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Here‘s a brave and principled stand by the International Judo Federation (via lgf):

Iran has escaped censure over the failure of its judo world champion to fight an Israeli at the Olympics.

The International Judo Federation accepted the disqualification of Arash Miresmaeili came because a medical condition left him too heavy to fight. […]

A spokesman for the Iran National Olympic Committee had said it was a “general policy” of the country to refrain from competing against Israeli athletes and that Miresmaeili had simply observed the protocol.

Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami said Miresmaeili’s act would be recorded among the nation’s glories.

However, the Iranian Olympic team had subsequently explained to the IJF that the fighter had suffered from digestive problems on arrival in Athens and had been unable to lose weight in time.

an green light. You cannot separate the two.”

Zeyad at Healing Iraq gives an amusing account of the proceedings, including this:

Another interesting incident was the objection of several fundamental delegates to one of the posters in the hall. It had half the face of a pretty (unveiled) Iraqi women on it representing the role of Iraqi women. They demanded the poster to be removed because ‘it was improper’. Some commotion followed and one woman stood up and harshly addressed the objectors, she said that if they removed the poster now they might as well remove the women from the conference. She was met with a standing ovation from the audience and the poster remained.

The World Food Program is warning of food shortages in North Korea (via NK Zone):

Changes in North Korea’s economy have led to spiralling food prices which many people cannot afford, according to the World Food Programme.
“As the economy shifts from a planned economy to a more market-based economy, there are winners and losers,” Richard Ragan, WFP director in Pyongyang, said.

He said that a new class of people now needed food assistance.

Australia’s Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, is currently in NK, trying to persuade it to renounce nuclear weapons:

Earlier this week he promised Pyongyang “substantial” benefits in aid and investment if it ended its nuclear activities.

Hmm. Jimmy Carter tried that, and it wasn’t a notable success. Here‘s an interview with the man on his return from North Korea in 1994:

JIMMY CARTER: … what the North Koreans were waiting for was some treatment of their exalted leader with respect and a direct communication….I think he was quite ready. I didn’t have to argue with him. When I outlined the specific points that I had been informed in Washington was the administration’s position, I presented them to him. And with very little equivocation, he agreed…. I think it’s all roses now…. I’ve known that there were people in Washington who were skeptical about any direct dealing with the North Koreans. They were already condemned as outlaws. Kim Il-sung was already condemned as a criminal…. And it was kind of like a miracle and almost an incredible statement that Kim Il-sung gave me in response to my proposals, and it was hard to believe….

JUDY WOODRUFF: …. Are you absolutely persuaded that the North Koreans are going to honor this agreement, that while the talks are going on that it’s not just a matter of buying time on the part of the North Koreans, that they will not secretly pursue the program they were pursuing earlier, nuclear program?

JIMMY CARTER: Judy, I’m convinced. But I said this when I got back from North Korea, and people said that I was naive or gullible and so forth. I don’t think I was. In my opinion, this was one of those perfect agreements where both sides won and got what they wanted and there were no-nobody blinked, nobody had to yield…. I think the most important lesson is that we should not ever avoid direct talks, direct conversations, direct discussions and negotiations with the main person in a despised or misunderstood or condemned society who could actually resolve the issue. And we went through this for ten years when nobody in our government would meet or talk to Yasir Arafat. The Norwegians did, and they were the ones that brought the peace agreement last summer….

Naive or gullible? Surely not.

Galloway is hoping for lots of US and British casualties in Iraq (via Chrenkoff):

George Galloway, the rebel MP, yesterday said he hoped that US and British forces in Iraq will stay there so they can receive a “bloody good hiding” from the Iraqi armed resistance to the occupation.
Mr Galloway, who said he would stand as a candidate for his new party, Respect, at the next general election, was asked at a packed session at the Edinburgh International Book Festival whether he wanted the troops to be withdrawn from Iraq.
He said: “In a perverse way I hope they stay there. If they stay there they will get a bloody good hiding.
“The Vietnamese gave them a bloody good hiding 30 years ago and they did not invade another country for a long time afterwards.
“And the Iraqi people are giving them a hiding daily and will continue to do so in increasing numbers as long as they stay there.”

There are limits though to what a sophisticated crowd at a book festival will find acceptable:

He prompted some jeers from the audience when he poured scorn on the idea of Scottish independence.

r, chemical, and biological installations and uranium-enrichment plants in Iran, such that the attack would also include Syria and Lebanon.” In the same article, Al-Siyassa reported that a “Syrian military source told the Syrian opposition in London that an Iranian military delegation specializing in missiles had accompanied the two deliveries to Syria, in order to oversee the deployment of the missiles in the various regions in Lebanon.”

The newspaper also quoted the source as saying that Iranian-Syrian missile cooperation is “the closest cooperation in the history of the two countries’ strategic relations, since Iranian scientists working on developing the Shihab missiles in Tehran had gone to Syria at the beginning of the year [2004] to participate in the development of missile artillery based on the same source on which Iran relies – that is, North Korea.”

we started to write for their sake.

محمد فاضل (Mohammed Fadhil)

What to make of this (via ALDaily) from a German neuroscientist?

The idea that someone should not be punished if their abnormal neural make-up leaves them no choice but to break the law is contentious but not new. However, one prominent neuroscientist has sparked a storm by picking it up and turning it round. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s leading newspapers, Wolf Singer argued that crime itself should be taken as evidence of brain abnormality, even if no abnormality can be found, and criminals treated as incapable of having acted otherwise.

His claims have brought howls of outrage from academics across the sciences and humanities. But Singer counters that the idea is nothing but a natural extension of the thesis that free will is an illusion – a theory that he feels is supported by decades of work in neuroscience. […]

His argument goes like this. Neurobiology tells us that there is no centre in the brain where actions are planned and decisions made. Decisions emerge from a collection of dynamic systems that run in parallel and are underpinned by nerve cells that talk to each other – the brain. If you look back in evolution to say, the sea slug Aplysia, you see that the building blocks of this brain have not changed. The amino acids, the nerve cells, the signalling pathways and largely the genes, are the same. “It’s the same material [in humans], just more complex,” says Singer. “So the same rules must govern what humans do. Unavoidable conclusion.”

Of course there’s “no centre in the brain where actions are planned and decisions made”. That’s because it’s people who plan actions and make decisions, not neurons. They will probably also find, should they care to look, that there are no neurons which support Arsenal or intend to vote Conservative at the next election. The whole argument is wrong-headed.

ave to convince China that punitive measures should be taken. Aside from any other consideration, given the size of Chinese investments in Sudan’s oil sector, Beijing will need a lot of convincing.

ue of the botched Iraq intervention into an essentially conservative argument which accepts the premise of a ‘clash of civilisations’ and the belief that the Arabs are incapable of democracy.

The debate about intervention in failed states has become muddied by Iraq, but it would be a mistake to forget the distance travelled over the 1990s because of the failures to intervene in Rwanda or, for too long, in Bosnia, because these ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ were none of our business. Whether over the current genocide in Sudan or elsewhere, these debates will soon return. But we may be considerably further from finding an effective response to them.

I think we’re beginning to see how this works out. The liberal left pushes for change, yet balks at any change actually taking place. After some tragedy has unfolded, say in Rwanda or Bosnia, or now in Sudan, it’s appropriate to ask all sorts of questions and even to berate ourselves for our failure to intervene in time. Hell, we can even write articles and books about it, hold meetings, host seminars. The debate however “has become muddied by Iraq”. Because here something was done. A vicious Stalinist regime, that defied the UN and had clear intentions to develop WMDs, was overthrown, and the possibility opened up of the establishment of some sort of functioning democracy. Because, for the liberal left in its current mood, actual intervention is something to be discussed, not something to be done, this is anathema.

Katwala, in keeping with the optimism he finds so refreshing in Garton Ash’s book, finishes with this challenging thought:

It is worth recalling the lesson of the fall of the Berlin Wall – politics sometimes needs to be the art of the impossible, too.

Yes indeed. A project perhaps as significant as the collapse of the Berlin Wall is the attempt to install a liberal democratic regime in Iraq, in the middle of all the pathologies of Middle Eastern politics. The reaction of the left? Many actually support the theocrats or Baathists trying to stop this happening. The rest have on the whole just washed their hands of it. Because all this stuff about politics being the art of the impossible, about pressing for change: they don’t mean it. It just sounds good, but really they’ve got nothing to offer.