Dmitry Medvedev has promised to extend Russia's civil and economic freedoms after being sworn in as new president.
"Human rights and freedoms... are deemed of the highest value for our society," he said at a lavish inauguration ceremony in the Kremlin.
Mr Medvedev took over from Vladimir Putin, becoming Russia's third leader since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Within hours, Mr Medvedev, 42, nominated Mr Putin, his mentor, as prime minister.
"Medvedev has put forward Putin's candidacy for prime minister to parliament," a Kremlin spokesman said.
Time will tell if the cynics are right that Medvedev is a mere puppet for eight more years of Putin.
We'll also see if Medvedev is serious about civil rights. The democracy in Russia is in a rather questionable state, including serious accusations that his election was secured through some very unnecessary electoral fraud.
Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC) reported that 69.7 percent of Russian voters turned out for the March 2 presidential elections, and Mr. Medvedev won overwhelmingly over his three rivals with 70.3 percent of the votes.
But a recent study of the official results by mathematician Sergei Shpilkin, a popular blogger, found statistical anomalies that bolster critics' claims that the elections were unfair. His analysis suggests that up to a third of the votes may have been rigged as part of an attempt to inflate Medvedev's margin of victory.
"It's a combination of fraud and administrative resources [official intervention] and it is difficult to distinguish between them," Mr. Shpilkin told a press conference at the Carnegie Center in Moscow last month. "One vote in three cannot be explained" by normal statistical models, he added.
Shpilkin found that an extremely improbable number of Russian polling stations reported turnout and voting results that ended in a round number, either a five or a zero.
"Figures ending in fives and zeros are best for falsification," says Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the independent Panorama think tank in Moscow. "It's a sign that votes have been stolen, then folded into round numbers."
Shpilkin also noted that Medvedev's support as reported by the CEC follows a normal pattern, which can be represented as a bell curve, only until it reaches 60 percent. Instead of sloping downward, as expected, the curve then becomes a series of statistically unlikely spikes.
And there is little doubt that Medvedev would have won anyway, thanks in part to near-total control of the media by the Kremlin. So why cheat?
I guess a lot of people in the west wonder why Russians, who are about as educated and politically savvy as anyone, vote for Putin and his protege in such overwhelming numbers. The answer is, I think, they lived through the Jeltsin chaos. They do remember, or at least know about, the horrors of the Soviet era. Putin has certainly improved their lives. They obviously think better civil rights and an open democracy would be fine, but compared to bread on the table, that is a luxury. Better the devil you know.
As concerned as I am about Putin's hardline policies, I am not sure I can really fault them. Maybe I would have thought the same if it was the quality of my life that was on the line, and the potential rivals included the communists and Zhirinovsky's party.
Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.
The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."
Or: The universe just isn't fair. Deal with it!
If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.
"Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives," the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, "apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."
Note that the study is adjusted for religiosity, at least as measured by church attendance, so supernatural rationalisations are ruled out.
I wonder where this left-right dichotomy leaves me, as socially radical and yet conservative on security issues and the economy. I feel great life satisfaction right now, so I guess that means I lean right.
Hamas militiamen in the Gaza Strip on Sunday attacked fuel trucks headed toward the Nahal Oz border crossing, forcing them to turn back, sources in the Palestinian Petroleum Authority said.
The fuel was supposed to go to the UN Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA] and hospitals in the Gaza Strip, the sources said.
"Dozens of Hamas militiamen hurled stones and opened fire at the trucks," the sources added. "The trucks were on their way to receive fuel supplied by Israel. The drivers were forced to turn back. Some of them had their windshields smashed." [...]
PA officials in Ramallah said Hamas's measures were aimed at creating a crisis in the Gaza Strip with the hope that the international community would intervene and force Israel to reopen the border crossings.
"As far as we know, there is enough fuel reaching the Gaza Strip," the officials said. "But Hamas's measures are aimed at creating a crisis. Hamas is either stealing or blocking most of the fuel supplies."
They pointed out that last week Hamas dispatched hundreds of its supporters to Nahal Oz to block the fuel supplies from Israel. Hamas claimed that the protest was organized by farmers and fishermen demanding an end to the blockade on the Gaza Strip.
This is nothing new. It has been going on for a long time.
Hamas, and other extremists, are intentionally martyring their own people, in little and big ways, because they know the chattering classes in the west are going to blame Israel all day, every time, and maybe once in a while write a mildly accusing note about Hamas' tactics in the twelfth paragraph.
Anti-Israelism in the west kills babies in Palestine. How is that for a headline?
I have previously written about the false doomsday predictions made in the name if science, for example the global cooling and famine panics of the 1970s, all presented by very well-respected scholars, and all looking outright ridiculous in hindsight.
The Washington Policy Center has a list of such scientific doomsday quotations, some from the same guys I mentioned earlier, and it is worth a look to cool our heads, if not the climate.
Truth is, our culture has a certain fetish with end-of-the-world fantasies.
The reason may very well be the role of apocalyptics in Christianity, or perhaps the cause is even deeper than that. The fact that people, even very intelligent and well-educated people, so easily have been taken in by religious and secular doomsday prophecies, all failed, is certainly good enough reason for a healthy dose of skepticism about today's favorite cause for the end of the world.
Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic. When the Mohammed cartoons—published in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to defy rising self-censorship after van Gogh’s murder—were answered by worldwide violence, only one major American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined such European dailies as Die Welt and El País in reprinting them as a gesture of free-speech solidarity. Editors who refused to run the images claimed that their motive was multicultural respect for Islam. Critic Christopher Hitchens believed otherwise, writing that he “knew quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for ‘restraint’ was simple fear.” Exemplifying the new dhimmitude, whatever its motivation, was Norway’s leading cartoonist, Finn Graff, who had often depicted Israelis as Nazis, but who now vowed not to draw anything that might provoke Muslim wrath. (On a positive note, this February, over a dozen Danish newspapers, joined by a number of other papers around the world, reprinted one of the original cartoons as a free-speech gesture after the arrest of three people accused of plotting to kill the artist.)
Bawer puts the problem of European (and, increasingly, American) defeatism in the face of Jihadist threats better than most.
I cannot help, however, believe that at some level he overstates the problem.
Also, though I know Bawer has addressed it elsewhere, he doesn't in this article point to the opposite, equally dangerous problem, which isn't "islamophobia", a nonsense word, but good old fashioned racism. No, emphatically, Islam isn't a race. And, again, no, your ideology or religion does not and should not be protected from ridicule, criticism and even exclusion to the same degree that your race, gender or country of origin is. If you believe that the earth is flat, you deserve ridicule, and if you believe the earth is flat because the great tinman in the sky says so, that doesn't lessen the stupidity. Moreover, if you argue that gays should be executed, your belief is both stupid and reprehensible, and it is certainly no less so because some old book tells you to believe that.
What I mean is that there are lots of thugs who hate Pakistanis or Somalians not because they object to certain cultural practices we find very backwards and dangerous, but because they are xenophobic. If these dark skinned people were Christians or atheists, they still wouldn't live next to them. Thus outright racists can hide behind skepticism to Islam, and the vacuous multiculturalists in the ivory tower will find it easy to brand any opposition to Islamism as racism.
However, I think there is certainly more to be deeply skeptical about in Islam, even the non-Jihadist variant, than there is to be skeptical about in fundamentalist Christianity, which the leftist elite has no problem attacking at every opportunity. When there exists a valid reason for seeing Islamism, and arguably Islam, as a genuine threat to our modern, western society, the skeptic should have a right to a presumption of innocence on the "racism" charge.
Unfortunately, in Europe, generally, there is a bigger divide between the ruled and the ruler than in the United States. Europeans call US politics populist, and it is, and it has to be, because even the candidacies of the major parties, not only the election, is decided by a direct or very close to direct popular election. In European democracies, Norway for example, the actual candidates are nominated internally in the party and elected through backroom deals that would never pass as free and fair among serious electoral observers. The people are then presented with a list of parties, and send parties with programmes already decided into parliament to elect the head of government.
But it's still a democracy. If the rulers annoy enough people, they will lose the next election. And the reason I'm not as worried about the compromises with Islamists as Bawer is (though it is very uncomfortable), is that the people are far to the right of the elites on this question. Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, I'm afraid the reaction, and the backlash, will be substantial, not to say brutal. Naive multiculturalists are certainly annoying, but those who may gain politically from this cowardice are the real fascists, and then we may have an even bigger problem.
Those battling global warming by promoting biofuels may unintentionally be adding to skyrocketing world food prices, creating what one expert calls "a silent tsunami" in developing nations.
The rising prices are "threatening to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger," Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations' World Food Program, said on the agency's Web site Tuesday.
Sheeran is one of the experts attending a Food summit hosted Tuesday by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, aimed at determining ways to boost food supplies and identify deterrents. Also attending the meeting are scientists and representatives from the European Union and Africa.
It is certainly possible that global warming can cause a food crisis in the future. Fear-mongering among alarmists is actually causing a food crisis now, and it may well develop into a total disaster.
So much for the better-safe-than-sorry approach of the panic-inducers. All actions have consequences, and major policy changes should not be undertaken before we have a better understanding of the risks and the potential outcomes.
The recounts will continue until Mugabe has won it:
The recount in 23 of 210 constituencies could overturn the parliamentary result which saw Zanu-PF lose its majority.
Results of the presidential poll, which the opposition MDC says it also won, have not been released. It is thought the recount may lead to a run-off vote.
Meanwhile, a Chinese ship carrying arms to Zimbabwe has left a South African port after workers would not unload it.
Hand weapons and ammunition, just what Mugabe's thugs need to secure their power. Just when China needs more bad PR.
Despite her campaign's relentless attacks on Barack Obama's qualifications and electability, Hillary Clinton has lost a lot of ground with Democratic voters nationwide going into Tuesday's critical primary in Pennsylvania, a new NEWSWEEK poll shows.
The survey of 1,209 registered voters found that Obama now leads Clinton by nearly 20 points, or 54 percent to 35 percent, among registered Democrats and those who lean Democratic nationwide.
Gallup Poll Daily tracking shows a tightening of the national Democratic race, with Barack Obama now holding just a 3-percentage point advantage over Hillary Clinton, 47% to 44%.[...]
In Thursday night's interviewing, Clinton received a greater share of national Democratic support than Obama, the first time she has done so in an individual night's interviewing since April 3.
It's a good thing that the pollsters are not up for election.
