Word: helpfulness
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...government has clear goals. It wants the denizens of its Silicon Valley to hatch lucrative inventions that will help break the economy's dependence on the sale of oil and gas. "The appearance of great ideas, like life itself, is still considered a miracle," said the Kremlin's chief ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, who laid out the project in a rare interview with Vedomosti, a Russian business daily, on Feb. 15. "There are, of course, no miracle workers among bureaucrats and businessmen, but together we need to create an environment where miracles are possible." (See how hackers crippled Twitter...
...weeks ago in Moscow, he hosted a delegation from the real Silicon Valley that included top executives from eBay, Twitter and Cisco Systems. The actor Ashton Kutcher also came along, and documented the visit on his Twitter feed. "Russia is building their own Silicon valley. And they want help," Kutcher tweeted on Feb. 18. "If we rebuilt it today what would we do differently...
Those criteria, which the UNDP insists it verifies for each hire, help prevent the program from becoming a political patronage orgy. UNDP officials say the Haitian government has been remarkably cooperative. But Haitians aren't shy about noting how thoroughly corrupt that government is. Many workers openly laud the fact that they don't need to know (or kick back to) a local machine boss to get a cash-for-work spot - "If the government were running this, I probably wouldn't have this job," says Sentelis Doassalit, 30 - and that the pay goes directly to their hands...
Comparisons between the two countries will no doubt be much discussed when the U.N. hosts a conference in New York City on March 31 to hash out how best to help Haiti rebuild. Donor governments already know why there was so much less destruction in Chile: it's because the government there forces builders to adhere to rigorous codes, while Haiti's incorrigible corruption and carelessness left such regulation all but nonexistent. On the global corruption index put out by Transparency International, a Berlin-based nonprofit that lists countries from the least to most corrupt, Chile ranks 25th and Haiti...
...lingering discrimination in the hemisphere and the world. (The U.S. wouldn't recognize Haiti until 1862, and Nicolas Sarkozy's visit there two weeks ago was, remarkably, the first ever by a French head of state.) As a result, the international community needs to give the country more comprehensive help than it's offered in the past. But such aid should not be delivered without an acknowledgment by Haiti's ultra-venal political and economic élite that the benighted way of doing things has got to end. Even Haiti's Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, conceded to TIME recently...