Baithak World Apr 17: Turkey, Climate Change, Conservation, Kareem on Obama, Black Swan, Poet Speak, Bush Lite, State Terrorism, Naipaul -French, RN

Turkey is locked in a do-or-die duel between its secular "fundamentalism" and "moderate" Islam. The outcome is likely to bring profound changes at home, and may affect its controversial bid for European Union membership. The all-embracing clash is coming to a boiling point after the Constitutional Court agreed to take up a case brought by the Chief Prosecutor to close down the highly popular ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) on grounds that it has become a cove for anti-secular activity bent on replacing the secular regime with an Islamic one. The prosecution also asked that Prime Minister and AKP Chairman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President Abdullah Gul, and 69 other senior party officials be barred from politics for five years. The AKP, despite its Islamist roots, denies the charges, and portrays itself as "conservative democrat" and loyal to entrenched secularism. The party is also portrayed as an expression of "moderate" Islam, as opposed to a more extreme form. Party closures are not rare in Turkey. The country is a notorious "graveyard" for political parties. In the past four decades, the judiciary has shut down a score of parties, including two Islamist ones with Erdogan and many other present AKP leaders in their cadres. The EU's human rights tribunal has upheld the closures as being in line with the country's laws. TURKEY: 'Secular Fundamentalism' Fights 'Moderate Islam' By Hilmi Toros

"Ancient rain-fed agriculture enabled the civilizations to thrive in the Fertile Crescent region," Pinhas Alpert, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Tel Aviv University, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But this blessing is soon to disappear due to human-induced climate change." Together with colleagues from Japan, the Israeli physicist simulated how rainfall patterns and the water flows of major rivers in the region will change over the 21st century. To do that, they made use of a climate change model developed by the Meteorological Research Institute in Tsukuba, Japan. The model is unique in that it allows researchers to simulate the climate with a spatial resolution of 20 kilometers, a scale previously unobtained by other global climate models
The model envisages two possible scenarios for the area's future: a moderate one, in which the average air temperature in the region climbs by 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to the pre-industrial period, by the end of this century. In the extreme scenario, temperatures rise by 4.8 degrees Celsius (8.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Climate change could turn the Fertile Crescent into a barren landscape.

Alpert presented the results of his research at the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna this week. Even with moderate temperature rises, he stated, the yearly rainfall rate on the Mediterranean coast -- in Syria, Israel and Lebanon -- will fall by 50 to 200 millimeters (2 to 7.9 inches). The Euphrates would carry 30 percent less water than today; in the Ceyhan River in south Turkey the water flow would shrink by 40 percent and in the Jordan River by as much as 80 percent. Climate Change Threatens Cradle of Civilization By Volker Mrasek


KOLAR, Karnataka, Apr 16 (IPS) - An initiative in India to introduce environmental conservation into village administration is making good headway in this rural district some 120 km from Bangalore, capital of southern Karnataka state. Venkatesh, 34, a local rural administrator from Maramakindapalli village in Kolar, bordering the discontinuous Eastern Ghat range of hills along India’s eastern coastline, says his mandate this year is to protect the surrounding scrub jungle in the Rayalpad forest zone from being lopped off by the villagers. That scrub, purportedly ‘forest’ under the forest department, has been denuded due to villagers cutting the trees for fuelwood and from massive forest fires, in all probability a consequence of the loss of tree cover. Venkatesh has supprot from the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), a non-government organisation ( NGO) initiated by India’s very successful National Dairy Development Board in Anand, Gujarat, and now funded by both government and international institutions like the British High Commission in Delhi, Swedish International Agency(SIDA), UNDP and the Canadian Agency for International Development (CIDA). ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Villages Coopted Into Conservation By Keya Acharya

Barack Obama is my choice for president. I've already explained why in previous posts. But if Obama isn't elected, it would be hard to blame racism. Republicans aren't going to vote for him, not because he's black, but because, even worse, he's a Democrat. And for the most part, Obama has garnered more popular support among white voters than any other candidate. If Obama is elected, I believe that through his leadership skills and intelligence he will usher in a dynamic new era of government by inclusion rather than secrecy. Like John F. Kennedy, Obama will inspire a younger generation and invigorate the older generation to take greater part in their government, society, and community. Horton Hears a Racist - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Taleb has gone from being a leading Wall Street heretic--he rails against economists and quantitative model makers--to a mini institution whose appeal reaches well beyond the realm of finance. More than 370,000 copies of The Black Swan are in print in the U.S. and the U.K. It spent 17 weeks on the New York Times best- seller list and is being translated into 27 languages. It even outranks Alan Greenspan's memoirs, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Penguin, 2007), among 2007 best-sellers on Amazon.com. The success of The Black Swan has led to a $4 million advance for the English-language rights to a follow-up book, according to a person familiar with the deal. It's tentatively titled Tinkering and will examine how to live in a world we don't understand. Taleb now charges more than $60,000 for some of his lectures, according to the London Speaker Bureau, a firm that places business, political and motivational speakers. He warns audiences against believing worst-case scenarios and making so-called naked, or unhedged, bets on the future that could lead to disastrous losses. Flight of the Black Swan By Stephanie Baker-Said

The BBC captured the voice of the great Irish bard William Butler Yeats in 1932. At the time, even those who loved Yeats' poetry would sometimes ask why he didn't take a more natural approach to reciting his poems. But Yeats was insistent: "I will not read them as if they were prose," he said. As a result, Yeats sometimes took a drubbing from critics for his other-worldly reading style. Of course, this is something you have to hear for yourself, but I'll give you an idea. When Yeats read, each syllable of his work marched forth with a measured emphasis on the rhythm:

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.
To the untrained ear, all poets may sound the same, but poets have voiced a wide range of styles for centuries. Yeats exemplifies what we'll call the "sing-song" voice. Anecdotal theories trace it to influential European poets with accented English, and some think the voice took on new dimensions during the drug-induced stupors of the beatnik era. And then there's the jazz remix of the poet voice, popular in the spoken word world. The Sing-Song Rhythm of Poet Speak - Jeremy Richards , Krissy Clark [thanks VN]

Are Americans unusually stupid or is it something our president put in the water? As millions surrender their homes and sacrifice other standards of our nation's economic and political reputation to the caprice of the Bush-Cheney imperium, a majority of voters tell pollsters that they might vote for a candidate who promises more of the same. Assuming that likely voters are not now thinking of yet another Republican president simply because John McCain is the only white guy left standing -- an excuse as pathetic in its logic as the decision four years ago to return two Texas oil hustlers to the White House because they were not Massachusetts liberals -- must mean that tens of millions of Americans have taken leave of their senses. If not the white-guy syndrome, why would even a shocking minority of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters say they prefer McCain to the other Democrat? How otherwise to explain the nation's widespread bipartisan rejection of the Bush presidency and yet a willingness to let McCain continue in that vein? The Man Who Would Be Bush By Robert Scheer,

A boy studies during a class at one of ICS's orphanages. (Shabtai Gold/IRIN)

HEBRON, 14 April (IRIN) - A Palestinian charity in the West Bank city of Hebron is concerned it will be shut by the Israeli military and forced to close its orphanages and schools, employees at the institution told IRIN. The Israeli military has ordered the closure of buildings rented by the Islamic Charitable Society (ICS), saying it is working for Hamas. "At first we thought maybe they were just taking the business side of the charity, but now, after we appealed to the Israeli high court, our lawyer realized the orders mean they really want to close everything, including the schools and orphanages," said Rashid Rashid from the ICS. Some 240 boys and girls aged 5-18 live at the orphanages, while thousands of other children, many of whom have lost at least one parent, receive schooling, food and clothing from the charity. The ICS has received support from both the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron and the Israeli Rabbis for Human Rights. It also said the Israeli military had seized US$157,000 worth of goods -- including rice, oil, sugar, clothing and first aid kits -- from its warehouse. The bakery's equipment, worth over $43,000, was confiscated, along with items at the administrative office. State Terrorism: Israel moves to shut Hebron orphanages, schools

While few know about the base on Diego Garcia - it has long been off-limits to all non-military personnel - it is hardly better known how it came into being. To create the base, the United States, with the help of Great Britain, exiled all the indigenous people of Diego Garcia and the surrounding Chagos Archipelago. Between 1968 and 1973, US and British officials forcibly removed about 2,000 people, called Chagossians, 2,000 kilometers away to islands in the western Indian Ocean. Left on the docks of Mauritius and Seychelles with no resettlement assistance, the Chagossians, whose ancestry in Chagos dated to the 18th century, have grown deeply impoverished in exile. Diego Garcia has become another Guantanamo in more ways than one: the product of years of deception and lies, a far more secretive detention facility than the Cuban prison, the cause of immense suffering and pain for an entire people, it has become a mark of shame for the United States that must be repaired. Introducing the other Guantanamo By David Vine

The nonprofit History News Network is reporting that in an informal survey of 109 historians, 98.2 percent considered President George W. Bush’s presidency to be a failure, while 1.8 percent called it a success. On the question of whether he is the worst president in history, there was greater difference of opinion: 61 percent said he was, while others disagreed or are withholding their opinions. (The survey also made clear that James Buchanan has some work to do rehabilitating his whole catapulted-the-nation-into-Civil-War reputation.) We take most unscientific surveys with a large grain of salt, and this certainly falls into that category. On the other hand, we like the idea of historians starting to think about the George W. Bush presidency, and how it fits into larger patterns of American history. We’d be interested in knowing more about the 1.8 percent of historians who regard this presidency as a success. Given the disastrous Iraq War, the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the economy hurtling toward recession, the huge budget deficits, the plummeting dollar — to name just a few problems — these historians sound a lot like the 20 percent of dentists who don’t recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum. NYT Editorial: The Bush Presidency: The Historians (Start to) Weigh In

Naipaul has been a polarising figure, especially when it comes to his study of the Muslim world. Edward Said called him an 'intellectual catastrophe'. Do you think Naipaul provokes for effect - you say that 'creating tension, insulting his friends, family or whole communities left him in excellent spirits'?

People should read his books rather than listen to his pronouncements. VS Naipaul likes to provoke people, partly out of conviction and partly to entertain himself, to get a reaction.

Naipaul's women have been absolutely essential to the sort of man he became, and to the books he wrote Patrick French

As he said of Said: "He is an Egyptian who got lost in the world and began to meddle in affairs he knew nothing about. He knew very little about literature, although he passed in America as a great, wise literary figure. He knew nothing about India, for example. He knew nothing about Indonesia. He had not travelled to Tehran or seen the revolution."

Did you get the feeling during your conversations that his views on India had changed radically? Or is he is still very sceptical of the way the country is going?

I show in The World Is What It Is how his ideas about India have changed considerably since he first went there in 1962. He is fairly optimistic now. Like many people from the diaspora, he felt insulted by India's history.

Did you get the feeling that he has mellowed with age? He is almost an unrelenting Darwinian, in a sense, famously saying things like "men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place"?

He has not mellowed, I am happy to say.

Going by how he appears to have used and abused his women, do you think Naipaul is a misogynist? Or is it more complicated than that?

It is much more complicated and more interesting than that: women - his grandmother, his mother and sisters, his two wives and his lover - have been absolutely essential to the sort of man he became, and to the books he wrote. British historian Patrick French's newly released biography of Nobel Prize-winning author Sir Vidia Naipaul has created waves.

Children from the age of 16 years are considered adults under Israeli military regulations.

By Kim Bullimore in the West Bank Today I witnessed, for the first time, a Palestinian child being abducted by the Israeli Occupation Forces. This, of course, is not the first time that a Palestinian child has been abducted in such a manner. It happens every single day in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada in September 2000, more than 2500 Palestinian children have been arrested by the Israeli forces [1]. Thousands more have been abducted and detained for several hours, often beaten and then released. In May 2007, there were 416 Palestinian child political prisoners in Israeli jails, while today of the 11,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons, more than 380 of them are children [2] Despite being aware of these facts, having seen photos of young men and boys arrested by the Israeli military and having made several trips to Palestine and lived in the Occupied West Bank for more than 12 months, it still came as a shock to see the young boy, aged 14, sitting hunched over and blind folded on a rock with his hands tied behind his back. It seemed a surreal and sickening image to me. No Child's Play in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Defying Israel, Carter meets with Hamas Former US leader trying to bridge gap "between people that won't communicate with each other" view Food shortages threaten 100 million Major funding needed to fight rapidly escalating crisis, UN chief says view Delta, Northwest now the world's largest airline Passengers concerned about higher prices, less options as Delta and Northwest join forces view