Historical development

A distinct New Zealand variant of the English language has been in existence since at least 1912, when Frank Arthur Swinnerton described it as a "carefully modulated murmur," though its history probably goes back further than that. From the beginning of the British settlement on the islands, a new dialect began to form by adopting Māori words to describe the different flora and fauna of New Zealand, for which English did not have any words of its own.^[3]
Audio recordings from the 1940s of very old New Zealanders have captured the speech of those born to the first generation of settlers in New Zealand, which means linguists can hear the actual origin of the accent. For example, a recording of 97-year-old Mrs Hannah Cross, who was born in New Zealand in 1851, and lived there her whole life, shows she had a Scottish accent. Even some second generation New Zealanders did not have a noticable "New Zealand accent", such as Mr Ernie Bissett, who was born in Kaitangata in 1894 and lived in New Zealand his entire life. But people growing up in mining town Arrowtown, where there was a mixture of accents, developed a recognizable New Zealand accent, such as Annie Hamilton, whose parents arrived there in 1862. [2][3] The children growing up exposed to different accents picked up different features of these, but in their children, the second generation, there is a unification towards the ‘foundation accent’.

Dictionaries of New Zealand English

The first comprehensive dictionary dedicated to New Zealand English was probably the Heinemann New Zealand dictionary, published in 1979. Edited by Harry Orsman, it is a comprehensive 1,300-page book, with information relating to the usage and pronunciation of terms that were both widely accepted throughout the English-speaking world and those peculiar to New Zealand. It includes a one-page list of the approximate date of entry into common parlance of many terms found in New Zealand English but not elsewhere, such as "haka" (1827), "Boohai" (1920), and "bach" (1905).
In 1997, Oxford University Press produced the Dictionary of New Zealand English, which it claimed was based on over forty years of research. This research started with Orsman's 1951 thesis and continued with his editing this dictionary. To assist with and maintain this work, the New Zealand Dictionary Centre was founded in 1997. Since then, it has published several more dictionaries of New Zealand English, culminating in the publication of The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary in 2004.
A more light-hearted look at English as spoken in New Zealand, A personal Kiwi-Yankee dictionary, was written by the American-born University of Otago psychology lecturer Louis Leland in 1980. This slim volume lists many of the potentially confusing and/or misleading terms for Americans visiting or emigrating to New Zealand. A second edition was published during the 1990s.

A Mexican Interlude: Venustiano Carranza

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Much Ado About "Concessions" By "Palestinians"

We've been hearing about the "concessions" that Fatah -- the PLO under a new name -- was prepared to make to Israel. Fine word, "concessions," But before we get to that word to see if it is relevant, a brief review in history class is called for. Remember, the midterm on the Middle East is coming up. Study hard, and good luck!
So here's that review:
The Jews in the nascent state of israel defeated the armies of seven Arab states in the 1948-49 war. However, Ben Gurion decided not to press his advantage, and called for a halt in hostilities when the army of Jordan (trained and armed by the British, who also armed, and to some degree trained, the armies of Egypt and Iraq, but before the war broke out had ruthlessly enforced a complete arms embargo  on the Jews of Mandatory Palestine) was in possession of parts of Judea and Samaria in Western Palestine  (The British had already lopped off all of Eastern Palestine, unilaterally rejecting the application of the terms of the Mandate for Palestine for any part east of the river Jordan).
After nearly 20,000 separate fedayin attacks from Egypt, Israel went to war in 1956 and gained the entire Sinai, which it proceeded to yield after the Great Powers supposedly extracted certain promises from Nasser -- some of which promises be broke within 24 hours of the withdrawal of Israeli forces.
In mid-May 1967 Nasser demanded of U Thant that he remove the U.N. peacekeepers in the Sinai, and he mobilized his army, and addressed crazed Cairene crowds of hundreds of thousands, promising them the imminent destruction of Israel. Egyptain ships blockaded the Straits of Tiran, Israel's shipping life-line.
The Six Day War ended with Israel in possession, for the second time, of the entire Sinai, and of Gaza, and of those parts of Judea and Samaria that the Jordanians had seized, and held onto, from 1949 to 1967, territories that the Jordanians had renamed the "West Bank" so as to attempt to efface the Jewish connection -- obvious in such toponyms as Judea and Samaria -- to that land. Curiously, Egypt had never bothered to change the name of Gaza, and that "Biblical name" -- a phrase with which shallow reporters like to impliedly take Israel to task, as if there is something wrong with using names as ancient as those in the Bible -- but what then of such toponyms as "Arabia" and "Egypt"?
The Yom Kippur War began with Egyptian and Syrian forces in a surprise attack on Israel. The attack was not only beaten back, but Israel managed to win what was surely not the largest, but the greatest, tank battle in history, near Mount Hermon, and in the Sinai, Sharon's forces surrounded, and could have destroyed, the Egyptain Third Army, had Kissinger not stepped in to pressure Israel into holding back, and letting the Egyptians escape.
For more than four decades "peace-making"-- beginning with Kissinger's shuttling, and the Rogers Plan, and then there was James Baker, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Dennis Ross, and Martin Indyk (as Amerian ambassador to israel strutting around like a viceroy), and Aaron David Miller and Richard Hass, all of them believing that "everyone knew" what "a settlement will look like" -- everyone, that is, except those who understaood that there was no "solution" to what is an endless Jihad against Israel, and no matter how you mix-n'-match what Miller and Hass and Ross and Indyk (and so many others too, who just can't stay away from the topic, but just can't be bothered to figure out, much less factor in, Islam) securityjerusalemsettlementsrefugees, or refugeessetllementsJerusalemsecurity, or settlementsJerusalemrefugeessecurity -- oh, go ahead, share with us the order you'd like to stack that deck, play n choose k to your stochastic-processes heart's content, do -- but don't wake us, at this point, till it's over.
Now we are coming to the apotheosis of idiocy, in The Guardian, and the BBC, with the notion that the "Palestinians" were offering "concessions."
What?
The "Palestinians" have no "concessions" to offer. It is Israel that is currently, by force of arms, in possession of the territories to which it has title, by the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine, and by Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, which requires the U.N. to accept, and not change, the undertakings of the League of Nations as its predecessor.
The "Palestinians" are not making "concessions" when the Slow Jihadists of Fatah -- both more patient and realistic, in their differences on matters of tactics and timing with the Fast Jihadists of Hamas -- contemplate, if indeed they do contemplate, not repeating in private the maximalist and ridiculous positions they insist on in public. No one should be impressed with the farrago of lies and half-lies and semi-truths and possible full-truths, which may madden Hamas, but which the Anti-Israel (and necessarily pro-Islam) lobby in the West uses as yet another stick with which to beat Israel for not, you see, "responding" -- which apparently means Israelis, even if they have at long last grasped the significance of  the history of all their previous treaty-making with Muslim Arabs, and furthermore, have come in greater numbers to understand, even if those always pressuring them do not, the central relevance of Islam, which makes it folly to rely on any "Peace Treaty" which is not only not the same thing as "Peace," but almost certainly will lead to the very opposite of peace.
Did the Nazis make "concessions" to the Allies in June 1945? Did the Japanese make "concessions" to the American government in September 1945? No? Then why should anyone claim that the "Palestinian" Arabs, the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel, are the ones making "concessions"? Only Israel has ever made "concessions" that counted. No Arab state has yet sacrificed anything, the way Israel has, for example, not once but twice, given up the entire Sinai, though it was not obligated to under international law, and in doing so with Sadat, gave up real claims, and real land, land given not for "peace" but for "promises" of an end to hostilities, and an encouragement by the government of Egypt of friendly relations, which encouragement never came.  ,
The only "concessions" being made are those being made by Israel. The local Arabs are giving up nothing.Their words are to be understood as they, and other Muslims, understand the words and promises of Muhammad made to the Meccans in 628 A.D. at Hudaibiyya. That is the model for Muslim treaty-making with Infidels. The Israelis are Infidels. Israel is an Infidel nation-state. Its existence, the very idea of its existence, cannot be tolerated. But some are willing to wait, to go in for the kill, and others not willing. Therein lies the whole fight between the Fast Jihadists and the Slow Jihadists. Sympathizers with the former no doubtr released documents to embarrass the latter. But the embarrassment should only be among Muslim Arabs. We who are neither Muslims nor Arabs should take no interest in, no notice of, what is essentially meaningless, missing-the-pointness, if one looks not to "treaties" but to Darura -- the "necessity" for Arabs not to go to war if Israel remains overwhelmingly, and obviously, stronger in a military sense. In all other senses, Israel is, and always will be stronger. There is no moral question here, but only a military one.

by Theodore Dalrymple

Often I read more than one book at a time. When I tire of one I fly to another. This is because the world has always seemed to me so various and so interesting in all its aspects that I have not been able to confine my mind to a single subject or object for very long; therefore I am not, never have been, and never will be the scholar of anything. My mind is magpie-like, attracted by what shines for a moment; I try to persuade myself that this quality of superficiality has its compensations, in breadth of interest, for example.
Be that as it may, I recently spent a day reading two books and constantly switching between them; the first Mao’s Secret Famine, by Frank Dikotter, a professor of Chinese at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, and the second Beyond Evil, by Nathan Yates, a journalist on the British tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror.
The famine of Dokotter’s title was that brought about by the Great Leap Forward in China between 1959 and 1962; the thing which was beyond evil was the murder of two little girls in the Cambridgeshire village of Soham, whose disappearance for a time captured the attention of the world.
The famine was probably the worst in world history, at least as measured by the absolute number of victims; according to Dikotter, there were 45,000,000 of them. Other famines have been worse relative to the total population: it is sobering to recall, for example, that the population of Ireland is still only 70 per cent of what it was before the great potato famine of the 1840s, when some in Britain regarded it coldheartedly as a Malthusian winnowing of the surplus population ordained by God.
Nevertheless, there seems something peculiarly dreadful about the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward: from its complete predictability from previous human experience of such great leaps to the utter indifference of Mao Tse-tung to the deaths of scores of millions of his compatriots and to the suffering of hundreds of millions of more of them.
Of course, Mao could not have produced the famine single-handedly, but the other authors of the catastrophe acted mainly from cowardice or sycophancy, unattractive but nevertheless human qualities that few of us have never exhibited in the course of our lives.
One finishes Dikotter’s book with a visceral loathing of Mao, whose preparedness to contemplate seriously the deaths of hundreds of millions of people if only his dim and half-baked ideas about the good society might be put into practice places him among the select company of true moral monsters of the Twentieth Century, for example Lenin and Hitler. The only lesson that Mao drew from the Great Leap Forward and its terrible associated famine was that he should revenge himself on Liu Shao-chi, who did much to bring it to an end. Mao duly took his revenge on Liu during the Cultural Revolution, again at the cost of untold suffering and destruction. Mao cared about as much for humanity as most of us do for ants in the kitchen.         
By comparison with the deaths of 45,000,000 people, those of the two little girls in Soham might seem insignificant. What are two to set against so many? The culprit was a man called Ian Huntley, who had a long history of dubious sexual relations, including with 12 year-old girls. But though he had been reported to or investigated by the police several times (many witnesses, including the mother of a 12 year-old girl whom he had sexually assaulted, refused to testify against him), he had no convictions and therefore no criminal record; thus, when he applied for a job as school caretaker there was no official record of anything that he had done that precluded him from taking up the job. What amounts, legally-speaking, to tittle-tattle cannot be allowed to stand in a man’s way.
The two girls whom he murdered went for a walk one evening, and he asked him into his house. They suspected no ill of him because they already knew him from their school. What happened next is known only to him, who has never told anyone the truth of what he did. Probably he assaulted one or both of them sexually and then, realising that each would be a witness to any allegations made by the other, he killed them both, taking their bodies under cover of night to a distant ditch where he later burnt them beyond recognition.
When a hue and cry for the missing girls was raised he played to psychopathic perfection the part of a concerned person and good neighbour. With all the other villagers, he searched high and low for the two girls, though of course he knew all along where they were. He even uttered words of comfort to the distressed parents.
The question I asked myself as I read the two books, switching from one to another, is ‘How and on what scale do you compare the evil of the two men, Mao Tse-tung and Ian Huntley?’ It hardly seems satisfactory to say that Mao was 22.5 million times worse than Huntley because he was responsible for that many more deaths than he. And yet to utter the two names in the same breath seems almost to indulge in bathos.
Huntley probably did not set out to kill the two girls. He had been violent to women and adolescent girls before, but not so as to cause them permanent physical injury. The chances are that in killing them he was only trying to get rid of the evidence. He preferred their deaths to his exposure as a sex criminal.
Likewise, Mao did not set out to kill millions, but he much preferred to do so than have to back-pedal or re-think his ideas, a back-pedalling that would have cost him his power. If the implementation of his ideas led to disaster, therefore, it proved to him only that there were saboteurs, class traitors and capitalist-roaders still at large, enemies to be destroyed. Never could he admit that his ideas were wrong, and moreover wrong for obvious reasons that anyone of average intelligence ought to have been able to see. Let the heavens fall, he said to himself, so long as I preserve my power.
It is clear that the evil of these two men cannot be compared using a linear scale, and the same goes for the suffering of their victims. Who would expect the parents of the murdered girls to be consoled by the thought that at least the murder of their children was not the Great Leap Forward, that at least Huntley killed only two to Mao’s millions, and that, everyone else they knew apart from the girls had survived, which was certainly not the case during the Great Leap Forward, when every survivor knew of scores who had died? And what would one think of a defence lawyer who argued in court that Huntley was not as bad as many others in history that he could name if he wanted?
Huntley and Mao did what evil they could within their own spheres. Mao’s sphere, alas, was the largest population in the world, while Huntley was confined to a small village in England. Only one of them – Mao – got away with it. But both conscientiously did the worst they could.
The urge or temptation to place people in a league table of evil is very strong, as if evil were measureable on a linear scale, like height or weight. Was Stalin as bad as Hitler, and if not, by what percentage was he less bad? Twenty per cent, forty per cent? Serious arguments are held on this question; I have had them myself, as if something depended upon the answer, as if indeed there were an answer; likewise the comparison of communism with Nazism.
Protagonists of the view that communism was at least as bad as Nazism point to the fact that it killed more people. Protagonists of the opposite view say that, while this might be so, communism lasted seventy years, while Nazism lasted only twelve, as if a longer rule implied almost a right, or an excuse, to kill more victims. If one divides the number of victims by the number of years in power, Nazism was probably worse than communism, even if it is not always entirely clear who was the victim of which ideology. Therefore, goes the argument, Nazism was the worse.
Then, of course, there is the argument about intentions. Communism may have been responsible for more deaths than Nazism, but at least it killed in the name of a universal ideal, not in pursuit of the supposed benefit of only a small portion of mankind. This is a distinction that has always seemed to me rather odd. Who would be much consoled by being asked whether he would prefer to be brutally murdered in the name of a universal ideal or merely because he was a member of a hated racial or religious group? Is it better to be killed as a bourgeois, as a kulak or as a Jew?
In opposing evil, of course, we often commit acts that, in other contexts, would themselves be evil. We are tempted to suppose that the end justifies the means – which sometimes it must, of course, but not always, if for no other reason than that the connection between ends and means is inherently an uncertain one.
And there is another trap that awaits us: there is nothing more delightful to the human mind, or at least to many human minds, than to do evil in the name of good. The number of sadists is legion, and the impulse grows with its satisfaction. Even the dullest of understandings is lightning-quick in its capacity to rationalise sadistic urges in the language of morality. We can thereby come easily to resemble, even if in only attenuated form, those whom we so fiercely oppose and claim to abhor.
There was a remarkable instance of this in the book about the Soham murderer, Ian Huntley. When he was brought to court for his trial, a mob had gathered outside to hurl execration at him. Most in the mob were women, and many had their young children with them. These children screamed in terror as their mothers threatened the culprit (still technically innocent) with physical violence. There is little doubt that, had it not been for the presence of the police, the accused would have been torn limb from limb, children or no children.
But it is morally certain that these Mesdames Defarge lived lives that were not beyond reproach as far as their upbringing of their children was concerned. At the very least, the example of public behaviour that they set was appalling, and their disregard of the terror of their own children in itself a form of abuse. Almost certainly some of them were the kind of women who would have refused to cooperate with the police in the days before Huntley turned murderer. If reproached for their behaviour, they would, with that quickness of mind to which I have already referred, have returned the reproach to its sender by saying that he who made it was a sympathiser with Huntley, and therefore some kind of accomplice of his.
The mob that howled at Huntley resembled that which howled at the victims of the Cultural Revolution. It is true that, unlike the victims of the latter, Huntley had committed a real and terrible evil, but it was an evil so self-evident that it required no howling mob to make evident or to condemn it; those who suffered most from it were certainly not among the mob baying for (among other things) his death. 
Delight in evil is very widespread, even if it is not quite universal, and it takes many forms. I do not exclude myself from these strictures, for I have sometimes enjoyed inflicting suffering on others, even if only of a comparatively mild kind. I have even sometimes suspected that I have enjoyed living among, and reading about, evil in order to assure myself that I am a jolly good fellow, at least comparatively-speaking, using a linear measure of evil of course.  

Li Moves On, Spurring Hope for a Chinese First

Nicolas Asfouri/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Li Na, who beat Andrea Petkovic on Tuesday, has long been considered the most impressive athlete among the Chinese women.

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

MELBOURNE, Australia — On a personal level, the stakes should be the same when Caroline Wozniacki and Li Na play in the Australian Open semifinals on Thursday. Neither woman has won a Grand Slam singles title, and a victory would put one of them a match from achieving it.

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Li Na has not lost a set on her way to the semifinals of the Australian Open, where she will face Caroline Wozniacki.

But viewed through a wider lens, the agendas diverge: Wozniacki needs to win this tournament to give herself and her No. 1 ranking credibility; Li needs to win it for more than a billion other reasons.
Of all the story lines still available in the women’s event, a Li victory, which would give China its first Grand Slam singles champion, would seem to be by far the most irresistible, and though Li and China have come this far before, the manner of Li’s victories this year in Sydney and now Melbourne has many — tennis executives presumably among them — looking ahead with anticipation.
Li has not dropped a set, not even been pushed to a tie breaker, on her way back to the semifinals here, where she and her compatriot Zheng Jie were beaten last year.
Among this year’s believers is Andrea Petkovic, the instinctive, outspoken young German whom the ninth-seeded Li beat, 6-2, 6-4, on Tuesday in the quarterfinals.
“It’s just the feeling, how she is on court, her confidence and the way she’s playing,” Petkovic said. “I just feel she has a great chance to win the tournament. I don’t want to put pressure on her, obviously. It’s just a feeling.”
Li knows pressure. She has been hearing the question “When will China have a Grand Slam champion?” since she reached the third round here in 2005. She and the other talented players of her generation, including Zheng and Peng Shuai, who lost in the fourth round after holding two match points against Agnieszka Radwanska, are collectively known as the Golden Flowers. In China, they are among the most recognizable sports figures, and the women’s team victory in last year’s Asian Games — a minor event in global tennis terms — was a significant story at home.
Chinese women have won Olympic gold medals and Grand Slam titles in doubles, but a major singles trophy remains the missing prize, made more pressing by the sense that the follow-up generation, once called the Little Flowers, has yet to make significant inroads on tour.
For now, and perhaps longer than that, it looks to be up to the 28-year-old Li, a late bloomer with a flower tattoo on her chest and an independent streak who, frustrated by her results on the satellite tour, once took a two-year break from the game to follow a media-studies program at a Chinese university before returning in 2004.
“I couldn’t find the positive thing,” she said of her sabbatical. “So I came to university for two years, also my husband with me. So we are in the same class.”
Seven years later, she and her husband, Jiang Shan, continue to work side by side. A former leading Chinese player, Jiang is back to being her primary coach after she parted ways with Thomas Hogstedt, a Swede who is now employed by Maria Sharapova.
Li has long been considered the most impressive athlete among the Chinese women. Her powerful legs and smooth base-line technique represent a very solid platform for hitting her relatively flat, low ground strokes. But she has kept faltering for good reasons: her margins for error are low, and she often becomes edgy and inconsistent under big-match pressure.
There should be plenty of that from here to the finish with the top three women’s seeds — Wozniacki, Vera Zvonareva and Kim Clijsters — still in contention. But Li should hardly walk into Rod Laver Arena without belief Thursday. She beat Wozniacki in both of their matches last season, winning in the fourth round here last year. She has the weapons and foot speed to trump Wozniacki’s world-class defenses, but Wozniacki, the not-quite-great Dane, is a remarkable competitor and underrated tactician.
She proved it again by rallying to defeat Francesca Schiavone, 3-6, 6-3, 6-3, on Tuesday. At the start, Wozniacki was marooned too far behind the baseline, while Schiavone, an Italian, used her panoply of shots and spins to spectacular effect. But Wozniacki gradually regained essential ground: advancing in the court and reeling off six straight games from 1-3 down in the second set as Schiavone, 30, began looking weary in the legs and the head.
That was no surprise considering that Schiavone is 10 years older than Wozniacki and had required 4 hours 44 minutes on Sunday to defeat Svetlana Kuznetsova in the longest recorded women’s singles match in Grand Slam history.

Dispute With Parliament Leaves Afghan Leader Isolated

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Newly elected members of parliament waited for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to open the new session.

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — As the long luncheon for newly elected Afghan members of Parliament wound to a close over tea and fruit last weekend, it became clear that President Hamid Karzai was outnumbered and outmaneuvered.

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Musadeq Sadeq/Associated Press

President Karzai inspected the honor guard outside Parliament on Wednesday. He was forced to back down in his standoff with the new lawmakers.

When he stood to speak, the lawmakers listened politely, but did not budge. They wanted him to inaugurate the Parliament the very next day. Not even the usually loyal Pashtuns at the gathering, who are from the president’s own ethnic group, agreed with his decision, announced days earlier, to delay the body’s opening for a month.
By the day’s end, Mr. Karzai had backed down, agreeing to inaugurate the newly elected lawmakers, which finally took place Wednesday after months of heated wrangling over the fairness of last fall’s elections.
The turnabout and the string of political miscalculations that led to it have left Mr. Karzai a diminished and more isolated leader, members of Parliament, Western diplomats and analysts say. At the very least, they say, the outcome seems certain to signal the beginning of a potentially more precarious period in Mr. Karzai’s relations with Afghanistan’s power brokers.
He has angered losing parliamentary candidates whom he encouraged to pursue claims of fraud and whom he has now effectively deserted. He has angered those who won by appearing to be willing to delay and possibly even annul their election. And he again alienated his Western backers, who already see him as an unpredictable and difficult partner.
“Nobody is left for President Karzai, nobody is left supporting him,” said Mir Wali, a candidate from Helmand Province who was disqualified at the last minute and is a prominent figure in the province. “And, I doubt the new Parliament will support him.”
Mr. Wali’s pronouncement may be too categorical, but it corroborates the view of many that Mr. Karzai has become increasingly isolated over the past 16 months since the 2009 presidential election in which he was forced into a runoff by Western diplomats as well as his Afghan supporters.
Once seen as a superb tactician, who could almost always find a way to juggle competing interests and slip through each crisis, he increasingly turns to a small group of advisers and on several occasions has begun to miscalculate.
He was convinced, along with Westerners and his Afghan opponents, that his support of candidates during the elections would propel a number of his backers into Parliament. The voters did not agree, and his supporters — among them more than a score of friendly, mostly Pashtun candidates — lost their seats or were disqualified.
There are 16 fewer Pashtuns in this Parliament than the last and 15 more Hazaras, according to an analysis by Western officials in Kabul. The result is a Parliament that is less reliably supportive of the president.
His efforts to make changes in the ranks of the winners during the appeals process failed. His attempt to use the attorney general’s office and a special court to review cases of allegations of fraud appears likely to yield little as well. Although the court is still working, once the lawmakers are sworn in, it is widely thought that it will be hard to unseat more than two or three.
Mr. Karzai’s miscalculation may be the fault of advisers, said several diplomats and analysts who also said he remained an extremely canny politician.
For instance, he is being told by those closest to him that the Northern Alliance, the old anti-Taliban coalition, has become too strong and that this threatens his position. However, if he faces off with them he may be in jeopardy because they have gained many important posts, and they are mostly not from his Pashtun base.
“He’s really in a bind,” said Martine van Bijlert, a co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network and a longtime observer of Afghan politics.
Afghan power brokers and diplomats both blame the narrowness of his consultations. “Karzai started having more people in opposition when he started to make decisions on his own,” said Qazi Nasir Ahmad, a member of Parliament from Herat Province, who was a longtime leader in the fight against the Russians. “He has not consulted very many people when making these election decisions.”
A Western diplomat in Kabul who has watched the election process agreed. “It used to be that before making any move, the president would consult himself to death,” the diplomat said. “Now he’s relying increasingly on a smaller group of advisers and it might be different if they represented more different groups, but they don’t.”

Obama to Deliver Second State of the Union Address

Dan Robinson | Washington  22 January 2011

Photo: Reuters

US President Obama (file photo)

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President Barack Obama delivers his second State of the Union Address to the nation on Tuesday, before a joint session of the U.S. Congress.

President Barack Obama will face a dramatically altered balance of power in the House of Representatives when he addresses Congress and the nation Tuesday in his State of the Union address.

Republicans are now in the majority in the House, and they have already approved a repeal of Mr. Obama's landmark reform of the U.S. health care system.  The move was symbolic, since the bill will die in the U.S. Senate, where Democrats and Independents still hold a majority.

Presidents traditionally use State of the Union addresses to assess the nation's condition, on everything from the economy to foreign policy.  They also use the speech to lay out agendas - and often propose new ideas, or changes in thinking they want Americans to consider.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says Mr. Obama is likely to focus on efforts to repair the economy.

"The steps that the president believes our country has to take to continue that economic recovery, steps that we need to take in the short term that relate to jobs, and steps that we need to take in the medium and long term to put our fiscal house in order and to increase our competitiveness and our innovation that allows us to create the jobs of tomorrow," said Gibbs.

Mr. Obama goes into this national speech enjoying a substantial positive bump in public approval ratings.  This is due to legislative victories, including some made possible by his controversial compromise with Republicans to extend Bush-era tax cuts for all Americans while extending government unemployment benefits

"We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that's entirely up to us," said Obama.

Brighter approval ratings are also due to what Americans view as Obama's skilled handling of a speech honoring the victims of recent shootings in Tucson, Arizona, in which he urged more civility in the national discourse.

Political analyst John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute says had the president delivered the State of the Union Address directly after last November's mid-term congressional elections, he would be in a weaker position.

But compromises he struck with Republicans have positioned him as someone pursuing a new pragmatism, something Americans appreciate.

"You do see the president already having some indication that he is moving to the middle, that he has a kind of pragmatism," noted Fortier.

This State of the Union Address comes as nearly 150,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, with opinion polls showing the Afghan war extremely unpopular among Americans.    Mr. Obama will again pay tribute to the sacrifices of the military.

Whatever the themes of the address, it's all but confirmed that President Obama intends to stand for re-election.

With a re-tooled White House staff helping to further cement his image as a political moderate rather than a far left liberal, and deal with strengthened Republican control of Congress, he is already establishing the political machinery for 2012.

Karbala Bombing Kills 6 Pilgrims

VOA News  24 January 2011

Photo: Retuers

Policemen search Shi'ite pilgrims attending the religious ceremony of Arbain outside Imam al-Abbas shrine in Karbala, 80 km (50 miles) southwest of Baghdad, 24 Jan 2011

 

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Iraqi officials say a car bomb has exploded outside the southern Shi'ite holy city of Karbala, killing six people and wounding at least 10 others.

Authorities said the bomb exploded Monday at a bus terminal, killing Shi'ite pilgrims who have gathered for the religious ceremony Arbain.

The bombing follows a pair of suicide blasts outside the city last week that killed at least 50 people.

Arbain marks the end of the annual mourning period for the death of the 7th century Shi'ite Imam Hussein.  The event culminates Tuesday.