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Word Count: 300

Maybe we're finally getting somewhere. Yesterday's announcement that the Federal Reserve and four other central banks are offering a new way for banks to borrow is the kind of creative regulatory plumbing we've been waiting to see in this credit imbroglio.

While news reports described this as one more "liquidity" injection, it is important to distinguish yesterday's move from the overall ...

Dec 13, 2007 04:30 AM

Like most Canadian teenagers, Aqsa Parvez just wanted to grow up her own way, hanging out with her friends, dressing like them and pushing her curfew. Her tragic death this week, allegedly at her father's hands in the family home in Mississauga, has shocked our community to the core, and has also highlighted the cross-generational and cross-cultural pressures that many families face.

Yesterday Aqsa's father, Muhammad Parvez was remanded in custody and is expected to be charged with killing his 16-year-old daughter. His son Waqas faces a charge of obstructing police in connection with the investigation into his sister's death. He was remanded in custody for a bail hearing Friday.

The courts will ultimately judge innocence and guilt, and whether this was a cultural dispute rooted in Aqsa's desire to wear tight-fitting clothes and remove her hijab, the Muslim head scarf, or in some other as-yet-unknown factors. The police have said little, and there is now a publication ban on the legal proceedings.

But whatever the facts, Aqsa's friends believe that a culture clash was playing itself out in the Parvez family before her death, which contributed to the other, inevitable strains that any immigrant family faces. The family came from Pakistan, and the parents are religious.

Reacting to that perception, thoughtful community figures such as Atiya Ahsan of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women have been quick to urge Muslim parents to take an understanding approach to their teenage children, to focus on the core values of their faith and not to obsess over a piece of clothing.

"If you know that your girl is good and she practises her faith ... then for heaven's sakes, you know, let the girl have a chance," she says. That would be good advice for any family.

And leading Muslim groups such as the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Social Services Association and the Islamic Society of Toronto are all urging "zero tolerance" for domestic abuse and violence against women.

Moreover, family violence is not a "Muslim issue," in any narrow sense. Or even an "immigrant issue." It is a deeply rooted problem in our society, regardless of race, religion or length of time in Canada.

Families that are relatively new to Canada may well face extra pressures – adapting to different lifestyles, cultural expectations, workplace demands, languages and the like. Sometimes, kids can feel trapped between two worlds. But families everywhere struggle to work through generational issues.

It is easy to find cases of conflict between parents and teens in families that have been here for generations, who do not profess any particular religion, and who share common cultural values. And occasionally, such conflicts spill over into violence, with tragic results.

Our challenge as a society is to ensure that young people such as Aqsa know where to go in order to get help when they need it. The schools play a critical role. So do community centres and clinics. Counselling and other services must be available for their parents, as well. Too often, resources are strained and underfunded.

And society as a whole must at every opportunity reinforce the message that coercion and violence have no place in the family, or anywhere else in our community. Preachers, teachers, physicians and other leaders have a duty to drive home the point that values are best lived, not imposed by force.

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Lucy Kellaway
December 13, 2007

Last week, for the first time in many years, I had a big, shouty, stand-up row with a colleague at work. It started off quite small, as these things often do. But then he accused me of being sloppy. I accused him of trying to cover something up. The two of us stood in the middle of a large, open-plan office and let rip. His complexion was deepest crimson and so was mine.

From my point of view he was intransigent, patronising and utterly insufferable. From his point of view - and I'm guessing here - I was superior, sarcastic and utterly toxic. So we fought for a bit and later, trembling with rage, I returned to my desk.

The conventional view is that rage at work is bad, as well as being mad and dangerous. A Gallup poll in the US showed that one in five office workers has been so furious with a colleague in the past six months that they would have liked to hit the other person.

* Leaders in need of a good idea

But the true picture is more complicated than that. There is good rage and bad rage. Someone who gets angry all the time is impossible to work with. But for the rest of us, occasional bursts of anger, especially if performed with panache, have much to be said for them.

My rage attack had two advantages. First, it was a gift to everyone else. Humdrum office life was briefly interrupted with a little drama. Eyes popped, and suddenly there was something to whisper about at the coffee machine. It was also good for me as it got my blood coursing agreeably through my veins.

* Reasons for being miserable at work

Companies have got themselves into a muddle over anger. On one hand they tell us to feel passionate about our work. On the other they expect us to be professional at all times - which means keeping our negative emotions under lock and key. Passionate and professional strike me as odd bedfellows.

Actually, I've never really gone along with the idea of passion at work. I've looked the word up in the dictionary and it means: a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Jesus at the crucifixion. Neither of these quite captures the mood of the average white-collar worker.

However, if what passion means is minding about work, I'm all for it. The trouble is that minding means sometimes feeling furious when things don't go according to plan.

Indeed, for me work is one long rage opportunity - starting with the fact that the machine that dispenses hot water for tea is on the blink. Clearly some management of rage is in order, and here is what the experts usually suggest.

Their first tip is to breathe. I've never been able to see what the big deal about breathing is. It keeps me alive, but that's as far as it goes.

Their second is "positive self-talk" - to squash your negative feelings and give the other person the benefit of the doubt. This is dodgy advice. Why should I give my patronising colleague the benefit of the doubt when he was so clearly in the wrong? The very thought make me much crosser than I was before.

The third tip is forgiveness. Again, no dice: I don't forgive the water machine and I don't forgive my colleague.

The reason this advice is so hopeless is that it is trying to eliminate anger. Instead, what we all need advice on is how to do anger better. My outburst last week could have been improved on. The first problem is that I don't get angry at work often enough, so last week's row was too shocking to my system. Once every 10 years is too little. Once every 10 minutes is too much. The ideal might be about once every couple of months.

The next problem was that I didn't end it properly. Afterwards I sought the advice of a pugnacious colleague. He said I should send an e-mail saying: "Don't ever speak to me like that again, and I demand an apology at once."

I rejected this because such e-mails are not my style. My style is more to nurse a lifelong grudge (and possibly write a column about it). Which approach is better? Clearly the pugnacious one is. My problem was that I was an anger wimp and didn't follow through.

Apologies all round are a good way of ending it. A fairly senior woman I know often has bad-tempered outbursts but always says a large and generous sorry afterwards. She reckons (and she may be right) that the effect of a furious shout followed by an apology often leaves her victim marginally better disposed to her than before the rage attack.

There are other principles for good anger. It is almost never good to shout at a subordinate. Mine was a row of equals. Second, however angry you are don't let it spill out of control. Throwing the computer keyboard is not advisable as it makes you look an idiot and then your computer doesn't work, making you crosser still.

If you are small and male, anger is to be avoided. A man under 5' 7" who loses it at work just looks comic. This isn't fair, but that's the way it goes.

The people who worry me most at work are not the people who get angry but the ones who never do. A calm man I knew in my teens once told me: never lose your temper, it makes you look weak. He had a catastrophic nervous breakdown in his mid-20s, poor man, and is now in sheltered accommodation in Arizona.

* Secret science of persuasion

Word Count: 715

There are bad ideas to address the mortgage meltdown, and then there are ideas so awful that they even have Democrats rebelling against their powerful House chairmen.

Such is the case with the mortgage bankruptcy bill passed yesterday by John Conyers's House Judiciary Committee. We warned in October about this legislation, which would allow bankruptcy judges to treat mortgage debt the same as credit-card debt. It sounds like a great idea to troubled borrowers, because judges could then reduce the amount that a borrower owes on a mortgage -- while letting the owner keep the property.

It's less great for ...

Higher education is about to change as elite universities decide what to do with their huge endowments.

BY FAY VINCENT
Thursday, December 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

On Monday Harvard said that next year it will substantially increase its financial aid to middle-class students, bringing its actual tuition costs down to or even below that of some state universities. This is possible because of Harvard's--and other universities'--growing financial success, and it is a signal of far-reaching changes that will ripple throughout higher education.

Superb investment returns have been generated by managers of the endowments of some of the elite private universities, including Harvard, Yale, and even of small liberal arts colleges like Amherst and Williams. The endowments of these four institutions range from $1.7 billion at Amherst to $35 billion at Harvard, and the investment managers are getting annual returns well in excess of 20%. This is more than the alumni of any of those institutions could possibly contribute, and by an enormous margin.

In 1970, when I became a trustee of Williams, the endowment stood at about $35 million. Even using constant dollars, the growth in the endowment since then has been astonishing. At June 30, 2007 it had reached approximately $1.9 billion.

Much (but not all) of this growth is due to the major diversification in the investment mixture adopted by trustees of these schools, who realized some 30 years ago that sticking with the ancient formulae of stocks and bonds was no longer prudent. The change came about because the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett, persuaded Grinnell College in 1976 to invest some $13 million in a local TV station that he had identified as a golden opportunity.

Before then, boards at such places worried that nontraditional investments might raise legal issues, or subject them to criticism from alumni. But when the Buffett suggestion turned into a significant windfall of some $36 million for Grinnell in about five years, the rest of the endowment world got the point. I once asked Warren if he had planned to cause such a major switch in strategy. He assured me he had not. "I just saw it as a good buy," he said.

Now, however, these enormous endowments are beginning to raise some fascinating issues for all of higher education. The most obvious issue is whether these schools can seriously claim to have any further need for donations from alumni and friends.

And if, as seems likely, there is much less need for additional giving, does that not mean the administrations of these institutions can operate without the traditional checks and balances of informed alumni? The boards and administrations of the well-endowed schools can safely and proudly proclaim their independence.

In the past, it would have been impossible to ignore alumni. Perhaps an early indication of what I am raising is the recent tussle at Dartmouth over the number of trustees the alumni will be permitted to elect. There the administration has instituted a by-law change that will result in an increase in the number of trustees to be elected by the board, thereby decreasing the power of the alumni.

In the present circumstances, the administration and boards of these schools now control the money because the endowment is managed by internally controlled entities. Accordingly, the most important voice at Yale would have to be the estimable and much-respected David Swenson, who has managed the Yale endowment to astonishing annual returns of over 20% for 10 years. Yale's endowment is about $22.5 billion. What does this mean for the future of governance at Yale? I wonder.

Similarly, these powerful investment returns will change tuition pricing and financial aid--and not just at Harvard. A scholar who follows these matters closely recently told me that he anticipates that the elite private colleges and universities will, in the not-too-distant future, stop charging tuition to any student whose annual family income is below the top 5% of all American families--currently around $200,000.

We already have seen a competition among these schools as of late, with "Free to $30,000" replaced by "Free to $40,000" and now "Free to $60,000." In fact, a recent announcement at Phillips Exeter Academy, that they are offering a free boarding school education to admitted students whose families earn $75,000 or less, raised the stakes for higher education.

If a "Free to $200,000" policy were to be enacted at my alma mater, Williams College, it would cost them only something like $15 million in net tuition revenue out of an operating budget of $200 million. At Harvard, the percentage contribution would be even less. Given the endowment performance at places like Williams and Harvard, they could easily adjust to the loss in tuition revenue. But what about all the lesser-endowed schools that are much more heavily dependant on tuition to maintain their financial stability? How can Fairfield University--where I have served as a trustee--possibly forego tuition to that extent?

What this means is that the cost of the educational Mercedes will be less than the educational Ford. And when Harvard is cheaper than Fairfield, how can Fairfield increase tuition each year, when it will no longer have the umbrella of similar tuition increases being announced by places like Williams and Yale?

I suspect many of us have viewed a four-year college education as a commodity that is priced within a reasonably narrow range. In the past, the Fairfield cost was close to that at Williams. If, as is likely, the big guys drop tuition for all but the richest students, all this will change.

There is another aspect of the financial aid universe that will be affected by these changes in pricing. Currently, there are universities and colleges granting what are known as "merit scholarships." These are financial grants to students who have no demonstrated need.

The Ivies, and many well-endowed institutions, profess only to grant aid based on need. But in the present circumstances, merit grants are being used to tempt talented students away from the Ivies. Some students accept these grants, and decline admission offers at the very elite schools in order to save money for graduate school costs. Thus, Harvard and Williams may be losing attractive students for largely financial reasons. In those cases, the merit offers make money a solid reason to go to a school down the food chain.

If, as is likely, the big guys drop tuition, all this will change, too. And who can blame the elites for using what they have the most of--money and huge endowments.

Because there are so few of these super-rich schools, the effects of their changes in policies will be felt slowly. But like the change in investment strategy Warren Buffett innocently suggested some 30 years ago, the size and growth of their endowments will have significant and not easily anticipated consequences. The ripples of moves made in Cambridge and New Haven will be widely felt.

Mr. Vincent, a former commissioner of Major League Baseball, is the author of "The Only Game in Town: Baseball Stars of the 1930s and 1940s Talk About the Game They Loved" (Simon & Schuster, 2006), the first in a multivolume oral-history project.

It’s not been two months since sex symbol Pamela Anderson and Rick Salomon got married, but they are all set to do a reality show.
Sources have revealed that the couple is developing a reality series for the E! network that will bring viewers inside their whirlwind lifestyle.
"Think Nick and Jessica's show [MTV's Newlyweds], but with a lot more sex and a crazier family life,” Us Weekly quoted the source, as saying.
Anderson recently said of her marriage, "We're in every night. Having sex."
The couple got married on Oct. 6 after dating for just over a month 40-year-old
Anderson is the mother of two sons (Brandon, 11, and Dylan, 9) from her marriage with rocker Tommy Lee.
However Salomon is best known for producing and starring in a 2003 sex tape with ex-girlfriend Paris Hilton.
Sources have revealed that the show is slated to debut in 2008.
“These two don’t have any boundaries, which is perfect for reality stars,” says a source of Anderson.
Earlier, the curvy actress’ honeymoon footage with ex Tommy Lee was turned into a porn video.

Dec 13 2007 by Delme Parfitt, South Wales Echo

IT would be patronising to conclude that the stormy Paris conditions acted as a leveller in Cardiff Blues’ near miss against French giants Stade Francais last weekend.

Yet cynics of the Arms Park revival may still put the theory forward, especially as Stade also capitulated against Bristol in heavy wind and rain on the second weekend of this season’s tournament.

However, anyone who watches the Blues regularly will know that they are never more at home than when the conditions favour putting some air on the ball.

And head coach Dai Young confirmed that the hosts are hoping to have the sun on their backs on Saturday when the pool favourites visit the Arms Park for the pivotal return match – even though that’s just how the French like it too.

“The way we like playing is with the ball in our hands and at a high tempo,” said Young.

“In our last two matches at Bath and in Paris, the weather has forced us to change approach and I think we have shown we can play it both ways.

“We’ll stand toe-to-toe with any team no matter what the conditions.

“But we want to play a fast and mobile game.

“Stade Francais have players who are fast and skilful and will want to do the same.

“That’s fine by us.

“There was some surprise that we ran Stade close out there, but we were the only ones who weren’t surprised.

“We were confident we could do a job and it is good that we have taken something from both our away games so far.

“That said, there’s no question of us rejoicing in defeat.

“All we did was answer a few questions about what we can do.

“Maybe we would have accepted a losing bonus point beforehand but after the game there were mixed emotions because we had a strong feeling that we should have won it.”

Saturday’s clash with the French has been dubbed as D-Day by the Stade management, who are clearly viewing it in the same way as the Blues – a must-win affair.

The hosts will go into it without fly-half Nicky Robinson who was due to have scans today to discover the extent of the thigh injury he aggravated on Sunday.

Youngster Dai Flanagan takes his place at number 10, and Young has no qualms about the former Ponty player whatsoever.

“Is it the biggest game of his career? We seem to be saying that every time he plays,” said Young. “But in fairness he has been with us 12 to 18 months now and he has enough experience to handle this.

“I just want him to go out there, do his best and enjoy himself.

“We are certainly confident he can do the business.

“Dai’s not let us down yet and I don’t feel there’s any reason for us to worry about him.”

Cardiff Blues (v Stade Francais, h): B Blair; J Roberts, T Shanklin, G Thomas, T James; D Flanagan, J Spice; G Jenkins, G Williams, T Filise; D Jones, P Tito; M Molitika, R Sowden-Taylor, X Rush (c). Reps: J Yapp, R Thomas, S Morgan, A Powell, M Williams, R Rees, J Robinson.

delme.parfitt@mediawales.co.uk

Iowa's January caucuses finally arrive for a face-weary electorate.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, December 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

The Iowa caucuses are in earshot, so naturally one's thoughts turn to fairy tales. Joy comes from entering the fairy-tale world only if one chooses to believe. Oz worked only so long as the locals believed the Wizard was real. Which means we're in Iowa now, with Huck, Hillary, Obama, Oprah, Rudy, Mitt and all the political dreams that money and muscle can muster.

Three weeks from today, Jan. 3, while you're watching the FedEx Orange Bowl between Kansas and Virginia Tech, Iowa's most politicized citizens will caucus and vote. When they're done, we'll know whether Mike Huckabee really has become the Wizard of Iowa.

As we all know too well, it's been a long, hard slog. During Mitt Romney's visit to the Journal's offices last month, he told us, with pride, that he'd done 462 events in Iowa and New Hampshire this year. More than a few eyes widened at the thought. Last weekend even Hillary's mom campaigned for her in Iowa, and Oprah was somewhere else in the state for Barack. A few days ago, Bill Clinton was in Ames, where he said that years ago he told Hillary to dump him so she could run for office. "I thought it would be wrong for me to rob her of the chance to be what I thought she should be," the former president said. "She laughed and said, 'First, I love you and, second, I'm not going to run for anything, I'm too hardheaded.' "

You have to ask yourself: No matter how many times Iowans have been down this path, what can they make of it all? What can anyone make of it?

Iowa matters. After nigh a year of magic bus tours through the state by the presidentially ambitious and after the Jan. 3 caucuses finish the most arcane voting game on the planet, two people will have won Iowa and most of the rest will be gagging down their losses. If Huck beats Mitt, Mitt's campaign is an empty husk. If Barack comes a close second to Hillary's dream team (this first-name game will be elaborated on in a moment), then he'll have the Iowa caucus's famous second-fiddle momentum, which carried Iowa second-place finishers George McGovern to the party nomination in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976.

If you were an Iowan, what would be the basis for your vote that frosty night? Would you vote the man, gender, pigment or an issue? Nonstop across nearly the whole of 2007, the candidates and our ever-malleable political "system" have thrown all of these at the American electorate, hoping some of it will stick. For most of the year, Barack Obama has tried to prevent the inevitable Hillary ascension by running as a reasonable, intelligent young man. With the clock running down, Team Obama decided to throw Oprah the length of the field. Who knows, it might work.

Gallup a few days ago reported what its polls say are on people's mind. The war in Iraq remains No. 1, at 36%, with the interest level then dropping by half to 16% for the economy. Immigration, the great GOP catfight, is said to be at only 10% for the general population. A Washington Post poll yesterday put the economy at 44%, the war at 37% and, oh yes, immigration, at 10%.

There is a plausible school of thought in our politics which says that most voters wait until the final week to look out the window, discern what strikes them as important, check out the candidates, press the two pieces--issues and candidates--against the template of their own beliefs, and vote.

This is probably as good a way as any to run a democracy. But politics risks turning to glue if the voters' moment of decision is preceded by nearly 100 weeks of constant campaigning. Like wary Olympic cyclists pedaling side by side around the velodrome, these front-runners aren't going to get out in front of the pack with a strong theme or issue. With a race this long, the whole world could change. Ask the Democrats. They thought they'd ride into the White House aboard one issue--national disaffection over Iraq. That's not going to happen. Now what?

Afraid that a turn in the economy, a terrorist bomb or an October (2008) surprise will turn a commitment way back when into an embarrassment 14 months later, most of the candidates are running campaigns more or less about nothing. Hillary Clinton is especially famous for having no set opinion about anything, other than that it's all George Bush's fault. There was palpable excitement as Fred Thompson's candidacy rumbled down the runway. But now that he's aloft, few can make out what he's about, other than joining most of the other Republican candidates to pistol-whip the Mexicans occasionally. Rudy Giuliani published a piece in The Wall Street Journal Dec. 3, "The Meaning of Fiscal Conservatism," a correct, but careful, tour d'horizon. As an astute friend described the piece, "It was without a galvanizing theme, to put it kindly." The Huckabee Fair Tax and the Thompson voluntary flat tax are more punch-list talking points than a defining, core commitment.

With the issues seen by these long campaigns as mercurial or dangerous, what does one run on for a year, or two years?

Yourself.

In an age in which media and marketing sell everything else as celebrity or self, there is logic in reducing one's campaign to biography. Nearly all these candidates want to be on a first-name basis with the nation. The Washington Post currently has a series running each day on the candidates in which one of the articles is done by the paper's fashion writer ("How He Looks"). Why not? It's a perfect fit for the shape of our politics now.

Voters will play the hand they've been dealt, and at last with Iowa the big moment has arrived. We should all be pumped. But the press reports disinterest and waning enthusiasm for the candidates. Before a single vote is cast, much of the electorate is experiencing issues fatigue and face fatigue. Hillary most of all didn't need this much face time with the voters. No one does.

Let's not do this two-year run again. Here's how: Dump the federal campaign-finance law, which forces candidates to raise millions in $2,300 dribs and drabs. That is why they've been running since last winter. The campaign isn't about us. It's designed as a sales pitch. It's about their fund-raising imperative. The result: Mike Huckabee may win Iowa in large part because he gives people a good laugh.

Not funny.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

Why Harvard costs so much.

Thursday, December 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

Harvard University got some nice press this week by announcing it will reduce tuition for middle-class families. It already allows students whose parents earn less than $60,000 a year to attend Harvard free. Now it promises that families making up to $180,000 will pay no more than 10% of their annual income to finance the $45,600 that a year in Cambridge now costs.

Drew Gilpin Faust, the school's new president, said the policy is designed to help families facing "increasing pressures as middle-class lives have become more stressed." Before applauding Harvard's altruism too loudly, however, readers should know that the school also had its back against a wall. In September, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley held hearings on whether colleges should be forced to spend a higher percentage of their endowments each year.

While private foundations have been required for decades to shell out 5% of their total assets annually, universities decide for themselves and average close to 4%. The difference may seem small, but the money at stake is very large. Harvard's endowment is $35 billion, and growing, with implications that Fay Vincent illuminates nearby. Mr. Grassley wants to know why rich schools don't spend more of their money to reduce ballooning tuition.

When the hearings began, Kevin Casey, the senior director of federal and state relations at Harvard, told the Crimson student newspaper that "it may not be the best thing for Congress to dictate the formulas by which financial aid and endowment spend-out should be connected." Mr. Casey is right. But given the hundreds of millions of dollars that the university receives from the government each year, Senators inevitably start to think that Harvard's business is their business.

Ironically, these government handouts are creating the tuition problem. Tuition has risen about three percentage points faster than inflation every year for the past quarter-century. At the same time, the feds have put more and more money behind student loans and other financial aid. The government is slowly becoming a third-party tuition payer, with all the price distortions one would expect. Every time tuition rises, the government makes up the difference; colleges thus cheerfully raise tuition (and budgets), knowing the government will step in.

As a result, "colleges have little incentive to cut costs," says economist Richard Vedder, the author of "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much." Mr. Vedder explains that there are now twice as many university administrators per student as there were in the 1970s. Faculty members are paid more to teach fewer hours, and colleges have turned their campuses into "country clubs." Princeton's new $136 million dorm, according to BusinessWeek, has "triple-glazed mahogany casement windows made of leaded glass" and "the dining hall boasts a 35-foot ceiling gabled in oak and a 'state of the art servery,' " whatever a servery is.

Our financial-aid system also hurts middle-class applicants. Parents who have saved money for their child's tuition quickly find that, by the strange calculus of financial aid, they are charged more for college tuition than if they had blown their savings on a bigger house. Mr. Vedder wonders why universities should get to ask the income of their students before telling them how much they'll be charged. That sounds like price discrimination: If a car dealer tried to make you fill out the form students have to fill out for financial aid, he notes, "you'd run to a consumer protection agency."

So is college still worth it? Though academic standards have certainly fallen, college graduates still, on average, make about twice as much over the course of their lifetimes as people with only a high school diploma. So if the government got out of the higher education business, a lot of families might decide to make the sacrifice anyway, even without the tuition aid. But they might also decide that they can live without the mahogany windows.

www.chinaview.cn 2007-12-13 06:08:31




U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill (R) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) (2nd R) are met by reporters after Hill gave a closed-door briefing on the Six-Party Talks on North Korea to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the Capitol in Washington, Dec. 12, 2007.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill (R) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) (2nd R) are met by reporters after Hill gave a closed-door briefing on the Six-Party Talks on North Korea to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the Capitol in Washington, Dec. 12, 2007.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
Photo Gallery>>>

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- The United States said Wednesday that it hopes the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) will keep its promise and disclose all its nuclear activities by the end of this year.

"We are hopeful that we will have the complete declaration provided by around the year end," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill said.

The DPRK is making progress in disabling its nuclear facility, Hill said.

U.S. President George W. Bush, in a letter to DPRK leader Kim Jong-Il last week, called on the DPRK to disclose all its nuclear activities. The United States has insisted that the DPRK has not so far explained the status of its nuclear program to U.S. satisfaction.

This was the first time for Bush to directly communicate with the DPRK since he took office.

It is widely regarded that the letter marked an apparent shift of attitude by Bush toward the DPRK, a country once he branded as one of the "axis of evil."

The six-party talks held in Beijing in February reached a nuclear deal, in which the DPRK agreed to disable its nuclear reactor and declare all nuclear programs and facilities by the end of this year to pave the way for dismantlement next year.

Editor: Mu Xuequan

December 12, 2007: 08:05 PM EST

Dec. 13, 2007 (Investor's Business Daily delivered by Newstex) --

Blinkx, founded in 2004 by Suranga Chandratillake, has cataloged -- and thus made searchable -- more than 18 million hours of online video, perhaps the most of anyone.

The Blinkx video search engine is based on technology conceived and nurtured at Cambridge University over some dozen years. Besides making all that video available at Blinkx.com, the company's technology is used to power video search at Ask.com and others.

Chandratillake recently spoke with IBD about video trends.

IBD: How much video is on the Internet today?

Chandratillake: Nobody knows for sure, but the growth rate is certainly explosive. We search the Web for video, using speech recognition and visual analysis, and then index the data. At the end of 2006, we had indexed around 3 to 4 million hours of video. By April, that had grown to 7 million hours, and we're now at 18 million. We believe we have the single largest index of all video on the Web, but even we don't think we have all of it. It could only be half of what's out there.

IBD: Does your video search differ from other such products?

Chandratillake: People have typically applied traditional text search when looking for video, but that is only reading words tagged around the video, like the title and summary. That's like judging a book by its cover.

Blinkx is different because we actually open the book. We watch the video and listen to it, using speech recognition software to analyze the words being spoken and visual analyses to understand what's happening within the video frame by frame. We pull out a lot more information on what the video is really all about. So when a user comes along to Blinkx, they can search for any topic they want and we can find very precisely and objectively videos that match that.

IBD: Is your technology used by other Web sites?

Chandratillake: Yes. Some of our big-name users are Ask.com, Real Network's RealPlayer, Lycos and InfoSpace. (NASDAQ:INSP) A number of these very large Web sites have video search that's powered by Blinkx. Those sites are able to monetize that service by placing advertising in and around the videos, and they share that revenue with Blinkx.

IBD: What is the ideal ad platform for video?

Chandratillake: We have an agnostic viewpoint 14 that. We have an ad platform that's called AdHoc that can match a video to ads that are about the same topic. When you can target people that way, the advertisers are happy to pay a higher rate because they know their ads are being played in a relevant context. We can work on multiple ad-delivery platforms.

IBD: Do you agree with eMarketer, which says online video ad revenue will grow from $775 million this year to $4.3 billion in 2011?

Chandratillake: That is one of the more conservative forecasts. Forrester Research (NASDAQ:FORR) recently put out numbers that are higher than that.

IBD: How many video Web sites are there?

Chandratillake: The last time we checked, we knew of at least 400 such sites. Some of them are huge, like YouTube, Crackle and Veoh, but many are very much smaller and it's questionable if they can continue to exist. Many of them have a lot of overlap of content and users, and over time I wouldn't be surprised if some of them merge. Advertisers will very happily pay high rates for professional content, but not for user-generated content.

IBD: So, is the market overcrowded across the board?

Chandratillake: In some areas, yes, but not overall. In professional media, it's still pretty sparse. There are a number of big shows you can watch online, but the reality is you have better programming on the TV than online. But the big networks are starting to put more things online, and more is coming.

IBD: What influence has the flood of user-generated content had?

Chandratillake: The costs of producing and distributing media have been so high traditionally that only a very small number could take part in that process. And only a tiny minority has ever made it big in Hollywood. The Internet has changed that market entirely because you can now very cheaply produce and distribute your own content. Content creation had always been a stacked market controlled by a small number of companies or people. The Internet is changing the perception of what media is good and what's not good.

IBD: Is the Internet, technologywise, in good enough shape to handle this explosion in video?

Chandratillake: It's not currently capable of delivering the video that will be coming five years down the road, but the Internet is not a fixed thing. It's always growing and expanding. It's capable of sustaining the experience we're talking about.

IBD: What about the emergence of high-definition video on the Web?

Chandratillake: I think that will happen in the next year or two.

Published: 13 December 2007

The latest joke about the prospective new England manager: how does Fabio Capello solve the Lampard-Gerrard conundrum? Answer: drop both of them.

The tough guy is coming and, so the wisdom goes, the more ruthless Don Fabio is with our underachieving national team, the better. We like the fact he talks English like some growling long-lost relative of the Sopranos because there is an old rule of popular opinion that any new England manager should be the polar opposite to what went before him.

Check the recent history. Kevin Keegan was the players' friend, brought in to appease those whose feelings had been hurt by Glenn Hoddle's aloofness. Sven Goran Eriksson was the balm to the frenetic Keegan reign, the detached Swede to calm the ship after what Gary Neville once called the "dark days". Six years of Eriksson and everyone had decided they were fed up with Johnny Foreigner – Eriksson and Luiz Felipe Scolari. What was needed was an English hand on the tiller.

Twenty months on from Steve McClaren's appointment it turns out we were wrong about that one, too. What is actually required is a coach so successful that he could not give a damn for the reputations of our most famous players. The kind of manager who has more medals than Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard put together – and who cares if he speaks English no better than the average Sicilian hit man?

However, you feel about Capello taking charge of England one thing is evident: the Football Association is continuing that tradition of appointing a man as different as possible from his predecessor. It tells us what we already knew about the England national team; that they go back to the drawing board each time in the hope that the latest radical departure will be the one who solves 40 years of chronic underachievement.

As a football coach, however, Capello is arguably the most credible man the Football Association has appointed since the war. His suitability to coach the footballers of this generation, to win trophies in the modern game and to stand up to all the attendant pressures that the England job brings are simply not in question. He is managerial gold. The problem is that he is taking on a team whose performances are more commonly compared to another naturally produced substance at the opposite end of the scale.

First it is important to dispel one nonsense that has stuck to Capello as he has become the leading contender over the last seven days: that old criticism that his teams play dull, defensive football. For the English football nation to make that kind of complaint at this lamentable stage of its national team's history would be comparable to stepping outside on Christmas Day and commenting that the brand new Ferrari sitting by the kerb for you is very nice but could you please have it in a different colour?

If Capello wants to play catenaccio for the next two and half years to get England to the next World Cup finals, then that will be infinitely more preferable to the shambolic retreat against Croatia in last month's Euro 2008 qualifying disaster. The FA is not in a position to demand that the England manager must, at all costs, deliver performances of heart-stopping beauty. The England team are currently outside the top 16 in Europe alone, low on confidence and under immense pressure to qualify for 2010. If they were a government department, they would be deemed not fit for purpose. In short, the team need to be rebuilt, first and foremost, into a winning side.

Those with an insight into Capello's career say that he has simply organised his teams according to their abilities: the less talented the players, the more conservative the team. When he took over at Real Madrid last season he realised what the rest of the world could see: the club were a disorganised bunch of superstars who needed some order in their lives, and his methods worked. The truth is that Capello is far too smart and too successful to be just one kind of coach whose teams have only ever played one kind of football.

What Capello has that none of his predecessors shared is the right to call himself bigger than the England job. He has a record and a reputation that make him a lot grander than the organisation and team he is about to take charge of – a claim McClaren could certainly never make. Even Eriksson, with his solitary Italian league title, was taking a step up from Lazio to England. Capello coming into the England team at this point of its decline is the equivalent of Sir Alex Ferguson agreeing to take over at Charlton Athletic. He is not likely to be fazed by the prospect.

It is worth considering a brief history of Capello outside of football because it tells you something about the character. His father was a primary school teacher who, during the Second World War, had been interned in a German prison camp. As a young player, Capello's father took him to a trial with the side SPAL, the equivalent of Wigan Athletic in 1960s Italian football, from Ferrara near Bologna. It was in that town he met his wife, Laura, who was studying to be a teacher. They have two sons, Pierfilippo, a lawyer who acts for his father, and Edoardo, who has two children himself.

After his career as a player at Roma, Juventus and Milan ended, Capello gained experience in business with Mediolanum, one of Silvio Berlusconi's companies, where he worked in insurance. He left to work in the academy at Milan but not before he gained some understanding of the working world outside football and picked up enough English to get him by when speaking to Dutch players in his later years as a manager. Apparently, the talk of him owning an art collection worth £10m is wide of the mark but he is a classical music connoisseur and a regular at La Scala.

All of which will delight the chattering classes who claim a stake in English football now, especially as the only clue to the musical tastes of McClaren was when he turned up at a Take That show. Capello, however, does not seem the type to be seduced by the celebrity of the job in the same way as happened to Eriksson. He has too much of a reputation to protect and appears to take himself extremely seriously. His life has been a study in football, and a very successful one too. He is the austere personality that English football craves at the moment.

Not that there is any guarantee he will be a success. He will be fighting a system with immense problems; a shortage of great players and a reluctance among the top English clubs to make the needs of the national team a priority. He will be up against the unfamiliar peculiarities of this particular football nation, the like of which they did not teach him at Coverciano, the de facto university for Italian football coaches.

Nevertheless, there does not seem to be a more suitable candidate for the job at this sorry moment in the England team's history. Austerity, leadership, direction – England finds itself in need of something approaching a modern-day Victorian schoolmaster. There has never been a time when the English football nation has been more prepared to tolerate radical changes – any changes – in order for their team to be successful. It must be an attractive prospect for Capello, but he certainly is not the first man to bring with him the shock of the new to this particular job.

Absolutely Fabio

From footballers who have played under him, to international and club managers, they all have one thing to say about his qualities as a potential England manager: he's brilliant

"Capello is the best possible choice for England. It's enough to see how many trophies Capello has won to realise what his qualities are."

Marcello Lippi, 2006 world cup-winning Italy coach

"Even when Jose Mourinho was in the running, I believed that Capello had the charisma, talent and experience for a challenging job like this."

Gianfranco Zola, former Italy striker, tipped to be capello's No 2

"With Capello you can start dreaming of winning again. He'll give you the best chance you've had for ages, a better chance than Eriksson did."

Dino Zoff, former Italy goalkeeper and national team coach

"Capello is ideal for this job. If England are capable of winning something, I truly believe Capello is the man who will bring it out in them."

Arrigo Sacchi, former Italy coach, who succeeded Capello at Milan

"I have known Fabio for a long time and he is an outstanding candidate. As far as the technical part of the job, you do not have to worry."

Arsène Wenger, Arsenal manager and friend of Capello

"He's always been a winner wherever he has gone... Fabio thinks about England as the mother of the game and the teacher of football."

Franco Baldini, Capello's Assistant at Roma and Real Madrid

"Capello has the kind of personality that I think England need at the moment. I have a lot of respect for him as a manager – he has a great track record. I think it is very important that the next manager we pick has a big personality with a big history, and Capello certainly has that with the titles that he has won at all levels of the game."

Frank Lampard, Chelsea and England midfielder

"To manage a national team you need to be a certain age, have experience and presence, and

an indisputable CV. Capello has all that."

Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United manager

"He is very specific and very clear what he wants from every player. Sometimes he really pushes you to the limits and that, of course, has proven effective. He has always asked for 100 per cent in training and on the field but he is not a very demanding person off the field. He can also drink a beer with the players in the bar or the hotel. When the focus is on the training, then he really expects 100 per cent and not less. He would rather have less quality but committed players rather than quality players who are not committed."

Clarence Seedorf, midfielder at Real Madrid under Capello