Is Iraq Headed for Genocide?




Civil war or not, some human rights experts say Iraq is showing precursor signs of genocide.

President George W. Bush has continued to reject assertions that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. But with the President set to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Amman, Jordan, to discuss the country's continuing sectarian violence, some human rights experts are worrying about a different, worse fate for Iraq: genocide.

Gregory Stanton, a professor of human rights at Virginia's University of Mary Washington, sees in Iraq the same troubling signs of preparation and execution of genocidal aims that he saw in the 1990s in Rwanda when he worked at the State Department. Sunni and Shiite militias are "trying to polarize the country, they're systematically trying to assassinate moderates, and they're trying to divide the population into homogenous religious sectors," Stanton says. All of those undertakings, he says, are "characteristics of genocide," and his organization, Genocide Watch, is preparing to declare the country in a "genocide emergency."

While the term conjures up thoughts of enormous numbers of civilian dead, the quantity of victims is not the warning sign experts look for when considering the danger of genocide. Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, says with Shi'ite and Sunni sub-groups already identifying and killing victims solely on the basis of their religious identity, "genocidal intent" is already present in Iraq. "When you drive up to a checkpoint and you're stopped and somebody pulls out your ID and determines whether you're a Sunni or a Shiite and takes you away and kills you because of that, there is a genocidal mentality afoot." The question, Power says, is how broadly that mentality will spread. Iraq has already seen one genocide in recent decades: Saddam Hussein stands accused of attempting to exterminate Kurds, the third largest group in the country.

While Power and Stanton both see a mounting danger of widespread genocide in Iraq, there is certainly not consensus on the threat. Other human rights organizations, like the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the International Crisis Group, do not see the conditions for genocide developing. Human Rights Watch, which is particularly restrictive in what it calls genocide, says it believes Iraq is not headed in that direction. Joost Hiltermann, who covers Iraq for the International Crisis Group, says that the biggest impediment to full-blown genocide is the fact that there are divisions between Shi'ite factions, which prevent them from uniting in a nationwide persecution of Sunnis.

Much of the debate over the possibility of widespread genocide in Iraq stems from differing interpretations of the 1948 United Nations convention on genocide. There, genocide is defined rather broadly as killing, seriously harming, restricting birth or attempting to destroy in whole or in part, "a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Says University of Mary Washington's Stanton, "Anyone who says that's not happening in Iraq is burying their head in the sand." But others say the number of people in Iraq operating with the intention of eradicating people solely on the basis of their membership in a ethnic or religious group is too small to constitute genocidal intent.

Stanton, Power, and a variety of politicians and foreign policy experts in Washington, including Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, worry that a U.S. pullout would only heighten the dangers of genocide. Some observers have held up Vietnam's long road to stability as a possible model for Iraq, after American troops leave. But says Power, "When you discuss what is left in America's wake you have to acknowledge that Saigon is not the only scenario that is hanging in our midst. What about the Rwanda scenario?" In Rwanda, the 1994 genocide that had been brewing only broke into full bloom after the withdrawal of U.N. peacekeeping forces.

While the genocide convention is relatively explicit about obligating its signatories to intervene to prevent genocide where it is occurring or preparing to occur, more often than not the world has declined to do so. And no one seriously believes that if widespread genocide unfolded in Iraq that the U.S. would be able to do anything about it. "The arc of humanitarian intervention has already been killed by Iraq for at least a generation," says Power. The clearest example of that is in Sudan. The United States has declared that genocide against the inhabitants of the Darfur region is under way, but there is no indication of possible military or humanitarian intervention to halt it.

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Radiation on Planes Is Now Part of the Litvinenko Poisoning Investigation




The discovery of traces of radiation on some British Airways jets only deepens the mystery (and creeping anxiety) over the fatal radiation poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.

Authorities found traces of radiation on British Airways jets, and the airline appealed Wednesday to tens of thousands of passengers who flew the aircraft to or from Moscow to come forward as investigators widened the search for clues into the poisoning death of a former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. The airline said the "risk to public health is low," adding that it was in the process of contacting tens of thousands of passengers who flew on the jets. Two planes at London's Heathrow Airport tested positive for traces of radiation and a third plane has been taken out of service in Moscow awaiting examination, British Airways said in a statement.

Natalia Remnyova, administrator at Domodedovo Airport, the Moscow airport used by British Airways, said she knew nothing of a plane grounded there. Russian Transport Ministry and other government officials could not immediately be reached for comment. The airline said it was contacted by the British government Tuesday night and told to ground the planes and allow investigators looking into Litvinenko's death to test them for radiation.

High doses of polonium-210 — a rare radioactive element usually manufactured in specialized nuclear facilities — were found in Litvinenko's body, and traces of radiation have been found at sites in London connected with the inquiry into his death. All three planes had been on the London-Moscow route, British Airways said. In the last three weeks, the planes had also traveled to routes across Europe including Barcelona, Frankfurt and Athens. Around 30,000 passengers had traveled on 220 flights on those planes, said Kate Gay, an airline spokeswoman. "The airline is in the process of making contact with customers who have traveled on flights operated by these aircraft, which operate within Europe," British Airways said in a statement. "British Airways understands that from advice it has been given that the risk to public health is low." The airline has published the flights affected on its Web site, and told customers on these flights to contact a special help-line set up by the British Health Ministry.

Litvinenko, a former colonel with Russia's Federal Security Service — the successor agency to the KGB — had been a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin before his death from radiation poisoning on Nov. 23. From his deathbed, he blamed Putin for his poisoning. Putin has strongly denied the charge. Britain's Home Secretary John Reid, who chaired a meeting of COBRA, the government's emergency committee, said that the tests on the planes were part of a wider scientific investigation into sites that could be linked to Litvinenko's death. Meanwhile, Italian security expert Mario Scaramella, who was one of the last people to meet with Litvinenko before the former spy fell ill, said tests cleared him of radioactive contamination.

Scaramella came from Rome and met Litvinenko at a sushi bar in London on Nov. 1 — the day the former intelligence agent first reported the symptoms. "I am fine," Scaramella told The Associated Press by telephone. "I am not contaminated and have not contaminated anybody else." Scaramella returned to London to undergo tests and talk with the police Tuesday. He said he is in security protection and refused to say where he was.

More than three dozen staff at the two hospitals that treated Litvinenko will be tested for radioactive contamination, Britain's Health Protection Agency said. The agency said 106 staff at Barnet General Hospital and University College Hospital had been assessed for possible exposure, and 49 would have their urine tested.

The mysterious death has clouded Anglo-Russian relations. Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that police were determined to find out who was responsible for Litvinenko's death. "The police investigation will proceed, and I think people should know that there is no diplomatic or political barrier in the way of that investigation," Blair said in Copenhagen, Denmark. "It is obviously a very, very serious matter indeed. We are determined to find out what happened and who is responsible."

Media reports in Britain and Russia on Wednesday said that Litvinenko had been engaged in smuggling nuclear substances out of Russia. The Independent newspaper reported that Litvinenko told Scaramella on the day he fell ill that he had organized the smuggling of nuclear material for his former employers at Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB. The newspaper reported that Litvinenko said he had smuggled radioactive material to Zurich in 2000.

But Scaramella told the AP that he had been misquoted by the newspaper. "He (Litvinenko) wanted to see me because he knew about smuggling of nuclear material, but as far as I know he was never involved in nuclear smuggling," he said.

London police say they are investigating the case as a "suspicious death" rather than murder, although they have devoted a large anti-terrorist force to the investigation. Scaramella said he had been cleared of any involvement in the 43-year-old former spy's death. "Let me take the opportunity to say that I'm not under investigation by any British authority," he said. "I am cooperating with them (the police)." Police declined to say whom they had spoken to.

Scaramella said he showed Litvinenko e-mails from a confidential source identifying the possible killers of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and listing other potential targets for assassination — including himself and Litvinenko. Following Litvinenko's death, more than 1,100 people called a health hot line over concerns they might be at risk from polonium poisoning, which is deadly in tiny amounts if ingested or inhaled. Sixty-eight have been referred to health authorities, the Health Protection Agency said — including the 49 hospital staff. Eight have been referred to a special clinic as a precaution. The tests should take about a week. Traces of radiation have been found at six sites visited by Litvinenko.

A coroner will perform an autopsy on Litvinenko on Friday, "subject to appropriate precautions," said the local authority responsible, Camden Council. Doctors had sought expert advice on whether Litvinenko's radioactive body posed a threat to those performing the post-mortem. A coroner's inquest will be opened Thursday and then adjourned until the police investigation is complete, the council said.

Associated Press Writers Jill Lawless in London and Ariel David in Rome contributed to this report

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Japan capable of making nuclear weapon



MARI YAMAGUCHI,

Associated Press Writer

Japan has the technological know-how to produce a nuclear weapon but has no immediate plans to do so, the foreign minister said Thursday, several weeks after communist North Korea carried out a nuclear test.

Foreign Minister Taro Aso, who has called for discussion of Japan's non-nuclear policy, also asserted in parliament that the pacifist constitution does not forbid possession of the bomb.

"Japan is capable of producing nuclear weapons," Aso told a parliamentary committee on security issues. "But we are not saying we have plans to possess nuclear weapons."

Japan, the only country ever attacked by atomic weapons, has for decades espoused a strict policy of not possessing, developing or allowing the introduction of nuclear bombs on its territory.

Aso's comments appear to be stronger than those made last month by Defense Minister Fimio Kyuma, who stated that Japan has "advanced technology and missile capabilities so perhaps we do have the potential to make nuclear arms."

The non-nuclear stance has come under increasing scrutiny since North Korea's Oct. 9 nuclear test, which raised severe security concerns in Japan.

The test has raised fears it could trigger a regional arms race. The North's nuclear test followed Pyongyang's test firing of several ballistic missiles capable of hitting Japan.

Kiyomi Tsujimoto of pacifist opposition Social Democratic Party, criticized Aso for supporting open debate over a possession of nuclear weapons amid such concerns.

"International community is greatly concerned about Japan's plutonium possession," she said. "As foreign minister, Mr. Aso, are you aware of global impact of saying it's not bad to discuss nuclear possession under the circumstances?"

Aso, however, denied he was fanning the debate.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has asserted several times since the test that Japan would not stray from its non-nuclear policy, and he has refused to initiate a formal review of that stance.

Several high-ranking government and ruling party members, however, including Aso, have argued for a high-level reappraisal of the nuclear policy in light of the North Korean threat.

In a hearing before the lower house of parliament's Security Committee, Aso reiterated his belief that the constitution's pacifist clause does not prevent Japan from having nuclear bombs for the purpose of defense.

The constitution's Article 9 bars Japan from the use of force to settle international disputes.

"Possession of minimum level of arms for defense is not prohibited under the Article 9 of the Constitution," Aso said. "Even nuclear weapons, if there are any that fall within that limit, they are not prohibited."

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Today in history - Nov. 30



The Associated Press

Today is Thursday, Nov. 30, the 334th day of 2006. There are 31 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On Nov. 30, 1782, the United States and Britain signed preliminary peace articles in Paris, ending the Revolutionary War.

On this date:

In 1803, Spain completed the process of ceding Louisiana to France, which had sold it to the United States.

In 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens — better known as Mark Twain — was born in Florida, Mo.

In 1874, British statesman Sir Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace.

In 1900, Irish writer Oscar Wilde died in Paris at age 46.

In 1936, London's famed Crystal Palace, constructed for the International Exhibition of 1851, was destroyed in a fire.

In 1939, the Russo-Finnish War began as Soviet troops invaded Finland.

In 1962, U Thant of Burma, who had been acting secretary-general of the United Nations following the death of Dag Hammarskjold the year before, was elected to a four-year term.

In 1966, the former British colony of Barbados became independent.

In 1981, the United States and the Soviet Union opened negotiations in Geneva aimed at reducing nuclear weapons in Europe.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady bill, which requires a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases and background checks of prospective buyers.

Ten years ago: Some 150,000 people filled the streets of Belgrade to protest Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. 1960's novelty singer Tiny Tim, best remembered for his rendition of "Tiptoe Thru' the Tulips," died in Minneapolis.

Five years ago: Robert Tools, the first person in the world to receive a fully self-contained artificial heart, died in Louisville, Ky., of complications after severe abdominal bleeding; he had lived with the device for 151 days. Gary Leon Ridgway was arrested in connection with four of the Green River serial killings in Washington state. (He later pleaded guilty to four dozen killings, and is serving life in prison.) In Georgia, former DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey and two other men were arrested and charged with murder in the slaying of Sheriff-elect Derwin Brown, who had defeated Dorsey in a bitter runoff election. (Dorsey was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison; the two other men were acquitted of murder in a separate state trial, but were later convicted of conspiracy in a federal trial.)

One year ago: President Bush gave an unflinching defense of his Iraq war strategy in a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, refusing to set a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals and asserting that once-shaky Iraqi troops were proving increasingly capable. Shimon Peres quit Israel's Labor Party, his political home of six decades, to campaign for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new organization. Actress Jean Parker died in Woodland Hills, Calif., at age 90.

Today's Birthdays: Actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. is 89. Actor Robert Guillaume is 79. TV personality and producer Dick Clark is 77. Radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy is 76. Country singer-recording executive Jimmy Bowen is 69. Movie director Ridley Scott is 69. Singer Rob Grill (The Grassroots) is 63. Movie writer-director Terrence Malick is 63. Singer Luther Ingram is 62. Rock musician Roger Glover (Deep Purple) is 61. Playwright David Mamet is 59. Actress Margaret Whitton is 56. Actor Mandy Patinkin is 54. Musician Shuggie Otis is 53. Country singer Jeannie Kendall is 52. Singer Billy Idol is 51. Rock musician John Ashton (The Psychedelic Furs) is 49. Comedian Colin Mochrie is 49. Former football and baseball player Bo Jackson is 44. Rapper Jalil (Whodini) is 43. Actor-director Ben Stiller is 41. Rock musician Mike Stone is 37. Actress Sandra Oh is 36. Country singer Mindy McCready is 31. Singer Clay Aiken is 28. Actress Elisha Cuthbert is 24. Actress Kaley Cuoco is 21.

Thought for Today: "The real problem is what to do with the problem solvers after the problems are solved." — Gay Talese, American author and journalist.

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Danish Christmas trees thin on ground


Stephanie Condron

Hundreds of thousands of Britons might find their garden centres selling out of real Christmas trees early this year, because of a shortage in Denmark.

The Danes usually export a millions trees to the UK but just 200,000 are expected, the British Christmas Tree Growers Association said.

It means shoppers may have to hunt harder for their favourite Nordmann fir if they want to avoid unwrapping presents around a plastic tree or one with nuisance needles.

Increasingly, garden centres have been buying them in wholesale deals with Danish farmers. But last year Danish farmers saw subsidies for growing Christmas trees cut, and the result is that fewer have been exported.

Farmers here will meet the shortage, but with mostly Norway spruces, Scots pines and Fraser firs which had been going out of fashion.

"If people want a real Christmas tree, they will get a real Christmas tree but it might not be a Nordmann fir," said Roger Hay, of the association. "We have other species in surplus. It's fashion thing."

Eight million real trees are sold each year in Britain but two thirds of homes prefer fake ones. However, the shortage will be short-lived because Danish farmers are now growing in the UK.

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Benedict XVI between Constantinople and Istanbul



Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis


When, within a few hours, the Pope will land in Istanbul, he will find himself for a few days outside Time; the evenly balanced gravitation of Istanbul and Constantinople will place the Pontiff at a uniquely equidistant point between Turkey and Europe, Christianity and Islam, and Orient and Occident. Few moments counted as much as this in the World History.

Pontiff’s visit is the Terminus Post Quem

Conflicting interests and disastrous policies cultivated and pursued for hundreds of years by all parts involved, in the past and the present, have brought the world at the brink of the abyss. Few realize how close the Mankind has reached to the point of collapse. From ecological disasters caused because of the Industrial revolution, the emergence of a besotted society of consumers, and the repeated arms races of all sorts to cultural and educational alienation of hundreds of millions of people, the Mankind deviated to the utmost materialism, extreme oppression, and absolute disregard of the Other, let alone the other’s sensitivities.

Suddenly, the world has become too small to accommodate an ill-conceived European unification, an American presence in five continents, two expansionist economies like those of China and India that are based on extreme and at times inhuman exploitation of masses without alleviating poverty and misery, plus unjustified and unsolicited anti-Americanism that emanates from uncultured and thuggish dictators like the Venezuelan clown, and last but not least, the hysteria and the hatred directed by the pseudo-Islamic sheikhs and their millions of followers against all the rest.

And all interconnected and interrelated to an extent that you almost cannot mend this without deteriorating that. What to do, and where to start?

Benedict XVI does not represent the Occident!

To some this statement may sound odd and erroneous, but brief thought is enough to drive us to the conclusion that Benedict XVI does not and by definition cannot represent the gay couples legalized in Spain or the accepted adoption of children by them. Furthermore, Benedict XVI does not represent abortion, pedophilia, and the ceaselessly increasing consumption of drugs by Western youth. No one can disagree on this; Benedict XVI and the Roman Catholic Church do not represent the advanced materialism that invaded the Western societies, taking all possible forms of existentialism of the Left, Marxism, anarchism and/or nihilism. Even more so, Benedict XVI does not represent secretive groups, plots and conspiracies, racism and anti-Semitism, all the ideological contaminations that brought wars and disaster to Europe and the world.

Benedict XVI represents, is the only Authority in the West to represent, Justice, Equity, Humanism, dedication to Spiritual Concern, and a certain Hope for many.

Benedict XVI represents Jesus, a person highly revered by Muslims, and adored by Christians. There is no divergence between the Christian and the Muslim sources about, and references to, Jesus as regards his Foremost Authority in terms of Justice and Equity.

Representing Jesus’ Legacy – or at least part of it as Muslims claim that too –, Benedict XVI can truly offer great service to the confused Mankind of our times, by sticking to the most representative Criterion for Jesus’ Concept of Justice; he must make it his, apply it everywhere, and support the approach:

Then give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.

Representing this sentence, Luke, 20:23-25, bringing forth Justice in the relations among states and nations, religions and ideologies, Benedict XVI has a chance to be heard and accepted by a significant number of Muslims, who know that the Right and the Just is not the monopoly of those who pray – like the Pharisees of Jesus’ times – five times per day, but forget to endure self-criticism and rejection of egoism.

Benedict XVI to vigorously support Turkey’s adhesion to the European Union

The Pontiff is a Head of State; and as such, he is able to understand that Vatican’s policies are not situated at the miserable level of parochial politicians like the former French Prime Minister Alain JuppĂ© and other lower and lewder fellows of the French Right.

The Pontiff cannot tolerate perverse political interests that would jeopardize the entire relationship of Christianity with Islam. As an institution, millennia long Vatican cannot be compared with, and therefore cannot allow policies corresponding to those of, the French Fifth Republic (est. 1958). The horizon of the universal Christian – Muslim relations cannot be damaged at the hands of people like Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, and their likes. Looking at the centuries ahead, Benedict XVI, although German of origin, cannot take into consideration the current pocket interests of German employees and workers.

What could all this miserable microcosm of the European politicians say, when Benedict XVI stipulates that Ephesus, Smyrna and Thyateira are as European as Stockholm and Dublin?

What would they answer to the Pontiff stating that Basil of Caesarea is as European, although Cappadocian, as Mohyieldin Ibn Al Arabi of Andalusia?

One sentence of the Pontiff can avert a most perilous blockage of the Turkish candidature at the hands of the Southern Cypriot president who is known for his long dated hatred of Catholic Christianity.

Benedict XVI to adamantly denounce colonial practices

The possibility to understand is one of the most significant privileges of the human being. Certainly the Pope understands that the masses gathered at the Aghia Sophia Museum two days ago do not hate him personally; they reject the injustices and the crimes carried out by the French and the British in Algeria, Greece, Egypt, Syria, Arabia and Mesopotamia.

By denouncing practices that were never accepted by Vatican, the Pontiff will demonstrate to hundreds of millions of Muslims that he agrees with them in the Search of Justice, namely that he indirectly condemns the murderous work of the colonials, and their illegal, unjust, and ultimately antihuman interference in the lands of the Ottoman Empire.

The Pontiff understands very well that the manipulation of Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire by the French, the Russians, and the British, who mercilessly and cynically abandoned these populations, after they had first long incited them against their own country, was a disreputable work for which the absolute condemnation is badly and urgently needed.

France rather than Turkey stands accused for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians of Van and of Aramaeans of Julamerg (the Kutshanus Patriarchate) and Tur Abdin. What does it mean except dishonesty and duplicity that France is vociferous when it comes to Armenians killed in WW I, but keeps silent about the parallel extermination of hundreds of thousands of Aramaeans?

Either all will be denounced or we all will forget it all. The cynical, unethical and disreputable attitude of thugs like the racist Kotcharian tyrant of Armenia, and his French presidential friend, must be castigated in Jesus language and terms.

Only then, the Muslims will be able to repent for their mistakes, regret for the oppression of millions of Aramaeans and Copts at their hands, be apologetic for their anti-Semitism, and finally, commonly with the Roman Pontiff, and all those who seek Justice and Truth on Earth, contribute to shaping a future faraway from the contamination of the anticlerical French conspirators.

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Fake boarding pass creator warns of security flaw


Alex Sanz

Eyewitness News

Bloomington - It was an admitted attempt to expose perceived flaws in aviation security landed Christopher Soghoian in trouble.

The Indiana University Graduate Student told us, "Any undergrad could have thrown this together in thirty minutes. It was a trivial computer program."

Soghoian developed a website that let travelers print out fake Northwest Airlines boarding passes in an effort to prove the Transportation Security Administration didn't take airline security seriously. The TSA shut the website down, The FBI raided his home and launched a more than month-long investigation. But Soghoian says talk of the boarding pass generator overshadowed what he considers a much larger issue.

"You can walk into an airport. You buy a ticket in a fake name. You go to the security checkpoint. And you say. I don't have any I. D. I forgot it today. And they'll search you. They'll search you vigorously. But then they'll let you on the plane," he said.

The use terrorist watch list, he says, is fundamentally flawed, and he hopes his run-in with the FB. is a wake-up call to the flying public.

He says, "The ability to fly without I. D., and the no-fly list, cannot cooperate together. One neutralizes the other. And, so, my goal, is to highlight this huge failure of the no-fly list. My goal here is to improve airport security. And I'm really, really hoping that TSA actually listens and doesn't just brush this one under the carpet."

Though the FBI says no criminal charges are being filed, the U.S. Attorney's office says civil charges are still possible. And that's because the Transporation Security Administration is conducting its own investigation.

As for Soghoian, he plans to continue his research, and advocate for more stringent airline security.

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Castro: Not well enough for b-day bash


ANITA SNOW,

Associated Press Writer

The ailing Fidel Castro was not well enough to attend the kickoff Tuesday of his 80th birthday celebrations, attended by hundreds of admirers who traveled here to fete him.

A government worker at the gala launch of the five-day birthday bash read a message which he said came from the Cuban leader. It said Castro's doctors had told him he was not in condition to go to the party at Havana's Karl Marx Theater where about 5,000 well-wishers gathered.

"I direct myself to you, intellectuals and prestigious personalities of the world, with a dilemma," said the note.

"I could not meet with you in a small locale, only in the Karl Marx Theater where all the visitors would fit and I was not yet in condition, according to the doctors, to face such a colossal encounter," it added. The reading of the message was broadcast live on state television.

The crowd, which included hundreds of guests from other countries and thousands of Cubans, responded with a standing ovation.

"My very close friends who have done me the honor of visiting our country, I sign off with the great pain of not having been able to personally give thanks and hugs to each and every one of you," the message said.

The Cuban leader has been seen by the public only in photos and videos since his July 31 announcement that he was temporarily ceding power to his brother, 75-year-old Defense Minister Raul Castro, while he recovered from surgery for intestinal bleeding. Details of his ailment and his medical treatment are state secrets.

U.S. government officials said earlier this month there is still some mystery about Castro's diagnosis, his treatment and how he is responding. But the officials believe he has terminal cancer of the stomach, colon or pancreas.

More than 1,300 politicians, artists and intellectuals from around the globe were expected to pay homage to the man who governed the communist-run island for 47 years.

Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rene Preval of Haiti have confirmed they will attend the celebrations along with former Ecuadorean President Rodrigo Borja and Nicaraguan President-elect Daniel Ortega.

Also expected are Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, an Argentine human rights activist.

Noticeably absent will be Castro's good friend and political ally Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who is up for re-election Dec. 3. In his absence, Chavez promised to dedicate his electoral victory to Castro.

The festivities were originally scheduled around Castro's actual birthday on Aug. 13. After falling ill, Castro asked to postpone them to Dec. 2 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the founding of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces.

Other events planned for the celebration include the dedication of the new San Geronimo College, a three-day academic conference, a concert, an art exhibit and a parade Saturday expected to draw 300,000 people.


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The Pope Tones Down His Act in Turkey




Long known for his rigid thinking, Benedict XVI shows new flexibility in trying to mend fences in the wake of his controversial speech about Islam.

Joseph Ratzinger has never been known for his flexibility. As a university theologian and the Vatican's top doctrinal watchdog, the German prelate consistently stuck to his intellectual guns, sometimes stepping on sensibilities in the process. That unbendable belief in his own truth may have indeed gotten the now Pope Benedict XVI into trouble with his provocative September speech about faith and violence that sparked anger throughout the Muslim world. But the papacy often requires old men to learn new tricks. And so on Tuesday, as he set off on the most delicate mission of his life, the 79-year-old Pontiff was showing a very different side, one that reflects a growing awareness of his new role.

In a rapid-fire, on-board encounter with reporters just before take-off, the Pope said his four-day trip to Ankara, Ephesus and Istanbul was aimed at "dialogue, brotherhood and reconciliation." He then heaped praise on Turkey, which he called a "bridge between cultures," and the Turks, whom he described as an open and peace-loving people. He also seemed to reverse his stance on Turkey's bid to join the European Union. Just two years ago, while Cardinal, he said the country's culture and history left it "in permanent contrast to Europe." On board his Alitalia flight, instead, he was pointing out that modern Turkey was founded on secular ideas of the French Constitution. Later in the day, Vatican officials in fact confirmed that the Holy See would favor Turkey's bid to eventually join the EU if it met all the necessary conditions.

Though Tuesday's tone will no doubt disappoint some of his ardent conservative fans, Benedict was never going to use his first visit to a predominantly Muslim country as a rhetorical Act II to the Regensburg speech. There, in the confines of a German university, he questioned Islam's compatibility with reason, he cited the Koran's references to jihad, and he quoted a Byzantine emperor's rude remarks about Muhammed. In Turkey, if nothing else, Benedict followed the old rule that visiting world leaders don't wag their finger at their host country.

Still, Benedict's two prepared remarks in the Turkish capital — at first blush, at least — seemed so careful as to make one wonder if the famous hardliner was going soft. After years of quietly, and then not-so-quietly, differentiating his approach to inter-faith relations from Pope John Paul II's, the German Pope was sounding a lot like his predecessor. During Benedict's speech alongside Turkey's head of religious affairs Ali Bardakoglu, the Pope cited: "mutual respect and esteem," "human and spiritual unity" and the common heritage of Islam and Christianity as ancestors of Abraham. In marked contrast to the nasty historical quote he'd cited in Regensburg, the Pope referred to a warm 11th century meeting of Pope Gregory VII and a Muslim prince. Still smarting from Regensburg, Bardakoglu told the Pope: "The so-called conviction that the sword is used to expand Islam in the world and growing Islamophobia hurts all Muslims."

Later, in a speech to foreign diplomats in the Turkish capital, Benedict was beginning to sound not only like his predecessor — but like himself. In the John Paul vein, he began a long reflection on war and violence by saying that "true peace needs justice, to correct the economic imbalances and political disturbances which always give rise to tension and threaten every society." This 'root-cause' exploration of conflict is much different than Regensburg's search at the heart of religion for the source of violence. It is also a very different tone than his meeting with German Muslims last year in Cologne, where he implored them to help weed out terrorists from their communities — without any mention of the difficulties facing those same immigrant communities.

Still, Benedict ultimately made clear that he will be tweaking, rather than changing, his fundamental message on inter-faith dialogue. In the speech to diplomats, he called out rather pointedly for religious freedom — using the secular Muslim state of Turkey as an example. The following passage may well wind up being the strongest of the entire voyage: "The fact that the majority of the population of this country is Muslim is a significant element in the life of society, which the State cannot fail to take into account, yet the Turkish Constitution recognizes every citizen's right to freedom of worship and freedom of conscience. The civil authorities of every democratic country are duty bound to guarantee the effective freedom of all believers and to permit them to organize freely the life of their religious communities," the Pope said, reading his remarks in English and coughing occasionally at the end of a long day of encounters. He continued: "Religious liberty is a fundamental expression of human liberty and that the active presence of religion in society is a source of progress and enrichment for all. This assumes, of course, that religions do not seek to exercise direct political power, as that is not their province, and it also assumes that they utterly refuse to sanction recourse to violence as a legitimate expression of religion."

So here, tucked inside a day otherwise focused on reconciliation, may be the first act in the "post-POST-Regensburg" phase of Benedict's papal diplomacy. How clearly can he draw the lines on the question of religious freedom? When will the "frank" public dialogue with Islam recommence? Can he lay out a new vision for a modern secular state — in both the Western and Muslim worlds — that gives due space to faith? And, perhaps just as importantly, can he keep the world's attention? The answers will depend on whether Benedict can strike the right balance between his newfound flexibility and an ancient, iron-clad faith.

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The Face of Brutality




Exclusive: A warlord tied to some of Baghdad's worst atrocities talks to TIME about the roots of Iraq's hate.

It was one of the most audacious operations, although not a single shot was fired. On the morning of Nov. 14, dozens of men wearing police commando uniforms pulled up in a fleet of pickup trucks at a building belonging to Iraq's Ministry of Higher Education. They fanned out across the four floors and herded everybody--staff and visitors--into a single room. All of them were ordered to hand over their cell phones. Then the women were taken into another room and locked in. About 150 men were marched outside, bundled into the pickup trucks and driven away. The whole operation took just 15 minutes.

When word of the kidnappings reached the control room of the Ministry of the Interior, an officer on duty there suspected immediately that the perps were acting on the orders of a fearsome Shi'ite militia warlord whose deeds the officer had been tracking for three years. "A ministry of mainly Sunni staff, 150 people taken captive--it can only be one thing," he says. "It had to be the work of Abu Deraa."

Few Americans have ever heard of him, and most Iraqis don't know what he looks like. But such is the reputation of Abu Deraa, 48, that all of Baghdad's biggest, most brazen attacks against Sunni targets are almost automatically assumed to be his handiwork. Iraqi and U.S. officials say Abu Deraa is the mastermind behind the killing of thousands of Sunnis this year. Loosely affiliated with the Mahdi Army of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Abu Deraa's death squad is suspected of involvement in some of the most daring kidnappings in the capital--including the Oct. 23 snatch of the U.S. soldier Ahmed Qusai al-Taie and the Nov. 14 raid on the Ministry of Higher Education. (Although more than half of the 150 abductees were released, many remain unaccounted for.) Abu Deraa has a personal fondness for gruesome torture. One of his signature techniques is running a drill into the skull of his live victim. His appetite for mayhem is so vast that Iraqis call him the "Shi'ite Zarqawi"; and like the al-Qaeda-in-Iraq leader, who was killed by a U.S. air strike last June, Abu Deraa has largely operated in the shadows, avoiding public appearances and almost never giving interviews.

But now he has. Abu Deraa agreed last week to provide written responses to TIME's questions, which were passed to him by intermediaries. He says he is "honored" by comparisons to al-Zarqawi and claimed, implausibly, to have no ill will toward ordinary Sunnis. He says his fight is against "occupiers, their supporters and takfiris"--a reference to Sunni insurgents linked to al-Qaeda. He denied that he had kidnapped al-Taie, the missing U.S. soldier, but added, "I would be very proud if it was me who kidnapped that soldier, and I am very proud of any kind of accusation against me, especially related to [acts against] the occupiers and those who serve the occupation." He said he was motivated by a "sense of holy duty toward my faith [to fight] against any hostile enemy of my faith."

Abu Deraa was born Ismail al-Zarjawi to a poor family in Sadr City. After a career in petty crime during the Saddam Hussein years, he became one of the first recruits of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army after the dictator's fall. "When the Americans entered the country and kicked Saddam out, we were very happy," Abu Deraa says. "But then we discovered their bad intentions against Iraq, so we started attacking the occupation forces." In the spring of 2004 he participated in the Shi'ite uprising against U.S. forces in Sadr City. That was also when he earned his nom de guerre Abu Deraa, or "Father of the Shield," a reference to his penchant for attacking U.S. armored vehicles.

He saw more action that summer in Najaf and that fall in Fallujah, when a small detachment of Shi'ites fought alongside Sunni insurgents against U.S. forces. Back then, he says, "it was a real resistance, and there was no sectarian affiliation." Abu Deraa spent the next year consolidating his position as a Mahdi Army leader, first among equals of three commanders in Sadr City. Iraqi officials say this was when he turned to kidnapping for cash, which he used to buy weapons and lure recruits.

It is the atrocities he is suspected of perpetrating against Sunnis that have earned him notoriety and helped plunge Iraq into civil war. Sunni leaders and some government officials blame him for the June 21 murder of one of Saddam's lawyers, the July 9 daylight slaughter of up to 50 Sunnis and the July 15 kidnapping of 30 officials from the Iraqi Olympic Committee. Unlike al-Zarqawi, Abu Deraa issued no statements and released no videos, except for a semicomic webcast, available on YouTube, that shows him offering a Pepsi to a camel. Still, his renown has spread beyond Iraq. On Internet bulletin boards he is hailed as a Shi'ite hero. A typical message reads, "Abu Deraa is a hero to all oppressed people on earth, fighting international tyranny of U.S. forces and fighting domestic tyranny."

The ruthlessness of Abu Deraa--and perhaps his growing fame on the Shi'ite street--has caused even al-Sadr to distance himself from his former protégé. Last month al-Sadr put Abu Deraa on a list of people no longer part of the Mahdi Army. U.S. officials began to describe Abu Deraa as a "rogue militia leader" and a "free agent" no longer in al-Sadr's control. But some of al-Sadr's associates continue to praise Abu Deraa. Falah Shansal, a member of parliament from the al-Sadr bloc, told TIME last week that Abu Deraa was still "a fighter in the Mahdi Army."

As long as Abu Deraa enjoys al-Sadr's tacit protection, he won't be easy to run down. U.S. forces believed they had him surrounded in Sadr City last month, but the militia leader narrowly escaped. A U.S. air strike is believed to have killed several of his closest fighters and severed an arm of one of his sons. "This is an honor for him, me and the family," Abu Deraa told TIME. The victims of Abu Deraa's brutality can only hope there are more such honors in store.

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Afghanistan Clouds NATO Summit

No longer threatened by the Soviets, NATO is now a global force. But Afghanistan shows that the enlarged alliance is not comfortable in its new role

Leaders of NATO's 26 member states gather this week in the Latvian capital, Riga, for a summit that will trumpet the solidarity of the world's most successful military alliance. The scripts have been largely written and surprises are unlikely. But as Christoph Bertram, the dean of German security experts, recently noted, the affair will be "like a Christmas service for agnostics, who for most of the year do not pray together or sing from the same hymnbook." The question of what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should do and become has been a subject of often deep disagreement since the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991. Here's a snapshot of where the alliance stands today.

How tough is its fight in Afghanistan? Tougher than most thought it would be when NATO first deployed forces in August 2003 to help the nascent Afghan government maintain security. "If we fail in Afghanistan it could be the end of the alliance," says Ronald D. Asmus, director of the Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a security think tank in Brussels. "It would be like losing the Korean War at the beginning of the cold war." There's not a single NATO member state who would argue otherwise, yet the trend line is not encouraging. This year has been the deadliest since the fall of the Taliban in 2001: insurgent and terrorist attacks have killed some 3,700 people since January, including at least 143 international troops. The insecurity is reversing economic gains as foreign aid workers withdraw from dangerous areas. What NATO once considered a stabilization mission has become a war-fighting one.

Are the 31,000 troops in Afghanistan enough? More troops could be put to good use: NATO has 16,000 soldiers in Kosovo, which is less than 2% the size of Afghanistan. But with major contributing countries already stretched in Iraq, Kosovo and Lebanon, a big infusion of new soldiers is not realistic. So the Riga horse-trading will concentrate on a related problem: that commanders often can't deploy existing troops as they would like because of national limits—or "caveats"—on their use. U.S., British, Canadian and Dutch troops are doing most of the frontline fighting; support from many of the other 33 countries in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force [ISAF ]ranges from secondary to symbolic. At Tuesday night's dinner with other NATO leaders, U.S. President George W. Bush is likely to take up the demands of isaf commander General David Richards that national governments loosen the strings. He will get support from Polish Defense Minister Radek Sikorski, who told Time: "What is the use of having the troops there if you can't use them when they are needed?"

Will that appeal work? Not yet. Germany, the third biggest troop contributor to isaf, has been the focus of the caveat debate because its 2,900 troops are restricted to the more secure regions of Kabul and the north. Karsten Voigt, coordiNATOr for U.S.-German relations in the Foreign Ministry, says he is under constant pressure to do more in Afghanistan: in Washington last month, he says, one interlocutor told him that "Germans have to learn how to kill." Berlin will not budge, though, since neither the government nor the public has the stomach for putting German soldiers in harm's way. Mindful of that political reality, Bush isn't likely to push for a sea change. Nevertheless, it was only seven years ago, in Kosovo, that Germany first committed combat troops to a NATO mission at all. Over time, if Germany moves into a foreign-policy role consonant with its economic weight, a more self-assured stance might become politically acceptable.

The original version of this article first appeared in the December 4, 2006 issue of TIME Europe.

Is NATO fighting the right way in Afghanistan? Many are beginning to wonder. NATO says its two-week offense in September, Operation Medusa, drove insurgents out of the Taliban strongholds of Panjwai and Zhari districts in Kandahar province. Daan Everts, NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, calls it a "critical turning point." But that operation also killed at least a dozen civilians. "If NATO cannot bring our people security and a peaceful life, then it has failed," says Noorolhaq Olomi, an M.P. from Kandahar and chairman of the parliament's defense committee. "There is no reconstruction, just destruction." Despite efforts to help reconstruction work around the country, a military force like NATO doesn't have the resources or expertise to make Afghanistan's huge deficits—poverty, pervasive corruption, poor education, a thriving drug trade—quickly disappear. Yet no one else is providing such help at the scale required.

Would ad hoc military alliances work better than NATO? NATO has been a rather unloved son in recent years. "We've had an unholy coalition of American and French unilateralists undercutting NATO for different reasons," says Asmus. Outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—who won't be in Riga—didn't want to be forced to forge unanimity around a table, so he ignored the alliance, even after it speedily invoked its "common defense" clause, for the first time in its history, after the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. France, for its part, will always see NATO as a U.S. appendage. And while Paris is willing to commit troops to dangerous places, as it's doing now in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Lebanon, its officials are a long way from embracing NATO. But no one is ready to dump the alliance. Its permanent structures, however unwieldy, are still the best way to muster, coordinate and confer legitimacy on international troops.

What's NATO's brief? "Our agenda with Europe is now a global agenda, and it tends to be about the rest of the world, about what we can do as partners in the Middle East, in South and East Asia, in Africa and in Latin America," said U.S. Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns last week. Washington wants to enhance the alliance's relations with like-minded allies such as Japan, South Korea and Australia, arguing that the West is as much an idea as a geographical concept. But don't expect to see that idea reflected in the final Riga communiqu�: a global NATO makes many allies, most notably France, uneasy. "We think there are enough problems with NATO in Afghanistan and Kosovo; we don't need to get involved in the Taiwan Strait," says a French Defense Ministry official. Many European governments, France in particular, worry that "expanding NATO into an alliance of democracies [could be] interpreted as 'the West against the rest,'" says Daniel Keohane, a security expert at the Centre for European Reform in London. The summit will endorse a mechanism for coordinating with out-of-area allies, but not the formal ties Washington has been hoping for.

Do NATO and the E.U. Know what each other is supposed to do? Not entirely, but the subject isn't nearly as fraught as it was five years ago, when an assertive European Union seemed on track to create military command structures that would compete with NATO's. While the E.U. is now independently running military operations in Bosnia, Macedonia and Congo and doing delicate work in East Timor and Gaza, that's no longer neuralgic for NATO. "Frankly, we want more NATO and more E.U.," says a senior U.S. official. But the idea of a robust E.U. military arm stumbles on the lack of an E.U. constitution, and falls on the matter of defense budgets: only six of NATO's 24 European members meet its benchmark of spending 2% of gnp on defense, and U.S. spending, at 3.7%, far eclipses the European average. Europe can dream of independence from U.S. security, but to make it happen, its governments have to spend more. And they have to face the reality that even the most humane diplomacy sometimes has to be backed by military force.

With reporting by Aryn Baker/Kabul, Leo Cendrowicz/Brussels, Sally B. Donnelly and Elaine Shannon/Washington, J.F.O. McAllister/London and Andrew Purvis/Berlin

The original version of this article first appeared in the December 4, 2006 issue of TIME Europe.

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Bush's Five Fatal Mideast Mistakes



The U.S. President may have had noble aims, but his administration's policies have helped push the region toward catastrophe.

President Bush travels to Jordan this week amid a consensus among U.S. allies in the Middle East that the region is monumentally worse off now than it was when he took office six years ago. In Iraq, there seems little prospect of achieving anything that could be construed as a U.S. victory — and as a result, it is unlikely to send the promised tidal wave of freedom crashing across the Arab world. Instead, Iraq has effectively disintegrated into a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war that threatens to spread instability throughout the region.

Elsewhere, Israelis and Palestinians have descended into one of the most intractable cycles of conflict in their long struggle. In Lebanon, the national unity agreement that ended almost two decades of civil war in 1990 appears to be unraveling, as sectarian factions are again edging toward another bloodbath. Meanwhile, Arab autocrats remain entrenched, Arab democrats are feeling abandoned, and Iran's Islamic revolution is enjoying a second wind. For all the grand ambition of President Bush's interventions in the Middle East, a veteran Western diplomat recently offered TIME the following glum assessment: "The region is in as serious a mess as I have ever seen it. There is an unprecedented number of interconnected conflicts and threats."

The fact that Bush is holding talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki not in Baghdad, but in the comparatively tranquil Jordanian capital of Amman, has not gone unnoticed."One hundred and fifty thousand U.S. soldiers cannot secure protection for their president," mocked a Jordanian columnist, who called the choice of venue "an open admission of gross failure for Washington and its allies' project in Iraq."

So, how did things go wrong? The Bush administration is not entirely to blame. The Middle East is a tough neighborhood, and many of its various ills — repression, extremism and conflict — have been around for decades. Bush deserves credit, in fact, for reversing — on paper if not in practice — years of American policy by promoting democracy in the Arab world and calling for an independent Palestinian state. But the Bush administration made five fatal mistakes that contributed to the crisis in which it now finds itself.

1. Bush ignored the Palestinians.

Up until the week that Bill Clinton left office in January 2001, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were still trying to work out an ambitious end-of-conflict agreement. True, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had unleashed an intifadeh, and the Israelis were on the verge of electing Ariel Sharon — an avowed enemy of the Oslo peace process — as prime minister, but the two sides were still talking. When Bush became president, he ended crucial American mediation, repudiated Arafat and backed Sharon, who proceeded to expand Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. With the conflict becoming bloodier than ever, Arafat died, and Hamas, the fundamentalist party that adamantly refuses to even recognize Israel, much less negotiate with it, ousted the late Palestinian leader's party from power. Besides angering Arab opinion, the lack of an Arab-Israeli peace process that would also address Israel's occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights has encouraged mischief-making by Damascus, which is suspected of aiding anti-U.S. insurgents in Iraq and committing political assassinations in Lebanon.

2. Bush invaded Iraq.

After 9/11, Bush became convinced that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons and represented a mortal threat to the West. He also came to believe that ousting Saddam would turn Iraq into a democracy that would become the model for the rest of the Arab world. Saddam turned out not to have nuclear weapons, and Iraq turned out to be more prone to civil war than democracy. It runs the risk of becoming a failed state from which terrorists run global operations, and/or breaking into ethnic mini states that inspire secessionist trouble throughout the region.

3. Bush misjudged Iran.

Just after Bush became president, Iranians re-elected moderate President Mohammed Khatami, who had reached out to the U.S. and called for a "dialogue of civilizations." Bush not only refused to extend the olive branch cautiously offered by the Clinton Administration, he declared Iran part of an "axis of evil." Khatami left office under fire for the failure of his conciliatory approach, to be replaced by hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who proceeded to promote Iran's nuclear ambitions and call for Israel to be wiped off the map. Despite Bush's tough talk against Iran, the Iraq war has dramatically expanded Iran's influence in the country. To make matters worse, Iran's Lebanese ally, Hizballah, withstood Israel's month-long onslaught last summer and is poised to topple the U.S.-backed Lebanese government.

4. Bush hurt Israel.

If protecting Israel had been a key goal of the administration's policies, it is hard to see how they have helped make the Jewish State better off today. Having gotten rid of Arafat, they have instead to face Hamas. And continuous rocket attacks from Gaza have highlighted the limits of what Israel can achieve through its plans to unilaterally redraw its borders. The confrontation in Lebanon over the summer and the messy engagement in Gaza also highlight the limits on the deterrent capacity of Israel's military advantages. Spreading instability in the region is not in Israel's long-term interests; nor is a nuclear Iran.

5. Bush alienated Muslims.

It was an honest misstep, but the problem began when Bush promised to wage a "crusade" against al-Qaeda after September 11, effectively equating his war on terrorism with an earlier Christian invasion of the Middle East that remains etched in the collective memory of Muslims. Since then, the Bush administration's involvement in or perceived support of military campaigns against Iraqis, Palestinians and Lebanese heightened Muslim anger at the U.S. and undermined the political position of moderate, pro-American Arabs, including old U.S. allies like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia — and, of course, King Abdullah II of Jordan, the host of Bush's Middle East visit this week.

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The Scariest Guy in Town

With subpoena power, Henry Waxman could be the Republicans' worst nightmare.

In the altered landscape that is Washington, there's a new contender for the title of Scariest Guy in Town. He stands 5 ft. 5, speaks softly and has all the panache of your parents' dentist. But when it comes to putting powerful people on the hot seat, there's no one tougher and more tenacious than veteran California Congressman Henry Waxman. In the Democrats' wilderness years, Waxman fashioned himself as his party's chief inquisitor. Working with one of the most highly regarded staffs on Capitol Hill, he has spent the past eight years churning out some 2,000 headline-grabbing reports, blasting the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress on everything from faulty prewar intelligence and flaws in missile defense to the flu-vaccine shortage and arsenic in drinking water.

Come January, however, the man that the liberal Nation magazine once called the "Eliot Ness of the Democrats" can do even more, thanks to the two words that strike fear in the heart of every government official: subpoena power. As the new chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, Waxman will have free rein to investigate, as he puts it, "everything that the government is involved with." And the funny thing is, Waxman can thank the Republicans for the unique set of levers he will hold. Under a rules change they put through in the days when they used the panel to make Bill Clinton's life miserable, the leader of Government Reform is the only chairman who can issue subpoenas without a committee vote. Then Chairman Dan Burton--who famously re-enacted the suicide of Clinton deputy White House counsel Vince Foster by shooting at what he called a "head-like thing" (later widely reported to be a melon) in his backyard--issued 1,089 such unilateral subpoenas in six years. Since a Republican entered the White House, the G.O.P. Congress has been far less enthusiastic in its oversight. Waxman likes to point out that the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony to get to the bottom of whether Clinton had misused the White House Christmas-card list for political purposes, but only 12 hours on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Iraq will get new attention with Waxman in power. This week he plans to send a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanding information on Halliburton's $16 billion contract to provide services to troops there. Waxman's staff has been poring over the fine print of that deal for more than two years, and is convinced that much of the money is slipping between layer upon layer of subcontractors.

Waxman, 67, is a most unlikely character to represent the glitzy congressional district that includes Beverly Hills. Nearly every profile of him points out that the hometown Congressman for the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard has never attended the Academy Awards. "It's such a long night," he says. "When I watch it on TV, I can get a snack." Waxman grew up over his family's grocery store near Watts, got his political start in the state assembly and came to Washington among the storied post-Watergate reformers known as the Class of 1974. Asked to name a hobby, he draws a blank.

What Waxman does love to do is write laws, and he has been extraordinarily good at it. The walls of his Washington office are covered with framed pens that Presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton used to sign the laws that Waxman helped make a reality: the Clean Air Act, generic-drug legislation, food- and toy-safety laws, and Medicare catastrophic coverage, to name a few. In 1994, as chairman of the health and environment subcommittee, he lined up the chief executives of the nation's biggest tobacco companies, had them raise their right hands and then shredded them as finely as their own products. His hearings helped pave the way for the lawsuits that followed, which led to a landmark $246 billion legal settlement with the industry.

Opponents have noted that Waxman is hardly an equal-opportunity muckraker. Republicans and industry groups say his investigatory zeal is limited to conservative targets: he spent the Clinton years trying to fend off congressional investigations, including the ones into the White House's questionable campaign fund-raising practices, and once led a Democratic walkout when Republicans released a report on the firing of White House travel-office workers. While Waxman promises what he calls oversight, the Republicans say it'll be more like a witch hunt, and the Administration is promising to fight him all the way to the Supreme Court to protect itself against what it expects to be a frontal assault on Executive power. Waxman says the G.O.P. should take comfort in the fact that he has historical perspective. "I've seen a good example of overreaching," he says, referring to the committee's treatment of Clinton. "It's not the way to behave."

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Today in history - Nov. 29


The Associated Press

Today is Wednesday, Nov. 29, the 333rd day of 2006. There are 32 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On Nov. 29, 1963, President Johnson named a commission headed by Earl Warren to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy.

On this date:

In 1530, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, one-time adviser to England's King Henry VIII, died.

In 1864, a Colorado militia killed at least 150 peaceful Cheyenne Indians in the Sand Creek Massacre.

In 1924, Italian composer Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels, Belgium, before he could complete his opera "Turandot." (It was finished by Franco Alfano.)

In 1929, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd radioed that he and co-pilot Bernt Balchen had made the first airplane flight over the South Pole.

In 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partitioning of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.

In 1956, the musical "Bells Are Ringing," starring Judy Holliday, opened on Broadway.

In 1961, Enos the chimp was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., aboard the Mercury-Atlas 5 spacecraft, which orbited earth twice before returning.

In 1964, the U.S. Roman Catholic Church instituted sweeping changes in the liturgy, including the use of English instead of Latin.

In 1981, actress Natalie Wood drowned in a boating accident off Santa Catalina Island, Calif., at age 43.

In 1986, actor Cary Grant died in Davenport, Iowa, at age 82.

Ten years ago: A U.N. court sentenced a Bosnian Serb army soldier (Drazen Erdemovic) to 10 years in prison for his role in the massacre of 1,200 Muslims. John C. Salvi III, serving a life sentence for fatally shooting two abortion clinic receptionists, hanged himself in his Massachusetts prison cell.

Five years ago: George Harrison, the "quiet Beatle," died in Los Angeles following a battle with cancer; he was 58. "A Separate Peace" author John Knowles died in Florida at age 75. The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a resolution extending the U.N. humanitarian program in Iraq and setting the stage for an overhaul of U.N. sanctions against Baghdad the following year.

One year ago: Al-Jazeera broadcast video of four Western peace activists held hostage by a previously unknown group, the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. (Three of the hostages were later released, but one of them, American Tom Fox, was killed.) The Vatican issued a document defending a policy designed to keep men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies from becoming priests, but said there would be no crackdown on gays who were already ordained. Actress Wendie Jo Sperber died in Sherman Oaks, Calif., at age 47.

Today's Birthdays: Hall-of-Fame sportscaster Vin Scully is 79. Blues singer-musician John Mayall is 73. Composer-musician Chuck Mangione is 66. Pop singer Denny Doherty (The Mamas & the Papas) is 66. Country singer Jody Miller is 65. Actress Diane Ladd is 63. Pop singer-musician Felix Cavaliere (The Rascals) is 62. Olympic gold medal skier Suzy Chaffee is 60. Comedian Garry Shandling is 57. Movie director Joel Coen is 52. Actor-comedian-game show host Howie Mandel is 51. Actor Jeff Fahey is 49. Actress Cathy Moriarty is 46. Actress Kim Delaney is 45. Actor Tom Sizemore is 45. Actor Andrew McCarthy is 44. Actor Don Cheadle is 42. Actor-producer Neill Barry is 41. Musician Wallis Buchanan (Jamiroquai) is 41. Pop singer Jonathan Knight (New Kids on the Block) is 38. Rock musician Martin Carr (Boo Radleys) is 38. Actress Gena Lee Nolin is 35. Actress Anna Faris is 30. Rapper The Game is 27. Rock musician Ringo Garza is 25. Actor Lucas Black is 24.

Thought for Today: "Superstition is the religion of feeble minds." — Edmund Burke, British statesman (1729-1797).

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Man, Girl Seriously Injured In Police Chase


A police chase on Indianapolis' north side early Tuesday morning ended with a car hitting a light pole and tree, seriously injuring a man and 16-year-old girl inside.

Investigators said the driver sped away as the officer tried to make a traffic stop, 6News' Julie Pursley reported.

The man and girl, whose identities were not immediately released, were taken to a hospital, where the man was listed in critical condition and the girl was listed in serious condition.

Central Avenue was closed in both directions between 15th and 16th streets following the crash. The chase began at about 2:30 a.m. when Indianapolis police Officer Zack Taylor saw a car that he said blew through a red light at 34th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

Officials said the car almost hit Taylor's cruiser before he tried to pull the driver over. Police said the man led police on the chase for several minutes before the crash.

A street sign went through the window of the car during the crash, narrowly missing both the driver and passenger.

"The family's been contacted of the girl," said IPD Sgt. Fred Ilnicki. "So, hopefully we'll get some more information into what led up to it. Why is a 16-year-old out (at 2:30 in the morning?)."

Officer Bruce Ali suffered minor injuries as he attempted to get the girl out of the car following the crash.

Officials planned to run tests to determine if alcohol or drugs were involved in the crash.

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Columbus Police Looking for Police Impersonator


Columbus Police are looking for a police impersonator. They say a man in a dark colored 4-door car with flashing red and blue lights pulled a person over.

The victim realized he wasn't really a police officer by the questions he was asking. The victim called 9-1-1 after getting to work.

The suspect is described as a white male, mid 40's, with unclean should length hair and missing some teeth. He was wearing a baseball cap, and a green sweatshirt or jacket.

Anyone with information is asked to call Columbus Police at (812) 376-2600.


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Today in history - Nov. 28

The Associated Press

Today is Tuesday, Nov. 28, the 332nd day of 2006. There are 33 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On Nov. 28, 1942, nearly 500 people died in a fire that destroyed the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston.

On this date:

In 1520, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Pacific Ocean after passing through the South American strait that now bears his name.

In 1806, French forces led by Joachim Murat entered Warsaw.

In 1919, American-born Lady Astor was elected the first female member of the British Parliament.

In 1925, the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville's famed home of country music, made its radio debut on station WSM.

In 1943, President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin began conferring in Tehran, Iran, during World War II.

In 1958, the African nation of Chad became an autonomous republic within the French community.

In 1964, the United States launched the space probe Mariner 4 on a course to Mars.

In 1975, President Ford nominated Federal Judge John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court seat vacated by William O. Douglas.

In 1979, an Air New Zealand DC-10 en route to the South Pole crashed into a mountain in Antarctica, killing all 257 people aboard.

In 1990, Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister of Britain during an audience with Queen Elizabeth II, who conferred the premiership on John Major.

Ten years ago: Defense Secretary William Perry joined U.S. soldiers in the mud and freezing rain of Bosnia-Herzegovina to deliver a Thanksgiving message of discipline and patience for their still-unfinished peacekeeping mission. A stuck hatch on the space shuttle Columbia prevented two astronauts from going on a spacewalk (engineers later discovered a loose screw had jammed the hatch mechanism).

Five years ago: Enron Corp., once the world's largest energy trader, collapsed after would-be rescuer Dynegy Inc. backed out of an $8.4 billion deal to take it over. Officials recovered the body of CIA officer Johnny "Mike" Spann from a prison compound in Mazar-e-Sharif after northern alliance rebels backed by U.S. airstrikes and special forces quelled an uprising by Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners.

One year ago: Eight-term Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleaded guilty to graft and tearfully resigned; the California Republican admitted he'd taken $2.4 million in bribes mostly from defense contractors in exchange for government business and other favors. A corruption scandal brought down the minority government of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. The trial of Saddam Hussein resumed after a five-week break, but adjourned until Dec. 5, 2005.

Today's Birthdays: Recording executive Berry Gordy Jr. is 77. Former Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., is 70. Singer-songwriter Bruce Channel is 66. Singer Randy Newman is 63. Movie director Joe Dante is 60. CBS News correspondent Susan Spencer is 60. "Late Show" orchestra leader Paul Shaffer is 57. Actor Ed Harris is 56. Actress S. Epatha Merkerson is 54. Country singer Kristine Arnold (Sweethearts of the Rodeo) is 50. Actor Judd Nelson is 47. Movie director Alfonso Cuaron is 45. Rock musician Matt Cameron is 44. Comedian Jon Stewart is 44. Actress Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon is 40. TV personality Anna Nicole Smith is 39. Rhythm-and-blues singer Dawn Robinson is 38. Hip-hop musician apl.de.ap (Black Eyed Peas) is 32. Actress Aimee Garcia is 28. Rapper Chamillionaire is 27. Actress Scarlett Pomers ("Reba") is 18.

Thought for Today: "Happiness is a sort of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you're lucky. Joy is a light that fills you with hope and faith and love." — Adela Rogers St. Johns, American journalist (1894-1988).

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The Russian Roulette




The fatal poisoning of an outspoken former KGB agent adds to the chill of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

The former spy lay dying in a London hospital--of what he didn't know. (It wasn't until after his death that Scotland Yard realized that the rare compound killing Alexander Litvinenko, 43, had left traces of radioactivity nearly everywhere he had been on Nov. 1.) But Litvinenko wanted the world to know who killed him, not how it was done or where. In a statement released after he died last week, the fierce critic of Russia's government directly addressed the man he said was responsible for his death: "You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."

Whoever did kill Litvinenko wasn't an amateur. British authorities announced last Friday that he had ingested a radioactive toxin, polonium 210, and that police had found traces of it in three locations: a sushi bar where Litvinenko had eaten lunch, a hotel he had visited on the same day and his home. Polonium 210 is so rare and volatile that the assassin would have needed access to a high-security nuclear laboratory to obtain it. Moscow denies that it had anything to do with the death. At a meeting with European officials in Helsinki, Vladimir Putin called the death a tragedy but also questioned the authenticity of Litvinenko's deathbed accusation and stated bluntly, "There is no issue to discuss."

Whether or not anyone in the Kremlin had targeted Litvinenko, his death, coming just weeks after the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in her Moscow apartment block, has sent a subzero chill over Russia's already frosty civil society. Human-rights campaigners and other Putin critics see the killing as the latest blow to democracy and free speech, part of a steady erosion of civil liberties. Russian democracy was chaotically vibrant just a decade ago, after the collapse of communism in 1991. But these days it is looking fragile. New legislation annuls independent candidates for the Duma (parliament's lower house), and no political party can exist without the Kremlin's approval. Regional governors and members of the upper house of parliament are no longer elected but appointed. Most key national media are in the hands of state or state-controlled corporations, and Russian activists live in fear of the consequences when they openly criticize Putin. "There may no longer be shortages of groceries and long lines at every street corner," says Ludmilla Alexeyeva, the doyen of human-rights activists in Moscow, "but Russia today is still a place where human rights and freedom are in short supply."

Litvinenko, for one, was unafraid to speak out. A former lieutenant colonel in the Russian federal security service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, Litvinenko gained notoriety in the 1990s for claiming to have refused a Kremlin order to assassinate the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He had long accused Putin of backtracking on democracy and, in a 2001 book he co-wrote, went so far as to allege that Russian security services organized apartment-block bombings in 1999 that stoked support for a resurgence of the war in Chechnya. He had most recently made public statements tying the Kremlin to the murder of Politkovskaya. Litvinenko was reportedly meeting contacts in London in the hope of gaining information on the case when he was poisoned. "The bastards got me, but they won't get everybody," he told his friend Andrei Nekrasov shortly before his death.

The Litvinenko case revived memories of perhaps the most notorious assassination carried out during the cold war, the 1978 murder in London of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who was working for the BBC. He was killed with a ricin-tipped umbrella while waiting for a bus, in a case that has never been solved. Just like the Markov murder, the death of Litvinenko has already given rise to a flurry of conspiracy theories, including speculation among defenders of the government that the poisoning was arranged by Russian émigrés or Western intelligence agencies to discredit Moscow. But for many Russian élites, the whole macabre spectacle has heightened anxieties about the Putin government's backsliding into communist-era intrigue and repression. "People who question the policies of our government are increasingly targeted. People who work for human rights are increasingly under attack," says Alexeyeva. "And even people who support this work are potentially in danger of being singled out by the government. So are we in Russia? Are we back in the U.S.S.R.?" It's becoming harder to tell the difference.

With reporting by Reported by Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

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Why We Need to Talk to Iran


Iran last week decided to play power broker. It invited Iraq's President to visit Tehran to discuss regional stability, and it sought to bring Syria into the process as well. This was not greeted with glee in Washington. But it should have been. One of America's top strategic interests is to get Iran to behave less like a revolutionary cauldron and more like a traditional nation-state. For the mullahs and their mad President to express a desire for a stable neighborhood is a good first step.

Step two should involve the U.S. talking, directly and seriously, to Iran. Our current conceit, which is that Iran should be denied the honor of our direct discourse until it suspends its nuclear-enrichment programs, hurts us more than it hurts Iran. For 27 years we have relied on unilateral sanctions and diplomatic chilliness to persuade Iran to moderate its behavior and forsake its nuclear ambitions. That hasn't exactly worked.

Direct talks with Iran will not persuade it to abandon its nuclear dreams right away. Even the slightly saner predecessors of President Ahmadinejad surreptitiously proceeded down the nuclear path despite pledges to do otherwise. Given Persia's precarious location and imperial impulses, I dare say that even our late unlamented friend the Shah was and would be doing the same.

When a problem is for the moment unsolvable, then enlarge it. (O.K., this is a Donald Rumsfeld maxim, but that doesn't make it inoperative.) One precedent is the opening to China negotiated by Henry Kissinger, which did not try to settle such intractable issues as the status of Taiwan but instead created a framework for a realistic long-term relationship involving both cooperation and contention.

Talks with Tehran should begin, without preconditions, by discussing such a framework while getting Iran involved in keeping the chaos in Iraq from ripping apart the region, just as Iran helped stabilize Afghanistan after the defeat of our mutual enemy the Taliban. We should then permit commercial deals with Iran's small private sector, which could build a middle-class constituency for stability and greater integration into the world economy. Who knows? Perhaps this could even lead to accession talks with the World Trade Organization. In the process, Iranians will see more clearly the benefits of being treated as a responsible global player. Only then might we have enough leverage to convince the nation's leaders that there's a downside to flouting the world on the nuclear issue.

President Ahmadinejad has the advantage of looking like a poet, sounding like a lunatic and not caring whether the West likes him. But Iran has multiple power centers. There's an election next month, for example, in which a reformist former President is challenging a fundamentalist cleric to join the Assembly of Experts that oversees Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. About 70% of the population is under 30, and there are at least 70,000 active blogs expressing all sorts of aspirations of a diverse people, including ones by the President (ahmadinejad.ir) and Supreme Leader (khamenei.ir).

That is why, in addition to government talks, it's useful to have informal contacts with the Iranian people. I was with President Bush in New Orleans a month ago, and he got to talking about the ravings of Ahmadinejad, but he knows not to personify relations the way he once did with Russia's Vladimir Putin. That is why he has called for, and Congress has funded, citizen exchanges with Iran. A delegation of health experts from Iran, whose AIDS program is one of the best in the region, will soon visit the U.S. under the auspices of the State Department's international visitors program and the Aspen Institute, where I work.

Engagement with Iran should be done in partnership with our allies in the region, namely Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. They can help keep the Iranians (and Syrians) in check and look after Sunni interests. That requires one other ingredient: reigniting efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace, if and when the Palestinians form a new government willing to deal with Israel. The Israelis understand this; Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has informally talked to the Saudis about relaunching their Arab peace plan.

Who best to choreograph all this? Jim Baker. The Iraq Study Group, which he chairs with Lee Hamilton, plans to recommend a process along these lines, and his associates say that Baker would be willing to help implement it as a special envoy if the President offers him enough authority. That might be resisted by Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council staffer who coordinates Middle East policy, and Baker would not accept the job unless this is resolved. But Condoleezza Rice, who has pushed for a comprehensive diplomatic approach to the region, might be supportive, even enthusiastic. She knows that the Administration needs to salvage a foreign policy legacy beyond the botched war in Iraq.

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Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn't... ...And Ignore The Things We Should.


It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many things trying to kill you every day. The problems start even before you're fully awake. There's the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. There's the early-morning heart attack, which is 40% more common than those that strike later in the day. There's the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that gets lodged in your throat, the tumble on the slippery sidewalk as you leave the house, the high-speed automotive pinball game that is your daily commute.

Other dangers stalk you all day long. Will a cabbie's brakes fail when you're in the crosswalk? Will you have a violent reaction to bad food? And what about the risks you carry with you all your life? The father and grandfather who died of coronaries in their 50s probably passed the same cardiac weakness on to you. The tendency to take chances on the highway that has twice landed you in traffic court could just as easily land you in the morgue.

Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we'd get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S., but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn't) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Six Muslims traveling from a religious conference were thrown off a plane last week in Minneapolis, Minn., even as unscreened cargo continues to stream into ports on both coasts. Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap. "We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million," says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. "Now it's parts per billion."

At the same time, 20% of all adults still smoke; nearly 20% of drivers and more than 30% of backseat passengers don't use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas--and when they're demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot. Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it's something we'll never do exceptionally well, it's almost certainly something we can learn to do better.

AN OLD BRAIN IN A NEW WORLD

Part of the problem we have with evaluating risk, scientists say, is that we're moving through the modern world with what is, in many respects, a prehistoric brain. We may think we've grown accustomed to living in a predator-free environment in which most of the dangers of the wild have been driven away or fenced off, but our central nervous system--evolving at a glacial pace--hasn't got the message.

To probe the risk-assessment mechanisms of the human mind, Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University and the author of The Emotional Brain, studies fear pathways in laboratory animals. He explains that the jumpiest part of the brain--of mouse and man--is the amygdala, a primitive, almond-shaped clump of tissue that sits just above the brainstem. When you spot potential danger--a stick in the grass that may be a snake, a shadow around a corner that could be a mugger--it's the amygdala that reacts the most dramatically, triggering the fight-or-flight reaction that pumps adrenaline and other hormones into your bloodstream.

It's not until a fraction of a second later that the higher regions of the brain get the signal and begin to sort out whether the danger is real. But that fraction of a second causes us to experience the fear far more vividly than we do the rational response--an advantage that doesn't disappear with time. The brain is wired in such a way that nerve signals travel more readily from the amygdala to the upper regions than from the upper regions back down. Setting off your internal alarm is quite easy, but shutting it down takes some doing.

"There are two systems for analyzing risk: an automatic, intuitive system and a more thoughtful analysis," says Paul Slovic, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. "Our perception of risk lives largely in our feelings, so most of the time we're operating on system No. 1."

There's clearly an evolutionary advantage to this natural timorousness. If we're mindful of real dangers and flee when they arise, we're more likely to live long enough to pass on our genes. But evolutionary rewards also come to those who stand and fight, those willing to take risks--and even suffer injury--in pursuit of prey or a mate. Our ancestors hunted mastodons and stampeded buffalo, risking getting trampled for the possible payoff of meat and pelt. Males advertised their reproductive fitness by fighting other males, willingly engaging in a contest that could mean death for one and offspring for the other.

These two impulses--to engage danger or run from it--are constantly at war and have left us with a well-tuned ability to evaluate the costs and payoffs of short-term risk, say Slovic and others. That, however, is not the kind we tend to face in contemporary society, where threats don't necessarily spring from behind a bush. They're much more likely to come to us in the form of rumors or news broadcasts or an escalation of the federal terrorism-threat level from orange to red. It's when the risk and the consequences of our response unfold more slowly, experts say, that our analytic system kicks in. This gives us plenty of opportunity to overthink--or underthink--the problem, and this is where we start to bollix things up.

WHY WE GUESS WRONG

Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread. For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things. The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. "We dread anything that poses a greater risk for cancer more than the things that injure us in a traditional way, like an auto crash," says Slovic. "That's the dread factor." In other words, the more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening. "It's called probability neglect," says Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago professor of law specializing in risk regulation.

The same is true for, say, AIDS, which takes you slowly, compared with a heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that heart disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year. We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, distributed way. "Terrorism lends itself to excessive reactions because it's vivid and there's an available incident," says Sunstein. "Compare that to climate change, which is gradual and abstract."

Unfamiliar threats are similarly scarier than familiar ones. The next E. coli outbreak is unlikely to shake you up as much as the previous one, and any that follow will trouble you even less. In some respects, this is a good thing, particularly if the initial reaction was excessive. But it's also unavoidable given our tendency to habituate to any unpleasant stimulus, from pain and sorrow to a persistent car alarm.

The problem with habituation is that it can also lead us to go to the other extreme, worrying not too much but too little. Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina brought calls to build impregnable walls against such tragedies ever occurring again. But despite the vows, both New Orleans and the nation's security apparatus remain dangerously leaky. "People call these crises wake-up calls," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. "But they're more like snooze alarms. We get agitated for a while, and then we don't follow through."

THE COMFORT OF CONTROL

We similarly misjudge risk if we feel we have some control over it, even if it's an illusory sense. The decision to drive instead of fly is the most commonly cited example, probably because it's such a good one. Behind the wheel, we're in charge; in the passenger seat of a crowded airline, we might as well be cargo. So white-knuckle flyers routinely choose the car, heedless of the fact that at most a few hundred people die in U.S. commercial airline crashes in a year, compared with 44,000 killed in motor-vehicle wrecks. The most white-knuckle time of all was post--Sept. 11, when even confident flyers took to the roads. Not surprisingly, from October through December 2001 there were 1,000 more highway fatalities than in the same period the year before, in part because there were simply more cars around. "It was called the '9/11 effect.' It produced a third again as many fatalities as the terrorist attacks," says David Ropeik, an independent risk consultant and a former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Then too there's what Ropeik and others call "optimism bias," the thing that makes us glower when we see someone driving erratically while talking on a cell phone, even if we've done the very same thing, perhaps on the very same day. We tell ourselves we're different, because our call was shorter or our business was urgent or we were able to pay attention to the road even as we talked. What optimism bias comes down to, however, is the convenient belief that risks that apply to other people don't apply to us.

Finally, and for many of us irresistibly, there's the irrational way we react to risky behavior that also confers some benefit. It would be a lot easier to acknowledge the perils of smoking cigarettes or eating too much ice cream if they weren't such pleasures. Drinking too much confers certain benefits too, as do risky sex, recreational drugs and uncounted other indulgences. This is especially true since, in most cases, the gratification is immediate and the penalty, if it comes at all, comes later. With enough time and enough temptation, we can talk ourselves into ignoring almost any long-term costs. "These things are fun or hip, even if they can be lethal," says Ropeik. "And that pleasure is a benefit we weigh."

If these reactions are true for all of us--and they are--then you might think that all of us would react to risk in the same way. But that's clearly not the case. Some people enjoy roller coasters; others won't go near them. Some skydive; others can't imagine it. Not only are thrill seekers not put off by risk, but they're drawn to it, seduced by the mortal frisson that would leave many of us cold. "There's an internal thermostat that seems to control this," says risk expert John Adams of University College London. "That set point varies from person to person and circumstance to circumstance."

No one knows how such a set point gets calibrated, but evidence suggests that it is a mix of genetic and environmental variables. In a study at the University of Delaware in 2000, researchers used personality surveys to evaluate the risk-taking behavior of 260 college students and correlated it with existing research on the brain and blood chemistry of people with thrill-seeking personalities or certain emotional disorders. Their findings support the estimate that about 40% of the high-thrill temperament is learned and 60% inherited, with telltale differences in such relevant brain chemicals as serotonin, which helps inhibit impulsive behavior and may be in short supply in people with high-wire personalities.

CAN WE DO BETTER?

Given these idiosyncratic reactions, is it possible to have a rational response to risk? If we can't agree on whether something is dangerous or not or, if it is, whether it's a risk worth taking, how can we come up with policies that keep all of us reasonably safe?

One way to start would to be to look at the numbers. Anyone can agree that a 1-in-1 million risk is better than 1 in 10, and 1 in 10 is better than 50-50. But things are almost always more complicated than that, a fact that corporations, politicians and other folks with agendas to push often deftly exploit.

Take the lure of the comforting percentage. In one study, Slovic found that people were more likely to approve of airline safety-equipment purchases if they were told that it could "potentially save 98% of 150 people" than if they were told it could "potentially save 150 people." On its face this reaction makes no sense, since 98% of 150 people is only 147. But there was something about the specificity of the number that the respondents found appealing. "Experts tend to use very analytic, mathematical tools to calculate risk," Slovic says. "The public tends to go more on their feelings."

There's also the art of the flawed comparison. Officials are fond of reassuring the public that they run a greater risk from, for example, drowning in the bathtub, which kills 320 Americans a year, than from a new peril like mad cow disease, which has so far killed no one in the U.S. That's pretty reassuring--and very misleading. The fact is that anyone over 6 and under 80--which is to say, the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population--faces almost no risk of perishing in the tub. For most of us, the apples of drowning and the oranges of mad cow disease don't line up in any useful way.

But such statistical straw men get trotted out all the time. People defending the safety of pesticides and other toxins often argue that you stand a greater risk of being hit by a falling airplane (about 1 in 250,000 over the course of your entire life) than you do of being harmed by this or that contaminant. If you live near an airport, however, the risk of getting beaned is about 1 in 10,000. Two very different probabilities are being conflated into one flawed forecast. "My favorite is the one that says you stand a greater risk from dying while skydiving than you do from some pesticide," says Susan Egan Keane of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Well, I don't skydive, so my risk is zero."

Risk figures can be twisted in more disastrous ways too. Last year's political best seller, The One Percent Doctrine, by journalist Ron Suskind, pleased or enraged you, depending on how you felt about war in Iraq, but it hit risk analysts where they live. The title of the book is drawn from a White House determination that if the risk of a terrorist attack in the U.S. was even 1%, it would be treated as if it were a 100% certainty. Critics of Administration policy argue that that 1% possibility was never properly balanced against the 100% certainty of the tens of thousands of casualties that would accompany a war. That's a position that may be easier to take in 2006, with Baghdad in flames and the war grinding on, but it's still true that a 1% danger that something will happen is the same as a 99% likelihood that it won't.

REAL AND PERCEIVED RISK

It's not impossible for us to become sharper risk handicappers. For one thing, we can take the time to learn more about the real odds. Baruch Fischhoff, professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, recently asked a panel of 20 communications and finance experts what they thought the likelihood of human-to-human transmission of avian flu would be in the next three years. They put the figure at 60%. He then asked a panel of 20 medical experts the same question. Their answer: 10%. "There's reason to be critical of experts," Fischhoff says, "but not to replace their judgment with laypeople's opinions."

The government must also play a role in this, finding ways to frame warnings so that people understand them. John Graham, formerly the administrator of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, says risk analysts suffer no end of headaches trying to get Americans to understand that while nuclear power plants do pose dangers, the more imminent peril to both people and the planet comes from the toxins produced by coal-fired plants. Similarly, pollutants in fish can be dangerous, but for most people--with the possible exception of small children and women of childbearing age--the cardiac benefits of fish easily outweigh the risks. "If you can get people to compare," he says, "then you're in a situation where you can get them to make reasoned choices."

Just as important is to remember to pay proper mind to the dangers that, as the risk experts put it, are hiding in plain sight. Most people no longer doubt that global warming is happening, yet we live and work in air-conditioned buildings and drive gas-guzzling cars. Most people would be far likelier to participate in a protest at a nuclear power plant than at a tobacco company, but it's smoking, not nukes, that kills an average of 1,200 Americans every single day.

We can do better, however, and leaders in government and industry can help. The residual parts of our primitive brains may not give us any choice beyond fighting or fleeing. But the higher reasoning we've developed over millions of years gives us far greater--and far more nuanced--options. Officials who provide hard, honest numbers and a citizenry that takes the time to understand them would not only mean a smarter nation, but a safer one. [This article contains a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy or pdf.] TOTAL ANNUAL DEATHS 2.5 MILLION Homicide 17,732 Suicide 31,484

Terrified of bees, snakes and swimming pools? ACCIDENTS 109,277 Maybe you should worry more about your heart DISEASES 2.3 million Other diseases 681,150 Diabetes 74,219 Chronic lower-respiratory disease 126,382 Stroke 157,689 Cancer 556,902 Heart disease 685,089 All other deaths 8,364 Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; National Transportation Safety Board

With reporting by With reporting by David Bjerklie/New York, Dan Cray/Los Angeles

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