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A section of the peace wall that divides Catholic and Protestant communities in Belfast wraps around houses in Cluan Place, east Belfast, in October. The first barriers were built in 1969, following the outbreak of the Northern Ireland riots known as 'The Troubles.' (Cathal McNaughton/Reuters)
15 years after Good Friday Agreement, an imperfect peace in Northern Ireland
Fifteen years ago today, one of Europe's longest and seemingly most intractable conflicts came to an end. On April 10, 1998, Irish republicans and unionists signed the Good Friday Agreement, a peace accord that put a formal end to the "Troubles," a slow-burn civil war that had been going on in earnest since 1969.
Well, in fact, they didn't sign it. Nothing was actually signed on paper by the opposing sides. But they did agree to it, marking the end of the beginning of the Irish peace process.
The guns had already fallen silent two years previously, with both the Irish Republican Army and their unionist antagonists declaring a cease-fire within a six-week span. In the years that followed, a new British prime minister, Tony Blair, and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, worked to bring reluctant unionists to the table with their hated and feared old enemies.
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And on this date 15 years ago, they succeeded: the Ulster Unionist Party agreed to work with republicans, something that would have been unimaginable just a short time earlier.
Life in Northern Ireland has been transformed since that day, no one disputes that. But the conflict has not been replaced with perfect peace. In July 1998, three young Catholic children were killed when the Ulster Volunteer Force, supposedly on ceasefire, firebombed their home. The infamous Omagh bomb, planted by dissident republicans, was to go off on August 15 of the same year, killing 29. And there have been murders carried out by both unionist and republican groups since then, as well as annualized rioting.
In some ways, the post-Good Friday state of affairs mirrors that of Northern Ireland prior to 1969, with sporadic episodes of violence punctuating a shaky peace. Still, with Irish republicans represented in government and Catholics no longer discriminated against in jobs, education, and housing, it is difficult to imagine the same sense of grievance that give birth to the conflict being nurtured ever again.
The problem, as with so many conflicts today, is that an honest desire to put an end to bloodshed and misery may not so much bring about peace as transform violence into deep-frozen cultural and pseudo-political resentments.
In Northern Ireland, as elsewhere, there was no single winner or loser. Both sides can legitimately claim to have won, or to have lost. Whichever they claim depends on how they are feeling at any given moment. This year's rioting in Northern Ireland, sparked by a decision to fly the British Union flag over Belfast city hall on state occasions rather than every day, speaks of a unionist community that is brittle and fearful. A community that thinks it has lost. A community that feels abandoned and is itself now nursing a sense of grievance.
High-flown talk about plurality and neutrality simply do not reflect reality on the ground, except perhaps in a few well-to-do areas.
No one, other than a few extremists on the fringes of unionism and republicanism, wants to see a return to violence in Northern Ireland, and so the architects of the Good Friday Accord can rightfully claim a victory on that front. A permanent peace remains a more remote prize.
Chinese women have a chat near a plum tree at a public park in Beijing Sunday. (Andy Wong/AP)
Finishing school, Chinese style
How’s this for a Chinese start-up? Finishing school.
Sara Jane Ho, a well-groomed young woman from Hong Kong, has just launched what she calls Beijing’s first “high end boutique finishing school” to teach China’s nouveau riche how to behave.
Good manners are not necessarily deeply instilled in your average Chinese citizen, and here I am being as polite as Ms. Ho teaches her students to be. But as she points out, only 50 years ago, people here “were fighting to get to the front of the food ration line, for survival. They were not thinking of manners.”
Today, though, wealthy Chinese businesswomen, housewives, and ladies of leisure are anxious to learn the social skills of their Western counterparts. And for a cool $15,000 for a 12-day course, Ho will initiate them into the mysteries of foreign etiquette at her Institute Sarita.
She has the background – both a business degree from Harvard and an etiquette diploma from the Institute Villa Pierrefeu, a Swiss finishing school – and she covers all the bases.
One moment her clients, gathered in Ho’s plush offices in the Park Hyatt Residences in downtown Beijing, will be learning what “black tie” means; the next moment they are practicing the correct pronunciation of “Louis Vuitton” or being given the “Introduction to Expensive Sports” course, which explains why they ought to enjoy horseback riding.
Predictably, perhaps, for women accustomed to eating even the grandest banquet with a simple pair of chopsticks, laying a Western table and learning how to handle knives and forks are especially puzzling skills. Nor does Ho make it easy: Her students have to remember such arcane details as the difference between the fork for extracting snails from their shells and the fork used to eat oysters.
But Ho says she also hopes to give etiquette a deeper meaning, to teach “the philosophy behind the mechanics.”
“Good manners go along with good morals,” she preaches, with a nod to Confucius. “Virtuous people do not commit murder … and nor do they behave in obnoxious ways when they travel.”
In the end, she points out, good manners are the same the world over once you get past such questions of which hand you should hold your fork in. “Good manners means respect for other people,” says Ho, and that is something that some of China’s new rich find even harder to learn than how to distinguish a Californian Chardonnay from a Bordeaux claret.
“I tell them [my clients] that they have to treat people as people no matter who they are speaking to,” she says. “You are not above other people just because you are in a rush or have more money. But that takes a long time to learn.”
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reviews the honor guard at the White House in Washington, as President Jimmy Carter follows, in December 1979. (Gerald Penny/AP/File)
The Britain that Margaret Thatcher inherited
“BRITAIN AT THE CROSSROADS,” blared a Monitor headline in July 1978, less than a year before Margaret Thatcher became the country’s prime minister. “Are law and order wilting?”
“Political, labor storms grow louder in Britain,” warned another, in January 1979.
“Britons’ patience … wears thin,” read a third.
As both tributes to Mrs. Thatcher and attacks on her leadership have poured in since her death, it is easy to forget the near-crisis that gripped Britain in the years preceding her rule, as the economy sagged under the weight of rampant inflation and broad unemployment. During the winter of 1978-79, just before the Tories swept to power, strikes rippled across the public sector – the infamous British “Winter of Discontent” – in response to a government wage cap.
Meanwhile, as nationalist rumblings rose in Scotland and parliament debated stricter limits on immigration, England seemed to be descending into a crisis of confidence about its very Englishness.
As a look through Monitor archives show, this was the deeply divided Britain that Thatcher and her Conservative Party took control of in May 1979 – beleaguered and world-weary, its patience for government tanking and its economy on shaky ground.
As the Monitor’s Takashi Oka reported,
In London’s Golden Square, behind fashionable Regent Street, a gardener lovingly tends his neatly trimmed rosebushes surrounding an Everest-high pile of black plastic rubbish bags. A cleaner from one of the smart offices surrounding the square drags over a roll of carpeting to add to the base of the towering pyramid.
Two weeks’ worth of uncollected garbage is the most visible sign of the labor discontent that grips strike-weary Britain this winter.… With hundreds of schools closed, more than a thousand hospitals reduced to emergency operations only, and wage demands spreading on numerous fronts, the hard-pressed Labour government, with traditionally close ties to the unions, is facing an increasingly embittered public.
What is the government doing about all this? Why must it mollycoddle the trade unions so? Why doesn’t it show some firmness for a change?
These questions, in essence, sum up the opposition Conservative Party’s challenge to Prime Minister James Callaghan and his Labour Cabinet. (“Britons’ patience with strikes wears thin,” Feb. 8, 1979)
The strikes were just the last spasm of the economic malaise of 1970s Britain, which featured high unemployment and double-digit inflation. In Sept. 1976, Mr. Oka noted that nearly 1.5 million Britons – 6.2 percent of the working population – were unemployed (“Soaring joblessness challenges Britain,” Sept. 22, 1976), a number that held roughly as national elections approached (“more than 1.5 million” in “Sunny Jim and Iron Lady about to face off in Britain,” Sept. 7 1978). Inflation averaged around 13 percent throughout the ‘70s, peaking at 25 percent.
Meanwhile, as the parties debated across the aisle in Parliament, Britain also revisited its own place in Europe.
Hamilton, Scotland – The integrity of the United Kingdom is being challenged.
It is under attack from within by the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and, in a somewhat different context, by the Northern Ireland Unionists.
It is also under attack from without, as the sovereignty of the traditional nation-state is eroded in small – but not insignificant – chunks by membership in the nine-nation European Community (EC). …
Is this old continent, where the modern nation-state was born and where it fought some of mankind’s most disastrous wars, to see its gradual transformation into something neither fish nor fowl, a kind of hybrid in which the trappings of sovereignty remain but much of the content is gone.
And if such a transformation does take place, what will this do to the Britishness of Britain, the Englishness of England? (“Britain at the Crossroads: Nationalist pressure,” July 10, 1978)
If those were the looming questions that faced Thatcher as she took office, however, she had also already earned some of the fierce loyalty that still characterizes her supporters. As Oka reported shortly after Thatcher became head of the Conservative Party in 1975,
The constituency chairman’s voice range out across the hall filled to bursting with Conservative Party faithful.
"Paraphrasing William Blake," as he put it, he began with familiar words, "I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.… “
Then, swelling to a climax, “till Margaret Thatcher is in power,” he thundered, “in England’s green and pleasant land.”
Cheers, laughter, and applause. All eyes were riveted on the blue-eyed, golden-haired woman in turquoise-blue dress standing beside the chairman.…
“It has been said that we are a middle-class party,” she said … “We’re not, you know … We’re the party of all the people who believe in independence and freedom, who believe in living up to the best of Britain and not the worst.”
“More cheers and applause,” Oka went on. “It was a rousing partisan speech, as it was meant to be.”
This is a 1969 file photo showing Margaret Thatcher. The former British Prime Minister known as 'the Iron Lady' passed away Monday morning. (AP/File)
At #Thatcher, no halfhearted tweets on Iron Lady's legacy
Irreverent, brisk, and decisive.
As Margaret Thatcher was in life, so are the tweets that have followed her death.
In the minutes following the announcement of the former British prime minister's death Monday, #Thatcher shot to the top of global Twitter trends as the world weighed in on her legacy – or at least as much of it as they could cram into 140 characters or less.
Here are some highlights of the global Twitter reaction.
Official response
World leaders were among the first to weigh in on Thatcher's legacy with carefully curated messages of condolence.
"Lady Thatcher didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country," wrote @David_Cameron, the official Twitter account of the British Prime Minister. (And the snarky backlash quickly followed. "From equality and happiness?" one tweeter replied, one of some 2,000 who responded to the prime minister's initial tweet. "Just how out of touch can one man be?" asked another.)
"She stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered," weighed in @BarackObama, while India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh (@PMOIndia) wrote blandly, "She was a transformative figure under whom the United Kingdom registered important progress on the national and international arena."
And the BBC sent along a message from Mikhail Gorbachev, tweeting: '#Thatcher "a great politician & bright personality" who will "remain in our memory & history"'
But in at least one corner of the world where Thatcher's legacy is particularly fraught, there was silence on official Twitter accounts.
"Waiting for an official comment from Buenos Aires re #Thatcher's death," tweeted the BBC's Argentina correspondent. "Under her govt Britain went to war with Argentina over the Falklands."
'Like a tank barrel'
Elsewhere in the Twitter-verse, reactions were more raucous, mixing critiques and memories of the Iron Lady's towering personality.
"Condolences to my British friends for the 1980s," wrote Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole (@tejucole).
"Asking Thatcher a q at a press conf was intimidating," remembered Australian journalist Mark Colvin (@Colvinius). "Her gaze swivelled on you like a tank-barrel."
He continued: "A friend of mine, interviewing Thatcher, asked her qs she didn't like. Just out of camera view, her press sec kicked him in the shins."
And one Canadian journalist weighed in to make sure a crucial aspect of the prime minister's legacy wasn't forgotten in the chatter. "Most of what Thatcher is claimed to have done is exaggerated," he wrote. "Except inventing soft ice cream - as a chemist in the '50s, she did that."
The empire tweets back
Meanwhile, across the British commonwealth, tweeters pondered the Thatcher legacy in their own backyard.
"Before there was Thatcher, there was [Indian Prime Minister] Indira Gandhi. Just saying. Apparently the two got along well," wrote Indian journalist Ammu Kannampilly.
South Africans were less generous. "Apartheid supporter Margaret Thatcher dead at last," wrote a popular opinion writer. "Apartheid would've ended a little earlier had it not been for her," said another.
And Irish comedy writer Colm Tobin put a finger on his country's national pulse when it came to Thatcher's legacy: "Not a lot of love for Margaret Thatcher in Ireland. As an enemy of the state she sits somewhere between Oliver Cromwell & Thierry Henry."
Too fast?
Amid the global haste to weigh on on Thatcher's death, however, Twitter also provided reminders about the dangers of the digital age scramble to be the first to a story.
Thatcher detractors, for instance, gleefully circulated a BBC-based headline typo announcing that Thatcher had "died of a strike."
Meanwhile, the opening paragraph of the Financial Times' obituary for Thatcher briefly revealed what one tweeter called "the perils of the pre-packaged obit."
The text was quickly corrected, but not before it was immortalized on Twitter, a moment of clumsy reaction captured in Internet amber for all the world to see.
None of the Twitter reaction, however, came as a shock to British journalist Martin Belam. In December he tweeted a pie chart he'd created called, "What Twitter will look like on the day Thatcher dies."
At last, a Thatcher tweet no one can dispute.
Anne Smedinghoff, 25, was killed Saturday, in southern Afghanistan, the first American diplomat to die on the job since last year's attack on the U.S. diplomatic installation in Benghazi, Libya. (Courtesy of Tom Smedinghoff/AP)
Mr. Kerry, how do you ask a woman to be the last to die in Afghanistan? (+video)
Once again, history thrust John Kerry today in front of microphones to speak about American youths who are cut down in the waning days of an unpopular war.
Mr. Kerry, now US secretary of State, urged Americans to “forge on” against terrorism in the wake of yesterday’s killing of Anne Smedinghoff, a 25-year-old US diplomat serving in Afghanistan. In 1971, a younger Kerry challenged Congress to stop elongating a fruitless war. He asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?”
Kerry’s famous question, posed in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, came on behalf of fellow soldiers he had recently served with in Vietnam. Today’s remarks also came from a personal place: He had just met Ms. Smedinghoff when she assisted him on his visit to Afghanistan two weeks ago.
RECOMMENDED: How well do you know Afghanistan? Take our quiz.
An explosion killed the Chicago native while on a mission to deliver textbooks to students in a wartorn part of southeastern Afghanistan. Three US soldiers, a civilian Defense Department employee, and an Afghan doctor also died in the attack, which may have been aimed at the governor of the province. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the Associated Press.
Kerry, speaking in Turkey, described Anne as “a selfless, idealistic young woman who woke up yesterday morning and set out to bring textbooks to schoolchildren, to bring them knowledge, children she had never met, to help them to be able to build a future.”
Smedinghoff’s parents released a heartbreaking statement highlighting their daughter’s enthusiasm for a post she volunteered to take: “We are consoled knowing that she was doing what she loved, and that she was serving her country by helping to make a positive difference in the world.”
The fact that the young diplomat volunteered for the post, and that US forces have similarly not been drafted into service, are important differences from Vietnam. But there are uncomfortable similarities in how the two wars limped painfully toward a very extended conclusion.
Most US troops will come home in 2014, President Obama promises. In the meantime, the US is trying to hand off responsibilities to Afghans.
In 1971, the White House was similarly trying to transition the war effort to the locals. The young Kerry saw it as an elongated effort to avoid the embarrassment of defeat at the cost of young Americans’ lives.
In a section of his testimony labeled “What was found and learned in Vietnam,” Kerry laid out the ground truths that made him a skeptic. The parallels to Afghanistan are legion – from villagers siding with whichever force is present at the time, to the difficulty of training local forces to “take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from,” to American tax money feeding “a corrupt dictatorial regime.”
Smedinghoff should be honored for taking the risks that the US asked of her. But her death should raise some questions about the long handover in Afghanistan. Is the Afghan government not capable of delivering textbooks to schools? If it is, then why are we getting in the way of Afghans running Afghan affairs? If not, will Hamid Karzai’s corrupt government be ready in a year’s time, when most US forces are set to depart?
It's these questions about whether this is time well spent that would prompt a younger Mr. Kerry to ask his older self: How do you ask a woman to be the last woman to die in Afghanistan?
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Iraqi Christians pray during a mass in Baghdad. (Khalid Mohammed/AP/File)
Good Reads: Christian Middle East exodus, online ed, drone strikes, and Japan's prisons
The post-Arab Spring climate in the Middle East has accelerated a “Christian exodus” from the region, says Hassan Mneimneh of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, in a piece on RealClearWorld.com. He sees “[t]he fate of the Christians in the Middle East” as “inseparable from the region’s transformation into a viable, prosperous, and progressive home for all of its inhabitants.”
Christian populations in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories have shrunk dramatically in recent years. In Syria, Christians face increased Islamic radicalization. In Egypt, they are being denied basic civic rights and protection. Even in Jordan, the Christian community eyes political and demographic developments within the kingdom warily.
In response, Christians have emigrated from the region en masse. Some have sought alliances with other minorities, including the Alawites of the Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah (Shiites) in Lebanon. And Mr. Mneimneh says efforts by Christian leaders in Lebanon to gain disproportionate political representation set a “dangerous precedent.”
Is online ed here to stay?
Massive open online courses, also known as MOOCs, have drawn plenty of attention – and hundreds of thousands of students. Several elite colleges have joined with companies such as Coursera, edX, and Udacity to offer free online courses, though not for credit, that can have tens of thousands of students at once.
Proponents laud the popular courses for “democratizing” access to knowledge and for their potential to educate future innovators. Critics who worry about “the McDonaldization of higher education” deplore a lack of accountability for plagiarism and cheating, and question the quality of the student experience.
What do the professors who create and teach the MOOCs say? According to a survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education, 79 percent believe the courses “are worth the hype.” Steve Kolowich says the findings signal “a change of heart that could indicate a bigger shake-up in the higher-education landscape.”
Nearly half of the professors said their MOOCs were as academically rigorous as their in-class versions. The majority (72 percent) felt successful students should be given credit at their institution. And an overwhelming majority believe free online courses will drive down the cost of college generally.
But a majority (55 percent) also said that MOOCs diverted time away from research and traditional teaching. And the average pass rate for their online courses (with a median enrollment of 30,000) was just 7.5 percent.
Professors cited a variety of motivations for teaching MOOCs, both altruistic and professional. But most saw online education as the inevitable wave of the future.
Visualizing drone strikes
According to a recent Gallup poll, 65 percent of Americans support US drone attacks on terrorists abroad, but less than half are closely following news on drones. That’s an awareness gap California media company Pitch Interactive seeks to bridge with its newly launched interactive Web visualization of the US drone strikes that have taken place in Pakistan since 2004. The animated visualization (drones.pitchinteractive.com) charts the chronology, frequency and volume, and victims of the attacks.
Using data primarily from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, New America Foundation, and “Living Under Drones” (a Stanford/NYU report), Pitch groups victims into four categories: children, civilians, other (“a very grey area”), and high-profile targets, which represent just 1.5 percent of total victims. Civilians and children account for 22.8 percent.
Slate blogger Emma Roller says the data should be taken with a grain of salt. For perspective, she also notes that the Iraq Body Count project estimates 60 percent of those killed in Iraq since 2003 were civilians. And though Pitch says its aim is not “to speak for or against [drones], but to inform,” Ms. Roller feels the group presents data “in a way that fits nicely into the ‘against’ column.”
Why Japan has a low crime rate
In the French daily Le Monde, Phillipe Pons takes a critical look at the harsh conditions of Japanese prisons and high rates of capital punishment. The piece can be read in English (translated by Carolina Saracho) at Worldcrunch, a site that translates and edits content from top foreign-language outlets.
The article describes draconian prisons and a criminal-justice system in which those arrested can be held in detention for 23 days without being charged or having access to a lawyer and in which “[a]lmost all convictions are obtained thanks to ‘confessions.’ ” During Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s 2006-07 term in office, 10 people were hanged in less than a year.
But Japan also has the lowest incarceration and recidivism rates of developed nations. The government says Japan’s relatively low crime rate justifies the tough penalties. And polls show that the majority of Japanese support the death penalty. But criminologists debate “the deterrent effect” and note other factors at play, such as strict gun laws. On balance, Mr. Pons worries that “Public order comes at a high price in Japan – the price of prisoner rights and the presumption of innocence.”
In this June 2008 image taken from television, the 60-foot-tall cooling tower is seen before its demolition at the main Nyongbyon reactor complex in Nyongbyon, also known as Yongbyon, North Korea. North Korea vowed Tuesday, to restart a nuclear reactor that can make one bomb's worth of plutonium a year, escalating tensions already raised by near daily warlike threats against the United States and South Korea. (APTN/AP/File)
Is North Korea on a 'collision' course with vow to restart nuclear reactor?
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un continued what has become a daily effort to raise tensions and fears abroad, and to consolidate patriotic ardor and unity at home, by saying he plans to restart an old nuclear reactor that can produce plutonium used in the creation of nuclear weapons.
In response, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the former foreign minister of South Korea, today described the North as on “a collision course with the international community” – even as some Korea watchers call it all bluster and bellicosity.
Experts say it could take as little as three months to a year for scientists to restart the Yongbyon nuclear facility. The facility was closed most recently in 2012 with the promise of food aid from the US – though that so-called "food for nukes" deal fell through with the North's third nuclear test in February.
It is quite unclear whether young leader Kim Jung-un – whose recent bone-jarring threats of war and attack are considered part of his consolidation of power inside Pyongyang and among the North Korean people – will go ahead with an expensive project of plutonium reprocessing and enriching uranium, or use these to extract aid and talks.
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A nuclear weapon or capability has long been the No. 1 prize sought by the Kim family dynasty in Pyongyang, dating to Kim’s grandfather Kim Il-sung, as the ultimate bargaining chip both for its own security and as a means to gain international attention and aid. In February, the North successfully tested a device, that resulted in UN sanctions that the North has protested are undeserved.
The reclusive state declared a “state of war” exists between the two Koreas last weekend, and last month vowed to target Hawaii and Guam with its rockets, though they are not currently thought capable of reaching US bases, nor are they nuclear-tipped.
The Associated Press writes today that:
A spokesman for the North's General Department of Atomic Energy said scientists will quickly begin work "readjusting and restarting" a uranium enrichment plant and a graphite-moderated, 5-megawatt reactor that could produce a bomb's worth of plutonium each year.
AP also quotes North Korean expert Hwang Jihwan at the University of Seoul, South Korea, who argues that Pyongyang’s recent behavior aims at "keeping tension and crisis alive to raise stakes ahead of possible future talks with the United States."
Essentially, reports the AP, "North Korea is asking the world, `What are you going to do about this?' "
Complicating matters is the fact that Kim Jong-un was considered by Western officials a relative unknown until he took over from his father, “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il last spring. And still, not much is known about him.
Bluster or not, the North’s belligerence has put the Korean peninsula on high alert. Kim Jong-un has scratched the armistice signed after the Korean War, cut military hotlines, brought new South Korean president Park Geun-hye to say that the South will retaliate over any provocations, and caused the US military, which has 28,000 troops in the South, to relocate sensitive radars and to send B-2 Stealth bombers in fly overs.
Yet, the Los Angeles Times today points out:
After the declaration of a "state of war" over the weekend, the White House said no major troop movements were detected in North Korea. White House officials have said the Pyongyang regime has shown no "action to back up the rhetoric."
The U.S. Navy, however, is moving a sea-based radar platform closer to North Korea to track possible missile launches, a Pentagon official said Monday. The support is the latest step to deter the North and reassure South Korea and Japan that the U.S. is committed to their defense.
In one sense, Korea watchers say, the new regime is simply rehashing and upping the volume of an ideology and a language that the North and the Kim family have used for many years to remain in power and keep people unified by the threat of an enemy.
Being taken seriously by the outside world is an important verification of the Kim regime, which feeds edited broadcasts of world media to its people, whose sources of information are carefully controlled.
Some analysts think officials in Pyongyang are beside themselves with the kind of attention they are now achieving, largely through verbal threats backed up by the nuclear test.
In a theater song performance broadcast to the nation in February, reminiscent of the kind of “ballet” the Chinese used to perform during the Cultural Revolution, a stage backdrop contained the phrase, "Let's strike the imperialists mercilessly with the same success we had carrying out the 3rd nuclear test."
RECOMMENDED: Kim 101: How well do you know North Korea's leaders?
A Malian soldier walks in Gao, northern Mali, in early February. Timbuktu has been hit by a prolonged battle between Islamic extremists and the Malian and French armies, residents and a Malian military spokesman said Sunday. (Jerome Delay/AP/File)
French in Mali face Islamist insurgency of unknown strength
Handfuls of Islamist radicals are slipping in and out of towns in northern Mali on hit and run operations, putting a question mark over France's aspirations to neatly wrap up its military intervention soon.
This weekend brought a suicide car bomb in Timbuktu that rattled residents and sparked a brief, intense skirmish with French and Malian troops who say they will now more strongly garrison the ancient trading post town. The French deployed air craft to crack down on rebels, whose identity in this attack remains unclear. Malian officials said 21 rebels were killed.
As French politicians and senior officers prepare to partly exit Mali this month, having largely assuaged fears of a new Afghanistan developing in northwest Africa, they are facing a new low-level radical insurgency of yet uncertain numbers, capability, and intent.
"The fighting is heavy and it is ongoing," Malian Army Capt. Modibo Naman Traore told Reuters on Sunday, adding that the Army was in the process of "encircling" the militants.
Last week in Gao, the largest city in the Malian north, rebels killed six locals in a similar attack. That operation, which French forces reportedly rebuffed quickly, was claimed by the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, a group that partly controlled the city last fall.
In January the French quickly drove out a loose but effective Islamist insurgency that last year took over huge swaths of Mali using weapons siphoned out of Libya after its civil strife ended.
But having liberated Gao, Timbuktu, and other northern towns, the French have focused on Islamists in the northern mountains; days back French forces confirmed killing a significant rebel leader Abou Zeid. Yet apparent French indifference to, or even collaboration in recent weeks with, ethnic Tuareg rebels, reported here by Peter Tinti in The Christian Science Monitor, has strained relations between government, military, and local populations.
Much of the media coverage and information of sensitive war operations in Mali by the French is under strict control. The New York Times today, reporting out of Paris, writes about the rebels in Timbuktu that,
“They had said Timbuktu was secured,” the mayor [of Timbuktu] lamented. The fighting had ceased by about 3 p.m. on Sunday, he said, though military aircraft, presumably French, continued to circle in the skies above Timbuktu. Two patrols of French fighter aircraft had been sent to Timbuktu, according to Colonel Burkhard, the military spokesman, but they did not fire any munitions.
Analysts continue to ask whether, after a successful effort to put Al Qaeda-linked rebels on the run, Mali itself can continue to hold together.
Mali has announced new elections in July and the French force levels are to draw down from more than 4,000 to 2,000 by that time.
Somali men look out across Mogadishu's fishing harbor in the early morning as fishermen land their catch and transport their fish to the market in the Xamar Weyne district of the Somali capital, March 16. Somalia is the second-least visited country in the world, according to a recent list compiled by travel writer Gunnar Garfors from UN statistics. (Courtesy of Stuart Price/AU-UN IST PHOTO/Reuters)
Oh, the places you won't go! World's 25 least-visited countries
For some travelers, getting off the beaten path is a point of pride, a way to see the parts of the world that don’t make it into glossy guidebooks.
But how many of those same adventurous travelers would be willing to visit, say, Somalia?
About 500, it turns out.
At least, that’s how many tourists found their way to the wartorn east African nation last year.
That makes Somalia the second-least visited country in the world, after the tiny pacific island nation Nauru, according to a recent list compiled by travel writer Gunnar Garfors from UN statistics.
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Little Nauru – 8.1 square miles in size, population 9,378 – got just 200 visitors last year, and it’s pretty clear why.
“There is almost nothing to see there,” writes Mr. Garfors, “as most of the island … is a large open phosphate mine.”
Indeed, most of the world’s least visited countries seem to fall in one of two categories. There are the Naurus, where you’ll puzzle over what to do, and the Somalias, where it’s simply too dangerous to do much of anything at all. (As Somalia’s Wikitravel page aptly notes, “the easiest method for staying safe in Somalia is not to go in the first place.”)
Most of the “nothing to do” countries are the crumbs that dust a map of the Pacific Ocean: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu. The latter shares with the Maldives the dubious distinction of having "highest elevation points" that are the lowest on earth – 15 feet above sea level. Visit while you can, as rising sea levels could make the island uninhabitable within a century.
As for the “too dangerous” countries, the list reads like a global primer in political conflict. For instance, despite its pristine national parks full of wild gorillas and elephants, the perpetually ungovernable Central African Republic (#23) is an unpopular destination for tourists. And its stock will likely continue to plummet – last week a rebel alliance seized the capital, Bangui, and the president fled to neighboring Cameroon. (For more on the tempestuous politics of the CAR, read about the rebel alliance that took power there Sunday)
Afghanistan (#10) also suffers from tourism-deflating instability, which keeps visitors away from its rugged peaks, ancient Buddhist monuments, and Islamic holy sites, including the 12th-century Minaret of Jam, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
“The Taliban have a message for foreign tourists who come to Afghanistan, especially if they are from any of the 50 countries that are part of the NATO-led coalition supporting the government: Big mistake,” writes The New York Times.
Other countries on the list, like Guinea Bissau (#14), Libya (#15), and East Timor (#18), have seen their reputations – and infrastructure – hobbled by recent wars or uprisings.
But not every country on the list is too dangerous or boring to visit. A few are simply effectively sealed off to the outside world.
All foreign visitors to North Korea (#16) are limited to a state-curated itinerary and must have an official government “minder” by their side at all times. But for the few Western tourists who venture into the country, that’s part of the appeal. “You will rarely get to see propaganda done more explicitly,” Garfors writes.
Except, perhaps, in Turkmenistan (#7), where visitors who brave the onerous Soviet-esque visa application process were, at least until 2010, rewarded with sites like a 50-ft. golden statue of former dictator Saparmurat Niyazov in the capital Ashgabat, which rotated throughout the course of the day to face the sun. But the country’s most indisputably impressive site is a massive flaming crater deep in the Karakum Desert. Measuring 230 feet across and almost 70 feet deep, the so-called “Door to Hell” has been burning continuously since Soviet scientists lit it on fire in 1971.
Obscure? Yes. But that's part of the charm.
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Gina, a US military bomb-sniffing dog, suffered from stress after serving in Iraq. (Ed Andrieski/AP/File)
Good Reads: dogs with PTSD, children in the news, unwed mothers, waking up the Ice Age
It has been said that war has no winners. That statement could easily include not just soldiers and civilians, but also the hundreds of stray animals that are caught in the crossfire.
As the 2014 withdrawal of US troops in Afghanistan draws closer, a lot of attention has been paid to how to care for the soldiers coming home, many of whom have done multiple tours. Attention is also being paid, as Jessie Knadler points out in The Daily Beast, to the animals they bring home with them.
Some dogs rescued from war zones appear to be coming home with their new masters exhibiting signs of post-traumatic stress disorder – even when their owners aren’t – as they adjust to not having to navigate land mines or sudden fights.
What’s the method to ease such a transition?
“All we could give her was time, love, freedom, and lots of exercise and discipline,” writes Ms. Knadler of Solha, the dog her Army Reservist husband brought home with him from Kandahar. “Is that how to treat canine PTSD? I don’t know. But Solha is a different, calmer dog today than she was a year ago. And she’ll never have to fight another dog again.”
Children on camera
By the time a 15-year-old schoolgirl named Malala Yousafzai was shot point-blank by the Taliban six months ago in Pakistan, her activism and story had captured interest around the world. She exemplified a rare courage, spunk, and determination that made her a powerful symbol of the fight for female education amid extremism.
It was the media that handed this young girl the soapbox – and possibly made her a target, worries Syed Irfan Ashraf, who first put Malala on camera when she was just 11 years old.
Disclosing the guilt he felt for doing so, he told Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair, “No one was paying attention to what was happening in Mingora. We took a very brave 11-year-old and created her to get the attention of the world. We made her a commodity.”
The economy of unwed mothers
Good news: Over the past two decades, teen birthrates have fallen. The other news? By the time American women turn 30, about two-thirds have had their first child – usually outside of marriage, according to a recent report highlighted in The Atlantic Monthly.
Take note of “usually outside of marriage,” writes Derek Thompson, asking, “Why so few marriages?” The answer, he writes, is best seen through the lens of three factors:
“(1) The changing meaning of marriage in America; (2) declining wages for low-skill men; and (3) the declining costs of being a single person.”
It used to be that the marriage contract was entered into in the US with specific roles in mind. The wife would stay home and take care of the kids, and the husband would go to work and put food on the table. That model has been upended.
“Think of marriage like any other contract or investment. It’s most likely to happen when the gains are big. So we should expect marriages among low-income Americans to decline if women perceive declining gains from hitching themselves to the men around them.”
Back to life, back to reality
Right now scientists in South Korea are combing the frozen remains of woolly mammoths looking for the scientific version of a needle in a haystack: a live cell. Any live cell. If they find one, they’ll try to use it to bring the mammoth back from centuries of extinction. (Don’t worry, they’ve got a Plan B.)
Roll your eyes if you must, but, writes Carl Zimmer in National Geographic, the idea of bringing vanished species back to life has percolated in popular culture and in science labs at least since “Jurassic Park,” and that technology is close – really close.
Indeed, advances in manipulating stem cells, in recovering ancient DNA, and in reconstructing lost genomes has pushed science closer to reviving that which was once thought to be lost for good. Remember Dolly, the first sheep to be cloned in 1996? Amateur. Scientists now offer up the hopeful example of Celia the bucardo (an extinct type of mountain goat).
“Celia’s clone is the closest that anyone has gotten to true de-
extinction. Since witnessing those fleeting minutes of the clone’s life, [Alberto] Fernández-Arias, now the head of the government of Aragon’s Hunting, Fishing and Wetlands department, has been waiting for the moment when science would finally catch up, and humans might gain the ability to bring back an animal they had driven extinct.”
The question now is, Should it be done?
“ ‘The history of putting species back after they’ve gone extinct in the wild is fraught with difficulty,’ says conservation biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University. A huge effort went into restoring the Arabian oryx to the wild, for example. But after the animals were returned to a refuge in central Oman in 1982, almost all were wiped out by poachers. ‘We had the animals, and we put them back, and the world wasn’t ready,’ says Pimm. ‘Having the species solves only a tiny, tiny part of the problem.’ ”
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