The World is Talking About…

Tajikistan is Talking About...Smuggling

River is a Drug Smuggler's Dream

Tajik border a sieve for Afghan heroin; Russia pays the price

By Alex Rodriguez, Chicago Tribune

Panj,  Tajikistan -  The smugglers almost always come in the dead of night, in small bands clutching packages of Afghan heroin and Kalashnikov rifles. On tires lashed together or on makeshift wooden rafts, they cross the meandering Panj River that separates Afghanistan and Tajikistan, slip through minefields and navigate the tall reeds and footpaths on the Tajik side of the Panj.

Most of the time, they make it through unscathed.

From atop a guard tower overlooking the Panj, Tajik border guard Capt. Abdulkhamid Murodov explains why. An electrified fence rigged with alarms and installed as a line of defense is largely useless because Murodov's outpost doesn't have enough electricity to power it. His outpost also doesn't have enough two-way radios, lacks searchlights and too often doesn't have enough gas to get extra soldiers to the river's edge when firefights with smugglers break out.

Murodov points to a set of binoculars hanging on the tower's inside wall--it's the outpost's only set.

"Too many drug smugglers get across and just dissolve into our country. This happened even when the Russians were here," Murodov said, referring to a time when Russian troops helped patrol the Tajik-Afghan border.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC, says this year's harvest of opium in Afghanistan will reach a record 6,100 metric tons. As one of six nations bordering Afghanistan, tiny, mountainous Tajikistan is at the front line in the battle to keep that heroin from reaching the rest of the world.

It's a task that Tajikistan, the poorest of former Soviet republics and one of the world's poorest nations, shoulders despite being underequipped and outmanned for the job...Read more...

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Paris is Talking About...Smoking

Comment: Well, this seems familiar. Here in Tokyo, where smoking is still very common, many of the wards have gone so far as to prohibit smoking on the public streets. This has led to the sight of "Smoking Rooms" -- sponsored by Japan Tobacco -- in some commercial areas, where smokers go inside a storefront or standalone bus-shelter-like structure on the sidewalk to smoke. Given the price and rents of commercial real estate in Tokyo, this cannot be cheap.

Smoking No Longer Très Chic in France

Today, nearly 80 percent of the French support the idea of a smoking ban in public places.

By Elaine Sciolino, New York Times

Paris, France - Jean-Paul Sartre smoked. So did Colette, Cocteau, Camus, and Coco Chanel.

One of the most memorable scenes in French films is Jean-Paul Belmondo lifting his head, dragging on a cigarette and rubbing his thumb back and forth across his lips in Breathless. (He smokes about two dozen times in the movie.)

There is something about smoking that seems very French.

But as in other European countries, smoking in public increasingly has fallen out of favor here. This week, after a five-month governmental inquiry, a parliamentary committee approved a proposal to ban smoking in public areas.

Under the measure, cafes, hotels, restaurants, discos and casinos could designate spaces for smoking only if they could be “hermetically sealed areas, furnished with air-extraction systems and subject to extremely rigorous health norms.”

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said he would decide quickly how to proceed on the matter. “The French people would not understand if we do not make a decision” in the face of the research, he told members of Parliament on Monday.

But not everyone here agrees. To diehard smokers and many tobacconists and bar and restaurant owners, the campaign reflects the loss of a core French value — the rights of the individual.

Read more...

Argentina is Talking About...Land Ownership

Argentine Land Fight Divides Environmentalists, Rights Advocates

Not just South American nationalism against foreign investors, but also environmentalists versus social justice advocates -- two activist movements often grouped together under the "progressive" label.

By Monte Reel, Washington Post

Concepción, Corrientes_Province, Argentina - From a flat patch of tree-studded savannah, the gaze stretches for miles: across a small pond where a marsh deer stops to drink, and over swampy wetlands where herons gingerly high-step.

Above it all, a small airplane drones. At the controls is Douglas Tompkins, an American who owns everything underneath him, paid for from the millions he earned as the founder of the North Face and Esprit clothing lines.

"It's an amazing piece of land," Tompkins said shortly after landing. "Extremely rich with biological diversity."

Now, many Argentine officials and social activists want to confiscate the property he says he bought to create an ecological preserve. They think that he and other wealthy foreigners who have bought enormous swaths of the Argentine and Chilean countryside are trying to wrest control of a continent under the guise of environmental preservation.

"We believe this is a new way of trying to dominate the South American countries," said Araceli Mendez, a congresswoman who represents this region and sponsored legislation last month that would expropriate Tompkins's land. "It is dangerous for the defense of our national security to have the concentration of so much land in the hands of foreigners..."

Read more...

Hong Kong is Talking About...Ballroom Dancing

Banker gets millions back for ballroom dance lessons

Offbeat Court Case Captivates Hong Kong

By Donald Greenlees, International Herald Tribune

Hong Kong - In a city used to the exuberance of its wealthiest inhabitants, Mimi Monica Wong set new standards with her passion for the rumba, samba and cha-cha.

The HK$120 million (or $15.4 million US) she agreed to pay for eight years of Latin dance classes has bemused and entertained many a Hong Kong dinner table.

Wong, who as head of HSBC's Asian private banking business advised the bank's richest customers on how to invest, had become so impassioned with mastering Latin dance that in 2004 she entered the exorbitant deal with two top dance instructors. She even turned over a HK$62 million ($8 million US) advance to Gaynor Fairweather, a world Latin dance champion, and her Italian husband, Mirko Saccani.

But on Wednesday, Wong, recently the butt of a lot of jokes, delivered her own punchline: a court ordered that her money be returned, with interest.

The ruling by the High Court of Hong Kong gave Wong, the 61-year-old daughter of a shipping tycoon, the last word on a relationship with her dance tutors she had described as "an affair."

Read more...