Month: October 2009

Columnist Bob Herbert has a must-read piece in today’s edition of the New York Times about what happened when justice failed and an innocent man was put on death row in Texas.

Referencing an article appearing in this week’s New Yorker (which can be read here), Herbert reports that on December 21, 1991, Cameron Todd Willingham was at his home in Corsicana, Texas, asleep. His two-year-old daughter and twin one-year-old daughters were in another room. He awoke when he heard the cries of his oldest child, and he quickly found that their room was being engulfed by fire.

Herbert tells us what happened next:

Willingham said he tried to rescue the kids but was driven back by smoke and flames. At one point his hair caught fire. As the heat intensified, the windows of the children’s room exploded and flames leapt out. Willingham, who was 23 at the time, had to be restrained and eventually handcuffed as he tried again to get into the room.

There was no reason to believe at first that the fire was anything other than a horrible accident. But fire investigators, moving slowly through the ruined house, began seeing things (not unlike someone viewing a Rorschach pattern) that they interpreted as evidence of arson.

Even though investigators couldn’t determine any motive for Willingham to kill his own children, nevertheless he was arrested and charged with capital murder. Willingham declined a plea deal that would have spared his life and maintained his innocence for the twelve years that he sat on death row. He was executed on February 17th, 2004.

Herbert points out that in the weeks leading up to Willingham’s execution, a leading chemist and fire expert named Gerald Hurst reviewed the arson investigator’s case against Willingham and knocked down key pieces of evidence. This didn’t persuade the state to spare Willingham’s life. Nevertheless, as part of an official review of the state of Texas’s mishandling of forensic evidence, another fire expert named Craig Beylor reviewed the Willingham case and recently released a report on the evidence that sent Willingham to his death.

Herbert writes:

The report is devastating, the kind of disclosure that should send a tremor through one’s conscience. There was absolutely no scientific basis for determining that the fire was arson, said Beyler. No basis at all. He added that the state fire marshal who investigated the case and testified against Willingham “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires.” He said the marshal’s approach seemed to lack “rational reasoning” and he likened it to the practices “of mystics or psychics.”

It looks like Willingham was completely innocent of murder and the house fire that claimed the lives of his daughters was a tragic accident. His execution by the state of Texas is irreversible. And it was the scientifically unsound testimony of an incompetent fire investigator (along with a jailhouse informant who was later shown to be unreliable) that put Willingham in the death chamber.

TH

PAKISTAN: The ritual abuse and naked humiliation of three women casts a deeper shame on the justice system that supported it
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AHRC-STM-206-2009 September 30, 2009

PAKISTAN: The ritual abuse and naked humiliation of three women casts a deeper shame on the justice system that supported it
The violent humiliation of three women reported from Punjab this week has thrown stark light on the complicity of the police and the courts in gender-based crimes — and on the continued degeneration of law enforcement in the region. This week three woman accused of prostitution were forced to parade naked through their neighborhood and onto a local highway; they were stripped and physically tormented under the direction of a man who leads a banned militant organisation. Yet when the police arrived on the scene they arrested the women. The courts complied with the arrest.

According to media reports this violation started, as many do in the country, with a land dispute. Union Council Nazim or Chairman Mr. Ilyas Khanzada wished to purchase the house of a woman, Ms. Shehnaz Sirajo, who had been accused of running a brothel from home for a number of years. On September 27 a mob attacked her house, dragged two women out and destroyed it. The women were stripped, reportedly under the orders of a Mr. Intezar-ul-Haq who leads a banned Muslim militant organization, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, but before they were forced to walk nude, children were instructed to degrade them by poking them with sticks, one woman’s face was blackened with ink and garlands of shoes were put around both their necks. When the home owner arrived on the scene the same was done to her. The three were paraded and tormented in a procession that led from their village onto a nearby national highway about 500m away.

In a show of solidarity for the base vigilante hysteria, the police arrested the three victims as soon as they arrived on the scene, to a chorus of jeers. The women were booked under sections 371-A and 371-B of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) which deals with prostitution. Though dismissing all of the women’s rights to protection — no one leading the mob was arrested — police have protested that they did their duty by providing the women with clothes before they were taken away.

The next day in the local magistrate’s court of Patuki town, advocates objected to the arrest and demanded that cases be filed against the police for the inappropriate use of the penal code; they after all, applied the wrong section with no evidence. The magistrate chose not to do so, simply releasing the women on bail. It is still not clear on which charges they were being released on bail. According to Pakistani law, persons who are booked on wrong case must be set free.

The gravest abuse of all was that neither the police nor the judge considered the rights of those being abused and defiled, because they were women; though many of these rights are clearly and very strongly represented in the constitution and the penal code. The one clear crime taking place when the police arrived, under Section 354-A of the PPC, can be met with the death penalty. As the Section reads: ‘assault or use of criminal force to women and stripping her of her clothes, in that condition exposes her to the public view, shall be punished with death or imprisonment for life, and shall be liable to a fine.’ Yet instead possible prostitution and the satisfying the irrational zeal of a mob took the officers’ priority — perfectly symbolic of the ways in which Pakistan’s laws are being belittled, mocked and abused by those meant to uphold them.

The question here perhaps, is whether the police and the magistrate even knew about this law. It is entirely likely that with the rights of women being so little regarded in legal practice in the country, laws protecting them have fallen into the shadows. They need a good airing. The Asian Human Rights Commission consistently comes across cases, in Punjab province in particular, in which vital laws are not being used; and strongly doubts the knowledge and the competence of certain police, judicial members and even ministers in the provincial government of Punjab, in applying laws correctly in the running of the state.

The other option is that the police and the magistrate knew of the law and of their responsibility to protect the abused women, but did not consider it worth applying. This not only shows a disregard for the law and those who wrote it, but is once again symbolic of the depths to which the judiciary has fallen when it comes to the protection of women. Supreme almost medieval challenges continue to face the women of Pakistan and they are receiving very little help.

That the police allowed their duties to be dictated to them by the leader of a banned militant organization is a different and yet equally disturbing, entrenched issue, one dealt with regularly in AHRC statements and appeals.

The Asian Human Rights Commission is outraged and appalled at the handling of this incident by the authorities and condemns the weaknesses it brings to light, and it urges the government of President Asif Zardari to take strong and appropriate action. These violations take place regularly because they go unpunished. The government must take a much stronger interest in the revival and implementation of laws to protect women in order for a change to be seen.

The AHRC urges that all those involved in the ritual vigilante and abuse and humiliation of these three women be thoroughly investigated and punished under section 354-A of PPC, and the police officials and magistrate responsible for the further legally sanctioned abuse of these women be investigated for misconduct. Training and education are also clearly required in these areas; we recommend that gender sensitization programs are undertaken without delay. For the women who fell foul of this vast male ocean of administrative and moral ignorance, the legal system must now be strong and representative. Compensation must be paid and their honour restored.

# # #
About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.

AHRC

By Jonathan Amos , Science reporter, BBC News

Herschel trains two eyes, Pacs and Spire, on our Galaxy’s centre

A remarkable view of our Galaxy has been obtained by Europe’s billion-euro Herschel Space Observatory.

The telescope was put in a special scanning mode to map a patch of sky.

The images reveal in exquisite detail the dense, contorted clouds of cold gas that are collapsing in on themselves to form new stars.
Herschel, which has the largest mirror ever put on an orbiting telescope, was launched in May as a flagship mission of the European Space Agency.

It is tuned to see far-infrared wavelengths of light and is expected to give astronomers significant insights into some of the fundamental processes that shape the cosmos.

Herschel’s great advantage is that its sensitivity allows it to see things that are beyond the vision of other space telescopes, such as Hubble.

A prime goal is to understand the mechanisms that control the earliest phases of stellar evolution.

HERSCHEL SPACE TELESCOPE

• The observatory is tuned to see the Universe in the far-infrared
• Its 3.5m diameter mirror is the largest ever flown in space
• Herschel can probe clouds of gas and dust to see stars being born
• It will investigate how galaxies have evolved through time
• The mission will end when its helium refrigerant boils off

Rich data return
Herschel’s special scanning mode means it has to shift its gaze back and forth across an area of sky, which in this case was about 16 times as big as the size of the Moon as viewed from Earth. The telescope was looking towards the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, in the direction of the Southern Cross constellation.

The mission will end when its helium refrigerant boils off

The scanning mode works with two of Herschel’s three instruments operating in tandem.

The UK-led Spire camera responds to longer wavelengths of light (250-500 microns – that is about 500-1,000 times longer than the wavelengths of light we detect with our eyes).

The German-led Pacs camera covers shorter wavelengths (70-170 microns).

Their pictures reveal a chaotic scene of gas and dust, and stars in all stages of development.

The material being observed is very cold – typically less than minus 170C (100 kelvin).

Anomaly investigation

BBC

Written by Tatiana Felix

Palma, Maracanã, Castanha, Cocal, Guará, Girassol, Pirapire, Tupi. The list of various names includes more than 40 local currencies that circulate in Brazilian neighborhoods and small towns where there are community banks, created to strengthen the economy in needy communities.

The worth of the local currency is identical to the real, the official currency of Brazil, but it is more valuable than the real because businesses give discounts for purchases made with this alternative money, according to Joaquim de Melo, founder and coordinator of Banco Palmas.

The bank is headquartered in Conjunto Palmeiras, a neighborhood on the South side of Fortaleza, the capital of the northeastern state of Ceará.

The use of the currency is simple: the local residents can trade the real for the local currency in a community bank and use it in regional businesses. If it is necessary to buy something with a real outside of the community where the bank is active, then a person can do the exchange in reverse.

The objective of the local currency is to have the currency circulate in the community. The practice increases sales and generates more jobs in those areas.

Banco Palmas is a pioneer in this area. It was the first community bank created in Brazil, founded in 1998. Two years later it brought out the currency of the same name, the palmas. The communitarian experience yielded such positive results that in 2005 the Network of Community Banks in Brazil was created.

According to Melo, around 240 commercial establishments are credentialed to receive the palmas. The attraction is the discount given by the business if the customer pays with in palmas. If they buy in reais, there is no discount.

“For the businessperson this means that the customer is loyal,” explains Melo. The practice aims to stimulate the use of the social currency.

“The real can be used outside of the community, generating wealth in other areas. The local currency has the power to generate wealth in the neighborhood,” he emphasized.

He estimates that there are around thirty-six thousand palmas circulating monthly in the region and there is already a palmacard, a credit card from the community bank.

Banco Palmas is now an example for the rest of the country. In the same building is the Instituto Banco Palmas, which offers courses on finances through resources acquired from the Bank of Brazil.
Melo explained that the incentive is also given by the Ministry of Work and Employment, through the National Secretariat of Economic Solidarity, “The Ministry is one of our partners and has supported the creation of community banks in the country.”

B

Every fall, the harvest moon appears right around the autumnal equinox.

By Amy Farnsworth

A harvest moon appears above John Olson’s farm in Elkhart, Ill. All this week you can view the harvest moon.
(Chris Young/The State Journal-Register/AP/FILE)

Look up at the sky on Oct. 4 and you’ll be greeted by the orange glow of the harvest moon.

Every fall – either in September or October – the harvest moon appears right around the autumnal equinox. During this time, the moon travels on a narrower, elliptic path close to the horizon, rather than its standard path. The moon also appears larger than life due to what is called a “moon illusion.”

The harvest moon gets its name because the light from the moon allows farmers to work later hours – past sunset – and harvest staple crops such as pumpkins, squash, beans, and wild rice, during this time period. The Farmers’ Almanac says “the moon typically rises an average of 50 minutes later each night, but for the few nights around the Harvest Moon, the Moon seems to rise at nearly the same time each night: just 25 to 30 minutes later across the US, and only 10 to 20 minutes later for much of Canada and Europe.”

The colors of the harvest moon vary and it can appear in red, yellow, or orange hues due to air pollution – mainly from forest fires.

Throughout centuries, the colorful harvest moon has inspired artists, painters, and poets. Many photographers have tried to capture images of the harvest moon, but it’s not very easy.

To take stellar photos of this seasonal event, Writer Geoff Gaherty of Space.com offers the following photography tips:

If your camera has automatic exposure, the scene will look too bright and the moon will be overexposed. The trick to capturing the harvest moon in a photograph is first, to zoom in with your telephoto lens to make the moon appear larger, and secondly, to underexpose the picture by a couple of stops, to darken the landscape, saturate the colors, and expose the moon properly.

Soon, it’ll be time to take out those cameras and capture one of nature’s annual spectacles.

CSM

By Dr. Sarojini Sahoo

(Raj Thakre, a thug, is the founder of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena and is the nephew of Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, the big but declining thug of Bombay or Mumbai. His tactics are similar to those of his uncle: patriotic jingoism, nationalist noise, and minority bashing. Ed.)

I haven’t seen Bollywood movie “Wake Up Sid”. I haven’t read it’s review. I was not aware about it’s info till today. It came to my knowledge that Film-maker Karan Johar on Friday apologised to MNS supremo Raj Thakre for using the word ‘Bombay’ instead of ‘Mumbai’ in his new film ‘Wake Up Sid’. It is reported that Raj has warned the film maker to prepare for the consequences , as they have hurt Marathi Manas by using the word Bombay in place of Mumbai.

I can’t understand, how the spelling or pronunciation of wrong words hurt the sentiments of a particular mass. Odisha, my own state has been spelt as Orissa, Udissa or Urissa, by non Oriya speakers and I don’t think, by spelling such they have any intention to dishonour my state or its people. It is just a question of ignorance, habit and tradition. Germany is spelt as Deutschland by Germans. In German, France is still called Frankreich, which literally means “Realm of the Franks”. In Spain, they pronounce their country as Espana and their language as Espanol. In Germany Spain is known as Spanien. In Spanish they call France as Francia. In Danish it is spelt as Frankrig.

There are a lot of examples that show that the name of one city and country has been spelt differently from language to language. When we are living in a global era, how can we expect that we would make every one to bind with our law. It is also very disgusting and anti democratic that Raj Thakre as an individual should issue any ‘forman’ (order) to stop the movie. It is the duty of judiciary not the MNS chief to make decision on any such matter. No one did bar Raj Thakre to ask for justice to the court of law.

This ‘news’ made me to worry. Are we moving on the path to bury our democracy and our democratic rights? Are we becoming more intolerant to democratic values? Aren’t the radical elements making us fools by exploiting mass sentiments?

http://www.anaindia.blogspot.com/

Dr. Sahoo’s website is http://sarojinisahoo.com/ and she can be reached at sarojinisahoo2003@yahoo.co.in

The current Utne Reader (their 25th Anniversary issue) features an article by Tom Jacobs called “Liberals Aren’t Un-American. Conservatives Aren’t Ignorant” (excerpted from the magazine Miller-McCune), which highlights the theories of Jonathan Haidt. Haidt, a University of Virginia Psychology Professor, believes both conservatives and liberals skew the moral argument and demonize each other even though they are interdependent. Haidt believes, perhaps correctly, that conservatives strive to uphold authority while liberals challenge it. He believes that if conservatives ran the world we would resemble North Korea and if liberals ran the world it would be chaos.

Haidt believes that morality is built on “five foundational moral impulses.” These impulses are:

• Harm/Care: It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.
• Fairness/ Reciprocity: Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.
• In-Group Loyalty: People should be true to their group and wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty, and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.
• Authority/ Respect: People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.
• Purity/ Sanctity: The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination, and associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

In the broadest sense, a moral entity would be one that contains all the above categories to some extent. According to Haidt, liberals are focused on the first two while conservatives are focused on the last three. He may be onto something; his website, YourMorals.org, allows you to take a quiz and see the results for not just yourself but also other self-identified liberals and conservatives. According to his results, in the aggregate liberals do emphasize the first two and conservatives the last three.

I’ve heard conservative/liberal morality arguments before; George Lakoff’s Moral Politics comes to mind. I’ll say exactly what I said in my review of that book in college, it’s all bunk. Haidt’s questions are so devoid of context and so complex as to be stupid. Here are a few examples:

• Respect for authority is something all children need to learn
• People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed
• People should be loyal to their family members, even when family members have done something wrong
• If I were a soldier and disagreed with my commanding officer’s orders, I would obey anyway because it was my duty

After each of these questions, and more, you are given the choice to strongly, moderately, or slightly agree or disagree. These are complicated questions, how on earth are you supposed to answer with a bubble sheet?

Children do need to learn to respect authority but they should also learn to challenge authority and call a teacher out when they say something wrong. Where on the agree/ disagree scale is that choice?

Should people do disgusting things? Who is going to answer that people should? And individuals might disagree, for example, on just how disgusting it would be to defecate in the woods out of necessity.

Should people be loyal to their family? What exactly does this mean, do I not turn my sister into the cops for a triple homicide, or do I act civilly the day after we have a fight? These are very different things with different answers and you cannot express it on the agree/disagree scale.

Would you follow orders if you were a soldier? Yes and no. If my commanding officer told me to hook electrodes to a guy’s testicles for fun I would have him court marshaled. If he decided to enter a town from the south as opposed to the north I would shut my mouth and do it. It depends on the context, it depends on the order, and it depends on your relationship with that officer.

All of these questions have a lot of context and complicated answers that this test does not allow for. All Haidt is really measuring is responses to key words that appear throughout the questions: authority, harm, loyal, duty, and more. So self-identified conservatives react more favorably to the word loyal, I fail to see what that has to do with morality or politics.

Politics is a complicated area. It does derive from people’s morality, I don’t deny that. But it is so much more complicated than Heidt’s test allows; there is the cult of personality, self interest, and parental party affiliation all playing into how people vote. Politics is much more about who gets what, when then it is about legislating morality. Haidt’s research is interesting, I give him that, he has shown that self-identified conservatives and liberals react differently to loaded words, but it is a mistake to believe that anyone’s politics, much less their morality, can be measured.

TH

As part of the U.S.-Africa Business Summit being hosted by the Corporate Council on Africa this week, four African heads of state, participated in a Presidential Roundtable on regional integration. The presidents of Rwanda, Ghana, the Republic of Congo, and Sao Tome and Principe answered questions, along with Brian Herlihy, CEO of Seacom. Questions were posed by David Senay, CEO of Fleishman-Hillard. Following are excerpts.

Investment is much easier than it used to be in Rwanda. The Financial Times says it takes an entrepreneur just two procedures and three days to start up a business. I’m not sure there are many places in the world where that happens. Can you tell us how you did this?

President Paul Kagame – Rwanda: What we have done is what other people can do. It is not magic, but we have focused on stabilizing our country, making sure that there is peace and security; second, build institutions of governance that deliver the public good as required, and then interact with the rest of the world in a way that we should be able to do it and working within the region.

But for us to be able to achieve what you have said in terms of being able to make it easy for people to do business in Rwanda, we had to take stock of what the situation has been in Rwanda, in the region and in general our continent … and after identifying those obstacles, then we started working on them, especially the ones that were within our means.

It was about putting in place institutions that would deal with matters of investment and trade … putting in place laws and regulations that would facilitate … establishing and doing business. Most importantly, having put these in place, you have to make sure that they work. You can have good laws, you can have good regulations, all kinds of good things that are written on paper and very impressive. But if you don’t follow through and make sure they serve the people they are supposed to serve then things will go wrong.

You have major ambitions for Rwanda for perhaps a regional hub for IT, for financial services, a regional airport, better roads, a rail link to the east coast of Africa. What are your highest priorities for the next years given the economic pressures right now, given the global recession? What do you want to accomplish next?

President Kagame: What we want to accomplish next builds on what we have already put in place that we need to consolidate, and also builds on the self-belief that we can actually do these things. Not only Rwanda. It will take Africa and the Africans ourselves to really take the lead in transforming our societies and develop our economies. Even if we are to partner with different people, still we have to take the lead ourselves.

But infrastructure is very important, for example, in facilitating businesses. You cannot talk about increased volume of trade when there are no roads, there are no rails, there are problems of air transport. At the same time you cannot talk about increased investments unless you can show that you will be able to supply electricity to industries. You cannot talk about communications and all that comes with it … unless you are able to put in place Internet and infrastructure providing that.

So focusing on infrastructure and believing that we can actually do it is what we are building on. The other major focus is on how we uplift our people … and bring them to participate in businesses at different levels and therefore be able to build on the infrastructure … This is the best way to fight poverty, through business, and this is the major focus we have in the next few years to come.

You preside over a nation of 24 or 25 million people with oil reserves, rich in precious metals and other commodities – a diversifying economy. You have the presence of many multi-national companies operating in Ghana. Tell us a little about your plans, or your vision for regional integration in West Africa. And we’d also like to hear a little bit about the economic partnership agreement that you’re in the process with other West African nations of negotiating with the European Union. Because that is a whole other phenomenon going on in Africa right now.

President John Atta Mills – Ghana: First of all, every political leader, especially in Africa, should ask himself or herself, why am I in power? To me the answer is very simple. The only justification for being in power is to help improve the living standards of our people. Nothing else matters.

How do I do this? By making sure that you have the necessary resources, you have the manpower, you create the necessary environment to promote businesses, either locally, or to attract foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment has no fixed allegiance to nationality. It goes wherever it is most welcome.
Now for us in Ghana we have realized that we cannot go it alone… We believe that charity begins at home and therefore the issue of regional integration is very important … In unity lies strength.

We are a group of very poor countries but we are very rich in national resources and therefore we have very common interests if we pool our resources. For example, if we strengthen cooperation among us we can have common services, common infrastructure, common energy programs. We think therefore that in West Africa the need for us to integrate is now more important than ever. We have been making strides although I must say we are not moving at the post that I think would guarantee us the kind of development we want in the time avail to us … In West Africa as a whole we have not done as well as we should.

(Regarding interim trade agreement with the European Union) let me say what is the use of an economic partnership agreement where you do not know what it is that you are putting into the partnership? There must be a level playing field, you must make sure that there is realistic quid pro quo. You must also make sure that from this partnership you will be able derive benefits [which will be] to the advantage of both partners.

Ghanaians must be empowered to take advantage of the partnership agreement. In West Africa right now you have three different trade regimes … How can you achieve anything when you have this divergence of interests? But we are working hard toward this.
The important thing that we should all realize, especially in West Africa, is that the people who voted us into power don’t owe us anything. They only want us to help improve their standard of living.
It is important that we bear this in mind. Sometimes certain events, certain positions taken by us political leaders are helping our people lose confidence in us. What our people have is only hope in a better future and we cannot disappoint them.

One of the concerns with economic partnership agreements used to be the whole question of market access, and that can go in different directions. Here you are trying to create new entrepreneurs, domestic businesses that can help your own economies and create employment. When you enter into trade agreements, you’re opening yourself up to competition from other countries, whether they’re within Africa, from Europe, wherever. Is that a real concern for you or not?

President Mills: Well, it is a concern. That is why I said that we must be sure that the parties to the partnership are equal. Equal in the sense that you will be able to derive the maximum advantage from this. Now, very often we have goods dumped on us. Sometimes you find that you signed this agreement but you don’t have a reliable supply chain. What we think is that, in these agreements, we should talk about a program for development. We should ensure that we are in a position to export and to export meaningfully.

A lot of countries are quite unhappy about some of these partnerships because they say there is no element of reciprocity – that we live an inter-dependent world and nobody is going to open their markets to you but we have to fight for this. Poor countries, if we are going to develop, must have access to the markets of the rich countries. It shouldn’t be the other way around. But there’s the question of quid pro quo and we’ll insist that we derive the maximum advantage from any such agreement.

You’re president of a country with, I think, more than four million people, [and] large oil reserves. We’d like to hear a little about your own plans for diversifying your economy. I know that you have some infrastructure priorities for your own country. Can you talk about what you’re doing in the Republic of Congo and then tie it back into this discussion of economic integration with your neighboring states.

AA

Amid an autumn breeze, a whirlwind transition has engulfed the political scene like the changing seasons. The government changed hands in what Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama described as “a triumph for democracy in Japan and a victory for the Japanese people” in his speech before the U.N. General Assembly.

Whether it is in fact a true victory will be decided by the people after Japan actually undergoes serious structural change. Here are some quotes from September, a month in which many turbulent political changes have occurred to make history.

A 45-year-old taxi driver, who gave his name simply as “Toshi,” liked the way newly appointed Cabinet ministers gave their inaugural news conferences. “They all spoke impromptu,” he said. “They are more serious than I thought. It is as though they are driving at full speed as they make a sharp turn. But I wonder if they can really make it.”

Already, a tsunami is shaking government offices in the Kasumigaseki district. Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada ordered ministry officials to look into secret agreements between the governments of Japan and the United States, saying, “This problem caused public distrust to spread and as a result weakened Japan’s diplomacy.”

“It is the job of politicians to make the move,” said a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official, adding that “if the prime minister or the foreign minister tells us to investigate, we will.”

Akira Nagatsuma, who “marched into” the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare as its chief, told his subordinates: “I am an examiner assigned by the people. I may clash with you, but I want you to get all the dirt out of your system.” Waving a copy of the Democratic Party of Japan’s manifesto, he said: “This is a written order of the people. Please carry it with you and carefully read it.”

The government told Naganohara, Gunma Prefecture, of its plan to cancel construction of the Yanba Dam. An angry town official blasted the decision, saying, “Because of the dam whose completion remains uncertain, the town became divided between proponents and opponents and residents who decided to move and those who remained behind.” The town greeted Seiji Maehara, the minister of land, infrastructure, transport and tourism, who came to inspect the site, with a sign that said “early completion.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said to the effect that every government has the right to change its policy, indicating a relaxed attitude by the Obama administration toward the DPJ’s plan to re-examine security policy. Apparently, she believes a party will become more realistic once it gains power. “You campaign in poetry but you govern in prose,” she told voters (during her presidential election campaign).

Audiences both at home and abroad are attentively watching changes that are about to unfold.

Asahi

By Rob Waters

Oct. 1 (Bloomberg) — The 4.4 million-year-old skeleton nicknamed “Ardi” by scientists who found her remains in Ethiopia show the earliest known ancestor of humans was a lot more like us than chimps or apes.

The 4-foot-tall Ardi was more than 1 million years older than the best-known human ancestor, “Lucy,” whose remains were found 75 kilometers (46 miles) away. Ardi, from Ardipithecus ramidus, walked on two feet and lived in groups where males cooperated rather than fought and females chose mates based on the size of their fangs, according to an analysis published today in the journal Science.

Ardi’s bones, discovered in the Afar Rift of Ethiopia and described in today’s report, challenge previous assumptions that when humans and apes split into separate species millions of years ago, the ancestor they shared was a lot like a chimpanzee.

“The common ancestor was not like a chimpanzee,” said Andrew Hill, an anthropologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who wasn’t involved in the research. “There were some good reasons we made that assumption, but it’s wrong.”

Some of the most compelling evidence of the divergent evolutionary paths humans and apes have taken is that the upper canine teeth of Ardi’s male peers were smaller than those of chimps.

“In Ardipithecus, the canine is no longer a weapon,” said Owen Lovejoy, an evolutionary biologist at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, who led the team’s anatomical analyses. “So there has been an enormous social transformation from heavily male-male conflict to virtual elimination of conflict. The males are cooperative.”

‘Lucy’ Not Oldest

The excavation and analysis of the remains of Ardi and her peers were conducted by a team of 47 scientists from 10 countries. Previously the earliest known pre-human remains were those of Lucy, a member of the genus Australopithecus afarensis.

Ardi helps fill a gap in the evolutionary history of humans, said Tim White, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the project’s co-director. “There’s been a tendency to view chimpanzees as the presumed stand-in for what the last common ancestor of both apes and humans looked like,” said Lovejoy. “This fossil changes that view completely.”

The report consists of 11 articles providing details of Ardi’s skull, hands, arms, pelvis and feet, and discussing how they illuminate the origin of humans and the evolution of behavior.

Finger Bone

Berhane Asfaw, an anthropologist with the Rift Valley Research Service in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was walking with his colleague Yohannes Haile-Selassie in November 1994 when Haile- Selassie found the first fragment of Ardi, a half of a finger bone.

Haile-Selassie blurted out “It’s a hominid,” recalled Asfaw, the project’s co-director, in a telephone interview from Addis Ababa yesterday, using the scientific name given to modern humans and their now-extinct ancestors. Haile-Selassie is now curator of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

“Then the whole crew converged on the area and we crawled on the surface like a baby on hands and knees” searching for additional bones, he said. In the coming months, they found dozens of bones scattered over an area of 10 to 15 meters (33 to 49 feet).
Lovejoy did an analysis on 145 teeth they found, including canines from as many as 21 individuals.

Not ‘Dagger-like’

They found Ardi’s group had teeth quite different from the “dagger-like” canines in male chimps and gorillas, Lovejoy said in a telephone interview yesterday. “Male gorillas use their canines to threaten and fight with other males and are usually successful in excluding all but one other male from the group.

As a result, gorillas live in groups with a dominant male, sometimes a subordinate male, and up to 12 females, Lovejoy said. Male chimpanzees stake out turf for their clan, patrol it, and keep unrelated males from entering, he said. Invading outsiders can be killed.

In Ardipithecus, male and female canines differ little in size and the male canine has been “dramatically feminized” with a shape like a diamond instead of a sharp point, the report found.

Lovejoy theorizes that canines shrunk in males as a result of evolutionary pressure from females choosing mates with smaller fangs who were less aggressive.

Food for Sex

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