Words in the News: March, 2007

Homophobia in Nigeria (IHT editorial, March 9, 2007; page 6).

• A piece of legislation is quickly making its way through the Nigerian National Assembly. Billed an an anti-gay-marriage act, it is considered by some to be a far-reaching assault on basic rights of association, assembly and expression.
• Unless the international community speaks out quickly and forcefully against the bill, it is almost certain to become law.
• Homosexual acts between consenting adults are already illegal in Nigeria under a penal code that dates back to the colonial period.
• This new legislation would impose five-year sentences on same-sex couples who have wedding ceremonies, as well as on those who perform such services, and even on all of those who attend such ceremonies.

Bananas at center of trade tiff (IHT, March 9, 2007; page 11).

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has consistently ruled against how the EU set tariffs for bananas, forcing the 27-country bloc to over haul a system that grants preferential conditions for producers from African and Caribbean countries, mainly former British and French colonies.

Nigerian election facing hurdles: For the first time, a civilian succession is in the offing (IHT by Lydia Polgreen, March 9, 2007; page 5).

Since its independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria has seesawed between civilian and military rule, enduring a brutal civil war and decades of misrule that siphoned billions of dollars from the country's oil wealth.

No previous civilian government in Nigeria has handed power to another civilian government, making April's election a watershed.

Further complicating Nigeria's march toward democracy is the unrest in the Niger Delta, where militants seeing more of the country's oil wealth for the impoverished residents of the oil-rich delta have carried out kidnappings and bombings that have harmed the oil industry.

Help wanted: Europe faces a high-tech hiring crisis: Posts in critical sectors go unfilled despite persistent joblessness (IHT by Carter Dougherty, March 10-11, 2007; page 15 & 16).

A director of human resources for Soitech, a French manufacturer of semiconductors, has created a web site that lets managers identify and recruit engineers directly, bypassing her own office for the sake of efficiency.

The human resources director travels to French universities and technical school to plant the idea of a career in semiconductors in the minds of young people, hoping they remember the name Soitech as well.

Despite such efforts, Soitech's stretched work force is still struggling to keep up with the orders that are coming in.

For recruiting departments around Europe, 2007 is shaping up as a perfect storm.

Now that European companies are turning to the labor market for new hires, they are finding the supply of qualified workers are scarce.

Europe's painful shift from heavy industry to more specialized manufacturing and services, combined with generally low prestige for highly technical professions, has outpaced what Europe's educational system has to offer.

Companies must now find ways to work around a limited supply of qualified employees by nurturing young talent, finding people from overseas, or simply moving operations outside Europe.

In the face of acute shortages, many companies are assuming a role previously dominated by the state in Europe: They are going into universities, technical academies, and even secondary schools to make their case directly to young people.

Recruiting more people from outside Europe is another persistent theme.

Even when companies manage to recruit from outside their home countries, they cannot always keep up with the outflow.

Germany, for example, has recorded a huge exodus of highly qualified people in a variety of fields.

Positions that could stay in Germany for cost reasons are headed abroad for lack of personnel.

China acts to become huge global investor (IHT by Jim Yardley and David Barboza, March 10-11, 2007; page 1 & 17).

The Chinese government announced the formation of a new agency to oversee investment of China's $1 trillion in foreign currency reserves, representing a potent new force in international finance.

China already has the world's largest foreign exchange holdings, and they are growing rapidly because of the country's huge trade surpluses.

They are not looking for financial assets, but energy assets and natural resources; such as, minerals, oil, etc.; things China desperately needs.

Some financial experts are already talking about the huge potential impact of China's emergence as a major global investor, and how that could push asset prices higher and create even more competition for scarce resources.

The new investment agency should be viewed in the context of other new government measures, like the recent efforts to pass a private property law and a law to equalize corporate taxes.

China is trying to create the legal and regulatory structure which will underpin its still-evolving market economy

Voice of an empire is all but extinct: Dwindling speakers of Manchu struggle to save language (IHT by David Lague, March 17-18, 2007; pages 1 & 6).

In Sanjiazi, there are only eighteen residents of this isolated village in northeastern China, all older than 80, who, according to Chinese linguists and historians, are the last native speakers of Manchu.

Descendsnts of seminomadic tribesmen who conquered China in the 17th century, they are the last living link to a language that for more than two and a half centuries was the official voice of the Qing Dynasty, the final imperial house to rule from Beijing and one of the richest and most powerful empires the world has known.

With the passing of these villagers, Manchu will also die, experts say.

All that will be left will be millions of documents and files in Chinese and foreign archives, along with inscriptions on monuments and important buildings in China, unintelligible to all but a handful of specialists.

It is just a matter of time before the Manchu language will face the same fate as some other ethnic minority languages in China and be overwhelmed by the Chinese language and culture.

The disappearance of Manchu will be part of a mass extinction that some experts forecast will lead to the loss of half of the world's 6,800 languages by the end of the century.

Few of these threatened languages have risen to prominence and then declined as rapidly as Manchu.

Within decades of establishing their dynasty in 1644, the Qing rulers had brought all of what was then Chinese territory under control.

They then embarked on a campaign of expansion that roughly doubled the size of their empire to include Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, and Taiwan.

The dynasty's fall in 1911 meant that the Manchus were relegated to the ranks of the more than fifty other ethnic minorities in China, their numbers dwarfed by the dominant Han, who today account for 93 percent of the country's 1.3 billion people, according to official statistics.

For generations, the fast majority have spoken Chinese as their first language.

Manchu survived only in small, isolated pockets like Sanjiazi, where, until a few decades ago, nearly all the residents were ethnic Manchus

Traditional shamanistic rites, along with ethnic dress and customs, have also been mostly abandoned, although some wedding and funeral ceremonies retain elements of Manchu rituals.

Villagers still observe one Manchu taboo which sets them apart from others in China's far northeast: they don't eat dog meat, and they never wear a hat made from dog fur.

The prohibition, according to tradition, honors a dog credited with having saved the life of Nurhachi, the founder of the Manchu state, who lived from 1559 to 1626.

Lice provide head-scratching hints on evolution by Nicholas Wade (IHT, March 9, 2007; page 2).

One of the more embarrassing mysteries of human evolution is that people are host to no fewer than three kinds of louse while most animal species have just one.

Even bleaker for the human reputation, the pubic louse, which gets its dates and residence-swapping opportunities when its hosts are locked in intimate embrace, does not seem to be a true native of the human body. Its closest relative is the gorilla louse. (Don't even think about it!)

Three kinds of louse call Homo sapiens their home, but each occupies a different niche on the human body.

1. The head louse, Pediculus humanus, lives in the forest of fine hairs on the human scalp.
2. Its cousin, the body louse, lives not on the skin but in clothes.
3. The exclusive territory of the pubic louse, Phthirus pubis, is the coarser hairs of the crotch.

Biologists have long been scratching their heads over the fact that the human head louse is a sister species to the chimpanzee louse, but the pubic louse is closely related to the gorilla louse.

To sleep and smell, perchance to remember (IHT by Benedict Carey, March 9, 2007; page 8).

Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before.

Research has shown that regions of the cortex, the thinking and planning part of the brain, communicate during deep sleep with a sliver of tissue deeper in the brain called the hippocampus, which records each day's memories.

What is most likely happening is that the cortex is reactivating the same set of neurons that fired when a particular fact was noticed or learned.

The hippocampus then encodes that firing sequence back in the cortex, consolidating the memory.

Olfactory sensing pathways in the brain lead more directly to the hippocampus than visual and auditory ones. That may be why smell can be linked so closely to memory.

China, in big policy shift, is set to pass property law (IHT by David Lague, March 9, 2007; pages 1 & 8).

The Chinese Parliament began debating a landmark private property measure which would ensure that all forms of property, including the assets of individuals, the state and collectives, have protection under the law.

Chinese leaders argue that the law is crucial for future prosperity, as private enterprise accounts for an increasing share of output in what was formerly a centrally planned economy.

Experts say the new law is unlikely to curb the forced reallocation of farming land for commercial or industrial use that has led to widespread unrest and protests in rural areas.

Senior government officials acknowledge that the proposed property law remains controversial despite revisions aimed at placating critics.

More than three decades of expanding economic freedom have delivered greatly improved living standards for hundreds of millions of Chinese.

Some economists warn that the law's passage would not significantly enhance the right of property owners while government officials exerted influence or even outright control over the courts.

Britain examines its conscience on the slave trade (IHT by Alan Riding, March 22, 2007; page 28).

The way history has long been taught, Britain's abolition of the African slave trade on March 25, 1807, allowed it to claim the moral high ground in the struggle to end slavery in the New World.

Two centuries later, if a series of exhibitions planned for this year leave their mark, perceptions may be about to change.

Rather than dwelling on William Wilberforce, the feisty abolitionist who drove the reform through the British parliament, these show are highlighting a far uglier back story: Britain's deep engagement in the slave trade in earlier centuries and the fundamental role this played in forging the nation's wealth and power.

Penitence seems to weigh most heavily on the northwestern port city of Liverpool, which in 1800 controlled 80 percent of the British slave trade and more than 40 percent of the European slave trade.

The triangular trade, by which African slaves were bartered for sugar, cotton, and tobacco in the Americas, was the foundation of Liverpool's enormous prosperity.

The various exhibitions throughout Britain about its involvement with the slave trade also hope to draw attention to new forms of slavery, whether in remote parts of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East; or closer to home, where immigrant women are forced into prostitution.

Germans all revved up over speed limits (IHT by Mark Landler, March 16, 2007; pages 1 & 8).

Few things are closer to the German heart than the freedom to drive like Michael Schumacher, the fabled Formula One champion.

Rule-bound and risk-averse in so many ways, Germans regard driving at face-peeling speeds on the autobahn as close to an inalienable right.

The EU environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, set off a national debate by suggesting that the German government introduce a general speed limit on the autobahn

Half the 12,000 kilometers of autobahn already have speed limits as do smaller roads; however, the "anything-goes" stretches of the autobahn are the fastest public roads in the world.

Critics brandish statistics that show a speed limit of 120 kilometers would only reduce Ge5man's overall carbon-dioxide emissions by three million tons a year, or 0.3 percent. It's better, they say, to focus on building more efficient power plants and houses.

For years, advocates of a speed limit tried to argue their case on safety grounds.

The autobahn is statistically safer than highways in many countries, even if its crashes are singularly horrific.

Germany also has a powerful economic incentive to resist a speed limit.

It builds some of the world's fastest cars, and the autobahn is a valuable showcase and marketing tool for the industry.

German judge rouses anger by citing Koran: She claims it sanctions wife-beating (IHT by Mark Landler, March 23, 2007; pages 1 & 4).

A German judge has stirred a storm of protest in Frankfurt by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim wife's request for a fast-track divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.

In a remarkable ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, said the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote, sanctions such physical abuse.

News of the ruling brought swift and sharp condemnation from politicians, legal experts, and Muslim leaders in Germany; many of whom said they were confounded that a German judge would put seventh-century Islamic religious teaching ahead of German law in deciding a case of domestic violence.

While legal experts said the ruling was a judicial misstep rather than evidence of a broader trend, it comes at a time of rising tension in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, as authorities in many fields struggle to reconcile Western values with their burgeoning Muslim minorities.

Last fall, a Berlin opera house canceled performances of a modified Mozart opera because of security fears stirred by an added scene that depicted the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad.

Stung by charges that it had surrendered its artistic freedom, it staged the opera three months later without incident.

To some people here, the ruling reflects a similar compromising of basic values in the name of cultural sensitivity.

Reaction to the decision has been almost as sulfurous as it was to the cancellation of the Berlin opera.

Muslim leaders agreed that Muslims living here must be judged by the German legal code, but they were just as offended by what they characterized as the judge's misinterpretation of a much-debated passage in the Koran governing relations between husbands and wives.

For some people, the greatest damage done by this episode is to other Muslim women suffering from domestic abuse. Many are already frightened of going to court against their spouses.

There have been a string of so-called "honor killings" here in which Turkish Muslim men have murdered women.

Viewed from the United States or Asia, Denmark is an environmental role model.

About one-fifth of the Denmark's electricity comes from wind, which wind experts say is the highest proportion of any country.

A closer look shows that Denmark is a far cry from a clean-energy paradise.

The building of wind turbines has virtually ground to a halt since subsidies were cut back.

Meanwhile, compared with others in the European Union, Danes remain above-average emitters of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

For all of its wind turbines, a large proportion of the rest of Denmark's power is generated by plants that burn imported coal.

The Danish experience shows how difficult it can be for countries grown rich on fossil fuels to switch to renewable energy sources like wind power.

Among the hurdles are fluctuating political priorities, the high cost of putting new turbines offshore, concern about public acceptance of large wind turbines, and the destructive volatility of the wind itself.

Some parts of western Denmark derive 100 percent of their peak needs from wind if the breeze is up.

Germany and Spain generate more power in absolute terms, but in those countries wind still accounts for a far smaller proportion of the electricity generated. The average for all 27 European Union countries is three percent.

The Germans and the Spanish are catching up as Denmark slows down.