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Orphan children play in their bedroom at an orphanage in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don December 19. A bill banning Americans from adopting Russian children went to President Vladimir Putin for his signature on December 26, 2012 after winning final approval from parliament in retaliation for a U.S. law that targets Russian human rights abusers. (Vladimir Konstantinov/Reuters/File)
Putin signs antiadoption law, throwing pending adoptions into confusion (+video)
President Vladimir Putin signed the Dima Yakovlev Act into law Friday, banning all adoptions of Russian orphans by US citizens as of Jan. 1 and throwing dozens of currently ongoing adoptions into confusion.
The mood among workers in the almost 40 Russia-accredited adoption agencies, which have survived repeated bouts of political tensions and ever-tightening regulations over the years, was near despair Friday.
"We have two cases of adoption in court and we're just asking ourselves the same question, what will be next?" says Lyudmila Babich, of the Cold Spring, New York-based Happy Families Center.
"We have no text of this law, nor any explanations of what's supposed to happen now. So, we're waiting," she says.
Any hope that Mr. Putin might impose some restraint upon a measure that even members of his own cabinet have criticized as possibly illegal and diplomatically disruptive were dashed Thursday when Putin explicitly endorsed the adoption ban and other tough measures against US citizens working in Russia in televised remarks.
"I see no reason not to sign the law," Putin said.
He added that he would also sign a presidential decree to improve procedures for adopting Russian orphans and abandoned children domestically, and also boost measures to help children with serious disabilities and health problems – who were previously the major pool of orphans made available for foreign adoption.
About 1,000 Russian children were adopted by US families in 2011, down from the annual average of 3,000 or so in the past decade, and only a small portion of the 120,000 Russian children who are considered eligible for adoption. Under Russian law, a child can be offered to prospective foreign parents only after having been rejected three times by Russian families.
Framed as 'selling' children
Russian nationalists argue that it's a shame for Russian children to be "sold" abroad, and several of the lawmakers who championed the Dima Yakovlev bill argued they will sponsor further efforts to ease the plight of Russia's huge numbers of institutionalized children.
Putin lent his support to the harshest critics of international adoption Thursday, by casually likening Russian children taken into US families to economic refugees.
"There are probably many places in the world where living standards are higher than ours. So what, are we going to send all our children there?" Putin said with sarcasm. "Maybe we should move there ourselves?"
The new law is a sudden about face from Russia's previous position. Russia's foreign ministry spent years negotiating a detailed US-Russia adoption accord, which regulates virtually all aspects of the adoption process, and came into effect just last month.
"I just don't understand how they can completely change the whole system for international adoptions, suddenly, all at once like this," says Svetlana Pronina, head of Child's Right, a Russian nongovernmental group that works for children's rights.
"It looks to me like children have become hostages to the political situation, and this is not a wise way to approach the needs of Russian children," she adds.
"How is it that our authorities were able to ratify a major agreement with the US about adoptions just a few months ago, and now they decided to abolish it? What sense is there in this?" she says.
One year's warning ignored
The law is slated to come into effect on Jan. 1, though the US-Russia bilateral accord stipulates that either side must give one year's warning before withdrawing from the deal.
The original idea of the Dima Yakovlev law was to frame a symmetrical response to the US Magnitsky Act, which targets sanctions at about 60 Russian officials allegedly involved in the 2009 prison death of whistleblowing anticorruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
That law would have levied visa and financial penalties on alleged US human rights violators, such as CIA officials involved in "black site" secret prisons, Guantanamo prison guards as well as US adoptive parents who abused their Russian-born children.
But after a series of amendments last week, the adoption ban was put front-and-center, along with measures that may lead to the closure of any NGO that receives US funding and stiff restrictions on US passport-holders (including thousands of dual US-Russia citizens) engaging in activities deemed "political" by authorities.
Pending adoptions a question
No one is sure what will happen with the approximately 50 cases of US-Russia adoption that are currently at various stages of completion.
Pavel Astakhov, the Kremlin's ombudsman for children's rights, who has been a strong supporter of the ban, says all current adoptions will be halted and the children re-assigned.
"There are 52 such children," Mr. Astakhov told the independent Interfax agency Friday.
"I believe they must be adopted in Russia, with the regional governors taking personal responsibility for them," he added.
Ilya Ponomaryov, the lone Duma deputy who voted against the Dima Yakovlev bill in all three readings, says there should now be absolutely no doubt about who was behind the adoption ban from the outset.
"The Duma has no independent will, it simply does what the executive branch tells it to," Mr. Ponomaryov says. "Now it's clear that this was Putin's initiative all along."
Indian protesters listen to a speaker during a protest against a recent gang rape of a young woman in a moving bus in New Delhi, India, Thursday. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged Thursday to take action to protect the nation's women while the young rape victim was flown to Singapore for treatment of severe internal injuries. (Altaf Qadri/AP)
India gang rape spurs national dialogue
The Indian government’s crackdown on the anti-rape protests that have continued for nearly two weeks in New Delhi has only aggravated public anger and concern about women’s safety.
The protests were sparked by the gang rape and brutal assault of a 23-year-old student on a bus in the elite South Delhi district on Dec. 16.
As the girl battles for her life in a Singapore hospital, Indians are debating how to make the country safer for women. Ten days after the incident, it dominates newspaper headlines and op-ed pages, pushing to the margins stories like the retirement of cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, the popular Indian sportsperson, highlighting just how much the case has affected people.
Sexual harassment is rampant in India, and the public has been largely apathetic to women’s plight, but many are hoping the attack could be a turning point in the way India treats women.
Calls for capital punishment, including the chemical castration of rapists, have died down, with various women’s groups decrying them. Given that in 94 percent of rape cases the rapist is known to the victim, Nilanjana S. Roy, writing in The Hindu newspaper she wonders if the protestors would be okay with death penalty if it were their father, uncle, neighbors, or even if it meant convicting Indian security forces in conflict zones.
The Monitor reported that India is considering a fast-track court process to expedite rape cases and step up punishment for sexual violence on the heels of the bus rape incident.
Beyond the law, what needs to happen, writes Shilpa Phadke, author of a book on women’s safety in Mumbai, has to do with how Indians use their streets: “We are safer when there are more women (and more men) on the streets. When shops are open, when restaurants are open, when there are hawkers and yes, even sex workers on the street, the street is a safer space for us all.”
The outrage that this case has spurred might finally bring about a cultural change in India, Stephanie Nolen of The Globe and Mail suggests in a report:
Women assaulted leaving bars or late at night or while wearing Western clothes have been chastised by police, judges and politicians for bringing their misfortune on themselves. This time, however, there is a current of defiance in the protests, noted Subhashini Ali of the All India Democratic Women’s Association. A young woman in central Delhi on Tuesday carried a sign saying, “Stop telling me how to dress, start telling your sons not to rape.”
But rape is still not seen as a men’s issue, Ms. Ali said. “I don’t think many people are asking that question yet [of how men are being brought up and how it shapes their attitude toward rape].”
“But that’s where we have to go.”
And that should start with using sexual education in schools as a means to counter systemic patriarchal attitudes, writes Ketaki Chowkhani in Kafila, a collaborative blog that I work with.
That need for an emphasis on social change rather than law enforcement was also highlighted by Praveen Swami in The Hindu newspaper. India could learn a lot from the United States, he writes, where the incidence of rapes have fallen:
“The decline in rape in the U.S. has mainly come about not because policing has become god-like in its deterrent value, but because of hard political and cultural battles to teach men that when a woman says no, she means no.”
Meanwhile, the crackdown on the protests in Delhi has drawn sharp reactions and much anger across the Internet. On Facebook, graphic designer Sangeeta Das narrated her experience of the protests on Dec. 23, republished on the Kafila blog:
“There were many volunteers distributing biscuits and water to every protestor. We were talking ... on how to tackle the violence on women and children starting from ourselves, our homes, and communities. We were simply talking ... when the police, hundreds of them ... charged at us from behind, without any warning.”
Meanwhile, the media have drawn the government’s ire. On Sunday, the same day one journalist was killed in Manipur when police opened fire on protestors, the government issued an advisory to news channels to show “maturity and responsibility” in their coverage of protests:
No programme should be carried in the cable service which is likely to encourage or incite violence or contains anything against maintenance of law and order or which promotes anti-national attitude.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a news conference in Moscow, Russia, Thursday. Putin says a draft bill banning US adoptions of Russian children is a legitimate response to a new US law that calls for sanctions on Russians deemed to be human rights violators. (Misha Japaridze/AP)
Deep emotions run beneath Russia's adoption ban
You usually can judge Vladimir Putin’s dislike of a reporter's question by the intensity of his expression. Such was the case this week at his annual news conference, when he greeted with a hard scowl the subject of pending Russian legislation that would ban Americans from adopting orphaned children. Mr. Putin unleashed invective on the fact that consular representatives aren’t allowed to visit adopted Russian children in the United States.
“I believe that is unacceptable. Do you think this is normal? How can it be normal when you are humiliated? Do you like it? Are you a sadomasochist or something? They shouldn’t humiliate our country,” he told reporters in Moscow.
As is often the case in Russia, there is the issue of what is going on versus what is really going on. And as is often the case in Russia, it’s complicated.
There is very little doubt as to the goal of the legislation, which passed its third and final reading in the lower house of parliament Friday and must still be signed by Putin. The bill is named after Dima Yakovlev, the toddler who died of heat stroke in 2007 after his adopted father forgot him in a locked car in Virginia for nine hours. The father, Miles Harrison, was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Dima, whose adopted name was Chase. His acquittal in 2008 sparked banner newspaper headlines, incendiary TV news reports, and howls of outrage in Russia.
Lawmakers in the State Duma made it clear that today's legislation is a direct response to the US “Magnitsky Act,” a law designed to sanction a particular group of Russian officials connected to the death of a whistle-blowing lawyer in a Moscow prison.
In other words, a law designed to punish people tied to a lawyer’s prison death has been answered with a law to prevent people from adopting orphaned children, many of whom have have developmental or other disabilities and will otherwise end up living much of their lives in orphanages that often resemble state mental hospitals of a bygone era.
Adoption is a searingly emotional issue for Russians, and one easily manipulated by the Kremlin. The institution of adoption is relatively uncommon in Russia, for cultural and other reasons. And judging by headlines in the Moscow tabloids, and the rhetoric of some state lawmakers, you’d think that Americans adopt Russian children to eat them.
Bolstering those who are suspicious of adoption is a smattering of abuse cases in Russian orphanages that have seized the public attention. In one notorious case, a nurse in a southern Russian children’s home was accused of taping pacifiers to the mouths of children to keep them from crying. And cases like that of Dima and of Artyem Savelyev, whose adoptive American mother sent the then-7-year-old boy home to Russia with a "to whom it may concern" note of rejection in 2010, give Russians fair reason for pause over foreign adoptions.
But for many Russians, the adoption of children by foreigners is a polite way of saying “foreigners are purchasing our children for export.” Some 60,000 Russian children have been adopted by Americans in the past two decades, and Russia trails only China and Ethiopia in popularity for Americans seeking to adopt foreign children, according to the US State Department.
Many also see it as ironic that Russia is being sanctioned for human rights violations by a country whose policies over the past decade have seared “Guantanamo” into the English language lexicon – an irony that Putin, who like many Russians has a nose for hypocrisy, clearly relished in pointing out.
“Not only are those prisoners detained without charge, they walk around shackled, like in the Middle Ages. They’ve legalized torture in their own country. Can you imagine if we had anything like this here? They would have eaten us alive a long time ago,” he said.
But regardless of the moralities involved, the fact of the matter is that there will be clear winners and losers from this ordeal.
The winners will be the middlemen, the orphanage directors, the bureaucrats, and the administrators all of whose signatures or stamps, essential to the adoption process, can yield a lucrative stream under-the-table revenues – revenues from well-meaning, would-be foreign parents with the means to pay thousands of dollars for the right to adopt a Russian orphan.
And the losers will be orphaned children who remain institutionalized. That was the point of US Ambassador Michael McFaul’s statement released Friday after the Duma vote: “The welfare of children is simply too important to be linked to others issues in our bilateral relationship.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a man not known for pulling his punches when it comes to US policy, has voiced his doubts, suggesting that more moderate voices might stop the bill's passage. Perhaps Putin, having made his point with his press conference performance and with the performance of the malleable State Duma, will relax his rhetoric and soften the bill to open the door to foreign adoptions again, thus portraying himself as doing the best for the children.
Mike Eckel reported from Moscow for five years.
Arizona Lottery officials stand next to an enlargement of the winning $587.5 Million Powerball ticket last week during a news conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. Phoenix resident Matthew Good claimed the second half of last month's record $587 million Powerball jackpot, pocketing $192 million after taxes. (Matt York/AP/File)
Good Reads: gun laws, lottery winners, online education, and tech gets sensory
The Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut brought a deluge of media attention to gun control. One useful perspective came from the Lexington’s Notebook column in The Economist magazine. Britain’s gun-related homicide rate is drastically lower than that of the United States not only because guns are harder to purchase, but because ammunition is scarce, the writer points out. In one recent incident in a crime-plagued British neighborhood, for example, “the gang had had to make its own bullets, which did not work well....”
In one recent year England and Wales experienced 39 fatalities from crimes involving firearms; the US had 12,000. In Britain, “The firearms-ownership rules are onerous, involving hours of paperwork. You must provide a referee who has to answer nosy questions about the applicant’s mental state, home life (including family or domestic tensions) and their attitude towards guns. In addition to criminal-record checks, the police talk to applicants’ family doctors and ask about any histories of alcohol or drug abuse or personality disorders.”
Some US gun owners argue that they might need firearms to fight a tyrannical government. But “I don’t think America is remotely close to becoming a tyranny, and to suggest that it is is both irrational and a bit offensive to people who actually do live under tyrannical rule,” the writer responds.
Lottery burdens
Are you eager to win the next big lottery? BloombergBusinessWeek writer David Samuels offers the cautionary tale of Jack Whittaker, a contractor in Scott Depot, W. Va., who 10 years ago found that his $1 Powerball lottery ticket had won him a $93 million payout after taxes.
Mr. Whittaker tried to do good with his bonanza, giving away a good portion to charitable groups, especially churches. But he still descended into alcohol addiction; was divorced by his wife; became tied up (by his own count) in some 460 legal actions; and lost his beloved granddaughter, on whom he had lavished piles of cash, to drug addiction. Before his lottery “win,” Whittaker’s contracting business had afforded him a comfortable life. “Nobody knew I had any money,” Whittaker said. “All they knew was my good works.” His life back then, he notes sadly, “was a lot easier.”
Online courses vs. college life
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are the wave of the future, “the end of higher education as we know it,” as one university president has predicted.
Or are they? Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“For Whom Is College Being Reinvented?”), Scott Carlson and Goldie Blumenstyk give Luddites their due. While it’s true that an online course conducted by a top teacher might trump a large lecture class offered by a second-rate live lecturer, those pushing MOOCs as inevitable should be heard with a skeptic’s ear.
“The idea that [students] can have better education and more access at lower cost through massive online courses is just preposterous,” says Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C. “There is an awful lot of hype about ... the need for reinvention that is being fomented by people who are going to make out like bandits on it.”
Even David Stavens, a founder of the MOOC provider Udacity, concedes that “there’s a magic that goes on inside a university campus that, if you can afford to live inside that bubble, is wonderful.”
High-tech touch and taste
IBM forecasts that within the next five years technology will vastly improve the way humans experience the five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch), according to a report in the Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence newsletter. Online shoppers, for example, will be able to “touch” a product using mobile devices, “using haptic, infrared and pressure-sensitive technologies to simulate touch – such as the texture and weave of a fabric as a shopper brushes their finger over the image of the item on a device screen.”
Clever sensors will also be able to detect sounds in the form of pressure, vibrations, and sound waves. This data will allow predictions of events such as when a tree might fall or when a landslide is about to happen. “Baby talk” will be decoded as a language, letting parents or other caregivers know what infants are trying to communicate. Computer systems will learn to detect emotions and sense a person’s mood by analyzing factors such as pitch, tone, and hesitancy in speech, allowing automated call centers to be more helpful and understanding between human cultures to improve.
Even the finest chefs will be challenged by technology. Computer programs “will break down ingredients to their molecular level and blend the chemistry of food compounds with the psychology behind what flavors and smells humans prefer,” IBM predicts.
Healthy foods will be made more palatable – and programming will pair up foods in ways that maximize taste and flavor. “A system like this can also be used to help us eat healthier,” IBM predicts, “creating novel flavor combinations that will make us crave a vegetable casserole instead of potato chips.”
A Mayan dancer performs at the Xcaret Eco Theme Park on the outskirts of Playa del Carmen, Mexico, on Wednesday. Although some say the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012, the Vatican's top astronomer is rather dubious. (Israel Leal/AP)
End of the world on 12/21/12? Not just yet, says the Vatican's top astronomer. (+video)
A Mayan prophecy that the world will end this week may have the more credulous stocking up on supplies and fleeing to "sacred" mountains in the hope of miraculous last-minute salvation by aliens.
But while the idea that Earth could be shattered into a billion pieces by some sort of interplanetary cataclysm has worried millions of people around the world, the Holy See's chief astronomer suggests that life as we know it is unlikely to come to an end quite so soon.
In an editorial in the Vatican's official daily newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano – in an issue whose front-page article was entitled “The end is not nigh – at least for now” – Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the director of the Vatican Observatory, criticized "pseudo-prophecies" about the end of the Universe.
“In the media and on the internet there is a great deal of talk of the end of the world, which the Mayan calendar supposedly predicted for Dec 21. If you do a search on Google, you get 40 million results on the topic,” wrote Father Funes, a Jesuit priest from Argentina.
A 5,125-year cycle known in the Mayan calendar as the Long Count comes to an end on Friday and has been widely interpreted by cultists, New Age disciples, and believers in the esoteric as heralding the destruction of the planet.
But in a lengthy discourse on astronomy and Christian belief, he said it was “not even worth discussing the scientific basis of these claims."
He acknowledged that the universe was slowly expanding, but that the destruction of the Earth – if it ever happens – will not occur for billions of years.
In any case, he said, Christians subscribe to the “fundamental conviction that death is not the last word.”
Four hundred years after the Roman Catholic Church put Galileo on trial for heresy based on his belief that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way round, the Vatican is rather more forgiving of the science of astronomy.
Its observatory is at Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of the pope, which lies in the hills outside Rome. One of the oldest astronomical research institutes in the world, it also has a research facility hosted by the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Funes, who has a master’s degree in astronomy from the National University of Cordoba in Argentina as well as degrees in philosophy and theology, was made director of the observatory in 2006.
He has not been reluctant to take modern science into account when considering religious tenets. In an interview in 2008, he said it was possible that intelligent forms of life could exist on other planets in the solar system.
Aliens would still be God’s creatures, he said, in an article in L’Osservatore Romano headlined "The extraterrestrial is my brother." The notion did not necessarily contradict the teachings of the Catholic Church, he said, arguing that to dismiss the possibility of alien life would be to underestimate God’s creative powers.
A page from a Chinese passport displays a Chinese map which includes an area in the South China Sea inside a line of dashes representing maritime territory claimed by China, in Kunming, Yunnan province, in this November file photo. (Reuters/File)
In passport kerfuffle, Taiwan is stickin' it to China
China hasn’t started a military war with Taiwan – as has been feared since the 1940s – but a battle that began on paper last month has met with a fiery pulp-and-ink response that could burn a hole in goodwill between the two once-hostile governments.
Pictures on Beijing’s latest passports show a map of China that includes two parts of Taiwan, including its scenic showpiece Sun Moon Lake. The travel documents also depict islets in the South China Sea as China's, despite competing claims by Taiwan and several Southeast Asian countries.
China, already a regional heavyweight, is believed to have issued 5 million of the passports between April and November when they inflamed a regional dispute with neighbors. Now Taiwan is joining the chorus of protest, not by refusing to stamp them as Vietnam has announced it is doing, and not by issuing their own maps as India has done, but with some provocative stickers with a message to China.
China has claimed Taiwan as part of its turf since the 1940s, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists set up a government to rival mainland China's about 100 miles offshore after losing the Chinese civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communists. The relationship between China and Taiwan has been up and down for the past few decades: Both formal reunification with the mainland and full Taiwanese independence have been suggested, but a tempering of relations has kept many content with the middle ground status quo, with Taiwan considering itself an effectively independent territory.
Still, the maps in China’s passports were taken as a bold affront to that. In response, Taiwan’s main opposition Democratic Progressive Party gave away 10,000 pink stickers at the foreign ministry consular office in Taipei. The stickers that read “Taiwan is my Country” can be slapped onto the back cover of a Taiwan passport or onto a plastic passport protector.
The stickers went fast two weeks ago, so the party copied off another 20,000. “People just love them,” says its policy coordination executive director Joseph Wu. “It’s quite clear that what China is doing trespasses into our sovereignty. Taiwan is not under any country’s jurisdiction.”
Across town, the smaller Taiwan Solidarity Union Party printed out oversized paper effigies of the Chinese passports and marred or burned them at a rally, according to local media.
Taiwan and China have set aside differences over sovereignty since 2008, when the island’s conciliatory President Ma Ying-jeou took office. Mr. Ma’s government has signed 18 deals with China, drawing Taiwan closer to the world economic powerhouse. Talks on those agreements built mutual trust that didn’t exist before.
The island’s foreign ministry says that trust is now being questioned. The ministry’s news release calls China’s passport issue “a provocative act that will … damage the mutual trust laboriously built by the two sides in recent years.”
Taiwanese opposition forces are protesting the Chinese passports because they worry that the government is courting China rather than standing up to it, but analysts say officials in Taipei are just as irked as their skeptics.
“Our government thinks that China betrayed common ground, which is that there’s one China but subject to different interpretations,” says Nathan Liu, an associate international affairs professor at Ming Chuan University in Taiwan, citing the basis for talks and deals since 2008.
Shipping trucks in Veracruz, Mexico, a major port city on the Gulf of Mexico. (Alfredo Sosa/Staff/File)
Good Reads: Mexico’s rise, Lincoln’s precedence, and tomorrow’s truth
Which country produces the biggest share of America’s flat-screen TVs? You know it can’t be China, or we wouldn’t bother asking.
Three years ago, a Pentagon report warned that Mexico was on the brink of becoming a failed state, notes a special report in The Economist. Instead, Mexico’s economic growth has overtaken and surpassed that of Brazil. And as Chinese wages have quintupled in the past 10 years, Mexico’s competitiveness is rising to match its great field position next door to the US Sun Belt. The flat-screen TVs are the least of it. What’s amazing to The Economist is how little Americans know about the progress of their southern neighbor. It estimates that nearly a tenth of current US residents, or their children, are Mexican citizens. But as the Monitor has noted, net migration from Mexico has dropped to zero or lower as opportunities there have expanded.
Many Americans have heard, if vaguely, of Mayan calendars that seem to predict the end of the world coming in a few weeks. But few have heard that recent translations revise that apocalypse into something more like a renewal or fresh start. And that, the magazine argues, looks to be where Mexico is heading.
Lincoln’s example for today’s mess
In these times of winter winds whipping across the “fiscal cliff” at Americans’ feet, compromise is suddenly in again. What was scorned in the tea party upswell of 2010 as caving in to bad Washington habits, is lauded in late 2012 as adult behavior and getting something done.
History, of course, stands on both sides of the compromise question. Abraham Lincoln may have been the self-effacing pragmatist who could hold together a diverse “team of rivals.” But he was not about compromise. This is something the new Steven Spielberg film on Lincoln gets right, says The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. The United States had been straddling various compromises over slavery for years, he says, and there are still arguments over whether Lincoln could have avoided the unprecedented human suffering of the war. But Lincoln instead stood at the end of the line for compromise. His position was absolute, both on union and on slavery.
“Lincoln was an uncompromising man who sponsored violence on a hitherto unimaginable scale; that he paid the highest price himself for the noble but hugely costly morality in which he believed is one of the things that makes his story still so fateful and, in its way, uncompromised.”
John F. Kennedy, not so much
Standing strong and unbending against all foreign adversaries is one of the lessons generations of Americans have drawn from President Kennedy’s “eyeball to eyeball” showdown with Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis 50 years ago. Kennedy’s threat to strike at those missiles risked a nuclear escalation of holocaust proportions. (There is also a movie version, “Thirteen Days,” with Kevin Costner.)
The Soviets blinked first and withdrew the missiles. Lesson learned. But Leslie Gelb, a foreign-policy expert who was in the State Department at the time, argues in Foreign Policy magazine that Americans learned the wrong lesson. They have ignored, played down, or forgotten that Kennedy didn’t just stand down his superpower rival; he worked a deal. His bargain for a missile withdrawal was not only that he promised not to invade Cuba, but that the US withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Part of the deal, Mr. Gelb writes, was that the Soviets wouldn’t mention the Jupiter withdrawal. They didn’t. And the real-leaders-don’t-bargain-with-the-enemy narrative is the one that stuck.
New facts, faded facts, and former facts
These days, not only is there far too much to know, but much of it isn’t true. Some facts actually change over time: The summit of Mt. Everest shifts a few centimeters each year, for example. And some facts – many, it appears – turn out to be not so factual. The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date, a book by Harvard-affiliated applied mathematician Samuel Arbesman, finds overarching patterns in scientific findings and conclusions.
Note first that of all the scientists in human history, a majority are alive and working today. By 1960, mathematician Derek J. da Solla Price concluded that scientific knowledge was doubling every 15 years.
But Dr. Arbesman notes another trend: the decay of what we formerly thought were facts. A review of medical research on liver disease found that it took 45 years for half of it to be proved false or otherwise obsolete. And the discredited share kept growing after that. Another study in 2011 found that of 53 landmark cancer research papers, the conclusions of only six could be reproduced in further research.
Everyone who’s seen Popeye cartoons knows the virtues of spinach. It turns out that the fabulous iron content of spinach is an artifact of a misplaced decimal point by a German chemist in 1870. The mistake was discovered in the 1930s, but spinach’s reputation remains unsullied in the popular mind.
The problem, writes Arbesman, is that “we persist in only adding facts to our personal store of knowledge that jibe with what we already know, rather than assimilate new facts irrespective of how they fit our worldview.”
In this file photo, Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks following an introduction of the new iPhone 5 in San Francisco earlier this fall. (Eric Risberg/AP)
Good Reads: American manufacturing, Apple's new CEO, and a father-son journey to meet two presidents
Manufacturing growth
Things may finally be looking up for US manufacturing, James Fallows argues in the December issue of The Atlantic.
Even in its battered condition, the American manufacturing sector is still the largest in the world, but its share of the US economy has declined from 20 percent in the early 1980s to just over 10 percent today. In the process, many high-paying jobs moved to China and other lower-wage countries, while Rust Belt communities in the United States were hard hit.
Two trends are likely to get trade winds blowing toward America again, Mr. Fallows contends. First, new technologies emerging in the US, such as 3-D printing, make it easier and faster to design, build, and refine products. Three-dimensional printing allows firms to use computerized molding systems to produce prototypes in minutes or hours. “A revolution is coming to the creation of things, comparable to the Internet’s effect on the creation and dissemination of ideas,” one industrial design expert told Fallows.
At the same time, tumultuous changes in China are reducing its manufacturing advantages, complicating life for outsourcers and exporters. “In China, wages are rising, workers are becoming choosier, public resistance to environmental devastation is growing, and the Chinese ‘investment led’ model is showing strain,” Fallows says.
Apple’s new CEO
Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook talked extensively about management and corporate creativity in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel.
Mr. Cook succeeded Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs. Mr. Jobs was a major shareholder in the Walt Disney Company and had seen how executives there wasted time trying to figure out what Disney himself would have done after the founder of the company had passed away. Jobs “removed a tremendous burden for me,” Cook says, by instructing, “I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what is right.”
Apple has taken heat for poor working conditions at massive Foxconn Technology Group factories in China where many of its products are assembled. Cook told Businessweek that Apple would start producing one line of its Mac computers in the US in 2013 – a modest sign of the brightening prospects for US manufacturing mentioned above.
Creativity, in Cook’s definition, is “people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it.” He laughed about corporate innovation departments saying that having one “is always a sign that something is wrong ... you know, put a for sale sign on the door.”
Religious Americans defined
A new Gallup survey about how Americans feel about religion offers fascinating glimpses into the nation’s spiritual life. In the past year, Gallup asked 320,000 people how religious they considered themselves to be and how often they attended religious services.
The answers form the foundation for a new book, “God Is Alive and Well: The Future of Religion in America,” by Gallup editor in chief Frank Newport. Overall, some 69 percent of adults consider themselves very religious or moderately religious, while 31 percent say they are nonreligious.
Religiousness is “distributed quite unequally across various subgroups and segments of the U.S. population,” Gallup says.
Religion could become more important in the US in years to come as baby boomers age and the number of Americans 65 and older nearly doubles. According to Gallup, religiousness peaks at 80.
A father, a son, and two presidents
Journalist Ron Fournier shares in the National Journal what he learned about fatherhood while visiting two American presidents in an effort to help his young son deal with a medical condition that hinders social interaction abilities.
This is not a story about disease but rather a deeply moving, first-person narrative about a father’s effort to correct his own shortcomings as a parent and his 15-year-old son Tyler’s wonderful resilience and forgiveness.
Mr. Fournier was able to arrange visits for Tyler with former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush because of his time as White House correspondent for The Associated Press. Fournier’s wife, Lori, suggested the road trip, saying, “You can use a job that took you away from Tyler to help him.” The duo ultimately visited 12 historical destinations together.
President Bush, “a man who famously doesn’t suffer fools or breaches of propriety, gave my son the benefit of the doubt,” Fournier says. “I was beginning to think that people are more perceptive and less judgmental toward Tyler than his own father is.”
President Clinton warmly welcomed Fournier’s son but at one point launched into a lengthy monologue about Teddy Roosevelt’s role as a bridge to the 20th century, clearly boring Tyler. “Suddenly I saw Tyler in another light. If even Bill Clinton, the most talented people person in a generation, can miss obvious social cues, why worry so much about my son?” Fournier says.
Duck boat sunk in World War II found in Italian lake
More than 70 years after it sank in a lake in northern Italy causing the loss of 24 American soldiers’ lives, a US amphibious vehicle has been found lying on the lake bed.
Amateur historians had been searching for months for the relic – a six-wheel, two-ton amphibious DUKW vehicle that sank during a storm on Lake Garda on the night of April 30, 1945 – but were only able to confirm their find on Monday.
The DUKW, pronounced “duck,” was carrying supplies and ammunition to an American military camp near the town of Torbole, at the northern tip of the lake, but sank as a result of gale force winds that were battering the area that night.
The truck was carrying 24 US soldiers aged between 18 and 25 from the 10th Mountain Division, only one of whom survived the accident. The men who died were from the division's 605th Field Artillery Battalion, as well as a driver from the Quartermaster Corps.
Days before armistice
The sinking happened just days before the end of fighting in Europe and the armistice with the Germans, on May 8, 1945.
“It was the biggest disaster to happen in modern times on Lake Garda,” said Mauro Fusato, the leader of the team that found the DUKW.
The wreck of the vehicle was found with sonar lying at a depth of 905 feet – one reason why it had not been located before.
“On Sunday, the sonar gave us an initial image, but it wasn’t clear enough to be able to say for sure that it was the DUKW,” Mr. Fusato told Ansa, an Italian news agency.
“On Monday, though, we used a remote-controlled camera and we saw it. It is intact and sitting upright.”
The next step is to try to identify any human remains that may still be lying around the wreck, as well as military equipment, insignia, and personal possessions. “There are lots of objects around it, which could be the skeletons or remains of the soldiers who drowned,” said Fusato.
Any operation to recover them would be highly complex and technically challenging, however. The wreck lies too deep for divers, and there are old fishing nets and other debris on the lake bed that could snag underwater subs. Ultimately it will be up to the US government to decide whether to proceed with a recovery, the researchers said, adding that they had informed American diplomats of the discovery.
Firefighters march in a line crossing the street on Tiananmen Square, next to the Great Hall of the People, the venue of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, in Beijing, November 14. (David Gray/Reuters/File)
Beijing targets those who cross the street 'with Chinese characteristics'
Beijing’s finest, ever vigilant on the law-and-order front, have set themselves a challenging new task: to eradicate the phenomenon known as “crossing the road, Chinese-style.”
A new “strike hard” campaign, launched last week, is aimed at “bringing order to traffic and security” at the city’s intersections, according to the Beijing municipal police website.
Good luck to them.
The police appear to have been goaded into action not so much by the anarchy that has long reigned on most Beijing streets, but by an online comment that went viral a few weeks ago.
A blogger remarked – entirely accurately – that crossing the road with Chinese characteristics has nothing to do with whether the lights are red or green. The determining factor is how many people are waiting on the curb. Once a crowd has reached critical mass, it moves.
As more and more Beijingers buy cars, and drive them without necessarily bothering to get a license, life for the city’s crowds of pedestrians and its diminishing band of cyclists has grown increasingly hazardous.
Pedestrian fatalities in China are 18 times higher, per 100,000 motorized vehicles, than in the United States, according to Ni Ying, who did her doctoral thesis on the dangers of Chinese crossroads.
“High rates of pedestrian noncompliance and low rates of driver-yielding behavior” accounted for the Chinese statistics, she concluded.
Jaywalking is a national habit that the capital’s police would like to break, but they are not training their sights on pedestrians alone. The goal, says the official website warning, is also to enforce drivers’ lane discipline and to stop cyclists crashing red lights, carrying passengers on the back seat, and riding the wrong way up cycle lanes.
This is nothing less than an assault on a fundamental right that all Chinese citizens hold dear: to do precisely as they please on the public highway.
Learning to 'Beijing it'
I walk, ride my bike, and drive my car all the time in Beijing, and frankly it is a miracle that I am still alive. Not least because after living here for six years, I have gone native when it comes to traffic etiquette.
I still recall the sense of pride with which I rode my bicycle the wrong way up a street for the first time, taking a call on my mobile phone. I felt like a true Beijinger. And the quaint idea that I should stop at a red light rather than weave a path through the cars getting in my way is one that I abandoned a long time ago.
I am better behaved behind the wheel of my 1980s Jeep Cherokee (an ideal, bullock-like vehicle in which to navigate the city’s traffic). But even then the frustration of watching other drivers jam up an intersection by ignoring the simplest rules of the road, not to mention elementary courtesy, can tempt me to barge into the melee myself.
In my family, we have coined a verb for the sort of inconsiderate and patently illegal behavior to which my wife and I occasionally sink, such as sailing past a highway traffic jam in the emergency vehicle lane: We call that “to Beijing it.”
If the city police have their way, that kind of description will soon be history. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
The Beijing police department is running a little quiz on its “weibo,” a Twitter-like platform, asking people why they think Beijingers are so careless on the road. The two most popular answers so far are “a weak sense of the law” and “low levels of public morality and civic responsibility.”
It will take more than a few traffic fines to deal with those problems, I’m afraid. And I say that as one who, to his shame, knows whereof he speaks.
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