Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 239
Palash Biswas
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Masters Of War
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead
| Maya Descendants at Risk of Disappearing | |
| Chiapas, Mexico 17 May 2009 | |
The Lacandon are direct descendants of the Maya peoples who live in the jungles of the
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| Lacandon priest kneels over a crystal skull at the Mayan ruins of Palenque, Mexico, 10 Mar 2008 M |
Our helicopter lands in a clearing in the Lacandon jungle. We are amazed at the sight of three men, who seem to have emerged from another era. They view the visitors with curiosity. They have long black, tangled hair. They wear knee-length white tunics. They are barefoot.
Government officials, local authorities and traditional leaders arrive to show us the way of life of the Na Ha people, one of three remaining Lacandon tribes.
MAN: "Senor Don Antonio Martinez. He is one of the oldest people in the community. He makes all the rituals. He heals people and all the magic things."
The Na Ha spiritual leader, Senor Don Antonio Martinez is 83 years old. Director of Natural Reserves and Wildlife in Chiapas, Maria Theresa Vasquez describes the ceremony Don Antonio is performing in the temple.
"Healing," said Maria Theresa Vasquez. "To wish that people is ill gets better soon. Only two people here in Na Ha and on the other side is Lacanja can practice…He is the last old man in this area that can do it. The tradition is getting a little bit lost because of the new culture."
The Lacandon are one of the most isolated and culturally conservative of Mexico's native peoples.
"The Lacandonians were the only Indians in Mexico who were never conquered because the place where they were living-it was very, very big and they were the only tribes that remained from the Indians, from the pre-classic, from the Mayans living in that area," said Vasquez.
Maria Luisa is president of the Board of Na Bolom, a scientific and cultural institute set up 60 years ago to protect the culture, traditions and environment of the Lacandon.
In the 1970's, she tells VOA, the Mexican government began paying the Lacandon for rights to log timber in their forests.
She says the government built roads, which helped expand farming and logging, but led to severe deforestation. She says Indians from other communities were brought into the Lacandonian jungle and they introduced cows and agriculture, which added to the problems.
"So, what we are trying is to teach them different ways of living in that area without affecting the jungle, which is at this moment very difficult because there are not many ways to do it," she said. "As a matter of fact, one of the projects we developed is the eco-tourism for people to come and to see this wonderful sight where the Quetzal still lived and everything."
The Quetzal is the royal bird of the Maya. Relatively few tourists go to the Lacandon jungle because it is so remote and difficult to reach. This is a problem because the indigenous people derive much of their income from selling handicrafts to tourists. Luisa worries about their future.
"At this moment, they are at big risk of disappearing because many of them are moving to another community, which will offer at this moment better opportunities of living," said Maria Luisa. "We cannot save the jungle if we do not save the people. So, we have to save the people first and teach them and work with them for them to learn how to protect the jungle."
The Lacandonians as an ethnic group is diminishing. There are only 1,100 people in the three communities. They are losing their customs. Many of the men are shedding their white tunics, cutting their hair and speaking Spanish instead of Mayan.
Their society is one in which men have all the rights and women practically none. Some girls get married as young as nine. They have between two and five children. The community has problems of domestic abuse, alcohol and drugs.
Jenner Rodas Trejo is chief of the Department of Wildlife and the Environment. He says there are genetic problems as well because of too much inbreeding, which causes mental retardation among other ills.
Trejo says the Lacandon are aware of this and, increasingly, the men are marrying women from other ethnic groups. He says that will ensure their survival as a people, but not as a culture.
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-05-17-voa15.cfm
The name Aila for the fierce cyclone that battered Bangladesh and coastal West Bengal was given by Maldives. The next cyclone to hit countries in the north Indian Ocean region will be called Phyan - a name given by Myanmar.
A cyclone that hit India and its neighbourhood between April 14 to 17 this year was called 'Bijli', given by India.
Aila has left 27 dead and over 400,000 affected in West Bengal so far.
Cyclones derive their names through a systematic procedure laid out by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).
"It's better to give an identity to the cyclones as the main purpose of naming a cyclone is basically for people to easily understand and remember it in a region and to facilitate tropical cyclone disaster risk awareness, preparedness, management and reduction," D. Chakrabarthi, additional director general India Meteorological Department (IMD), told IANS.
Met officials in fact have decided the names of cyclones till 2009-end.
Eight north Indian Ocean countries - Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand - have prepared a list of 64 names. When a cyclone hits these countries, the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre (RSMC), housed in the IMD office in New Delhi picks up the name next on the list. The RSMC has been set up in Delhi by the WMO for forecasting tropical cyclones in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal.
"It is important to note that tropical cyclones are not named after any particular person, or with any alphabetical sequence preference. The names selected are those that are familiar to the people in each region," said Mr. Chakrabarthi.
Since 2004, the eight countries have faced 19 cyclones. The countries take turns in naming the cyclones. The last six were: Sidr (named by Oman), Nargis (Pakistan), Rashmi (Sri Lanka), Khai-Muk (Thailand), Nisha (Bangladesh) and Bijli (India).
"All these countries meet once in two years and review the progress of cyclones and how many cyclones there were. Every country reports its assessment of the cyclones and then they arrive at a mutual plan of action, which includes creation of a database for the names to be given to tropical cyclones," M. Mohapatra, director Cyclone Division IMD, told IANS.
"We have around 40 names right now. Once a name is used it cannot be used again for another cyclone," said Mr. Mohapatra.
The practice of naming cyclones began years ago in order to help in the quick identification of storms in warning messages because names are presumed to be far easier to remember than numbers and technical terms.
The trend started in the 19th century in Australia where cyclones were named after corrupt politicians. It soon caught on in other countries, and met officials in some countries began naming cyclones after their former girlfriends or divorced wives.
In the 1970s, the WMO in Geneva asked some countries around the Pacific Ocean to prepare a list of names and keep it ready.
Sri Lanka has rejected a call by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to lift restrictions on aid delivery and unhindered access by humanitarian groups to overcrowded displacement camps. The Secretary General 's hurriedly planned visit to Sri Lanka Saturday was designed to keep the spotlight on the plight of the several hundred thousand civilians displaced by the recently-concluded civil war there.
An Israeli ultra-nationalist party led by the country's foreign minister has drafted a law that would require citizens to pledge loyalty to Israel as a "Jewish, Zionist and democratic" state.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman promoted the idea of a loyalty law in his campaign for parliamentary elections earlier this year.
His Yisrael Beitenu Party grew into the third largest in parliament after winning votes from Israeli Jews who perceive the country's Arab citizens to be disloyal. Israeli Arabs make up about one-fifth of the population.
Lieberman's party drafted another bill on Sunday that would ban Israeli Arabs from holding annual commemorations of what they call the "catastrophe" (or "Naqba" in Arabic) marking Israel's creation.
The proposals have drawn strong criticism from some opposition lawmakers and rights groups who call them a violation of democratic rights.
Yisrael Beitenu says it will seek Cabinet approval for the loyalty bill on Sunday before presenting it to parliament, where it would have to pass several votes before becoming law.
The legislation would require all Israelis to swear allegiance to a "Jewish, Zionist and democratic" Israel in order to receive an identity card. It also would give authorities the power to revoke the citizenship of people who refuse to serve in the military or perform a national service.
The proposed ban on commemorating the "Naqba" calls for a three-year prison sentence for violators. The measure also must be approved by lawmakers in several votes.
A group of Southeast Asian politicians is urging the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to suspend Burma's membership if it refuses to release democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Aung San Suu Kyi testified Tuesday against charges that could put her in prison for five years.
China says it is firmly opposed to North Korea's nuclear test, but is repeating its call on the international community to remain calm in formulating a response.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said China firmly opposes the North Korean nuclear test on Monday. He says Beijing has two main objectives - a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, as well as safeguarding peace and stability in Northeast Asia.
Ma says China calls on what he described as "relevant parties" to respond in a "coolheaded and appropriate way." He says the Chinese government would like to see all sides resolve the issue peacefully, through consultation and dialogue.
He repeated his government's earlier calls for North Korea to return to its commitment of denuclearization. And said China has directly expressed its position to North Korea. He also urged Pyongyang to return to the six party talks, which include the United States, North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia. The six party process began in 2003, but has been stalled since the end of last year.
On the other hand,Human Rights Watch says severe shortages of food, water and medicine are creating a major humanitarian crisis for the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in northwestern Pakistan.
The group's Asia director, Brad Adams, urged the Pakistani military to immediately lift a curfew that has been in place in the Swat Valley and surrounding areas for the past week.
He said the civilians in the conflict zone face a "humanitarian catastrophe" unless Islamabad lifts the curfew and take all possible measures, including airlifting supplies, to quickly alleviate large-scale human suffering.
On Monday, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani met with visiting U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy, Mark Warner and Sheldon Whitehouse to discuss the military operations against Taliban insurgents in Swat and the surrounding areas.
Mr. Gilani thanked the U.S. officials for the $110 million in humanitarian assistance for the some two million internally displaced persons in the region. But he said more aid is needed.
President Asif Ali Zardari also separately briefed the lawmakers.
Meanwhile, the Taliban said it will stop attacking security forces in the main city of Pakistan's northwestern Swat Valley.
Taliban Spokesman Muslim Khan said militants will stop their resistance in Swat's main town of Mingora out of concern for the safety of civilians and their property.
Khan did not describe the fighting as a cease-fire. He says the Taliban will not create any obstacles for civilians wishing to return to the area.
Pakistan's army said Monday that it has captured several key sites around Mingora including Maalam Jabba, a nearby ski resort which militants converted into a training center.
The army launched the offensive earlier this month after militants violated a peace deal and advanced within 100 kilometers of the capital, Islamabad.
The Pakistani army says about 1,100 militants and at least 63 soldiers have been killed in the offensive.
 |
| Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi (File) |
"The Lady," as she is known by her supporters, is on trial for breaking the terms of her house arrest.
The trial has been widely condemned as an excuse to keep the Nobel Peace Prize winner locked up and pressure is growing for her release.
The ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus on Tuesday called for tougher actions against Burma, including suspending its membership in the regional bloc.
Charles Chong, a Singaporean lawmaker and member of the caucus, told journalists in Bangkok that dealing with Burma has bogged down ASEAN, making it harder for them to accomplish anything.
"More and more parliamentarians within ASEAN are beginning to lose their patience with Burma. And, we are calling upon our governments to do more than just expressions of dismay, regret, grave concern and so on, and seriously look at suspending Burma's membership of ASEAN," he said.
Aung San Suu Kyi is expected to be sentenced to from three to five years in prison for allowing an eccentric American man, who snuck into her house, to stay there for two nights without official permission.
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| Handout photo taken on 13 May 2009, provided by Myanmar News Agency shows US Citizen John William Yettaw in Rangoon |
Burma's military-run government has kept the democracy icon under house arrest for 13 of the last 19 years.
The detention has long been criticized and was set to expire on Wednesday.
But a Burmese government spokesman on Tuesday told journalists and diplomats the house arrest would not expire for another six months.
Also on Tuesday, Burma rights campaigners say they have collected more than 600,000 signatures from 220 countries calling for the United Nations to get tough on Burma.
Khin Ohmar is with Forum for Democracy in Burma.
"The voices are calling Mr. Ban Ki-moon [is] that he must accept nothing, nothing less than the immediate and unconditional release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners including all ethnic nationalities' leaders," said Khin Ohmar, who is with Forum for Democracy in Burma.
Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party won Burma's last elections in 1990 but was never allowed to take power.
The Burmese military then placed the NLD leader under house arrest and has only let her out on rare occasions.
A new election is scheduled for 2010 as part of Burma's "roadmap to democracy" but is thought to be a sham to keep the military in power.
The ASEAN legislators say ASEAN has failed to move Burma and may need to consider targeted sanctions to pressure them for democratic change.
The group includes lawmakers from ASEAN members Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.
| Cyclone Aila Lashes Eastern India, Bangladesh | |
| 26 May 2009 | |
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| Villagers walk with umbrellas made of palm leaves as rain clouds loom over sky on outskirts of Bhubaneswar, India, 25 May 2009 |
Cyclone Aila, with winds speeds up to 100 kilometers per hour, unleashed a four-meter high tidal surge and flooded low-lying regions. The storm is especially devastating for farmers in both India and Bangladesh who were preparing to harvest rice and other crops. In the Indian state of West Bengal, state officials say several thousand thatched and mud houses have been destroyed.
Relief camps set up
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee visited a few of the 100 relief camps quickly established.
The chief minister says the Army has been mobilized to assist with rescue and relief operations in the worst affected areas of West Bengal. He adds military helicopters are dropping food packets.
Transportation grinds to stop
The cyclone came within 50 kilometers of the state capital, Kolkata, where transportation and utility systems were paralyzed. Official describe it as the worst storm to hit Kolkata in 20 years. But the city is quickly getting back to normal with a clean-up under way to remove debris, including hundreds of uprooted trees and power poles.
Rivers flowed over mud embankments in the Sundarbans Delta, in which the world's largest tiger reserve is located. Conservationists are expressing concern about the fate of 500 tigers which live in the mangrove forests straddling both sides of the India-Bangladesh border.
Bangladesh reports casualties
Most of the human casualties reported are across the border in Bangladesh. Aid agencies say they fear the final death toll will be in the hundreds. Officials there say a half million residents of coastal areas were forced by the storm to evacuate their homes.
Bangladesh's Army, Navy and Coast Guard have joined civil servants and volunteers to search for the missing and rescue the marooned, some of whom are standing in water reaching up to their shoulders.
The Bay of Bengal is frequently devastated by such storms. Cyclone Sidr in November 2007 left more than 3,000 people dead in Bangladesh. And Cyclone Nargis, one year ago, is estimated to have killed nearly 150,000 Burmese.
What's a Liberal Justice Now?
When talking about the Supreme Court, Barack Obama has resisted the familiar ideological categories that have defined our judicial battles for the past several decades. He has made clear that despite his progressive inclinations, he is not a 1960s-style, Warren Court liberal — someone who believes that the justices should boldly define constitutional rights in an effort to bring about social change. It's true that Obama has cited Chief Justice Earl Warren as a judicial ideal, emphasizing that Warren, a former governor of California, had a sensitive understanding of the real-world effects of Supreme Court decisions. But at the same time, Obama has suggested that liberals in the Warren Court mold may have placed too much trust in the courts and not enough in political activism. "I wondered," he writes in his book "The Audacity of Hope," alluding to Senate battles over George W. Bush's court appointments, "if in our reliance on the courts to vindicate not only our rights but also our values, progressives had lost too much faith in democracy."
Likewise, Obama has both rejected and embraced elements of conservative legal doctrine. The ideological antithesis of Warren Court liberals are Reagan-era conservatives like Justice Antonin Scalia, who argue that the Constitution should be "strictly construed" in light of its original meaning. While expressing respect for aspects of this method, Obama has rejected it, in the end, as overly rigid and impractical. "I'm not unsympathetic to Justice Scalia's position; after all, in many cases the language of the Constitution is perfectly clear and can be strictly applied," he writes in "The Audacity of Hope." "Ultimately, though, I have to side with Justice Breyer's view of the Constitution — that it is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world."
By tipping his hat to Breyer, Obama acknowledged one of the two liberal justices appointed to the court during Bill Clinton's presidency. (The other is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) In different ways and to different degrees, each of them has championed yet another conception of the judiciary: one in which the courts, in most cases, should play only a "minimalist" role in America's democracy, generally preferring deferential and narrow rulings to broad ones. This doctrine developed in part as a strategic and defensive response to the fact that conservative activists on the Supreme Court were aggressively striking down progressive legislation. But minimalism is also principled. It urges judges to issue opinions that focus closely on the particular circumstances of the case at hand, steering clear of sweeping pronouncements about liberty, equality or justice. By so doing, the theory goes, the courts can avoid getting too far ahead of the will of the people and their elected representatives, and preserve judicial legitimacy in the process.
Yet with minimalism too, Obama's sympathies have been hard to pin down. One leading academic minimalist, Cass Sunstein, was an informal adviser to Obama during the presidential campaign and is now the incoming head of the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs; he is often said to be someone whom Obama might someday appoint to the Supreme Court. Sunstein has argued that judges (as well as government regulators) should "prefer nudges over earthquakes," gently influencing political debates without trying to settle them. But Obama has indicated that he himself isn't a wholehearted minimalist. When earlier this month he discussed Justice David Souter's pending retirement, Obama said that the "quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles" is "an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes." He seems sympathetic, in other words, to a more ambitious role for judges than a jurisprudence of the gentle nudge.
Obama's ideological elusiveness has perplexed liberal and conservative court watchers alike. Critics may see his ambiguity as just another example of his instincts to swaddle ideological divisions in the soothing rhetoric of bipartisanship and compromise, to reconcile the irreconcilable. Obama, however, may be looking to synthesize and transcend the established legal categories — articulating a genuinely new vision for what it means to be a liberal justice in the 21st century.
In "The Audacity of Hope," Obama calls for "a shift in metaphors, one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had." As it happens, the same metaphor — of conversation or dialogue — is now being elaborated and made more concrete in a legal context by some of the country's most notable progressive legal scholars. They call themselves "democratic constitutionalists." And they and Obama seem to be arguing along similar lines, suggesting that the courts should neither issue rarefied edicts from on high nor passively defer to the political branches but instead participate in a "dialogue" with Congress, the president and the American public to define and protect constitutional values. Although this emerging paradigm is not yet fully developed, it has the potential to transform what we mean when we talk about liberalism on the Supreme Court.
If this new understanding of legal liberalism can be traced back to a single moment, it was in April 2005, when the American Constitution Society and other progressive groups sponsored a conference at Yale Law School called "The Constitution in 2020." Taking as their model a white paper produced by the Reagan Justice Department in 1988 called "The Constitution in the Year 2000," the organizers set out to gather together a group of scholars to define a progressive constitutional agenda for the coming century. (A book inspired by the conference, "The Constitution in 2020," has just been published.) The conference brought to New Haven many of the leading liberal scholars in the country, including several who in recent weeks have been mentioned in connection with Obama: Pam Karlan, a law professor at Stanford; Harold Koh, of Yale Law School; and Sunstein, then a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
Like the Babylonians in exile, the participants at the conference debated how best to return to the land of political relevance. Their favored judges had been shut out of consideration not only during Republican presidencies but also, to some extent, during the Clinton era, when political realities and the president's ideological inclinations resulted in fairly moderate appointees to the federal courts. At the same time, the conference participants agreed that a return to the Warren Court liberalism of the '60s would be politically impractical as well as doctrinally undesirable. They also viewed Warren Court liberalism as too backward-looking to galvanize young progressives today. They sought to nurture a new generation of legal liberals who would pose an alternative to the conservative strict-constructionist lawyers who emerged from the Federalist Society to dominate the federal courts during the Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 eras.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/magazine/31court-t.html?ref=global-home
Aung San Suu Kyi 'composed and upfront' in witness box at trial
(AFP/Getty Images)
Aung San Suu Kyi being escorted to a car to give evidence at her trial today
The Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi took the witness stand in her own criminal trial today, and denied any wrongdoing in giving shelter to an eccentric American well-wisher who swam to her home after he dreamed of her assassination.
Ms Suu Kyi thanked a group of foreign diplomats who were allowed to attend the trial for 50 minutes along with Burmese journalists, the second time that the normally closed court has been opened to foreign scrutiny.
But diplomats attending the trial expressed doubt that she would receive a fair hearing from a military dictatorship which has locked her up in her own home for 13 out of the past 19 years.
So far, she has only been allowed to consult with her lawyers in the courtroom itself, and a request for an opportunity to meet privately with them was rejected by the court.
Today she denied having any knowledge of the motives of John Yettaw, the 53-year old American who emerged from the waters of Rangoon's Inya Lake to enter the grounds of her house.
According to a diplomat who was present in the court, Ms Suu Kyi said that she had not even met Mr Yettaw when he paid his first clandestine visit to her house in November last year.
She first encountered him at 5am on 3 May after he had crossed the lake for a second time, dodging the police who were supposed to be guarding it, by using an empty plastic bottle as a float.
Appearing healthy and composed, she told the court that she did not know why he had left behind a bizarre collection of items, including ropes, a head torch, and two Islamic style abaya dresses, and that she did not even know his name until after his arrest.
"I allowed him to have temporary shelter," she said. Her lawyers have previously said that she did not report him to the authorities because she did not want Mr Yettaw, or the police who should have detected him, to get into trouble on her account.
He left shortly before midnight the following day, and was arrested in the early hours of the next morning. "I only knew that he went to the lakeside," she said. "I did not know which way he went because it was dark."
At one point, when asked about the motives of Mr Yettaw, Ms Suu Kyi said, "Why don't you asked him?" and looked across at her co-defendant who was seated a few feet from her.
After his arrest, Mr Yettaw, described by his family in the US state of Missouri as an unemployed Vietnam War veteran, reportedly told the police that he wanted to help Ms Suu Kyi after having a dream of her assassination.
Appearing alongside her were her two friends and housekeepers, a mother and daughter named Khin Khin Win and Win Ma Ma, who also face a sentence of as long as five years in prison.
"She was very composed, forceful and upfront," said Mark Canning, the British ambassador to Rangoon, who was present at today's hearing.
"I think they are letting us into the trial for a transparent reason, because they have been taken aback by the scale of the reaction. No one is under any illusions that letting us in is going to change the course of the trial."
Ms Suu Kyi's detention had been expected to expire tomorrow, and the strange case of Mr Yettaw provides the junta with a pretext for detaining her for longer, until after the elections which it is promising to hold next year. But it may have misjudged the strength of international sympathy for her provoked by the case.
The subject was discussed today at a meeting of European and Asian foreign ministers in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. Some participants said that even the Burmese government's traditional supporters were showing signs of impatience.
"I sensed that there's actually been a shift on this issue," the British junior foreign office minister, Bill Rammell, said. "I think other states are engaging on this in a way that wasn't the case in the past. … If I'm honest I think the Burmese regime has miscalculated and has been somewhat taken aback by the force of international reaction."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6365278.ece
SCENARIOS - What outcome for Pakistan's battle in Swat?
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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of Pakistani civilians trapped by an offensive against the Taliban in Swat face catastrophe, a rights group said on Tuesday, as fighting flared in another militant-plagued region.
The offensive in the Taliban bastion of Swat, about 120 km (80 miles) northwest of Islamabad, is the military's most concerted effort to roll back a spreading Taliban insurgency that has thrown the nuclear-armed country's future into question.
Here are some possible outcomes of the fighting in Swat where the military says about 15,000 members of the security forces face 4,000-5,000 militants.
QUICK SUCCESS
A quick victory in Swat would allow the army to tackle militant strongholds on the Afghan border, such as North and South Waziristan, part of a region from where the Taliban orchestrate their Afghan war and where al Qaeda plots violence. The government and army retain public support for the Swat offensive. If they can deal a significant blow to the Taliban, stocks, which have dipped in recent sessions because of worry about the fighting, could see strong gains.
Quick success in Swat would also allow the 2.3 million people displaced by the fighting, according to government figures, to go home faster. Their plight, and civilian casualties in fighting, will determine how fast opposition to the offensive crystallises.
Given public backing and the authorities' resolve, the army is expected to push the militants out of Swat's main areas though it remains to be seen how long it takes. A decisive campaign and the speedy return of the displaced would be a boost for the unpopular President Asif Ali Zardari.
Continued...
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'Rahul Gandhi, the boxer, is extremely fit'
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Agencies
Posted: May 26, 2009 at 1559 hrs IST
New Delhi Rahul Gandhi landed some hard punches on his opponents during the recent elections. Now we know where he learnt it.
India's first Dronacharya awardee Om Prakash Bharadwaj taught him techniques of boxing for two months last year. The yesteryear boxer and renowned coach said that Rahul learnt the techniques with the objective of keeping himself physically and psychologically fit for a busy political life.
"It was a great opportunity for me to train Rahul Gandhi in boxing for two months last year," said Bharadwaj.
"In the beginning I was also surprised why he wanted to learn boxing because I was sure that he was not going to box in the ring. But later I realised that he was keen to have some knowledge about the art of self defence," he added.
The 70-year-old coach-cum-commentator said Rahul had great interest in sports and he was also a good shooter, swimmer and horse-rider.
"I observed that he likes sports. He is a good swimmer, shooter and horse rider. He is interested to have elementary knowledge in various activities and keep himself busy. He believes in making efforts and does not waste a single minute," Bharadwaj said.
The former boxer rated 39-year-old Rahul as a great learner, who is physically very fit. "You won't believe but he was too good and had prior knowledge of a few boxing techniques. He would also discuss about the game's various techniques. I found him physically quite fit. For instance, knowing his busy schedule I kept for him light training and for the warm-up would ask him to run one round of his residence ground. But he would ask me if the drill was enough and run two more rounds."
"During the strenuous work-outs on punching pad also I never saw him tired," Bharadwaj said.
The coach was all praise for Rahul's humility and was completely bowled over by his manners and etiquettes. "One day when I wanted some water to drink, instead of asking any attendant he himself rushed to the kitchen to fetch me water. On another occasion, when he was escorting me to their gate, Soniaji called him but he replied 'let me see sir up to the gate and then I will come'. What better behaviour and etiquette I can expect from such a top youngster of the country?" he said.
Bharadwaj also recalled when Priyanka Gandhi Vadhra also tried her hand at boxing during one of their practice session. "One day Priyankaji showed her interest in working on the punching pad, saying 'main bhi boxing karungi'. I went to Soniaji, who was sitting nearby, and requested her to allow Priyankaji and told her Indian women were already world champions in boxing," said Bharadwaj, heavily impressed by the top family of the country.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Rahul-Gandhi-the-boxer-is-extremely-fit/466253/
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