GOP Democrats

Kathuria could become a symbol. Of the maturing assertion of a community that now totals over 1.6 million. Bush8217;s strategists, said the ECONOMIST, are urging their party to pay more attention to the Asian vote.

A spin of concern

But the GUARDIAN fretted about the future of India. More specifically, the future of Indian spin. 8216;8216;A mighty legacy 8230; is in peril8217;8217;. Where is the next generation of spin bowlers, it asked.

It predicted that the Indian cricket board8217;s blueprint for revival will not make the ball turn. The new ban on one-day tournaments for the under-17 and under 15-levels is merely 8216;8216;eye-catching8217;8217;. Because there are no inter-state or inter-zonal one-day tournaments in India at under-17 and under-15 levels in the first place. Junior one-day cricket is popular at the school and club grades, but that falls in the purview of the state associations. The piece concluded on a yet more sceptical note: Is the Indian cricket fraternity being 8216;8216;blindly seduced8217;8217; by the past? 8216;8216;Sometimes it is almost as if the romance around spin, rather than effective spin, is the desired end.8217;8217;

This was also the week when Nasser Hussain bowed out of English cricket. 8216;8216;For sheer shock value, I can8217;t think of anything to match Nasser Hussain8217;s departure since Harold Wilson walked out of Downing Street for no obvious reason 27 years ago8217;8217; exclaimed cricket writer Matthew Engel. For Engel, one of Hussain8217;s accomplishments was to remove the captaincy from the business of everyday debate. 8216;8216;It took an Indian-born Essex lad to silence everyone, because for the past four years Hussain has been the best man for the job8217;8217;.

Beaming8216;em on Beeb

Speaking of spin. In Britain, there8217;s open scepticism about the political future of Tony Blair. Despite the 8216;8216;charts-and-graphs8217;8217; presentation of his government8217;s achievements at a news conference at Downing Street this week. And in spite of the fact that on Saturday he becomes Britain8217;s longest continuously-serving Labour prime minister. 8216;8216;Suddenly it is possible to imagine life without Tony Blair at No 108217;8217; wrote columnist Michael Brown in THE INDEPENDENT.

Blair8217;s most recent troubles have to do with the death of a scientist. The suicide of David Kelly, the man the government earlier named as the source of BBC reports that the government had 8216;8216;sexed-up8217;8217; the evidence on Iraq8217;s WMDs, has kicked up an ugly row. Did Kelly end his life because of the intolerable pressure the government put him under? Or was the BBC guilty of embroidering, even distorting, what Kelly had said?

By and large, in the British media, you are either with the government on this one, or with the BBC. 8216;8216;The BBC is pathologically hostile to most British institutions8217;8217; raged press baron Lord Black in a letter in his DAILY TELEGRAPH. It is virulently biased, guilty of 8216;8216;assassinating the truth about the Iraq war8217;8217;. It had become 8216;8216;the greatest menace facing the country it was founded to serve and inform8217;8217;.

The GUARDIAN immediately took him up on that last bit. 8216;8216;Read those 13 words again slowly. That8217;s right 8212; the greatest menace to Britain today! Greater than war, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism 8212; Romano Prodi, even!8217;8217;

Alone! Anyone?

In the US media, a debate that is picking up force: Should the US involve the UN now, in Iraq, and elsewhere. In Liberia? Consider how much easier America8217;s job would be in Iraq, if only it were seen to be more on the right side of international law, Anne Marie Slaughter was being pragmatic in NEWSWEEK. In TIME, Michael Elliott was ready with a division of labour. He advocated an 8216;8216;improved version8217;8217; of the 8216;8216;model8217;8217; the international community stumbled on in Sierra Leone three years ago. When 8216;8216;A ragtag multinational UN mission policed relatively peaceful areas of the nation, while an independent British force outside UN command crushed a rebellion with efficient gusto.8217;8217;

Oriental Speak

The key element that holds great modern empires together, wrote Edward Said in Egypt8217;s AL AHRAM WEEKLY, is not military power, but the imperial perspective, 8216;8216;that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it to one8217;s gaze, constructing its history from one8217;s own point of view 8217;8217;.

The American perspective is so incompetent and ideological, Said lamented again this week. Because generations of Americans have come to see the Arab world mainly as a dangerous place, where terrorism and religious fanaticism is spawned. 8216;8216;The distortions of imperial perspectives produce further distortions in Middle Eastern society that prolong suffering and induce extreme forms of resistance and political self-assertion8217;8217;.

Also this week, the GUARDIAN wondered whether anyone is counting the Iraqi dead. America agonises over its losses, but Iraq8217;s military dead are unnumbered. And it is left to unofficial researchers, such as the Iraq Body Count, to estimate the civilian deaths, 8216;8216;conservatively in excess of 5,0008217;8217;.