Dangerous transactions

In the week in which North Korea declared it had produced nuclear weapons, intends to go on producing them, and will not talk anymore, Time ...

In the week in which North Korea declared it had produced nuclear weapons, intends to go on producing them, and will not talk anymore, Time profiled the 8216;8216;Merchant of Menace8217;8217;. The magazine succeeded in sounding ominously sober. A Q Khan, twice awarded Pakistan8217;s highest civilian honour, may be under house arrest in Islamabad now. But the global nuclear-smuggling ring he put in place through years of clandestine labours, said Time, may have made the world a more dangerous place in ways it cannot yet fully fathom, or fight.

He is said to be motivated by a hate for India and a love for science. Also, by 8216;8216;a devout faith and a burning belief that Muslim possession of nuclear weapons would help return Islam to greatness8230;8217;8217; According to the magazine, his operation continues after his arrest, largely as before, only now there8217;s a vacancy at the top.

What the magazine was suggesting is this: while George Bush may have declared a War on Terror, the War on Nuclear Terrorism is still to be joined.

Blogger8217;s law

Excitement about the New Media and its freedoms has been on a high for some years now. More recently, during the Bush-Kerry presidential race in the US, fresh enthusiasms were triggered by the political role played by the growing community of Internet bloggers. A blogger at freerepublic.com first detected flaws in documents used by a report on CBS News that was critical of Bush8217;s National Guard Service. CBS had to fire three executives and a producer after those revelations filtered into the mainstream media.

Is the New Media the powerful new player in the political game? Could it play a more encompassing, more liberating role8212;of forcing Mainstream Media to be constantly on its guard for risk of disclosure by the more fleetfooted armies of New Media?

That discussion has been taking a distinctly new turn. New questions are coming up that have to do with the limits of the new freedoms. In The Washington Post, an article highlighted the growing familiarity of the term: getting 8216;8216;dooced8217;8217;. Blogger Heather B Armstrong coined the phrase in 2002, the paper said, after she was fired from her web design job for writing about work and colleagues on her blog Dooce.com.

Companies have developed e-mail and Internet policies but they have still to devise blog policies. Questions abound about the role of political websites which often purvey anonymous insinuations and assertions. As a media expert told the Post, the lawlessness in the blogosphere is good and bad: 8216;8216;Sometimes that means information the quote-unquote mainstream media are keeping you from, and sometimes that means rumours the mainstream media responsibly ignores8217;8217;.

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It8217;s suddenly newsworthy after Madhur Bhandarkar8217;s film of the same name. Suddenly more and more people want to look again at a phenomenon that8217;s been with us a while. Last week, The Washington Post joined the discussion on India8217;s Page 3. It outlined the story so far. Page 3 has acquired a new look since the mid-1990s when policies of economic liberalisation supplied a new elite to the ranks of the old celebrities consisting of Bollywood stars, cricket players and socially domineering political figures. This coalition of the old and the new is now being avidly chronicled in the expanding column space devoted to lifestyle matters by newspapers that earlier concentrated mostly on matters of state.

The Post captured the new trend, but not without recycling some old and tiresome oppositions: 8216;8216;Western-style celebrity culture8217;8217; in a 8216;8216;conservative nation of more than a billion people8217;8217;. Or, Celebrity in the land 8216;8216;of Mahatma Gandhi, who dressed in robes of homespun cotton and eschewed all but the most basic necessities8230;8217;8217;

Who8217;s Natan Sharansky?

Just who is Natan Sharansky? He first figured prominently in Bush8217;s inaugural address after re-election8212;the US president is said to have quoted several passages, verbatim, from Sharansky8217;s book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. Ever since, the case for the world to make its acquaintance with this minister without portfolio in Ariel Sharon8217;s Likud government, and formerly a Soviet dissident, has only been growing more urgent.

Last week, The Economist dedicated a full page to 8216;8216;The odd couple8217;8217;. They8217;re talking of the 8216;8216;Bush-Sharansky freedom doctrine8217;8217; now. Because, as the magazine explained, 8216;8216;Mr Sharansky8217;s message comes down to three points. First, 8216;realpolitik8217; is bankrupt. America cannot go on coddling tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia because those regimes invariably try to buy stability at home by exporting hatred abroad. Second, democracy is the best insurance against aggression. Third, the world really is divided between good and evil8217;8217;.

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Going by the evidence, Economist warned, Bush8217;s Manichean worldview will continue into his second term.