Berlusconi sends Italian women to Libya for 'romance tour'

Creepy.

Building on his friendship with Silvio Berlusconi, Libya's leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has begun flying groups of Italian women to Libya for "cultural" tours of the country, with the aim of marrying them off to local men – starting with his nephew.

"The leader wants young people from other countries to visit Libyan hospitals and universities as well as understand its history," said Alessandro Londero, the manager of the Italian hostess recruiting agency which supplies the women.

"But he is also interested in romances developing between youths from Libya and Italy." Gaddafi reportedly has high hopes that romance will spark between Clio Evans, 24, a half-English actor from Rome who has visited Libya four times, and his nephew, Ghazali.

Read the rest of this post...

Night Music

A beautiful boy, age 11 and an accomplished cellist, plays The Swan (composer: Camille Saint Saens) and explains its "true meaning," which makes this the truly Endearing edition of Open Thread.

Read the rest of this post...

Juan Cole on the Asian Century & what Bush-Cheney bought us

Buried in a great article by Juan Cole on Obama's Asia trip is this comment on the Bush-Cheney "foreign wars" project. It's the clearest statement yet of what those two were really up to, and what they, and we, got for their trouble:

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney thought in terms of expanding American conventional military weapons stockpiles and bases, occupying countries when necessary, and so ensuring that the U.S. would dominate key planetary resources for decades to come. Their worldview, however, was mired in mid-twentieth-century power politics.

If they thought they were placing a marker down on another American century, they were actually gambling away the very houses we live in and reducing us to a debtor nation struggling to retain its once commanding superiority in the world economy. In the meantime, the multi-millionaires and billionaires created by neoliberal policies and tax cuts in the West will be as happy to invest in (and perhaps live in) Asia as in the United States.

I'm sure in Cheney's mind, his foreign wars project was patriotic, an attempt to use American military power to secure control of vital resources ahead of our international competitors, like China and India. Occupying Iraq, for example, would prevent the Chinese and Russians from accessing Iraqi oil. Occupying Afghanistan, and placing an ex-oil industry shill in the nominal seat of power, would guarantee control of the planned natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan.

Again, the goal would not be to secure those resources for us (they would be secured for the oil and gas companies); the goal would be to block "unfriendly" access to them, thus boxing in our competitors and giving us a deciding international hand in resource allocation.

This is the Great Game, 21st century style. It failed, and we live among the shards of the result — Cole's point in the passage quoted, I think.

Read the rest of the article for more on the present — Obama's Asia trip and American prospects, as seen from Cole's perspective. It's very good. But I thought the above was an interesting post-scriptorial comment on the era just ended, the failed Bush-Cheney project.

GP Read the rest of this post...

By the way, anyone notice the home page finally loading more quickly?

After six years of hell, and failed attempts, we finally figured out how to make the ads load at the same time as the content on the blog, rather than having the ads go first and then the content wait until the ads finished - making it seem as though the page wasn't loading (well, it wasn't). Our ad guy discovered some new code, and we finally got it installed a few days ago, so hopefully you're now seeing the page load pretty fast - even if the ads take a while, the rest of the content should load quickly regardless. Is it? Read the rest of this post...

Director of 'Inside Job' on the American duopoly

If you haven't yet seen the movie, here's director Charles Furguson discussing it a few months ago on MSNBC. It looks brilliant. (Here's the shorter trailer.) He raises questions that I've been asking for a while and still remain unanswered. As much as we continue to discuss the Democrats versus Republicans theme, the difference between the two on the financial crisis is minimal. Both sides were active participants in creating the problem and both sides were equal participants in bailing out the bankers, which went well beyond the issue of bailing out the banks.

I held my nose and voted Democratic for my Senate candidate but chose not to support my Democratic Congresswoman who supports the Comcast position on Net Neutrality. At this point I'm very reluctant to support any more Democrats (and certainly not Republicans) who can't come out in strong support of the American public, beyond Wall Street. Something tells me that I'm not alone in this either.

More from Furguson on the Huffington Post:

My answer is this: far from being in an era of brutal partisan warfare, as conventional wisdom holds and as watching the nightly television news might suggest, the United States is now in the grip of a political duopoly in which both parties are thoroughly complicit. They play a game: they agree to fight viciously over certain things to retain the allegiance of their respective bases, while agreeing not to fight about anything that seriously endangers the privileges of America's new financial elites. Whether this duopoly will endure, and what to do about it, are perhaps the most important questions facing Americans. The current arrangement all but guarantees the continuing decline of the United States as a nation, and of the welfare of the bottom 90% of its citizens.

First, consider Obama Administration policy. The Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates down, which greatly enriches the financial services industry. The bipartisan budget commission, whose Democratic head is a former investment banker, recommended raising taxes on most Americans while reducing taxes on corporations. And while, to its rare credit, the Obama Administration has sought to repeal some of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, it has avoided any serious attempt to tax or control financial sector compensation, to recover any of the massive amounts taken by bankers during the bubble, to penalize or prosecute those who caused it, or to reverse the extraordinary rise in inequality that has transformed America over the last generation. The Republicans go even further in catering to the wealthy and the financial sector, but the differences are relatively minor.

The financial services industry and the most successful American multinational firms now obtain rapidly increasing fractions, often already the majority, of their investment, employees, and revenues from (a) other wealthy individuals and corporations and/or (b) outside the United States. Over the last two decades their political interests, contributions, and lobbying have gradually followed these larger trends. As a result, the political duopoly has overseen a massive disinvestment in the future of the United States and the American people, and a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 1%. Taxes on dividends, high incomes, capital gains, and estates have sharply declined, while tuition at public universities, hours worked per family, household debt, and government deficits have all increased.

Read the rest of this post...

WHO says BPA mostly eliminated through urination

It would be good to see other independent studies confirm this, but it's good news if accurate.

Bisphenol-A, or BPA, a chemical widely-used in plastic food containers and packaging, is mostly eliminated through the urine and does not accumulate in the body, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

After reviewing recent studies on the impact of the chemical on human health, a panel of 30 experts from Canada, the United States and Europe meeting in Ottawa determined that the amounts of BPA measured in urine were equivalent to ingested amounts of the chemical.

Levels of the chemical were "very low, indicating that BPA is not accumulated in the body and is rapidly eliminated through urine," the WHO said.

Even so, the panel concluded, "recent experimental and epidemiological studies found associations between low BPA exposure levels and some adverse health outcomes."

Read the rest of this post...

Bush too lazy to write own memoir, lifted passages from his advisers' books

From Ryan Grim at HuffPost:

When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn't getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises "gripping, never-before-heard detail" about the former president's key decisions, offering to bring readers "aboard Air Force One on 9/11, in the hours after America's most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor; at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq," and other undisclosed and weighty locations.

Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial "decision points" of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir.

Read the rest of this post...

Aung San Suu Kyi freed

Earlier this week, Myanmar held sham elections. The dictators won.

Yesterday, Chris reported that Suu Kyi might be released from house detention. Today, that happened:

Myanmar's military government freed its archrival, democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, on Saturday after her latest term of detention expired. Several thousand jubilant supporters streamed to her residence.

Read the rest of this post...

Yasmin Levy - Irme Kero

I'm recently back from my longest visit to the US in a few years. Fortunately we're a long way past the days when I was asked why I hated America for questioning the reasons for invading Iraq. That's definitely good news. I spent a bit of time in Boston which I think is one of the best cities around. Our good friend lives in Back Bay so not only is it an attractive area, it's well connected for transport and there is so much great food nearby. The people there are friendly and it's a great walking city (and lots of bike lanes too!) but if only it didn't have those winters.

I then flew into Houston, which I managed to avoid for well over a decade. Massive trucks and SUVs everywhere, lots of highways to get anywhere, not to mention the miserably hot and humid weather. Even worse, everyone runs A/C which I can't stand. That city will never win any beauty contests but at least the the Tex Mex food can be excellent. Also, Central Market (grocery store) is really impressive and a notch above Whole Foods. The prices were so high that I felt like I was shopping in Paris for my groceries. My most odd moment was when I visited a diner in the Montrose area, thinking it would be a safe haven from the right wing insanity that was especially popular outside of the beltway. (I love American diners.) Two guys walk in then proceed to talk about the first time they found Jesus. Check please.

After that I went through Philadelphia, the city that holds a special place in my heart after a dozen years there. The people were mostly the way they were when I left though I did stay with a friend who lives in Chestnut Hill, which went a long way to help me forget about other parts of the city. Even outside of the mansions in the area (certainly not where I stayed) the cobblestone main street and old 1930's houses have so much charm. What a cozy area.

My return back to Paris was greeted with the the RER (regional train) station closed. Oh joy, after overnight travel in a packed plane riding in cattle cart. I instead decided to jump on an Air France bus into town but the bus driver decided it was not going to be that easy. He refused to sell me a ticket, insisting that I had to purchase it inside from the ticket counter that had a long line. Interesting how others did manage to buy a ticket later. Even though I'd say it was the exception that proves the rule, there's the France that the world knows and loves. Read the rest of this post...

Chinese court allows job discrimination against HIV-positive person

As eager as the government is to move into the modern world in some areas, they remain hopelessly backwards in so many other ways. Whether it's discriminating against an HIV-positive teacher or imprisoning activists in mental institutions, China has a long way to go. Why is it that Western politicians are so casual about overlooking these issues? It's not that we don't hear a few chirps on occasion, enough to give lip service, but Western leaders are much too fearful of calling out these problems. Read the rest of this post...