“Time is running out for Tibet. Every day, while we are sitting here praying for world peace, inside Tibet there’s more and more and more… and more… Chinese moving in. And, as I see it, the Chinese are playing for time… and we’re playing into their hands.” — Lhasang Tsering, Pro-Independence Tibetan in Exile.
It is time to rethink a strategy that will lead to Tibetan independence as it’s clear that current strategy hasn’t worked. A report from the Times of London:
Exiled Tibetan leaders began an unprecedented week-long conference today to discuss whether to stick to the Dalai Lama’s non-violent quest for autonomy within China or re-launch a drive for outright independence.
More than 600 Tibetans from around the world are attending the meeting in Dharamsala, the north Indian hill station where the Dalai Lama set up his government-in-exile after fleeing Tibet in 1959.
The Dalai Lama called the meeting last month after stunning his followers by saying he had “given up” on his attempts, launched 20 years ago, to negotiate a “middle way” with China by asking for autonomy within its borders.
He said he wanted an open discussion about the future of the Tibetan movement in the light of the violent anti-China protests and riots that erupted across Tibet in March and the uncompromising Chinese response.
The only issue not up for negotiation is his policy of non-violence, according to his aides.
“I don’t know what will happen,” the Dalai Lama said earlier this month, as the latest round of talks between his envoys and Chinese officials ended in failure.
“Their minds should be open to explore all different options.”
Insiders say the debate will reflect the growing frustration and tension within the exiled Tibetan community, which numbers about 200,000 and is mostly based in India and Nepal, with a small number in North America and Europe.
It’s noteworthy that so much attention is being paid in the international media to President-Elect Obama’s intentions in the Middle East especially as concerning the stalled Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. Why is there such the laser-like focus? Why amongst all the problems we face domestically and abroad is President Obama so eager to make Arab-Israeli peace negotiations such a high priority?
Perhaps this article by Phillip Stevens of the Financial Times suggests an answer:
At home as much as abroad, Mr Obama has choices to make.
The region he cannot ignore is the Middle East – the place where the dangerous meets the most intractable of America’s strategic challenges. Even if pragmatism blurs the precision of his campaign promise, Mr Obama is committed to a speedy drawdown of US troops in Iraq; likewise to bolstering the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan and to rooting out al-Qaeda from the tribal areas of Pakistan. Iran promises to test both the new president’s strategic diplomacy and America’s relations with its allies; likewise Afghanistan.
All these problems, of course, are connected. Progress in Afghanistan is contingent on the co-operation of its neighbours – Iran as well as Pakistan. It may be too late to stop Tehran from acquiring the capability to build a nuclear bomb, but a serious effort to persuade it not to start a nuclear arms race will demand recognition of its security interests. On the other hand, the stability of a Shia-led and Iranian-backed government in Iraq will depend on the comfort levels of its Sunni Arab neighbours.
The largest, and most important, piece in this multi-dimensional jigsaw is the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It is the issue that more than any other shapes attitudes in the region towards the US. On almost everything else, probably the best the incoming president can hope for is to damp the fires. A deal between Israel and the Palestinians would change the game.
The grim news continues to drip out of the world’s financial markets. Citigroup announced that it would shed some 52,000 jobs or about 14% of its global workforce. Overall, Wall Street firms have shed more than 120,000 workers since the beginning of 2007, and analysts forecast at least 240,000 more will go this year and next. That’s quite the global downsizing. It’s hard to foresee the financial industry being able to reabsorb these numbers. That then signals that for these individuals, a major salary adjustment is in the offing assuming that they can find jobs to begin with in the near future.
With its losses mounting, Wall Street is cutting jobs faster — and deeper — than even pessimists had feared.
In one the largest single rounds of layoffs on record, not just for the financial industry but for any industry, Citigroup said on Monday that it planned to eliminate a staggering 52,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its global work force.
While Citigroup had announced its intention to do away with about half those jobs already, news of the additional cutbacks — and the sheer size of the total — underscored the flagging fortunes of the entire financial industry. Not since the early 1990s has an American company announced such a sharp reduction in one swoop.
But few think the pain will end there for Citigroup or its industry rivals. After years of breakneck growth during which the financial industry, its profits and its pay assumed outsize roles in the nation’s economic life, Wall Street is in the grips of its sharpest contraction in modern times. The industry has shed more than 120,000 workers since the beginning of 2007, and many predict at least 240,000 more will go this year and next.
Citigroup has suffered through a year of losses, and its stock price has spiraled lower for months, and it is hardly alone in its pain. Given the gaping losses at many financial companies, and the hundreds of billions of dollars that the government is spending to shore them up, executives are under growing pressure to reduce their pay and forgo annual bonuses. That is particularly so now that jobs are disappearing along with the profits that banks generated in good times.
After Citigroup announced its plan for accelerated layoffs on Monday morning, Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, called for the company to refrain from paying senior executives bonuses this year, a step that Goldman Sachs said on Sunday that it would take.
“It would send exactly the wrong message for Citigroup’s top brass to collect bonuses while investors, taxpayers and now Citigroup’s own employees suffer,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement.
Across Wall Street, it is the outlook for rank-and-file workers that is particularly dire. In early September, Moody’s Economy.com had predicted that 45,000 to 65,000 financial workers in the New York area would lose their jobs by the middle of 2010. Now, Moody’s puts that figure at 70,000 — and that assumes some workers find new jobs in a rapidly shrinking market.
The New York economy will feel Wall Street’s pain, since the financial industry is one of the region’s main growth engines and sources of city and state tax revenue. Its high wages have also propelled the region’s housing market.
Turkish immigrants began to enter Germany 50 years ago under a guest worker program, and brought Islam with them. Today, the country is home to 2.6 million Turks, who face challenges integrating with German society. That’s up 800,000 over the past decade though the guest worker program ended in 1973 and despite that only a fraction of them are German citizens.
But Germany’s 3.2 million Muslims — most of them Turks — are becoming more visible and vocal. On October 25, the largest mosque in Germany opened in Duisburg. And there are plans to build more like it — sparking fierce debate in the country. Then there was the high profile honour killing in Hamburg of a young Afghan girl by her older brother.
Worldfocus correspondent Martin Seemungal reports from Cologne, Germany — home to 120,000 Muslims — where the city’s first official mosque is pending constructing.
The story of Turks in Germany can be told as a tale of two shocks. In 2001 Germans were stunned by mediocre results in the first international PISA test of reading and maths, which was largely due to the poor performance of its “migration-background” students. The second shock was September 11th 2001, when Turks became Muslims in the eyes of many Germans and thus a threat to peace. The PISA shock matters more.
The school authorities in Neukölln, a multi-ethnic part of Berlin, deployed guards to 13 schools in December 2007, not so much to enforce good behaviour as to ward off outside gangs. That modest deterrent barely begins to address their problems. In one such school, Thomas Morus, only two or three of the 50 or so pupils who graduate each year find apprenticeships, the stepping-stone to employment for most young Germans. Four-fifths of the students, with Turks the biggest group, come from homes where German is not the first language. Most speak neither German nor their mother tongue well, says Volker Steffens, the school’s principal. Thomas Morus entered the news briefly in 2005, when a student defended the “honour killing” of a Kurdish girl because “the whore lived like a German”, prompting Mr Steffens to send a written rebuke to pupils and parents.
As a Hauptschule, Thomas Morus is in the lowest of the three orders of high school into which most German children are streamed, usually at ten but, in Berlin, at 12. Just 14.8% of German children but 45.4% of Turks end up in Hauptschulen, which ought to prepare them for simple trades but often fail to do even that. In Neukölln they are a dumping ground. Graduates cannot work out how many square metres of carpet would cover a floor, says the district’s education chief, Wolfgang Schimmang. The “negative selection” of Thomas Morus’s student intake, says Mr Steffens, is “downright extreme”.
The plight of Turkish students has many causes, but they begin with an earlier act of negative selection, the “guest-worker” programme launched in the 1950s. From 1961 onwards, Turkish workers streamed out of the Anatolian countryside to take up West Germany’s offer to join its “economic miracle”, which needed unskilled labour to keep it going. Alongside lesser numbers of Italians, Yugoslavs and others, the Turks mined coal, forged steel and manned factories, transferring their earnings back to the home country they assumed they would return to.
When the miracle ended, Germany tried to get rid of them. It shut the door to new guest-workers in 1973, which had the unintended effect of encouraging migrants to import their families. By the early 1980s the government was offering Turks cash to return; it was accepted only by the few who were planning to go back anyway.
As the migrants dug in to Germany, they lost their footing in its economy. The steel and coal industries of the Ruhr slumped in the face of foreign competition. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 the government withdrew subsidies to industry in West Berlin; more than 200,000, many of them Turks, were fired, says Nihat Sorgec of BildungsWerk in Kreuzberg, which trains young Turks for work. Many eluded unemployment—and some entered the middle class—by starting their own businesses; Turks own more than 70,000 across the country, often doner-kebab joints. But many drifted. The unemployment rate among foreigners is more than double the overall German rate of 7.8%. In Neukölln, says Mr Schimmang, 40% of the workforce is jobless and half the families live off government handouts.
The UK Guardian is reporting that Senator Clinton will accept President-Elect Obama’s offer to become Secretary of State.
Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.
Obama’s advisers have begun looking into Bill Clinton’s foundation, which distributes millions of dollars to Africa to help with development, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. But Democrats do not believe that the vetting is likely to be a problem.
Clinton would be well placed to become the country’s dominant voice in foreign affairs, replacing Condoleezza Rice. Since being elected senator for New York, she has specialised in foreign affairs and defence. Although she supported the war in Iraq, she and Obama basically agree on a withdrawal of American troops.
Clinton, who still harbours hopes of a future presidential run, had to weigh up whether she would be better placed by staying in the Senate, which offers a platform for life, or making the more uncertain career move to the secretary of state job.
Obama and McCain Meet in Chicago
More from the Guardian:
As part of the coalition-building, Obama today also reached out to his defeated Republican rival, John McCain, to discuss how they could work together to roll back some of the most controversial policies of the Bush years. Putting aside the bitter words thrown about with abandon by both sides during the election campaign, McCain flew to meet Obama at his headquarters in the Kluczynski Federal Building, in downtown Chicago.
Obama, speaking before the meeting, said: “We’re going to have a good conversation about how we can do some work together to fix up the country.” He said he also wanted to thank McCain for his service to the country.
Asked by a reporter whether he would work with Obama, McCain, who has long favoured a bipartisan approach to politics, replied: “Obviously”.
Sources on both sides said Obama did not offer McCain a cabinet job, but focused on how the senator for Arizona could help to guide through Congress legislation that they both strongly favour.
Given Obama’s status as president-in-waiting, the two met in a formal setting, a room decked out with a US flag, and were accompanied by senior advisers. Obama appeared the more relaxed of the two, sitting with legs crossed, smiling broadly and waving to reporters, while McCain sat stiffly, with a seemingly fixed grin.
Although the two clashed during the election campaign over tax policy and withdrawal from Iraq, they have more in common than they have differences. They both favour the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, an increase in US troops to Afghanistan, immigration reform, stem cell research and measures to tackle climate change, and oppose torture and the widespread use of wire-tapping.
Although Democrats made gains in the Senate in the November 4 elections, they fell short of the 60 seats that would have allowed them to override Republican blocking tactics and will need Republican allies to get Obama’s plans through. This was highlighted today when the Democratic leadership in Congress announced that a broad economic stimulus package Obama sought was not likely to be passed because of Republican opposition.
Obama confirmed at the weekend that he would offer jobs to some Republicans. One of the names that crops up most often is Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator who is a specialist in foreign affairs and a critic of the Iraq war.
Chuck Hagel as Secretary of State would work but I am still not convinced that the American people would be better served by Senator Clinton’s departure from the Senate.
President-Elect Obama resigned his Senate seat yesterday. It was a wise move on many levels. And yet his Vice President, Joe Biden, still has his Senate seat and what’s worse Senator Biden is playing politics so as to arrange a placeholder to keep the seat warm until his son Beau Biden, currently the Delaware Attorney General but also in Iraq with the Delaware National Guard, can assume the office. It’s time for old smokin’ Joe to tender his resignation and to concentrate on his upcoming tasks as Vice President. If the younger Biden wants to run for the Senate, let him earn it.
There’s been plenty of speculation that Vice President-elect Joe Biden would love to see his son, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, take over his soon-to-be vacated Senate seat, NBC News’s Doug Adams writes. Some believed that Biden may wait to resign his seat in a maneuver — giving newly-elected governor Jack Markell the power to appoint rather than outgoing-Gov. Ruth Ann Minner — aimed at helping that happen. However, with Obama’s resignation from the Senate yesterday, Biden may be pressured to resign soon.
With the younger Biden scheduled to be deployed to Iraq for about a year, a place-holder would be needed for the next two years — someone who wouldn’t challenge Beau in a 2010 special election. One person mentioned is outgoing-Lt. Gov. Jack Carney.
From NBC News:
With all of this swirling, Obama’s resignation Sunday is putting a lot of pressure on Biden to announce his intentions soon, several Delaware political observers tell NBC News. Waiting to resign could be seen as unseemly — an obvious political ploy to manipulate the system and clear the way for his son.
So the likely speculation now — and that’s all it is at this point — is that Joe Biden will step down sooner rather than later, and allow outgoing Gov. Minner to name his successor.
For those who care — any appointee named before the incoming 2009 freshman class is sworn in on Jan. 3rd would have more seniority. And if Carney isn’t the pick, then Delaware Secretary of State Harriet Smith Windsor could be the choice, observers say. She’s in her late 60s, a loyal ally of Gov. Minner, and unlikely to want a long career in the US Senate. If selected, she’d be the first female US senator from Delaware.
Shouldn’t the Governor be selecting the best person for the job and the people of Delaware and not what’s best for the career of Beau Biden?