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Health care reform legislation cleared an important hurdle on Nov. 21, when the U.S. Senate voted to open full debate on a proposed 10-year, $848 billion overhaul of the industry. Democrats relied on a coalition of centrists and liberals to advance the measure with a filibuster-proof 60-to-39 vote; all the nays came from Republicans. Maintaining the fragile Democratic alliance could mean weeks of legislative haggling and debate: four key moderate Senators oppose the inclusion of a public-insurance option, which some colleagues on the left consider nonnegotiable. A final vote is probably a month or more...
...years, anti-Chinese riots have erupted everywhere from the Solomon Islands and Zambia to Tonga and Lesotho. Tensions are also simmering in India, where the Chinese are involved in several major infrastructure projects. Even high-level officials are speaking up. In Vietnam, plans for a $140 million Chinese-operated open-pit bauxite mine were publicly excoriated by none other than revolutionary hero General Vo Nguyen Giap because, he said, of "the serious risk to the natural and social environment...
...Tensions exploded in the 1990s on the P.N.G. island of Bougainville, where concerns over the environmental and economic effects of an Anglo-Australian-run copper mine sparked a secessionist struggle that claimed 15,000 lives over the course of a decade. (The mine, one of the world's largest open-pit sites, is now closed as a result of the civil war, which officially ended in 2000.) Separately, the national government was forced to declare a state of emergency in Southern Highlands province three years ago when protests over a multinational consortium's proposed gas pipeline reached a crescendo...
...five months ago, when a local youth was accidentally injured by a Chinese-driven tractor. More than 100 villagers went on the rampage, targeting the Chinese with stones and bush knives. The foreigners defended themselves with welding torches, but three were so gravely injured - one had his stomach sliced open - that they had to be airlifted to a hospital...
Feinstein also argues that Zuma is wildly inappropriate for the task he has set himself. Feinstein resigned from the ANC in 2001 in protest at his party's open hostility toward his investigation into a corrupt $5 billion arms deal. Through his financial adviser, who was jailed in 2005 for fraud, Zuma was one of the beneficiaries of kickbacks worth thousands of dollars. With Mbeki and Zuma slugging it out at the time, the courts and the state prosecutors became their arena, at considerable cost to the judiciary's independence. Prosecutors finally dropped the case in April, two weeks...