An enormous drill began preliminary work Monday on carving a half-mile chimney through solid rock to free the 33 men trapped in a Chilean mine, their ordeal now having equaled the longest known survival in an underground disaster.
The 31-ton drill bored 50 feet into the rock, the first step in the weeklong digging of a "pilot hole" to guide the way for the rescue. Later the drill will be outfitted with larger bits to expand the hole and pull the men through - a process that could take four months.
The men were trapped Aug. 5 in the San Jose mine in Chile's northern Atacama Desert. Before rescuers dug bore holes to reach them, they survived 17 days without contact with the outside world by rationing a 48-hour supply of food and digging for water in the ground.
The miners are now being funneled food and chlorine to disinfect the underground water through an "umbilical cord" connecting them to the surface. They've also received vaccinations and rubber boots to help prevent diphtheria and tetanus and a video camera, which they're using to film their injuries so a doctor on the surface can provide advice for spot treatment.
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Last week, The Daily Beast's Peter Beinart proposed the idea that "you can't divorce the right to do something from the ability to exercise that right."
He was referring to the debate over whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should go ahead with plans to build a mosque on private property a short distance from the former site of the World Trade Center.
Among those opposed to such action, a distinction has emerged. Some argue either that Muslims do not have a right to build a place of worship in the United States or that other citizens have a right which supersedes that freedom of religious expression. Another, ostensibly more reasonable, group acknowledges the right certainly exists but argues that the spiritual leader should scrap the plans anyway. Their assertion is that having the right to do something does not necessarily mean one should exercise that right.
Although it is certainly an inexact analogy, this reminds me a bit of women's rights in Iran. The law of the Islamic Republic does allow women to run for and hold elected offices. Somehow, despite hundreds of attempts and an apparent lack of legal obstacles though, no woman has ever been certified by the Guardian Council to run for President. A contradiction seems to exist between what is legally permissible and what is socially allowable.
There are times when the liberties enshrined in our Constitution afford rights to people that make us uncomfortable. Standing up for those rights anyway is a true expression of patriotism. Legally allowing an action while using popular opinion to effectively forbid it is a specious way to honor a fundamental American value.
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Prime Minister Raila Odinga accepts the new oath of office.
The new Kenyan constitution was promulgated on Friday in Uhuru park in Nairobi. The east African country has been working to adopt a new governing document since 1990, when opposition groups began protesting across the country in support of a multi-party political system.
In the two decades that followed, Kenyans have ridden a roller coaster of false starts and ethnic tension, a relatively uncommon occurrence in Kenya, which prides itself on being a bulwark of stability in a region prone to conflict.
After the 2007 presidential elections, riddled with allegations of vote-rigging and aggression between communities, a peace deal was signed which led to a determination and resolve to finally institute change. It was for this reason that millions of Kenyans stood in line for hours to vote for the new constitution earlier this month. Sixty of the nation's two-hundred ten constituencies had turnout numbers greater than eighty percent.
The constitution itself seems worthy of high hopes. It could ensure the nation's survival long-term by reforming a political establishment prone to corrupt and abusive governance and the skewed distribution of resources and land.
The challenge now facing Kenyans is to continue to hold their leaders accountable, ensuring a faithful implementation of the document they so deserve.
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U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden arrived in Baghdad on an unannounced visit this morning, a day before the formal end of combat operations in Iraq.
President Obama is to address the nation on Tuesday on Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are now fewer than 50,000 troops on the ground in Iraq, down from 160,000 at the end of President George W. Bush's administration. The remaining troops will focus on providing assistance and training to the Iraqi military.
Biden will also meet with Iraqi officials who have been struggling to form a government after elections in March resulted in a hung parliament, including Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Vice President Tariq Hashimi, Vice President Adil Abd Mahdi and Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. ____________________________________________________________________________
"In an exhaustive 18-month review, the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board found that the complexity of the nation's tax laws has increased dramatically in recent years. Lawmakers have changed the code more than 15,000 times since the last major overhaul in 1986. Meanwhile, instruction booklets for the standard Form 1040 have swelled from 14 pages to 44 pages last year.
The board also found that the profusion of credits, deductions, phaseouts and conflicting eligibility requirements frays the sanity of ordinary taxpayers just as surely as it complicates the calculations of wealthy families and business owners. Tax provisions affecting families and children were among the most frequently cited sources of confusion."
Read the full report here.
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Negotiators have made significant progress as the unofficial September deadline for the Basel III Accord nears. The accord consists of international recommendations on banking laws and regulations issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in Switzerland. The third of the Basel Accords is being written in response to the recent global financial crisis.
The current sticking point is over the amount of "safety capital" financial institutions should be required to maintain as a buffer for risk. Basel officials have recommended the level be set at 5% of assets, i.e., loans and investments, with an additional 2.5% buffer accessible to banks during periods of difficulty.
A deal seems likely to conclude with the level set at 7 or 8% including the additional buffer. Since most U.S. firms already keep a larger percentage of safety capital on hand than most European banks, the new requirements are likely to be more onerous for the latter.
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The Briefing is pleased to announce some major changes to our mission and design.
The most aesthetically obvious of these changes is our reworked website and new logo. This shift reflects our new commitment to expanding our coverage and analysis to international issues.
If you've been following us for the breaking political news and policy information, don't worry. That content isn't going anywhere. We're just adding a larger world perspective to encourage each of us to be productive and informed global citizens. We hope this new focus will lead to many conversations about the nature of the issues we face in the world today and a constructive dialogue about how we can work together as an international community to address those issues.
As a helpful reference, you'll notice all posts now have a policy area (Immigration, National Intelligence, etc.) or world region (The Middle East & Northern Africa, Europe/Russia, etc.) tags before the headline.
Additionally, you'll see a larger percentage of our news updates on Facebook containing links to a quick write-up with a few additional details and some brief analysis. You can often expect a headline and three to five sentences of detail here on The Briefing site.
As always, we hope these new features are helpful and interesting to you. Please know that we always appreciate comments and questions.
Ken Wyatt was elected to a seat representing a Western Australian district as a member of the center-right Liberal Party.
Ethnic tension continues to exist in the country, as evidenced by Wyatt's receipt of racist hate mail, but the election of an indigenous person is a welcome and historic step forward for Australia.
Last week's parliamentary elections resulted in both major parties falling three to four votes short of a majority, forcing the Liberals and Labor to reach out to the Independents who now hold the balance of power.
Imagine the entire population of our largest metropolitan area, New York City, were made homeless over night and a third of them were starving. Now double that.
For most in the United States, the country of Pakistan holds a checkered reputation.
First, there's the evidence of past duplicitous relations with our nation's military and collusion with the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan. Then there's the less-than-predictable politico-military power balance in a nation with a stockpile of roughly 150 nuclear warheads. Add to that volatile relations stemming from three separate wars with India which have seemed to distract the nation's foreign policy establishment to the near-total exclusion of threats in the north and it's generally true that those in the States who know much of anything about Pakistani current affairs tend to not like what they've heard.
It's possible that it's for this reason that so few of us have been moved to help a nation that's been devastated in the last three weeks by widespread floods; in truth, I'm guessing few have even heard of the crisis.
But, a crisis it most surely is, already having afflicted disaster on more human beings than the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir and that which struck Haiti earlier this year. The flooding of the Indus River, which stretches across the entire length of Pakistan, has killed more than 2,000, left over 700,000 families homeless, and affected more than 20 million people, reducing entire towns to muddy rubble. Some 17 million acres of agricultural land have been submerged, and more than 100,000 animals have perished. Six million people are in need of food aid.
In some areas, the waters have begun to recede, leaving unusable farm land and pools of stagnant water which threaten to cause widespread outbreaks of disease. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns of a "second wave of death" unless aid comes quickly, with the World Health Organization declaring six million people, including 3.5 million children, at risk from diseases like cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A and E, and dysentery.
In other areas, most notably the southern Sindh province, rain fall continues to exacerbate the Indus, threatening even further breaches of the river banks.
The United Nations estimates $460 million is needed to deal with immediate humanitarian needs and the Pakistani government estimates the total reconstruction cost at nearly $15 billion. So far the world has pledged or donated just $125 million.
It should be pointed out that the U.S. Department of State has mobilized more emergency aid than any other country, including tons of food aid and the dispatching of Navy helicopters to assist with search and rescue missions. It's also true that the Pakistani army has reacted swiftly and competently. But neither of those truths has multiplied the aid actually available to make a difference.
Some worry the money could fall into the hands of the Taliban, but while international aid agencies and non-governmental organizations have taken steps to prevent such a possibility, that reticence to help the militants has unintentionally opened a dangerous door. While the U.N., Red Cross, Care, and others have pleaded for more aid, the Taliban hasn't focused on siphoning it off, but rather on actually assisting the victims themselves. Especially in strategic areas like the Swat valley, this has left many rural Pakistanis with the impression that the international community and their own government have abandoned them while the Taliban come to their aid.
Make no mistake, the victims of this disaster are farmers and shopkeepers and schoolteachers, men and woman and children.
They say that Americans, blessed with so much, are some of the most giving people on the planet and that economic hard times actually lead to an increase in charitable giving as we come closer to what really matters and reconnect with the empathy that defines our humanity.
On Monday, several hundred people blocked the main highway linking Punjab province with the city of Karachi in protest. "We have no food and no shelter," they cried. "We need immediate help."
As a human being, I implore you to help in any way you can. Please, give generously.
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To help, text 'SWAT' to 50555 on your mobile phone to donate $10 directly to the UNHCR or give to one of these organizations working to mobilize relief workers and supplies and combat disease on the ground:
I'll be back later with some more analysis of this morning's rather dismal jobs report, but wanted to share a quick though on the temporary census positions that accounted for most of this morning's reported job losses.
You'll remember that in May the U.S. Census Bureau added 411,000 temporary positions to execute the decennial counting of Americans for representation and apportionment. A number of sources, most notably many conservatives, cried foul, saying these positions, because they were temporary and public sector, did not count. Only private sector jobs, of which there was a net gain of 41,000 in May, should be accepted as actual progress.
In June, we lost 225,000 of those temporary, public sector positions as the census presumably went forward fairly smoothly and more than half the work was finished in less than a month. The private sector added 83,000 jobs. Surprisingly, the same individuals who cried foul at counting the addition of census jobs last month are those advocating most loudly for this morning's numbers reflecting the loss of those jobs to be the most important story of the month.
To me, this smacks of hypocrisy. You can't have it both ways. Either the positions should be completely discounted or they should be viewed as what they are: jobs held by real people that offered a brief, limited reprieve from joblessness.
Either way you slice it, two things are clear: those workers are now back in the ranks of the unemployed, which is bad news, and we should expect more of these losses in the coming months as the nearly 200,000 remaining census workers also wrap up their work.
