REUTERS - Two more Irish bishops have said they will offer their resignations to the Pope, bringing the total number of church leaders to quit after a damning report into child sex abuse by priests to four.

Bishops Eamonn Walsh and Raymond Field, the only two serving auxiliary (assistant) bishops in the archdiocese of Dublin, said they had informed Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of their decision.

"It is our hope that our action may help to bring the peace and reconciliation of Jesus Christ to the victims/survivors of child sexual abuse. We again apologise to them," they said in a statement released late on Thursday.

Like Bishop Jim Moriarty who resigned on Wednesday, both bishops had said the report had shown that they had done nothing wrong.

The court in Belgrade confirmed the 40-year sentence on Friday for Radomir Markovic over a 1999 plot to kill former Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic. 

Six others accused of involvement in the attack were handed jail terms ranging from six months to 35 years.

The supreme court also confirmed the maximum sentence for Milorad Ulemek "Legija," the former head of an elite secret police unit, who was handed two 40-year jail terms for masterminding the murders of Serbian reformist Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003 and former President Ivan Stambolic in 2000.

The Serbian court also confirmed the maximum sentence for two other members of Ulemek's notorious "Red Berets" police unit.

His evolution from fascist cheerleader to polished statesman is one of the most remarkable transformations in Italian politics.

And now Gianfranco Fini's new-found role as a voice of moderation in Italy's centre-Right government makes him one of the most potent threats to Silvio Berlusconi as the prime minister recovers from injuries he received during an attack in Milan and looks ahead to 2010.

While his political clout makes him a key ally in Mr Berlusconi's coalition government, Mr Fini's independent streak, and increasingly strident criticism of the administration, also makes him one of the prime minister's worst enemies.

Activists in Italy say the level of racism in the country has worsened in recent years, and a number of events in the run-up to Christmas would seem to support that view. A campaign against illegal immigrants, called "Operation White Christmas," has been taking place in a small town near Milan. The campaign is run by the anti-immigrant Northern League party. In Verona, a furious row has broken out over the use of a dark-skinned statue of the baby Jesus in a nativity scene outside the town hall.

Over the past 20 years, Turkey has been trying to gain admittance to the European Union. Turkey is not a European country. Most of its land mass is in Asia Minor. It is not ethnically, socially, culturally or religiously European. Yet the U.S. government (especially under President George W. Bush) has lobbied the Europeans forcefully to admit Turkey into the EU because Turkey is our military ally, and the American military and political establishment didn't want them falling into the Russian or the Iranian sphere of influence.

Couple of different issues at play here. Yes, Turkey has been trying to gain admittance for quite some time. And the Euros would have been wise to have accepted Turkey 15 years ago. This would have forced the secularists in government to change the economy for the better. And it was a huge missed opportunity, if Europe truly cares about Turkey remaining secular. Here's what happened instead. The Turks grew disillusioned with the secularists and voted for the soft-shoe Islamists to run the country and economy, making what I would call a Faustian bargain, hoping they would fix the economy and not impose their brand of religious politics along with it.

The Turks got an exceptionally strong economic recovery, as I documented during my time there. But they also got the Islamist baggage along with it. And now that the economy threatens to head south in light of the global financial crisis, the Turkish Islamists are using the culture war card to stay in power.

This is a shame. It is also worrisome. Just look at the power the culture war has over the American imagination.
Now, as to Huffington's contention that Turkey isn't a European country. Well, a good 15% of the landmass sits in Europe. So does Istanbul. Of course, that's easy to dismiss. But what isn't is this: Turkey has been an integral partner in the European state system since the French allied with the Turks several hundred years ago to outflank the Hapsburgs. So, feel free to dismiss Turkey as an "Asian country." But let's not forget history.

hmm...

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

AFP - Eurotunnel on Friday accused Eurostar staff of not following safety rules when evacuating passengers from high speed trains that broke down in the tunnel under the Channel last weekend.

The tunnel operator strongly rejected suggestions that it contributed to the chaos when 2,000 passengers were trapped for a night in five trains that broke down in the tunnel between Britain and France on December 18.

"We have, here and there, been unjustly suspected of not acting as we should have done" after the breakdown, Eurotunnel said in a statement.

Eurotunnel said the time it took to evacuate the passengers "was unfortunately extended because the Eurostar teams, in complete violation of the safety procedures, asked passengers to take their bags with them."

"We have just experienced that excess amongst financial actors, and faults in state oversight have plunged the world into a deep crisis," he said. "We need to understand that money must serve people and cannot be allowed to rule them."

MOSCOW -- Russia's central bank Friday unveiled its 10th interest rate cut of the year, with economists expecting more gradual trims in the coming months as policymakers try to stimulate the country's blighted economy.

The central bank said it is reducing its benchmark refinancing rate to 8.75 percent effective from Monday, from 9 percent. The minimum one-day repo rate will be cut to 6 percent from 6.25 percent.

"The decision to cut rates is expected to soften the factors restraining economic revival and will secure the stability of the growing trend" of gross domestic product," the regulator said in a statement.

If someone asks you what happened in 2009, the answer is simple - two things. There was a huge credit and liquidity crunch, and then there was Quantitative Easing. The last is the Fed's equivalent of band-aiding a zombied and ponzied corpse, better known as the US economy. It worked for a while, but now the zombie is about to go back into critical, followed by comatose, and lastly, undead (and 401(k)-depleting) condition.

In 2009, total supply of all USD denominated fixed income, net of maturities, declined by $300 billion from $2.05 trillion to $1.75 trillion. This makes sense: the abovementioned crunches stopped the flow of credit from January until well into April, and generally firms were unwilling to demonstrate to the market how clothless they are by hitting the capital markets until well into Q2 if not Q3. What happened was a move so drastic by the Fed, that into November, the worst of the worst High Yield names were freely upsizing dividend recap deals (see CCU) - the very same greed and stupidity that brought us here....

Back to the math... And here is the kicker. Accounting for securities purchased by the Fed, which effectively made the market in the Treasury, the agency and MBS arenas, but also served to "drain duration" from the broader US$ fixed income market, the stunning result is that net issuance in 2009 was only $200 billion. Take a second to digest that.

And while you are lamenting the death of private debt markets, here is precisely what the Fed, the Treasury, and all bank CEOs are doing all their best to keep hidden until they are safely on their private jets heading toward warmer climes: in 2010, the total estimated net issuance across all US$ denominated fixed income classes is expected to increase by 27%, from $1.75 trillion to $2.22 trillion. The culprit: Treasury issuance to keep funding an impossible budget. And, yes, we use the term impossible in its most technical sense....

Out of the $2.22 trillion in expected 2010 issuance, $200 billion will be absorbed by the Fed while QE continues through March. Then the US is on its own: $2.06 trillion will have to find non-Fed originating  demand. To sum up: $200 billion in 2009; $2.1 trillion in 2010. Good luck.

Madrid has unveiled plans for a new high-rise financial centre to rival the City of London or Canary Wharf.

The ambitious building project will see the skyline to the north of the Spanish capital transformed with the addition of 20 skyscrapers including four towers over 60 storey's high.

The initial stage of the project - dubbed "Operation Chamartin" - was given the green light last month (NOV) by authorities in the capital who have earmarked 11 billion euros investment to see to completion.

Twenty years after Poland ditched the dowdy austerity of communism the country will welcome Ferrari's prancing horse with the opening of the glamorous sports car company's first showroom in the country.

The showroom, due to open next year on Warsaw's premiere shopping street, will offer Polish car enthusiasts a chance to tap into an Italian line of luxury once inconceivable for a country that became synonymous with poverty and shortages during the dark days of socialism.

But with the Polish economy, buoyed by foreign investment and EU membership, now rapidly catching up on those in the west, Ferrari feel that the time is ripe to set up shop.

Russian oil giant Gazprom said it believes Ukraine will have difficulties paying for gas shipments, prompting fears of a possible repeat of the New Year gas row between the two countries that led to supply cuts throughout Europe.

AFP- The head of Russian gas giant Gazprom said Friday that Ukraine had cut back on purchases of Russian gas since mid-December and appeared to be facing serious cash problems.
   
"Ukraine is experiencing serious problems with payment," Alexei Miller said on Russia's Vesti channel in comments carried by the Ria-Novosti news agency.
   
Ukraine has until January 11 to pay for gas, according to Gazprom, which has cut off supplies to the country over unpaid bills repeatedly in the past.

Couple of different issues at play here. Yes, Turkey has been trying to gain admittance for quite some time. And the Euros would have been wise to have accepted Turkey 15 years ago. This would have forced the secularists in government to change the economy for the better. And it was a huge missed opportunity, if Europe truly cares about Turkey remaining secular. Here's what happened instead. The Turks grew disillusioned with the secularists and voted for the soft-shoe Islamists to run the country and economy, making what I would call a Faustian bargain, hoping they would fix the economy and not impose their brand of religious politics along with it.

The Turks got an exceptionally strong economic recovery, as I documented during my time there. But they also got the Islamist baggage along with it. And now that the economy threatens to head south in light of the global financial crisis, the Turkish Islamists are using the culture war card to stay in power.

This is a shame. It is also worrisome. Just look at the power the culture war has over the American imagination.
Now, as to Huffington's contention that Turkey isn't a European country. Well, a good 15% of the landmass sits in Europe. So does Istanbul. Of course, that's easy to dismiss. But what isn't is this: Turkey has been an integral partner in the European state system since the French allied with the Turks several hundred years ago to outflank the Hapsburgs. So, feel free to dismiss Turkey as an "Asian country." But let's not forget history.

...

The Trojan Horse Boogey Man | The Agonist

As I have repeatedly stated in posts about Iran and Turkey: the best way to counter the Islamists is to engage them and play their own game. Tell Turkey, sure, you can join the EU, but remember, hejab in the EU is a no-no. You don't like it, too bad. Moreover, religious tolerance is a key virtue in the EU and a fundamental aspect of the acquis communitiare, and if you can't ratify that, well, you've got no chance of joining the EU. The bottom line here is that the EU has leverage over the Islamists in Turkey it's too pusillanimous to use.

France and other European countries rightfully have serious and well-founded reservations about admitting Turkey into the EU. If Turkey were admitted any Turkish citizen could travel, work and reside in any EU country because they would no longer need a visa. There are Islamist fundamentalist in Turkey as there are in Iraq, Iran, Egypt and other Muslim countries. This would be a security nightmare. The American Administration should butt out of this issue and let the Europeans make their own decisions.

Clearly Huffington has been huffing some glue here. Yes, of course, there are Islamists in Turkey. But not of the virulent al Qeada type. Please. Are there terrorists? Yup, sure are. But they are Kurds. A people who speak an Indo-European language who value secularism just as much as the secular Turks and Europeans do. Again, the Kurdish issue is more leverage the EU could and has used. But I do agree with Huffington in that the US should butt out.

The Taliban have released a video of captured US soldier Robert Bergdahl, six months in to his captivity. The Taliban want the release of their prisoners from US detention centres in exchange for Bergdahl's freedom.

AFP - Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama insisted Thursday he intended to fight on after a former aide was charged in a political funding scandal, but hinted he could step down if the public demanded it.

The indictment caps a difficult first 100 days in office for the political blue-blood, whose August election victory ended more than half a century of almost unbroken conservative rule in the world's number two economy.

"I feel grave responsibility," Hatoyama told a news conference after prosecutors indicted his former aide Keiji Katsuba for allegedly misreporting millions of dollars of donations.

I'm having a déjà vu.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

A Chinese court has sentenced a leading dissident to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power".

Liu Xiaobo, a 53-year-old academic, who was previously jailed over the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, had been charged for co-authoring a document appealing for political liberalisation.

The verdict was handed down by a Beijing court on Friday after a two-hour trial on Wednesday in which prosecutors accused Liu of "serious crimes".

Liu's lawyer, Shang Baojun, said he had 10 days to appeal, but Liu's wife, Liu Xia, had said on Wednesday that her husband had no plans to appeal.

An incident on a transatlantic airliner arriving in the US city of Detroit may have been an attempted attack, American media reports say.

An official said the incident, in which firecrackers were initially said to have been set off, had been an attempt by a passenger to blow up the plane.

Panic ensued aboard the Airbus 330, which had flown from the Netherlands, and several people were slightly hurt.

The White House says President Barack Obama is monitoring the situation.

Today, five years after one of the worst natural disasters of modern times, Lampuuk, on Aceh's west coast, has been transformed. Instead of mountains of rubble there are hundreds of new houses. Children race their bicycles around the newly paved streets. The everyday buzz of community life has replaced the wailing of the bereaved.

The area has been rebuilt from the ground up, in a remarkable effort has been replicated around Aceh, where up to 170,000 people died and more than 600,000 were left homeless by the 2004 tsunami. Survivors have rebuilt their lives in an extraordinary testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Yet the wounds remain raw; while normality has been restored, grief hovers not so very far below the surface.

A recent military policy that added pregnancy to the list of reasons a soldier could be disciplined in a war zone will be rescinded by a new order drafted by the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Gen. Raymond Odierno has drafted a broad new policy for the U.S. forces in Iraq that will take effect Jan. 1, and that order will not include a controversial pregnancy provision that one of his subordinate commanders enacted last month, according to the U.S. military command in Iraq.

Odierno's order comes about a week after the pregnancy policy issued by Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo triggered a storm of criticism. Cucolo had issued a policy that would allow soldiers who become pregnant and their sexual partners to be punished.

Schools in the United States are more segregated today than they have been in more than four decades. Millions of non-white students are locked into "dropout factory" high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate, and few are well prepared for college or a future in the US economy.

According to a new Civil Rights report published at the University of California, Los Angeles, schools in the US are 44 percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school students in the US.  Latinos and blacks, the two largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights movement forty years ago. In Latino and African American populations, two of every five students attend intensely segregated schools.  For Latinos this increase in segregation reflects growing residential segregation. For blacks a significant part of the reversal reflects the ending of desegregation plans in public schools throughout the nation. In the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court concluded that the Southern standard of "separate but equal" was "inherently unequal," and did "irreversible" harm to black students. It later extended that ruling to Latinos.

The Civil Rights Study shows that most severe segregation in public schools is in the Western states, including California--not in the South, as many people believe. Unequal education leads to diminished access to college and future jobs. Most non-white schools are segregated by poverty as well as race. Most of the nation's dropouts occur in non-white public schools, leading to large numbers of virtually unemployable young people of color.

A central London restaurant has insisted that diners sign an indemnity form before eating Christmas puddings, some of which contained silver pieces.

Some 350 diners at High Timber signed the waiver before eating the desserts, which contained silver charms.

It read: "I absolve High Timber from blame should I come to harm including a chipped tooth, or any injury as a result of swallowing it."

Restaurant owner Neleen Strauss said it had "created a bit of a stir".

BEIJING, Dec. 26 -- Competition between airlines and rail operators will further hot up on Saturday thanks to the launch of China's longest high-speed train link between Wuhan and Guangzhou.

    The line stretches more than 1,000 km and will slash the travel time from Wuhan, Hubei province, to Guangzhou in Guangdong from 10 hours to just three.

    Tickets for the service - which also stops at Changsha, capital of Hunan - went on sale at new stations in the three cities last weekend, with prices ranging from 780 yuan ($110) for first class to 490 yuan for second class, said a joint document released by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Railways.

REYKJAVIK, Dec 23 (IPS) - Iceland already gets over 72 percent of its energy from renewable, hydroelectric and geothermal sources, but Icelanders are ambitious when it comes to energy and scientists are now looking at osmotic and tidal power to meet future energy needs.

Prototype power plants tapping these innovative sources are to be located in the West Fjords of Iceland and expected to be functional in the next few years.

Osmotic power, harnessed at estuaries, is probably the world's newest form of energy. However, the basic technology behind it is over 30 years old as it is basically desalination in reverse.

Thorsteinn Ingi Sigfusson of Innovation Centre Iceland (ICI), who has been involved with the development of osmotic energy and tidal power, says that osmotic technology is relatively safe and simple.

Conservative bloggers are calling for a boycott of the company. Executives say the series, in which Santa is warned the North Pole could melt before Christmas, was intended to inspire children.

St. Louis - First, Chicken Little warned children that the sky was falling. And now Build-a-Bear Workshop has warned children that the North Pole could disappear before Christmas. The Missouri-based company has found itself in hot water, defending an animated series on its website featuring polar bears, penguins and Mrs. Claus, as Santa is warned that global warming is "a serious situation."

Conservative bloggers reposted the videos online and called for a boycott of the toy company, saying Build-a-Bear should not be presenting a political stance to children.

The company relented, took down the videos and posted on its website a letter from Build-a-Bear founder and Chief Executive Maxine Clark. "Our intention with the polar bear story was to inspire children, through the voices of our animal characters, to make a difference in their own individual ways," Clark wrote. "We did not intend to politicize the topic of global climate change or offend anyone in any way."

....

Darren Pope, a writer for Examiner.com, was one of the harshest critics of the videos, in which a polar bear named Ella tells Santa: "At the rate it's melting, the North Pole will be gone by Christmas." In a letter to Clark, which he posted online, Pope wrote: "It is one thing to use fear mongering and scare tactics when attempting to win adults over to a particular point of view, it is quite another when using those tactics against very young, impressionable children."

Western users of heavy rare earths say that they have no way of figuring out what proportion of the minerals they buy from China comes from responsibly operated mines. Licensed and illegal mines alike sell to itinerant traders. They buy the valuable material with sacks of cash, then sell it to processing centers in and around Guangzhou that separate the rare earths from each other.

Companies that buy these rare earths, including a few in Japan and the West, turn them into refined metal powders.

"I don't know if part of that feed, internal in China, came from an illegal mine and went in a legal separator," said David Kennedy, the president of Great Western Technologies in Troy, Mich., which imports Chinese rare earths and turns them into powders that are sold worldwide.

Tomorrow, it will be 20 years since Dan Voinea helped send Nicolae Ceausescu before a Christmas Day firing squad.

But the anniversary of the climax to Romania's revolution will not bring unalloyed joy to the prosecutor, or indeed to his compatriots, as they struggle to unearth the truth of what really happened in those extraordinary days, and to discover whether it was a vengeful people or a communist clique that really toppled the Romanian dictator.

Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, had been forced to flee Bucharest, after a wave of protests against their quarter-century of despotic rule swept across the country from the western town of Timisoara, reaching the capital on 21 December. The loathed couple fled the next day, flying by helicopter and commandeering cars on country roads on their wild dash for freedom, before finally being caught.

L'AQUILA, Italy -- Cities take centuries to grow, but they can die in the relative blink of an eye.

After an earthquake in April killed hundreds and left tens of thousands homeless in and around this medieval and Baroque city some 70 miles northeast of Rome, the emergency relief efforts were extraordinary. Volunteers from all over Italy rushed to help. Tent villages were swiftly set up outside the danger zone. Concerts were staged to provide continuity and hope, and construction workers were soon erecting dozens of housing complexes on the outskirts of town.

But now, as the region's mayors and the Italian culture ministry prepare to take over recovery efforts from emergency agencies in January, the longer-term future of L'Aquila is in question. Shortages of money, political will, architectural good sense and international attention -- along with a distinctly Italian predilection for a kind of magical thinking -- threaten to finish what the quake started.

NORTH POLE (The Borowitz Report) - The Central Intelligence Agency confirmed reports today that an unmanned predator drone accidentally hit Santa Claus' sleigh on Christmas Eve, killing Santa Claus and injuring an undetermined number of reindeer.

The CIA drone, which was intended to kill an al-Qaeda operative located in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, went off course and targeted Claus instead.

A CIA spokesperson said the agency was still trying to sort out what, exactly, sent the predator off course, but offered one theory: "It's conceivable that it was thrown off by the beard."

Sean Paul Kelley writes:

I don't buy all the hype that the internet is even the primary culprit of the demise of journalism. The primary culprit is the same as it is all over the country, in every industry and in government: equity extraction.

Let me explain, in short: when executives expect unrealistic profits of 20% and higher per annum on businesses something has got to give. It's an unnatural and unsustainable growth rate. For the first ten or so years of a small to medium size company's life? Sure. But when you are 3M, or GE? Unrealistic and ultimately impossible.

So, when such rates cannot be achieved by organic growth in the business, executives start shaving off perceived fat and before they know it they're cutting off the muscle and then shaving off bone chips. And when they've gotten to the bone chips they borrow other people's money to buy new companies, load up those companies with debt and extract equity form them and then because it looks like the parent is still growing award themselves huge bonuses. It's a shell game.

That is what has happened to the news industry in America. The excessive obsession with unnaturally high profits has led to a vicious circle of cutting budgets, providing less services, which is then followed by even more drastic cuts. The local San Antonio paper is a great example of this. Twenty years ago there were two large dailies in my hometown. Both competed with each other for real scoops. Both had book reviews by local writers, providing local jobs. Both covered the local arts and sports scene. Both covered local politics in depth and local and state news in depth. Both had vigorous investigative teams. Both had bureaus in Mexico and both had offices and reporters on the ground in DC.

And then corner offices of Gannet and Harte-Hanks were populated with Kinsey-esque managers and the rout was on ... So, today, San Antonio has one daily that is as flimsy and tiny as the local alternative ... And 80% of this happened before ... the internet. All in the name of higher industry profits-not some overwhelming fear of the world wide inter-tubes. So, who's profiting? Certainly not the intellectual vigor of the locals? And certainly not the writers who are all now `journalism entrepreneurs.' The only people who profited are the executives who obsessed over profits, to lard up their own bonus pool ...

You can provide a public service with small profits for a long, long time, but if you demand large ones you will destroy it. Just ask the big banks.

So why isn't the failure of the health-care reform initiative an epochal example of the failure of leadership? Democrats know who I mean...

Or perhaps you don't agree that having dumped the public option and the Medicare buy-in to get Lieberman and/or Snowe, Senate Democrats have neither of those two votes, so they're looking around for some piece of the store that has not yet been given away.

They've forced millions of Americans to buy insurance, which is useless. I don't need insurance against something that's certain to happen, I need health care. Most of those Americans can't afford insurance, so government will have to pony up the money that supplies the insurance companies with profits. Why do I have to pay taxes that get handed over to insurance companies?

And they've removed any hint of a competitor for those insurance companies. Medicare won't expand, and we'll all have no option but to purchase insurance from private corporations with histories of lawlessness, dishonesty, and disregard for public welfare. Do you believe that having insurance means you're covered when you get sick? Ask the 1.5 million Americans who filed for bankruptcy last year, of whom over 60 percent are estimated to have been driven to the extreme by problems that included significant medical bills.

Bankruptcies due to medical bills increased by nearly 50 percent in a six-year period, from 46 percent in 2001 to 62 percent in 2007, and most of those who filed for bankruptcy were middle-class, well-educated homeowners, according to a report that will be published in the August issue of The American Journal of Medicine.

"Unless you're a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, you're one illness away from financial ruin in this country," says lead author Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., of the Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Mass. "If an illness is long enough and expensive enough, private insurance offers very little protection against medical bankruptcy, and that's the major finding in our study."

[...]

Overall, three-quarters of the people with a medically-related bankruptcy had health insurance, they say.

Pope Benedict XVI looked to be on good form as he delivered his traditional Christmas message on Friday, urging tolerance for migrants, a day after falling during an assault at St Peter's Basilica.

...In his traditional "Urbi et Orbi" message to the city and the world from the central balcony of St Peter's Basilica, the pope urged the world to rediscover the simplicity of the Christmas message and read Christmas greetings in 65 languages.

As the pope spoke to tens of thousands of people in the square below, the Vatican remained focused on Thursday night's incident, which raised again the question of how the pope can be protected while still having close contact with people.

Susanna Maiolo, 25, an Italian-Swiss national, shocked the Catholic world and Vatican security when she jumped over a barricade in the basilica, lunged at Pope Benedict, grabbed his vestments and caused him to fall to the marble floor.

The Vatican said she was "psychologically unstable" and unarmed and the pope was not hurt in any way. She was taken to an Italian hospital for psychological treatment.

(The Pope's actual words about migrants weren't newsworthy for France24.)

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

This modern era of moviemaking has plenty of peculiar challenges for actors -- on green-screen sets, for instance, they have to watch a ping-pong ball hanging from a string and convince the camera that they actually staring down some magical beastie -- but for the actors auditioning for "Avatar" the biggest challenge may have been reading a sheet of paper with words invented by a USC professor named Paul R. Frommer.

Frommer, a linguistics specialist, was brought in by "Avatar" writer-director James Cameron to create an entire functioning language for the tribe of 10-foot-tall blue aliens who inhabit Pandora, the setting for the film's conflict. Frommer tackled the project with glee -- "How often do you get an opportunity like this?" -- but the actors who had bend their tongues around the invented vocabulary and syntax were slightly less charmed by the experience.

(...)Frommer didn't start completely from scratch; Cameron had come up with about three dozen words of the Na'vi language at that point in his project document, which was like a quasi-script or a long treatment ("They called it a scriptment," Frommer said, "and that was a new word to me")  but most of the words  were character names.

(...)Frommer prepared three "sound palettes," which were collections of words and phrases that did not have meaning but did have the cadence and feel of languages. Cameron mulled over the sound files and picked the third as the best fit for the world he wanted to hear. He did not want tonal differences and variations in vowel length, for instance, but he loved the ejectives.

Then came the heavy lifting -- nailing down the sound system, word construction, the rule of syntax -- and Frommer immersed himself in the thousands of decisions required, many of them deciding what goes in and what goes out. The Na'vi language, for instance, does not have the sounds buh, duh, guh, chu, shu, and by restricting the sounds, Frommer said, a characteristic shape of the language begins to distinguish itself.

When George W. Bush moved back to Crawford, Texas, the locals organized a Welcome Home Bash for the ex-president featuring a Lone Star band that included drummer Josh Garner. During Secret Service background checks, Garner was asked, "What is your affiliation with James McMurtry?" It happened that Garner had played with McMurtry, the Austin-based rocker whom author Stephen King calls "the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation" and whose searing songs blistered Bush and Bushism. McMurtry took the news in stride, celebrating the fact that he was "on the radar" and releasing a brilliant live album and a DVD featuring the sharpest of his Bush-battering tunes, "We Can't Make It Here."

wow

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

AP Images
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)

For a number of years now I have, with wise counsel from Nation colleagues, Washington watchdogs and grassroots activists around the country, worked up a year-end list of Most Valuable Progressives for TheNation.com. Begun during the Bush/Cheney era, the project initially highlighted dissenters against unnecessary wars, unfair economic policies and assaults on civil liberties. As the popularity of the online project grew, it expanded to recognize social and cultural interventions, especially those by activists and artists whose work was not as well-known as it should be.

...

 Although the MVP list, which makes its print debut here, focuses on individuals and organizations, it is really about issues and ideas. As such, the point is not to identify perfect players so much as to make note of activists and activist groups that may not get enough recognition but that are having a demonstrable effect--in Washington and around the country. That's even more important now that Bush and Cheney are gone and progressives are faced with the daunting task of assuring that Democrats govern with principle and an adventurous impulse.