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Miliband’s
ballistics Mother
and child |
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Quiet
flows dirt
Islamic
factor in Pakistan
Soft and
low
Tired
comparisons Uniform marriage laws
required Economic pundit case
roils Koreans
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Mother and child
THE governments, both Central and state, have been proclaiming time and again that health and education are their top priority. But the latest UNICEF State of the World Children report once more proves that India faces a major challenge in healthcare. Its record in treating mothers and children, the most vulnerable section of the population, seems most disheartening. According to the report, India loses nearly one million neonates annually. About 78,000 women die due to pregnancy and childbirth complications. The track record of UP is predictably the worst. UP’s maternal mortality rate, the maximum in the country, puts it at par with Sudan. What is shocking is that a majority of the neonatal and maternal deaths can be prevented. The Government of India's Integrated Child Development Scheme, the local NGOs, CARE and USAID have been trying to reduce infant mortality and child malnutrition in several Indian states. The government has also taken steps to increase public awareness on the importance of neonatal care. In the newborn week, November 15-21, information regarding woman's health, importance of nutrition, vaccination, antenatal and newborn care is spread through the media and public meetings. Yet, India falls way behind the Millennium Development Goals on both the maternal and neonatal mortality. The pursuit of Safe Motherhood has not yielded the same desirable results in developing nations like India as in the developed world. Since the institutional delivery rate in India is rather poor, undisputedly there is an urgent need to step up institutional deliveries. There is also an equally pressing requirement to train midwives to ensure safe deliveries at home. The health programmes have to lay emphasis on recognising mother and child as a single entity that deserves care. Only a healthy mother can give birth to a healthy baby. Contributory factors like poor education, low socio-economic status and malnutrition too need to be addressed. In a nation that has begun to boast of medical tourism, ironically healthcare for all, especially the rural poor still remains a distant dream. |
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Quiet flows dirt
ONCE again, The Tribune has focussed on the ceaseless contamination of Budha Nullah through an exhaustive three-part report. The Punjab and Haryana High Court, too, is seized of the matter. In November last, the court had directed the Punjab Pollution Control Board to shut the 35 dyeing units which discharge their untreated effluents into the nullah. The board reportedly asked the Punjab State Electricity Board to cut power supply to the erring units. Till date nothing has happened. The polluting industrial units are functioning as usual. It is true that the establishment of effluent treatment plants requires money, which is difficult to arrange for a recession-hit industry and the cash-strapped state government. Equally true, the closure of industrial units along Budha Nullah would cause mass dislocation and loss of jobs, but continuing with the status quo is causing immense harm at a much larger scale. Residents of Ludhiana and villages along the nullah pay a heavy price for no fault of theirs. Their life is shortened by diseases caused by the toxic water of once pristine Budha Nullah. The impure water is used for irrigating the fields, thus contaminating even fruits and vegetables consumed by the public at large. Tests have shown the presence of heavy metals in ground water too. Such is the clout of the industry in the Akali Dal-led coalition government that no official, big or small, dare touch any polluter, notwithstanding the incalculable loss to human life, public outcry through the media and the unusual but appreciable judicial activism. When the High Court warned the pollution board functionaries of serious trouble as it “was a clear case of bribery”, the board counsel had denied the bribery charge but admitted to “pressures from the top”. Politicians are hand in glove with the industry. Since media campaigns and court orders do not seem to stir politicians into action, Ludhiana’s residents should use the weapon of votes to stamp out all opposition to Operation Cleanup. |
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This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen. — Lancelot Hogben |
Islamic factor in Pakistan
Pakistan
is in trouble and so is India’s Pakistan diplomacy. India’s demand to return fugitives to Indian justice or to try them in Pakistan has been rebuffed. Indian claims that evidence exists of complicity of “elements in Pakistan” in the recent Mumbai attacks is considered vague and lacking as “firm evidence” by President Zardari. New Delhi’s emphasis thus far has on diplomatic action to mobilise Pakistan and the international community but this approach is faulty because it does not address the character of the Pakistan problem which has spawned terrorism. Without dealing with the cause the symptom cannot be dealt with in a proper manner. The problem of Pakistan is mainly India’s. It is not a major problem for the West or China because Pakistani terror disturbs the peace of mind of Europeans and Americans but it does not affect their economic and social wellbeing. If the Western mission fails in Iraq and Afghanistan and they walk away the Western powers will lose face, but their survival and security is not affected as long as they maintain their programmes for homeland security. The recent Mumbai attack, however, reveals that the Indian government cannot protect its citizens and foreign visitors; it cannot guarantee security for its economic assets. The problem which Pakistan poses for India is that Pakistani survival and identity depend on an expansionist and interventionist ideology and policy, and all Pakistani institutions — political leaders, civil servants, military officers, intellectuals and public opinion — since 1947 have built themselves on this core consensus. Pakistan has repeatedly tried to expand its strategic space in its neighbourhood — in Kashmir since 1947-48, in Afghanistan since the 1980s, in India’s Punjab since the 1980s, but it has repeatedly failed. Still it keeps trying. Pakistan’s consensus is to secure Indian concessions for Pakistan and its call for friendship is a tactical pose. The plea for friendly relations is an Indian mantra which is misplaced because it takes two to form a friendship. Most countries in the world seek the “best possible relations under the prevailing circumstances” and by all methods, including intervention (coercive measures short of war) and war if necessary. What is the character of the core consensus? Pakistan’s geographical and cultural core is around the Indus river valley, the Punjab-Sind area. But to preserve the core, Pakistan had to strengthen its buffers in its frontier regions - the NWFP and Balochistan, which are hard to assimilate and manage by direct administration and military rule. The Baloch plateau moves towards Iran; and the NWFP and FATA blends into Afghanistan with a porous border and ethnic commonality, and Azad Kashmir blends into the geography and politics of Pakistan’s northwestern and northern areas. The clash between Indian and Pakistani political cultures is in the plains, around the Indus valley, although the public focus is on the Kashmir dispute. Solving the Kashmir issue does not settle the war between Indian and Pakistan geo-cultural influences — either to restore Muslim glory in India or to extend Indian influence into the Pakistani heartland. Pakistan’s core consensus is that to secure its frontiers as buffers — a hard task, given the problems of geography, ethnicity and Pakistani history — strategic space must be found beyond the buffer areas. This required the mobilisation of the Islamic factor to bring together the people in the frontier areas and the buffers and to shrink the Indian sphere of socio-economic-political action in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistan can consolidate its internal geo-cultural core either by building satisfactory internal political and economic arrangements and linkages or by diverting internal pressures to its neighbourhood. Islam has been the unifying element since 1947. It was meant to do double duty - to bring together all Pakistanis and to secure strategic space in Afghanistan and in India by mobilising Islamist intervention. But the project appears to have failed because the Islamists have killed but they have failed to expand Pakistan’s geo-cultural space and now they have turned against those who organised them in the 1980s. What happened? The story begins in the early 1950s before Zia-ul-Haq’s rise as an Islamic warrior. After Jinnah’s death the Pakistan Army countered Pakistani secularism, ethnic nationalism in the frontier areas and checked those Pakistanis who flirted with ideas about democracy and neutralism in Pakistan. The Pakistan Army first encouraged the development of Islamists in the Pushtun area. With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1978-89), the Pakistan Army promoted Islamist radicals like Hekmatyar, with US and Saudi support, to dislodge the Soviet forces. In 1989 Pakistan wanted an Islamic republic in Afghanistan, which would be responsive to Pakistani direction and opposed to Indian influences. The ISI was the agency to fight the Russians and to build an Islamist Afghanistan; the Taliban came out of this approach. But the Pakistan Army-ISI approach did not go according to plan. After 1989 the Taliban rose from the ashes of an Intra-Islamist factional fight, Hekmatyar ( ISI’s man) lost, the ISI dropped him, joined with the Taliban and the Saudis. Arabs under Osama bin Laden too joined the Taliban and a new coalition emerged. The Pakistan Army-ISI-Taliban aim was to gain Kashmir, Al Qaeda-Taliban aim was to recreate the Caliphate and to bring democracy and secularism to an end in the Middle-East and South Asia. Pakistan’s core consensus was to support the first line but now the second line threatens the control over Pakistani politics by its politicians, its Army and its ISI. The Mumbai attack is based on the second line in Pakistani politics and society. Mr Zardari’s speeches reflect the first line. It is for the Pakistanis, not for the Indians and Americans, to resolve the contradiction between the two lines of social and political behaviour. In any case, against this formidable array of shifting allies that include Islamists, foreign supporters (Saudis) and the Pakistan Army-ISI-Taliban combination, and its Taliban-Al-Qaeda-frontier tribal alignments, Indian talk about friendly diplomatic relations and composite dialogue lacks leverage to turn Pakistan around to its point of view. Even if the ISI brass listens to the Pakistan Army brass, the ISI handlers are the movers and the allies of organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiyaba and other such outfits. Only a micro-analysis could reveal such ties and sources of Pakistan-based actions. Thus, the Pakistan Army and the ISI brass have plausible deniability that it is not involved because it is the handlers at the border who get people across. What should the Indian government do in these circumstances? Its options include the following. One, create a security architecture to prevent security lapses and infiltration of terrorist groups into India. As a matter of transparency and credibility it should explain why the lapses occurred and what the corrective actions are. Two, stop the composite dialogue but, in the fine tradition of Indian hospitability, provide endless cups of tea for talks, not serious discourse ( Darjeeling and Upper Assam for the guests, please!). Three, encourage the External Affairs Minister to stop talking about what Mr Zardari should do when he cannot. Four, rollback the Gujral doctrine which talked about Pakistan friendship and which rolledback the RAW operations in Pakistan. Spying is an honourable profession if it is conducted professionally, if it prevents nasty surprises, and if it is not used for domestic political purposes. Five, encourage the build-up of internal pressures within Pakistan through Balochistan and Afghanistan and cut down the release of internal pressures through bilateral talks until it is clear that Pakistanis seek a political settlement with India that rejects its historical core consensus. Just as Wall Street has to unwind its toxic portfolios, the Pakistanis need to do the same with their baggage. Treat the Pakistanis in a cool, detached manner until they work out their internal arrangements with toxic elements in Pakistan. Six, stop talking about ‘friendly relations; talk instead about the best possible relations-good or
bad. The writer is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Waterloo, Canada.
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Soft and low Young
people who indulge in the frenetic exercise in palsy that goes by the name of dancing, to the accompaniment of weird sounds produced by odd-looking instruments, should take note of the findings of a team of investigators from the ENT clinic of the University of Dusseldorf. The team recently conducted tests in 20 discotheques in a west German town and found that the sound level in four of them was between 91 and 98 decibels, which constitutes a positive danger to the human ear. Reading this report in a foreign newspaper, I was reminded of the time before World War II when one could be sure of dancing to the soft strains of an old waltz played as Strauss or Lehar had intended it to be played when they had written their immortal classics. I remember well the tea dances on Wednesday evenings at the Astoria ballroom in Connaught Circus. The bush-shirt had not made its appearance but, in any case, you wouldn’t have dreamt of wearing one to the Astoria any more than you would of walking into the Asoka Hotel in your striped pyjamas. It had to be a lounge suit at evening dances and dinner jackets on Saturday nights. Ken Mac and his crooner Beryl Templeman were the main attractions at the Astoria. Beryl was a pretty girl in a willowy, wispy sort of way. I can still picture her clinging to the mike as she sang “Good-night My Love” which was Ken’s signing-off tune. During the War she got married to a Major in the R.I.A.S.C. We were a happy crowd of swashbuckling subalterns and boisterous boxwallahs who worked hard all day and played hard after office hours. The playing part of it meant tennis at the Delhi Gymkhana, then called the “Imperial Delhi Gymkhana”, a look-in at the Astoria and finally a late dinner at the Roshanara Club at the other end of Delhi. And there was nothing bleary-eyed about us as we went to work the following morning. Life continued in much the same way in the early years of the War except that every now and again one of the group would disappear leaving an A.B.P.O address. But the winds of change were gathering force, slowly and imperceptibly at first, and then with all the noise and hustle associated with the Yanks and the defence contract-wallas who swarmed over Delhi sending prices sky-high and destroying our sense of values almost over-night. Ken Mac had moved to Bombay and a new band played at the Astoria. I remember an evening soon after the War when it broke into a “syncopated” version of the “Merry Widow” waltz. I knew, then, that the break with the past was
complete.
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Tired comparisons
It
all depends where you live. That was the geography of Israel’s propaganda, designed to demonstrate that we softies – we little baby-coddling liberals living in our secure Western homes – don’t realise the horror of 12 (now 20) Israeli deaths in 10 years and thousands of rockets and the unimaginable trauma and stress of living near Gaza. Forget the 600 Palestinian dead; travelling on both sides of the Atlantic these past couple of weeks has been an instructive – not to say weirdly repetitive – experience. Here’s how it goes. I was in Toronto when I opened the right-wing National Post and found Lorne Gunter trying to explain to readers what it felt like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. “Suppose you lived in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills,” writes Gunter, “and people from the suburb of Scarborough – about 10 kilometres away – were firing as many as 100 rockets a day into your yard, your kid’s school, the strip mall down the street and your dentist’s office...” Getting the message? It just so happens, of course, that the people of Scarborough are underprivileged, often new immigrants – many from Afghanistan – while the people of Don Mills are largely middle class with a fair number of Muslims. Nothing like digging a knife into Canada’s multicultural society to show how Israel is all too justified in smashing back at the Palestinians. Now a trip down Montreal way and a glance at the French-language newspaper La Presse two days later. And sure enough, there’s an article signed by 16 pro-Israeli writers, economists and academics who are trying to explain what it feels like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. “Imagine for a moment that the children of Longueuil live day and night in terror, that businesses, shops, hospitals, schools are the targets of terrorists located in Brossard.” Longueuil, it should be added, is a community of blacks and Muslim immigrants, Afghans, Iranians. But who are the “terrorists” in Brossard? Two days later and I am in Dublin. I open The Irish Times to find a letter from the local Israeli ambassador, trying to explain to the people of the Irish Republic what it feels like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. Know what’s coming? Of course you do. “What would you do,” Zion Evrony asks readers, “if Dublin were subjected to a bombardment of 8,000 rockets and mortars...” And so it goes on and on and on. Needless to say, I’m waiting for the same writers to ask how we’d feel if we lived in Don Mills or Brossard or Dublin and came under sustained attack from supersonic aircraft and Merkava tanks and thousands of troops whose shells and bombs tore 40 women and children to pieces outside a school, shredded whole families in their beds and who, after nearly a week, had killed almost 200 civilians out of 600 fatalities. In Ireland, my favourite journalistic justification for this bloodbath came from my old mate Kevin Myers. “The death toll from Gaza is, of course, shocking, dreadful, unspeakable,” he mourned. “Though it does not compare with the death toll amongst Israelis if Hamas had its way.” Get it? The massacre in Gaza is justified because Hamas would have done the same if they could, even though they didn’t do it because they couldn’t. It took Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times’s resident philosopher-in-chief, to speak the unspeakable. “When does the mandate of victimhood expire?” he asked. “At what point does the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews cease to excuse the state of Israel from the demands of international law and of common humanity?” I had an interesting time giving the Tip O’Neill peace lecture in Derry when one of the audience asked, as did a member of the Trinity College Dublin Historical Society a day later, whether the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace agreement – or, indeed, any aspect of the recent Irish conflict – contained lessons for the Middle East. I suggested that local peace agreements didn’t travel well and that the idea advanced by John Hume (my host in Derry) – that it was all about compromise – didn’t work since the Israeli seizure of Arab land in the West Bank had more in common with the 17th-century Irish Catholic dispossession than sectarianism in Belfast. What I do suspect, however, is that the split and near civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority has a lot in common with the division between the Irish Free State and anti-treaty forces that led to the 1922-3 Irish civil war; that Hamas’s refusal to recognise Israel – and the enemies of Michael Collins who refused to recognise the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the border with Northern Ireland – are tragedies that have a lot in common, Israel now playing the role of Britain, urging the pro-treaty men (Mahmoud Abbas) to destroy the anti-treaty men (Hamas). I ended the week in one of those BBC World Service discussions in which a guy from The Jerusalem Post, a man from al-Jazeera, a British academic and Fisk danced the usual steps around the catastrophe in Gaza. The moment I mentioned that 600 Palestinian dead for 20 Israeli dead around Gaza in 10 years was grotesque, pro-Israeli listeners condemned me for suggesting (which I did not) that only 20 Israelis had been killed in all of Israel in 10 years. Of course, hundreds of Israelis outside Gaza have died in that time – but so have thousands of Palestinians. My favourite moment came when I pointed out that journalists should be on the side of those who suffer. If we were reporting the 18th-century slave trade, I said, we wouldn’t give equal time to the slave ship captain in our dispatches. If we were reporting the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, we wouldn’t give equal time to the SS spokesman. At which point a journalist from the Jewish Telegraph in Prague responded that “the IDF are not Hitler”. Of course not. But who said they were? — By arrangement with
The Independent
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Uniform marriage laws required Now
that the hullabaloo over the conversion of Chander Mohan (Chand Mohammed) and Anuradha Bali (Fiza) and their subsequent marriage has died down, it is time to cogitate on loopholes in our legal system which this marriage has once again exposed. This is not the first that time some Hindu has embraced Islam in order to marry for a second time. Actors Dharmendra and Hema Malini also did the same and rechristened themselves as Dilawar Khan and Ayesha Bir, respectively, and got married. Later Dharmendra even contested elections with his old name and mentioned the name of his first wife as his spouse. Kishore Kumar became Abdul Kareem and married Madhubala. Such stories are galore. When the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 made bigamy among Hindus illegal, people easily found an escape route and took sanctuary in the Muslim personal law. The Supreme Court tried to plug this loophole in Sarla Mudgal v. Union when it held the second marriage of a Hindu husband after converting to Islam illegal and ordered even his prosecution under section 494 of the IPC. Though under the Muslim personal law, such marriages are not void or invalid, the apex court invalidated the second marriage keeping in view the spirit of the law. Notwithstanding the fact that the law laid down by the Supreme Court is the law of the land as per Article 141 of the Constitution, there is a glaring error in the judgment as one can be prosecuted for the bigamy under section 494 of the IPC only if the second marriage is void which is not the case under the Muslim personal law. It is understandable why no criminal case against Chander Mohan has yet been filed. The Court was aware of its handicap in the Sarla Mudgal case and so directed the government to implement the mandate of Article 44 of the Constitution, which enjoins the state to make endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India, and asked the government to file an affidavit giving details of the steps taken in this direction. Article 44 is a directive principle of the state policy, which is not justiciable. But it is again debatable whether the court can direct the government to implement it. However, it is true that men are able to take recourse to such a mischief causing extreme cruelty to their first wives only because India does not have a common civil code. Besides, India is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 1979. Thus, India is under a legal obligation to ensure gender equality. But India has hardly taken any major steps in compliance of the international laws. It openly accepted the prevalence of discrimination against women under various personal laws of different communities before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in 2000 when it said: “The personal laws of the major religious communities had traditionally governed marital and family relations with the government maintaining a policy of non-interference in such laws in the absence of a demand for change from individual religious communities.” The committee has noted that “steps have not been taken to reform the personal laws for different religious and ethnic groups in consultation with them so as to conform to the Convention”, and warned that “the government’s policy of non-interference perpetuates sexual stereotypes, son preference and discrimination against women”. The Supreme Court has been emphasising the need to have a uniform civil code since 1985 when in the famous Shah Bano case it lamented that Article 44 of the Constitution had remained “a dead letter”. It was pushed further ahead in the Sarla Mudgal case, but in Ahmedabad Women’s Action Group, the court, shedding its activist role, held that the removal of gender discrimination in personal laws fell in the domain of state policies in which the court could not interfere. The first major step towards enforcing a common civil code was taken when the Hindu Code Bill was enacted which fructified in the form of four laws: the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenace Act of 1956 and the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act of 1956. These Acts did away with the prevailing personal laws among Hindus which permitted a man to keep more than one wife, denied women the right to divorce their husbands and right to property over their ancestral property. By making bigamy for men illegal and bequeathing the right of divorce to wives men and women were brought on the same footing in one stroke. In the Hindu religion marriage is considered a sacrament (“samskara”), which brings about not merely physical union, but the union of souls, which once solemnised could not be dissolved, not only during the lifetime of spouses but even during the lives in subsequent births. However, the right of divorce altered this concept. Men did not need to divorce as they could marry any number of times if they were not satisfied, but women had no option except to suffer. Religious sentiments of different communities must be respected, but the law of marriage and divorce can be made uniform without tinkering with their personal laws much. Without it, discrimination against women cannot be stopped. |
Economic pundit case roils Koreans He
was a self-styled Internet prophet, an economic pundit who went by the name of “Minerva,” after the Roman goddess of wisdom. In blogs posted in 2008 that drew a cultlike following, he pontificated on South Korea’s ailing economy, castigated policymakers and forecast dire scenarios that many investors took to heart. He was a genius, they claimed, a mysterious inside trader with a Matt Drudge-like acumen for scoops that uncannily predicted the global economic crisis. But prosecutors say he crossed the line. His attorneys made a motion to dismiss charges that as Minerva he spread false rumors damaging to the government’s reputation in the world financial market. In a Dec. 29 posting, the online commentator wrote that the South Korean government had ordered financial institutions to stop buying U.S. dollars in order to curb the fall of the won, South Korea’s currency, against the greenback. The posting devastated the local foreign exchange market, forcing the nation’s financial authority to spend $2 billion of its reserves as the demand for dollars surged wildly, prosecutors say. Park’s arrest has pierced the Minerva mystique. He reportedly has told authorities that he had never invested in stocks nor gained financially from his postings. Park, who is unemployed, has said he briefly attended community college and never believed his writings would jeopardize his nation’s economy. “I’m not a serial killer,” he reportedly told his lawyers before the proceeding. “Frankly, I’m scared. It’s scary that I should talk with my hands handcuffed.” The arrest also has triggered a fierce debate here over freedom of expression in South Korea. Park’s supporters insist he was a blogger expressing his opinions and that the charges against him jeopardize the integrity of the nation’s Internet culture. Prosecutors counter that the government needs to bring more accountability to Internet postings. Last year, a well-known South Korean actress committed suicide after what police called an act of cyberterrorism. Choi Jin-sil hanged herself amid a barrage of Internet postings claiming that she lent large amounts of money to an actor who took his own life. Park Chan-jong, a former South Korean National Assembly member who is representing Park Dae-sung, said the two cases are different because his client was expressing his opinion online and was not engaged in personal attacks. Debate over the two cases comes at a time when government officials are pushing to introduce new clauses in communication laws to enforce harsher punishment for “cyber-insults.” The country also is preparing to extend an existing law that requires Internet service providers to confirm Social Security numbers and the real names of users. The Internet is deeply ingrained in South Korean society, where nine of 10 households have access to cheap broadband. The nation’s computer usage is among the highest in the world, with each user online an average of 34 hours a month, according to a 2007 survey. Police say the arrest of the man alleged to be Minerva has led to additional cases of cyber-hostility. The Seoul judge who issued the warrant for Park’s arrest was the victim of an Internet assault in which his picture, birth date and academic background were published online with demands for his impeachment, they say. And a radio talk show host who in January dismissed Minerva as a “fortune teller” was deluged with 1,000 e-mails, many of them attacking the host. Experts say such responses are predictable in the Internet age. “It is a phenomenon that happens not only in South Korea but globally,” said Chun Sang-chin, a sociology professor at Sogang University. “Minerva shows ordinary citizens’ uprising against elite leaders.” The government is increasingly sensitive to negative reports on the economy, one of the hardest hit in Asia by the global financial crisis. The won’s value fell 28 percent last year. One survey said 60 percent of 640 corporate leaders, lawyers and academics queried supported the legal action against Minerva. Others say officials are going too far. Analysts say they have been under pressure not to voice negative views on the economy as a result of the case. Park told the Los Angeles Times that his client became obsessed with the economy after a friend’s father committed suicide during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. He saw his postings as a way to help ordinary citizens. — By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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