DENVER, Colo. -- Just now at a panel of Barack Obama's foreign policy team (Adam Smith, Tony Lake, Richard Danzig, Susan Rice, Greg Craig, Gayle Smith) hosted by the National Democratic Institute, Rice -- summarizing Obama's foreign policy ideas -- made a derogatory aside about John McCain's call for a "league of democracies." Whereupon Lake dispatched a (mildly worded but unmistakable) rebuke before the audience: "Senator Obama has not taken a position on a concert of democracies, and I think a campaign is not the place to work it out."

Let the ideological jockeying begin!

DENVER, Colo. -- Tom Donohue’s optimism about NAFTA shouldn’t be taken as read on the Democratic Party’s attitude, writ large, toward trade liberalization. Even if the controversial trade agreement survives unaltered, now is a day of rising protectionism. Mark Warner, who spoke at Tuesday's convention proceedings, is a case in point.

The 2008 presidential hopeful was once the face of centrist liberals. He was a hugely successful businessman (cell phones) and the Democratic governor of a red state. He belonged the Democratic Leadership Council, wrote articles with titles like “The Sensible Center,” and endured the ire of the party’s left wing. His answers to a 1996 questionnaire support free trade.

But in tonight’s speech, he threw red meat to anti-free-traders. Warner’s summation of world affairs: “Two wars, a warming planet, an energy policy that says let’s borrow money from China to buy oil from countries that don’t like us.” And at the climax:

If you can send a job to Bangalore, India, you sure as heck can send one to Danville, Virginia and Flint, Michigan and Scranton, Pennsylvania and Peoria, Illinois. In a global economy, you shouldn’t have to leave your home town to find a world-class job.
Let me tell you about a place called Lebanon—Lebanon, Virginia. Lebanon is in the coalfields of southwest Virginia, and everyone in that whole town could fit right here on the convention floor. Lebanon is like many small towns in America. It has seen the industries that sustained it downsized, outsourced, or shut down. Now, some folks look at towns like Lebanon and say, “Tough luck. In the global economy, you’ve lost.”

“Outsourcing,” even if it makes American goods and services cheaper in the aggregate, is not something politicians can ever get behind. But their critiques of it lie on a scale, and Warner’s has, over recent years, moved from the mild pole to the fiery one.

By Zachary Kussin

As Jason McClure writes in this week's magazine, piracy off the coast of Somalia has become a major maritime headache. Just last week, on Aug 20, another three vessels -- a Malaysian palm oil transport, a Japanese tanker, and a German cargo ship -- were hijacked. The machine gun-carrying pirates threatened uncooperative crewmembers with death, locked them up and steered the vessels to pirate bases on the northern Somali coast. Shortly thereafter, they began ransom negotiations with the ships' owners. The Gulf of Aden, which lies off Somalia and leads to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, is now considered to be the world's riskiest area for international shipping, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting marine crime. So far in 2008, 15 vessels have been hijacked off Somalia alone.

Lawlessness and heavy traffic -- 7.5 percent of world shipping passes through the Gulf each year -- makes the area a fat target for pirates. They can operate in Somalia's territorial waters with impunity. The Somali government, unable to patrol the Gulf on its own, asked the United Nations for help back in June, and the result was Resolution 1816, which allows the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Pakistan and Canada to help patrol the dangerous waters. The measure will help cargo containers and other commercial ships, of course, but its intended beneficiaries are the ships delivering humanitarian assistance to Somalia, which depends on food aid to feed close to three million of its desperately poor inhabitants.

The multilateral initiative hasn't lived up to expectations, however. In its three months on the job, the Canadian security contingent, which will head up the patrol until December, has helped prevent just two hijackings. And as of now, no naval force has agreed to take over from Canada once its six-month rotation is up. Pottengal Mukundan, the IMB's director, attributes the lack of participation "to items in other nations' foreign policy agendas, such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which surpass piracy." For now, ship crews will have to keep rolling the dice, or avoid the Gulf of Aden altogether.

DENVER, Colo. -- When times are bad, Democrats tend to sour on trade. So when Austin Goolsbee, an economic adviser to Barack Obama, reportedly told Canadian government officials that Obama wouldn’t really “redo” NAFTA (despite campaign claims), the campaign had to repudiate his comments. Obama also opposed the Colombian and South Korean free-trade deals. Yet while the American business establishment might see this as a red flag, Tom Donohue, the lead spokesman for American business, doesn’t take it too seriously. To him, Goolsbee’s comment was a “Kinsley gaffe”: when someone accidentally tells the truth.

Donohue told me he’d come to Denver to find common ground with Democrats (global warming, infrastructure investment) and remind them that, when they don’t see things his way, the Chamber—which represents three million companies—“can raise a lot of hell.” But he wasn’t lying awake at night imagining the death throes of free trade under President Obama. So Obama isn’t likely to “renegotiate” NAFTA? “When he started campaigning he might have been, but when he’s finished he won’t be,” Donohue says. “When he looks at NAFTA and sees that the largest sources of oil and gas are Canada and Mexico, he’ll forget all about a redo.”

In fact, the real bogeyman of business is “card check,” a proposed rule that would allow unions to organize more easily, partly by forgoing secret ballots. Unions, he says, will spend $500 million on this election, and he’s desperate to have enough business-friendly senators to keep a filibuster. “More Democrats than Republicans remind me of the importance of that, because they know if they’re owned by trial lawyers and the unions, they won’t be around long.”

Notably, there are no Obama advisers secretly telling businesspeople that Obama won’t really sign card-check legislation.

By Andrew Bast

This weekend witnessed a worrying twist of fate in Bolivia. Voters went to the polls in a national referendum on the country’s leadership, and President Evo Morales won in a landslide. He took more than sixty percent of the vote, higher even than the fifty-three percent he won in the 2005 presidential election. His enthusiasm was unguarded. "I dedicate this victory to all the revolutionaries in the world," he proclaimed in a nighttime victory speech from the balcony of his presidential palace in the capital of La Paz. He had reason to celebrate. The vote cemented his leadership and gave momentum to what could likely be his landmark accomplishment in office, rewriting the country’s constitution.

The twist is that voters not only cast ballots on the president, but on their local leaders as well, and a coterie of opposition governors in the country’s wealthy eastern provinces--Morales’ chief adversaries--also won in the referendum. For months they have been organizing against Morales. The departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando and Beni have all voted to become more autonomous from the central government, challenging Morales’ centralization of power in La Paz, his land reform initiative and his reengineering of the constitution. “The outcome of the vote in Bolivia is likely to only deepen the wounds between two fiercely antagonistic political projects,” says Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue. “Each side will be tempted to dig in even further.” How Morales plays his so-called revolutionary hand will very much determine Bolivia’s future. Morales would be wise to watch his autocratic ally, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, for what not to do; better to err on the side of democracy and demonstrate real skill as a politician.

Bolivia’s provinces, especially Tarija, are rich in natural gas, making the situation all the more volatile. After taking office, Morales nationalized the industry, straining tensions to the breaking point. Recently, autonomy protests in the provinces have turned violent, and the memories of the 2003 protests over the country’s natural gas reserves, which left eighty people dead, ousted President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and helped bring Morales to power, are still fresh. The issue is as raw as any in the country and could give rise to conflict once again.

A resolution seems distant. Morales has said publicly that he is prepared to talk with the governors, though no one knows what, if any, concessions he would be willing to make. From the outside, the U.S. State Department has said it "stands ready to assist" the discussions, despite its tormented relationship with Morales’ government. Spain, Bolivia’s once-colonial administrator, has also offered to help nudge talks along. The most promising pledge came this week from the Organization of American States, which is headed by the Chilean José Miguel Insulza and had a major success earlier this year when it passed a resolution in March to resolve the standoff between Hugo Chávez and Colombia. In Bolivia, negotiations are the next logical step, but with both sides boosted by big wins at the polls, when, where or on what terms are all big question marks rather than agenda items.

In addition to touting his success as another victory for the revolution, Morales has said that his presidency “starts a new Bolivian history.” Indeed, he is the first indigenous president to be elected in Latin America, and his proposed constitutional reforms would lend political representation to the long-disenfranchised indigenous majorities in the country. But his presidency is not a revolution. It is the result of votes and process and democracy, and with that recognition comes the undeniable fact that he cannot write off the past, no matter how much he may want to.

After a stinging defeat of his Venezuelan constitutional reforms in December, Morales’ staunch ally Hugo Chávez last week decided to instead issue his reforms by decree, subverting the democratic process. Morales would be wise to learn from his mentor, namely that such autocratic strategies make for bad so-called revolutions. Changing Bolivian history could mean bringing the country together, not fanning the flames of autonomy by strong-arming the opposition. Since they have popular support in their provinces, the governors’ grievances deserve a fair hearing, and if Morales has the political skill to bring them into the fold, 21st-century socialism in Bolivia could establish a sound democratic foundation. Considering the way that Chávez’s project is being left behind by less bellicose leaders like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Morales’ aim may be morally admirable, but his method will have to be more independently minded.

Turkey was just one judge’s vote away from a constitutional coup. But after three days of secret deliberations, Turkey’s constitutional court voted six to five not to ban the country’s ruling party and exclude its top leaders from power. Seven votes were required to shut the party down on charges of allegedly plotting to introduce Islamic law to secular Turkey – a judgment which would certainly have plunged Turkey into a full-blown political crisis. Instead the court’s members – hardline secularists all – nevertheless decided to pull back from the brink and impose a simple penalty of cutting the party off from State funding – effectively a slap on the wrist for the AKP, but at the same time a face-saving solution for the judges.

Chief prosecutor, Aburrahman Yalcinkaya had demanded that Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country's president, Abdullah Gul, and 69 other AKP figures be banned from politics for five years. Their crime, according to the lengthy indictment, was that they had allowed the party to become a focal point of “anti-secular activity". In particular, the prosecutor was incensed by the AKP’s lifting of a two decades-old ban on female students wearing Islamic headscarves at university.

A seemingly trivial pretext, perhaps, for banning a democratically elected government – and one which is the most popular in modern Turkish history. But the court case is just the latest and most dramatic episode in a decades-old confrontation between political Islam and the secular establishment, which has sworn to keep religion out of public life in accordance with the radical secularism of Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk. In 1999, just three years before his party swept to power, Erdogan himself was imprisoned for sedition after reciting a religious poem at a rally. And just last year, Turkey’s politically powerful military tried - unsuccessfully - to prevent Gul's election to the presidency, also because of his strong religious beliefs and his headscarf-wearing wife. The AKP called the military’s bluff by immediately calling an early general election, which it won in a landslide, and then successfully re-nominating Gul. The secularists’ response to that defeat was to draft the indictment which was knocked down by the court today.

Nevertheless, the AKP must tread carefully to avoid more time-wasting battles which have distracted the ruling party from much needed reforms and spooked markets. "I hope the party in question will evaluate this outcome very well and get the message it should get,” warned chief justice Hasim Kilic in his ruling. "The verdict on cutting treasury aid has been given because of members who decided that the party was the hub of anti-secular activities but not seriously enough [to close the party].” The subtext was clear: the court had decided to spare the party – and spare the country months of political turmoil – but now expected the AKP to steer clear of more provocative moves such as the headscarf law.

The ruling is good news for Turkey’s path to the European Union. EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn said that "despite everything, this is a good day for Turkey and for Europe … There is a vast majority among the Turkish people who are in favour of European values. I'm sure this played a role, as stated by the president of the Turkish constitutional court."

It should also allow the AKP to take up a long delayed reform program on free speech and democratization. “Today’s decision by the Constitutional Court not to close down the ruling Justice and Development Party has averted a political crisis in Turkey,” says Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The ruling party should honor its election promises now and revive the long-stalled reform of human rights in Turkey.”

Brazil today boasts 1,100 privately owned helicopters (half of them in São Paulo), the world's third largest fleet and growing at the clip of 15 percent a year. For those below, condemned to battling one of the worst rush hours on the planet (on a bad day, traffic pileups can run to 160 kilometers or more), the view isn't so inspiring. But like the crowded skies, the clotted streets are emblems of the remarkable new moment in a nation that has hoisted itself from the ranks of chronic underachiever to emerging market upstart. (Read this week's magazine story, Weathering the Storm.)

The new bullishness has taken many by surprise. For half a century Brazil has been flirting with greatness, aiming for the clouds and then flaming out. At its loftiest the country has charmed a host of believers, but their convictions have wavered. Fleeing Europe to Brazil ahead of World War II, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig famously declared his adoptive country “the land of the future” but then lost hope in the world and downed a lethal dose of vironal in 1942, in the middle of carnival, at that. The future would have to wait.  Charles DeGaulle looked down his spacious nose at much of the world, but the Brazilians always took personally his generic snub that  "Brazil is not a serious country."

It's poetic justice of sorts that the Brazilians are looking down on much of the serious world today. In the quarter century or so I've been keeping an eye on this country, this is the first time I can recall that the dark talk of "crisis" refers not to some domestic debacle but to the mess beyond national borders. "Hey, Bush, we've been waiting 20 years to grow," scolded president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in an impromptu speech the other day, referring to the global spillover from the U.S. subprime credit crunch. "Get your act together."

Except for on the football pitch or the catwalks, such hubris is new for this chronically underperforming country. Maybe it's the currency. When I first arrived in Rio, in the early 80s, with inflation topping three digits, the greenback was almighty. Converted into wads of pink and green cruzeiros or cruzados or new cruzeiros (pick your perishable banknote), a hundred U.S. dollars could buy you a week on the town. Now and then the officials in Brasília tried to do something about it, lopping three zeros off the currency and decreeing drastic price freezes, so bringing only a flicker of stability. It wasn't as bad as Bolivia, where I once saw them weighing money instead of counting it in the Chapare district, but it left the continent's biggest country dysfunctional, all the same.

I keep a box in my drawer stuffed with inflation memorabilia from those days. Lost in the rubble of half a dozen versions of soiled bank notes and a kilo or so of useless coins, there's a small paper chit with the number 2147 stamped on it. It's the waitlist number I drew for the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro air shuttle, which thanks to the price freeze during the so called Cruzado Plan, of 1986, cost $38, about half the current bus fare. When prices are kept steady, goods tend to disappear, and the Cruzado Plan was no different; Brazil's airports became flop houses as stranded passengers waited hours for an available seat.

It's not always easy to pinpoint a nation's turning point, but 1994 has to be a modern Brazilian watershed. That was the year of the Plano Real, a radical new stabilization plan named for the eponymous currency, backed this time by fiscal discipline, not a price freeze or any of the other "heterodox" hocus pocus of former plans. Brazilians were skeptical and who could blame them, after a quarter century of band-aid reforms and Monopoly money?

Today, with foreign investors tripping over themselves to pour money into Brazil, the real has outgunned the world's top 16 currencies, from Euro to Yen, gaining 13 percent against the dollar this year alone, and nearly 60 percent since 2004. To my knowledge Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen never actually turned down work for U.S. dollars, but when the rumor that she had went viral in Brazil I knew the earth had shifted in this part of the hemisphere. Now it's outbound Brazilians changing their reals into wads of greenbacks and having the time of their lives in Paris or Disney World.

You don't have to go that far to watch them frolic. The boom that has seen Brazil's economy soar has also deepened pockets. The country now boasts 20 billionaires on the Forbes list (up from just four in 2003) and 140 millionaires, a 19 percent rise year to year, against a 6 percent rise for the rest of the world. Boutique banks and private asset managers have decorated the skylines with their logos and heli-pads.

The bonanza is not just for those commuting in choppers. Climbing wages (overall payroll is up 16 percent year to year), a flood of consumer credit (growing by 30 percent yearly) and plenty of new jobs (1 million this year, 7.3 million since 2004), have hoisted countless poor into the consuming classes. Much is made of how China's surging economy has lifted tens of millions out of poverty. In fact, Dragonomics has increased the wealth gap, while Brazil has managed to reduce inequality at the same it booms. Brazil's poorest ten percent have seen their wages grow by 57 percent in real terms between 2002 and 2006, against a nine percent rise for the richest tenth, says economist and poverty scholar Marcelo Neri of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a business school.

And while the middle class in the developed world moans about slipping downmarket, Brazil's just keeps on rising. Some 20 million Brazilians have moved up to the middle class in the last decade, and are now putting 800 new cars a day on the road in São Paulo alone. Sound exaggerated? Check out rush hour.

After 14 months, the cloud of suspicion over Kate and Gerry McCann has lifted. The British couple are no longer officially considered suspects in the disappearance of their four-year-old daughter Maddy from a holiday complex in Portugal. The police inquiry is shelved. According to a statement from the country's attorney-general there is no evidence linking the parents to any crime.  That may come as little suprise to the British media, which throughout the affair never hesitated to dress up speculation as proof. This was the story that was simply too good to drop: a missing child, good-looking parents and a mystery that defied solution. Basic reporting standards were forgotten in pursuit of attention-grabbing headlines. Is the media now ready to mend its ways?

By Jonathan Kent

Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim is again under arrest on charges of sexual misconduct that appear to be politically motivated. Police detained him today in Kuala Lumpur before he was to appear voluntarily to face questioning over new charges that he violated Malaysia’s anti-sodomy law with a political aide. Days before his latest arrest, Anwar told Newsweek that the new charges against him were “disgusting” and said elements of the current government had framed him.