Read the Financial Times, Not the New York Times

In comments. Bupa says that I should praise the New York Times's Steven Weisman because he gets the punch line right on the latest developments in the Wolfowitz-Riza affair:

Bush Opens Door to Wolfowitz’s Resigning - New York Times: A factor that kept emotions high was the disclosure on Tuesday of documents that seemed to buttress the bank committee’s conclusion that Mr. Wolfowitz tried to keep the pay and promotion arrangement for Ms. Riza a secret. According to one document, Mr. Wolfowitz had a bitter showdown with the bank’s personnel director, Xavier Coll, in March 2006.... Mr. Coll recounted that Mr. Wolfowitz became "increasingly agitated"... using expletives and threatening retaliation.... [T]he document seemed to demonstrate that Mr. Wolfowitz was aware six months after he arranged for Ms. Riza’s [large raise in salary] that few people at the bank knew about it. This appeared to contradict his contention that it was well known at the bank and deemed appropriate.

I'm not so sure. I think I would set the bar higher. First of all, these are the last paragraphs of Weisman's story, not the first. They belong high up in the story.

Second, there are a good many things that Weisman does not say in the story that he should. For example, he should say that on Sunday he reported on the Coll memos like this:

[World Bank o]fficials... said testimony and notes that Xavier Coll, vice president of human resources, provided to a bank committee investigating the matter supported the charge that Mr. Wolfowitz was aware of engaging in favoritism. One said the documents were "devastating" to Mr. Wolfowitz’s case... and... have become central to the charges Mr. Wolfowitz is fighting. The officials did not provide the documents.

It was unclear whether Mr. Wolfowitz’s supporters would read the same information differently and insist that it buttressed his insistence that his actions were encouraged by others and subsequently cleared by them. Robert S. Bennett, Mr. Wolfowitz’s lawyer... disputed that any such evidence existed and suggested that there might be some misinterpretation of the evidence. Mr. Bennett has reviewed extensive amounts of the testimony in the case.... "I will say that a careful review of all the documents shows, if anything, that there was no bad faith on Mr. Wolfowitz’s part."

Weisman should say that Robert Bennett lied to him: Coll's document says that there was bad faith on Wolfowitz's part. And Weisman should also explain to his readers why he gave Bennett as much relative weight as he did in his story of last Sunday.

Perhaps this is setting the bar too high--perhaps no establishment Washington reporter can be asked to press Robert Bennett rather than simply printing what Bennett wants to say. But on this issue, Krishna Guha and Eoin Callan's reporting in the Financial Times has been earlier, more comprehensive, better, and fairer than the reporting in the New York Times or the Washington Post: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2378a922-0358-11dc-a023-000b5df10621,dwp_uuid=2114d450-df62-11da-afe4-0000779e2340.html, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ef1356a6-0310-11dc-a023-000b5df10621,dwp_uuid=2114d450-df62-11da-afe4-0000779e2340.html, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0f18fcf0-0251-11dc-ac32-000b5df10621,dwp_uuid=2114d450-df62-11da-afe4-0000779e2340.html, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/35c4cbe0-f9dc-11db-9b6b-000b5df10621.html.

Comments

[Bupa]

Gee Brad, thanks for taking me up on my offer. You left out my final sentence:

"Aside from getting the punch line right, there is much else to cricitize in Weisman’s coverage. I’ll leave that to the master. Brad?"

While I'm a long time supporter of your advice to read the FT and not the NYT, even the FT, whose coverage while better than Weisman still doesn't live up to the high standards you set, does not call Bennet a high paid liar.

[Bupa]

Also, Bennet may not have been lying. He may have been referring to other Coll documents which Wolfowitz referred to in his statement to the Board yesterday.

The FT links to Wolfowitz's statement:
http://media.ft.com/cms/7455ad00-035c-11dc-a023-000b5df10621.pdf

He has changed his tactics once again. Now he is groveling. He opens with "I have spent nearly alll my life in public service. Some people have disagreed with my policies and positions. But never before have they questioned my honesty or integrity."

Guess he isn't aware that many people in the world think he is a war criminal.

Guess he isn't aware that many people in the world think he intentionally obfuscated American Fiscal Policy in attempts to hide the cost of the war of agression that he designed and advocated. What was the name of that unfortunate General who Wolfie demoted or sacked after he testified to Congress that the cost of the war would be huge?

Honesty. Integrity. Hallmarks of the Bush administration's legacy.

[Bupa]

http://media.ft.com/cms/7455ad00-035c-11dc-a023-000b5df10621.pdf

another great quote:

"I tell you this so you can understand why I have been figthing so hard to defend myself. I know that you would do the same if you were in my position."

No, Paul, international civil servsnts and public servants with an ounce of integrity from around the world would have resigned long ago. Integrity. Not a weakness found in the Bush Administration.

As the "devestating report" says:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21335416~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html

"The Group is troubled by Mr. Wolfowitz's own public statements as well as those of his lawyer made on his behalf....first they involve disclosure of information...which...are confidential and are not publicly available...But of greater concern to the Bank Group is the attitude it reveals about the nature of the process currently underway. It has turned an internal governance matter into an ugly public relations campaign in which Mr. Wolfowitz...has resorted to public attacks...which denigrates the istitution he was selected to lead...this is a concern for a variety of reasons: (1) it places Mr. Wolfowitz's personal interests ahead of institutional interests; (2) it casts Mr. Wolfowitz as an adversary of the World Bank...;(3) it results in the institution being seen in a bad and unfair light in the public eye; and (4) it has produced an environment that, put mildly, is not conducive to maximum work efficiencey or positive staff morale."

"The Group believes that the President's actions are inconsistent with his obligation to "maintain the highest standards of integrity in his personal and professional conduct and observe principles of good governance" as required by the Code of Conduct."

Lacking integrity is not a firing offense in the eyes of the Bush Administration.

[banana]

I wrote a note that says Brad oves me $100. Please send to banana@paypal.com

[anne]

Yes; if the purpose in reading a newspaper is to be a narrow as a twig, then read the Financial Times and not the New York Times. If the idea is to be well educated, then read the New York Times and the Financial Times as well for more, well, finance.

[anne]

"Read the Financial Times, Not the New York Times"

Frankly, I find this an offensive heading when the best possible thing for a person who wishes to be well-rounded educationally is to read the New York Times. Criticism is always due and hopefully will be attended to, but there is simply no comparison between the papers other than in finance and there is more than finance to be attended to and even there I will settle for the New York Times.

[Bupa]

Anne, perhaps you could bolster your position by giving some examples. The New York Times covers more stuff than the FT and devotes more space to....science, arts, sports, book reviews, comics, style, travel, health....so the NYT is better than the FT in some things

But the FT is better than the NYT in more than finance. They are better in their political coverage. They are better in covering world events. They are better, with the exception of Paul Krugman, in editorial and op ed.

But Brad would have had a loooong title to point out these nuances.

[Bupa]

Perhaphs Anne and others don't agree that the FT practices higher quality journalism than the NYT.

But just grant me the point for the sake of argument.

What is the reason that one top newspaper is better than the other?

Is it because one newspaper hires better journalist than the others?

Or is it the editors that make the difference?

Or both? Or are there other reasons?

[Bupa]

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSWAT00750920070516

>

Classic Bush Admin brinksmanship. Thieves, Thugs, Liars and an Idiot.

It is time for the world to stand up to these thugs.

Vote, don't cut deals, vote to fire this man.

[anne]

Bupa, I like you so I will grumble at Brad DeLong, but when I am a little fed and rested from my run I will think of your question. Editing is awfully important, however. The Financial Times is really quite a fine newspaper, but simply not comprehensive and extensive enough.... I am so hungry.

[Bupa]

Wolfowitz refuses to quit Bank, wants name cleared By Lesley Wroughton
48 minutes ago

Here is Wolfowitz's view of Integrity.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz refused on Wednesday to bow to heavy European pressure to resign as he sought to clear his name in negotiations with the bank's board over a possible exit strategy.

ADVERTISEMENT

"Mr. Wolfowitz will not resign under this cloud and he will rather put this matter to a full (board) vote than to capitulate on his integrity," his lawyer Robert Bennett (news, bio, voting record) told Reuters.

Several European countries have said Wolfowitz should step down to salvage the bank's credibility, which they say has been damaged by his handling of a high-paying promotion for his companion, bank Middle East expert Shaha Riza.

The controversial former deputy U.S. defense secretary and architect of the Iraq war has insisted he acted in good faith on the advice of a board ethics committee in overseeing the promotion of Riza and has said he wants it to acknowledge its own failures.

A board panel found his efforts on her behalf broke bank rules and represented a conflict of interest.

Board sources said talks were launched on Wednesday over how to push the dispute to a close. Some members have suggested a resolution that would recognize the panel's findings and Wolfowitz's efforts to resolve the conflict of interest issues over Riza, but also acknowledge mistakes by the board.

However, the board adjourned until Thursday without a decision.

Under a contract he signed in June 2005 when he became World Bank president, Wolfowitz would receive a year's salary, or around $375,000, if his service were terminated by the board or if he resigned.

PRESSURE TO RESIGN

Pressure to resign intensified on Wednesday as European countries signaled they would resist a bid by the United States to keep Wolfowitz in the job.

Wolfowitz had been scheduled to attend a meeting of the Group of Eight finance ministers in Germany this weekend.

But German Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul said Wolfowitz was not welcome to take part in a two-day World Bank forum on development aid for Africa that starts on Monday in Berlin.

"He would do the bank and himself a great service if he resigned," Wieczorek-Zeul, one of Wolfowitz's strongest critics, told reporters in Berlin.

"It would be the best thing for all concerned."

European countries have had misgivings about Wolfowitz since his nomination by President George W. Bush in 2005, at the height of bitter tensions between the White House and Europeans over the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The White House publicly maintained its support for Wolfowitz on Wednesday.

"We stand by our support of Paul as the World Bank president," White House spokesman Tony Snow said.

Tensions increased after the U.S. administration tried to a cut a deal that would have separated consideration of Wolfowitz's ethics violations from a decision over whether he had the credibility to continue, but only Japan out of the G7 countries sided with the United States.

G7 sources said most board members wanted a quick resolution to the protracted dispute, which has paralyzed the bank for more than a month.

[jeff hoffman]

So who's getting voted off next? The format of this administration: reality TV .

[Bupa]

More from the FT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7e72b456-0404-11dc-a931-000b5df10621.html

"Fellow travellers on path to crisis
By Eoin Callan in Washington

Published: May 17 2007 00:34 | Last updated: May 17 2007 00:34

At about noon on March 21 2003, the US launched the first full-scale bombing of Iraq, ordering about 1,700 sorties and firing more than 500 cruise missiles.

Sometime during that day, amid the frenzied activity at the Pentagon, an e-mail was sent with an order originating in the office of Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defence, to hire Shaha Riza, a World Bank employee...."

"Mr Wolfowitz acknowledges that by the start of the Iraq war he had a “close personal relationship” with Ms Riza, an outspoken advocate of women’s rights and democracy in the Middle East.

Officials said that departmental records confirm Mr Wolfowitz showed a “personal interest” in the contract to send Ms Riza and three other consultants to Iraq to advise on postwar state-building.

E-mails sent by Pentagon staff at the time state there was “interest from Wolfowitz on down” and that the “E-ring” – or outer ring of the Pentagon, where the leadership is located – was “screaming” for immediate action on the contract.

Bea Edwards, of the Government Accountability Project, said: “The e-mails regarding Riza reflect a dependence on a very small circle in shaping Iraq’s reconstruction that was characteristic of war ­planning....”

"The deputy defence secretary was the leading proponent of a doctrine of US power based on military might and radical democratic reforms. The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a first step in the vision shared by Mr Wolfowitz and Ms Riza.

The e-mails highlighting Ms Riza’s place in the reconstruction planning are contained in a copy of a Pentagon investigation launched after President George W. Bush announced the appointment of Mr Wolfowitz to head the World Bank in 2005...."

"The Pentagon probe was started when press reports about his relationship with Ms Riza “triggered recollection by auditors” from the department who sought to establish whether he “used his public office for the private gain” of his partner. The probe cleared him but the interest shown by the Pentagon auditors underlined the potential for others to see conflicts of interest."

[Bupa]

Perhas the Pentagon's investigation was not as thorough as the Bank's investigation. Perhaps the Pentagon should hire Wijffels to conduct their investigation.

[anne]

There is simply no other such newspaper:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/international/americas/09mexico.html?ex=1270699200&en=002dab476b252724&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

April 9, 2005

At 15, Dreaming Big Dreams: Oh, to Be a Scholar
By TIM WEINER

MEXICALI, Mexico

ALICIA ÁLVAREZ lives two miles from the American border and light-years from the American dream.

Growing up in Mexicali has made her a realist at 15. She has no taste for romances and soap operas. Harry Potter stories and a horror movie at the mall are as far away as fictions take her from her city's heat and dust.

Alicia has a fierce intelligence, and it fires her only soaring ambition: to get a decent education, schooling that could lift her up and out of her surroundings into a better life. It looks to her as likely as a trip to Mars.

"It seems impossible," Alicia said with a shy, distant gaze. She has started high school, having proved herself one of the brightest girls in her city, a straight-A student with an exceptional aptitude for math.

"My family has no money for college," she said. "I probably will never get to a university, though I would love to.

"My education has been hard. My teachers are trained in teaching, not in math and science. It's a struggle for them to teach me what I need to be taught. To learn what I want to know. And I want to know so much."

She finds herself, like her country, poised with one foot in the door of opportunity and one stuck in the poverty and powerlessness of the past. But with her fine mind, the idea of having a better life than one's parents, while distant, is still a shimmering possibility.

Her father, David Osuna, 46, works part time selling used cars. He has good weeks and bad weeks. Her mother, Alicia Álvarez, 48, keeps house. They have provided their children with the basics of life: food, clothes, shelter. Their slender, dutiful, deep-thinking daughter is a bit of a mystery to them.

Alicia's brothers, David, 21, and Luis, 16, are in awe of her intelligence, respectful, sometimes distant. David is the one in whom she sometimes confides her dreams.

ALICIA'S uncle and godfather, Abel Álvarez, 56, knows her aspirations. He grew up behind a plow, and then crossed over the border when he was her age to work the fields of the Imperial Valley in California. He now earns a good living in construction, a self-made man who builds malls in El Centro, Calif., 15 minutes north of Mexicali.

He has watched Alicia grow up with a mixture of pride and worry.

"It's not a lot easier growing up in Mexicali now than it was 40 years ago," he said. "The pie's a little bigger, but a lot more people want a slice. Growing up here, you go up against all that, and with the United States and all its riches just over the line."

Mexico's economy has been flat for almost five years. Poverty is ever-present. The middle class is small; it has been shrinking for a generation. Stealing into the United States is often the only way out.

Alicia has seen what is over the line, having traveled with her uncle and cousins on short trips to Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside, halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. "I love Riverside best of all, it's so pretty," she said. "So much greenery, so many trees. It's the cleanest, greenest place I've ever seen."

But Alicia says the idea of sneaking across the border to live and work holds no attraction for her. "I don't want to migrate," she said flatly. There is no legal path for her, and she does not want to be an outlaw.

She is a bit better off than many other young Mexicans, especially the millions living in the countryside whose families struggle for enough to eat, and she would not risk what little she has for a gamble in a strange land.

Still, Alicia sometimes feels the walls of her cinder-block house closing in on her. The heat rises above 100 degrees in Mexicali for almost half the year. The house is crowded, and the closeness sometimes chafes at family life and familial love.

"We quarrel sometimes," she says. "We don't always get along. My parents don't always think the way I do." When the little house gets too hot, too close, she finds refuge in books, or when there is a little money to spare, alone at the movies, at a mall a mile from home on the edge of the city, near where the desert begins.

She has become, of late, more of a loner, though she has a best friend, Karen Aguilar. "She is my one close friend, Karen, and no one else," Alicia said. "We grew up together. We shared secrets and all that. We used to spend all our free time together. But now she works, and I have to study, and time seems so short."

Karen, 16, used to visit Alicia almost every day. "We'd go hide in her room, play music, dance together, talk about boys and things," Karen said. "If we went out, it would be to walk to the mall, look at clothes. She is often a shy girl, but with me, she'll open up."

But things are changing. Karen's father forbade her to go to Alicia's 15th birthday celebration last year, a day that serves as the formal presentation of a girl as a woman in Mexican society. It traditionally is marked first with a formal Catholic Mass, then with the best party a girl's family can afford.

Karen's parents are Jehovah's Witnesses, and they objected to her going to a Catholic church. The schism almost broke Alicia's heart. While not a deeply devout Catholic, Alicia took the ritual seriously - the Mass is the last of its kind that a Mexican girl receives before her marriage.

Karen's absence was marked by an empty chair at the party afterward, held in an electricians' union hall. A D.J. played Eminem. Many of the girls danced with one another in a tight circle, dressed in tube tops, hot pants and tiny minidresses, making sexy hip-shaking moves stolen from music videos.

Alicia danced chastely, outside the edge of the circle, moving slowly in her creamy beige gown.

The priest and her elders had said this was to be the most beautiful day of her life. On the first night of summer, under a new moon, she was turning from a girl into a woman. The party made her parents happy, and that made Alicia happy.

But the ritual was a little empty, like her friend's place at the table, and the romance of it all felt rented, like the hall. She was dancing alone, a world apart....

[anne]

There is simply no other such newspaper:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9903EED9163EF930A15756C0A9629C8B63

The Hawks on Iraq, And My Lost Son

To the Editor:

In ''The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts,'' you note that the shapers of thoughts and architects of the war now have troubling doubts about their enthusiastic support of the invasion of Iraq. How sad for them.

I am the mother of Sgt. Sherwood Baker of the Pennsylvania National Guard, soldier 720. That number is seared on my soul now, along with the screams and despair of my family and the wind carrying the sound of taps above the weeping crowd at the grave site of my son.

To me and mine, the consequences of the failed judgment and outright lies of the Bush administration and its apologists and spokesmen are not just becoming ''depressed'' or ''angst-ridden.'' We have lost our brave and beloved son, who was ordered to the war these folks dreamed of and hoped for.

The explosion that killed my son in Baghdad will go on in our lives forever. Sherwood gave the full measure of his responsibility as an American citizen doing his duty for an administration that betrayed him.

CELESTE ZAPPALA
Philadelphia, May 17, 2004

[anne]

There is simply no other such newspaper:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/arts/07GAY.html?ex=1391490000&en=25655dedbc29ffd6&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

February 7, 2004

Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name
By DINITIA SMITH

Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan, are completely devoted to each other. For nearly six years now, they have been inseparable. They exhibit what in penguin parlance is called "ecstatic behavior": that is, they entwine their necks, they vocalize to each other, they have sex. Silo and Roy are, to anthropomorphize a bit, gay penguins. When offered female companionship, they have adamantly refused it. And the females aren't interested in them, either.

At one time, the two seemed so desperate to incubate an egg together that they put a rock in their nest and sat on it, keeping it warm in the folds of their abdomens, said their chief keeper, Rob Gramzay. Finally, he gave them a fertile egg that needed care to hatch. Things went perfectly. Roy and Silo sat on it for the typical 34 days until a chick, Tango, was born. For the next two and a half months they raised Tango, keeping her warm and feeding her food from their beaks until she could go out into the world on her own. Mr. Gramzay is full of praise for them.

"They did a great job," he said. He was standing inside the glassed-in penguin exhibit, where Roy and Silo had just finished lunch. Penguins usually like a swim after they eat, and Silo was in the water. Roy had finished his dip and was up on the beach.

Roy and Silo are hardly unusual. Milou and Squawk, two young males, are also beginning to exhibit courtship behavior, hanging out with each other, billing and bowing. Before them, the Central Park Zoo had Georgey and Mickey, two female Gentoo penguins who tried to incubate eggs together. And Wendell and Cass, a devoted male African penguin pair, live at the New York Aquarium in Coney Island. Indeed, scientists have found homosexual behavior throughout the animal world....

[Bupa]

More from the FT.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/06fe83c2-0414-11dc-a931-000b5df10621.html

Has the NYT written anything like this:

"The situation has been complicated by the fact that few people within the Bush administration understand what the World Bank does, says another official. This has meant that the administration's shifting calculations have been mostly guided by day-to-day political deliberations rather than by an assessment of what would be in the longer-term interest of the US.

"Not many people care about the multilateral institutions or have a view one way or another," said an official. "At no point has the administration sat down and said: "What do we think about the World Bank? How does it conflate with American interests?"

Some in the first camp fear that the US has now left it too late to retain the degree of goodwill it would need to ensure that Mr Wolfowitz's [American] successor could help frame a positive agenda. "The longer the White House has delayed the inevitable the weaker its hand has become," said one. "From a strategic point of view we could not have played this any worse."

[anne]

There is simply no other such newspaper:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Rafferty-t.html?ex=1336708800&en=ef5467487a9d2b2b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

May 13, 2007

Cops and Rabbis
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION
By Michael Chabon.

"Don't get wistful on me," says a sly old man in Michael Chabon's sly new novel, his first big serious one since the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," seven long years ago. "God knows I've had my fill of wistful Jews, starting with myself." Chabon, starting with himself as writers should, seems determined in "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" to stave off wistfulness by any means, even if it requires him to turn the story of the endless, endemic disappointment of the Jews — their millenniums-old-and-counting wait for the Messiah — into a screwball, alternative-reality, hard-boiled mystery, set, for maximum incongruity, in Alaska. The impressively wacky premise is that after the Holocaust, large numbers of Jews were relocated to Sitka, where by statute they were allowed to make their home for the next 60 years, at the end of which the town would revert to the control of Alaska. Israel, it appears, didn't work out: the Jewish settlers there were ejected "with savage finality" in 1948. "The Holy Land," the novel tells us, "has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew of Sitka." The godforsakenness of the place is something more than a figure of speech.

Stuck in just another temporary, cruelly provisional homeland, farther than ever from the one originally promised — yes, you could get a little wistful in a situation like that. But it soon becomes clear that Sitka's very remoteness, its impossible distance from the dreamed-of site of redemption and fulfillment, suits both Chabon and Meyer Landsman, his alcoholic homicide-cop hero, right down to the frozen ground. This bustling Yiddish-speaking enclave in the far north is so improbable, so irredeemably absurd, that it functions as a kind of comfort zone for an irreligious Jew like Landsman, a daily confirmation of his unbelief: the chances of the Messiah turning up in Sitka look gratifyingly slim....

[anne]

There is simply no other such newspaper:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/30/international/africa/30africa.html?ex=1272513600&en=5c1a0fc83c0b49f0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

April 30, 2005

A Would-Be Pilot, Hitting Turbulence on the Ground
By MICHAEL WINES

MASJAING, South Africa

IN a part of the world where so many young people never get off the ground, 17-year-old James Mokoena wants to be a pilot.

He will fly a fighter jet, but not just to wage aerial battles. Africa is full of hungry people and people sick with malaria, he said. Many of them need a James Mokoena to bring them food and medicine.

"I haven't been in a plane," he said, but dismissively. "I want to be in a plane for four, five years, and to know that I am in that plane - me. That I, James, am driving it."

He is standing outside his cement-stuccoed house, a four-room box on a dirt road in this township of about 30,000 on the Lesotho border. Inside is a single bed for him, three brothers and a sister. His mother is ill. His father never got past the sixth grade. Everything here fairly shouts that James's dream is folly.

Except James himself. Two years ago, having completed his elementary years at the township primary school, he walked the mile from Masjaing to Fouriesburg, the far wealthier town on the other side of the highway. There, he announced that he wanted a better education than he could get at Masjaing's uninspiring local high school, from which few students ever graduate, and that he wished to enroll in the eighth grade.

"I asked him whether he realized there were school fees to be paid, and he said his father would pay them," said Irina Grice, the principal at Fouriesburg Intermediate School. "His father came, but oh, his clothes were torn, and he was very, very poor.

"But the father said, 'The child chose, and he wants to be in this school.' "

One in three of South Africa's 37 million blacks live in townships like Masjaing, slums built to keep them away from white people when they were not mining whites' coal or cleaning whites' houses. Of those township dwellers over age 15, well over half are jobless. Of those with jobs, about 6 in 10 earn less than $250 a month. The townships are economic and social sinkholes, poverty traps in a nation where the rich-poor gap is among the widest on earth.

JEREMANE MOKOENA - he calls himself James, he said, because he dislikes his first name - wants out of Masjaing. He wants out of the underclass that apartheid created and into the world of opportunity that apartheid's demise has opened up for other, luckier youths.

Few of his friends here - boys idling on the dusty soccer pitch and clustered on gravel street corners, clueless about how impending manhood will shut off their escape route - have the pluck for the journey James so clearly craves. For those who do try, success is rare. Failure, and consignment to a life in society's cellar, is crushing.

Slim, with a shy, if broad smile and a tendency to look away when talking, James resembles anything but a pioneer. But nobody should underestimate his grit.

"My father, he works," James said. "He keeps on telling me that life is very strong, like a rock. You have to push it forward. You have to stand for yourself, not just wait to have somebody come and say, 'James, go forward.' "

His father, 44-year-old Petrus Mokoena, is James's unlikely inspiration. A gaunt man in threadbare blue coveralls and a fluorescent red jacket, he works a split shift for the Masjaing (pronounced mush-a-ENG) sanitation department, collecting trash in the predawn hours, catching some sleep, then collecting more trash in the afternoon.

For this, Mr. Mokoena earns under $300 a month. Fouriesburg Intermediate wanted $40 for tuition. Mr. Mokoena paid it. Apartheid, he said, kept him an indentured and ignorant laborer on a white-owned farm his entire youth.

"I want James to see that not to go to school is a bad thing," said Mr. Mokoena, speaking in Sotho, his only language. "I want him to speak English and to write English."

Forty dollars is no small sacrifice. Ms. Grice said she once asked James why he was doing poorly in one subject. "He said, 'I can't finish off the work before it's dark, and we don't have electricity,' " she said.

"So I said to him, 'It's possible to study by candlelight.' And he said, 'We don't have any candles.' "

It is James, the one with a shot at a future, who has become the family's center of gravity....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/18/opinion/l18iraq.html

The Relentless Tragedy Called Iraq

To the Editor:

"Insurgent Bombs Directed at G.I.'s Increase in Iraq":

I can't help but compare your headline with President Bush's bizarre remarks on Wednesday: "There's some good people in our country who believe we should cut and run. They're not bad people when they say that, they're decent people":

"President Joins in G.O.P. Attacks on Democrats About Terrorism."

You better believe I'm a decent person — and a decent mother whose 19-year-old United States Marine son is being deployed to Iraq next month to face a deadly, targeted anti-American insurgency that has nothing to do with the "war on terror."

Why should my son, or any other mother's son, be sacrificed in a mounting civil war because it's not politically advantageous for the Bush administration to admit that its Iraq policy has failed?

My decency is suffused with bitterness.

Donna J. Anton
Hayle, England, Aug. 17, 2006

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/opinion/l12herbert.html

Is This 'Supporting the Troops'?

To the Editor:

My 20-year-old son is nearing the end of his first deployment to Iraq with the United States Marines. Only a few days ago, we learned that he received a commendation for initiative and bravery for pulling wounded and dead Iraqi soldiers out of a bus hit by a roadside bomb during a recent midnight convoy.

Specifically, he was recognized for "tirelessly moving multiple wounded Iraqis to the casualty collection point and loading them on the medivac helicopters ... and also volunteering to help collect the dead and ensuring that they were evaluated."

It's bad enough that my son is risking his life fighting a war that was waged on lies and deception. How infinitely more galling it is to realize that his value to the Bush administration wouldn't even merit decent care at Walter Reed if he were wounded or disabled.

Bob Herbert is right about the troops being shortchanged: it's something I never thought that America would do either.

My son has been commended for extending a degree of professionalism, respect and devotion to duty in aiding wounded Iraqi soldiers that the United States government doesn't extend to its own troops.

The horror, the horror.

Donna J. Anton
Hayle, England, March 8, 2007

[Bupa]

Anne, as I said, this comes from the Sunday Book Review section. The FT doesn't have a Sunday paper and the book reviews it does have do not compare to the breadth and talent of the NYT.

That said, the NYT book review is not alone at the top of this part of the trade. I prefer the New York Review of Books. Granted NYRB is a bi-weekly focused only on essays and book reviews so it is not in the same category.

Still, while the FT does not cover the breadth of material the NYT covers, the quality of the journalism in the FT has been consistently superior to the NYT in areas that the FT focuses on, including American and European politics, world events, international finance and business.

[Bupa]

Wow, glad we're not in the Wild West. I'd be full of holes. Anne is 4 times as fast as me in posting.

[andres]

Hey Lockhorns, don't you think that we can try to come to a more nuanced position rather than simple-minded NYT vs. FT partisanship? I fully agree that there are parts of the NYT that must be resolutely avoided (eg I've yet to learn anything of value from David Brooks), and their coverage of political decisionmaking in DC, such as the Wolfowitz case does leave much to be desired (I agree with Brad here. hurrah).

I am much less familiar with the FT, but have usually found its op-ed page to be too overbearing, though it is free of the mendacity of the WSJ op-ed page, of course. Quite a few FT columns gave the wrong position on Argentina before and after the 2001 collapse, for example. In general, I tend to be distrustful of any publication that tends to be heavily influenced by economists. That's just my dissent from the profession speaking, but I think there's something to it. So while I would read the FT, I would also be skeptical of much that it advocates. And anne has a point that it's non-economic coverage tends to be too narrow.

Read both the NYT and the FT--neither of them has yet made the NR/WSJ op-ed garbage heap. But stay skeptical, and don't forget that newspapers of the material kind are good to wrap flowers with.

[anne]

Andres is perfect; and, in just this sense, I certainly have no disagreement with Bupa or our Brad DeLong.

Latin America reporting, as mentioned, is tricky in both the Financial and New York Times, and needs to be read understanding the respective slants. I always try to understand the slants in coverage, and there is where the criticism helps me while not discouraging the reading.

[Bupa]

andres no complaints from me on keeping a healthy dose of skeptism.

interesting bias you have against things produced by economists. I assume it applies to Brad DeLong though with the FT you choose to abstain and with Brad you are regular reader and contributor.

Brad has fought a legimate battle for years against the poor journalism in America's elite newspapers. The battle he has waged is well placed. We lost a free and inquisitive press, an opposition party, and the checks and balances of a 3 branch government in the years following 9/11. Perhaps if the press had done its job the opposition party and the checks and balances would not have remained comatose for so long. Perhaps if the press had done its job a majority of Americans would not have re-elected the worst president in american history. Not that I always agree with Brad's nitpicking. But his cause has been a good one. And the FT is an excellent (though narrowly focused) newspaper.

[andres]

Bupa: it's true that Brad has conducted a necessary campaign to improve the quality of journalism with regards to economics. However, while an economist-dominated newspaper will produce good news and analysis on purely economic issues, such purely economic issues are few and far between--one can too often count on economists to get the politics and the political economy wrong, as they did in Yeltsin's Russia and 21st century Argentina.

I still have echoing in my head the call of respectable economists such as Mussa at the IIE saying that Argentina collapsed because of excessively loose fiscal policy, without mentioning at all the political difficulties of fiscal contraction in a country suffering from 13% open unemployment in 1998 and more thereafter (without even mentioning underemployment and other hidden forms of labor underutilization).

So yes, I think economists can get things wrong, which is why a good newspaper needs a balanced staff of economists, finance specialists, political scientists, and just good social scientists in general in order to be a good journalistic operation.

[anne]

The lack of understanding or perverse unwillingness to understand what was happening to Argentina which in keeping the peso pegged to a strengthening dollar was pricing exports out of critical trade partners as Spain and Brazil was astonishing to me. To maintain the dollar peg, Argentina further limited growth and slow growth became a recession which became a depression.

Austerity was the cry of economic analysts, for after all speculators had a free speculative ride in and out of Argentina with a pegged currency. Wall Street Week of public television was broadcast from Buenos Aires, with economists crowing about Argentina's currency and wishing Brazil would peg as well.

[anne]

Simply looking beyond the absurd economic model, to actual middle class life in Argentina would have given an immediate answer, drop the darn peg. The New York Times is slanted in Latin American coverage, especially so South American, but comprehensive enough to allow for finding what a more narrowly focused approach may and here did miss.

I like the Financial Times, but like Andres or Robert Waldmann know there is reason to question what I know of economics all the time.

[Bupa]

anne, andres,

the topic was Wolfowitz. Brad has spent more energy fighting inadequate political coverage than economic coverage.

anyway, another Bush crony has gone down in disgrace....poor coverage notwithstanding. Wolfowitz has announced his resignation.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/023bffd4-03cb-11dc-a931-000b5df10621.html

Let's hope Gonzales is next....then Cheney, then Bush.

[Bupa]

Ah yes, now that the Wolfowitz distraction is over, I can fix a error I made earlier today in my exchange with anne.

I said the NYT has a better coverage of science than the FT. I retract that statement. The NYT has more coverage of science that the FT; and that is good. But, on the most important issue humanity (and other species) face today, global warming, the NYT has been wishy-washy (i.e. given the stakes, abysmal) while the FT has been exemplary.