Musings of a Madman

The constitution, originally written by the United States after the defeat of Japan in 1945, would continue to reject war as an option. But the new draft would remove limitations on the country’s 240,000-member Self-Defense Forces, which have been defined as being strictly limited to defending Japan’s home islands.

The new military status would explicitly authorize Japanese participation in foreign peacekeeping efforts, although the country has sent small troop contingents on such missions, including about 600 soldiers now serving in a noncombat capacity with the United States in Iraq. The constitutional draft would broaden the government’s ability to send forces overseas; such an order now requires special legislation in parliament.

The revision also opens the door to a broader interpretation of the constitution, permitting what some call “collective self-defense” — or coming to the military aid of other countries. The most likely beneficiary would be Japan’s closest ally, the United States, which has urged Japan to adopt such measures. Changes in Japan’s constitutional status would have major significance in the region, particularly in the event of a conflict between China and the United States over Taiwan.

“In addition to activities needed for self-defense . . . the defense forces can take part in efforts to maintain international peace and security under international cooperation, as well as to keep fundamental public order in our country,” the draft says.

The revised constitution, released on the 50th anniversary of the LDP’s founding, faces major hurdles and may not be approved for at least a year. Parliamentary approval requires a two-thirds vote by both the lower and upper houses, and the debate is likely to be highly emotional. New Komeito, the LDP’s coalition partner since 1999, favors new clauses and refinements, rather than major changes, in Article 9 of the constitution, which deals with the military.

After parliamentary approval, the draft would also require majority approval in a national referendum.

The release of the draft by the LDP, which has governed the country for most of the post-World War II era, marked a significant turning point in the crusade to give Japan a higher international profile, commensurate with its status as the world’s second-largest economy.

“Today, a major step was taken toward the revision of the constitution,” Taku Yamasaki, an LDP lawmaker and adviser to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, told reporters.

The draft maintains language that defines the emperor of Japan, once revered as a divine being, as a symbol of the state. But the constitutional revision waters down the concept of separation of church and state, which would make it easier for sitting prime ministers to visit Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine honoring Japan’s military dead, including World War II criminals. Koizumi’s annual visits to Yasukuni have caused outrage in China and South Korea.

Officials in both those countries have expressed concern about the proposed constitutional language on the military, noting the rise to power of nationalist Japanese political leaders and a new sense of patriotism among the populace.

On Tuesday, the official New China News Agency described Japan’s revision as a document “designed to provide legal support for its ambition of playing a greater political role on the global stage and of boosting the defense force’s status.”

By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: November 22, 2005

CHERKESSK, Russia – Security officials here in Karachayevo-Cherkessia, a restive republic on Russia’s mountainous southern border, have a secret list of people who are kept under scrutiny.

Those on it have committed no crimes, but are considered suspect because they are Muslims who practice Islam outside of the state’s sanctioned mosques.

Ovod Golayev is on that list. He lives in Karachayevsk, a city nestled in the foothills of the Caucasus, where he works for a tourism company that organizes skiing and hiking excursions. He wears his hair and beard long. He prays five times a day. He fasts during Ramadan, which is unusual here.

In recent weeks, he said, the police have detained him four times, twice in one day.

Mr. Golayev, 36, said the Islam he observes is opposed to violence, but he warned that the mistreatment of believers was driving men like him to desperation.

“They will pressure me enough,” he said, “and then I will blow somebody’s head off.”

Here in the northern Caucasus, and across all of Russia, Islamic faith is on the rise. So is Islamic militancy, and fear of such militancy, leading to tensions like those felt in Europe, where a flow of immigrants from the Muslim world is straining relations with liberal, secular societies.

And so the government has recreated the Soviet-era system of control over religion with the Muslim Spiritual Department, which oversees the appointment of Islamic leaders.

But the Muslims of Russia are not immigrants and outsiders; they are typically the indigenous people of their regions. “These are Russian citizens, and they have no other motherland,” President Vladimir V. Putin said in August, when he met with King Abdullah of Jordan.

In Russia, the struggle over Islam’s place is not seen as a question of whether to integrate Muslims into society, but whether the country itself can remain whole. The separatist conflict in Chechnya, more than a decade old, has taken on an Islamic hue. And it is spilling beyond Chechnya’s borders in the Caucasus, where Islam has become a rallying force against corruption, brutality and poverty.

On the morning of Oct. 13, scores of men took up arms in Nalchik, the capital of the neighboring republic, Kabardino-Balkariya. They were mostly driven, relatives said, by harassment against men with beards and women with head scarves, and by the closing of six mosques in the city. In two days at least 138 people were killed. In Dagestan and Ingushetia, militants have been blamed for unending bombings and killings.

Followers of a Chechen terrorist leader, Shamil Basayev, have claimed responsibility for the deadliest attacks, including the one in Nalchik, and before that a similar raid in Ingushetia and the school siege in Beslan in September 2004. In Beslan, 331 people were killed, 186 of them children.

All have been part of Mr. Basayev’s declared goal to establish an Islamic caliphate, uniting the northern Caucasus in secession from Russia.

That goal has little popular support in the region’s other predominantly Muslim republics, but discontent is spreading as the government cracks down. Not all involved in the attacks are hardened fighters of Chechnya’s wars. More and more oppose the hard-line stands that the Kremlin takes against anyone who challenges its central authority.

In places like Nalchik and here in Karachayevo-Cherkessia, “official” muftis and imams have themselves been accused of acting to preserve their own status by tolerating the Kremlin’s efforts to repress anyone practicing a “purer” form of Islam.

Larisa Dorogova, a lawyer in Nalchik whose nephew Musa was among those killed in the fighting, said Muslims had appealed to the authorities, both religious and secular, to end the abuse of believers, only to be ignored. “If they had listened to the letters we wrote – from 400 people, from 1,000 – maybe this would not have happened,” she said.

Officials have denounced those who took up arms in Nalchik with the same broad brush they have used to describe Mr. Basayev’s forces. Mr. Putin linked the Nalchik uprising to international terrorists, whom he called “animals in human guise.” But in the Caucasus, where Islamic-inspired violence has killed far more people than terrorists have in Western Europe, the prevailing view is quite different.

“They were all good guys,” Ms. Dorogova said of Nalchik’s fighters.

The paradox of Islam in today’s Russia is that Muslims have never been freer.

Read more….

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 17, 2005

Iran began converting a new batch of uranium at a key nuclear facility yesterday, rejecting international pleas to suspend such work and dismissing a new offer — sponsored by Russia — that was designed to ease tensions over the country’s nuclear ambitions, U.S. and European officials said.

The work at the facility in the town of Isfahan does not bring Iran significantly closer to nuclear capability. But the decision to convert additional uranium — a key ingredient for fueling nuclear energy or weapons programs — was seen as a provocative move just days after Iranian officials reacted coolly to the Russian offer.

Coming at a sensitive time, the Iranian moves threatened to derail efforts to set up a meeting next week between European and Iranian officials that was meant to reinvigorate negotiations on hold since the summer, diplomats said. Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is leading an investigation of Iran’s nuclear program, also canceled a planned trip to Tehran, said officials in Vienna, where the agency is based.

R. Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, was to travel to London today to meet with his European and Russian counterparts about next steps in an effort to increase diplomatic pressure on Tehran. The 35-member IAEA board meets in Vienna on Nov. 24 to discuss the status of Iran’s program. For more than two years, the Bush administration has been unable to persuade allies to send the Iranian nuclear case to the U.N. Security Council, where the country could face economic sanctions for failing to disclose a nuclear energy program built in secret over 18 years.

Iran has said the program was designed to produce nuclear energy, not bombs. But the scale of the program and its clandestine nature have fueled suspicions that Tehran is using it to conceal a weapons effort. The Bush administration and several key allies have said they want Iran to forgo plans to complete a uranium enrichment facility, the most sensitive aspect of the nuclear fuel cycle, because it would give Iran the capacity to produce bomb-grade uranium. The Iranians have said they will not give up that part of the program, which they are allowed to have as signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

One of the key countries that has so far resisted sending Iran’s case to the Security Council is Russia, which has a close economic partnership with Tehran and helped build one of the country’s larger nuclear power reactors.

Igor Ivanov, a senior Kremlin adviser and the country’s former foreign minister, offered Iran a deal that would have allowed it to continue operating the Isfahan facility as long as Iran’s enrichment effort remained on hold. According to officials who have been briefed on the offer, the converted uranium from Isfahan would have been shipped to Russia for enrichment and then sent back to Iran to fuel the Russian-built reactor. Russia offered Iran a 35 percent financial stake in the Russian end of the enrichment process and suggested the deal remain in effect for several years while Iran continued to negotiate a broad-ranging deal with the West.

Iranian officials initially rejected the deal but then offered cool public statements saying they would consider the proposal. At the end of the Ivanov trip, the Iranians reportedly agreed to delay additional work at Isfahan until after the Vienna meeting and committed to a meeting next week with European and Russian officials.

But yesterday, the Iranians began converting more uranium at the Isfahan facility. Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the IAEA, said agency inspectors were at the facility at the time. The Bush administration is hoping the move may persuade Russia to vote with other IAEA board members to send Iran’s case to the United Nations.

David Albright, a nuclear expert and the president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said Iran’s move at Isfahan was “mostly symbolic” but the Iranians will “end up with a larger stock” of converted uranium that they can store away for the day when their own enrichment facility is completed. If that happens, Iran could wind up with enough bomb-grade uranium for as many as eight weapons, he said.

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Sorry, couch potatoes — the verdict is in: People who exercise regularly really do live longer.

In fact, people who get a good workout almost daily can add nearly four years to their life spans, according to the first study to quantify the impact of physical activity this way.

The researchers looked at records of more than 5,000 middle-aged and elderly Americans and found that those who had moderate to high levels of activity lived 1.3 to 3.7 years longer than those who got little exercise, largely because they put off developing heart disease — the nation’s leading killer. Men and women benefited about equally.

“This shows that physical activity really does make a difference — not only for how long you live but for how long you live a healthy life,” said Oscar H. Franco of the Erasmus M.C. University Medical Center in Rotterdam, who led the study, published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine. “Being more physically active can give you more time.”

Previous studies have found that being physically active has a host of health benefits. It reduces the risk of being overweight and of developing many illnesses, improves overall quality of life, and lowers the mortality rate. But the new study is the first to directly calculate the effect on how long people live.

“This should encourage people to be more active — to take a more active role in their own health and not just sit and wait for a pill to prevent this or that or save your life,” Franco said.

Franco and his colleagues analyzed data from the Framingham Heart Study, a well-known research project that has followed 5,209 residents of a Massachusetts town for more than 40 years, collecting detailed information about their lifestyles and health.

The researchers calculated the effects of low, moderate or high levels of physical activity on life span, accounting for the possible effects of factors such as age, sex, education, and whether they smoked or had serious health problems.

People who engaged in moderate activity — the equivalent of walking for 30 minutes a day for five days a week — lived about 1.3 to 1.5 years longer than those who were less active. Those who took on more intense exercise — the equivalent of running half an hour a day five days every week — extended their lives by about 3.5 to 3.7 years, the researchers found.

The findings show that even for people who are already middle-aged, exercising more can add years to their lives, Franco said.

“This shows it’s never too late to start following a healthy lifestyle. It’s never too late to start exercising,” Franco said. “For example, instead of taking your car to your office, why don’t you take your bike or walk? Physical activity is very important for a healthy lifestyle.”

Other experts said the study was consistent with the growing evidence that exercising on a regular basis is one of the most important things people can do for their health.

“At the end of the day, this is more evidence that the sedentary lifestyle is the most devastating to health, longevity and chronic disease development,” said James O. Hill of the University of Colorado at Denver, adding that he hoped it might motivate more people to exercise. “Putting it in terms of life expectancy is something that’s relevant to people.”

While adding one to four years may not sound like a lot to some people, Franco, Hill and others said exercising regularly also enables people to live healthier lives, free from a host of chronic illnesses that can make it hard for people to enjoy their later years.

In addition, recent studies have also found that exercise has payoffs for the mind, too. It has been shown to improve overall well-being, reduce stress and depression, and cut the risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, several experts said.

“The benefits of physical activity extend well beyond the effects on longevity,” said JoAnn E. Manson of Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

The trouble is, many people seem to ignore the evidence, government recommendations and public health campaigns to be physically active.

Most Americans still fail to exercise regularly, and the number who exercise in their leisure time has been dropping, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Franco and others noted that this and other studies show that people do not have to be exercise fanatics to reap the benefits. Adding just a little activity to the daily routine can have major benefits.

“What we’re talking about is small changes,” Hill said. “We’re telling people to get out and walk more. Fifteen, 20 or 30 minutes of walking each day is probably enough.”

Start Air University Graduate Course today. It is an 18 month program, hope to finish it in 8-12. Will make a schedule tomorrow on start compiling notes.