Constitution must be revised before election: opposition leaders - Mizzima

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by Salai Pi Pi
Monday, 26 October 2009

New Delhi (Mizzima) – Prominent Burmese opposition leaders say the junta’s planned 2010 elections cannot be inclusive and broad-based unless the 2008 Constitution is first revised.

Win Tin, a veteran politician and senior member of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) party, said in order to make the 2010 election inclusive the 2008 Constitution must be amended, as the document, which he asserts enshrines military-rule, will essentially bar all dissidents including Aung San Suu Kyi from participating in the poll.

“The constitution does not allow any political prisoners their electoral rights, and this will also include Aung San Suu Kyi,” Win Tin clarified. “Therefore, it is necessary that the constitution is revised before the election.”

Win Tin’s comments came in response to a statement from the Burmese Prime Minister at the 15th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, concluded on Sunday.

The Burmese Premier, Thein Sein, reportedly ensured leaders of the 10-member ASEAN bloc meeting in Thailand that the 2010 elections would be free, fair and inclusive of all stakeholders.

Thein Sein also commented that Aung San Suu Kyi could be allowed to play a role in national reconciliation, further hinting that the regime may relax restrictions on the detained opposition leader if she maintains a “good attitude.”

“He briefed us on some of the dialogue that is taking place and he feels optimistic that she can contribute to the process of national reconciliation,” Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva told reporters.

“We welcomed the affirmation by the Prime Minister of Myanmar [Burma] that the general elections to be held in 2010 would be conducted in a free, fair and inclusive manner,” Abhisit continued in his statement.

While cautiously welcoming Thein Sein’s comments, Win Tin noted the Nobel Peace Laureate has been maintaining a soft stance towards the regime and urging national reconciliation for the last twenty years.

Meanwhile, Aye Thar Aung, Secretary of the Committee Representing Peoples’ Parliament (CRPP), a coalition of political parties that won the 1990 election, on Monday echoed similar views to those of Win Tin, primarily that the junta’s planned election next year cannot be inclusive unless the constitution, which he called “forcibly endorsed in 2008”, is revised.

“Without revising the 2008 Constitution, the election will not be able to yield anything good for the people of Burma,” Aye Thar Aung told Mizzima.

Aye Thar Aung added that Burma’s generals only want Aung San Suu Kyi to contribute for their national reconciliation plan but are reluctant to change their overall stance in fear of losing power.

“Changes have to come from both sides. They [the junta] also must change their stance towards her,” he elaborated.

He said the only way to build a genuine national reconciliation is to hold a tripartite dialogue between the Burmese generals, Aung San Suu Kyi and leaders of the ethnic groups.

Following the U.S. announcement of its new policy on Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi last month offered junta leader Senior General Than Shwe her willingness to cooperate in the easing of sanctions.

In response, Than Shwe allowed her and her party meetings with western diplomats.

Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent 14 of the past 19 years in detention, was sentenced to another 18 months of house arrest in August after an American man swam uninvited to her lakeside home, spending two nights on the premises.

The NLD won a landslide victory in the 1990 election, but the regime refused to honor the result and instead drew up a seven-step roadmap to democracy. According to the roadmap, the proposed 2010 election is the fifth step.

In a statement at the end of the ASEAN summit in Thailand, leaders of the 16 countries encouraged Burma to ensure the implementation of their seven-step roadmap and to restore democracy in the country.

However, Win Tin emphasized the “NLD will not contest the upcoming election if the regime does not revise the constitution.” The NLD has also consistently called on the junta to release all political prisoners, in addition to mandating free and fair elections, before they consider participating in any poll.

Inside Indonesia - ‘Selamat Berbuka Puasa’

A few minutes before Magrib, the time of day when Muslims break their fast during the month of Ramadan, local television in South Kalimantan broadcasts daily advertisements featuring a cross section of the province’s top politicians. No less than the governor, his deputy, the mayor of the provincial capital Banjarmasin, two high profile district heads, one Banjarese member of President Yudhoyono’s cabinet, and the head of major political party all line up for the chance to appear on the province’s TV screens. On the surface, these advertisements consist of purely religious statements. However on a deeper level they carry political messages that are closely connected to up-coming local elections. And it’s not something that happens only in South Kalimantan.

The thirty to sixty second advertisements take the form of ‘Ramadan messages’. They have three things in common. First, the Islamic greeting ‘assalamu’alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh’ opens and closes each of the broadcasts. Second, the advertisements identify the TV star politicians through digital texts spelling out their names and positions for viewers. In most cases, each of the politicians restates this information in his spoken message. Third, there is a congratulatory statement for Muslims practising the obligatory fast, along with the expressed hope that their act of devotion will be acceptable to God. However within this overall pattern, differences in style and presentation emerge.

Some politicians are livelier and more engaging than others. Additional images may be inserted into the advertisement, such as those that depict a district head’s initiative in fostering hundreds of orphans, or offer a glimpse into his office complex. Another district head demonstrates his mastery of Arabic by prefacing his Indonesian message with an Arabic introduction. All of them are outdone by the deputy governor, who features in a series of advertisements entitled ‘In the Steps of the Caliph’, which show him visiting a number of sites in Saudi Arabia. In other words, some advertisements are more attractive and informative than others, and are more likely to attract the attention of viewers.
Islamic credentials

At the local level, the demonstration of Islamic credentials has become a political necessity for Muslim politicians. Whatever political platform and agenda they espouse, politicians feel it necessary to present themselves as good Muslims who have performed the hajj pilgrimage, are close to Islamic teachers and attentive to their needs, and are supportive of Islamic prayer houses, schools, and public events and activities sponsored by local Islamic institutions. This behaviour is especially prominent during campaign periods and in areas where Islam is of particular political importance like South Kalimantan.

With 97 per cent of its population professing Islam, South Kalimantan has a history of strong support for Islamic political parties. In the direct gubernatorial elections in 2005 all candidates used Islamic symbols. Although Islamic credentials alone were not enough to hand victory to a candidate – other factors such as a clean reputation, sufficient time and funds for a successful campaign, and the backing of effective political machinery all played their part – they represented an essential ingredient in each candidate’s campaign.

The broadcasting of advertisements during Ramadan is part of this recognition of Islam’s strategic importance in areas like South Kalimantan. Their timing – just before buka puasa, or the breaking of the fast – is cleverly calculated to reach the maximum viewing audience. This is because it is common practice for Indonesian Muslims to gather together in private homes, mosques or other community sites while they await the sound of the drum or siren from the mosque that signals the beginning of Magrib. While awaiting the signal, people often sit around their TV sets, reciting holy verses or engaging in small talk. As the time for breaking of the fast approaches, these TV sets are almost always tuned to the local channels, because these channels broadcast the exact local time for buka puasa, not the Jakarta time announced on national TV. It is precisely at this moment – the moment which the Prophet Muhammad likened to the joy of meeting God in the afterlife – that the advertisements appear.

Campaigning and Islam

Apart from appearing in buka puasa advertisements, candidates for the 2010 gubernatorial elections in South Kalimantan also figure in a range of other campaign activities specifically geared to the month of Ramadhan. The publicity-hungry deputy governor has sponsored football competitions, a big contest to recite Maulid Nabi (the story of the Prophet Muhammad) in the form of Arabic poems and pop concerts with performers imported from Jakarta for the local youth. He appears on local television on an almost daily basis, either in news programs or in interactive dialogues with viewers. The governor tries to counterbalance his deputy’s campaign by having his picture plastered right up and down a new road under construction, as well as sponsoring smaller events like a song bird competition and using government funds at his disposal to renovate the provincial mosque.

The biggest challenger facing off against both these candidates is the head of the district 3of Tanah Bumbu, the site of the province’s most extensive mining and logging activities. Through large hoardings and street banners in Banjarmasin and other parts of South Kalimantan, he has been promoting his district’s establishment of a ‘palace for orphans’ (Istana Anak Yatim) as a way of establishing his social welfare credentials. With the help of an academic from Lambung Mangkurat University he has instituted a so-called Manajemen Ilahiyyah program (‘a system of management based on God’s commands’).

Intended to inject a religious atmosphere into the working environment in his office, this program requires public servants to recite the Qur’an every morning at the office, perform daily prayers as a congregation, and attend a weekly ‘religious-advice-evening’, without any clear indication of how it contributes to good governance in the region. However many of the local religious teachers who received invitations to deliver Islamic lectures as part of the ‘advice evenings’, and took home substantial amounts of money as honoraria, have praised the initiative. With the next gubernatorial elections less than a year away, it is not surprising that Ramadan advertisements have become part of this intense competition for votes.
Islam and politics

Ramadan media advertisements are not the sole monopoly of local politicians in South Kalimantan. In the adjoining province of East Kalimantan, which boasts what is claimed to be the largest mosque in Southeast Asia, prominent local politicians and other aspiring candidates for the July 2009 mayoral elections produced their own Ramadan-oriented messages for local TV. In Lombok, another region where Islam plays a significant role in politics, radio was the medium through which Ramadan messages were disseminated. One of these messages reached the ears of listeners almost every ten minutes, almost giving the impression that the radio station was holding a competition for the best Ramadan message of the year.

The high profile of local television during Ramadan has encouraged the stampede by local politicians to get their images on TV screens at prime viewing times. Though ostensibly religious in character, these ‘messages’ carry strong political overtones, and are intended to boost the popularity of candidates contesting up-coming local elections. In parts of Indonesia where Islam and politics are closely intertwined, they function as a contemporary example of the long history of the penetration of religion into local-level political processes. ii

Ahmad Muhajir (ajir_82@yahoo.com) has just completed a Masters thesis on Islamic scholars and politics in South Kalimantan at the Australian National University.

California: Golden State Is Thriving, Despite Its Woes - TIME

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by Michael Grunwald

California, you may have heard, is an apocalyptic mess of raging wildfires, soaring unemployment, mass foreclosures and political paralysis. It's dysfunctional. It's ungovernable. Its bond rating is barely above junk. It's so broke, it had to hand out IOUs while its leaders debated how many prisoners to release and parks to close. Nevada aired ads mocking California's business climate to lure its entrepreneurs. The media portray California as a noir fantasyland of overcrowded schools, perpetual droughts, celebrity breakdowns, illegal immigration, hellish congestion and general malaise, captured in headlines like "Meltdown on the Ocean" and "California's Wipeout Economy" and "Will California Become America's First Failed State?" (

Actually, it won't.

Ignore the California whinery. It's still a dream state. In fact, the pioneering megastate that gave us microchips, freeways, blue jeans, tax revolts, extreme sports, energy efficiency, health clubs, Google searches, Craigslist, iPhones and the Hollywood vision of success is still the cutting edge of the American future — economically, environmentally, demographically, culturally and maybe politically. It's the greenest and most diverse state, the most globalized in general and most Asia-oriented in particular at a time when the world is heading in all those directions. It's also an unparalleled engine of innovation, the mecca of high tech, biotech and now clean tech. In 2008, California's wipeout economy attracted more venture capital than the rest of the nation combined. Somehow its supposedly hostile business climate has nurtured Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, Twitter, Disney, Cisco, Intel, eBay, YouTube, MySpace, the Gap and countless other companies that drive the way we live. (See pictures of California First Lady Maria Shriver.)

"Whenever we have a problem, everyone makes a big drama — 'Oh, my God, it's the end. California is over,'" Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger told me. "It's all bogus." Schwarzenegger likes spin and drama too — he's issued warnings about a "financial Armageddon" — and he literally blew smoke in my eyes while we spoke. But his belief in the anything-is-possible dream of California is more than spin; he is, after all, its ultimate embodiment. (See how marijuana is taxed in California.)

California, to borrow a phrase, will be back. It's been stuck in an awful recession — not quite as awful as Nevada's — but it's getting unstuck. It's made nasty cuts to close ugly deficits, but it hasn't had to release prisoners or close parks, and its IOUs are being paid. Its businesses aren't fleeing to Nevada or anywhere else; Jed Kolko, an economist at the Public Policy Institute of California, has shown that fewer than one-tenth of 1% of its jobs leave the state each year. Even California's real problems tend to get magnified by its size. If it were a country, it would be in the G-8. So, yes, California has the most foreclosures and layoffs. With 38 million residents and a $1.8 trillion economy, it also has by far the most homes and jobs.

It can be perilous to generalize about a place this gigantic, an overwhelmingly metropolitan state that leads the nation in agricultural production, a majority-minority state with a white-majority electorate. There are real differences between (crunchy, techy) Northern and (hipster, surfer) Southern California, and especially (richer, denser, bluer) coastal and (poorer, sparser, redder) inland California. But one generalization has held true from the Gold Rush to the human-potential movement to the dotcom boom: California stands for change, for disruption of the status quo. "California is not another American state," concluded Carey McWilliams in his 1949 history California: The Great Exception. "It is a revolution within the states."

Today, it's still the home of the new new thing. It is electric-vehicle start-ups like Tesla, Fisker and Better Place taking on the Big Three, or the local-organic foodies behind California cuisine going after Big Ag. It's Kaiser Permanente, the HMO whose model of salaried doctors in group practice may be the future of health care, or the University of California at Irvine's law school, which opened this semester with free tuition and was instantly more selective than Harvard or Yale. It's SpaceX, the private rocket-launching company, or Kogi, the Korean taco truck that announces its location over Twitter to flash mobs of Angelenos. "The beauty of California is the idea that you can reinvent yourself and do something totally creative," says Kogi's Roy Choi, a former chef at the Beverly Hilton. "It's still the Wild West that way."

California is a state of early adopters — not only in fashion, technology and design but in politics too. Its voters approved huge bonds for stem-cell research, high-speed rail and repairs to aging infrastructure while Washington was dragging its feet; its politicians adopted first-in-the-nation greenhouse-gas regulations, green building codes and efficiency standards for automobiles and appliances that have rearranged the national energy debate. Yes, it was also an early adopter of subprime mortgages — Countrywide, Golden West and IndyMac were all California-based — but life on the frontier has always been risky. "This is the most dynamic place for change on earth," genomic pioneer J. Craig Venter said on a recent tour of his San Diego labs, where researchers are studying ways to convert algae into oil, coal into natural gas and human wastewater into electricity. "That's why we're here." Dressed in shorts, flip-flops and a crazy-loud floral shirt on a typically perfect day, Venter noted that California's quality of life isn't bad either: "It is pretty nice not to have to wear pants."

California has long inspired its own premature obituaries. The 1855 book The Land of Gold dismissed it as "lawless, penniless and powerless." TIME published a woe-is-California issue called "The Endangered Dream" in 1991 after the aerospace industry collapsed. But even with 12% unemployment, California still has an enviably young and productive workforce. And it's still a magnet for dice-rolling dreamers who want to start anew, make money and change the world, with or without pants. "I see my own pattern repeated again and again — people who want to invent the future and aren't afraid to fail," says billionaire Silicon Valley financier Vinod Khosla, an Indian immigrant who helped found Sun Microsystems and recently unveiled a $1.1 billion venture fund for investments in clean technology.

Which just happens to be the next California gold rush.

The New Gold Rush
Tom Dinwoodie is standing on a roof, staring at the future. The roof covers Richmond's grand "daylight factory" overlooking San Francisco Bay, where Ford built Model A's before World War II and then the iconic Rosie the Riveter built jeeps and tanks during the war. Now SunPower Corp. uses it to assemble the world's most efficient solar panels, including a sleek array on its roof. That's where Dinwoodie, SunPower's chief technology officer, likes to go to look across the bay at a collection of hulking tanks in which Chevron stores fossil fuels. If we don't stop global warming, he says, that water will rise. But if solar and other renewables keep growing as fast as they are in California, "we'll turn those tanks into hot tubs."

If you think solar is an eco-fantasy, you probably don't live in California, where rooftop installations have doubled for two years in a row, to 50,000, heading to the state goal of 1 million by 2017. The San Francisco utility Pacific Gas & Electric, which recently bolted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over climate policy, has 40% of the nation's solar roofs in its territory. SunPower now has more than 5,000 employees. It's building massive power plants for utilities, as well as roof panels for big-box stores, complete subdivisions and individual homes. Prices are plummeting, and competition is fierce, most of it from California firms like BrightSource, Solar City, eSolar, Nanosolar and Solyndra. "The scramble is on, and California is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the country," says Dinwoodie. "That's true of all energy issues." (Read a 2003 profile of Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

When it comes to energy, California is not just ahead of the game; it's playing a different game. Its carbon emissions per capita are less than half the U.S. average. And from 2006 to '08, it attracted $3 of every $5 invested in U.S. clean tech — five times as much as the No. 2 state. It's by far the national leader in green jobs, green patents, supply from renewables and savings from efficiency. It's also leading the way toward electric cars, zero-emission homes, advanced biofuels and a smarter grid: its electric utilities plan to install smart meters in every California home. It's even launched a belated battle against car-dependent sprawl, with unprecedented rules forcing communities to consider carbon emissions in their land-use plans.

California has been preparing for its clean-energy future for a long time. Starting in the energy crisis of the 1970s, California revamped its electricity markets so that utilities could make more money by helping their customers use less power. It also began enacting groundbreaking efficiency standards for buildings, appliances, pool heaters and almost anything else that needs juice. It just proposed the first standards for flat-screen TVs. As a result, per capita energy use has remained stable in California while soaring 50% nationwide, saving Californians an estimated $56 billion and avoiding the need for 24 new gas-fired power plants. On the supply side, the state has required utilities to provide one-fifth of their power from renewables by 2010, which will jump to one-third by 2020. And California's soup-to-nuts effort to slash emissions — including a cap-and-trade regimen in 2012 — is the blueprint for federal climate legislation. (Download a PDF on California's industries, labs and technologies.)

This public-sector foresight has created alluring opportunities for the most tech-savvy private sector on earth. The venture capitalists behind the high-tech and biotech booms see clean tech as the next big score. The necessary engineers, scientists, accountants, lawyers, marketers and other knowledge workers are already there. "We've already turned industries on their heads, so we assume we can do it again," says Steve Dolezalek, VantagePoint Venture Partners' managing director, who oversaw the firm's software and life-sciences investments before heading its clean-tech group.

The lines between sectors are blurring fast. As its name suggests, eSolar is essentially a software play; its added value is advanced code that positions vast arrays of mirrors to the millimeter to maximize their exposure to sunlight. The company was spawned by IdeaLab, a Pasadena incubator that developed NetZero, Picasa, pay-per-click ads and online car-selling. "We only do ideas that challenge the status quo, and California is the only place we'd do it," says CEO Bill Gross. (See pictures of San Francisco.)

Chip-industry veterans are also drifting into solar, as well as LED lighting and green materials, while Cisco, which made the guts of the Internet, is pivoting to make the guts of the digitized grid. San Diego's cluster of more than 500 biotech companies is now the world capital of algae-to-fuel experiments, including a new $600 million joint venture between ExxonMobil and Venter's Synthetic Genomics. Khosla's investments include Calera, a carbon-capturing-cement start-up founded by a Stanford expert in medical cement; Amyris, which has Berkeley malaria researchers working to turn sugar into diesel; and Soladigm, which exploits semiconductor-industry expertise to make energy-efficient windows.

California scores poorly in most "business friendly" ratings, which tend to focus on tax rates and wage levels rather than on, say, worker productivity or creativity. And the state has more than its share of no-no-no types protesting nanotechnology, synthetic biology and even some SunPower solar-energy projects, which could possibly imperil kangaroo rats and fairy shrimp. But the state's business culture fetishizes long-shot ventures and game-changing ideas. Failure is appreciated, not stigmatized, and an entrepreneur without a few busted start-ups on his résumé is almost suspect. (See TIME's City Guide: Los Angeles.)

Guido Jouret, who oversees Cisco's emerging technologies, explained this creative destruction when we talked over TelePresence, an ultra-high-definition substitute for the hassle, expense and carbon footprint of business travel. We were 3,000 miles (4,800 km) apart, but I kept forgetting we weren't at the same conference table. One of Steven Spielberg's cinematographers helped Cisco get the illusion of intimacy just right. "California has a very welcoming attitude, but it's a Darwinian society," Jouret said. "Companies come and grow and die, and no one sheds a tear. And there's a real sense that it isn't worth doing if it won't change the world."

California's high-tech community has concluded en masse that the next Google guys are going to be the visionaries who figure out how to harness the sun, build a battery to store the wind or engineer the renewable fuel that won't compete with the food supply. (It could be the actual Google guys, who have launched an aggressive clean-energy initiative.) "Inventing a better gadget isn't enough anymore. We're trying to reshape the way people live," says SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive, a South African who went to California for the world underwater-hockey championships, got caught up in the Internet boom and never left. He built and sold an IT-support company; now he's reshaping its software to monitor solar panels.

The State of Progress
So why all the end-is-nighism? Schwarzenegger thinks California gets slagged nationwide for the same reason the U.S. gets slagged worldwide: it's natural to resent the big kahuna. (He should know; his approval rating has dipped below 30%.) In a poolside interview after hosting a global climate summit in Century City, he suggested that outsiders envy California's immense resources — beaches, mountains and redwoods; Hollywood, Napa and Disneyland; the best in stem-cell research, fruits and vegetables, entertainment and fashion. (He was sporting a suit with a zebra-print lining.) "We're all about the cutting edge," he said. "I mean, come on. California is wild!" He's right about the schadenfreude, and it was fun to hear him say the word. It is easy to gloat when the cool jock with the hot girlfriend wrecks his sweet car, especially if he seems kind of smug. I was reminded of this during Rob Lowe's talk at the summit, when he declared that everyone has an obligation to join the fight against global warming, then continued, "For my part, I'll be doing The Ellen DeGeneres Show."

Then again, California has legitimate problems that inspire legitimate criticism: gangs, sprawl, disturbing dropout rates, water shortages that don't seem to stop farmers from irrigating rice and cotton in the desert, the crazymaking traffic that Hollywood immortalized in Falling Down. It's still sitting on a fault line. Its expensive housing, even after the real estate crash, poses a real obstacle to the dream of upward mobility. So do its public schools and other public services, which have been deteriorating for years — in part because older white voters have been reluctant to subsidize younger minorities.

This gets to the one area where California really is dysfunctional: its budget. Californians generally enjoy government spending more than they enjoy paying for it, which is a national problem, but they've also straitjacketed their politicians with scads of lobbyist-produced ballot initiatives locking in huge outlays for various goodies, as well as the notorious Proposition 13, which has severely restricted local property taxes since 1978. California is also one of only three states that need a two-thirds supermajority to pass a budget or raise taxes, a virtual impossibility in its ultra-partisan legislature. So it relies on a boom-and-bust tax base that even many liberals admit is overreliant on the rich. The state's economy actually grew last year, but its revenues crashed because its top earners had lower incomes and capital gains. That meant sharp cutbacks, especially in education, which in California is unusually dependent on state cash. "We have an incredibly dynamic economy, but we'll still end up in federal receivership if our government can't pay its bills," says historian Kevin Starr, a prolific chronicler of the state.

Fortunately, help may be on the way. Nonpartisan groups like Repair California and California Forward have built momentum for sweeping reforms that could stop the unsustainable chaos — including an end to the two-thirds rule, limits on ballot initiatives and a new system of taxation. Schwarzenegger is pushing for a gargantuan water-sharing agreement that could help prevent the state from running dry. And his potential successors are also formidable go-getters with forward-thinking credentials — including former governor and current attorney general Jerry Brown, golden-boy San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. Brown, the early front runner, was widely mocked as Governor Moonbeam back in the 1970s, but some of his ideas — including energy efficiency, as well as the emergency-communications satellite that inspired his nickname — no longer seem so flaky. (Download a PDF on California's industries, labs and technologies.)

But the krazy-Kalifornia criticism is likely to continue regardless of the facts on the ground — not just because of envy, but because of ideology as well. The collapse of the Golden State provides an irresistible parable for hippie-lefty vegan politics, the failure of a quasi-Scandinavian progressive experiment symbolized by MoveOn.org, Daily Kos and the Sierra Club; yoga, crystals and medical marijuana; "Hollywood values" and "San Francisco values." California has a tradition of activist government, and public support for the University of California, federal energy labs and the military-aerospace-industrial complex played a huge role in creating Silicon Valley, San Diego's biotech cluster and the state's other private-sector centers of innovation. So it's been a juicy target for right-wingers who consider Schwarzenegger a squishy sellout. If a low-carbon, Big Government, change-obsessed state with high taxes on the wealthy, draconian environmental regulations, a porous border and the nation's most vibrant labor movement were imploding, what would that say about the age of Obama?

Then again, the home state of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan has been a conservative trendsetter as well, leading the backlash against taxes, affirmative action and illegal aliens and enacting the first three-strikes law against career criminals. Its economy is much closer than the nation's to a true model of free-enterprise capitalism, in which government sets rules and enforces a level playing field but declines to pick winners. And what could be more Californian than the conservative megapastor Rick Warren urging his multimedia flock to make a fresh start with a forgiving God? "A clean slate is possible!" he wrote in his best seller God's Power to Change Your Life. "It's a lot like my son's Etch A Sketch."

In any case, California is not imploding, which ought to be heartening to Americans regardless of ideology or geography. Because America is essentially the land of the Etch A Sketch, and California is America but more so, beckoning dreamers who want to cook Korean tacos or convert fuel tanks into hot tubs. It's progressive more in the literal than in the political sense of the word. And it's where America is going: a greener, more advanced and more global economy; a browner and more metropolitan population; and, yes, some staggering debts and other governance problems that need to be resolved. It's expensive and crowded — because people still want to be there! — and it's recovering from an economic earthquake. But it continues to have a powerful claim on the future. "In the depths of the breakdown, you can see the next narrative," says Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution's metropolitan-policy program. "It's California. The next economy is already in place there, and it's amazing."

Predator Drones and Pakistan - The New Yorker

Jane Mayer on Predator Drones and Pakistan

In this week’s issue of the magazine, Jane Mayer writes about the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of drones to kill terrorist suspects in Pakistan—a program that the Obama Adminstration is relying upon more and more. (Subscribers can access the entire article; everyone else can buy access to this issue online.) Mayer spoke about the costs of a remote-controlled war, the C.I.A.’s lack of transparency, and the Pakistan’s complicated response.

How has the use of Predator drones by the United States changed the situation in Pakistan?

Well, there’s good news and bad news. According to the C.I.A., they’ve killed more than half of the twenty most wanted Al Qaeda terrorist suspects. The bad news is that they’ve inflamed anti-American sentiment, because they’ve also killed hundreds of civilians.

And how is it different than other uses of American force?

It’s not coming from the military. It’s a covert program run by the C.I.A. People know about Predator drones, but not that there are two programs. The U.S.-military program is an extension of conventional military force. The C.I.A. runs a secret targeted-killing program, which really is an unprecedented use of lethal force in places where we are not at war, such as Pakistan. It’s a whole new frontier in the use of force.

John Radsen, a former lawyer for the C.I.A., told me that [the C.I.A.] “doesn’t have much experience with killing. Traditionally, the agency that does that is the Department of Defense.” You’ve got a civilian agency involved in targeted killing behind a black curtain, where the rules of the game are unclear, to the rest of the world and also to us. We don’t know, for instance, who is on the target list. How do you get on the list? Can you get off the list? Who makes the list? What are the criteria? Where is the battlefield? Where does the battlefield end?

It originally seemed simple, because in the beginning it seemed like they would just go after Al Qaeda, but the target list has been growing, particularly in Pakistan.

How do these targeted killings not violate the U.S. ban on assassinations?

After 9/11, the Bush Administration declared that terrorism was no longer a crime; it was an extension of war. Soldiers are privileged to kill enemy combatants in a war, and America is legally allowed to defend itself. And these targeted killings became an extension of the global war on terror.

How long has there been drone activity in Pakistan? Is it new?

Toward the end of the Bush Administration, the drone program in Pakistan ramped up, but when Obama became President, he accelerated it even faster. It’s surprising, but the Obama Administration has carried out as many unmanned drone strikes in its first ten months as the Bush Administration did in its final three years. It’s the favorite weapon of choice right now against Al Qaeda, and for good reason: It’s been effective in killing a lot of people the U.S. wants to see dead.

What does Pakistan think of the drones?

Originally, the Pakistani people’s reaction to the U.S. drone strikes in their country was incredibly negative. Pakistanis rose up and complained that the program violated their sovereignty. So, to obtain Pakistani support—or at least the support of the Zardari government—the Obama Administration quietly decided last March to allow the Pakistani government to nominate some of its own targets. The U.S. has been and is involved in killing not just Al Qaeda figures, but Pakistani targets—people like Taliban leader Beitullah Mehsud who are enemies of the Pakistani state.

Are there any safeguards that prevent the U.S. from carrying out political vendettas for top Pakistani officials?

Well, the problem with this program is that it’s invisible; I would guess there must be all kinds of legal safeguards, and lawyers at the C.I.A. are discussing who we can kill and who we can’t, but none of that is available to the American people. It’s quite a contrast with the armed forces, because the use of lethal force in the military is a transparent process. There are after-action reports, and there’s a very obvious chain of command. We know where the responsibility runs, straight on up to the top of the government. This system keeps checks on abuses of power. There is no such transparency at the C.I.A.

How does the continued collateral damage from Predator drones square with General Stanley McChrystal’s order to the military to lay off the air strikes in Afghanistan and avoid civilian deaths?

Well, you could argue it either way. There is less collateral damage from a drone strike than there is from an F-16. According to intelligence officials, drones are more surgical in the way they kill—they usually use Hellfire missiles and do less damage than a fighter jet might.

At the same time, the fact that they kill civilians at all raises the same problem that McChrystal is trying to combat, which is that they incite people on the ground against the United States. When you’re trying to win a battle of hearts and minds, trying to win over civilian populations against terrorists, it can be counterproductive. That’s why [the former Petraeus adviser and counterinsurgency theorist] David Kilcullen wrote, “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement.”

Are people in Pakistan scared to move around because of the drones?

According to some recent studies, terrorists are scampering around only at night and accusing each other of being spies and informing on one another. So it’s had the desired effect in unravelling terror cells.

If the C.I.A. doesn’t have experience killing people, who is piloting the drones?

It doesn’t take as much talent or experience or training to pilot a drone as it does to pilot a real plane. The skills are much like what you need to do well in a video game. And the C.I.A. has outsourced a lot of the drone piloting, which also raises interesting legal questions, because you not have only civilians running this program, but you may have people who are not even in the U.S. government piloting the drones.

You mention in your piece that drone pilots, who work from an office, suffer from combat stress.

Someone sitting at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia, can view and home in on a target on the other side of the world with tremendous precision, even at night, and destroy it. Peter Singer, who wrote a book on robotic warfare, said that cubicle warriors experience the same stress as regular warriors in a real war. Detached killing still takes a tremendous emotional toll inside our borders.

Why do you think the Obama Administration chose to rely more on drones?

Basically because they can. It’s sort of the least bad option. They can’t get into the tribal areas of Pakistan where a lot of Al Qaeda suspects are thought to be hiding, but they can see them with these drones. So it’s the only way they can get at them.

But there are all kinds of unintended consequences. For one thing, these missile strikes could scatter Al Qaeda, and cells could move to other parts of Pakistan, maybe down toward Karachi, where the population is denser. There have been reports of people already starting to move there.

Also, if the United States can legally kill people from the sky in a country that we’re not at war with, other countries will argue they can do the same thing. And the people using those joysticks in Langley and the deserts of Nevada could now be considered under international law to be engaged in warfare, which means they can legally be retaliated against. It’s a new horizon.

What would the outlines of a more transparent drone program look like?

Michael Walzer, the political philosopher, has noted that when the United States goes about killing people, we usually know who they can kill and where the battlefield is. International lawyers are calling for a public revelation of who is on this list, where can we go after them, and how many people can we take out with them. They want to know the legal, ethical, and political boundaries of the program.

Birth Control Bill Has Enemies in Philippines - NYTimes.com

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By CARLOS H. CONDE

MANILA — Gina Judilla already had three children the first time she tried to terminate a pregnancy. “I jumped down the stairs, hoping that would cause a miscarriage,” she said. The fetus survived and is now an 8-year-old boy.

Three years later, pregnant again, she drank an herbal concoction that was supposed to induce abortion. That, too, failed.

Three years ago, in another unsuccessful attempt to end a pregnancy, she took Cytotec, a drug to treat gastric ulcers that is widely known in the Philippines as an “abortion pill.”

What drove Ms. Judilla, a 37-year-old manicurist, to such extreme measures is a story familiar to many Filipino women. She and her unemployed husband are very poor, barely able to buy vitamins for their youngest child or to send more than two of their older children to school.

“When I had my third child, I swore to myself that I will never get pregnant again because I know we could not afford to have another one,” Ms. Judilla said in a recent interview inside her home in Pasig City, on the eastern outskirts of Manila.

Abortion is illegal in the Philippines, though birth control and related health services have long been available to those who can afford to pay for them through the private medical system. But 70 percent of the population is too poor and depends on heavily subsidized care through the public health system. In 1991, prime responsibility for delivering public health services shifted from the central government to the local authorities, who have broad discretion over which services are dispensed. Many communities responded by making birth control unavailable.

More recently, however, family planning advocates have been making headway in their campaign to change this. Legislation before the Philippine Congress, called the Reproductive Health and Population Development Act, would require governments down to the local level to provide free or low-cost reproductive health services — from condoms and birth control pills to tubal ligation and vasectomy. It would also mandate sex education in all schools, public and private, from fifth grade through high school.

Supporters of the bill cite urgent public health needs. A 2006 government survey found that between 2000 and 2006, only half of Filipino women of reproductive age used birth control of any kind.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization based in the United States that works to advance reproductive health, 54 percent of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the Philippines in 2008 were unintended. Most of these unintended pregnancies — 92 percent — resulted from not using birth control, the institute said, and the rest from birth control that failed.

These unintended pregnancies, the institute says, contributed to an estimated half-million abortions that same year, despite the ban on the procedure. Most of these abortions are done clandestinely and in unsanitary conditions. Many women resort to crude methods like those Ms. Judilla attempted.

Moreover, maternal deaths in the Philippines are among the highest in the region: 230 for every 100,000 live births, compared with 110 deaths in Thailand, 62 in Malaysia and 14 in Singapore, according to the United Nations Population Fund.

The bill’s main proponent in Congress, Representative Edcel C. Lagman, also argues the need for a check on population growth in the interest of national welfare. The Philippine population is estimated at 92 million and is growing at more than 2 percent annually, one of the highest rates in Asia. “Unbridled population growth stunts socioeconomic development and aggravates poverty,” Mr. Lagman wrote in an op-ed column in The Philippine Daily Inquirer.

But attempts to make reproductive services more broadly available met stiff resistance, leading to the defeat of several earlier bills over the past decade.

The main opposition in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country has come from the church and affiliated lay organizations, which say the proposed law would legalize abortion.

One organization, the Catholic Alumni United for Life, said in a position paper that the legislation would promote abortion by financing abortion-inducing drugs, and therefore “violates explicit Catholic teaching.” Bill supporters counter that the legislation says birth control pills should be made available but that these do not constitute abortion-inducing drugs.

The Rev. Melvin Castro of the Episcopal Commission on Family and Life of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines said the Catholic Church and the laity would fight the bill, if passed into law, up to the Supreme Court.

“The Constitution is very clear that the state should protect life from conception up to its natural end,” Father Castro said in an interview. “Regardless of their religion, Filipinos are God-fearing and family-loving. This bill will change that culture.”

Still, proponents of the bill are optimistic, noting that this is the first time such legislation has won the support of the House committee on health. They also cite opinion surveys that show support for the bill and hope it can be passed before Congress adjourns in June.

It seems certain that debate over the legislation will heat up with the approach of the May national elections. Father Castro said the church wanted the bill to be an election issue.

“The more time is given to all the parties concerned to debate the bill, everybody will come to realize that there is no need for it,” he said.

Already, the church has issued statements calling on Senator Benigno Aquino III, expected to be the opposition’s presidential candidate, to oppose the bill. Mr. Aquino, the son of the late president Corazon Aquino, who was extremely close to the church, has said he would not do this.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who is barred from running for another term, has been sending mixed signals of late about her position. In previous statements, however, has said she would let her Catholic faith guide her. “My faith has a very, very strong influence on me,” she said in a speech last year.

Other politicians, particularly those on the local level, have chosen to side with the church. In 2000, Jose Lito Atienza, who was mayor of Manila at the time, issued an executive order ending government-financed birth control in the capital. Condoms and other contraceptives were removed from government clinics and hospitals. Patients who asked for them were turned away.

Mr. Atienza, who is now the environment secretary, defends his order as “the right thing to do.”

“Contrary to what many are saying, that policy was meant to protect women, to protect their wombs from those who want to take away life,” he said.

Passage of the reproductive health bill would automatically nullify Mr. Atienza’s order, said Clara Rita A. Padilla, executive director of EnGendeRights, a nonprofit group that supports the bill. “The poor women of this country need this law to protect them,” she said.

Some communities have taken a different approach. In 2005, Rodrigo Duterte, mayor of the southern city of Davao, offered 5,000 pesos, or roughly $100, to anyone who would undergo a vasectomy or tubal ligation. The church authorities responded by saying they would remove women’s IUDs for free.

Ms. Judilla’s community did not have the same restrictive policy as Manila — there were simply no contraceptives available when she visited the public clinic, a situation the legislation promises to change. She said she had decided against tubal ligation when she was told that she would not be able to work for a week after the surgery.

Britons Weary of Surveillance in Minor Cases - NYTimes.com

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By SARAH LYALL

POOLE, England — It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives.

A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore.

But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her, noting on a log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car).

It turned out that Ms. Paton had broken no rules. Her daughter was admitted to the school. But she has not let the matter rest. Her case, now scheduled to be heard by a regulatory tribunal, has become emblematic of the struggle between personal privacy and the ever more powerful state here.

The Poole Borough Council, which governs the area of Dorset where Ms. Paton lives with her partner and their children, says it has done nothing wrong.

In a way, that is true: under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate surveillance powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers — which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers — to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.

But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs.

“Does our privacy mean anything?” Ms. Paton said in an interview. “I haven’t had a drink for 20 years, but there is nothing that has brought me closer to drinking than this case.”

The law in question is known as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA, and it also gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies — including the Ambulance Service and the Charity Commission — powers once held by only a handful of law enforcement and security service organizations.

Under the law, the localities and agencies can film people with hidden cameras, trawl through communication traffic data like phone calls and Web site visits and enlist undercover “agents” to pose, for example, as teenagers who want to buy alcohol.

In a report this summer, Sir Christopher Rose, the chief surveillance commissioner, said that local governments conducted nearly 5,000 “directed surveillance missions” in the year ending in March and that other public authorities carried out roughly the same amount.

Local officials say that using covert surveillance is justified. The Poole Borough Council, for example, used it to detect and prosecute illegal fishing in Poole Harbor.

“RIPA is an essential tool for local authority enforcement which we make limited use of in cases where it is proportionate and there are no other means of gathering evidence,” Tim Martin, who is in charge of legal and democratic services for Poole, which is southwest of London, said in a statement.

The fuss over the law comes against a backdrop of widespread public worry about an increasingly intrusive state and the growing circulation of personal details in vast databases compiled by the government and private companies.

“Successive U.K. governments have gradually constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world,” the House of Lords Constitution Committee said in a recent report. It continued: “The development of electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information have become pervasive, routine and almost taken for granted.”

The Lords report pointed out that the government enacted the law in the first place to provide a framework for a series of scattershot rules on surveillance. The goal was also to make such regulations compatible with privacy rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights.

RIPA is a complicated law that also regulates wiretapping and intrusive surveillance carried out by the security services. But faced with rumbles of public discontent about local governments’ behavior, the Home Office announced in the spring that it would review the legislation to make it clearer what localities should be allowed to do.

“The government has absolutely no interest in spying on law-abiding people going about their everyday lives,” Jacqui Smith, then home secretary, said.

One of the biggest criticisms of the law is that the targets of surveillance are usually unaware that they have been spied on.

Indeed, Ms. Paton learned what had happened only later, when officials summoned her to discuss her daughter’s school application. To her shock, they produced the covert surveillance report and the family’s telephone billing records.

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re within their rights to scrutinize all applications, but the way they went about it was totally unwarranted,” Ms. Paton said. “If they’d wanted any information, they could have come and asked.”

She would have explained that her case was complicated. The family was moving from their old house within the school district to a new one just outside it. But they met the residency requirements because they were still living at the old address when school applications closed.

At the meeting, Ms. Paton and her partner, Tim Joyce, pointed out that the surveillance evidence was irrelevant because the surveillance had been carried out after the deadline had passed.

“They promptly ushered us out of the room,” she said. “As I stood outside the door, they said, ‘You go and tell your friends that these are the powers we have.’ ”

Soon afterward, their daughter was admitted to the school. Ms. Paton began pressing local officials on their surveillance tactics.

“I said, ‘I want to come in and talk to you,’ ” she said. “ ‘How many people were in the car? Were they men or women? Did they take any photos? Does this mean I have a criminal record?’ ”

No one would answer her questions, Ms. Paton said.

Mr. Martin said he could not comment on her case because it was under review. But Ms. Paton said the Office of the Surveillance Commissioners, which monitors use of the law, found that the Poole council had acted properly. “They said my privacy wasn’t intruded on because the surveillance was covert,” she said.

The case is now before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which looks into complaints about RIPA. It usually meets in secret but has agreed, Ms. Paton said, to have an open hearing at the beginning of November.

The whole process is so shrouded in mystery that few people ever take it this far. “Because no one knows you have a right to know you’re under surveillance,” Ms. Paton said, “nobody ever makes a complaint.”

Obama Declares Swine Flu Outbreak a National Emergency - NYTimes.com

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By JACKIE CALMES and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

WASHINGTON — President Obama has declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, allowing hospitals and local governments to speedily set up alternate sites for treatment and triage procedures if needed to handle any surge of patients, the White House said on Saturday.

The declaration came as thousands of people lined up in cities across the country to receive vaccinations, and as federal officials acknowledged that their ambitious vaccination program has gotten off to a slow start. Only 16 million doses of the vaccine were available now, and about 30 million were expected by the end of the month. Some states have requested 10 times the amount they have been allotted.

Flu activity — virtually all of it the swine flu — is now widespread in 46 states, a level that federal officials say equals the peak of a typical winter flu season. Millions of people in the United States have had swine flu, known as H1N1, either in the first wave in the spring or the current wave.

Although there has been no exact count, officials said the H1N1 virus has killed more than 1,000 Americans and hospitalized over 20,000. The emergency declaration, which Mr. Obama signed Friday night, has to do only with hospital treatment, not with the vaccine. Government officials emphasized that Mr. Obama’s declaration was largely an administrative move that did not signify any unanticipated worsening of the outbreak of the H1N1 flu nationwide. Nor, they said, did it have anything to do with the reports of vaccine shortages.

“This is not a response to any new developments,” said Reid Cherlin, a White House spokesman. “It’s an important tool in our kit going forward.”

Mr. Obama’s declaration was necessary to empower Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services, to issue waivers that allow hospitals in danger of being overwhelmed with swine flu patients to execute disaster operation plans that include transferring patients off-site to satellite facilities or other hospitals.

The department first declared a public health emergency in April; Ms. Sebelius renewed it on Tuesday. But the separate presidential declaration was required to waive federal laws put in place to protect patients’ privacy and to ensure that they are not discriminated against based on their source of payment for care, including Medicare, Medicaid and the states’ Children’s Health Insurance Program.

As a practical matter, officials said, the waiver could allow a hospital to set up a make-shift satellite facility for swine flu patients in a local armory or other suitably spacious location, or at another hospital, to segregate such cases for treatment. Under federal law, if the patients are sent off site without a waiver, the hospital could be refused reimbursement for care as a sanction.

A few hospitals, including some in Texas and Tennessee, have set up triage tents in their parking lots to screen patients with fever or other flu symptoms. A Health and Human Services official said no hospitals had requested a waiver. David Daigle of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said he had not heard of any hospital that has faced a surge of patients so large that it had to set up a triage area or a treatment unit off site.

In Chicago on Saturday, health officials began giving free vaccinations at six City College locations, and within hours hundreds of people were turned away because supplies had been exhausted. The city distributed 1,200 vaccines to each site, immunizing more than 7,000 people, said Tim Hadac, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Public Health. All but two of the sites ran out of the vaccine.

At Truman College on Chicago’s North Side, lines formed at 7 a.m., two hours before the doors opened. Mary Kate Merna, 28, a teacher who is nine months pregnant, arrived too late to get a vaccination. “I thought I’d be a priority being nine months pregnant,” she said. “You hear it’s a national emergency and it scares you.”

In Fairfax County, Va., officials had planned to have swine flu clinics at 10 different locations on Saturday. But the county did not receive the number of doses it requested, and was forced to offer the vaccinations only at the government building. People began lining up with camping gear the night before to get vaccinations.

Merni Fitzgerald, Fairfax’s public affairs director, said officials were aiming to administer 12,000 doses of the vaccine to those most at risk for serious complications from the H1N1 virus, mainly pregnant women and children 6 to 36 months.

But that did not stop some other high-risk patients. “I lied and told the doctors I was pregnant,” said Theresa Caffey of Centreville, who has multiple sclerosis and nurses her 11-week-old son, Joshua. “I’m religious. I don’t lie. But it’s not about me. It’s for my son. It’s safer for him if I have the antibodies.”

In a briefing on Friday, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the C.D.C. director, acknowledged problems with the vaccine production. “We share the frustration of people who have waited on line or called a number or checked a Web site and haven’t been able to find a place to get vaccinated,” he said.

Federal officials predicted last spring that as many as 120 million doses could be available by now, with nearly 200 million by year’s end. But production problems plagued some of the five companies contracted to make the vaccine. All use a technology involving growing the vaccine in fertilized chicken eggs; at most of them, the seed strain grew more slowly than expected.

The manufacturers are “working hard to get vaccine out as safely and rapidly as possible,” Dr. Frieden said. But since it is grown in eggs, “even if you yell at them, they don’t grow faster.”

Since last winter’s more isolated cases of swine flu, the expectation that the virus would return with a vengeance in this flu season had posed a test of the Obama administration’s preparedness. Officials are mindful that the previous administration’s failure to better prepare for and respond to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 left doubts that dogged President George W. Bush to the end of his term.

There is no overall shortage of seasonal flu vaccine — 85 million doses have shipped, and the season has not started. But there are temporary local shortages. The seasonal flu typically hospitalizes 200,000 and kills 36,000 nationwide each year. But over 90 percent of the deaths are among the elderly, while the swine flu mostly affects the young.

Jackie Calmes reported from Washington, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Crystal Yednak in Chicago and Holli Chmela in Fairfax, Va. contributed reporting.

Opposition figure Maksharip Aushev gunned down in Russia's North Caucasus - washingtonpost.com

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By Philip P. Pan
Sunday, October 25, 2009 4:58 PM

MOSCOW -- A popular opposition figure in Russia's restive Ingushetia province was gunned down Sunday morning in the latest killing of a government critic in the North Caucasus, prompting outrage from human rights groups and raising fears of further violence in the region.

Maksharip Aushev, a businessman who had led mass protests against abuses by the government's security forces, was driving on a major highway in the neighboring province of Kabardino-Balkaria when a passing vehicle sprayed his car with more than 60 bullets, authorities said. The attack also seriously wounded a passenger.

Colleagues condemned the slaying as an attempt to silence voices critical of the authorities, and said it sent an especially chilling message because Aushev held a post on a human rights council established by Moscow and enjoyed the support of Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the local governor appointed by President Dmitry Medvedev last year.

Yevkurov has reached out to human rights activists and the opposition, offering them a degree of protection, but Aushev's killing suggests that he, and by extension the Kremlin, may be losing control over the overlapping law enforcement agencies fighting an growing Islamist insurgency in the region.

In an interview with The Washington Post this month, Aushev accused the security forces of conducting an indiscriminate campaign of abductions, torture and killings in Ingushetia that had only strengthened the rebels. He singled out the powerful Federal Security Service, one of the successors of the KGB, as well as local police controlled by Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin's strongman in neighboring Chechnya.

"I don't consider them officers. I consider them bandits," he said, over dinner during the wedding of one of his sons.

Two years ago, another son and a nephew were abducted, taken to Chechnya and tortured. Aushev blamed the FSB and won their release by organizing huge street protests, emerging as one of the most outspoken leaders of the opposition to Ingushetia's governor at the time, Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB officer and an ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

After another opposition figure, Magomed Yevloyev, was shot to death in police custody last year, Aushev agreed to take over his Web site, a news operation that infuriated the authorities with its reports on corruption and human rights violations. He later led protests that helped persuade the Kremlin to fire Zyazikov and bring in Yevkurov.

In a show of support for the new governor, Aushev said he retired from politics and no longer considered himself a member of the opposition. But he had no illusions about the new governor's ability to rein in the security forces. "From day one, they've been sabotaging him, undermining his authority and continuing with the illegal executions and torture," he said.

Aushev added that the FSB still considered him "enemy number one."

A month ago, the security forces stopped his car and attempted to take him into custody after he left a meeting with the government. He escaped only because a crowd of motorists, including an aide to the governor, surrounded him.

"If I had been a half-meter closer, they would have tied me up and I would have disappeared without a trace," he told Caucasian Knot, a Web site that covers the region.

In a statement Sunday, Yevkurov described Aushev's slaying as a "heinous crime intended to destabilize the region" and vowed to do everything in his power to punish the killers.

One of the governor's aides, Musa Pliyev, a former member of the opposition who had worked closely with Aushev, said there was little doubt "the murder was a political one" but stopped short of blaming the security services.

"If the authorities who should guarantee the freedom and safety of their citizens fail to do this, then they must be blamed for Aushev's death and many other human rights activists and journalists who have been killed recently," he added.

The shooting follows the execution-style killings of two charity workers in the Chechen capital of Grozny in August and of Natalya Estemirova, Chechnya's most prominent human rights activist, whose body was found in Ingushetia in July.

Scores killed, at least 500 wounded in bomb attacks in Baghdad - washingtonpost.com

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By Anthony Shadid
Sunday, October 25, 2009 9:16 AM

BAGHDAD -- Twin car bombs targeted two government buildings in downtown Baghdad Sunday, wrecking pillars of the state's authority and cutting like a scythe through snarled traffic during the morning rush hour. The government said at least 132 people were killed and 520 wounded in one of the worst attacks in Baghdad.

The first bomb struck an intersection near the Justice Ministry and the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works at around 10:15 a.m. on the first day of the Iraqi work week, when streets are always more crowded. Less than a minute later, a second blast targeted the Baghdad provincial headquarters, draped in a sign heralding its renovation.

The bombings bore the hallmarks of an attack Aug. 19 that targeted the Finance and Foreign Ministries, also killing more than 100 people. Unlike the carnage unleashed by attacks in crowded mosques, restaurants and markets, aimed at igniting sectarian strife, these blasts appeared to rely on a distinct political calculus, designed to undermine faith in the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has staked his political future on restoring a semblance of security to the war-wrecked country.

"This is part of the struggle over power in Iraq, and Iraqis will have to sacrifice themselves for it," said Mohammed al-Rubai, an opponent of Maliki who serves as a member of the Baghdad provincial council. "Everyone in charge shares responsibility."

Hours after the attack, Maliki visited the scene. As in August, he blamed members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

"The cowardly acts of terrorism, which occurred today, must not weaken the resolution of Iraqis to continue their journey and to fight the followers of the fallen regime, the Baathists and al-Qaeda," he said in a statement released by his office. The culprits, he added, "have their black hands stained by the blood of the Iraqi people."

The blasts, which the Interior Ministry said were carried out by suicide bombers, detonated under a pale gray sky, shattering windows more than a mile away. Broken water mains sent water coursing through the street, strewn with debris. Pools of water mixed with blood gathered along the curbs, ashened detritus floating on the surface.

Cars caught in traffic jams were turned into tombs, the bodies of passengers incinerated inside. The smell of diesel mixed with the stench of burning flesh.

"Bodies were hurled into the air," said Mohammed Fadhil, a 19-year-old bystander. "I saw women and children cut in half." He looked down at a curb smeared with blood. "What's the sin that those people commited? They are so innocent."

Ali Hassan, an employee at the provincial headquarters, said the building was filled with women with their children seeking compensation for past terrorist actions.

"Now they've become the victims again," he said.

The cacophony of destruction ensued after the blasts. The thud of helicopters intersected with the noon call to prayer, as rescue workers, shouting at each other, frantically pulled charred bodies from crumpled cars. Broken glass littered the sidewalk like ice in a hailstorm, scraping under the shuffling of feet. Bulldozers dragged the carcasses of vehicle across the pavement, then deposited them randomly.

"Bring blankets! Bring blankets!" Iraqi relief officials shouted at colleagues, as they trudged through the flooded streets. "There are more bodies!"

"Clear the street!" other police shouted at bystanders who had gathered.

On the sidewalk, wet corpses were covered in checkered brown blankets. Others were sheathed into gray body bags, then dragged through the coursing water.

"What kind of improvement is there? None," said Riyadh Jumaa, 32, who fled with his 3-year-old son in his arms. When the second blast struck, both were hurled to the ground. "The ministers, the officers, they're sitting in their chairs doing nothing."

Like the attacks Aug. 19, the blasts Sunday seemed to have their desired effect, underlining the government's inability to protect the capital, the seat of its authority.

In the wake of the earlier attacks, Maliki's government arrested several army and police officers, accusing them of negligence. Officials also promptly purported to have detained the culprits, and they aired a video of a man who confessed to organizing the attacks. But U.S. officials later cast doubt on the veracity of the arrests or the confession.

At the time, Maliki faced criticism that his administration had prematurely scaled back security measures in Baghdad just days before. His detractors have also lambasted him for being overconfident in his security forces' readiness as American forces pull back from the cities in preparation of a larger U.S. withdrawal by next August.

The attacks Sunday seem sure to accentuate doubts in Maliki's ability to maintain security, the cornerstone of his party's campaign in national elections in January.

At the scene, bystanders grew angry as high-ranking police and army officers visited the devastated ministries, surrounded by security details of dozens of men.

"Look! 200 just to protect him!" shouted Ahmed Abed. "Who has trust in the government," he went on. "Why should I have trust? Should I trust the son of a dog?"

In front of the provincial headquarters, Iman Barazinji, a Kurdish member of the provincial headquarters, made the same complaint, echoing popular frustration at the inability of Baghdad's ubiquitous checkpoints to stop cars laden with explosives and at the caravans that escort officials ensconced in offices fortified by blast walls.

"We don't want anyone to hide behind the walls any longer," she shouted.

Correspondent Ernesto Londoño and special correspondents Aziz Alwan and Qais Mizher contributed to this report.