Jaffer threatens to sue the Toronto Star

By QMI AGENCY

April 8, 2010

Former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer is threatening legal action against a Toronto newspaper, claiming its report on him was “inaccurate” and a “complete mischaracterization.”

The threat comes on the heels of a story published Thursday in the Toronto Star referencing Toronto businessman Nazim Gillani, chief executive officer of International Strategic Investments, who suggested Jaffer could help open the doors to the Prime Minister’s Office.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office quickly dismissed suggestions Jaffer could open its doors and help companies get lucrative grants.

“The accusation that the Prime Minister’s Office has opened its doors for Mr. Jaffer and his associates is false and it is also absurd,” said Andrew MacDougall, deputy press secretary.

Jaffer is not registered to lobby the federal government.

The boast that Jaffer had opened the Prime Minister’s Office for the company came following dinner in Toronto Sept. 10 that included Gillani, Jaffer, business associates and three women, the paper reported.

Later that night, Jaffer was stopped at a police roadside check and charged with drunk driving, speeding and possession of cocaine. Jaffer ended up pleading guilty to the lesser charge of careless driving, was fined $500 and made another $500 donation to charity.

The Toronto Star report is the latest of several controversies to dog Jaffer and his wife, Conservative MP Helena Guergis.

The Liberals have repeatedly called for Guergis to resign after she lost her temper at the airport in Charlottetown, calling Prince Edward Island a ‘hellhole.’

The Liberals have also asked the ethics commissioner to investigate her mortgage on an Ottawa area home following reports that the mortgage was for the entire purchase price of the property.

Top court sides with Crown in Courtepatte appeals

Michael Briscoe

By Ben Gelinas and Karen Kleiss, edmontonjournal April 8, 2010

EDMONTON — Michael Briscoe will again stand trial in the sex slaying of Edmonton teen Nina Courtepatte, and Joseph Laboucan’s first-degree murder conviction in the same case has been reinstated in a pair of decisions handed down Thursday by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Briscoe was initially acquitted, but the Court of Appeal ordered a new trial, because the judge didn’t consider the possibility that Briscoe was “wilfully blind.” The Supreme Court agreed.

“Even (Briscoe’s) own statements to police, on which the trial judge relied heavily, suggest that he had a strong, well-founded suspicion that someone would be killed at the golf course and that he may have been wilfully blind to the kidnapping and prospect of sexual assault,” the Supreme Court stated in its decision. “His statements also show that he deliberately chose not to inquire about what the members of the group intended to do, because he did not want to know.”

Briscoe, 34 at the time of Nina’s death, once again faces charges of first-degree murder, aggravated sexual assault and kidnapping.

Laboucan was 19 when Nina died. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life before the conviction was overturned by the Alberta Court of Appeal.

The trial judge rejected Laboucan’s testimony, believing he had reason to lie. The Court of Appeal said this showed the judge did not presume Laboucan innocent.

Canada’s top court determined that the judge’s consideration of Laboucan’s motives in testimony did not undermine the presumption of innocence.

Nina’s mother lauded the decisions.

“They shouldn’t get away with what they think they were going to get away with. I’m glad that the Supreme Court said no, and they’re going to be put back in their place,” Nina’s mother Peacha Atkinson said.

Atkinson said she had trouble sleeping as she turned over the potential outcomes overnight.

“To me, it’s been drawn out, going on too long, and yet, in the same breath, I have to thank everybody — the Crown and the Appeal Crown — for going to bat for this case,” Atkinson said. “For that, I am so grateful. If I didn’t have them in my corner, I don’t know what would happen.”

Atkinson said she’ll be there to watch Briscoe’s new trial.

“Now that he’s going back to trial, we can rest a little bit easier. We’re not looking forward to going back to trial, but I’ll be sitting there,” she said.

She hopes this will send Briscoe a message.

“We can never get over the feeling of the loss. So by seeing my face, you’ll know the pain we’re going through every day,” she said.

Evidence in court revealed that on April 3, 2005, a group of mall rats invited Nina, 13, and her friend to a bush party. The group drove to a golf course outside Edmonton, where Nina was raped twice before being slashed and bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer.

Nina Courtepatte

In all, five people were charged in connection with Nina’s death.

Michael Blaine “Pyro” Williams was 17 when he raped and helped beat Nina to death, then tried to light her clothes on fire.

In the face of DNA evidence, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance at parole for 10 years. The sentence was upheld on appeal in 2008.

Williams’ girlfriend at the time was a troubled 16-year-old mall rat nicknamed Buffy who came along and held Nina down while she was repeatedly raped, then she used her “throwing knives” to slash the young girl’s throat and face.

Buffy was convicted of second-degree murder and aggravated sexual assault and now, at the age of 21, is serving a four-year jail term followed by three years of supervision. She is the only one to be sentenced as a youth, and she received the most severe sentence available under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

Crown prosecutors believe she should have been convicted of first-degree murder, and they have appealed the verdict.

Stephanie Rosa Bird was 17 when she helped lure Nina to the golf course and struck the first blow, hitting her victim in the head with a wrench. Then she helped hold the girl down, before she had a change of heart and left the scene. The first judge who heard the case convicted Bird of manslaughter, in part because she left before Nina was killed.

However, Bird’s case also went to the Supreme Court of Canada, and in December the high court replaced the manslaughter verdict with a first-degree murder conviction. She is now serving a life sentence with no chance at parole for 10 years.

Laboucan also faces a first-degree murder charge in the death of Ellie May Meyer, an Edmonton sex-trade worker. His preliminary inquiry began last month.

China Offers High-Speed Rail to California

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April 7, 2010

By KEITH BRADSHER

A high-speed train, above, on the Zhengzhou-Xi’an railway.

BEIJING — Nearly 150 years after American railroads brought in thousands of Chinese laborers to build rail lines across the West, China is poised once again to play a role in American rail construction. But this time, it would be an entirely different role: supplying the technology, equipment and engineers to build high-speed rail lines.

The Chinese government has signed cooperation agreements with the State of California and General Electric to help build such lines. The agreements, both of which are preliminary, show China’s desire to become a big exporter and licensor of bullet trains traveling 215 miles an hour, an environmentally friendly technology in which China has raced past the United States in the last few years.

“We are the most advanced in many fields, and we are willing to share with the United States,” Zheng Jian, the chief planner and director of high-speed rail at China’s railway ministry, said.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has closely followed progress in the discussions with China and hopes to come here later this year for talks with rail ministry officials, said David Crane, the governor’s special adviser for jobs and economic growth, and a board member of the California High Speed Rail Authority.

China is offering not just to build a railroad in California but also to help finance its construction, and Chinese officials have already been shuttling between Beijing and Sacramento to make presentations, Mr. Crane said in a telephone interview.

China is not the only country interested in selling high-speed rail equipment to the United States. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Spain, France and Italy have also approached California’s High Speed Rail Authority.

The agency has made no decisions on whose technology to choose. But Mr. Crane said that there were no apparent weaknesses in the Chinese offer, and that Governor Schwarzenegger particularly wanted to visit China this year for high-speed rail discussions.

Even if an agreement is reached for China to build and help bankroll a high-speed rail system in California, considerable obstacles would remain.

China’s rail ministry would face independent labor unions and democratically elected politicians, neither of which it has to deal with at home. The United States also has labor and immigration laws stricter than those in China.

In a nearly two-hour interview at the rail ministry’s monolithic headquarters here, Mr. Zheng said repeatedly that any Chinese bid would comply with all American laws and regulations.

China’s rail ministry has an international reputation for speed and low costs, and is opening 1,200 miles of high-speed rail routes this year alone. China is moving rapidly to connect almost all of its own provincial capitals with bullet trains.

But while the ministry has brought costs down through enormous economies of scale, “buy American” pressures could make it hard for China to export the necessary equipment to the United States.

The railways ministry has concluded a framework agreement to license its technology to G.E., which is a world leader in diesel locomotives but has little experience with the electric locomotives needed for high speeds.

According to G.E., the agreement calls for at least 80 percent of the components of any locomotives and system control gear to come from American suppliers, and labor-intensive final assembly would be done in the United States for the American market. China would license its technology and supply engineers as well as up to 20 percent of the components.

State-owned Chinese equipment manufacturers initially licensed many of their designs over the last decade from Japan, Germany and France. While Chinese companies have gone on to make many changes and innovations, Japanese executives in particular have grumbled that Chinese technology resembles theirs, raising the possibility of legal challenges if any patents have been violated.

All of the technology would be Chinese, Mr. Zheng said.

China has already begun building high-speed rail routes in Turkey, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. It is looking for opportunities in seven other countries, notably a route sought by the Brazilian government between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Mr. Zheng said.

 

The site of a high-speed rail project in east China, which has a reputation for building lines quickly and inexpensively.

International rail experts say that China has mastered the art of building high-speed rail lines quickly and inexpensively.

“These guys are engineering driven — they know how to build fast, build cheaply and do a good job,” said John Scales, the lead transport specialist in the Beijing office of the World Bank.

The California rail authority plans to spend $43 billion to build a 465-mile route from San Francisco to Los Angeles and on to Anaheim that is supposed to open in 2020. The authority was awarded $2.25 billion in January in federal economic stimulus money to work on the project.

The authority’s plans call for $10 billion to $12 billion in private financing. Mr. Crane said China could provide much of that, with federal, state and local jurisdictions providing the rest. Mr. Zheng declined to discuss financial details.

China’s mostly state-controlled banks had few losses during the global financial crisis and are awash with cash now because of tight regulation and a fast-growing economy. The Chinese government is also becoming disenchanted with bonds and looking to diversify its $2.4 trillion in foreign reserves by investing in areas like natural resources and overseas rail projects.

“They’ve got a lot of capital, and they’re willing to provide a lot of capital” for a California high-speed rail system, Mr. Crane said.

Later plans call for the California line to be extended to Sacramento and San Diego, while a private consortium hopes to build a separate route from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

Toyota is shutting a big assembly plant in Fremont, Calif., that it once operated as a joint venture with General Motors, and one idea under discussion is converting the factory to the assembly of high-speed rail equipment, said Mr. Crane, who is also a member of the state’s Economic Development Commission.

Rail parts from China would then come through the nearby port of Oakland, in place of auto parts from Japan.

“High-speed rail requires a lot of high technology — we would send many high-end engineers and high-end technicians” to California, Mr. Zheng said.

G.E. estimates that the United States will spend $13 billion in the next five years on high-speed rail routes. China, with a much more ambitious infrastructure program, will spend $300 billion in the next three years on overall expansion of its rail routes, mainly high-speed routes, according to G.E.

China’s long-term vision calls for high-speed rail routes linking Shanghai to Singapore and New Delhi by way of Myanmar, and someday connecting Beijing and Shanghai to Moscow to the northwest and through Tehran to Prague and Berlin, according to a map that Mr. Zheng keeps on a bookshelf behind his desk. He cautioned that there were no plans to start construction yet outside China.

A high-speed rail link for passengers from Beijing to Shanghai will be finished by the end of 2011 or early 2012, and cut the journey to four hours, from 10 hours now, Mr. Zheng said.

New York to Atlanta or Chicago is a similar distance, and takes 18 to 19 hours on Amtrak, which must share tracks with 12,000-ton freight trains and many commuter trains.

For the American market, Mr. Zheng said, “we can provide whatever services are needed.”

New Hominid Species Discovered in South Africa

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April 8, 2010

Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist, with son Matthew and dog Tau, at the at the Malapa site where they discovered the new hominid species.

By CELIA W. DUGGER and JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

CRADLE OF HUMANKIND, South Africa — Nine-year-old Matthew Berger dashed after his dog Tau into the high grass here one sunny morning, tripped over a log and stumbled onto a major archeological discovery. Scientists announced Thursday that he had found the bones of a new hominid species that lived almost two million years ago during the fateful, still mysterious period spanning the emergence of the human family.

“Dad, I found a fossil!” Matthew said he cried out to his father, Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist, who had been searching for hominid bones just a hill-and-a-half away for almost two decades. Fossil hunters have profitably scoured these rolling grasslands north of Johannesburg since the 1930s.

Matthew held in his hands the ancient remains of a 4-foot-2 boy who had been just a few years older than Matthew himself. Dr. Berger, with the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and his fellow researchers have since found much more of the boy’s skeleton, including his extraordinarily well-preserved skull, and three other individuals. South Africa’s children will compete to name the boy.

The cranium of Australopithecus sediba from the Malapa site in South Africa.

In a report being published Friday in the journal Science, Dr. Berger, 44, and a team of scientists said the fossils from the boy and a woman were a surprising and distinctive mixture of primitive and advanced anatomy and thus qualified as a new species of hominid, the ancestors and other close relatives of humans. It has been named Australopithecus sediba.

The species sediba, which means fountain or wellspring in the seSotho language, strode upright on long legs, with human-shaped hips and pelvis, but still climbed through trees on apelike arms. It had the small teeth and more modern face of Homo, the genus that includes modern humans, but the relatively primitive feet and “tiny brain” of Australopithecus, Dr. Berger said.

Geologists estimated that the individuals lived 1.78 to 1.95 million years ago, probably closer to the older date, a period when australopithecines and early species of Homo were contemporaries.

Dr. Berger’s team said that the new species probably descended from Australopithecus africanus. At a teleconference on Wednesday, he described the species as a possible ancestor of Homo erectus, an immediate predecessor to Homo sapiens, or a close “side branch” that did not lead to modern humans.

Scientists not involved in the research debate whether the bones belong to the Homo or Australopithecus genus, but most agreed that the discovery of the skeletons at the Malapa site here in the Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage site where dolomitic limestone caves contain fossils of ancient animals and hominids, was a major advance in the early fossil history of hominids.

“They are a fascinating mosaic of features,” said Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution. “It reminds us of the combining and recombining of characteristics, the tinkering and experimentation, that go on in evolution.”

Dr. Berger said the path to discovery began over the Christmas holidays in 2007 when he began using Google Earth to map caves in the Cradle of Humankind. On a recent visit to his office, he rotated Google Earth images of the dun landscape on his desktop, showing how he spotted the shadows and distortions of the earth that gave clues to the location of caves, often topped with wild olive and white stinkwood trees.

On Aug. 15, 2008, when Matthew called his father to look at the bones he had found, Dr. Berger began cursing wildly as he neared his son. The boy mistook his father’s profanity for anger. But from 15 feet, Dr. Berger, who had done his Ph.D. on hominid shoulder bones, among them the clavicle, was astounded to see that his son had in his hands a clavicle with the unmistakable shape of a hominid.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Berger giddily recalled. “I took the rock, and I turned it” and “sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died,” he said, adding “What are the odds?”

In March 2009, he found the remarkably intact cranium of the sediba boy whose clavicle Matthew had picked up. Donald Johanson, who found the famed 3.2 million year old Lucy skeleton in Ethiopia in 1973, described the skull as “a fabulous specimen.”

In his lab last week, Dr. Berger took a fire-resistant case from a metal safe and reverently lifted the skull from its foam bed, revealing its startlingly delicate face.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said.

The scientists also found a profusion of animal fossils at the site — saber-toothed cats, mongoose, wild dogs, antelopes, hyena and mice, among others. Dr. Berger and Paul Dirks, a geologist at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, hypothesized that the animals may have been lured to the edge of a 100-150 foot funnel-shaped shaft into a deep cave, perhaps by the scent of water during a drought, then plunged to the bottom of a death trap.

There is evidence that maggots and carrion beetles, but not carnivores, fed upon the rotting carcasses, leading the scientists to conclude that the carnivores, too, must have died from the fall. The first downpours of the rainy season may have swept the bodies into a pool of water rich with lime and sand — the ingredients of cement — which essentially froze them in place. Dr. Berger called the sediba fossils “a time machine” into evolutionary processes.

Researchers now think the split between apes and the hominid lineage occurred around seven million years ago in Africa. The sparse fossil record shows early hominid species already walking upright, but still relatively apelike. Small australopithecines, with bodies and brains not much bigger than those of modern chimpanzees, were widespread from 3.8 million to 3 million years ago, most famously Australopithecus afarensis like Lucy.

Just when changes leading to Homo were happening remains unclear in the fossil record. Hominids started shaping stone tools about 2.6 million years ago. Hominids identified as Homo appeared more than 2 million years ago, their direct ancestry anything but clear. The species Au. sediba thus shared a time with Homo habilis and Homo erectus.

Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, supported the discovery team’s interpretation of the fossils as a previously unclassified species of advanced Australopithecus “with suggestions of Homo.”

But it is often a toss-up whether a fossil discovery will bring order or confusion to the family tree. William H. Kimbel, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, said the fossil remains were instead a species of early Homo with some cranial and skeletal material “seen otherwise only in Homo.”

As the taxonomic debate continues, so, too, does fossil hunting at the Malapa site. So far, the scientists exploring it have not even started digging, but have cleared it of rubble left by men mining for lime, probably about a century ago, and other debris. They keep finding more hominid bones that click together like pieces of jigsaw puzzles. Since submitting the paper to Science in November, they have found at least two more individuals, one an infant.

“Every time we sift anything or pick up a rock, it has something in it,” Dr. Berger said.

One recent afternoon, he and Matthew, now 11, clambered down into the small rocky pit that remains of the original deep-set cave, eroded over eons. Their dog Tau paced excitedly along the edge. Dr. Berger put his hands against the rock where he had found a woman’s skeleton, and the child’s skull just above her — the pair described in Science.

Matthew Berger, 11, was nine when he stumbled into a major archeological discovery.

“There’s probably someone else in here,” he said.

He then went to a dirt road that miners had filled in with earth blasted from the cave. It was one of those chunks that Matthew likely found with the clavicle bone in it. Dr. Berger pointed to a hominid skeleton plainly visible in the road bed, now cleared of debris and fill. Two teeth lay right on the surface.

Dr. Berger, considering what may lie buried between the road and the cave, said “If there’s this density, what could be there? Oh, my!”

Celia W. Dugger reported from Cradle of Humankind, and John Noble Wilford from New York.

Is President Obama Fulfilling Clinton’s Promise?

 

 

 

 

Larry Downing/Sygma — Corbis (left); Luke Sharrett, via The New York Times (right)

LINKED President Clinton in 1994; President Obama in March 2010.

By PETER BAKER

Published: April 2, 2010

WASHINGTON — For years, Bill Clinton tried to negotiate an arms control treaty for the post-cold-war era. He and Boris Yeltsin even agreed on a framework for a new Start treaty in Helsinki. But it never came to be. So when President Obama flies to Prague this week to sign a New Start treaty with Russia, it will culminate Mr. Clinton’s unfulfilled aspiration.

Nine years after Mr. Clinton left office, Mr. Obama has in some ways picked up his Democratic predecessor’s mantle. While they are very different presidents and not personally close, at least some of the unfinished agenda items left from the Clinton administration have found their way to the top of the Obama priority list. And the 44th president is arguably profiting from the work, and the setbacks, of the 42nd president.

The treaty to be signed this week and the health care overhaul signed into law last month represent the most obvious examples. But Mr. Obama also pushed through an economic stimulus package last year, which Mr. Clinton tried unsuccessfully to do in his first year. Mr. Obama has drawn bipartisan support for lifting the ban on gay men and lesbians’ serving openly in the military, an idea that backfired on Mr. Clinton. And where Mr. Clinton never submitted the Kyoto treaty to a hostile Senate, Mr. Obama is pushing forward with climate change legislation that has a shot at passing.

Other presidents have built on the policy agendas of predecessors. George W. Bush fashioned his presidency as an extension of Ronald Reagan’s, especially in cutting taxes. And Franklin D. Roosevelt completed the legacy of Woodrow Wilson, particularly in building a lasting international organization with American participation.

“Every great progressive era, if you look at history, begins with somebody hitting the barricades first and the other person establishing that progressive agenda and coalition,” said Rahm Emanuel, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Clinton and is now Mr. Obama’s White House chief of staff.

Such was the case with health care, 16 years after Mr. Clinton’s effort collapsed, he said. “Without ‘94 creating some space and some knowledge, the truth is 2010 could not have happened.” Of course, the comparisons are imprecise and the times in which the two men governed are radically different. In the calm after the cold war, Mr. Clinton was trying to pull his party back to the political center after years in the wilderness, while Mr. Obama campaigned as a more liberal figure in a time of war, terrorism and economic crisis. And there are areas where Mr. Clinton’s agenda has no need for continuation. Mr. Clinton’s success in reshaping welfare, pushing through free trade policies and enacting a tougher approach to crime arguably took those issues off the table for Mr. Obama.

 A CLINTON FAILURE President Clinton at a 1994 rally calls for health care reform

“Clinton’s problem was trying to change the system during a time of peace and prosperity,” said H. W. Brands, a presidential historian who has written books on Wilson and F.D.R. “Americans are status quo friendly; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Obama’s opportunity was to arrive when the status quo had been jolted and, in the eyes of many, discredited.”

Still, Republicans are confident that Mr. Obama has learned the wrong lessons from Mr. Clinton, and that he will ultimately see his party suffer at the polls as well.

“Certainly he achieved a legislative success that Clinton was unable to reach and that has given them confidence and momentum,” said Robert Walker, a former Republican representative from Pennsylvania. “But the problem they’ve got is the only momentum is with their own base. For independents, the real issues are the debt and deficit. And some of the programs he’s putting forward are exacerbating the problem.”

As he pursues initiatives that echo the Clinton era, Mr. Obama is benefiting from a changed society.

Attitudes toward gays in the military have shifted since Mr. Clinton’s time. Then, the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Colin L. Powell, opposed lifting the ban. Now, the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, supports lifting the ban. And so does General Powell, who has changed his mind, not to mention former Vice President Dick Cheney.

But by paving the way on some of these issues, Mr. Clinton provided a roadmap for Mr. Obama. On gays in the military, for instance, Mr. Obama was careful not to tackle the issue from the start, as Mr. Clinton did much to his regret because it blew up in his face and he was forced to accept the compromise known as don’t ask, don’t tell.

“Rather than rushing into top-down change, the Obama White House has carefully mobilized support within the military leadership and has created a process of consultation designed to mute complaints that change is being rammed through,” said William A. Galston, a former Clinton adviser now at the Brookings Institution.

On health care, some like Mr. Galston argued that Mr. Obama took the Clinton lesson too far by giving Congress too much free reign. But Mr. Obama succeeded in part because Democratic lawmakers saw what happened when Mr. Clinton failed and they lost their majorities.

“The lesson many Democrats took from the Clinton experience 1993 and 1994 is that failure to lead guarantees election losses,” said Steve Elmendorf, a longtime Democratic strategist.

And Democrats learned, perhaps, to be bold. The later Clinton years showed “that even the most worthwhile incremental changes, like expansion of children’s health insurance, can’t get at the root economic dysfunctionality of the current system,” said John D. Podesta, who was Mr. Clinton’s last chief of staff and later led Mr. Obama’s transition after the 2008 election.

That applies overseas as well. Strobe Talbott, who was Mr. Clinton’s deputy secretary of state and main interlocutor with Russia, noted the different contexts the two presidents faced. “That said, there’s no question that the main themes and exertions of the Clinton foreign policy did lay a groundwork for what Obama’s trying to do,” he said, citing arms control, nonproliferation, strengthening international institutions “and, for that matter, climate change.”

A CLINTON PRIORITY President Obama announced a new Start treaty with Russia.

The danger, naturally, is to draw too much from the Clinton experience.

“You have to be careful not to overlearn old lessons,” said Joel P. Johnson, a former senior adviser to Mr. Clinton. “The times and circumstances have changed dramatically. But certain fundamentals remain the same, and past mistakes provide present insights. It’s the rough equivalent of studying game films in the N.F.L.”

Words as Weapons: Dropping the ‘Terrorism’ Bomb

Rodrigo Corral and Steve Attardo

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: April 2, 2010

WASHINGTON — Words can be weapons, too. So after nearly every new report of political violence, whether merely plotted or actually carried out, there is a vocabulary debate: Should it be labeled “terrorism”?

When early reports of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s shooting spree at Fort Hood, Tex., in November mentioned his personal problems and failed to apply the T-word, activists on the right cried foul: He’s a radical Muslim terrorist, they said, and only political correctness run amok could argue otherwise.

When A. Joseph Stack III flew his Piper Dakota into an Internal Revenue Service office building in Austin, Tex., in February, killing himself and an I.R.S. manager, it was the left that blew the linguistic whistle: If such a public, politically motivated act of lethal violence is not terrorism, they asked, just what is?

Last week, the arrests of nine members of the Hutaree Christian sect in Michigan on charges that they plotted to kill police officers and then bomb their funerals stirred up the question again.

Were they terrorists? Were they Christians? Were they just weirdos? Had they been Muslims, some commentators complained, there would have been not a moment’s hesitation at applying both names: Islamic terrorism.

“None dare call it terrorism,” wrote David Dayen at the liberal Firedoglake blog, noting that most of the major media outlets had not used the word “terrorism” in reporting the Hutaree arrests for plotting exactly that. “These are Christians, so they cannot be terrorists. Or something,” he added, with sarcasm.

At Lucianne Goldberg’s conservative Web site, Lucianne.com, a contributor calling himself kanphil rejected the labels: “Not Christians. Not terrorists. Just dimwits that couldn’t organize a decent deer hunt.”

The right-left squabbles are an attempt to spin violence for political advantage. If Major Hasan was a Muslim terrorist, the right’s logic goes, then oversensitivity to the rights of Muslims is unjustified and the tough security measures of the Dick Cheney school are validated. If the Hutaree are government-fearing, right-wing Christians, the left suggests, then perhaps there is reason to be wary of the extremism of other anti-government, conservative Christians, whether of the Tea Party or plain Republican Party variety.

But more is at stake here than semantics or petty point-scoring in the blogosphere. Political violence has two elements: the act, and the meaning attached to it. Long after the smoke of an explosion has cleared, the battle over language goes on, as contending sides seek to aggrandize the act or dismiss it, portray it as noble or denounce it as vile.

“The use of the term terrorism delegitimizes the opponent,” said Martha Crenshaw, a scholar at Stanford who wrote her first essay wrestling with the definition of terrorism in 1972. “It’s not just the tactics that are discredited, it’s the cause, as well.”

In fact, accused terrorists often throw the label back at their accusers. In a recording played in court last week, David B. Stone Sr., leader of the Hutaree group, described the government as a “terrorist organization.” And Doku Umarov, the Chechen guerrilla leader who claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings in the Moscow subway, took the same line in a videotaped message, suggesting that the real terrorist was his nemesis, Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister.

“Any politician or journalist or any person who will condemn me for those operations, or who will accuse me of terrorism, I am laughing at those people,” he said, “because I haven’t heard that Putin was accused of terrorism for the murder of civilians.”

The word originated in the context of large-scale violence by the state: the Jacobin Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, when 16,000 to 40,000 people were killed in 13 months. The Latin root “terrere” means “to cause to tremble,” and one essential notion in most definitions of terrorism is that it seeks to frighten the enemy, as well as to inspire allies.

Over time, terrorism has come to be applied more commonly to the violent tactics of nonstate groups, often in a campaign of repeated attacks. The targets are often chosen for symbolic reasons (the World Trade Center, the Pentagon), and the victims usually include civilians. The acts of terror seek to influence an audience, ostensibly in service of a political goal.

The anarchist movement before and after the turn of the 20th century spoke of the “Propaganda of the Deed,” a phrase that captures both the violence and its purported political purpose. Their deeds included the assassination of numerous politicians and world leaders, including President William McKinley in 1901, and they were the rare militants who did not shun the terrorism label.

“They called themselves terrorists and they were proud of it,” said David C. Rapoport, a historian of terrorism and editor of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence.

With time, however, the term terrorism took on connotations of cowardice, unfairness and special brutality, whatever the larger cause it claims to serve. Today even the most brazen of terrorists generally shun the label. In a recent audio message, Osama bin Laden described Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “holy warrior and hero.”

Major Hasan, by the standard definition, would qualify as a terrorist. Whatever his emotional troubles, he appears to have viewed his killings as part of the larger global campaign of Muslims fighting what they view as American aggression.

Likewise, though Joe Stack certainly had his personal gripes against the I.R.S., the six-page manifesto he left behind suggested that he was dying for the cause of freedom in a blow against “Mr. Big Brother I.R.S. man.”

True, both men seem to have been eccentrics and sociopaths. But so are many who all agree are terrorists — remember Mohammed Atta, with his creepy list of instructions for how his body should be handled after death? By choosing, in their despair, not just solo suicide but an attack against others, and by attaching their violence to a political point of view, they earned the label.

From the debate over word choice came the adage that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” a cliché already by the 1980s.

“That’s a catchy phrase, but also misleading,” President Ronald Reagan said in a 1986 radio address. “Freedom fighters do not need to terrorize a population into submission. Freedom fighters target the military forces and the organized instruments of repression keeping dictatorial regimes in power. Freedom fighters struggle to liberate their citizens from oppression and to establish a form of government that reflects the will of the people.”

But distinguishing these points is not always easy: Major Hasan targeted military forces; Mr. Stack surely considered the I.R.S. an “organized instrument of repression.”

Thinking of ends and not means, Mr. Reagan praised the Nicaraguan contra rebels, who had a bloody record fighting the Communist Sandinistas, as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” In the cold war contest with the Soviet Union, he armed and embraced the Afghan “freedom fighters” and their Arab allies, some of whom evolved into the terrorists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

That long-ago radio address sounds naïve in retrospect in another respect, too. “History is likely to record that 1986 was the year when the world, at long last, came to grips with the plague of terrorism,” President Reagan declared. President Obama is unlikely to venture a similar prediction anytime soon.

13-Year-Old Yemeni Bride Dies of Bleeding

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: April 8, 2010

A Yemeni girl unrelated to this news story

SAN’A, Yemen (AP) — A 13-year-old Yemeni girl has died of injuries to her genitals four days after a family-arranged marriage, a human rights group said.

The practice of marrying young girls is widespread in Yemen and has drawn the attention of international rights groups seeking to pressure the government to outlaw child marriages. Legislation that would make it illegal for those under the age of 17 to marry is in serious peril after strong opposition from some of Yemen’s most influential Islamic leaders.

The 13-year-old girl from Hajja province, northwest of the capital, died on April 2, four days after her marriage to a 23-year-old man, said Majed al-Madhaji, a spokesman for the Sisters Arab Forum for Human Rights. A medical report from al-Thawra hospital said she suffered a tear to her genitals and severe bleeding.

Authorities detained the husband.

The Yemeni rights group said the girl was married off in an agreement between two men to marry each other’s sisters to avoid having to pay expensive bride-prices. The group said that was a common arrangement in the deeply impoverished country.

A Yemeni girl unrelated to this news story

 

Yemen’s gripping poverty plays a role in hindering efforts to stamp out the practice, as poor families find themselves unable to say no to bride-prices in the hundreds of dollars for their daughters.

More than a quarter of Yemen’s females marry before age 15, according to a report last year by the Social Affairs Ministry. Tribal custom also plays a role, including the belief that a young bride can be shaped into an obedient wife, bear more children and be kept away from temptation.

Last month, a group of the country’s highest Islamic authorities declared those supporting a ban on child marriages to be apostates.

A February 2009 law set the minimum age for marriage at 17, but it was repealed and sent back to parliament’s constitutional committee for review after some lawmakers called it un-Islamic. The committee is expected to make a final decision on the legislation this month.

Some of the clerics who signed the decree against a ban sit on the committee.

Further imperiling the effort is the weak government’s reluctance to confront the clerics and other conservative tribal officials, whose support is essential to their fragile hold on power.

The issue of Yemen’s child brides got widespread attention three years ago when an 8-year-old girl boldly went by herself to a courtroom and demanded a judge dissolve her marriage to a man in his 30s. She eventually won a divorce, and legislators began looking at ways to curb the practice.

In September, a 12-year-old Yemeni child-bride died after struggling for three days in labor to give birth, a local human rights organization said.

Yemen once set 15 as the minimum age for marriage, but parliament annulled that law in the 1990s, saying parents should decide when a daughter marries.

Thrill of the chaste: The truth about Gandhi’s sex life

With religious chastity under scrutiny, a new book throws light on Gandhi’s practice of sleeping next to naked girls. In fact, he was sex-mad, writes biographer Jad Adams

No sex please: Gandhi, above, ‘tested’ himself by sleeping with naked grand-nieces Manu, left, and Abha, right

It was no secret that Mohandas Gandhi had an unusual sex life. He spoke constantly of sex and gave detailed, often provocative, instructions to his followers as to how to they might best observe chastity. And his views were not always popular; “abnormal and unnatural” was how the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, described Gandhi’s advice to newlyweds to stay celibate for the sake of their souls.

But was there something more complex than a pious plea for chastity at play in Gandhi’s beliefs, preachings and even his unusual personal practices (which included, alongside his famed chastity, sleeping naked next to nubile, naked women to test his restraint)? In the course of researching my new book on Gandhi, going through a hundred volumes of his complete works and many tomes of eye-witness material, details became apparent which add up to a more bizarre sexual history.

Much of this material was known during his lifetime, but was distorted or suppressed after his death during the process of elevating Gandhi into the “Father of the Nation” Was the Mahatma, in fact, as the pre-independence prime minister of the Indian state of Travancore called him, “a most dangerous, semi-repressed sex maniac”?

Gandhi was born in the Indian state of Gujarat and married at 13 in 1883; his wife Kasturba was 14, not early by the standards of Gujarat at that time. The young couple had a normal sex life, sharing a bed in a separate room in his family home, and Kasturba was soon pregnant.

Two years later, as his father lay dying, Gandhi left his bedside to have sex with Kasturba. Meanwhile, his father drew his last breath. The young man compounded his grief with guilt that he had not been present, and represented his subsequent revulsion towards “lustful love” as being related to his father’s death.

However, Gandhi and Kasturba’s last child wasn’t born until fifteen years later, in 1900.

In fact, Gandhi did not develop his censorious attitude to sex (and certainly not to marital sex) until he was in his 30s, while a volunteer in the ambulance corps, assisting the British Empire in its wars in Southern Africa. On long marches in sparsely populated land in the Boer War and the Zulu uprisings, Gandhi considered how he could best “give service” to humanity and decided it must be by embracing poverty and chastity.

At the age of 38, in 1906, he took a vow of brahmacharya, which meant living a spiritual life but is normally referred to as chastity, without which such a life is deemed impossible by Hindus.

Gandhi found it easy to embrace poverty. It was chastity that eluded him. So he worked out a series of complex rules which meant he could say he was chaste while still engaging in the most explicit sexual conversation, letters and behaviour.

With the zeal of the convert, within a year of his vow, he told readers of his newspaper Indian Opinion: “It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife.”

Meanwhile, Gandhi was challenging that abstinence in his own way. He set up ashrams in which he began his first “experiments” with sex; boys and girls were to bathe and sleep together, chastely, but were punished for any sexual talk. Men and women were segregated, and Gandhi’s advice was that husbands should not be alone with their wives, and, when they felt passion, should take a cold bath.

The rules did not, however, apply to him. Sushila Nayar, the attractive sister of Gandhi’s secretary, also his personal physician, attended Gandhi from girlhood. She used to sleep and bathe with Gandhi. When challenged, he explained how he ensured decency was not offended. “While she is bathing I keep my eyes tightly shut,” he said, “I do not know … whether she bathes naked or with her underwear on. I can tell from the sound that she uses soap.” The provision of such personal services to Gandhi was a much sought-after sign of his favour and aroused jealousy among the ashram inmates.

As he grew older (and following Kasturba’s death) he was to have more women around him and would oblige women to sleep with him whom – according to his segregated ashram rules – were forbidden to sleep with their own husbands. Gandhi would have women in his bed, engaging in his “experiments” which seem to have been, from a reading of his letters, an exercise in strip-tease or other non-contact sexual activity. Much explicit material has been destroyed but tantalising remarks in Gandhi’s letters remain such as: “Vina’s sleeping with me might be called an accident. All that can be said is that she slept close to me.” One might assume, then, that getting into the spirit of the Gandhian experiment meant something more than just sleeping close to him.

It can’t, one imagines, can have helped with the “involuntary discharges” which Gandhi complained of experiencing more frequently since his return to India. He had an almost magical belief in the power of semen: “One who conserves his vital fluid acquires unfailing power,” he said.

Meanwhile, it seemed that challenging times required greater efforts of spiritual fortitude, and for that, more attractive women were required: Sushila, who in 1947 was 33, was now due to be supplanted in the bed of the 77-year-old Gandhi by a woman almost half her age. While in Bengal to see what comfort he could offer in times of inter-communal violence in the run-up to independence, Gandhi called for his 18-year-old grandniece Manu to join him – and sleep with him. “We both may be killed by the Muslims,” he told her, “and must put our purity to the ultimate test, so that we know that we are offering the purest of sacrifices, and we should now both start sleeping naked.”

Such behaviour was no part of the accepted practice of bramacharya. He, by now, described his reinvented concept of a brahmachari as: “One who never has any lustful intention, who, by constant attendance upon God, has become proof against conscious or unconscious emissions, who is capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful, without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited … who is making daily and steady progress towards God and whose every act is done in pursuance of that end and no other.” That is, he could do whatever he wished, so long as there was no apparent “lustful intention”. He had effectively redefined the concept of chastity to fit his personal practices.

Thus far, his reasoning was spiritual, but in the maelstrom that was India approaching independence he took it upon himself to see his sex experiments as having national importance: “I hold that true service of the country demands this observance,” he stated.

But while he was becoming bolder in his self-righteousness, Gandhi’s behaviour was widely discussed and criticised by family members and leading politicians. Some members of his staff resigned, including two editors of his newspaper who left after refusing to print parts of Gandhi’s sermons dealing with his sleeping arrangements.

But Gandhi found a way of regarding the objections as a further reason tocontinue. “If I don’t let Manu sleep with me, though I regard it as essential that she should,” he announced, “wouldn’t that be a sign of weakness in me?”

Eighteen-year-old Abha, the wife of Gandhi’s grandnephew Kanu Gandhi, rejoined Gandhi’s entourage in the run-up to independence in 1947 and by the end of August he was sleeping with both Manu and Abha at the same time.

When he was assassinated in January 1948, it was with Manu and Abha by his side. Despite her having been his constant companion in his last years, family members, tellingly, removed Manu from the scene. Gandhi had written to his son: “I have asked her to write about her sharing the bed with me,” but the protectors of his image were eager to eliminate this element of the great leader’s life. Devdas, Gandhi’s son, accompanied Manu to Delhi station where he took the opportunity of instructing her to keep quiet.

Questioned in the 1970s, Sushila revealingly placed the elevation of this lifestyle to a brahmacharya experiment was a response to criticism of this behaviour. “Later on, when people started asking questions about his physical contact with women – with Manu, with Abha, with me – the idea of brahmacharya experiments was developed … in the early days, there was no question of calling this a brahmacharya experiment.” It seems that Gandhi lived as he wished, and only when challenged did he turn his own preferences into a cosmic system of rewards and benefits. Like many great men, Gandhi made up the rules as he went along.

While it was commonly discussed as damaging his reputation when he was alive, Gandhi’s sexual behaviour was ignored for a long time after his death. It is only now that we can piece together information for a rounded picture of Gandhi’s excessive self-belief in the power of his own sexuality. Tragically for him, he was already being sidelined by the politicians at the time of independence. The preservation of his vital fluid did not keep India intact, and it was the power-brokers of the Congress Party who negotiated the terms of India’s freedom.

Gandhi: Naked Ambition is published by Quercus (£20). To order a copy for the special price of £18 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08430 600 030, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk