As Greece awaits bailout, southern Europe seethes

 

European governments are expected to sign off on a second bailout for Greece today. But conditions set on rescue money have fueled populist unrest in southern Europe.

By Robert Marquand, Staff writer / February 20, 2012

Greek students block traffic in an anti-austerity protest in Athens. Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

Paris

The mood is growing surly in the south of Europe as austerity measures take hold. With unemployment at 20 percent in some countries – and youth unemployment as high as 50 percent – warnings are growing sharper about a troubling rise of populist feeling.

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The current chaos in Greece presents a vivid example.

Ahead of a key March deadline, the Greek government agreed – after much political agonizing and protesters' torching of dozens of buildings throughout Athens – to a number of cuts demanded by the European Union and International Monetary Fund in exchange for a bailout necessary to remain solvent. Minimum wages and public jobs will be cut. More taxes will be raised and collected. Greece will cede a substantial amount of economic sovereignty to international lenders.

Many Greeks are aware they hold a lion's share of the blame for their predicament. But the effect of ongoing screw-tightening by Germany, the growing admission throughout Europe that Greece is poised to default, and the Greeks' inability to see a way out of the crisis has deepened discontent and humiliation.

In the days leading up to the Feb. 13 government approval of the latest rounds of cuts, Greeks in the streets accused their leaders of betrayal for acceding to international lenders' demands. They compared the government to the military dictatorship that ruled the country until the mid-1970s.

Isn't Greece simply paying the price of reform – one that Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Italy all have to pay, to some degree?

Perhaps. But austerity may have consequences that aren't easily seen on the accounting books: How much austerity can a democratic government impose before it loses the trust of citizens needed to make reforms?

Mario Monti, Italy's new, widely respected leader, issued a blunt warning last month to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has led Europe's austerity march. Without growth and greater European solidarity, public anger in Italy could cause it "to flee into the arms of populists," Mr. Monti cautioned.

Populism in Europe is a slippery term with a bad history. In the "prosperity Europe" of the past 50 years, angry populism was a memory from the 1930s or a spasm of antiforeigner hatred – skinheads, neo-Nazis, anti-elite, and anti-Europe hate groups, basically.

But in "austerity Europe" populism has a new and more powerful economic dimension: the unemployed, sitting on the street with no sense of future.

Rising authoritarian appeal

Southern Europe's democratic tradition is relatively new. Besides Greece, Spain and Portugal were also run by dictators until the 1970s.

When the Italian and Greek governments fell last autumn, technocrats were appointed to take over, rather than new leaders being elected. There is no guarantee that the next elections will bring to power those seeking the sunny uplands of democracy, rather than demagogues.

Austerity has brought a dramatic and abrupt shift to Europe's political scene. In Greece, reports suggest a shattering of the political center, new interest in the far right and left, continuing anti-immigrant sentiment, and growing support for more authoritarian politicians.

Romania's former prime minister, Emil Boc, stepped down last month amid mounting street protests against austerity.

In Hungary, run by the Soviets until 1989, strongman President Viktor Orbán has shown a willingness to change his nation's constitution and control the media to stay in power – with the backing of a growing far right.

Nor is populist feeling restricted to the more peripheral countries. In France, the far-right Marine Le Pen has been turning heads ahead of the April 22 presidential election. She looks askance at the euro, would take a protectionist approach to trade, abhors globalization and immigration, and says France is decaying.

"Our country is in the process of underdevelopment, of Third Worldization," she argues. Ms. Le Pen now scores 20 percent in the polls and is scaring the pants off President Nicolas Sarkozy's reelection team. Surveys last month found more than 30 percent of French see her ideas favorably.

"With an austerity policy, my best prediction is zero growth for years," says Jean-Paul Fitoussi of Sciences Po in Paris. "What would change that is a rising populism," he says, which could bring political disarray, which would make things even worse. "Already, 33 percent of French agree with Le Pen about globalization and the euro. It's a definite wild card."

Europe lacks a unifying narrative

It may be too early for the direst predictions. No armies of brown shirts or Bolsheviks are appearing on Europe's streets just yet. Some fear and anger was dampened after the European Central Bank quietly loaned $639 billion to banks in December 2011.

But the underlying direction of Europe is not toward the robust growth and idealistic integration that characterized the Continent in the postwar era.

Rather, the current period is witnessing the disappearance of the narratives of the past decades. Talk of shared values is giving way to talk of national interests and competition. The grand narratives that brought solidarity – the cold war, the "End of History," the "Clash of Civilizations," the "Return of History" – are over. The lack of a shared project at a time of austerity is causing fragmentation, the rise of populist sentiments, and the sapping of trust.

The Italian social thinker Raffaele Simone argues in a recent work, "The Sweet Monster," that Europe is preoccupied with the surface attractions of celebrity culture and new technology, and it merely seeks to sustain its comfort levels. Such a condition, in which older narratives of justice and human rights are ignored, is a seedbed for extremism and anger he says, whether against immigrants or elites.

London-based Adam Posen of the Peter­son Institute for International Economics argued at Chatham House last month that Western economies were not on the brink, comparing them to a post-Gilded Age period of the late 20th century, what he calls "the Old Normal," and thinks a "backlash" against inequity is still a decade away.

Still, he was concerned about the speed of global changes and said the prescription of austerity may have unintended consequences. Speaking of the Irish bailout last year and Monti's warning to Ms. Merkel, Mr. Posen said, "It is mind-boggling to watch the Irish be asked to eat their children, as Jonathan Swift suggested.... It is entirely right and justified for my friend Mario Monti to stand up and say, 'If we're going to do this much austerity, you better ... give us something or there is going to be a horrible backlash.'"

It 'boils down to trust'

The issue boils down to trust, says Felix Roth of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. Trust is often indefinable, but crucial for democracy, and without it, he says, "What we worry about is that people will find their own solutions via populist leaders and say we don't [care] anymore."

Mr. Roth has worked out measurable "trust" quotients for Europe. In 2010, less than one-quarter of the populations of Spain, Ireland, and Greece trusted their parliaments, and "approximately 70 percent do not trust it anymore," he wrote in "The Eurozone Crisis and Its Effects on Citizens' Trust in National Parliaments."

Spain went from a "plus 23" trust quotient in 2008 on Roth's scale to "minus 50" in the past year. Italy's levels of trust in its institutions today is at a "minus 70," which he calls "serious."

"The opposition of citizens is growing far too strong, and we aren't talking about the Assad regime and Syria," Roth told the Monitor. "These are European states. Austerity has limits, but I'm not sure economists have put this in their models.

"To get reforms to work you need trust, which isn't there," he says. "So they won't get implemented, and that's what you have been seeing in Greece."

As Greece awaits bailout, southern Europe seethes - CSMonitor.com

Sixty Years of Elizabeth II: An Ideal Queen in a Flawed Monarchy

RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Fedyashin 20:11 07/02/2012

Queen Elizabeth II © AFP/ Fiona Hanson

Multimedia

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• Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
• Queen Elizabeth II Celebrates 60 Years on Throne
• Elizabeth II was crowned at the age of 27

Sixty years ago, on February 6, Queen Elizabeth II was proclaimed sovereign of the Commonwealth following the death of her father King George VI. Her Majesty is the oldest monarch in Europe, and in just three years she will surpass the reign of Queen Victoria, who ruled the British Empire for 63 years. Health permitting, in the spring of 2024 she could become the world’s longest reigning monarch, breaking the record set by Louis XIV, the Sun King, who occupied the French throne for over 72 years.

Diamond Jubilee

British royal traditions and customs are a curious thing. Official celebrations go by their own calendar. All British monarchs, no matter when they were born or acceded to the throne, celebrate their jubilees in early June. I suppose it’s part of their royal prerogative.

Elizabeth became Queen in the winter of 1952 but her official coronation took place in the summer of 1953 after the end of the mourning period for her late father. The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee – just like her silver and gold ones – will be marked this summer during the official celebration of her birthday.

It was King Edward VII that began the tradition of celebrating royal birthdays on the first, second or third weekend of June in 1908. His Majesty was unlucky to be born in early November, when London is usually besieged by chilly rain. Realizing that his subjects were not going to be in an exultant mood standing in the mud on their king’s birthday, he made what would now be called a great PR move.

Queen as national treasure

Brits are great stewards of their history, monuments, culture and ancient customs. With few exceptions, Brits abroad are genuine patriots who will not tolerate a bad word about their beloved islands, the monarchy, pubs, beer, football, Oxford, Cambridge, sausage, tea and democracy… But you can criticize the weather all you like.

Refusing to criticize your country abroad is an admirable quality. But Brits are very different at home. They lash out at everything that they would staunchly defend on the other side of the channel, as if venting long accumulated stress.

Royal jubilees – a couple of weeks before or after the celebrations – are especially good occasions for such venting. Britain, primarily England, is getting excited and starting to judge the conduct of all royals, dividing into camps of advocates and opponents.

Your more indifferent Brits want to keep the crown simply as a tourist attraction. Discussions about abolishing the monarchy are nothing new. They could be heard both before and after WWII, but became especially heated during the long reign of Elizabeth II.

The marriages of her sister and three of her children, with the exception of the fourth, Prince Edward, ended in divorces, scandal or post-divorce scandal. This was the case with her sister Margaret, Prince Charles and Lady Diana, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. Princess Ann divorced and remarried. It would be pointless to lay the blame on anyone but there was infidelity, as well as sober and not quite sober escapades of all sorts.

This is why the 1970s and 1980s you heard the common refrain about “They behave badly, and we pay them for it.” Incidentally, the Queen has been a paragon of royal bearing – she has always been an ideal monarch both by character and conduct.

How much do they cost?

According to the Civil List (taxpayer funding for the Queen), Her Majesty receives 7.9 million pounds a year – the same sum since 2001.

In 2013 parliament is supposed to cancel the Civil List and pay a percentage of revenues from the Crown Estates. The portfolio of royal real estate, which is administered by the Treasury by law, includes enormous plots of land in different parts of Britain and the most expensive districts of London. The portfolio’s net worth is estimated at about eight billion pounds.

In 2010 (latest data) net revenues amounted to about 211 million pounds. Starting in 2013 the Queen (without her sons and grandchildren) will receive a portion of this sum for all official functions.

In reality, the overall cost of royal needs is much higher. Upkeep of official residencies, official trips, and security for the Queen and members of the royal family totals about 80 million pounds a year.

With a population of 62.7 million, this is about 1.3 pounds per subject a year, which is not much. Britain’s revenue from tourism is estimated at over 115 billion pounds per year.

If there is no Queen, court or other royal accessories, tourist revenue could be cut in half – what else is there to see?

Monarchy as ideology

Decades of debate in the UK over keeping the monarchy have not changed anything.

One of five Brits wanted to abolish the monarchy on the eve of the Silver Jubilee. The ratio remained the same on the eve of the Gold Jubilee in 2002. And it is likely to remain unchanged well after the Diamond Jubilee. The most popular subject of pre-jubilee debate is how to make the monarchy the glue that holds Britain together in the 21st century, as it has in all previous centuries of its existence.

In effect, the monarchy is a kind of national ideology for the Brits, notwithstanding George Bernard Shaw’s wry comment that “Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.” But this hallucination is part and parcel of British history and identity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

Sixty Years of Elizabeth II: An Ideal Queen in a Flawed Monarchy | Features, Opinion & Analysis | RIA Novosti

Midnight's children: Could the Lord’s Resistance Army's horrific practices in Africa soon end?

 Emily Dugan Sunday 05 February 2012

Walk to freedom: 'Night commuters' walk into Gulu, Uganda, having left their village to avoid being abducted .John Stanmeyer

Children in Rafai don't like getting up early. It's not that they want a lie in or to avoid chores or going to school. In this small town in the south of the Central African Republic (CAR), there is just one thing children really worry about: a visit from the Tongo Tongo. The literal translation from the local Zande dialect is "those who come early" – a reference to the guerillas' terrifying dawn attacks – but the Tongo Tongo are better known elsewhere by another name, one that strike fear into tens of thousands of terrorised civilians across Africa: the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a movement which this year marks a milestone that few will celebrate – 25 years since leader Joseph Kony first started the group's bloody campaign to establish a theocracy that would rule Uganda according to the 10 Commandments.

Media coverage of this brutal military movement has waned over the years, but their reign of terror has not. Far from disappearing, it has spread across the continent, leaving behind a bloody trail of death, kidnap and destruction, displacing entire communities from their homes – and many have begun to despair of anyone coming to their aid.

Yet there is reason to believe 2012 could be the year that changes. In the past month American troops have arrived in bases across the region on a mission to help Ugandan forces in their war against the LRA. The world is watching to see whether this will be enough to flush out the notoriously elusive Kony and his followers.

For the past quarter of a century, children have borne the brunt of this violent cult's misdeeds: seized to be sex slaves, trained up as soldiers or simply used like human cart horses. As the sun rises in Rafai, the town is gripped by an eerie silence which stays unbroken until around 8am, when children first tentatively, and soon raucously, make their way to school. But there are some children here who will never add their voices to the playground hubbub, even when the dangerous early hours have passed.

Kevin Ndibanga rarely speaks; the 15-year-old's childhood ended abruptly in 2010 and in repose his face settles into a murderous frown. Early one morning two years ago, when his father and stepmother heard that the LRA were coming, they took the fatal decision of attempting to hide at home. "They found us in the house and they killed my father by hitting him on the back of his head with a plank of wood until he died," Kevin recalls, his stare fixed on the middle distance. "My stepmother fled and left me alone."

Kevin was tied up and taken at gunpoint into the forest with seven others to join a group of 65 LRA fighters and prisoners. They were forced to walk barefoot for a month, carrying heavy loads, before arriving at a camp in a clearing. "They killed two people on the way. They hit me with machetes on my back and it still hurts there," he says, gesturing towards his slumped shoulders.

After more than nine months in captivity at the camp, he was accused of stealing meat and sent into the bush to find yams as a punishment. Despite being weeks' walk from anywhere and having no idea of his location he took the opportunity to escape. "I was in the bush for three weeks before coming out on to the road. I was alone and I was eating yams and fruits to survive." A group of LRA fighters were sent to find him, but failed. They returned to the camp and told his friends he was dead. When Kevin finally emerged, he bumped into strangers who helped him get back to Rafai, where he now lives with his uncle.

On 12 October last year, President Barack Obama announced that he would send around 100 troops to central Africa. The move has caused many to hope that the guerillas' grip on the region can be undone. The American soldiers – mostly Special Forces – will act as advisers and intelligence gatherers to the Ugandan military already in the area. In his announcement, Obama said the troops had been set the specific goal of "removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA".

Human Rights Watch, which has documented abuses at the hands of the LRA, welcomed the news, saying it "could be critical in strengthening regional efforts to arrest the LRA's ruthless leader, Joseph Kony, and other top leaders – all wanted by the International Criminal Court [ICC]".

In 2005, Kony and four of his fellow LRA leaders became the first people to be indicted by the ICC. The warrant for their arrest said the group had "established a pattern of brutalisation of civilians by acts including murder, abduction, sexual enslavement, mutilation, as well as mass burnings of houses and looting of camp settlements".

Despite this record, the small militia can barely be called an army. Its military core is not believed to be much more than a few hundred men and women, many of whom do not stay in one group, but are rather scattered in smaller numbers across central Africa. The army's puny size is not proportionate to its impact in the region, however. Over the past quarter of a century it has been responsible for around 1.5 million people fleeing their homes, as well as the abduction of 20,000 children as soldiers and sex slaves. Though the LRA hasn't been seen in Rafai since last year, it continues to cast a long shadow over the town: the population has more than doubled over the past 12 months, with the arrival of thousands of people from surrounding villages whose homes have been destroyed by the group.

Now some 10,000 people live in the remote town that can be reached only by crossing the Chinko River using a decrepit 1940s ferry that constantly breaks down and does not operate at night. If the LRA attacks, everyone is trapped. In December, Kony and his fighters hid and regrouped in the forests of Vovodo, just north of the town. Some of his troops have now scattered to the Congo, but Kony himself is still understood to be lying low in CAR.

Most people would struggle to find the Central African Republic on a map, though the clue is in its name. It is k

not just a cliché to say that Rafai lies at the heart of Africa – its co-ordinates are at the exact centre of the continent. Which makes its people uniquely vulnerable to attack: the republic is bordered by some of Africa's most notorious trouble spots, including Darfur, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad. Outside the capital, Bangui, its own scattered population survives in remote towns and villages, as most of the land is taken up by dense, unpoliced forests that have become a home for disaffected rebel groups from across the region. The UN estimates that at least 10 armed groups operate in the country.

The national army offers scant protection; its 6,000-strong force, including cooks and cleaners, reserves half its strength to protect President François Bozizé (who also happens to be Minister of Defence) in Bangui. Bozizé seized power in 2003 in a coup, and is paranoid – not without reason – that rebels will oust him. The remaining 3,000 troops are unable to exert any control on the vast forests.

There were no soldiers on hand to protect Fabrice Mongui, 15, when the LRA suddenly appeared out of the bush in August 2010 while he was at his family's vegetable patch near Rafai with his father, stepmother, younger brother and seven-year-old half-sister Florida. It was early in the morning and nobody had seen them coming.

"My stepmother wanted to run away but it was too late. When they found us they had already kidnapped some people, so they had guns as well as shotguns they had stolen. They made us harvest our food and pound the rice. Then they tied us together with the other people they'd kidnapped with ropes around the waist. There were 24 of us tied in a line. If we didn't walk with the rice fast enough they beat us with machetes. They beat me twice.

"The next day we arrived at the farm of my mother and stepfather – it was just a coincidence – and they ran away, abandoning Florida. The LRA gave her a knife and told her to get home. [These "farms" – not unlike our allotments – tend to be miles from the villages.] She spent two days alone in the bush and didn't know where she was. Two days later people from the village found her and brought her home."

Today, as Florida sits next to Fabrice, she mirrors the way he twists the skin on his fingers out of nervousness and speaks in a barely audible whisper. The two of them are seated in an outdoor chapel beneath a whitewashed Virgin Mary, in the heart of Rafai. Behind them is a church, behind that a monastery and to their left, a nunnery. This preponderance of prayer houses hasn't escaped the attention of the LRA, which, as its name denotes, still has pretensions to religious sensitivity. On two previous occasions when they have attacked Rafai, it has been after they got word that the priests and sisters were on retreat.

The priests were away when Fabrice was taken. After seeing Florida abandoned on the farm, he was marched into the jungle along with the other prisoners. "We were divided into groups. The older group ran away but the younger ones were stuck. My dad was with 10 people who ran away in the night but I was with the younger group.

"In the morning they went and looked for the people who had run and told us they had killed everyone who fled. After another two days walking they said my little brother wasn't walking fast enough, so they killed him. They told me to go and sit on my brother's dead body. I said I wouldn't do it, even if they killed me. They said, 'We've killed your father and brother and we'll kill you.'

"After another five days we arrived at the LRA camp. There were lots of people there. Women, children, so many people. We found Kevin [Ndibanga] there, too, and we were there together for three months. I also met my aunt at the camp and the three of us made a plan to escape. When we were about to escape they discovered some meat had been stolen and sent Kevin to look for yams. They said if he didn't come back with yams he'd be killed, so he ran away. They went to look for him and said they killed him. They said if I tried to escape they'd kill me too."

Fabrice eventually managed to run away with his aunt as they were marched through the forest. It took them nine days to find a road, another three to find help. When he arrived home, Fabrice discovered his father was still alive.

According to Human Rights Watch, the LRA killed more than 2,400 civilians across central Africa between January 2008 and May 2011, abducted more than 3,400 – mostly children – and displaced 400,000 from their homes. A recent report said: "Far too often United Nations peacekeepers have left terrified citizens to face the LRA threat on their own. The lack of effective protection has meant that some areas have been attacked repeatedly, such as Doruma town in northern Congo [DRC]." In April last year, the town was attacked five times in a single month.

Kony's LRA bears more relation to a messianic cult than a movement of political freedom fighters. They started out in opposition to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's regime, which seized power in 1986 and moved to abolish all political parties. But since they have been driven out of Uganda, they have all but forgotten their original desire to protect the interests of northern Uganda's marginalised Acholi tribe, from whom their first fighters were drawn. Now, their members are drawn from across the region and their aims have morphed into a cycle of self-preservation and mindless killing.

The LRA's continued survival owes a lot to the government of Sudan in Khartoum, which has offered arms, medical treatment and a hiding place, partly in retaliation for the support the Ugandan government extended to South Sudan separatists. Yet being bankrolled from Khartoum may not protect them now that the US has stepped up the military presence in the region.

In addition to the $17m a year it spends transporting Ugandan forces to the conflict zone, the US government has established two joint intelligence centres in Congo and CAR, and is working with the Ugandan army at two bases across the affected countries, in Obo and Nzara. The new troop influx will provide training and advice in intelligence-gathering, and diplomatic sources understand they will bring in advanced surveillance technology for tracking.

"This is building up into the most comprehensive strategy yet against the LRA and the Americans seem confident," says Philippe Maughan, political adviser to the European Union on the LRA. "That said, you always have in the back of your mind that they've evaded capture for 25 years."

The US is determined to have the operation completed swiftly – according to Maughan, US defence officials have "consistently told us [ in security meetings] that politically in the States this won't be able to last more than a year" – but the deadline also reflects US confidence that Kony and other LRA top brass can be caught or killed before 2012 is out.

As well as military intervention, radio broadcasts are being used to encourage fighters to give themselves up in exchange for amnesty. But the effectiveness of promising immunity from prosecution is likely to be undermined by what is proving to be a shaky guarantee. Thomas Kwoyelo, one of the group's leaders who was captured in 2009 during a military raid in the DRC, is likely to be tried for war crimes this year, including 53 counts of murder. The trial has already been cancelled once because it clashes with amnesty law, but anger over the severity of his crimes has caused it to be pushed through to a new court.

Betty Atuku Bigombe is one local politician who believes the arrival of US troops has "sent a very strong message" to Kony that it is no longer the Ugandan government alone that is fighting him. While few statespeople have stood up to the LRA over the past 25 years, Bigombe, now a minister in the Ugandan government, has consistently gone straight to the source of the problem. A member of the Acholi tribe herself, she has met with Kony six times and led three major attempts to broker peace since 1993. The

most recent of these was the Juba Peace Talks in 2006-2007, overseen by South Sudan. Unfortunately, they ended just as all the others had – with Kony walking away and refusing to agree to the terms of any agreement. But, she says, "When you have a physical presence it makes a lot of difference. Since the Americans arrived, attacks have been dwindling and the LRA has been sending women and children away so they can move more freely."

Bigombe cautiously believes 2012 could be the year Kony is captured, but warns against too much optimism: "I believe it's possible to capture Kony this year but it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. The LRA no longer use satellite phones and rarely use communications that could be detected; Kony uses people to take messages."

Many feel sure that capturing Kony is all it will take to see the movement wither and die. Bigombe asked a criminal profile specialist from Scotland Yard to analyse Kony to try to understand why he commits such disturbed atrocities against women and children – including cutting off the ears and legs of deserters. The specialist diagnosed multiple personality disorder and declared him a psychopath. But his insanity should not be mistaken for stupidity. Kony has a religious hold over his fighters and is adept at manipulating his soldiers. He has declared himself a prophet and tells his followers that he is under instruction from God to "save" the Acholi people: if his soldiers don't cross themselves before going into battle, they can be murdered immediately by their fellow men. What's more, says Bigombe, "Often those abducted come from such impoverished environments that they consider themselves lucky to get a meal a day. Then they're given weapons which are a symbol of power, and they become loyal."

For those such as 66-year-old father Eduard Piki, Kony's end cannot come soon enough. Two of his seven children were taken in an attack in Agoumar, near Rafai, in July 2010. His 14-year-old daughter, Djabinza Nadine, and his 11-year-old son, Bakoumbazanga Benjamin, are still missing. Now he is one of more than 1,000 people living in a refugee camp outside Rafai, after being driven from their homes by LRA attacks. The camp has an exercise book with the names of the dead, missing and injured from the raids in the area. The careful record is clung to in the hope that one day there will be justice. In a single raid a year ago, 17 were kidnapped, eight were killed and nine wounded.

Eduard's face is corrugated with worry and every day he hopes will be the one when he sees his children again. "I think my children are both still with the rebels in the forest," he says. "I'm very worried about them because I've never heard any news from them."

All he can do now is sit, wait and hope they are still alive. As military plans against the LRA intensify, Eduard can hold on to a sliver of hope that one day his family may be reunited. But with an enemy as inventive and wily as Kony, there is always a chance that this fanatical leader will evade capture for another quarter of a century.

Midnight's children: Could the Lord’s Resistance Army's horrific practices in Africa soon end? - Africa - World - The Independent

Daily Mail, New York Times: How the British tabloid became the world’s most-popular online newspaper.

By Will Oremus|Posted Friday, Feb. 3, 2012, at 5:44 PM ET

 

The Mail Online surpassed other online newspapers by building an idenity completely separate from its print product

The world’s most popular online newspaper is not the New York Times, USA Today, or the Wall Street Journal. You may not have ever visited it on purpose. If you’re American, you may not have even heard of it. It’s the Daily Mail.

When online traffic counter comScore announced last week that the lower-middlebrow British tabloid had surpassed the NYT in traffic, drawing 45.3 million unique visitors to the Gray Lady’s 44.8 million, reactions ranged from gleeful to apocalyptic. The Times, rather ungraciously, questioned the metrics. The Daily Mail is first only if you count the traffic to its subsidiary personal finance site, ThisIsMoney, a Times spokeswoman pointed out. Since the Times’ figures don’t include traffic to subsidiaries such as the Boston Globe, the comparison is apples to apples-plus-oranges. “We remain the No. 1 individual newspaper site in the world,” the spokeswoman told Buzzfeed.

Console yourself with that if you must, Times honchos, but you’re missing the bigger picture. In the sentence, “The Daily Mail is now the most popular online newspaper,” the “most popular” claim is the least of the misnomers. The most important thing to know about the Daily Mail’s website (more properly called the Mail Online) is that it’s not really an online newspaper. That’s exactly why it’s so successful.

Unlike traditional online newspapers, the Mail Online bears little resemblance to the British tabloid that spawned it. Consider the differences between the two on Thursday. The Daily Mail’s top story in print that morning was a tale of “valiant villagers” from an obscure British Midlands town who were ordered by the government to tear down a protest camp they had built to “protect” their village from an “illegal gipsy invasion.” The Gypsies, the article noted bitterly, were allowed to stay.

In its xenophobia and parochialism, the piece was typical of the paper, which skews conservative, populist, and suburban. In tone, it stakes out the ground between establishment Tory broadsheets like the the Daily Telegraph and hysterical, barely literate “red top” tabloids like the Sun. If David Brent, Ricky Gervais’ chauvinist, pseudo-educated character on the British version of The Office, reads a newspaper at home, it’s probably the Daily Mail (though he might not admit it). Also typical was the teaser that ran across the top of the paper, advertising a story in its Femail Magazine insert: “Can a marriage survive when the breadwinner is forced to become a househusband?” Aside from its political niche, the Daily Mail has long cultivated female readers with lifestyle, fashion, and home-decorating features.

The Mail Online also targets women, but in an entirely different way. On Thursday morning, the website carried no mention of Gypsies or valiant villagers. Instead, U.S. visitors were greeted with unflattering pictures of actress Cameron Diaz. The headline: “Beware if the wind changes! Cameron Diaz pulls some odd facial expressions while out and about in London.” The brief accompanying story was about, well, Cameron Diaz making some odd facial expressions while out and about in London on a windy day—the unwritten implication being that she just had some type of cosmetic surgery. Another top story Thursday was headlined, “Graffiti artist who painted Facebook’s HQ set for $200 million payday as staff celebrate social network’s $5bn IPO.” It was essentially a shorter, rewritten version of a New York Times story, which mentioned but did not link to the original. It showed no original reporting, but efficiently distilled the more nuanced Times piece into a handful of paragraphs and pictures, leaving out the boring context and philosophizing.

A third headline blared, “Threat from new virus-infected emails which take over your PC even if you DON’T open their attachments.” How could you not click on that? Several others dealt with celebrities, pets, and especially, celebrities’ pets. One was about Lady Gaga and Elton John taking a “pampered pooch” to dinner in Los Angeles. Another had Courtney Love’s daughter alleging that the boozy rock star had, through negligence, killed two family pets.

This is not news, really. It’s click bait, the stuff pageviews are made of. There’s no parochialism, no xenophobia, no mock outrage, and almost no politics—nothing that could limit the potential audience for these pieces, which is, in short, the entire English-speaking online world.

If this seems like the work of an entirely different publication than the print Daily Mail, that’s because it is. The Mail Online is run as a separate entity by top digital editor Martin Clarke, who divides his time between the United States and the United Kingdom. The site has 40 staffers in the U.K., 20 in New York covering U.S. and world news, and 10 in Los Angeles covering show business. Like the content, the audience is mostly separate from the Daily Mail’s: comScore reports that 36 percent of its traffic comes from the United States, compared to 27 percent from the U.K. The website’s American audience alone dwarfs the paper’s print circulation, which, at 2 million, is not shabby but certainly not among the world’s largest.

The Mail’s traffic surge shouldn’t be taken as a sign that tabloids have conquered stodgy broadsheets in the race for online market share. The New York Post is nowhere near the Times in traffic, nor are British tabloids like the Sun. For a legacy media organization, the Daily Mail is in a category of its own. Its singular success is the result of learning one lesson better than any of its competitors: To succeed on the Web, you can't just make a Web version of your print paper. You have to build a different product, geared to a different audience—one not bounded by geography or social class.

The Times has fared better than most newspapers in the Web age because its focus was national, even global, to begin with. Rather than seeking out an entirely new audience online, it has simply expanded the one it already had. And while it has mostly given up on the idea of a separate digital staff, it still differentiates its Web product by devoting plenty of resources to online-only content such as videos, interactive features, and blogs like FiveThirtyEight and Motherlode. That it remains so popular despite putting up a pay barrier last year is a testament to the site’s value.

On the other hand, newspapers and magazines that have replicated their print product online have fared poorly. “Most legacy news organisations have just assumed that the web would automatically lap up their existing output,” the Mail Online’s Clarke told me via email. “We chose from the outset not to integrate our print and online teams.” The online team, he said, branched out in two directions: “both upmarket, in the sense that we do much more science and foreign news, for example, and downmarket, if you like, in that we also do more show business.” Or, as he told Buzzfeed, “We just do news that people want to read.”

You can disagree with the print Daily Mail’s virulent opposition to unsanctioned Gypsy settlements, but it's still original reporting guided by genuine values. The Mail Online, by contrast, is not immoral but amoral, driven less by politics than by profit motive. Original reporting, it has apparently decided, is an inefficient way to garner clicks.

The downside to this approach is that it’s not a good way to cultivate a loyal readership. But the new dynamics of Internet news have made this problem moot. Even if more readers make the Times their homepage—which is surely the case—the Mail can make up the difference via search and social-media traffic. Many American readers who don’t think they read the Mail Online probably do—just not on purpose.

The Times’ spokeswoman got flak for saying the Mail is "not in our competitive set." Though it came across as snooty, it has the benefit of being true. Despite its print roots, the Mail Online has more in common with Web natives like TMZ, MSN, and, especially, the Huffington Post, to which its homepage bears a striking resemblance. Put it in its proper category, and the Mail Online’s astronomical traffic numbers look more down to earth. It’s more popular than TMZ, but it overtook the Huffington Post only recently and still trails MSN News by about 10 million unique visitors. Meanwhile, the Times regains its rightful place as the world’s largest online newspaper.

Shifting around those categories doesn’t change the fact that the Mail Online is, by most reckonings, wildly profitable, while the New York Times Co. just reported yet another disappointing quarter. That’s not a surprise: Writing and editing original journalism requires a lot more resources than rephrasing other papers’ stories or repeating gossip without checking the facts. The question, then, is not which type of online newspaper fares best. It’s whether any genuine news site can make money online. If not, the Web will soon belong to photos of Elton John’s pampered pooch.

Daily Mail, New York Times: How the British tabloid became the world’s most-popular online newspaper. - Slate Magazine

European Fiscal Pact: Int'l. Financial Dictatorship

 

Written by Bob Adelmann

Tuesday, 31 January 2012 16:15

Monday’s meeting of the European Union in Brussels resulted in agreement of 25 of the 27 member states to inflict upon themselves and their hapless and increasingly powerless citizenry the tools of international fiscal dictatorship.

The purpose of the “fiscal pact” is to enforce “budgetary discipline” so that the present euro crisis can be contained and future such crises averted. In the short run that means granting the European Central Bank (ECB) additional power to expand its reserves so that bailouts to failing countries can continue, subject to enforcement rules. In the longer run, the pact puts in place the primary tool of coercion, the European Stability Mechanism, to be effective in July. 

European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said that initially the ESM will be limited to just €500 billion ($650 billion) but that the ultimate number “will be reassessed down the line.”

Critics say that’s the entire purpose of the ESM: to set up the mechanism of control under the guise of providing bailout funds to members in need while installing ruling class elites (bankers with ties to Goldman Sachs) out of reach of the taxpayer class. Angela Merkel, German Chancellor and mouthpiece for the ESM, was clear: “It is an important step forward to a stability union. For those looking at the union and the euro from the outside, it is very important to show this commitment.”

She failed to mention that Great Britain and the Czech Republic have both distanced themselves, for the time being at least, from the pact. Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron said, “We’re not signing this treaty. We are not ratifying it. And it places no obligations” on the United Kingdom. He added, “Our national interest is that these countries get on and sort out the mess that is the euro.” And Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas told French President Nicolas Sarkozy that he could not “accede to the future treaty” for constitutional reasons.

And no wonder. A careful look at the ESM reveals it to be a naked grab of power over what used to be sovereign nations. The New American's Alex Newman characterized the ESM as a plan to “foist a massive perpetual bailout machine on eurozone members.” Here’s how it will be funded, according to the treaty:

ESM Members hereby irrevocably and unconditionally undertake to provide their contribution to the authorized capital stock. They shall meet all capital calls on a timely basis in accordance with the terms set out in this Treaty.

In addition, the ruling elites in charge of the forced extraction of funds from members will be above the law. More from the language of the ESM treaty:

Governors shall enjoy immunity from every form of judicial process [and] be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation or any other form of seizure, taking or foreclosure by executive, judicial, administrative or legislative action.

In other words, the self-elected masters in charge of the ESM will be free to loot the citizens forever without any limits whatsoever.

Anthony Wile, political and financial commentator and free-market entrepreneur, sees the ESM as a totalitarian scam. He wrote: “The EU was sold as a trade association. Later on it became a currency zone. Now it seeks to become an Empire, complete with vassals and conquered territories sending unlimited amounts of tribute.”

Critics of the EU note that there is none so blind as he who refuses to see. Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, still publicly thinks the ESM is somehow supposed to do something about growing the European economies: “You don’t have to be an economics professor to know that if you have zero growth you are not going to sort things out.” Similar ignorance about what’s really afoot here was expressed by the former Prime Minister of Belgium, who complained that “the new agreement consolidates fiscal discipline but omits completely to address the other side of the coin — that of…creat[ing] jobs and growth.”

But there was never any intention of promoting anything but an authoritarian supranational ruling body; improving economies was never part of the deal. Absorbing sovereignty was always the purpose from the beginning. And on July 1 the final gate in the increasing encirclement of the European “members” through economic and political dictatorship will slam shut.

Photo: European Central Bank headquarters

European Fiscal Pact: Int'l. Financial Dictatorship