AFTER a bleak six months, prospects for a rapid revival of the World

Trade Organisation’s stalled Doha round of negotiations are starting to look up. Vows to get the talks back on track following their suspension in July 2006 because of fierce transatlantic discord over farm trade liberalisation have been made in recent weeks by an array of top officials, including US Trade Representative Susan Schwab, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and Japan’s Trade Minister Akira Amari.

Equally significantly, key Asian and Latin American states appear ready to resume discussions, prompting WTO director general Pascal Lamy to enthuse in a recent interview that current signals from major players were “qualitatively different from what we heard last year.”

The test of governments’ political determination to restart the talks will come on January 30 when ministers from leading rich and developing countries meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Lamy insists that “the political chemistry is beginning to work,” with key nations finally recognising the costs of failure and showing a new willingness to revisit their positions. “The consequences of failure and the risk of a surge of protectionism have become more evident to governments,” said Lamy.

Caution is advisable, however. While Schwab, Mandelson and Amari have gone out of their way in recent weeks to spotlight their readiness to inject new life into the crippled Doha round, all three have been reluctant to be drawn on any new concessions they may be ready to make to ensure success in the WTO.

Trade negotiators also face three major challenges: upcoming May presidential elections in France -- traditionally the staunchest defender of farming interests in the EU -- lack of enthusiasm for the Doha round among Democrats who now control Congress and the expiry on June 30 of US President George W Bush’s “fast-track authority” to sign trade deals, which the Congress cannot unravel by demanding amendments. The news from France is not encouraging. In talks with Mandelson early

January, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin insisted the EU must not be the first to make concessions to revive the WTO talks. “No new elements” justify changing the European position, said Villepin, reaffirming opposition in Paris to any further EU tariff dismantling in the farm sector.

France is being challenged on the issue by Germany, a major exporting country with strong pro-free trade instincts, which has vowed to seek success in the Doha talks during its six-month EU presidency which began from Jan 1. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has said he believes there is still a chance of a WTO breakthrough.

“We need to take advantage of the window of opportunity in the weeks ahead in order to make concrete progress that could lead to a breakthrough,” Steinmeier said in Berlin after talks with Lamy.

However, given the electoral clout of French farmers, neither Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative presidential candidate nor Segolene Royal, the socialist contender, are likely to publicly support a revival of the Doha talks.

Getting US Democrats to renew President Bush’s fast track authority is likely to prove equally difficult unless a resurrected Doha round looks like a deal worth saving and, possibly, Washington gives in to demands for tougher labour standards in bilateral trade deals.

US Trade Representative Schwab, who has held talks with Lamy as well as senior trade officials from the EU, Japan, Brazil, India, Australia and

Indonesia in recent days has compared the Doha negotiations to a “three-dimensional chess game” that will require compromises from most WTO states. The US trade chief said in Geneva recently that she was “more optimistic” the moribund talks could be given a new lease of life but warned: “We have a long way to go for a breakthrough”.

Most importantly, Bush has weighed into the debate by declaring after talks with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in Washington earlier this month that a new trade liberalisation deal was needed to boost development in poor countries.

“We both recognise that the best way to help impoverished nations is to complete this Doha round and to encourage the spread of wealth and opportunity through open and reasonable and fair trade,” said Bush while Barroso insisted: “We are really at a defining moment.”

While few doubt that the Doha talks are a crossroads, a successful conclusion of negotiations requires the US to move beyond words to real action on slashing trade-distorting farm subsidies, currently worth about 22 billion euros a year and for EU governments to agree to a further reduction in tariffs beyond the 39 per cent decrease promised so far, with reduced protection for sensitive products such as beef and poultry. Developing nations including Brazil and India, meanwhile, will have to be persuaded to reduce their tariffs on industrial products.

The stakes are certainly high. The suspension of the talks last July has already prompted both the US and the EU to step up efforts to strike bilateral deals with key trading nations, a move that WTO chief Lamy has denounced as potentially risky for the Doha talks. Failure to conclude the negotiations, which opened in the Qatari capital in November 2001, will also undermine confidence in the global trading system and trigger a surge of commercial disputes, particularly over agriculture which has long proved the most difficult issue in the WTO talks.

IF there was any doubt at all about the power of television over young minds, that must certainly have been erased with the deaths by hanging of at least eight children around the world, including one in Pakistan, following the repeated airing on global television of the viral video clip of Saddam Hussein’s execution. (Note: viral video refers to video clip content, usually shot by amateurs with camera phones, which gains widespread popularity through the internet).

It may be difficult to believe but it has happened: a bizarre combination of western foreign policies and modern technology — in the form of camera mobile phones, internet and satellite channels — can be so lethal that it caused the death of eight innocent children in different countries within days of Saddam’s execution, even though international and local news channels were careful not to show the actual moment when the trapdoor dropped and Saddam was hanged.

These children, including one in Rahim Yar Khan, were reported to have died when they tried to imitate Saddam’s hanging, the latest incident of which was reported last week in Turkey. The nine-year-old boy from Rahim Yar Khan died while trying to copy Saddam’s execution — with the help of his ten year old sister — by tying one end of a rope to a ceiling fan and putting the noose on the other end round his neck.

The other six children who also died acting out what they had seen on television were from the US, India, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and two from Yemen. In Algeria, the boy, a 12 year old, was hanged by a group of school children in a game simulating Saddam’s execution.

The idea that children tend to imitate what they watch on television is not new. Back in the 1970s before satellite television and 24-hour news channels came into the picture, at least one child in Pakistan was known to have been involved in a nasty accident while trying to mimic the miraculous feats of the then popular character, the ‘bionic man’, in the television series The Six Million Dollar Man.

In the case of Saddam’s execution, even though most television channels did not show the actual moment of hanging, the stimulant to copy must have been quite effective given the fact that Saddam was shown globally on television standing there with a noose around his neck probably a dozen times in an hour. A relative of the boy in Texas in the US who died while imitating Saddam’s execution has questioned the wisdom of showing over and over again on television such graphic details of the last two minutes of Saddam’s life.

In reaction to the hanging to death of the latter 10-year-old boy in Texas, who had seen the noose being put around Saddam’s neck on television the day before and had asked his uncle why he was being killed, one American psychologist is reported to have said that the kid was just trying something that he thought fun to act out without having the emotional and psychological maturity to think the thing through before he acted on it.

The deaths of these children has naturally raised questions about whether the media is exercising enough social and ethic responsibility when deciding on what it should or should not air. For all we know, the visuals of Saddam’s hanging may even encourage more people to commit suicide, or at least encourage people who already have suicidal tendencies to choose hanging as the method of suicide rather than any other means.

According to a 2003 report by NewScientist.com, a study in Hong Kong showed that there was an “alarming escalation” in people using the burning of charcoal to commit suicide following media accounts of a woman who took her own life by starting a charcoal fire in her cramped apartment and suffocating in the carbon monoxide gas produced.

Suicide by charcoal burning, previously an uncommon suicide method in Hong Kong, became the third most common method within two months of the death of the woman in 1998. By 2001 it had replaced hanging as the second most common method of suicide in Hong Kong (the most common method being jumping from a high-rise building).

Apart from the above immediate and possible medium term impact of the visuals of Saddam’s execution (viz., deaths of children trying to play-act the execution and greater number of adult suicides by hanging), there is another more damaging and long lasting impact, i.e., greater hostility and distrust among Muslims between the Shiite and Sunni communities wherever they are living side by side.

At a time when sectarian relations are already being strained by western policies in the Middle East and West Asia, the taunting of Saddam just before he was hanged (as was heard in the viral video clip of his execution), and the reported gloating over his death by some communities in some places after the hanging, cannot but have a further negative impact on sectarian relations.

One indication of this is the report of Shiite-Sunni sectarian clashes in a predominantly Muslim locality in Detroit in the US, where previously such clashes were unheard of. After Saddam’s execution, two Shiite mosques and five Shiite-owned businesses in this locality were reportedly vandalised, and the finger has obviously been pointed at the Sunnis.

It is perhaps no coincidence that our president last week warned of a sectarian crisis brewing in the Muslim world.

Notwithstanding the apparent negative impact of the visuals of Saddam’s execution, it is nevertheless the duty of the media to report or air images of events or acts which tell the true story, particularly when governments are involved in the process. And Saddam’s execution, as seen and heard on the viral video clip, is apparently the true story.

At the same time though we must not forget that in today’s media-savvy world, many policies are being formulated with a media strategy built in them. So much so that very often we do not know exactly whether and what the media is reporting or airing would have happened the same way — if at all — if no media was present.

In this information age, the media is often willy-nilly no longer a disconnected observer of events but an actual participant in the way communities and societies understand each other and the way parties wage conflict.

Therefore, the media is likely to find that it has increasingly to juggle around three important roles, viz., airing what people want to see; exposing injustices and thus bringing about greater transparency in governments’ policies; and at the same time helping to ease the underlying structural and cultural violence that makes our interdependent yet bitterly divided world a dangerous place.

PARIS: France loves its dramas, no more so than at the ballot box where voters regularly stun politicians and pollsters alike with unexpected results.

In 2005, France defied its ruling class by voting down the European Union constitution in a referendum. In 2002, far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen pulled off a major upset by making it through to the second round of a presidential election.

But with less than 100 days to go before the first round of the 2007 election, a fresh shock looks highly unlikely, such is the dominance of the two main candidates.

Socialist hopeful Segolene Royal towers over competitors on the left, while Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy looks equally in control of the right after easily securing the nomination of the ruling UMP party.

“As things stand I do not think we will have a repeat of 2002,” said Dominique Reynie, a professor at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris.

“At the moment I think we will have a normal election between two party candidates who will do well in the first round and will meet each other in the second round,” he said.

Such a scenario obviously appals the other candidates, who are trying to draw comfort from past elections that showed early leaders often falling by the wayside.

“There will be another surprise this time around,” Le Pen told a small group of foreign reporters last week.

“I feel a tsunami coming. The children are still playing on the beach and don’t realise what is happening, but the wave is heading towards France and will turn politics upside down.”

But Le Pen is unable to provide evidence of such a tsunami and is struggling to obtain the necessary 500 signatures from France’s 40,000 mayors to secure his own candidacy.

MUONG LAY: Over the past 15 years, this remote town has lost its original name and half its people.

Those left behind know what awaits their homes: submersion beneath Vietnam’s largest dam.

By 2010, Muong Lay will be at the bottom of the giant reservoir of a hydropower project to fuel economic growth in cities and industrial parks far away from this north-western region, one of the country’s poorest.

Vietnam’s communist leaders have promised to compensate and resettle the 10,000 residents of this bleak town, but for many here, hopes have dimmed like the street lamps that no longer light the main street at night.

For centuries, the waters and alluvial soils of the Da River, also named the Black River, have brought life to this region near the borders of China and Laos, a bumpy 500-kilometre drive from Hanoi.

Now the economic potential of the waterway has spelled its death sentence.

In Vietnam, a poor but fast-growing economy still hobbled by electricity shortages in homes and factories, the $2.6 billion project promises to help meet national power demand that is now growing by 15 per cent a year.

The 215-metre dam wall will create a lake that will swallow 18,000 hectares of mountain land and forest, driving turbines that are projected to generate 2,400 megawatts of power by 2015.

The dam will displace 94,741 people, by official count, many from the Hmong, Thai and other ethnic minorities, in the largest resettlement scheme in Vietnam’s history.—AFP

WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush once said he was determined to stick with the Iraq war even if his wife and his dog were the only ones left at his side.

It is moving in that direction.

People in the United States already were angry about the war before Bush said he would try to bring unrelentingly violent Iraq back from the brink by adding 21,500 more US troops to the 132,000 there now.

Polls show the US public overwhelmingly does not like the idea. Democrats always in opposition were joined very publicly by some Republicans in dissent. Even Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had to be persuaded to go along with a larger US presence in Baghdad.

“He is as isolated as a president can be,” said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University.

Lawmakers did authorise the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today, however, the Democratic-controlled Congress is poised to produce votes against a policy that, although nonbinding, will reverberate into the 2008 elections.

And Bush’s problem with Washington’s politicians is not only the product of the new partisan divide.

Moderate Democrats who had the president’s back on the war are jumping ship. The din of disapproval is heard even among some conservative Republicans. The time when only a few Republican lawmakers gingerly would criticise the president’s leadership on the war has given way to the kind of no-holds-barred rhetoric heard the day after Bush’s Wednesday night speech.

War commanders feared a troop increase would strain the armed forces while reducing incentives for Iraqis to take over for themselves. So they had to be brought around.

They received assurances Bush would couple the build-up with significant economic aid and demands that the Iraqis make difficult political and tactical changes. But the president attached no consequences if al-Maliki fails — as he has in the past — to deliver.

Bush has always said he sleeps soundly, admitting to no fretting about his decisions and no concern about polls. Johnson, by contrast, famously obsessed over the war night and day, asking to be awakened every time someone died.—AP

PORTLAND: Matt Halfhill is crazy about sneakers. He worked in a shoe store as a teenager, buying shoes on clearance. He has charmed his wife with kicks, buying limited edition pink and red Nikes for her on Valentine’s Day. He collects them obsessively, lining the walls of his home with about 500 pairs of shoes.

Welcome to the world of the sneakerhead, where shoes reign supreme.

Collectors range from casual fans of sneaker fashion to those who buy and sell shoes like a cardboard-encased commodity. True fanatics will camp out overnight for the latest pair, buy multiple pairs (in case one gets scuffed) and sometimes even wear them. It is an obsession that has been gaining traction in recent years, even as sneaker sales have grown only slowly.

There are websites, magazines, books, movies and radio shows dedicated to sneaker culture. There have even been television shows, like ESPN2’s “It’s About the Shoes” that included tours of collectors’ enormous closets.

“I think people are more aware (of sneaker culture), the general public, because of the media and Internet,” said Alex Wang, creative director for Sole Collector magazine and admitted shoe aficionado.

Sneakers have been a part of urban culture for decades. Run DMC rapped about “My Adidas” in the 1980s, and it remains a part of hip-hop culture with famous sneakerhead artists like Missy Elliot and Fat Joe.

But sneaker love has spread. British teen pop star Lilly Allen sings about her “trainers” and rocks them onstage while wearing a posh dress.

“You can tell so much about a person by what they have on their feet,” said Andre Speed, 36, at a Portland specialty sneaker store called Lifted.

Shoe makers are feeding off the energy. They work with artists to develop specialised pairs, such as Puma’s electric blue and red trainers designed by Brazilian artist Frederico Uribe. There are stores where people can order styles of their own—AP

MOUNT WASHINGTON: The weather station on top of Mount Washington, New Hampshire, is built for severe conditions, and with good reason.

The top of the 6,288-foot mountain gets about 42 feet of snow per year and in January -- the coldest month on the mountain -- the temperature averages 3.9 degrees Fahrenheit.

But this winter, which has been unusually warm on top of the mountain and across the US Northeast, the Mount Washington Observatory is having some trouble with some of its systems, which just aren’t designed for mild weather.

It turns out that the 20-foot pole the staff uses to clear ice from the observatory’s windows is not quite long enough when there are no snow drifts at the base of the tower to climb on.

The unusual warmth has also made forecasting trickier, the meteorologists said. They noted that a local ski area recently called to complain after temperatures unexpectedly rose above freezing overnight, so that the resort’s snow making equipment wound up spraying water onto the slopes, instead of snow.

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” said Ken Rancourt, who has worked at the observatory since 1979 and serves as director of summit operations.

Across New England, skiers, ice fisherman and others are adjusting to the warmer conditions. They are not alone.

Last year went down as the warmest on record in the United States, according to data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday. Five states -- New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, New York and Minnesota -- recorded their warmest Decembers on record, while the country as a whole was 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average in 2006 than over the last century.

Winter this year has been mild across much of the United States, with the notable exception of Colorado, which has seen several heavy snowfalls and at least one major avalanche that buried three lanes of a major highway.

Scientists say this year’s unusual weather cannot necessarily be blamed on global warming. An El Nino warming pattern in the Pacific Ocean and little cold air coming down from Canada are the main culprits.

“We’re seeing real changes in our climate,” said Cameron Wake, a climatologist at the University of New Hampshire. “The climate in this region, in New England, that our children and grandchildren will experience will depend fundamentally on the decisions that we make today.”—Reuters