After years of competing for overseas oil and mines to fuel their still-growing economies, India and China are silently scouring the world for their next great need: farmland to grow food.
The destination: Africa, where economies are poor and land is cheap.
Buying farmland abroad is not new, but it has gained urgency after a worldwide spike in food prices through 2007 and 2008.
So, more than a dozen companies from India, backed by the government, invested about $2 billion (Rs 10,000 crore) in leasing land and installing plants in Ethiopia last year to produce sugar, tea and several other crops. That number is expected to double to $4 billion this year, said Gurjit Singh, India’s ambassador to Ethiopia.
While India is just warming up, China and rich Gulf states that face graver land and water shortages have been aggressively acquiring land across Africa and some parts of Asia, said a report prepared by
the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
There are others.
Last May, South Korea joined the race, buying 690,000 hectares — about five times the size of Delhi — in Sudan to grow wheat.
Land worth between $20 billion and $30 billion (Rs 100,000 crore and 150,000 crore) was bought in Africa and Asia over the past three years, said Joachim von Braun, director general of IFPRI, who authored the report.
How much land has been sold? Between 15 million and 20 million hectares, which is more than all of Germany’s farmland, said Braun.
“Many governments, either directly or through state-owned entities and public-private partnerships, are in negotiations for, or have already closed deals on, arable land leases, concessions, or purchases abroad,” said the IFPRI report titled ‘Land Grabbing by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries: Risks and Opportunities’.
Unlike earlier, when companies from the developed world bought land for profit, the new deals are driven by spiralling shortages in emerging economies such as India or China, where rising incomes are pushing up demand for food so fast that governments fear domestic production could eventually fall short.
Currently, India’s annual food grain production of 230 million tonnes is just about what the country needs. By 2020, the Planning Commission estimates the demand to grow to 240 million tonnes. There are also forecasts that put the figure as high as 250 million tons.
But economists say, unlike China, India need not look to farmland elsewhere to meet that demand, because it can fill the gap by increasing farm productivity, said Mahendra Dev, chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, a government organisation that recommends procurement prices for major farm produce.
Still, the Indian government and several companies have intensified the chase for farmland abroad. “Even farmers from Andhra Pradesh have gone and invested in land in Kenya,” said Dev
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Interrogation Debate Sharply Divided Bush White House
The proclamation that President George W. Bush issued on June 26, 2003, to mark the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture seemed innocuous, one of dozens of high-minded statements published and duly ignored each year.
The United States is “committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example,” Mr. Bush declared, vowing to prosecute torture and to prevent “other cruel and unusual punishment.”
But inside the Central Intelligence Agency, the statement set off alarms. The agency’s top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, called the White House to complain. The statement by the president could unnerve C.I.A. interrogators Mr. Bush had authorized to use brutal tactics on Al Qaeda prisoners, Mr. Muller said, raising fears that political winds could change and make them scapegoats.
White House officials reaffirmed their support for the C.I.A. methods. But the exchange was a harbinger of the conflict between the coercive interrogations and the United States’ historical stance against torture that would deeply divide the Bush administration and ultimately undo the program.
The aftershocks of the interrogation policy continue. President Obama’s recent decision to release Bush administration legal memorandums on interrogation and to fend off calls for a broad investigation has only fueled debate over the efficacy, legality and morality of what was done. Just last week, bloggers seized upon a new video clip of Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state, sharply defending the program to a Stanford undergraduate and saying nothing about the bitter internal arguments that accompanied the demise of the program.
Most news accounts of the C.I.A. program have focused on how it was approved and operated. This is the story of its unraveling, based on interviews with more than a dozen former Bush administration officials. They insisted on anonymity because they feared being enmeshed in future investigations or public controversy, but they shed new light on the battle about the C.I.A. methods that grew passionate in Mr. Bush’s second term.
The consensus of top administration officials about the C.I.A. interrogation program, which they had approved without debate or dissent in 2002, began to fall apart the next year.
Acutely aware that the agency would be blamed if the policies lost political support, nervous C.I.A. officials began to curb its practices much earlier than most Americans know: no one was waterboarded after March 2003, and coercive interrogation methods were shelved altogether in 2005.
Yet even as interrogation methods were scaled back, former officials now say, the battle inside the Bush administration over which ones should be permitted only grew hotter. There would be a tense phone call over the program’s future during the 2005 Christmas holidays from Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, to Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director; a White House showdown the next year between Ms. Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney; and Ms. Rice’s refusal in 2007 to endorse the executive order with which Mr. Bush sought to revive the C.I.A. program.
The real trouble began on May 7, 2004, the day the C.I.A. inspector general, John L. Helgerson, completed a devastating report. In thousands of pages, it challenged the legality of some interrogation methods, found that interrogators were exceeding the rules imposed by the Justice Department and questioned the effectiveness of the entire program.
C.I.A. officials had sold the interrogation program to the White House. Now, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, knew that the inspector general’s report could be a noose for White House officials to hang the C.I.A. Mr. Tenet ordered a temporary halt to the harshest interrogation methods.
The report landed on the desks of some White House officials who were already having their doubts about the wisdom of the C.I.A.’s harsh methods. John B. Bellinger III, who, as the National Security Council’s top lawyer, played a role in discussions when the program was approved in 2002, by the next year had begun to research past ill-fated British and Israeli discursions into torture and grew doubtful about the wisdom of the techniques.
Mr. Bellinger shared his doubts with his boss, Ms. Rice, then the national security adviser, who began to reconsider her strong support for the program.
If the inspector general’s report was a body blow to the C.I.A. program, the bill passed by Congress the next year was a knockout punch. Provoked by the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and pushed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who had been tortured by the North Vietnamese, the 2005 bill banned cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
Top C.I.A. officials then feared that the agency’s methods could actually be illegal. Mr. Goss, who had succeeded Mr. Tenet at the C.I.A., wrote a memorandum to the White House saying the agency would carry out no harsh interrogations without new Justice Department approval.
The national security advisor, Mr. Hadley, was angered by the C.I.A.’s response. He called Mr. Goss at home over the Christmas holidays to complain; Mr. Goss, backed by his lawyers, would not budge. Mr. Hadley decided he could not push the C.I.A. to do what it thought might be illegal.
Nobody knew it then, but the C.I.A.’s fateful experiment in harsh interrogation was over. The “enhanced” interrogation, already scaled back, would not be used again.
But Bush administration officials could not agree about what to do with the agency’s prisoners. Already, disclosures of secret prisons in Eastern Europe had prompted the C.I.A. to fly many in a hurry to Afghanistan.
Mr. Cheney led those who argued that publicly acknowledging the detainees would reveal secrets and expose the program to exaggerated accusations of torture.
Ms. Rice, on the other hand, advocated moving the 14 remaining detainees in C.I.A. custody to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Only by publicly admitting that the United States had held the prisoners could Mr. Bush end what critics called the “disappearing” of terrorism suspects, she told colleagues.Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales proposed a middle ground: move the detainees to Guantánamo but never acknowledge having held them in secret prisons. This proposal, lampooned by some officials as the “immaculate conception” option, was dismissed as unrealistic.
After a tense meeting in the White House’s grand Roosevelt Room in summer 2006, Mr. Cheney lost the argument to Ms. Rice. Within days the C.I.A. prisoners were loaded onto a C-17 cargo plane and taken to Cuba.
Still, Mr. Cheney and top C.I.A. officials fought to revive the program. Steven G. Bradbury, the head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel and author of the recently declassified 2005 memorandums authorizing harsh C.I.A interrogations, began drafting another memorandum in late 2006 to restore legal approval for harsh interrogation. Mr. Bradbury noted that Congress, despite the public controversy, had left it to the White House to set the limits.
Early drafts of the memorandum, circulated through the White House, the C.I.A. and the State Department, shocked some officials. Just months after the Supreme Court had declared that the Geneva Convention applied to Al Qaeda, the new Bradbury memorandum gave its blessing to almost every technique, except waterboarding, that the C.I.A. had used since 2002.
Forced as secretary of state to defend the C.I.A. program before angry European allies, Ms. Rice and her aides argued that it had outlived its usefulness.
In February 2007, Mr. Bellinger wrote to the Justice Department challenging Mr. Bradbury’s position. He called Mr. Bradbury’s memorandum a “work of advocacy” that gave a twisted interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and told colleagues he might resign.
When Mr. Bush finally reauthorized C.I.A. interrogations with an executive order in July 2007, it reflected the yearlong lobbying of Mr. Bellinger and Ms. Rice: forced nudity was banned, and guidelines for sleep deprivation were tighter.
But Mr. Cheney and his allies secured other victories. The executive order preserved the secret jails and authorized a laundry list of coercive methods. Ms. Rice, several officials say, declined to endorse the order but chose not to block it.
When Mr. Obama was sworn in on Jan. 20, the C.I.A. still maintained a network of empty jails overseas, where interrogators were still authorized to use physical pressure. Within 48 hours, he banned the methods.
Finally, last month, the program that had been the source of so many vigorous fights in Washington’s power corridors met a prosaic end.
Leon E. Panetta, the new C.I.A. chief, terminated the agency’s contracts providing the security and maintenance for the prisons, emphasizing the economic benefits. Closing the C.I.A. prisons, Mr. Panetta said, would save taxpayers $4 million.
The United States is “committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example,” Mr. Bush declared, vowing to prosecute torture and to prevent “other cruel and unusual punishment.”
But inside the Central Intelligence Agency, the statement set off alarms. The agency’s top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, called the White House to complain. The statement by the president could unnerve C.I.A. interrogators Mr. Bush had authorized to use brutal tactics on Al Qaeda prisoners, Mr. Muller said, raising fears that political winds could change and make them scapegoats.
White House officials reaffirmed their support for the C.I.A. methods. But the exchange was a harbinger of the conflict between the coercive interrogations and the United States’ historical stance against torture that would deeply divide the Bush administration and ultimately undo the program.
The aftershocks of the interrogation policy continue. President Obama’s recent decision to release Bush administration legal memorandums on interrogation and to fend off calls for a broad investigation has only fueled debate over the efficacy, legality and morality of what was done. Just last week, bloggers seized upon a new video clip of Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state, sharply defending the program to a Stanford undergraduate and saying nothing about the bitter internal arguments that accompanied the demise of the program.
Most news accounts of the C.I.A. program have focused on how it was approved and operated. This is the story of its unraveling, based on interviews with more than a dozen former Bush administration officials. They insisted on anonymity because they feared being enmeshed in future investigations or public controversy, but they shed new light on the battle about the C.I.A. methods that grew passionate in Mr. Bush’s second term.
The consensus of top administration officials about the C.I.A. interrogation program, which they had approved without debate or dissent in 2002, began to fall apart the next year.
Acutely aware that the agency would be blamed if the policies lost political support, nervous C.I.A. officials began to curb its practices much earlier than most Americans know: no one was waterboarded after March 2003, and coercive interrogation methods were shelved altogether in 2005.
Yet even as interrogation methods were scaled back, former officials now say, the battle inside the Bush administration over which ones should be permitted only grew hotter. There would be a tense phone call over the program’s future during the 2005 Christmas holidays from Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, to Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director; a White House showdown the next year between Ms. Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney; and Ms. Rice’s refusal in 2007 to endorse the executive order with which Mr. Bush sought to revive the C.I.A. program.
The real trouble began on May 7, 2004, the day the C.I.A. inspector general, John L. Helgerson, completed a devastating report. In thousands of pages, it challenged the legality of some interrogation methods, found that interrogators were exceeding the rules imposed by the Justice Department and questioned the effectiveness of the entire program.
C.I.A. officials had sold the interrogation program to the White House. Now, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, knew that the inspector general’s report could be a noose for White House officials to hang the C.I.A. Mr. Tenet ordered a temporary halt to the harshest interrogation methods.
The report landed on the desks of some White House officials who were already having their doubts about the wisdom of the C.I.A.’s harsh methods. John B. Bellinger III, who, as the National Security Council’s top lawyer, played a role in discussions when the program was approved in 2002, by the next year had begun to research past ill-fated British and Israeli discursions into torture and grew doubtful about the wisdom of the techniques.
Mr. Bellinger shared his doubts with his boss, Ms. Rice, then the national security adviser, who began to reconsider her strong support for the program.
If the inspector general’s report was a body blow to the C.I.A. program, the bill passed by Congress the next year was a knockout punch. Provoked by the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and pushed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who had been tortured by the North Vietnamese, the 2005 bill banned cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
Top C.I.A. officials then feared that the agency’s methods could actually be illegal. Mr. Goss, who had succeeded Mr. Tenet at the C.I.A., wrote a memorandum to the White House saying the agency would carry out no harsh interrogations without new Justice Department approval.
The national security advisor, Mr. Hadley, was angered by the C.I.A.’s response. He called Mr. Goss at home over the Christmas holidays to complain; Mr. Goss, backed by his lawyers, would not budge. Mr. Hadley decided he could not push the C.I.A. to do what it thought might be illegal.
Nobody knew it then, but the C.I.A.’s fateful experiment in harsh interrogation was over. The “enhanced” interrogation, already scaled back, would not be used again.
But Bush administration officials could not agree about what to do with the agency’s prisoners. Already, disclosures of secret prisons in Eastern Europe had prompted the C.I.A. to fly many in a hurry to Afghanistan.
Mr. Cheney led those who argued that publicly acknowledging the detainees would reveal secrets and expose the program to exaggerated accusations of torture.
Ms. Rice, on the other hand, advocated moving the 14 remaining detainees in C.I.A. custody to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Only by publicly admitting that the United States had held the prisoners could Mr. Bush end what critics called the “disappearing” of terrorism suspects, she told colleagues.Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales proposed a middle ground: move the detainees to Guantánamo but never acknowledge having held them in secret prisons. This proposal, lampooned by some officials as the “immaculate conception” option, was dismissed as unrealistic.
After a tense meeting in the White House’s grand Roosevelt Room in summer 2006, Mr. Cheney lost the argument to Ms. Rice. Within days the C.I.A. prisoners were loaded onto a C-17 cargo plane and taken to Cuba.
Still, Mr. Cheney and top C.I.A. officials fought to revive the program. Steven G. Bradbury, the head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel and author of the recently declassified 2005 memorandums authorizing harsh C.I.A interrogations, began drafting another memorandum in late 2006 to restore legal approval for harsh interrogation. Mr. Bradbury noted that Congress, despite the public controversy, had left it to the White House to set the limits.
Early drafts of the memorandum, circulated through the White House, the C.I.A. and the State Department, shocked some officials. Just months after the Supreme Court had declared that the Geneva Convention applied to Al Qaeda, the new Bradbury memorandum gave its blessing to almost every technique, except waterboarding, that the C.I.A. had used since 2002.
Forced as secretary of state to defend the C.I.A. program before angry European allies, Ms. Rice and her aides argued that it had outlived its usefulness.
In February 2007, Mr. Bellinger wrote to the Justice Department challenging Mr. Bradbury’s position. He called Mr. Bradbury’s memorandum a “work of advocacy” that gave a twisted interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and told colleagues he might resign.
When Mr. Bush finally reauthorized C.I.A. interrogations with an executive order in July 2007, it reflected the yearlong lobbying of Mr. Bellinger and Ms. Rice: forced nudity was banned, and guidelines for sleep deprivation were tighter.
But Mr. Cheney and his allies secured other victories. The executive order preserved the secret jails and authorized a laundry list of coercive methods. Ms. Rice, several officials say, declined to endorse the order but chose not to block it.
When Mr. Obama was sworn in on Jan. 20, the C.I.A. still maintained a network of empty jails overseas, where interrogators were still authorized to use physical pressure. Within 48 hours, he banned the methods.
Finally, last month, the program that had been the source of so many vigorous fights in Washington’s power corridors met a prosaic end.
Leon E. Panetta, the new C.I.A. chief, terminated the agency’s contracts providing the security and maintenance for the prisons, emphasizing the economic benefits. Closing the C.I.A. prisons, Mr. Panetta said, would save taxpayers $4 million.
For Many Pakistani Children, Madrasas Fill a Void
The elementary school in this poor village is easy to mistake for a barn. It has a dirt floor and no lights, and crows swoop through its glassless windows. Class size recently hit 140, spilling students into the courtyard.
But if the state has forgotten the children here, the mullahs have not. With public education in shambles, Pakistan’s poorest families have turned to madrasas, or Islamic schools, that feed and house the children while pushing a more militant brand of Islam than was traditional here.
The concentration of madrasas here in southern Punjab has become an urgent concern in the face of Pakistan’s expanding insurgency. The schools offer almost no instruction beyond the memorizing of the Koran, creating a widening pool of young minds that are sympathetic to militancy.
In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have struck in Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended madrasas.
“We are at the beginning of a great storm that is about to sweep the country,” said Ibn Abduh Rehman, who directs the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent organization. “It’s red alert for Pakistan.”
President Obama said in a news conference last week that he was “gravely concerned” about the situation in Pakistan, not least because the government did not “seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of the people.”
He has asked Congress to more than triple assistance to Pakistan for nonmilitary purposes, including education. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has given Pakistan a total of $680 million in nonmilitary aid, according to the State Department, far lower than the $1 billion a year for the military.
But education has never been a priority here, and even Pakistan’s current plan to double education spending next year might collapse as have past efforts, which were thwarted by sluggish bureaucracies, unstable governments and a lack of commitment by Pakistan’s governing elite to the poor.
“This is a state that never took education seriously,” said Stephen P. Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution. “I’m very pessimistic about whether the educational system can or will be reformed.”
Pakistani families have long turned to madrasas, and the religious schools make up a relatively small minority. But even for the majority who attend public school, learning has an Islamic bent. The national curriculum was Islamized during the 1980s under Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, a military ruler who promoted Pakistan’s Islamic identity as a way to bind its patchwork of tribes, ethnicities and languages.
Literacy in Pakistan has grown from barely 20 percent at independence 61 years ago, and the government recently improved the curriculum and reduced its emphasis on Islam.
But even today, only about half of Pakistanis can read and write, far below the proportion in countries with similar per-capita income, like Vietnam. One in three school-age Pakistani children does not attend school, and of those who do, a third drop out by fifth grade, according to Unesco. Girls’ enrollment is among the lowest in the world, lagging behind Ethiopia and Yemen.
“Education in Pakistan was left to the dogs,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad who is an outspoken critic of the government’s failure to stand up to spreading Islamic militancy.
This impoverished expanse of rural southern Punjab, where the Taliban have begun making inroads with the help of local militant groups, has one of the highest concentrations of madrasas in the country.
Of the more than 12,000 madrasas registered in Pakistan, about half are in Punjab. Experts estimate the numbers are higher: when the state tried to count them in 2005, a fifth of the areas in this province refused to register.
Though madrasas make up only about 7 percent of primary schools in Pakistan, their influence is amplified by the inadequacy of public education and the innate religiosity of the countryside, where two-thirds of people live.
The public elementary school for boys in this village is the very picture of the generations of neglect that have left many poor Pakistanis feeling abandoned by their government.
Shaukat Ali, 40, a tall man with an earnest manner who teaches fifth grade, said he had asked everyone for help with financing, including government officials and army officers. A television channel even did a report. “The result,” he said, “was zero.”
A government official responsible for monitoring schools in the area, Muhamed Aijaz Anjum, said he was familiar with the school’s plight. But he has no car or office, and his annual travel allowance is less than $200; he said he was helpless to do anything about it.
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Turning to Madrasas With few avenues for advancement in what remains a feudal society, many poor Pakistanis do not believe education will improve their lives. The dropout rate reflects that.
One of Mr. Ali’s best students, Muhamed Arshad Ali, was offered a state scholarship to continue after the fifth grade. His parents would not let him accept. He quit and took up work ironing pants for about 200 rupees a day, or $2.50.
“Many poor people think salaried jobs are only for rich people,” Mr. Ali said. “They don’t believe in the end result of education.”
In Punjab, the country’s most populous province, the despair and neglect have opened a space that religious schools have filled.
“Madrasas have been mushrooming,” said Zobaida Jalal, a member of Parliament and former education minister.
The phenomenon began in the 1980s, when General Zia gave madrasas money and land in an American-supported policy to help Islamic fighters against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
The Islamic schools are also seen as employment opportunities. “When someone doesn’t see a way ahead for himself, he builds a mosque and sits in it,” said Jan Sher, whose village in southwestern Punjab, Shadan Lund, has become a militant stronghold, with madrasas now outnumbering public schools.
Poverty has also helped expand enrollment in madrasas, which serve as a safety net by housing and feeding poor children.
“How can someone who earns 200 rupees a day afford expenses for five children?” asked Hafeezur Rehman, a caretaker in the Jamia Sadiqqia Taleemul Koran madrasa in Multan, the main city in south Punjab. The school houses and feeds 73 boys from poor villages.
Former President Pervez Musharraf tried to regulate the madrasas, offering financial incentives if they would add general subjects. But after taking the money, many refused to allow monitoring. “The madrasa reform project failed,” said Javed Ashraf Qazi, a retired general who served as education minister at the time.
Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab, says he is acutely aware of the problem and is trying a different approach, recently setting aside $75 million to build free model schools in 80 locations close to large madrasas, a tactic General Qazi had also proposed.
In the district that includes Mohri Pur, a mud-walled village of about 6,000 where farmers drive on dirt roads in tractors and donkey carts piled high with sticks and grasses, there are an estimated 200 madrasas, one-third the number of public schools, said Mr. Anjum, the education official.
Nonreligious private schools have also sprouted since the 1990s. They have better student-teacher ratios, but only the most exclusive — out of reach of most middle-class Pakistanis — offer a rigorous, modern education.
Mr. Ali, the fifth-grade teacher, says the madrasas have changed Mohri Pur. They are Deobandi, adherents of an ultraorthodox Sunni school of thought that opposes music and festivals, which are central aspects of Sufism, a tolerant form of Islam that is traditional here.
There were no madrasas in Mohri Pur in the late 1980s, when Mr. Ali began teaching. Now there are at least five. Most are affiliated with a branch in the neighboring town of Kabirwala of Darul Uloom, a powerful Deobandi seminary founded in 1952, and whose leaders in other parts of Pakistan have links to the Taliban.
Several local residents said they believed the Kabirwala seminary was dangerous. Some of its members were involved in sectarian violence against Shiites in the 1990s, they said.
“People seem scared of them,” Mr. Ali said. “We don’t ask questions.”
Even if the madrasas do not make militants, they create a worldview that makes militancy possible. “The mindset wants to stop music, girls’ schools and festivals,” said Salman Abid, a social researcher in southern Punjab. “Their message is that this is not real life. Real life comes later” — after death.
On a recent Thursday, the Kabirwala seminary was buzzing with activity. Officials showed rooms of boys crouched over Korans, reading and rocking. A full kitchen had an industrial-size bread oven. Flowers adorned walkways. The foundation for a new dormitory had been broken.
There was also a girls’ section, with its own entrance, where hundreds of young women chanted in unison after directions from a male voice that came from behind a curtain. “We have a passion for this work,” said Seraj ul-Haq, a computer teacher who is part of the family that founded the seminary.Teachers preach restrictions. February’s newsletter set out a list of taboos: Valentine’s Day. Music. Urban women “wearing imported perfume.” Talking about women’s rights.
Suicide bombings were neither encouraged nor condemned.
The ideology may be rigid, but it offers the promise of respect, a powerful draw for lower-class young men.
Abed Omar, 24, had little religious education before he was inspired by a sermon at the seminary last year. Better educated than most, he began to work in his family’s sweets shop.
Restless and unfulfilled, he joined a conservative Islamic group, paying about $625 to travel with them around the country for four months on a preaching tour.
The group, Tablighi Jamaat, taught him that Islam forbids music and speaking with women. (He would speak to this reporter only through a male colleague.) American officials suspect that the group is a steppingstone to the Taliban. Pakistani officials say it is peaceful.
Now, when Mr. Omar visits his friends, “they turn off their tape players and give me their seat,” he said, a smile lifting his face, which, in the practice of some conservative Islamists, has a bushy beard but no mustache.
He is frustrated by a lack of opportunity and at how much of Pakistan’s bureaucracy requires political connections, which he does not have. “There is no merit,” he said.
His faith gives him hope. “I want to make everyone a preacher of Islam,” Mr. Omar said brightly, eating honey-soaked fritters in his family’s shop.
He knows about 100 people in his town who have done a four-month tour like his. As for those who sign up for less, he said “they are countless.”
But if the state has forgotten the children here, the mullahs have not. With public education in shambles, Pakistan’s poorest families have turned to madrasas, or Islamic schools, that feed and house the children while pushing a more militant brand of Islam than was traditional here.
The concentration of madrasas here in southern Punjab has become an urgent concern in the face of Pakistan’s expanding insurgency. The schools offer almost no instruction beyond the memorizing of the Koran, creating a widening pool of young minds that are sympathetic to militancy.
In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have struck in Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended madrasas.
“We are at the beginning of a great storm that is about to sweep the country,” said Ibn Abduh Rehman, who directs the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent organization. “It’s red alert for Pakistan.”
President Obama said in a news conference last week that he was “gravely concerned” about the situation in Pakistan, not least because the government did not “seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of the people.”
He has asked Congress to more than triple assistance to Pakistan for nonmilitary purposes, including education. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has given Pakistan a total of $680 million in nonmilitary aid, according to the State Department, far lower than the $1 billion a year for the military.
But education has never been a priority here, and even Pakistan’s current plan to double education spending next year might collapse as have past efforts, which were thwarted by sluggish bureaucracies, unstable governments and a lack of commitment by Pakistan’s governing elite to the poor.
“This is a state that never took education seriously,” said Stephen P. Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution. “I’m very pessimistic about whether the educational system can or will be reformed.”
Pakistani families have long turned to madrasas, and the religious schools make up a relatively small minority. But even for the majority who attend public school, learning has an Islamic bent. The national curriculum was Islamized during the 1980s under Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, a military ruler who promoted Pakistan’s Islamic identity as a way to bind its patchwork of tribes, ethnicities and languages.
Literacy in Pakistan has grown from barely 20 percent at independence 61 years ago, and the government recently improved the curriculum and reduced its emphasis on Islam.
But even today, only about half of Pakistanis can read and write, far below the proportion in countries with similar per-capita income, like Vietnam. One in three school-age Pakistani children does not attend school, and of those who do, a third drop out by fifth grade, according to Unesco. Girls’ enrollment is among the lowest in the world, lagging behind Ethiopia and Yemen.
“Education in Pakistan was left to the dogs,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad who is an outspoken critic of the government’s failure to stand up to spreading Islamic militancy.
This impoverished expanse of rural southern Punjab, where the Taliban have begun making inroads with the help of local militant groups, has one of the highest concentrations of madrasas in the country.
Of the more than 12,000 madrasas registered in Pakistan, about half are in Punjab. Experts estimate the numbers are higher: when the state tried to count them in 2005, a fifth of the areas in this province refused to register.
Though madrasas make up only about 7 percent of primary schools in Pakistan, their influence is amplified by the inadequacy of public education and the innate religiosity of the countryside, where two-thirds of people live.
The public elementary school for boys in this village is the very picture of the generations of neglect that have left many poor Pakistanis feeling abandoned by their government.
Shaukat Ali, 40, a tall man with an earnest manner who teaches fifth grade, said he had asked everyone for help with financing, including government officials and army officers. A television channel even did a report. “The result,” he said, “was zero.”
A government official responsible for monitoring schools in the area, Muhamed Aijaz Anjum, said he was familiar with the school’s plight. But he has no car or office, and his annual travel allowance is less than $200; he said he was helpless to do anything about it.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Slide Show
Turning to Madrasas With few avenues for advancement in what remains a feudal society, many poor Pakistanis do not believe education will improve their lives. The dropout rate reflects that.
One of Mr. Ali’s best students, Muhamed Arshad Ali, was offered a state scholarship to continue after the fifth grade. His parents would not let him accept. He quit and took up work ironing pants for about 200 rupees a day, or $2.50.
“Many poor people think salaried jobs are only for rich people,” Mr. Ali said. “They don’t believe in the end result of education.”
In Punjab, the country’s most populous province, the despair and neglect have opened a space that religious schools have filled.
“Madrasas have been mushrooming,” said Zobaida Jalal, a member of Parliament and former education minister.
The phenomenon began in the 1980s, when General Zia gave madrasas money and land in an American-supported policy to help Islamic fighters against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
The Islamic schools are also seen as employment opportunities. “When someone doesn’t see a way ahead for himself, he builds a mosque and sits in it,” said Jan Sher, whose village in southwestern Punjab, Shadan Lund, has become a militant stronghold, with madrasas now outnumbering public schools.
Poverty has also helped expand enrollment in madrasas, which serve as a safety net by housing and feeding poor children.
“How can someone who earns 200 rupees a day afford expenses for five children?” asked Hafeezur Rehman, a caretaker in the Jamia Sadiqqia Taleemul Koran madrasa in Multan, the main city in south Punjab. The school houses and feeds 73 boys from poor villages.
Former President Pervez Musharraf tried to regulate the madrasas, offering financial incentives if they would add general subjects. But after taking the money, many refused to allow monitoring. “The madrasa reform project failed,” said Javed Ashraf Qazi, a retired general who served as education minister at the time.
Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab, says he is acutely aware of the problem and is trying a different approach, recently setting aside $75 million to build free model schools in 80 locations close to large madrasas, a tactic General Qazi had also proposed.
In the district that includes Mohri Pur, a mud-walled village of about 6,000 where farmers drive on dirt roads in tractors and donkey carts piled high with sticks and grasses, there are an estimated 200 madrasas, one-third the number of public schools, said Mr. Anjum, the education official.
Nonreligious private schools have also sprouted since the 1990s. They have better student-teacher ratios, but only the most exclusive — out of reach of most middle-class Pakistanis — offer a rigorous, modern education.
Mr. Ali, the fifth-grade teacher, says the madrasas have changed Mohri Pur. They are Deobandi, adherents of an ultraorthodox Sunni school of thought that opposes music and festivals, which are central aspects of Sufism, a tolerant form of Islam that is traditional here.
There were no madrasas in Mohri Pur in the late 1980s, when Mr. Ali began teaching. Now there are at least five. Most are affiliated with a branch in the neighboring town of Kabirwala of Darul Uloom, a powerful Deobandi seminary founded in 1952, and whose leaders in other parts of Pakistan have links to the Taliban.
Several local residents said they believed the Kabirwala seminary was dangerous. Some of its members were involved in sectarian violence against Shiites in the 1990s, they said.
“People seem scared of them,” Mr. Ali said. “We don’t ask questions.”
Even if the madrasas do not make militants, they create a worldview that makes militancy possible. “The mindset wants to stop music, girls’ schools and festivals,” said Salman Abid, a social researcher in southern Punjab. “Their message is that this is not real life. Real life comes later” — after death.
On a recent Thursday, the Kabirwala seminary was buzzing with activity. Officials showed rooms of boys crouched over Korans, reading and rocking. A full kitchen had an industrial-size bread oven. Flowers adorned walkways. The foundation for a new dormitory had been broken.
There was also a girls’ section, with its own entrance, where hundreds of young women chanted in unison after directions from a male voice that came from behind a curtain. “We have a passion for this work,” said Seraj ul-Haq, a computer teacher who is part of the family that founded the seminary.Teachers preach restrictions. February’s newsletter set out a list of taboos: Valentine’s Day. Music. Urban women “wearing imported perfume.” Talking about women’s rights.
Suicide bombings were neither encouraged nor condemned.
The ideology may be rigid, but it offers the promise of respect, a powerful draw for lower-class young men.
Abed Omar, 24, had little religious education before he was inspired by a sermon at the seminary last year. Better educated than most, he began to work in his family’s sweets shop.
Restless and unfulfilled, he joined a conservative Islamic group, paying about $625 to travel with them around the country for four months on a preaching tour.
The group, Tablighi Jamaat, taught him that Islam forbids music and speaking with women. (He would speak to this reporter only through a male colleague.) American officials suspect that the group is a steppingstone to the Taliban. Pakistani officials say it is peaceful.
Now, when Mr. Omar visits his friends, “they turn off their tape players and give me their seat,” he said, a smile lifting his face, which, in the practice of some conservative Islamists, has a bushy beard but no mustache.
He is frustrated by a lack of opportunity and at how much of Pakistan’s bureaucracy requires political connections, which he does not have. “There is no merit,” he said.
His faith gives him hope. “I want to make everyone a preacher of Islam,” Mr. Omar said brightly, eating honey-soaked fritters in his family’s shop.
He knows about 100 people in his town who have done a four-month tour like his. As for those who sign up for less, he said “they are countless.”
The flip-side of same-sex marriage
As a growing number of states stand poised to pass same-sex marriage laws, they should consider this: It's possible to legalize gay marriage without infringing on religious liberty. But it takes careful crafting of robust religious protections. And no state has gotten that right yet.
The country is deeply divided on same-sex marriage. But once it is recognized legally, all kinds of people -- clerks in the local registrar's office, photographers, owners of reception halls, florists -- might not have the legal right to refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings, even if doing so would violate deeply held beliefs. Religious organizations could be affected too. For example, a Catholic university that offers married-student housing might have to rent to married same-sex couples or risk violating state law.
These are not imagined or speculative concerns. Flash-points over same-sex unions are already occurring across the United States. In Iowa, the state's attorney general told county recorders that they must issue licenses to same-sex couples or face criminal misdemeanor charges and even dismissal. New Mexico's Human Rights Commission fined a husband-wife photography team more than $6,000 because they declined to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony. In New Jersey, authorities yanked the property tax exemption of a church group that denied requests by two lesbian couples to use the group's boardwalk pavilion for their commitment ceremonies.
So what should states do to respond to these clashes between same-sex relationships and religious liberty?
What they should not do is what New Hampshire's Senate did last week: pay lip-service to religious freedom while enacting meaningless protections. New Hampshire's bill provides that "members of the clergy ... shall not be obligated ... to officiate at any particular civil marriage or religious rite of marriage in violation of their right to free exercise of religion." But this is a hollow guarantee: The 1st Amendment already provides such protection.
Last month, Connecticut and Vermont became the first states to pass conscience protection for religious dissenters in their same-sex marriage laws. Both states provide that religious groups "shall not be required to provide services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods or privileges to an individual if the request ... is related to the solemnization of a marriage or celebration of a marriage." Both also bar civil suits by people denied such wedding-related services.
Connecticut went even further. In that state, a "religious organization" providing adoption services may continue to place children only with heterosexual married couples as long as it gets no government money. Thus, in Connecticut, unlike in Massachusetts, Catholic Charities will not have to close its doors or face litigation threats.
As important as these exemptions for organizations are, states still weighing same-sex marriage should do better. Wedding advisors, photographers, bakers, caterers and other service providers who prefer to step aside from same-sex ceremonies for religious reasons also need explicit protection.
Some have argued that gay-marriage laws do not need such guarantees because they don't require religious objectors to do any particular thing. But new laws are interpreted in light of existing statutes, and Vermont and Connecticut -- as well as all six states still considering same-sex marriage -- have laws on the books prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Because of those laws, many people could have to choose between conscience and livelihood. In Massachusetts, individuals violating the non-discrimination statute can be fined up to $50,000. In Connecticut, business owners can be sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Conscience protections are a thoroughly American idea. Since Colonial times, legislatures have exempted religious minorities from laws inconsistent with their faith. Such exemptions allow Americans with radically different views on moral questions to live in peace and equality in the same society.
Connecticut and Vermont have gone part of the way toward recognizing that the rights of same-sex couples should not come at the expense of the religious people who believe that marriage means a husband and a wife.
Now, New York, Illinois, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia should take the time to get same-sex marriage right
The country is deeply divided on same-sex marriage. But once it is recognized legally, all kinds of people -- clerks in the local registrar's office, photographers, owners of reception halls, florists -- might not have the legal right to refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings, even if doing so would violate deeply held beliefs. Religious organizations could be affected too. For example, a Catholic university that offers married-student housing might have to rent to married same-sex couples or risk violating state law.
These are not imagined or speculative concerns. Flash-points over same-sex unions are already occurring across the United States. In Iowa, the state's attorney general told county recorders that they must issue licenses to same-sex couples or face criminal misdemeanor charges and even dismissal. New Mexico's Human Rights Commission fined a husband-wife photography team more than $6,000 because they declined to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony. In New Jersey, authorities yanked the property tax exemption of a church group that denied requests by two lesbian couples to use the group's boardwalk pavilion for their commitment ceremonies.
So what should states do to respond to these clashes between same-sex relationships and religious liberty?
What they should not do is what New Hampshire's Senate did last week: pay lip-service to religious freedom while enacting meaningless protections. New Hampshire's bill provides that "members of the clergy ... shall not be obligated ... to officiate at any particular civil marriage or religious rite of marriage in violation of their right to free exercise of religion." But this is a hollow guarantee: The 1st Amendment already provides such protection.
Last month, Connecticut and Vermont became the first states to pass conscience protection for religious dissenters in their same-sex marriage laws. Both states provide that religious groups "shall not be required to provide services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods or privileges to an individual if the request ... is related to the solemnization of a marriage or celebration of a marriage." Both also bar civil suits by people denied such wedding-related services.
Connecticut went even further. In that state, a "religious organization" providing adoption services may continue to place children only with heterosexual married couples as long as it gets no government money. Thus, in Connecticut, unlike in Massachusetts, Catholic Charities will not have to close its doors or face litigation threats.
As important as these exemptions for organizations are, states still weighing same-sex marriage should do better. Wedding advisors, photographers, bakers, caterers and other service providers who prefer to step aside from same-sex ceremonies for religious reasons also need explicit protection.
Some have argued that gay-marriage laws do not need such guarantees because they don't require religious objectors to do any particular thing. But new laws are interpreted in light of existing statutes, and Vermont and Connecticut -- as well as all six states still considering same-sex marriage -- have laws on the books prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Because of those laws, many people could have to choose between conscience and livelihood. In Massachusetts, individuals violating the non-discrimination statute can be fined up to $50,000. In Connecticut, business owners can be sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Conscience protections are a thoroughly American idea. Since Colonial times, legislatures have exempted religious minorities from laws inconsistent with their faith. Such exemptions allow Americans with radically different views on moral questions to live in peace and equality in the same society.
Connecticut and Vermont have gone part of the way toward recognizing that the rights of same-sex couples should not come at the expense of the religious people who believe that marriage means a husband and a wife.
Now, New York, Illinois, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia should take the time to get same-sex marriage right
Web providers must limit internet's carbon footprint, say experts
The internet's increasing appetite for electricity poses a major threat to companies such as Google, according to scientists and industry executives.
Leading figures have told the Guardian that many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs of delivering billions of web pages, videos and files online – in a "perfect storm" that could even threaten the future of the internet itself.
"In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption," said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers.
Bapat said the network of web servers and data centres that store online information is becoming more expensive, while profits come under pressure as a result of the recession.
"We need more data centres, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more," he said. "If you compound all of these trends, you have the perfect storm."
With more than 1.5 billion people online around the world, scientists estimate that the energy footprint of the net is growing by more than 10% each year. This leaves many internet companies caught in a bind: energy costs are escalating because of their increasing popularity, while at the same time their advertising revenues come under pressure from the recession.
One site under particular scrutiny is YouTube — now the world's third-biggest website, but one that requires a heavy subsidy from Google, its owner. Although the site's financial details are kept under wraps, a recent analysis by Credit Suisse suggested that it could lose as much as $470m (£317m) this year, as it succumbs to the high price of delivering power-intensive videos over the internet.
And while the demand for electricity is a primary concern, a secondary result of the explosion of internet use is that the computer industry's carbon debt is increasing drastically. From having a relatively small impact just a few years ago, it is now leapfrogging other sectors like the airline industry that are more widely known for their negative environmental impact.
However, tracking the growth of the internet's energy use is difficult, since internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.
"A lot of this internet stuff is fairly secretive," Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, told the Guardian.
"Google is probably the best example: they see it as a trade secret: how many data centres they have, how big they are, how many servers they have."
One study by Brown, commissioned by the US environmental protection agency, suggested that US data centres used 61bn kilowatt hours of energy in 2006. That is enough to supply the whole of the UK for two months, and 1.5% of the entire electricity usage of the US.
Brown said that despite efforts to achieve greater efficiency, internet use is growing at such a rate that it is outstripping technical improvements – meaning that American data centres could account for as much as 80bn kWh this year.
"Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services," he said. "It's a common story … technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand."
Among the problems that could result from the internet's voracious hunger for electricity are website failures and communications disruption costing millions in lost business every hour – as well as power cuts and brownouts at plants which supply data centres with electricity.
To combat this, initiatives are taking place across the industry to cope with the problem, including new designs for data centres, innovative cooling methods and more investment in renewable energy.
Researchers at Microsoft's £50m research lab in Cambridge are even turning to older technology in an attempt to turn the clock back – by replacing energy-hungry new machines with the systems used in older, less powerful laptops.
"It turns out that those processors have been designed to be very energy efficient, basically to make batteries last," said Andrew Herbert, the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge.
"We found we can build more energy-efficient data centres with those than with the kind of high performance processors you find in a typical server."
Google was among the first internet companies to take action to reduce its footprint by developing its own data centres — but even though it pumped an estimated $2.3bn into infrastructure projects last year, it remains unclear whether it is winning the battle.
The company's vice-president of operations, Urs Hölzle, told the Guardian that it was struggling to contain energy costs. "You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don't have exponential growth of revenue to go with it," he said.
"With good engineering we're trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up."
Despite mounting evidence that the internet's energy footprint is in danger of running out of control, however, Hölzle dismissed concerns about the environmental impact of using the web as "overblown".
"One mile of driving completely dwarfs the cost of a search," he said. "Internet usage is part of our consumption, just like TV is, or driving. There is consumption there, but in the grand scheme of things I think it is not the problem."
Leading figures have told the Guardian that many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs of delivering billions of web pages, videos and files online – in a "perfect storm" that could even threaten the future of the internet itself.
"In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption," said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers.
Bapat said the network of web servers and data centres that store online information is becoming more expensive, while profits come under pressure as a result of the recession.
"We need more data centres, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more," he said. "If you compound all of these trends, you have the perfect storm."
With more than 1.5 billion people online around the world, scientists estimate that the energy footprint of the net is growing by more than 10% each year. This leaves many internet companies caught in a bind: energy costs are escalating because of their increasing popularity, while at the same time their advertising revenues come under pressure from the recession.
One site under particular scrutiny is YouTube — now the world's third-biggest website, but one that requires a heavy subsidy from Google, its owner. Although the site's financial details are kept under wraps, a recent analysis by Credit Suisse suggested that it could lose as much as $470m (£317m) this year, as it succumbs to the high price of delivering power-intensive videos over the internet.
And while the demand for electricity is a primary concern, a secondary result of the explosion of internet use is that the computer industry's carbon debt is increasing drastically. From having a relatively small impact just a few years ago, it is now leapfrogging other sectors like the airline industry that are more widely known for their negative environmental impact.
However, tracking the growth of the internet's energy use is difficult, since internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.
"A lot of this internet stuff is fairly secretive," Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, told the Guardian.
"Google is probably the best example: they see it as a trade secret: how many data centres they have, how big they are, how many servers they have."
One study by Brown, commissioned by the US environmental protection agency, suggested that US data centres used 61bn kilowatt hours of energy in 2006. That is enough to supply the whole of the UK for two months, and 1.5% of the entire electricity usage of the US.
Brown said that despite efforts to achieve greater efficiency, internet use is growing at such a rate that it is outstripping technical improvements – meaning that American data centres could account for as much as 80bn kWh this year.
"Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services," he said. "It's a common story … technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand."
Among the problems that could result from the internet's voracious hunger for electricity are website failures and communications disruption costing millions in lost business every hour – as well as power cuts and brownouts at plants which supply data centres with electricity.
To combat this, initiatives are taking place across the industry to cope with the problem, including new designs for data centres, innovative cooling methods and more investment in renewable energy.
Researchers at Microsoft's £50m research lab in Cambridge are even turning to older technology in an attempt to turn the clock back – by replacing energy-hungry new machines with the systems used in older, less powerful laptops.
"It turns out that those processors have been designed to be very energy efficient, basically to make batteries last," said Andrew Herbert, the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge.
"We found we can build more energy-efficient data centres with those than with the kind of high performance processors you find in a typical server."
Google was among the first internet companies to take action to reduce its footprint by developing its own data centres — but even though it pumped an estimated $2.3bn into infrastructure projects last year, it remains unclear whether it is winning the battle.
The company's vice-president of operations, Urs Hölzle, told the Guardian that it was struggling to contain energy costs. "You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don't have exponential growth of revenue to go with it," he said.
"With good engineering we're trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up."
Despite mounting evidence that the internet's energy footprint is in danger of running out of control, however, Hölzle dismissed concerns about the environmental impact of using the web as "overblown".
"One mile of driving completely dwarfs the cost of a search," he said. "Internet usage is part of our consumption, just like TV is, or driving. There is consumption there, but in the grand scheme of things I think it is not the problem."
Berlusconi's wife seeks divorce
Veronica Lario, the wife of the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is to ask for a divorce after a series of public disputes with her husband over the close attention he pays to younger women.
Italian media reported that Lario, 52, had contacted a lawyer to start divorce proceedings against Berlusconi, 72, whom she married in 1990.
Last week, Lario fired off an angry letter to a local news agency, Ansa, describing as "shameless rubbish" Berlusconi's reported plan to select a series of young women, including a Big Brother contestant, as candidates for the European parliament.
She also criticised her husband's decision to spend a night at a Naples disco celebrating the birthday of an 18-year-old, Noemi Letizia.
A source close to Lario confirmed the contents of a report in today's La Repubblica, which quoted Lario as stating: "I cannot stay with a man who frequents minors."
Berlusconi publicly asked Lario for forgiveness in 2007 after she wrote to an Italian newspaper complaining about his flirting with a TV showgirl at an awards ceremony. After last week's outburst, Berlusconi did not back down, claiming Lario had been swayed by misleading press reports.
Lario, a former actor whose real name is Miriam Raffaella Bartolini, was courted by Berlusconi after he saw her appear topless in a Milan theatre production in 1980. At the time, Berlusconi was married to his first wife, with whom he had two children. Lario and Berlusconi have three children.
La Repubblica reported that Lario had discussed her decision to divorce with her children. "I am convinced that at this point it would be more dignified to stop here," the newspaper quoted her saying.
Niccolò Ghedini, a lawyer for Berlusconi, said today the prime minister was not making a statement. "All affairs of this kind are personal and painful," he told Corriere della Sera.
Italian media reported that Lario, 52, had contacted a lawyer to start divorce proceedings against Berlusconi, 72, whom she married in 1990.
Last week, Lario fired off an angry letter to a local news agency, Ansa, describing as "shameless rubbish" Berlusconi's reported plan to select a series of young women, including a Big Brother contestant, as candidates for the European parliament.
She also criticised her husband's decision to spend a night at a Naples disco celebrating the birthday of an 18-year-old, Noemi Letizia.
A source close to Lario confirmed the contents of a report in today's La Repubblica, which quoted Lario as stating: "I cannot stay with a man who frequents minors."
Berlusconi publicly asked Lario for forgiveness in 2007 after she wrote to an Italian newspaper complaining about his flirting with a TV showgirl at an awards ceremony. After last week's outburst, Berlusconi did not back down, claiming Lario had been swayed by misleading press reports.
Lario, a former actor whose real name is Miriam Raffaella Bartolini, was courted by Berlusconi after he saw her appear topless in a Milan theatre production in 1980. At the time, Berlusconi was married to his first wife, with whom he had two children. Lario and Berlusconi have three children.
La Repubblica reported that Lario had discussed her decision to divorce with her children. "I am convinced that at this point it would be more dignified to stop here," the newspaper quoted her saying.
Niccolò Ghedini, a lawyer for Berlusconi, said today the prime minister was not making a statement. "All affairs of this kind are personal and painful," he told Corriere della Sera.
Refugees on a wild frontier between army and Taliban
Two hours' drive from downtown Islamabad, with its leafy avenues and upmarket restaurants, a chain of jagged mountains in North-West Frontier Province marks the frontline of Pakistan's war with the Taliban.
A flood of refugees spills down from the hills and on to the plains at the edge of war-torn Buner district, bringing tales of bloodshed and destruction. Many are angry at the Pakistani army which, they say, has shelled homes and mistakenly killed civilians.
In Totalai, on the southern edge of Buner, a clutch of angry men piled off an overloaded tractor pulling a trailer filled with burka-clad women clutching cloth sacks and exhausted children.
"At night we are bombarded by the big guns and in the day by the helicopters," said Muhammad Saleh, a farmer, gesticulating wildly. They had come from Nawagai, a village caught in the crossfire, he said, pointing to a teenager with a bandaged leg, injured by army shelling.
"They should use smaller weapons. They are trying to hit a pigeon with a cannon," he said.
On another vehicle, a 30-year-old teacher, Abdul Aziz, said the head of Nawagai secondary school, Bakht Garim Shah, had been shot in his car by a helicopter gunship as he returned from an examination centre. "There were three other people with him and all were killed. And on the television the government was calling them suicide bombers!" he said. "Now we can't even get their corpses."
Last Friday, a day after the alleged incident took place, a military spokesman said the army had destroyed eight "suicide vehicles" and six vehicles containing fleeing militants.
Other refugees backed the operation, despite its heavy toll. Zakir, a 22-year-old computer store clerk, said his village, Swari, was straining under food shortages and a 24-hour curfew. But life under the Taliban had been worse, he said.
After seizing control last month, militants had robbed two banks, closed barber shops, banned music and forced people to disable their satellite television receivers, he said. They had tried to impose a crude form of justice, threatening to flog a man alleged to have made a sexual advance to another. "This is not right. There is no [use of] force in Islam," said Zakir, speaking from the safety of a house where he had taken shelter.
A journalist from the main town, Daggar, said the Taliban stole women's jewellery at gunpoint, occupied several marble factories and looted the homes of tribesmen who had dared to oppose them.
There is no official estimate of the number of refugees, but it is thought to be thousands. Many are being welcomed into Buner by al-Khidmat, the charity wing of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), the country's largest religious party. Volunteers offer food, drink and an Islamist-tinged critique of the situation.
"They should not have launched this operation. The problem could be solved through negotiation," said Ghuluam Mustafa, a JI official and deputy mayor of Buner district.
Further north, along the border, on the edge of the fighting, there were no refugees. In Rustum, the army had set up artillery to fire on Taliban positions in the Ambela pass, scene of the heaviest fighting. On Saturday afternoon the main street was empty and most shops shuttered. But Muhammad Javed, an elderly watch repairman, kept his door open.
The sound of shelling, from a nearby field, was keeping him awake at night, he complained. "Our people are not bad," he said. "It's just our terrible system of governance that has caused all this."
Down the road, Khalid Khan, a teacher and landowner, said the fighting had upset his nightly sessions of online Scrabble. Instead of playing with fellow enthusiasts in England, he said, he used his internet connection to share the sound of battle with them. "Obviously they were pretty shocked," he said.
Khan said the battle was "critical" to Pakistan's future, but US fears of a Taliban takeover in Islamabad, 55 miles to the south, were ill-informed. "The concept that this is an organised army, moving towards the capital, is just wrong," he said.
Last night, though, more fighting loomed as a peace pact in neighbouring Swat hung by a thread. Tensions rose as armed Taliban started patrols in the main town, Mingora. They beheaded two security personnel and blew up a bridge; the government imposed a curfew.
President Asif Ali Zardari, who flies to Washington this week for talks with President Barack Obama, urgently needs a victory. US officials, dangling $400m in aid, have been sharply critical of his government. But it is not just Zardari's fault. Earlier efforts to tackle militancy have been hampered by poor strategy and, sometimes, the ambivalence of those fighting the battles.
Among a small number of refugees in Rustum was a paramilitary soldier with the Frontier Constabulary who said he had surrendered to the Taliban after his platoon was overrun at the Pir Baba sufi shrine last week.
The soldier, who requested anonymity, said the Taliban treated him surprisingly well – offering food, tea, a torch and even a bus fare home. The shalwar kameez he was wearing had been donated by a Talib who took his uniform, he said.
The experience made him develop a certain sympathy for the militants, he said with a shy smile. "From what I heard them say, and what I saw, I feel we are in the wrong," he said.
A flood of refugees spills down from the hills and on to the plains at the edge of war-torn Buner district, bringing tales of bloodshed and destruction. Many are angry at the Pakistani army which, they say, has shelled homes and mistakenly killed civilians.
In Totalai, on the southern edge of Buner, a clutch of angry men piled off an overloaded tractor pulling a trailer filled with burka-clad women clutching cloth sacks and exhausted children.
"At night we are bombarded by the big guns and in the day by the helicopters," said Muhammad Saleh, a farmer, gesticulating wildly. They had come from Nawagai, a village caught in the crossfire, he said, pointing to a teenager with a bandaged leg, injured by army shelling.
"They should use smaller weapons. They are trying to hit a pigeon with a cannon," he said.
On another vehicle, a 30-year-old teacher, Abdul Aziz, said the head of Nawagai secondary school, Bakht Garim Shah, had been shot in his car by a helicopter gunship as he returned from an examination centre. "There were three other people with him and all were killed. And on the television the government was calling them suicide bombers!" he said. "Now we can't even get their corpses."
Last Friday, a day after the alleged incident took place, a military spokesman said the army had destroyed eight "suicide vehicles" and six vehicles containing fleeing militants.
Other refugees backed the operation, despite its heavy toll. Zakir, a 22-year-old computer store clerk, said his village, Swari, was straining under food shortages and a 24-hour curfew. But life under the Taliban had been worse, he said.
After seizing control last month, militants had robbed two banks, closed barber shops, banned music and forced people to disable their satellite television receivers, he said. They had tried to impose a crude form of justice, threatening to flog a man alleged to have made a sexual advance to another. "This is not right. There is no [use of] force in Islam," said Zakir, speaking from the safety of a house where he had taken shelter.
A journalist from the main town, Daggar, said the Taliban stole women's jewellery at gunpoint, occupied several marble factories and looted the homes of tribesmen who had dared to oppose them.
There is no official estimate of the number of refugees, but it is thought to be thousands. Many are being welcomed into Buner by al-Khidmat, the charity wing of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), the country's largest religious party. Volunteers offer food, drink and an Islamist-tinged critique of the situation.
"They should not have launched this operation. The problem could be solved through negotiation," said Ghuluam Mustafa, a JI official and deputy mayor of Buner district.
Further north, along the border, on the edge of the fighting, there were no refugees. In Rustum, the army had set up artillery to fire on Taliban positions in the Ambela pass, scene of the heaviest fighting. On Saturday afternoon the main street was empty and most shops shuttered. But Muhammad Javed, an elderly watch repairman, kept his door open.
The sound of shelling, from a nearby field, was keeping him awake at night, he complained. "Our people are not bad," he said. "It's just our terrible system of governance that has caused all this."
Down the road, Khalid Khan, a teacher and landowner, said the fighting had upset his nightly sessions of online Scrabble. Instead of playing with fellow enthusiasts in England, he said, he used his internet connection to share the sound of battle with them. "Obviously they were pretty shocked," he said.
Khan said the battle was "critical" to Pakistan's future, but US fears of a Taliban takeover in Islamabad, 55 miles to the south, were ill-informed. "The concept that this is an organised army, moving towards the capital, is just wrong," he said.
Last night, though, more fighting loomed as a peace pact in neighbouring Swat hung by a thread. Tensions rose as armed Taliban started patrols in the main town, Mingora. They beheaded two security personnel and blew up a bridge; the government imposed a curfew.
President Asif Ali Zardari, who flies to Washington this week for talks with President Barack Obama, urgently needs a victory. US officials, dangling $400m in aid, have been sharply critical of his government. But it is not just Zardari's fault. Earlier efforts to tackle militancy have been hampered by poor strategy and, sometimes, the ambivalence of those fighting the battles.
Among a small number of refugees in Rustum was a paramilitary soldier with the Frontier Constabulary who said he had surrendered to the Taliban after his platoon was overrun at the Pir Baba sufi shrine last week.
The soldier, who requested anonymity, said the Taliban treated him surprisingly well – offering food, tea, a torch and even a bus fare home. The shalwar kameez he was wearing had been donated by a Talib who took his uniform, he said.
The experience made him develop a certain sympathy for the militants, he said with a shy smile. "From what I heard them say, and what I saw, I feel we are in the wrong," he said.
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