Now Glencore is going public, the destructive power it can wield to force up food prices could be even greater

What does it take to make the food speculators at Goldman Sachs look like they're playing for lunch money? A secretive Swiss-based company, and one of the world's largest commodity trading firms, knows. With its initial public offering announced on Thursday, Glencore – a multibillion-dollar mining, energy and food trader that will soon list in London and Hong Kong – is the envy of Wall Street. When Goldman Sachs was floated, the then CEO Hank Paulson made off with $219m. Glencore's chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg, has already earned the moniker "The Ten Billion Dollar Man" for his share of the bonanza.

Glencore will be the first company in 25 years to make the FTSE 100 on its first day of trading, with an estimated valuation of about $60bn. The company has had an average return on equity of 38% (compared to Goldman Sachs's 12%). Its base in the Swiss town of Baar has freed it of even the minimal regulation US-based companies entertain. Not by accident does Glencore find itself in Switzerland. Like the mining and oil trading company Trafigura, Glencore is a descendant of the Marc Rich group. Rich fled the US in 1983 after being indicted by a federal prosecutor, Rudolph Giuliani, for tax evasion and trading with Iran (though he was pardoned by Bill Clinton). As Marcia Vickers reported in a Businessweek exposé: "Rich's philosophy is that no law applies to him."

In exchange for going public and raising money for further acquisitions, Glencore will now have to submit to the bared gums of UK regulators – whose rules are far less onerous than their US counterparts. With the funds from its flotation, the company looks set to dominate the fields in which it chooses to operate. Although primarily a mining and energy company, it has substantial interests in food – controlling around a quarter of the global market for barley, sunflower and rape seed, and 10% of the world's wheat market.

In the weeks before flotation, Glencore allowed us a glimpse of the kind of power it wields. Last year Russia, the world's third largest wheat exporter, experienced a drought the like of which had never been recorded; fires damaged tens of thousands of acres of cereal.

Glencore has now revealed its traders placed bets that the price of wheat would go up. On 2 August Glencore's head of Russian grain trading called on Russia's government to ban wheat exports. Three days later, that's what it did. The price of wheat went up by 15% in two days. Of course, just because a senior executive at one of the world's most powerful companies suggested a course of action that a country chose to follow doesn't mean Glencore made it happen. But happen it did, and the consequences rippled round the world.

At the time, Mozambique experienced a massive uprising in response to increased food and fuel prices. Protests were organised via text messages and, in actions that foreshadowed those of governments in the Arab spring, the Mozambican state responded by shutting down text capability for pre-paid phones and sweeping up hundreds of protesters. Over a dozen people died, many were injured, and millions of dollars of damage was caused. It's safe to say that tens of thousands were pushed further towards hunger as a result of the higher wheat prices.

According to the Financial Times, Glencore's speculation didn't necessarily bring riches to the company. Although the bets on the future price of wheat paid off, Glencore is so big that other parts of the company were tripped up. Its wheat customers in the Middle East had contracts that needed to be fulfilled, and the company was left scrambling after its Russian supplies were walled away.

But Glencore itself admits to prodding the boundaries of how markets ought to work – its flotation prospectus reveals that its Belgian agricultural subsidiary is embroiled in charges of corruption, allegedly involving inside information on European export subsidies.

This story may help economists who are having a hard time understanding how speculation works. In its recent thoughts on the global food market, the Economist defended speculators because "trading cannot drive prices up in the long term since for every buy, there is a sell". By definition, for every smart or lucky trader who comes out with a yacht, some other trader loses their shirt. It's all very nicely confined to the paddling pool of the futures exchange, and the yellow water needn't taint the rest of the market, where the real demand is.

While the economic world ought to work this way in theory, it doesn't in practice. Goldman Sachs has an investment structure that is only about buying food futures. Despite what the theorists say, speculators have profited from hunger. And there's now mounting evidence from some economists that the rush of money into commodity funds is indeed driving prices higher.

But even these kinds of analysis assume that there are rational moves made by actors within the market's confines. When financial powerhouses like Glencore are able to control and engineer the terms on which they are governed, economics has painfully little to say. Rather than being "price takers", today's financial behemoths are price makers. To understand the power at play, we're better served by the insight of the French historian Fernand Braudel – that capitalism is, at its pinnacle, not about the facilitation of free exchange, but about its destruction.

Not really a model, just a case study. My friend in France, Albert, sent me a PR featuring me.

I didn’t know about it, because, food safety journalism has been reduced to rewriting press releases.

Lessons from two highly-publicised incidents involving dioxin contamination in Belgium (1999) and Ireland (2008) have allowed researchers from Kansas State University to learn from past mistakes and develop a model for effective crisis management emphasising three key factors: prompt communication, acknowledgement of risk, and stigma control.

Thought to cause cancer in humans, dioxins reached the food supply in both incidents through the contamination of fat used from animal feed. Researchers compared the poor crisis management during the Belgian dioxin crisis in summer 1999 with the successful management of the Irish dioxin crisis in winter 2008. In both cases, the food and agricultural industries relied on crisis management activities of the federal government to limit adverse public reaction, yet the outcomes of each incident were stark contrasts.

In the case of poor management, Belgian authorities delayed informing the public of the dioxin contamination once confirmed, failed to acknowledge the true risk to consumers, and lost the trust of the public and the media regarding the dioxin contamination. Where Belgian authorities failed in 1999, Irish authorities triumphed with the Food Safety Authority of Ireland quickly working to confirm the presence of dioxins, promptly communicating the risk levels and safety measures initiated, and controlling the public messaging via labelling mandates and timely public announcements.

The failure of the Belgian government to include the interest and concerns of the public in the decision-making process led to widespread distrust in the government by both consumers and importing nations. In contrast, prompt and detailed communication by Irish authorities maintained the trust of the public and other nations throughout the crisis management.

The analysis of the management of the two crises in addition to a subsequent review of crisis management literature, led to the development of an effective three-factor crisis management model.

Sevginae Mehmed, a recent migrant from Bulgaria looks out from the terrace of an apartment on the ninth floor of a 24-story building in central Brussels. Brilliant rays of sun bounce off the polished surface of the Atomium in the near distance.  She lights a Marlboro Golde and gently waves away a swirl of smoke. “I may have cried,” she says referring to the first time she was solicited for sex. “But now, it’s actually boosted my confidence as a woman,” she says smiling broadly.

Sevginae Mehemd

She left Bulgaria for Brussels three months ago to find work scrubbing toilets in people’s homes, serving dinners and preparing meals at parties, and washing out stains from shirts and blouses. It’s not uncommon for some clients to make additional requests for services she is unwilling to perform. Now, she tells everyone she’s married. Before going to work, she puts on a wedding ring.

In Bulgaria, she was the senior advisor at a labour bureau. Fluent in several languages, educated with two university degrees, this ambitious woman gave it up for a new and an uncertain future. She’s thirty-three.

Her five-year old son, Attila, is sitting in an oversized red armchair. Her estranged husband remains in Bulgaria – where Sevginae had left him behind along with his abuse, his violence, and his alcohol. He hasn’t paid child support for almost two years now. With debts, an abusive husband, and a child to raise, her meagre salary of 250 Euro at the labour bureau was no longer sustainable.  In Brussels she makes close to a 1000 Euro.

Sevginae Mehemd’s Attila with family friend

She’s registered as an independent worker and deducts around 230 Euro for social security and taxes. With rent, food, utilities and daily expenses, she’s left with next to nothing. She has no account and must be paid in cash. In her spare time, she volunteers her services at a Turkish travel bureau. Still, she’s happy and is now planning on opening her own travel agency by the end of this year – a prospect that would create more opportunities and more jobs.

But why come to Brussels?  And why as a cleaning lady? Sevginae explains that many Bulgarian women find themselves as house cleaners because they don’t have the language skills. “It’s the easiest job we can find,” she says, adding that age is also a factor: “The older you are, the more difficult it gets.”

But the reality is more complex. Many migrants, documented or not, are also shut out from the normal labour market.  “The industrial sector is no longer the sector with highest demand in foreign labour,” says Bernd Hemingway, Regional Representative at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Brussels.

Bernd Hemingway, Regional Representative at the IOM in Brussels

“Belgians are evenly spread over all the various sectors of activity of the labour market, unlike migrant workers. The over representation of foreigners can be observed in agriculture and services,” he says, adding that migrants often occupy unsavoury job positions in construction, hotels and restaurants, retail and industrial cleaning. He then explains that migrant women especially face severe discrimination. “Female migrants are discriminated both as migrants and as women, and often relegated to the bottom of the labour market irrespective of their qualifications.”

According to one study by the Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, the gap in the employment rate between non-EU nationals and their Belgian counterparts is among the highest in Europe. In 2008, 17.2% of the foreign active population were unemployed as opposed to 8.9% of the Belgian active population. EU citizens account for nearly 68% of the foreign population living in Belgium – most of whom reside in Brussels. With more than 12% foreign-born in the population, Belgium has in relative terms one of the largest immigrant communities in Europe. In 2008, around 9% of the whole population were foreigners.

“To work in Belgium, citizens from new Member States who joined in 2004 were required to have a B labour card,” says Vincent Corluy, a researcher at the Herman Deleeck Centre. “Then in 2009, all new Member States, except for Bulgaria and Romania, were no longer required to have such a card.” As a result adds Corluy, Bulgarians and Romanians who came to work in Belgium did so on the black. The restriction will be removed in May.

Sevginae sees it differently. Her friend, himself a Bulgarian working in Brussels for an NGO, gave her an outlet, a possibility to establish a new life. And that’s all she ever really wanted.

Belgium’s stratified migrant labour market 

Despite numerous studies that point to the positive role migrants play in society, decision-making in migration policy remains embroiled in contentious issues. Questions over national identity, integration, welfare, and sustainable economic models often dominate the debate. Rarely discussed are some of the more positive aspects of migrants.

According to the IOM, migrants in Germany contribute far more to the social welfare system than they take out. But as populist politicians, some trade unions and certain media distort these fears, many Europeans are finding it difficult to extend the notion of solidarity and a socially inclusive Europe to third-country migrants. A rhetoric of exclusion has emerged that on the one hand rejects out-right racism but on the other embraces a discourse of cultural incompatibility, tradition and heritage.

Belgium, for its part, has one of the most liberal migration policies in Europe. Natural citizenship, for instance, takes three years as opposed to ten in the Netherlands or 15 in Germany. However, this more liberal policy may change as some Belgian politicians are vying to impose a ‘probation period’ of exemplary citizenship. The individual, under some sort of surveillance regime, would then be judged at the end of this six-month long scrutiny. The logic behind such a proposition is lost in the fear of the ‘other’ whereby rules and regulations meant to organise and secure society begin to spin off absurdities.

Caught in this turbulence are people simply attempting to carve out a better life for themselves and their children. Often excluded and marginalised, recently arrived migrants and third-country naturalised citizens tend to find themselves in a stratified labour market where employment is concentrated in sectors that are dirty, dangerous and difficult. Jobs that most Belgians simply do not want. Or as one Brussels’ night shop owner Mohammed Ashraf from Pakistan told me, “Why do you think you never see white Belgians running these shops? Because they have a choice!”

Night shop owner in Brussels

The distribution of migrants on the labour market in Brussels is influenced by conditions imposed by the admission regime, workforce demand in a particular sector, persistent ethnic and gender discrimination, cultural differences, and use of migrant networks for recruitment. In September last year, a Belgian television crew placed hidden cameras in eight interim agencies throughout Brussels. Six agencies were caught on camera stating they would not hire Belgian citizens with non-European backgrounds.

Because of these barriers, some simply choose to be self-employed as house cleaners, night shop owners, or any number of small, individually run businesses: jobs and sectors that contribute not only valuable services, but at prices that benefit the every day consumer. Sectors, like textiles, agriculture and construction, are outsourced onsite to non-EU nationals in order to lower labour costs and remain competitive.  These non-EU nationals are often undocumented workers who are easily exploited. Wages are  sometimes withheld and normal working conditions and standards disregarded. Jan Knockaert, coordinator of the Organization of Undocumented Workers (OR.C.A) based in Brussels says, “there probably isn't a building construction site in Brussels that hasn't employed an undocumented worker.” This includes current building sites by the EU institutions.

Lack of empirical data

While there is no empirical data to support this personal observation, in Brussels many night shop owners appear to be either from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh (or are Belgian citizens with these origins). Belgium at the federal level does not calculate or identify nationals of foreign origin in their labour market surveys.  Flanders does possess a statistical category called “allochtones” which identifies foreigners. But French-speaking institutions do not use any such category or terminology. Still, it would appear that construction workers at building sites are largely undocumented Brazilians or are Belgians who speak Portuguese with thick Brazilian accents. Halal butchers and vegetable shopkeepers appear predominately North African. And cleaning ladies are often Bulgarian or Polish.

Curiously, the ethnostratification and genderisation of the migrant labour market appears to differ in Flanders, Wallonia and the Brussels-Capitale Region. Perhaps this is because the Flemish and French speaking communities handle migrants differently. Polish and Bulgarian women in Flanders, for instance, predominately work in the agricultural sector – most likely as a fruit and vegetable pickers according to the IOM.

Ashraf, the same night shop owner in Brussels, says he had run 14 night shops with his uncle in Flanders. Life, he said, was easier for migrants in Flanders. “People here in Brussels have no respect,” he says though his comment is most likely biased by a recent spate of thefts from his shop. He now keeps the cigarettes behind the counter. But even then, he says, they don’t make him much money as he only gets a 6% profit for every packet sold. When asked why he left Lahore, he said poverty drove him out. He now has two sons, both born in Belgium.

Just a few shops down the same street, 25-year old Ashan (who would not give his last name), also from Lahore, runs a telephone and internet shop. He’s in Brussels just to work for a few weeks before returning to Lithuania where he studies engineering. “There is a lot racism here, especially from uneducated people,” he says. According to Ashan, a lot of people leave for Europe thinking they will somehow find paradise and fortune. Their families back home depend on them. When things turn bad in Europe, some are too ashamed to return and instead pretend that they have good paying jobs and nice apartments. “We have too much honour in our community,” he says.

The Algerian butcher

Now 43, Ali Meruuane fled Algeria for Belgium 17 years ago – two years after the conflict between government forces and Islamist rebels claimed over 100,000 mostly civilian, lives. Stout with broad shoulders and a quick smile, Ali has since then been working as a butcher. “It’s in my blood. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” he says.

Ali Meruuane, butcher

He arrived, undocumented, and quickly found work as a butcher with the aide of family and friends already established in Brussels. Over the years, his skills progressed. Eventually, he was given amnesty and was entitled to Belgian citizenship. Now he runs his own business and employs half a dozen butchers, many of whom are naturalised Belgians from the Congo:

“It’s crazy that I have to come here to work without any papers when my country has such enormous wealth,” he says citing its vast reserves of oil and gas. “But it has no social justice. We need a real democracy. If we had this there would be no need to migrate.”

His employee, Joseph Kitoko-Mpindi from the Congo has been working with Ali for the past five years. He too fled in the early 1990s. Trained as an accountant, Joseph is hoping to return to his home country one day: “Europe gave me a sense of life with the kind of business experience I hope to one day apply back home.”

Joseph Kitoko-Mpindi, butcher

That day will arrive, he says, when there is greater stability. When there is hope and a future for his family.

Photographs taken by Nikolaj Nielsen

International Crises Boost Russia's Energy Posture

With U.S.-led fighter jets pounding military assets in oil-rich Libya, and Japan still struggling to contain radiation at its stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, concerns are rising around the world about the future of energy supplies. But not in Russia.

As the unrest in the Middle East bites into supplies, prices for crude approached $105 a barrel this week. That's helping drive windfall profits that are enabling the world's biggest energy exporter to finally emerge from recession triggered by the global financial crisis in 2008.

But while that's good news for Russia's economy, Kremlin critics say rising energy prices are again shoring up the country's authoritarian government -- and that's bad for politics.

Exclusive: U.S. submarines show force amid race for Arctic riches

(Reuters) - The United States is staging high-profile submarine exercises in the Arctic Ocean this month as evidence mounts that global warming will lead to more mining, oil production, shipping and fishing in the world's last frontier.

Forecast of $185 oil that carries some weight

Oil prices in 2020? The futures market is pricing the cost of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate for delivery in December 2019 – the farthest forward futures on the Nymex exchange in New York – at $104 a barrel. But Paul Horsnell, the veteran oil watcher at Barclays Capital, believes it will hit an astonishingly high $185.

Mr Horsnell published his latest long-term crude oil forecast late on Thursday, triggering a mini-stir on the market. He says that West Texas Intermediate will hit $185 and Brent $184 by 2020, much higher than any forecast seen so far.

In Syrian flashpoint town, more deaths reported

(CNN) -- At least 15 people were killed as thousands took to the streets in or made their way to the restive Syrian city of Daraa, where deadly clashes erupted over the last week between protesters and security forces.

Sources told CNN the slain people were trying to march to Daraa, where an eyewitness, Abdullah, also reported many casualties in the city.

Turkey and France clash over Libya air campaign

Turkey has launched a bitter attack on French president Nicolas Sarkozy's and France's leadership of the military campaign against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, accusing the French of lacking a conscience in their conduct in the Libyan operations.

The vitriolic criticism, from both the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the president, Abdullah Gül followed attacks from the Turkish government earlier this week and signalled an orchestrated attempt by Ankara to wreck Sarkozy's plans to lead the air campaign against Gaddafi.

BP halts business with Tamoil after sanctions

(Reuters) - BP is halting all business with Libyan oil company Tamoil and declaring force majeure on all oil and product deliveries, a company spokesman told Reuters on Friday.

Russia new oil tax regime to take effect by July

(Reuters) - Russia's new oil and oil products tax regime will take effect no later than July, deputy Finance Minister Sergei Shatalov told reporters on Friday.

Tokyo Electric likely liable for nuclear accident-Japan gov't

(Reuters) - Tokyo Electric Power will be likely be held responsible for damages stemming from a nuclear plant that was crippled by this month's massive earthquake and tsunami and has been leaking radiation, Japan's top government spokesman said.

EPA pursues Michigan's largest coal-fired plant

A Michigan utility spent $65 million last year replacing key parts at the state's largest coal-fired power plant in Monroe. Now DTE Energy is in court with federal regulators who say millions more should have been spent to reduce air pollution.

Osborne’s North Sea Oil Tax Risks Stalling $3 Billion of U.K. Field Sales

George Osborne’s increased tax on U.K. oil production risks holding back investment in the North Sea and stalling BP Plc and ConocoPhillips’s plans to sell off mature assets.

BP, Rosneft Share-Swap Deal Blocked in Dispute With Russian Billionaires

BP Plc’s proposed $7.8 billion share swap and Arctic exploration deal with OAO Rosneft was thrown out by an arbitration tribunal after a legal challenge by its Russian billionaire partners.

Nigeria sets sites on natural gas

ABUJA, Nigeria (UPI) -- Foreign investments of around $25 billion in Nigeria will boost the country's natural gas sector under plans outlined by the country's president.

A cornerstone of the investment plans is a $3 billion deal between Italian energy company Eni and Nigeria's Oando to process gas from the Niger Delta, said Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan.

Israel, the oil producer, is about to have the last laugh

The joke has been told by generations of Jews, most famously Golda Meir, the former Prime Minister of Israel. Why did Moses lead us to the one place in the Middle East without oil?

But an updated version may be required if Harold Vinegar and his colleagues get their way. Dr Vinegar, the former chief scientist of Royal Dutch Shell, is at the centre of an ambitious project to turn Israel into one of the world's leading oil producers.

What Exxon Valdez spill can still teach us

(CNN) -- The Exxon Valdez catastrophe on March 24, 1989, no longer holds the distinction of being the largest oil spill ever in U.S. waters. In sheer size, it was eclipsed last April by the disastrous well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. But as the Pew Environment Group's video, "Lingering Oil," shows, the lessons of the Exxon Valdez spill are more vital than ever as we approach the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and contemplate drilling in the even more challenging Arctic Ocean.

4 Benefits Of Rising Oil Prices

No, that title is not a misprint. While everybody likes cheap energy and most economists believe that economic growth is predicated at least in part on cheap access to energy, it does not automatically follow that there is no good that can come from higher energy prices. Markets are made up of multiple independent agents and what constitutes a challenge for one can be an opportunity for others.

Monbiot - Budget 2011: George Osborne's plans are a disaster for the environment

An incentive to consume more petrol, relaxed planning rules and a weak green bank add up to a black budget for the environment

An interview with Naomi Klein. Part One: “…that world view is killing us and needs to be replaced with another world view…”

I’m worried that we need a strategy of change that doesn’t rely on the coming of an oil shock, a price shock – we need to change without the market forcing us to change. That may well be different here, because I think you are in a more precarious energy situation than we are in North America. In some ways I think it would be a blessing if we were in a more precarious energy situation, because it would force that change, but everything I’m seeing right now, what really terrifies me is that if these stories that we tell ourselves about how there will always be more, and another frontier, are manifesting themselves in this Jared Diamond-esque hell, a suicidal collapse. I don’t feel that we have the luxury to wait for change to be imposed from the outside and just have to decide whether we’re going to manage it or not.

Three strikes - we're out.

Most people devote themselves to one cause or another, as I tend to do so myself. Yet, looking at all the events that tie into that one cause, whether it is the one I devote myself to or any other one that I look into because it pertains to the core of my investigations, all these individual causes are really bush fires, flare-ups in the general slow inexorable flow towards a large change in our global society.

Richard Heinberg: Won’t Innovation, Substitution, and Efficiency Keep Us Growing?

I want to believe in innovation and its possibilities, but I am more thoroughly convinced of entropy. Most of what we do merely creates local upticks in organization in an overall downward sloping curve. In that regard, technology is a bag of tricks that allows us to slow and even reverse the trend, sometimes globally, sometimes only locally, but always only temporarily and at increasing aggregate energy cost.

Earth Hour aims for hope in darkened world

SYDNEY (AFP) – Lights will go out around the world Saturday with hundreds of millions of people set to take part in the Earth Hour climate change campaign, which this year will also mark Japan's earthquake and tsunami.

Report: Decade of low carbon transition not moving fast enough

The transition towards low carbon technologies will continue over the next decade, but will not accelerate quickly enough to deliver the deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions scientists believe are necessary.

That is the conclusion of a major new report released yesterday by global risk management firm DNV, which attempts to predict the main technology trends that will occur over the next 10 years.

JP Morgan raises oil price forecast to $118

"There is a real risk that oil producers respond to, rather than pre-empt, price signals, or perhaps wait until OPEC's meeting in mid-June before raising output," JP Morgan analysts headed by Lawrence Eagles said.

"By then, it will be too late to prevent higher prices and could extend what we see as a mid-quarter blip to a much more serious and destabilizing price surge that could distort stock-holding behavior and economic growth, leading to more significant problems in stabilizing the oil market," the bank said in the report dated March 24.

Oil Trades Near Two-Week High on Libya Conflict; JPMorgan Raises Forecast

Oil traded near a two-week high in New York as continued fighting in Libya fanned concern that unrest in the Middle East will further disrupt supply.

Libyan airspace 'under control,' with new strikes

BENGHAZI, Libya – France declared Libya's airspace "under control" on Friday, after NATO agreed to take command of the no-fly zone in a compromise that appeared to set up dual command centers. Moammar Gadhafi drew a rare rebuke from the African Union, which called for a transitional government and elections.

Syrians hold demos as media banned from key city

DARAA, Syria – Thousands of Syrians took to the streets Friday demanding reforms and mourning dozens of protesters who were killed during a violent, weeklong crackdown that has brought extraordinary pressure on the country's autocratic regime.

Ivory Coast Braces for Civil War as Violence Escalates

At least 52 civilians have been killed in the past week amid escalating violence instigated by an authoritarian President who refuses to heed the will of his people. No, not in Libya, or Yemen, or Bahrain, but in the West African nation of Ivory Coast, which is struggling for media attention amid crises elsewhere.

Firms pull staff out of Yemen

Foreign oil and gas producers are pulling staff out of Yemen while the French energy group Total, the country's biggest energy investor, has warned of possible force majeure affecting exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Unrest in the country could lead to supply disruptions, a Total spokeswoman told customers of Yemen LNG, a group the company leads.

"This is a notification of a possible force majeure event, because for now production is still ongoing," she told Reuters.

Report on Oil Spill Pinpoints Failure of Blowout Preventer

HOUSTON — A buckled section of drill pipe caused the malfunction of supposedly fail-safe equipment when a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico blew out last April, killing 11 workers and spewing millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, according to a report released by the Interior Department on Wednesday.

The report, a detailed analysis by a Norwegian company that was hired as part of the federal investigation into the spill, could lead to design changes in blowout preventers, the industry-standard devices that are the last line of protection to prevent drilling disasters. It might also prompt changes in the procedures that rig workers use to control subsea wells.

The lessons of the blowout preventer's failure at the Deepwater Horizon: An editorial

The report does not exonerate or place blame for the BOP's failure. Civil and criminal investigations of the incident are likely to do that. But regulators clearly must ensure that all blowout preventers are maintained and operated to current standards. They also need to revisit those standards in light of the new findings.

Even current standards, however, had not always been enforced before the BP spill. BOPs are required to be pulled up, docked, inspected and certified every three to five years, but a Transocean official last year testified that the Deepwater Horizon's BOP was probably not in compliance. The BOP had not gone through a certification since it was first delivered to the rig in 2001.

Revisiting the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Until a year ago, the marine scientist Samantha Joye studied a fairly obscure natural phenomenon: the seepage of oil from undersea deposits into deepwater environments. Then, in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon accident, she felt compelled to turn her attention to an unnatural phenomenon: oil spills.

Breach in reactor suspected at Japanese nuke plant

TOKYO – A suspected breach in the core of a reactor at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant could mean more serious radioactive contamination, Japanese officials revealed Friday, as the prime minister called the country's ongoing fight to stabilize the plant "very grave and serious."

A somber Prime Minister Naoto Kan sounded a pessimistic note at a briefing hours after nuclear safety officials announced what could be a major setback in the urgent mission to stop the plant from leaking radiation, two weeks after a devastating earthquake and tsunami disabled it.

Asahi: Fukushima Accident Classified as Level 6 Case

A leading Japanese daily says the level of radiation from the crippled Fukushima Number One nuclear power plant in Japan is classified as a level 6 incident.

Rules Faulted For Poor Data On Failures At Reactors

Nuclear power plants in the United States are not reporting some equipment failures to the government because of badly written rules, the inspector general of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned.

Nuclear Safety Lessons Start With Manholes, Axes

The next generation of plants must be built to work with nature, and human nature, rather than against them, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its March 28 edition. They must be safe by design, so that even if everything goes wrong, the outcome won’t be disaster.

In the language of the nuclear industry, they must be “walkaway safe,” meaning that even if all power is lost and the coolant leaks and the operators flee the scene, there will be no meltdown of the core, no fire in the spent fuel rods, and no bursts of radioactive steam into the atmosphere.

What's next for nuclear power?

The disaster at Fukushima is raising antinuclear sentiment around the world. But can society afford to live without this carbon-free energy source? Six experts weigh in.

The meltdown in Japan and our energy future

Wherever you stand on controversial energy issues of the day, I think you would have to admit we are in a pickle. If you don’t believe in peak oil, do you believe that fossil fuel consumption can increase indefinitely, which is what we currently require of it? Can it do so without causing disastrous global climate change and more mistakes like Deepwater Horizon?

Wherever you stand on nuclear power, do you see us adding hundreds of plants over the next couple decades to meet worldwide demand?

Why Buffett Says High Oil Prices Are Not a Signal to Buy Oil Stocks

For the past few years I have been reading everything I can about world oil demand and supply and also been analyzing publicly-traded oil companies on a pretty steady basis. My basic thinking has evolved into a belief that the world is heading for a real oil crunch as demand for oil increases in emerging economies, while our maximum daily production rates are pretty close to having peaked already. As a result, I’ve loaded my portfolio with companies that own undervalued oil reserves.

Oil: Where is the spare capacity?

Call it peak resources, peak oil, the end of cheap oil, whatever – the fact is there is a finite amount of natural resources on the planet and we are consuming an inordinate amount of it. At some point, the demand for these resources will outstrip the affordable supply. This naturally induces a parabolic move in price due to inelastic demand – and that's when the Easter island question presents itself...

The World Beyond ‘Peak Oil’

Most of the increase in production that has come in total oil produced worldwide in the past ten years or more have come from three sources: previously underdeveloped or neglected regions such as Russia, Central Asia, and Africa; deepwaters in the Gulf of Mexico, offshore Brazil and a few other places; and really unconventional places, like the oil sands of Canada, Venezuela’s heavy oil deposits, and, most dramatically, the shale gas formations in North America, which also contain liquids.

Some of the exciting new discoveries offshore and in frontier areas like tropical Africa are large but expensive, are taking a long time to ramp up to full production — such as the deep salt sites offshore Brazil — and will only replace the declining production elsewhere, while demand in China, India, and Africa relentlessly increases. In the sense that the only net increase in production has come from heavy oil, oil sands or EOR, then indeed Peak Oil has really come to pass.

PG&E; Offers Critics Option to Turn Off Smart Meters

SAN FRANCISCO — Pacific Gas and Electric proposed a solution on Thursday for Northern Californians who do not want so-called smart electricity meters installed in their homes: they must accept them but may have their wireless radio signals turned off, the company said.

First Wind Starts Up Oahu Wind Farm With Largest Battery Storage System

First Wind Holdings Inc., a closely held developer, said a 30-megawatt wind farm in Hawaii has gone into commercial service, the first renewable energy project to be completed with backing from the U.S. Energy Department’s loan guarantee program.

The Kahuku Wind project on Oahu has the largest installed battery storage system connected to a U.S. wind farm, the Boston-based company said in a statement today.

Now, Starter Homes Boast Solar Arrays

Among the standard features offered for new homes at Manzanita at Paseo del Sol, a KB Home development in a desert suburb southeast of Los Angeles, are nine-foot ceilings, six-panel doors and a 1.4-kilowatt solar array.

While KB Home has offered rooftop photovoltaic panels as an option for some time, the home builder now will make solar arrays from SunPower standard equipment on more than 800 homes in 10 communities being built in Southern California.

Cooling Delhi Hospital Using Heat to Cut Power Sees India Partner Germany

India and Germany are using a New Delhi hospital to demonstrate how heat harnessed for cooling can help contain surging electricity demand in the world’s second- fastest growing major economy.

German Energy Company Hits Headwinds in India

FRANKFURT — With Japan’s crisis raising new questions about nuclear power, this might seem an ideal time for a company that is a global leader in alternative energy and has a big presence in an energy-starved country, India.

But for Enercon of Germany, one of the world’s biggest makers of wind turbines, India is shaping up as a disaster.

The company says it has just lost its entire Indian subsidiary, a major operation with annual sales of more than $566 million, after a dispute with a local partner and a run-in with Mumbai law enforcement authorities.

Enercon also says it has lost control of its patents in India and fears its technology could be appropriated by competitors in a country where wind energy is a big and growing market.

Throwing Together a Meal, One Swap at a Time

Ms. Solomon’s event, which is now more than a year old, is one of a number of food swaps popping up around the Bay Area. Taking cues from the food co-operatives of the 1970s, these urban dwellers are restructuring their food economies around face-to-face relationships.

The Local Food Revolution

A local food revolution is quietly unfolding in our midst right here in Boulder County. It’s a revolution aimed at rebuilding this region’s capacity to feed its own people, to ensure food security and food sovereignty for all.

Traffic Pollution Doubles Lung Transplant Death Rate, Study Finds

Air pollution from car traffic may double the risk of organ rejection and death in lung transplant patients, Belgian researchers report in a new study.

The study, which tracked nearly 300 lung transplant recipients over more than a decade, found that patients living less than 600 feet from a main road were twice as likely to develop a severe lung inflammation associated with organ rejection within several years of surgery.

Europe Prepares to Impose Carbon-Reduction Measures on Maritime Transport

The European Union is preparing to include maritime transport in its emissions-trading system or impose charges on carbon discharges from ships should international talks fail to cut pollution from the industry.

Kevin Jackson is a luminary in the field of cloud computing. He is currently an engineering fellow at NJVC, one of the largest IT solutions providers supporting the U.S. Department of Defense. He is also editor of the Government Cloud Computing Journal and founder of "Cloud Musings" blog. Kevin was trained at the United States Naval Academy, Naval War College, and Naval Postgraduate School.

In this interview, we discuss:

• Actual government IT successes, especially using cloud computing
• Deconstructing the hype around cloud computing and talking about its real characteristics and value
• How clouds need a critical mass to function and provide elasticity, and how the size of the US places it in a strong position to develop these kinds of clouds
• Industry transition from system integration to service integration
• Use of clouds among defense departments and other organizations with other high security requirements
• Synergy between cloud computing and geospatial data

Robert Duffner: To get us started, could you please take a minute to introduce yourself and your experience with cloud computing?

Kevin Jackson: I'm the Director of Cloud Computing Services at NJVC. I've been in technology for a very long time. I started in the military, where I was an aircraft carrier pilot, flying the E-2 Hawkeye aircraft, specializing in command and control. I also worked with the National Reconnaissance Office, where I did a lot of early work in the delivery of intelligence products over global networks to mobile devices.
After I left the military, I focused on leveraging Internet technology in support of national objectives, eventually working with IBM in the WebSphere software group and developing SOA-based architectures to support the mobile devices that were coming into commercial use, developing infrastructures that delivered information to mobile devices securely.

That experience led to my interest in developing global SOA-based infrastructures for the government. Over the past few years, that came to be known as cloud computing, as it morphed into leveraging SOA on top of virtualized infrastructures.

I joined NJVC in February 2010, with a focus on the use of cloud computing to support the mission of central government, particularly the DOD and intelligence community.

Robert: It's always fun for the media to highlight government IT failures, and ZDNet even ran an article saying that Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO that you've had private conversations with, wants to get serious about Federal IT success. Can you talk about some of the big successes you have seen, especially in the context of federal cloud IT projects?

Kevin: One of the promises of cloud computing is that it allows you to leverage resources more efficiently. And the federal government is notorious in the inefficient use of technology, because each of the agencies and departments have built their own separate and independent approaches with respect to IT.

One area that the government has been underutilized in is the collection of data. The government has data on everything, from insects, to traffic, to where people live and where they move. That data has been collected for various reasons, but it is typically locked up in databases or storage, never to see the light of day again.

They store it because it's the public's property, but there is no impetus or resources to use the data for anything else. When Vivek Kundra first came in, he saw that as a waste of a valuable resource, and through usaspending.gov and data.gov, he was able to leverage commercial cloud computing offerings to set that data free. And by making this data, which is owned by the public, available to the public, new and amazing applications are being developed and released almost on a daily basis.

This approach was modeled after his experience with the D.C. government, where he did a very similar thing: Apps for D.C. So Apps for America, I think, is an awesome example of how innovation combined with cloud computing can provide extraordinary value. The army took that leap and did what's called Apps for the Army, which is a very similar thing.

They used the Defense Information Systems Agency's platform, called RACE, and offered that platform and its development environment to members of the army so they could use their innovation to develop applications that would support specific army missions. That pilot was also extremely successful, and I believe the Army is now planning on expanding it.

Their ability to leverage open source and to build a secure cloud infrastructure actually led to data.gov being hosted on the NASA Nebula Cloud, which was developed and built by Chris Kemp. That achievement shows that the federal government itself can be a successful cloud provider, which I think is huge in its own right.

Robert: That's definitely a great example, although alongside those successes, there's clearly an initial wave of hype, in this emerging market of cloud computing. There's broad-based skepticism about cloud really being all about hype, and about the government moving to the cloud being a boondoggle.

I'm actually thinking about an article titled "Government Incompetence Led to Compromise." It was on the AEON Security Blog, where the author asks why in the world did the government get suckered into the cloud?  I think it was back in February. They talked about how hackers may have gained access through the content management system of third party vendor, GovTrends. I know there's also the Joomla CMS. Can you talk about some of the skepticism that you've encountered?

Kevin: First of all, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding around cloud computing. Many people I talk to think cloud computing is just the next technology du jour. They see it as the next marketing push; first there was mobile, followed by SOA, and now it's cloud computing. They believe that it's really nothing new, important, or different.

The first misconception is that cloud computing is a new technology. In my mind, cloud represents an evolution of technology that combines things like virtualization, SOA, mobile technology, and mobile infrastructures. It blends them together into a new model for consuming and delivering information technology.

Cloud computing is more a business model, an approach, and a technique than it is a technology. I think the first thing that's important to understand is that it's not new technology, but rather using and leveraging existing technology in novel ways.

Second, this is an inevitable transition that I sometimes liken to the industrial revolution. There, society went from an environment where products were handmade in cottages to assembly lines powered by the steam engine.

That was a revolution not just in society but in the economy and many, many different domains. What we're seeing with cloud computing is the exact same thing, except it's for information technology. It's the next step in the information revolution.

The hand-built, hand-designed works of art that we call our IT infrastructures are being transitioned to assembly line, modern, professional infrastructures composed of commodity components run in an automated fashion. So we're actually seeing the IT infrastructure being put on the assembly line.

I think it's going to have very similar effects to our society, the beginnings of which you can see today. My daughter is a freshman in high school, and she was born on the net. The way she needs, consumes, and reacts to information technology is completely different from the way I use and consume technology. I had to learn how to leverage the network. She was born into it.

So, that's what cloud computing is. It's not really hype, but rather a transition that we all have to be comfortable with. And I'm happy to see the federal government for once taking the lead in doing something that it really needs to do.

Robert: Across the board, we tend to be early adopters of IT here in the US, but government cloud isn't just a US phenomenon. You've pointed to the governments of Taiwan and Korea, in particular. How are you seeing similarities and differences in cloud computing requirements among world governments?

Kevin: When I was in Europe earlier this summer, I actually did a presentation on international governments and their use and adoption of cloud. One thing I found was that many governments are scared to death of the United States and its rapid adoption of cloud computing.

One of the key tenets of being a successful cloud provider is scale. You have to have enough scale so that you can leverage the differences between groups of users. That's how Amazon Web Services has been successful with providing infrastructure as a service. That's how Google can successfully get high efficiencies from its global IT infrastructure.

The criticality of scale, I believe, is one of the key reasons why cloud computing companies arose first in the United States, because you had a large market with a diverse user base that could leverage the capabilities of cloud. Arguably, the first cloud companies are Google, Amazon, and eBay. They are all US companies, and European governments see that as a threat to their own sovereignty.

Just take Belgium for instance. You may only have 10 million people in the country, but is 10 million people in a single time zone enough scale to leverage cloud computing? Will you ever see a Belgian cloud service provider? Take Africa, they may have leapfrogged other countries with cell phone technology because they didn't have to put in the wired infrastructure, but will that be possible with cloud?

And if United States companies become the largest cloud providers in the world, will that make the United States the key information superpower? These are the types of issues that governments have to deal with. It may be better to invest in having a domestic cloud infrastructure, even if you don't have the scale to be commercially successful.

If you're a central government and you need to provide services to your constituents, should you leverage a foreign government, a foreign power's cloud infrastructure because it's cheaper? Or should you invest in your own domestic cloud infrastructure so that your country can have that capability domestically?

Robert: In your session at Cloud Expo, you said that cloud customers must be able to easily store, access, and process data across multiple clouds. How are you seeing the interaction between private and public clouds evolving?

Kevin: I believe that in the delivery of IT systems, we're going to be transitioning from system integrators to service integrators, and these services are going to be delivered by multiple clouds. You have private clouds, public clouds, community clouds, and you may have industry clouds.

You will have services that are designed and optimized for specific verticals, and an information technology provider would need to understand not only what its customer needs are, but what services they will have to integrate in order to support all of their customers' needs. And it will be just too expensive to hire people to custom-design, build, and deliver these systems.

So as you transition from the system integrator role to the service integrator one, there's going to be a rise in requirements for cloud brokers. These brokers will need to understand the marketplace, including an in-depth understanding of customer needs and requirements.

They will need to be able to look at various types of clouds and figure out how best to leverage these services to meet their customers' missions, needs, and requirements. That's basically why I believe you will have multiple clouds and you will have to understand how to integrate these services.

That's another reason I believe the networking effect of cloud is going to drive an acceleration in the establishment of cloud standards. The value of the Internet grew as it expanded from a small nucleus to its global breadth today. That was relatively easy, since any node that wanted to join had to align with the standards that were already established.

As the basic Internet grew, it became more valuable. As it became more valuable, more people wanted to join it, which reinforced the existing standards. And that's why TCP/IP became the powerful global standard that it is today.

Cloud, fortunately or unfortunately, is starting with a global breadth from its very beginning. That means you're going to have multiple organizations trying to substantiate their way of doing cloud into the de facto standard.

The conventional wisdom is that it will be much more difficult to establish a standard, but I feel that the value of this new approach to IT will actually hasten the establishment of cloud standards. Cloud service integration and cloud brokerage will be an important catalyst to the economies of the world.

Robert: At our Windows Azure Customer Advisory Board meeting, we had Ray Ozzie as one of our speakers. He talked about how you have to have standards, and you have to have multiple offerings that appear similar to customers before you start to see broad adoption of technology.

Generally,  I see that when your value props start to sound very similar to those of your competitors, it's generally a good sign that there's an understanding by your customers of what that offering is. It's clear we're not there yet with the cloud.

Kevin: The competition is going to be at the upper layers: at the services layer, rather than at the infrastructural layer. I think at the infrastructure and the platform levels, we are going to see a rapid convergence of standards, and the competition will be associated with support offerings that are optimized for different verticals, industries, and tasks.

Robert: What do you think about the idea of a business process as a service?

Kevin: We will have value chains being created between clouds that are optimized for specific industry services. And there will be entire business-process management chains. Initially, they will arise internally, within enterprises as they look for ways to increase efficiency in their delivery to their customers. Eventually, they will morph into external, competitive offerings. In a lot of ways, salesforce.com is trying to deliver business-process management as a service.

Robert: To circle back a bit, you mentioned in a blog post that the army is taking cloud computing seriously, and you pointed to the Army Private Cloud RFP. What do you think is driving defense organizations in particular to embrace cloud technology?

Kevin: Government as a whole has an economic imperative to increase efficiencies and reduce costs. The DOD's mission is not to build IT infrastructure, but rather to support the goals of national policy, so the more they can reduce their IT investment requirements, the better. At the same time, though, they need to address the increasing need to leverage information technology.

The United States is arguably the world's only superpower, so we are seeing a transition to asymmetric warfare. The enemies of the United States aren't trying to out-muscle the United States. They're actually leveraging technology, speed, stealth, and the global reach of the Internet to force us to incur costs, both monetarily and in terms of loss of life.

Many of our enemies are against the concept of nation states, so this notion of warfare is going to continue, and the defense department needs to protect the United States as their core mission. Information is really the way that asymmetric warfare is waged against the United States. Cloud computing, quite frankly, addresses both the economic imperative of increasing efficiency and reducing costs while also enhancing our capability to fight this asymmetric information war.

Robert: You talked about the DOD investing in private clouds, but what are you seeing as the public cloud potential for defense and intelligence agencies?

Kevin: I see it as huge. Society lives in the open, and in order to understand what's happening in society, and the intercourse between nation states, the DOD and the intelligence community have to understand what's happening in the open society.

So, if it cuts off its ability to view, understand, and analyze what's going on in public, it basically does a self-imposed denial of service, and it will be impossible for these organizations to fulfill their missions. Understanding, leveraging, and participating in the discourse on the public networks is critical.

Robert: Clearly, you can have a very secure public cloud.

Kevin: Absolutely. I think that most of the reflex that there's not enough security in public cloud is misplaced. The vast majority of the information holdings of the DOD and the federal government is unclassified.

There are things that will never be in the cloud, but you simply don't put them there. Cloud is not a panacea for everything. It is great for some things and awful for others. The challenge is to understand how to use cloud for the things that it's good for, and also understand how not to use it for the things that you shouldn't.

And that's really all about in managing changing policies and procedures, learning more about the IT environment and the information revolution that we're all entering.

Robert: Let's talk about geospatial data. Back in June, Microsoft announced that SQL Azure, which is our cloud relational database server, now supports geography and geometry types plus spatial query support. It seems like geospatial data is an obvious intersection of government and cloud. Actually, you've talked about it and we're supporting it in Windows Azure. Can you talk a little bit about some of the use cases you see for geospatial data in the cloud?

Kevin: Since everything occurs in a specific place and at a specific time, all information has a geospatial coordinate associated with it. In order to understand the relationship of information to society, you also have to understand that geospatial coordinate.

I had a conversation a few months ago about healthcare reform. Apparently, it's a known fact that most healthcare fraud occurs in California and Florida, but a lot of the data associated with healthcare fraud does not have a geospatial linkage. So how can you design and apply national policies but also be able to understand when and where those policies should be enforced?

It costs money to enforce policies, so should you invest the same amount of money to prevent fraud in Florida that you do in Montana? You have a lot less fraud in Montana, so the money spent in preventing fraud there may have a far smaller return on investment than in Florida.

If you don't have a geospatial component to the data, then you have no way of deciding how to design, implement, or enforce public policy based on location.

Robert: I'm mindful of time here, so as you look five years into the future, what are some of the things you hope come to fruition with government use of the cloud?

Kevin: I would hope that more and more data will become available in the cloud, because with data, you get visibility and transparency. But you also get innovation, and innovation will drive society quicker. It enhances the economy, and as they say, a rising tide lifts all boats. If we can raise the economy of the world through the liberation of data and a more effective and efficient use of information technology, it will raise the status of individuals worldwide.

I see information technology enhancing the economies of the world and really enhancing society as a whole in the future.

Robert: That's a great place to wrap up, Kevin. Thank you for taking the time to talk today.

Kevin: It was my pleasure.

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Washington’s bureaucratic turf wars are a dismal reality of politics in Beltwayistan, but are now threatening national policy, as competing agendas threaten policies extending far beyond the continental U.S.

In two of the most notable recent examples, the Kazakh “Giffengate” corruption case and attempts to extradite notorious “Lord of War” Viktor Bout to the United States, eager federal officials in both cases are running up against other government elements content to let both cases lie fallow, notably the CIA and Pentagon.

The controversies, schizophrenic as they are, shed a bright light into the darker corners of federal realpolitic, pitting the pragmatists against a younger generation of Elliot Nesses. In the end, the eventual casualty is Washington’s relentlessly self-proclaimed image abroad as a “nation of laws.” Giffen has already essentially walked, and many are betting that similarly, Bout will likely not face American justice.

The two cases provide a microcosm of Washington’s contradictory agendas, where one federal agency trods upon the  toes of another.  While little is certain, as the country observes the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon and CIA in the name of national security have more clout than ever before, and eager beaver Department of Justice attorneys and Drug Enforcement Agency agents are about to have their wings clipped due to CIA and Pentagon modesty about their achievements.

JAMES GIFFEN AND “KAZAKHGATE”

A not inconsiderable aspect of “Kazakhgate” is the fact that that the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, the most prestigious federal prosecutor’s job outside Washington, has proven a notable launch pad for subsequent political careers. In 1983, Rudolph W. Giuliani was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he prosecuted drug dealers, organized and white-collar crime and government corruption.

As his biography on http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/rwg/html/bio.html notes admiringly, “Few U.S. Attorneys in history can match his record of 4,152 convictions with only 25 reversals.” On 30 January 2009, a New York Times article labeled the office, “A Steppingstone for Law’s Best and Brightest.”

Other notable alumni of the Southern District of New York include Thomas E. Dewey, Governor of New York and Republican presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948 and more recently, former United States Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and former FBI director Louis Freeh.

Giffen was arrested in 2003 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York while attempting to board a plane to Paris and subsequently charged by the U.S. Attorney office for the Southern District of New York with violating the 1974 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering. Charges included creating Swiss bank accounts and transferring $20 million, covering tuition at exclusive boarding schools for Kazakh officials’ family members along with purchasing millions of dollars in jewelry.

For the U.S. Attorney office for the Southern District of New York legal eagles, the case seemed a slam dunk, with Giffen’s pelt a glittering trophy on the way to future political greatness.

Enter Giffen’s background and legal team. Inside the Beltway, word was that if Giffen was not a long-time CIA employee, then he was certainly a long-time agency asset, whose career of interacting with the Soviet and post-Soviet officials extended back to Gorbachev. Kazakhstan officially maintained that the charges had nothing to do with their country as they concerned a U.S. citizen.

Playing hardball, Giffen's lawyers asserted that Giffen was acting with the full knowledge and approval of the U.S. government, whom he kept apprised of all his actions, providing a valuable window into the Eurasian post-Soviet space. When his lawyers requested “discovery” access to classified information from the CIA to back up his claims for his trial, alarm bells rang throughout Langley. For Giffen, the stakes were immense, as he faced up to 88 years in prison if found guilty on all charges.

Adding to the CIA’s nervousness, Giffen could spill beans well beyond post-Soviet incipient Caspian hydrocarbon deals and border U.S. foreign policy initiatives.

According to a February 1991 top secret report by Vadim Zagladin, a high-ranking Soviet official and close advisor to USSR General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and recently released by the Gorbachev Foundation Archive, “On 14 February, I met with Jim Giffen… Giffen informed me, in strict confidence, that he has just finished one of his regular trips to Iran. He goes there on instructions from Bush and Scowcroft, trying to improve U.S.-Iranian relations.”

On 6 August Giffen pled guilty to a misdemeanor tax violation and a minor bribery count against his company, Mercator, and now faces a maximum of six months in prison and a fine when Judge William Pauley sentences him on 19 November.

Insiders believe that Giffen strolled because of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), enacted in 1980, as CIPA’s procedural protections prevent the unnecessary disclosure of classified information. According to Abbe Lowell, head of the white collar crime practice at Washington’s McDermott Will law firm, CIPA’s terms mean that “embarrassing” cases canbe made to vanish.

In a masterpiece of lawyerly understatement Lowell noted, “Today, under CIPA, there is still the inherent pressure on the intelligence community to decide if any prosecution that may result in the disclosure of classified information is worth the leak or offence it wants to prosecute.”

THE “MERCHANT OF DEATH” AND DEA DRUG STINGS

If the federal case against Giffen collapsed like a soufflé, then the Bout case threatens to cover zealous DEA and DOJ Washington apparatchiks with more egg on their faces than an Iowa battery chicken farm salmonella recall.

The arrest of 41 year-old Viktor Anatol’evich Bout in Bangkok on 6 March 2008 as a result of a DEA sting has the potential for creating many Maalox moments - for the Pentagon - which freely used his services in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite Bout’s initial incarceration period of two weeks, which could supposedly be extended a maximum of seven times, he has languished in Bangkok’s notorious Klong Prem prison ever since his arrest.

According to the U.S. indictment, Bout allegedly offered to supply weapons to people he thought were representatives of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels. Bout’s arrest was truly a multinational effort, involving not only the US Drug Enforcement Agency and the Royal Thai Police, but elements from the Romanian Border Police, the Romanian Prosecutor's Office Attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice, the Korps Politie Curacao of the Netherlands Antilles and the Danish National Police Security Services.

The day after his detention, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Bout with conspiracy to provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization, conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to kill U.S. officers or employees and conspiring to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile.

Adding to Washington’s sense of imminent victory in the extradition case, federal agents scored a coup when on 10 March in Manhattan district court federal agents arraigned Bout's associate, Andrei (Andrew) Smulian, who was arrested along with Bout in Thailand, but agreed to extradition. Smulian was charged with conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

During his career Bout was an equal opportunity purveyor of carnage, reportedly supplying former Eastern bloc weaponry to 17 African countries, al-Qaida, Afghanistan's Northern Alliance and subsequently the Taliban, Hezbollah, Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi and the Philippines' Abu Sayyaf militant group, among others.

But it was Africa that proved his most lucrative field, where his client list eventually included factions in Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the DRC, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Congo-Brazzaville, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland and Uganda.

The scale of Bout's various enterprises was startling; one Russian media source reported that in the aftermath of the post-Soviet economic chaos in the Ukraine, Bout and his associates purloined a third of Ukraine's Soviet-era arsenal and sold it on the global market for $49 million.
Additional U.S. charges against Bout were filed in February, including illegal purchase of aircraft, wire fraud and money laundering.

The only fly in the ointment of this roseate picture of U.S. determination to bring Bout to justice is that the Pentagon freely used his services in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Beginning in 2003, Bout's 60 aircraft and 300 pilots and personnel provided Pentagon officials with "plausible deniability" in case one is downed, causing far less of a PR ruckus than if insurgents downed U.S. military aircraft. Bout’s airline, British Gulf, flew massive amounts of material into Baghdad International airport for the U.S. occupation forces.

Quoted in Stars & Stripes in July 2004, commander of the U.S. Transportation Command, Air Force General John Handy noted, "As we fly around, we are repeatedly shot at, with manpads (man-portable air defense systems), small arms, and triple-A (anti-aircraft artillery)."
Bout's U.S. air operations included establishing Air Cess Inc. in Miami in September 1997 until the company was dissolved in September 2001. His agent, Richard Ammar Chichakli said that after 9/11 Bout organized three flights transporting U.S. military personnel to Afghanistan, but gave no further details.

In 2004, as Bout’s flights into Iraq continued, the Bush administration began to press for Bout to be left off planned U.N. sanctions, in spite of French efforts at the U.N. in March 2004 to freeze his assets and act upon an outstanding Interpol warrant for his arrest.

By late 2004 however, Bout's activities had also become a liability for the Pentagon. During a 15 December 2004 Special Defense Department Briefing on Iraq Reconstruction Update a journalist asked Charlie Hess, director of the Project and Contracting Office in Iraq, about Bout.

To a question about whether the DoD had ever used Bout's services Hess replied, "I have not heard anything about that. But if you had some details, we can certainly check into it." The next month, in a January 2005 letter to Congress, then-assistant defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted the Defense Department "did conduct business with companies that, in turn, subcontracted work to second-tier providers who leased aircraft owned by companies associated with Mr. Bout," ABC news reported.

Nor are only U.S. authorities nervous about what Bout might reveal – in an Oct. 2008 interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant Bout stated, “We made more than 150 flights from the French base in Istriz to Zaire - from there they would proceed to Rwanda. We also moved the Belgian troops to Somalia and for 1.5 year we provided all transportation for the Belgian military personnel from Somalia to Belgium.”
Bout also flew cargoes for the British Ministry of Defense. Bout had UK connections dating back to at least 1999, when British gunrunner Christopher Barrett-Jolley leased Bout's aircraft to run armaments to Sudan, the DRC and other African hotspots.

In 2000, Peter Hain, Minister for Africa at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, used MI6 reports and his parliamentary immunity publicly to name Bout as one of Angola's sanction busters.

In March 2005, according to official Civil Aviation Authority records, in one instance Britain's Ministry of Defense hired Bout's Trans Avia and Jet Line International to transport armored vehicles and a small number of British troops from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and RAF Lyneham to Kosovo, according to the Evening Standard.

The Russian government has strongly protested Bout’s innocence. One can only speculate on the media circus if the DEA and DOJ manage to extradite Bout that will occur in a the Southern District of New York, as his defense lawyers subpoena Pentagon, British, Belgian, French, Iraqi, Afghan, Eastern European and African military officials and politicians to testify under oath about their relations with Bout and his transit companies.

Michael Bagley, operations director for the Washington DC-based Global Intelligence Report, observed, “If the Bout extradition proceeds and he stands trial in the U.S., the implications are enormous. While Department of Justice and Drug Enforcement Agency officials are eager to proceed, for the U.S. the international implications involved in prosecuting Bout have the potential to disrupt relations not only with the Russian Federation, but EU allies embedded in Afghanistan as well, not to mention a number of African nations, where the Pentagon is attempting to improve relations in order to establish its AFRICOM military presence."

Interestingly, prior to his bust, Bout had never been involved in Latin American gunrunning, concentrating instead on Africa and Eurasia. Even more interestingly, despite his purported contacts with the Philippines' Abu Sayyaf Group, Bout was never apparently involved with Muslim insurgents in Thailand’s southern Satun, Songkhla, Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces for the last decade.

Bout apparently also stayed away from dealings with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, southern Asia’s most successful insurgency until their defeat by the Sri Lankan military in May 2009. Given that the LTTE fielded not only ground forces, but had a navy and miniscule air force as well, the question arises as to why Bout would become involved in a new enterprise in the Western hemisphere for a paltry reported $5 million while overlooking much more lucrative opportunities closer to home.

As the Pentagon scrabbles to keep its NATO coalition afloat while disengaging from Iraq, it seems most unlikely that the publicity surrounding Bout’s prosecution will most certainly not be to their liking, however much the DOJ and DEA want a “win.” Oh, and don’t forget pressing the “reset” button with Russia, and the Northern Distribution Network railway link that snakes across its territory, now supplying one-third of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Bout in a federal courtroom? About as likely as Giffen serving 88 years. Just two more innocents slipping through the cracks of Beltwayistan’s interminable turf wars.

This article was written by John C.K. Daly for Oilprice.com

by Lisa Couturier

I WENT TO AN AUCTION last Monday. Not an auction for foreclosed homes. Not an auction for priceless art or jewelry or land. I went to the New Holland Livestock Auction in the Amish and Mennonite country of New Holland, Pennsylvania, where each week horses are sold—though I’d no intention of buying one. I know a thing or two about horses. I spend a significant amount of time with them and can groom them, bathe them, saddle them, walk them, run them on a lead, ride them, feed them, blanket them, work them in a round pen, give them medicine, soak their sore hooves, lift and stretch their hindlegs and forelegs, clean the undersides of their feet, bandage their legs, and minister to their wounds. But I could not foresee, in the spare few minutes each horse at such an auction is given to demonstrate its abilities, personality, strength, or lack thereof (whether young or old, muscled or thin), that I’d be able to determine whether any particular horse would be the one for me.

Besides, it was hard to even think at the auction. I took a seat in the large crowd of people—with the Amish men wearing straw hats, black pants, and jackets; with the Mennonite men in their black hats and suspendered pants; with the city slickers from somewhere else and the country folk from nearby; with children and their grandparents fussing over spilled sodas. People talked, laughed, visited, ate hot dogs, Amish pies, and French fries. We all sat sandwiched together in the steep, gray bleachers that formed an oval around the dirt ring in which the horses were shown, one after another, from ten a.m. until midafternoon. A “loose horse” was a horse that came into the auction ring without a rider; the horses with riders were called “saddle horses.” Loose horses are at a disadvantage in terms of finding a good home because even though they are often saddle broke they nonetheless sell for less without a rider atop them in the ring.

The fate of those horses that entered and exited the ring quickly—such as one thin copper-colored Thoroughbred mare I remember—seemed bleak, the implication being that the horse was barely worth the time it took to auction off. That particular Thoroughbred mare, whose long, flaxen mane and tail were braided, must have had someone who had cared enough for her to make her pretty, perhaps believing this would help sell her to a good home, where a girl might braid her once again. Her head hanging low, she slowly walked around the ring, only once, and then stepped out a side exit. If there was any bidding for her, I didn’t hear or see it.

More than once the black-bearded Mennonite man running the auction—someone called him Zimmerman—asked the audience to settle down. Given the noisy crowd and the loud, stern voice of the auctioneer calling out in rapid-fire succession the back-and-forth bidding for the animals, I did not expect the saddle horses to try so hard to do well. Horses are flight animals; they flee at the unfamiliar; fear is their dominant emotion. But they are social creatures, too. They aim to please because they’ve learned to trust, which meant that even the strong and healthy horses, of which there were many, obediently did as they were told amid the chaos of the auction: go forward; go back; turn left, now right; stop, immediately; go fast, go slow; stand still. They were willing to do as asked, as they’ve been over the centuries—to churn the soil in our fields, to fight our battles, to run our races until their lungs bleed or their bones break. This might possibly be their last chance to perform, and they mustered up that certain nobility and courage possessed by horses, as though they had upon their backs the Navajo of long ago, the warriors who, before battle, would whisper into the ears of their horses: Be brave and nothing will happen. We will come back safely.

BEFORE THE AUCTION BEGAN, I had walked through the barns adjoining the auction ring where the horses stood tied to their posts. There are approximately 9 million horses in the United States, and at the auction there were two hundred of not necessarily the unwanted but surely the unlucky. Unlucky because, though I suppose going to a horse auction might sound like a day in the country—Amish food and horse-drawn buggies and all that—this particular auction is frequented by men known as “kill buyers,” which, by association, makes New Holland a kill auction, one of the largest east of the Mississippi. Kill buyers (KBs) also are called “meat men”—the men who purchase horses, typically from the major kill auctions, and deliver them for slaughter, though they also visit Thoroughbred racetracks and wheel and deal with horse dealers who’ve secured horses elsewhere: former show horses from the hunter/jumper/eventing/dressage worlds whose unsuspecting owners believe the dealer will place their horses in good homes; horses listed in newspaper classifieds or on Craigslist (you can find them for sale for a dollar); surplus lesson horses; horses that start out at smaller auctions, such as the Hickory Auction in Pennsylvania, the Camelot Auction in New Jersey, or any of the other nearly one hundred horse auctions scattered across the U.S. All these places are entry points for what is termed the “slaughter pipeline”; and those horses unlucky enough to stay in the pipeline eventually arrive at bigger and potentially more deadly places such as New Holland, where, the day I attended, the younger Mennonite and Amish boys managed a parade of breeds and types (drafts, minis, Quarter Horses, Thoroughbreds, Standardbreds, fit and fat and healthy horses, tired and skinny horses, carriage horses, work horses, mares and geldings and stallions and foals) by whipping in the face the more frightened horses that took longer than a few seconds to understand what they were being told to do. Of course, not just KBs attend such auctions. And the horses being sold could have many possible new homes and potential uses—with families who want a trail horse, say, or with horse trainers, or with competitive riders looking for a strong event or endurance horse. Nonetheless, by the end of the day at any number of auctions around the country, the KBs have “bid for horses against private buyers, against each other and other dealers, as well as against horse rescues,” says Christy Sheidy of Another Chance 4 Horses, in Bernville, Pennsylvania. “The horses the kill buyers took could’ve easily been re-homed and gone on to live happy lives with families who want and appreciate them. They were not unwanted.”

Ultimately, kill buyers take what they need to satisfy their contracts with slaughterhouses. The day I visited New Holland, they were taking horses going for $500 or less; and though sometimes these were the young or the old, the sick or the skinny horses, it was clear that the healthy ones were preferred—the more body weight, the more money for the load. The buzz at New Holland that day was that a KB would receive about $600 from the slaughterhouse for each horse, though prices fluctuate depending on location, supply, and demand. A report quoted by a USDA slaughter statistician for that time period indicated the price of a horse at auction to be around forty-three cents per pound, but horse meat can fetch as much as fifteen dollars per pound in the retail market.

Because Americans don’t eat horses, it is surprising to learn that people of other cultures do. “Horse meat became popular after World War II,” says Carolyn Stull, animal welfare specialist at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis. It was an inexpensive protein “for lower-income people in Europe, where beef was scarce, and old or lame draft horses were processed as affordable meat.” Prices have risen since World War II, but the market continues to be highly profitable for the foreign companies that process horses from the U.S. and Canada, both of which have large horse populations. In a paper concerning horse transport regulations, Stull cites the different types of horse meat various cultures prefer. For instance, the Japanese prefer draft horse meat, she writes, referencing a 1999 article titled “Horses Destined to Slaughter” (though at New Holland I heard that the Japanese and French like Quarter Horses the most because of the lean muscle mass). The Italians, cites Stull, prefer eighteen- to twenty-four-month-old horses; the French go for ten- to twelve-year-old horses; and the Swiss take the two- to three-year-olds.

There are currently no horse-slaughtering facilities in the U.S., which means horses are transported to Canada and Mexico before being put to a typically untimely death. In the 1980s there were sixteen slaughterhouses in the U.S. By 1993 there were about ten, scattered across the country—in Connecticut, Texas, Oregon, Illinois, Nebraska, and Ohio. By the fall of 2007, the last three—two in Texas and one in Illinois—were shut down by courts that upheld state laws banning horse slaughter. The fight against slaughter within the U.S. grew from outrage over the fact that ex-racehorses like Ferdinand, Kentucky Derby winner and Horse of the Year, as well as a racehorse named Exceller, who’d defeated two Triple Crown winners, had slipped through the cracks and been purchased for slaughter overseas (Exceller in Sweden in 1997, and Ferdinand in Japan in 2002). Slaughter opponents included the general public (seven in ten Americans are against it, according to Madeleine Pickens, former racehorse breeder and wife of billionaire T. Boone Pickens); a majority of the Thoroughbred racing industry; and professionals within the horse industry (trainers, riders, breeders), all of whom, once they spoke up for horses, were labeled “animal rights activists” by the proslaughter contingency as a way to discredit them.

Slaughter, however, is not banned at the federal level, and individual states that have not banned it could see new slaughterhouses opened in the future. In early 2009, a Montana state legislator, aptly named Ed Butcher, tried and failed to lure the Chinese (who eat a lot of horses) into building a plant there. But Butcher has not given up. As of March 2010, even though he decided not to run for re-election, he told a reporter for the Montana Independent Record that he’s still “shepherding his horse slaughterhouse idea by trying to find a market.” According to the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, lawmakers in nearly a dozen states are drafting initiatives to reintroduce the possibility of slaughtering of horses in the United States. This is why slaughter opponents ceaselessly fight for the passage of the Prevention of Equine Cruelty Act of 2009 (H.R. 503 / S. 727), which would end at a national level the slaughter of horses for human consumption as well as the domestic and international transport of live horses or horseflesh for human consumption.

A new plot turn in this story is that, as of July 31, 2010, the European Union (EU) will require that horses destined for slaughter and human consumption are free from certain drugs, including many that long have been in the bodies of horses, most notably phenylbutazone (a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory commonly called “bute,” which is given to an estimated 98 percent of American Thoroughbred racehorses as well as to just about any breed of horse to relieve occasional pain or swelling). Kill buyers will be required to provide a signed statement for each horse claiming that to the best of their knowledge the animal has not been treated with these particular substances. “Some kill buyers claim openly that they will simply fill in bogus forms,” says John Holland, president of the Equine Welfare Alliance. The fact is, it would be impossible for KBs to tell the truth, because the horses they pick up could have had numerous owners, and it is rare for papers of any kind to travel with horses to auction, let alone an animal’s lifelong medical history.

It is unlikely that this new hurdle will suddenly stop kill buyers from shipping horses across our borders, as they had been doing even before the last three U.S. slaughterhouses closed. The figures for 2009 show that horses slaughtered in Canada were sold to as many as twenty-four countries, with France, Switzerland, Japan, and Belgium receiving 92 percent of the exports. The demand from countries where horseflesh is considered a pricey delicacy is the predominant reason horses go to slaughter. Some slaughter proponents suggest that the demand is met by horses that are no longer useful to their owners and are therefore better off slaughtered than suffering starvation and neglect. Neglect does of course occur, but neglected and starving horses are not necessarily the ones chosen by the KBs, and such horses don’t always make it to auction to begin with. Consider the nearly two hundred mustangs found starving—seventy-four of them already dead—at the Three Strikes Ranch in Nebraska in 2009. With such a large enticement of horseflesh, the owner of Three Strikes could have chosen to have the meat man come hither; he could’ve sent his neglected horses off with a KB who would’ve paid him for the animals. But he did not.

It is more often the case that horse owners do not wish their healthy animals an untimely death, are unaware that dealers flip their equines like real estate, and would be horrified to know that their animals had been sold into the slaughter pipeline. Bottom line: a horse is a commodity and someone is making money off of it somewhere down the road. And it is all perfectly legal, since horses are deemed livestock by the U.S. government, even though they are not part of the American food chain.

Horses in America today are used less for agricultural purposes and more for sport, competition, trail rides, and showing. They are bred and raised to be companions, not dinner entrees, which is why slaughter seems incompatible with our country’s relationship to this animal. And the manner in which these horses are killed only makes it more so. Before a horse is ostensibly unconscious and hung upside down by one of its back legs, and before its throat is cut and it is bled out, the horse must enter the killbox, or knockbox, where it is shot in the head with a device called a captive bolt gun, which is a four-inch-long, retractable, nail-like instrument. The captive bolt gun does not immediately kill the horse but is meant to render it insensible to pain. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, a captive bolt gun will work effectively under the following conditions: if it is clean and in proper working order, if the horse stands still, and if, shall we say, the gun is dead-on the right spot on the horse’s forehead. These conditions are hard to ensure.

“It is a dangerous practice to equate the medical procedure of chemical euthanasia performed by a veterinarian to end an animal’s life with that of a slaughterhouse worker killing an animal,” says Nena Winand, a faculty member in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. “There are many differences. Vets monitor vitals to cause the least amount of trauma, mental or otherwise. [Slaughterhouse workers] don’t take the time to monitor that the horse is dead. The horse gets hit multiple times with the captive bolt gun. We don’t know that they’re always insensible to pain. This treatment of horses has been going on since I was a kid, and I’m fifty-two now. The industry has never been successfully regulated. We pay taxes to monitor and enforce the humane treatment of these horses, but nothing’s enforced and it never has been. Whoever says otherwise is misrepresenting the history of this industry. To say it’s all perfect—well, it’s just insane.”

It all seems like the ultimate betrayal to a horse that likely served its owners for years and, at some point in its life, experienced human kindness. But there is not an exchange rate for kindness, while there is one for demand. In 2009 alone, demand resulted in the slaughter of 93,812 horses in Canada; of those, 56 percent were American horses; Canada’s revenue was $86.9 million; and the largest importer was France, paying $27.8 million. Worth noting, in a reflective and economy-minded sort of way regarding the issue of demand, is something comedian Jon Stewart said, which was referred to by racing columnist Jay Hovdey in the Daily Racing Form: “There’s demand for cocaine and hookers, too.”

“There are two things that flourish in the dark—mushrooms and horse slaughter,” said the late John Hettinger, a Thoroughbred racing legend and former member of the board of trustees of the New York Racing Association. “Most people don’t know it’s going on. We must deny them the darkness.” To shine a light inside the darkness, various humane groups (the Humane Society of the U.S., the Humane Farming Association) have taken undercover videos inside slaughterhouses, where workers poke, whip, and beat the animals’ bodies with fiberglass rods. Video from inside Mexican slaughterhouses reveals horses stabbed repeatedly with knives, which paralyzes the horse but leaves it conscious at the start of the slaughter process. The videos are exceedingly difficult to watch. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the USDA recently disclosed some nine hundred pages (including photos) documenting hundreds of violations of humane treatment to horses during transport to slaughter and at the American plants prior to their closings in 2007. The photos (available on Kaufmanzoning.net) depict horses with severed legs, crushed skulls, and missing eyes, as well as pregnant mares. Late-term pregnant mares, foals, blind horses, and horses who cannot stand on all four legs are not supposed to be sent to slaughter. Those animals that do make the trip are to be fed, watered, and rested. Often they are not.

“The whole thing, it’s a boondoggle on the American people,” said slaughter opponent and oilman T. Boone Pickens to a Chicago NBC reporter. “People that are for slaughter should be forced to go down on that kill floor.”

For those of us who will never get to the kill floor, or who have not the stomach to watch the videos on YouTube, here are two short excerpts, the first from the notes of an Animal and Plant Health Inspection Investigator at eleven-twenty a.m. on April 13, 2005, at the Cavel slaughter plant in DeKalb, Illinois:

Eight horses were in the alleyway leading directly to the knock-box. . . . The employee who is routinely assigned to work on the kill floor, hanging the horses on the rails, was using a riding crop to whip the horse in the alleyway closest to the knock-box. This horse continued to move backward, away from the knock-box causing the other horses behind it to be overcrowded. As the whipping continued the horses in the alleyway became extremely excited. I immediately told the employee to stop but he did not listen to me. During this time, the last horse in the alleyway attempted to jump over the alleyway wall and became stuck over the top of the wall. Eventually it had flailed around enough to fall over to the other side of the wall. I went to the kill floor to find the plant manager, could not find him. . . . Meanwhile two more horses fell down in the alleyway. The first was the second horse in line to the knock-box. It had fallen forward and the horse behind it began to walk on top of it as the downed horse struggled to get up. The second horse to fall was the fourth horse in line. It had flipped over backwards due to the overcrowding and was subsequently trapped and trampled by the fifth and sixth horses in line in their excitement. . . .

And in this statement taken from records in Cook County, Illinois, a former slaughterhouse employee testified to the following:

In July 1991, they were unloading one of the double-decker trucks. A horse got his leg caught in the side of the truck so the driver pulled the rig up and the horse’s leg popped off. The horse was still living, and it was shaking. [Another employee] popped it on the head and we hung it up and split it open. . . . Sometimes we would kill near 390, 370 a day. Each double-decker might have up to 100 on it. We would pull off the dead ones with chains. Ones that were down on the truck, we would drag them off with chains and maybe put them in a pen or we might drag them with an automatic chain to the knockbox. Sometimes we would use an electric shocker to make them stand. To get them to the knockbox, you have to shock them . . . sometimes run them up the [anus] with the shocker. . . . When we killed a pregnant mare, we would take the guts out and I would take the bag out and open it and cut the cord and put it in the trash and sometimes the baby would still be living, and its heart would be beating, but we would put it in the trashcan.

I’D FOUND MY WAY to New Holland with a horse rescue worker I’ll call Pat. Like many people who start up rescues, Pat was a lifelong rider and horse owner before opening her rescue in 2008. When I first visited her on a cold winter afternoon several weeks before the auction, I was led into a paddock of ex-racehorses rescued from nearby tracks. While we walked, Pat recounted for me the injuries that ended the horses’ careers and commented on the “bottom-dweller trainers who would’ve sold them to the meat man” and the “good trainers who call rescues to come take them.” The horses gravitated toward her, while chickens poked about and ran under the horses’ legs of gold and a Labrador puppy jumped up to kiss the horses’ long sculpted faces. “These are Thoroughbreds?” I asked, surprised by their calmness. “They’re here for a few weeks or so, they settle in,” she told me, while leaning into the horses’ bellies and cooing to them. “Isn’t that right?”

Pat was willing to take me to New Holland—driving us north for three hours in her 100,000-plus-mileage truck, her old trailer trailing behind us. “I need a new trailer, a new truck, fences. Everything. But it works out, somehow. It just does,” she said after jump-starting the truck that morning as the sun rose and the fog settled into the foothills and roosters called in the background. We were heading to Pennsylvania to meet a man named Frank, who runs an auction in New Jersey.

“Frank is a kill buyer, plain and simple,” says Anne Russek, a former Thoroughbred racehorse trainer who trained out of Monmouth Park Racetrack in New Jersey and who worked with HBO producers on an episode of Bryant Gumbel’s Real Sports that aired on May 12, 2008, titled “Hidden Horses.” The segment was an exposé that followed the path of a four-year-old Thoroughbred bay filly named No Day Off, who raced for the last time at Mountaineer Park Racetrack in West Virginia on April 12, 2008—just one month before the program aired. When a Thoroughbred racehorse reaches the end of its career or is simply no longer profitable on the track, said the HBO trailer, it is often taken directly to auction and sold for meat.

“Frank wants to work with the rescues,” says Pat. “But when he has a full load of horses, he will ship them to Canada.” Pat implies, as we talk in the truck about meeting with Frank, that he has of late softened a bit. When finally I glimpse him at the auction sitting not far from us on a row of bleachers, I notice that he is older than the other KBs; he has white hair, a wide face, blue eyes, and a heather-brown, zip-up cardigan that gives him a rather grandfatherly look. Later in the day, after Frank has assisted Pat with rescuing a small pony that her daughter might like, the first thing he says to me when he learns I am writing about auctions, racing, and slaughter is: “I have an excellent attorney.”

The purpose of meeting Frank at New Holland was to pick up two Thoroughbred mares, former racehorses. Thoroughbred racehorses are not supposed to end up at horse auctions, nor are they to be disposed of directly off the track with the KBs in what is euphemistically referred to as “stable to table in seven days.”

“I’ve been involved in the Thoroughbred industry for thirty-eight years,” says Russek, who is now chairperson of the Thoroughbred Celebration Horse Show series, which exclusively features off-the-track racehorses. “As much as I was involved, I never realized how many Thoroughbreds were going to slaughter. It was a secret. Everybody’s dirty secret. You have to show so much identification to get onto the backstretch of a racetrack, where the horses are kept, but you show nothing to get a horse off the track. When I started working on this issue I couldn’t have been more surprised by the denial. Every track said, ‘It’s not happening at our track.’ It became very apparent to me what was happening. For instance, at a track like Belmont, where it wasn’t happening so much—but then a horse loses and goes to a lower-level track and the horse starts going down. They end up at Mountaineer Park, at Charlestown, at Beulah Park, Penn National. Those are where the East Coast horses end up.”

Some racetracks profess that their horses do not end up at auctions or in slaughterhouses because the tracks have instituted zero-tolerance policies for such behavior from trainers and owners. But the reality, explains Monique Koehler, founder of the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, is a “Thoroughbred industry made up largely of owners with only modest resources and current economics that dictate that among all owners, no matter how responsible and well-intended, only a relatively few are capable of maintaining even a single Thoroughbred once it is unable to earn its keep on the track.”

Though it would not be impossible to list the policies of the nearly one hundred racetracks in the U.S., consider it safe to say that there are a good number of tracks with ostensible zero-tolerance, or “no kill,” policies. These “no kill” tracks attempt to clear away their injured and their low earners through more acceptable channels—retirement, retraining and adoption, or rescue; all three options are carried out by various high- and low-budget rescue groups. One inventive effort at the Finger Lakes Racetrack involves a transition barn of sorts, called the Purple Haze Center, where horses no longer able to race are retrained and stabled on the grounds of the track until they are adopted. It is the first Thoroughbred track in the country to have an in-house adoption program that is run collaboratively between track management and horsemen. And some tracks, such as Suffolk Downs in East Boston, are connected to CANTER (the Communication Alliance to Network Thoroughbred Ex-Racehorses), a group that works with trainers to identify racehorses who need homes and lists available horses on their website.

But not all horsemen take advantage of groups like CANTER or other rescue options and, apparently, resort instead to unscrupulous practices. Russek describes a place not far from New Holland that is run by a Mennonite man. “I went there hoping to establish a relationship with him,” she explained. “He told me dealers bring horses from the track saying they must go to slaughter because trainers don’t want it known what they’re doing.” In other words, a dead horse is harder to trace than a horse that ends up at auction when it’s not supposed to.

Take the story of Twilight Overture, a gelding who came from Thistledown, “which is a ‘no-kill’ track,” says Nena Winand. One of the rescues alerted Thistledown’s general manager that the horse had been purchased by a kill buyer at the Sugarcreek Auction in Ohio. At the request of the manager, the rescue called the KB, who, surprisingly, turned his double-decker around and returned Twilight Overture to Sugarcreek for the rescue. Thistledown and Winand paid the KB $850 for the racehorse. “I renamed him Next Stop: Mars,” says Winand. “Why? Because if you look at his record, he was in training from track to track to track. What does he think of his life? He was shipped every two weeks somewhere. Then he’s on a double-decker to get his head bashed in. He’s big, extremely athletic. His story epitomizes that slaughter is a convenient disposal system. This horse is very usable. There’s no limit to what he can do; he’s not bad-minded. It’s default; it’s convenient. That’s why it’s happening. Why would a trainer kill this horse, my horse? Because they want the 300 bucks they get for him from the kill buyer.”

“Zero-tolerance at the tracks? Yeah, right. There’s no enforcement,” says Pat, when two weeks after our trip to New Holland I arrive at her rescue and find her all in a flurry trying to raise $1,500 to rescue three Thoroughbreds from Mountaineer Park. “The trainer wants $300 each or she’s letting the meat man take them. And I need $200 each just to get them here. And I need it now.” She scampers from the field to a stall to the computer to check in with contacts about the amount of money being raised to rescue the Thoroughbreds. “Everyone wants me to take two of them; you know, I just got those others. I don’t have enough money to do it.” Pat sighs, slipping in and out of various website forums and boards where people from across the country shoot messages back and forth. This is their battle—to save horses —and the computer is both their weapon and their battlefield. Pat pulls up photos of two of the Mountaineer Park horses in immediate need. One is a chestnut named Nitro, the other a black horse named I Gotta Go. Seeing their photos makes them real; and I am reminded that, as another Triple Crown season winds down—that time of year when Americans watch the fastest of the fast run their million-dollar races—thousands of the lesser-known Thoroughbreds like Nitro and I Gotta Go await their fate, having not only never made it to national television, but potentially never making it out of racing alive.

All of this sheds light on—but in the end proves nothing about—how a tall, slender, dapple-gray Thoroughbred gelding that had raced at Suffolk Downs in Boston and at Tampa Downs in Florida ended up at New Holland the morning I was there, still wearing his racing plates and standing quietly in front of me, roped to a post against a concrete wall. He already had been claimed by a KB, whom Pat would have to find and then pay more than he had paid for the gelding if she wanted to take the horse home. About a month later, I will call this kill buyer to inquire about the dapple-gray gelding. Where had the horse come from? Who’d shipped him? The KB will inform me, rather politely at first, that he is on the road with the rig and cannot give me any phone numbers. As I ask again about the journey of the dapple-gray, I picture this KB standing ringside at the auction, closest to the horses entering, along with the other KBs, all Caucasian, most in their midforties, wearing baseball caps, slouchy jackets like high-school football players, jeans, and colorful studded leather belts. Soon enough he tires of my questions.

“Who the fuck are you? Are you the horse’s owner?” he rages.

“No,” I answer.

“Then why the fuck are you poking your fucking nose into this?”

OF THE TWO THOROUGHBRED mares we’d planned on retrieving from Frank at the auction, one was pregnant, due imminently, so Pat had spent the weekend building a foaling stall for the mare. When I called on Sunday morning to confirm our arrangements, Pat was hammering nails into plywood with a retired neighbor who volunteers. Later that afternoon, though, Pat called back to say that the pregnant mare had been inadvertently sent off on the slaughter truck a few days earlier. It was not clear how this had happened. Despite the fact that it’s against regulations, she nonetheless had been dispatched on the long trip to Canada.

Probably, said Pat, she was already dead.

At the auction, Pat leaves the bleachers frequently to track down Thoroughbreds, and while she is away, quite a few of them stream in and out of the noisy bidding ring, along with other breeds, too many to list, all in and out so fast it is hard to keep track of the numbers and prices. All of the following, which is in no way a complete list, were taken by the kill buyers:

– Thoroughbred bay gelding: $310

– Thoroughbred chestnut gelding: $325

– Palomino gelding, whipped several times by rider: $450

– Two Thoroughbred geldings, lost track of price

– Thoroughbred gelding, no price that I can hear, exits early

– Standardbred mare, leaves the ring early. On her way out, Mennonite boys whip her repeatedly in the face. Russek will tell me later that some of the Amish and Mennonites can be “truly heartless” in the way they treat their horses, an observation that is, in all but the same words, repeated by a horse rescue worker who reported her experience at an Indiana auction on the Grateful Acres website: “The kill pen is full of Belgian draft horses, the powerful, living machinery of Amish farms. . . . [T]he Belgians in this pen are grievously and horrifyingly injured. They have been worked until they literally cannot stand any longer. . . . No matter that the animal has slaved . . . for any number of years, no matter that his swollen, oozing knee is collapsing at every forced step. Just as a broken plow would be sold to the junk man for the metal, these broken animals are sold to the kill-man for meat.”

– Thoroughbred / Quarter Horse cross: $125

– Farm horse sold “as is” leaves ring early

– Paso Fino gelding, eleven years old, brown with white face: $160

– Brown and white Paint pony: $250

– Paint gelding: $360

After two hours it becomes increasingly difficult to watch, so I walk with Pat back into the barns to be with the horses, though the decision to be with the animals suddenly feels worse than staying in the bleachers. Standing so close to so many of them, looking into their faces, rubbing their bodies, listening to them eat hay, watching them watch us, I realize the emotional blackmail of the moment. There is the wish to save them all, knowing full well no one can, and that by tonight many of them will be heading to Canada, or to feedlots to be fattened up for a slaughterhouse in Canada. To the extent that one can, Pat has crossed this threshold, and her time in the barn is more goal-directed: She weaves through the lines of animals to find the Thoroughbreds. “Here’s one,” she yells out to me, while lifting the horse’s upper lip and calling out the tattoo number for me to write down. Racehorses are required to have a tattoo inside their upper lip, which identifies the horse and links it to its registration papers. Soon enough she is off with a list of tattoos to call in to a contact waiting to help identify the racetracks to which the Thoroughbreds were last connected. Meanwhile, I scan the rows and rows of horses and ponies, looking for the copper-colored mare I’d seen earlier in the day, the one with the braided mane and tail. Pat hurries back to say she has the dapple-gray racehorse. The KB gave it over for $600. “It’s a lot, but I’ll train him to jump,” she says. “He’ll make a good jumper, and people love the dapple-grays.”

People love ponies, too, Pat had said at the beginning of the auction. “They’re always asking me for ponies.” And so more than midway through the auction she has bought, for about $200 each, several ponies to adopt out as 4-H projects or as pony club mounts. One is a large, brown, bulldozerlike Hackney gelding she later will name Edward; another is a small gray boy just gelded and still shot up with testosterone who will be called Merry Legs; an unbroke Paint mare with one blue eye will become Maeve, or “the cause of great joy” in Gaelic. And then, finally, the gray roan Pony of the Americas (POA), who tentatively walks into the ring, scared enough that she’ll barely move forward. She is led to stand near the fence by the kill buyers. Her eyes look up into the bleachers, her skin twitches when someone touches her, and the bidding begins. “Do you want that pony, Pat?” I ask.

“I don’t have any money left. She’s cute, though.”

I raise my bidding card and so does a kill buyer. We start low, $35.

The KB raises his card for $40.

I go $45.

He goes $50; I raise for $60.

Zimmerman, the bearded Mennonite, looks up to me. I am new here, and I sense at that moment he knows it. He raises the bidding by $20.

KB agrees to $80. I go to $90. KB takes $95.

The auctioneer calls out $100. Zimmerman’s dark eyes stare straight to mine. Once we get to $100 the price could keep climbing, and I am unsure what I can do; at the same time, I look at the POA. As much noise as there is around me—the old couple bickering, kids playing and laughing—it suddenly seems as if there is no sound, and I feel like the student in the classroom who everyone’s looking at because I’ve been asked to answer a question I don’t have an answer for.

I raise for $100.

Zimmerman looks at the KB. There is a pause. But the KB does not bid. It is over, suddenly, in a matter of seconds. “One hundred dollars for number 730-1,” the auctioneer calls out.

I climb the stairs to the New Holland Auction office to pay for the pony I later will name Bridget and give to Pat, and I think how often I’ve blown a hundred dollars on a meaningless trip to Target. The cashier gives me the name and number of the person who unloaded Bridget at the auction because I request it. I am still naïve at this point and I assume her owners brought her here. I want to call them later to ask about their pony and tell them I have her now. That she is safe. “Charlie, here,” the voice answers, when a few days later I call. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout her, ma’am,” the man says. “Bought her cheap at the Hickory Auction. I sell tack there and someone’s sellin’ her. So I take her. I bought her on Sunday and took her to New Holland on Monday. Ain’t gonna lie to ya ma’am, don’t know nothin’ ’bout her. I buy cheap horses and resell ’em. That’s what I do.”

Down on the auction floor, Pat is gathering up Bridget to put her in the pen with Edward, Maeve, Merry Legs, and the dapple-gray Thoroughbred. Not long after, we will meet up with Frank and transfer the mare he brought down from New Jersey. In the afternoon, when the auction is over and we are loading the horses and ponies onto Pat’s trailer, around the corner will come the thin copper-colored mare with the long flaxen braids. The bones of her skinny shoulders and hips poke up from her body when she walks. She is led by a KB.

He instructs her onto his trailer. She does not move. He yanks hard on her lead rope. As thin and weak as she is, she jumps back from the trailer, her long braided mane flopping against her neck. He yells at her, harsh and fast and low, and whips her over and over in the face and on her shoulders and belly. She jumps up and throws herself against the inside wall of the trailer.

He shoves her into the horses already on the rig and they all jostle together, colliding, biting, and agitating one another. As the dust floats up and is set aglow by the afternoon sunlight streaming into the trailer, the mare stumbles. Finally, she finds a place by the window and gazes out. 

Before we get into today's Outside the Box I want to clear up a few ideas from this weekend's letter. There have been posts on various websites equating my piece on deflation with Paul Krugman. They say I am advocating kicking the can down the road and not reducing the deficit.

Wrong. What I have been trying to point out for several years is that we have no good choices. We are down to bad and very bad choices. The very bad choice (leading to disastrous - think Greece) is to continue to run massive deficits. The merely bad choice is to reduce the deficits gradually over time. As I try to point out, reducing the deficits has consequences in the short term. It WILL affect GDP in the short term. Krugman and the neo-Keynesians are right about that. To deny that is to ignore basic arithmetic.

I am not for kicking the can down the road. Not to begin to deal with the deficits, and soon, risks an even worse problem. But - and this is a big but - I don't want to stomp on the can, either.

Now, let's get into this week's Outside the Box. I offer you a very intriguing essay by those friendly guys from Bedlam Asset Management in London. They argue that Belgium's sovereign debt should be suspect, and is the country that could be a "sleeper" problem. This is a very interesting read, with a lot of history. It is not too long and very interesting. Enjoy. (www.bedlamplc.com)

Your thinking sovereign debt is the biggest bubble of all analyst,

John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box

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Running through a minefield, backwards
Part II - farewell Flanonia?

The last issue concentrated on sure sovereign default by Greece, Spain and Portugal - partly due to hopeless economic numbers but more because of various 'soft' issues. For, just as the numbers in a company's balance sheet theoretically provide all that is required to understand and value it, the reality is that squishy issues, such as the quality of management, staff morale or even simple luck can make a mockery of these numbers. Part I also emphasised the futility of gnawing at the bone of the de facto bankruptcy of these three countries. Backward looking investment never makes money; better surely to recognise the sovereign default cycle has further to go, and so spend time identifying the next unexpected candidate.

On the numbers alone, the most likely casualties are the UK and US in that order, but both have good odds of escaping. Many hard issues help. In America, one such is the dollar's currently irreplaceable role as the world's reserve currency. In the UK, the relatively excellent debt duration (i.e. it is spread over many years rather than near-term) is a plus. Each also has good soft issues: the market likes the new British government's tax and slash policies so is a willing buyer of UK debt, whilst the Asian central banks have so many US bonds they simply self destruct if they refuse to keep buying.

The standout surprise candidate for sovereign default by end-2012 is Belgium. A decent country; civilised, at peace, wealthy and globally competitive in several areas. Moreover, first glance at the numbers gives no particular reason to expect Belgium to default. Its potential financial problems have been on the radar screen for so long that we have grown used to them, rather like those many parents who fail to recognise the repulsiveness of their offspring. With net government debt of €400bn, it is hardly a huge world borrower in absolute terms. Yet default could occur almost entirely by accident and the ripples be far greater than its size warrants, because of its position as the de facto federal capital of the EU. Belgium's hastening car crash is not in current bond prices or exchange rates.

The glue has dissolved

There are five reasons why Belgium has hung together for the last 180 years: Britain, God, the King, fear and most importantly, money. Before addressing these, it is necessary to understand why Belgium exists at all. When in 1815 Britain was the Big Beluga after the battle of Waterloo, it wanted a buffer state to contain France. The easy solution was to give the area now known as Belgium to one of its staunchest allies, Holland. Unfortunately, King William I of the now-renamed United Netherlands was not, even according to Dutch history books, the smartest primate in the zoo, and he suffered from the diplomatic skills of a water buffalo. Holland (or the Kingdom of the Netherlands to give it its official name) had a long history of Calvinism. This was unpopular with the newly acquired Dutch and French Catholic subjects alike. Moreover, by deliberately ensuring the French were under-represented in all parts of government, yet overtaxed, the embers of resentment smouldered. These grew hotter in 1823 after an attempt to make Dutch the official language for the whole population. Surprisingly, full rebellion was ignited by the staging of a sentimental patriotic opera in Brussels in 1830. The crowds poured out of the theatre and went on the rampage. As Britain still wanted a buffer state, and was still the world superpower, it quickly moved to ensure the creation of a new country called Belgium, uniting Flanders and Wallonia (hence Flanonia might have been more appropriate).

The people, having suddenly been rebranded, opted for a French king. Britain growled, ever mindful of France's latent imperial ambitions, thus a minor German duke's second son was chosen instead. After nine years' skirmishing, as Holland held onto a few strong points, and a minor invasion by France, Holland withdrew to sulk.

The Dutch king's alienation of his many Dutch speaking but Catholic subjects in Belgium united them with their French counterparts, providing a powerful glue to hold society together well into the late twentieth century. Now, like most of Western Europe, society has rapidly turned secular. In 1967, 43% of the population attended Catholic mass every Sunday. By 1998 (the last year in which the Roman Catholic Church produced data) this was down to 11%. It is estimated to have fallen by 0.5% p.a. ever since, possibly accelerating given the latest sex-scandal investigations. (The Bishop of Bruges confessed to an unpleasant 20-year history and resigned; the police then raided and sealed off the Archbishop's palace, also the national catholic HQ on similar charges. The investigation continues.)

In line with this trend, reverence for the monarchy has also waned, although most of the country's kings have done a good job given they have forever walked the high wire over ferocious political and linguistic divisions. Little needs to be said of the fear quotient. Belgium has suffered from three highly aggressive neighbours: Germany, France and the Netherlands. It was a popular sport for each to routinely stomp all over the area. They have all changed their ways. Leaving aside a lack of clout, the British are now wholly ignorant of how or why they created Belgium at all.

The language chasm

Belgium is a federation of three states: Flanders in the North, where Dutch (Flemish) is spoken by the native Flemings; Wallonia in the South where the official language is French; and thirdly the all-important region of Brussels. This is surrounded by Flanders although the majority of the region speaks French. The linguistic divide is well-known, but this is not of the Mandarin vs. Cantonese or Castilian vs. Catalan spat variety. It is aggressive. Ten metres either side of the official linguistic border, the other language does not exist. Municipalities can and often do insist official documents and meetings only take place in their local language. This draconian legal divide was foolishly legislated into place in 1980 and has become more intolerant every since. Belgian politics are so culturally divided that all 12 of the major parties break down on linguistic lines and cannot stand in the other language area.

A shifting balance of power

Post-independence the balance of power shifted to the French speakers. The richer Flemish Belgians were highly dependent on Holland's colonial trade and capital. Post independence, this stagnated and so they concentrated on successfully out-breeding the French over the next 150 years. Meanwhile the French speaking south boomed. The development of iron, steel, coal and heavy industry - funded by French, and to a lesser extent German, capital and supplied by the major mineral deposits nearby - put all the financial and industrial power into Walloon hands. Like their previous masters in Holland, this was gradually abused. Almost all higher education was in French; plump political posts always went to French-speakers.

Meanwhile, the Flemish-speakers developed into a distinct but majority underclass. By the early 1970s, the wheel had again turned. Today, 75% of GDP is accounted for by the service sector as industry withers. The majority Flemings now sit in the financial chairs and have not hesitated to embark on a little light payback, such as splitting up key universities into Flemish and French speaking sections from 1968 onwards. The relative wealth of the Flemings is simply overwhelming. Their income per head is 118% of the EU average - the French-speakers 85%. Per capita productivity is 20% higher. They make up over 70% of the skilled labour force. French unemployment is twice that of the Flemish speakers.

Per capita, subsidies for French speakers are 50% more than for the Flemish. In short, Flanders funds and props up Wallonia.

This has not been lost on the ever chaotic voting system. Recent headlines have screamed that the independence parties have taken over. A slight exaggeration. True, the Flemish speaking, free market and pro-independence Vlaams Belang (VB) party won the most seats in the 150- member lower house, with an increase from 17 to 27 (in line with the wealth divide, the second largest party with 26 seats is the French-speaking Socialist "welfare" party). But this does not ensure separation, even though in those areas where it was allowed to stand, VB and its sympathisers won over 40% of the votes. Belgian law requires that at least four of the 12 "major" parties (seven Flemish and five French) form a government with at least one from each state. Hence, once again various caretakers are manning the desk. There is no elected government.

The most heated and longest debates in parliament concern two issues: language superiority and the French speakers demanding, and to date getting, an ever greater and disproportionate share of the welfare pie. Up north, not surprisingly this is unpopular. The result is net government borrowing equal to 100% of GDP. Not quite as bad as Greece and a few other miscreants, but add a budget deficit of 6% of GDP and a too-high a structural deficit, and Belgium is in the top fifth of over-borrowed nations globally, a position it has steadfastly maintained for the last 30 years. It has even been worse. Throughout most of the late 1980s and 1990s net government debt averaged 114% of GDP.

As with several Mediterranean countries, Belgium was a huge beneficiary of joining the euro (it was the first to do so) because the implicit German guarantee allowed heavy borrowing at much lower interest rates. Before joining the euro zone, general government net interest payments in 1992 absorbed a whopping 10.3% of GDP. In 2009, even after the collapse and necessary bailing out of its banks, especially the big two of Fortis and Dexia, interest payments were only 3.6%.

Follow the money

High debt and gradual linguistic separation have been a constant for 30 years. The recent elections confirm the trend of accelerating separatism. Yet these are likely to morph faster than expected into a financial problem because of Brussels.

Much to the dislike of most politicians across Europe, Brussels is the de facto Federal Capital. A small city; and only 1.1m people live within the "Brussels region". It is wealthy, with income per head 233% above the EU average. Moreover, despite being only a tenth of the Belgian population, it accounts for over a fifth of GDP. The reasons are well-known. Since the early 1950s treaties presaging the European Union, money has poured into Brussels. The EU Commission alone employs 25,000 people, the EU parliament another 7,000. There are over 10,000 registered lobbyists and more diplomats and countries represented in Brussels than in Washington. Then there are 1,200 accredited journalists (which may explain why expenditure on expenses accounts alone was €800m in Brussels in 2009). Just for direct running costs (i.e. rentals and electricity), the EU pumps $1bn into Brussels every year. Yet this money fountain is not only the EU. 40% of the population comes from outside Belgium, as it is headquarters to a range of other organisations which have developed into an administrative cluster. The better known includes groups like NATO, where Brussels is the European HQ with 5,000 employees. The range includes the weird, such as the heavily funded, big employing World Customs Organisation or EURATOM.

All these foreigners, usually funded by their overseas governments, are amongst the very highest earners in Europe, creating a major multiplier effect on schools, restaurants, cleaners, auto sales or house building. Originally majority Flemish-speaking, now most locally born Brussels residents speak French, the result of policies introduced when they were at the top of the economic tree. Yet Flemings - residents and commuters - still dominate the better paid and skilled jobs, hence Brussels is the only part of Belgium where both languages must co-exist by law. Some local French speaking politicians have been muttering darkly about doing to Flanders what Flanders wants to do to Wallonia, i.e. spin out of Flanders or even Belgium itself. This is because the money spigot is about to jam.

Turning off the taps

As the third richest region in Europe (after Luxembourg and London) it could in theory exist as a wealthy city-state cum federal capital, but such a dream is a chimera. Derided eurocrats live a life apart. Even Brussels-born residents who benefit from their largesse often complain that the many organisations have created rich ghettos from which they are excluded. That these eurocrats are out of touch has been demonstrated both by pay and expenses enough to make a third world dictator blink, and recent demands for pay rises.

There is a commonsense test to apply to the financial future of Brussels. Most European countries are net recipients of aid from the EU. Of the minority putting money in, Germany dominates. Other small contributors such as Scandinavia or the UK are co-joined triplets with Germany. Forced to slash their own capital, social, and welfare budgets following the financial crash, they will not put more into Brussels. It is a matter of time before each country decides to reduce its net or gross cheques written out to various Brussels organisations; hence the second most important engine of Belgium's economy (after the wider economy of Flanders) suffers its first ever post-war squeeze. This means it has less largesse to spread around - particularly in Wallonia

Moreover, Brussels is no longer so logical a geographic centre for a federal capital since the EU expanded eastwards. This has not been lost on the Germans (Brussels' most significant honey provider). Its press and politicians have suggested for example that NATO be moved from a largely neutral country with minimal military capability to one with a little more vim, such as Germany. France would murder to get its hands on more EU institutions. Even the UK, ever-equivocal about what it really wants form the EU, and outside the euro zone, would like a few pointless but foreign funded pork barrels like EURATOM. Such major political changes will take time. Turning off the money spigot is easier and will happen sooner.

How it plays out?

What is evolving in Belgium is old news. The problem now, as for divorcing couples, is how to divide up the assets, or more precisely in Belgium's case, its sovereign debt. It is noteworthy that the government is chary in producing full data on how much Brussels and Flanders subsidise the minority Walloons, but roughly speaking the national debt should probably be split about 35:65 Dutch:French. Yet relatively poor Wallonia simply could not service nearly €260bn of national debt (€175,000 per person in employment). Meanwhile, wealthy Flanders would emerge with a budget surplus, a minute structural deficit and debt to GDP the lower than any EU nation outside of Scandinavia. The imperative for Flanders, along with the scope for argument, is clear.

There is a growing risk of a faster than expected dissolution of Belgium which will result in sovereign default; this is based on a belief in the inability of the individual nations within the euro zone, let alone the EU institutions themselves, to realise that as nations unravel, speed is of the essence. To repeat, the net €400bn national debt is chicken feed - less than half the loss racked up by America's AIG in 2007-8. And in wealthier times, the dream then shared by most of its members, of a politically united Europe would have ensured a quick bailout led by Germany. Mrs Merkel has already discovered that small cash subsidies to the profligate, such as Greece, are very expensive electorally. So foot dragging and evasion are sure to be the political order of the day. As the divorce commences, little is gained in double guessing the next phase. Whether Flanders goes alone as a fabulously rich small state or joins up with Holland (now the religious issue is moribund) is a moot point. Equally, whether France chooses to absorb Wallonia into greater France (Sarkozy's wild card to escape likely electoral defenestration?) or to subsidise Wallonia as a client state again, is also an unknown. On every topic, there is no agreement on how these regions should evolve, nor who is responsible for the debts, further ensuring delay.

Investment conclusions

If markets have re-learned one lesson recently, it is that small events have disproportionate results. Belgium ranks as the world's 20th economy by size, accounting for 0.8% of world GDP. Greece before the fall was No. 28, with 0.6%; its problems continue to shake markets, both because they were unexpected and because of the risk of a domino effect. So too would be the problem with Belgium. It is yet another reason why government bonds are toxic and why at some stage their yields will blow out, thus capital values fall.

Obviously, not holding Belgian shares on a medium term basis is sensible unless valuation work has fully taken account of these unexpected risks (clients have zero exposure). Once again the euro would fall and the German export machine boom. Equity markets would rattle around for a while but then absorb the key lesson. For Belgium is yet another example, as if one was needed, that the supply of government bonds over coming years will continue to soar to unprecedented levels even. All commodity prices tumble when the supply is perceived as infinite. Meanwhile, equities would benefit.

Regards
Bedlam Asset Management plc

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This guest post comes courtesy of John Mauldin's Thoughts From The Frontline >

Join the conversation about this story »

It's possible that some restaurants will eventually have to disclose the number of calories in the booze they serve. The federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau might force them to do it, and if it doesn't, the Food and Drug Administration might step in.

There has been some confusion about all this, as Greg Kitsock reports in the Washington Post's All We Can Eat blog. Under the new healthcare reform law, restaurant chains with more than 20 locations must disclose calorie counts and other nutrition information on their menus. Initially, it was believed that alcoholic beverages would be exempt, but now the National Restaurant Association thinks the FDA is getting ready to apply the law to beer, wine and booze.

For most big chains, this won't be a big problem when it comes to beer. They generally sell well-known brands that are already labeled. Amusingly, Kitsock notes that it's "not unusual to walk into a restaurant like Ruby Tuesday’s or T.G.I. Friday’s and be told that their 'microbrew of the month' is Blue Moon Belgian White (a brand of MillerCoors, the nation’s second largest brewer)."

But what about those that sell (actual) microbrews, or make their own? Many craft brewers don't test their beers to determine calorie counts. Supposedly, the plan is to have the FDA create categories, so that each style of beer would have its own reference calorie count.

"However, a downside is that it would involve the FDA in defining beer styles," Kitsock writes.  "Would the federal government act as 'beer police,' disqualifying a beer from a certain stylistic category if it went a few calories overboard?"

And what about restaurants that serve dozens or even hundred of craft beers on an ever-rotating menu? Sure, not many such restaurants are part of a big chain, but some are, as Kitsock notes. Luckily, there is a loophole for them: if they make any single product available for less than 60 days, it's exempt. Still, it sounds like some restaurant managers will soon have yet more red tape to deal with. 

Maybe the solution is to have them include on their menus something like, "Note: beer has a lot of calories. If you're trying to lose weight, don't drink too much."

Court: Christian Tracts Allowed at Arab-Fest

City police had threatened arrest for handing out information

An emergency motion has been granted by a federal appeals court in order for a Christian to hand out information about his faith at the annual Arab Festival in Dearborn, Mich., this weekend without being arrested.

A three-judge panel from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals today granted the motion requested by the Thomas More Law Center on behalf of Pastor George Saieg, a Sudanese Christian who has been trying to get permission to distribute literature and talk about his Christianity to Muslims at the festival.

The event is Friday through Sunday in Dearborn, where an estimated 30,000 of the city’s 98,000 residents are Muslim.

According to the law center, Judge Paul Borman just a week ago had affirmed the city’s ban on handing out Christian material near the festival. It was last year when Dearborn police threatened Saieg with arrest if he handed out information on Christianity near the festival.

‘Allahu Akbar!’ Shouted as Christians Cuffed

Four Christians were arrested and thrown out of a public Arab festival in Michigan — and at least two people claim a crowd cheered “Allahu Akbar!” while the Christians were led away in handcuffs for doing nothing more than engaging in peaceful dialogue and videotaping the event.

Nabeel Qureshi, David Wood, Paul Rezkalla and 18-year-old Negeen Mayel attended the 15th annual Dearborn Arab International Festival on June 18 in Dearborn, Mich., where an estimated 30,000 of the city’s 98,000 residents are Muslim.

The American Arab Chamber of Commerce announced the event was expected to draw “over 300,000 people from across the country, Canada and the Middle East.” The festival covers 14 blocks and is free and open to the public.

Qureshi and Mayal are former Muslims who are now Christians. Mayal’s parents emigrated from Afghanistan. Wood is a former atheist. All are from a Christian group called Acts 17 Apologetics.

In the following video after the arrest, Qureshi said his group took “extra precautions” to prevent disruptions by not handing out pamphlets and to speak only to people “who first approached us”:

“This was to limit accusations of instigation and disruption,” he explained. “We knew people have a tendency to accuse us of being disruptive, of inciting and instigating. So we wanted to make sure we did absolutely nothing of the sort.”

[…]

According to his post, the video footage was confiscated by police. Versions posted online had been removed at the time of this report.

“[W]e will post footage when the police give us back our cameras,” he wrote.

Qureshi recounted his experience:

At one point, we came across a festival volunteer who seemed to take issue with us simply being at the festival. We could tell he had a problem with us, and so we asked “What are we doing wrong?” He said, “Put the camera and microphone down, and I’ll tell you.” (By the way, there was more to this conversation, but when you see the footage, I think you’ll see I’m being fair in my summary.) So I obliged, handing the microphone to David and asking him to not record the man. I then approached him and said, “No camera, no mic, tell me what we’re doing wrong.” He said “Get away from me!” (or something to that effect). Again, I obliged, and walked away.

About 20 minutes later, to shouts and cheers of “Allahu Akbar!” we were all being led away from the festival in handcuffs. From the brief description we were given by the police of why we were being arrested, it sounds like the festival volunteer said we surrounded him and didn’t give him an opportunity to leave, thereby “breaching the peace.” This is as blatantly false as an accusation can get.

[…]

One witness named Steven Atkins, a resident of Toronto, Canada, said, “I never thought I would see this in America.”

“When Dr. Quereshi was arrested I heard people clapping and applauding, and some said ‘Allahu Akbar,’“ he said. “It was an intense discussion, but it was not unruly. … There was no threat of violence.”

Atkins added, “It’s becoming more restrictive here than in Canada.”

Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad, an officer who was recently appointed to serve on the Homeland Security Advisory Council, told the Detroit Free Press the four Christians were arrested for disorderly conduct.

“We did make four arrests for disorderly conduct,” Haddad said. “They did cause a stir.”

Haddad told the paper he’s not taking sides, but he said officers must keep the peace at the event that draws 300,000 people over three days.

“Everyone’s space should be respected,” he said. “It’s Father’s Day weekend…. People are here to have a good time, and it’s our job to ensure security.”

America, 2010: Christians Hauled to Jail for Preaching Jesus

‘Apparently the Constitution carries little weight in Dearborn’

One of the nation’s top legal teams regarding civil and religious rights has stepped into a dispute stemming from last weekend’s Arab Festival in Dearborn, Mich., where police are accused of enforcing Islamic law.

“Officers arrested four Christian missionaries and illegally confiscated their video cameras which were recording the events surrounding their arrests,” said a statement today from the Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Mich.

Officials in the police department with the city of Dearborn declined to comment to WND.

But the law center announcement said the incident has been described as “police enforcement of Shariah law.” The organization said it would represent the Christians.

“These Christian missionaries were exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion, but apparently the Constitution carries little weight in Dearborn, where the Muslim population seems to dominate the political apparatus,” said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center.

[…]

The Arab event was June 18 in Dearborn, where an estimated 30,000 of the city’s 98,000 residents are Muslim.

Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Haddad Appointed to Homeland Security Advisory Council

In Dearborn, we were arrested for having a peaceful dialogue with Muslims. The police claimed we were being disruptive. We invited them to view the video footage, which would prove our innocence. They refused, preferring to take us to jail when we had indisputable proof against the false charges. Police seized our cameras illegally, and have to this day refused to share the footage with us, footage that will completely exonerate us. Police Chief Ronald Haddad refuses to return our cameras, despite the fact that he knows we are innocent. He is responsible for the persecution and oppression of Christians in Dearborn.

So guess who should be appointed to the Homeland Security Advisory Council? You guessed it: Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Haddad:

DEARBORN — Police Chief Ronald Haddad was recently appointed to serve on the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which provides advice and recommendations to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on matters related to homeland security.

The council is comprised of leaders from state and local government, first responder communities, the private sector, and academia.

“It’s an honor, a privilege and a tremendous responsibility,” said Haddad, who traveled to Washington, D.C. earlier this month to meet with his fellow council members.

The group’s efforts, Haddad said, will be focused on sharing information and improving communication on the national stage.

In addition to Haddad, the group currently has more than two-dozen individuals listed on its membership roster, including Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, Community Engagement Officer Omar Alomari with Ohio Homeland Security, Acting Professor of Law Asli Bali of the UCLA School of Law, President and CEO Richard Cohen of Southern Poverty Law Center, Sheriff Doug Gillespie of the Las Vegas Police Department, Senior Analyst and Executive Director Dalia Mogahed of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, Executive Director Dan Rosenblatt of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and Director Nadia Roumani of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute. [emphasis added]

“Our job is to identify what type of training would suit front line law enforcement, officers, and to improve their ability to work more effectively with community members to mitigate threats or actual crime,” Haddad said.

The council, he said, was formed in the wake of a growing number of attacks on American soil, including the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day in 2009 and the arrest of the Hutaree militia group charged with plotting to levy war against the U.S.

“When you look at those things, it’s clear that we can ill afford to work in a vacuum,” Haddad said. “We need to reach out to members of the community and open up the lines of communication.”

The city of Dearborn and its police department has already established several similar advisory committees to facilitate communication between different cultural and religious groups, as well as various groups and organizations throughout the city.

“We’re engaging the community in a way that’s never been done before,” Haddad said…

Well, Christians have been persecuted by Muslims for centuries, so Haddad’s not actually engaging the community in a new way. Perhaps he means that he’s engaging the American community in a new way, e.g. by taking away the Constitutional rights of Christians. But he needs to be clear about that. People might get the idea that he believes in American values.

If anyone would like to contact the Homeland Security Advisory Council, you can reach them here.

Immigration and the SPLC: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Invented a Smear, Served La Raza, Manipulated the Press, and Duped its Donors

By Jerry Kammer
March 2010

Introduction

This report examines the efforts by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to smear the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and, by extension, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA.

With no serious analysis, the SPLC in late 2007 unilaterally labeled FAIR a “hate group.” That poisonous designation became the centerpiece of a “Stop the Hate” campaign launched by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), also known as La Raza, to call on Congress and the media to exclude FAIR from the national debate on immigration.

The campaign gathered strength as newspapers across the country reported that FAIR had been “designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.” While the news stories generally included FAIR’s denial of the charge, thereby providing a semblance of balance, the designation’s taint lingered. The SPLC, presenting itself as a non-partisan, public-interest watchdog, never acknowledged — and no reporter ever disclosed — that the center was an active ally of the NCLR in the campaign.

The evidence presented here demonstrates that the SPLC became a propaganda arm of the NCLR. The SPLC’s decision to smear FAIR was the work of a kangaroo court, one convened to reach a pre-determined verdict by inventing or distorting evidence. The “Stop the Hate” campaign would more accurately be labeled as a campaign to “Stop the Debate.”

As this report notes, FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA have raised questions about the social, economic, and fiscal costs of the “comprehensive immigration reform” sought by La Raza and such allies as the National Immigration Forum and America’s Voice. Rather than engage in a debate, La Raza and its allies have waged a campaign to have the other side shunned by the press, civil society, and elected officials. It is an effort to destroy the reputations of its targets. It also seeks to intimidate and coerce others into silence. It undermines basic principles of civil society and democratic discussion.

We examine the SPLC’s work in the campaign against the background of the law center’s history, acknowledging that the SPLC has done admirable work in attacking the Ku Klux Klan and in representing immigrant workers who have been exploited by employers.

But we also review two decades of work by investigative reporters that has exposed SPLC hate-mongering and deception of the donors on whom it depends. Indeed, the SPLC’s hometown paper, the Montgomery Advertiser, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for its nine-day exposé of the SPLC and its founder, Morris Dees, in 1994. The current attack on FAIR is consistent with the duplicity documented by that series and by other journalists who have investigated the SPLC.

Finally, we examine the SPLC attack on John Tanton, the Michigan environmental activist who founded FAIR in 1979. We document repeated distortion and exaggeration and show that many of Tanton’s concerns about immigration, though cited by the SPLC as proof of bigotry and intolerance, also have been raised by respected scholars and journalists.

But we also discuss how Tanton has undermined the movement by adhering to a big-tent philosophy that embraces some figures who do not play a constructive role in the immigration debate.

In a civil society, proven racists, bigots, and hate mongers deserve rejection. This report shows that the SPLC, while claiming to hold high the banner of tolerance, failed to observe basic standards of responsible judgment, honest reporting, and simple human decency. It preferred to engage in character assassination.

The SPLC is entitled to its opinion. But it cannot pose as a non-partisan watchdog when it fabricates and distorts evidence to delegitimize one side of the immigration debate while it is actually working as an ally of the opposing side. Claiming to act in the name of tolerance, the SPLC has tried to destroy it.

Tom Barry, director of the TransBorder Project at the liberal Center for International Policy in Washington, DC, noted that the SPLC’s “hate group” designation of FAIR “provided highly explosive ammunition for the character assassination campaign.”

Barry, who supports “comprehensive” reform, offered this assessment of the “Stop the Hate” campaign: “Trying to stick a label of ‘extremist’ on institutes that have massive memberships, good relations with the media, and good standing on the Hill is a measure of how desperate and isolated the pro-immigration forces that have embraced this strategy really are.”

I. Anatomy of a Smear

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s December 2007 announcement that it had decided to designate the Federation for American Immigration Reform as a “hate group”1 was a dramatic move by the Alabama-based organization, which claims to be “dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry.”2

The designation placed FAIR, one of the most prominent organizations that favor reduced immigration and oppose a sweeping legalization of illegal immigrants, on an SPLC list occupied by notoriously bigoted groups of racist skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan.

What prompted the move? After all, the SPLC had been writing critically about FAIR for years without taking the extreme measure of branding it as a hate group.

Surely, the SPLC, which presents itself as an advocate of tolerance and which touts its dream of “peace, respect, and understanding,”3 would not take such a step without damning new evidence.

But that is what it did.

The SPLC’s move was not an act of conscience. Nor was it the bark of a public-interest watchdog. It was a publicity stunt in the service of the National Council of La Raza, which was about to launch a campaign intended to drive FAIR from the arena of public debate on national immigration policy.

The law center, while claiming to be non-partisan, served as a propaganda arm of La Raza’s effort to shape immigration policy. The NCLR has been grateful for the assistance. The website of its “Stop the Hate” campaign lists the SPLC as one of its six allied organizations.4

The campaign’s strategy was to portray FAIR as an extremist organization, so tainted by hatred and racism that it should be excluded from the public discussion of immigration. La Raza president and CEO Janet Murguia personally led the attack. Appearing on the Lou Dobbs show in early 2008, she cited the SPLC’s designation and declared, “FAIR is a known, documented hate group.”5

Another NCLR ally in the campaign was a new organization called America’s Voice, whose work to influence public opinion on immigration policy is being funded by a $6 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation, a philanthropic foundation. America’s Voice is directed by Frank Sharry, who for 17 years was executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which bills itself as “the nation’s premier immigrant rights organization.”6 Its board of directors includes representatives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the National Immigration Law Center, and the American Nursery & Landscape Association.

As reported in the Carnegie Corporation’s magazine, America’s Voice was launched as a “communications effort designed to more directly challenge those who oppose immigration reform.”7 The organization sponsored full-page ads that touted the SPLC’s “hate group” declaration in Politico and Roll Call, Capitol Hill newspapers that are widely read by congressional staff and other members of the Washington political establishment.8

“The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is Designated a HATE GROUP by the Southern Poverty Law Center,” said the ad, using red capital letters to highlight “FAIR” and “HATE GROUP.” It added, “Extremist groups, like FAIR, shouldn’t write immigration policy.”9

Highlighting the gravity of the charge, and the disgrace it intended to inflict, the America’s Voice website noted: “Other SPLC ‘hate groups’ include: the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and the Aryan Nations.”10 It urged supporters: “Tell Congress, Don’t Meet with FAIR!”

Tom Barry, director of the TransBorder Project at the liberal Center for International Policy, questioned not only the wisdom of the campaign, but also its integrity.

“Is seeking to undermine the influence of these groups in the media and on Capitol Hill by throwing (them) in the same lot as the Ku Klux Klan and National Socialist Aryan Order [something that can] really be considered an effective and principled political strategy?” he asked in his Border Lines blog in late 2008. “Will smearing the restrictionist policy institutes and their leaders in campaigns of character assassination bolster the possibilities of passing a liberal immigration reform bill?”11

It would also be reasonable to ask how such a campaign fits the mission of the Carnegie Corporation, whose $6 million grant to America’s Voice helped finance the inflammatory ads. Its mission statement says its work “honors Andrew Carnegie’s passion for … the health of our democracy.”12

La Raza is also lavishly funded, primarily by foundations and corporate donors. Its annual report for 2008 listed 38 donors who had contributed at least $200,000 that year. They included the Bank of America, Citi, ConAgra Foods, Freddie Mac, General Motors, and Wal-Mart, as well as the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Its grants for 2008 totaled $28.3 million, including $5.1 million from the federal government.13

Crossing the Rubicon, SPLC Style

An organization that claims to offer expertise in the business of identifying hate groups, as the SPLC does, might be expected to work with precise, rigorous criteria. The SPLC has no such standards.

Heidi Beirich, the law center’s director of research and special projects and a frequent contributor to its Hatewatch blog, acknowledged in an e-mail that “we do not have a formal written criteria.” When a radio host asked her in late 2007 how an organization qualifies for the label, Beirich offered this explanation. “You qualify as a hate group if you treat an entire group of people for their internal characteristics, or their inherent characteristics, as less, or you demean them in some way.”14

A definition this flexible and imprecise could summon the SPLC Hate Patrol to the door of nearly any group of football fans, political activists, or Apple computer enthusiasts. It is an invitation to just the sort of mischief that gives the SPLC’s designation of FAIR the odor of a made-to-order, politically expedient smear. It was delivered in December 2007, the month before La Raza launched its “Stop the Hate” campaign. The SPLC showed all the precision and care of gang members spraying obscenities on a warehouse wall.15

In his roll-out of the “hate group” designation, the SPLC’s Mark Potok acknowledged that his bill of particulars against FAIR consisted almost entirely of information that had been known for years. So to make the timing of the announcement seem plausible, Potok needed something new and powerful. Indeed, he claimed to have found proof that FAIR had crossed “the Rubicon of hate” in an act of self-revelation so stark and shameless as to require the SPLC to take action.16

Their Rubicon-crossing evidence was a sham.

Potok pointed to a FAIR meeting with Belgian elected officials who belonged to a right-wing political party whose predecessor had been banned by a Belgian court. This charge, elaborated in Hatewatch blog posts about an obscure and insignificant meeting, would be laughed out of any credible forum of public opinion. But for the SPLC’s kangaroo court — where Potok and Beirich were prosecutors, judge, and jury — it was good enough.

Potok hyped his case by erroneously reporting that FAIR “officials” had met with the Belgians. Beirich erroneously added that “a senior FAIR official sought advice” from the Belgians.17

In fact, the FAIR official who met the Belgians was Jack Martin, a retired State Department diplomat who regularly meets with the Spanish-language press because of his fluency in Spanish. Martin said he met with the Belgians because they had asked for a briefing on how FAIR sought to influence U.S. policy on illegal immigration.

“I’ve met with visitors from dozens of foreign countries who are traveling here,” said Martin. “The fact that I met with them does not mean that I agree with their politics. I’ve met with officials from Communist China, and that doesn’t mean I’m a communist.”18 Martin calls the SPLC “members of the flaky left who have a tendency to engage in McCarthyite techniques” of guilt by association.

Here is how Stephen Pollard, a respected British journalist writing in The Times of London, described the Belgian party that sent a delegation to Washington:

The banned party is VlaamsBlok (VB). The Court of Appeal in Ghent — notorious for its left-liberal bias — deemed it to be an “undemocratic and racist” organization because of its policy that immigrants should be given only two choices: “to assimilate or to return home.”

Maybe such a policy is indeed racist; maybe it isn’t. … But in a democracy, surely, that is a decision which voters should make, not judges.

But the VB’s racism was merely an excuse. The real reason why the Belgian authorities have been bent on banning the VB for years has nothing to do with racism and the rights of immigrants. It is that the party advocates secession from Belgium and the establishment of a Republic of Flanders. Worse still, as Belgium’s only conservative party it upsets the country’s cosy political applecart. The Belgian Establishment has responded not by defeating it in argument but by banning it.19

Lacking the authority to banish FAIR, the SPLC set out to delegitimize it, setting the stage for allies who would call on the press and elected officials to banish FAIR from the national immigration debate. As the SPLC’s Mark Potok rolled out the “hate group” designation, he said the law center had “decided to take another look at FAIR” after the meeting with the Belgians. Said Potok, “When our work was done, it was obvious that FAIR qualified as a hate group.”20

The claim that an inconsequential meeting would jolt the SPLC into a reevaluation of an organization it had been denigrating for years is implausible. But for La Raza’s “Stop the Hate” campaign, the timing was perfect. The campaign was launched the following month. Beirich said in an email that the “hate group” announcement “was our decision alone and had nothing to do with NCLR.” She did not respond when asked whether the SPLC knew at the time of the announcement that planning for the campaign was in an advanced stage. The SPLC’s work was a central part of that campaign.

Asli U. Bali is an Associate Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School. She has lectured on Comparative Political Systems of the Middle East at Princeton University and served as an Associate at the firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York and Paris. She engaged in extensive pro bono work relating to immigration, civil liberties, and international human rights. Bâli’s research interests focus on issues of non-proliferation, human rights, terrorism and the Middle East. Recent work includes Interventionism and its Discontents in the Middle East (co-authored working paper with Aziz Rana); From Subjects to Citizens? The Shifting Paradigm of Electoral Authoritarianism in the Middle East (forthcoming in the Journal of Middle East Law and Governance). Ms. Bali received a B.A. summa cum laude from Williams College, a M.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School. J.D., Yale, 1999. Her Ph.D from Princeton University will be conferred later this year.

FULL STORY: A conference at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on April 16, 2010, offered “Critical Perspectives on the Criminalization of Islamic Philanthropy in the War on Terror.” Co-sponsored by the UCLA International Institute, the Critical Race Studies Program, and the UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law — and including speakers from UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) — the conference proffered the usual apologist fare.

It was also an echo chamber. Of the approximately 30 people in attendance, 20 of them were academics. Several students showed up, in addition to the usual assortment of aging Leftist revolutionaries.

The thrust of the conference was simple: The war on terror has led to a crackdown on Muslim charities, which has had a chilling effect on Muslims by rendering them unable to engage in Zakat (charity), one of the five pillars of Islam.

Unmentioned throughout this eight-hour infomercial was that the majority of the charities that have been investigated for financially aiding terrorism were found guilty and that decent Muslims are capable of giving to charities that do not foment bombings and beheadings.

Asli Bali, Acting Professor of Law at UCLA, organized the conference and acted as one of the principal moderators. She responded to challenging questions from the audience by stating: “We will take three questions from presenters; others will have to wait.”

Asli Bali, Board Member, American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

ADC is notable not only for its programs and campaigns, but also for its open expressions of support for some controversial figures. For instance, in 1987 the Committee honored filmmaker Michael Moore for his “courageous efforts in journalism.” A decade and a half later, when University of South Florida professor Sami-Al Arian was indicted on terrorism-related charges, ADC’s Hussein Ibish depicted FBI investigations of Al-Arian “a political witch hunt, a vendetta, and a kind of very, very ugly post-9/11 McCarthyism.”

Witness Omar Alomari is the Ohio Department of Public Safety’s Department of Homeland Security multicultural relations officer. Since taking the job in 2006, he wrote a 40-page Culture Guide related to Arabic and Islamic Culture. In this document, Alomari defined jihad as the benign pursuit of personal betterment. It may be applied to physical conflict for Muslims, but only in the arena of Muslims defending themselves when attacked or when attempting to overthrow oppression and occupation.

Jihad as a holy war is a European invention, spread in the West, he wrote.

Alomari also authored a two-page brochure called “Agents of Radicalization” for the Ohio Department of Homeland Security. In it, he lists several grievances driving terrorism in the Muslim world, including Israel’s occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, U.S. support for Israel, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Muslim lands and support for repressive regimes. Alomari goes on to explain that such terrorism also stems from the expected societal reaction of the once proud and thriving Arab/Muslim culture, now in decline and conflict because of the stronger and aggressive West.

[…]

The material Alomari’s agency is putting out is “classic Islamist propaganda” which suggests that “these thugs who kill people in restaurants and shopping malls will stop if we solve the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Jasser said. “In fact, they’ll find another grievance in a year or two.”

Alomari acknowledges that some Muslim communities do, in fact, provide support for the radical jihadists, who he labels “the opposition.” He also describes Islam as a “politicized religion” in terms of terrorism and how “it’s easier for extremists in Islam to convince youngsters to join in their extremist organizations.”

But the brochure ends with a list of seven Muslim organizations the Ohio agency works with. All the groups have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood or have their own history of extremist rhetoric.

June 14, 2010

Ohio Homeland Security official Omar Alomari under investigation after Jawa Report investigation

The wheels of justice grind slowly, as the saying goes. But they (along with the establishment media) are finally catching up with the Jawa Report.

Exhibit A is a front page article in the Columbus Dispatch on Saturday concerning a story we broke here back in April concerning the various follies within Ohio Homeland Security; specifically, our reports about their multicultural affairs/community engagement director Omar Alomari being previously fired from a state college for sleeping with one of his students — whom he later sued (unsuccessfully) for defamation after she reported him to the school; and another top official, Olen Martin, who padded his resume with not one, but two fake college degrees.

State official under scrutiny for job history

An Ohio Homeland Security official is being investigated for failing to disclose his former employment at Columbus State Community College, where he was fired after an improper consensual sexual affair with one of his students.

Omar Alomari, the department’s community engagement director, did not list his tenure at Columbus State from 1990 to 1996 when he applied to work for the state and submitted background-check materials in late 2006.

Department of Public Safety officials began an administrative investigation into the accuracy of Alomari’s paperwork last month after a terrorism-related website began digging into his background.

Alomari, 59, a native of Jordan, was a full-time humanities instructor at Columbus State. He disputed his dismissal, filing a national-origin discrimination complaint with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. He also sued the woman with whom he had an affair, accusing her of slander and seeking damages.

The civil-rights commission found no probable cause of discrimination and dismissed Alomari’s complaint. The lawsuit against his former student also was dismissed.

Dalia Mogahed: A Muslim George Gallup or Islamist Ideologue?

IPT News
April 15, 2010

Few American Islamists receive the kind of glowing media coverage given to Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, who is sometimes described as the “most influential person” shaping the Obama Administration’s Middle East message.

Mogahed, who claims to have played an important role in the drafting of President Obama’s historic Cairo speech to the Muslim world, was appointed to serve on the President’s Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The council released its final recommendations last month.

When European Islamist Tariq Ramadan kicked off his U.S. tour last week at Cooper Union in New York City, Mogahed and two journalists joined him for a panel discussion. Her remarks emphasized polling data showing that Muslim Americans are more affluent and socially content than their European counterparts.

Muslim Americans are no more likely to support political violence than the rest of the nation, Mogahed said. The minority of Muslim Americans who do support attacks on civilians base this position on politics, not religion.

It’s a message that Mogahed attempts to drive home at every opportunity.

She routinely is depicted as a scholarly analyst monitoring public opinion on subjects like anti-Muslim prejudice in the United States or global Muslim attitudes toward America. On other occasions, she is treated as a pioneering Muslim celebrity or portrayed as a victim of anti-Muslim “smears.”

But the reality is much more complicated. Mogahed is not some apolitical social scientist chronicling political trends in the manner of George Gallup, founder of the parent organization for her polling center. While Gallup strived to maintain his objectivity, Mogahed has followed a very different course. As we will explain in more detail below, she works behind the scenes with radical Islamist groups to enhance their standing in the presidential council’s activities.

Mogahed is a protégé of John Esposito, executive director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin-Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University and a longstanding apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood. The pair have worked together at the Gallup Center, and co-authored the book Who Speaks for Islam? What A Billion Muslims Really Think in 2007, which was subsequently turned into a film. Read the State Department website’s coverage of the film premiere here.

Mogahed has been a tenacious defender of groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), both of which are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. During a September 2008 appearance at the Religion Newswriters Association Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., she was asked about links between the two organizations and Islamic radicals. Mogahed replied that it would be unfair to have those groups “disenfranchised” because of “misinformation.” Without offering evidence, she claimed “there is a concerted effort to silence, you know, institution building among Muslims. And the way to do it is [to] malign these groups. And it’s kind of a witch hunt.”

Nadia Roumani is the Director of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute, a faith-based leadership training and civic engagement program that strengthens young leaders in the Muslim community who are working towards the full participation of Muslims in American public life. AMCLI is housed at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, and works in partnership with Georgetown’s Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim- Christian Understanding.

In addition to her work with AMCLI, Nadia is the consultant program officer for the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art’s Building Bridges Program, and the Principal of Roumani Consulting LLC. Nadia consults regularly for several international organizations, foundations, and nonprofit organizations. Among others, she has consulted for the World Bank, UNDP, UN Alliance of Civilizations, the Brookings Institution, the Four Freedoms Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, the Rothschild Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Nadia was the interim director for the Women Leaders Intercultural Forum, and a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, where she co-founded the Global Policy Innovations Program. Between 2000 and 2004, Nadia was the Assistant Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a project directed by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and a junior associate in Stiglitz’s office at the World Bank from 1999-2000.

Nadia is the President of the Board of Directors of the Muslim Public Service Network; a Member of the Pacific Council on International Policy; and a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Nadia received her master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and her bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations from Stanford University.

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. […] It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is […]

• The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)
  
• The Muslim Student Association (MSA)
  
• The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) (which holds the title to a large number of mosques, financed by Saudi Arabia)
  
• The Fiqh Council of North America (in 1991 the ISNA Fiqh Committee; under its new name it is still a subordinate element of ISNA)
  
• CAIR
  
• The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)
  
• The International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT)

That so many people in the Netherlands and Belgium have voted along ethnic lines in their respective elections is unsettling

The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg were once collectively known as the Low Countries, largely by Britain which eyed them from across the Channel, and often fought them too. Over the centuries this rather disparate grouping of people and interests passed from ruler to empire, from Charlemagne to the Bourbons, through the Spanish and eventually the Dutch, before finally gaining official separation with the creation of Belgium in 1830, and the demise of the union between the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1890. As a result of this history, there is nothing worse than lumping two or three of these states together in any way – which makes it all the more ironic to mark how alike they seem to have become.

Both the Netherlands and Belgium have been to the polls within days of each other, and both have produced rather similar results: a rise in narrow national, near-nationalist interests, coupled with a strong socialist showing. These are interesting trends.

In the Netherlands, the big winner was Geert Wilders and his populist right wing Freedom Party that is openly anti-Muslim, and is only marginally less hostile to other foreigners. Their message is loud and clear: the Netherlands is for the Dutch, and only if they are white. With 15% of the vote, giving them 24 seats in parliament, they are a power to be reckoned with. This is especially true given the strong showing by the VVD, the right-of-centre party that is pro austerity and anti EU, which garnered 20% of the vote and 31 seats, and will most likely lead the next government. However, right behind them, with 30 seats, are the Socialists, who seek greater cohesion and broader welfare in the face of the financial crisis for all the Dutch, regardless of ethnicity.

Creating a working coalition between these disparate groups will be difficult – but nowhere near as much as the task facing the Belgians. For here, 30% of the Flemish north in Flanders region voted for the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) headed by Bart de Wever, which openly advocates a dissolution of the federal Belgian state along linguistic lines. They also espouse financial austerity and a return to economic growth, possibly with cuts to health and pensions.

However, in the Walloon French speaking south that suffers high unemployment, it was the Socialists who won big, with 36% of the vote, on a platform promising ever greater state aid and subsidies – largely from a federal pot that is running a 99% deficit on GDP (the second highest in the eurozone after Greece), and the largesse of the more industrious Flanders.

The Rubik's Cube of coalition building is the natural order of political life in both Belgium and the Netherlands, and ultimately governments will be formed in both. However, that step cannot – and should not – mask two clear realities: that there are deeply conflicting views on the very essence of the state and its role, not least in the economic and social perspective; and that a sizeable portion of a broad group of people spread between Flanders and the Netherlands do not like foreigners and have no qualms saying so.

As for the first, it is no longer a case of simply left or right of centre, as has been the conventional wisdom of the past decade – but rather of socialism reverting to a more fundamental form that embraces an ever-widening welfare state, and liberalism with a much diminished contribution from the state. These are disparate visions – and they may become apparent across the EU.

As for the ethnic vote – whether it is an independent Flanders for the Flemish or a Netherlands for the white Dutch – it must be seen as unsettling. For the genies let out of these bottles are not only those of dividing states, but also of public acceptance: in neither state has there been any collective intake of breath in horror at the idea that so many people felt it correct to vote on ethnic lines. Nor has there been any attempt so far to examine how this has become publically and socially acceptable in states that apparently deem themselves liberal and open.

The point of democratic elections is that electors have the option to vote or not to vote for something, with not voting in a party sending as strong a message as a pro vote. In the UK, for example, the electorate rejected both the xenophobic UKIP and the racist BNP by not voting for them, even though both were listed.

In both Flanders and the Netherlands the voters clearly decided to vote for ethnic and effectively nationalist parties. And while they may hate being lumped together, the similar choices in both suggest the region may once again merit the collective title of the Low Countries: low in intent, low in outcome, low as in debased.

Winning Flemish nationalist offers premiership to socialist rival in return for concessions

Belgium's quest to form a stable government appeared further away than ever today after a general election produced a seismic shift towards disintegration.

Bart De Wever, the nationalist whose New Flemish Alliance party enjoyed the first ever victory for separatism, was summoned by King Albert II, as was Elio di Rupo, whose francophone Socialist party came second. Both leaders, one on the right in Flanders in the north, the other on the left in Wallonia, the southern half of the country, are of diametrically opposed views: De Wever seeks a managed dissolution of the 180-year-old kingdom, and Di Rupo wants a more centralised state.

The outcome of the election, called a year early because the outgoing government fell following an intractable dispute over the rights of French-speakers in Flemish towns, made forming a new government even more difficult.

De Wever, 39, emerged as the most powerful figure as leader of a party dedicated to the phased break-up of Belgium and the creation of an independent Flanders, the northern 60% of the country.

While entitled to become prime minister by convention, he made plain that his absolute priority is to engineer greater decentralisation, turning Belgium into a loose confederation as a precursor to divorce between Flanders and Wallonia.

The biggest obstacle to a smooth parting of the ways is Brussels, the French-speaking capital that is also headquarters of the EU and Nato but which sits in Flanders, almost on the border with Wallonia.

De Wever, taking advantage of Flemish voters' exasperation with the broken promises of other parties, insisted he would focus on a new deal, seeking to decentralise key powers, particularly over public finances and social security, to the two regions, Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia.

In return for concessions, Di Rupo could become prime minister, meaning that Belgium would get its first non-Flemish leader in more than a generation.

De Wever said that a quick solution to the long-running argument about voting rights in the Brussels suburbs and villages surrounding the capital would be the lynchpin of his negotiating strategy.

The issue has bedevilled Belgian politics for the past decade and caused the downfall of governments. There is little to suggest that De Wever and Di Rupo will be able to reach an agreement since the positions of both are further apart than ever.

After the elections in 2007 it took almost 200 days to form a government. The country then had three different governments in three years. Now, the situation looks even more polarised. Belgium assumes the EU's six-month rotating presidency at the end of June, meaning that the EU's crisis of leadership is likely to get worse.

De Wever's party took 27 of the 150 seats in the federal parliament, while Di Rupo's Socialists took 26. The aim now is to concoct a coalition across the linguistic divide.Analysts doubt whether the two sides will be able to agree on a coalition pact.

While Wallonia voted left, Flanders voted for the right; unemployment is twice as high in the French-speaking south as in Flanders; and, while De Wever is arguing for budget cuts, Di Rupo is calling for increased public spending despite the fact that Belgium has the third highest national debt in the EU.

Despite the success of the New Flemish Alliance in the general election, those wanting a break-up of Belgium are in the minority

Reports of the impending death of Belgium are much exaggerated. The success of the separatist New Flemish Alliance party in Sunday's Belgian general election will be seen by some as evidence that Belgium is finally about to fall apart. But those who gleefully await the implosion of a country at the heart of the European Union are likely to be disappointed.

The election results confirm that many in Dutch- and French-speaking communities find the complexities of the present Belgian federal state constitution frustrating. There is also growing social tension over the consequences of the global crisis, which has hit Belgium and left it with massive debt. But those Flemings who want a complete break-up of Belgium with an independent Flanders remain a minority.

This is not the first allegedly existential crisis that has wracked Belgium in its 180-year history. The very creation of the Belgian state in 1830, bringing together the two different language communities, owed much to the intervention of Britain's imperial prime minister, Lord Palmerston, who was anxious to create a buffer state between the Netherlands and France. The political elites in both Flanders, in the north and Wallonia, in the south were actually French speaking.

The impact of the first industrial revolution also primarily benefited the French-speaking communities in Wallonia and left the mainly agricultural Flemings (the majority of the country) economically and politically disadvantaged. Flemish resentment at being treated as culturally inferior by an arrogant Francophone establishment encouraged the development of Flemish nationalism. Some extreme Flemish nationalists were even willing to collaborate with the occupying Germans in both world wars in pursuit of their aims.

In the past 25 years Flanders has become by far the more economically successful part of the country, while Wallonia – like Britain – has struggled with the dire social consequences of deindustrialisation. As a result of successive political deals done as a result of the "language wars" a great deal of power has already been devolved to the elected regional governments of Flanders and Wallonia. The main unresolved problem has been the status of the capital, Brussels – a mainly French speaking city inside Flemish territory and especially the complicated bilingual status of some Brussels suburbs in Flanders.

The rise of the New Flemish Alliance and its hitherto largely unknown leader, Bart de Wever, owes much to the widespread popular discontent with the Flemish political establishment parties (notably the Christian Democrats and Liberals) who have provided the leaders of most recent Belgian coalition governments. They and their French-speaking counterparts on the centre-right have seemed immobile in the face of the economic and financial crisis.

But, as De Wever, was quick to point out, the great majority of Flemings still voted for "pro-Belgium" parties rather than the nationalists. He accepted that if his party is to join a new government there will have to be a negotiated compromise with the other parties and he has even surprisingly indicated that he may accept the leader of the French-speaking Socialist party, Elio di Rupo, who emerged as the other major victor in the election, as the next prime minister.

The Flemish nationalists acknowledge that major policy areas such as defence and justice should remain Belgian until they can be transferred to the responsibility of a fully federal EU. Since this is an unlikely development in the near future, the nationalists will, in practice, settle for a further devolution of powers to the regions but within the Belgian federal state. Negotiations to form the next government will be long and difficult. Success or failure will probably come down to the thorny issue of the status of the Brussels region and the extent to which social security should no longer be a matter for the Belgian government but transferred instead to the regions – anathema to the dominant parties of the left in Wallonia.

If no compromise emerges until later this year, the present centre-right coalition, led by Yves Leterme, will have to assume responsibility for the rotating presidency of the EU, which passes to Belgium at the end of this month. This is less of a problem now that the Lisbon treaty has transferred the leadership of the EU to the new long-term president of the European council, Herman van Rompuy who is a veteran former Belgian prime minister.

The leaders of the New Flemish Alliance know their problem now will be getting acceptance from their own party on the compromises Belgian realities require if they are to be in government. "Compromis a la Belge", although sometimes scorned by other Europeans, has proved a more civilised way to manage crises than resorting to the armed conflicts, which have plagued other parts of the continent.

New Flemish Alliance led by Bart De Wever becomes largest party with Dutch-speaking Flanders set to demand more self-rule

The Belgian general election produced a stunning win for a Flemish separatist party that wants Dutch and French-speakers to end years of acrimonious linguistic disputes, or go their own way and break up Belgium.

The New Flemish Alliance shook up Belgium's political scene yesterday by winning 27 seats, up 19 from the 2007 elections, to become the country's largest party.

Its win was a withering verdict on premier Yves Leterme's outgoing coalition of Christian Democrats, Liberals and Socialists – split into Dutch- and French-speaking factions – whose three years in office were marked by enduring linguistic spats that remained unresolved.

The election outcome was seen as a warning to Francophone politicians that Flanders will bolt if they do not negotiate seriously about granting Dutch- and French-speakers more self-rule.

The reaction in Wallonia was one of shock.

The daily Le Soir said "Flanders has chosen a new king," referring to Bart De Wever, 39, the leader of the New Flemish Alliance, who urged "Francophones to make [a country] that works".

Belgium's 6.5 million Dutch-speakers and 4 million Francophones live very separate lives.

Nearly everything in the country – from political parties to broadcasters to boy scouts and voting ballots – already comes in Dutch- and French-speaking versions. Even charities such as the Red Cross and Amnesty International have separate chapters.

De Wever seeks an orderly breakup of Belgium. His party accuses Wallonia, Belgium's poorer southern half, of bad governance that has raised the jobless rate to double that of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north.

On Monday, King Albert is expected to start one-on-one meetings with political leaders to see who should form a new government. In 2007, those talks lasted more than six months.

If he becomes premier of Belgium, De Wever will head a coalition government which will force him to tone down his independence talk and negotiate for more regional self-rule within Belgium.

These talks have been deadlocked for years.

True to tradition, the big winners in Wallonia were the Socialists who won 26 seats, up six. Their leader, Elio di Rupo, also a prospective premier, said: "Many Flemish people want the country's institutions reformed. We need to listen to that."

Flanders and Wallonia already have autonomy in urban development, environment, agriculture, employment, energy, culture, sports and other areas.

Flemish parties demand that justice, health and social security are added to that list, but Walloon politicians fear that ending social security as a federal responsibility will mark the end of Belgium.

The divide goes beyond language. Flanders is conservative and free-trade minded. Wallonia's long-dominant Socialists have a record of corruption and poor governance.

Flanders enjoys a 25% higher per-capita income, and its politicians are tired of subsidising Francophone neighbours.

As governments worldwide tried to tame a financial crisis and recession, the four parties that led Belgium since 2007 struggled with linguistic spats, most notably over a bilingual voting district comprising the capital, Brussels, and 35 Flemish towns bordering it.

The high court ruled it illegal in 2003 as only Dutch is the official language in Flanders. Over the years, Francophones from Brussels have moved in large numbers to the city's leafy Flemish suburbs, where they are accused of refusing to learn Dutch and integrate.

Flemish politics are governed by The Rule, which is: the party that “owns” the theme that dominates the campaign wins the election.

• If the big theme is social security or redistribution, the socialists win.
  
• If it’s food or environmental safety, the greens win.
  
• If everyone is talking about budgetary orthodoxy, then it’s time for the liberals to cash in.
  
• If relations between the Dutch and the French speakers dominates, the nationalists are in for sure

.

The chances are slim that you can find anyone on the street who can explain what confederalism means, yet this has become a major theme in the election debates. A confederation, should you wonder, is an association of sovereign member states. This is one step further than the federal state Belgium is at the moment - a union of partially self-governing regions and communities - and in the eyes of many French speakers, it is one step removed from Flemish secession.

Over the past two decades, the international media has been obsessed with just one party in Flanders: the Vlaams Belang (previously Vlaams Blok) and its mixture of separatism and xenophobia, leading to conclusions about this region being narrow minded and racist.

The reports have often missed the point that, even at its peak - with 24% of the votes - most people in Flanders actively detest the Vlaams Belang. This is not a party like any other, was the phrase often used. Because of its anti-immigrant viewpoints, often bordering on the racist, all other Flemish parties created a cordon sanitaire around the Vlaams Belang, refusing to enter any government with them.

Polls predicted a solid showing for a mainstream Flemish party whose leader wants Dutch-speaking Flanders to sever its unhappy ties with Francophone Wallonia and, in time, join the European Union as a separate country.

This is a nightmare scenario for poorer Wallonia which greatly depends on Flemish funds and shows how linguistic disputes dominate national politics…

Although there are still a good number of results to be declared, a clear trend is emerging. The Flemish nationalist party N-VA has polled even more than it did in recent opinion polls. With 29% Bart De Wever’s party is streets ahead of its nearest rival the Christian democrats. [it's now 30% - D]

• Evidently the biggest loser was the Christian Democrats, who are reduced to 17.5%, their worst-ever electoral showing.
  
• Vlaams Belang is much reduced, losing about a third, holding onto only 12.5%.
  
• The Liberals garnered 14.5%, down from the last election.
  
• Lijst Dedecker has lost more than a third of its support. It will have no MPS outside West Flanders.

The N-VA is heading for a share of the vote of up to 30% across Flanders. This makes the Flemish nationalists the biggest party in Flanders and Belgium

Mr De Wever said that now was the time to build bridges and he hoped that others, even those who lost ground in this election, would be prepared to take up government responsibility.

Mr De Wever said that now was the time to build bridges and he hoped that others, even those who lost ground in this election, would be prepared to take up government responsibility.

Mr De Wever noted that 70% of Flemings had not voted N-VA.

The constitutional model endorsed by the New Flemish Alliance would allow Belgium to escape from the doldrums

On Monday morning, Belgians may be waking up to a different country. If recent polls prove correct, Sunday's elections will result in a landslide victory for the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which advocates a federalist model for Belgium.

Back in 2007, the leading party in Flanders, the Christian democrats, was in an electoral pact with the N-VA, on a platform that focused on major reform of the state. Now, with the country's debts rising above 100% of its GDP, increasing unemployment, a judicial system that is in desperate need of modernisation and its once-praised social security system on the brink of bankruptcy, Belgium is in dire need of adapting its structure to today's challenges.

Taking into account the different problems that Flanders and Wallonia suffer from, this requires a more decentralised policy. For instance, while Flanders has to cope with a high number of elderly unemployed, Wallonia needs to tackle rising youth unemployment.

Despite promises that he would not form a government without an agreement on this necessary reform of the country, the then leader of the Christian democrats, Yves Leterme, became prime minister without doing so. He resigned about a year later because of allegations of attempts to influence court proceedings in the acquisition of Belgium's biggest bank Fortis by the French BNP Paribas. Leterme came back to power after his successor Herman Van Rompuy got the job of European president.

Since 2007, though, Belgium's government policy has been in a state of paralysis. Budget policy got out of hand, with no measures taken to revitalise the economy and the employment market. As a result, the Christian democrats dropped Leterme as the party's main candidate for the upcoming elections in favour of Marianne Thyssen. All former ministers have had a difficult time defending their policy decisions over the past three years.

This paralysis in government policymaking was caused by the obstinate refusal of the French-speaking minority to enter negotiations. As former prime minister Jean-Luc Dehaene announced after his failure to reach an agreement between both regions, Belgium's survival depends on assurances by the Flemish people not to take advantage of their demographic majority and on the willingness of the Walloon minority to come to a compromise.

A large body of constitutional protection measures make it possible for the will of the minority in federal decision-making to be ignored. No one, however, can force this minority to yield to certain demands in relation to modernising the country.

The result of this impasse is a growing impatience in Flanders; a desire for progress and increased pressure on Wallonia to reorganise Belgium into a federalist state. Throughout the past decade several departments such as education, culture and sport have been decentralised, allowing regions to develop their own policy. Yet this again has led to a complex web in which different sections of these departments are administered by the regions and others by the federal state. As a consequence, in Belgium no less than nine ministers are assigned to oversee the health department. This is why most Flemish parties now opt for so-called homogenous departments, to avoid policies being taken on different levels that interfere with and obstruct one another.

The confederation now endorsed by the New Flemish Alliance would involve Flanders and Wallonia electing their own representatives in their respective regional parliaments. The same representatives would gather in the federal assembly, making federal elections redundant. The federal parliament would tackle those issues that both regions agree on still dealing with together. For instance, no one is in favour of a separate Flemish and Walloon army, so long as defence doesn't become a centralised European affair. A link between both regions that ensures the operation of defence throughout Belgium seems preferable. The bilingual capital Brussels, which is sometimes jokingly said to have more politicians than civilians, would be governed in a coalition between Flanders and Wallonia.

This scenario is nothing to be afraid of. It only entails the modernisation of the state apparatus to live up to the economic and geopolitical challenges that await us. And despite their reluctance to move along in this direction, Wallonia, which is now one of the poorest regions in Europe with a dramatically high unemployment rate of 14%, will benefit most from a decentralised policy that can take advantage of measures specially tailored to tackle its own problems.

Belgium doesn't exist, only Flanders and Wallonia as Dutch and French communites live apart. By Ian Traynor in Brussels

Twenty minutes north of Brussels, in Belgium's medieval royal seat of Mechelen, there's a science playground, just the place for the kids on a boring, wet Sunday afternoon.

Technopolis is stuffed with interactive gadgets and games, making education fun. There is also another message. When entering the complex, the paving stones are inscribed with a simple, direct statement. The message is in Dutch only, the language of Flanders, the bigger northern half of the country. You are told the size of Flanders in square kilometres and its population density.

There is no mention of Belgium. That does not exist. You are in a country called Flanders. That does not exist either, but if many of the politicians running this divided society get their way it is only a matter of time.

"Long live free Flanders, may Belgium die" was the battle cry ringing out in Belgium's federal parliament on Thursday as the 150 elected deputies cleared their desks and returned home to prepare to fight an early election next month, triggered by the latest collapse of the national government.

Following the last election in 2007, Belgium went without a government for six months because of the divisions and squabbling between Dutch-speaking Flanders to the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south. Three years later, the same conflict has brought down the government again.

In most countries of western Europe, the third prime ministerial resignation in three years would be cause for alarm. In Belgium, the latest resignation – of Yves Leterme, the Christian Democrat prime minister – after only five months has instead been greeted with shrugs of indifference and expressions of relief.

"We are incredibly lucky to be here; this is one of the luckiest countries in the world," says a senior government official. "We are very successful." Which is true in many respects. But the political class running this wealthy state of 10.5 million people gives a very good impression of caring little for a country called Belgium.

"I'm Flemish, not Belgian," says Willy De Waele, mayor of the small Flemish town of Lennik, just south of Brussels. "There's no loyalty to a country called Belgium. There has never been a country that has lasted so long in conditions like this."

Only a few miles to the east, but on the other side of the language barricades, Damien Thiéry, a French speaker, is more sorry than angry, but similarly pessimistic. "We've been arguing about this for 30 years. I'm not sure we will ever find a solution."

Language is the fundamental flaw at the core of Belgium's existential crisis, taking on the role that race, religion, or ethnicity play in other conflict-riven societies. The country operates on the basis of linguistic apartheid, which infects everything from public libraries to local and regional government, the education system, the political parties, national television, the newspapers, even football teams.

There is no national narrative in Belgium, rather two opposing stories told in Dutch or French. The result is a dialogue of the deaf.

"When I was studying in Brussels in the 1970s," says a Flemish former deputy prime minister, "I knew all the Walloon colleagues because we were on the same campus. But then they split the universities and now there's no contact."

Indeed, the two sides seldom interact. Intermarriage between Flemish and Walloons is low. Nor do they clash. They keep themselves to themselves.

The big exception is Brussels and its outlying districts, where the two cultures rub up against one another. Leafy, suburban, middle-class Brussels, a million miles from resembling a war zone, has become the frontline of the language conflict.

The city of two million is home to the EU and Nato, with tens of thousands of affluent foreign professionals and a large immigrant underclass of Turks, Moroccans and Africans living cheek by jowl with the natives. But Brussels is French-speaking, surrounded by Dutch-speaking municipalities. It is here that the language battles are fiercest. It is here that governments rise and fall.

"We won't fall into madness, like Serbia and Croatia," says Jeroen Vermeiren, a Flemish bookseller just outside Brussels. "But it creates great emotions on both sides."

"It's surreal, absurd," says Thiéry. "And it's not democratic." He sits at the very heart of the conflict, in the town hall of Linkebeek, a comfortable town that is home to 5,000 and sits astride the city limits. He is a French-speaking Walloon, born and bred in Linkebeek, who has been elected mayor with 66% of the local vote in a town that is 85% francophone.

But Linkebeek is in Flanders, not Brussels. The Flemish interior minister has barred him from being mayor because he sends out election literature in French to French-speakers, and not in Dutch, as required.

Linkebeek's municipal life is consumed by petty challenges, demonstrations and taunts. Separatists deface bilingual street names. The language police show up at monthly meetings of the local council. If the proceedings are conducted in French – 13 of the 15 councillors are French-speakers – the session is deemed invalid.

At the local primary school, French-speaking kids are downstairs, Dutch-speakers upstairs. The curriculums are different. The public library is denied Flemish government funding unless 55% of the books are in Dutch.

There are six such small towns on the fringes of Brussels, all with large francophone majorities, all in Flanders, three of them without mayors who defy the rules, three of them with French-speaking mayors who toe the line.

The problem is the result of urban sprawl. As middle-class professionals grow older, marry and have children, they move out of the city to the suburbs for a bigger house, a garden, a different quality of life. In Brussels, that means French-speaking couples "colonising" Flemish territory and upsetting the language balance in small Dutch-speaking communities.

"This is not a conflict where people will get killed," says the former deputy prime minister. "But it has the same structure as most big international conflicts – the clash of the rights of the traditional population with the rights of incomers."

This makes suburban Brussels the battleground, for the capital is the only officially bilingual bit of Belgium. For electoral purposes it has been connected with 35 Flemish surrounding districts, which means that francophones can vote across the language barrier for French-speaking parties in Brussels. The Flemish living in Wallonia cannot do the same. The constitutional court has ruled this illegal. And the politicians cannot fix it.

It is a question of political will, a problem of the repeated failures of Belgium's political elites. There are 11 parties in Belgium's federal parliament in Brussels. There are another five parliaments and governments in the regions and language communities.

"We have 600 elected deputies in this country of 10 million," says De Waele. "It's ridiculous. There's no future for a country with this construction."

In this crowded political scene, there is only Flemish and Walloon politics, no Belgian. Over the decades, the politicians have contrived to create a system where there is no unifying institution, barring the royal palace and King Albert II.

There are no national political parties, no national newspaper, no national TV channel, no common school curriculum or higher education. There is, however, the national debt, running at 80% of GDP. Like a couple trapped in a loveless marriage, eyeing divorce but unable to agree on the mortgage liabilities, the Flemings and the Walloons may be stuck together because of the cost of splitting up.

But the frustrations run deep. The main francophone newspaper, Le Soir, was bitter when the government fell: "Is there any sense in maintaining a country when there are no more men, women, or systems capable of reaching the compromise essential for Belgium to continue?" it asked.

Broadly speaking, the Walloons vote for the left, the Flemish for the right. Flanders is prospering, Wallonia is depressed, with twice the unemployment rate of the north. Flemish leaders are increasingly strident in demanding greater autonomy, while the Walloon leaders retreat to their bunkers and refuse to negotiate. Flemish separatism was once the stronghold of the extreme right: it is now much more mainstream.

If push came to shove, the preferred option would be velvet divorce as in Czechoslovakia, rather than Yugoslav violence. But Brussels sucks in tens of thousands of commuters from both sides and makes a negotiated unravelling of Belgium virtually impossible.

"Do we want to live together?" says Thiéry. "That is the question we have to ask ourselves."

Tensions between French and Flemish speakers in Brussels may be bringing separation a step closer

British prime ministers – or so the story goes – give their Belgian counterparts less time than others at EU summits because they know that within a year or two they'll be dealing with someone new. Belgium's federal government falls with such regularity that the resignation last week of prime minister Yves Leterme was hardly noticed around the world – or in Belgium for that matter. For the man in the street, the only noticeable consequence was the cancellation of the scheduled parliament vote on the banning of the burqa.

But amid the ceaseless tension between the Flemish-speakers of the north and French-speakers of the south, there are signs that Belgium, a "non-country" in the words of Ukip leader Nigel Farage, is becoming difficult to fix.

The fault line runs through Brussels, the capital of both Belgium and Flanders. Officially it's a bilingual city, though in reality it has become largely French-speaking, a process accelerated by immigration from north Africa and the ever-expanding EU quarter (EU officials must speak French, but are under no obligation to learn Flemish).

The Flemish speakers, increasingly alienated, have retreated to the Brussels suburbs, where they have drawn a line in the sand named Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde. This electoral district, where French and Flemish speakers live cheek by jowl, has brought down government after federal government. Flemish parties want electoral reform that would give their politicians greater power. French-speaking parties are refusing to budge unless a "corridor" is created, linking Brussels with French-speaking Wallonia. This is the nub of the problem: French-speaking Brussels is an island, surrounded by Flemish speakers. If the country splits, what will become of Brussels?

The artificial calm imposed by all sides while the federal government tackled the financial crisis has now been broken. The country's political leaders are this weekend "consulting" with the King. Albert II still has power to forge governments, though this power too is under attack in the north. The separation of the country is one step closer.

Dutch-speaking Liberals quit Cabinet, accusing Francophones of blocking deal to break up voting district

Belgian premier Yves Leterme's government collapsed today after negotiations to resolve a long-simmering dispute between Dutch- and French-speaking politicians over a bilingual voting district broke down.

Dutch-speaking Liberals, one of Leterme's five coalition parties, quit the Cabinet, accusing their Francophone counterparts of blocking a deal to break up the Brussels-area district the constitutional court ruled illegal in 2003.

Leterme offered King Albert the resignation of his government. The Belgian monarch has not immediately accepted it, but began consultations with key politicians on the way forward. That may take several days, parliament president Patrick Dewael told reporters.

In a statement, the royal palace called a political crisis "inopportune". It said it could harm "Belgium's role in Europe and at an international level" – a reference to fear that the political deadlock could drag into the second half of 2010 when Belgium holds the EU's rotating presidency.

That is not an unreasonable fear. Leterme's government took office on 20 March 2008 after a political impasse over a similar and related linguistic spat that lasted a record 194 days.

Linguistic disputes – rooted in historical and economic differences – have long dominated politics in this country of 6.5 million Dutch-speakers and 4 million Francophones.

Belgium is divided into Dutch- and French-speaking regions, which determines what single language is used on everything from mortgages and traffic signs to election ballots and divorce papers.

In 2003 the constitutional court ruled the bilingual Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde voting district illegal as it violates the separation of Dutch- and French-language regions. It comprises officially bilingual Brussels but also 20-odd towns in Dutch-speaking Flanders around the capital.

Dutch-speaking politicians have long complained the district lets Francophones – who have moved from Brussels into Dutch-speaking suburbs – vote for French-speaking parties in the capital.

Leterme's alliance of Christian Democrats, Liberals and Socialists – split into Dutch and French-speaking camps – agreed to resolve the voting district issue by Easter 2010, a deadline that was missed, leading to the government's collapse.

"We are the end of our rope," Guy Vanhengel, a Flemish Liberal, said yesterday. "I think that efforts to come to a negotiated settlement are not succeeding."

Belgium has three main regions: Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north, economically-lagging Francophone Wallonia in the south, and officially bilingual – but largely French-speaking – Brussels in the middle. The three regions have in the past 25 years acquired ever more autonomy.

As King Albert met with political leaders at the royal palace, about 15 members of the far-right Flemish Interest party sang the Flemish anthem and briefly hoisted a banner in the empty parliament chamber. It read: "Time For An Independent Flanders."

Flemish parties want their prosperous part of the country to be even more autonomous, notably by shifting taxes and some social security measures from the federal to the regional level. They also want more self-rule in transport, health, labour market and justice areas.

Francophone parties say enough powers have been devolved since the mid-1980s and accuse Dutch-speakers of trying to cut loose Wallonia, troubled by desolate smokestack landscapes and an excessive jobless rate.

It is that tense backdrop that feeds the debate over the contentious voting district.

Home affairs committee of Brussels federal parliament votes unanimously to ban partial or total covering of faces in public places

Belgium today moved to the forefront of a widening campaign to restrict the wearing of the Muslim veil by women when a key vote left it on track to become the first European country to ban the burqa and niqab in public.

The home affairs committee of the Brussels federal parliament voted unanimously to ban the partial or total covering of faces in public places.

"I am proud that Belgium would be the first country in Europe which dares to legislate on this sensitive matter," the centre-right MP Denis Ducarme said.

Daniel Bacquelaine, the liberal MP who proposed the bill, said: "We cannot allow someone to claim the right to look at others without being seen.

"It is necessary that the law forbids the wearing of clothes that totally mask and enclose an individual. Wearing the burqa in public is not compatible with an open, liberal, tolerant society."

The Belgian move came as neighbouring France and the Netherlands continued to grapple with the idea of imposing similar restrictions.

The Canadian province of Quebec last week introduced parliamentary measures to proscribe facial covering in public service employment – a move that enjoyed overwhelming public support in Canada.

Support for the ban in Belgium transcended party lines, ranging from the Greens to the far right, and also resulted in a rare show of unity between the linguistically divided halves of the country.

The full support of the home affairs committee means parliament is likely to vote for the curbs in mid-April, with a ban in force by the summer.

Under the proposals, a fine of up to €25 (£22) or punishment of up to seven days in prison would be imposed for wearing the full-body burqa or face-masking niqab.

The bill, to be debated next month, states that anyone in a public place "with face covered or disguised in whole or in part to the extent that she cannot be identified" is liable to incur the penalties.

A Green MP noted that the proposed curbs could play havoc with Santa Claus lookalikes in December shopping malls.

While today's vote paved the way for the first nationwide ban on the veil in Europe, local authorities in Belgium already have the power to ban the burqa and niqab in public places.

Of the 500,000 Muslims living in Belgium – with big populations in Brussels and Antwerp – very few women wear the full veil, and there has been little public debate about the need to ban it.

While Bacquelaine admitted there was little problem with full facial covering among Muslims in Belgium, he argued for a preemptive move, saying: "We have to act as of today to avoid [its] development."

Rather than being about the burqa and the niqab, the bigger debate in Belgium – as elsewhere in Europe – is about the less severe headscarf, with Muslim parents pressing for schools to allow their daughters to cover their heads and often opting to send them to private schools tolerant of the practice.

The Belgian move is similar to other campaigns in Europe.

Following a heavy regional elections trouncing last week, President Nicolas Sarkozy, of France, called for a burqa ban.

"The all-body veil is contrary to the dignity of women," he said. "The answer is to ban it. The government will introduce a bill to ban it that conforms to the principles of our laws." The headscarf is banned in schools in France.

But yesterday, France's advisory state council cast doubt on Sarkozy's plans when it said a burqa ban could be unconstitutional.

In the Netherlands, rightwinger Geert Wilders – riding high in the opinion polls prior to elections in June – is also campaigning for Muslim veil bans and has issued warnings about the "Islamification" of Dutch society.

Isabelle Praile, the vice-president of the Muslim Executive of Belgium, warned that a Belgian ban could be the thin end of the wedge.

"Today it's the full-face veil. Tomorrow the veil, the day after it will be Sikh turbans, and then perhaps it will be miniskirts," ," she told the AFP news agency.

It remains to be seen whether any bans will be challenged at the European court of human rights.

Asia

• At least 13 people were killed by a bicycle bombing in Afghanistan's Helmand province. 
• Pakistan is asking Switzerland to reopen corruption investigations into President Asif Ali Zardari. 
• The Yahoo accounts of  more than a dozen journalists academics and activists focused on China have been hacked. 

Middle East

• A vetting panel says that six of the winning candidates in Iraq's parliamentary elections should be disqualified because of ties to the Baath party. 
• Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appears intent on remaining in power after coming in second to former Prime Minsiter Ayad Allawi's bloc in the elections. 
• New sanctions targeted at Iran's nuclear program were discussed at a meeting of G8 foreign ministers in Canda.

Africa

• The U.S. embassy in Nigeria has raised its security alert status. 
• Kenya's government has denounced a U.N. reports saying that many of its citizens are linked to Somalia's al Shabaab rebels. 
• Ugandan police say a man has confessed to setting fire to royal tombs in Kampala earlier this month. 

Europe

• A British investigation into the "climategate" e-mails largely cleared the scientists involved on any wrongdoing. 
• Serbia's government approved a measure apologizing for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. 
• A Belgian parliamentary committee has voted to ban the waring of the Burqa in public. 

Americas

• A Colombian soldier held hostage by the FARC was finally released after 12 years. 
• Former U.S. President Bill Clinton will co-chair a committee overseeing billions in aid to Haiti. 
• An Ecuadorean journalist facing a three-year sentence for defamation has accused Rafael Correa's government of persecuting journalists. 

NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

Asia

• At least 13 people were killed by a bicycle bombing in Afghanistan's Helmand province. 
• Pakistan is asking Switzerland to reopen corruption investigations into President Asif Ali Zardari. 
• The Yahoo accounts of  more than a dozen journalists academics and activists focused on China have been hacked. 

Middle East

• A vetting panel says that six of the winning candidates in Iraq's parliamentary elections should be disqualified because of ties to the Baath party. 
• Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appears intent on remaining in power after coming in second to former Prime Minsiter Ayad Allawi's bloc in the elections. 
• New sanctions targeted at Iran's nuclear program were discussed at a meeting of G8 foreign ministers in Canda.

Africa

• The U.S. embassy in Nigeria has raised its security alert status. 
• Kenya's government has denounced a U.N. reports saying that many of its citizens are linked to Somalia's al Shabaab rebels. 
• Ugandan police say a man has confessed to setting fire to royal tombs in Kampala earlier this month. 

Europe

• A British investigation into the "climategate" e-mails largely cleared the scientists involved on any wrongdoing. 
• Serbia's government approved a measure apologizing for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. 
• A Belgian parliamentary committee has voted to ban the waring of the Burqa in public. 

Americas

• A Colombian soldier held hostage by the FARC was finally released after 12 years. 
• Former U.S. President Bill Clinton will co-chair a committee overseeing billions in aid to Haiti. 
• An Ecuadorean journalist facing a three-year sentence for defamation has accused Rafael Correa's government of persecuting journalists. 

NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

The Department of State warns U.S. citizens of the high security threat level in Yemen due to terrorist activities. The Department recommends that American citizens defer non-essential travel to Yemen. American citizens remaining in Yemen despite this warning should monitor the U.S. Embassy website and should make contingency emergency plans. This replaces the Travel Warning for Yemen issued June 26, 2009.

The security threat level remains high due to terrorist activities in Yemen. The U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen closed on January 3 and 4, 2010, in response to ongoing threats by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to attack American interests in Yemen.Following the attempted attack aboard Northwest Airlines flight 253 on December 25, 2009, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) publicly claimed responsibility for the incident and stated that it was in response to what they described as American interference in Yemen. In the same statement, the group made threats against Westerners working in embassies and elsewhere, characterizing them as “unbelievers” and “crusaders.” On the morning of September 17, 2008, armed terrorists attacked the U.S. Embassy in Sana'a, Yemen. A number of explosions occurred in the vicinity of the Embassy's main gate. Several Yemeni security personnel and one Embassy security guard were killed, as were a few individuals waiting to gain entry to the Embassy, one of whom was a U.S. citizen.

U.S. Embassy employees have been advised to exercise caution when choosing restaurants, hotels or visiting tourist areas in Sana’a in order to avoid large gatherings of foreigners and expatriates. Only limited travel outside of the capital is authorized at this time.

U.S. citizens who travel to or remain in Yemen despite this warning should exercise caution and take prudent security measures, including maintaining a high level of vigilance, avoiding crowds and demonstrations, keeping a low profile, varying times and routes for all travel, and ensuring travel documents are current. American citizens in Yemen are advised to exercise particular caution at locations frequented by foreigners countrywide, including restaurants and hotels frequented by expatriates. From time to time, the Embassy may restrict official Americans from restaurants, hotels, or shopping areas. The Department of State strongly encourages American citizens to consult the most recent Warden Messages on the U.S. Embassy website to get up-to-date information on security conditions. Americans who believe they are being followed or threatened while driving in urban centers should proceed as quickly as possible to the nearest police station or major intersection and request assistance from the officers in the blue-and-white police cars stationed there.

The Department remains concerned about possible attacks by extremist individuals or groups against U.S. citizens, facilities, businesses, and perceived interests. On June 12, 2009, seven Germans, one Briton, and one South Korean were kidnapped in Sa’ada resulting in three confirmed deaths. There have been no claims of responsibility in this incident and the investigation is ongoing. On March 15, 2009, four South Korean tourists were killed in a suicide bomb attack in the city of Shibam in southern Hadramout province. On March 18, 2009, a South Korean motorcade was attacked by a suicide bomber near Sana'a International Airport. On January 17, 2008, suspected al-Qaeda operatives ambushed a tourist convoy in the eastern Hadramout Governorate, killing two Belgians. On July 2, 2007, suspected al-Qaeda operatives carried out a vehicle-borne explosive device attack on tourists at the Belquis Temple in Marib, which resulted in the deaths of eight Spanish tourists and two Yemenis. The targeting of tourist sites by al-Qaeda may represent an escalation in terror tactics in Yemen. On February 3, 2006, 23 convicts, including known affiliates of al-Qaeda, escaped from a high-security prison in Sana’a, some of whom remain at large. Two of the escapees were killed in vehicle-based suicide attacks on oil facilities near Mukalla and Marib on September 15, 2006. Those attacks were followed by the arrest the next day in Sana’a of four suspected al-Qaeda operatives, who had stockpiled explosives and weapons.

The Government of Yemen has been battling al Houthi rebels in and around the northern governorate of Sa’ada intermittently since 2004. A ceasefire was announced on February 12, 2010.

U.S. citizens traveling in Yemen should be aware that local authorities occasionally place restrictions on the travel of foreigners to parts of the country experiencing unrest. In addition, the U.S. Embassy itself often restricts travel of official personnel to the tribal areas north and east of Sana’a, such as the governorates of Amran, al-Jawf, Hajja, Marib, Sa’ada, and Shabwa. Travelers should be in contact with the Embassy for up-to-date information on such restrictions.

Travel by boat through the Red Sea or near the Socotra Islands in the Gulf of Aden presents the risk of pirate attacks. In 2009, over 70 vessels were reportedly attacked. Since the beginning of 2010, 4 vessels reportedly have been seized in the area, with one released in February. As of February 2010, 11 vessels were believed to be held for ransom, including the yacht of a British couple. Following the April 2009 hijacking of a U.S. cargo vessel and the subsequent rescue of the vessel’s captain, resulting in the deaths of three pirates, Somali pirates threatened to retaliate against American citizens transiting the region. The threat of piracy extends into the Indian Ocean off the Horn of Africa as well. See our International Maritime Piracy Fact Sheet. If travel to any of these areas is unavoidable, travelers may reduce the risk to personal security if such travel is undertaken by air or with an armed escort provided by a local tour company.

U.S. citizens should register at the Consular Section of the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a and enroll in the warden system (emergency alert network) to obtain updated information on travel and security in Yemen. This can be done online prior to arrival in Yemen at State Department's travel registration website.

The U.S. Embassy, Sana’a is located at Dhahr Himyar Zone, Sheraton Hotel District, P.O. Box 22347. The telephone number of the Consular Section is (967) (1) 755-2000, extension 2153 or 2266. For after-hours emergencies, please call (967) (1) 755-2000 (press zero for extension) or (967) 733-213-509. From time to time the Embassy may temporarily close or suspend public services for security reasons. Emergency assistance to U.S. citizens during non-business hours (or when public access is restricted) is available through Embassy duty personnel.

Current information on travel and security in Yemen may be obtained from the Department of State by calling 1-888-407-4747 within the United States and Canada or, from outside the United States and Canada, 1-202-501-4444. These numbers are available from 8:00am to 8:00pm Eastern Time Monday through Friday (except U.S. federal holidays.) U.S. citizens should consult the Country Specific Information for Yemen and the Worldwide Caution on the State Department's Internet site. Up-to-date information on security conditions can also be viewed at U.S. Embassy Sana’a's American Citizens Services web page.

Professional golfer Tiger Woods and Japanese automaker Toyota are both struggling under the media spotlight to repair their damaged public images and resorting to public statements and advertizing. But communications alone is never enough when faced with a risky situation – it’s the combination of risk assessment and management, along with communications, that helps individuals, corporations and governments regain trust and public favor.

New research from a team led by Dr. Doug Powell, an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University and published in the journal, Public Understanding of Science, further validate the idea that words alone are never enough when managing a food safety crisis – actions are also important.

The authors examined two incidents of dioxin contamination of food in Belgium and the Republic of Ireland in 1999 and 2008, respectively. In both cases, dioxins reached the food supply through the contamination of fat used for animal feed. The food and agricultural industries connected to each incident relied on crisis management activities of federal governments to limit adverse public reaction.

In 1999, the Belgian government delayed communicating with the public and other European agencies about possible risks, failed to acknowledge perceived risks with dioxin-laden feed, and ultimately suffered huge economic losses, a damaged food industry and deterioration in public confidence.

In the winter of 2008, the Republic of Ireland faced a similar dioxin-in-animal-feed crisis and, unlike the Belgian response, promptly communicated with the public, and acknowledged perceived risks by mandating that all pork products released for sale were to carry a special label to indicate they had no association with the potentially contaminated feed.

“Prompt communications with the public, acknowledgement of both real and perceived risks, and control of stigma surrounding a hazardous incident are important factors in effective crisis management,” said Powell. “The Irish government succeeded by not only saying the right things, but by removing potentially contaminated product from commerce in a timely manner. Actions and words must be consistent to manage any crisis and garner public support.”

Abstract below:

Government management of two media-facilitated crises involving dioxin contamination of food
23.feb.10
Public Understanding of Science
Casey J. Jacob, Corie Lok, Katija Morley, and Douglas A. Powell
http://pus.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/0963662509355737v1
Abstract
Incidents become crises through a constant and intense public scrutiny facilitated by the media. Two incidents involving dioxin contamination of food led to crises in Belgium and the Republic of Ireland in 1999 and 2008, respectively. Thought to cause cancer in humans, dioxins reached the food supply in both incidents through the contamination of fat used for animal feed. The food and agricultural industries connected to each incident relied on crisis management activities of federal governments to limit adverse public reaction. Analysis of the management of the two crises by their respective federal governments, and a subsequent review of crisis management literature, led to the development of an effective crisis management model. Such a model, appropriately employed, may insulate industries associated with a crisis against damaged reputations and financial loss.
First published on February 5, 2010
Public Understanding of Science 2010

On November 5, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a licensed Army psychiatrist, walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center on Fort Hood military base in Killeen, Texas. After yelling “Allahu akbar,” Hasan, 39, opened fired with a semiautomatic handgun, killing 13 people (12 of them Soldiers) and wounding 32 others before he was shot by military police. Hasan sustained multiple injuries and is currently hospitalized in stable condition at an Army hospital in San Antonio. He will face 13 charges of premeditated murder in a military court.

The Fort Hood shooting ranks as the nation's worst ever on a military installation. It also has raised new fears about terrorist attacks on the homeland, as Hasan had been in contact with a radical imam that has praised the killings.

The U.S. Congress is now preparing to investigate the shooting to determine what action they might take to prevent similar tragedies in the future. Later in the month, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, headed by Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), will begin hearings on the subject. As these inquiries commence, we would urge legislators to take several important actions concerning America’s gun laws:

1) Close the “Terror Gap” in Gun Purchasing Laws and Allow Federal Agencies to Share Critical Information
A May 2009 Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that 865 individuals on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List were allowed to purchase firearms from federally licensed gun dealers between February 2004 and February 2009. Amazingly, while individuals on the FBI’s list are prohibited from boarding planes, they can purchase as many guns as they want as long as they can pass an instant computer background check.

While there has been no indication from federal officials that Hasan was on the Terrorist Watch List, the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force had investigated Hasan after they discovered 10-20 email communications between him and Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki, a radical imam now living in Yemen, was known to have associated with two of the 9/11 hijackers. Hasan worshipped at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque, led at the time by al-Alwaki, in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001 along with the two hijackers.

When Hasan purchased his weapons in August 2009, the Joint Terrorism Task Force was not informed. An NRA-drafted provision in the “Tiahrt Amendments” attached to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) appropriations bill requires the Department of Justice (DOJ) to destroy completed background check records within 24 hours. The NRA has also been able to enact restrictions that restrict federal agencies from sharing information about legal gun purchases.

"The piece of information about the gun could have been critical," said former FBI Special Agent Brad Garrett. "One of the problems is that the law sometimes restricts you in what you can do." "We need to be smarter about sharing information," added former 9/11 commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste. "It's very disturbing to see…that the FBI is precluded from sharing information."

There is no rational reason to allow potential terrorists to purchase firearms. The U.S. Congress should act immediately to pass S. 1317—sponsored by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)—and H.R. 2159, sponsored by Representative Peter King (R-NY). This legislation would give DOJ the discretion—subject to judicial review— to block gun sales to individuals on the Terrorist Watch List. Congress should also remove current information-sharing restrictions on federal agencies so that they can better monitor gun purchases.

2) Oppose and Defeat the “Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act”
In the U.S. Senate, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) has offered a legislative proposal, the “Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act,” that would require that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to stop submitting the records of those found to “lack the mental capacity to contract or manage their own affairs” to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The immediate effect of this measure would be the removal of approximately 116,000 such records already in the system. These individuals would be free to purchase and own firearms even if the VA determined they are “mentally incapacitated,” “mentally incompetent,” or “experiencing an extended loss of consciousness.”

Senator Burr’s legislation would put veterans, their families, and the public in danger. Researchers are predicting that the rate of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among veterans returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom could be as high as 35%. Furthermore, the Army suicide rate is at its highest level in three decades. The New York Times reported that “at least 128 soldiers killed themselves [in 2008], and the Army suicide rate surpassed that for civilians for the first time since the Vietnam War.” All told, 12,000 veterans under VA care attempt suicide each year. A 2007 study by researchers at Portland State University and Oregon Health & Science University found that male veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide as their civilian counterparts. The study also found that veterans are 58% more likely to use firearms to commit suicide than non-veterans.

The shooting at Fort Hood wasn’t the only recent tragedy to remind us of how lethal the combination of mental illness and guns can be. Just two days after Hasan’s attack, a 63 year-old veteran suffering from PTSD opened fire while being escorted out of a bar in Vail, Colorado, killing one and injuring three.

The “Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act” is an affront to common sense and the well-being of America’s veterans and should be rejected by Congress.

3) Enact Licensing Laws for Handgun Purchasers
Currently, only 11 states in the entire country require the licensing of handgun purchasers. Of these, nine states conduct a thorough background investigation on licensees that goes far beyond a simple instant computer check through the FBI’s National Instant Computer Background Check System (NICS).

The problem with NICS checks (like the one which Hasan passed at Guns Galore) is that they lack critical information from state and local authorities. According to a Third Way report entitled “Missing Records,” “91% of those adjudicated mentally ill or involuntarily committed cannot be stopped by a gun buyer background check” because their disqualifying records are not in the system. In addition, one out of four felony conviction records are not in NICS. Third Way’s overall assessment of the database is that it is “deeply flawed.”

Would a background investigation (as opposed to a computer check) have stopped Nidal Malik Hasan from purchasing a handgun? Possibly.

There were several red flags in Hasan’s background that suggested he might have been a threat to himself or others. He had been working with service members suffering from PTSD for more than six years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and experienced problems that required counseling.. He had also begun openly opposing America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and espousing extremist Islamic views. While a senior-year psychiatric resident at Walter Reed, Hasan gave a PowerPoint presentation to mental health staff members which concluded, “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.” In the Spring of 2008 and again in the Spring of 2009, key officials from Walter Reed and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences met and expressed concern about Hasan's behavior, which fellow students and faculty had described as "disconnected, aloof, paranoid, belligerent and schizoid."

Finally, as described above, Hasan was being monitored by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force because of emails he had exchanged with the radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki. The FBI was also investigating whether he was behind violent anti-American comments left on a website under the screen name of "NidalHasan."

None of these warning signs were revealed by the NICS check that Hasan underwent at Guns Galore. But any or all of this information might have been uncovered by a background investigation if Hasan had had to obtain a license in order to purchase a handgun. Such investigations typically involve interviews with licensees’ family, friends, and co-workers/colleagues.

Because instant computer checks are imperfect, the U.S. Congress should adopt licensing standards for handgun purchasers similar to those enacted in New York and New Jersey. This would help ensure that dangerous individuals do not legally acquire handguns.

4) Regulate High-Powered Firearms on the Civilian Market
Hasan used a Belgian-made FN Herstal Five-seveN semi-automatic pistol during the shooting which he legally purchased at Guns Galore in Killeen. The weapon's name refers to its 5.7 mm bullet diameter. The Five-seveN is popular with U.S Secret Service agents and police SWAT teams because of its ability to penetrate body armor. It is also popular with the Mexican drug cartels, who call the Five-seveN the “Mata Policia” (“Cop Killer”).

The Legislative Director of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, Steve Lenkhart, has called the Five-seveN "an assault rifle that fits in your pocket."

FN Herstal maintains that armor-piercing ammunition for the Five-seveN is only available to law enforcement and military personnel. However, when first launched for civilian sales, FN officials advertised that “enemy personnel, even wearing body armor can be effectively engaged up to 200 meters.” Additionally, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence tested the Five-seveN in January 2005 with commercially-available SS192 ammunition and found that it penetrated both Level IIA and Level IIIA body armor.

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence joined the Violence Policy Center, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Legal Community Against Violence, Freedom States Alliance, and States United to Prevent Gun Violence on a November 19 letter urging President Obama to use existing executive authority to prohibit the importation of the Five-seveN as well as 5.7X28mm ammunition with armor-piercing capabilities.

It's not easy learning about events that have been going on for some time in another country. Here is a chronological account of al Qaida Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and other terror-related events in Yemen and Saudi Arabia I've compiled from the update section of the last ten issues of The Sentinel published this year. The Sentinel is the publication of The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. I'm mostly posting it as a reference point since I've been trying to get up to speed and want the information in one place, and the easiest way to do that is to post it.

The list includes events from from December, 2008 through November, 2009. [More...]

December 15, 2008 (YEMEN): Three Germans were kidnapped by Bani Dhabyan tribesmen in Dhamar Province. The Germans consist of an aid worker and her visiting mother and father. – AP, December 18

December 19, 2008 (YEMEN): Three German citizens being held by tribesmen in Yemen were released to authorities. According to an Agence France-Presse report, “Unconfirmed reports on a Yemeni Internet site, Marebnews, said the mediator had promised a ransom of 100,000 dollars and an assurance that the kidnapper would not face prosecution.” – AFP, December 20

January 19, 2009 (YEMEN): Yemen’s official state news agency reported that government forces killed two suspected al-Qa`ida militants and wounded a third during a raid in Sana`a. A fourth al-Qa`ida member part of the cell escaped. – Reuters, January 20

January 23, 2009 (YEMEN): A U.S. counterterrorism official told reporters that a Saudi militant released from Guantanamo Bay has become a leading figure in the Yemen branch of al-Qa`ida. The militant, identified as Said Ali al-Shihri, was released to Saudi authorities in 2007. – AP, January 23

January 26, 2009 (YEMEN): The U.S. Embassy in Sana`a released a warden’s message, stating that “the U.S. embassy has received a threat against the embassy compound regarding a possible attack which could take place in the foreseeable future. U.S. citizens in Yemen are advised to exercise caution and take prudent security measures in all areas frequented by Westerners.” – AFP, January 26

January 26, 2009 (YEMEN): Police exchanged fire with gunmen in a car at a checkpoint near the U.S. Embassy in Sana`a. The gunmen fled the scene, and there were no injuries. The incident occurred after the U.S. Embassy released a warden’s message warning that threats were made against the facility. – AP, January 27

January 27, 2009 (YEMEN): Al-Qa`ida’s factions in Yemen and Saudi Arabia announced that they are merging their operations. The deputy of the new consolidated group has been identified as Said Ali al-Shihri, who was released from Guantanamo Bay in 2007. – al-Jazira, January 28 January 28,

February 2, 2009 (SAUDI ARABIA): The Saudi government issued a list of 85 wanted militants based outside of the country. Authorities said the men had “adopted the straying ideology,” which signifies that they are suspected of al-Qa`ida involvement. The government called on the men to turn themselves in overseas to “return to a normal life.” Out of the group, 83 are Saudis and two are Yemenis. Saudi officials also announced that 11 Saudis who were released from Guantanamo Bay and subsequently passed through the Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists have left the country and joined terrorist groups abroad. – Reuters, February 2; New York Times, February 3

February 8, 2009 (YEMEN): A Yemeni security official told reporters that authorities have decided to release 176 people suspected of having ties to al-Qa`ida. Of the group, 95 were freed on February 6. According to the BBC, “The ruling excludes those convicted of terrorism, unless they have completed their sentence.” – AFP, February 8; BBC, February 8

February 10, 2009 (GLOBAL): Interpol issued a rare “orange” global security alert for 85 suspected al-Qa`ida-linked terrorists wanted by Saudi Arabia. On February 2, the Saudi government issued a list of 85 wanted militants based outside of the country. – CNN, February 11

February 10, 2009 (YEMEN): The Yemeni Embassy in Washington, D.C., released a statement denying a February 8 report which claimed it released more than 170 al-Qa`ida suspects from its prisons. The new statement said that authorities have released 108 prisoners, but they were “not affiliated in any way to al Qaeda.” – CNN, February 10

February 17, 2009 (SAUDI ARABIA): Muhammad al-Awfi, a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay who became an al-Qa`ida commander after his release, turned himself in to Saudi authorities. Last month, al-Awfi appeared in an al-Qa`ida video claiming that he had joined al-Qa`ida in Yemen. He allegedly turned himself in to Yemeni authorities after securing his repatriation to Saudi Arabia. – Reuters, February 17

February 19, 2009 (SAUDI ARABIA): Alleged al-Qa`ida operative and Saudi national Ahmed Owaidan al-Harbi was handed over to Saudi authorities after he was arrested in eastern Yemen. – AP, February 19

February 19, 2009 (YEMEN): Al-Qa`ida in the Arabian Peninsula leader Nasir al-Wahayshi released a new audio message urging Yemenis to rise up against the government. – AP, February 19

March 15, 2009 (YEMEN): Four South Korean tourists were killed in a suicide bombing in Hadramawt Province. Two Yemenis were also killed. The Yemeni government blamed al-Qa`ida for the attack and claimed that the bomber was trained in neighboring Somalia. – AP, March 15; BBC, March 15; AFP, March 16; Reuters, March 17

March 15, 2009 (YEMEN): Yemen’s Interior Ministry announced that they recently captured Abdullah Abdul-Rahman Mohammed al-Harbi, one of the most wanted militants in Saudi Arabia. Al-Harbi was apprehended in Taiz Province. – Saba, March 15

March 18, 2009 (YEMEN): A suicide bomber attacked a convoy of South Korean officials investigating the March 15 attack that killed four Korean tourists in Yemen. The South Korean ambassador to Yemen was in the convoy at the time of the latest attack. No one in the convoy was injured. – AP, March 18

March 25, 2009 (YEMEN): Yemen’s Interior Ministry released a statement claiming it had arrested six men for plotting attacks against foreigners in the country. The statement said that the men were recruited by al-Qa`ida. – AP, March 25

April 7, 2009 (SAUDI ARABIA): Saudi security forces arrested 11 alleged al-Qa`ida militants operating from a hideout near the border with Yemen. The men were allegedly planning to attack police installations, conduct armed robberies and kidnap people in Saudi Arabia. Explosive suicide belts were uncovered during the operation. – BBC, April 7; Reuters, April 7

April 13, 2009 (YEMEN): Yemeni tribesmen released two Dutch hostages who were kidnapped on March 31. It appears a ransom was paid. According to Reuters, “Tribesmen often kidnap Western tourists in Yemen...to pressure the government to provide better services and improve living conditions.” – Reuters, April 13

May 27, 2009 (UNITED STATES): The U.S. Defense Department confirmed that five percent of former Guantanamo Bay detainees have returned to the fight against the United States and its allies. – AFP, May 27

June 14, 2009 (YEMEN): Yemeni authorities announced the arrest of a Saudi al-Qa`ida financier who they consider “one of the most dangerous members of al-Qa`ida.” The financier, Hassan Hussein bin Alwan, was arrested the previous week. – AFP, June 14

June 15, 2009 (YEMEN): The mutilated bodies of two German nurses and a South Korean teacher were discovered by shepherds in Yemen’s Saada region. Later in the day, six other foreigners were found dead. The nine foreigners—who all worked for World Wide Services Foundation, a Dutch relief group—disappeared on June 12. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the murders. – Independent, June 15; Christian Science Monitor, June 15; AP, June 15

June 18, 2009 (YEMEN): A Saudi al-Qa`ida suspect, Nayif Yahya al-Harbi, turned himself in to Yemeni authorities, according to Yemen’s Defense Ministry. – Reuters, June 18

July 13, 2009 (YEMEN): A Yemeni court sentenced six suspected al-Qa`ida militants to death for their role in a series of deadly attacks on government and Western targets in Yemen. Another 10 defendants, including a Saudi and four Syrians, received sentences ranging from eight to 15 years in jail on the same charges. The group was convicted of carrying out the January 2008 attack that killed two Belgian female tourists, a March 2008 attack that targeted the U.S. Embassy in Sana`a, and a rocket attack on a compound housing U.S. oil workers. The men were all accused of having ties to al-Qa`ida. – AFP, July 13; Guardian, July 13

July 30, 2009 (YEMEN): Al-Qa`ida militants ambushed an army truck in Yemen’s Marib Province, killing two Yemeni soldiers and seizing military ammunition and equipment. Authorities then stormed the militants’ hideout and killed A’ed Saleh al-Shabwani, one of the militant leaders. A soldier was also killed in the fighting. – AFP, July 31

August 21, 2009 (UNITED STATES): A U.S. federal judge ordered the release of Muhammad al-Adahi, a Yemeni who has been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002. The judge ruled that al-Adahi’s brief time at an al-Qa`ida training camp and two encounters with Usama bin Ladin was not enough to justify his continued detention. – Washington Post, August 21

August 27, 2009 (SAUDI ARABIA): A suicide bomber attempted to assassinate Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayif. Nayif was slightly wounded in the attack. Al-Qa`ida in the Arabian Peninsula claimed credit for the operation, and it identified the bomber as Abdullah Hassan Taleh Asiri. The bomber traveled across the Saudi border from Yemen. – AP, August 27; AFP, August 30

October 4, 2009 (GLOBAL): Al-Qa`ida deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri appeared in a new video message vowing to kill more Westerners to avenge “crimes” against Muslims. – AFP, October 5

October 13, 2009 (SAUDI ARABIA): Two suspected al-Qa`ida militants and a Saudi police officer were killed at a checkpoint in Saudi Arabia, 75 miles from the city of Jizan. The al-Qa`ida militants, who were both shot to death, were wearing vests packed with explosives. A third militant was arrested. Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry later said that the men entered Saudi Arabia from neighboring Yemen to carry out “an imminent criminal act.” – BBC, October 13; Bloomberg, October 18

October 17, 2009 (YEMEN): Yemen’s state security court began trial for seven suspected al-Qa`ida members. The defendants are accused of forming an armed group to carry out criminal acts and target foreign tourists and Western interests in Yemen, in addition to targeting the government and security forces. – Saba, October 17

November 1, 2009 (GLOBAL): The leader of al-Qa`ida in the Arabian Peninsula called on militants to bomb airports and trains in Western countries, explaining that explosives can easily be acquired from household materials. Nasir al-Wahayshi, the leader of the group, wrote in the jihadist magazine Sada al-Malahim that “you do not need to exert great effort or spend a lot of money to make 10 grams of explosives, more or less. Do not spend a long time searching for materials as they already exist in your mother’s kitchen. Make them [explosives] in the shape of a bomb you hurl, or detonate through a timer or a remote detonator or a martyrdom-seeker belt or any electrical appliance.” Al-Wahayshi also wrote that “it is a duty that a Muslim mujahid be busy planning to reap the heads of infidels.” – Reuters, November 2

November 3, 2009 (YEMEN): Suspected al-Qa`ida militants killed seven members of Yemen’s security forces in eastern Hadramawt Province. The men were ambushed as they traveled back from a post on the Saudi Arabian border. Three of the dead were senior officers, including the chief of the Political Security Organization for Hadramawt Province, the regional security chief, and the head of the regional criminal investigation division. Al-Qa`ida in the Arabian Peninsula later took credit for the attack. According to the New York Times, which referred to an official Yemeni government statement, “The assailants opened fire on the motorcade’s lead vehicle as it passed through the town of Kashm Alein in the Alabr district, causing the vehicle to collide with an oncoming truck in the opposite lane and burst into flames.” – BBC, November 4; Reuters, November 5; New York Times, November 3

November 15, 2009 (YEMEN): Takeo Mashimo, a 63-year-old Japanese engineer, was kidnapped near Sana`a by tribesmen seeking to exchange him for one of their relatives held by police. – AFP, November 22

November 23, 2009 (YEMEN): Japanese engineer Takeo Mashimo, who was kidnapped by Yemeni tribesmen near Sana`a on November 15, was released after a week of captivity. The release occurred after negotiations by Yemen’s government. – AP, November 23

November 26, 2009 (YEMEN): Al-Qa`ida in the Arabian Peninsula released a new video showing the corpse of abducted Yemeni security official Bassam Tarbush. According to Reuters, “The video showed group members preparing to shoot Tarbush, kidnapped in June according to Yemeni media, for spying on Islamic militants, but the actual shooting was not shown. The footage later carried a still photograph apparently showing his corpse with facial cuts.” – Reuters, November 26

Changing political groupings within the European parliament was the right move for my party. We can now deliver better for Britain

In the runup to the general election, Labour will be grasping at straws for attack lines against the Conservatives. When a party runs out of ideas, all it has left is to smear and destroy, rather than ask the people to judge them on their prospectus for the nation. Glenis Willmott's rather pitiful attack, published here on Monday, illustrated this well.

Apart from the despicable personal digs at our allies in the European parliament, another emerging line of attack is that our new group, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), has diminished British Conservative influence in the EU. Such an argument just goes to highlight how Willmott, and Labour ministers, completely misunderstand the nature of decision-making at the European level.

Conservative MEPs are in a strong position to deliver for Britain.

Had we remained in the centre-right European People's party group, we would have been the fifth largest delegation. In the last session we were the second largest delegation and while we did punch above our weight, we were still constrained within a federalist group. Now we are by far the largest delegation in a political group of our own, and more importantly, the sands in the European parliament itself have shifted, making our group's role pivotal.

Willmott is correct to say that the European parliament's watchword is consensus. Around each issue, each directive, each resolution, no political group has an absolute majority so a coalition must be built. When we look at the European parliament following June's elections, it is clear that the socialists have been consigned to obscurity, and with just 13 MEPs in the socialist group, British Labour MEPs are an irrelevance.

When William Hague, Mark Francois and I met with the leader of the EPP just before the European elections, we made it clear that we want to maintain extremely close relations with them. I believe we still enjoy a strong rapport that is born from two things: the EPP's respect for the hard work and effectiveness of Conservative MEPs; and the fact that the EPP needs our group in order to defeat "the left" in the parliament.

Nothing summed this up better than the re-election of José Manuel Barroso for president of the European commission. Without our votes he would not have secured the majority required to give him a mandate from MEPs. Our group was the first in the parliament that Barroso attended when setting out his priorities for another term. I chaired the meeting and, as the largest delegation in the ECR we were able to subject Barroso to a grilling of several hours. Since that election, I have enjoyed significant amounts of face time with him, enabling us to put the case of the British people direct to those at the top.

Time and again, our analysis is showing that votes are being won and lost in the European parliament, because of our group.

It's worth remembering that we are a new group and it takes time for any movement to become established. However, we are already working well with the EPP and many other sections of the chamber where we can do business. On issues like financial services regulation we can work with our allies in the EPP, but we will also help build a coalition from the more liberal-minded members of the parliament's Liberal group. The Liberals have chosen the former prime minister of Belgium, Guy Verhofstadt, as their leader. He is not a liberal, but a Belgian social democrat, and he has proven a divisive figure in the Liberal group as he imports the worst aspects of Belgian politics to the European parliament. There are plenty of Liberals with whom we are already doing business.

Our group is not just pivotal given the current balance of the European parliament, it is also extremely strong in its own right. We enjoy the chairmanship of the powerful internal market committee. Barroso set out the completion of the single market as one of his main priorities in the next five years. He could hope for no better ally than my colleague Malcolm Harbour, who is renowned in the European parliament as a passionate advocate of completing the single market. Doing so will open up new opportunities to small businesses across Britain.

We have co-ordinators, who manage the business of committees and steer its political direction, on almost every major committee. We have many vice-presidents of committees. As deputy chairman of the group, I regularly represent the group on the parliament's conference of presidents, which is the top table of the parliament, and which enables our group to have direct influence on the business of the whole parliament.

We also enjoy the procedural benefits of having our own group. In the EPP, had we wanted to submit an amendment to a directive in the main chamber we had to plead our old group to submit it. In the many circumstances when this was impossible our members would find themselves trawling around the parliament trying to find 40 MEPs to sign our amendment. Now, we submit our own without hindrance.

Our positions enable us to engage constructively in the EU, but our new group also gives us the freedom to put across our own vision for a European Union that does less and does it better.

Our record of engagement and constructive criticism can be contrasted to Labour's which is one of absence and drift. We all remember when Tony Blair gave away £7bn of Britain's rebate in exchange for a vague promise to reform the common agricultural policy (CAP). You'd have thought that, given the price tag, Britain would have taken a keen interest in those discussions. However, when agriculture ministers met in Slovenia to discuss the so-called CAP health check, there was only one British parliamentarian there: my Conservative colleague Neil Parish. Not a single Labour minister bothered to attend these crucial first discussions, and as a consequence the reform was botched by the French.

That incident was not isolated: ministers are frequently absent from important discussions. One of the worst offenders was Gordon Brown when chancellor. How can they wield influence when they cannot even be bothered to turn up to the meetings?

Worse still, we all witnessed Brown handing away a key economic portfolio in the European commission in order to save face for his failure to install Blair as president of the council of ministers. I personally think we can work with the new French internal market commissioner, Michel Barnier, but we must never forget that, thanks to Labour, Britain no longer has a voice in the economics team of the commission.

The British government naturally has influence in the EU. It will regardless of who is in control. But what's important is how you use that influence to deliver your manifesto priorities for the people. Conservative MEPs have put themselves in a strong position to deliver the agenda of change that the British people voted for in June. I have no doubt that David Cameron, if elected prime minister, will engage fully in the EU in order to fight for Britain in the EU, not the EU in Britain. Labour will undoubtedly continue to carp from the sidelines. The British people deserve better.

Israelis file complaint with Belgian judiciary against Hamas

Fifteen Israeli Belgians who were either injured or lost a relative in the war in Gaza (late 2008 — early 2009) are filing a complaint with the Belgian court against ten political and military leaders of Hamas. The fifteen are living in the vicinity of Gaza. This is what several Israeli newspapers have reported.

The complaint names Hamas leaders like Khaled Mashaal, who lives in Damascus, Prime Minister Ismaaïl Haniyah in Gaza, the former Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar, plus the military chiefs Ahmed Jabri and Mohammed Def.

Six applications for an arrest have been submitted, after six months of legal preparations. The complaint is based on “strict proof that links leaders of Hamas with terrorist attacks involving Belgian citizens who have suffered from it” as the papers quote lawyer Roel Coveliers. “I do not think that Belgium will lay the complaint aside,” he added.

Second legal complaint against a terrorist

Besides the Goldstone report, the complaint cites reports of international human rights organizations, Ha’aretz reports. It is the second legal complaint in recent months against a “terrorist organization” for attacks on Israelis, The Jerusalem Post writes.

On April 30 there were thirty Israelis who had been hit during the second war in Lebanon who filed a complaint with a court in Washington against North Korea and Hezbollah.

Roel Coveliers has already received five Israeli cases

The Belgian lawyer Roel Coveliers has already received five cases from Israelis who want to file a complaint with the Belgian courts. “The Israeli lawyers with whom we work have fifteen cases, but for the present I have as yet only received five. The other cases will follow,” said Coveliers.

Rocket Attacks

The complainants live in Israel, but have Belgian nationality. “In the period between June 18, 2008 and January 18, 2009 they became the victims of rocket attacks. Two complainants were slightly injured thereby. All people had to flee their homes and have remained in camps since then, with all the attendant emotional and psychological problems. Their normal daily life is thoroughly disrupted,” the lawyer Coveliers explains.

War Crimes

The filing of the complaint is a first step. It is now up to the federal prosecutor to determine whether the complaint is admissible. Should that be the case, he must appoint an investigating judge. Coveliers points out that attacks which do not distinguish between military targets and civilian targets can be seen as war crimes. “But it is for the courts to decide. Whether we can actually manage to get one person to Belgium to be sentenced is questionable, but it will be an important step if an investigating judge were to investigate the matter.”

Israelis file complaint against Hamas with Belgian judiciary

Fifteen Israelis with the Belgian nationality have filed a complaint with the Belgian courts against the radical Islamic movement Hamas, accusing it of committing war crimes by firing rockets from the Gaza Strip. That is what their lawyer Roel Coveliers made known this Thursday.

The complainants say they have become victims in varying degrees. Since Hamas took over power in Gaza in June 2007, thousands of stove-pipe projectiles have been fired on southern Israel, causing seven deaths.

The impetus for the legal action comes from the European pro-Israel lobby “European Friends of Israel” [EFI] and is a response to the attempts to try to bring Israeli leaders to international tribunals.

The complaint is based on the report of the South African judge Richard Goldstone. He accuses the Jewish state and Palestinian armed groups of “war crimes” during the Israeli Gaza offensive about one year ago. According to the Palestinians, there were 1,400 dead on their side, as they claim, mostly civilians.

The Belgian law provides that international crimes can be judged by Belgian courts when the victims are Belgians or at least had been living in Belgium for three months before the acts were committed.

Until 2003, the Belgian courts had universal jurisdiction in relation to alleged war crimes, thus without the suspected perpetrators or victims having a relationship with Belgium. But after a tsunami of complaints against, for instance, the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former U.S. president George Bush, this caused such a diplomatic storm that the Belgian Parliament abolished the law, although some elements have been included now in the criminal code.

Complaint by Israelis in Belgium: “PR disaster” due to involvement of Coveliers (Ha’aretz)

Belgian Jewish Organizations in Antwerp [actually, only one] and Israel strongly criticized the involvement of a leader of Vlaams Belang in a complaint by Israeli Belgians to the Belgian judicial authorities against Hamas, as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported on Friday. The organizations warn of a “public relations disaster”.

At the initiative of a pro-Israeli lobby, the law office of Hugo Coveliers (Vlaams Belang) has filed the request with the Belgian court to sentence Hamas leaders in Gaza because Israel they have caused damage to Belgians living in Israel.

“The involvement of (Coveliers) […] is very stupid,” said Eli Ringer, Vice Chairman of the Forum of Jewish Organizations in Belgium. “From a PR perspective in Belgium this is a catastrophe”. VB is no movement with which Israel should be associated in the Belgian political discourse. From a practical point of view, the initiatives of Vlaams Belang guys are not taken seriously.”

“[…] The idea has little chance of success in Belgium, even without the involvement,” of VB, said David Lowy, founder of a group of Belgian immigrants, “Jobi”. “To involve them with this is like shooting yourself in the foot or making an own-goal. Having Vlaams Belang out there defending the Israeli position only makes this more difficult to defend.”

On behalf of the lobbying group European Initiative, Director Uri Jablonka contended that the “only link” to Coveliers and his lawyers is that they “represent our lawsuit,” on a strictly professional basis.

It’s not “VB out there”, as Eli Ringer, Vice Chairman of the Forum of Jewish Organizations in Belgium says, suggesting that the law firm and VB are the same — although VB may indeed be the only party in Belgium (together with LDD of Dedecker) defending Israel. Even the left-wing Roth Institute on anti-Semitism in Tel Aviv, which also denounces VB, states:

In September 2008, MEP Frank Vanhecke, one of the leaders of Vlaams Belang, was interviewed by Israel’s Ha’aretz after the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs decided to lift his immunity (see below). Vanhecke said he was aware that many Jews viewed Vlaams Belang as anti-Semitic, but that this “misconception” was due in part to a “grave error” on the part of some Flemish secessionists who had sided with the Nazis in the 1940s “only as a misguided and naïve attempt to achieve independence.” He also referred to “the unacceptable behavior of a few weeds” who associated themselves with the party, adding: “They say I’m anti-Semitic when the truth is I am one of Israel’s staunchest defenders in the European Parliament.” Unlike its Flemish counterparts, the French-speaking right has never put anti-Semitism on hold.

The same Roth Institute thus also criticizes the VB background of the director of Coveliers’ law firm, finally discovering in 2008 that “Among all progressive and leftist circles, the Jew who does not openly disown the State of Israel is considered the enemy of humankind. Indymedia Belgium […] is one of the vectors of radical anti-Zionism and the new anti-Semitism. […] For contemporary Belgian opposition to Israel serves the interests of many components of its society, on the left as well as on the right. […] Unlike its Flemish counterparts, the French-speaking right has never put anti-Semitism on hold.”

In 2008 Eli Ringer, the Vice Chairman of the Forum of Jewish Organizations [FJO] in Belgium, stated to Ha’aretz that “should Vlaams Belang visit Jerusalem [Filip Dewinter was invited by Professor Eldad for a conference], there will be a real mess, because it will break the Jewish boycott of this problematic and xenophobic entity.”

However, Hans Knoop, the FJO Forum-partner of Eli Ringer, states: “I have lived twenty years in Belgium,” said Knoop [who emigrated there from the Netherlands]. “When I came here, the Jewish community then viewed the Vlaams Blok, now Vlaams Belang, as a great danger because they were against foreigners. Now everything is seen as a threat except Vlaams Belang, which on the basis of the anti-Islam agenda clearly makes overtures.”

Not to mention Eli Ringer’s counterpart in the Netherlands, “Een Ander Joods Geluid” [Another Jewish Voice], which openly sides with left-wing and extreme left-wing Hamas supporters like the anti-Wilders “Netherlands Admits Color” [international Socialists, supporters of Hamas], Netherlands Palestine Committee [supporters of PLO and Hamas] and Vrouwen in het Zwart [Woman in Black, left-wing pro-Hamas group] who demand that Israel to withdraw fully and unconditionally from all occupied [sic] Palestine territories.”

HoeiBoei wrote: “Too bad in the case of Another Jewish Voice (EAJG) that in their criticism of Israel they are blind to the anti-Semitism of fundamentalist terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.”

There are pictures and material on this page, and activities are listed here.

From the activities list:

Israeli Ambassador Gideon Meir makes no apology for his government’s hard-handed approach towards the Palestinians. He tells Kurt Sansone that Israelis are fed up with ceding land for peace and getting war in return.

Finally someone who says what should be said — this is the Wilders tone, a splendid interview with Gideon Meir here:

There is a new government that was elected by the Israeli people and it is the people who have made it clear that they are fed up. For 16 years we made concessions, giving up land for peace and peace did not come. The key word is negotiation. This means that the two parties talk and both make concessions. But what do we have until now? Israel gave up land and in return all it got was more war, more terror.

There is also an excellent article by Magdi Christiano Allam.

Ok, this is a typical Belgian story but please try to understand, we're a small country and federalised...

Here's the short version; on December 21 a chemical company called Floridienne Chemie accidentally drops between 300 and 600 kg of zinc-chloride in the Dender, a river which runs both through Flanders and Wallonia.

What happens next is rather unbelievable but still....

As the origin of this environmental accident lies in the Walloon part of the country the local government instance there has the responsibility to warn the other instances down river, in this case the Flemish government.

The whole procedure for this type of crisis situation is known by all involved, it is written down and it is followed... It clearly states that a FAX (!) should be send to warn the other instances...!

And of course we all know how a fax works these days.... So in this specific scenario the warning fax never came through because of an electricity failure on the Flemish side.

Apart from the fact that both responsible environmental ministers, Philippe Henry (Ecolo) & Joke Schauvliege (CD&V) played a shameful and childish blame game for about a week, it is also incredible to find out that a crisis procedure is based on sending a fax !

Here are some tips in case they both take their "communications audit" serious enough this time:

• Never, ever rely on just one means of alert... Use a cascading system where you would use the phone first, SMS second, email next etc.... I would not even include a fax or, if needed, I would fax through the internet.
• Always use a control system - you need to be certain the message or alert arrived. By phone it is quite obvious but also with SMS and email you can get a response saying the message was delivered. Even better is to agree on a "confirm receipt" sign from the other side.
• Be prepared for electricity and/or internet failures - always have "runners", people who are able to physically carry a message to others, integrated into your plan.

Several governments, even smaller local entities, use well known industrial messaging systems which have already proven their effectiveness. Of course business continuity and crisis management is serious stuff and should be handled by certified professionals.. but there is no excuse these days not to use a standardised system.

At the same time, crisis preparedness is a state of mind and a "culture" and I am not so certain that even with the finest systems in place our federalised entities and their ministers would be able to manage another crisis.

We've seen it before - when the system works they suddenly don't understand the language spoken on the "other side". Another case for having civil servants who speak the 3 national languages, but that in itself is considered a "crisis prone" discussion in my little country.

At the end of the day in this specific story, the environment and the Belgian taxpayers have lost here, and that's a pity...