Thin People May Be Fat Inside

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Paul Wolfowitz and his close female
friend Shaha Riza (File Photo)

WASHINGTON, May 9 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank's board is
leaning toward taking stern disciplinary action against President Paul
Wolfowitz, with some bank officials saying there could be majority support in
favor of calling for Wolfowitz's removal as early as this week, The Wall Street
Journal reported Wednesday.

    The 24-member board is expected in the coming days to
respond formally to a confidential, 50-page draft report by a special board
committee set up to look into Wolfowitz's handling of a promotion package for
his girlfriend and bank staffer, Shaha Riza.

    The report concludes that Wolfowitz placed himself in
a "conflict of interest" when he dictated the terms of Riza's package and says
he should have removed himself from the situation, according to a source close
to the board who is familiar with the document.

    It raises concerns about his failure to consult with
the board and bank ethics officials on details of Riza's transfer, noting that
the pay increases and promotion given to her were excessive and went beyond what
bank rules allow.

    The panel has given Wolfowitz until the end of
Wednesday to respond to the allegations.

    Bank officials said they expected the panel to
incorporate his response into its final report to the full board, along with its
recommendations on what steps the board should take. The full board might then
take up those recommendations Friday.

    As Wolfowitz's attorney demanded more time to
respond, some European finance ministers added Tuesday to the growing pressure
for Wolfowitz to step down. But the White House said it was standing by the
former deputy defense secretary.

    Despite the Bush administration's apparent
steadfastness, Wolfowitz's reign at the bank appeared increasingly tenuous as
the full board began to weigh how to respond to the committee report.

"The current drug system is ill thought-out and
arbitrary," said Nutt, referring to the United Kingdom's practice of assigning
drugs to three distinct divisions, ostensibly based on the drugs' potential for
harm. "The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is,
from a scientific perspective, arbitrary."

    Experts ranked heroin and cocaine most
dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the
fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Marijuana came in
11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy.

    According to existing British and U.S. drug policy,
alcohol and tobacco are legal, while marijuana and Ecstasy are both illegal.
Previous reports, including a study from a parliamentary committee last year,
have questioned the scientific rationale for Britain's drug classification
system.

    Tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses,
while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency
rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and
occupying police services.

    Nutt hopes the research will provoke debate
within the UK and beyond about how drugs -- including socially acceptable drugs
such as alcohol -- should be regulated. While different countries use different
markers to classify dangerous drugs, none use a system like the one proposed by
Nutt's study, which he hopes could serve as a framework for international
authorities.

BEIJING, March 23 (Xinhuanet) -- A new "landmark"
British study concludes alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal
drugs such as marijuana or Ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal
systems.

    Professor David Nutt of Britain's Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification
of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society in research
published Friday in the Lancet magazine. Their ranking listed alcohol and
tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances.

ROME, May 10 (Xinhua) -- Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi opened on Thursday a major UN-backed forum on sustainable development in Trieste, a city of extreme northeast Italy, urging scientists, politicians and entrepreneurs to map out an action plan for the Group of Eight.

    Launching three days of discussions among 500 experts, Prodi invited UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura to produce "a page or two of priorities" to send to the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany next month, local media reported.

    The goal of the G8-UNESCO World Forum, proposed and hosted by Italy, is to "generate high-level discussion of concrete initiatives combining Education, Innovation and Research in the interests of Sustainable Development."

    "The phase of development that the world is now experiencing is unlike anything seen before in history. But developing countries must be helped," Prodi said, mentioning Africa in particular.

    The idea behind the forum is that the G8 can be the vehicle through which long term attention is focused on key issues such as the environment, energy and research.

    The World Forum brought together scientists, government representatives and entrepreneurs from 60 countries, including several in the Developing World.

HAVANA, May 10 (Xinhua) -- Cuban local daily Granma published Thursday a new article of President Fidel Castro, in which he said "the transformation of food into energy is a monstrous act," as a reflection of Argentine Atlio Boron's article.

    In the text titled "the debate intensifies," Castro said, "food is transformed into energy to continue the irrationality of a civilization, that in order to safeguard the wealth and privileges of a few people, carry out a brutal attack against environment."

    Castro said that with those actions, capitalism gets ready to practise a massive euthanasia to the poor, and especially to the southern poor, because southern region of the planet holds the largest biomass reserves needed to produce biofuels.

    The Cuban President said that no matter how official discourses say it is not an option between food and fuels, reality proves "that this is precisely the alternative: either land is destined to produce food or to produce biofuels."

    "Mathematics do not lie: neither the United States nor the European Union have land available to sustain a simultaneous food production and agro-energy increase," Castro said.

The Benefits of Soft Power



8/2/2004


"Leaders have to make crucial choices about the types of power that they use," says Joseph S. Nye Jr., until recently the dean of Harvard's Kennedy School. Here's how to choose.


by Joseph S. Nye Jr.



It is a central paradox of American power: The sheer might of the United States is unquestioned: U.S. troops are stationed in some 130 countries around the globe, and no opposing army would dare to challenge it on a level playing field. But as America's military superiority has increased, its ability to persuade is at low ebb in many parts of the world, even among its oldest allies. In the following remarks, drawn from an address given on March 11 at the Center for Public Leadership's conference on "Misuses of Power: Causes and Corrections," Joseph S. Nye Jr., Dean [until June 30, 2004] of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, distinguishes between hard power—the power to coerce—and soft—the power to attract.





The dictionary says that leadership means going ahead or showing the way. To lead is to help a group define and achieve a common purpose. There are various types and levels of leadership, but all have in common a relationship with followers. Thus leadership and power are inextricably intertwined. I will argue below that many leadership skills such as creating a vision, communicating it, attracting and choosing able people, delegating, and forming coalitions depend upon what I call soft power. But first we should ask, what is power?





What is power?

At the most general level, power is the ability to influence the behavior of others to get the outcomes one wants. There are several ways to affect the behavior of others.





• You can coerce them with threats.
• You can induce them with payments.
• Or you can attract or co-opt them.





Sometimes I can affect your behavior without commanding it. If you believe that my objectives are legitimate, I may be able to persuade you without using threats or inducements. For example, loyal Catholics may follow the Pope's teaching on capital punishment not because of a threat of excommunication, but out of respect for his moral authority. Or some radical Muslims may be attracted to support Osama bin Laden's actions not because of payments or threats, but because they believe in the legitimacy of his objectives.





Practical politicians and ordinary people often simply define power as the possession of capabilities or resources that can influence outcomes. Someone who has authority, wealth, or an attractive personality is called powerful. In international politics, by this second definition, we consider a country powerful if it has a relatively large population, territory, natural resources, economic strength, military force, and social stability.





The virtue of this second definition is that it makes power appear more concrete, measurable, and predictable. Power in this sense is like holding the high cards in a card game. But when people define power as synonymous with the resources that produce it, they sometimes encounter the paradox that those most endowed with power do not always get the outcomes they want. For example, in terms of resources, the United States was the world's only superpower in 2001, but it failed to prevent September 11. Converting resources into realized power in the sense of obtaining desired outcomes requires well-designed strategies and skillful leadership. Yet strategies are often inadequate and leaders frequently misjudge—witness Hitler in 1941 or Saddam Hussein in 1990.

The basic concept of power is the ability to influence others to get them to do what you want. There are three major ways to do that: one is to threaten them with sticks; the second is to pay them with carrots; the third is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they want what you want. If you can get others to be attracted, to want what you want, it costs you much less in carrots and sticks. [1]

Soft power, then, represents the third way of getting the outcomes you want. Soft power is contrasted with hard power, which has historically been the predominant realist measure of national power, through quantitative metrics such as population size, concrete military assets, or a nation's Gross Domestic Product. But having such resources does not always produce the desired outcomes as the United States discovered in the Vietnam War. The resources from which soft power behavior is derived are culture (when it is attractive to others), values (when there is no hypocrisy in their application) and foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others). Unless these conditions are present, culture and ideas do not necessarily produce the attraction that is essential for soft power behavior. The extent of attraction can be measured by public opinion polls, by elite interviews, and case studies. Nye argues that soft power is more than influence, since influence can also rest on the hard power of threats or payments. And soft power is more than just persuasion or the ability to move people by argument, though that is an important part of it. It is also the ability to attract, and attraction often leads to acquiescence.

If I am persuaded to go along with your purposes without any explicit threat or exchange taking place — in short, if my behavior is determined by an observable but intangible attraction — soft power is at work. Soft power uses a different type of currency — not force, not money — to engender cooperation. It uses an attraction to shared values, and the justness and duty of contributing to the achievement of those values. [2]

The success of soft power heavily depends on the actor’s reputation within the international community, as well as the flow of information between actors. Thus, soft power is often associated with the rise of globalization and neoliberal international relations theory. Popular culture and media is regularly identified as a source of soft power, as is the spread of a national language, or a particular set of normative structures; a nation with a large amount of soft power and the good will that engenders it inspire others to acculturate, avoiding the need for expensive hard power expenditures.

In their studies of these channels, Li and his colleagues developed a new way of testing thousands of druglike molecules to find any that could turn the potassium switch on or off. Their approach involved chemically shaving off all the potassium channels on the cell surface and forcing the cells to make new channels. By measuring the activity of the new channels, the researchers could identify molecules that accelerated the recovery.

One chemical that proved quite effective in improving channel recovery was zinc pyrithione (ZnPy), the active ingredient in many dandruff shampoos. Li explains that ZnPy has a shape that allows it to fit into the gate region of the channel protein and allow more potassium flow. "If you think of these channels as doors on the cell's surface," Li says, "then ZnPy made this door both easier to open and stay open longer. It's like a tunable hinge that helps sticky doors swing freely."

The researchers then tested defective channels that contain the same mutations known in humans to cause mild epilepsy-like seizures in infants. Bathing cells with small amounts of ZnPy caused the mutant potassium channels to let three times as much potassium flow through, raising the possibility of restoring normal nerve cell activity.

"Most drug discoveries uncover chemicals that stop things from working - it's a lot easier to close or block a door than open it," Li says. "But here we found a chemical that makes a defective protein work better. So now we have a chance to actually try to fix the causes of epilepsy, rather than traditionally circumventing them. Plus, this study really shows that we don't fully appreciate the biological roles of many familiar chemicals that surround us."

Anti-dandruff Compound May Help Fight Epilepsy

Science Daily — Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that the same ingredient used in dandruff shampoos to fight the burning, itching and flaking on your head also can calm overexcited nerve cells inside your head, making it a potential treatment for seizures. 

***
The
Lincoln Initiative ***

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The biggest political problem of the working
class is that there is no "party of the people". The website Open Secrets tells us
"who gives and who gets" and it shows that many corporate industries
invest heavily in the campaigns of both major parties. It's easy to see why our
political parties back candidates who favor big business. It's easy to see how
we got a Senior Prescription Drug Bill that's a bonanza for the
pharmaceutical industry. It's easy to see why a bankruptcy reform bill favors
financial institutions. It's easy to see why the defeat of Soviet
Communism didn't lower our defense spending.

To put it bluntly, Our government is
controlled by the corporate establishment. "We the people" aren't
represented by either party. We're in the same predicament that our founding
fathers were in. They rebelled against the tyranny of "taxation
without representation". The question then is, "What can we do about
it?". Obviously, the 1776 solution is unthinkable, a third party is
impracticable, and voting "big business" out of power is
impossible. 

It's time for a new, unique strategy,
The Lincoln Initiative is unique. It can't be compared to other grassroots
movements past or present. This is a simple strategy based on the successful
tactics of the labor unions; make your demands and give an "or else".
It uses the power of our votes before the election. It forces both parties to
compete for our votes on each important issue. Through the use of e-mail
networking it is possible to recruit the huge number of voters needed to carry
out a successful campaign before the November election. The time for
change is now!

It is easy to join this movement. Two
easy steps. It costs nothing and takes five minutes of your time. Do
it today and take back your government.

1. Copy and paste the
following e-mail in your e-mail form. The addresses are for the Republican
National Campaign Headquarters and the Democratic national Campaign
Headquarters. Remember to substitute your most
important issue for the example given (health care) in both the title and body.
The "TLI" in the subject ties all the e-mails together.
It allows the recipients to know what's in the message so that they
can just tally the titles without opening the messages if they want to.

US Congress investigates Pentagon's version of war stories

AM - Wednesday, 25 April , 2007  08:11:00

Reporter: Michael Rowland