Airports Queue to Fly to Cuba

By PAULO PRADA

U.S. airports are pressing the government to broaden the list of ports of entry allowed to handle flights to and from Cuba, even though the White House is proceeding cautiously with changes in travel policy.

In a recent letter, Peter Horton, the director of Key West International Airport in Florida, urged the Treasury Department to add the facility to the list of three big international airports in Miami, Los Angeles and New York. Earlier this year, Tampa's airport made a similar request. And airport officials in Houston, already one of the biggest gateways between the U.S. and Latin America, say local business leaders have pressed them to push for access to Cuba, too.

In April, the Obama administration eased restrictions on travel and money transfers to the island by U.S. citizens or residents with family in Cuba. The recent requests are an effort by cities and airports to position themselves ahead of any further loosening of travel policy.

"Cities are looking to get ready for any other moves that could mean more travelers flying back and forth between the two countries," said Kirby Jones, a consultant in Bethesda, Md., who advises companies on business with Cuba.

A spokeswoman said the Treasury couldn't comment on specific requests for changes to existing travel policy, but that requests were reviewed when received.

Under Treasury rules, travel to Cuba by Americans is restricted to family members of Cuban citizens, government officials, academics and others who qualify for special licenses to travel there. About 50,000 American travelers, most of whom traveled by charter flights, received licenses last year.

If the travel ban were lifted, eventually as many as one million Americans a year would visit Cuba, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission, a federal agency. Already, charter operators say the changes earlier in the year have caused a spike in the number of Cuba-bound passengers.

"There's a lot of pent-up demand," said Tom Cooper, chairman of Gulfstream Air Charter Inc., a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., carrier that has seen a 25% increase in passengers on the flights it operates between Miami and Cuba.

For decades, travel-related businesses have decried U.S. restrictions, designed to punish Cuba's Communist government, because the rules prevent what could be a lucrative market from developing. Last week, Orbitz Worldwide Inc., the online travel agency, emailed customers asking them to sign a petition urging the U.S. government to lift the ban on travel to and from Cuba outright. The message cites bills, introduced earlier this year in Congress, that propose to do that.

The Obama administration, despite the easing of policy since it took office, hasn't prodded lawmakers to make the bills a priority. Both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have said that any further changes in travel policy, or the broader and longstanding economic embargo against the Cuban regime, would depend on whether Havana takes steps toward democracy.

Still, airports angling for future Cuba service say they need to get ready. Mr. Horton, the Key West airport director, said the island's proximity to Cuba, plus the sizable Cuban-American community living nearby, are factors that would sustain a market for charter flights. The airport has been in the process of expansion and renovation this year.

The airport's letter to the Treasury was accompanied by a letter from Cape Air, an East Coast carrier that flies to Key West, expressing interest in flying to Cuba.

If demand for flights were to increase because of further lifting of restrictions, Mr. Horton said, "the last thing that we want is to get lost in the shuffle as people scramble to try to fly there."

Write to Paulo Prada at paulo.prada@wsj.com

In War and Isolation, a Fighter for Afghan Women

By DENISE GRADY

Everybody wants Pashtoon Azfar. Her government, American aid groups and her own colleagues, the midwives of Afghanistan, all want her to work for them, lead them, help them rebuild a health system from the rubble of war.

Ms. Azfar, 51, is trying to oblige. By day she directs Afghanistan’s Institute of Health Sciences, by night she works for a nonprofit group from Johns Hopkins University that focuses on women and children’s health, and somehow she also manages to serve as president of the Afghan Midwives Association.

Visiting from Kabul recently, she was the star at a Capitol Hill briefing titled “Maternal Health in Afghanistan: How Can We Save Women’s Lives?” Her audience included members of the Congressional caucus for women’s issues.

Afghanistan has the world’s second-highest death rate in women during pregnancy and childbirth (only Sierra Leone’s is worse). For every 100,000 births, 1,600 mothers die; in wealthy countries the rates range from 1 to 12. In one remote northeastern province, Badakhshan, 6,507 mothers die for every 100,000 births, according to a 2005 report in the medical journal Lancet. In all, 26,000 Afghan women a year die while pregnant or giving birth.

The main causes of these deaths are hemorrhage and obstructed labor, which can be fatal if a woman cannot obtain a Caesarean section. Even if the mother survives, obstructed labor without a Caesarean usually kills the baby. Most of the maternal deaths — 78 percent, according to the Lancet report — could be prevented. Against this bleak history, Ms. Azfar told her Washington audience, “I would like to share some successes with you.”

An intense woman with short, graying hair, Ms. Azfar rarely smiles. She ran through statistics showing notable increases recently in the country’s number of midwives, their education and the percentage of women who give birth with the help of a “skilled attendant,” usually a midwife. The United States, the World Bank, the European Commission, Unicef, the Hopkins group (known as Jhpiego) and other donors have all helped Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health to make improvements.

But there is a long way to go. Most women in Afghanistan, as many as 80 percent, still give birth without skilled help, and only a third receive any medical care at all during pregnancy.

Afghanistan’s problems mirror those of many other poor countries: shortages of personnel, supplies and transportation to clinics or hospitals, especially in remote regions and mountainous areas that are snowbound half the year. The deeper problems are cultural, rooted in the low status of women and the misperception that deaths in childbirth are inevitable — part of the natural order, women’s lot in life.

During her talk in Washington Ms. Azfar quoted Dr. Mahmoud Fathalla, an Egyptian physician and advocate for women’s health: “Women are not dying of diseases we can’t treat. ...They are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving.”

Ms. Azfar works 12 hours a day, seven days a week. She has irked relatives by missing weddings and other family events because of work.

“My children are not happy,” she said in an interview after her speech.

Ms. Azfar grew up in a village about an hour from Kabul.

“Everywhere then, girls went to school,” she said. “Women’s rights before the Taliban were the same as in Western countries. Women had the right to vote.”

Her mother had 10 children, 2 of whom died. She always gave birth alone, behind a closed door. When Ms. Azfar was 9, she began to help, by waiting outside the door to receive the newborn baby and wash and swaddle it, while her mother then delivered her own placenta.

Ms. Azfar never actually saw a birth until she began studying midwifery at age 16, and only then, she said, did she realize how brave her mother had been. She finished the rigorous three-year program at the top of her class in 1976.

“It was a very well-respected profession in my country,” she said.

But decades of war destroyed midwifery and much of health care, she said. Professionals fled the country, and many never went back.

“One day, 100 rockets came into Kabul,” she said. She and her husband, a physician, took their four children and moved to Pakistan, living there from 1992 to 2003. She had a fifth child there.

By the time she returned to Afghanistan, she said, midwifery was in a shambles. Spots in professional schools of all kinds were being filled by people with political connections instead of those with good grades. The midwives who had stayed behind had not received any continuing education. Their skills were outdated, and their attitudes were even worse.

“A culture of war was going on,” Ms. Azfar said. “If a mother came for delivery they didn’t treat her as she deserved or needed to be treated. There was no emotional support.”

Attitude counts in midwifery: if midwives and other health workers seem indifferent or disrespectful, women start to avoid the clinics, and they miss out on the help they urgently need.

Ms. Azfar acknowledged that it was hard to change attitudes, but she insisted that it could be done, by making “interpersonal skills” part of the training and the tests that students must pass to be allowed to practice. In Afghanistan, these things became part of the midwifery curriculum in 2004.

“Does she greet the mother properly?” she asked. “Offer her a chair? A drink of water? Introduce herself? Let the mother ask questions? They are trained. They have to do it.”

She has seen signs of progress, of hope.

“Just five years ago we started the reconstruction of this profession,” Ms. Azfar said. “These midwives, they are champions. Oh, I love them. They are my heart.”

Entry Level - Where Nepalese Is Spoken, and Yak Is Served

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

Located in the shadow of the elevated No. 7 train tracks in Jackson Heights, Queens, Himalayan Yak is a popular restaurant for Nepalese and Tibetan immigrants in the region. Jamyang Gurung, 26 (or 27, using the Nepalese method of calculating age), manages the restaurant for his uncle, who bought it about five years ago.

Behind the restaurant’s name: The old owner was pure Tibetan. The old name was Yak. We keep the same Yak, but we added the “Himalayan” word. We wanted to serve all Himalayans.

Do you serve yak? Yes. But not right now. We have to place an order before a week. We order it from over there — Minnesota, Colorado. Yak meat is not that expensive. More expensive than lamb. Yak meat is $7.99. Yak meat is very good and organic, and juicy.

On the menu: Typical Nepalese food. Our restaurant is famous for Tibetan food also. We have Indian food also. We are going to change a little bit. We want to add seafood items.

Is there seafood in Himalayan cuisine? We don’t have sea in Nepal. Nepal is a landlocked country. We don’t have sushi also over there.

Hometown: I was born in Nepal, in Mustang, like Mustang car, you know. Mustang is the border of Tibet and Nepal. It’s one of the famous tourist areas in Nepal. All our ancestors are from Tibet. Most Mustang people are similar to Tibetan. Our culture is the same. We believe in Buddhism. We also believe in Dalai Lama.

How many languages do you speak? Just three: Nepali, Tibetan and English. All the Mustang people speak Tibetan. Our mother tongue is Tibetan. The national language is Nepali. Because it’s a tourist area, it’s very important to speak English. You have to deal with customers.

On moving to New York in 2002: I thought New York must be very beautiful, very different from Katmandu. When I came to Queens, it looked so similar. But then I went to Times Square and that was, I thought, “Oh, my God.” There were all these high buildings. I thought, “How can they build like this? How many people can fit in one building?”

Does the subway bother you? Sometimes, but it has now become a habit. Mustang — we have wind, crazy wind. It’s a cold desert. It’s very loud. Around 12 midday, it stops everything. People stop to walk in the day.

On-location TV shoot: “Ugly Betty” was here. They booked the whole day. The location director came as a customer. He liked the environment. He talked to the main director. They ordered yak sausage.

The breakdown of your customers: Nepalese, Tibetan, Himalayan are 75 percent, 25 percent are foreigners.

Are they foreigners, if your restaurant is in the United States? We call them tourists in Nepal. Whenever you see white people, you call them tourists. So many people come from Europe and America, so you don’t know if they are Americans. That’s why we call them tourists. When you are over here, we have the same concept.

Landowners Still in Exile From Unstable Pakistan Area

By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Even as hundreds of thousands of people stream back to the Swat Valley after months of fighting, one important group is conspicuously absent: the wealthy landowners who fled the Taliban in fear and are the economic pillar of the rural society.

The reluctance of the landowners to return is a significant blow to the Pakistani military’s campaign to restore Swat as a stable, prosperous part of Pakistan, and it presents a continuing opportunity for the Taliban to reshape the valley to their advantage.

About four dozen landlords were singled out over the past two years by the militants in a strategy intended to foment a class struggle. In some areas, the Taliban rewarded the landless peasants with profits of the crops of the landlords. Some resentful peasants even signed up as the Taliban’s shock troops.

How many of those peasants stayed with the militants during the army offensive of the last several months, and how many moved to the refugee camps, was difficult to assess, Pakistani analysts said.

But reports emerging from Swat show that the Taliban still have the strength to terrorize important areas. The army continues to fight the Taliban in their strongholds, particularly in the Matta and Kabal regions of Swat, not far from the main city, Mingora, where many refugees have reclaimed their homes.

In those regions, the Taliban have razed houses, killed a civilian working for the police in Matta and kidnapped another, worrying counterinsurgency experts, who fear that the refugees may have been encouraged by the Pakistani authorities to go back too soon.

The rebuilding of Swat, a fertile area of orchards and forests, is a critical test for the government and the military as they face Taliban insurgencies across the tribal belt, particularly in Waziristan on the Afghanistan border.

In a sign of the lack of confidence that Mingora was secure, the Pakistani military declined a request by the Obama administration’s special envoy to Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, to visit the town last week.

There was nervousness, an American counterinsurgency expert said, that the plans by the Pakistani authorities to build new community police forces in Swat would not materialize quickly enough to protect the returning civilians, who are also starved of basic services like banks and sufficient medical care.

“There is no apparatus in place to replace the army,” said an American counterinsurgency official. “The army will be the backstop.”

About two million people have fled Swat and surrounding areas since the military opened its campaign to push back the Taliban at the end of April. The United Nations said Monday that 478,000 people had returned to Swat so far, but it cautioned that it was unable to verify the figure, which was provided by the government.

Assessment trips by United Nations workers to Swat scheduled for Monday and Tuesday were canceled for security reasons, and the United Nations office in Peshawar that serves as the base for Swat operations was closed Monday because of a high threat of kidnapping, a spokesman said.

The landlords, many of whom raised sizable militias to fight the Taliban themselves last year, say the army is again failing to provide enough protection if they return.

Another deterrent to returning, they say, is that the top Taliban leadership, responsible for taking aim at the landlords and spreading the spoils among the landless, remains unscathed.

If it continues, the landlords’ absence will have lasting ramifications not only for Swat, but also for Pakistan’s most populated province, Punjab, where the landholdings are vast, and the militants are gaining power, said Vali Nasr, a senior adviser to Mr. Holbrooke, the American envoy.

“If the large landowners are kept out by the Taliban, the result will in effect be property redistribution,” Mr. Nasr said. “That will create a vested community of support for the Taliban that will see benefit in the absence of landlords.”

At two major meetings with the landlords, the Pakistani military and civilian authorities requested that they return in the vanguard of the refugees. None have agreed to do so, according to several of the landowners and a senior army officer.

“We have sacrificed so much; what has the government and the military done for us?” asked Sher Shah Khan, a landholder in the Kuz Bandai area of Swat. He is now living with 50 family members in a rented house about 60 miles from Swat. Four family members and eight servants were killed trying to fight off the Taliban, he said.

At one of the meetings, Mr. Khan said he had asked the army commanders to provide weapons so the landlords could protect themselves, as the landowners had in the past.

The military refused the request, he said, saying it would fight the Taliban. Yet Pakistani soldiers had failed to protect his lands, he said. Twenty of his houses were blown up by the Taliban after the army ordered him and his family to leave their lands on two hours’ notice last September, he said.

A letter he sent last month to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the head of the Pakistani military, asking for compensation has gone unanswered, he said. In the meantime, one of his tenants called asking if he could plant crops on Mr. Khan’s property. He refused but had little idea what was happening back home, Mr. Khan said.

Other landlords are equally frustrated. The mayor of Swat, Jamal Nasir, fled after his father, Shujaat Ali Khan, regarded as the biggest landlord in Swat, narrowly avoided being killed by the Taliban. Mr. Nasir, a major landowner himself, now stays in his house in Islamabad.

The top guns of the Taliban are still in Swat, or perhaps in neighboring Dir, Mr. Nasir said. “These people should be arrested,” he said. “If they are not arrested, they are going to come back.”

Another landlord, Sher Mohammad, said he was still bitter that the army refused to help as he, his brother and his nephew fought off the Taliban last year for 13 hours, even though soldiers were stationed less than a mile away. Mr. Mohammad was hit in the groin by a bullet and lost a finger in the fight.

At one of the meetings with the military in Peshawar, Mr. Mohammad, a prominent politician with the Pakistan Peoples Party, said he told the officers that he was not impressed with their performance.

“They said, ‘We will protect you,’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘We don’t trust you.’ ”

Different Teams, Common Goals: Camaraderie, Competition Unite Area Ethnic Groups

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Uighurs eased their cars into George Mason University's Lot I, as they do most Sundays. They dropped their bags on the edge of a field and pulled on cleats and blue shirts.

The Kurds arrived soon after. They slapped hands with the Uighurs and exchanged greetings: "Hey," they said, "Salam-u aleikum." A few from both sides knelt on the field to pray. Then it was time to play.

Soccer is the Esperanto of sports. Everyone from everywhere seems to play it; all you need are feet and a ball. In the Washington region, where so many ethnic enclaves share a passion for the sport, soccer fields can sometimes feel like the United Nations: Ethiopians and Ugandans; Bolivians and Kazakhs; Uighurs and Kurds. The teams might not speak the same language, but everyone understands "goal," "pass" and "corner."

Uighur United, a Northern Virginia-based team of men in their teens and 20s, was formed in 2005. Many Uighurs, a Muslim minority in western China, arrived with their families about 10 years ago, often via countries such as Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, where they fled to escape pressure from the Chinese government. They play against other Uighurs (pronounced "WEE-ghurs") across the United States and in Canada and this year plan to go to Australia.

"We're using it as a tool to reunite our youth," said Shafkat Ali, 22, a George Mason student who lives in Reston.

"Some of the people who come here at a young age, they sort of forget their own culture," explained Mustafa Sidik, 25, a University of Maryland student who lives in Annandale. "They get kind of Americanized. That's not a bad thing, but we don't want them to forget their culture."

They are also doing something their cousins in western China can't since a violent Chinese crackdown on Uighur protesters this month.

"Most of the time they . . . don't want you to get together," said Sidik, referring to the Chinese government, which he said has barred large gatherings of Uighurs. Soccer counts as a gathering. "I don't think anyone's playing soccer right now."

Kurds in northern Iraq can gather unmolested these days, but they, too, faced repression for years and often came here for similar reasons. In fact, many played soccer with the Uighurs at Fairfax High School, and they now attend local universities together.

For whatever reason, the Uighurs are more organized than the Kurds, who don't have matching shirts or even a team name.

"I wish we could have a team like them, because they go to Canada and different states," said Zirian Shammo, 21, a Kurd from Centreville who studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The Sunday afternoon games are not particularly competitive. Still, each team wants to win. "They make fun of us all week if we lose," Shammo said. "The past couple of months, we've been losing, so all the jokes are on us."

The field has the potential to be a cacophony of tongues. The Uighur language is similar to Turkish, and two Kurdish dialects spoken by the players, Bahdini and Sorani, are incomprehensible to one another. The referee, an Iraqi, speaks Arabic. The game, therefore, takes place mostly in English.

As does the cheerleading, undertaken by a lone Kurdish woman with long black hair and coal black eyes.

"What the hell was that?" shrieks Sabat Mahmoud, 20, when the Uighurs score a goal in the first minute. She attends George Mason and often attends these games. "Come on, Kurdistan!"

About 20 minutes in, another group of Kurds shows up. Furious that the game has started without them, they pull on fluorescent yellow vests and run onto the field, insisting that they are the regulars and that the non-regulars must leave. Those already playing say there is no official roster; it's first-come, first-served.

The argument heats up. Some Uighurs sit down on the field to wait. Ahmed Razak, an Iraqi computer engineer who describes himself as a little of everything -- "Kurd, Turkish, Shi'a" -- retires to a bench, muttering, "You wonder why there's no peace in the Middle East."

But the fight has nothing to do with nationality; it's the same posturing among young men anywhere. Accusations of "disrespecting" are thrown around. A Kurdish player charges another; a Uighur holds him back. Rolling her eyes like an experienced matron, Mahmoud inserts herself between the combatants, saying, "Why don't we just go bowling?"

Finally, the fighting ebbs, a goal is moved to make room for a smaller Kurdish game and the larger game starts over. Despite the damp heat, they play energetically; they are even balletic. By the time the referee blows the whistle, it is almost dark.

The Kurds have won, 7-5. The Uighurs collapse beside their goal and justify their loss: They were more fatigued at the end because they played longer than the Kurds, thanks to the earlier mix-up.

The conversation turns to Chinese food, which the Uighurs insist includes dog meat; Japanese food, which is "cleanest" but involves raw fish; and wives, which, they say, are hard to find here. Most players live with their parents, who want them to find Uighur girls, but the pool is limited. One player went back home in 2006 to look for one but had no success there, either.

Ashraf Tahir, a native of Sudan and one of the team's two non-Uighurs, sympathizes about the difficulty of finding a good wife. "Our women, once they get here, become harder to deal with on a daily basis."

The players cross the field toward their cars. They talk about an upcoming protest in front of the White House. They talk about how the Chinese didn't like their parents' generation to practice Islam; now that they are here and free to worship, in some ways it's more difficult because of the non-Islamic temptations.

Walking ahead, Tahir, 24, explains to the Uighur goalie, a tall boy of 16, that a real man doesn't lose his temper, that Islam teaches that the best person is the one who controls his emotions. Many things in life will require a lot more patience than soccer.

"One day, you're going to have a wife to deal with," he said, "and you're going to have kids, and a job and a boss and co-workers who stab you in the back."

Iranian Leaders Urge Protections for Detained Protesters

By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

TEHRAN, July 27 -- Top Iranian leaders on Monday called for greater protection for opposition demonstrators arrested during this summer's protests after at least three were reported in recent days to have died in custody.

The calls reflect concern, even among Iran's ruling elite, that some of those detained are being mistreated by officials and groups operating under the authority of the powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has taken an ever larger role in Iranian affairs since protests over June's disputed presidential election triggered a massive crackdown.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, speaking through his representative on the National Security Council, called Monday for criminal acts to be handled through proper legal channels. Khamenei ordered the closure of a substandard prison facility and reminded officials that "criminal acts should be confronted by government bodies only within the framework of the law and no one can deny the legal rights of any individual," the representative, Saeed Jalili, quoted Khamenei as saying, according to the semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency.

Meanwhile, Iran's judiciary chief, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, ordered the Tehran prosecutor to decide within a week the fate of protesters detained after the election, his spokesman told the Mehr News Agency. He also called for the quick release of those who have not committed serious crimes.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps, the 125,000-strong military force that also commands the volunteer Basij militia, took control of Tehran's security in the aftermath of the election. Politicians inside and outside the government have said they believe that the Revolutionary Guard has also taken the lead in handling detained protesters, and that the traditional justice system has been circumvented.

"The police and the Intelligence Ministry have said that they're not at the center of this and are not aware of who is responsible," said Hamid Reza Katouzian, a member of a parliamentary commission researching the arrests, according to the semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency. "Those who've created such a security environment and have been going forward with military force need to be held responsible."

Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated presidential candidate who leads the opposition, echoed those comments Monday. "I'm sure the Justice Ministry cannot and does not have the right to visit many of the prisons," he said, according to Ghalam News, run by his supporters.

He and other protest leaders have asked the Interior Ministry for permission to hold a silent commemoration service Thursday, which marks the 40th day after the violent death of Neda Agha Soltan, whose final moments were captured on video and broadcast around the world. Officials say 20 protesters and seven Basij members were killed during the demonstrations. Human rights groups say the toll was far higher.

Concern for prisoners comes amid shock within Iran's political elite over the death in custody of a protester who was the son of a former top adviser in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government.

Mohsen Rouholamini, a computer programming student who was in his 20s, was arrested July 9 during a large anti-government demonstration. Twelve days later, his family members were told they could pick up his body. Hossein Alaei, a retired Revolutionary Guard commander and friend of the Rouholamini family, wrote a dramatic open letter published on Nowruznews, a Web site close to the opposition, conveying the words of Abdolhussein Rouholamini, the father.

"When I saw his body I noticed that they had crushed his mouth. My son was an honest person. He wouldn't lie. I'm sure that he's given correct answers to anything they'd asked him," the letter said. "They probably couldn't stand his honesty and beat him until he died under torture."

Feud Between Greece, Macedonia Continues Over Claim to Alexander the Great

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

SKOPJE, Macedonia -- Alexander the Great died more than 2,300 years ago. But his cult of personality is just starting to grip this tiny Balkan country.

To the annoyance of next-door Greece, which has long claimed the conqueror as its own, Macedonia has anointed Alexander its national hero. The government has renamed the international airport here in his honor, as well as the main highway to Greece. Soon to come: a 72-foot-tall marble colossus of Alexander astride his favorite warhorse, Bucephalus, which will dominate the skyline of the capital, Skopje.

The mania over Alexander is the latest chapter in a long-running feud between Macedonia and Greece that some officials fear has the potential to destabilize a region still trying to recover from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

The dispute centers on a basic question: Does Macedonia, a country born out of the rubble of the former Yugoslavia, have the right to call itself what it wants? For 18 years, the conflict has defied attempts by the United States, the United Nations and European powers to find a solution.

The Greek government refuses to recognize its neighbor's constitutional name, the Republic of Macedonia, which it sees as a thinly veiled bid to lay claim to three of its northern districts, a region known as Greek Macedonia. After Macedonia declared independence in 1991, Greece prevented it from joining the United Nations and imposed an economic blockade that nearly strangled the fledgling country.

Greece also vetoed Macedonia's bid to join NATO last year and is blocking its admission to the European Union until it changes its name to the Republic of Skopje, the Slavic Republic of Macedonia or something similar.

Macedonian officials said they cannot understand why Greece sees their country's name as a threat or thinks they have a secret plan to annex northern Greece.

"It's laughable," said Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki, noting that the Macedonian military consists of 8,000 troops and a fleet of eight helicopters. "In America, you have a good phrase to describe a confusing situation. You say, 'It's all Greek to me.' Sometimes we say it's all Greek to us as well."

Greeks complain that the Republic of Macedonia is challenging their national identity and stealing their history. Alexander, the ruler of the ancient kingdom of Macedonia, was born in the city of Pella, located in present-day Greece. The Athens government says there is no question that he was Greek. The Republic of Macedonia, it says, consists of Slavs and other outsiders who invaded the region a millennium after Alexander died.

"This practice is bothering Greece a lot," said Greek Deputy Foreign Minister Yannis Valinakis. "It demonstrates Skopje's lack of goodwill and respect."

Under a truce brokered in 1995 by former U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance, Macedonia was allowed to join the United Nations on the Greek condition that it refer to itself in multinational institutions as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM. It was also required to change its flag and rewrite its constitution to include a promise never to violate Greek territory or interfere in Greece's internal affairs.

Macedonians hate the FYROM label, which is a reminder of communist times. Although the government has persuaded more than 120 countries, including the United States, to recognize it as the Republic of Macedonia, it is still forced to go by FYROM at the United Nations.

Officials in Skopje said that they were willing to swallow FYROM again as the price of admission to NATO last year but that Greece refused. Matthew Nimetz, the U.N.'s special envoy for the dispute, said recently he was optimistic a compromise could be reached but gave no details.

Leaders in Macedonia, a poor, landlocked country about the size of New Hampshire, warned they may have trouble holding the nation together if Greece does not relent soon. Internal unrest, they said, could easily spread to other fragile nations in the Balkans, such as neighboring Kosovo, where 1,500 U.S. troops serve as part of a peacekeeping force.

"The problem is threatening the fabric of our society," Gjorge Ivanov, the president of Macedonia, said in an interview. "The pressure that Greece is making is destabilizing the whole region."

In the Balkans, it doesn't take much for conflicts to spin out of control. Macedonia almost descended into civil war in 2001 because of fighting between ethnic Albanians, who are Muslim and constitute a quarter of the population, and ethnic Macedonians, who are Orthodox Christian.

Since then, the two groups have shared power under a peace agreement based on the assumption that Macedonia would join NATO. Both sides see the military alliance as a guarantee of internal stability. "It would give us medicine for our hot heads," said Menduh Tachi, leader of the opposition Democratic Party of Albanians.

But Tachi said the pact could be derailed if the dispute over the country's name persists much longer. "I don't even want to think of what would happen if we can't resolve it and join NATO," he said. "It would be a Frankenstein scenario."

Macedonians say the name of the country is crucial to developing their still wobbly national identity. Ethnic Albanians say they would revolt if the Slavic Republic of Macedonia was the new name because they are not Slavs. Almost nobody wants another Greek-preferred version, the Republic of Skopje, which ignores everyone outside the capital.

Historically, territory inhabited by ethnic Macedonians has belonged to other nations: Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. Those countries have been reluctant to recognize ethnic Macedonians as a separate people, to recognize their Slavic language as a distinct tongue or even to recognize the Macedonian Orthodox Church.

Todor Petrov, president of the World Macedonian Congress, a group founded by Macedonian exiles in 1899, said the country should stop kowtowing to Greece and just call itself the Republic of Macedonia, regardless of how badly it wants to join NATO or the European Union.

In an interview, he accused Greece of "practicing ethnic cleansing and genocide on the Macedonian nation" for the past 100 years. "They're denying our nationality and culture and church and history and our borders," he said.

It is not just Macedonia's national identity that is at stake. The Greek government does not recognize ethnic minorities within its own borders, including Macedonian-speaking residents of northern Greece.

Pavle Voskopoulos, a Greek citizen who leads the Rainbow Party, a group of ethnic Macedonians in northern Greece, said the country subscribes to a myth of a "pure" Greek people who are directly descended from Alexander and others from his era. "This is all about modern Greek identity," he said. "If there is a Macedonia as an independent state, this is a great threat against Greek policy and Greek ideology."

Lacking the clout to force Greece to budge, Macedonia has intensified its glorification of Alexander and other ancient heroes, a campaign that critics in Skopje deride as "antiquization."

The country has renamed its national stadium for King Philip II, Alexander's father, and organized dozens of archaeological digs. Officials also like to needle Greeks that the philosopher Aristotle, who tutored the teenage Alexander, was from the kingdom of Macedonia, not Athens.

Pasko Kuzman, the government's director of cultural heritage, is a driving force behind Macedonia's surge of interest in the past. With flowing white hair, three heavy-duty watches strapped to his thick wrists and a National Geographic fanny pack, he has been described as a cross between Indiana Jones and Santa Claus.

In an interview in his office, sitting next to a wall-size copy of a 13th-century icon of Alexander, Kuzman insisted that Greece had stolen the conqueror's legacy from Macedonia, not the other way around.

"The Greeks are sorry that they are called Greece and not Macedonia," he said. "What else can I tell you?"

As Violence Hurts Commerce, Pakistanis Doubt Value of U.S. Textile Bill

By Joshua Partlow and Haq Nawaz Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- A concrete wall already encircles Mohsin Aziz's office, but workers are making it higher brick by brick. Kalashnikov-wielding guards shadow the industrialist everywhere he goes. A chase car tracks his black sedan through thick city traffic.

Even with such precautions, Aziz said, his family considers him a "madman" for keeping his business in Peshawar, the violent capital of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. Military-imposed curfews keep laborers from his factories, and he sometimes has to beg his managers to come to work.

"I tell them, 'I am here with you. I will not leave you behind, dead or alive,' " said Aziz, who manufactures matches, textiles, laminates and particleboard. "We will die together."

Bombings and kidnappings by the Taliban and criminal gangs are strangling the economic life of this metropolis adjacent to the tribal territory along the Afghan border. Businessmen have fled south to safer provinces or left the country, slashed production, laid off employees, and closed down offices.

Government statistics show that large-scale manufacturing has contracted 7.6 percent across Pakistan in the past year, while a survey by the Industrialists Association of Peshawar found a 37 percent plunge in the industrial sector here. Business associations estimate that the number of industrial jobs, the main economic lifeline, has already fallen from more than 100,000 to about 25,000. Factories that ran round-the-clock now scrape by with a single shift.

"This is a recipe for disaster," said Nauman Wazir, former president of the Industrialists Association. "This is going to have a spiraling effect into more unemployment and into more radicalism."

The Obama administration has pledged to bring economic relief to these border regions dominated by Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. In March, the president called on Congress to pass a bill that would create what are known as "reconstruction opportunity zones" to "develop the economy and bring hope to places plagued with violence."

That bill passed the House last month. It is intended to allow businesses in areas such as North-West Frontier Province, the tribal areas and a 100-mile border swath of Baluchistan in southern Pakistan to export textiles and apparel to the United States duty-free.

But Pakistani businessmen said limits on what textiles are covered -- sought by U.S. business lobbyists -- render the bill, and its pending Senate version, largely worthless.

Many products eligible for duty-free status are not items that Pakistan produces in large quantity, according to an analysis by the Citizens Voice, a Peshawar-based think tank of business and civic leaders.

"This is ridiculous, this is not going to work, this is a non-starter," said Aleema Khan, chairman of Cotton Connection, a Lahore-based firm that buys textiles for large American companies. "Everybody's rejecting it. Major industry is rejecting it. Buyers are rejecting it. This bill should not go through. The fact that they haven't done their homework is what's so scary."

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), one of the sponsors, said that he would support expanding the scope of products eligible for duty-free status, "so long as that does not doom the prospects of the bill."

"I always worry about making the perfect the enemy of the good. It's important to get something started," Van Hollen said. "One thing the president's been clear about is that military force alone will not resolve the conflict in Afghanistan, you need to provide greater economic opportunities in these conflict-ridden regions. This is not something that happens overnight, and this is part of a sustained strategy."

Van Hollen, citing a report by the Congressional Research Service, said the 38 textile and apparel categories included in the bill account for $1.4 billion of the $2.7 billion worth of goods that Pakistan exports each year to the United States.

Businessmen in Pakistan dispute those figures. Muhammad Atif Hanif, a manager at Dubai Islamic Bank in Peshawar and a member of the Citizens Voice, said that Pakistani textile exports tend to fall into six categories -- including cotton pants, underwear, knit shirts and hosiery -- and all are excluded from the legislation. The current legislation would benefit only about $200 million of the export industry, he said.

Said Mohsin Aziz: "We are supposed to produce swimsuits, we are supposed to produce neckties, we are supposed to produce handkerchiefs, we are supposed to produce silk gowns, which we have never produced, which we do not have the raw material for, which we do not have the expertise for. It's just a game."

Most people concede that developing significant industry in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas remains a long-term goal because the region is largely ungoverned mountain territory devoid of modern property rights or legal infrastructure and on the verge of a Pakistani military invasion. But trying to encourage textile investment in North-West Frontier Province also has generated skepticism here, as those industries' hubs reside in Karachi and Faisalbad, outside this province.

"It's not something they've ever done. I'm not going to buy from there, and I'm one of the most aggressive buyers in this country," Khan said.

On the ground in Peshawar, debates over U.S. help that is potentially years away are overshadowed by the threats businessmen face each day. As many as 300 people a month, mostly businessmen, have been kidnapped for ransom in the province, said Muhammad Ishaq, vice president of the Frontier Chamber of Commerce. Two years ago, there were 2,254 industrial companies here. Today, 594 remain, the others driven out by war and power shortages, according to the chamber.

Earlier this year, anonymous letters believed to be from the Taliban, delivered to banks, insurance companies and other businesses, demanded that employees wear traditional Islamic baggy tunics and pants, known as a salwar-kameez.

"I am wearing this because bankers have been threatened not to wear suits," one Peshawar banker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said of his tunic.

Ilyas Bilour, a senator and owner of a vegetable oil business in Peshawar, said he has shed 10 to 20 percent of his workforce, and the factories now operate only half the month. He moved his children and grandchildren to Islamabad to keep them safe.

"The insurance people are not covering terrorism insurance. We are ready to pay them more, much more, but they are not ready to accept our high offers," he said.

Nauman Wazir, who owns companies that produce rebar, marble and hunting weapons, has a simple strategy to weather these violent times. "I travel fully armed. AK-47s. Pistols can't save you. An AK-47 can save you. Fully loaded. I don't take chances," he said. He knows what he's up against. A decade ago, kidnappers held him for 60 days.

"Either I'm going to kill him or I'm going to get killed. I'm not having any of this kidnapping business."

New Strategy Urged in Mexico

By William Booth and Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

MEXICO CITY -- President Felipe Calderón is under growing pressure to overhaul a U.S.-backed anti-narcotics strategy that many political leaders and analysts said is failing amid spectacular drug cartel assaults against the government.

There are now sustained calls in Mexico for a change in tactics, even from allies within Calderón's political party, who say the deployment of 45,000 soldiers to fight the cartels is a flawed plan that relies too heavily on the blunt force of the military to stem soaring violence and lawlessness.

"The people of Mexico are losing hope, and it is urgent that Congress, the political parties and the president reconsider this strategy," said Ramón Galindo, a senator and Calderón supporter who is a former mayor of Ciudad Juarez, a border city where more than 1,100 people have been killed this year.

U.S. officials said they now believe Mexico faces a longer and bloodier campaign than anticipated and is likely to require more American aid. U.S. and Mexican officials increasingly draw comparisons to Colombia, where from 2000 to 2006 the United States spent $6 billion to help neutralize the cartels that once dominated the drug trade. While violence is sharply down in Colombia, cocaine production is up.

Mexico, nearly twice Colombia's size, faces a more daunting challenge, many officials and analysts said , in part because it sits adjacent to the United States, the largest illegal drug market in the world. In addition, at least seven major cartels are able to recruit from Mexico's swelling ranks of impoverished youth and thousands of disenfranchised soldiers and police officers.

"The question is whether the country can withstand another three years of this, with violence that undermines the credibility of the government," said Carlos Flores, who has studied the drug war extensively for Mexico City's Center for Investigations and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology. "I'd like to be more optimistic, but what I see is more of the same polarizing and failed strategy."

U.S. and Mexican government officials say the military strategy, while difficult, is working. Since Calderón took office in December 2006, authorities have arrested 76,765 suspected drug traffickers at all levels and have extradited 187 cartel members to the United States. Calderón's security advisers said they have few options besides the army -- as they just begin to vet and retrain the police forces they say will ultimately take over the fight.

"No one has told us what alternative we have," said Interior Minister Fernando Gómez Mont, gently slapping his palm on a table during an interview. "We are committed to enduring this wave of violence. We are strengthening our ability to protect the innocent victims of this process, which is the most important thing. We will not look the other way."

Drug-related deaths during the 2 1/2 years of Calderon's administration passed 12,000 this month. Rather than shrinking or growing weaker, the Mexican cartels are using their wealth and increasing power to expand into Central America, cocaine-producing regions of the Andes and maritime trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific, according to law enforcement authorities.

In Mexico, neither high-profile arrests nor mass troop deployments have stopped the cartels from unleashing spectacular acts of violence. This month, the cartel called La Familia launched three days of coordinated attacks in eight cities in the western state of Michoacan. Responding to the arrest of one its leaders, La Familia abducted, tortured and killed a dozen federal agents; their corpses were found piled up beside a highway.

In Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Calderón flooded the city with 10,000 troops and federal police officers in February in an effort to stem runaway violence. After a two-month lull, drug-related homicides surged 307 percent, to nearly eight killings a day in June. On Wednesday, a man eating lunch at a Denny's restaurant across the street from the U.S. Consulate was shot six times in the head by a trio of gunmen.

Lawmakers in Chihuahua state, where Juarez is located, debated this month whether Calderón's surge was "a total failure." Antonio Andreu, president of the state legislature's commission on security, said it appears that drug gangs have infiltrated the military's intelligence networks and figured out how to circumvent the gauntlet of security forces in Juarez.

Héctor Hawley Morelos, the state forensics chief for Juarez, said he expects this year to be bloodier than the last. He said the soldiers don't help solve crime cases and often get in the way of investigations.

But Calderón has no intention of changing course, according to senior Mexican officials. In some respects, the government has become more combative. After a La Familia leader called a television station and said the cartel was "open to dialogue," Gómez Mont vowed that the government would never strike a deal with the traffickers.

"We're waiting for you," he warned La Familia.

In the interview, Gómez Mont said that to ease up now would be to sanction criminal behavior and its corrupting influence on Mexican society.

"We have to do this while we are strong enough to do it," he said. "We know we are right. Do I have to accept corruption as a way of stabilizing our society? No. I have to act."

"This battle is a full frontal assault," Monte Alejandro Rubido, Calderon's senior adviser on drug policy on Mexico's National Security Council, said in an interview. "There are no alternatives."

Calderón is highly regarded in U.S. law enforcement circles for declaring war on the traffickers and increasing cooperation between the two governments. Asked whether he would make any changes to the Mexican president's strategy, Anthony Placido, chief of intelligence for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, replied: "None."

But Placido said he was concerned that Calderón was fighting not only well-entrenched criminal organizations. "He's also fighting the clock," Placido said. "Public support for this can't remain high forever. He's really got to deliver a death blow, or significant body blow, in the short term to keep the public engaged."

Calderón appears to be increasingly isolated in Mexico, weakened by his party's defeat in recent mid-term elections and by the relentless carnage. The cover of the influential news magazine Proceso this week featured a photo of the 12 federal agents, their bound and mutilated corpses in a pile, beneath the headline: "Calderón's War."

"The president feels alone, and he told me that personally," said Galindo, the senator, who belongs to Calderón's conservative National Action Party.

Galindo said he urged Calderón to change course. Instead of relying on the army to destroy the cartels, he said, the federal government should work to strengthen local communities that are most vulnerable to the traffickers.

"Every day that we delay making these communities more self-sufficient, it is going to become more difficult to find good people prepared to serve as mayor in any city -- no matter how large or small -- because it's like a death sentence," he said.

Dan Lund, president of the MUND Group polling organization, said public support for Calderón's strategy appears to be weakest in the places where the federal government needs it most. "In a series of national surveys, polls consistently have found a reasonable but cautious level of support for using the military in the front lines against the cartels," he said. "But in all the states where the military is actually deployed, the support goes down, sometimes dramatically."

The situation has been exacerbated by the global economic crisis, which has cast millions of Mexicans into poverty. José Luis Piñeyro, a Mexican military analyst who maintains close ties with the armed forces, said rising unemployment and poverty "is creating what I call an 'army in reserve,' " for the traffickers.

In Michoacan, La Familia has used the media to try to align itself with the disenfranchised. After the recent attacks, one of its leaders, Servando Gómez, called a local television station and told viewers: "I want to say to all Michoacanans, we love them and respect them."

"Everyone here has known us since we were kids," said Gómez, who is known as "La Tuta." "We are with the people of Michoacan."

Carlos Heredia, a former Michoacan official who now works as an analyst at a Mexico City think tank, said the government's iron-fisted approach is a recipe for failure in regions where mistrust of the government is high.

"You don't have the hearts and minds of the local population," Heredia said. "And if the local drug lords play Robin Hood, then you are lost. Because the people are ultimately going to say, 'What do those officials in Mexico City care about us? They despise us. And these drug guys, at least they give us something.' "

The Sentencing Project Releases National Report: 1 in 11 Prisoners Serving Life Sentences

Source: The Sentencing Project

A new report released by The Sentencing Project finds a record 140,610 individuals are now serving life sentences in state and federal prisons, 6,807 of whom were juveniles at the time of the crime. In addition, 29% of persons serving a life sentence (41,095) have no possibility of parole, and 1,755 were juveniles at the time of the crime. No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America represents the first nationwide collection of life sentence data documenting race, ethnicity and gender. The report’s findings reveal overwhelming racial and ethnic disparities in the allocation of life sentences: 66% of all persons sentenced to life are non-white, and 77% of juveniles serving life sentences are non-white.

+ Full Report (PDF; 1.2 MB)

Data Security and the Worry-Free Traveler

Data Security and the Worry-Free Traveler (PDF; 483 KB)
Source: Kroll Fraud Solutions

It seems Americans have given up on the true getaway vacation. According to a recent study by Expedia, Americans receive – and use – less vacation time than their European counterparts. And for those who do get away, many often take the office with them on the road. We simply can’t unplug. Unfortunately, data breaches and identity theft don’t take holidays either. Given that the loss of a laptop, thumb drive, or even a wallet is all too common when traveling … maybe relaxing too much isn’t such a good thing after all.

Shared Hope International’s Report on Child Sexual Slavery in America

Source: Shared Hope

In 2006 Shared Hope International received a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to perform field research on Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking (DMST)—the sex trafficking of American children. The National Report is the culmination of ten field assessments conducted in targeted locations in the United States, providing a comprehensive understanding of child sex trafficking across America. This unprecedented report reveals the starling reality that American children are being recruited from our neighborhoods and sold on our streets!

The National Report found misidentification of victims to be the primary barrier to properly addressing America’s trafficked children. Consequently, this misidentification often leads to the criminalization of victims, barring them from receiving proper treatment and care. In fact, in nearly every location American child victims of sex trafficking are being arrested for the crime committed against them while their abusers walk free. In addition, the study found a severe lack of appropriate protective and therapeutic shelters. Finally, the National Report emphasizes that although buyers are a critical in addressing the issue of child sex trafficking, buyers most often escape criminalization.

+ Full Report (PDF; 1.3 MB)

Panel Proposal, Euroseas 2010: Eastern Indonesia under Reform

C A L L F O R P A P E R S

Eastern Indonesia under reform: New topics, new approaches

Panel accepted for the sixth EuroSEAS Conference, 26-28 August 2010, Gothenburg, Sweden

Panel convenors:

Birgit Bräuchler, University of Frankfurt, birgitbraeuchler[at]gmx.net

Maribeth Erb, National University of Singapore, socmerb[at]nus.edu.sg

This panel is an attempt to update the ethnography of an area that has been described by Josselin de Jong as a field of ethnological study and that underwent tremendous (social) changes in the last few years: Eastern Indonesia. The panel not only strives to get insights into recent developments in this particular area, but also aims to explore new approaches in anthropology that are in use in current research on Eastern Indonesia. In the past, Eastern Indonesia has been the subject of various larger research projects, some of them with a particular theoretical focus: van Wouden's and Josselin de Jong's dualism and structuralism in the 1930s, James Fox's kinship and exchange volume in 1980, a conference organized by Signe Howell on sacrificing in Eastern Indonesia in 1992, and an edited volume on resource management by Sandra Pannell and Franz von Benda-Beckmann in 1998. A volume edited by Sandra Pannell in 2003 on violence, society and the state in Eastern Indonesia focused on one topic, i.e. conflict, in primarily one region, the Moluccas. There has been no joint effort by anthropologists to explore the tremendous and multi-dimensional changes that took place in Eastern Indonesia after the stepping down of Suharto, and the onset of the so-called reformation era. Hence an updated volume with a re-examination of the region, the effect of the massive political, economic and social changes over the past decade, along with possible reappraisals of the earlier studies is overdue.

What we would therefore like to do in this panel is to bring together anthropologists conducting research in various parts of Eastern Indonesia in this new era and thus produce a thematic and methodological update. We would also like to reflect on whether it is still legitimate to conceptualize Eastern Indonesia as a “field of ethnological study”. We encourage paper submissions that deal with contemporary issues in Eastern Indonesia such as decentralization, political reforms, economic developments, conflicts and conflict management, tourism, (new) media, revival of tradition, the increasing importance and influence of the world’s principle religions in the area, and so forth, and with the new methodological approaches these research questions challenge us to develop. Papers should draw on ethnographic fieldwork and be theoretically well-founded at the same time. As stated above, the hopes of the organizers are that this panel will result in a volume that will offer an updated look at this fascinating and vibrant ethnographic region.

Please send your abstract of about 300 words plus a short biosketch to both convenors (birgitbraeuchler@gmx.net and socmerb@nus.edu.sg) by February 1, 2010. This autumn, 2009, the pre-registration process for the conference will start and those who submit their abstracts early can have them uploaded already during the autumn. For more information on the conference and upcoming deadlines please see the conference webpage http://www.euroseas.org/platform/en/content/the-6th-euroseas-conference-gothenburg-2010.

What's Chinese for .limitedgovernment?

One of the marvels of the Internet is that it is self-governing, with private groups of engineers and technology companies doing their best to keep it up and running without political interference. Many countries around the world censor how their citizens access the Web, but governance of the Internet itself has been left to technologists and their largely libertarian instincts.

This happy state of affairs could be close to an end. There are now more Internet users in China than in any other country, and the fastest growing group of new users online is from non-English- speaking developing countries. This has led to a well-meaning plan to reorient the Web toward these users. But it could result in authoritarian governments insisting on more influence.

At issue is a key shift in the approach of Icann, the California-based nonprofit that maintains the directory of Internet addresses. Icann, which stands for Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, ultimately reports to the U.S. Commerce Department, though it has numerous advisory groups from other countries and from free-speech and other advocacy groups. It plans to open the door to many new Web addresses and to give better access to non-English-language users.

Next spring, Icann is set to expand Web addresses beyond the familiar .com, .org and .edu to domains that would include the names of industries, companies and political movements. Under its proposed rules, anyone who could afford the almost $200,000 registration fee should be able to start a domain. Icann would also permit top-level domains in non-Latin alphabets. This means Internet addresses in languages such as Chinese, Arabic and Farsi.

This will make the Web more accessible to non-English-speakers but also will lead to tricky issues, such as whether dissidents in China or Iran will be permitted to have their own dot-addresses. How would Beijing respond to a Chinese-language domain that translates into .democracy or .limitedgovernment, perhaps hosted by computers in Taipei or Vancouver?

This prospect could explain why Beijing recently had a top bureaucrat engage with Icann for the first time since 2001. Governments tend to be less concerned when only their better-educated, more English-fluent citizens have access to information. When I ran the English-language Far Eastern Economic Review magazine in the 1990s, it was rarely blacklisted in China for its reporting, but issues were routinely banned when they included political cartoons featuring Chinese government officials.

The combination of more domains in more languages could put unprecedented pressures on a system under which Web addresses are interoperable only because all governments agree that Icann controls the directory.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a Web researcher writing a book about lessons from China on Internet freedom, praises Icann for being influenced by nongovernmental groups, not just governments. “The U.N. model of Internet governance is highly unsatisfactory from a human-rights and free-expression point of view for obvious reasons,” she told me. “The Chinese and the Iranians and various other authoritarian countries will insist on standards and rules that make dissent more difficult, destroy the possibility of anonymity, and facilitate surveillance.”

Up to now, governments have been largely hands-off. An amusing example is the dispute over the domain www.newzealand.com. The queen of England, “in right of her Government in New Zealand, as Trustee for the Citizens, Organizations and State of New Zealand,” brought an action in 2002 against a Seattle-based company called Virtual Countries Inc. that had registered the Web address. The queen argued that her antipodean country should have control over its own .com name. This may sound reasonable, but she lost. New Zealand had to buy the .com address for $500,000.

Will governments like China’s be as philosophical about Internet domain decisions they don’t like?

Countries such as China, Russia and Iran have long argued that it’s wrong for Icann to report to the U.S. government. Any alternative to the light control exerted by the U.S. government could put the Web on a slippery course toward more control. This is one reason efforts by these countries to politicize Icann have failed in the past.

“I think the question here is not about which governments have the moral right to lead Internet governance over others,” Ms. MacKinnon argues, “but about whether it’s appropriate that Internet governance should be the sole province of governments, many of which do not arguably represent the interests of Internet users in their countries because they were not democratically elected.”

It’s tempting to dismiss Internet idealists, but the Web has been a powerful force for individual expression, especially in parts of the world where free speech had been limited to those who could afford it. Groups like Icann will have their hands full trying to keep controlling governments from restricting freedom of the Internet.

Asian Nations Revisit Safety Net in Effort to Bolster Spending

By PATRICK BARTA

Bangkok

Asian countries are beginning to build extensive social-welfare programs like those that long have existed in the West, a move they hope will encourage their people to save less, spend more and help put the region -- and the world -- on a stronger economic footing in the years ahead.

But creating a reliable social safety net is hard work, and it may be a long time, perhaps decades, before Asia sees results.

Analysts have long worried that Asians lack sufficient health, unemployment and other benefits to tide them over when downturns or emergencies occur, or to prepare for old age. Only about 30% of Asia's elderly receive a pension, according to the United Nations. Just 20% of its unemployed have access to unemployment benefits or other work-related social programs.

Partly as a result, Asians tend to save more and spend less of their income than their counterparts in the West. That contributed to the global imbalances that are one cause of the current world recession: U.S. consumers went deep into debt to finance consumption while Asians socked away money and relied on exports to Western consumers.

Social-welfare programs are one way of addressing those imbalances. The idea is that if Asian consumers have more confidence in their governments to take care of them in times of trouble, they will be more willing to spend today, igniting new demand for consumer goods and leaving the world economy less dependent on Western shoppers.

China recently said it will invest $120 billion to improve health care by building clinics and extending basic medical coverage to 90% of its 1.3 billion people within three years. Vietnam is implementing a national unemployment-benefits system. India has unveiled a voluntary pension system for up to several hundred million people who work at small companies, and is developing a nationwide identification database to better provide health care and other benefits.

Those programs build on efforts undertaken in recent years. Thailand launched a national health-care program in 2001 that offers basic medical care for just 30 Thai baht, about $1, to most citizens. India's latest national budget expands a program begun in 2005 that guarantees 100 days of work per year for rural laborers.

Public health expenditure* as a percentage of GDP in 2006

India	0.9
Indonesia	1.3
Philippines	1.3
Cambodia	1.5
Malaysia	1.9
China	1.9
Vietnam	2.1
Thailand	2.3
Australia	5.9
Japan	6.6
United States	7.0
High-income OECD	7.0
New Zealand	7.2

*Includes recurrent and capital spending from government, borrowings, grants and social insurance funds

Source: World Bank

The expansion of Asia's safety net "is happening, and it will help" wean Asia from an over-reliance on exports, says Robert Subbaraman, chief Asia economist at Nomura International in Hong Kong.

But many governments, including India, suffer from large budget deficits or lax tax collection, and may find it hard to finance expanded welfare programs.

In addition, a stronger safety net is no guarantee Asians will consume more. Europeans enjoy one of the world's most robust safety nets, and they tend to save more than Americans.

And it can take years, maybe decades, before consumers build up enough trust in welfare programs to modify spending behavior. In many Asian countries, such as Indonesia, services provided by social programs are dismal, with many residents avoiding government medical clinics altogether.

"The credibility of the systems has to be tested, and people have to be comfortable" that they still will be around after changes in government or economic crises, says Joseph Zveglich, an Asian Development Bank economist. Although he supports efforts to expand social safety nets, he says, "it's going to take time for people's activities to change."

Agence France-Presse

Consumer spending has fueled growth in South Korea, which reported its best quarterly performance in more than five years.

Some analysts say a better way to wean Asia off exports and encourage domestic consumer spending would be to let Asian currencies appreciate. That would make Asian exports less attractive to foreign consumers, give local consumers more spending power to buy imported goods, and force Asian business to diversify beyond exports. But Asian authorities may be unlikely to risk putting exporters in jeopardy by allowing their currencies to rise.

Those countries that have expanded their safety nets over the past decade have seen mixed results. In Thailand, residents were quick to take advantage of the country's new national health-care program. More than 45 million people registered to participate by mid-2003. Consumer spending shot up soon after the program was introduced, but economists believe the surge was driven more by an expansion of consumer credit and a sharp uptick in growth that occurred as Thailand's economy rebounded from the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.

Growth in consumer spending later slowed, and in recent years Thailand's savings rate has begun climbing again after several years of declines, according to the Asian Development Bank. Most other major Asian countries have likewise seen their savings rates increase or stay about the same since the late 1990s, including Vietnam, where savings climbed to about 32% of gross domestic product in recent years from roughly 18% in 1995. Those trends could intensify in the future as the region struggles to fully recover from the current recession.

"In this economy, I'm trying to save as much as I can," says Banyen Sriwongrak, a 43-year-old vendor in central Bangkok who makes about $12 a day selling jasmine garlands near a religious shrine. She says she used Thailand's 30-baht health-care program to have a lump removed two years ago in a surgery that normally would have cost 16,000 Thai baht, or about $475. Having that protection was helpful, she says, but it hasn't fundamentally changed her spending, which includes squirreling away two or more days' worth of income each month and sending an additional $60 or so to support her mother in rural Thailand. "We don't know what the future will bring," she says.

None of that means Asian governments should stop investing in welfare programs. Such programs can greatly improve residents' lives even if they don't ultimately affect spending patterns. And the benefits in terms of changed consumer behavior may show up later.

Upgrading safety nets "isn't something that's going to get us out of the [current financial] crisis," says Mr. Zveglich, the Asian Development Bank economist. But if investments in the social safety net are made now, it may help the next time.

Write to Patrick Barta at patrick.barta@wsj.com

NPR Is Enhancing Its Web Site

By ELIZABETH JENSEN

NPR, the public radio network, is introducing a revamped NPR.org this week, giving users what its executives say is an easier-to-navigate Web site that emphasizes written reporting over audio reports.

It is part of a digital expansion, branded with the new tagline “Always On,” that will include several mobile applications to be available late this summer.

The changes are meant to raise the level of NPR’s journalism and journalistic output, and to make public radio more widely available, not just on local stations but on any format consumers might want, said Vivian Schiller, NPR’s president and chief executive.

“We are a news content organization, not just a radio organization,” Ms. Schiller said.

But NPR is also a membership organization, partly financed by local public radio stations nationwide. While Ms. Schiller said that Web and mobile changes would make it easier than ever to find programming from local stations, they will also make it much more convenient for listeners to bypass local stations, if they choose.

“That’s the risk,” said Jake Shapiro, the executive director of Public Radio Exchange, which works with stations to expand programming options, and just released a new version of its own iPhone application, the Public Radio Player.

“It increases the pressure for stations to offer compelling and distinct programming,” Mr. Shapiro said. “There is definitely some anxiety about how easy these devices make the ability to shop around.”

The changes to NPR’s Web site are intended to make it easier for users to find NPR news reports on a less cluttered home page, or to jump to two other areas of emphasis, Arts and Life, and Music.

Breaking news is already being posted faster, after a merger of NPR’s radio and digital news desks, and a regimen of Knight Foundation-financed digital training for NPR’s journalists. Searching for, sharing and commenting on NPR articles will be simpler, and free transcripts will be offered for the first time.

By next year, when NPR expects to have secured the digital rights, the site will offer entire NPR programs for downloading on demand.

The Web site changes are part of a strategy meant to increase NPR’s share of the midday audience, between its “Morning Edition” and the late afternoon “All Things Considered,” when listening to NPR stations drops considerably, said Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media.

Instead of short paragraphs that direct users to click on links to audio reports taken from NPR’s programs, the Web site will now offer fully reported text versions of articles, so users can click from their cubicles. “We think the midday experience is much more text-driven,” Mr. Wilson said.

The Web site will flip “from being a companion to radio to being a news destination in its own right,” Ms. Schiller said.

It will not be as comprehensive as some sites, like CNN’s, are, Mr. Wilson said, but will “concentrate on areas where we can be particularly authoritative.” He added, “We’re not in a battle for share with established players who’ve been doing this for 15 years.”

Users can customize the Web site with a link to a local station, a feature that Ms. Schiller said was far superior to the capabilities of the current NPR Web site. Still, she said, “the bypass issue,” as it is referred to internally in public radio, “is not going to go away overnight.” Until it can be sorted out, she added, “first and foremost, we have to serve the audience” by making NPR content as easy as possible to find.

Stations worry about listeners cutting them out of the loop because they get much of their financing through local donations. NPR, however, will experiment this fall with letting users donate to specific local stations directly through the NPR Web site, which Ms. Schiller said could make it easier for stations to raise money and could encourage “impulse donors.”

In the coming weeks, NPR will release free mobile applications for the iPhone, Google’s Android and Symbian-powered phones.

Dozens of public radio apps already are available for the iPhone and other mobile platforms. NPR’s new applications, however, will emphasize news content, offering quick links to articles in written or audio form.

One element that users will not see much of on the NPR Web site is video. An experiment a year ago of adding more video to the site particularly irked local member stations, who did not want competition from video. Video is expensive, Ms. Schiller said, and she and Mr. Wilson are not convinced of its value. “We absolutely should not be heavily invested in video,” she said.

6 Killed in Attack at Chechen Theater

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

MOSCOW — Six people were killed in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, on Sunday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives outside a theater as a crowd gathered for a performance. The bombing was the second in the city this month.

Police officers had stopped the man a dozen or so yards from the theater’s entrance, news agencies reported, preventing him from entering a hall packed with about 1,000 people where he might have caused many more casualties. Instead, the man exploded his explosives beside benches and a fountain in front of the theater.

Russian state television showed police tape cordoning off the square and ambulances leaving the area. Ten people were wounded, television news reported. The powerful blast rattled windows blocks away.

Four of the dead were police officers, including the director of security for public events in Grozny, the Russian Information Agency reported. Another was a Turkish construction worker described as a bystander, and the sixth a citizen of Georgia who died in a hospital later on Sunday.

Another Georgian citizen was wounded, the news agency reported. It said the bomber’s remains were too damaged to be identified immediately.

On July 7, a bomb hidden in an urn on a Grozny street exploded, wounding nine people.

Russia is fighting a low-grade insurgency in Chechnya, a region in the Caucasus Mountains the size of Connecticut, where rights groups say police abuse is as much of a problem as militant attacks.

Two weeks ago, Natalia Estemirova, a researcher for the human rights group Memorial, was abducted in Grozny and her body later found on the side of a road. Memorial accused the region’s president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, of involvement in her killing; Mr. Kadyrov has sued the group for slander.

In other violence in the region on Sunday, police officers in Grozny killed a man in a shootout who was described as a rebel. In the neighboring region of Ingushetia, four men died when the car they were riding in exploded. The regional Interior Ministry said they were militants transporting a makeshift bomb, The Associated Press reported.

Violent attacks have increased in the North Caucasus recently. In June, a suicide car bomber critically wounded the president of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, by colliding with his motorcade on a highway.

After the explosion on Sunday, Mr. Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya, said it was an effort by militants to halt a military operation under way in the mountains between Chechnya and Ingushetia that was begun in response to the attack on Mr. Yevkurov.

Terror Ties Run Deep in Pakistan, Mumbai Case Shows

By JANE PERLEZ and SALMAN MASOOD

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — In a high-security jail here, five men — all members of the Islamic militant group described by the United States and India as the organizers of the terrorist rampage in Mumbai last year — were brought before a makeshift court in Pakistan’s first steps to bring them to justice.

The brief appearances, described by a defense lawyer, were held in secret for security reasons on Saturday in a case that Pakistan says shows its willingness to prosecute the group, Lashkar-e-Taiba. Pakistan also says that the case will demonstrate that its military, which once backed the group as a surrogate force against India, has severed all ties.

But behind the first glimmerings of the case, sympathies for Lashkar-e-Taiba and its jihadist and anti-Indian culture run deep in this country, raising a serious challenge to any long-lasting moves to dismantle the network.

The membership of Lashkar-e-Taiba extends to about 150,000 people, according to a midlevel officer in Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. Together with another jihadi group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, the Lashkar loyalists could put Pakistan “up in flames,” the officer admitted.

Despite that risk, the jihadis “were good people” and could be controlled, the officer said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s custom.

Obama administration officials say they continue to press the Pakistanis to guarantee prevention of a sequel to November’s Mumbai attacks, in which more than 160 people were killed in a rampage across two five-star hotels, a Jewish center and a busy train station.

A surprise confession last week of the sole surviving attacker made clear that Lashkar-e-Taiba has the capacity to quickly and inexpensively train young men from villages into intensely driven, proficient killers, a senior Obama administration official said.

The attacker, Ajmal Kasab, 21, has described receiving training in camps in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-held Kashmir, and in Manshera, a northwest town.

His account has been largely discounted in Pakistan as being forced by Indian investigators, but many details conform to descriptions of Lashkar operations offered by two former members. The members, who said they had friendly relations with Lashkar-e-Taiba, said that at least one Lashkar training camp was still operating in the hills around Muzaffarabad.

Pakistan said it had severed ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, under pressure from the Bush administration to join its campaign against terrorism. The interior minister, Rehman Malik, said in an interview that the group’s infrastructure was “no more intact.”

But Obama administration officials say they are still trying to understand the state of relations between Pakistan and the group. Among the most likely versions, they say, none would tamp down hostilities between Pakistan and India.

The possibilities include that Lashkar-e-Taiba remains a lever of the Pakistani state; that the group and others have realigned themselves quietly behind the interests of Pakistan and could be used covertly; and that the groups have broken away from the official security apparatus and are running independently.

A senior Pakistani official reinforced the last option, saying the connections between Pakistan’s spy agency and Lashkar-e-Taiba were so sundered that it was a matter of regret that the military could no longer control them.

A lack of control could have as devastating consequences as if the Pakistani Army was still supporting the groups, two senior American officials said. “My guess is, the army did not have command knowledge” of the Mumbai attacks, one of the American officials said. “Was there a lack of discipline? It’s a very, very serious issue whichever way it is.”

The commander of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has said in conversations with the Obama administration that he was trying to control Lashkar-e-Taiba.

“They say, ‘We are being more vigilant,’ but add, ‘By the way, India has to stop messing around in Baluchistan,’ ” an American official familiar with the conversations said of the Pakistanis, referring to a province that has been torn by a brutal sectarian struggle, in which Pakistan has accused India of financing insurgents.

The overarching goal of Lashkar-e-Taiba, which operates under the front of a charity, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, is the defeat of India. It also embraces a strong anti-Israeli platform and adheres to Ahl-i-Hadith, a strain of the Wahabi sect of Islam.

On those doctrinal grounds, Lashkar-e-Taiba has much in common with the goals of Al Qaeda, terrorism experts say.

“Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaeda are allies in the global Islamic jihad,” said Bruce Riedel, who led President Obama’s review of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy this year. “They share the same target list, and their operatives often work and hide together.”

Among the evidence of Lashkar’s sophistication in the Mumbai attacks is the voice of one of the attackers’ handlers, speaking fluently in English, on what seem to be tapes of telephone intercepts provided to Channel 4 in Britain for a documentary shown this month.

Mr. Malik, the Pakistani interior minister, said he had asked India for the telephone numbers of the calls.

It seemed unlikely that the handler was the man accused of masterminding the attacks, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who was one of the five men who appeared in court on Saturday. Mr. Lakhvi, about 55 years old, does not speak English, according to the two former Lashkar members.

On the tape, the handler speaks in chilling tones as he advises the gunmen on targets at which to aim, weapons to use and what to say to hostages and the Indian authorities while staying calm under pressure.

“Lashkar-e-Taiba was definitely involved, but they had outside help and assistance,” said Sajjan M. Gohel, a terrorism expert in Britain. “The tape suggests that the handler had military training which went beyond basic terrorist preparation.”

Vikas Bajaj contributed reporting from Mumbai, India.

North Korea Asserts New Willingness to Talk

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said on Monday that it was open to a form of dialogue to help resolve the dispute with the United States over its nuclear weapons program — but not to six-nation talks involving other regional powers.

The statement, from North Korea’s Foreign Ministry, was seen as an unusually conciliatory-sounding expression of willingness to engage the United States in direct, one-on-one talks — a longstanding North Korean preference.

The statement followed remarks over the weekend by Sin Son-ho, the top North Korean diplomat at the United Nations, who said his government was “not against a dialogue” with Washington.

North Korea’s suggestion appeared to brighten the prospects for dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington after months of tensions punctuated by the North’s long-range rocket launching in April and its second nuclear test in May.

There was no immediate reaction from Washington to the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s statement on Monday. The Obama administration has indicated that it is willing to engage the North in direct talks, but only if the North agrees to return to six-nation talks, a position reiterated over the weekend by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who just completed a visit to Asia. Those talks also include South Korea, China, Japan and Russia.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry’s statement said the six-party talks were dead the moment that member countries agreed to the international sanctions that the United Nations Security Council imposed on North Korea following the May 25 nuclear test. The North has said those sanctions violate its sovereignty.

But the ministry’s statement on Monday added, “There is a specific and reserved form of dialogue that can address the current situation.”

North Korea has said the purpose of the six-nation talks was to “disarm and incapacitate” it.