Google News Experimenting with Links to Wikipedia on Its Homepage

Source - Nieman Journalism Lab

By Zachary M. Seward / June 9 / 2:51 p.m.

The discrete news article, it has been said, is a framework that worked well in print but doesn’t make much sense on the web. News sites can offer context in a variety of ways that explode the story model, from visualizations to comment threads to what might be called the Wikipedia model of news. No, not collaborative editing, although that has its own advantages, but merely the structure of a Wikipedia article: one page devoted to an ongoing topic that’s updated throughout with new developments but can always be read, from top to bottom, as a thorough primer. Compared to a folder of chronological news clippings, well, I would always prefer the Wikipedia model.

So, too, would readers. Wikipedia became the Internet’s most popular news-and-information site in 2007, and its dominance in search results attests to the demand for authoritative topic pages over individual articles. Now, in a small but potentially crucial moment for the evolution of storytelling, Google News has quietly begun experimenting with links to Wikipedia on its homepage.

“Currently, we’re showing a small number of users links to Wikipedia topic pages that serve as a reference on current events,” Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for Google, told me in an email this afternoon.

Sadly, I’m not one of those users, but I was alerted to this development by blogger Michael Gray, who viewed Wikipedia’s presence on Google News in a more-sinister light but helpfully provided screenshots. I grabbed the one above from Gray, highlighting a link to the Wikipedia page for the mysterious disappearance of Air France Flight 447. As is typically the case, there is no single page on the Internet with a more thorough, helpful, or informative synopsis of the crash.

Google News redesigned its homepage last month and began integrating YouTube clips from news organizations. Its cluster pages for individual news stories also got a makeover that more closely resembles a topic page than the old list of articles.

In his email to me, Stricker called the links to Wikipedia an experiment, which it is, but Google has made clear that it prefers the Wikipedia model of storytelling over discrete articles. In her testimony to Congress last month, Google vice president Marissa Mayer (that’s a link to Wikipedia, natch) said, “The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media.” She continued:

Today, in online news, publishers frequently publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with identical or closely related content, each at their own URL. The result is parallel Web pages that compete against each other in terms of authority, and in terms of placement in links and search results.

Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity. We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.

It’s not a new concept, and news organizations like The New York Times have been working on it for years. (Kevin Sablan recently summarized the latest literature on all this — a topic page for topic pages.) And yet, the article and its close cousin, the blog post, remain the dominant frameworks for news reporting on the web. Radical reinventions of storytelling are, surprisingly, few and far between: Matt Thompson, the leading thinker on this subject, is trying “a completely different type of news site” in Columbia, Missouri, that’s worth keeping an eye on. And, now, Google News is toying with links to Wikipedia. Here’s hoping for more developments like this.

ICG - Recruiting Militants in Southern Thailand

Asia Report N°170
22 June 2009

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

While Thai leaders are preoccupied with turmoil in Bangkok, the insurgency in the South continues to recruit young Malay Muslims, especially from private Islamic schools. These institutions are central to maintenance of Malay Muslim identity, and many students are receptive to the call to take up arms against the state. This is not a struggle in solidarity with global jihad, rather an ethno-nationalist insurgency with its own version of history aimed at reclaiming what was once the independent sultanate of Patani. Human rights abuses by the Thai government and security forces have only fuelled this secessionist fervour, and policies that centralise power in the capital have undermined a regional political solution. Changing these policies and practices is essential as the government tries to respond to the insurgents’ grievances in order to bring long-lasting peace to the region.

Related content Thailand: Political Turmoil and the Southern Insurgency, Asia Briefing N°80, 28 August 2008 Southern Thailand: The Problem with Paramilitaries, Asia Report N°140, 23 October 2007 CrisisWatch database: Thailand All Crisis Group Thailand reports

The Islamic schools in which pious young Muslims are recruited and radicalised are generally the larger, more modern and better-equipped institutions in a complex educational system that ranges from secular state school to traditional Muslim boarding schools (ponoh). The classroom is the point of first contact. Recruiters invite those who seem promising – devout Muslims of good character who are moved by a history of oppression, mistreatment and the idea of armed jihad – to join extracurricular indoctrination programs in mosques or disguised as football training. As recruits are drawn into the movement, they take an oath of allegiance followed by physical and military training before being assigned to different roles in village-level operations.

Islamic schools are not the only place where young Malay Muslims are radicalised, nor should all such schools be stigmatised as militant breeding grounds. Even in schools where insurgents are active, not all school administrators, teachers and students may be aware of what is happening, let alone consent to it. But these schools are rich in opportunities for recruiters. Religious young males – the natural foot soldiers of the insurgency – are found in academies numbering thousands of students. These crowds provide natural cover, especially for a movement that draws heavily upon teachers to do its covert recruitment.

The Thai security forces and some independent analysts believe that the insurgency is largely under the leadership of the National Revolutionary Front-Coordinate (Barisan Revolusi Nasional-Coordinate, BRN-C). It uses a classic clandestine cell network, in which rank-and-file members have no knowledge of the organisation beyond their immediate operational cluster. It also appears to be highly decentralised, with local units having a degree of autonomy to choose targets and carry out political campaigns. This structure has allowed it to remain active despite crackdowns by security forces.

Policymakers should be cautious of quick fixes to what is a highly complex conflict. This struggle, nominally between a Thai Buddhist state and a Malay Muslim insurgency, targets civilians of all religions. More than 3,400 people have been killed since the violence surged in 2004. There are more dead Muslim victims than Buddhists, and many of the slain Muslims were marked as “traitors” to Islam. Insurgents draw on local culture to invoke traditional oaths to discipline their own ranks, though such practices alienate them from the religious purists attached to the global jihad. Ancient charms and spells are applied to protect fighters from harm, co-existing with YouTube videos and propaganda circulated on VCDs. Despite the leap into cyberspace, the insurgency has, for the most part, restricted itself to the geographic boundaries of the three southernmost border provinces.

As earlier Crisis Group reports have stressed, the movement shows little influence of Salafi jihadism, the ideology followed by al-Qaeda and the Indonesia-based regional jihadi group Jemaah Islamiyah. Some insurgents follow a mystical variant of Shafi‘i Islam and are actively hostile to the puritanism of what they term “Wahhabis”. Although a few Malaysians have been arrested in southern Thailand for trying to join the struggle, there is no evidence of significant involvement of foreign jihadi groups. While politically distinct, the movement uses the language of Islam and jihad to frame its struggle, as such words resonate with its membership and the constituencies it seeks to sway.

Even as the political battle between the government and supporters of ousted former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra – in itself violent – plays out in the capital, Thailand needs to address the political grievances that have long fuelled resentment: the disregard for Malay ethnic identity and language, the lack of account­ability for human rights abuses, and the under-representation of Malay Muslims in local political and government structures. Without such measures, harsh suppression and attempts at instilling Thai nationalism in Malay Muslim radicals through re-education will only generate more anger that will in turn ensure a steady flow of recruits committed to an enduring struggle.

Bangkok/Brussels, 22 June 2009

Recovery's Missing Ingredient: New Jobs

By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 22, 2009

Despite signs that the recession gripping the nation's economy may be easing, the unemployment rate is projected to continue rising for another year before topping out in double digits, a prospect that threatens to slow growth, increase poverty and further complicate the Obama administration's message of optimism about the economic outlook.

The likelihood of severe unemployment extending into the 2010 midterm elections and beyond poses a significant political hurdle to President Obama and congressional Democrats, who are already under fire for what critics label profligate spending. Continuing high unemployment rates would undercut the fundamental argument behind much of that spending: the promise that it will create new jobs and improve the prospects of working Americans, which Obama has called the ultimate measure of a healthy economy.

"Our hope would be to actually create some jobs this year," Obama said in an interview with The Washington Post in the days before taking office.

Obama has defended his economic approach -- which includes the $787 billion economic stimulus plan and record investments in health care, alternative energy, education and job training -- as necessary to stabilize the shaky economy and point the way to job growth.

So far, the White House has counseled patience even as the political debate surrounding its economic policies grows more urgent. Officials point out that job growth will not come until robust economic expansion takes hold, which they expect will happen as stimulus funding works its way through the economy. Still, the flagging job market is likely to stir calls for further stimulus efforts as polls show voters growing increasingly wary of federal spending in the wake of a costly series of financial- and auto-industry bailouts and amid current efforts to expand health-care coverage to the uninsured, which is estimated to cost at least $1 trillion over the next decade.

With many forecasters projecting unemployment to remain above 10 percent next year and not return to pre-recession levels of roughly 5 percent for years after that, Obama is likely to be confronted with defending the effectiveness of his economic policies as the nation endures its worst employment situation in a generation.

Analysts say the high levels of joblessness would be accompanied by increases in child poverty, strained government budgets, and black and Latino unemployment rates approaching 20 percent.

"I find it unfathomable that people are not horrified about what is going to happen," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. "I regard all this talk about how the recession is maybe going to end, all the talk about deficits and inflation, to be the equivalent of telling Americans, 'You are just going to have to tough it out.' But we're looking at persistent unemployment that is going to be extraordinarily damaging to many communities. There is a ton of pain in the pipeline."

Christina Romer, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said that while the president is "very concerned" about the unemployment forecasts, the White House has assumed "a posture of watchful waiting," adding: "There will be big increases in stimulus spending in the fall and early next year. We have to wait to see what happens with that. If you get to the end of this year or early next year and employment is still limping back, then we have to do some serious thinking about whether there might be special problems in the labor market that require targeted interventions."

Before passage of the stimulus bill, the Obama administration had predicted that unemployment would peak at 8 percent before beginning to abate this fall. But unemployment has already reached 9.4 percent, the highest level in a quarter-century, and the situation is not projected to start improving until long after the White House had predicted.

Many economists agree that the job market would be in much worse shape had the stimulus package not been enacted. And some say more stimulus measures may be needed, even as the federal government grapples with a huge budget deficit.

"There is a good economic argument to be made that the government has not done enough stimulus," said Niko Karvounis, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation who recently wrote a report warning that the economic recovery is likely to be tepid and accompanied by unusually high unemployment.

But with polls showing increasing public opposition to government spending and with no significant constituency mobilized to push for more government investment in jobs, the political prospects for any further stimulus legislation seem slim. Meanwhile, the continued rise in unemployment is creating an opening for Republican critics, who have criticized the level of spending Obama has pursued to try to fix the economy.

"They even predicted that if we passed it quickly, unemployment wouldn't go higher than 8 percent. Well, here we are just a few months later and the unemployment rate is approaching 10 percent," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). "The administration admits that their earlier predictions were a guess -- and that they guessed wrong."

Obama tersely acknowledged in an interview with Bloomberg Television last week that unemployment is likely to peak above 10 percent. That prediction is in line with a growing number of respected economic forecasts, including those of private economists and the Congressional Budget Office, which projects that the unemployment rate will continue to rise into the second half of next year.

"Unemployment won't peak until this time next year, and then it will remain very high through next year," said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com. "It won't get back to full employment until 2013 or 2014. This really speaks to the severity of the job losses that have been absorbed by the economy. They were massive."

Since the recession took hold in December 2007, the U.S. economy has lost 5.7 million jobs, a rapid decline that caught administration and other economists off guard. In recent months, the velocity of job losses has slowed substantially, which, combined with a rising stock market and increases in consumer spending, has offered hope that a recovery is beginning to take hold.

But employers still cut 345,000 jobs last month, while the nation's growing working-age population requires the job market to expand by 125,000 to 150,000 a month just to keep the unemployment rate stable.

The dynamics of the modern economy further dim the employment picture. Job growth was weak for years after the past two recessions, in 1991 and 2001. Employers have grown increasingly slow to rehire workers, and steady advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with fewer workers.

While the recession has touched workers across the spectrum, "many of the job losses are in manufacturing and construction, affecting less-educated workers and immigrants," Zandi said. "It is going to be hard for them to find their way back into the workforce quickly."

Meanwhile, the current recession has been characterized by the implosion of the housing market and the near collapse of the financial sector and automobile industry. Despite huge federal interventions, many of the jobs in those industries are gone for good.

High unemployment also does not bode well for consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the nation's economic activity, putting further pressure on the job market.

"We have not seen the highest unemployment rate, and this is going to go on for a long time," Mishel said. "The political conversation seems to be that we have already dealt with the recession. But we need to have a conversation about how we are going to get to the other side, where employment is growing again."

Unrest in Iran Sharply Deepens Rift Among Clerics

The New York Times

Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of the former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, attended a rally for Mir Hussein Moussavi. Iranian state television reported on Sunday that Ms. Hashemi and four other members of the family had been arrested.

By NAZILA FATHI and MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Published: June 21, 2009

TEHRAN — A bitter rift among Iran’s ruling clerics deepened Sunday over the disputed presidential election that has convulsed Tehran in the worst violence in 30 years, with the government trying to link the defiant loser to terrorists and detaining relatives of his powerfulbacker, a founder of the Islamic republic.

Ali Safari/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Iranian protesters covered their faces to protect themselves from tear gas during clashes with police in Tehran on Saturday.

The loser, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the moderate reform candidate who contends that the June 12 election was stolen from him, fired back at his accusers on Sunday night in a posting on his Web site, calling on his own supporters to demonstrate peacefully despite stern warnings from Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that no protests of the vote would be allowed. “Protesting to lies and fraud is your right,” Mr. Moussavi said in a challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority.

Earlier, the police detained five relatives of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who leads two influential councils and openly supported Mr. Moussavi’s election. The relatives, including Mr. Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, were released after several hours.

The developments, coming one day after protests here in the capital and elsewhere were crushed by police officers and militia members using guns, clubs, tear gas and water cannons, suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei was facing entrenched resistance among some members of the elite. Though rivalries have been part of Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, analysts said that open factional competition amid a major political crisis could hinder Ayatollah Khamenei’s ability to restore order.

There was no verifiable accounting of the death toll from the mayhem on Saturday, partly because the government has imposed severe restrictions on news coverage and warned foreign reporters who remained in the country to stay off the streets.

It also ordered the BBC’s longtime correspondent in Tehran expelled and ordered Newsweek’s correspondent detained.

State television said that 10 people had died in clashes, while radio reports said 19. The news agency ISNA said 457 people had been arrested.

Vowing not to have a repeat of Saturday, the government on Sunday saturated major streets and squares of Tehran with police and Basij militia forces. There were reports of scattered confrontations but no confirmation of any new injuries by evening. But as they had on previous nights, many residents of Tehran clambered to their rooftops and could be heard shouting “Death to the dictator!” and “God is great,” their rallying cries since the crisis began.

It was unclear whether protests, which began after the government declared that the conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won re-election in a landslide against Mr. Moussavi, would be sustained in the face of the clampdown.

Amateur video accounts showed at least one large protest gathering, on Shirazi Street, though it was unclear how long it lasted.

But in the network of Internet postings and Twitter messages that has become the opposition’s major tool for organizing and sharing information, a powerful and vivid new image emerged: a video posted on several Web sites that showed a young woman, called Neda, her face covered in blood. Text posted with the video said she had been shot. It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the video.

The Web site of another reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, referred to her as a martyr who did not “have a weapon in her soft hands or a grenade in her pocket but became a victim by thugs who are supported by a horrifying security apparatus.”

Accounts of the election’s aftermath in the state-run press suggested that the government might be laying the groundwork for discrediting and arresting Mr. Moussavi. IRNA, the official news agency, quoted Alireza Zahedi, a member of the Basij militia, as saying Mr. Moussavi had provoked the violence, sought help from outside the country to do so and should be put on trial. The Fars news agency quoted a Tehran University law professor as saying that Mr. Moussavi had acted against “the security of the nation.” State television suggested that at least some of the unrest was instigated by an outlawed terrorist group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, which does not have a strong following in Iran.

Mr. Moussavi was not seen in public on Sunday but showed no sign of yielding. In his Web posting, he urged followers to “avoid violence in your protest and behave as though you are the parents that have to tolerate your children’s misbehavior at the security forces.”

He also warned the government to “avoid mass arrests, which will only create distance between society and the security forces.”

The moves against members of Mr. Rafsanjani’s family were seen as an attempt to pressure him to drop his challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei — pressure that Mr. Rafsanjani’s son, Mehdi Rafsanjani, said he would reject.

“My father was in jail for five years when we were young. We don’t care if they keep her even for a year,” Mehdi Rafsanjani said in an interview, referring to his sister, Ms. Hashemi.

Mr. Rafsanjani was deeply critical of Mr. Ahmadinejad during the presidential campaign, and is thought to have had a strained relationship with Ayatollah Khamenei for many years.

But he remains a major establishment figure, and the detention of his daughter, albeit briefly, was a surprise. In Ayatollah Khamenei’s sermon on Friday, in which he backed Mr. Ahmadinejad and threatened a crackdown on further protests, he praised Mr. Rafsanjani as a pillar of the revolution while acknowledging that the two have had “many differences of opinion.”

Last week, state television showed images of Ms. Hashemi, 46, speaking to hundreds of people to rally support for Mr. Moussavi. After her appearance, state radio said, students who support Mr. Ahmadinejad gathered outside the Tehran prosecutor’s office and demanded that she be arrested for treason.

Mr. Rafsanjani, 75, heads two powerful institutions. One, the Assembly of Experts, is a body of clerics that has the authority to oversee and theoretically replace the country’s supreme leader. He also runs the Expediency Council, empowered to settle disagreements between the elected Parliament and the unelected Guardian Council.

The Assembly of Experts has never publicly exercised its power over Ayatollah Khamenei since he succeeded the Islamic Revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989. But the increasingly bitter confrontation between Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr. Rafsanjani has raised the prospect of a contest of political wills between the two revolutionary veterans.

In a sign that the crisis in Iran threatened to spill far beyond the nation’s borders, the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, on Sunday called for reconsidering relations with Britain, France and Germany after their “shameful” statements about the election.

State radio reported that Mr. Larijani, who has his own aspirations to one day become president, made his comments in a speech to the full Parliament. Mr. Larijani’s position, which reflects the anti-Western orientation of the hard-liners in charge, could further undermine President Obama’s efforts to reach out to Iran and begin a diplomatic dialogue. The United States severed ties with Iran 30 years ago.

In Washington, Mr. Obama resisted pressure from Republicans who have called his response to the Iranian crackdown too timid. On Saturday, Mr. Obama stepped up his criticism of Iran’s government, calling it “violent and unjust,” and said that the world was watching its behavior.

Mr. Obama has argued that a more aggressive White House stance against the Iranian government crackdown would be used by Tehran as anti-American propaganda. “The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with Harry Smith of CBS News broadcast Friday. “We shouldn’t be playing into that.”

In an interview broadcast Sunday on Iranian television, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that officials were examining the charge of voting fraud and expected to issue their findings by the end of the week. But like Ayatollah Khamenei, Mr. Mottaki appeared to have already judged the vote as clean and fair. He said the “possibility of organized and comprehensive disruption and irregularities in the election is almost close to zero,” according to Iran’s English-language Press TV.

At the same time, serious new questions about the vote’s integrity were raised outside of Iran. Chatham House, a London-based research organization, released a study done with the University of St. Andrews challenging the Iranian government’s declared results, based on a comparison with the 2005 elections as well as Iran’s own census data.

The study showed, for example, that in two provinces where Mr. Ahmadinejad won a week ago, a turnout of more than 100 percent was recorded.

The study also showed that in a third of all provinces, the official results, if true, would have required that Mr. Ahmadinejad win not only all conservative voters and all former centrist voters and all new voters, but up to 44 percent of formerly reformist voters.

With the police on the streets demonstrating a willingness to injure and even kill, one question political analysts and opposition members were beginning to ask was whether it was time to shift strategies, from street protests to some kind of national strike.

It was unclear if the opposition had the support or organization, especially within the middle class, to carry out such a measure, but a strike would be immune to the heavy hand of the state and could wield leverage by crippling the already stumbling economy, analysts said.

Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Michael Slackman from Cairo.

Indonesia's High Hopes For The Next SBY Term

Far Eastern Economic Review, Jakarta, James Van Zorge, June 19 - There are few people in Indonesia who doubt that the incumbent president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, widely known as SBY, will win the July 8 presidential election. Mr. Yudhoyono's competitors, who include his predecessor and erstwhile boss, Megawati Sukarnoputri, and his current vice president, Jusuf Kalla, are trailing far behind in popularity polls. Pundits and pollsters alike doubt Ms. Megawati can win more than 20% of the popular vote, and Mr. Kalla would be considered extraordinarily lucky if he could manage 10% of voters' support in his bid for the presidency. Barring some unforeseen disaster on the campaign trail, Mr. Yudhoyono will walk away with a simple majority of the vote and once again become the leader of the world's third-largest democracy.

The president's broad appeal compared to Ms. Megawati and Mr. Kalla is no mystery. The primary reason is economic performance: Under Mr. Yudhoyono's leadership, over the past five years the Indonesian economy has registered strong growth, more than 6% in 2008 and perhaps reaching 4% in 2009, a respectable performance for any economy during today's global financial crisis. Poverty, underemployment and income distribution remain an issue, yet there are signs that poorer Indonesians have seen an improvement in their standard of living and the middle class continues to grow.

The international and domestic business communities also praise Mr. Yudhoyono's administration for its macroeconomic management. In particular, the stewardship of Minister of Finance Sri Mulyani has stood Indonesia in good stead, and the country is well positioned to receive direct and portfolio investment flows when the global economy starts to recover. A few multinationals are already taking the plunge -- Volkswagen of Germany, for example, recently inked a deal to develop a large manufacturing facility in Jakarta to serve the domestic and regional markets.

Another reason why voters find Mr. Yudhoyono an attractive presidential figure is his image as a clean politician, a rare commodity in Indonesia. Unlike his predecessors, he has managed to steer clear of scandals, and his administration has clamped down on corruption throughout the country. Retired ministers, governors, members of the House of Representatives (DPR) and a former central banker have been brought to court on charges of corruption and, in many cases, given stiff prison sentences. As recently as five years ago, public officials viewed their stay in office as an opportunity to steal from the state's coffers with impunity. Now they have to think twice before taking the risk.

Indonesians remember Mr. Yudhoyono's predecessor, Megawati Sukarnoputri, in a dramatically different light. As the daughter of the country's first president, Sukarno, she initially evoked sentiments of nationalist pride and hopes for a return to the imagined glories of her father's era. Using the Sukarno name as her main calling card, most Indonesians did not seem to notice her lack of depth in policy issues. But not soon after rising to office, very quickly Ms. Megawati's supporters realized that she was out of her league.

Aloof and apparently taking very little interest in managing affairs attendant of her office, most of Ms. Megawati's time was spent on ceremony and pomp. Meanwhile, the policy vacuum was filled by her husband, businessman Taufiq Kiemas, along with a gang of crony politicians and their financiers in the corporate world. Not only was there little reform, there was a palpable sense the country was going backward.

Whereas Ms. Megawati suffers from the public's memories of her lackluster performance in office, Vice President and Golkar Party Chairman Kalla fares even worse. Touted as faster and better than Mr. Yudhoyono, Indonesians might concede that their president is not much of a decision-maker, but they are not necessarily convinced Mr. Kalla would make a better head of government.

Most Indonesians would probably agree that Mr. Kalla has shown himself to be a more decisive leader than Mr. Yudhoyono. The president is widely viewed as risk-averse and painfully slow when it comes to making policy pronouncements. As one cabinet minister recently told me, "I have been going to cabinet meetings for almost five years. Not once did the president make a decision during any of those meetings."

Yet Mr. Kalla consistently polls less than a 5% approval rating as a presidential candidate. One possible reason is his background. As a successful businessman during the former Suharto regime, Mr. Kalla is placed in the same class as another Golkar Party leader, Aburizal Bakrie, a billionaire who also happens to serve as Mr. Yudhoyono's coordinating minister of people's welfare. Mr. Yudhoyono might not fit everybody's image of the ideal president who takes charge, but Mr. Kalla is viewed as something worse: a political dinosaur.

Certainly Mr. Kalla and Ms. Megawati have not helped their chances of winning through their choices of running mates. Mr. Kalla picked retired General Wiranto, a former Suharto adjutant commander-in-chief of the Indonesian armed forces. Ms. Megawati joined forces with Prabowo Subianto, another retired general and former in-law of Suharto. Both vice presidential candidates share a tainted past. Mr. Wiranto is thought to be responsible for bloodbaths in East Timor, while Mr. Subianto has admitted to being behind Operation Rose, a special forces operation ordered by Suharto in 1998 that involved abductions, torture and the murder of student activists.

In stark contrast, Mr. Yudhoyono's running mate is Boediono, a professional economist and widely respected technocrat who until recently was head of Indonesia's central bank. Holding a doctorate in business economics from Wharton, the soft-spoken Mr. Boediono is not only recognized as a highly competent public official, but clean as well.

So far, opposition candidates have tried a variety of tactics to attract voters. Mr. Kalla and Ms. Megawati are, for example, trying to woo voters with a nationalist platform, and have charged Mr. Boediono with being a "neoliberal," implying that he is overly inclined to support foreign investment and open markets at the expense of the welfare of poorer Indonesians.

Unfortunately for the opposition, a nationalist platform is unlikely to elicit much excitement or support from lower-income Indonesians, primarily because they have seen their household incomes improve substantially during Mr. Yudhoyono's tenure in office. Calls for retreating to inward-looking policies might be attractive to a minority of voters, but when the economy is doing well it is hardly a winning platform.

Both of the opposition candidates are also claiming that they will be able to grow the economy faster than Mr. Yudhoyono. In a recent business forum, Ms. Megawati said she could grow the economy by 11% -- when she was queried how she would achieve growth rates exceeding China's, her only reply was that she did not yet have any specific policy ideas. Lacking substance, it is unlikely Indonesians will be buying Ms. Megawati's tales of future prosperity.

Mr. Yudhoyono should not assume a victory in July would necessarily result in a more vibrant business climate. Indonesia is definitely better placed now than some of its regional neighbors in attracting investment, especially when one looks at the economic challenges facing Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, and the political turmoil in Thailand and Malaysia. Still, some questions need to be asked about the direction Mr. Yudhoyono will be taking Indonesia for the next five years.

Investors will be watching for Mr. Yudhoyono's choice of a cabinet. They will also be waiting to see if he will be able to parlay a mandate from the electorate into a pliant DPR -- at least one that is more cooperative than during his first term in office. Finally, the international and domestic business community will be anxious for the president to articulate a more detailed blueprint for economic policy for his new administration, hopefully addressing some of the more pressing issues that previously remained untouched.

Hopefully, Mr. Yudhoyono will not yield to the temptation to stitch together a coalition cabinet. He tried this during his first term in office, as did his predecessors, based on the mistaken belief that bringing politicians from other parties into the cabinet would result in greater support for his policy initiatives inside the DPR. Not only did cabinet positions fail to buy loyalty, it also resulted in cabinets with little redeeming value, more often than not burdening the president with ministers who were more focused on advancing their vested interests, and in more egregious cases used their offices as a source of largesse.

At the very least, Mr. Yudhoyono will need to reserve some of the more critical economics-related and judiciary cabinet postings for seasoned, reputable professionals if he is to instill confidence and win the respect of the business community. Mr. Yudhoyono's choice of Mr. Boediono as his vice president is an early sign that he will probably lean in this direction. Still, it is too early to tell whether or not Mr. Yudhoyono might succumb to political pressure from party bosses and make unnecessary compromises.

Assuming the president does select a cabinet based primarily on merit, that opens up a related question: If a coalition cabinet does not ensure loyalty to the president from coalition members inside the DPR, then what will? Indeed, it has become increasingly difficult for Indonesian presidents since the demise of Suharto and his Golkar party to find ways to work effectively with the DPR. The powers of the DPR have increased substantially, and members are eager to exercise them.

Moreover, the number of new parties has mushroomed since 1998 (32 parties participated in this April's elections, and nine ended up with sufficient votes to seat members inside the DPR). To make matters even more complicated, leadership within parties tends to be fractured. If chairmen find it difficult to lead their own parties, how can a president be expected to deal with nine individual parties at once?

One possible solution is to give the president more help inside the palace. In terms of professional support staff commonly found in mature democracies, the Office of the Presidency currently has scant resources. For example, there is no equivalent of the U.S. White House Office of Congressional Affairs, which is staffed with scores of analysts and skilled operators whose sole purpose is to improve prospects for congressional approval of the president's legislative agenda. There are rumors in palace circles that Mr. Yudhoyono is thinking about creating a legislative liaison office to help him realize his policy agenda.

What then will Mr. Yudhoyono try to achieve during his next five-year term? So far there are few signs of new directions on the policy front. It is probably safe to assume that one of Mr. Yudhoyono's priorities will be continuing efforts to combat corruption. It is also widely assumed that his core economics team will stay in place, and therefore sound monetary and fiscal policies will remain a hallmark of his administration.

The business community hopes for more -- the investment community believes that the president should leverage the country's political stability and economic recent successes, and use his public mandate for pushing ahead with policies that could reposition Indonesia as the destination of choice for business in Southeast Asia. Business leaders put the priority on three areas: expanding and modernizing the country's antiquated infrastructure, overhauling uncompetitive labor laws, and improving the legal and regulatory framework underpinning regional autonomy. Whereas infrastructure is primarily an issue requiring increased government spending and could be easily accommodated because of Indonesia's low budget deficit, the latter two areas would require some political risk-taking from Mr. Yudhoyono.

Indonesia's labor laws, in particular excessively high severance pay, have long been a source of complaints from local and foreign business, causing many labor-intensive manufacturing industries such as textiles and footwear to relocate to China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Corporations also complain frequently about local governments' cavalier attitude toward business and excessive rent-seeking.

Reforming Indonesia's labor and regional autonomy laws would require the president to challenge labor leaders and heads of local governments. The prototypical Javanese, Mr. Yudhoyono avoids conflict and seeks consensus above all else. Those are precisely the types of character traits that many find troublesome, especially those who hope for more change in the future. Whether or not Indonesia's president is capable of finding the strength to tackle the next stage of reform remains to be seen.

---

Mr. Van Zorge is a partner in Van Zorge, Heffernan & Associates, a consulting firm in Jakarta specializing in business intelligence and government relations.

Iran's Top Leader Endorses Election

By Thomas Erdbrink and William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 20, 2009

TEHRAN, June 19 -- Iran's supreme leader on Friday put his full authority behind the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rejecting allegations of vote fraud and declaring that foreign "enemies," including the United States, were behind a week of massive street demonstrations.

By placing his personal seal of approval on the election's official result, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei significantly raised the stakes for Iran's political opposition, which must now either concede the election or be seen as challenging the supreme leader himself. So far, opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters have questioned the validity of the June 12 election but not the country's theocratic system of governance.



In a dramatic speech before thousands of worshipers at a Friday prayer service, Khamenei warned that the leaders of the protests will be held "directly responsible" for any bloodshed that results from continued demonstrations.

The prospect of a violent crackdown poses a quandary not only for the Iranian opposition but also for the Obama administration. U.S. officials said Khamenei's speech would not change President Obama's hands-off approach toward Iran's internal turmoil or his policy of seeking dialogue with Iran on its nuclear program and other critical issues. But they said that violent repression could force a reevaluation of Obama's overtures to Tehran.

Iran's government should "recognize that the world is watching," Obama said Friday in an interview with CBS News. How Iranian leaders "deal with people who are, through peaceful means, trying to be heard" will signal "what Iran is and is not," he said, adding that he was concerned by the "tenor and tone" of the supreme leader's speech.

Both the House of Representatives and the Senate overwhelmingly passed nonbinding resolutions expressing support for the rights of the Iranian demonstrators. Republicans sought to portray the votes as criticism of the president's response to the events in Iran, but the administration publicly welcomed the congressional action. "It's consistent with what the president has said," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Gibbs added, however, that the United States will continue to try to avoid entanglement in the Iranian debate.

"We're not going to be used as political foils and political footballs in a debate that's happening by Iranians in Iran," he said. "There are many people in the leadership that would love us to get involved, and would love to trot out the same old foils they have for many years. That's not what we're going to do.

"Our interests remain the same," Gibbs continued. "We're concerned about the Islamic republic living up to its responsibilities, as it relates to nuclear weapons."

In a sign hours after Khamenei's remarks that at least some Tehran residents rejected his warnings, people took to their rooftops after dark across the city and chanted slogans such as "Death to the dictator" and "Allahu akbar," or "God is great." Their chants were similar to those at rallies this week against Ahmadinejad and in favor of Mousavi. And the rooftop tactic recalled a method that was used to voice anti-government sentiment three decades ago, during the opposition movement that ultimately succeeded in ousting the shah of Iran.

Mousavi, who appeared at a massive demonstration in South Tehran on Thursday to back his demands that the election be annulled, has called for another march Saturday in downtown Tehran. The 67-year-old former prime minister did not attend Khamenei's speech and did not immediately react to it publicly.

Pro-Mousavi Web sites were not updated, leaving it unclear whether the demonstration would be canceled or go ahead as planned, setting up a potential confrontation if security forces are ordered to intervene.

But another opposition presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, implicitly defied Khamenei's stand, publicly supporting Mousavi's position by calling on Iran's powerful Guardian Council on Friday to nullify the election and order another one. In an open letter to the council, which is charged with confirming the election results, Karroubi urged its members to "accept the will of the nation" and throw out results announced by the Interior Ministry showing a landslide win for Ahmadinejad. The council has said it would investigate irregularities supported by evidence, but it has ruled out annulling the election.

Khamenei, 69, a Shiite Muslim cleric who holds ultimate political and religious authority under Iran's theocratic system, emphatically backed that view Friday. He told tens of thousands of people who spilled out of a covered pavilion at Tehran University that the election is over, and he expressed confidence in the vote tallies.

"Some of our enemies in different parts of the world intended to depict this absolute victory, this definitive victory, as a doubtful victory," he said. "It is your victory. They cannot manipulate it.

"The competition is over," he declared in response to calls for nullification. "Over 40 million people voted; they voted for the Islamic republic.

"The margin between the candidates is 11 million votes," Khamenei continued. "If it is 500,000, maybe fraud could be of influence. But for 11 million, how can you do that?"

He said the protests would not change the Iranian system.

In a warning to protest organizers, the supreme leader said, "If the elite breaks laws, they will be held responsible for violence and bloodshed."

He warned Iranians not to cause problems, because "Iran is at a sensitive juncture." And he asserted that foreign governments, especially the United States and Britain, were encouraging the opposition.

"American officials' remarks about human rights and limitations on people are not acceptable because they have no idea about human rights after what they have done in Afghanistan and Iraq and other parts of the world," Khamenei said. "We do not need advice over human rights from them."

Khamenei said the Guardian Council is looking into complaints of voting fraud. The council, a 12-member panel of senior Islamic clergy and jurists, has invited the four presidential candidates to a meeting Saturday to discuss their concerns about the balloting.

But Khamenei's comments rejecting significant irregularities appeared to preempt the council's probe. As Khamenei arrived to lead the Friday prayers, a sea of fists punched the air, and thousands of supporters roared their greetings: "Our blood in our veins is for you, O Leader!" Khamenei smiled, raising his hand, which was resting on the barrel of a gun, to calm the audience.

High officials sat cross-legged on a green carpet in a cordoned-off area in front of the stage. A choir of young men in suits sang a cappella. The rows quickly filled up with turbaned clerics, members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and influential politicians.

The crowd cheered as Ahmadinejad came in, late. Khamenei nodded at him as the president bowed forward with his hand on his chest. Ahmadinejad occupied a place of honor, sitting just behind the spot where Khamenei would lead the prayers.

Banners hanging from the pavilion roof bore messages such as "Don't speak to us with the tongue of old imperialism, BBC" and "Westerners get away from us."

In Washington, a senior administration figure called Khamenei's speech "a significant statement," adding, "The question is what becomes of it." He said that the protest movement has "taken on a life of its own" but that where it goes next remains unclear.

Another official dismissed criticism of Obama from U.S. conservatives who want him to publicly endorse the demonstrations. "I don't think we feel a lot of pressure to go a different way," the official said. "We're trying to promote a foreign policy that advances our interests, not that makes us feel good about ourselves."

A third official said the events in Iran were part of regional changes, noting the opposition's movement from preelection concerns about the Iranian economy to what could become a challenge to the country's theocratic system. "I think something bigger is going on," the official said, citing the recent defeat of the Hezbollah-led coalition in Lebanese elections and the sight of "people bravely speaking their minds in Iran."

The administration officials all emphasized that they want to keep the United States out of the Iranian debate. But, as one noted, "the United States has an important place in their historical narrative."

Obama has repeatedly denied that the United States is "meddling" in Iranian politics. But in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, Obama said he hoped "the regime responds not with violence, but with a recognition that the universal principles of peaceful expression and democracy are ones that should be affirmed."

Khamenei on Friday compared Obama's comments about Iran to the tragic conclusion of the Branch Davidian standoff with federal agents in Waco, Tex., during President Bill Clinton's administration. The leader of that group, David Koresh, and at least 74 supporters died in a fire at their compound. A federal probe concluded that the Davidians committed suicide, but survivors said it was started by tear gas rounds fired by government agents into the buildings.

"People affiliated with the Davidians were burned alive," Khamenei said. "You were responsible -- the Democrats. The administration was angered and 80 were burned. And do you know the true meaning of human rights? The Islamic Republic of Iran is the flag-bearer of human rights. We defend the oppressed."

Branigin reported from Washington. Staff writer Lexie Verdon in Washington contributed to this report.

Iran's Steely Chief Cleric Steps Forward

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 20, 2009

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who warned at Friday prayers of continued demonstrations leading to "bloodshed," has held the title of supreme leader of the revolution for 20 years, twice as long as the man for whom the title was created. In laying down an ultimatum to protesters demonstrating against alleged vote fraud, Khamenei showed the steel that got him the job.

Thirty years ago, Khamenei's mentor, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, swept to power in Iran when the monarch running the ancient country backed away from a similar challenge. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's decision to flee in the face of a rising revolt left the country to Khomeini, a coal-eyed cleric whose righteous persona and unquestioned religious credentials personified the 1979 Islamic revolution he instigated from exile and dominated upon his triumphant return.

But when Khomeini died 10 years later, he left no successor. The grand ayatollah widely expected to follow him, Hossein Ali Montazeri, lost his place by expressing revulsion at violence committed in the name of the revolution.

"I surely would follow you up to the entrance of hell," Montazeri wrote to his mentor, Khomeini, in 1988, when political prisoners were being hanged by the hundreds each day. "But I am not ready to follow you in."

And so the question of who would inherit Khomeini's mantle went to committee.

Khamenei, now 69, was the overwhelming choice of a conservative clerical establishment that -- with his white beard, black turban and name just a few vowels away from his mentor's -- he tends to blend right into.



Only a mid-ranking cleric at the time of his selection, Khamenei was immediately promoted to ayatollah. That move, analysts say, was immensely significant, instantly introducing practical politics into a religious hierarchy grounded for centuries exclusively in scholarship. It also signaled that, with the death of its founder, the Islamic Republic of Iran was going to involve a certain amount of improvisation.

Twenty years later, the essentials of Khamenei's tenure were on display with him at Tehran University during Friday prayers.

Iranian officials point out that Khamenei favors jazz and wears a wristwatch, a modern flourish for a cleric. In official portraits, his smile appears gentle beside Khomeini's frown. But his life in Iranian politics has also left him battle-scarred: His right hand is withered from a 1981 bomb attack by political rivals.

Analysts said his long experience has left him wary of perceived threats from inside and outside Iran.

"Whether true or not, Khamenei has long believed that the U.S. is bent on regime change in Tehran, not via force but via a soft or velvet revolution," said Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "For the last 20 years, I imagine he goes to sleep at night and wakes up every morning mistrusting both outside powers and his own population. In that type of atmosphere of fear and mistrust, he's relied on the intelligence, security and military forces much more than the clergy."

Around Khamenei's neck yesterday was the simple plaid kerchief worn by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the military organization that, unlike the regular army, reports directly to the supreme leader.

"There's a question in my mind whether Khamenei is calling the shots or whether the Revolutionary Guards are calling the shots," said Gary G. Sick, a Columbia University professor who was at the National Security Council in 1979. "But clearly the Revolutionary Guards, their whole organization and their leadership have assumed a position in the constellation of voices in Iran that is extraordinary, and they say they are absolutely loyal to Khamenei."

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who sat cross-legged in the front row at prayers yesterday, emerged from both the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij, the largely working-class, volunteer organization that is part paramilitary, part social welfare. Khamenei has nurtured both groups as constituencies and instruments of social control independent of the clergy.

"Khamenei depends on them almost entirely,'' Sick said of the Basiji. "He is in no position to contradict them or take exception to their wishes. They are very conservative and want to protect the system as it is."

Conspicuously absent from the audience was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, two-time president of Iran, current head of two major councils and, not least, the cleric historians say worked hardest to ensure that Khamenei succeeded Khomeini. The two men go back 50 years, to the underground that deposed the U.S.-backed shah by the power of street demonstrations and cries of "God is great" much like those heard this week.

Rafsanjani is widely believed to loathe Ahmadinejad, whose victory was endorsed by Khamenei yesterday. Sick said Rafsanjani's absence from "possibly the most important speech by any top leader in the past 30 years strikes me as really significant."

"There are funny bedfellows in Iran," he added. "And things are proceeding in a way that was not anticipated by them and by people outside the country."

In U.S., Iranians See Country And Countrymen in a New Light

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 20, 2009

For the past week, young members of the Iranian diaspora have been able to assume a few things about each other: They spend all day glued to the Internet, and they're suddenly experts on a handful of bearded men they may not have cared much about before.

With huge crowds taking to Iran's streets to protest a presidential election they say was rigged, Iranians outside the country have been staying up late into the night, watching the drama unfold online, in tweets and status updates and shaky video clips. They are jittery and excited, consumed by a passion many did not know they had, for a country some have never even visited.

Hussein Banai, 28, a graduate student at Brown University, had so little faith in the Iranian system that he didn't vote last week for the president of the country he left 13 years ago. Like many, though, he has been swept up by what followed. "I've never seen so many people outside the country being so viscerally engaged with the political process," he said. "I'm hoping this will result in a major shakeup of the regime."

Some scenes are disturbing, such as those of protesters being beaten or shot. But there are also human moments, such as demonstrators surrounding a policeman and asking whether he speaks Arabic or Farsi -- evidently in response to rumors that militias were brought into Iran from Arab countries to replace police who might not fire on crowds.

In the clip, the policeman cracks a smile and says, "Farsi," prompting delighted demonstrators to ask for whom he voted. And observers abroad have been prompted to add their own delighted comments.

"It's amazing. It's like watching the Berlin Wall come down," said Nika Khanjani, 34, a filmmaker who lives in Montreal. "I really feel like something's changing."

Like many, she said she can hardly stand not to be in Iran now. "I feel sorry for myself that I'm alone here, and I realize that there is this incredibly strong desire to feel connected, and that is my answer to myself as to why I'm on the computer all the time," she said. "I just need to be around people who care about this."

That feeling has prompted many in the Iranian diaspora, which numbers about 1 million people in the United States, to join forces in a way they never have before. Almost every day since the disputed June 12 election, they have participated in vigils and marches in cities around the world.



They are taking their cues from people in Iran, said Babak Talebi, 29, of McLean, an organizer of the grass-roots group Whereismyvote.org. "We were just like, 'Damn, the Islamic Republic did it again,' " he said. But then, "When it became clear that people inside Iran were not letting this go without dissent, we were just like, 'We have to do something.' "

Many people around the world have replaced their online photos with the words "Where Is My Vote?" against a green backdrop, the color of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign. But many abroad say they are uniting not around a specific political leader so much as around their support for Iranians they see as taking huge risks in the name of democracy.

Such risk-taking is not unprecedented: Student protests in 1999 raised hopes but resulted in a crackdown and did not spark the same level of involvement abroad. This time, technological advances have allowed for wider dissemination of the events. But there is more to it than that, said Jahanshah Javid, who runs a diaspora Web site, Iranian.com.

"The student movement was more radical," he said, noting that this time some of Iran's establishment clerics have joined the protests, emboldening usually apolitical Iranians to participate. "This fear of the security forces, of the Islamic Republic in general, has melted away."

So far, the demonstrators' demands include a new election and the release of those arrested but not a new system, and most expatriates are echoing that, Talebi said. "This is the consensus -- that we're going to create change in Iran without a revolution, with internal reform."

Not all have united around this idea. Shouting matches have broken out at demonstrations in Los Angeles and Washington between middle-aged Iranians carrying the lion-and-sun flags of the shah's era and mostly younger Iranians, who fear that such flags will allow Tehran to link the protests with monarchists seeking to overturn the government.

In fact, many protesters have adopted slogans and imagery of the 1979 revolution, such as shouting "Allahu akbar" from rooftops and sharing video clips of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini speaking about blood spilled for the country and a rising wave of protest around the world.

Mindful that the Iranian government could seek to discredit the protests as foreign-backed, some in the diaspora are also arguing over how much the Obama administration should get involved. In an informal poll put out this week by the Washington-based National Iranian American Council, 60 percent of respondents said that U.S. involvement would be counterproductive but that human rights violations must be condemned; 19 percent said the United States should not get involved at all.

The House of Representatives voted 405 to 1 yesterday to condemn Tehran's crackdown on demonstrators. The Senate voted unanimously to condemn censorship and intimidation of the press in Iran.

Iranians in the United States say they are hearing from friends interested in Iran for the first time, and some are amused by comments from non-Iranians who are struck by the images of hip young Tehran protesters after so many years of seeing clerics as the face of Iran. There is a newfound sense of pride, they say, a sense of wanting to wear an "Iran" T-shirt or carry an "Iran" book in public, to show off a heritage many were more used to hiding.

"You're seeing for the first time the Iranian coming out in you, whether you're full Iranian or half or a quarter," said Goli Fassihian, a NIAC spokeswoman. "Most people feel that this is the beginning of a long-term thing."

For those old enough to remember the animosity unleashed on Iranians during the hostage crisis, the transformation can be liberating. "All my formative years, I dreaded the reaction when people would find out I was Iranian," said Khanjani, who grew up in Texas. "It was so vilified, and it's like vindication right now. Would we feel so proud of our country if it hadn't gone through 30 years of being demonized?

"Especially when I read about the silent marches and the integrity with which these people are organizing, and the courage," she added. "Yeah, these are Iranians -- full of passion, full of moxie, intelligent. It's just so cool that the whole world is watching."

Obama Administration Looks to Colleges for Future Spies

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 20, 2009

To the list of collegiate types -- nerds, jocks, Greeks -- add one more: spies in training. The government is hoping they'll be hard to spot.

The Obama administration has proposed the creation of an intelligence officer training program in colleges and universities that would function much like the Reserve Officers' Training Corps run by the military services. The idea is to create a stream "of first- and second-generation Americans, who already have critical language and cultural knowledge, and prepare them for careers in the intelligence agencies," according to a description sent to Congress by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.

In recent years, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have struggled to find qualified recruits who can work the streets of the Middle East and South Asia to penetrate terrorist groups and criminal enterprises. The proposed program is an effort to cultivate and educate a new generation of career intelligence officers from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds.

Under the proposal, part of the administration's 2010 intelligence authorization bill, colleges and universities would apply for grants that would be used to expand or introduce courses of study to "meet the emerging needs of the intelligence community." Those courses would include certain foreign languages, analysis and specific scientific and technical fields.

The students' participation in the program would probably be kept secret to prevent them from being identified by foreign intelligence services, according to an official familiar with the proposal.

Students attending participating colleges and universities who agree to take the specialized courses would apply to the national intelligence director for admittance to the program, whose administrators would select individuals "competitively" for financial assistance. Much like the support provided to those in the military programs, the financial assistance could include "a monthly stipend, tuition assistance, book allowances and travel expenses," according to the proposal. It also would involve paid summer internships at one or more intelligence agencies.

Applicants to the intelligence training program would have to pass a security background investigation, although it is unclear when they would have to do so. Students who receive a certain amount of financial assistance would be obligated to serve in an intelligence agency for the same length of time as they received their subsidy.

Students in the military programs typically participate for all four years of college, but the intelligence program would seek to recruit sophomores and juniors.

Through grants to colleges and universities, intelligence agencies have been building partnerships with academia and specific professors, some of whom in past decades served as channels for recommending applicants to the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The intelligence community already has a Centers of Academic Excellence Program that funds programs in national security studies at more than 14 colleges and universities, with a goal of having 20 participating schools by 2015. The programs receive between $500,000 and $750,000 a year.

The intelligence officer training program would build on two earlier efforts. One was a pilot program, first authorized in 2004, for as many as 400 students who took cryptologic training and agreed to work for the National Security Agency or another intelligence agency for each year they received financial assistance. That program will be replaced by the new one because cryptology is not as needed as it once was.

A second program provided financial assistance to selected intelligence community employees who agreed to study in specialized academic areas in which officials believed there were analytic deficiencies.

Named the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, after the Kansas Republican who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, over the past four years it has provided funds to some 800 students and current employees.

The director of national intelligence would make the Roberts program permanent under the new proposal and expand it beyond analysts to include personnel in acquisition, science and technology. It also could be used to help recruit employees by reimbursing them for prior education in critical areas.

Wikipedia to Add Video Options to Articles

Posted: 19 Jun 2009 08:06 AM PDT

Wikipedia is a great knowledge base, containing tons of text and lots of photos, but it’s lacking when it comes to videos, which are, well, quite scarce. This is all going to change in a couple of months, as Wikipedia has big plans for video; both in the sense of having more videos on the site, and letting contributors edit and annotate the actual videos.

According to MIT’s Technology Review, this should happen within two or three months. Wikipedia editors will get a new option, Add Media, which will let them search for videos, and insert portions of the video (via a simple drag and drop interface) into the article. Further plans include annotating the actual videos, and editing as well as reorganizing Wikipedia’s video collection – similar to what is now done with Wikipedia’s articles.

Where will the videos come from? Wikipedia has a plan. First, there’s the Metavid, a repository of Congressional speeches and hearings; Internet Archive and its 200,000 videos, and Wikimedia Commons, which is currently mostly holding photos but has a collection of video files as well.

However, once this initiative takes place, Wikipedia hopes that its users and editors will be more keen on uploading videos to Wikimedia. There is a catch, however: the videos added to Wikipedia’s database will have to be based on open-source formats. Since Wikipedia offers great exposure and traffic to everyone, this will surely motivate more people to use or convert their videos to these formats, and more open source is always a good thing.

The Candidates for Indonesia’s Future Bear a Strong Resemblance to the Past

Jakarta Globe, James Van Zorge, June 18 - When I think about how to describe the current crop of Indonesian presidential hopefuls, I have a vision of the past. All three contenders are, in their own way, creatures of Indonesia’s past. Just a decade into the reform period, the major political figures in this country all came into prominence during the Suharto era. Among them, I see one as a classic Suharto-esque businessman, another as a woman longing for a return to the glory days of her father and the third as a transitional liberal willing to break with the past but uncertain how to do so decisively.

Golkar standard-bearer and Vice President Jusuf Kalla belongs to a class of businessmen who seem to view politics as a branch of the family business. Under Suharto, there was nothing wrong with growing one’s business while supposedly serving the public. In this rarefied Manichaean world, monopolies can be a good thing and competition from outside the club is treated with contempt. This is a conservative world where the tenets of democracy might be tolerated but it is hardly a place of liberal values and policies.

For businessmen who thrived under the Suharto regime, growing an empire was predicated upon the grace of the president and his family. Rent-seeking, not competition and open markets, was the magical key for building wealth.

It is small wonder that Kalla and his cohorts wax eloquently about the Suharto years. More than once Kalla has voiced his opinion that democracy has gone too far in Indonesia. I worry that if he were to have his way, he would more than likely dismantle anticorruption agencies, place a muzzle on the media and clamp down on civil and human rights activists.

Given his personal history and values, it is no coincidence that Kalla has chosen retired Gen. (ret.) Wiranto as his running mate. At a young age, Wiranto was taken under Suharto’s wing and served faithfully as the president’s adjutant. In the eyes of Suharto and his children, Wiranto would have made a perfect successor, mostly because he could be trusted to protect the family’s interests and keep the clan firmly in power.

If you think I am exaggerating, consider this: By virtue of where they sit, crony businessmen think of democracy as an intrusion, an unnecessary import from the Western world and, given the potential stakes, which is the dissolution of an old order they came to thrive upon, something to be inherently feared. In the words of a famous liberal US Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis: “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.”

Megawati Sukarnoputri, in contrast to Kalla, is far from being an avaricious industrialist. Neither does she dream of returning Indonesia to its Suharto-run past. But for sure, she is thinking deeply about another past — her father’s.

When I first met Megawati in 1997, I asked her about any plans she might have for a political future and what she might consider as a strategy to reach higher office. Our ensuing conversation, with her eyes swelling in pride whenever I raised the name of Sukarno, was most telling: “Of course I will one day be the president. I often have conversations with my father about that. But as far as a strategy, you Westerners don’t seem to understand. I have no need for a strategy. Instead, I rely upon something else: Factor X.”

True to her word, Megawati did eventually become president. And as far as I could tell, she certainly did not have a strategy. What she did have in mind, however, was following in her father’s footsteps, and if you listened to what she said and even the countries she visited when she was president, it was eerily in lockstep with Sukarno’s own philosophies and travels.

Today, there should be little doubt that what Megawati wants more than anything else is to build a sort of Sukarno dynasty. In that sense, she is similar to another famous woman politician, the late Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, whose father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was, just like Sukarno, an avowed nationalist with socialist leanings who was eventually ousted by a military coup.

Unfortunately, there are also some striking dissimilarities between Megawati and Benazir. While Benazir experienced, in her own words, some of the happiest days of her life in the West during her university years and hence was decidedly pro-Western in her views, Megawati leans toward the opposite side of the aisle. One can only surmise that perhaps her dislike for the West is linked somehow to her knowledge that the United States was no friend of her father.

What, then, given her background, can the electorate expect of Megawati? There is much we know already from her previous stay in office, and many people would conclude from that experience alone that she would not prove much of a leader. Megawati claims, however, that she has learned from her past mistakes. She has also chosen a dynamic running mate, Prabowo Subianto, also a Suharto-era general, who presumably would compensate for her well-known weaknesses.

Still, one must wonder. Megawati’s life experience can’t be erased. Aloof, an avowed nationalist with a strong aversion toward the West, seemingly uninterested in and incapable of grasping the policy issues that are required of a president, and primarily driven by a dynastic impulse for power, there is little reason to believe that Megawati would be a better president if given another chance.

Finally, there is the incumbent, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. How to describe him? I might choose a well-known political figure from the past with similarities to Yudhoyono: former US President Jimmy Carter. Much like Carter, who was also a military man, Yudhoyono’s politics are liberal. Both men are innately reserved and studious. Both are highly educated and considered to be intellectuals.

But the similarities go much deeper. Like Yudhoyono, Carter was criticized while in office for paying too much attention to details. He was also viewed as being indecisive, something which both the Jakarta elite and the electorate recognize as one of Yudhoyono’s most glaring deficiencies. Finally, Yudhoyono shares with Carter an inability to roll up his sleeves and develop the types of political relationships outside the palace grounds that would serve him well in building support for his policies.

If re-elected, many Indonesians are hopeful that, somehow, Yudhoyono will become more assertive and leave more of an imprint and legacy behind him.

Personally, I find it difficult to believe he will change very much in his ways. Adjusting policies is one thing, and there are many examples of presidents who have had second thoughts about their previous stances and took on new courses. But the weaknesses that are so apparent in Yudhoyono are not related to policy. Rather, like Carter, it is a question of character and temperament. Should we expect a mature man entering his sixth decade in life to suddenly and radically change his behavior? Of course not. As the old saying goes, what you see is what you get.



James Van Zorge is a partner in Van Zorge, Heffernan & Associates, a business strategy and government relations consulting firm based in Jakarta. He can be reached at vanheff@gmail.com.

Karen Rebel Army Forced to Retreat

Mizzima, Mae Sot, Larry Jagan, June 18 - Burma’s largest active ethnic rebel group has been forced to abandon its stronghold on the Burmese border with Thailand after weeks of fierce fighting with government troops and rival Karen guerrillas.

The Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), the armed wing of the Karen National Union (KNU), will now resort to guerrilla tactics to fight the Burmese Army rather than waste lives trying to defend territorial bases in eastern Burma, KNLA Commander Jonny told reporters on Thursday.

"The withdrawal from our 7th Division base does not mean we are defeated. It is a tactical redeployment. We also do not want to kill our fellow Karens in this battle," he said.

But many analysts believe this may be the beginning of the end for the KNLA, which has been fighting for self-determination from the Burmese government for sixty years.

Nonetheless, KNU and KNLA leaders insist that the struggle is far from over. “We will fight to the bitter end,” David Thackerbaw, a KNU spokesperson, told Mizzima. “We have no option but to continue fighting. We must hold onto every strip of land."

“We know what is at stake. The Burmese Army will continue to commit human rights abuses, seize our land and control our natural resources if we don’t resist them,” he added.

In the past few weeks thousands of ethnic Karen villagers have been forced to flee across the border into Thailand as the Burmese Army stepped up its assault on the Karen rebels.

Fierce fighting and constant mortar fire close to the Thai border by the Burmese Army has thus far forced more than four thousand ethnic Karen villagers to flee for their safety, according to aid workers in the area.

More than two weeks ago the Burmese Army and a pro-government militia – the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) – launched a major attack along part of the border with Thailand in a last ditch effort to finally destroy the KNLA.

In the past few days the Burmese Army has increased its offensive against the KNU’s armed wing, targeting the KNLA's strongest outfit, the 7th Brigade.

For several weeks the 7th Brigade was able to hold their own against the all-out joint assault, though the strategic relationship appears now to have altered. “If we cannot stand our ground, we will move away,” Thackerbaw emphasized. “We will not let our troops die unnecessarily.”

More than 300 fresh DKBA were brought up from Pa’an, capital of Karen State, over the weekend, reinforcing the already 600-strong force fighting alongside the Burmese Army, according to Karen sources in Burma.

“They intend to use a pincer maneuver to dislodge the KNLA,” a Thai military intelligence officer told Mizzima on condition of anonymity. “There are six Burmese Army battalions involved, with the two thousand Burmese troops split equally at the northern and southern ends of the 7th Brigade’s territory.”

“But it’s the 900-strong DKBA that will bear the brunt of the fighting as they lead the attack, with logistical support from the Burmese Army on either side,” he added.

The 7th Brigade is the KNLA's largest and best trained force. More critically it controls a long and strategically important stretch of land between the KNLA’s northern and southern forces.

Now that they are retreating the other two Karen strongholds are isolated and susceptible to being easily surrounded, according to military analysts in the region.

The KNU has been fighting for independence in the hills of eastern Burma and the world's longest running insurgency. They are one of a handful of rebel militias not to have signed a ceasefire agreement with the junta.

“There is no doubt that the junta, with the help of the DKBA, are going all-out to wrest control of the area along the border from the KNU,” Burmese academic and military specialist Win Min told Mizzima.

The renewed military campaign against the KNLA has been prompted by the regime’s planned elections next year and the proposed creation of a national border police force – comprised of disarmed ethnic rebel armies having reached ceasefire agreements with the regime.

However, thus far most ethnic groups have rejected the junta’s plans, though the DKBA has agreed in principle to become a border police force.

In the area along the Thai border where the KNLA is active, the Burmese Army has closed some 30 of its 100 military camps in the last few months, in anticipation of the DKBA taking control of the area, according to the Free Burma Rangers, who operate inside the country.

“They want to eliminate the KNU now because we have called on all Karen to boycott the elections,” speculated Thackerbaw. “The last thing they want is for other ethnic groups to follow our lead.”

Meanwhile, across the border in Burma many villagers are bracing themselves for further fighting and shelling, with the next few days likely to see the Burmese military substantially step up their operations, said a senior Thai military officer.

As the fighting continues more Karen refugees are certain to seek safety across the border in Thailand. So far refugees have fled from seven villages in the war zone, but there are more than 40 villages affected by the current fighting.

“If the fighting continues, at least 8,000 more villagers will have to escape across the border or die at the hands of the soldiers,” Zipporah Sein, General Secretary of the KNU, told Mizzima.

An Ancient Pagoda’s Collapse Turns Myanmar’s Gaze to the Stars

New York Times, Bangkok, Seth Mydans, June 18 — It cannot have pleased Myanmar’s ruling family: the collapse of a 2,300-year-old gold-domed pagoda into a pile of timbers just three weeks after the wife of the junta’s top general helped rededicate it.

There is no country in Asia more superstitious than Myanmar, and the crumbling of the temple was seen widely as something more portentous than shoddy construction work.

The debacle coincides with the junta’s trial of the country’s pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, after an American intruder swam across a lake and spent a night at the villa where Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for most of the past 19 years.

After two weeks of testimony that began May 18, the trial has been suspended as the court considers procedural motions — and as the junta apparently tries to decide how to manage what seems to have been a major blunder, drawing condemnation from around the world.

The superstitious generals may be consulting astrologers as well as political tacticians for guidance. That would not be unusual for many people in Myanmar, formerly Burma.

Previously, currency denominations and traffic rules have been changed, the nation’s capital has been moved and the timing of events has been selected — even the dates of popular uprisings — with astrological dictates in mind.

“Astrology has as significant a role in policies, leadership and decision making in the feudal Naypyidaw as rational calculations, geopolitics and resource economics,” said Zarni, a Burmese exile analyst and researcher who goes by one name. He was referring to the country’s fortified capital, which opened in 2005.

And so it seemed only natural to read a darker meaning into the temple’s collapse.

The Danok pagoda, on the outskirts of Myanmar’s main city, Yangon, was newly blessed May 7 in the presence of Daw Kyaing Kyaing, the wife of the country’s supreme leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, along with an A-list of junta society. The rite received major coverage in government-controlled media.

In a solemn ceremony, the worshipers fixed a diamond orb to the top of the pagoda along with a pennant-shaped vane and sprinkled scented water onto the tiers of a holy, golden umbrella, according to the government mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar.

Like the rest of the heavily censored press, the newspaper was silent when it all came crashing down.

But word of mouth — and foreign radio broadcasts — spreads fast in Myanmar.

“People were laughing at her,” said a longtime astrologer, reached by telephone in Myanmar, speaking of Mrs. Kyaing Kyaing.

“O.K., she thinks she is so great, but even the gods don’t like her — people believe like that,” the astrologer said on the condition of anonymity because of the danger of speaking to reporters.

“Even the spiritual world will not allow her to do this thing or that thing,” the astrologer said. “People laugh like that.”

The ceremony was part of a decades-old campaign by the senior general to legitimize his military rule on a foundation of Buddhist fealty — dedicating and redecorating temples, attending religious ceremonies and, with his influential wife, making donations to monks and monasteries.

That campaign was undermined, and perhaps fatally discredited, in September 2007 when soldiers beat and shot monks protesting the military rule in the streets, invaded monasteries without removing their boots and imprisoned or disrobed hundreds of monks.

“No matter how many pagodas they build, no matter how much charity they give to monks, it is still they who murdered the monks,” said Josef Silverstein, a Myanmar specialist and professor emeritus at Rutgers University, at the time of the protests.

So when the Danok pagoda suddenly collapsed May 30 as workmen were completing its renovation — killing at least 20 people, according to émigré reports — many people saw it as the latest in a series of bad omens for the junta that included a devastating cyclone early last year.

The pagoda’s sacred umbrella tumbled to the ground, and its diamond orb was lost in the rubble, according to those reports.

“The fact that the umbrella did not stay was a sign that more bad things are to come, according to astrologers,” said Ingrid Jordt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and a specialist in Burmese Buddhism.

“It is also a sign that Than Shwe does not have the spiritual power any longer to be able to undertake or reap the benefit from good acts such as this,” Professor Jordt said in an e-mail message.

“In a sense, the pagoda repudiated Than Shwe’s right to remain ruler.”

As laborers began trying to rebuild the pagoda, local residents gave émigré publications vivid accounts of supernatural happenings.

“The temple collapsed about 3:10 p.m. while I was loading bricks on a platform around the pagoda,” a 24-year-old construction worker told The Irrawaddy, an exile magazine based in Thailand.

“The weather suddenly turned very dark,” he was quoted as saying. “Then we saw a bright red light rising from the northern end of the pagoda. Then, suddenly, the temple collapsed. I also heard a strange haunting voice coming from the direction of the light.”

Indeed, the Danok pagoda may have been a poor choice for the junta’s ruling family to seek religious affirmation.

According to The Irrawaddy, “Several elderly locals from Danok Model Village said that they believed that the pagoda never welcomed cruel or unkind donors, and always shook when such persons made offerings.”