Rebels refuse to extend Nepal truce
The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse
MONDAY, JANUARY 2, 2006


KATMANDU, Nepal Nepal's Maoist rebels said Monday that they would not extend their four-month unilateral cease-fire that was to end at midnight.

The rebels' truce started Sept. 3 and was later extended by a month in response to public pressure. The announcement on Monday came after rights groups and political parties here had asked the insurgents to extend the cease-fire.

"We have found out that the rebel leaders are holding consultations whether to further extend the cease-fire," Jhanath Khanal, a leader of the Nepal Communist Party-United Marxist Leninist, said early Monday. "We have asked them to prolong the truce by at least another 15 days and give the government another chance."

The Royal Nepalese Army had not matched the cease-fire and called it a ploy by the militants to buy time to reorganize.

On Monday afternoon, the Maoists said they would not extend the truce because the military continued to press its campaign against them.

"The royal army is surrounding our people's liberation army, which is in defensive positions, to carry out ground as well as air attacks on us," the rebels said in a statement. "Therefore, we are compelled to go on the offensive not only for the sake of peace and democracy but for the sake of self-defense."

Political groups in the capital had awaited the rebels' decision with some hope of success.

The European Union and the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, had issued statements urging the Maoists to extend the cease-fire in their "people's war."

In November a group of seven opposition parties, four of which were removed from power by King Gyanendra in February, reached a 12-point agreement with the Maoists. The agreement was intended to get Gyanendra to step aside and restore multiparty democracy in this impoverished Himalayan country.

Under the cease-fire, the rebels pledged not to attack military or civilian targets in hopes of reviving peace talks but said they would continue to defend their positions.

They have, however, continued to block highways, extort money and kidnap villagers for indoctrination sessions.

Political parties said that the rebels were being provoked by the government's refusal to join the cease-fire and its description of the militants as terrorists. "The government statements and attitude is angering them," said Pradeep Nepal of the Communist Party of Nepal.

The rebels have agreed with the country's seven main political parties to step up their opposition to the administration of the king, who dismissed a provisional government and seized absolute power early last year.

The rebels, who claim to be inspired by Mao Zedong, have been fighting to topple Nepal's monarchy and establish a communist state. More than 12,000 people have died in the decade-long insurgency.

A Marie Antoinette moment
The New York Times
TUESDAY, JANUARY 3, 2006


There is no shortage of numbers and studies detailing the widening gap between what American companies pay workers and the millions of dollars those same companies pay top executives. But just in case anyone hasn't been paying attention, here enters David Brooks, chief executive of the bulletproof vest manufacturer DHB Industries Inc., to provide a fuller picture.

Brooks has made hundreds of millions of dollars through the company, principally from federal and municipal contracts for bulletproof vests. But while 18,000 of those vests were being recalled by the U.S. military, some from Iraq, Brooks was in the midst of throwing a private party for his daughter and her friends at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center in New York.

The bash was headlined by a list of performers that could easily have carried the Super Bowl halftime extravaganza. The superstar rapper 50 Cent and the front men from the rock group Aerosmith were among the night's many performers. According to The Daily News in New York, the party's estimated $10 million price tag - a figure Brooks albeit called greatly exaggerated - culminated with guests reportedly walking out carrying gift bags valued at $1,000 each, stocked with digital cameras and video iPods.

Brooks is free to spend his money as he pleases, but he might have thought better than to draw added attention to his company right now. The November recall of the vests was the second by the military in 2005. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the company and Brooks. And the company is also the target of several shareholder lawsuits after a material in some of its body armor failed a federal safety test.

Meanwhile, the party came less than three months after the release of a report on ballooning pay for chief executives that singled out Brooks for making $70 million in 2004 compared with $525,000 in pre-Iraq-war 2001. The report said he made an additional $186 million in 2004 selling company stock.

The same report, by the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning research center, and United for a Fair Economy, a group seeking to narrow the gap between rich and poor, found that in 2004 the ratio of chief executive pay to worker pay at large companies had ballooned to 431:1.

If the minimum wage had advanced at the same rate as chief executive compensation since 1990, America's bottom-of-the-barrel working poor would be enjoying salad days, with legal wages at $23.03 an hour instead of $5.15.

In the go-go days of the Internet bubble, these kinds of statistics were easy to ignore because it felt as if anyone could be the next millionaire and surely the rising tide would lift all boats. Now corporate profits are being wrung in large part from cost cutting like reductions to worker health care and retirement, layoffs and plant closings.

It would be nice to see corporate America put more effort - and money - into quality control and fair living wages for workers and less into exorbitant pay packages and bonuses for corporate chieftains. We remain hopeful, although we can't help but think that while the average American will read about Brooks's war-windfall party at the Rainbow Room and feel queasy, someone in the ranks of the super-rich might take it as a challenge and check to see if the Taj Mahal is available for birthday parties.

Our place in nature's riotous order
Olivia Judson The New York Times
TUESDAY, JANUARY 3, 2006


LONDON In 2005, chimpanzees joined humans, chickens and mosquitoes, as well as less famous occupants of the planet, on an exclusive but growing list: organisms whose complete genomes have been sequenced.

What would they make of this news, I wonder? Perhaps they would resent the genetic evidence that they are related to us. Or perhaps they would, as I do, revel in being part of the immensity of nature and a product of evolution, the same process that gave rise to dinosaurs, bread molds and myriad organisms too wacky to invent.

Organisms like the sea slug Elysia chlorotica. This animal not only looks like a leaf, but it also acts like one, making energy from the sun. Its secret? When it eats algae, it extracts the chloroplasts, the tiny entities that plants and algae use to manufacture energy from sunlight, and shunts them into special cells beneath its skin. The chloroplasts continue to function; the slug thus becomes able to live on a diet composed only of sunbeams.

Still more fabulous is the bacterium Brocadia anammoxidans. It blithely makes a substance that to most organisms is a lethal poison - namely, hydrazine. That's rocket fuel.

And then there's the wasp Cotesia congregata. She injects her eggs into the bodies of caterpillars. As she does so, she also injects a virus that disables the caterpillar's immune system and prevents it from attacking the eggs. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the caterpillar alive.

It's hard not to have an insatiable interest in organisms like these, to be enthralled by the strangeness, the complexity, the breathtaking variety of nature.

It's not that I have a fetish for obscure facts. It's that small facts add up to big pictures. For although Mother Nature's infinite variety seems incomprehensible at first, it is not. The forces of nature are not random; often, they are strongly predictable.

For example, if you were to discover a new species and you told me that the male is much bigger than the female, I would tell you what the mating system is likely to be: males fight each other for access to females. Or if you discover that the male's testicles make up a large part of his weight, I can tell you that the females in his species consort with several males at a time.

Suppose you find that a particular bacterium lives exclusively in the gullets of leeches and helps them digest blood. Then I can tell you how that bacterium's genome is likely to differ from those of its free-living cousins; among other changes, the genome will be smaller, and it will have lost sets of genes that are helpful for living free but useless for living inside another being.

Because a cell is a kind of factory that produces proteins, and because proteins can have a variety of components, some of which are cheaper to synthesize than others, you might expect that proteins that are mass produced are made from cheaper components than proteins that are constructed only occasionally. And you'd be right.

The patterns are everywhere. Mammals that feed on ants and termites have typically evolved long, thin noses and long, sticky tongues. A virus that is generally passed from mother to child will tend to make its host less sick than one that readily jumps from one host to another via a cough or a sneeze.

When I was in school, I learned none of this. Biology was a dreary exercise in the memorization and regurgitation of apparently unconnected facts. Only later did I learn about evolution and how it transforms biology from that cotton ball into a magnificent tapestry, a tapestry we can contemplate and begin to understand.

Some people want to think of humans as the product of a special creation, separate from other living things. I am not among them; I am glad it is not so. I am proud to be part of the riot of nature, to know that the same forces that produced me also produced bees, giant ferns and microbes that live at the bottom of the sea.

For me, the knowledge that we evolved is a source of solace and hope. I find it a relief that plagues and cancers and wasp larvae that eat caterpillars alive are the result of the impartial - and comprehensible - forces of evolution rather than the caprices of a deity.

More than that, I find that in viewing ourselves as one species out of hundreds of millions, we become more remarkable, not less so. No other animal that I have heard of can live so peaceably in such close quarters with so many individuals that are unrelated. No other animal routinely bothers to help the sick and the dying, or tries to save those hurt in an earthquake or flood.

Which is not to say that we are all we might wish to be. But in putting ourselves into our place in nature, in comparing ourselves with other species, we have a real hope of reaching a better understanding, and appreciation, of ourselves.

(Olivia Judson is an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College in London.)