Politics this week: 13th - 19th January 2007

The American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, toured the Middle East to promote George Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq; she also sounded out the Palestinians and Israelis over the possibility of reviving a peace process, and proposed a three-way meeting soon. As well as Israel and the Palestinian territories, she visited Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. See article

Israel's top general, Dan Halutz, resigned over the handling of last summer's war in Lebanon. Meanwhile, the justice ministry announced a criminal investigation into corruption allegations against the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, whose government looks increasingly fragile.

Sectarian carnage in Iraq persisted. A bomb attack on a university in Baghdad killed at least 70 people, many of them female students, while attacks elsewhere in Baghdad and in the disputed city of Kirkuk killed at least another 100. The government, meanwhile, said it had agreed to a new law to distribute oil revenue fairly among Iraq's people.

Tunisia's interior minister said that an armed group that was broken up by security forces in a recent shoot-out were radical Islamists who had infiltrated from Algeria. This raised fears that groups linked to al-Qaeda were trying to build a north African front.

On a tour of Latin American countries with anti-American governments, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said he would put $1 billion into an Iranian-Venezuelan fund to help poor countries throw off the “yoke of American imperialism”. But back home, powerful figures criticized him for his bellicose foreign policy and extravagant economics. See article

The African Union continued its effort to raise an 8,000-strong peacekeeping force for Somalia to replace the Ethiopian army which, with American backing, has swept the Islamists from power in the past few weeks. See article

On second thoughts

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain's socialist prime minister, said he had made a “mistake” in predicting improved relations with ETA, the Basque terrorist group. His prediction had been made one day before ETA broke a ceasefire on December 30th with a bomb at Madrid's airport that killed two people. See article

Breaking a seven-month political stalemate, a center-right coalition under Mirek Topolanek formed a government in the Czech Republic. It relies on two defectors from the opposition for its majority in the deadlocked parliament.

A vote in Ukraine's parliament diminished the power of the presidency. The measure was another blow to President Viktor Yushchenko, and a victory for Viktor Yanukovich, the prime minister. Yulia Tymoshenko, the president's former ally, sided with Mr Yanukovich for the vote.

Security was increased in the Moscow metro and at transport and infrastructure facilities across Russia following warnings of an impending terrorist attack. The security services said they were acting on a tip-off from foreign colleagues.

Nearing the end?

Fidel Castro has had three operations for diverticulitis— an inflamed colon—and is now suffering from peritonitis, and other complications, according to a detailed account in El País, a Spanish newspaper. Cuban officials have refused to discuss their president's condition, except to deny American claims that he has cancer.

In the first confession by a senior paramilitary leader in Colombia under a controversial peace process, Salvatore Mancuso gave details of the killing of more than 300 people in 87 different militia operations. See article

Evo Morales, Bolivia's president, sent the army to patrol the country's third city, Cochabamba, after two people were killed and dozens wounded in clashes between his supporters and those of the local governor, who supports regional autonomy.

Talking shop

Meeting in Cebu, the Philippines, leaders of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) agreed to accelerate their move toward a regional free-trade area, and signed an agreement on migrant labor. An accord was also reached with China on liberalizing trade in services. See article

China and Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution put forward by America condemning the junta in Myanmar and demanding political reform. Indonesia, its ASEAN partner, abstained.

The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan met in Islamabad. There was no breakthrough, but both sides spoke positively of a peace process that had appeared in jeopardy after last July's bombings in Mumbai. See article

Fakhruddin Ahmed, a former World Bank economist and central-bank governor, was appointed the new head of Bangladesh's caretaker administration. With the country in a state of emergency enforced by the army, Mr Ahmed promised to arrange credible elections. See article

In important steps towards cementing peace in Nepal, Maoist rebels took seats in an interim parliament, and promised to dissolve their parallel government. They also began to register and lock up their weapons.

Senior Afghan and American officials continued to accuse Pakistan of harboring Taliban militants active in Afghanistan. Pakistan denied the charges and mounted air strikes on a militant camp in South Waziristan, a tribal area bordering Afghanistan. See article

The Philippines army claimed to have killed Abu Sulaiman, a leading member of the Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf, in a gun battle. The group has been linked with al-Qaeda.

The new kid on the block

Barack Obama took his first formal step towards running for president by forming an exploratory committee. The senator from Illinois, who has held his seat for two years, is considered a front-runner for the Democratic nomination along with a certain senator from New York who is expected to make her intentions known (officially) soon. See article

Jury selection began in the trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The former chief of staff for the vice-president, Dick Cheney, is accused of perjury in an investigation into the leaking of a former CIA officer's name to the press. The Plame affair was a headache for George Bush prior to the 2004 election.

Click here to see the original summaries and more features from The Economist

Business this week: 13th - 19th January 2007

BP's management was sternly criticized in a report from a panel investigating safety at its operations in the United States. The panel, led by James Baker, a former secretary of state, was commissioned by BP (on the recommendation of America's chemical-safety board) after an explosion at its Texan oil refinery in 2005 killed 15 people and injured 170 others. John Browne, BP's chief executive, who last week said he was stepping down in July, vowed that the report's recommendations would be implemented in full. See article

A consortium of private-equity firms offered $37.6 billion for Equity Office Properties, topping Blackstone's bid for America's largest real-estate investment trust. The target of the biggest-ever leveraged buy-out, Equity Office owns 20m square feet (1.9m square meters) of office space in Manhattan alone, and is attractive because rents in many of America's business districts are predicted to rise.

Loosening the purse strings

General Electric agreed to buy the aerospace business of Smiths, a British engineering group, for $4.8 billion, boosting GE's presence in supplying flight management, landing gear and cockpit systems to civilian and military aircraft makers. GE's spending spree looked set to continue with speculation that it was about to buy the diagnostics business of Abbott Laboratories.

Airbus reported 790 net orders for aircraft last year, confirming it had slipped behind Boeing (which took 1,044 orders) for the first time since 2000. But despite the production misery surrounding its A380 super-jumbo, Airbus managed to deliver more airplanes than its rival.

The trial of 19 former senior executives at Swissair began in Zurich. The airline, once considered a paragon of Swiss business efficiency and reliability, collapsed in 2001 with debts of SFr17 billion ($10.5 billion). The 19 defendants are accused of neglecting their responsibilities to shareholders when making expansive acquisitions in the 1990s.

The parent company of American Airlines reported net income of $231m for 2006, its first profitable year since 2000. The carrier benefited from a surge in travel.

Digging itself out of a hole

Eurotunnel's debt-restructuring plan was approved by a French court (and 33 lawsuits from creditors appealing against the process were thrown out). The operator of the tunnel linking Britain and France has £6.2 billion ($12.2 billion) of debt, which will be cut by half as agreed to by most debt-holders. Shares in Eurotunnel, suspended since last spring, are expected to start trading again next month.

An $8.9 billion offer for Cablevision Systems from the company's founding Dolan family seemed doomed after it was turned down by a special committee of the board for not offering fair value. Charles and James Dolan, respectively Cablevision's chairman and chief executive, led the bid.

The share prices of Intel and its arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices came under pressure after indications that the chipmakers' price war is hurting profits. Intel announced that gross profit margins in 2007 would be lower than expected. AMD said its fourth-quarter earnings (due next week) would show its profit had been squeezed by prices.

Apple surpassed the already giddy forecasts of its quarterly earnings and reported a net profit of $1 billion, a rise of 77% for the quarter ending December 30th compared with a year ago. Some 21m iPod players were shipped in the period, 50% more than last year.

The music industry's trade group said that worldwide revenue from tunes legally downloaded from the internet almost doubled in 2006, to $2 billion, accounting for 10% of all music sales. Although 795m songs were transferred to music players, burned to blank discs and the like, that was not enough to cover the loss to recording companies of falling CD sales.

A zesty rise in the price of oranges was forecast after a cold snap in California's Central Valley damaged a large part of the crop. The frigid weather also hurt other produce, including lemons, lettuces and avocados. Around 20% of America's oranges are grown in the Golden State, mainly for eating rather than pulping as orange juice.

Give me liberty, anytime

The annual “index of economic freedom” for 157 countries was released. The index measures ten variables, such as the ability to do business, property rights, corruption and labor freedom. The average score (0 equals repressed, 100 equals free) was 60.6%, down slightly from last year but the second-highest since the survey began. North Korea remained rooted at the bottom (several countries, including Iraq, were not ranked).

Click here to read the original business news summaries from Economist.com

Kazaa, Skype founders test online TV service

LOS ANGELES - The founders of Skype, an online telephone business sold last year to eBay Inc. for $2.6 billion, are testing a broadband television service for computer screens, the founders' spokesman said on Monday.

The service, called "The Venice Project" is expected to be launched next year, according to the spokesman for London-based Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, who used part of the money they made on the sale of Skype to develop the broadband TV service.

"We are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet," wrote Friis, Skype's director of strategy and innovation, on his blog at (www.janusfriis.net).

The spokesman said the beta test was launched last week, with some 6,000 people testing the service.

On his blog, Friis said the partners had been "quietly testing with a small circle of people" for a few months, and that now they were going to expand the circle.

The service will offer high-quality programs through an ad-supported platform. The project aims to bring quality TV programs free to consumers who have a broadband Internet connection, the spokesman said.

Friis and Zennstrom, who is Skype's chief executive, also co-founded the wildly popular file-sharing service Kazaa, which they sold to Australian company Sharman Networks in 2001.

In July, the entrepreneurs reached into their own pockets to help settle a copyright infringement lawsuit against Sharman by the music and movie industries. Zennstrom and Friis contributed an undisclosed amount to a total payout of well above $100 million.

Click here to read the original report from Reuters.com

Every day should be Martin Luther King day

I know we had some great playoff games this weekend, but I think it's only proper to reflect on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. on what would have been his 78th birthday. Here's a short biography of the slain civil rights leader from the Nobel Prize organization:

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had been graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastoral of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "I Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.

Selected Bibliography

Adams, Russell, Great Negroes Past and Present, pp. 106-107. Chicago, Afro-Am Publishing Co., 1963.

Bennett, Lerone, Jr., What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Chicago, Johnson, 1964.

I Have a Dream: The Story of Martin Luther King in Text and Pictures. New York, Time Life Books, 1968.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Measure of a Man. Philadelphia. The Christian Education Press, 1959. Two devotional addresses.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Strength to Love. New York, Harper & Row, 1963. Sixteen sermons and one essay entitled "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence."

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York, Harper, 1958.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience. New York, Harper & Row, 1968.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? New York, Harper & Row, 1967.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Why We Can't Wait. New York, Harper & Row, 1963.

"Man of the Year", Time, 83 (January 3, 1964) 13-16; 25-27.

"Martin Luther King, Jr.", in Current Biography Yearbook 1965, ed. by Charles Moritz, pp. 220-223. New York, H.W. Wilson.

Reddick, Lawrence D., Crusader without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York, Harper, 1959.

From Nobel Lectures, Peace 1951-1970, Editor Frederick W. Haberman, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972

Click here to here to see the original biography from NobelPrize.org