A senior Tory MP today called for an investigation into whether MI5 mistakenly recruited al-Qaida sympathisers.

Patrick Mercer, the chairman of the counter-terrorism subcommittee, said six Muslim recruits had been thrown out of the service because of serious concerns over their pasts.

The MP said he was writing to the home secretary, Alan Johnson, to call for an investigation into the matter.

Two of the six men allegedly attended al-Qaida training camps in Pakistan while the others had unexplained gaps of up to three months in their CVs.

Mercer told the Telegraph that the September 11 2001 terror attacks on the US should have prompted the British government to expand the security services, but this did not happen until the bombings on London's transport network on 7 July 2005.

"It took an attack on this country for such measures to be started," he said.

"But at this point it was an unseemly rush of which our enemies, not unsurprisingly, took advantage."

The right to end your life on the NHS will be available within a few years, campaigners forecast yesterday, as they stepped up their battle to change Britain's suicide laws.

Buoyed by the law lords' ruling in the case of Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis, they have vowed to renew their efforts to change the law. Mrs Purdy stressed yesterday that she would rather be able to die at home when she chooses, than go to Switzerland, where the laws on assisted suicide are less restrictive than in the UK.

"Swiss people don't use the Dignitas clinic, because the law allows them to die in hospital or at home," she said. "Foreigners do that, because we have no option. My choice would be to die at 90, of old age, after the medical profession had found a cure for multiple sclerosis, but because that probably won't happen, when life is unbearable I would prefer to be able to have an assisted death in this country, and not to have to travel."

Her remarks will fuel the campaign for a change in the 1961 Suicide Act, which makes it illegal under any circumstances to assist someone to commit suicide - with the result that 115 British patients have travelled to Switzerland to die there.

White, working-class estates are to be targeted by a government campaign to head off the threat from far-right extremism.

A list of "hot spots" considered susceptible to the far-right's messages is being drawn up by officials in the Department for Communities and Local Government. About 100 council wards will be identified by using crime, unemployment, and income data, supplemented by "soft intelligence" from local sources.

Each community will be targeted with "tailored" measures designed to steer them away from the far right. The tactics used will include:

*Holding "open and honest" discussions to allow residents to air grievances without being accused of racism, while tackling immigration "myths";

*Tackling segregation by bringing together people from neighbouring, but ethnically distinct communities;

*Focusing a £1bn new jobs fund on the areas, offering jobs and work experience for unemployed young people;

*Fostering more community leaders, who can help local authorities to respond to the concerns of communities;

*Forcing local authorities to be more transparent on social housing policies.

The nationwide drive comes after the British National Party (BNP) won two seats during the European elections last month.

The EU and international lending institutions have agreed a deal with Ukraine to help it provide stable supplies of Russian gas to Europe.

Loans worth $1.7bn (£1bn) were agreed in return for reforms to Ukraine's gas sector, the European Commission said.

The deal is meant to include money to help Ukrainian national gas company Naftogaz pay off large debts to Russia.

In January, many countries were left without gas because of a payment dispute between Moscow and Kiev.

The new deal will allow Ukraine to replenish its reserves of Russian gas before the winter.

Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said Ukraine had made commitments which would ensure increased transparency and the long-term viability of the industry, though he did not give details.

A funeral has been held for the two policemen killed by a car bomb on the Spanish island of Majorca on Thursday.

The service, in the Majorcan capital Palma, was attended by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and members of the royal family.

The attack was the second in 48 hours. Both have been blamed on the Basque separatist group, Eta.

Also on Friday, police made a public appeal for help in tracing six people they believed to be Eta members.

A minute's silence was also held across Spain in memory of the dead.

A government watchdog is to investigate whether companies are exploiting thousands of graduates by employing them on unpaid, long-term internships during the recession, the Guardian has learned.

The Low Pay Commission is expecting to include recommendations on internships in its annual review in the new year amid concerns that companies are taking advantage of the tough jobs market.

A Guardian inquiry has also discovered that MPs could be breaking the rules. Ministers have estimated that unpaid interns work up to 18,000 hours a week inside parliament, a saving of more than £5m a year on the national minimum wage. MPs are each given a staffing allowance of £104,000pa.

Concern has become acute because of the huge numbers leaving university this year without a job. Official figures are likely to show one million young people in total out of work by the autumn.

Under the National Minimum Wage Act, interns who work rather than observe should be paid, but employers have taken advantage of a legally grey area, and the willingness of young people, to pay just expenses, or nothing at all.

A government-commissioned review of the corporate governance of the UK banking industry should be more radical in considering reform of bank ownership structures, the City minister, Paul Myners, said today.

Lord Myners suggested that the former regulator Sir David Walker should consider changes that would give greater voting rights to shareholders who stuck with companies rather than selling up when they got into difficulties.

He said Walker should force banks to disclose the names and pay packages of their top-earning staff, regardless of whether they were on the board.

Myners, a former investment banker, told the BBC: "I would like to see David Walker step one step further outside the box of thinking he is currently in and see what are the more radical, indeed the most radical, solutions."

In February, the prime minister, Gordon Brown, commissioned Walker to carry out a review of the governance of the banking industry.

Walker produced an interim report last month which recommended strengthening boards, in particular by boosting the role of non-executives in the risk and remuneration process.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the success of Wall Street in subordinating the real economy to its wishes and needs is the con job implicit in the application of the word "innovation" to what might more accurately be described as tax evasion, regulatory arbitrage, and chicanery. Martin Mayer once described innovation as "using new technology to do that which was forbidden under the old technology."

Rob Johnson, former economist to the Senate Banking Committee, has a new article that parses how the financial services industry has managed to wrap itself in the mantle of progress, when if anything its new products have been a force for destruction rather than creation.

The backward revision economic data train continues, this time in GDP, which came in at a "better" than expected 1% while the prior quarterly data was adjusted significantly downward from -5.5% to -6.4%. Additionally, per a brand new revision to the way GDP data is presented, the GDP decline demonstrated over the past year is now the largest since World War II. Current quarter jiggering aside, downward revisions to prior quarters have left the decline in real GDP at -3.9% in the year through Q2. And to demonstrate, the severity of this downturn, the Q2 data concluded the first three-quarter consecutive period of falling GDP since 1953-1954.

Economic indicators that many were looking to for an advance signal of the inflection point of the recession did not materialize. Most notably, consumer spending fell a more than expected 1.2%, after a 0.6% improvement in Q1, and even the Q1 blip was merely a function of one-time tax rebates that concluded in May. On an adjusted basis excluding the benefits of one-off consumer fiscal stimuli, the consumer deterioration is truly unprecedented.

Another major negative data point was inventories, which fell by a record $141 billion in Q2. Yet due to the major drop in Q1, this only accounted for a 0.8% decrease in GDP, which was less then expected. And keep in mind that this percentage drop was nearly completely offset by increased governmental defense spending! Nothing like Uncle Sam to keep plugging the holes as they appear.

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In summary employment, industry data, and profits were under severe pressure over the past year, and downward revisions to growth in the year behind us are not much of a surprise. The concern is that while governmental spending was critical and necessary over the past 2 quarters to keep the collapse from being unprecedented, this form of governmental intervention is merely a non-recurring event. Try as he might, Obama is helpless to singlehandedly prop up the 70% of the $14 trillion of US GDP which is accelerating its weakening support of the economy. The increase in total unemployment rolls will puts further pressure not just for continued government subsidies in all sectors of the economy (to the chagrin and detriment of key U.S. trading partners), but also for the need of Stimulus II. Without it, disinflation conversion into outright deflation is a practical certainty.

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It is a sorry state where the only thing that is propping the world's greatest economy are promises of improvement and confidence games via the traditional media, with hopes of propping up a stock market which has long since ceased to be an indication of economic reality. The convergence between the S&P and the underlying fundamentals is, unfortunately for the administration, inevitable, especially since the government has now single-handedly taken over a key portion of major GDP output industries. Numerous empirical studies, especially from communist block countries, demonstrate just how "effective" the government is, when it decides to get directly involved in running a substantial portion of the economy.

Norris: The accompanying charts show the trend in durable goods spending, for military purposes and for other shipments of durable goods, from 2000 through this June. In June, seasonally adjusted shipments for civilian purposes were 19 percent below the average monthly figure for 2000. Shipments of military items were running 123 percent above the 2000 average.

Those figures are in nominal dollars, not adjusted for inflation. That fact may exaggerate the trend, since prices of some durable goods, like computers, have fallen over the years.

The United States remains primarily a civilian economy. The military now takes about 8 percent of all durable goods, up from 3 percent in 2000.The charts also show just how much change there was in durable goods orders, and shipments, in the first half of 2009 compared with the first half of 2008.

Over all, shipments for nonmilitary purposes were down by 20 percent, while orders fell by 27 percent. The declines in some areas were much larger, with orders for primary metal products, like iron and steel, plunging by 44 percent. The government cannot track orders for semiconductors because Intel will not provide figures, but shipments in that category were down by a third.

Taplin: "We have so hollowed out our industrial plant that the only thing we are now producing is weapons of war. The great British Historian Arnold Toynbee's theory about the decline of the Roman Empire has lessons for our current age."

ht madman

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

The first trials of opposition political activists and protesters arrested after June's disputed Iranian presidential election began today.

Up to 100 defendants were reported by Iranian media to be appearing before a court in the capital, Tehran, accused of violence following the 12 June vote.

The election sparked days of protests as thousands of Iranians took to the streets to denounce the official results, which declared victory for the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The official IRNA news agency said the defendants were charged with rioting, attacking military and government buildings, having links with armed opposition groups and conspiring against the ruling system.

Under the country's Islamic law, acting against national security - a common charge against dissidents - could be punishable by a long sentence or even the death penalty.

The abduction of the British computer expert Peter Moore and his four bodyguards was carried out partly in revenge for deadly bomb attacks in south-west Iran which Iranian officials blamed on Britain, according to a well-placed source in Baghdad.

The five men were abducted by an Iranian-backed group in 2007 and it is now believed four of them have been killed. The fate of Mr Moore remains unclear. The Iranians orchestrated the abduction through an Iraqi proxy, the Asaib al-Haq, which they largely controlled, the source said.

Their main motive was to obtain prisoners to be used as a bargaining chip to secure the release of Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asaib al-Haq, and other imprisoned militants who had split from the movement led by the Shia anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

A Burmese court has postponed its verdict in the trial of the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, her lawyer said yesterday.

Ms Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has spent 14 of the past 20 years in detention, is charged under Section 22 of a law protecting the state from "subversive elements". A guilty verdict was widely expected yesterday. "The judge adjourned the trial until 11 August. He didn't elaborate on the reason why," said Nyan Win, a lawyer for the veteran pro-democracy leader. A diplomatic source who attended the proceedings said the verdict was delayed "because of the need to interpret legal terms relating to the 1974 constitution". The charges stem from a bizarre incident in May, when an American intruder, John Yettaw, swam across Lake Inya to Ms Suu Kyi's home, where he stayed uninvited for two days

Three missing US nationals have been detained by Iranian guards after they crossed into Iran from Iraq, Iranian media confirmed.

The two men and a woman, described as tourists by Iraqi media, were reported to have been hiking in Iraq's Kurdish region which borders Iran.

Iranian media said the three were arrested inside Iran.

The Iraq-Iran border is generally well guarded but is not well marked in this area, correspondents say.

Iran's state-owned Al-Alam confirmed the arrests, quoting an informed source. No other details were given.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama on Friday expressed sadness at the death of former Philippine president Corazon Aquino, describing her as a historic figure who helped restore democracy to her country.

Obama "was deeply saddened" by news of Aquino's death, read a statement late Friday from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

Aquino "played a crucial role in Philippines history", moving the country to democratic rule through her non-violent "People Power" movement over 20 years ago.

"Her courage, determination, and moral leadership are an inspiration to us all and exemplify the best in the Filipino nation. On behalf of the American people, the President extends his deepest condolences to the Aquino family and the nation of the Philippines," the statement read.

New Zealand stands accused of "war crimes" for handing over prisoners who were mistreated by the American military during George W Bush's so-called war against terror in Afghanistan.

International legal experts say New Zealand broke the Geneva Convention and laws against torture when, from 2002, our elite SAS troops transferred 50-70 prisoners to the Americans at the Kandahar detention centre in southern Afghanistan.

The centre was known by US soldiers as "Camp Slappy", and prisoners there have described being severely beaten and tortured, drenched with water and left to freeze outside in winter.

Several other countries, including Denmark, seem to have made the same mistake.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | Checking out of 'Hotel America'

"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave..."

America was not designed to be left. The opposite in fact - it was designed to be arrived in.

It was programmed to receive and - as was the case in the Eagles' song Hotel California - there is some wonderment at the front desk when you try to go.

For effect, I sometimes exaggerate our sadness at the end of our time in America, result: confusion.

"Our British home is in south London so we'll probably all be murdered before Christmas."

"Oh, my gosh, um, why not stay?" Because you have no sense of humour, would be one answer. But it is not why we are leaving.

In more than seven years of life in America, I have come to value - to love, actually - the stolid, sunny, unchallenging, simple virtuousness of the American suburban psyche.

The woman who is to sell our house is a prime specimen. She is perky. Nothing gets her down, not even the fact that we are selling in the midst of the biggest depression since the Great Flood. In this area it is different.

"You have a lovely home!"

But she thinks we have too many books. She does not say so but she talks of creating spaces on the shelves - for snow-globes, perhaps, or silver photo frames with perfect children showing off perfect teeth.

Seen from afar, the Mont Saint Michel looks likes a gigantic sandcastle, permanently stranded at low tide. Closer, in summer-time, it resembles Disneyland. The Mont's single, narrow, medieval street is sometimes so jammed with tourists you have the impression that you could move along without your feet touching the ground.

In the 8th century, when a chapel was carved into its granite pinnacle, the Mont was a rocky island, three miles from the shore of the bay where Normandy and Brittany join. Now, on summer days, the car-parks and coach-parks sprawl like multi-coloured seaweed over the mud-flats on the landward side. The incoming sea scarcely ever wets the visitors' tyres.

How would you imagine an environmentalist would react when presented with the following proposition? A power company plans to build a new development on a stretch of wild moorland. It will be nearly seven miles long, and consist of 150 structures, each made of steel and mounted on hundreds of tons of concrete. They will be almost 500 feet high, and will be accompanied by 73 miles of road. The development will require the quarrying of 1.5m cubic metres of rock and the cutting out and dumping of up to a million cubic metres of peat.

The answer is that if you are like many modern environmentalists you will support this project without question. You will dismiss anyone who opposes it as a nimby who is probably in the pay of the coal or nuclear lobby, and you will campaign for thousands more like it to be built all over the country.

The project is, of course, a wind farm - or, if we want to be less Orwellian in our terminology, a wind power station...

To me it looks like a pair of pirouetting wolves. Others in the Independent office suggested a butterfly and one forensically inclined colleague thought it was a pelvis. Whatever you see, it could just open a window on your soul.

For decades, psychologists have used the Rorschach ink blot test to provide them with an idea of the sort of person you are. They show you a random pattern - the ink blot - ask you what you see and record your response. From that, the theory goes, they can construct a picture of how your mind works, and what may be wrong with it.

Now a Canadian doctor has spoilt the fun by posting on Wikipedia the 10 ink blot images used by Herman Rorschach, the Swiss psychiatrist who developed the test in 1921. And, in a move that has angered psychologists even more, he has posted alongside the images the commonest responses they evoke. Critics have besieged Wikipedia protesting that this is tantamount to publishing the answers to exam questions before anyone has sat the exam. It risks invalidating one of the oldest psychological tests in use.

A Boston University student has been ordered to pay $675,000 ($403,000) to four record labels for illegally downloading and sharing music.

Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., admitted he downloaded and distributed 30 songs. The only issue for the jury to decide was how much in damages to award the record labels.

Under federal law, the recording companies were entitled to $750 to $30,000 per infringement. But the law allows as much as $150,000 per track if the jury finds the infringements were willful. The maximum jurors could have awarded in Tenenbaum's case was $4.5 million.

The case is only the nation's second music downloading case against an individual to go to trial.

There was a time when French beaches were full of topless women - but no longer. As cities empty, and France makes its annual migration to the coast, Paris-based journalist Regan Kramer - a member of the feminist Les Chiennes de Garde group - asks why the breast is now back in the bikini.

In the early 70s, American and British women would struggle to stay well hidden behind their towels as they changed into or out of their bathing suits.

Even undoing their suit tops as they lay on their stomachs poolside could attract a reprimand.

So it's no wonder that the French Riviera, with its brazenly topless women, was something to fantasize about back then - both for the women who dreamt of finally feeling the sun on their hitherto hidden breasts and for all those who were happy just to look.

It all started in Saint Tropez in 1964.

Although initially banned, going topless caught on quickly and spread throughout France in under a decade.

Astronomers are puzzled by a strange bright spot which has appeared in the clouds of Venus.

The spot was first identified by an amateur astronomer on 19 July and was later confirmed by the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft.

Data from the European probe suggests the spot appeared at least four days before it was spotted from Earth.

The bright spot has since started to expand, being spread by winds in Venus's thick atmosphere.

Scientists are unsure as to what caused the bright spot tens of kilometres up. However, a volcanic eruption is a possibility.

Much of the planet is thought to have been resurfaced by volcanism. Though no firm evidence for present-day volcanism has been discovered, scientists suspect it could still be happening on Venus.

But an eruption would have needed to be extremely powerful to penetrate this far through the planet's dense, mainly carbon dioxide, atmosphere.

Trading standards officers say that consumers are being tricked into buying fake goods on the internet by companies pretending to be based in the UK.

The websites are often based in China, but use "co.uk" as part of their domain name, giving shoppers a false sense of security, they say.

It is thought that there could be as many as 480,000 websites which carry "co.uk", but which are not UK based.

The sites sell a range of goods from trainers to hair straighteners.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Brighton for the annual Pride parade through the city.

The theme for this year's event, which featured more than 50 floats, was "Pride beside the seaside".

The procession set off from Madeira Parade at 1100 BST before making its way along the seafront, North Street, past The Pavilion and to Preston Park.

It was the highlight of the week-long Pride festival, which has featured more than 100 events.

Pride spokeswoman Judith Manson said: "The parade looked fantastic, with large crowds lining the street.

"There were some superb floats."

Before the start of the parade she predicted this year's procession would be the "biggest and brightest".

Annie Leibovitz, the photographer who has taken portraits of the world's most famous people - from the Queen and Michelle Obama to David Beckham - is being sued for allegedly reneging on the terms of a $24m personal loan.

The lawsuit was filed by Art Capital, a company that might best be described as "a pawnbroker to the stars" because it offers wealthy people loans with their art collections surrendered as collateral. Art Capital claims Leibowitz, 59, has reneged on an agreement to sell her life's work to repay the debt. It has asked a court to order her to open her home and studio to its property agents.

It was only a drab union room and it was over faster than you could pluck a paper umbrella from a rum cocktail. But on Wednesday night, Havana briefly embraced Hollywood once again. Bill Murray crooned "As Time Goes By" from the film Casablanca while actors James Caan, Benicio del Toro and Robert Duvall smilingly looked on.

Whence this instant of glamour on an isle that remains mostly shuttered off from America even if this year has seen first glimmerings of change? Mr Del Toro, it turns out, was in the hall receiving an award from his Cuban peers for his performance in the title role of two-part bio-epic Che, about Che Guevara, the lieutenant to Fidel Castro in the overthrow of the Batista regime in 1959. The film, directed by Stephen Soderbergh, was a huge hit in Cuba.

His latest, Inherent Vice, is the most accessible novel he has written. Weighing in at a mere 369 pages, it can be read easily over the course of a weekend and involves no complex mathematical formulae or hypotheses. Set mainly in Los Angeles in 1970 with the Manson Family trials looming in the background, the book is a wild romp through the paranoid landscape of post-`60s America. It's very cinematic, the narrative doesn't pose any particular challenge to the average reader and it would make a great movie with, say, Terry Gilliam or Oliver Stone directing. My first take on it was "Holy Shit! Pynchon has written a Tim Dorsey novel!", and that isn't too far from the truth. But Inherent Vice is much more than that.

It might be the herald of a whole new genre: psychedelic noir. Kinky Friedman and the aforementioned Tim Dorsey have both skimmed the waters here, but neither of them has produced anything as thoroughly soaked in dope as this thing, and Pynchon's well-known talent for depicting the vast Manichean world of unseen forces bidding for dominion over souls it at its clearest and sharpest here. His ability to shift effortlessly from slapstick comedy to profound and lyrical longing is his territory exclusively. No one else does this, and I'm not sure that anyone else can....

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The cast of characters includes Nazoid ex-cons and bikers, one with a serious fixation on Ethel Merman, surfers and surf musicians (including a zombie surf band), bent cops, heroin smugglers, black militants and FBI agents, COINTELPRO informants and provocateurs, Vegas mobsters, a reanimated dead junkie, sinister dentists, an LSD guru whose main squeeze is fixated on the lost continent of Lemuria (which may or may not be resurfacing off the coast of L.A.), and a mysterious ship called The Golden Fang, the most demented and enigmatic plot device in the book.

Pynchon's knowledge of surf music is encyclopedic, he very nearly pounds us with it here, and I was delighted to see that he shares my fondness for the Bonzo Dog Band, one of the truly great under-appreciated acts of the period. His depiction of the creeping menace of corporate fascism encroaching upon the various avatars of freedom at play in the book speaks of personal experience.

It's a hugely comic novel that ends on a wistful, tragic note lost in the fog, out on the freeway, the procession of the preterite, not sure where they're going, not sure where they are. It's a love letter to the Sixties, a wake, an elegy to doomed aspirations and thwarted idealism, but it speaks to our present condition directly and clearly, with an open heart. Nobody does it better.

Cabal describes Pynchon's current work as "psychedelic noir" and Pynchon as "the last and greatest voice of the Beats."  His earlier works certainly have that sensibility, where ever he takes us in space and time.

A good companion for this paean to the '60s might be Robert Stone's PRIME GREEN:REMEMBERING THE SIXTIES.  Damascus Gate is an excellent more recent novel by Stone set in Israel and Jerusalem in the year leading up to the millennium.  I think Stone deserves to be mentioned along side Pynchon.  (Prepares for incoming stones.)  

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Avoiding Crime in Naples: Get a Criminal Guide

If you are heading off to Naples while in Italy, but feeling a little insecure about getting around the Mafia-influenced city on your own, a new scheme might help you out. About 70 ex-prisoners have been hired to help tourists find their way around Naples, while giving them tips on areas to avoid and how to protect themselves, for example, taking off expensive jewelry when approaching areas where petty crimes like pickpocketing are common.

The scheme has even got some of its funding from the European Union, although there are some local concerns that ex-criminals may not have the best "people skills" for dealing with tourists, but it sounds like something that is worth trying. If you are in Naples you will easily be able to spot these ex-con guides: they will be wearing bright yellow jackets and also carry ID cards so you can be sure you are being h

LOL

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Jarrett, the former chief executive of a Chicago real- estate company who acts as the president's liaison to the business and financial community, dismissed reports the administration and Wall Street are at odds.

"We have a Cabinet that is sensitive to the needs of the business community," she said. Business leaders who have spent time with Obama "understand his philosophy; there's no disconnect."

She said criticism of Obama's Cabinet because it doesn't include any former top executives was off base.

"We have a very diverse cabinet," she said. "We've recruited broadly in the business community."

Portrait, Valerie Jarrett | NYT | 26 July 2009

Jarrett's shared experience with the Obamas is about race -- and on a deeper level, about the coexistence, in the post-King African-American psyche, of conscience and ambition, activism and accommodation. Their identity rests on that fulcrum; it is, as Barack Obama would say, who they are.

Jarrett was born in Shirz, Iran and lived there until the age of 5

"I think the thing that's important to the president and the first lady is this whole notion of authenticity," says Martin Nesbitt, a Chicago parking-lot entrepreneur whose closeness to Barack Obama rivals that of Jarrett. "And knowing them as well and being as close a friend as she is, Valerie's always there to say: `Yeah, but you know what? That's not you. You wouldn't say that. Somebody else is saying that. Barack Obama wouldn't say that.'"...

The experience of infuriating developers and neighborhood groups alike "toughened me greatly," Jarrett says. From 1991 until 1995, she presided over a rancorous but largely successful makeover of the city's landscape, tearing down blighted housing projects and relocating residents -- those who qualified anyway -- to far more attractive new developments in racially mixed neighborhoods. (After her tenure, the infamous projects bearing her grandfather's name were demolished.)

The Plan for Transformation, "They was going to do what they was going to do"

Meanwhile, she was raising her daughter and developing a social life that revolved around an intimate community of like-minded black urban professionals who, like Jarrett, sought advancement not only for themselves but for the local African-American community. Chief among them were the Obamas. Jarrett brought Michelle into the Daley administration, attended their wedding, threw a book-signing party for the "Dreams From My Father" author and generally assumed a big-sisterly presence in the young couple's lives such that "I don't think either of them made major decisions without talking to her," Susan Sher said....

"This town loves and is dying for a whiff of a Rahm/Valerie power struggle," Cecilia Muñoz, Jarrett's director of intergovernmental affairs, says. "And there isn't one."

Too bad.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.