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Attack terrorism
Share shock |
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Make it shorter
China and balance of power
Palm-patting
Community radio can boost rural employment scheme Kandahar: reliving the nightmare The world’s rising middle class
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Attack terrorism
THE recrimination between the ruling Congress and the opposition BJP over the issue of terrorism is unfortunate, to say the least. It is the BJP which first attacked the Congress for being soft towards terrorists. Party president L.K. Advani even went to the extent of saying that the terrorists could consider the UPA government as their own. It is common for partymen from Mr Narendra Modi to Ms Sushma Swaraj to single out the non-hanging of Afzal Guru, convicted for the terrorist attack on Parliament, as a vindication of their claim that the Congress is not serious about fighting terrorism The revocation of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) is also cited as yet another indicator of its lukewarm attitude towards the cause of fighting terrorism. They claim that the terrorist attacks at several places are all because of the Centre’s lack of will to fight terrorism. Far from taking the accusations lying down, Congress leaders have been busy picking holes in the BJP’s claim about fighting terrorism. They point out that some of the worst incidents of terrorism like the attack on Parliament, the Akshardham temple in Gujarat and the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly happened when the BJP was in power. The sensational jailbreak by Hawara and company in Chandigarh also occurred when Mr Advani was the Union Home Minister. The presence of TADA on the statute book did not make any difference to the situation. There is evidence that TADA was used more against ordinary people than terrorists. What’s noteworthy is that the holier-than-thou attitude of the two parties is unjustified and is not based on facts. Such verbal attacks serve no purpose other than spoiling their relations. However, there can be no denying that the nation faces a grave threat from terrorists, not just in Jammu and Kashmir. It is difficult to say whether any state is free from the scourge of terrorism. The very fact that the Central government had to advise Mr Advani to change his travel plans recently in view of the threats he faced shows how serious the situation is. Instead of wasting their energy on sparring, the Congress and the BJP should join hands to fight the common enemy. In doing so, they will be doing a yeoman’s service to the nation. |
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Share shock IT was a fall few had anticipated. A month ago as the BSE Sensex touched 21,000, Anil Ambani’s Reliance Power collected Rs 11,560 crore. Driven by greed and the Ambani tag, investors lapped up India’s biggest, even if steeply priced, initial public offer. On Monday, Reliance Power fell to Rs 355 during intra-day trade against its issue price of Rs 450 a share. The Reliance Power investors alone lost Rs 1,600 crore on the first day of its trade. To add to the agony, the Sensex also collapsed 843 points -- as part of the global meltdown - and closed at 16,630. So sharp has been the swing in investor sentiment within just a month that the IPOs of two companies - Emaar MGF and Wockhardt Hospitals- had to be cancelled. The Reliance Power issue was particularly sold to small investors with an incentive. A publicity blitzkrieg was launched. Reliance mobiles bleated “Power on. India on”. Many first-timers filled the application forms. Banks worked over time to open demat accounts. Risk-takers even took loans, hoping to make good money in a short time. The media, too, contributed to the hype. Experts recommended “a strong buy” as an Ambani company was entering the much-touted infrastructure sector. Anil Ambani was tipped to be the world’s richest Indian. The blockbuster listing, however, came as a nasty surprise. Experts and investors now question the regulator’s role in allowing the issue and blame the bankers for over-pricing it. There is a lesson in every setback. Small investors must guard against being carried away by greed or publicity. For the time being, it seems India’s four-year-long bull run has come to a rather swift end. Foreign funds have been on a selling spree in the emerging economies for the past few weeks, reacting viciously to the bad news from the US. Although India’s long-term growth story is intact, a slowdown seems inevitable. Despite the RBI’s emphasis on controlling inflation, instead of giving a push to growth, banks have started tinkering with the interest rates. After the shock delivered by Reliance Power, close on the heels of two IPOs being scrapped, it will take quite some time before India Inc ventures out for cheap public money. |
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Make it shorter THE Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel and Public Grievances wants the entire process of conducting the civil services examination completed in six months. The Union Public Service Commission should follow the pattern of General Management Aptitude Test for the civil services. This will reduce the long period the examination takes at present. The civil services exam has three layers: preliminary (objective type questions), main (descriptive) and interview. Of over 1.5 lakh candidates trying their luck every year to qualify for the main examination, followed by the interview, about 500 are finally selected. Based on their ranks, candidates join various services like the IAS, IFS and IPS. As the civil services are the most sought after career option for thousands of college and university students, the UPSC should evolve measures to make it more focused, open and transparent. No doubt, it enjoys a high degree of credibility for conducting the examination in a free and fair manner, year after year. However, its image and stature will go up further if the whole process of examination is demystified and made transparent. As a first step, it should disclose the marks obtained by the candidates in the preliminary examination. A contrary stand would be out of sync in the present-day context. Secondly, there is merit in the recommendation of the parliamentary committee that the details of all candidates should be displayed on the UPSC website. In fact, the UPSC would be rendering a great service if it helps all candidates to know how they performed. It cannot deprive them of this privilege in the name of “crucial secrets and intellectual property”. Under the Right to Information Act, every candidate has the legitimate right to know about his performance. It has also suggested that the practice of having separate interviews for the candidates of general and reserved categories should be dispensed with. Such segregation does not make any sense at all. |
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I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... But I am too busy thinking about myself.
— Edith Sitwell |
China and balance of power THE Chinese protest against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh as well as his speech there hailing Arunachal as the land of the rising sun for India has received very widespread attention in the country. So also the response of the Indian Minister of External Affairs, Mr Pranab Mukherji, that the Prime Minister’s right to visit any part of the country could not be questioned. It is reported that the Chinese protest was not to the Indian Ambassador nor an official one. There has been no protest by the Chinese mission in Delhi though the Chinese Ambassador asserted China’s claim over Arunachal Pradesh in the past. The Chinese are noted for doing things in nuanced ways. It is obvious that they were sending a message. That message is not a simple and straight forward one and is deliberately meant to be interpreted in different ways. Such ambiguity in communication can always be made use of at a later date by the Chinese according to their calculations. One should recall China putting off India about the border issue in the initial years till their road construction in Aksai Chin got well advanced. Till then they explained away the Chinese maps as a legacy of the past. Dr Manmohan Singh’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh is the first by him and is a visit by the Prime Minister of the country after a long time. Therefore, the Chinese decide they should register a protest. But they do not want to make that protest too formal to make it interfere with the improving relations between their country and India. So, no written protest, nor is it made to our Ambassador nor by the Chinese Ambassador in India. Yet they ensured that it would become public and create a certain hullaballo and then die down. It will be on record and yet not be one that would create trouble if they want India to forget it at a later date. We must give them credit for their diplomacy. It is tended to be forgotten that in 1962 the Chinese forces came down to the foothills and withdrew back to the Mcmahon Line after the declaration of the ceasefire. But in Ladakh the Chinese forces did not withdraw from the territory they occupied when they proclaimed the ceasefire. One explanation was that the Chinese knew that militarily it would be difficult to maintain their forces south of the Himalayan watershed, especially if India were to decide to use its air force and when heavy snow would interrupt supply lines and, therefore, they made a virtue of their withdrawal. Another explanation was that China was vitally interested in the Aksai Chin territory as its strategic road communications traversed it and their interest in Arunachal was not that vital strategically. In this connection it may be recalled that Premier Zhou En Lai during his last visit to Delhi had suggested that a border agreement was possible if India ceded the Aksai Chin to China because of its vital strategic interest to that country and in exchange China could consider giving up its claims to Arunachal. In the eighties Chinese leader Deng Xiao Peng reiterated roughly the same offer. China withdrawing from Arunachal Pradesh after parts of it came under its occupation in 1962 is perhaps the most meaningful signal it had given on how flexible it could be on this territory, including Tawang. It is possible to interpret the present Chinese behaviour as signalling that while they will continue to dispute our sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh, they are not prepared to take it beyond a particular point in the present circumstances. At the same time, they keep their option open to escalate it into a serious dispute if their future strategy should necessitate it. At this stage it does not appear to be in China’s interest to raise the temperature on the territorial issue. They should be deriving a lot of satisfaction how the Indian domestic politics is creating problems for India from liberating itself from the international technology apartheid and integrating itself with the rest of the world,economically as they have done. At this stage any undue pressure on India from China on the territorial issue may lead to India getting closer to the US and the West. China does not want that. The Chinese do not take a black and white attitude towards India. They are not against India growing fast so that a fast-growing India along with a fast-growing China will increase the global product, reduce the US share of the world economic pie and thereby make the US more vulnerable to countervailing by other five major balancers of power comprising of China, Japan, the European Union, Russia and India. Their aim is to prevent India from growing too fast and becoming a challenge to themselves through its partnerships with the US, the European Union and Japan. They would prefer that their own partnerships with the US, the European Union and Japan should be stronger than those of India with the latter. The Chinese do not take an undifferentiated adversarial view against the US as our Left parties, who appear to be the last survivors of the Cold War, do. They understand the problems of climate change and the need for India to have sources of clean energy as they themselves do. They are planning to construct 30 nuclear reactors and are partners with the US, Russia and France in the global nuclear energy partnership (GNEP) programme. Therefore, they are not likely to be against India signing a 123 Agreement with the US, as they themselves have done and are getting access to clean energy technologies. An India generating a greater amount of greenhouse gases is bound to aggravate China’s climate change problem. India’s response to China on the Arunachal issue was also nuanced at the government level. However, India is a democracy and China is not. Therefore, the Chinese diplomatic moves are under its total control. In India independent and free media and opposition political parties have to be factored in. In this asymmetric situation there are always pressures in India to adopt a tough line towards China and to treat China as a potential adversary. When China talks of two countries being partners and not rivals one must understand that even partnership often involves healthy competition. China understandably wants to be ahead in that competition. There should, therefore, be a sophisticated understanding in India of China’s strategy to rise “peacefully” in a balance of power. While China understands that the Cold War was over and in today’s world cooperation and competition among major powers are the requirements for the advancement of its own national interest, many sections, both belonging to the Left and the Right in other nations including India, behave like the small groups of Japanese soldiers in various island territories of the Pacific who lost contact with their command and went on attempting to fight the war on behalf of their emperor long after World War II
ended. |
Palm-patting
I
have a strange habit of narrating a story and then jutting out my open palm in front of the listener expecting from him a short pat on it. Patting is not necessary, even a simple touch by him satisfies me. Another option is that I take my hand to such a position that the listener is forced to offer his protruded palm to be patted upon by me. I have observed that I am not singular in the workout; there is a large fraternity of players who heedlessly continue playing this game. “Is this pat a sign of confirmation or seconding the viewpoint or simple acclamation or expression of glory-be-to?” I asked the question from myself and other members of the palm-patters club. My interlacing thoughts put myself in a bog while the other luminaries of the field did not bother to indulge in needless expenditure of thought over my “silly” question and so I am ill equipped to answer it. I have, however, faced many embarrassing situations arising out of this habit. Once I was bragging about an instance of how I floored the super-boss and concluded my discourse with a protruding palm. My friend immediately drew a one rupee coin from his pocket, placed it on my palm and left the place. Amongst other colleagues, I was grounded and felt like a deflated balloon. Once, a friend knowing my habit played a prank on me. He willingly offered his palm twice to me but swiftly withdrew it the third time. Thud….my palm landed on the hard top of the office-table instead of the expected soft-landing. I stood wooden. Again, having talked about feathers in my cap and how I gathered those, I offered my stuck out palm to an acquaintance listener. Instead of patting he held it, looked at it closely and, amidst many laughing buddhas, mocked that my lifeline was going to clash with my wifeline in near future. I felt deplumed. Nevertheless, my palm-patting continues despite many New Year Resolutions of doing away with it but what amazed me recently was to discover that there were a few rules to the game. On a freezing wintry day, I witnessed an addressor and an addressee removing their mittens for this crucial pat. My enquiry disclosed that to pat with gloves on were bad manners; “skin-touch” was essential requirement. Who has framed the rules? Nobody knows. I marvel what a westerner would do if an Indian tosses his hand like that in front of him. As the tradition goes, he would kiss it. Not always. When a young man asked James Joyce, the Irish novelist, “May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?” He replied, “No, it did a lot of other things,
too”. |
Community radio can boost rural employment scheme THE National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is now in its second year. It already covers more than half of rural India – over three lakh villages and 1.5 lakh gram panchayats in the most arid and drought-prone regions. It is now further being extended to cover all the 330 districts of the country. However, grassroots review of the implementation of the programme has brought to fore three critical issues of access, transparency and accountability. How can more active participation of the rural poor, unorganised, exploited and those on the fringes of hunger be ensured? What can be the effective role of gram panchayats in a situation where most have a limited capability, little experience and virtually no manpower? In fact, the Comptroller and Auditor General’s six monthly performance audit clearly brings out the fact that if this scheme continues to be a top-down welfare programme for a passive target population it is bound to flounder. Further, that we need to break the patronage networks aligned to oppressive social hierarchies in the rural areas that impinge upon the scheme’s operation. In the above context, the concept of community radio holds tremendous potential as a tool of empowerment to conscientise and build capacities of communities to become active participants in the scheme’s implementation. In fact, the November 2006 Policy Guidelines for setting up community radios in rural areas envisions that the marginalised must have access to media not solely as receivers and consumers but as producers and contributors of relevant media messages. The aim is to generate an autonomous, democratic, community-based communication environment with opportunities for articulating localised and people- centred development needs. Private FM radio stations and university stations came to be established in 2000 and 2005, respectively. Hence, non-profit civil society and voluntary organisations willing to serve a well-defined local community are eligible to apply for a radio licence. The guidelines are very specific about the fact that such organisations should have an ownership and management structure that is reflective of the community that the community radio station seeks to serve. Besides, fifty per cent of the content will be generated with the participation of the local community for which the station has been set up. Thus, with a transmitter having an effective radiated power of 100 Watts the community radio station is expected to cover a range of 6-10 kilometres. The most forward-looking provision of the guidelines is that the non-profit organisations that apply will be eligible to seek funding from multilateral aid agencies. It goes without saying that programmes for broadcast have to be relevant to the developmental and socio-economic needs of the community in the region that the radio station seeks to serve. The issue of ‘equity’ and ‘local need’ in rural areas can be very effectively addressed if provisions for community radio licensing can be incorporated in the Employment Guarantee Act to aid the process of identification of projects and their social audit in the gram panchayat area. Gram panchayats with the assistance of district administration have, by and large, been enabled do disseminate information about the initial registration process, issuance of job cards and availability of work on demand. But identification of projects by the gram panchayat and their social audit by the gram sabha will become a reality only if two things happen. Firstly, the gram panchayats, currently undergoing a phase of second generation reforms are devolved funds, functions and functionaries in a time bound manner. Secondly, they ought to attain the capacity to make planned media literate interventions, relevant to the local area with the involvement of the village community. In context of the latter, the cost effectiveness and reach of community radio, cutting across the need for a literate community as a pre-requisite, is tremendous. Plenty of government schemes, social programmes and civic coordination tasks that could otherwise empower communities languish for want of low-cost, relatively easy to deploy and a locally innovated communication fabric that works for illiterate and semi-literate people alike. Under NREGA selection amongst possible shelf sectors of the scheme i.e. water conservation, renovation of water bodies, irrigation on scheduled caste/scheduled tribe landholding or land development need to be deliberated first in content development workshops at the gram panchayat level focusing on core aspects of the above shelf sectors. The implications of factors such as labour migration, water availability, electricity position etc in the village have to be kept in view at this stage. This is to be followed by recording feedback suggestions on the prioritised needs by groups of gram sabha inhabitants through portable cassette recorders (after due media training). After these field recordings are brainstormed in gram panchayat level technical workshops, project coordinators (in NREGA’s case it could be the Programme Officer working in tandem with gram panchayat members and a media NGO) would take them back to the village wards for narrowcasting (playing back to each other for a thorough ‘felt need’ scrutiny by the community members). Finally, the licensed community radio station would broadcast the developed programme content module for the community in the gram panchayat area and within a radius of 6-10 km if need be. Similarly, if enhancement of livelihood security is the main objective of the scheme community radio can be very instrumental, for instance, in evolving area specific feedback of and by the community about critical issues such as the schedule of rates. The latter’s formulation needs to be community centric. The gram sabha either on its own accord or with the help of self help groups has to be empowered to intervene starting from site selection, cost estimation and the way work is measured and paid for. This in turn, as grassroots implementation of the scheme in Andhra Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Orissa and Rajasthan has shown, significantly impacts the payment of the statutory minimum wage, assessing of productivity norms and check corruption occurring due to fudged muster rools. Interestingly, the 2006 Policy guidelines for community radio have excluded gram panchayats as body corporates to be eligible to apply for a licence. Their role in empowerment of the poor under the employment guarantee programme is fundamental. Besides, the satellite revolution and boom in information and communication technologies have provoked a spirited public debate about the role community media can play in rural India. Hence, we need to evolve structural linkages that dovetail community radio ownership and programming with both service delivery systems of gram panchayats and aggressive advocacy in media literacy of reputed media
NGO’s. The writer is an IAS officer. The views expressed are personal. |
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Kandahar: reliving the nightmare Patiala
– The life imprisonment awarded to three accused persons on February 5, 2008, in the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC 814 when it was on its way from Kathmandu to New Delhi on December 24, 1999, is a punishment only for the conspirators in the crime – the masterminds and the main accused are still at large. These include five Pakistani hijackers and two Pakistani conspirators. One of the accused, Abdul Latif, hired a flat at Golden Soil Apartment, Jogeshwari (West), Mumbai, in the name of Javed A Siddiqui, in June,1999, where he started holding meetings with other masterminds of the hijack. Abdul Rauf hired a flat in Subzi Mandi area of Dhaka in July 1999. In a few days all of them reached Dhaka and held a meeting in which Ibrahim Athar explained the plan to hijack the flight. It was also decided that if the Indian government did not concede to their demand for the release of Maulana Masood Azhar, they would blow up the aircraft and sacrifice themselves. Hearing in the case commenced in Patiala since the Special CBI court to try such cases is located here. Because of security reasons, the hearing of the case was shifted to the Patiala central jail in 2003. Those awarded life sentence included Abdul Latif, Bhupal Man Damai alias Yusaf Nepali and Dilip Kumar Bhujel. The Central Bureau of Investigation had registered a case against 10 persons but the masterminds behind the IC 814 hijacking were never nabbed. The five main accused were given safe passage during hijacking and two others have been missing. The week-long hijack drama ended with the release of three dreaded terrorists --Masood Azhar Mushtaq, Ahmed Zargar and Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed. All 189 on board were let off safely, except for two. Rupin Katyal was killed by the hijackers on day one and Satnam Singh was stabbed nine times but survived. According to the CBI chargesheet filed in the special court, on December 24, 1999 while flight IC 814 with 179 passengers and 11 crew members on board was flying within the air space of India under the control of Air Traffic Control, Varanasi, at about 4.53 p.m., Ibrahim Athar, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Shahid Sayeed Akhtar, Zahoor Ibrahim Mistri and Rajesh Gopal Verma, who were passengers on board, hijacked the flight. Ibrahim Athar entered the cockpit with a revolver and a hand grenade in his hand wearing a mask and threatened the pilot Capt Devi Sharan and co-pilot Rajendra Kumar as well as flight engineer Anil Jaggia. They asked: “Aap ke paas kitna tel hai”. The pilot and co-pilot said that they have fuel up to Delhi only. Ibrahim directed the pilot “Is ko aap Lahore le chalo”. The pilot said that the aircraft could not go to Lahore . Ibrahim threatened the pilot: “Is tayare ko burst kar denge”. The hijackers forced the pilot to divert the aircraft to Lahore and when the airport authorities at Lahore did not allow the landing of the aircraft the pilot managed to land at Raja Sansi Airport, Amritsar at about 7 pm for refueling. The hijackers took passengers Pawan Garg, Rupin Katyal, Satnam Singh, Daman Kumar Soni, Chandra Chabra, Abhinav Khandelwal, Rajinder Dogra, and Kulasekharan to the business class after landing at Amritsar airport, tied their hands at the back and tied them to the seats. When the bouzer did not reach the aircraft and the pilot did not take off, Shahid Sayeed Akhtar, on instructions from Ibrahim Athar in the cockpit, stabbed Satnam Singh and Rupin Katyal repeatedly with a knife. The pilot took off from Amritsar airport at about 7.50 pm after the hijackers threatened to kill other passengers if he failed to take off immediately. The aircraft landed at Lahore airport at about 8 pm and after refuelling, took off from Lahore at about 10.30 a.m. and next landed at Minhad airbase in Dubai at about 1.30 am on December 25, 1999. The aircraft was refuelled there and the hijackers released 27 ladies, children and aged passengers including the injured Satnam Singh. They also discharged the dead body of passenger Rupin Katyal on the tarmac. The aicrcraft took off from Minhad air base, Dubai , at about 6.20 am and landed at Kandahar international airport in Afghanistan at about 8.30 am . The aircraft remained at Kandahar till December 31, 1999. The aircraft and the hostages were released after an Indian negotiating team reached Kandahar. The Government of India released three militants Maulana Masood Azhar,Umar Shaikh and Mohd. Zargar on December 31, 1999 from the Indian jail and took them to Kandahar and handed them over to the hijackers. Abdul Latif and Yusuf Nepali were arrested by the Mumbai police on December 30, 1999. Dilip Kumar Bhujel was arrested by the CBI on March 31,2000 from
Kalimpong. |
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The world’s rising middle class THE middle class in poor countries is the fastest-growing segment of the world’s population. While the planet’s total population will increase by about a billion people in the next 12 years, the ranks of the middle class will swell by as many as 1.8 billion – 600 million just in China. Homi Kharas, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, estimates that by 2020, the world’s middle class will grow to include 52 percent of the total population, up from 30 percent. The middle class will almost double in the poor countries where sustained economic growth is fast lifting people above the poverty line. While this is, of course, good news, it also means humanity will have to adjust to unprecedented pressures. The rise of a new global middle class is already having repercussions. Last month, 10,000 people took to the streets in Jakarta to protest skyrocketing soybean prices. And Indonesians were not the only people angry about the rising cost of food. In 2007, pasta prices sparked street protests in Milan. Mexicans marched against the price of tortillas. Senegalese protested the price of rice, and Indians took up banners against the price of onions. Argentina, China, Egypt, Venezuela and Russia are among the nations that have imposed controls on food prices in an attempt to contain a public backlash. These protesters are the most vociferous manifestations of a global trend: We are all paying more for bread, milk and chocolate, to name just a few items. The new consumers of the emerging global middle class are driving up global food prices. The food-price index compiled since 1845 by the Economist is now at its all-time high; it increased 30 percent in 2007 alone. Wheat and soybean prices rose by almost 80 percent and 90 percent, respectively. Many other grains reached record highs. Prices are soaring not because there is less food (in 2007, the world produced more grains than ever before) but because some grains are now being used as fuel and because more people can afford to eat more. The average consumption of meat in China, for example, has more than doubled since the mid-1980s. The effect of a fast-growing middle class will be felt in the price of other resources. After all, members of the middle class are also buying more clothes, refrigerators, toys, medicines and eventually will buy more cars and homes. China and India, with nearly 40 percent of the world’s population – most of it still very poor – already consume more than half of the global supply of coal, iron ore and steel. Thanks to their growing prosperity and that of other countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey and Vietnam, the demand for these products is booming. Moreover, a middle-class lifestyle in these developing countries, even if more frugal than what is common in rich nations, is more energy-intensive. In 2006, China added as much electricity as France’s total supply. Yet, millions in China lack reliable access to electricity; in India, more than 400 million don’t have power. The demand in India will grow fivefold in the next 25 years. And we know what happened to oil prices. Oil reached its all-time high of $100 a barrel not because of supply constraints but because of unprecedented growth in consumption in poor countries. China alone accounts for one-third of the growth in the world’s oil consumption in recent years. The public debate about the consequences of this global consumption boom has focused on what it means for the environment. Yet its economic and political effects will be significant too. The lifestyle of the existing middle class probably will have to change drastically as the new middle class emerges. That might not be all bad. The cost of polluting water or destroying the environment might be more accurately reflected. But other dislocations will be more painful and difficult to predict. Changes in migration, urbanisation and income distribution will be widespread. And expect growing demands for better housing, health care, education and, inevitably, political participation. Higher prices and new technologies that boosted supplies, like the green revolution, always came to the rescue. That might happen again. But the adjustment to a middle class greater than what the world has ever known is just
beginning. By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post |
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