By Daya Varma

Notwithstanding compromises made by the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League in the past, its impressive victory against Zia Khaleda’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in the December 29 elections in Bangladesh is a refreshing development and a decisive verdict against fundamentalism.
The Indian subcontinent is never short of springing surprises of optimism notwithstanding chronic poverty and interludes of violence and discord. The backward nation of Nepal rose like no one had ever imagined; a despotic monarch is gone and the Communist Party of Nepal is on a pragmatic rather than a reckless path. The ever powerful General Musharraf is finally gone; that is an achievement although no one is sure that the control of the Pakistan Army on civil life has ended. Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which allowed the massacre of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, had to lick its wounds in the 2004 parliamentary elections. Not only that – in the recent provincial elections too, BJP’s hold on some states and its influence in other provinces has declined. The Mumbai terrorist attack has not materialized into a major India-Pakistan conflict – at least as yet. In the recent elections in Kashmir, far more people went to the polls than can be accounted for due to police and army coercion; an entirely new situation is ripe for a meaningful solution.
To top it all, the people of Bangladesh did something which surprised even the hardened skeptics. First they forced an election against the wishes of the military-cum-bureaucracy. And when the elections were finally held on December 29, 2008, fundamentalists were not just edged out but rather trounced. It is estimated that the voting percentage was nearly 70%; this in itself was a momentous warning to military-bureaucratic rule, which invariably thrives on promises to root out political and other forms of corruption.
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(Submitted by Feroz Mehdi)

by Najam Sethi

A PEACE delegation comprising human and womens rights activists, media peaceniks and party political representatives from Pakistan recently visited New Delhi. They went with a threefold objective: to “ condole” the Mumbai attacks and express solidarity with Indians in their hour of grief, to explain how and why Pakistan too is a victim of the same sort of terrorism that is threatening to afflict India, and to try and put the peace process and people- to- people channel back on track.
In view of the adverse travel advisories put out by both countries and the war paint put on by both media, the delegation risked being branded “ unpatriotic” in Pakistan. But the two leaders of the delegation, Asma Jehangir, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, and Imtiaz Alam, Secretary- General of the South Asia Free Media Association, are known as fearless crusaders in the region for doggedly promoting the cause of peace between India and Pakistan. Given the goodwill they personally enjoy in India, they threw caution to the wind at home and embarked on their journey across the border with great expectations.
In the event, however, even they were surprised by the consistently frosty, sometimes hostile, reception that they received at private, official and media forums in Delhi. It seemed as if all of India, public and private, had consciously united to send out one harsh message to Pakistan: that India is deeply wounded and will not take another such attack lying down. This is perfectly understandable.
THE terrorist attack was on the Taj Mahal Hotel, the pride and symbol of resurgent modern India; it humiliated Indias “ powerful” security establishment by exposing its gaping weaknesses; and the terrorists targeted innocent civilians rather than any specific military or intelligence organ of the state or government, thereby signaling their intent to wage war on India, Indians, and indeed the very idea of secular India.
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By Amy Goodman

Karl Rove recently described George W. Bush as a book lover, writing, “There is a myth perpetuated by Bush critics that he would rather burn a book than read one.” There will be many histories written about the Bush administration. What will they use for source material? The Bush White House was sued for losing e-mails, and for skirting laws intended to protect public records. A federal judge ordered White House computers scoured for e-mails just days before Bush left office. Three hundred million e-mails reportedly went to the National Archives, but 23 million e-mails remain “lost.” Vice President Dick Cheney left office in a wheelchair due to a back injury suffered when moving boxes out of his office. He has not only hobbled a nation in his attempt to sequester information – he hobbled himself. Cheney also won court approval to decide which of his records remain private.
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By J. MICHAEL COLE
Michael Ignatieff, once a respected academic, authored a handful of important books on human rights, nationalism and ethnic conflict in the 1990s, making him the pride of many Canadians — even if, from 1978 until 2000, he lived in the UK, and then in the US, where he was director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. Blood and Belonging, The Warrior’s Honor and The Rights Revolution were all must-reads, proof, we thought, that intellectuals had a role to play in describing, and perhaps influencing, the politics of our time. Despite his almost 30 years of exile, Canadians counted him as one of theirs, someone who reflected the ever-elusive “Canadian values.”
Then Sept. 11, 2001, happened, and more importantly, the US launched its mass disinformation campaign to justify its invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11.
Strangely, during that period Ignatieff became more conservative in his views and penned justifications of his own to support the actions of the US government in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Empire Lite,” which served as both catchphrase and title of one of his books, followed by The Lesser Evil, epitomized Ignatieff’s radicalization. Where in the past Ignatieff had sided with the downtrodden, and where he had been so perceptive on the idiosyncrasies of nationalism, the academic now argued that empire — supported by force of arms and buttressed by an architecture of racism, lies and deceit — was a good thing, even if, in retaliation for Sept. 11 and in the name of “nation-building” a la US, Washington ended up slaying more Afghan civilians than died on that fateful morning in September, and many, many more in Iraq.
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By Martin Enserink

Serotonin, the brain chemical involved in depression, anger, and a variety of other human behaviors, turns out to have another surprising role: It transforms desert locusts from solitary, innocuous bugs into swarming, voracious pests that can ravage orchards and fields in a matter of hours. The findings, published in tomorrow’s issue of Science, could point the way to new locust-control methods that don’t rely on insecticides.
Most of the time, the desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) is a bland, greenish insect that lives an inconspicuous life, shunning other members of its species and flying only by night. But when their densities reach a certain threshold, locusts become gregarious: They seek out one another’s company, start reproducing explosively, and eventually form massive swarms that can move thousands of kilometers beyond their usual habitats and create havoc of biblical proportions. The behavior changes are accompanied by a complete physical makeover, taking several generations, during which the insects first turn pink and eventually black and bright yellow.
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By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

A betting man, the morning after Obama’s inauguration, would surely have found odds-on stakes that the new president’s first daring cavalry charge would be an assault on the economic crisis, worsening day by day. Our Wednesday-morning gambler would have found much longer odds being offered on any surprising moves in that graveyard of presidential initiatives sign-posted “Israel-Palestine”.
But there’s been no exciting surprise or originality in Obama’s opening engagements with the reeling economy. His team is flush with economists and bankers who helped blaze the path to ruin. He’s been selling his $819 billion stimulus program on the Hill, with all the actors playing their allotted roles and many a cheering Democrat not entirely confident that the House Republicans may not have had a point when, unanimously, they voted No on the package
America’s economy may be so hollowed out, its industrial base so eroded by twenty years of job exports to China and other low wage sanctuaries, that a bail-out may not turn the tide, Then the Republicans will have their told-you-so’s primed and ready to go in the mid-term elections.
But Obama can scarcely be blamed for putting up his $819 billion pump primer. It was a given, from the moment he got elected, and indeed probably owes, both in its good and bad components, more to Rep Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, than to Geithner or Summers.
Obama’s timid folly comes with the impending $2 to 4-trillion bailout package for the banks, signaled by Treasury Secretary Geithner. If anything can make Wall Street smile bravely through the hail of public ridicule for the way it’s been handing out the previous wad of bail-out money in the form of bonuses, it’s the prospect of getting further truckloads of greenbacks to lend out to Americans already crippled by debt.
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Watch 60 Minutes segment by Bob Simon

The Human Costs of the Economic Crisis

By Nick Turse

The body count is still rising. For months on end, marked by bankruptcies, foreclosures, evictions, and layoffs, the economic meltdown has taken a heavy toll on Americans. In response, a range of extreme acts including suicide, self-inflicted injury, murder, and arson have hit the local news. By October 2008, an analysis of press reports nationwide indicated that an epidemic of tragedies spurred by the financial crisis had already spread from Pasadena, California, to Taunton, Massachusetts, from Roseville, Minnesota, to Ocala, Florida.

In the three months since, the pain has been migrating upwards. A growing number of the world’s rich have garnered headlines for high profile, financially-motivated suicides. Take the New Zealand-born “millionaire financier” who leapt in front of an express train in Great Britain or the “German tycoon” who did much the same in his homeland. These have, with increasing regularity, hit front pages around the world. An example would be New York-based money manager René-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet, who slashed his wrists after he “lost more than $1 billion of client money, including much, if not all, of his own family’s fortune.” In the end, he was yet another victim of financial swindler Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

An unknown but rising number of less wealthy but distinctly well-off workers in the financial field have also killed themselves as a result of the economic crisis — with less press coverage. Take, for instance, a 51-year-old former analyst at Bear Stearns. Learning that he would be laid off after JPMorgan Chase took over his failed employer, he “threw himself out of the window” of his 29th-floor apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Or consider the 52-year-old commercial real estate broker from suburban Chicago who “took his life in a wildlife preserve” just “a month after he publicly worried over a challenging market,” or the 50-year-old “managing partner at Leeward Investments” from San Carlos, California, who got wiped out “in the markets” and “suffocated himself to death.”

Beverly Hills clinical psychologist Leslie Seppinni caught something of our moment when she told Forbes magazine that this was “the first time in her 18-year career that businessmen are calling her with suicidal impulses over their financial state.” In the last three months, alone, “she has intervened in at least 14 cases of men seriously considering taking their lives.” Seppinni offered this observation: “They feel guilt and shame because they think they should have known what was coming with the market or they should have pulled out faster.”

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