crytical

The War Recovery?
When the midterm election cycle began, the prevailing opinion was that Barack Obama was cleverer and more inspirational than anyone else on the scene. As it ends, nothing appears to have changed.
OH, YES, I know that Democrats have fallen into a peck of trouble and may lose control of Congress. But even if they do, Obama can still storm back to win a second term in 2012. He is that much better than the competition.
In what respects is he enduringly superior? Let’s start with the basics. He is much smarter than his challengers in either party, better able to read the evidence and come to the right conclusions.
Over time, his conclusions are likely to stand scrutiny better than those of other politicians.
The crucial case in point is his analysis of economic forces. No one would pretend that this is anything but a daunting situation. The nation is suffering simultaneously from high and persistent unemployment, lagging investment, massive public and private debt, and a highly inefficient tax system.
The steps that have been ordered so far in Washington have done nothing more than put the brakes on the runaway decline. They have not spurred new growth.
But if Obama cannot spur that growth by 2012, he is unlikely to be reelected. The lingering effects of the recession that accompanied him to the White House will probably doom him.
Can Obama harness the forces that might spur new growth? This is the key question for the next two years.
What are those forces? Essentially, there are two. One is the power of the business cycle, the tidal force that throughout history has dictated when the economy expands and when it contracts.
Economists struggle to analyze this, but they almost inevitably conclude that it cannot be rushed and almost resists political command. As the saying goes, the market will go where it is going to go.
In this regard, Obama has no advantage over any other pol. Even in analyzing the tidal force correctly, he cannot control it.
What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.
Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.
Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.
I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.
davidbroder@washpost.com

Book Review – Eels – By James Prosek
“A fisherman,” according to an old Russian proverb, “can spot another fisherman from far away.” This is true. And within the fishing clan there is a set of private yet shared moments that bond fishermen together in an almost spiritual communion. The explosion of spray and color when a big fish charges a topwater lure. The devastating ping of snapped line after that same fish makes a last desperate surge and claims its freedom.
But there is one shared experience that my fellow anglers surely know and yet seldom discuss: the moment when a hard-fighting fish finally comes to net and reveals itself to be not some gorgeous bass or trout but an eel. This can happen in a clear Maine lake, a tepid Georgia river, the salty blue-green depths off Montauk Point, or in any other body of fresh or salt water around the globe inhabited by one of the many species of the genus Anguilla. And while to the Western eye eels lack the charisma we like to assign to glamorous marine megafauna like, say, striped bass (for which eels are often used as bait), their mysterious life cycle and tendency to turn up on the end of the line just about everywhere make them excellent game for an angling writer who is prepared to go deeper, so to speak.
And so we have “Eels,” by James Prosek. Prosek has made his reputation as a kind of underwater Audubon. His trout watercolors, collected in a book when he was still an undergraduate at Yale, bear those particular, exciting hues that still-living fish possess — a quality that fish-catchers cherish and everyday fish-eaters couldn’t care less about. As “Eels” demonstrates, Prosek is every bit as good a writer as a painter. Perhaps this is because both his art and writing draw their inspiration from a similar challenge: to express the ineffable, fading aspect of the natural world in the industrialized era, the feeling of bright colors slipping through your fingers. It is this quality that makes “Eels” much more than a fish book. It is an impassioned defense of nature itself, rescued from the tired rhetoric of 1970s-style environmentalism by good, honest shoe-leather reporting. And yet it contains the untainted germ of Age-of-Aquarius eco-consciousness by centering on an essential question: Does a tidy scientific analysis of a creature really tell us all we need to know, or are there numinous qualities to every life-form that require a different kind of meditation?
This question takes Prosek to a series of key eel haunts around the world: a river in the Catskills of New York; the traditional Maori eeling grounds of New Zealand; and an odd little volcanic island in the South Pacific called Pohnpei, where the population is divided, like something out of Dr. Seuss, between those (usually from the nearby island of Kosrae) who eat eels and those who think eels are sacred ancestors and would sooner eat a fellow human.
Despite these disparate locales, the fish’s life cycle itself manages to unify Prosek’s narrative. Eels follow a cycle called catadromy — the contrarian habit of spawning in saltwater and then migrating to freshwater rivers and lakes to mature — the opposite of salmon, striped bass and most other fresh/salt migratory fish. It’s the catadromous lifestyle that gives eels their profound weirdness. As adults, some eels will live for a hundred years in a tiny pond while waiting for a storm to come and wash them back out to sea. In the process they may grow until they have “heads on ’em like a full-grown Labrador dog,” as one Maori puts it to Prosek. When a big storm finally comes along and moistens up everything nicely, eels will ooze across open ground to get to the next portage, gather up into giant eel balls and roll downhill, or form themselves into eel braids to climb up and over obstructions. Once at sea they will seek out highly specific portions of the ocean they have not seen since they were tiny, transparent creatures called glass eels. And while the general locations of several species’ spawning grounds have been found (including the Sargasso Sea, for the European and American eel) humans have been much less successful in finding eels actually in the act of spawning. Not that they haven’t been eager to scoop up the results. One Taiwanese trader Prosek meets hops around the globe from Maine to Micronesia buying glass eels for as much as $250 a pound for China-based eel ranches that grow baby eels to full size and sell the finished product to Japan, a practice that has devastated populations of the American and European eel.
Prosek explores what science has learned about eels, but it isn’t always much. In response to a half-dozen seemingly obvious questions about the fish’s habits, all a prominent eel expert named Jim McCleave can come up with is “Dunno.” Prosek gets his sources to fess up to science’s limitations. “A lot of scientists ignore personal experience altogether, largely because it can’t be measured,” one eel expert tells him. “That’s not necessarily a mistake if you’re doing science. But if you’re trying to evaluate life on earth, it probably is.”
It is both the failing of science to explain things and Prosek’s own style of fisherman-as-pantheistic-nature-worshiper that drives him to the Maori and the Lasialap tribe of Pohnpei. Both groups are cagey about revealing their eel myths, some of which involve young girls being violated by eel tails. When he finally does tease out the stories, he risks bombarding the reader with too many details. But like Bruce Chatwin in “The Songlines,” Prosek has an ear for the particular strangeness of native storytelling. Even if it doesn’t convince you of the spiritual quality of eels, Prosek does at least open a window for the validity of an alternative, non-Western narrative. He does this while simultaneously raising the point that Westerners eavesdropping on native myths are in fact stealing them, just as they have stolen the very land.
Ultimately, Prosek seems to justify his own narrative thefts by trying to repurpose them for the larger cause of eel-kind. Eels, like so many other species, are vanishing from the world. Thanks to thousands of often useless dams throughout North America and Europe, the spiriting away of eel juveniles for the Asian market, and pollution just about everywhere, eel populations have declined by as much as 99 percent in some areas. And it is not just eels, but river-to-ocean connections more generally, that are disappearing — the very flow of organic wealth between land and sea as embodied by migratory fish. We are in fact witnessing the death of the “circulatory system,” as Prosek calls it, of nature itself.
At the conclusion of the verbatim transcription of a Micronesian eel myth, the Lasialap elder telling the tale ends the story thus: “Ahi soai pwoat torohr wei likin imwen. Pass it on — from this house to people outside of your house.” This is in effect what Prosek has done. In “Eels,” he passes on the truth that the often­disdained eel, like all migratory fish, is vital and mysterious and worthy of our full effort to bring it back.
Paul Greenberg is the author of “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.” New York Times

At its worst, the British literary scene behaves like a community of nerdy parochialists who imagine themselves to be cosmopolitans, fretting about whether there can be any great novels any more now that Amis is past it and Updike has died. The ongoing story of literature in foreign languages is barely noticed, a background pixel in the all-important anglophone display.
Indie UK publisher Portobello has issued all three novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, a multi-prizewinning German who is one of the finest, most exciting authors alive. In our island, she’s just another obscure outlander whose work attracts almost no reviews and certainly no media fanfare. This autumn, an extravagantly hyped American novel examining in exhaustive detail how the middle classes there currently feel about themselves will be bought by a great many Britons who’ll strive to understand every local nuance. But Erpenbeck? East Germany? Who cares? How I wish that Visitation could change all that. How I hope that some room may be found to celebrate this author’s uncanny gifts.
Erpenbeck’s reputation was made by her 1999 debut, The Old Child, one of the best first novels ever written. Next came The Book Of Words, surreal and dreamlike but no less potent. Each of these pocket-sized novellas was about a young girl, yet also functioned as an enigmatic allegory of a country with dark secrets. In Visitation, allegory is toned down, history intrudes more explicitly, and the narrative canvas is bigger. The page count may still be modest, but the achievement and resonance are massive.
Visitation’s central character is a place. In a grand house and its grounds, by a lake in Brandenburg, a succession of occupants dislodge each other, borne along by the political calamities of 20th century Europe. The Jewish family who own the property in the 1930s are forced to sell while they wait for visas out of the Third Reich. An architect renovates the house; at the end of the second world war, it’s requisitioned by the Russian army; then, under the GDR, the architect has to flee for having done illegal business with the west. The place is reclaimed by returning exiles from Siberia, then resold by estate agents.
The set-up is strikingly similar to Simon Mawer’s Booker-shortlisted The Glass Room, published only last year, although Erpenbeck’s novel appeared in Germany in 2008. The handling could hardly be more different, with Erpenbeck’s prose eschewing the conventional tactics, neatly sewn-up psychologies and film-friendly dialogue that characterised Mawer’s work. Visitation is foreign in the profoundest sense of that word. We are shown no dramatic meetings, no fraught conversations, between the architect and the Jews he supplants; we only see him taking a swim and wiping himself dry with one of the towels that are still hanging in the bathing-house “before it could occur to his wife to wash them”. He congratulates himself for having given the Jews the full half market-value set by the law, and for helping them escape persecution. “Strange towels,” he reflects. “Cloth manufacturers, these Jews. Terrycloth. Top quality goods.”
Quotes like this, while they hint at the troubling finesse of Erpenbeck’s touch, don’t do justice to the true subtlety of her fiction. It’s common for literary authors to give objectionable characters a veneer of decency for us to see through; that’s not what Erpenbeck is aiming for. She immerses us so deeply in the worldview of each protagonist that we grow fond of them all, worry about the things that worry them, cease to see the things that they ignore. We want them all to hold on to their home.
The one person known to all the owners and occupants – and thus the thread that binds the narrative together – is the gardener. Periodic updates are given of his activities, describing his routines in detail. The first few times, the repetitious litany of watering, pruning, composting, etc, seems unnecessary, but as the decades pass and the property gets eaten away by misuse and decay, the gardener’s patient, pragmatic labours become unexpectedly moving. No word is ever heard from him, and Erpenbeck allows no access to his mind, but we end up feeling great relief whenever he reappears, and deep sadness as this increasingly frail figure does what he can to forestall his Eden’s incremental slide into ruin.
Indeed, the amount of emotional engagement Erpenbeck manages to win from us, in a mere 150 pages, is just one proof of her mastery. In marked contrast to the unearned love that inflated novels so often demand, Visitation allows us to feel we’ve known real individuals, experienced the slow unfolding of history, and bonded unconditionally with a place, without authorial pestering or pathos-cranking.
Impressive as it is, Visitation lacks the jewel-like perfection of The Old Child. Its richly populated, realistic narrative poses a big challenge for an author previously hailed as a miniaturist, and Erpenbeck is tempted by different methods of tackling it. The introduction, describing the prehistoric forces that formed the landscape on which the house will stand, may strike some as pretentious. The chapter devoted to the first tenant and his four daughters, in the Weimar period, is part fable, part poetry, part database of superstitious custom, stylistically harking back to The Book of Words. Even once Erpenbeck has settled into the book’s distinctive form, the concept of the Brandenburg estate as the narrative’s picture-frame is not consistently adhered to: a chapter covering the fate of Doris, one of the exiled Jews, shifts the action to an abandoned house in the Warsaw ghetto. (A forgivable diversion. This 11-page episode, set mostly inside a pitch-dark closet, is one of the most powerful distillations of the Holocaust I’ve ever encountered in fiction: it deserves to be widely anthologised as a classic short story.)
Translator Susan Bernofsky, who did a superb job on the previous books, is back for this one. Erpenbeck’s German is poetical, almost incantatory, taking full advantage of the portmanteau words and Rubik’s cube grammar of that language. Bernofsky opts for a smooth style that won’t come across as bizarre in English, sacrificing some of Erpenbeck’s verse-like cadences and delivering a flexible, accessible narrative. Typical of her shrewdness is the title, Visitation, which at first glance seems a dryly prosaic alternative to Erpenbeck’s original Heimsuchung (“homeseeking”) but reveals its appositeness as the story unfolds: not only is there a literal visitation when a wife is granted access to her imprisoned husband, but the displaced residents of the house become increasingly like unwelcome ghosts haunting the locus of their lost lives.
So, there you have it: an extraordinarily strong book by a major German author, ingeniously translated, produced with love by an idealistic publisher intent on doing something about the shamefully small proportion of foreign literature whose existence our country acknowledges. Will Visitation find a home here? Or will the Anglo incumbents claim all the lebensraum?
Michel Faber review in The Guardian 30. 10. 2010

“People nowadays do not understand what cruelty is. [...] Ordinary cruelty is simply stupidity. It is the entire want of imagination. It is the result in our days of stereotyped systems, of hard-and-fast rules, and of stupidity.
Wherever there is centralisation there is stupidity. What is inhuman in modern life is officialism. Authority is as destructive to those who exercise it as it is to those on whom it is exercised. It is the Prison Board, and the system that it carries out, that is the primary source of the cruelty that is exercised on a child in prison. [...] It is supposed that because a thing is the rule it is right. [...]
The child, consequently, being taken away from its parents by people whom it has never seen, and of whom it knows nothing, and finding itself in a lonely and unfamiliar cell, waited on by strange faces, and ordered about and punished by the representatives of a system that it cannot understand, becomes an immediate prey to the first and most prominent emotion produced [...] — the emotion of terror. [...]
The child’s face was like a white wedge of sheer terror. There was in his eyes the terror of a hunted animal. The next morning I heard him at breakfast-time crying, and calling to be let out. His cry was for his parents.”

Oscar Wilde, Letter to the ‘Daily Chronicle’, May 28 1897

Secret Files Show How Us Ignored Torture

Insurgent suspects are led away by US forces. Some of those held in Iraqi custody suffered appalling abuse, the war logs reveal. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

A grim picture of the US and Britain’s legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.
The new logs detail how:
• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.
• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.
• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee’s apparent death.
As recently as December the Americans were passed a video apparently showing Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar, northern Iraq. The log states: “The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him.”
The report named at least one perpetrator and was passed to coalition forces. But the logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring such allegations. They record “no investigation is necessary” and simply pass reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence. By contrast all allegations involving coalition forces are subject to formal inquiries. Some cases of alleged abuse by UK and US troops are also detailed in the logs.
In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found “bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck” on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of “bad kidneys”, was found to have “evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen“.
A Pentagon spokesman told the New York Times this week that under its procedure, when reports of Iraqi abuse were received the US military “notifies the responsible government of Iraq agency or ministry for investigation and follow-up”.
The logs also illustrate the readiness of US forces to unleash lethal force. In one chilling incident they detail how an Apache helicopter gunship gunned down two men in February 2007.
The suspected insurgents had been trying to surrender but a lawyer back at base told the pilots: “You cannot surrender to an aircraft.” The Apache, callsign Crazyhorse 18, was the same unit and helicopter based at Camp Taji outside Baghdad that later that year, in July, mistakenly killed two Reuters employees and wounded two children in the streets of Baghdad.
Iraq Body Count, the London-based group that monitors civilian casualties, says it has identified around 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths from the data contained in the leaked war logs.
Although US generals have claimed their army does not carry out body counts and British ministers still say no official statistics exist, the war logs show these claims are untrue. The field reports purport to identify all civilian and insurgent casualties, as well as numbers of coalition forces wounded and killed in action. They give a total of more than 109,000 violent deaths from all causes between 2004 and the end of 2009.
This includes 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as “enemy” and 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces. Another 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers complete the body count.
No fewer than 31,780 of these deaths are attributed to improvised roadside bombs (IEDs) planted by insurgents. The other major recorded tally is of 34,814 victims of sectarian killings, recorded as murders in the logs.
However, the US figures appear to be unreliable in respect of civilian deaths caused by their own military activities. For example, in Falluja, the site of two major urban battles in 2004, no civilian deaths are recorded. Yet Iraq Body Count monitors identified more than 1,200 civilians who died during the fighting.
Phil Shiner, human rights specialist at Public Interest Lawyers, plans to use material from the logs in court to try to force the UK to hold a public inquiry into the unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians.
He also plans to sue the British government over its failure to stop the abuse and torture of detainees by Iraqi forces. The coalition’s formal policy of not investigating such allegations is “simply not permissible”, he says.
Shiner is already pursuing a series of legal actions for former detainees allegedly killed or tortured by British forces in Iraq.
WikiLeaks says it is posting online the entire set of 400,000 Iraq field reports – in defiance of the Pentagon.
The whistleblowing activists say they have deleted all names from the documents that might result in reprisals. They were accused by the US military of possibly having “blood on their hands” over the previous Afghan release by redacting too few names. But the military recently conceded that no harm had been identified.
Condemning this fresh leak, however, the Pentagon said: “This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. Our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment.”

Nick Davies, Jonathan Steele and David Leigh
The Guardian 22.10 2010

‘A Turning Point In The Long Struggle’: Chinese Citizens Defend Liu Xiaobo By Perry Link | Nyrblog


STR/AFP/Getty Images
Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia, Beijing, October 22, 2002
It would be hard to overstate how much the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo on October 8 has meant to China’s community of dissidents, bloggers, and activists. Not only has it lifted their spirits tremendously; many also view it as a possible turning point in the long struggle to bring democracy and human rights to their country. Their ebullience seems unaffected by the hostile reaction of the Chinese government, which has called the Nobel Committee’s decision “obscene” and an “insult to China.” Chinese authorities have spread the message in China’s state-run media that Liu Xiaobo is a criminal serving time in prison, but without quoting even a small sample of the words or ideas that have caused him to be there; and they have escalated their harassment of Liu’s friends and colleagues.
On October 14, one hundred and nine of those friends and colleagues released on the Internet the open letter that follows. The signers include Zhang Zuhua, Wen Kejian, Wang Debang, and others who worked with Liu Xiaobo on Charter 08, the citizens’ pro-democracy statement that became the main reason for Liu Xiaobo’s 11-year prison term. The co-signers include many other distinguished figures: rights lawyers Pu Zhiqiang and Teng Biao; Dai Qing , the journalist and environmental activist; the novelist and democracy theorist Wang Lixiong; the Tibetan poet Woeser; veteran publisher Yu Haocheng; film scholar (and translator of Vaclav Havel into Chinese) Cui Weiping; senior academicians in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Zi Zhongyun, Xu Youyu and Zhang Boshu. Co-signers came from all across China, including two each from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
After release of the letter, its organizers invited signatures from anyone in the world, and within days hundreds more had signed. Readers of this blog are welcome to sign, too, by writing to freexiaoboliu@gmail.com. An updated list of signers can be found at http://wexiaobo.org.
Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities continue to try to control how the story is perceived both at home and abroad. Liu Xia, who is Liu Xiaobo’s wife, is under house arrest without having been charged, which violates Chinese law and is bad press internationally for the regime. Her telephone and computer have been confiscated, but she managed to get this message out on October 16 by Twitter on a cell phone:
One of the policemen watching me said that it was his wife’s birthday and that he wanted to go shopping for her. But his orders were that he had to stay with me, so would I like to accompany him to the shopping mall? Sure, I thought, and went. When we got to the mall, I noticed all kinds of strange people photographing me from various angles. I realized it had all been a trick. The authorities wanted photographs to prove that Liu Xia is free and happily shopping at malls.
This shows, beyond the regime’s bald mendacity, that it cares about international opinion.
—Perry Link

On Liu Xiaobo and the Nobel Peace Prize: An Open Letter
The awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese citizen, has drawn strong reactions both inside and outside China. This is a major event in modern Chinese history. It offers the prospect of a significant new advance for Chinese society in its peaceful transition toward democracy and constitutional government. In a spirit of responsibility toward China’s history and future promise, we the undersigned wish to make these points:
        1.        The decision of the Nobel Committee to award this year’s prize to Liu Xiaobo is in full conformity with the principles of the prize and the criteria for its bestowal. In today’s world, peace is closely connected with human rights. Deprivation and devastation of life happen not only on battlefields in wars between nations; they also happen within single nations when tyrannical governments employ violence and abuse law. The praise that we have seen from around the world for the decision to award the prize to a representative of China’s human rights movement shows what a wise and timely decision it was.
        2.        Liu Xiaobo is a splendid choice for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has consistently advocated non-violence in his quest to protect human rights and has confronted social injustice by arguing from reason. He has persevered in pursuing the goals of democracy and constitutional government and has set aside anger even toward those who persecute him. These virtues put his qualifications for the prize beyond doubt, and his actions and convictions can, in addition, serve as models for others in how to resolve political and social conflict.
        3.        In the days since the announcement of his prize, leaders in many nations and major world organizations have called upon the Chinese authorities to release Liu Xiaobo. We agree. At the same time we call upon the authorities to release all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience who are in detention because of what they’ve said or written, their political views, or their religious beliefs. We ask that legal procedures aimed at freeing Liu Xiaobo be undertaken without delay, and that Liu and his wife be permitted to travel to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10.
        4.        Upon hearing the news of Liu Xiaobo’s prize, groups of citizens in several places in China gathered at restaurants to share their excitement over food and wine and to hold discussions, display banners, and distribute notices. Law-abiding and reasonable as these activities were, they met with harassment and repression from police. Some of the participants were interrogated, threatened, and escorted home; others were detained; still others, including Liu Xiaobo’s wife Liu Xia, have been placed under house arrest and held incommunicado. We call upon the police to cease these illegal actions immediately and to release the people who have been illegally detained.
        5.        We call upon the Chinese authorities to approach Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize with realism and reason. They should take note of the responses to the prize inside and outside China and see in these responses the currents in world thinking as well as the underlying preferences of our fellow citizens. China should join the mainstream of civilized humanity by embracing universal values. Such is the only route to becoming a “great nation” that is capable of playing a positive and responsible role on the world stage. We are convinced that any positive steps taken by or sign of goodwill from the government and its leaders will be met with understanding and support from the Chinese people and will be effective in moving Chinese society in a peaceful direction.
        6.        We call upon the Chinese authorities to make good on their oft-repeated promise to reform the political system. In a recent series of speeches, Premier Wen Jiabao has intimated a strong desire to promote political reform. We are ready to engage actively in such an effort. We expect our government to uphold the constitution of The People’s Republic of China as well as the Charter of the United Nations and other international agreements to which it has subscribed. This will require it to guarantee the rights of Chinese citizens as they work to bring about a peaceful transition toward a society that will be, in fact and not just in name, a democracy and a nation of laws.

October 18, 2010 10:36 p.m.
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United Nations Report Focuses On Global Lot Of Women
UNITED NATIONS — American men who maintain they are doing more housework have a second source to back their claim — a United Nations report released Wednesday — although it would be premature to argue that the sexes had reached parity on domestic chores or nearly any other issue.
Housework statistics are perhaps the lightest slice from a welter of numbers in the report, which focused on the global lot of women. The latest in a series of compilations published every five years, the World’s Women 2010 was released to mark World Statistics Day. (When the United Nations wants to draw attention to an issue, it usually gets a day. For a particularly intractable problem, it often gets a year.)
Statistics Day is being honoured in 100 countries to underscore the need for data as a development tool. (The list of events started with Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai was to participate in a statistical celebration that was presumably not the disqualification of a quarter of the votes from the recent polls.)
Although the 255-page report shows that women have made progress in areas like health and education — elementary school enrolment is now the same for boys and girls — they still lag over all. “Much more needs to be done, in particular the need to close the gender gap in public life and to prevent many forms of violence against women,” said Jomo Kwame Sundaram, the assistant secretary general who released the report here.
A second hefty report by the United Nations Population Fund, also released Wednesday, digs deep into areas where positive news is much harder to find: the harm visited on women.
It suggested that helping women and children recover from the sexual violence and other trauma they suffer in war or natural disasters is a key to moving countries forward on all fronts. Women savagely raped during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina still suffer from limited access to counselling 15 years after the peace treaty, the reported noted.
Among the world’s nearly seven billion people, men outnumber women by 57 million, concentrated mainly in China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Those countries also have the highest female child mortality rates, the statistics report said. Though obesity has become a national preoccupation in the United States, it did not make the chart of 17 countries where more than 20 percent of the women are obese. That roster was led by Qatar with about 45 percent of its women (versus 34 percent of the men). Men and women in Canada are in a dead heat on this score at about 23 percent, whereas, among the most obese countries, only in the Czech Republic do men pull ahead of women — 25 percent versus 22 percent.
On housework, there are wide latitudes on chores — women tend to cook more than men, but men spend time shopping. In the United States, they have moved toward parity, the report says.
Generally in developed nations, women spend close to five hours a day on child-care and domestic chores, whereas men spend two and a half. But the numbers vary markedly. Women in Italy, Japan, Portugal and Spain among the developed, for example, do three to four times as much domestic work as men.
On education, the statistics have flopped; women pursuing higher education now dominate, making up 51 percent of college students. That has yet to translate into earning gains: women earn 70 percent to 90 percent of their male counterparts.
In politics, 14 women were either head of state or government in 2009, and just 23 countries had what the United Nations considers critical mass in Parliaments, 30 percent. Absolute gender parity for women is not exactly a United Nations goal. Officials noted, for example, that women worldwide live longer, and they would not want to pull women down even with men.
Neil MacFarquhar NYT 20.10.2010