DISCUSSION
GROUP
Washington Post
By Craig Whitlock, Leila Fadel and Ernesto Londono
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 10, 2011; 10:58 am
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/09/AR2011020905656_pf.html
CAIRO -- President Hosni Mubarak will meet the demands of protesters, military and ruling party officials, the Associated Press reported Thursday, in the strongest indication yet that Egypt's longtime president may be about to give up power.
The military's supreme council was meeting Thursday, without Mubarak, its commander in chief, and announced on state TV its "support of the legitimate demands of the people," AP said.
A spokesman said the council was in permanent session to explore "what measures and arrangements could be made to safeguard the nation, its achievements and the ambitions of its great people."
Gen. Hassan al-Roueini, military commander for the Cairo area, told thousands of protesters in central Tahrir Square, "All your demands will be met today."
But the atmosphere remained tense and uncertain, as top government officials remained vague or gave contradictory statements about Mubarak's future.
After the Army's statement, Shafiq, the prime minister, phoned into state television and said that he could neither confirm nor deny any changes at the top. "The president is in his position and we have not received any decision by him to indicate anything new," Shafiq said.
There was no word from Mubarak himself.
Meantime, revolutionary fervor tightened its grip on the country as doctors, lawyers, bus drivers and factory workers marched through the streets.
Hossan Badrawi, the newly appointed secretary general of the National Democratic Party, told the BBC that Mubarak "may be stepping down" and could give a televised address this evening.
Badrawi later appeared on Egyptian state television and acknowledged that the government was considering constitutional amendments, including one related to a "peaceful transfer of power." Asked if that involved Mubarak, Badrawi replied: "No, I don't have specific information. All I can do is offer predictions. And I would predict that that would be a good thing."
Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq also confirmed that discussions were underway at the highest levels of government about Mubarak ceding at least some of his authority.
Egyptian state television reported that the High Council of the Egyptian armed forces met Thursday afternoon and issued a statement, recognizing the "legitimate demands of the people." The armed forces said they would meet later to discuss "all the necessary measures to preserve the nation." The statement did not mention Mubarak and was not more specific, but it heightened anticipation that major changes were in the offing.
Those reports spread quickly throughout the capital, as many tens of thousands of Egyptians converged on Tahrir Square, the plaza that has served as the epicenter of demonstrations that have convulsed the country for the past 17 days.
Outside the parliament, where protesters had blocked a street and camped out in anticipation of even bigger demonstrations on Friday, people shouted and kissed the ground after hearing news reports that Mubarak might relinquish power. But their emotions swung into reverse moments later, when chants of "false report, false report" dashed their hopes.
Protesters have insisted they will not disband until Mubarak is gone. The authoritarian ruler has responded to them with a combination of fist and glove. Security forces rounded up hundreds of activists and harassed journalists last week; since then, Vice President Omar Suleiman has tried to engage in talks with protest leaders. But the government's offers of vague or limited political concessions have done little to stem the demonstrations, which have been united in their calls for Mubarak's ouster after 30 years of strongman rule.
Earlier Thursday, Egypt's foreign minister warned that the army could seize control of the country if protesters do not halt the anti-government demonstrations that have been underway for 17 days, a prospect that he called "very grave."
If "adventurers" take over the process of reform, Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit told the satellite channel Al Arabiya, according to the Associated Press, Egypt's military "will be compelled to defend the constitution and national security ... and we'll find ourselves in a very grave situation."
Demonstrators are calling for a "million man" protest Friday.
The Mubarak government had harsh words Wednesday for the United States, a longtime ally. In an interview with "PBS NewsHour," Aboul Gheit said he was "often angry" and "infuriated" with the White House for its criticism of the Egyptian government's response in the early days of the crisis.
He also said Mubarak would not budge on his refusal to resign before his term ends in September. "He thinks it would entail chaos and it would entail violence," Aboul Gheit said.
In Washington, the White House repeated its call for Egypt to take "immediate" steps, including an end to violence and suppression of opposition figures and journalists, the lifting of long-standing emergency laws that restrict civil rights, and a broadening of the government's dialogue with the opposition.
White House officials declined to say what action, if any, the administration would take if the Egyptian government continued to reject its entreaties.
"The Egyptian people are going to be the drivers of the process," said deputy national security adviser Benjamin J. Rhodes. "Our ability to dictate outcomes, that's not something we're able to do. But we are able to make very clear what we expect and what we stand for."
Egypt's opposition leaders met with Suleiman on Sunday, but they have refused to join in further talks, despite a pledge by the vice president to set up committees to study possible constitutional changes. The negotiations will go nowhere, the opposition leaders say, unless Mubarak quits or acts more decisively to meet their demands.
"What is taking place on the ground is a conflict of wills," said Mohammed Mursi, a senior figure with the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist movement that seeks to impose religious rule. "The steadfastness of the people is confronting the stubbornness of the man who heads the regime."
The size of the crowd in Tahrir Square Wednesday and Thursday was modest compared with the unprecedented numbers that packed the city center Tuesday. But organizers were calling for another huge turnout Friday, the start of the Muslim weekend.
Among those joining in the labor unrest were 2,500 textile and steel workers who staged a strike in Suez, following 6,000 workers in the canal zone who had walked out the day before. In towns across the Nile Delta, about 1,500 nurses held a sit-in at a hospital, 800 workers went on strike at a bottling plant and 2,000 more stopped work at steel factories, according to state media reports.
In the industrial city of Mahala, about 24,000 textile factory workers were planning a strike Thursday, said Kamal Abbas, head of the Center for Trade Unions and Workers Services. "These are spontaneous," he said.
Fresh demonstrations erupted in remote corners of the country, including one that led to a confrontation between security police and about 3,000 protesters in the New Valley region, in Egypt's western desert. At least three protesters were killed, state television reported. In Assiut province, about 8,000 protesters blocked the main highway and railroad to Cairo with burning palm trees, then pelted the provincial governor's vehicle with rocks when he tried to talk to them.
Mubarak has refused calls from Washington and European capitals to lift the 30-year-old emergency law and to order the security services to stop harassing activists and journalists. Suleiman also has made clear in recent public statements that the government thinks it has done enough to accommodate protesters.
Any acts of civil disobedience, the vice president said Wednesday, would be "very dangerous for society, and we can't put up with this at all."
Although Suleiman has been the government's public face in talks with opposition factions, Mubarak remains fully in charge, said a Western diplomat in Cairo, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing Egyptian officials. Mubarak has ignored calls to cede power to a transition council while elections are prepared.
Opposition leaders and Western diplomats said it is unclear when or if negotiations will resume. Suleiman "doesn't want to give people any hope that the government will give further inducements," said the diplomat in Cairo. But so far, the diplomat said, "it's not working for them."
"The ball is in their court," Essam el-Erian, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, said of the government.
One complicating factor, the diplomats said, is that the opposition is highly decentralized. No figure has emerged who can speak for a majority of the demonstrators, many of whom have been spurred on by a coterie of young, well-educated Egyptians who have had no previous involvement in politics.
"It's the challenge of dealing with this leaderless phenomenon," said the Western diplomat in Cairo. "These are names, we have to say, that we don't know who they are. And they could be the next leaders of Egypt."
whitlockc@washpost.com fadell@washpost.com londonoe@washpost.com
Special correspondent Samuel Sockol in Cairo and staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”
This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”
Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.
The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.
And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.
Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.
But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.
Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.
So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.
Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.
Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”
There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.
“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.
Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.
There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.
________________________________
A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.
Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.
Zhou Family Ties
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
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