By Jerry Guo

The United Nations' inspection of Iran's clandestine nuclear facility outside Qum, slated as of press time for Oct. 25, was already treated as something of a coup in the West. With its air-defense batteries and centrifuges buried deep in the mountainside, the site smacked of dangerous nuclear intentions. But assuming the visit takes place, the progress it represents needs to be kept in perspective. By cooperating with the U.N., Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime gets to look as if it's opening a window on its nuclear program, slowing the momentum toward tougher international sanctions, when it's likely that Qum is only one of many secrets Iran is concealing. 

U.S. arms-control experts say that Qum is probably one of at least a half-dozen undeclared sites in Iran's "nuclear archipelago." At its present rate of production, Qum's estimated 3,000 antiquated IR-1 centrifuges would take two years to churn out enough highly enriched uranium for a single bomb, according to Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. If Iran had another secret site, its parallel fuel cycle would cut down the waiting time to a year.

by Melinda Liu

As of late, Beijing has been very publicly questioning the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. Yet China actually increased its holdings of U.S. Treasuries to $800 billion in July, compared with $767 billion in Q1. Despite its tough talk, Beijing knows that selling off greenbacks would wipe out much of its own wealth; it holds a whopping $1.6 trillion in reserves, much of it in USTs. Still, speculation that Beijing is plotting the dollar's demise just won't go away. Earlier this month, the U.K.'s Independent reported that Gulf states, along with China, Japan, France, and Russia, were secretly negotiating to denominate oil trades in currencies other than the dollar by 2018. (Officials in most of the nations involved denied the report.) But such a move would be self-defeating and "would only add volatility to the Gulf countries' already volatile oil revenues," since many Gulf nations peg their currencies to the dollar, says Royal Bank of Scotland economist Ben Simpfendorfer. China has another reason to keep purchasing dollars: to hold down the value of the yuan, it must buy foreign assets--lots of them. So for now, China may have to keep amassing greenbacks.

by Christopher Werth
Poland is quickly emerging as one of the few bright spots in a recession-torn Europe hit hard by the economic crisis. In a recent revision upward, the International Monetary Fund now expects Polish GDP to expand by 1 percent, making it the only European economy projected to see positive growth in 2009. And to top it all off, Warsaw just replaced Moscow on a tally of European cities as the No. 1 destination for companies looking to expand over the next five years.

To what do Poles owe the honor? Positive perceptions have gone a long way to assure investors. When the IMF was doling out emergency loans earlier this year, it instead deemed Poland worthy of a $20.5 billion flexible-credit line. Simply having that kind of rainy-day fund at hand was enough to calm markets without the government needing to withdraw a single zloty (Poland's currency), which incidentally has tumbled as much as 30 percent since last year. That's a boon to Polish exporters, and the country's large domestic market has also helped to balance trade flows and shield it from the whims of global consumers, who are starting to save rather than spend. Poland could also be benefiting from its political turbulence earlier this decade, when Jaroslaw Kaczynski reigned as prime minister (his twin brother, Lech, is still the president)--a contentious few years that may have scared off some of the "hot money" that's now wreaking havoc in neighboring Latvia and Hungary. Ironically, Poland's political woes may now be paying off.

By Stefan Theil
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has put integration at the top of her agenda, pushing for naturalization of immigrants and creating a high-powered Islam Conference that has raised the visibility of Muslim leaders in German public life. Yet last week, the OECD published a damning report on Germany's integration efforts, ranking it at or near the bottom on several measures of its ability to provide education and employment opportunities for its 15 million migrants (who make up 19 percent of the population). One painful statistic: young second-generation immigrants--who should be getting integrated through the education system--are twice as likely to be unemployed as native Germans, even when both hold a college degree. The gap was the highest among the 16 countries studied, a result that author Thomas Liebig blames on rampant discrimination.

And in the one area where the German government has direct control, it is dismally failing to follow its own exhortations to integrate: according to the same report, no country performed worse in opening its civil service to citizens with a migrant background. Second-generation migrants are joining the civil service at less than one third the rate of same-age Germans--also the biggest gap among all the countries studied. At German schools, for example, only an estimated 1 percent of teachers have a non-German background, even as the share of students with a migrant background approaches one in three countrywide. Merkel and her ministers can promote integration as much as they want, but unless they do more to open up Germany's ethnically homogenous public administration, as many other countries have done, these efforts will remain halfhearted gestures.

By Jimmy Langman
The large-scale effort over the past two decades by Esprit and Northface cofounder Doug Tompkins to buy up land in Patagonia for nature protection has engendered more controversy than applause among locals. His foes include former Chilean president Eduardo Frei, a leading candidate in the country's presidential elections this November, who claims that Tompkins is taking too much real estate out of circulation for development projects. But supporters of Tompkins and other wealthy conservationists say that such land grabbing is for a greater good that trumps national interests: saving the planet for future -generations.
The Idea: Tompkins's critics accuse the billionaire of holding back economic progress in Chile, and even of threatening the country's national security with his 720,000-acre Pumalin Park, which splits the nation in half geographically. But according to journalist Edward Humes, whose new book, Eco Barons, defends Tompkins and his ilk, the detractors are missing the point: far from being enemies of progress, Eco Barons are progress's new face for an eco--conscious century.

The Evidence: Just as the robber barons of the 1800s embodied rapacious capitalism, Humes sees a day when the Eco Barons will be synonymous with leading the fight to stave off the planet's extinction crisis. Former media tycoon Ted Turner, who owns more than 2 million acres in the American West and some 10,000 acres in Argentina, has set up an -endangered--species fund to successfully reintroduce wolves, bears, and other animals to his land. Burt's Bees founder Roxanne Quimby, who owns 80,000 acres of Maine forests, is working to convert the state's northern woods into a national park and tourism destination, creating new economic opportunities that go hand-in-hand with conservation. And, of course, there's Tompkins, who left the business world in the early 1990s to divert his time toward buying and organizing more than 2.2million acres of rainforest, mountains, and rivers in Chile and Argentina. The centerpiece of his conservation agenda is Pumalin, the world's largest private park, where visitors can hike through temperate rainforest; see local fauna such as Chilean dolphins, and sea lions; and view small-scale farms which double as park ranger offices.

The Conclusion: Some politicians and developers may resent the Eco Barons for monopolizing land use, and others may question whether private land purchases are the best way to inspire popular support for nature protection. But as Humes shows, the Eco Barons aren't afraid to use their wealth as a trump card and save ecosystems--whether the locals want them to, or not.

Conventional wisdom holds that typical U.S. shoppers are so traumatized by high debt and rising unemployment that their spending will remain subdued for years.  That means, the reasoning goes, that the world's largest economy will be mostly a follower in any global recovery. With consumer spending representing about 70 percent of gross domestic product, lackluster buying will hobble the U.S. expansion and provide little benefit for America's trading partners.

Don't believe it, says economist Susan Sterne of Economic Analysis Associates.  Consumer buying is already propelling the U.S. recovery and will continue to do so in 2010, she says.  Among other things, she expects car and light truck sales to rebound to 14.4 million units next year, up from 10.6 million in 2009, and housing starts nearly to double, from 585,000 in 2009 to 1.038 million in 2010. Total consumer spending should increase 4.8 percent in 2010, compared with a decline of 0.5 percent in 2009 (corrected for inflation, the figures are 3.1 percent for 2010 and a drop of 0.5 percent this year.) That should help foreign exporters of everything from PCs to cars to exotic cheeses.

What’s more dangerous than being an American in Afghanistan? Being an Indian in Afghanistan. On Oct. 8, a car bomb exploded outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul, killing 17 people and wounding 76. The attack came 15 months after another bomb damaged the embassy and killed 58, including the Indian defense attaché. Elsewhere in the country, Indian workers have been victims of suicide attacks and kidnappings.

That's right. This evening, as Barack Obama continues to fret about war, peace, and the domestic political fallout from an unexpected (and seemingly unwelcome) Nobel win, Bill Clinton will be at the Pierre Hotel in New York accepting the annual Scholar-Statesman Award from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Last week, the Gagglers named Bill Clinton one of the six people most peeved about the Obama win, but we say he has plenty of reason to feel just as good about his new award. For one, the two have a lot in common. Last year's Scholar-Statesman was Henry Kissinger, who has also won a Nobel Peace Prize. For another, the description sounds catchier. "There's a certain magic when you bring together people who have contributed so much to our nation and Western Civilization writ large," said Robert Satloff, the Washington Institute's director, of the event last year. The Nobel Committee describes its own ceremony as "solemn." And finally, anybody can order up their own knock-off Nobel Prize Award Dinner at the Grand Hotel Oslo these days. Take that, Nobel.

By Jason Overdorf

Experts estimate that corruption in India indirectly kills more than 8,000 people a day by diverting money from food programs into the pockets of crooked officials. Now the government hopes to reduce graft with a new approach: instead of specifying how much money will be spent on welfare programs, it will use laws guaranteeing employment, education, and food to set out the exact services that each government agency must deliver. 

The idea: The centerpiece of the movement is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), passed in 2005, which guarantees 100 days of paid work to every rural household and forces the government to fork over the money again if the original funds are stolen. "This is one reason why the government is showing an unprecedented concern with corruption in public-works programs," says economist Jean Dreze, who was instrumental in setting up the act. 

As any world leader knows, breaking bread with unsavory regimes is an occupational hazard. But palling around with pariahs is another matter. So when Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva slapped Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the back at the U.N. General Assembly, stoutly defended Iran's nuclear program, and invited Ahmadinejad to visit Brazil, the world took note. What is Lula's game?

In part, it's about his ambition to position Brazil as a "first-class nation." Lula has visited 45 countries in the last three years alone and opened 35 embassies since 2003, most of them in Africa and the Caribbean. This all fits his "South to South" strategy, a diplomatic blitzkrieg designed to gather political capital across the developing world. As a result, Brazil is well regarded in places many other nations ignore, and its trade relations are well balanced, spread in roughly equal measure between Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, Europe, and the U.S. This helped Brazil keep its footing during the global economic crash to become one of the first to shake off recession. It also turned its president into a global star.

Click here for our photo tour of Obama's rise from Barry to Barack. (Photo credit: Gerald Herbert / AP)

Barack Obama's big surprise win this morning produced more than a few "huhs?!?" heard 'round the world. Our personal favorite came from Lech Walesa, the 1983 Peace Prize winner and Poland’s president from 1990 to 1995, who told reporters in Warsaw: “Who, Obama? So fast? Too fast—he hasn’t had the time to do anything yet.” Of course, the head-scratching most relevant to this particular prize is happening in places like Jerusalem, Peshawar, and Harare. Here's what folks there have to say on the matter:

The dairy farmers of Europe have had it with the politicking at the European Union, prompting huge protests in the streets of Brussels--and puntastic headlines the world over. The beef comes down to milk prices; farmers say they're below 75 percent of production costs this year, while the European Commission, arguing that they've actually risen slightly in the past few months, has responded so far only by convening a committee to monitor the issue. This farmer had a particularly blunt way of expressing his distaste for that tepid response: spritzing the cops stationed outside E.U. headquarters with milk, fresh out of the udder.

The NYT noted farmers' anger spilling into the streets of Brussels, while we've put our offering in the headline. Now it's your turn: got captions?

By Jerry Guo

The conventional wisdom is that whatever Iranians think of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they generally support their president's drive to build nuclear weapons. Not so. The more Ahmadinejad resists Western pressure to abandon nukes, the more his people wish he would stop. A recent survey by WorldPublicOpinion.org reveals that regular Iranians' support for the regime to develop the bomb has dropped to 38 percent, from 51 percent last year. Even support for developing nuclear energy, which a whopping 89 percent favored a year ago, is backed by only half the population now. 

Much was made of the meeting between U.S. diplomat Bill Burns and Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, in Geneva on Thursday. The 45-minute one-on-one was a breakthrough for the Obama administration, which has been trying to “engage” with Tehran for nine months. But perhaps the bigger star of the nuclear talks was Sergei Ryabkov, the Russian deputy foreign minister who has not been a big player until now, according to a European participant.

Ryabkov was “very forceful, very articulate, and very persuasive” in pushing the Iranians to make concessions, said this official, who would describe the details of the talks only on condition of anonymity. The Russians, who in the past have been at best reluctant to press Tehran, came into the talks with a distinctly more cooperative approach since President Dmitry Medvedev’s meeting in late September with Barack Obama. At the time Medvedev said, “We believe we need to help Iran to take a right decision,'' adding that ''in some cases, sanctions are inevitable.'' That followed the U.S. president’s unilateral decision to shift his approach to missile defense in Eastern Europe to a stance considered much less threatening by Moscow. Jalili also had a separate session with only Ryabkov and the Chinese delegate in the room.

Still, participants in the talks were very cautious about any reported progress. The biggest “concession” out of the talks—Iran’s general commitment to send a substantial portion of its uranium to Russia to be enriched—was actually Tehran’s idea to begin with, and predated the meeting, said the European official.

Israel has often found itself asking the question, how much is a life worth? This week they asked it with a twist: how much is mere proof of life worth? A whole lot.

The government yesterday traded 20 female Palestinian prisoners—accused (and often convicted) of crimes from plotting suicide attacks to carrying concealed weapons—for a video proving the soldier Gilad Shalit is still alive. Captured by Hamas in 2006, Shalit has been subject of several attempted deals, and when his freedom is finally won, it will likely be in a hugely asymmetrical deal. Is it worth it?

Probably not. Even conceding that a soldier's life is worth the release of hundreds of prisoners, Israel has several times gotten a raw deal from these trades. In one famous 1985 exchange, Jerusalem traded 1,150 Arab prisoners—some of whom turned around and started shooting again—for three soldiers captured during the Lebanon occupation. Even when they don't, trades like these convey exactly the wrong incentive structure, encouraging the taking of hostages. I wrote about this last summer:

The Israelis have since learned their lesson, says Robert Hunter, who was director of Middle East affairs on the National Security Council during the Carter administration. There are up to 40,000 Arabs in Israeli jails today, and many could indeed be released without posing an immediate security threat. Last fall, in an effort to bolster the teetering government of Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert liberated 90 prisoners, none of whom, Olmert swore, had previously engaged in terrorism. And Nissim Nasser—the Hizbullah spy Israel just freed into Lebanon—is now so well known that he no longer poses an espionage threat. "Obviously, they only release the people who don't pose a big risk," says Hunter.

Analysts say there's an even greater threat, however: the strategic danger that prisoner swaps will encourage terrorists to take more prisoners, and not only in Israel. "[It] says to future terrorists that if you can get somebody valuable enough, Israelis will trade," says Todd Sandler, a professor of economics at the University of Southern California. "They'll trade if you capture a soldier or children. And the exchange rate is very high." Indeed, a kind of inflation can result. Sandler's data, collected from across the world over 37 years, show that for every kidnapper paid off, 2.5 more abductions took place.

Case in point: in 2004, the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon traded 435 Hizbullah irregulars for a kidnapped Israeli businessman and the remains of three soldiers. Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah came out looking like a hero and learned his lesson well: two years later, Hizbullah snatched two soldiers from inside Israel—an incident that led to the Lebanon war of 2006 (the soldiers remain in captivity).

Given the risks, why has Israel stuck with its unofficial policy? Part of the explanation is religious: pidyon shevuyim, the redemption of captives, is a commandment from Genesis. Maimonides, the 12th-century Jewish philosopher, wrote that pidyon shevuyim is a more important duty even than feeding and clothing the poor. More prosaically, Israel is a democracy, and its citizens—especially mothers of young captured soldiers—often put intense pressure on the government to win their release.

While the impetus to trade may be understandable, however, the dangers are very real—and can spread across borders. "There is no question that the Iraqi Shia insurgency learns from Hizbullah, and the Taliban learns from the Sunni insurgency," says Steve Simon, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. Al Qaeda documents released by the Pentagon in 2006 show that the group learned not only from its own experiences, but also from other terrorists like the Italian Red Brigades.

This suggests that terrorist strategists worldwide may be watching Israel closely—and concluding that it would serve them well to capture Western soldiers deployed to hot spots in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere. It points to an awkward truth for Israel: the tiny state often feels that it's left on its own to face a great many dangers, and that's true. But in this case, at least, the actions it takes in response can end up endangering us all.

Geneva is a city long accustomed to international negotiations. One of the grander parks on its chilly lake houses the Palais des Nations, a pillared concrete monolith built to house the League of Nations after World War I. The League, faltering predecessor to the United Nations, didn't fulfill the ambitions of its founders, as World War II proved. But the Palais remains—an imposing reminder of how difficult it is to resolve conflicts between nations, but how important it is to try.

The agreement in Geneva on Thursday between Iran and a coalition of nations (the five veto-bearing Security Council members, plus Germany) affirm those lessons—and with them another principle of international affairs: nothing can be resolved without talking. First reports from Geneva must be read skeptically. The U.S. and European diplomats who briefed the assembled Western media had a vested interest in positive spin. (Briefings by the others there—Iranian, Russian, and Chinese diplomats—will supply correctives in the days ahead.) The truly important fact about this daylong session at the elegant Villa de Saugny is that Tehran and Washington were meeting openly at the highest level in 30 years. And the 45-minute lunchtime one-on-one between the Iranian emissary, Saeed Jalili, and William Burns—the most-senior diplomat in the State Department—does appear to have produced at least a way out of a confrontation that has been on course toward war.

It started with a post in Arabic last month by 23-year-old blogger Fadal Atamaz Al-Sibai, who complained that masturbation in Syria has "spread among the youths like wildfire," and announced a campaign to end the "secret habit."

His comments prompted a snarky response from Abufares, one of Syria's leading bloggers, who called for a countercampaign culminating in an "unprecedented Syrian Orgasm against absurdity, hypocrisy, and sanctimony."

Then things really picked up.

by Julia Ioffe

It started off as an article about a cleverly named kebab house in Moscow and quickly became yet another story of political coercion and muzzling of the press. Less than a week after the article came out, Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth group, is demanding that the journalist who wrote it, Aleksandr Podrabinek, be kicked out of the country and stripped of his Russian citizenship. After death threats and an attempted break-in at his apartment, Podrabinek is now in hiding, announcing on his blog that "in the interests of security, I am limiting my contacts."

Partly, this is the same, tired story of the Kremlin intimidating the last remnants of a once free press. But it's also a story about a country still fighting over the meaning (and ownership) of patriotism, over the return of Soviet symbolism, over where the Soviet Union ends and Russia begins, and over how to talk about the martyrdom and the crimes of World War II.

There is devastating news coming out of the South Pacific again, where the death toll from yesterday's 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Sumatra has topped 500. Just a day before that, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Samoa, triggering a tsunami that flattened whole towns and killed nearly 200 people.

Before any conspiracy theorists start sounding off about the coming apocalypse, it should be noted that the two earthquakes occurred in the most volatile region on the planet. It's part of the Ring of Fire, which stretches from Indonesia to Chile. Nine out of every 10 earthquakes in the world take place there. And in the immediate sense, seismologists are saying, the quakes are probably unrelated. They were caused by slippages in faults on two completely different tectonic plates that took place nearly a full day apart. Stresses from the first couldn't have built up that much further along the fault to trigger the second. And surface waves from the first quake would have reached Sumatra long before the second quake happened there.

But that's not to say they're completely unrelated. A study published just yesterday in Nature found that the earthquake that triggered the monstrous 2004 tsunami was so destructive that it weakened fault lines around the world─reaching all the way to California's San Andreas Fault, 5,000 miles away. Since then, the researchers say, there has been an "unusually high" number of earthquakes around the world, suggesting that especially big quakes might beget more quakes. What's more, a California Institute of Technology researcher who studies seismic activity in Asia notes that a cycle of earthquakes in the region that started in 2007 is likely to produce an even bigger disaster sometime in the coming years. “There’s no city on earth that’s had more wake-up calls than Padang,” he told Bloomberg, predicting that the next one could hit a magnitude of up to 8.8. “They’ve had five or six major earthquakes in the last 10 years, and a bigger one to come.” Given that 2004's quake, at 9.1, was not much more than that, officials throughout the South Pacific had better be doing some serious thinking about disaster preparedness.