ruch | Published: April 21, 2011


Monterey Park, California, outside of Los Angeles is considered the first of America's Asian-dominated "Ethnoburbs." Image by: New York Times, "Mapping America"

When US President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removing decades-long restrictions on admission and citizenship for immigrants from Asia, Asian-Americans made up only 0.5% of the total population. Forty-five years later, the 2010 Census reveals a dramatically different American racial landscape. Today, 14.7 million identify as “Asian-alone,” comprising 4.8% of the population. More dramatically, the Census names Asians as the fastest-growing racial group of the past decade, increasing an astounding 43.3%.

While these numbers are significant in showing the role of Asians in the demographic changes of the US in the past generation, they do not provide the whole picture. A more accurate count includes the 2.7 million people who consider themselves to be multi-racial Asian, or 29% of those reporting to belong to two-or more racial groups. This brings the total of number people of Asian-descent to 17.3 million, or 5.5% of the US population.

America’s Asian population is also spreading from its traditional density in the West and Pacific to states across the country. Hawaii’s unique location at the crossroads of the Pacific remains evident in the data showing that well over half of its population, 57.4%, is of Asian descent. Meanwhile California is still home to the largest number of Asian-Americans, some 5.5million in 2010, but it is followed by New York, Texas, New Jersey, showing the spread of the population from coast to coast.

The growth of Asian Americans is leading to demonstrable demographic shifts in American cities and communities. The Washington Post reported that the influx of Hispanics and Asians prevented over half of the top 100 largest cities in the US from shrinking. Urban areas as disparate as Anaheim, California; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Jersey City, New Jersey have their growing Asian populations to thank for maintaining positive growth. In New York City, the Asian population increased by nearly 250,000, a gain of 32% and the largest of any ethnic group, according to the Wall Street Journal.

As in the past, much of this growth is driven by immigration as a majority of new arrivals settle in cities seeking employment opportunities. According to the immigration statistics maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, in 2010 over 420,000 immigrants from Asia became permanent residents, while over 250,000 received full US citizenship. In both instances this was more than any other region in the world.

The demographic shifts have not been limited to urban communities. For the first time in its history, minorities make up the majority of the population in affluent Montgomery County, MD, outside of Washington, DC. Brookings demographer William Fry told the Washington post that the influx of Blacks, Asians and Hispanics is “reinvigorating” the region’s suburbs, making the DC area more globalized in the process. In California and other regions along the West coast, Asian “Ethnoburbs”— suburban municipalities dominated by a non-white ethnic group— show former immigrant populations moving out of the “Chinatowns” and “Little Tokyos” of the past and into large, prosperous, Asian-majority suburban communities.

The 2010 Census depicts a more diverse and dynamic American than fifty years ago. The Asian-American community has grown and spread throughout the country significantly in the past few decades; contributing to the trend of minority-propelled growth into the 21st century.

How the U.S. found and finished Bin Laden

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

By David Ignatius, Monday, May 2, 12:58 PM

The assault on Osama bin Laden — as quick and ruthless an operation as you would see in any spy movie — shows that the CIA and the military’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command have combined to create what amounts to a highly effective killing machine.

The shorthand for these operations is “find, fix, finish.” The CIA and other intelligence agencies typically provide the first two, and the bin Laden attack shows that this process can take years of patient detective work. JSOC warriors then come in for the finish.

A reconstruction of how this operation was put together shows how the pieces of America’s counterterrorism policy fit together. It also illuminates one of the CIA’s biggest puzzles, which is whether it can work effectively with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. The answer seems to be “sometimes.”

The trail that led to bin Laden’s hideout in the town of Abbottabad, about 75 miles north of Islamabad, began between 2002 and 2004 with the CIA’s interrogation of al-Qaeda “high-value targets” at secret CIA sites overseas. Several detainees mentioned the “nom de guerre,” or nickname, of one of bin Laden’s couriers.

Some of the detainees who confirmed the courier’s nickname were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the CIA’s formal name for what is now widely viewed as torture. This adds a moral ambiguity to a story that is otherwise one of triumphal retribution and justice.

The CIA spent years trying to figure out the courier’s identity. Using sources that U.S. officials won’t discuss, the agency finally discovered the courier’s real name in 2007, along with the important fact that he had a brother. In early 2009, a team from the agency’s counterterrorism center traced him to a compound in Abbottabad that he shared with the brother.

Pakistan was told little about the bin Laden manhunt, for fear that the information would leak. But a U.S. official said the Pakistanis offered some help. “They provided information that helped us identify where one of the brothers might be located,” this official said. He added: “They didn’t tell us he was in Abbottabad, but their information allowed us to track him there.”

Now the agency had a suspect location but no firm idea bin Laden was there. Surveillance confirmed that this was an unusual compound. The surrounding walls were up to 18 feet high, and even the balconies had seven-foot walls. And the compound maintained unusual security: It had no telephone or Internet service, and trash was regularly burned.

As the CIA continued its surveillance, analysts concluded that another family was secretly living in the compound, along with the two brothers. The number of family members and other details matched bin Laden’s likely family group. This crucial “circumstantial” evidence was briefed to President Obama last August, says a U.S. official.

This year, JSOC began preparing the “finish” operation, using members of Seal Team 6, its most elite counterterrorism unit. Obama was given a choice between bombing the compound or staging the raid. Obama opted for the latter, believing the United States needed to capture bin Laden’s body.

One of the mysteries is whether the Pakistani government knew all along who was hiding in Abbottabad. It is hardly remote territory: A Pakistani military college is two miles away. A senior U.S. official says the CIA has carefully examined this question but has “zero evidence” of Pakistani government knowledge of bin Laden’s location. That’s not quite the same as saying for certain that the Pakistanis didn’t know, and it allows the ISI and CIA to continue working as sometime partners.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who directed the operation, told Pakistan nothing until the helicopters had left Abbottabad to return to Afghanistan. But U.S. officials describe the subsequent Pakistani reaction as helpful. Pakistani officials urged Obama to make his unusual late-night announcement so the Pakistani public would immediately know the U.S. had attacked bin Laden, not a Pakistani target. And Islamabad promised to try to mitigate Pakistani popular anger, which officials did by issuing a supportive statement Monday.

Does bin Laden’s demise mean the death of al-Qaeda? CIA analysts won’t go that far. But they have concluded that the operation “will accelerate its demise,” and that the battered organization is now at a “tipping point” that could lead to collapse.

The hidden trophy of Sunday’s raid: The JSOC team captured intelligence materials from the compound that might reveal the location of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the organization’s new commander. “That’s where we’re going next,” says one U.S. official involved in planning the operation.

davidignatius@washpost.com

Shortages of key drugs endanger patients in US

Image via Wikipedia
By Rob Stein, Sunday, May , 3:14 PM

Doctors, hospitals and federal regulators are struggling to cope with an unprecedented surge in drug shortages in the United States that is endangering cancer patients, heart attack victims, accident survivors and a host of other ill people.

A record 211 medications became scarce in 2010 — triple the number in 2006 — and at least 89 new shortages have been recorded through the end of March, putting the nation on track for far more scarcities.

The paucities are forcing some medical centers to ration drugs — including one urgently needed by leukemia patients — postpone surgeries and other care, and scramble for substitutes, often resorting to alternatives that may be less effective, have more side effects and boost the risk for overdoses and other sometimes-fatal errors.

“It’s a crisis,” said Erin R. Fox, manager of the drug information service at the University of Utah, who monitors drug shortages for the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. “Patients are at risk.”

The causes vary from drug to drug, but experts cite a confluence of factors: Consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry has left only a few manufacturers for many older, less profitable products, meaning that when raw material runs short, equipment breaks down or government regulators crack down, the snags can quickly spiral into shortages.

“It seems like there were a lot of things happening with consolidations and quality issues and more things coming from overseas,” said Allen J. Vaida, executive director of the Institute for Safe Medicine Practices, a nonprofit group that helped organize a conference last fall to examine the issue. “It just reached a point where the number of shortages was slowly going up and up, and now we have a national crisis with this huge shortage of critical medications.”

While the dearth that has garnered the most public attention is — ironically — for a barbiturate that is hindering prisons trying to execute inmates, the scarcities are having a much broader impact on keeping people alive, especially in emergency rooms, oncology wards and intensive care units.

No one is systematically tracking the toll of the shortages, but reports are emerging of delayed treatments, anxious searches for desperately needed drugs, devastating injuries from mistakes and less-adequate drugs, and even possible deaths.

Federal regulators have been rushing to alleviate the shortages, sometimes helping firms resume production more quickly or approving emergency imports of supplies from overseas.

The Food and Drug Administration eased a shortage of the anesthetic propofol last year by allowing foreign importation, for example, and this year approved bringing in several other medications, including two cancer drugs.

“The types of products we’re seeing shortages of are really concerning,” said Valerie Jensen, who heads the FDA’s Drug Shortages Program. “This is affecting oncology drugs, critical-care drugs, emergency medicine drugs. We’re doing everything we can under our current authority to try to deal with this situation.”

In Congress, legislation has been introduced to address the problem. For example, a bill would require companies to notify the FDA in advance about anything that might cause a shortage and give the agency new powers to try to assuage them.

“We can’t put patients’ lives at risk simply because there’s some snafus in a process or a manufacturer decides it’s less profitable to make a certain drug,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). “Patients deserve better than that.”


‘Very global supply chain’

Many of the shortages involve older, cheaper generic medications that are less profitable, causing many firms to stop producing them and leaving fewer sources. Most involve “sterile injectable” medications that are more complicated to produce and therefore are more prone to manufacturing problems.

In addition, drug companies increasingly rely on raw materials from other countries.

“We’ve certainly reached a very global supply chain for drug products, with the active ingredients typically made outside of the United States,” said Gordon Johnston, vice president for regulatory sciences at the Generic Pharmaceutical Association. “It could be Europe, India — some cases China. If there’s a problem at a facility in Italy or India, it leads to disruption of the drug supply in the United States.”

Some industry representatives blame part of the problem on increased oversight by the FDA, which has made drug safety a higher priority after coming under intense criticism for being too lax.

“As you know right now, FDA has taken a heightened approach towards drug safety,” said Maya Bermingham, senior assistant general counsel at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. “FDA has stepped up inspections. The more you look, the more you may discover problems.”

While acknowledging that the industry needs to do a better job of coordination, some company officials said the agency should coordinate enforcement actions and drug shortage issues more closely to avoid administrative requirements that cause interruptions.

“We’re not sure how much of that is going on recently because we’ve seen more and more shortages in the industry. We think that maybe some of those coordination issues can be worked on,” said Joshua Gordon, vice president and general manager of specialty pharmaceuticals at Hospira, the largest producer of specialty generic sterile injectables.

Shortages of pre-loaded epinephrine syringes and propofol, for example, occurred when suppliers dropped out just as the FDA was demanding additional documentation, he said.

“They are very focused on taking quick and and aggressive action,” Gordon said. “We applaud the agency’s role in assuring quality, but it can slow things down significantly.”

FDA officials dispute that greater government oversight is a major factor, saying manufacturing problems were the cause of most shortages.

“There has not been a significant increase in domestic enforcement actions (seizure or injunction) for this class of products in recent years,” Jensen wrote in an e-mail.

‘Too many . . . will die’

Whatever the causes, many of the affected drugs are mainstays of medical care, such as the potent painkiller morphine, norepinephrine, which is commonly used in emergency rooms, and electrolytes, which are often given to patients in intensive care.

But shortages have been reported in many categories of drugs, including antibiotics, and drugs central to the treatment of many cancers, forcing oncologists to delay or alter carefully timed chemotherapy regimens.

“We have heard some horror stories where patients are really begging to get the drugs from other sources and where practices or institutions are forced to kind of triage patients and save the drugs for those — quote — most curable, where they have the best prognosis and using substitutes where there isn’t a cure possibility,” Michael Link, president-elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

The drug cytarabine has caused the most concern and gotten the most attention because it is highly effective for treating several forms of leukemia and lymphoma but must be administered as quickly as possible, especially to patients with acute myeloid leukemia.

“With this drug they can be cured and without this drug too many of them will certainly die. That’s the simplest way to put it,” said Deborah Banker, vice president for research communication at the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. “The disease progresses so rapidly that untreated patients can sadly die within days. There is no time for delay and no certainty of a good outcome if you can’t get a full dose.”

Many hospitals are running low, and some have run out completely. That has required many facilities to ration the drug, giving priority to those who need it most urgently.

“It’s so unbelievable,” said Mary Collins, 57, of La Crosse, Wis., whose husband, Michael, 66, had problems obtaining cytarabine to fight lymphoma. “A cancer diagnosis is a long, very, very stressful circumstance. And then to learn that a particular drug is no longer available to you and that there seems to be no formalized mechanism in place to correct it just makes it worse.”

Cytarabine’s scarcity was caused by hitches that two out of the three manufacturers hit in obtaining raw materials, as well as the discovery of crystals in some shipments.

The third manufacturer was unable to make up for the shortfall. Some of the problems have been resolved, however, and the FDA is working on importing the drug.

The shortages are forcing hospital pharmacists to juggle supplies and hunt for new sources. Many hospitals, including several contacted in the Washington area, say they are usually able to patch together solutions.

But some resort to paying inflated prices or buying from unfamiliar suppliers, increasing the risk they may be getting counterfeits.

“When it becomes clear that some drug may be in short supply or going into a shortage, what happens is sometimes there are unsavory folks — small distributors — who buy up whatever is left and sell it back at exorbitant prices,” said Roslyne Shulman, director of policy development for the American Hospital Association.

‘Panic in the pharmacy’

When shortages occur, physicians turn to less optimal alternatives or find out too late that the drug they need is unavailable. Mark Warner, president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, described two calamities that occurred in the past year because of shortages. In one, a 16-year-old boy suffered brain damage because doctors did not have one muscle relaxer needed to treat a complication from jaw surgery.

In another, a middle-aged woman was left in a permanent vegetative state because doctors did not have the drug epinephrine after she experienced complications from heart surgery.

“These are tragic cases,” Warner said. “It’s one of those things most anesthesiologists in the country think about when they are driving to work every day. We don’t know where the shortages are and they come on very quickly. ”

Nurses and doctors responding to emergencies, meanwhile, are losing precious minutes when they must work with unfamiliar substitutes or recalculate dosages, increasing the chances of overdosing or under-dosing patients. One of the biggest problems is a shortage of syringes pre-filled with precisely measured doses.

“Grabbing the right medication out of a crash cart that’s already in a syringe is a big advantage over having to get out the syringe, get out the needle, get the medication and get the measurement right,” said Angela Gardner, an emergency medicine physician at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and immediate past president of the American College of Emergency Physicians. “Those minutes are lives.”

Many hospitals are recalibrating electronic medication delivery systems or preparing the correct doses ahead of time, especially for the emergency room, to minimize mistakes.

“We’ve been extremely fortunate using strategies in cooperation with our medical staff,” said Jay Barbaccia, head pharmacist at the Washington Hospital Center. “We’ve had a lot of panic and inconvenience but minimal, if any, impact on our ability to provide care. It makes my life miserable — the panic is in the pharmacy when we’re scrambling around to find alternatives.”

Nevertheless, a long list of errors and near-misses have been reported, including incidents in which patients required emergency care to save them.

At least two patients reportedly died from overdoses of hydromorphone they received because of a morphine shortage.

At least 19 patients were sickened and nine died in Alabama this year after being infused with a solution through their feeding tubes that was apparently contaminated with bacteria by a pharmacy using an unfamiliar ingredient because of a shortage.

The shortage occurred because the manufacturer had trouble getting the product’s packaging.

“It’s horrible. It’s something that shouldn’t have happened,” said Donald J. Mottern of Alabaster, Ala., whose 71-year-old mother was one of the victims. “We lost the matriarch of our family. The loss to our family has left each of us very hollow.”

Drug makers develop medicines to meet Asia's needs

By Mariko Oi Asia Business Report, BBC World News
Woo Kum Tin managed to overcome liver cancer

Exactly eight years ago, Woo Kum Tin had to make a life or death decision.

The 56-year-old was diagnosed with liver cancer and was given three days to decide whether to undergo major surgery to save his life.

"I could not believe it," Mr Woo recalls, adding that his wife made the doctor's appointment after she noticed he had lost his appetite.

"I tried to bargain with the doctor. Give me one month. Give me two weeks," he laughs.

His surgery went well, and although Mr Woo had a large chunk of his liver removed, he remains healthy.

In Asia, this makes him extremely lucky, not least because three-quarters of the world's liver cancer cases in males and two-thirds in females occur in the region.

With a fatality rate of 93%, it is a particularly Asian disease that has a high human and economic cost. Deadly disease

According to the World Health Organization, liver cancer kills 700,000 people every year, which makes it the third most common cause of death from cancer worldwide.
Liver cancer does not respond well to chemotherapy

China alone has more than half of newly diagnosed liver cancer cases in the world, while fewer than 4% occur in the US.

The main causes are alcoholism and infection with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV).

These viruses are spread from person to person through sexual contact, blood transfusions, re-use of contaminated needles and childbirth.

Worryingly, fewer than 20% of patients who are diagnosed with liver cancer can opt for surgery, according to Professor London Ooi of the National Cancer Centre in Singapore.

And even if they undergo an operation, four out of five patients will see a recurrence within five years after surgery. Lucrative market

In the past, the pharmaceutical industry focused on designing medicines for more lucrative markets in the West. As a result, there was only a limited amount of liver cancer treatments.

But as Asian patients have become wealthier, with their purchasing power boosted by economic development in countries such as China and Singapore, drug makers are paying more attention to their needs.

Diseases more common in Asia
Head and neck cancer
Stomach cancer
Liver cancer
Hepatitis B
Tuberculosis
Dengue fever

Asia's pharmaceutical industry is estimated to be worth $168bn (£101bn) at the end of 2010, according to market research and information analysis company RNCOS.

And while that is much smaller than the West, the speed at which it expands is expected to be much quicker in coming years.

The pharmaceutical industry is expected to grow by about 9.5% this year, while the sectors in the US and Europe are forecast to grow by 3.2% and 4.5% respectively, RNCOS estimates.

As a result, companies such as Pfizer, the world's biggest drug producer, are now developing treatments for diseases which are more prevalent in Asia.

"The diseases that are more common here include head, neck, stomach and liver cancers, as well as infectious diseases like hepatitis B, tuberculosis and dengue fever," says Dr Chong Chew Lan, medical director at Pfizer's clinical research unit in Singapore.

"We are at the early stage of developing medicines for these diseases and we will definitely see an increasing trend of companies focusing their research on Asia," she says.

"This is because there is a large population in Asia and there is a growing middle class who can afford these medications." Traditional medicine

But while the companies are hoping to tap into rising demand, they will face competition from less modern medical miracles.

For thousands of years across Asia, people in the region have been relying on traditional Chinese medicine.

Liver cancer survivor Woo Kum Tin says he would have gone to his Chinese doctor and asked for herbal medicine, had he been given more than three days to decide over his surgery.
Many Asian patients still rely on traditional Chinese medicine

So is Western medicine well accepted in Asia?

"I remember the days when my grandparents would prefer to use traditional Chinese medicine," says Pfizer's Dr Chong.

"But with my own parents, I have seen that change," she adds.

"Now, they are more likely to use a combination of both. They go for Western medicine for a quick relief, while they use traditional Chinese medicine for an improvement of general health."

One company in Singapore, Eu Yan Sang, has been offering traditional products and services since 1879.

Dr Caryn Peh, senior general manager of the company's Clinic Services, says traditional medicine plays a complementary role.

"In Singapore, more than 80% of patients who are diagnosed by Western doctors also seek traditional Chinese medicine," she says.

"In developing nations, they might be more traditionalists in their ways of thinking," she added. Different responses

They may have a point, especially as some experts believe that Asian patients also react differently to Western medicine.

Dr Chong of Pfizer Clinical Research Unit says there is a need to understand the effects of drugs on Asian patients.

"The advantage of having a research facility in Singapore is the multi-ethnic population of Chinese, Malays and Indians that we have," she says.

"What we noticed is that Asians tend to be more sensitive to any central nervous system responses caused by drugs," Dr Chong explains.

"So for example, if the drug causes drowsiness, we notice it more quickly in our Asian patients."

While reactions may differ, there is very little disagreement over the need for better and more effective medicines in Asia.

And now that the region's growing wealth offers greater opportunities for pharmaceutical firms, there is every chance that Asia's patients will also get to live longer and more prosperous lives.