By Karen MacGregor

For the past eight years, the majority of Zimbabweans have made it clear that they want to be rid of an increasingly autocratic, corrupt and incompetent Zanu-PF government led by President Robert Mugabe. But in elections Saturday their hopes might for the third time be dashed, amid mounting evidence of large-scale vote rigging that will ensure a poll that is anything but free and fair. Still, with the stiffest competition he has ever faced from two other candidates, Mugabe’s sacked finance minister Simba Makoni and opposition Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe is holding its breath for polling results that are expected to begin rolling in on Sunday.

Polling stations around the country were open for 12 hours on Saturday, with an electorate of just under six million people voting for president as well as members of a 210-seat parliament and local councils. Security has been tight but voting appeared to proceed peacefully--though extremely slowly at urban stations, where most opposition supporters reside. Almost all Western journalists have been denied accreditation to cover the election, and only observers from “friendly,” mostly African countries, have been invited. Zimbabweans abroad, now thought to number more than three million of a former population of 13 million people--many of them opposition supporters who have fled to South Africa to escape intimidation and economic collapse--have not been allowed to vote.

The past eight years have been a nightmare for most Zimbabweans. In 2000 Mugabe had already been in power for 20 years, and in February of that year citizens said, “no” to him in a referendum on constitutional changes. Faced for the first time with a real threat to his rule, Mugabe--once the darling of the West for running sub-Saharan Africa's major post-colonial success story--reacted with ruthless speed in cracking down on a swelling trade union-led opposition movement and white farmers, whom he perceived as its funders. Since then white farmers have been chased off their land, thousands of opposition supporters have been assaulted (and many killed) by security forces and militia, draconian laws have been passed, corruption has run rampant and the economy has collapsed. Inflation is running at 100,000 percent and unemployment at 80 percent.

Mikhail Kalashnikov got a fairly raw deal out of Communism. The assault rifle he designed while lying wounded in hospital at the end of the Second World War became a Twentieth Century icon. His name is the world's best-known brand (think about it - there may be Kalahari bushmen who havent heard of Coca Cola, but odds are they've heard of Kalashnikov). According to Jane's Defense Weekly, up to 100 million Kalashnikovs of various

types have been produced since the gun went into production in 1947, largely thanks to the Soviet habit of giving friendly foreign allies the technology to produce the weapons free of charge. But Kalashnikov himself, who will be 90 this year, lives in a modest apartment in the Volga city of Izhevsk. He hasn't received a penny of royalties on his famous invention - though he is a Lieutenant-General and boasts a chestful of medals.

Now, the Russian state is trying to do its best to redress that injustice - if not in the interests of the AK-47's inventor, then at least in the interests of his country. First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov announced today

By Brian Byrnes

The Queen’s honeymoon was over before it even began. Less than 72 hours after she donned the azure-and-white sash as Argentina’s first elected female president, her highness had already gone to battle.
 
Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s reputation as strong-willed, outspoken and sometimes flippant had earned her the faux-royal title, and it was proven in spades on December 13,  when she took the podium at the Pink House in downtown Buenos Aires to blast U.S. allegations that  Venezuela's Hugo Chavez had tried to fund her presidential campaign with clandestine petrodollars.
 
With pointing fingers and a steely glare, “garbage” was how she described a U.S. prosecutor’s charges that a suitcase from Venezuela stuffed with $800,000 in cash had been destined for her campaign coffers before it was detained at a Buenos Aires airport in August. Fully aware of the moment, Cristina played the gender card, vowing not to be “pressured” because she was a woman and -- in a not-so-subtle dig at the Bush administration -- promising to strengthen relations with “friendly” countries, like Venezuela.
 
Not exactly a winning start for a president who was expected to improve ties with the U.S. following a frosty four-and-a-half years under her predecessor (and husband) Nestor Kirchner, who routinely blamed the IMF and Wall Street for Argentina’s catastrophic economic collapse in 2001. Cristina--with her penchant for globetrotting, high fashion and political discourse--would surely be able to patch up foreign relations, or so everyone thought.

Politicians on both sides of the partisan divide in the U.S. rarely miss a chance to beat the drums over the perils of the immigrant tide and the imperative to "secure our borders." That might be a good idea. With the world's largest economy on a slide, the dream of making America is looking less lustrous every day, and now the U.S. risks seeing one of its most dynamic and creative sources of human capital blow away with the prairie dust. 

There are already troubling signs. A recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank reports that the flow of dollars Latin American and Caribbean immigrants send back home is slackening. In 2007, Latins living in the U.S. remitted $66 billion to their native countries. That's not half bad (a record amount, in fact) but what drew the Bank's attention was the modest 7 percent increase over the previous year. Until then the flow of dollars back home had been expanding at double digit rates every year. Last year the nominal sum of incoming migrant dollars actually fell in Brazil, from $7.4 billion to $7.1 billion.

By Mary Hennock

China's parliament is frequently dismissed as a rubber stamp body whose delegates agree with every government measure and avoid controversy. This year's session has seen a new trend at work. The two-week gathering of the National People's Congress has seen protesters lobbying hard against a key government policy. No, not Tibet independence activists, angry farmers, or unemployed workers, but company bosses. Many delegates are entrepreneurs, and they're objecting to China's new labor contract law, introduced just over two months ago. "The law is overly-protective of workers' rights," delegate Zong Qinghou told Reuters, adding, "It isn't reasonable." Zong is the chairman of Wahaha Group, China's biggest private soft drinks company.

By Barbie Nadeau 

Beijing isn't alone in its "edifice complex," the massive urban makeover that has transformed the Chinese capital in the run-up to the Summer Olympics. In Shanghai the remodeling of the city's famous Bund waterfront has led to some raised eyebrows. My colleague Duncan Hewitt writes from Shanghai:

When Shanghai does something, it doesn't do it by halves. For years, local urban planners have admitted that the city made a mistake in the 1990s, when it routed one of its major highways right along the famous Bund waterfront. Since then conservationists have dreamt of the day when the traffic would be rerouted, or even put underground in a tunnel, to spare the historic structures from pollution and improve the view of the famous old stretch of colonial-era buildings.

By Mike Elkin
 
With Spanish national elections two days away, a former Socialist town councilor was assassinated around midday today. Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and opposition leader Mariano Rajoy agreed to cancel the remaining campaign events and have convened a parliamentary session at 7pm to respond to the attack. Government officials attributed to violent separatist group ETA, but no group has claimed responsibility.
 
“The Spanish democracy has shown that it won't allow challenges from those who defy its basic principles and its essential values," said Zapatero. "It hasn't allowed them in the past, it won't allow them now and it will never allow them. Together… we will defend our institutions and our freedoms.” 

The gunman shot dead 42-year-old Isaías Carrasco, who worked at a highway toll station and was a councilman in the town of Arrasate-Mondragón in the Basque Country between 2003 and 2007. He was shot three times as he left his home with his wife and daughter.
 
ETA hasn’t targeted a specific person for assassination since May 2003. It's widely believed that the group is trying to influence the outcome of the election. The separatists, who have killed around 850 people over the past 40 years, appear to be following the precedent set in 2004 when the Madrid train bombings by an Al Qaeda-inspired group tipped the scales in favor of the Socialists. Or perhaps ETA wanted to send a bloody reminder to the country that has been focusing its political attention on the ailing economy and immigration.

It’s hard to say how this attack will affect the elections on Sunday. The initial reaction from the Socialists and Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) has been one of solidarity in the face of a common enemy – a solidarity that has been absent since the Socialists won the last election. The political atmosphere of the past four years and especially this campaign has been tense and angry. And while the PP consistently attacked the government’s anti-terror policy, namely Zapatero’s decision in 2006 to open talks with ETA after it declared a ceasefire, a collective political response is more likely than not.

 When U.S. president George W. Bush called on Africa the other day, he was greeted with a rare show of bonhomie. Chalk it up to mosquito diplomacy.  After all, few continents on earth are more plagued by bug-borne diseases.( 80 percent of the 1 million deaths a year caused by malaria are logged in sub-Saharan Africa.) Like some Bill Gates manqué, Bush handed out thousands of bed nets to grateful crowds in Benin, Ghana, Liberia, Rwanda and Tanzania. Too bad the Exterminator stopped there.

  Plenty of folks across the Atlantic could also use some pest control. Not least in Brazil, where an old scourge has come roaring back. Latin America's largest nation is in the throes of one of its deadliest epidemics of dengue fever on record - far deadlier, in fact, than officials let on. According to O Estado de São Paulo, 324 people died from dengue fever in 2006 and 2007. That's 45 percent more dengue-related deaths than the Brazilian health ministry acknowledges. What's behind the numbers gap? An actuarial sleight of hand.

By Barbie Nadeau

 
For those who may have thought the French were always a little more, hmmmm, you know, open about sex, the latest Le Nouvel Observateur may come as something of a shock. The cover of France's leading weekly magazine of news and opinion--entitled "The New Sexuality of the French"--suggests the country is still coming to grips with the revolution in morals and manners that began 40 years ago in, you guessed it, that pivotal year of Boomer consciousness: 1968. The ensemble of stories includes everything from small talk about deep thinking--an interview with the aging nouveau philosophe Alain Finkielkraut--to a survey of sex toys. Some, we're told, "are useful for relieving stress."

The core of the coverage, however, is built around a survey of 12,364 men and women aged 18 to 69 conducted by the French National Agency for AIDS Research. It's a follow-up on a similar study done in 1992, and the changes revealed are more evolutionary than revolutionary: The traditional idea of men as predators and women "waiting for the warrior at the entrance to the cave," as the Nouvel Obs writes blandly, "just won't fly anymore. Henceforth, women want to take part in the hunt."  Backing that up are numbers that show men have about the same number of sexual partners over a lifetime today (12.9) as they did in 1970 (12.8), while the number of partners for women has increased from an average 1.9 in 1972 to 5.1 today.

With respect to gays, some prejudice endures and homosexual practice, at least as shared with those conducting the survey, seems to be pretty much the same as it's been for years: 4 percent of women say they have sexual relations with other women, compared with 2.6 percent in 1992; among men the numbers are unchanged at 4.1 percent. "The development of tolerance as a matter of principle, which is especially pronounced among the young, has not been enough to produce radical changes in private attitudes toward homosexuality," says the research agency's report.

And sexual practices? There's nothing in Le Nouvel Obs, in fact, about French kissing. But there are many other details about preferred approaches to sexual intercourse--or not, as the case may be. A checklist:

All the criticism of Russia's deeply flawed presidential election yesterday misses the point: the election was doubtless a farce, with no serious opposition to the Kremlin's man. But Vladimir Putin deserves credit for doing what no other Russian leader has ever done--he voluntarily ceded power at the height of his political career. Boris Yeltsin's 2000 resignation falls into a different category: there was no way he had the health or popularity to continue. Putin does. So for all the terrible things he has wreaked on Russia during his tenure--dismantling Russia's democracy chief among them--one must at least salute the man for keeping his word and respecting the letter, if not the spirit, of Russia's constitution.

The inheritance which he's passing to Dmitry Medvedev, the unsurprising victor of Sunday's vote by a landslide of over 70%, is a different matter. As this week's Economist argues, there are dark clouds on the economic horizon. Putin's reaped the benefits of three years of meteoric rises in oil and gas prices, which have allowed him the luxury, unknown to politicians in the West, of booming State revenues without any increase in taxation. But the flip side of Russia's oil-fuelled boom has been brutal inflation and a growing poverty gap.

How an exploration of Buddhists' forays into politics led to some surprising discoveries

The idea for the piece that became this week's cover story on Buddhist political activism came to me last fall, when I traveled to Southeast Asia to report on the monk-led "Saffron Revolution" in Burma (also known as Myanmar). The fact that Buddhist monks had decided to put themselves at the head of a Burmese opposition movement against the military junta in their country was intriguing. Because the government was refusing visas to journalists, I ended up doing much of the
reporting out of Bangkok, and along the way I also found myself fascinated by the situation in Thailand, where Buddhism has become an increasingly assertive political force in recent years.

Most people outside of the region probably don't tend to think of Buddhism as a political religion. When westerners think of Buddhists, the image that probably comes to mind most readily involves people sitting in the lotus position, calmly meditating in some blissful spot far-removed from the daily tumult of ordinary life. As one leading scholar, Ian Harris at the UK's University of Cumbria, put it to me, "This idea of the monk withdrawn in contemplation is to some extent an Orientalist construction," a cliché indulged by naïve Westerners. Buddhists, he pointed out, have always been deeply involved in the societies in which they live. In medieval times some served as close advisers to kings, while others fought injustice as warriors. In Southeast Asia monks played a major role in decolonization movements after World War II. Nor are Buddhists always noble oppositionists. In Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam Buddhist clergies are tightly subordinate to local governments, and few among the faithful seem visibly disturbed by the idea. "Monks are people, too," notes Thomas Borchert of the University of Vermont. "They're religion specialists but they're citizens. They may not be able to perform politics in quite the same way as other people, but they're still citizens."

And Buddhism, as a faith struggling to contend with the vagaries of twenty-first century life, is finding itself subject to many of the same pressures as other religions: globalization, and the rapid spread of values, information, and money that goes along with it, is challenging traditional beliefs in Buddhist cultures just as elsewhere. "Buddhist monks have to somehow come to terms with rapid changes," says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, one of Thailand's leading political analysts. "Some monks carry mobile phones; lots of monks sleep now in air-conditioned monasteries. This is not just Buddhism. You have a lot of religions that have fundamental beliefs challenged by modernity." Last November a Thai bank proposed an "e-merit-making service," offering users convenient, Internet-assisted ways to make donations to their favorite Buddhist cause and thereby reap a bit of positive karma. Thailand now has thousands of Buddhist websites.