By Scott Johnson

After almost two months of bloodshed, Kenya's dueling leaders have finally agreed to a power-sharing arrangement intended to end the violence that has crippled the country since its disputed December presidential poll. It's the most positive development Kenya has seen in a long time. In a ceremony staged to calm tempers former U.N Secretary General Kofi Annan brought president Mwai Kibaki and his rival, opposition leader Raila Odinga, together and encouraged them to shake hands for the cameras.

But now the tricky part begins. The agreement creates a powerful prime ministerial post for Odinga while Kibaki stays on as president. It also splits cabinet posts between the governemnt and the opposition. For Odinga, the first order of business will be to figure out a way to peacefully repatriate over 300,000 Kenyans displced by the violence without further inflaming  ethnic hatreds.  Like Kibaki, the vast majority of those uprooted are ethnic Kikuyus, and resettling them is going to be a colossal task that could take several years, according to those involved in the negotiations.  "It's a huge problem, a huge problem," says Sammy Nyongesa, an opposition mobilizer who was in a celebratory mood earlier today, "It's not going to be solved immediately because politics in Kenya has been ethnicized now."

It's still not clear what form the new arrangement will take. Odinga could well be appointed as prime minister within the next week if the proper constitutional changes are made. Either way, the deal shifts the balance of power in Kenya significantly--away from the ruling elite that have governed the country since independence, opening it up to an entirely new coalition of interests from across the country. Odinga's ODM party now controls a majority of parliament, as well as the powerful house speaker position, and is running high on the momentum that Odinga brought to bear. "Everything is working on our side," Nyongesa said.

But who knows how long that will be the case. Odinga's hardline position started to breed resentment recently when people began to pin the violence on his unwillingness to accept anything less than the presidency. Eventually he did, but not without costs. "It was not good for Raila to continue to have such a hard line stance because of what we had gone through as a country," said one opposition source who asked not to be named, "That was what made him change his mind."  

Hopefully, that spirit of reconciliation will last long enough for Kenya to get back on its feet.

Call It the cough heard round the world. The World Health Organization's Feb. 26 report on how super strains of tuberculosis are on the loose has shaken physicians and policy makers everywhere to the marrow. And rightly so. The study, based on a massive survey of 90,000 patients worldwide, is eloquent testimony to the ravages of a modern killer: multi drug resistant tuberculosis, known as MDR TB in the chilly shorthand of public health, and its even deadlier next of kin, extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, or XTR-TB, which is practically untreatable.  

It's no surprise that poor countries, rife with malnutrition, claustrophobic slums, and especially AIDS are super TB's closest ally. Precisely because HIV strafes the human immune system, patients are sitting ducks for infection. That's why almost everywhere that AIDS is prevalent,  tuberculosis is soaring. Worst hit are the fragments of the old Soviet Union (led by Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where one in four new tb patients have the super variety) and Africa, with the highest rate of TB in the world and the worst public health statistics (only six nations on the continent managed to report to Geneva).  At this rate the Economic Forum at Davos might have to be scrapped in favor of the sanatorium that once crowned that Magic Mountain.

There is one bright spot in the developing world's deathlock with TB: Brazil. That may sound odd. Nearly a quarter of the 185 million Brazilians live below the poverty line, where contagions rage, and some 620,000 have AIDS, a third of all cases in Latin America. But unlike almost every other developing nation, Brazil has not seen the overall TB infection rate spike - much less a runaway outbreak of MDR-TB - among the most vulnerable population. The reason is as simple as it is controversial: free meds for HIV and AIDS patients. In 1996, the Brazilian congress passed a law requiring the government to hand out antiretrovirals to anyone with HIV free of charge. Drug companies were disgruntled, not least because Brazil browbeat them into slashing prices for the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals, the state of the art medicine used to combat the virus. The same policy encouraged nearly two dozen other developing countries to take on the biggest pharmaceutical corporations as well.

No one ever claimed Brazil was a health spa, of course. After a brief lull, mosquito-borne dengue fever has come raging back, including the killer hemorrhagic variety. An outbreak of micobacteriosis, which causes a nasty hospital infection, leaves lasting surgery scars and can withstand all but the most drastic disinfectants, is on the loose. And while in theory anyone may be treated at the country's public hospitals, chronic underfunding has apparently forced brain surgeons in Rio de Janeiro to resort to common power tools, like home drills, in the operating rooms.

Still, it's hard to argue with success. A team of international scientists recently crunched the numbers and found that Brazilians living with AIDS who reguarly took the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals had 80 percent lower TB infection rates than did patients who were not treated. (The study reviewed data from 1995 to 2001, but researchers say that the trend holds to this day.) The bottom line is that systematic use of  cutting edge HIV/AIDS medicine may be one of the best ways to keep this millennial scourge at bay. That may not be the best news for Big Pharma's shareholders. But it ought to give public health authorites a shot in the arm.

Home Away From Home: The prince in his accommodations at Forward Operating Base Delhi on Jan. 2, 2008. Photo: John Stillwell / AP-pool.

Around 5pm GMT this afternoon, the breaking news started coming--Prince Harry, the second son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, was fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. The way it was presented, it was almost as if the red-haired party-loving Brit was fighting a one-man battle in the dusty environs of Helmand province. Video started appearing on the BBC, showing the prince firing guns, doing foot patrols and on the telephone doing his high pressured job as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC).  The prince it seems has been in Afghanistan since mid-December (missing his family's annual Christmas celebrations in Sandringham) . How could the news have taken this long to get out? Because there was a gentlemen's agreement between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the British press. Fleet Street agreed not to report the deployment in exchange for having access to Prince Harry in the field. Under the blackout deal the British media had access to pooled footage, interviews and photos of the soldier prince that otherwise wouldn't have been released until Harry came back from battle in April.

It's hard to believe that anyone could long for the good old days of Jacques Chirac, but when President Nicolas Sarkozy visited the Agriculture Fair in Paris a few days ago, he managed to remind the French how comfortable they used to feel with his lanky, laid-back predecessor. When Chirac visited the annual fair, he did so as a bon vivant. Sarkozy, on the other hand, went through it in an overheated rush, using language fit for a scrum in the Metro. The video of the event captured by the tabloid daily Le Parisien has been watched by more than three million viewers:

(You can see it with relevant translation on The Shadowland Journal.) The climax comes when Sarkozy is shaking hands with the crowd and one man pulls back, "Ah, no, don't touch me." Sarko, his fixed smile unwavering says, "Get lost, then." To which the man responds, "You got me dirty." To which Sarko responds (this is a polite way of putting it), "Get lost, you jerk."

The French don't like their presidents to talk that way in public. (Chirac's language was plenty salty in private.) But the real problem is that they're discovering they just don't like Sarkozy. The cover story of this week's Le Nouvel Observateur explains why. In the lead article headlined "And if this were to end badly ...," François Bazin writes that other presidents have been unpopular, but for the most part late in their terms. When Chirac's ratings took a nose dive in 1996, early in his first mandate, his prime minister, Alain Juppé, took the fall.

But Sarkozy wants all attention fixed on him, and is managing to attract opprobrium to the office of the president itself. "What's happening today is literally unimaginable," writes Bazin.

"In the current political equation," he says, "there are plenty of other factors that enter into to the bottom line. The international crisis that's sinking growth. A campaign slogan ('Work more to earn more') that's remembered only too well and that's come back like a boomerang. All that creates turbulence, but doesn't justify the sense of an impending crash.The mistake of the president, what has really cost him, goes much further than management of change that's often contrarian and always marked by traces of narcissism that are a bit childish.

"The breaks with past conceptions of a modern presidency that Sarkozy has introduced are all symbolic in nature," writes Bazin. "His cardinal sin is to have called into question, sometimes just with little details or simple matters of behavior, that which legitimizes the authority of the head of state in a country like France." One day he manages to diminish the secular character of the French Republic (which is, to the French, almost sacred). The next he tries to tweak the nation's conscience by making 10-year-olds "adopt" victims their age killed in the Holocaust. On yet another day, he undermines the institutional rules that regulate the relationship  a president has with his ministers, parliament, and the constitutional council. "There's no such thing as good governance without measure and distance," says Bazin. "And that presumes that the head of state is something other than a gang leader you can collar and talk to using he familiar 'tu.' And that also implies a certain simplicity needed in the 'republican monarch' ... who should not be transformed into a jet-setter fascinated by the glitz of power...."

"At the center of the rumbling political and media storm, the president has chosen to expose himself more than is reasonable," Bazin concludes " Every day he makes a statement that's offensive or provocative in some way, radicalizing and shamelessly playing up to a disoriented public opinion that just wants to feel secure. Dividing and victimizing. More than a method, it's the formula of every man for himself. Nicolas Sarkozy is out walking with a lightning rod in his hands. The risk for him—and above all for the office that he holds—is that the thunderbolts will not come from the presidency but land on it, which is not at all the same thing."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has a genius for turning conciliation into provocation and common sense into cause for resentment, outdid himself recently when he proposed that fifth-graders identify themselves with individual children killed in the Holocaust, in effect adopting the memory of the dead.

The most widely read French news and opinion weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, devoted several articles to the controversy in Thursday’s edition, including a petition for the proposal to be withdrawn: "We decline to discuss the nobility of the intentions, the good will and the level of spirituality that gave rise to such a project," says the appeal. "But we already see the effects of it and they are catastrophic. They divide communities -- even, and perhaps more so, the Jewish community."

By Jacopo Barigazzi

If you're at loose ends next weekend, think about popping over to Pristina for a mini-break. The capital of Kosovo has some good restaurants--Café Boheme has lovely pasta and there are also some surprisingly yummy sushi places. But the real reason to be in Pristina is that it looks pretty darn likely that on  February 17 the world will wake up to Kosovo declaring itself an independent nation. Sunday, it seems, is a strategic day for Prime Minister Hashim Thaci to make his historic announcement because the Security Council would not be able to meet in time to put out the proverbial flames of a nation emerging. The rumors are that the United States, Germany and Britain will then instantly recognize Kosovo and it's de facto a done deal. All my Balkan pals have been muttering about it for weeks. Serbia has just re-elected the Western-leaning Boris Tadic as president and last week it was announced that the European Union would be taking over from the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), which has effectively run Kosovo since the NATO war with Serbia ended in June 1999.  With Tadic talking of Serbia becoming a member of the EU and the EU mission effectively moving Kosovo in the direction of eventual EU membership, all the pieces seem to have finally fallen into place.

For Sgt. Matthew Villalpando, Tuesday wasn't so Super in Baghdad. The California native has to be at the International Zone's Checkpoint Two by 6 a.m. every day for work, so when the results of the primaries started rolling in late Tuesday night, he was sound asleep in bed with his alarm set for 4 a.m. He didn't even have time to check on what had happened before heading out the door Wednesday morning.

Like Villalpando, most troops were too busy--or tired--to stay up to watch Super Tuesday's results as they unfolded back home. Few had the time to vote themselves, saying that, given their busy schedules, it was not a priority. While the Iraq war provides unprecedented means for soldiers to follow events back home--satellite television, cellular telephones, Internet and daily deliveries of the Stars and Stripes newspaper--there are still pockets that are out of touch. In a new base set up two weeks ago in an abandoned house in the Arab Jabour area, less than 100 soldiers live without any hook-up to the civilian world--they only have one room with electricity so far. Not only did most not know Super Tuesday was held yesterday, many still did not know the outcome of the Super Bowl.

Soldiers abroad vote by absentee ballot, which they can request over the Internet from their home states. Voting Assistance Officers at the U.S. Embassy can also help, but some still say the process should be made simpler.