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Current events updatecampaign 2008

the presidency

immigration

military

iraq

china

zimbabwe

europe

society

education

science

environment

sports

business

G l e n c o e S o c i a l S t u d i e S

n a t i o n

w o r l d

S o c i e t y , S c i e n c e a n d b u S i n e S S

Open Season....................................................................2

- WORKSHEET: Interpreting polls and Graphics...............................5

Bloggers on the Bus.......................................................6

Warrior for Peace...........................................................7

The Case for Amnesty.....................................................9

Outsourcing the Iraq War............................................11

Where Iraq Works........................................................13

- WORKSHEET: the u.S. in Iraq: a Gallery of views.........................15

Dangerous Trading.......................................................16

Land of Chains and Hunger........................................18

Two Fresh Faces...........................................................20

Busy Is O.K. for Kids...................................................22

Speaking Up for Themselves.......................................23

A Deadly Mystery.........................................................25

What Now For Our Feverish Planet?.........................26

Meet the World’s Youngest Bullfighter......................28

How Agent Zero Saved D.C. .....................................29

Corn-Powered In Yuma..............................................30

Who Needs the United States?...................................31

- WORKSHEET: Current events in review..................................32

Answers..............................................................................33

C A M P A I G N 2 0 0 8

Open SeasonThe presidential election has started early, with new faces, new rules and, more than ever, a chance to make history

by Karen tuMulty

the last time a little-known arkansas governor ran for President, he waited until four months before the Iowa caucuses to make his announcement. That worked out pretty well for Bill

Clinton, so it’s understandable that until recently, Mike Huckabee thought he had plenty of time. Buoyed by early encouragement from some Republican activists and savoring his last days in the Governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Huckabee assumed that he would wait until at least the spring before announcing whether he would run in 2008. Better to move slowly and develop a sure message, he figured, than to rush in before he was ready. But this election is different. Huckabee realized that time is a luxury he doesn’t have. Top political talent was being snapped up. Antsy potential supporters were starting to look elsewhere and asking why it was taking so long for Huckabee to start his campaign. Then there’s money. Huckabee will have to raise about $100 million or so in order to be considered a serious contender. So on January 28, 2007, Huckabee made it official: He announced that he is a candidate for President.

The Iowa caucuses won’t take place until January 2008, but it sure feels like the presidential-

election season has reached full swing. There are at least 20 actual or assumed or wished-for candidates—a field that narrowed by one when John Kerry dropped out. Most of them have begun raising money, hiring staff and lining up endorsements. The roster of declared candidates

2 time, february 5, 2007

SenatorHillaryClinton

SenatorBarackObama

JohnEdwards

New York IllinoisFormerNorth CarolinaSenator

Campaign status

Looking back on the war in Iraq

Appearances inPEOPLE magazine

Number of blog posts linking to website

Amazon.comsales rank of most recent book

SenatorJohnMcCain

RudolphGiuliani

NewtGingrich

MittRomney

SenatorChuckHagel

GeorgePataki

MikeHuckabee

ArizonaFormerNew York Citymayor

FormerHouseSpeaker

FormerMassachusettsGovernor

FormerNew YorkGovernor

FormerArkansasGovernor

Nebraska

Officially in the race

“Obviously, if we knew then what we know now ... I certainlywouldn’thave voted that way”

“All the troops in the world won’t be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down”

“This is an utterdisaster ... the worst strategicmistake in the entire history of the U.S.”

“I was wrong ... It was a mistake to vote forthis warin 2002”

“I think we mustsucceed in Iraq. We cannot fail. We must do whatever’snecessary”

“TheterroristsunderstandhowimportantIraq is”

“If [everyone] continues to avoid the word failure, how can you bring about [the next] stage?”

“I don’t think we did an adequate jobexplaining... all the reasons for enteringIraq”

“We [can’t] leave Iraq in a position where it placesAmerica in greaterjeopardy”

“Now is the time to clearly and firmlydefine our goals and set a realistictimetable”

“I don’t think there’s any point in going back andreviewing or replayingthe bad decisions”



No formal decision yet







3943,204 3,437 1,586 46 54580 350208 1,459

9 5 1 0 1 0 0 0 00

5TheAudacityof Hope

3,646LivingHistory

52,789Home: The Blueprintsof Our Lives

AlGore

FormerVice President


141

6

139AnInconvenientTruth

18,550Turnaround

1,171,190Pataki:An Autobio-graphy

10,391Leadership

16,230CharacterIs Destiny

606,593Voicesof War

1,740RediscoveringGod inAmerica

2,732From Hope to Higher Ground

Percentage who have never heard of the candidate

2% 22% 15% 14% 10% 17% 58% 39% 71% 67%3%

Percentage who would definitelysupport* the candidate in election

28% 22% 15% 16% 18% 11% 7% 3% 6% 2%17%

Percentage who think it’s likely that the candidate would win*the 2008 election

62%63% 57% 50% 59% 23% 29% 19% 18% 17%40%

Percentage with a favorable view* of the candidate

58% 70% 62% 54% 70% 82% 40% 49% 45% 33% 38%

Visits to New Hampshire 0 1 9 5 2 5 12 4 2110

includes five current or former Senators—Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama on the Democratic side, John McCain and Sam Brownback on the Republican—and two Governors, Democrat Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Republican Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. In the crowd there are, for the first time, credible contenders who give voters a chance to make history on a host of fronts—by electing the first woman President or the first African American or the first Latino or the first Mormon.

The eagerness of candidates to make themselves known and liked as quickly as possible is understandable, as this will be the most wide-open

presidential race in generations and the first since 1928 in which no incumbent President or Vice President appears on a primary ballot anywhere. The states are as anxious as the candidates to get things going, and more and more of them are deciding they don’t want to be left out of the make-or-break early balloting. The calendar is still in flux, but as things look now, 20 or more states will have their primaries or caucuses before mid-February 2008. Practically speaking, that means candidates will need full-fledged national operations by this fall, and there will be little opportunity for the late-starting insurgent. It suggests that both parties will have settled on their nominees fully eight months

before Election Day, giving a depressingly early launch to what promises to be a brutal general-election campaign.

At the same time, however, it could be harder for a front runner in any primary to deliver an early knockout punch to the rest of the field. “The odd effect could be to elongate the process, not shorten it,” says former Republican chairman Ken Mehlman, who was George Bush’s 2004 campaign manager. “On each side, there will be two or three candidates who will have the resources to survive a key loss early on.”

Is all this a good thing for democracy? More than a few political hands are worried that

time, february 5, 2007 3

C A M P A I G N 2 0 0 8

SenatorHillaryClinton

SenatorBarackObama

JohnEdwards

New York IllinoisFormerNorth CarolinaSenator

Campaign status

Looking back on the war in Iraq

Appearances inPEOPLE magazine

Number of blog posts linking to website

Amazon.comsales rank of most recent book

SenatorJohnMcCain

RudolphGiuliani

NewtGingrich

MittRomney

SenatorChuckHagel

GeorgePataki

MikeHuckabee

ArizonaFormerNew York Citymayor

FormerHouseSpeaker

FormerMassachusettsGovernor

FormerNew YorkGovernor

FormerArkansasGovernor

Nebraska


“Obviously, if we knew then what we know now ... I certainlywouldn’thave voted that way”

“All the troops in the world won’t be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down”

“This is an utterdisaster ... the worst strategicmistake in the entire history of the U.S.”

“I was wrong ... It was a mistake to vote forthis warin 2002”

“I think we mustsucceed in Iraq. We cannot fail. We must do whatever’snecessary”

“TheterroristsunderstandhowimportantIraq is”

“If [everyone] continues to avoid the word failure, how can you bring about [the next] stage?”

“I don’t think we did an adequate jobexplaining... all the reasons for enteringIraq”

“We [can’t] leave Iraq in a position where it placesAmerica in greaterjeopardy”

“Now is the time to clearly and firmlydefine our goals and set a realistictimetable”

“I don’t think there’s any point in going back andreviewing or replayingthe bad decisions”










3943,204 3,437 1,586 46 54580 350208 1,459

9 5 1 0 1 0 0 0 00

5TheAudacityof Hope

3,646LivingHistory

52,789Home: The Blueprintsof Our Lives

AlGore

FormerVice President


141

6

139AnInconvenientTruth

18,550Turnaround

1,171,190Pataki:An Autobio-graphy

10,391Leadership

16,230CharacterIs Destiny

606,593Voicesof War

1,740RediscoveringGod inAmerica

2,732From Hope to Higher Ground

Percentage who have never heard of the candidate

2% 22% 15% 14% 10% 17% 58% 39% 71% 67%3%

Percentage who would definitelysupport* the candidate in election

28% 22% 15% 16% 18% 11% 7% 3% 6% 2%17%

Percentage who think it’s likely that the candidate would win*the 2008 election

62%63% 57% 50% 59% 23% 29% 19% 18% 17%40%

Percentage with a favorable view* of the candidate

58% 70% 62% 54% 70% 82% 40% 49% 45% 33% 38%

Visits to New Hampshire 0 1 9 5 2 5 12 4 2110

*Among respondents who had heard of the candidate. Sources and notes: The TIME poll was conducted Jan. 22-23 among 1,064 randomly selected registered U.S. voters by SRBI Public Affairs. The margin of error is ±3 percentage points. Visits to New Hampshire are since November 2004 according to Democracy in Action; PEOPLE magazine figures are since Jan. 1, 2006; blog posts are from Technorati.com statistics as of 12:30 p.m. Jan. 24; book sales are from Amazon.com; betting odds for winning the presidency are from British oddsmaker William Hill.

the accelerated schedule is putting high-priced consultants and moneymen in the driver’s seat, preventing candidates from figuring out their own answers to the question that famously stumped Teddy Kennedy in 1979: Why do you want to be President? The result could be a campaign that offers voters plenty of carefully managed themes but little in the way of policy solutions. “If what you’re going to do all day every day is exhaust yourself running around, meeting with precinct leaders, raising money, there’s an exhaustion, a banality and a narrowness of focus, all of which are bad for the American system,” says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is considering a bid for the g.o.p. nomination. “This may be where it ends up. It doesn’t mean it’s reasonable, rational or good for the country.”

There is value in listening to what voters have to say out-side the scripted settings of a big campaign. Vermont’s then Governor Howard Dean, a phy-sician, intended to center his 2004 campaign on health-care issues, but the more he talked to Democratic voters in Iowa, the more he realized that their passions were being stirred by the Iraq war. Hammering home his opposition to the war turned Dean—briefly—into the front runner, bringing in a flood of contributions over the Internet.

This time the Internet will be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it gives all the candidates a chance to get their message out without spending big money on television advertising. Both Obama and Clinton made their announcements on the Internet. “You don’t have to go from city to city to city to do events,” says former Senator Bob Kerrey, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1992. “You don’t have to be there for people to feel that you are.” But there will also be the caution of knowing that every stray utterance could end up on YouTube. “The margin for rhetorical errors is quite small today. Any slight misstep can be distributed in all 50 states simultaneously,” Kerrey

adds. “There will be less creativity in talking—and in thinking.”

Campaign veterans caution against taking this early frenzy of election action too seriously, noting that actual voters aren’t likely to start paying much attention until after Labor Day. But the mania has a way of feeding on itself, as every campaign seeks to impress the media, the donors and one another with its poll numbers, endorsements, financial strength and organization on the ground.

And there’s more than a bit of shadowboxing going on. Republican consultant Mike Murphy, who has worked for g.o.p. contenders John McCain and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Rom-

ney, says he always hangs a map behind his desk—and has a cam-paign intern pepper it randomly with colored stickpins—so that visitors will be impressed with his campaign’s “field operation.” The real measure of a campaign in the early stages, he says, is often what it isn’t doing. “If you hear one campaign is talking to Mayor Bag O’Doughnuts, you feel you’ve got to run and get a meeting with the mayor,” Murphy says. “The campaigns that use the preseason well are the campaigns that are secure and ringwise enough to say no a lot.”

Don’t count on it. If anything will bring these campaigns back to reality, it could be the electorate. “The saving grace is the voters, who at the end of the day insist on real substance,” says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, who was Bill Clinton’s chief domestic policy adviser. But then again, he adds, “they don’t always get what they want.” π

Questions

1. In what ways is the 2008 presidential election a chance for voters “to make history on a host of fronts”?2. According to the article, how will the 2008 elec-tion differ from all other U.S. presidential elections that have been held over the past 80 years?


C A M P A I G N 2 0 0 8

Worksheet Prepared by Time Learning Ventures 5

Name Date -worksheet

Interpreting polls and GraphicsThe public-opinion poll presented in Your Guide to a Crowded Field on pages 2 and 3 and the graphs and map presented in A World of Trouble on page 27 are packed with information. But what does it all mean? Use the questions below to sharpen your skills in reading and interpreting polls and graphics.

your Guide to a crowded Field1. What percentage of respondents who participated in this poll had never heard of Barack Obama?

2. Is the percentage of poll respondents who had never heard of John McCain greater or less than the percentage who had never heard of John Edwards? By how much?

3. True or false: Among the candidates listed, Mitt Romney has taken the most visits to New Hampshire.

4. Which candidate’s book has the highest sales rank on Amazon.com?

5. Which candidate’s book has the lowest sales rank on Amazon.com?

6. Among respondents who had heard of Rudolph Giuliani, what percentage say it’s likely that he would win the 2008 election?

7. Among respondents who had heard of Al Gore, what percentage would definitely support him if he decides to run for President?

8. What is the margin of error on this poll?

a world of trouble

9. What is the subject of this graphic?

10. According to the graphs, are carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels higher in Europe or the Middle East?

11. In what region did CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels drop significantly between 1980 and 2004?

12. Which region had the highest level of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels as of 1980?

13. Which region had the highest level of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels as of 2004?

14. Which region has the highest annual per capita emissions of carbon dioxide?

15. True or false: The combined annual per capita emissions of carbon dioxide from Africa, Central and South America, and the Middle East are greater than those from North America.

16. In the U.S., what percentage of carbon dioxide emissions come from industry?

17. True or false: In the U.S., the greatest source of carbon dioxide emissions is businesses.

18. True or false: In the U.S., homes and businesses cause more CO2 emissions than transportation.

C A M P A I G N 2 0 0 8


Bloggers on the BusThey are the hot new hires on the campaign trail. But bloggers’ bravado can backfire

by MaSSiMo calabreSi

the 2008 presidential race marks the arrival of the star blogger as the hot new cam-paign commodity, however

controversial. Almost every major candidate, from Hillary Clinton to John McCain and Mitt Romney, has hired well-known Web voices to help the candidates tap into the vast fund-raising, organization and communication potential of the Internet. That group is potentially huge: a Pew study of blogs dur-ing August 2006 found 4.8 million people blogging, commenting or sharing political content online.

But bottling the lightning of blogger authenticity is not easy. Many blogosphere activists suspect that anyone who signs on with a campaign has sold out. And in an era of tight message control, campaigns are not inclined to tolerate the independence bloggers need to maintain credibility.

Getting the marriage between campaign and blogger right is probably more important for John Edwards than for any other Democratic candidate. The former vice-presidential candidate is moving hard to the left to differentiate himself from Clinton and Barack Obama ahead of next year’s primary contests. The blogosphere, with its large number of Democratic base voters, is a natural target audience: almost a third of the estimated 5 million daily political blog readers identified themselves as strongly liberal in a George Washington University study published last October.

Edwards has given overall control of Internet strategy to Mathew Gross, the man who pioneered

that job for Howard Dean in 2004. The efforts have seemed to pay off: Edwards almost always wins the nonscientific but closely watched daily straw poll organized by liberal

blogger Markos Moulitsas. At the Democratic fund-raising site Act-Blue, he has raised $765,000 so far, nearly three times as much as any other candidate on the website.

The least tangible yet most important asset that bloggers bring to a campaign is their credibility with fans, which is earned over years and gives their endorsement of a candidate real weight. Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager in 2004, says that letting the blog-gers operate freely while on the payroll is crucial: he remembers cringing as he read Moulitsas’ criticisms of Dean even as the cam-paign kept writing $2,500 monthly retainer checks.

Candidates are discovering some potential pitfalls of putting blog-gers to use. McCain’s campaign was criticized for using one as a propa-gandist when conservative blogger Patrick Hynes admitted he was sur-

reptitiously paid by the candidate while writing critical posts about McCain’s G.O.P. rival Romney (Hynes is now publicly on the McCain payroll). In 2005, John Thune, the Democratic candidate for Senate in South Dakota, paid bloggers to attack supporters of his op-ponent. Clinton’s big blog hire for this campaign, Peter Daou, has caused a kerfuffle by buying advertisements on blogs around the country, including conservative sites, drawing criticism from liberal pundits and from bloggers whose sites were left out of the ad buy. All in all, however, blogging is bringing a dynamic new dimension to Campaign 2008—one that will be closely watched by voters, candidates and pundits alike. π

Questions

1. Why are blog readers a natural audience for John Edwards?2. What pitfalls have campaigns faced in using bloggers?

Profile pat hyneS, 34

blog site anklebitingpundits.net

blog style Sober, slightly wonkish

likes Victory in iraq, John Mccain

dislikes having to disclose in every post that Mccain is his client

friend blogs GraniteGrok, Brainster

enemy blogs LostNation.tv, Stopjohnmccain2008

Profile peter daou, 41

blog site was daoureport.salon.net, then blog.hillaryclinton.com

blog style heavy on content and analysis,* too centrist for some **likes John Kerry, the u.n., Stephen colbert

dislikes MSM, the Minutemen

friend blogs HuffPo, David Corn

enemy blogs Hugh Hewitt, Daily Kos

T H E P R E S I D E N C Y

time, july 27, 2007 7

by daVid talbot

John f. kennedy’s loyal white house aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers titled their 1972 J.F.K. memoir Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye—despite the fact that they had served him since his days as a scrawny young congres-

sional candidate in Boston. So it’s no surprise that Americans are still trying to figure out nearly half a century after his abbreviated presidency who Jack Kennedy really was. Was he a cold war hawk, as much of the history establishment and presidential hopefuls of both parties—eager to lay claim to his mantle of muscular leadership—have insisted over the years? Or was he a man ahead of his time, a peace-minded visionary trying to untie the nuclear knot that held hostage the U.S. and the Soviet Union—and the rest of the world?

As the U.S. once again finds itself in an endless war—this time against terror, or perhaps against fear itself—the question of Kennedy’s true legacy seems particularly loaded. What is the best way for America to navigate through a world where its enemies seem everywhere and nowhere at the same time? What can we learn from the way Kennedy was trying to redefine the U.S. role in the world and to invite Americans to be part of that change? Who was the real John Fitzgerald Kennedy?

The puzzle begins with Kennedy himself, a politi-cally complex man whose speeches often contained arrows as well as olive branches. This seemingly contradictory message was vividly communicated in J.F.K.’s famous Inaugural Address. While Kennedy vowed the nation “would pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of

liberty”—aggressive rhetoric that would fit right in with George W. Bush’s presidency—the young leader also dispensed with the usual Soviet bashing of his time and invited our enemy to join us in a new “quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all of humanity.” It would be hard to imagine the current occupant of the White House extending the same offer to Islamic jihadists or

Iran’s leaders. Young Jack Kennedy developed

a deep, gut-level disgust for war because of his—and his family’s— experiences in it. “All war is stupid,” he wrote home from his pt boat in the Pacific battleground of World War II. That war destroyed the fam-ily’s sense of godlike invincibility. His older brother Joe—a Navy pilot—died in a fiery explosion over the English Channel after volunteer-ing for a high-risk mission, and the young husband of “Kick” Kennedy,

J.F.K.’s beloved sister, was also killed. As Jack wrote to Claiborne Pell in 1947, the war had simply “savaged” his family. “It turned my father and brothers and sisters and I upside down and sucked all the oxygen out of our smug and comfortable assumptions.”

But Kennedy and his brothers were also bred by their father to be winners. When he entered the 1960 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, one of the dirtiest fighters in the American political arena, J.F.K. was prepared to do whatever it took to prevail. At the height of the cold war, that meant positioning himself as even more of a hawk than his Republican opponent. Kennedy had no interest in becoming another Adlai Stevenson— the high-minded liberal who was easily defeated in back-to-back elections by war hero Dwight Eisenhower. J.F.K. was determined not to be turned into a weakling on defense. So he outflanked Nixon,

Warrior for peace As President, John F. Kennedy was convinced that America’s true power came from our democratic ideals, not military might

warning that the country was falling behind Russia in the nuclear arms race and turning “the missile gap” into a major campaign theme. Kennedy also championed the cause of Cuban “freedom fighters” in their crusade to take back the island from Fidel Castro’s newly victorious regime. Kennedy’s tough posture helped secure him a wafer-thin victory on Election Day in 1960.

Working with the newly elected President at the Kennedy family’s Palm Beach villa in early January 1961, speechwriter Theodore Sorensen struggled to interweave the two sides of J.F.K. as the two men crafted the President-elect’s Inau-gural speech. Looking back, says Sorensen today, the most important line of that ringing address wasn’t, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” It was, “For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.” This peace-through-strength message “was the Kennedy policy in a nutshell,” says Sorensen. Kennedy often said he wanted his epitaph to be “He kept the peace.” Even Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban President Fidel Castro, Kennedy’s toughest foreign adversaries, came to appreciate J.F.K.’s commitment to that goal. The roly-poly Soviet leader, clowning and growling, had thrown the young President off his game when they met at the Vienna summit in 1961. But after weathering storms like the Cuban missile crisis, the two leaders had settled into a mutually respectful quest for détente. When Khrushchev got the news of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, he broke down and sobbed in the Kremlin, unable to perform his duties for days. Despite his youth, Kennedy was a “real statesman,” Khrushchev later wrote in his memoir, after he was pushed from power less than a year following J.F.K.’s death. If Kennedy had lived, he wrote, the two men could have brought peace to the world.

Taking to the road in the fall of 1961, J.F.K. told the American people why his efforts to extricate the world from the cold war’s death grip made more sense than the right’s militaristic solutions. On

November 16, Kennedy delivered a landmark speech at the University of Washington in Seattle. There was nothing “soft,” he declared that day, about averting nuclear war—America showed its true strength by refraining from military force until all other avenues were exhausted. And then Kennedy made a remarkable acknowledgment about the limits of U.S. power—one that seemed to reject his Inaugural commitment to “oppose any foe” in the world. “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only 6% of the world’s population, that we cannot impose our

will upon the other 94% of mankind, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an Ameri-can solution to every world problem.” Sorensen calls it “one of Kennedy’s great speeches on foreign policy.”

Kennedy reached another visionary pinnacle on June 10, 1963, when—eager to break the diplomatic deadlock with the Soviet Union—he

gave wing to the most poetic foreign policy speech of his life, a speech that would go down in history as the “Peace Speech.” In this stirring address, J.F.K. would do something that no other President during the cold war—and no American leader today—would dare. He attempted to humanize our enemy. “We all inhabit this small planet,” he said. “We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” The following month, the U.S. and the Soviet Union reached agreement on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the first significant restraint put on the superpowers’ doomsday arms race.

Under relentless pressures to go to war, Kennedy kept the peace. He talked to his enemies; he recog-nized the limits of American power; he understood that our true power comes from our democratic ide-als, not our military strength.

He is still a man ahead of his time. π

Questions

1. Why did J.F.K. develop a disgust for war?2. According to speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, what was the essence of J.F.K.’s policy on war and peace? Cite a speech in which J.F.K. expressed this view.

T H E P R E S I D E N C Y

8 time, january 15, 2007

What can we learn from the way Kennedy was trying to redefine

the u.S. role in the world and to invite

americans to be part of that change?

by nathan thornburGh/BEARDSTOWN, ILLINOIS

amnesty has emerged as the pariah term of the immigration debate, avoided even by those who believe in its goals. But what are the alternatives to letting illegals stay?

Deporting millions? Devising other punishments? Doing nothing at all? Few places have struggled with these questions as much as rural Beardstown, Illinois, where an April immigration raid at the town’s largest employer exposed a community that is both dependent on its undocumented workers and deeply resentful of their presence.

amnesty can work politicallyOne day before the June 5 Republican presidential debate, Senator John McCain tried to preempt the coming criticism. He knew he would spend the debate flanked by nine candidates waiting to rip into the Senate compromise bill he helped write, which calls for a combination of legalization, border security and guest-worker programs. So in a Miami speech on June 4, he sought to distance himself from the “a” word. “Critics of the bill attack this as amnesty,” he said. “[But] we impose fines, fees and other requirements as punishment.” The bill, he insisted, is not amnesty.

Yes, it is. Whether you fine illegal aliens or stick them in English classes or make them say a hundred Hail Marys, at the end of the day, illegals would be allowed to stay and become citizens under this bill. That’s amnesty. And that’s a good thing for America. The estimated 12 million illegals are by their sheer numbers undeportable. More important, they are too enmeshed in a healthy U.S. economy to be extracted.

Yet the word “amnesty” was still used as a weap-on at the g.o.p. debate—McCain’s rivals clobbered him with the term, and he turned it on them as

well, saying that doing nothing is “silent and de facto amnesty.” Why are the bill’s supporters so skittish about the word? If the past five years of immigration debate have taught us anything, it’s that railing against the illegal invasion is easy, popular and effective. Now

politicians are being roasted for con-ceding a reality: illegal or not, most of those 12 million are here to stay.

The heat extends from President George W. Bush to McCain and all the way down to the mayor of Beard-stown, where a decade of intense immigration has turned a nearly all-white town into a place in which 72% of the prekindergarten class is His-panic. “If I got up and said I’m gonna run each and every Mexican out of town on a donkey, the voters here would cheer me on,” says Mayor Bob

Walters. “But I’m not going to say that. It’s not our job to deport them all, and it’s not the right thing to do.”

Many of Beardstown’s white residents were pleased by the federal raid on the massive pork-processing plant at the edge of town, owned by multinational meatpacker Cargill Meat Solutions (the April 4 opera-tion targeted a subcontractor that was cleaning the plant, not Cargill itself). The raids netted 62 people, most of whom were sent to federal detention centers that night and later deported. “It’s good they got those people,” Oscar Cluney, 18, told me. “The whole situa-tion here makes me kind of mad.”

A lot of voters are upset too—but they are deeply conflicted about the right solution. A recent Gallup poll found that 60% of people who were following the immigration bill closely were opposed to it. But an April USA Today/Gallup poll found that just 14% of respondents wanted to send illegal immigrants home with no chance of returning to the U.S. The public seems confused about the definition of amnesty.

Amnesty, as defined by its opponents, has come to mean getting forgiveness for free. But under the

I M M I G R A T I O N

time, june 18, 2007 9

the Case for amnestyWhy legalizing the illegals makes sense for America

Senate’s proposed compromise, the path for illegals is not anything close to easy. Under the compromise, the 12 million would face a 13-year process including $5,000 in fines per person, benchmarks for learning English and an onerous “touchback” provision that calls for the head of each household to leave job and family behind and return to his or her home country for an indeterminate amount of time to queue up for the final green card. There’s nothing free about that.

amnesty won’t depress wages — globalization has already done thatAcross the U.S., Americans feel threatened by the newcomers. Part of the anxiety is undeniably race based. Others worry about language preservation. Yes, it’s true: Mexicans speak Spanish. But Mexicans also know that English is the key to getting ahead in the U.S. When Beardstown opened a bilingual program at the elementary school, Hispanic parents were as worried as white parents about missing out on an English-only education. Assimilation is slow, but it is inevitable. Beardstown was settled in the 19th century by unapologetically German immigrants, but you won’t hear so much as a gesundheit uttered there today. What is lacking, in Beardstown as in Washing-ton, is faith in America’s ability to change immigrants more than they change the U.S.

Economic anxiety animates much of the resistance to amnesty, particularly from the left. Real wages have been stagnant for nearly three decades throughout the U.S., and for a place like working-class Beardstown, an influx of Spanish-speaking workers seems like add-ing insult to economic injury. But if times are tough

in rural America, are illegal immigrants to blame? It turns out that the truly good jobs left Beardstown long before the Mexicans came. In the mid-’80s, the Cargill plant was owned by Oscar Mayer. Bob Walters was the union representative at the plant back then, and he says it offered good jobs and good benefits, but globalization and other corporate pressures caught up with them. The company shuttered and sold the plant in 1987. Five months later, it reopened under a new owner, with lower wages and fewer benefits. “The starting wage went from $11 an hour to $7.50,” says Walters. “The meatpacking industry ought to be ashamed of what they did to towns like ours.”

The first Hispanics didn’t come to work at Cargill en masse until years later. And as Cargill likes to point out, more white workers work at the factory than before. The plant has in fact grown, thanks largely to hardworking migrants, not just from Mexico but from more than 20 other countries. The business seems robust for the time being. The workforce is unionized again. Salaries are creeping up. A Wal-Mart Super-center is on the way. Cargill’s strength has turned Beardstown into a place that investors are paying at-tention to. And the town is leading its pitch with the fact that it has a large Hispanic workforce.

The economics of immigration remain a mys-terious science. Everyone has a pet study proving immigration suppresses wages or builds economies. Many towns, like many companies, are faced with a stark choice in the global economy: grow or die. So Beardstown is growing, a healthy economy sur-rounded by dying rural towns. The U.S. is in the same situation. For all the stresses of immigration, it

is the only industrialized nation with a population that is growing fast enough and that is young enough to provide the kind of workforce. The illegals are part of the reason for that—and amnesty ensures that competitive advantage. π

Questions

1. Where does the mayor of Beard-stown, Illinois, stand on the amnesty debate?2. Under the compromise proposed by the Senate, what steps would immigrants have to take to remain in the U.S.?

I M M I G R A T I O N

10 time, june 18, 2007

M I L I T A R Y

time, march 26, 2007 11

by brian bennett

In many ways, katy helvenston is like any mother who has lost a son in Iraq. She talks to others who have survived their kids. She wonders whether she could have done more to keep him out of harm’s way. She breaks down

in tears at random intervals.But Helvenston has problems that military mothers

do not have. Her son Scott, who was killed in 2004 at the age of 38, was neither a soldier nor, really, a civilian. He was an ex-Navy seal who worked for a private security firm called Blackwater. Instead of a headstone at Arlington, he has his name etched in a rock at Blackwater’s corporate campus in North Carolina. And Helvenston says that three years later, she still has no real answers from the company about what led to her son’s death—a death that she believes was due in part to the company’s negligence.

You may remember how Scott Helvenston and his three colleagues died. Video of their killings made newscasts around the world on March 31, 2004, when a Blackwater security convoy was ambushed by gunmen in Fallujah, Iraq. The four men were dragged from their cars, mutilated by a mob and set on fire. The torsos of Helvenston and fellow Blackwater employee Jerry Zovko were hung from the green steel girders of a bridge on the edge of town. In Fallujah, it’s still known as Blackwater Bridge.

It was a loss not just for four families. It was a turning point in an already foundering war. An ecstatic mob in the center of a major Iraqi town had torn Americans limb from limb in front of rolling cameras. A series of catastrophic recriminations followed. Muqtada al-Sadr, emboldened by the attack, called for the first Shi‘ite uprising against the occupation. U.S. Marines retook Fallujah but flattened parts of the city in the process and set the stage for future cycles of invasion and uprising that have scarred the city—and the country—ever since.

It is telling that this watershed moment involved American employees of a private security contractor. Of all the changes in tactics that have made the war in Iraq distinct from prior U.S. engagements, perhaps no shift is as profound as the massive hiring—and varied deployment—of private contractors in combat zones. There are an estimated 100,000 contractors in Iraq, compared with a fraction of that the last time the U.S. was fighting there, and they are not working in just mess halls. They are bodyguards, snipers in the field, translators and interrogators. They staff checkpoints at Army bases and run supply convoys through the streets of Iraq. As with much of the occupation, the emergence of guns for hire among this contractor group was not part of the original plan. The number of contractors swelled, the insurgency grew, and the military was unable to provide adequate security for all of the civilian workforce. So companies like Blackwater began offering those services—at a high price—in the military’s stead.

Helvenston, along with the families of the three men killed with her son—Wes Batalona, Mike Teague and Zovko—are suing Blackwater for wrongful death in a case that, after more than two years and a stop before the Supreme Court, has landed in front of a North Carolina state judge. The families want to know what happened that day in Fallujah. But they also want to press their claims that Blackwater, in its zeal

Outsourcing the Iraq WarFour families want to know how their men, all guns for hire, died

to exploit this unexpected market for private security men, showed a callous disregard for the safety of its employees. In the process, the case of the Fallujah Four, as some now refer to them, has stirred a nest of questions about accountability, oversight and regula-tions governing for-profit gunslingers in war zones.

Before 9/11, Blackwater mostly trained swat teams and other specialized law-enforcement officers at its 6,000-acre campus on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. With the war on terrorism, however, a new niche business developed. The State Department did not have the internal resources or Marines to protect all of its diplomats and overseas embassies, but Blackwater had access to a deep roster of former special-forces soldiers who, it argued, could do the job. It wasn’t long before the company was offering a broad range of services, from protection by bodyguards to aerial surveillance, for the State Department, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. In 2003, Black-water landed its first truly high-profile contract: guarding Ambassador L. Paul Bremer in Iraq, at the cost of $21 million in 11 months. Since June 2004, Black-water has been paid more than $320 million out of a $1 billion, five-year State Department budget for the Worldwide Personal Protective Service, which protects U.S. officials and some for-eign officials in conflict zones.

These days Blackwater is expand-ing the number and type of aircraft it can provide, including blimps for aerial surveillance. Last year it won the lucrative contract to protect the U.S. embassy in Iraq—the largest American embassy in the world. Blackwater vice chairman Cofer Black says the com-pany could also help provide muscle in peacekeeping missions. “Helping people and doing good is a good thing,” he told Time. “Blackwater is the premier com-pany in the training area and security solutions area. If my mother needed protection, if you’re going to Iraq, you’d be nuts not to hire someone like Blackwater.”

The Pentagon seems likely to keep creating oppor-tunities for private contractors. The agency’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, a strategic assessment of the future for the U.S. war machine, envisions their expanded use. The report describes contractors as an

integral part of the “total force” and describes ways to further integrate contractors into war-fighting capa-bility. The previous strategic report, published before 9/11, doesn’t even contain the word “contractors.”

Despite the Pentagon’s support, U.S. lawmakers are calling for a dramatic reappraisal of how the mili-tary uses these men. There is certain to be greater demand for transparency. Since private contractors now are not required to open their books, no one can be certain how many are in Iraq; even the Pentagon doesn’t keep track. Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, who has taken a personal interest in Katy Helvenston’s story, introduced a bill in the House that would, for the first time, require the creation of databases to monitor the deployment and cost of contractors. Only last fall did the Department of Defense conduct a poll of some contracting companies, which came back with the suspiciously round num-

ber of 100,000 contractors operating in Iraq. “An owner of a circus,” says Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors, “faces more regulation and inspection than a private military company.”

the night before scott died, katy Helvenston turned her phone’s ringer off while she slept. When she woke up, there was a message from Scott. “Hi, Mom. It’s your son. It’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon here,” he said. “We’re all safe with our body armor. It’s all good, Mom.

Just wanted to say I’m safe and that I love you.”For almost three years, Katy has kicked herself

for missing his call. She wonders what Scott would have told her about some of the things that were going wrong with his mission that day. Maybe she could have persuaded him not to go. She knows it’s too late to keep him safe, but she still wants to know what happened after he hung up the phone. And because her son died for his company, not his country, she’s in for a fight. π

Questions

1. How many contractors are estimated to be in Iraq, and what tasks are they performing?2. What changes regarding the military’s use of contractors are lawmakers calling for?

12 time, march 26, 2007

M I L I T A R Y

Of all the changes that make the Iraq war distinct from

prior conflicts, perhaps none is as

profound as the massive hiring of

private contractors in combat zones.

time, april 23, 2007 13

I R A Q

by andrew lee butterS / ARBIL, IRAQ

Inhabitants of arbil—the capital of the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq—get a little flutter in their hearts when they see planes coming in to land. Built after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Arbil’s international airport

is a symbol to Kurds that their years of isolation as an oppressed ethnic minority are over, and that the Kurdish region, unlike the rest of Iraq, is open for business. Passengers flying into Baghdad have to endure a corkscrew landing to avoid possible surface- to-air-missiles. But a trip to Arbil is so safe that I was the only passenger on my flight packing body armor. Upon arrival, my biggest problem was the $50 fare charged for a 10-minute cab ride by the drivers of Hello Taxi, and finding a reservation at one of the city’s packed hotels.

Such is life in Kurdistan, the last beacon of stabil-ity amid the wreckage of the U.S. enterprise in Iraq. But even there, stability is a relative term. True, the airport is putting in a runway long enough to accommodate jumbo jets, but for now it will be used mainly for U.S. military flights.

Iraqi Kurds have been in control of their own region since 1991, when, with the help of the American- enforced no-fly zone, they drove Saddam’s forces out of northern Iraq. But now, four years after the liberation of the rest of the country, Kurd-ish Iraq is undergoing an identity crisis. On the one hand it is a rare American success story in the Middle East, a stable territory run by a secular leadership committed to economic and political reform and sitting on a huge pool of oil. On the other hand, it is a tiny landlocked region, uncomfortably attached to a war-ravaged nation, and surrounded by unfriendly neighbors.

Despite outward signs of tranquility, the fate of Kurd-istan remains unresolved. Whether it will continue as an inspiring example of what the rest of Iraq could look like, or become engulfed by the country’s vio-lence depends as much on what happens to the barely functioning Iraqi state as on the Kurds themselves.

The central question, of course, is how long the Kurds intend to remain a part of Iraq—and what will happen if they make moves toward secession. The overwhelming majority of Kurds would like to break free of Iraq and form an independent nation. So far, Kurdish leaders have been a constructive force in holding Iraq together, helping to write and pass a national constitution, which, though it granted great powers to the regions, has kept Iraq intact as a federal state. Kurds are serving at the highest levels of the Iraqi government, including as President, Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.

But the further Iraq slides into civil war, the more the Kurds will want to insulate themselves from it by carving out more political and economic autonomy for themselves. Though Kurds have thus far accommodated themselves to the American policy for a unified Iraq, that spirit of cooperation won’t last forever. Even if they stop short of outright secession, the Kurds could still open up new

conflicts in Iraq if their impatience with the Baghdad government prompts them to take action on their own—especially in determining the future status of Kirkuk, the disputed oil-rich city that the Kurds lay claim to. Said Iraq’s Kurdish

President, Massoud Barzani, during the farewell visit of departing U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad: “Our patience is not unlimited.”

When I first traveled to the Kurdish North in August of 2004 to escape the heat and violence of Baghdad, the “Switzerland of

Where Iraq WorksKurdish Iraq is a largely peaceful corner of a war-torn nation. But its desire for independence could make it the next battleground

baghdad

basra

mosulArbil

kirkuk

i r a Q

KURDISH AREA

Iraq” was disappointing in just one respect: summers on the high plains of Arbil are almost as scorching. Otherwise, Kurdistan was a refuge. In Baghdad, jour-nalists had begun hiring security guards and erecting guarded compounds. Up north in Arbil, as a visiting American, I was practically given keys to the city. I did my reporting by foot or hailed taxis from the street, spent my evenings in pizza parlors, and slept on the roof of my apartment with the sound of crickets rather than Kalashnikovs in the cooling night air.

Since then the differences between Kurdistan and Iraq proper have become even more dramatic. The plains around Arbil—once a glaring semidesert wasteland—are exploding with luxury housing developments. The Turkish developers of Naz City, a high-rise condominium complex, are trying to sell house-proud Kurds on modern apartment living. An American company wants to build Iraq’s first ski resort in the mountains near the Turkish and Iranian borders. While citizens in Baghdad struggle to survive, a sign in Arbil declares that the city is “Striving for Perfection.”

The Kurds’ most important achieve-ment has been to keep their region free of Iraq’s insurgency and sectar-ian warfare with their army of 70,000 peshmerga soldiers. Not a single American soldier has been killed in Kurdistan since the start of the war in Iraq, and there hasn’t been a major terrorist attack in Arbil since June 2005.

Take a walk, however, in any one of this city’s safe and prosperous neighborhoods and you’ll quickly see that the other Iraq isn’t so far away. Some 150,000 displaced Iraqi Arabs have taken refuge in Kurdistan from the conflict in the central and southern parts of the country. Kurdish officials require Arab Iraqis trying to enter Kurdistan to have a Kurdish resident vouch for their character. As a result, the Arab refugee population is largely middle class, with a glut of doctors, lawyers and other professionals. But as the number of newcomers swells, tensions are rising. Not many Kurds forget the years of repression from Iraq’s Arab majority, and many now blame Arabs for rising home prices. While I was waiting to speak to the president of Salahaddin University in Arbil, which recently added around 200 Arab professors to its

faculty, a visiting Kurdish archeologist offered his opinion on the subject: “From Muhammad until now, Arabs are rotten to the bone,” he said. “Even when they are being friendly to you.” Non-Kurdish Iraqis, for their part, resent being treated as second-class citizens in Kurdish Iraq. “Why do I need permission to live in my own country?” said Walaa Matti, an Assyrian Christian who recently fled his home in Mosul and now works in the business center of a hotel in Arbil. “I’m Iraqi and this is my country, but I feel like a stranger.”

Kurdistan’s tenuous relationship with Arab Iraq is even more evident some 45 miles south, in Kirkuk. The city is less than a two-hour drive from Arbil, but the road trip into the other Iraq is a spooky one. To the left, there’s a chain of forts left over from the Iran-Iraq war, crumbling masonry monsters that look like they were built according to World War I specifica-

tions. The Hamreen mountains to the right are practically deserted save for a series of sentry posts silhouetted along the ridgeline.

U.S. officials and Kurdish leaders know that unilateral moves by Kurds—to take Kirkuk on their own or to drop out of the Iraqi government—could not only provoke the ire of Iraq’s Arab

majority but also impel intervention by neighbors of Iraq such as Turkey, Iran and Syria that have restive Kurdish minorities of their own. Falah Mustafa Bakir, head of the Kurdish government’s office of foreign relations, told me that declaring independence would be “political suicide.”

Just four years since the fall of Saddam, most Kurds may be willing to remain a part of Iraq for now, but few want their destinies to remain tied to a poor, failing state beset by sectarian carnage. Over time, the push for a free and independent Kurdistan may become irresistible. In a bid to manage expectations, the Kurdish leadership has introduced a new slogan, echoed in mosques and newspaper editorials: “Be grateful.” But eventually, even gratitude runs out. π

Questions

1. Describe the “identity crisis” facing Kurdish Iraq. 2. According to the writer, what has been the Kurds’ greatest achievement in recent years?

I R A Q

14 time, april 23, 2007

While citizens in Baghdad struggle

to survive, a sign in arbil declares that the city is “striving

for perfection”

Worksheet Prepared by Time Learning Ventures 15

Name Date -worksheet

the u.S. in Iraq: a Gallery of viewsIn Where Iraq Works on pages 13 and 14, Andrew Lee Butters refers to Kurdistan as “the last beacon of stability amid the wreckage of the U.S. enterprise in Iraq.” Four years after the U.S. invasion of Baghdad, numerous commentators have offered perspectives on America’s ongoing role in Iraq. Study the three cartoons at left. Then answer the questions below.

1. Describe the action taking place in each image. What figures are shown? What symbols do you see?

2. In the top cartoon, what does the soldier in the glass cabinet represent? What development has prompted President Bush to send additional troops to Iraq?

3. What does the plane symbolize in the second cartoon? What comment is this cartoonist making on the state of the Iraq war?

4. What is the cartoonist who created the bottom image saying about the impact of the Iraq war on domestic affairs in the United States? How does he make this point?

5. How do you think President Bush would respond to each of these cartoons? Be specific in your answers.

For Further Exploration Select a presidential candidate and, using Internet or library resources, conduct research to find out where he or she stands on Iraq. What course of action does this candidate want the U.S. to take in Iraq? Does he or she support the withdrawal of U.S. troops? Under what circumstances? Present your findings in a one-page report.

by Jyoti thottaM

On a warm friday afternoon in june, about 50,000 boxes of toothpaste got their last squeeze inside an industrial trash com-pactor in Homestead, Florida. They were yanked from the shelves of discount stores

and bathroom cabinets after a nationwide recall warned that the toothpaste contained a chemical, diethylene glycol, that could lead to kidney failure. Francisco Botta, who distributed the toothpaste for his family’s wholesale business in Miami, stocked his warehouse bathroom with the stuff. “I used it every day,” he says. “I told everybody to stop.”

Like so many other things that Americans buy these days without thinking, those tubes of Dr. Cool, Superdent and Everfresh Smile2 began their life in a factory in China—in this case, in Wuxi, a city of 4.5 million about 80 miles west of Shanghai. They were sold by Goldcredit International Enterprises, which is based in a gated community called Lakebank Elegant Garden, within sight of China’s Taihu Lake. It makes not just toothpaste but also pencil sharpeners and balloons, hand sanitizer and toothbrushes. “What we exported is in line with the Chinese-government standards,” Goldcredit business manager Shi Jun says about the toothpaste. Adds manager Hu Keyu: “The Chinese government already issued a statement. What more do you want from us?”

Would a nontoxic product be asking too much? On the 8,000-mile journey between Wuxi and Home-stead, Goldcredit’s products move, in effect, through

time. When a product made in China enters the U.S., it arrives with a kind of unfettered capitalism that hasn’t existed in America for a century—uninhibited by regulation, lawsuits or, until recently, public out-rage. It’s difficult even for a businessman who tries to follow the rules. “You go to China, you check the place out, check the quality of the products,” Botta says. But after the recall—of a product labeled safe in China—he is wary. He visited a big candy factory while he was in Wuxi. “I wouldn’t buy that,” he says. But he’ll continue importing school supplies and shower curtains.

It’s the same calculation that millions of American consumers are making since the recent recalls of deadly pet food, lead-paint-tainted toy trains and shredding tires made in China. The U.S. imported 40% of its consumer goods from China last year. But there is no practical way to gauge, other than by reputation, whether a Chinese import is as safe as it is cheap. So should you worry more about the extension cords or the TV? Screen the kids’ toys but not their shoes? Until China’s capitalism develops its own set of rules and limits, is that our only option in a made-in-China world?

C H I N A

dangerous tradingRecalls of tainted pet food, toothpaste, toys and tires show the dark side of Asia’s boom. What it will take to make imports safer

who buyS chineSe GoodS

$203.9billion

canada$15.5

u.s.

hong kong$155.4

taiwan $20.7

south korea$44.5

Japan$91.7

c h i n A

germany $40.3the netherlands$30.8

Britain$24.2

France$13.9

italy$15.9

u.A.e. $11.4

spain$11.5

russia $15.8

india$14.6

Australia$13.6

singapore$23.2

the u.s. accounts for one-fifth of all chinese exports. china’s top export destinations, 2006

Note: China figures do not include Hong KongSources: International Monetary Fund; General Administration of Customs (Beijing) —Reported by Maximilian Moehlmann

Malaysia$13.5

s o u t hA M e r i c A

A F r i c A

All figures in billions

0

100

$200

’85 ’90 ’95 ’00 ’06

$55.2billion

goodsfrom

chinato u.s.

goodsfrom u.s.to china

A GROWINGTREND

since 2003, the u.s. trade deficit with china has more than doubled

More than 60 million cans of cat and dog food were recalled owing to 16 pet deaths

The FDA ordered recalls after a poisonous ingredient was found in toothpaste

More than 1.5 million imported toy trains were made using lead paint

Nearly 450,000 tires were recalled in June because of potential tread separation

GETTY AP

JEFFREY B. KILLINO, ESQ.

the World’s Factory After a series of product recalls, from pet food to tires, American regulators are paying more attention to goods exported to the U.S. from China, which have surged over the past decade to more than $200 billion. How the U.S. stacks up against China’s other big trading partners

16 time, july 9, 2007

Every time a federal agency recalls a Chinese product—as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ordered June 26 with nearly 450,000 tires—consumers get jolted with concern but also relief that someone is paying attention. Yet the volume of imports from China is straining the capacity of U.S. regulators to watch them, and those goods are over-whelming China’s efforts to reform the eight agencies that regulate its consumer products.

More than 40% of recalls by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, including all the toys recalled this year and 79% of toys last year, involved products from China. The volume of consumer goods from China has nearly tripled since 1997, but the agency’s budget has increased just 12%, to $62 million, over the past five years.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (fda) is also struggling to keep up. Shipments of fda-regulated goods from China have jumped fourfold over the past decade, according to the Congressional Research Service. But the fda has only 1,317 field investigators for 320 ports of entry. The agency inspects just 0.7% of all imports under its purview, half of what it did 10 years ago. We’ve dropped our guard.

Sure, it would be great if the fda could stamp every import with its seal of approval the way the Department of Agriculture does: meat, poultry and eggs can’t be imported without meeting its standards. But David Acheson, who was appointed the fda’s

assistant commissioner for food protection after the recall of tainted pet food in March, says that kind of monitoring for 16 million shipments of everything

from cough syrup to toothpaste would be “too complex and cumbersome.”

So instead the fda saves its fire for the high-risk goods that have caused health problems. That’s what happened in early June with Chinese-made toothpaste. Following 100 deaths in Panama linked to cough syrup containing diethylene glycol (the ingredient had been mislabeled as glycerin, which is harmless), the fda issued an import alert on all tooth-paste made in China, tested the tubes it could find for the toxin and recalled the questionable batches.

That approach makes the fda a “tombstone” agency: nothing happens unless someone dies. Changing that would require improving China’s food and product safety at the source. Despite our buying power, the U.S. government has very little leverage to impose new restrictions on Chinese goods, in part because it is lobbying China to open up its markets to U.S. goods.

The real test of China’s progress won’t be whether it can produce more rules or testing labs. It’s whether Chinese consumers will demand—and receive—the same assurance of safety that Western consumers do. David Zweig, a scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, compares China’s brand of capitalism to the Wild West. In late 19th-century Amer-ica, snake-oil salesmen became notorious for their dangerous, counterfeit cure-alls, and there were no laws to stop them. By 1906, Americans had had enough bad medicine, and Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation of the fda. Bureaucracy, corruption and lack of a free press are huge obstacles to a similar change in China, but there are encouraging signs. In 2004 the deaths of 13 babies who were fed adulterated milk powder

touched off a national furor. China’s leaders, says Zweig, “know that Chinese people have this sense that they deserve better.” π

Questions

1. What percentage of U.S. consumer imports came from China in 2006?2. In what sense is the fda a “tombstone” agency?

time, july 9, 2007 17

C H I N A

who buyS chineSe GoodS

$203.9billion

canada$15.5

u.s.

hong kong$155.4

taiwan $20.7

south korea$44.5

Japan$91.7

c h i n A

germany $40.3the netherlands$30.8

Britain$24.2

France$13.9

italy$15.9

u.A.e. $11.4

spain$11.5

russia $15.8

india$14.6

Australia$13.6

singapore$23.2

the u.s. accounts for one-fifth of all chinese exports. china’s top export destinations, 2006

Note: China figures do not include Hong KongSources: International Monetary Fund; General Administration of Customs (Beijing) —Reported by Maximilian Moehlmann

Malaysia$13.5

s o u t hA M e r i c A

A F r i c A

All figures in billions

0

100

$200

’85 ’90 ’95 ’00 ’06

$55.2billion

goodsfrom

chinato u.s.

goodsfrom u.s.to china

A GROWINGTREND

since 2003, the u.s. trade deficit with china has more than doubled





GETTY AP

JEFFREY B. KILLINO, ESQ.





by aleX perry / BULAWAYO, ZIMBABWE

a bad jail wastes a body quickly. when i entered Cell 6 at Gwanda police station, I was fit. After five days in a concrete and iron-bar tank, with no food and only a few sips of water, my skin was flaking and my clothes

were slipping off. A prison blanket had given me lice. The water I had palmed from a rusty tap in the shower had given me diarrhea. Under a 24-hour light, I hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time. And I stank.

It took 22 hours to get arrested in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. On March 28, I flew into Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, with the intention of reporting on the ruinous policies that have turned Zimbabwe into one of the poorest and most repressive countries in the world. Foreign journalists are routinely refused permission to travel to Zimbabwe, so I entered the country as a tourist and drove south from Bulawayo to the goldfields of the Great Dyke. I was following tens of thousands of Zimbabweans who, as the economy collapsed, headed to the gold-mining region of Matabeleland, hoping the red hills might give up something to live on. My goal was to get a firsthand look at the misery facing ordinary people in Zimbabwe today. But I had little notion of just how close I would get.

To maintain my pretense as a tourist, I would have been safer staying north, near the game parks and Victoria Falls. But Matabeleland is a microcosm of Zimbabwe’s implosion. Thousands in the region are dying of malnutrition. Hundreds of thousands survive by trapping wild animals or bare-handed mining. When I arrived in the gold-rush town of West Nicholson, I met with a local miner in his bungalow. Several times during our 10-minute chat, he would step out for a few moments. When I emerged from his house, two plainclothes officers were waiting to detain me.

In the 1980s, Zimbabwe was the second largest economy in southern Africa. Millions of tourists visited each year to see hippos, lions and the awesome drama of Victoria Falls. And Zimbabwe—a nation of 11 million to 13 million people (nobody knows the precise number, partly because so many have fled)—gave black Africans the best education and health care on the continent. But over the past two decades, Mugabe’s single-minded protection of his power has devastated the economy and turned the country into a police state. Unemployment is at 80%, living

standards are back to their 1953 levels, and the World Health Organization says life expectancy is 34 for women and 37 for men—the lowest in the world. Inflation hit 1,792.9% in February and is predicted to reach 3,700% by year’s end. (A currency free fall of that magnitude means, for instance, a single brick today costs more than a three-

bedroom house with a swimming pool did in 1990.)Arriving in the country is like touching down the

day after a cataclysm—a place where the clocks have stopped. There are roads but few cars, and roadside railings are torn up at the stumps. The shops feature bare shelves and price boards for imaginary products that are changed three times a day. Telephones don’t work, the power is out, and blackened factory stacks spew no smoke. “What do people eat?” I asked a lawyer I met. “Good question,” he replied.

The one thing Zimbabwe is in no danger of run-ning out of is pictures of “Comrade” Robert Gabriel Mugabe. He looks down from framed photographs in every store, gas station and government office, a small man in gold glasses. When I landed in Zimbabwe, he was front-page news in every newspaper, railing against the West, which could “go hang” for plotting “monkey business” against his country. A few weeks earlier, I caught a television interview on his 83rd birthday. “Some people say I am a dictator,” he said at

Land of Chains and HungerIn a harrowing eyewitness account, the author comes face to face with the misery of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe

Z I M B A B W E

18 time, april 23, 2007

Mugabe’s protection of his power has devastated the

economy and turned Zimbabwe into a police state.

Z I M B A B W E

his 25-bedroom villa in the capital, Harare, complete with Italian-marble bathrooms and roof tiles from Shanghai. “My own people say I am handsome.”

My 10-minute conversation with the miner in West Nicholson turned out to be my last interview. The plainclothes officers brought me to the West Nicholson police station, where I spent the night. The next day I was driven north to the provincial police headquarters at Gwanda. My escorts accused me of planning to write “negative” stories about Zimbabwe—as if arresting me would dispose me to more positive stories.

At Gwanda, I was interrogated by a series of detectives and was denied a lawyer and a phone call. The detective in charge of my case introduced himself as “Moyo” and disclosed that he approved of a beating if the crime warranted it. I was driven to the prosecutors’ office and charged with breaching sections 79 and 80, Chapter 10: 27, of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, “working as a journalist without accreditation.” The maximum sentence was two years.

Ranking officers like Moyo would not grant me permission to visit the toilet or brush my teeth with-out approval from their superiors. The walls of his office made clear that the regime saw the opposition less as a threat than as an affront. The top crime on a list hanging above Moyo’s desk was “insulting or undermining the authority of the President.”

In truth, Zimbabwe’s opposition remains weak. The main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (m.d.c.), peaked in 2002, when leader Morgan Tsvangirai polled 42% to Mugabe’s 56% in presidential elections. Since then the anti-Mugabe movement has faltered because of infighting and intimidation. Mugabe has unleashed a campaign of beatings, mass arrests and shootings of his political opponents.

Mugabe has also targeted some longstanding foreign adversaries. The West, particularly Britain and the U.S., is plotting to recolonize Zimba-bwe, he charges. That paranoia courses through every level of the country’s security apparatus. A directive on Moyo’s office wall reminded him his job was to “investigate all cases of a political nature, suppress all civil commotion and gather political intelligence.”

I began to see my captors as victims as much as persecutors. Many had not been paid. A drive to Bulawayo, ostensibly to search my hotel room, became a shopping trip as five officers crammed into the car and spent the day hunting roadside stalls for cheap tomatoes, queuing at gas stations and atms, seeking out a country butcher with a reputation for value. “I cannot lie to you. The situation is very bad,” said Moyo. “You can see for yourself.”

Court took 10 minutes. I pleaded guilty and was fined 100 Zimbabwean dollars—at present values, half a U.S. cent. Outside, two men in suits and sunglasses watched as I left court. I jumped in my rental car and, calculating that the authorities would expect me to head south to South Africa or west to Botswana, drove 373 miles north to Zambia. An hour after nightfall, the road became muddy. A rumbling filled the air. I looked left, and there, silver in the moonlight, framed between two cliffs, was Victoria Falls. I was out.

My last night in jail was a Sunday. I was falling asleep on the floor when I felt a low harmony echoing up through the concrete of the cell next door. There was bass, tenor and rhythm. For two hours, prisoners filled the jail with music. These were songs of suffering and acceptance, of beauty and soul undiminished. π

Questions

1. What is the condition of Zimbabwe’s economy?2. Why was Alex Perry arrested and imprisoned?

time, april 23, 2007 19

AUSTRIA

ITALY

SPAIN

FRANCE

PORTUGAL

HUNGARYROMANIA

BULGARIA

TURKEY

UKRAINECZECH

SLOVAKIA

GREECE

CYPRUS

BELGIUM

SERBIA

ALBANIA

MOLDOVA

LUX.

MONTENEGRO

BOSNIACROATIA

SLOVENIASWITZ.

MACEDONIA

KENYA

ETHIOPIA

ERITREA

SUDAN

EGYPT

NIGER

MAURITANIAMALI

NIGERIASOMALIA

NAMIBIA

LIBYA

CHAD

SOUTH AFRICA

TANZANIA

ZAIRE

ANGOLA

ALGERIA

MADAGASCARMOZAMBIQUE

BOTSWANA

ZAMBIA

GABON

CENTRAL AFRICANREPUBLIC

TUNISIA

MOROCCO

UGANDA

SWAZILAND

LESOTHO

MALAWI

BURUNDI

RWANDA

TOGO

BENINGHANA

IVORY COAST

LIBERIA

SIERRA LEONE

GUINEABURKINA

GAMBIA

CAMEROON

SAO TOME & PRINCIPE

ZIMBABWE

CONGO

EQUATORIAL GUINEA

WESTERNSAHARA

DJIBOUTI

SENEGAL

GUINEA BISSAU

Canary IslandsJORDAN

ISRAEL

LEBANON

ARMENIAAZERBAIJAN

GEORGIAKYRGYZSTAN

TAJIKISTAN

KUWAIT

QATAR

U. A. E.

YEMEN

SYRIA

IRAQ IRAN

OMANSAUDI ARABIA

RUSSIA

AFGHANISTAN

PAKISTAN

KAZAKHSTAN

TURKMENISTAN

UZBEKISTAN

by peter GuMbel / PARIS

Half a century ago, the prime minister of France came up with a novel idea. Then as now, the world was occupied with the threat of war in the Middle East—this one sparked by Egypt’s decision to nationalize the Suez

Canal. As troops from France and Britain geared up to attempt to take back the canal, Guy Mollet, France’s Socialist Prime Minister, secretly presented his British counterpart Anthony Eden with a proposal: What if France and Britain became one country?

The idea was quickly dropped, and when its details were disclosed for the first time earlier this year, citizens of both countries had to suppress their dis-belief. These days, it seems, France and Britain are separated by much more than the English Channel. Aside from their distinctive histories and identities, Britain and France in recent years have been on to-tally different trajectories—London up, Paris down. Personal relations between the two leaders of the past decade, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Tony Blair, have been prickly. Opposing positions on everything from the war in Iraq to European farm subsidies have at times degenerated into public shouting matches.

But the pendulum of history is swinging again. In Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown, the two nations are getting new leaders who are closer in outlook and personality

than any French President and British Prime Minister in living memory. While nobody dreams of reviving the Mollet plan, the two men have an opportunity to put Britain and France back into the same orbit—with potentially significant consequences for the U.S., which for the first time in years is being cheered rather than jeered by a French leader.

At first sight, Brown and Sarkozy hardly seem like soul mates. Sarkozy, who won an easy victory in the French presidential run-off election on May 6, is the son of a Hungarian émigré aristocrat. A mediocre student who still refers painfully to the “humiliations” of his childhood, Sarkozy embraced

Gaullist conservatism as a young man, when most of his French contemporaries were reveling in the make-love-not-war spirit of the late 1960s. He triumphed in the French vote by consistently painting himself as the candidate able to lift the nation out of its economic troubles. “Together we will write a new page in our history,” he promised the country in his victory speech.

By contrast, Brown represents continuity: as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he has steered British government economic policy for the past decade. Brown is unlike Sar-kozy in that his ambition has been evident since his youth. The son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, Brown so excelled at school that he was accepted into the University of Edinburgh at age 16, then worked his way up through the ranks of Britain’s Labour Party.

E U R O P E

two Fresh FacesThe arrival of new leaders in France and Britain could lead to closer ties between America’s oldest European allies. Here’s why Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy are good news for the U.S.

20 time, may 21, 2007

Brown

56

Ph.D., University of Edinburgh

One

Two sons

Labour

Debt relief

Cape Cod, Mass.

Age

educAtion

MArriAges

children

PArty

Pet issue

VAcAtion sPot

sArkozy

52

Law degree, University of

Paris, Nanterre

Two

Three sons

Gaullist

Immigration

French Atlantic Coast

how they Measure up

For all these differences of background, however, Sarkozy and Brown have some unexpected similari-ties on the big issues: economics, national identity and foreign policy. Both stress the importance of a strong work ethic and advocate free markets—but with limits. Both have a controversial nationalist bent: while Brown talks about the importance of “British-ness” and has openly resisted the idea of giving up the pound to join Europe’s common currency, Sarkozy is seeking to establish tighter citizenship criteria for immigrants. Both feel warm about the U.S. but are cool toward President Bush. Neither gets emotional over the idea of European unity, preferring to see what works and what doesn’t. Both are impatient, often short-tempered and, say their critics, sometimes authoritarian. And both have had to wait their turn to assume power. Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank, says Sarkozy, Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel could create a dynamic team at Europe’s core. All three, he says, “are Atlanticist, economically liberal—more or less—and take a pragmatic rather than ideological approach to the European Union and its institutions.”

The two men know each other from Sarkozy’s brief stint as French Finance Minister in 2004; they met regularly at E.U. ministerial meet-ings in Brussels. In a country where being called Anglo-Saxon is often an insult, Sarkozy is openly admiring of the ability of Britain and the U.S. to create jobs. He promises to deregu-late France’s labor market and lower the nearly 9% unemployment rate, one of the highest in Europe and almost double that of Britain. During a debate with his Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal, he lauded Britain—along with Ireland, Sweden and Denmark—for its success in combatting unemployment. Opponents tried to paint Sarkozy as an American-style neoconservative, but it was a winning message. “He’s as economically liberal as it’s possible to be for a French politician,” says Grant.

France has languished in the economic doldrums for the past few years, even as Britain has caught up and overtaken it. In 2002, according to statistics of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and

Development, Britain’s national income per capita exceeded France’s for the first time, and since then the gap has grown sharply. Brits, long the poorer neighbors, are now on average 10% richer than the French. That’s one important factor feeding a deepen-ing mood of pessimism about the future in France—a mood that Sarkozy is pledging to change.

Brown has challenges of his own. As the architect of Labour’s economic policies, he has presided over an economy that has broken records by notching up an astonishing 58 consecutive quarters of growth. Yet he still faces the huge task of raising the quality of public services, particularly the health system, up to French levels. (France’s healthcare system is the top-ranked in the world.) Both countries have a spending prob-lem: French national debt has quintupled since 1980, while Britain is running a budget deficit equivalent to 3.5% of its gdp, according to economist Peter Spencer. While consumer spending has helped fuel Britain’s powerful growth, Spencer says, “the bottom line is that we are all living beyond our means.”

So what will the emergence of Europe’s new lead-ers mean for the rest of the world? Britain has an-

nounced plans to withdraw 1,600 of its 7,700 troops from Iraq this year, with the rest to leave in 2008. That’s a pledge Brown is likely to stick to, given the disdain for the war in Britain.

Sarkozy and Brown have hinted that they intend to push Washington to pay more attention to issues beyond the Middle East, such as Third World de-velopment and global warming. Per-suading the current U.S. Administra-tion to take more dramatic action on

the environment may turn out to be a formidable task. But if the arrival of Sarkozy and Brown leads to closer cooperation on global issues between the U.S.’s two oldest European allies, then Washington will benefit in the long run. The world tends to be a more agree-able place when your friends get along. π

Questions

1. What similarities exist between Sarkozy and Brown’s positions on big issues? 2. What areas are Sarkozy and Brown expected to urge Washington to focus on in greater detail?

E U R O P E

time, may 21, 2007 21

Sarkozy and Brown have some unexpected

similarities on the big issues:

economics, national identity

and foreign policy.

Busy Is O.K. For KidsDespite all the dire warnings, most children flourish when their schedules are packed

by John cloud

One of the neuroses that afflicts a youth-obsessed society is the fear that childhood isn’t what it used to be. Every few years a new

book or magazine article warns that kids are being rushed through childhood with barely a second to skin a knee. Three new offerings have recently been published in the lost-childhood genre: a report in the journal Pediatrics on the loss of free playtime and two books from David Elkind, a psychologist whose The Hurried Child—first published in 1981 and now available in a 25th-anniversary edition—has made him the dean of too-fast-too-soon studies.

The idea that kids should slow down and trade electronic pleasures for pastoral ones is a fine example of transference. (Aren’t adults really the ones who want to lose the BlackBerry and go fish-ing?) But there’s not much evidence that the ways childhood has changed in the past 25 years—less unstructured play, more gadgets, rough college admis-sions—are actually hurting kids. Just the opposite.

The Hurried Child has sold some 500,000 copies, and at 75, Elkind still enjoys an active speaking sched-ule. The book hypothesized that nearly every social ill affecting kids—ranging from substance abuse to bad grades—was rooted in society’s relentless message that the young should act older. But kids’ lives have become even more rushed, scheduled and digitized than Elkind could have imagined in 1981, yet many psychosocial metrics of childhood have improved. The teen pregnancy rate in 2000, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has figures, was the lowest since 1976. There’s less

school violence and juvenile crime. sat scores have risen during the same period.

Elkind extends his philosophy in his new book, The Power of Play, a lamentation on the gradual replace-ment of toy trucks and dollhouses with “robo pets and battery-operated cars,” which “don’t leave much to the imagination.” (But didn’t the toy truck seem out-rageously modern to a Victorian who grew up playing with wood blocks and marbles?) Similarly, in its jour-nal this month, the American Academy of Pediatrics protests the ebb of recess, arguing that “undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts ...” But most

schools—at least 70%—haven’t cut recess. And according to the Univer-sity of Maryland’s Sandra Hofferth, who has studied children’s time use, while noncomputer playtime has shrunk, kids now spend more hours studying, reading and participating in youth groups, art and other hobbies. Kids also take more time to shop and groom but not to watch tv: Hofferth and her colleagues have found that

9-to-12-year-olds were watching less than 15 hours a week in 2002—down from 20 hours in 1981.

Not all the news is good. Kids spend less time outdoors these days (only 25 minutes a week for the average 6-to-12-year-old) and more time with Wiis and iPods. Kids’ lives are also indisputably more scheduled now, partly because the baby boomlet has made élite college admissions tougher. But last year a team led by Joseph Mahoney of the Yale psychol-ogy department wrote a paper for the journal Social Policy Report showing that most of the scheduling is beneficial: kids’ well-being tends to improve when they participate in extracurriculars. The paper notes that only 6% of adolescents spend more than 20 hours a week in organized activities. And there’s no consistent evidence that even these enthusiasts are worse off. Instead they report better well-being. They even eat meals with their parents more often than those who don’t participate at all. π

Questions

1. What is Elkind’s argument in The Hurried Child? 2. What are Mahoney’s findings about scheduling?

S O C I E T Y

22 time, january 29, 2007

there’s not much evidence that says

less unstructured play, more gadgets and

rough college admissions are

actually hurting kids.

by reynoldS holdinG

the first morning of the 2005 school year held more than the typical jitters for Toni Kay Scott. One moment, the seventh-grader, known as T.K., was stepping from her mom’s Ford pickup to join friends

in front of Redwood Middle School in Napa, California. Minutes later, the police officer assigned to watch arriving students was steering her toward the principal’s office.

Scott had violated Redwood’s dress code. The code aimed to squelch gangs by requiring students to wear only certain clothes and solid colors. Scott could change her outfit and stay at school, or she could spend the day at home. “I said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with what I’m wearing. I’m going home,’ ” recalls Scott, a near straight-A student. “I thought it was kind of ridiculous.”

Her parents thought the dress code more than just ridiculous: they considered it unconstitutional. In March they and a dozen other Redwood parents and students sued the school and the Napa Valley Unified School District in state court. They claim that students have a fundamental right to express them-selves through their attire—to speak, in effect, through the kind of clothes that Scott insisted on wearing that first day of school: a denim skirt and socks depicting Tigger, a character from Winnie-the-Pooh.

We have come a long way in the four decades since three students in Des Moines, Iowa, wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War—and won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision establishing the right to speak freely in school. Back then lawsuits over school speech were almost unheard of, and they usually involved weighty issues such as racial equality and the right to political protest. But since 1998, stu-dents have sued schools in astounding numbers, with as many as 94 disciplinary cases reaching appellate

courts in one year. And while lots of these suits claim First Amendment violations, the speech involved can feel trivial: inappropriate clothes, online insults or, as in a recent Supreme Court case, bong hits 4 jesus written on a banner.

That the bong-hits case, known officially as Morse v. Frederick, has come before the court is a sign of the times. An unprecedented wave of similar suits has clogged the lower courts in recent years, pro-pelled, say legal experts, by several developments: stricter rules in the aftermath of gang violence and school shootings, a crackdown on alarming Internet comments and a perceived hostility toward religion in public schools.

While the lawsuits may strengthen student rights, they come at a high cost for schools—in diminished authority as well as dollars. “We used to defer to the professional discretion of teachers and administra-tors,” says Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University and the author of Judging School Discipline. “Now our schools are run increasingly by lawyers and judges.”

The notion that whatever the teacher says goes began to fade in the 1960s. Outrage over racism, poverty and the Vietnam War made questioning authority a righteous cause in schools as well as on the streets. But students also attracted attention from

time, may 21, 2007 23

E D U C A T I O N

Speaking up for themselvesTeens are upping the battle over their right to free speech in school. But should they go to court to protect their rights?

E D U C A T I O N

public-interest lawyers who believed that stronger rights of expression would allow children to get a better education. Their first big victory came in 1969 with the black-armband case, called Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. In a 7-to-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech ... at the schoolhouse gate” as long as they don’t cause “substantial disruption” at school. Courts gave stu-dents even more rights over the next decade, but the rise of drugs and alcohol on campus made judges increasingly sympathetic to schools. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court cut back the rights granted in Tinker, telling schools they could limit student speech that was “vulgar and offensive” or “sponsored” by the school in, for example, a student newspaper.

Student lawsuits started to dry up after the back-lash. From 1969 to 1975, an annual average of 76 school-discipline cases made their way to appeals courts, according to Arum, but from 1976 to 1989, the annual average dropped to 29.

In 2002 the Juneau-Douglas High School in Alaska let students cross the street to watch the Olympic torch pass on its way to Salt Lake City. As TV cameras rolled, senior Joseph Frederick and several friends unfurled a banner that said bong hits 4 jesus. Frederick testi-fied that the banner was supposed to be “meaningless and funny, in order to get on television.” But the school principal suspended Frederick for 10 days.

Frederick sued the school for violation of his free-speech rights and won in the lower federal courts. But the Supreme Court accepted the school’s appeal, making this the most significant high-court case since Tinker to test a school’s authority to suppress student dissent. In a 5-4 ruling, the court declared schools may punish “student speech celebrating drug use” without violating the Constitution. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts stressed that “drug abuse can cause severe and permanent damage to the health and well-being of young people” and so “deterring drug use by school children” is justification enough for silencing a student.

The problem, says Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in dissent, is that the Roberts opinion invents “out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions

drugs.” Stevens is fine with a rule that prohibits stu-dents from promoting illegal drugs. But no matter what the principal argued in this case, Frederick’s banner—in Stevens’ view—conveyed “nonsense,” speech “that was never meant to persuade anyone to do anything.”

Stevens explains that most students knew the ban-ner had no meaning, because most of them “do not shed their brains at the schoolhouse gate.” And so to allow schools to ban speech that merely alludes to drugs might, he says, squelch “a full and frank discussion of the costs and benefits of the attempt to prohibit the use of marijuana,” a topic at the heart of political debate.

In the end, says Arum, “Tinker was all about explicitly political topics, and the courts were sym-pathetic about protecting students’ fundamental political rights. It’s quite different when you’re talking about bong hits.” Or, for that matter, Tigger socks. π

Questions

1. What did the Supreme Court rule in the Tinker case? 2. What is your view of the Morse ruling? Explain.

24 time, may 21, 2007

Landmark Cases these cases were milestones in the ongoing battle over freedom of expression in public schools.

1943 west VirginiA stAte BoArd oF educAtion V. BArnette

The U.S. Supreme Court acknowledges free-speech rights for students, striking down a West Virginia law requiring public-school children to salute the flag

1969tinker V. des Moines indePendent coMMunity school district

The Supreme Court strengthens speech rights for students when it rules that they may protest the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands to school

1986 Bethel school district no. 403 V. FrAser

With this case, the court determines that schools may bar student speech that is vulgar, lewd or offensive

1988 hAzelwood school district V. kuhlMeier

Limits on school-sponsored speech like stories in student newspapers are permissible under the First Amendment, says the high court

2007 Morse V. Frederick The Supreme Court rules that a high school

principal may punish students for displaying a banner that reads “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” across the street from school

S C I E N C E

time, may 7, 2007 25

a deadly MysteryA savage outbreak of Ebola virus is killing gorillas. Now scientists have figured out why

by Michael d. leMonicK

there’s nothing like an outbreak of ebola virus to guarantee screaming headlines. That’s largely due to the mid-1990s bestseller The Hot Zone, which described

the disease’s horrifying course in gruesome detail, leaving many readers to believe that Ebola posed a looming threat to human existence. The truth is, however, that since the first recorded human cases in the 1970s, only a few hundred people have died from it. Of all the diseases you need to be afraid of, Ebola is near the bottom of the list.

Unless, that is, you’re a gorilla. Over the past decade or so, tens of thousands of the great apes have died of Ebola in central Africa, along with similar numbers of chimpanzees. A report in the American Naturalist explains just why Ebola is spreading among the animals so furiously—and shows how it could be stopped, according to lead author Peter Walsh of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany. The epidemiological tactics used to treat outbreaks of human scourges like E. coli hold the answer.

Ebola is transmitted by contact with body fluids, and it is rapidly fatal. When people get it, they become so sick so fast—their organs literally liquefy— that others try to stay away from them. What’s more, the mere fact of their quick immobility means they can’t carry the virus very far. Ebola usually burns through an isolated village or community and then has nowhere else to go.

“People always assumed it was the same for goril-las,” says Walsh. This belief made particular sense

since gorillas live in relatively compact packs that don’t interact much with other packs. Ebola, how-ever, is oddly aggressive in great apes, ignoring pack boundaries and advancing across great-ape habitats at a rate of about 30 miles a year. Heading into the field to study the outbreaks, as well as animal behavior that could be contributing to them, Walsh and his team soon cracked the mystery.

It turns out that animal epidemiologists had based all their Ebola assumptions on mountain gorillas—the kind studied by Dian Fossey—and not on Western gorillas, which were actually dying. The mountain variety subsists mostly on leaves, which are available all over the forest. Western gorillas, by contrast, live mostly on fruit, a scarcer resource that draws differ-

ent groups of gorillas and chimpanzees to the same trees at different times of day. “They defecate and urinate in and around the trees,” says Walsh, leaving infected body fluids to sicken the next group. Gorillas also examine the bodies of dead apes they come upon, perhaps because they’re smart enough to want to know if whatever claimed that life is a threat to them. This provides another

means of direct transmission. Now that the mechanics of the epidemic are

known, putting the brakes on it could be compara-tively easy. Ebola vaccines exist, but public-service announcements won’t exactly bring gorillas to a vaccination center where the entire population can be inoculated. Instead, epidemiologists can use selective-vaccination techniques, which work with human communities when universal vaccination isn’t practical. Just inoculate a few gorilla groups along the infection chain, and when the virus reaches them, it is stopped cold.

“We’re not talking about massive vaccination anymore,” says Walsh. “We’re talking about getting a vaccine into key gorilla populations.” And the cost? Perhaps as little as $2 million—a small price to save our closest evolutionary kin from extinction. π

Questions

1. Why has the Ebola virus been spreading so rapidly among the gorilla population? 2. How could Ebola be stopped among gorillas?

a new report explains why the

ebola is spreading so furiously among gorillas—and shows

how it could be stopped.

E N V I R O N M E N T

26 time, april 9, 2007

by JeFFrey KluGer

It was probably too much to believe that human beings would be responsible stewards of the planet. If droughts and wildfires, floods and crop failures, collapsing climate-sensitive species and images of drowning polar bears didn’t quiet

most of the remaining global-warming doubters, the hurricane-driven destruction of New Orleans did. What’s more, the heat is only continuing to rise. This past year was the hottest on record in the U.S.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report on the state of planetary warm-ing in February that was surprising only in its utter lack of hedging. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” the report stated. What’s more, there is “very high confidence” that human activities since 1750 have played a significant role by overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide; as a result, solar heat is retained that would otherwise radiate away. “The science,” says Christine Todd Whitman, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (epa), “now is getting to the point where it’s pretty hard to deny.” Indeed it is. Atmospheric levels of CO2 were 379 parts per million (p.p.m.) in 2005, higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years. Of the 12 warmest years on record, 11 occurred between 1995 and 2006.

So if the diagnosis is in, what’s the cure? There is little question that the most powerful players— government and industry—have to take the lead. Still, individuals too can move the carbon needle. You can choose a hybrid vehicle, but simply tuning up your car and properly inflating the tires will help too. Buying carbon offsets can reduce the impact of your cross-continental travel, provided you can ensure where your money’s really going. But cleaning

up the wreckage left by 250 years of industrial produc-tion will require fundamental changes in a society hooked on its fossil fuels. Here are some of the most dramatic shifts that are occurring:

the Scientists’ SolutionsIf the Earth is choking on greenhouse gases, it’s not hard to see why. Global carbon dioxide output last year approached a staggering 32 billion tons, with about 25% of that coming from the U.S. Turning off the carbon spigot is the first step, and many of the solutions are familiar: windmills, solar panels, nuclear plants. Biofuels, however, are the real growth science, particularly after President George W. Bush called for the U.S. to quintuple its production of biofuels, primarily ethanol. That was good news to American corn farmers, who produce the crop from which the overwhelming share of domestic ethanol is made. But the manufacture of corn ethanol is still inefficient: the process burns up almost as much energy as it produces. (See page 30 for more on ethanol.)

Building a Better SkyscraperIf you want to see what the future of architecture looks like, take a look at the new federal building in San Francisco, but don’t look too long. The glinting, 18-story steel tower jangles badly against the gentle skyline of San Francisco, but it’s beautiful on the inside. There’s the absence of conventional heating and air condition-ing in 70% of the floor space. There’s the natural light that fills the workspace during much of the day. There are the windows that actually open and close, and the awninglike fins that filter out heat and glare. It’s easy to overlook how important a building like this one could be. While the power and auto industries get the bulk of the blame for the planet’s carbon crisis, the business

What now for Our Feverish planet?It will take a lot of people—including us—to reverse climate change

E N V I R O N M E N T

of operating office buildings and homes is responsible for 38% of U.S. CO2 emissions.

the Green CompanyWhen a business with more than 7,000 stores, 1.8 million employees and $345 billion in sales changes its ways, it’s hard not to notice. Wal-Mart has made itself the darling of greens with its pledge to install solar panels on many of its stores, switch to hybrid vehicles, conserve water and even buy wild-caught salmon. More important, its mandates are having an incalculable ripple effect through its 60,000 suppli-ers, which are being asked to join Wal-Mart’s effort to reduce packaging, waste and energy use.

Change on the HillJubilant Democrats crowed about big changes to come when they won majorities in the House and Senate last November. James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has referred to global warming as the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” has been replaced by California’s Barbara Boxer as chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public

Works. In his four years in the post, Inhofe held a total of five hearings on climate change. The true measure of success for the Democrats will be whether Congress finally passes a law to limit greenhouse emissions. That effort began in earnest in 2003, when Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman sponsored a bill that would set limits on industrial greenhouse gases and let companies that do better than required sell pollution credits to those that fail to meet targets.

States and cities aren’t waiting for Congress to act. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger commit-ted his state to a 25% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020; he was promptly sued by carmakers that would have to increase fuel efficiency to sell there. But if California prevails, the size of its market could turn its regulations into a de facto national standard—and that, in turn, would be good news for the entire planet. π

Questions

1. What did the U.N. panel on climate change con-clude in its newly issued report?2. What percentage of U.S. CO2 emissions come from operating office buildings and homes?

time, april 9, 2007 27

0

2

4

6

8

a World of trouble total carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, by region

20041980 20041980 20041980 20041980 20041980 20041980 20041980

U.S.

Others

North America Central andSouth America

Africa Europe MiddleEast

Eurasia Asia andOceania

China

Japan

India

Others

Billions of metric tons

SOURCES OF CO2 EMISSIONSIN THE U.S.

33% Industry 28% Homes 21% Businesses

Other

17%

1%

Transportation

Includes natural gas flares, cement production and nonfuel emissions

Source: Energy Information Administration

2.3

1.1

2.6

Circles indicate annual per capitaCO2 emissions,in metric tons

15.7

7.9

6.8

8.6

28 time, june 11, 2007

Meet the World’s Youngest BullfighterWith no minimum age for matadors, Mexico has children as young as 10 picking up the sword. Can they save a dying sport?

by tiM padGett

rafita mirabal’s statuesque pose might lead observers to think he is a classical ballet dancer—until they spot the 450-pound bull snorting in front of him. Dressed in a

matador’s “suit of lights,” he coaxes the beast to make two angry passes under his outstretched cape, so close that the horns and snout brush his sequined thighs. But on the third pass, the bull’s head slams Rafita’s torso and lifts him into the air until he frees him-self. Rafita walks away rubbing his hip, more irked than injured. “You let him see your body instead of the cape,” says his coach, Juan Ramírez. “The bull learns from your mistakes.”

Rafita has a more serious issue on his mind. At this bullfight rehearsal in a private ring outside his hometown, Aguascalientes, in central Mexico, Rafita wants to attempt something he’s never done but will have to learn someday: kill the bull. That is what makes bullfighting a life-and-death allegory to its fans. As Ramírez nods, Rafita locks eyes with the animal’s, aims his sword between its shoulders and thrusts—only to watch the blade bounce off the bull into the dirt. Mind you, Rafita doesn’t lack the courage or the skill. He lacks the height and the heft. Rafita is only 10 years old and weighs 80 pounds.

Rafita is thought to be the youngest torero, or bull-fighter, in the world. He is also one of the most popu-lar in Mexico. Together with a handful of other child stars, Rafita has reawakened interest in bullfighting when it looked headed for obscurity in Mexico. “I get bored running up and down a field with a ball,” says Rafita, the oldest child of a lower-middle-class family. “But if I don’t turn just right when a bull is charging

at me—that’s more exciting.” No exact box-office figures are available, but experts like bullfighting writer Juan Antonio de Labra say kid toreros are raising formerly flat attendance at many of Mexico’s 300 bullrings. “When a youth has such amazing talent, be it bullfighting or golf,” says de Labra, “it’s good for the show.” The revival comes as welcome news to Aguascalientes, an otherwise quiet provincial capital where bullfighting has long been king.

The sport’s revival is not without controversy. The children have sparked an impassioned debate over whether bullfighting is a noble drama that preserves Mexican heritage or a barbaric spectacle that, in the words of animal-rights activist Eduardo Lamazón, “has no place in a society like ours that’s trying to

modernize.” The argument got louder in May after a Spanish child torero, Jairo Miguel Sánchez, 14, was gored by a 900-pound bull at an Aguascalientes festival. A horn punctured his lung and plunged near his heart. Local newspapers breathlessly reported that the boy cried out, “Daddy, I’m dying!” as he was rushed to the hospital. (He’s now recovering back home in Spain.)

Toreros must be at least 16 in Spain. That’s a big reason Mexico, which has no age limits, attracts young sensations like Jairo Miguel, who was report-edly set to make about $250,000 this year. Rafita fights smaller bulls, so he earns much less. Still, he was thrown and trampled during his major debut last year, getting a bruise on his face the size and color of a hockey puck.

Critics question his family’s judgment. But the boy’s hard-working parents compare themselves to others raising a prodigy. “I don’t know where Rafita’s courage comes from,” says his father Rafael, watching the boy perform a few cape passes. “But the more we watch him, the more we know he can handle the dangers. As long as this is his passion, we’ll do battle alongside him.” π

Questions

1. What debate has been sparked in Mexico by the emergence of young bullfighters like Rafita Mirabal?2. How do Rafita’s parents respond to critics who question their judgment?

“When a youth has such amazing talent,

be it bullfighting or golf, it’s good for

the show.”—Juan Antonio de Labra,

bullfighting expert

S P O R T S

time, february 19, 2007 29

S P O R T S

How agent Zero Saved d.C.The intense motivations and wacky philosophy of the NBA’s least conventional superstar

by Sean GreGory / WASHINGTON

Gilbert arenas, wonder guard of the Washington Wizards, goes by a superhero nickname, Agent Zero, as in the number on his uniform. Here’s a more appropriate label:

Agent Weirdo. Why? This is a guy who at halftime of one game took a shower—fully uni-formed—to cool down. His quirky habits are many and, Arenas admits, “pointless,” including watching bad dvds, wearing vintage jerseys, and his latest, collecting crappy basketballs. Arenas is amassing the synthetic balls the nba unveiled and dumped this season after players complained about cutting their fingers on them.

But despite these quirks, residents of Washington, D.C., can cheer for a team with playoff potential and an mvp-caliber player in the prime of his career. Led by Arenas, the nba’s second leading scorer (at 29.4 points per game) and least conventional superstar, the Wizards had the second best record in the admit-tedly woeful Eastern Conference as of February. In Washington, only the Pentagon has a longer-range arsenal than Arenas does. And Arenas may be more accurate. He has scored more than 50 points three times this season, including a 60-point outing against the Lakers in Los Angeles. He also hit two game- winning three-pointers at the buzzer and made dozens of acrobatic shots. The ability to hit long bombs or flash to the basket makes Arenas a nightmare to cover. “He’s storybook,” says former nba guard and current tnt broadcaster Kenny Smith, of Arenas.

To reach an élite level, Arenas has fought through personal and professional rejections, including his exclusion from the Team U.S.A. roster that played (below expectations) in the World Championship last summer. It’s an omission that baffles Smith: “He’s doing things only the greatest players in the league have done.”

And enjoying every minute of it, which in today’s image-driven sports world is also, sadly, somewhat strange. “nba players are so scared of being viewed in a certain way that they can’t be who they want to be,” Arenas says. “They put on a mask.” Arenas takes it off—just for fun. During the home opener this season, he wore a satin boxing robe for pregame introduc-tions. He reaches out to struggling kids on MySpace and has sponsored a video-game team.

Gilbertology offers many unusual tenets, among them: 1) Thin the air in your house with a special air conditioner to mimic living at a high altitude, so that when you’re at low altitude—say, on a basketball court in Washington—you can breathe easily. 2) Hold extra practice sessions at midnight. 3) Pull pranks

on fellow players and dare them to retaliate. (During a road trip, Arenas filled teammate Andray Blatche’s hotel bathtub with coffee.) And 4) dream of a post-playing career in advertising.

Although Arenas played high school ball in Los Angeles, backyard

power ucla didn’t recruit him. So he dashed to the desert—the University of Arizona—where he took the number 0—in his mind, the number of minutes his doubters thought he would play as a freshman. After helping the Wildcats reach the ncaa champi-onship game in 2001, Arenas watched every team bypass him in the first round of the nba draft. He cried. Says an amazed Dallas Mavericks general manager Donnie Nelson—whose team didn’t have a first-round pick—“The teams in this league said no to Gilbert Arenas.”

But things had changed by the time the 2007 nba All-Star Game came around. Arenas finally made the starting five, and it was a chance for him to win over a global audience. Not surprisingly, his mind was firing from long range. “I’m trying to get two blimps,” he said before the game. “They’d just fly around the city and say, agent zero has arrived.” Let’s hope he’s just getting started. π

Questions

1. Why did Gilbert Arenas choose the number 0 as a college basketball player?2. What are some examples of Arenas’ quirky philo-sophy on and off the court?

In Washington, only the pentagon has a

longer-range arsenal than arenas does.

30 time, june 18, 2007

Corn-powered In YumaA Colorado farm town fuels its future on ethanol. It’s far from a sure bet

by bob diddlebocK / YUMA

Most days, main street in the tiny farm community of Yuma, Colorado, is slow, save for a few folks meandering from Hardware Hank’s to the coffee shop and maybe some

pickup trucks poking along. But this agricultural town of 3,400 is placing itself smack in the middle of the global energy game. Farmers are plowing their fields, planting corn and feeding cattle while work continues on the first of two multimillion-dollar corn-ethanol plants that could transform Yuma into one of the more vibrant alternative-fuel production centers in the Western U.S. The timing couldn’t be better, with gasoline prices well over $3 per gallon. But the choice of corn-based ethanol is one that might not play out in the energy future, from either an environmental or an economic standpoint.

A new ethanol-distilling plant owned by the locally backed Yuma Ethanol is scheduled to open within months. Another plant is scheduled to break ground later this year. Together, these operations, which rep-resent $250 million in capital investment, plan to chew up at least 55 million bushels of corn per year and pump out 200 million gallons of what President George W. Bush, Corn Belt politicians, A-list investors

and farmers hope will cut the U.S.’s reliance on foreign oil, clean up the air, slow global warming, promote rural job growth and all but turn water into wine.

Ethanol, which is little more than alcohol distilled from fermented corn mash, had been a curiosity for the past century before hitting the Green Revolution’s radar a few years ago, when it was added to the U.S. gasoline supply with the goal of reducing vehicle emissions. In January, when oil was passing the $55-per-barrel mark, the President called for the production of 35 billion gallons of renewable fuels annually by 2017, which would reduce U.S. gas consumption 20%. The Energy Act of 2005 mandated a market for ethanol by asking refiners to churn out 7.5 billion gallons per year of the stuff by 2012.

But corn-ethanol critics have doubts about the fuel as a short- and long-term energy solution. As U.S. vehicles burn through 9 million barrels of gasoline a day, skeptics fear that the home-brewed replacement may be only a pricey stepping-stone to a new gen-eration of more efficient, lower-cost power sources like other biofuels, solar cells, wind and ethanol made from farm waste or other sources. Brazil, for instance, brews sugarcane-based ethanol, which is more efficient than corn-based.

Indeed, corn ethanol is no slam dunk. It costs more than gasoline to manufacture. It breaks down in exist-ing pipelines, so it has to be trucked. It gets about 30% fewer miles to the gallon than gas. And ethanol does little, on balance, to reduce greenhouse gases.

Still, in Yuma County, where gasoline costs around $3.35 per gallon in recent weeks—while ethanol E85 fuel was $2.43 per gallon—seldom is heard a discouraging word. Even Brad Rock, who is being hit hard by rising feed prices for the 4,000 head of cattle on his Box Elder Ranch in nearby Wray, admits that the ethanol projects “are good for the community from a jobs perspective.” Adds Trent Bushner, a Yuma farmer and county commis-sioner: “Every time we put a gallon of ethanol in our car, that’s a gallon of gasoline we’re not putting in it that we got from the Middle East.” π

Questions

1. Why do proponents support the use of ethanol?2. What drawbacks are involved in the production and use of ethanol?

B U S I N E S S

Who needs the united States?Vibrant Asian and European economies may test the theory that when America sneezes, the planet catches a cold

by peter GuMbel

Why is nicole leibinger-kammüller still smiling? The chief executive of Trumpf, a family-owned machine-tool firm in Germany, has watched orders from the

critical U.S. market slow significantly in the past few months. But while the U.S. economy has been sluggish and the dollar weak, it’s all proving quite manageable. “We can feel the U.S. slowdown, but it’s not unset-tling. There’s no crash,” Leibinger-Kammüller says. Trumpf’s sales of its metal-cutting machines elsewhere—to Saudi Arabia, to Singapore and espe-cially in Germany—continue to rack up double-digit growth rates.

Economists and policymakers have been furiously debating whether the world has “decoupled” from the U.S. economy. The U.S. constitutes about 28% of global gross domestic product (gdp) as measured in dollars, and it accounted for one-fifth of worldwide growth from 2000 to 2006. When the U.S. faltered in the past, the rest of the world staggered. And certainly there are signs of fatigue. A cooling housing market slowed U.S. gdp growth to 2% in the third quarter of 2006, and even if the economy has strengthened a bit since, as many economists believe, its growth is still way below the blistering 5.6% rate of the first three months of 2006. Jim O’Neill, London-based head of global economic research for Goldman Sachs, says that even if the U.S. economy remains soft for much of the year, “we’re pretty confident that the rest of the world will withstand it.” So far at least, businesses ranging from Hong Kong electronics makers to German machine-tool producers are riding out a period of U.S. weakness. At the German Engineering Federation in Frankfurt, chief economist Ralph Wiechers concurs. “It used

to be that the U.S. economy supported the world economy,” he says. “Now it’s the other way around.”

The old industrialized-world triad of the U.S., Japan and Western Europe no longer dominates to the degree it once did. China is close to snatching the Number 3 slot on the list of world’s biggest economies away from Germany, and India and South Korea are set to join the top 10 within a decade. India’s gdp has expanded by $350 billion in the past six years—equal to the entire economy of the Netherlands in 2000. Once moribund countries such as Argentina and Russia are doing much of the heavy lifting today. According to the World Bank, developing nations collectively grew about 7% last year—more than twice as fast as high-income countries. They now account for 49% of world economic output, up from 39% in 1990.

Still, even the biggest optimists concede that nobody would escape unscathed if the U.S. economy were to hit a wall. Its big local trading partners, Mexico and

Canada, would probably be hurt the most, but the reverberations would be felt worldwide.

Those who dispute the decoupling theory point to the seemingly insa-tiable appetite of American consumers for imported goods, which has been a critical driver of the world’s economic

expansion. For example, while China’s imports are way up, those gains are due less to a free-spend-ing middle class than to increasing demand for raw materials and components to feed the country’s manufacturing sector, which turns the material into finished products to ship to the U.S.

For Trumpf, operations in the U.S. serve as a springboard not just to the American market but also to Asia, where it exports part of its U.S. production. “Russia is going well, so are opec countries,” says Leibinger-Kammüller. “But we also believe in the American economy.” While the world tries to figure out just how critical the U.S. is, keeping your eggs in a lot of different baskets may be the best strategy. π

Questions

1. What evidence suggests that the world has “decoupled” from the U.S. economy?2. What countries are challenging the economic domi-nance of the U.S., Japan and Western Europe?

B U S I N E S S

time, january 29, 2007 31

the u.S.-Japan- Western europe triad no longer dominates the global economy

as it once did.

32 Worksheet Prepared by Time Learning Ventures

Current events In reviewTest your knowledge of stories covered in the Current Events Update by answering the following multiple-choice questions.

____ 1. Alcohol distilled from corn produces a fuel known as: a. methanol c. ethanolb. biodiesel d. microalgae

____ 2. In the case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling on: a. affirmative action c. voting rightsb. freedom of speech d. school segregation

____ 3. The hottest year on record in the U.S. was:a. 1997 b. 2000 c. 2003 d. 2006

____ 4. The estimated number, in millions, of illegal immigrants in the U.S. is: a. 10 b. 12 c. 14 d. 16

____ 5. An Iraqi city located in Kurdistan, a politically stable region of Iraq, is:a. Arbil c. Fallujahb. Baghdad d. Karbala

____ 6. Tens of thousands of gorillas have died in Africa as result of: a. the swine flu c. yellow fever b. the Ebola virus d. rabies

____ 7. The chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works is:a. Dianne Feinstein c. Hillary Clintonb. Barbara Boxer d. Madeleine Albright

____ 8. The estimated number of U.S. contractors serving in Iraq is:a. 25,000 c. 75,000b. 50,000 d. 100,000

____ 9. Which of the following is not a possible outcome of the 2008 presidential election? a. Election of the first African Americanb. Election of the first womanc. Election of the first Asian Americand. Election of the first Mormon

____ 10. The essence of J.F.K.’s political philosophy can be summed up by his belief in: a. expansion of the federal governmentb. peace through strengthc. isolationism for the U.S.d. an end to taxation

Name Date

Match each of the locations below with the description at right. Write the letter of the correct country in the space provided. (Note: Not all answers will be used.)

a. Canada

b. China

c. France

d. Iran

e. Iraq

F. Japan

G. Mexico

h. Singapore

i. United Kingdom

J. United States

K. Zambia

l. Zimbabwe

____ 11. This nation has the world’s lowest life expectancy: 34 for women and 37 for men

____ 12. In 2006, 40% of consumer goods imported by the U.S. came from this country.

____ 13. Nicolas Sarkozy is the new President of this nation.

____ 14. The world’s youngest bullfighter lives here.

____ 15. Nation from which Britain has pledged to remove all troops by 2008.

____ 16. Nation that, along with the U.S. and Western Europe, has traditionally dominated the world economy

____ 17. This country is located due north of Zimbabwe.

____ 18. A serious economic slowdown in the U.S. would most likely hit Mexico and this country the hardest.

____ 19. Gordon Brown recently became Prime Minister of this country.

____ 20. The two superpowers involved in the cold war were the Soviet Union and this nation.

-worksheet

Answers open Season (pages 2–4)1. Voters have the chance to make history by electing the first woman, the first African American, the first Latino or the first Mormon President.2. The 2008 election will be the first since 1928 in which no incumbent President or Vice President appears on a primary ballot.

interpreting polls and Graphics (page 5)1. 22%2. less than 1%3. True4. Obama5. Pataki6. 62%7. 17%8. ±3 percentage points9. Total carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, by region10. Europe11. Eurasia12. North America13. Asia and Oceania14. North America15. False16. 28%17. False18. True

bloggers on the bus(page 6)1. Edwards is moving to the left to differentiate himself from Clinton and Obama, and nearly one third of daily blog readers are strongly liberal, making them a natural target audience for Edwards.2. John McCain’s campaign was criticized for using a blogger as a propagandist; John Thune paid bloggers to attack supporters of his opponent; Hillary Clinton’s blogger Peter Daou sparked controversy by buying advertisements on blogs around the country.

warrior for peace (pages 7 and 8)1. J.F.K. became disgusted with war because of his and his family’s experiences in it. His older brother Joe, a Navy pilot, was killed in a high-risk mission; the young husband of J.F.K.’s sister also died as a result of war.2. Sorensen argues that the essence of Kennedy’s philosophy was a belief in “peace through strength.” This was expressed in his inaugural address, in the address he gave at the University of Washington in Seattle, and in his “Peace Speech.”

the case for amnesty(pages 9 and 10)1. Beardstown Mayor Bob Walters believes that deporting illegal immigrants is “not the right thing to do.”2. Under the Senate’s proposed compromise, the 12 million illegal immigrants now in the U.S. would face a 13-year process including

$5,000 in fines per person, benchmarks for learning English and a “touchback” provision that calls for the head of each household to return to his or her home country to line up for the final green card.

outsourcing the iraq war (pages 11 and 12)1. There are an estimated 100,000 contractors in Iraq; they are working as bodyguards, snipers, translators, interrogators and drivers. 2. U.S. lawmakers are calling for an examination of how the military uses contractors. A bill introduced by Representative Jan Schakowsky would, for the first time, require the creation of databases to monitor the deployment and cost of contractors.

where iraq works (pages 13 and 14)1. Kurdish Iraq is a stable territory run by a secular leadership committed to economic and political reform and sitting on a huge pool of oil. At the same time, it is a tiny landlocked region attached to a war-ravaged nation. The central question is how long the Kurds will remain part of Iraq—and what will happen if they attempt to secede.2. The writer states that the Kurds’ most important achievement has been to keep their region free of Iraq’s insurgency and sectarian warfare with their army of 70,000 peshmerga soldiers.

the u.S. in iraq: a Gallery of Views (page 15)1. In the top image, President Bush is about to break the glass of a cabinet that contains more troops. In the middle image, a plane that symbolizes the Iraq war has crashed as President Bush continues to make positive statements about the war. The third image shows a bridge that has collapsed in the U.S.; the caption notes that billions of dollars are being spent in Iraq while the U.S. infrastructure suffers.2. The soldier represents more troops; the insurgency in Iraq has prompted Bush to send additional forces to Iraq.3. The plane symbolizes the Iraq war; the cartoonist believes that the war effort has run into serious problems.4. The cartoonist argues that bridges and other aspects of U.S. infrastructure are suffering because funds are being diverted to the war. He makes this point by showing a bridge that has collapsed.5. Bush would probably react favorably to the top cartoon and say that more troops will be a key to progress in Iraq. He would disagree with the second cartoon and say that despite temporary setbacks, the war effort remains winnable. He would argue that the U.S. can afford to support its infrastructure while continuing to fund the war effort.

dangerous trading(pages 16 and 17)1. 40%2. The fda is a “tombstone” agency in the sense that it launches investigations into tainted products only if people die or suffer serious health problems.

land of chains and hunger (pages 18 and 19)1. Zimbabwe’s economy is in a disastrous state. Unemployment is at 80%, living standards are at 1953 levels, and inflation is predicted to reach 3,700% by the end of 2007.2. Perry was imprisoned after being accused of violating Zimbabwe’s law against “working as a journalist without accreditation.” The maximum sentence was two years.

two Fresh Faces (pages 20 and 21)1. Both Sarkozy and Brown are economically liberal: they stress the importance of a strong work ethic and advocate free markets. Both have a controversial nationalist bent, and both feel warm about the U.S. but cool toward President Bush. 2. Sarkozy and Brown are expected to urge Washington to pay more attention to issues beyond the Middle East, such as Third World development and global warming.

busy is o.K. for Kids(page 22)1. In The Hurried Child, David Elkind argues that nearly every social problem affecting kids—ranging from substance abuse to bad grades—is rooted in society’s message that the young should act older. 2. Joseph Mahoney of Yale found that scheduled activities are beneficial and that kids’ well-being tends to improve when they participate in extracurriculars.

Speaking up for themselves(pages 23 and 24)1. In the Tinker case of 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech ... at the schoolhouse gate” as long as they don’t cause “substantial disruption” at school. 2. Answers will vary but should include a reaction to the court’s 5-4 ruling that schools may punish “student speech celebrating drug use” without violating the Constitution.

a deadly Mystery (page 25)1. Western gorillas defecate and urinate in and around the trees, leaving infected body fluids to sicken the next group. Gorillas also examine the bodies of dead apes they come upon, providing another means of direct transmission of the Ebola virus. 2. Vaccinating a few gorilla groups along the infection chain would eliminate the spread of Ebola.

what now for our Feverish planet? (pages 26 and 27)1. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that warming of the climate system is “unequivocal” and that there is “very high confidence” that human activities have played a significant role in creating this warming by overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.2. 38%

Meet the world’s youngest bullfighter (page 28)1. Rafita and other young bullfighters have sparked a debate over whether bullfighting is a noble sport that preserves Mexico’s heritage or a barbaric spectacle that should be outlawed.2. Rafita’s parents compare themselves to others who are raising a prodigy; they have vowed to support Rafita as he pursues his passion for bullfighting.

how agent Zero Saved d.c. (page 29)1. Arenas choose the number 0 because in his mind, it represented the number of minutes his doubters thought he would play as a freshman.2. Arenas’ philosophy includes the following elements: 1) Thin the air in your house with a special air conditioner to mimic living at a high altitude, so that when you’re at low altitude, you can breathe easily. 2) Hold extra practice sessions at midnight. 3) Pull pranks on fellow players and dare them to retaliate.

corn-powered in yuma (page 30)1. Backers believe ethanol will cut the U.S.’s reliance on foreign oil, clean up the air, slow global warming, and promote rural job growth.2. Ethanol costs more than gasoline to manufacture, it breaks down in existing pipelines, it gets about 30% fewer miles to the gallon than gas, and it does little to reduce greenhouse gases.

who needs the united States? (page 31)1. Businesses around the world are riding out a period of U.S. weakness rather than suffering as a direct result of economic troubles in America.2. China is close to snatching the Number 3 slot on the list of the world’s biggest economies away from Germany, and India and South Korea are set to join the top 10 within a decade.

current events in review(page 32)1. c 2. b 3. d 4. b 5. a 6. b 7. b 8. d 9. c 10. b 11. L 12. B 13. C 14. G 15. E 16. F 17. K 18. A 19. I 20. J

33

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