30/08/06, Yassin Musharbash, Jihad on the Web, Al-Qaida's German Blog

Though learning Arabic was once a prerequisite for watching and reading al-Qaida's latest doings in Iraq, now taking German lessons could help. For the last three months, sympathizers have been using a blog to publish related materials -- in German.

[photo A screenshot of the blog that hosts the "Global Islamic Media Front" in Germany.]

Starting around mid-May, messages began popping up on German Islamic Internet forums advertising the "Global Islamic Media Front" and promising the latest videos, announcements and news from the mujahedeen in German. One click and the promise becomes reality -- almost everything released by the Iraqi wing of the al-Qaida terror network is available just days after its initial appearance. And translated into German.

The latest translation is dated August 22. "The killing of two crusaders and the injury of two crusaders by causing an explosion of a bomb near their Hummer vehicle in the Saylo region, near Baquba, with praise and thanks to Allah," the post says. Verifying the authenticity of the translation isn't difficult -- a similar entry by the "Mujahedeen Shura Council of Iraq" claims responsibility in Arabic on a Web site focused on the war-torn country. The organization was founded by none other than Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi and was a front for several terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida in Iraq. The translation is practically literal and appears to have been done by a human and not by a computer.

In total, there are hundreds of notes like this claiming responsibility for attacks. They are listed one after the other, separated only by collages that celebrate the deceased Zarqawi and other al-Qaida leaders. The site's webmaster has also included dozens of links to videos of suicide attacks and similar material. These practices along with the links appear to have been appropriated from the original Arabic Web pages of al-Qaida members.

The successor to al-Qaida's news agency

Jihadist Internet forums are hardly new to German-speaking cyberspace. Indeed, law enforcement officials have repeatedly seized materials translated into German that provided training in weapons and radical fundamental ideology. But the Global Islamic Media Front's German pages are a first because no site before it in Germany has claimed to be the mouthpiece of al-Qaida in Iraq. Removing the language barrier will certainly be appreciated by some jihadists who had previously struggled to stay up-to-date.

[photo A screenshot of one of the Web sites where Arab letters claiming responsibility for different acts of terrorism are posted.]

The operators of the Web site leave little doubt as to their alignment. Dubbing themselves the German equivalent of the "Global Islamic Media Front" (GIMF) is no accident -- a group of the same name has existed for years in both English and Arabic. Just two years ago the GIMF was practically al-Qaida's very own news agency. According to bin Laden's own people at the time, only material from the GIMF was to be considered authentic. This unofficial public relations department generally called Yahoo!'s Internet servers home.

However, recently it's become apparent that GIMF is gradually being transferred to al-Qaida sympathizers who possibly no longer have direct contact with the organization. "GIMF is an Islamic media center on the Internet. It's the ambassador of the mujahedeen. If the Americans think that the Internet belongs to them and believe they can control it, then we plan to use the magician's own magic against him. GIMF doesn't belong to any one person. It belongs to all Muslims," the organization's Arab leaders announced about a year ago. But now the site's role seems to have diminished to that of a "producer" of al-Qaida material that "reformats and refashions" terror-related media "in a sleeker and more attractive manner," Norwegian expert Brynjar Lia wrote in a recent issue of Jane's, a defense trade journal. Still, the shiny packaging could help win recruits.

More than just sympathizers?

Because it's difficult to know just how close GIMF is to terrorists in the field, it's hard to draw conclusions about the individuals responsible for the German-language pages. "The pages are proof that there are people here who sympathize with al-Qaida in Iraq," says Guido Steinberg, a terror expert with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. "If you consider how key media work has been for the group since 2004, you could also categorize the operators as active members of the organization and not just sympathizers."

[photo About 12 hours after the initial publication of this article in German, Google posted a warning message on the GIMF Web site.]

The al-Qaida mouthpieces don't give out anything other than the GIMF name and they provide no proof of their link to bin Laden's terror network. The material they use is translated directly and largely unaltered from that available on Arabic Jihad Web sites. It doesn't provide any indication that the site has any kind of exclusive access to al-Qaida in Iraq.

It's also not possible to tell for sure if the site is being updated from inside German-speaking Europe. Technically, the site is just a blog that is based on blogger.com's technology. Blogger.com prides itself on giving "people their own voice on the Web", which is just what GIMF has done -- albeit without the knowledge of Blogger. It takes just minutes to create a blog using the company's services. "As is usually the case with such services, the registration process is kept very simple. Normally, the information a user enters is not verified," says Stefan Keuchel, a spokesman for the German headquarters of search engine Google, which owns blogger.com. Keuchel points to the company's Terms of Service which prohibit hate speech and must be accepted by all users.

The authorities have Internet too

Blogger.com is certainly by no means the first company to be used by terrorists to disseminate propaganda. Yahoo!, Geocities and other rivals have all had their share of experiences. But Keuchel says he's never heard of a similar case at Google Germany.

At least three German security authorities are aware of the German GIMF site. "We've watched it from the beginning," says one official, who asked not to be identified by name. Officials believe more than one person is involved based on the sheer volume of information being produced on the blog. But at the moment, there is nothing more they can do but just observe the site.

"We'll take a closer look at the site," Keuchel says. "We'll have to see if the content is prohibited by our Terms of Service or German law to see if we have the ability to remove it." Hours after talking to SPIEGEL ONLINE, Google added a warning label to GIMF indicating it had received complaints about the site.

Still, many experts doubt whether deleting pro-Jihad Web sites does any good -- these days there are thousands and whenever one is deleted, two new ones appear. "You can maybe get one or two people," says Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on al-Qaida's Internet activities. "But you'll never be able to stop the entire flow of radical Islamic propaganda."

28/08/06, Spiegel Interview with Bolivia's Evo Morales

"Capitalism Has Only Hurt Latin America"

Bolivia's President Evo Morales, 46, talks to DER SPIEGEL about reform plans for his country, socialism in Latin America, and the often tense relations of the region's leftists with the United States.

[photo AP, Bolivian President Evo Morales sits in front of a picture made out of coca leaves depicting leftist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara.]

SPIEGEL: Mr. President, why is such a large part of Latin America moving to the left?

Morales: Injustice, inequality and the poverty of the masses compel us to seek better living conditions. Bolivia's majority Indian population was always excluded, politically oppressed and culturally alienated. Our national wealth, our raw materials, was plundered. Indios were once treated like animals here. In the 1930s and 40s, they were sprayed with DDT to kill the vermin on their skin and in their hair whenever they came into the city. My mother wasn't even allowed to set foot in the capital of her native region, Oruro. Now we're in the government and in parliament. For me, being leftist means fighting against injustice and inequality but, most of all, we want to live well.

SPIEGEL: You called a constitutional convention to establish a new Bolivian republic. What should the new Bolivia look like?

Morales: We don't want to oppress or exclude anyone. The new republic should be based on diversity, respect and equal rights for all. There is a lot to do. Child mortality is frighteningly high. I had six siblings and four them died. In the countryside, half of all children die before reaching their first birthday.

SPIEGEL: Your socialist party, MAS, does not have the necessary two-thirds majority amend the constitution. Do you now plan to negotiate with other political factions?

Morales: We are always open to talks. Dialogue is the basis of Indian culture, and we don't want to make any enemies. Political and ideological adversaries, perhaps, but not enemies.

SPIEGEL: Why did you temporarily suspend the nationalization of natural resources, one of your administration's most important projects? Does Bolivia lack the know-how to extract its raw materials?

Morales: We are continuing to negotiate with the companies in question. The current lack of investment has nothing to do with nationalization. It's the fault of the right-wing government of (former president) Tuto Quiroga, who stopped all investment in natural gas production in 2001 because, as he claimed, there was no domestic market for natural gas in Bolivia. We plan to start drilling again. We have signed a delivery agreement for natural gas with Argentina, and we are also cooperating with Venezuela. We have signed a contract to work an iron mine with an Indian company. This will create 7,000 direct and 10,000 indirect jobs. We have negotiated much better prices and terms than our predecessors.

SPIEGEL: But there are major problems with Brazil. Bolivia is demanding a higher price for natural gas shipments. Doesn't this harm your relationship with (Brazilian) President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva?

Morales: Lula is showing his solidarity. He behaves like a big brother. But we are having problems with Petrobras, the Brazilian energy company. The negotiations are very difficult, but we are optimistic.

SPIEGEL: Petrobras has threatened to end all of its investments in Bolivia.

Morales: This isn't coming from the Brazilian government, but from a few Petrobras executives. They print these threats in the press to put us under pressure. Brazil is a major power, but it has to treat us with respect. Compañero Lula told me that there will be a new agreement, and that he even wants to import more gas.

SPIEGEL: Bolivia doesn't sell natural gas to Chile because the Chileans took away Bolivia's access to the sea in a war more than 120 years ago. Now a socialist is in power in Chile. Will you supply them with natural gas now?

Morales: We want to overcome our historical problems with Chile. The sea has divided us and the sea must bring us back together again. Chile has agreed, for the first time, to talk about sea access for Bolivia. That's a huge step forward. The Chilean president came to my inauguration, and I attended (Chilean President) Michelle Bachelet's inauguration in Santiago. We complement each other. Chile needs our natural resources and we need access to the sea. Under those circumstances, it must be possible to find a solution in the interest of both countries.

[photo AP/ Granma, Morales is close to Latin America's other leading leftists Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.]

SPIEGEL: What influence did Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have on the nationalization of Bolivia's natural resources?

Morales: None whatsoever. Neither Cuba nor Venezuela was involved. I managed the nationalization myself. Only seven of my closest associates knew about the decree and the date. Although I did meet Chavez und (Cuban leader) Fidel Castro in Cuba a few days before the announcement, we didn't talk about nationalization. I had already signed the decree before I departed for Cuba, and the vice president gave it to the cabinet. When Fidel asked me in Cuba how far the project had progressed, I told him that we planned to announce the nationalization in the coming days, but I didn't give him a date. Fidel warned me to wait until the constitutional convention. Chavez wasn't aware of anything.

SPIEGEL: Chavez wants to install a socialism for the 21st century in Venezuela. His ideological advisor Heinz Dieterich, a German, was recently in Bolivia. Do you intend to introduce socialism in Bolivia?

Morales: If socialism means that we live well, that there is equality and justice, and that we have no social and economic problems, then I welcome it.

SPIEGEL: You admire Fidel Castro as the "grandfather of all Latin American revolutionaries." What have you learned from him?

Morales: Solidarity, most of all. Fidel helps us a great deal. He has donated seven eye clinics and 20 basic hospitals. Cuban doctors have already performed 30,000 free cataract operations for Bolivians. Five thousand Bolivians from poor backgrounds are studying medicine at no charge in Cuba.

SPIEGEL: But Bolivian doctors are protesting the Cubans' presence. They say that they deprive them of their livelihood.

Morales: The Bolivian state doesn't pay the Cuban doctors any salaries, so they're not taking anything away from the Bolivians.

SPIEGEL: Do you know how Castro is doing?

Morales: Yes, I spoke with him on the phone today. He has been feeling better for the last two days. He told me that he'll be well enough to attend the summit of nonaligned nations in Havana in September.

SPIEGEL: And he'll give a speech then?

Morales: Certainly. It's an opportunity he won't miss.

SPIEGEL: The Americans are worried that Chavez is gaining too much influence. Aren't you making yourself dependent on Venezuela?

Morales: What unites us with Chavez is the concept of the integration of South America. This is the old dream of a great fatherland, a dream that existed even before the Spanish conquest, and Simon Bolivar fought for it later on. We want a South America modeled after the European Union, with a currency like the euro, one that's worth more than the dollar. Chavez's oil is unimportant for Bolivia. We only get diesel under favorable terms. But we are not dependent on Venezuela. We complement each other. Venezuela shares its wealth with other countries, but that doesn't make us subordinate.

SPIEGEL: The Latin American left is fracturing into a moderate, social democratic current, led by Lula and Bachelet, and a radical, populist movement represented by Castro, Chavez and yourself. Isn't Chavez dividing the continent?

Morales: There are social democrats and others who are marching more in the direction of equality, whether you call them socialists or communists. But at least Latin America no longer has racist or fascist presidents like it did in the past. Capitalism has only hurt Latin America.

SPIEGEL: You are the first Indian president in Bolivian history. What role will indigenous culture play in your government?

Morales: We must combine our social consciousness with professional competency. In my administration, intellectuals from the upper class can be cabinet ministers or ambassadors, as can members of Indian ethnic groups.

[photo REUTERS, Bolivian soldiers guard the main gate to the San Alberto gas plant in the southern state of Tarija, where President Evo Morales announced the nationalization of the country's petroleum industry last spring.]

SPIEGEL: Do you believe that the Indian peoples have developed a better social model than the white, Western democracies?

Morales: There was no private property in the past. Everything was communal property. In the Indian community where I was born, everything belonged to the community. This way of life is more equitable. We Indians are Latin America's moral reserve. We act according to a universal law that consists of three basic principles: do not steal, do not lie and do not be idle. This trilogy will also serve as the basis of our new constitution.

SPIEGEL: Is it true that all government employees will be required to learn the Indian languages Quechua, Aymara und Guaraní in the future?

Morales: Public servants in the cities are required to learn the language of their region. If we already speak Spanish in Bolivia, we should also be fluent in our own languages.

SPIEGEL: Are the whites treating the Indians better, now that you're in power?

Morales: It's gotten a lot better. The middle class, intellectuals and the self-employed are now proud of their Indian roots. Unfortunately, some oligarchic groups continue to treat us as being inferior.

SPIEGEL: Some critics claim that the Indians in Bolivia are now racist toward the whites.

Morales: That's part of a dirty war the mass media are waging against us. Wealthy, racist businessmen own much of the media.

SPIEGEL: The Catholic Church has accused you of wanting to reform religious instruction. Will there be no freedom of religion in Bolivia?

Morales: I am Catholic. Freedom of religion isn't at issue. But I am opposed to a monopoly when it comes to faith.

SPIEGEL: Some large landowners have threatened violent resistance to the planned land reforms. Whose land do you intend to seize?

Morales: We will expropriate large land holdings that are not being farmed. But we want democratic and peaceful agrarian reform. The 1952 land reform led to the creation of many tiny, unproductive parcels in the Andean highlands.

SPIEGEL: Bolivia is divided into the rich provinces in the east and the poor Andean highlands. There is a strong movement for autonomy in the east. Is the country at risk of breaking apart?

Morales: This is what a few fascist, oligarchic groups want. But they lost the vote over the constitutional convention.

[photo REUTERS, Bolivian President Evo Morales (R) and his vice-president Alvaro Garcia wear wreaths of coca leaves during a visit to the Chapare region about 600 km southeast from La Paz.]

SPIEGEL: Bolivia is an important narcotics producer. Your predecessors had illegal coca plantations destroyed. Do you intend to do the same thing?

Morales: From our standpoint, coca should be neither destroyed nor completely legalized. Farming should be controlled by the state and by the coca farmers' unions. We have launched an international campaign to legalize coca leaves, and we want the United Nations to remove coca from its list of toxic substances. Scientists proved long ago that coca leaves are not toxic. We decided on a voluntary reduction in the amount of acreage being farmed.

SPIEGEL: But the United States claims that the majority of the coca harvest ends up in the cocaine trade.

Morales: The Americans say all kinds of things. They accuse us of not fulfilling the conditions of their development aid. My pro-capitalist predecessor administrations supported the massacre of coca farmers. More than 800 campesinos died in the war on drugs. The United States is using its war on drugs as an excuse to expand its control over Latin America.

SPIEGEL: The American Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, has agents stationed in Bolivia who advise the military and the police in their efforts to combat the drug trade. Will you be sending them home now?

Morales: They're still here, but they are no longer in uniform or armed, as they were before.

SPIEGEL: How is your relationship with the United States? Do you plan to travel to Washington?

Morales: A meeting with (US President) George W. Bush is not planned. I do intend to travel to New York to visit the UN General Assembly. When I was still a member of parliament, the Americans didn't let me into the country. But heads of state don't need a visa to travel to the UN in New York.

SPIEGEL: You broke your nose while playing soccer a few weeks ago. Are you playing less these days?

Morales: Does my nose still look crooked? Playing sports has always been my greatest pleasure. I don't smoke, I hardly drink alcohol and I rarely dance, although I used to play the trumpet. Sports helped get me into the presidential palace. My first position in the union was that of sports secretary. I was head of a soccer club in the countryside when I was 13.

SPIEGEL: Why don't you wear a tie?

Morales: I never wore a tie voluntarily, even though I was forced to wear one for photos when I was young and for official events at school. I used to wrap my tie in a newspaper, and whenever the teacher checked I would quickly put it on again. I'm not used to it. Most Bolivians don't wear ties.

SPIEGEL: Mr. President, thank you for speaking with us.

The interview was conducted by Jens Glüsing and Hans Hoyng and was translated from German by Christopher Sultan.

30/08/06, Geoffrey York, Chinese dissident disputes organ-harvest allegations

Key witness's evidence fabricated, Wu says.

BEIJING -- A famed Chinese dissident and labour-camp expert has concluded a witness fabricated evidence to support allegations that China runs a secret concentration camp where organs are harvested from thousands of Falun Gong prisoners.

The dissident, Harry Wu, is challenging a key witness who is widely cited by Falun Gong to support their assertions that 6,000 members of the spiritual movement were sent to a Nazi-style concentration camp where three-quarters of them were systematically killed for their organs.

However, a prominent Canadian lawyer who investigated the accusations says he is still convinced that large numbers of Falun Gong members were probably killed by Chinese authorities after their organs were extracted.

The Falun Gong spiritual movement is banned in China, where its millions of adherents are viewed with deep suspicion and routinely imprisoned.

Mr. Wu, who spent 19 years as a prisoner in a Chinese gulag and later became a leading researcher on Chinese labour camps, was denounced as a "butcher" and "Communist spy" by the Falun Gong after he questioned the account.

The witness, the ex-wife of a Chinese surgeon, said her husband told her that he removed the corneas from about 2,000 Falun Gong prisoners who were killed and incinerated after various organs were extracted from them.

Mr. Wu concluded that the witness was unreliable and her story was fabricated. He said the Falun Gong prevented him from meeting this witness and a second witness who made a similar claim. He sent his own investigators to the alleged site of the "concentration camp" in northeastern China and concluded that there was no trace of one.

"If 4,500 live persons had their organs removed and then their corpses were destroyed, then this is an unthinkably big deal in world history," Mr. Wu wrote later. "There has to be enough solid eyewitnesses, evidence and investigation. Based only upon the indirect testimony of two witnesses, the outside world will think that this was just propaganda."

If the Falun Gong allegation is correct, it would mean that at least 120 people per month had their organs removed and were killed -- "technically infeasible and impossible" in a single facility, Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Wu has some credibility on the issue because he is a long-time expert on the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners in China. He says the Chinese authorities have brutally extracted the organs of death-sentence prisoners "on a large-scale, long-term basis in violation of the basic principles of human rights."

Canadian lawyers David Matas and David Kilgour, however, have lent credence to the Falun Gong accusations. In a report released last month after a two-month investigation, the lawyers concluded that authorities are executing a "large but unknown number of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience" and seizing their vital organs -- including hearts, kidneys, livers and corneas -- for sale at high prices to foreigners and others.

In an interview, Mr. Matas rejected Mr. Wu's conclusion that the concentration camp does not exist. "He seemed to make up his mind before he sent his investigators to the site," the human-rights lawyer said.

And despite Mr. Wu's criticism of the testimony by the ex-wife of the surgeon, Mr. Matas said she seems credible and reliable, even if her testimony is not corroborated.

"We are satisfied that the ex-wife of the surgeon was telling the truth about what she saw and heard," he said. "But there remains to be explored whether she understood correctly or misunderstood what she heard, as well as whether what she heard others tell her was accurate in substance."

Mr. Matas said he is not surprised that Mr. Wu's investigators were unable to find evidence at the site.

"I wouldn't have expected them to see anything," he said. "They didn't find anything, but that doesn't mean anything. If this is happening, it's happening in an underground way. The victims are cremated and there are no autopsies. There are no bystanders."

He also rejected Mr. Wu's suggestion that the Falun Gong allegations are technically impossible. Surgeons can remove an eye, for example, in just 10 to 20 minutes, he said.

28/08/06, Val Ross, Gertrude Kearns: Scenes from the Front

Gertrude Kearns's works can create their own conflicts, but she's earned respect from soldiers and curators alike.

When artist Gertrude Kearns heard that Corporal David Braun had been killed by a suicide bomber last week just outside Kandahar, she responded a little differently than her downtown Toronto neighbours. Kearns returned from Afghanistan seven months ago after spending five weeks in uniform, embedded with the Canadian Forces. "When you have an on-the-ground understanding of what's happening over there," she explained, "you feel it in your mind and in your gut."

As Canada's death count in the Afghan mission nears 30, so too does the declining percentage of those who support our 2,300 troops' involvement. And death and ambivalence saturate the six sombre canvases Kearns painted from her experiences. "Being around war kind of blows any philosophical thoughts out of your head," she says, sipping tea in her sunny studio.

But along with ambivalence, what stares from her canvases is respect for the men and women who have put themselves in harm's way. "I can relate to them now with a growing sense of the hard practical reality of a theatre of war," she says. "A rational sensibility develops which can transcend the emotional. That's how soldiers have to function."

Kearns's six canvases were supposed to have been flown to Kandahar next month to be displayed in Canadian Forces HQ. The military has since decided the works are too significant and too fragile.

"We saw that more care should be taken," says Colonel Steve Noonan, former commander of Task Force Afghanistan, under whose aegis Kearns's visit occurred. "We want to see them get appropriate exposure." Negotiations are under way to install them in Ottawa, possibly at the Canadian War Museum or the Department of National Defence.

The canvases could draw fire en route; Kearns's works tend to create their own conflict zones. Last year, Cliff Chadderton, militant chairman of the National Council of Veteran Associations, threatened to boycott the Canadian War Museum for exhibiting Kearns's shocking painting of a Canadian soldier torturing Somali teenager Shidane Arone to death.

Retired Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire voiced his discomfort with the museum's prominent placement of his portrait by Kearns (the anguished image has since been moved to an interior gallery). Nor has the War Museum yet displayed a Kearns image of a wryly smiling retired General Lewis MacKenzie, which bears the bold words: KEEP THE PEACE OR I'LL KILL YOU.

Laura Brandon, the museum's war art historian, says the museum has more than 13,000 works of art, but calls Kearns's work "tremendous."

MacKenzie also likes her work. "My butt suffered, but the painting was flattering," he says of his portrait. As for the text, he says, "I used that phrase today when I did a BBC interview and said, 'Peacekeeping is: Please, we're here to help. But peacemaking means that: Keep the peace or I'll kill you.' "

Thanks to such images, Kearns has become one of Canada's best-known war artists since the Second World War. Born in 1950 to the family of Frederic Steiger, a professional artist, Kearns grew up in Toronto in the era of Vietnam draft dodgers, when few artists gave a flying paint fleck for military subjects. She didn't go to art school, but a life-drawing class she attended in her mid-20s was so enthralling that she moved into portraiture.

Then, during the 1991 Gulf War, Kearns found herself compelled by the newscast images of stupendous explosions of military might. "I had a sense of the power of the weapons, but also of resisting the seduction of the whole thing," she says.

She has tackled other subjects, too, from storm-lashed seacoasts to a series on the battered face of art critic John Bentley Mays. But the military, and its experiences in Somalia and Rwanda, branded her imagination. In 1997, the War Museum acquired two of her paintings of Kyle Brown, who was implicated in Arone's killing. Later, it picked up her MacKenzie and Dallaire portraits. These aren't just faces; there's Manichean meaning in the black-and-white cubes Brown holds in his hands, sardonic punning in the title of her Dallaire series (UNdone).

Some of her work was made possible under the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP), which enables artists to record Canada's soldiers in action. It was through CFAP in 2004 that Kearns underwent a nine-day training session at Ontario's Camp Petawawa. She finished, even as soldiers with sprained ankles were airlifted out, and earned the military's confidence that she could survive Afghanistan's rigours.

After obtaining clearance from her own HQ (her children, Hector, then 20, and Iona, then 18), Kearns donned a combat uniform and flew to Kandahar in December. She wore no hijab, just a helmet. At tribal councils, or the bedsides of wounded civilians, she sometimes sketched or shot photos; other times, she merely absorbed detail.

All the large, rectangular canvases stacked around her studio tell stories. One recalls Jan. 15, the day Kearns had breakfast with Canadian diplomat Glyn Berry. Later came the news that his convoy had been attacked. Berry was killed, and survivors were being rushed to the base hospital. Kearns tried to help, mopping blood off the floor. Months later, she produced a painting. The foreground shows a woman doctor and a local woman in a blue burka, both bending over a child. Beyond them is a medic, Master Corporal Paul Franklin of 1 Field Ambulance, cradling a hypodermic and explaining its use to another child. Not shown are Franklin's legs. One was blown off in the attack on Berry's convoy.

The War Museum's Brandon isn't sure if this painting will join her collection. But, she says, "Kearns is a very thoughtful artist. She's not just painting what she sees. She paints a multifaceted debate."

For her part, Kearns wants to return to Kandahar, even though she, better than most, appreciates the dangers. "Everyone was saying even before January 15 that it would have to be bad before it got better. . . . So these works reflect a turning point in our engagement," she says. "I hope they have enough depth to resonate with our current accomplishments and despairs."

06/08/06, Stephanie Porter, Big wind blowing

St. John's: The CEO of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro says there’s the potential for a “large wind generation operation” in Labrador — as much as three times as powerful as the proposed lower Churchill development.

“By large, I mean the overall potential may by up to the 10,000 megawatt potential,” Ed Martin says. “It’s a world-class wind resource.”

To put that number in perspective: the upper Churchill generates about 5,400 megawatts of power; the lower Churchill, at Muskrat Falls and Gull Island, is expected to produce 2,800 megawatts. The Holyrood generating station provides 480 megawatts. According to Hydro’s website, peak demand in the province in 2004 was 1,405 megawatts.

In other words, a full-blown Labrador wind farm could potentially meet the province’s energy needs many times over.

But Martin is quick to caution. “That potential may be (there), but generally speaking … the 1,000-2,000 megawatt development is what you’re looking at — for starters.”

According to Martin, the province has asked Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro to research wind generation in Labrador, in preparation for its much talked-about energy plan. (A spokeswoman for the Department of Natural Resources tells The Independent the energy plan will be released before the end of 2006.)

“Even though we know there’s a fair amount of wind in Newfoundland and Labrador, we have to be a little more scientific than that,” Martin continues. “We’ve gone up there and put up some wind monitoring towers so we can gather some information for Hydro and the province.”

He hasn’t seen any early test results, but he says “we’re fairly confident.”

The key with wind generation, he says, is regularity and dependability of the flow. Wind power is virtually impossible to store, so if the wind drops suddenly or stops, there has to be another source of power to fill the gaps.

“So if you can marry wind with a hydro or river resource, you have something really effective.”

In Labrador, Martin says the priority would be to provide enough power for Labradorians and industrial development in that part of the province.

“Past that, you’re into a resource the size of which you would want to export … like a lower Churchill or any other provincial resource that is there for the benefit of the province.

“Once we have a scientific look at what the actual quality of the resource up there, we’ll be putting it into the energy plan. In that process, some big decisions will be made as to how to handle the provincial resource portion of that kind of resource.”

Martin says he hopes to have collected enough data in the next few months to begin making some policy decisions. But the wind monitoring will continue into the future — and he doesn’t shy away from saying a wind farm could be its own mega-project, a way of harvesting a limitless resource for energy and income.

“My job isn’t to be excited about things,” he says. “I want the facts, the dollars and cents, the value to the province and all those good things. The fact we’re looking at it means we’re excited — but I need the numbers.”

26/08/06, Siobhan Roberts, An equation for controversy

With $1-million at stake, the Poincaré conjecture is fuelling competition -- and ethical conflict; Siobhan Roberts reports on the reclusive genius at the centre of it all.

Many a mathematician's richest fantasies were realized last week when:

1.1. The Poincaré conjecture, described as "one of the most burning mathematical questions of all time," was declared almost certainly solved. And:

1.2. This Poincaré plot, full of intrigue, prizes and power plays, transformed the normally anonymous calculations of mathematicians into fodder for headlines worldwide.

The central character in this drama, however, was less than a willing participant. Despite winning the Fields Medal on Tuesday for his work on the Poincaré, reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman not only declined to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid to accept his prize -- from the King of Spain no less -- he refused the medal altogether.

The shy, though obstinate 40-year-old is the first person to reject what is considered the Nobel of math. And, according to an article in The New Yorker, he also resigned from the Steklov Mathematics Institute in St. Petersburg last December, quitting mathematics altogether. His objections: the community's questionable ethics and unseemly politicking around his work.

All of which has raised speculation as to whether Dr. Perelman will also turn down the $1-million (U.S.) Millennium Prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute (a think tank in Cambridge, Mass.) for the first person to prove the century-old Poincaré. Or, for that matter, whether any one mathematician in a supremely collaborative field can really claim credit at all.

The Poincaré plot is particularly fraught in this respect, because Dr. Perelman provided only a rough sketch of his strategy to solve the conjecture. He posted two papers on an on-line "preprint" archive, and then ostensibly abandoned his work, deliberately leaving it to stand or fall on its own merit. Three camps of mathematicians rushed in to flesh out the details -- so the question then becomes who really provided a comprehensive and complete proof?

Sir John Ball, the president of the International Mathematical Union, made a not-so-veiled reference to this in his opening address at the ICM. "We freely discuss our work with others without fear of it being stolen, and research is communicated openly prior to formal publication," he said. "Editorial procedures are fair and proper, and work gains its reputation through merit and not by how it is promoted. . . . The exceptions are rare, and they are noticed."

The most notable exception in the Poincaré imbroglio is Chinese mathematician Shing-Tung Yau. Now at Harvard, the 57-year-old is known in the math world for being unpleasantly competitive -- a trait that can be attributed in part to his zeal for building the mathematical enterprise in China.

Dr. Yau is a celebrated mathematician, for a theorem uniting topology and geometry, and seminal work pertaining to string theory. He won a Fields medal in 1982. He has dabbled with the Poincaré since the 1970s, and two of his former students wrote one of the papers explicating Dr. Perelman's results.

But lately, Dr. Yau has been manoeuvring for more photons of the limelight than he deserves, promoting his students' work as an original contribution, rather than a compliment to Dr. Perelman's insights.

In contrast, the purist Dr. Perelman -- who makes quite an impression with nails that are apparently inches long -- is described as living on an "ideal plane," governed, like the discipline of mathematics, by absolute axioms.

Rather than chasing renown, he treasures his privacy and shuns material trappings. In the 1990s, he refused a prize from the European Mathematical Society, and the 6,000 euros that went with it. The current monetary value of the Fields is $13,000 (U.S.).

With such a tempestuous plot, the Poincaré excitement at the ICM was scarcely diminished by Dr. Perelman's repudiation of his accolades. More than 3,000 of the world's mathematicians are congregating and cogitating through the middle of next week, with one main item on the itinerary: a "verdict" on whether Dr. Perelman's proposed solution to the Poincaré is, in fact, correct.

As stated by the ICM, the event "will in all probability go down in history as the occasion when this conjecture became a theorem, a term used by mathematicians to refer to a demonstrated hypothesis."

Frenchman Henri Poincaré -- one of the great mathematicians and an eloquent popularizer of his field -- formulated his namesake conjecture in 1904.

As described by Canadian Donal O'Shea, a math professor and dean at Mount Holyoke College who is finishing a book on the subject, the Poincaré conjecture "is a bold guess about nothing less than the shape of our universe.

"The problem of proving, or disproving, it," he writes, "has exerted a siren-like pull on mathematicians."

The Poincaré conjecture states that the three-dimensional sphere is the only three-dimensional space that does not go on forever, and does not have any walls, and in which you can shrink every loop to a point.

"It's probably the simplest question you could ask about these three-dimensional shapes, but just the fact that it is not known has driven everybody crazy," Dr. O'Shea says, adding that, surprisingly, it has been proved in every higher dimension.

In this sense, the road to Dr. Perelman's proof of the Poincaré has been a cumulative and collaborative venture. Stephen Smale, at the Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago, proved the conjecture held true in five or more dimensions in 1960. Michael Freedman, at Microsoft, proved it was true for four dimensions in 1983. And in the 1970s, William Thurston, now at Cornell, wrote the broader "geometrization conjecture" that encompassed Poincaré.

All three mathematicians subsequently won the Fields -- though none succeeded in proving the elusive Poincaré itself. "The Poincaré conjecture has been a trap, a tar pit, for so many good mathematicians," Dr. Thurston says.

Or, as an ICM press release states, "It has been one of the problems that has consumed the most 'brain power' in mathematics, to such an extent that the issue has been referred to as 'Poincaritis,' a species of contagion affecting those who have spent decades in an attempt to resolve the problem."

Richard Hamilton also has spent decades on the problem. In 1981, the Columbia professor developed a mathematical concept called Ricci flow, treating geometric manifolds in a manner that is analogous to the diffusion of heat. This was the main tool Dr. Perelman used to get his results, and for his crucial contribution to the venture Dr. Hamilton been praised as a "hero."

Dr. Perelman began his work on the Poincaré in the 1990s. He was already well known for his perfect score at the age of 16 at the 1982 International Mathematical Olympiad and for solving a big geometry theorem called the Soul conjecture. After a stint at Berkeley in the early 1990s, he was offered professorships at Princeton and Stanford.

But he rebuffed these opportunities, and in 1995 returned to St. Petersburg, where he lives in an apartment with his mother and has few friends -- the perfect equation for withdrawing into one's head and communing only with mathematics. According to ICM literature, Dr. Perelman "sequestered himself away to tackle the problem, and for the following eight years gave no signs of life."

In November, 2002, he resurfaced and announced his results in a sketchy "preprint" paper posted on the on-line math archive arXiv.org, followed by another in March, 2003.

"There was a buzz all over about the papers," Dr. O'Shea says. "But a ton of caution too. There have been so many wrong proofs of the Poincaré conjecture by very good mathematicians that everybody had been feeling a little burnt."

After Dr. Perelman posted his papers, he was eager to discuss his results and accepted invitations to deliver a series of talks in the U.S. But shortly thereafter he again dropped out of sight. It soon became apparent that he had no plans to publish his results in a refereed journal -- a necessary step to qualify for the Millennium Prize.

As Dr. Perelman bowed out, other mathematicians took up the task of expounding upon his work, transforming his rough papers into comprehensive treatments.

These efforts, which have almost certainly confirmed that yes indeed Dr. Perelman has a complete and correct proof, came to fruition in rapid-fire succession in May, June and July -- just in time for the ICM.

Interestingly, though Dr. Perelman's two papers amount to 61 pages, a book by Columbia's John Morgan and Princeton's Gang Tian (to be published by the Clay Institute) is 474 pages; "Notes on Perelman's Papers," by Bruce Kleiner of Yale and John Lott of the University of Michigan, is 192 pages; and the work of Huai-Dong Cao, at Lehigh in Bethlehem, Pa., and Xi-Ping Zhu, at Zhongshan, in Guangzhou, China, is 328 pages.

"It's a funny role," Dr. Morgan says of the nearly two years he has spent verifying Dr. Perelman's proposal. "One doesn't usually spend so much time writing out somebody else's ideas, for obvious reasons. But I was sufficiently interested . . . And so between that, and doing some public service for the community, those were my main motivations to get involved."

The motivations of others have come to seem less noble. Dr. Morgan's co-author, Dr. Tian, is a former student of Dr. Yau -- and now his rival for status as the pre-eminent mathematician in China.

Dr. Cao and Dr. Zhu, authors of the 328-page paper, touted in its title as "the complete proof," are also former students of Dr. Yau. They executed their Poincaré work under his wing and in the run-up to the ICM, Dr. Yau promoted their work vigorously, at times seeming to suggest they had done more than a mere verification.

Practitioners familiar with Dr. Perelman's proof dispute that the Yau-Cao-Zhu treatment contributed anything of originality. "There have been a lot of major advances from many people [on the Poincaré]. And they kind of tie together. This is nothing unusual. It's how all of science works," Dr. Thurston says.

Dr. Perelman's results, on the other hand, were described in his Fields citation as "revolutionary." And, at a lecture Thursday, Dr. Morgan stated unequivocally that Dr. Perelman had solved the Poincaré.

"Dr. Perelman is after far more, and has seen far deeper, than Dr. Hamilton or Dr. Yau," Dr. O'Shea says.

As for the Millennium Prize, contenders will now undergo a two-year waiting period, to ensure all papers receive intensive scrutiny by the mathematics community.

And although this Poincaré proof was a collective effort that evolved over a century, James Carlson, president of the Clay, comments that "anyone involved in this will regard Hamilton and Perelman as the principal players."

For his part, Dr. Perelman says he will not decide whether to accept the $1-million Millennium Prize until it is offered.

Siobhan Roberts is the author of the upcoming King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry.

The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot (1925)

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
     A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

18/08/06, Paul Heinbecker, Talk is mightier than the tank

Hand-to-hand diplomacy holds the key to a more peaceful future, hand-to-hand combat does not, says Paul Heinbecker, a former ambassador to the United Nations, distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and director of the Laurier Centre for Global Relations.

It is always risky to draw lessons from a conflict before the dust has settled, but a few things seem clear enough from the Lebanon war to suggest some conclusions that can guide diplomacy and might point to a more peaceful future.

Lesson 1

Hezbollah, which surprised everyone with its military sophistication, can probably go still further up the technology ladder. So long as it has allies or can otherwise find willing suppliers, it will be able to acquire increasingly effective missiles. Buffer zones and barriers will not themselves be sufficient to deliver real security.

Lesson 2

The corollary is that it is time for all concerned to stop relying on military strength to solve political problems. Until the past few weeks, most observers, perhaps including most Israelis, assumed that Israel's undoubted arms superiority would make short work of Hezbollah. It didn't and, increasingly in the future, it probably won't. In an age of asymmetric power, warfare will rarely be conducted by conventional armies facing off in open terrain where technological superiority can be determinant and the outcome decisive. War is what we have been seeing for three long years in Iraq, increasingly in Afghanistan and currently in Lebanon.

Lesson 3

Real security comes from building political and economic relationships that give all concerned a vested interest in peace. The Europeans, after having come to understand how literally dead end the track they were on was, progressively rejected the use of force to resolve problems among themselves. Merely wishing the same for the Middle East will hardly make it so, but counting predominantly on armaments to deliver security there seems equally wrong-headed. Peace will come from removing the root cause of the conflict, identified by the Group of Eight communiqué as "the absence of a comprehensive Middle East peace." That will mean resolving the issues that have bedevilled diplomacy for decades -- the West Bank settlements, the status of east Jerusalem and the rights of the refugees.

Lesson 4

The Middle East peace process needs new management. Prospects for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have worsened in part because of the malign neglect of the Bush administration. They have been further impeded by that administration's refusal to talk to Syria and Iran. Not talking to Iran, with whom the U.S. is on a collision course, is particularly dangerous.

Further, while the U.S. remains indispensable to achieving Middle East peace, nearly two decades of an American monopoly on Middle East diplomacy have not succeeded in delivering that peace, in part because of the intrinsic complexity of the problems, in part because of the contradictions inherent in the U.S. roles of honest broker and partisan player. These contradictions have to be somehow overcome. Perhaps this past week's United Nations Security Council negotiations, where the Europeans and the Americans ultimately found common ground on Lebanon, points to a potentially more effective avenue of diplomacy.

Lesson 5

The conflation of the occupation of Iraq, the Middle East conflict and Washington's "war on terror" colours the views not just of ordinary Arabs but of vast numbers of people around the world toward the United States and its allies. U.S. polls show that those views have become dangerously negative.

Further, newly free Arab news networks have been showing their viewers the gruesome war images from the fighting in Iraq, Gaza and Lebanon that their Western counterparts have delicately been denying us. Where we are shown rubble and twisted steel, Arabs see mutilated bodies, many of whom are women and children, most of whom are Muslim. With 1.2 billion Muslims on this planet, the radicalization of even one in 10,000 is simply unaffordable. The response to international terrorist crimes needs to be aggressive, but it also needs to be disaggregated from the discredited "war on terror."

Lesson 6

There are lessons in the Lebanon conflict specific to Canada, too. Foreign policy is important. Successive governments have experienced major challenges in foreign policy: Jean Chrétien on Iraq, Paul Martin on Afghanistan and weapons of mass destruction, and Stephen Harper on Afghanistan and Lebanon. Yet, in the last election campaign, scarcely a question was asked on foreign affairs. To be effective, the government needs the mandate of Canadians. And to get that mandate, it needs to conduct a foreign policy that enjoys consensus support.

Lesson 7

Foreign policy is not rocket science but, as successive Canadian governments have discovered, it is harder than it looks. Canada was right to sign on to the G8 summit communiqué, which blamed Hezbollah for triggering this round. But the government made a rookie mistake in calling the Israeli response to the Hezbollah action "measured," only to see a major escalation follow, a family of eight Canadians killed and thousands needing evacuation. It supported the U.S. in its resolve to give Israel more time to destroy Hezbollah to create the conditions for a lasting peace, only to have the Americans shift position when that did not work.

Interestingly, what was not possible in Lebanon was possible in Sri Lanka, where Canada called for an immediate cessation of hostilities. If the thesis of Seymour Hersh published in The New Yorker that the U.S. and Israel had agreed months in advance on the need to attack Hezbollah is proved correct, the Canadian government's position will seem even more credulous. It is safe to say that, in the Middle East, things are always more complicated than they look.

Lesson 8

Canada's public service exists in part to give advice on this complexity, and governments ignore it at their peril. Foreign Affairs and others would have advised that, in the torrent that is Middle East politics, the only rock on which to stand without losing equilibrium is international law.

The government was right to insist that Israel had every right to defend itself, but it was wrong to assume that that right was unqualified under international law, even appearing to blame the UN when a Canadian peacekeeper was killed on duty.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, a former international war-crimes prosecutor and Supreme Court of Canada justice, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned both sides about how they were prosecuting the fighting. Human Rights Watch (I am a member of the Toronto committee), which did not join the rush to judgment of Israel over Jenin four years ago and which censured the recent UN Human Rights Council's one-sided resolution against Israel, reported this time that "the pattern of attacks during the Israeli offensive in Lebanon suggests . . . the commission of war crimes."

Regarding Hezbollah, Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch and a former U.S. prosecutor, said that "lobbing rockets blindly into civilian areas is without doubt a war crime." Canada has been a leader at the UN in urging the protection of civilians in armed conflict. Canada's position on the Lebanon war would have been more consistent and principled if it had at least called for full respect of international law.

One definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. The Arab-Israeli conflict fits this definition and is harming all parties to it and endangering the rest of us in the process. As long as it continues, things are as likely to get worse as better. The elements of a solution are well known. Perhaps the most important lesson we all need to learn is that it is in everyone's interests to help resolve this conflict before it is too late.

14/08/06, Mark Hume, Sea-lice researcher vindicated at last

VANCOUVER -- Ever since Alexandra Morton began stirring the debate over salmon farms on the West Coast with her keen observations in the Broughton Archipelago, she has been the target of personal and professional attacks.

She has been given the finger, subjected to mooning and sworn at by fish-farm advocates stung by the links she has made between the industry and sea-lice infestations of wild salmon.

Ms. Morton so raises the bile of her critics that if you mention her in a newspaper article you are soon bombarded with cranky e-mails.

Responding to a recent column citing her work, Terry Nielsen, of Courtenay, wrote to introduce himself as a "marine biologist by trade, who has been looking at this issue far longer than you." Credentials established, he dismissed Ms. Morton as "a joke," who somehow has managed to "hoodwink a willing layman press."

Patrick Moore, the former Greenpeace founder who now consults the fish-farming industry, wrote to say: "Alex Morton is not a scientist, she has a BA. She has never demonstrated that she has a science education . . . I think you are a scoundrel with an agenda, and no respect for real science."

Stuart Morrison, of Kelowna, stated: "Your column refers to Alexandra Morton and her 'scientific' studies on sea lice. . . . Like most reporters, you have simply accepted the news releases issued by protesters and their organizations."

Strong stuff. But Ms. Morton's detractors were handed a setback, last week, when the B.C. Criminal Justice Branch validated her work.

Frustrated by the failure of authorities to adequately respond to the concerns she had raised over sea lice, Ms. Morton took the extraordinary step, in June, 2005, of initiating a private prosecution against the provincial and federal governments and Heritage Salmon Ltd.

She sought to have the three parties charged under the Fisheries Act for unlawfully releasing sea lice into the environment, specifically citing Heritage's Burdwood Farm.

That prosecution was taken over by the Crown and Bill Smart, the special prosecutor, sought out Frederick Whoriskey, vice-president, research and environment, at the Atlantic Salmon Federation, for an expert opinion on the science.

When the Crown decided not to prosecute, accepting Mr. Smart's assessment that conviction was unlikely, it released Mr. Whoriskey's report. That document leaves no doubt about the importance of Ms. Morton's work.

"Having reviewed the evidence specific to the Broughton Archipelago, additional studies available in the scientific literature on the impacts of sea lice upon salmonids worldwide, having visited the Broughton Archipelago, and based on my past work experience, I am of the opinion that the evidence shows that sea lice in the Broughton Archipelago are infecting and killing pink salmon," wrote Mr. Whoriskey.

"Ms. Morton and her colleagues have carefully and diligently executed their scientific work. They have used credible experimental and data analysis methods, regularly subjected their results to peer review, and have presented their results for scientific scrutiny through publication in established scientific periodicals. This is the globally accepted procedure for the conduct of good science . . ."

Mr. Smart chose not to prosecute because of a narrow legal interpretation of what it means to "release" sea lice. But he concluded that on the evidence available "it appears to us that there is validity to Ms. Morton's assertions that sea lice from fish farms are having a deleterious effect on the pink salmon population in the Broughton Archipelago."

And what sea lice there are. Mr. Whoriskey estimated a farm such as Burdwood would typically produce 57 million lice a year. There are 27 farm sites in the Broughton Archipelago. Do the math on that, and try not to be concerned.

Ultimately, what is important about this case is not the Crown's decision to stay charges, but the vindication it gives to Ms. Morton, whose important work has been dismissed for too long by too many.

12/08/06, Charles Montgomery, Mr. Cool & friends

12/08/06, Charles Montgomery, Mr. Cool & friends, (Source).
14/08/06, Letters to the Editor, Flat Earth society, (Source).
15/08/06, Letters to the Editor, Hot global topic, (Source).


12/08/06, Charles Montgomery, Mr. Cool & friends, (Back).

(published in the Globe and Mail, Saturday August 12 2006 but not included on their website for some reason)

Former geography professor Tim Ball is Canada's most vocal climate change skeptic. Supporting him is a coalition of oil patch retirees, skeptical scientists, anonymous donors and public relations experts intent on quashing the Kyoto Accord.

On a cloudless morning in June, Tim Ball has joined a hundred-odd members of the Comox Valley Probus Club for a buffet of coffee, cinnamon buns and pink lemonade. As this group of retired business people wraps up its monthly meeting, Prof. Ball surveys the crowd and runs a hand over his suntanned dome.

He does not appear the least bit fatigued, which is remarkable considering that the 67-year-old former University of Winnipeg professor has spent much of the last couple of months crisscrossing the country, addressing community forums, business groups, newspaper editorial boards and politicians about climate change. He has been nearly as dogged as Al Gore, whose own globe-hopping slide show is the subject of the documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth.

But that is where the similarity between them ends.

Prof. Ball clutches a cordless microphone and smiles out at the sea of white hair. He teases the audience about their age, throws in a hockey joke, then tells the crowd that, unlike Mr. Gore, he is a climatologist, and he is not at all panicking about climate change.

"The temperature hasn't gone up," he asserts. "But the mood of the world has changed: It has heated up to this belief in global warming."

Over the next hour, Prof. Ball stitches together folksy anecdotes with a succession of charts, graphs and pictures to form a collage of doubt about the emerging consensus on climate change. There's a map of Canada covered in ice 20,000 years ago - proof, he says, that wild swings in the earth's temperature are perfectly normal. There's a graph suggesting that atmospheric carbon dioxide is at its lowest level in 600 million years.

Gaining momentum, he declares that Environment Canada and other agencies fabricated the climate-change scare in order to attract funding for propaganda and expensive attempts to model climate change using supercomputers.

"Environment Canada can't even predict the weather!" he bellows. "How can you tell me that they have any idea what its going to be like 100 years from now if they can't tell me what the weather is going to be like in four months, or even next week?"

As proof of the climate-change conspiracy, Prof. Ball shows the crowd a graph with a kinked line jigging across it. This is the famous "hockey-stick graph" published by Pennsylvania State University scientist Michael Mann and his team in 1999, which shows temperatures to be fairly stable for hundreds of years, then rising rapidly in the last few decades. Al Gore, among many others, uses it to illustrate the case for global warming.

Prof. Ball claims that the Mann team "cooked the books," and that its blunders were confirmed just a few days previously, in a report to the Congress by the U.S. Academies of Science. "He threw out all the data that didn't fit his hypothesis," Prof. Ball says, without offering evidence to back the charge. His outrage is now as searing as the baking-hot sun outside. "I personally think [Mann] should be in jail!"

In fact, Prof. Ball says, the real danger for Canada is not warming, but cooling: "It's like Y2K," he concludes. "We all just need to calm down."

He is met with raucous applause. It is as though a weight has been lifted from the audience's collective shoulders: What a relief to learn that this global crisis, one they keep hearing will bring extreme weather, submerge small island nations and devastate economies, may be nothing to worry about.

Few in the audience have any idea that Prof. Ball hasn't published on climate science in any peer-reviewed scientific journal in more than 14 years. They do not know that he has been paid to speak to federal MPs by a public-relations company that works for energy firms. Nor are they aware that his travel expenses are covered by a group supported by donors from the Alberta oil patch.

Most Canadians recognize, of course, that fossil-fuel businesses could lose large sums if the federal government moves to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions.

But they may not realize that by quietly backing the movement behind maverick figures such as Prof. Ball, the fuel industry - with its close ties to the party that brought Prime Minister Stephen Harper to power - is succeeding, bit by bit, in influencing both public opinion and Canadian policy on global warming, including the international Kyoto Accord.

An Ipsos Reid poll released in May found that, despite increasing scientific evidence to the contrary, four of every 10 Canadians surveyed still agreed with Prof. Ball's assertion that climate change is due to natural warming and cooling patterns.

"He is a very entertaining performer, very slick," says Neil Brown, the Conservative MLA for Calgary-Nose Hill, who attended a presentation Prof. Ball made to a caucus of provincial Tories in Calgary. "When someone shows up and tells me that the earth is actually cooling, then it gets my attention."

***

The scientific mainstream is unequivocal that global warming is real, happening at a rate unprecedented in human history, and most likely caused mainly by human greenhouse-gas emissions. Last year, the national academies of science of all the G8 nations, representing most scientists in the developed world, sent a joint message to their leaders urging prompt action.

In February, the UN and the World Meteorological Society's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which brings together more than 2,000 scientists to review tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers on climate science, will release its fourth report. The authors say it will contain a warning that human-caused global warming could drive the Earth's temperature to levels far higher than previously predicted.

Andrew Weaver is the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria, and a lead author of a chapter in the upcoming IPCC report. He gives a frustrated sigh at the mention of Tim Ball's cross-country tour.

"He says stuff that is just plain wrong. But when you are talking to crowds, when you are talking on TV, there is no challenge, there is no peer review," Prof. Weaver says.

Like other senior scientists, he charges that Prof. Ball's arguments are a grab bag of irrelevancies and falsehoods: "Ball says that our climate models do not [account for the warming effects of] water vapour. That's absurd. They all do."

Likewise, he says, Prof. Ball's claims that climate change could be explained by variations in the earth's orbit or by sunspots are discounted by widely available data.

Many of Prof. Ball's other arguments don't stand up to scrutiny. Consider the hockey-stick graph: He was right that the U.S. Academies of Science had delivered a review of climate science to Congress. But their report concluded that temperatures in the last 25 years really have been the highest in 400 years. Moreover, the panelists assured reporters that there was no evidence at all that the Mann team cherry-picked its data - completely contradicting what Prof. Ball told his audience in Comox.

"What Ball is doing is not about science," says Prof. Weaver. "It is about politics."

Leaders throughout Europe have accepted the IPCC position on climate change, and have been looking for ways to take collective action, primarily via the Kyoto Accord. Yet North Americans have lagged behind, hamstrung by a lingering debate in the media and among politicians about climate science.

How did this doubt take hold?

In a now-infamous 2003 memo, U.S. pollster and consultant Frank Luntz advised Republican politicians to cultivate uncertainty when talking about climate change: "Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate ," wrote Mr. Luntz (the italics are his own).

Nurturing doubt about climate-change science has become big business for public-relations companies and lobbyists south of the border. Between 2000 and 2003, ExxonMobil alone gave more than $8.6-million (U.S.) to think tanks, consumer groups and policy organizations engaged in anti-Kyoto messaging, according to the company's own records. Those groups promote the minority of scientists who still dispute the IPCC consensus on climate change, creating the appearance of widespread scientific disagreement.

Mr. Luntz met with Prime Minister Harper in May, but the Conservatives already had adopted his advice. Mr. Harper was emphasizing that climate change was but an "emerging science" long before he cancelled an array of programs designed to promote energy conservation.

Environment Minister and Edmonton-Spruce Grove MP Rona Ambrose, for example, has talked up the flaws of the Kyoto Accord, while steadfastly rejecting its modest emission-reduction targets. And on June 30, the government simply disappeared its main climate-change web site ( www.climatechange.gc.ca ), which once contained educational materials for teachers.

However, given the resonance of the climate-change issue with most Canadians, political leaders can't afford to denounce mainstream science too loudly. That task has instead been taken up by activists in the Conservative Party's Alberta heartland.

Over the past four years, a coalition of oil-patch geologists, Tory insiders, anonymous donors and oil-industry PR professionals has come together to manufacture public consent for Canada's withdrawal from Kyoto. Through a Calgary-based society ironically dubbed the Friends of Science, they have leveraged Tim Ball and a handful of other "climate skeptics" onto podiums and editorial pages across the country.

While the federal government stalls, the skeptics preach doubt, softening the public for a diluted "Made-in-Canada" climate policy. Prof. Ball admits that when he meets with business leaders and politicians,he advises them to weigh the high price of action against more cost-effective "lip service."

These efforts may help delay emissions caps for years. Not bad for a campaign that began with a bitch session among a clutch of oil-patch retirees.

***

"We started out without a nickel, mostly retired geologists, geophysicists and retired businessmen, all old fogeys," says Albert Jacobs, a geologist and retired oil-explorations manager, proudly remembering the first meeting of the Friends of Science Society in the curling lounge of Calgary's Glencoe Club back in 2002.

"We all had experience dealing with Kyoto, and we decided that a lot of it was based on science that was biased, incomplete and politicized."

Mr. Jacobs says he suspects that the Kyoto Accord was devised as a tool by United Nations bureaucrats to push the world towards a world socialist government under the UN. "You know," he says, "to this day, there is no scientific proof that human-caused C02 is the main cause of global warming."

He managed to insert that last message into the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists' official statement on climate change in 2003. But he and his fellow Friends of Science decided that if they wanted to have broad influence on climate policy, they needed money in order to stage events, create publicity materials, commercials and a web site, and reach the media and politicians. Tim Ball spoke at the group's first fundraiser.

But the event didn't raise enough for the group's ambitious plans. There was plenty of money for the anti-Kyoto cause in the oil patch, but the Friends dared not take money directly from energy companies. The optics, Mr. Jacobs admits, would have been terrible.

This conundrum, he says, was solved by University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper, a well-known associate of Stephen Harper.

As his is privilege as a faculty member, Prof. Cooper set up a fund at the university dubbed the Science Education Fund. Donors were encouraged to give to the fund through the Calgary Foundation, which administers charitable giving in the Calgary area, and has a policy of guarding donors' identities. The Science Education Fund in turn provides money for the Friends of Science, as well as Tim Ball's travel expenses, according to Mr. Jacobs.

And who are the donors? No one will say.

"[The money's] not exclusively from the oil and gas industry," says Prof. Cooper. "It's also from foundations and individuals. I can't tell you the names of those companies, or the foundations for that matter, or the individuals."

When pushed in another interview, however, Prof. Cooper admits, "There were some oil companies."

The brilliance of the plan is that by going through the foundation and the university fund, donors get anonymity as well as charitable status for their donations. In the last two years, the Science Education Fund has received more than $200,000 in charitable donations through the Calgary Foundation. Yet its marketing director Kerry Longpré said in June that she had never heard of the Friends of Science. The foundation, she said, deals only with the university, which is left to administer donations as it sees fit.

Prof. Cooper and Mr. Jacobs both affirm that the Science Education Fund paid the bills for the Friends' anti-Kyoto video, Climate Catastrophe Cancelled. It features Canada's most vocal climate skeptics, including Prof. Ball, University of Ottawa hydrologist and paleoclimatologist Ian Clark, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, University of Ottawa lecturer Tad Murty and retired meteorologist Madhav Khandekar, who is affiliated with the oil-industry-funded Cooler Heads Coalition.

It also includes Sallie Baliunas, a senior scientist with the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, a fiercely anti-Kyoto think tank which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from ExxonMobile.

Roman Cooney, the university's vice-president of external relations, insists that the Friends of Science is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by the school. And when he saw the University of Calgary's coat of arms on early copies of the anti-Kyoto video, Mr. Cooney ordered Prof. Cooper to remove it.

***

There is a letter-sized piece of paper bearing the words "Friends of Science" taped to the wall in Kevin Grandia's Vancouver office. From that single sheet, Mr. Grandia has strung a web of string, leading to the names of individuals, free-market think-tanks, private companies and charitable foundations. And from them more strings lead, invariably, to the names of energy corporations.

Mr. Grandia is being paid full time by James Hoggan and Associates, a public-relations firm, to examine the connections between fossil-fuel companies, the climate skeptics, and the PR industry itself.

"Follow the money trail," says Mr. Grandia, ball of string in hand. "Why the hell do all of these lead back to oil and gas?"

Take Fred Singer, a former professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, who supplied one of the charts for Tim Ball's slide show. A string leads from Mr. Singer's name straight to ExxonMobile, which has given his Science and Environment Policy Project $20,000 (U.S.), according to the oil company's 1998 and 2000 grant records.

Other strings loop from Mr. Singer to Shell, Arco, Unocal, Sun Energy and the American Gas Association. In a Massachusetts superior court deposition, he admitted to having consulted for all those companies, as well as the Global Climate Coalition, whose members in industry spent tens of millions of dollars to fight the Kyoto Accord in the 1990s.

Mr. Grandia's boss, James Hoggan, chuckles when he sees the wall of paper and string. Mr. Hoggan, whose clients include Alcan, CP Rail, Norske Canada and the David Suzuki Foundation, has assigned two of his 19 staffers to this bit of intra-industry tail-chasing. (It is supported by a donation of $300,000 from former Internet entrepreneur John Lefebvre, now an environmentalist and philanthropist.)

Mr. Hoggan says he got involved simply because he was angry that his peers in PR were muddying public understanding of climate science. "For years there have been these kind of campaigns that are aimed at manipulating public opinion, and not necessarily manipulating it in the direction of good public policy, but trying to fight government regulations that will cost industry money.

"It happened with the tobacco industry. It happened with the chemical industry. It happened with the asbestos industry. And now it's happening with climate change," he says.

"It makes me extremely angry. I don't think that the people who are involved in this should be able to get away with it. My goal is to find out as much as we can about these people and make it public. Who are they? Who is paying them? What motivates them? How is it they can sleep at night?"

Several of Mr. Hoggan's peers show up on Grandia's Friends of Science spider web. First is Morten Paulsen of the PR giant, Fleishman-Hillard, who wears three hats. In one, he's a long-time Tory/Reform/Canadian Alliance activist - the co-chair of the Alberta Conservatives' 2006 convention, and one-time director of communications for Preston Manning. In another, Mr. Paulsen is the registered lobbyist for ConocoPhillips Canada, the country's third-largest oil-and-natural-gas production and exploration company.

Mr. Paulsen also happens to be the registered lobbyist for the Friends of Science. Indeed, he used to be listed as the main public-relations contact on the Friends' website. Then, in June, his Tory connections were revealed on Mr. Grandia's blog (desmogblog.org). Mr. Paulsen's name no longer appears on the site.

Then there is Tom Harris, Ottawa director of the High Park Group, which is a registered lobbyist for the Canadian Electricity Association and the Canadian Gas Association.

Mr. Harris has written several essays attacking Kyoto and the science behind climate change for the National Post and the CanWest newspaper chain. In his articles, he quotes several members of the Friends of Science advisory board - including Profs. Ball, Khandekar, Patterson and Murty - but he never mentions his own connections to the Calgary organization.

In 2002, for example, Mr. Harris organized the Friends' first Ottawa press conference in 2002, and helped make their video, according to Mr. Jacobs. And as recently as May, he organized a trip to Ottawa for Tim Ball, paying him $2,000 to give a presentation to federal MPs.

***

The election of a Conservative government to Ottawa presented a golden opportunity for the Friends of Science to help reopen the debate on Kyoto. This spring, they circulated thousands of Climate Catastrophe Cancelled DVDs among politicians and news outlets, ran a radio ad on stations in Alberta, put up a web site, and jetted Tim Ball across the country for face time with media, business and politicians.

The climax of the spring campaign was an open letter to Mr. Harper, printed in the Financial Post and other CanWest chain newspapers on April 6. The letter, signed by "60 experts in climate and related scientific disciplines," exhorted the Prime Minister to hold public consultations on the government's climate-change plan.

Members of the climate and meteorological science establishment quickly noted that only a third of the names on the petition were Canadian. Many of them were economists and geologists, not climate experts. One of them, Gordon Swaters, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Alberta, later said that he disagreed with the letter completely.

Several of the other signatories had received money from the oil, gas and coal industries in the U.S. - Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia, for example, was handed more than $100,000 for climate skeptic work by the coal-based Intermountain Rural Electric Association this July, according to the Associated Press.

"These people are ignorant. Well-meaning, but just plain ignorant," fumed Ian Rutherford, executive director of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, which represents 800 Canadian atmospheric and oceanic scientists and professionals.

"The Friends of Science are driven by ideology and some kind of a misplaced understanding of how the world works. Many are what you would call paleogeologists. Looking at the geological record, they see evidence of wild swings in climate. Of course these swings are there: If you go back hundreds of millions of years, 40-million years, even 400,000 years, you will find wild swings in temperature over long periods of time. But that's irrelevant. There was hardly any life on earth, let alone human life, at that time. So their time scale is all out of whack.

"None of them ever come to our scientific conferences. They know they would be laughed out of the building. The stuff they say, some of it is so nonsensical it's hardly worth discussing."

In its own letter to the Prime Minister, the Meteorological and Oceanographic Society objected to the Friends' complaints about a lack of debate, pointing out that Canadian climate scientists from universities, government and the private sector participate actively in the IPCC's international reviews. The government, it argued, should be relying on IPCC reports for good scientific information.

But various levels of government have gone on to give Prof. Ball an audience. This spring he addressed the Alberta Tories in Calgary, as well as the province's standing policy committee on energy and sustainable development. On the trip Tom Harris organized for him in May, he met with the Ottawa Citizen editorial board, and gave his slide show to a half-dozen federal Conservative MPs and a clutch of Tory staffers. (Prof. Ball is not listed in the federal government's Lobbyists' Registry.)

He made a particular impression on Brad Trost, MP for Saskatoon Humboldt: "It really broadened the perspective. You know, maybe there is more uncertainty on [climate change]. Maybe we need to put more research into this to get a better idea," says Mr. Trost. "Just like the Y2K problem, we were a little oversold on that one. You sort of wonder. Just because something is repeated often, it doesn't make it true."

"In public relations," says Mr. Hoggan, "we call this the echo-chamber technique. You have Tim Ball saying the polar bears are fine. Then you get Tim Ball's PR guy writing the same thing. And then Tim Ball takes to the road, talks to reporters and does press briefings, making sure the message is repeated over and over.

"The effect is to delay public judgment on climate change, and thereby delay policy."

***

In his speeches and interviews, Tim Ball consistently denies any knowledge that he is receiving funds from oil companies.

"I wish I was being paid by them," he deadpanned at his Comox show. "Maybe then I could afford their products."

Like Mr. Jacobs, Prof. Ball says he doesn't know, and doesn't want to know, who forks out the money for his expenses and activism. He simply wants to talk about the science, and will do so to whomever will listen.

Certainly, climate skepticism isn't exactly making Prof. Ball rich. He says that although he has earned as much as $5,000 for speeches to industry groups such as lime producers, he more frequently gives talks for free.

He is a warm, likable character, and there is no reason to believe he is not sincere in his concern for science and public policy. He clearly relishes the spotlight, and seems to grow taller, sharper and brighter on stage. He punches the air with his microphone, and breaks out into a broad grin at the crowd's response to his jabs at Environment Canada.

Still, it must take something more than conviction to propel him through the more than 100 barn-burning speeches he gave across the country in the past year. He angrily claims that his stance has led to being denied research funding from Environment Canada, although he admits that he has not actually applied for federal climate-research funding in more than a decade.

One old colleague at the University of Winnipeg puts Prof. Ball's passion down to sheer anti-authoritarianism. "He is a contrarian. He lives to challenge authority," says the professor of geography, who would speak only anonymously.

"If the IPCC scientists suddenly recanted," he jokes, "Tim would be the first one out there saying, 'Wait a minute, global warming really is happening!' "

Prof. Ball's adversaries admit that skeptical inquiry serves to make the science better. They just wish he would conduct new research and practice his skepticism on the pages of the peer-reviewed journals.

For his part, Prof. Ball insists that the reason he lobbies so tirelessly on the issue is his frustration that the skeptics' arguments aren't reflected in the pronouncements of scientific institutions like the IPCC. Perhaps so, but his hard work is helping weaken the power of such internationally respected institutions.

The proof, for Friends of Science founder Albert Jacobs, is in the policy.

"Our success is very recent, and our success is tied to the Conservative government," Mr. Jacobs says. "Rona Ambrose, she has been tearing down that Kyoto building."

The next big challenge, he says, is to reach children. The Friends of Science is now lobbying to have its message included in the grade-school curriculum.


14/08/06, Letters to the Editor, Flat Earth society, (Back).

G.A. HAMEL:
Toronto -- Congratulations on your invaluable account of the efforts to deny the scientific evidence about global warming. It takes courage for even so well-established and secure an entity as The Globe and Mail to take on the oil and gas interests. You'll be hearing from them.

The strategies you describe are essentially those employed by the tobacco companies in challenging the claims by independent medical researchers of a link between smoking and lung cancer: hire your own compliant "experts" to fudge the data and mount a well-financed and adroitly-directed propaganda campaign.

The delaying measures effected by the tobacco industry led to hundreds of premature deaths. Unfortunately, the tactics of the petroleum and gas concerns seem to be working; even more unfortunately, the toll of death and suffering this time is likely to be enormous.

JEANNETTE GOGUEN:
Toronto -- Charles Montgomery's article Nurturing Doubt About Climate Change Is Big Business (Aug. 12) shows us how once again the lies of corporate America are influencing our politicians and threatening to influence our children's thinking. It scares me that there are lobbyists in Canada trying to distract people from the real issue -- how to swiftly implement changes in energy consumption to minimize the impact of global warming.

I hear my American friends lament the biases in their newspapers. It brings hope that The Globe and Mail publishes articles denouncing the naysayers. Let's just hope someone listens.

PAUL THIESSEN:
Vancouver -- In the 15th century, Tim Ball would probably have been criss-crossing the country eloquently opposing the heliocentric theory of our universe, or in an even earlier era, making impassioned speeches claiming that the Earth is flat.

DAVID WILSON (not printed):
St. John's -- Thanks for printing this piece front and centre - I prefer to see flat-earthers, holocaust deniers, and others of the ilk (even tobacco advertizers) out in the open.

Comparing big oil's campaign around climate change with the equivalents in the past around tobacco is useful. The difference is that smokers (I am one) influence only their own fates, while mis-information on global warming and the resulting confusion in public policy will very likely influence the fates of all of our grandchildren, negatively I would say.

PS - why did you not include this article on your web site?


15/08/06, Letters to the Editor, Hot global topic, (Back).

KEVIN KEY:
Victoria -- Here's a tip for Tim Ball. As he attempts to convince seniors that perilous climate change is simply not happening, and that the Earth is actually cooling, tell them that the skin cancer they have is simply bunk, it's a conspiracy of the health-care industry. It's natural, we should all just calm down, and the truth is they should be more concerned about frostbite.

JAMES SCHAEFER: associate professor of biology, Trent University
Peterborough, Ont. -- At last, some comforting news on global warming (Meet Mr. Cool -- Aug. 12). According to climatologist Tim Ball, the dire warnings of climate change are just the consequence of cooked data and conspiracy -- merely an excuse for the folks at Environment Canada to shop for supercomputers. And I suppose at NASA too, because they're telling us that the five hottest years on record were (in order): 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, and 2004. We can now safely ignore these data and continue to have that feel-good experience the next time we fill up at the gas pumps.

The birds and bees, however, beg to differ. Myriad wild species are showing poleward shifts in their distribution and changes in the timing of breeding and flowering -- an unmistakable biological fingerprint, precisely as predicted in a warming world. It seems that neo-conservatives and contrarians might not believe in climate change, but the plants and animals do.

(Back)

11/07/06, Dante Chinni, When media aims for balance, some views and facts get lost

All opinions and points of view aren't equal when one digs into the facts.

WASHINGTON – A few weeks ago in this space I asked you for your thoughts on the news media - what you don't like and don't understand about how reporters and news outlets go about their work. A few dozen responses later, it's safe to simply say there's a lot.
But if, as reporters always defensively say, the media are not a monolith, that is even more true of media users. Some of you turn to and trust the biggest media and some of you dislike them. Some of you think blogs are more honest news sources and some of you are leery of them - others don't use them at all and don't understand the fuss over them. Some happily sample a large number of outlets on the Web and others purposely restrict their choices.

But several of you raised the same point of concern: The media need to do a better job with "balance" in the news. That's not surprising considering the nation's current political divide that has led to considerable talk of bias in the news.

Again though, readers came at this issue from different vantage points. Some of you (and this came from conservatives and liberals) said that the stories are often too one-sided. Others felt that the media was too worried about giving "both sides of the story" at the expense of the truth and that this itself represented a form of bias. Still others said the media did a fine job of giving two sides of stories, but that there are often many more sides than that to give and those points of view are neglected.

Who's right? Well, that depends.

Balance is one of those issues that seems simple on the surface, but gets more complicated as you look at it more deeply. As a concept, it is often trumpeted by outlets that profess to be objective - and not just FOX News with its "Fair and Balanced" tagline, but any number of other publications and programs that promise "both sides" in their coverage.

The problem, of course, is that balance doesn't necessarily lead to getting the story right. Consider: If a group of Yankee fans and a group of Red Sox fans watch the two teams battle, they will probably have different views on what exactly happened during the game and why. Was an 8-0 final score the result of great hitting or bad pitching or both?

Asking a guy in pinstripes and a gal with a "B" on her hat may provide a "balanced" view, but it doesn't really answer the question. The answer, if it can be found, lies somewhere in the statistics and a careful viewing of the game. Was the pitcher hitting his spots? What were the at-bats like? It involves effort.

So it is with any number of stories. Just because there are differences of opinion doesn't mean both sides are equally correct. When reporters don't make the effort to sort through the evidence and simply fall back on "this side says this, and that side says that," they are being lazy.

That doesn't, however, mean giving "both sides" of an issue is inherently lazy.

With some issues the answers are simply unknowable - this is particularly true when a person proposes something and says it will have a specific impact, such as a policy proposal - and asking supporters and opponents what they think is useful. The actual impact of a proposal at a specific moment in time is unknowable. It hasn't happened yet.

Or consider scientific debates where the academic community is legitimately split. Giving both sides is essential.

But it isn't giving one side or giving both sides that has been journalism's biggest "balance" shortcoming in recent years. It is refusing to recognize that there are usually more complicated views on most issues. There simply aren't many issues that boil down to a nice, neat Hegelian dialectic where the possible answers are two clearly delineated opposites.

In searching for an easy way to explain the news in a limited space, journalists too often reduce issues to their most rudimentary forms.

This is true on debates ranging from gay marriage (a for-or-against argument with little talk of what rights gays should have) to when troops in Iraq should come home (stay or "cut and run" even though both sides are talking about when reductions should occur) and everything in between. The extreme points of view on those issues may be actual positions, but so are the many nuanced views that live between them and get less coverage.

In other words, despite its prominent place in many media debates, "balance," as it is usually understood, is often not particularly useful in journalism. All opinions and points of view aren't equal when one digs into the facts and "both sides" leaves a lot of sides out.

Dante Chinni, a senior associate at the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, writes a twice-monthly column on media issues.

07/08/06, Editorial, Two crucial questions on Israel v. its enemies

When puzzling out the rights and wrongs of the Middle East conflict, it's helpful to pose two questions. Question one: If Israel stopped attacking Hezbollah, would Hezbollah stop attacking Israel?

The clear answer is no. Hezbollah rocket attacks and cross-border guerrilla raids had been going on for years before the current hostilities broke out, and they would certainly start up again sooner or later even if Israel ceased firing and swore never to venture into Lebanon again. The last time Israel pulled back, when it ended its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah hailed it as a great victory, rushed to rearm and started to strike across the border at Israelis.

Question two turns things around. If Hezbollah stopped attacking Israel, would Israel stop attacking Hezbollah? Just as clearly, the answer is yes. If Lebanon ever managed to do what the United Nations has demanded and took control of the south away from Hezbollah, neutralizing it as a threat to Israel, the Israelis would have no motive for any kind of military action in Lebanon. Israel has no quarrel with its neighbour to the north: no claim on its territory, no animus against its people. It simply objects to seeing southern Lebanon turned into a launching pad for attacks on Israeli citizens by a militant group that swears to seek its destruction.

Were Hezbollah to proclaim tomorrow that it was giving up its armed struggle against Israel, this conflict would be over. Were Israel to say, on the other hand, that it was giving up its fight against Hezbollah and withdrawing all its forces from the border zone, the conflict would surely continue as an emboldened Hezbollah pressed home its victory.

This little exercise of the two questions may help sort out who is really to blame in this conflict. Hezbollah says it is firing rockets at Israeli population centres in answer to Israeli "aggression" against Lebanon. No. Oxford defines aggression as "the act or practice of attacking without provocation, esp. beginning a quarrel or war." That is exactly what Hezbollah did when it crossed the UN-certified border into Israel, kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others, setting off the current fighting. Israel did nothing to deserve that attack except (in Hezbollah's eyes) for being Israel. Israel's counterattack wasn't aggression; it was simple self-defence. When Hezbollah cries "aggression," it is like the thug who chucks a brick at a cop and then yells "police brutality" when the cop whacks him with a baton. It's the oldest trick in the revolutionary handbook, and the world should be able to see through it by now.

The idea that Hezbollah is somehow defending Lebanon's national sovereignty from an imperialistic Israel would be laughable if it were not so widely believed in the Arab world. It is Hezbollah itself that has diluted the sovereign power of the Lebanese government by setting itself up in southern Lebanon as a militant state within a state beyond the power of Beirut. And it is Hezbollah that has put Lebanon's sovereignty at risk by attacking Israel and hijacking the country's foreign policy.

But wait, Israel's critics will say, Hezbollah had a good reason for attacking: Israel's ongoing occupation of Arab land. Every people has the right to resist a foreign occupier and Hezbollah was simply exercising that right when it went on the attack.

That argument might have carried water at one time. Not any more. Far from swallowing up Arab land, Israel is pulling back. It pulled out of Lebanon six years ago. It pulled out of Gaza a year back. Its current government won election in March on a pledge to leave most of the West Bank, too -- a withdrawal that might leave some territorial disputes in its wake, but would represent a substantial move all the same. Apart from the Golan Heights, there is no other Arab land occupied by Israel, and successive Israeli governments have indicated they would support some form of withdrawal even from the strategic Golan in return for a reliable peace agreement with Syria and a deal on demilitarizing the heights.

Yet Israel's enemies keep on attacking. They attacked after Israel signed the Oslo accords that let Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization set up shop in the West Bank and Gaza in the 1990s. They attacked after prime minister Ehud Barak sketched out the most sweeping concessions to Palestinians from any Israeli government in the Camp David talks of 2000. They attacked when Israel made its boldest territorial concession by withdrawing from Gaza -- packing up all its settlers, withdrawing all its soldiers and handing the whole place over to the Palestinians to govern as they wished (only to find Israel being bombarded by rockets based in Gaza). And now they attack from southern Lebanon, which was handed over in its entirety in 2000, and held until then only as a defensive buffer.

Is it any wonder Israelis feel beleaguered? Is it any wonder they took so long to accept turning over the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians, considering the threat it might pose to their security? If these relentless attacks stopped, if the Arab world came to accept the existence of a Jewish state in its midst, there would be no reason on Earth for Israel to employ its armed might against its neighbours as it is doing now with such devastating effect.

Which brings us back to those two basic questions. If Israel's enemies stoppedattacking Israel, would Israel stop attacking them? Certainly. If Israel stopped attacking its enemies, would they stop attacking Israel? Sadly not; at least not yet. And that is why the Arab-Israeli dispute drags on.