india lose to bangladesh in cricket

Bangladesh Beat India
In the end, it was a demolition job, professionally executed. They deserved to win because they bowled better, fielded better and batted better. They simply out-performed a complacent and listless India. A confident, composed and calm Bangladesh made short work of Indian bowling after initial prospects of an Indian fightback -- when three Bangladesh wickets had fallen at 79 -- proved to be shortlived.

The Bangladesh chase of India's 191 was largely built around the three contrasting 50s by Tamim Iqbal, Saqibul Hasan and Md Raheem -- three players still in their teens, with ages ranging from 17-19. And it was perhaps this fire in the belly of the youngsters, tempered with perfect discipline and no sudden rushes of blood that ensured smooth sailing for test cricket's youngest entrants. If their victory in 1999 World Cup against Pakistan had been treated as a fluke, there was no such element of fluke today. They just played better. Or, perhaps, it was the Indians who batted abysmally.
Edited at Mar 18, 2007 More here. Seems Pakistan is losing to New Zealand.

alice walker and rebecca walker

NYT discusses the evolution of a feminist daughter.

Today, however, Ms. Walker, 37, has become what she called a new Rebecca, one who has a male partner, a child and some revised theories about the ties that bind, which she explores in a new book, “Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence” (Riverhead), to be released on Thursday. A review appears in The Times Book Review today.

Its inspiration? Her son, Tenzin, 2, who is named after the Dalai Lama. (Ms. Walker’s father voted for Chaim and lost.)

Ms. Walker and her partner, a Buddhist teacher named Glen (whose last name does not appear in the book), have been living in Maui, where Tenzin plays amid the lush landscape and is pushed about in a Maclaren stroller.

“I feel like I have arrived in myself to where I want to be and who I want to be,” Ms. Walker said in a telephone interview.

Motherhood, she writes in “Baby Love,” is “the first club I’ve unequivocally belonged to.”

The book explores the usual pregnancy topics like food intake, genetic counseling and the doctor-versus-midwife debate, and reveals that Ms. Walker is now estranged from her famous mother.



nyt reviews her book here, along with Peggy Orenstein's “Waiting for Daisy"

It’s to Orenstein’s considerable credit that even when she’s naked from the waist down, she never really takes her reporter’s hat off, applying the same measured scrutiny to a junior-high-school boyfriend with a brood of 15 or the plight of women left barren and disfigured by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima as she does to her own ultimately happily resolved situation. Alas, the same can’t be said for Rebecca Walker, the author of “Baby Love,” a solipsistic open diary of gestation that shares the earthy, spontaneous form of Anne Lamott’s child-rearing classic, “Operating Instructions,” if not its transcendent quality.

Like Orenstein, Walker shunned dolls and grew up profoundly ambivalent about becoming a parent, a prospective role complicated by her bisexuality and troubled relationship with her own mother, the novelist Alice Walker, whose intermittent airing here gives the reader the uncomfortable if fascinated feeling of sitting in on an unproductive family counseling session. The younger Walker musters thoughtful passages on abortion and feminism’s obligations to men. Yet she sorely tests the reader’s patience while settling into a pregnancy of privileged contemplation, achieved with relative ease under the ministrations of a homeopath — just one in a “small army of healers” she assembles for ailments that often seem more psychic than physical (though when her son is born with meconium in his lungs and sent to the neonatal intensive care unit, it comes as a profound relief that she jettisoned the plan for a home birth with a “polytheistic fiesta theme”). A Tibetan doctor, the daughter of one of the Dalai Lama’s private physicians, offers her “little silk bags of herbs”; hovering in the background, meanwhile, are an osteopath, doula, pedicurist and masseuse. “What a bummer it is that I can’t wear scent,” Walker grouses when a spritz of perfume sets off morning sickness. She consoles herself with bad TV and indulges in repeated retail therapy. “The whole time I was shopping I was thinking that once the baby comes I will never shop again,” she writes. “The thought was like walking into an airplane propeller.”

Not to begrudge the author such luxuries, but there was no need to make the world privy to them. Orenstein’s interrogation of her own profiteering pregnancy retinue comes across as a welcome, even necessary exposé; Walker’s merely a paean to pampering.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed

KSM's sudden confession of having undertaken so many terrorist attacks appears suspicious. I wonder how much torture he underwent.

Newsweek, Mar. 15, 2007

How Not to Win the War on Terror

The KSM case points up what's wrong with the way the Bush administration fights terrorism. How the next president can do better.

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY

By Michael Hirsh



The abrupt reappearance of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed—and his brazen comparison of himself to George Washington—four years after the alleged 9/11 mastermind was captured in Pakistan should provoke some serious self-examination in the minds of Americans. The first question we need to ask ourselves is: Does the Bush administration have any clue any longer how to fight the "war on terror" legally? The next question should be: Can't our next president, whoever he or she turns out to be, do any better than this?



Let's hope so. Because if there is even a shadow of a doubt that the United States is losing the battle for hearts and minds to the self-confessed murderer of 3,000 people—that would be KSM—then something is very wrong. Let's get one thing straight: despite his touching claim that he doesn't like to kill "kids," KSM is a very bad man. Most people frankly wouldn't have much of a problem if he were waterboarded or beaten to an inch of his life in a dark room somewhere—which is almost certainly what happened to him in one of the CIA's secret prisons.



But the fact that four years to the month that he was captured—near Islamabad in March 2003—KSM is just beginning the process of being deemed an "enemy combatant" at the "Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing" at Guantanamo Bay shows that something is very wrong. The Bush administration has argued, with some legitimacy, that this is a new kind of war in which new rules are needed. Fair enough. But should it really require all this time, such a complicated series of court decisions and legislative maneuverings, to decide what those rules are?



The issue that the administration confronted after 9/11 was what to do with evil people like KSM. The Bush team decided that this was a war rather than a criminal matter—and a war unlike any other. Therefore none of the previous rules of war, like the Geneva Convention protections, applied, in their view. That left culprits like KSM in a legal limbo for four years while they were ferried around to secret prisons, long after their intelligence value had been milked dry (a process that by the estimate of most interrogators should take no longer than a year). Even some CIA officials were privately upset by this, fearing that the agency would be the fall guy in the end (they were right). "Where's the off button?" one retired CIA official said to me two years ago, in February 2005, before the military tribunals that KSM and others are being judged at—at long last—were created. Lawyers for the agency "asked the White House for direction on how to dispose of these detainees back when they asked for [interrogation] guidance. The answer was, 'We'll worry about that later.' Now we don't know what to do with these guys."



John Sifton of Human Rights Watch says the case of KSM and other key detainees—as well as some who are likely innocent—shows that the Bush administration has simply never defined what kind of enemy KSM is. Sifton adds: "This really is an example of how the war paradigm for counterterrorism—that it is only armed conflict—has backfired. Now we have a man comparing himself to George Washington. It might have been more appropriate to just call him a criminal and indict him in federal court, to say, 'You're no warrior, you're no George Washington. You, sir, are a criminal.'"



Scott Horton, another prominent human-rights attorney, agrees. Had the case been handled properly, KSM's confession to plotting 9/11 and many other actual or planned terror acts could have made him a "showcase defendant" for America's cause, rallying support and allies around the world. "He could have been charged within six months of his detention and prosecuted in a proceeding, which would have added to the reputation of our country for justice," says Horton, "and would have supported the righteousness of the cause of going after KSM."

We study the mind because we want the harmony of peace to prevail,
because we need the joy of love in our hearts,
because we care about the quality of life our children will inherit...
To be attentive requires tremendous love of living.

~ Vimala Thakar, a living Indian sage

Alberto Gonzales list of falsehoods

U.S. Attorney General Gonzales is under fire, here are a list of reasons. The source is Scott Horton.

First, Gonzales said, under oath, that the seven of the eight U.S. attorneys were fired for performance reasons. It now turns out this was a falsehood, as the glowing performance evaluations attest.

Second, Gonzales said that he would 'never, ever make a change for political reasons.' It now turns out that this was a falsehood, as all the evidence makes clear that this purge was based purely on politics, to punish prosecutors who were perceived to be too light on Democrats or too tough on Republicans.

Third, Gonzales said this was an 'overblown personnel matter.' It now turns out that far from being a low-level personnel matter, this was a longstanding plan to exact political vendettas or to make political pay-offs, involving the president, his personal counsel and his principal political advisor.

Fourth, Gonzales stated that the White House was 'not really involved' in the plan to fire U.S. attorneys. This is now also revealed as a conscious lie.vHarriet Miers was one of the masterminds of this plan, as demonstrated by numerous e-mails made public today. She communicated extensively with Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson about the firings of the U.S. attorneys. In fact, she originally wanted to fire and replace the top prosecutors in all 93 districts across the country (including Patrick Fitzgerald).

Fifth, Gonzales stated that Karl Rove had no involvement in getting his protégé appointed U.S. attorney in Arkansas. In fact, here is a letter from the Department of Justice prepared under Gonzales' supervision. Quote: 'The department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin.' It now turns out that this was a conscious lie, as demonstrated by Mr. Sampson's own e-mail. Quote: 'Getting him, Griffin, appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, et cetera.'

Sixth, we were told to change the Patriot Act was an innocent attempt to fix a legal loophole, not a cynical strategy to bypass the Senate's role in serving as a check and balance. Now White House documents disclose that this was all part of a careful plan to cashier noncompliant US Attorneys as part of a political game.

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