June 29, 2009 at 12:04 am
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In August 2007, the presidents of Afghanistan and Tajikistan walked side by side with the U.S. commerce secretary across a new $37 million concrete bridge that the Army Corps of Engineers designed to link two of Central Asia's poorest countries. Dressed in a gray suit with an American flag pin in his lapel, then-Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said the modest two-lane span that U.S. taxpayers paid for would be "a critical transit route for trade and commerce" between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Today, the bridge across the muddy waters of the Panj River is carrying much more than vegetables and timber: It's paved the way for drug traffickers to transport larger loads of Afghan heroin and opium to Central Asia and beyond to Russia and Western Europe. Standing near his truck in a dusty patch on the Afghan side of the river, Yar Mohammed said it was easy to drive drugs past the Afghan and Tajik border guards.
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New Yorkers deserve the basic democratic right—enjoyed by most other Americans and in most of the country’s big cities—to have a direct say in our city’s future and the laws we live by. The right of citizens to propose and vote on laws is fundamental to democratic government around the country. Some of NYC’s lowercase democrats aim to get it for New York by amending its charter.
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In the game of Quantum Soccer, the aim is to shape the wave function of a quantum-mechanical “ball” so that the probability of it being inside one of the goals rises above a set threshold. This is achieved by using the motion of the players to alter the energy spectrum of the wave function: when a player moves across the field, the energy that this action provides (or absorbs) enables transitions between certain modes of the wave function. The pairs of modes involved depend on the player's velocity; the exact rules are spelt out in the mathematical details, but it's easy to experiment using trial and error.
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See http://www.slate.com/id/2221405
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With Congressional elections set for Sunday, Argentineans will pass judgment on their government's crisis management this weekend. President Cristina Kirchner has been campaigning on doctored statistics, but with the economy tanking, it is unlikely that voters will be fooled.
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The assassinations of the chief of defence staff, General Batista Tagme Na Wai, on 1 March 2009 and President Joao Bernardo Nino Vieira early the next day have plunged Guinea-Bissau into deep uncertainty. National Assembly Speaker Raimundo Pereira was quickly sworn in as interim president pending the election the constitution requires. That the killings occurred only months after the acclaimed November parliamentary elections, however, indicates that, in current circumstances, the democratic process cannot cope with the rule of the gun, as well as the extent to which the military’s use of force has overwhelmed state institutions.
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In the wake of a conceptually flawed peace agreement, the Taliban takeover of large parts of Malakand division, subsequent military action in the area, almost three million internally displaced persons (IDPs) have fled to camps, homes, schools and other places of shelter across Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). The challenge for the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)-led government and international actors is to make relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts responsive to needs and empower local communities in Malakand Division. Failure to do so will reverse any gains on the battlefield and boost radical Islamist groups. The military’s use of heavy force in the ongoing operations, failure to address the full cost to civilians and refusal to allow full civilian and humanitarian access to the conflict zones has already been counterproductive. The public, particularly those directly affected, is increasingly mistrustful of a military that has…
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On a cold evening in January, days before taking the oath of office, President-elect Barack Obama paid a visit to the Lincoln Memorial. Obama often cites the 16th president as a source of inspiration, so it was no surprise that he chose to ascend the steps and spend some reflective minutes at the statue. But there may have been another motivation, another cultural reference subtly invoked Seventy years earlier, another idealistic young politician came to the same spot to gather his thoughts before assuming his duties. That would be Jefferson Smith, the newly minted U.S. senator played by Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," which is still America's iconic tale of a principled outsider who sets out to change a corrupt and compromised political culture. Is it a coincidence that Obama, together with his wife and daughters, concluded a day of sightseeing as his fictional antecedent had done? Maybe not.
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