US Lawmakers Call for Hard-Nosed Approach With Iran

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Leading U.S. lawmakers are urging the Obama administration to take an even tougher stance with Iran over its nuclear program, questioning whether expanding economic sanctions are making a difference.

Photo: Reuters

Iran's International Atomic Energy Agency ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh (R) briefs the media during a board of governors meeting at the United Nations headquarters in Vienna, Austria, March 8, 2012.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Democrat John Kerry, called Iran and its nuclear program the "biggest foreign policy challenge facing the U.S." during a hearing Wednesday. He said sanctions alone are unlikely to make Iran change course and called for Washington to engage in what he called "hard-nosed diplomacy."

The committee's leading Republican lawmaker, Senator Richard Lugar, also warned that Iran has refused to change "even as its isolation has grown." He said Tehran needs to understand it must choose between pursuing its nuclear program or preserving Iran's economic viability.

The lawmakers said the U.S. is keeping all options on the table, including the use of military force.

Iran denies Western claims it is trying to develop atomic weapons and says its nuclear activities are purely for power generation and medical research purposes.

Iran's Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Wednesday that he expects renewed talks with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council - the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France, plus Germany - to begin April 13.

The group, known as the P5+1, reaffirmed its support for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue earlier this month. But in a statement, the group also voiced "regret" about Iran's escalating campaign to enrich uranium, and urged Tehran to open its Parchin military site to inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Kerry said the prospect of a military confrontation gives "added urgency" to the upcoming talks.

A spokesman for European Union policy chief Catherine Ashton said there is no agreement on a time or place for the talks. But Salehi told Iranian state media Wednesday that a site will be set in the next few days.

Iran wants the meeting to take place in the Turkish city Istanbul, where a previous round of talks broke down in January 2011.

Salehi welcomed Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Tehran on Wednesday for meetings with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other officials.

Turkey's Anatolia news agency quoted Erdogan as saying no one has the right to "impose anything" on a country using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. He also said, though, "Anyone who has common sense is against nuclear weapons. And so no one has the right or the entitlement to impose such a thing."

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UK helps Vietnam improve the quality of auditors

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(VOV) - The Vietnamese Ministry of Finance and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) have agreed to organize professional auditors contests in Vietnam.

At the signing of a cooperative agreement in Hanoi on April 18, Minister of Finance Vuong Dinh Hue highlighted ACCA's assistance in developing auditing work in Vietnam.

Under the agreement, ACCA will help the MoF's staff improve their ethical and professional standards. ACCA is also committed to granting full scholarships to Vietnamese financial officials.

The cooperative agreement will take effects in five years (from April 18, 2012 to April 17, 2014).

Theo en.baomoi.com

Op-Ed Columnist

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In Search of Sustainable Swagger

By ROGER COHEN

Published: April 2, 2012

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RIO DE JANEIRO — I came to Brazil in the 1980s at a time of funny money. Inflation peaked at 6,821 percent in April 1990. Today it's a place of funny prices. An ordinary Chilean red may go for $100 and brand-name sneakers for $350. Paris and New York seem like a steal.

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The funny money was given many names — cruzeiro, cruzado, cruzado novo, cruzeiro real — in search of an elusive credibility. But Brazil had only one name: instability. Then came the introduction of the real in 1994, solid democratic institutions, monetary reform, privatizations, booming commodities, trade with China, massive oil discoveries — and pizza margarita at $45.

This boom-era Brazilian pizza makes me glum. A certain swagger is needed to bake and flog flat, round bread for that price — the very swagger gone from the West. We are living the great global inversion. The price tag screams: You're history, baby!

It can certainly seem that way. Citibank officers once viewed Brazil as a basket case: there's a story of tables turned. Brazilian capitalism has fared better than U.S. capitalism of late and a lot better than U.S. banks. Inequality, still marked, has declined here in recent years. Of all the fast-growing Brazilian commodities, confidence is the most conspicuous.

Let's deconstruct this Gucci of pizzas. After all, it sells. Behind the fabulously expensive dough, tomato and mozzarella lurks an overvalued Brazilian currency. Behind that stand interest rates high enough and a nation stable enough to attract global corporations and the world's super-rich to put their money here. Behind that investment choice lie American and European crises that have cheapened major currencies, in part through the Central Bank cash infusions known as quantitative easing.

In short, this is a bellwether pizza. There is more belief in Brazil than in the Europe of the compromised euro or the United States of a compromised financial industry. Bullish Brazil, with its offshore oil and onshore Olympics coming, offers a mirror image of a brittle West. Looking for the promise of the Americas? Come here.

The global agenda in 2012 has no more important focus than finding a balance between the extremes of developing-world optimism and developed-world moroseness. The post-9/11 wars are over or ending. They were not entirely lost but nor were they won.

The recent murderous rampage of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales — a U.S. infantryman in southern Afghanistan on his fourth deployment in those wars, plagued by financial problems, in danger of losing his home — summed up the frustrations of those conflicts. Bales lost it. Many have lost everything. After the wars and the trillions of dollars they have consumed comes the hard slog of overcoming debt and deficits and high unemployment and anemic growth and shaken self-esteem.

This digging-out from a time of injury cannot be anything other than a joint effort. Developing economies like China and Brazil will have to see their surpluses come down if the debilitating deficits of the West are to be addressed.

That overvalued real, which punishes manufacturers trying to export, is no better for Brazil in the long term than a euro lurching from one salvage operation to the next is for Europe. Brazil, China and all the emergent economies are not served by a U.S. and Europe seized by doubt and plagued by youth unemployment. The world is still looking for a sustainable path out of the meltdown of 2008. Papering-over, at moral cost, has averted the worst. It has not laid credible new economic foundations.

When an outgoing Goldman Sachs executive, Greg Smith, wrote recently in The New York Times that, "It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off," his disgust with his company mirrored a widespread disquiet over the way big American financial institutions, bailed out by the taxpayer, walked away from the 2008 crisis without any serious reckoning.

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Health Ruling Hinges on How Justices Frame the Core Issue

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday is hearing arguments on the central question in the constitutional challenges to President Obama ’s health care overhaul law. How it answers the question depends in large part on how the justices decide to frame the core issue.

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: March 27, 2012

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The law’s challengers — 26 states led by Florida, the National Federation of Independent Business and several individuals — present the central question as one of individual liberty. May the federal government, they ask, compel individuals not engaged in commerce to buy a product, here health insurance , from private companies?

The Obama administration, by contrast, urges the court to answer a different question. May Congress decide, in fashioning a comprehensive response to a national crisis in the health care market, to regulate how people pay for the health care they will almost inevitably need?

However the questions are ultimately framed, the Supreme Court’s answers will be grounded in the text of two provisions of the Constitution and in the precedents interpreting them.

The Constitution grants the federal government specified powers, reserving the rest to the states and to the people. The two powers at issue in the case, set out in Article I, Section 8, concern the regulation of interstate commerce and the imposition of taxes.

The administration’s primary argument is that the law is authorized by the commerce clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate commerce "among the several states." The Supreme Court has read the clause broadly, saying it allows Congress to limit how much wheat may be grown on a family farm and to punish the cultivation of home-grown marijuana.

There have been only two modern exceptions to that broad interpretation. In 1995, the court struck down a federal law regulating guns near schools . In 2000, it struck down a federal law allowing suits over violence against women . In both cases, the court said the activity sought to be regulated was local and noncommercial.

The decision under review , from the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, said the health care law overstepped the limits imposed by the commerce clause by regulating inactivity and forcing people into the marketplace.

In his main brief , Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. urged the justices to look at the bigger picture.

"The minimum coverage provision," he wrote, using the law’s name for what most people call the individual mandate, "is within Congress’s power to enact not only because it is a necessary component of a broader scheme of interstate regulation, but also because, within that scheme, the provision itself regulates economic conduct with a substantial effect on interstate commerce, namely the way in which individuals finance their participation in the health care market."

Uninsured Americans each year use $43 billion of health care they cannot pay for, effectively transferring those costs to other American families to the tune of about $1,000 per year, Mr. Verrilli said.

In response , Paul D. Clement, representing 26 states challenging the law, said this conception of federal power amounts to "a revolution in the relationship between the central government and the governed."

"If this is to remain a system of limited and enumerated federal powers that respects individual liberty, accountability and the residual dignity and sovereignty of the states, the individual mandate cannot stand."

The federal government also argued that the mandate is separately authorized by Congress’s power to levy taxes. The penalty that people who fail to obtain insurance must pay is calculated as a percentage of their income and is paid to the Internal Revenue Service along with income and other taxes each April.

Mr. Clement responded that the challenge is to the mandate, which applies to almost all Americans, rather than the penalty, which applies to a subset of them. In any event, he said, a penalty is not a tax.

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Southeast Asia starts to plan for climate change

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A forum on fighting climate change was held in Thailand recently. Viet Nam News spoke to Robert Mather, head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Southeast Asia Group, about the project.

Can you tell us about the project?

The project started last year and will last until December 2014. Supported by funding from the European Union, it seeks to strengthen the capacity of local governments and people to plan for and adapt to future climate risks in Cambodia's Kampot and Koh Kong Provinces, Thailand's Chanthaburi and Trat, and HCM City, Ben Tre, Soc Trang, and Kien Giang in Viet Nam.

This will enable local government agencies to conduct vulnerability assessments, identify pilot activities to reduce the vulnerability, design, implement, and monitor the success of these activities, and carry out cost-benefit analysis and feasibility assessment for replicating pilot actions over a wider area.

It will identify best practices developed by local people and provide opportunities for communities on different parts of the coast to learn from each other.

In Viet Nam, the IUCN has two partners – the Viet Nam Administration of Sea and Island and German Society for International Co-operation (GIZ) – with their own projects and collaborative ones in various Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta provinces.

What we have in the project that will be important is sharing and learning between the different countries and different provinces or sites working in each country.

Climate change is now becoming a familiar word. How can we cope with it?

Climate change is real. It has already happened and is happening now. We don't know how long it will happen and how quickly. We do know it has already happened and is getting worse.

The impact of climate change will be totally different for different people, depending on who you are, where you live, what you do, and how you feel about climate change.

If you look at one community, one place, depending upon whether you are a man or woman, old or young, fishermen or farmer, it will be different for you.

Climate change is a new issue that as garnered a lot of attention. Climate change adaptation is something that I think a lot of people are trying to find how we should do, what we should actually do, what climate change adaptation really needs.

That is why we need to find out local places for a project to share and learn from each other. And also carry out exchanges between local communities, local governments, technical experts and also higher level of national government.

It is important to learn, to exchange both vertically and horizontally.

So climate change adaptation is still a question without an answer?

Here is an obvious message: There no single solution for climate change. There are many solutions because we need solutions for every community and for different groups of people.

I try to think of a number. There may be 20 million communities around the world. Let us say we need at least 10-20 different climate change adaptation solutions for each community. So in the world we need 200 – 400 million solutions for climate change. And our project can only help deliver 20 to 40.

What we really want to focus on is how nature can offer us solutions. We want to focus on nature-based solutions because we really need nature.

Whether we reforest the watershed or replant the mangrove forest, all natural solutions to climate change will be important. Natural solutions will not be the only solutions, we are still seeking some hard-infrastructure options but when we think about the benefits of natural solutions, they are available to everybody and cheap.

If you build a wall to stop the sea level from rising, it will cost a lot of money. If you have mangroves to stop the sea level from rising, it is cheaper and you can get a lot of other benefits too.

But none of this is going to work unless local communities, local people really have secure access to natural resources and local environment so that they can manage climate change adaptation.

Is there anything else on the forum agenda?

Writing about climate change, how to figure out what is climate change is difficult for journalists too. If even people implementing the projects are still not sure about the right solutions, how can we expect journalists to understand the right solutions? And if journalists carry stories on newspapers or TV, how many people reading, listening, or watching can understand?

So a strong focus on the media with regard to climate change is very important and we also want to know how the media understands climate change and tells the public about the issue.

We hope this is the first step in starting close long-term collaboration between international organisations and the media to figure out the right thing and take it to everyone in these countries. — VNS

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David Hallberg Joins The Bolshoi Ballet as a Premier Dancer

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An American ballet star has joined the Bolshoi Ballet as what"s called a premier dancer. David Hallberg is the first American to achieve such a distinction.

They call him the Prince, that's the Prince of Ballet.   He is 29 year-old David Hallberg of Rapid City, South Dakota.

AP/Evan Agostini

American ballet dancers David Hallberg, right, and Tiler Peck perform at the 2010 World Science Festival opening night gala performance at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday, June 2, 2010 in New York.

This young dancer, who hails far from the cultural centers of the U.S.,  is now the first American to enlist permanently with the world-renowned Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow.  It has special meaning for him.  "For me the responsibility is large," he said. "The pressure is, of course, quite large.  So is the responsibility to represent a new generation, a new era in ballet."

Hallberg will have a starring role with the Bolshoi.  Over the last 10 years he has made tremendous strides.  In 1999, he trained at the Paris Opera Ballet School and in 2000 he joined American Ballet Theater in New York.

He's now a principal dancer with ABT and will continue to dance with Ballet Theater from time to time.

Kevin McKenzie is artistic director of ABT. He says he never doubted Hallberg's potential.  "We knew right away that we had a talented boy on our hands," he said.

"It was just evident when it was time to open the gates and let him go and he took off like a meteor."

The move comes 50 years after Rudolf Nureyev's historic defection from the Soviet Union.  That turned the world of dance upside town.

Then, in 1974, the great Mikhail Baryshnikov defected.

Now, the journey is in reverse.

Hallberg believes the collaboration will be positive. "I will be like a sponge trying to absorb everything around me and trying to see all the other dancers, the ballets and the repertoire.  And on the other hand, I feel the dancers can be influenced by the way I dance as well," he said.

Kevin McKenzie, of ABT, is proud. "Until this very moment in time it was always American companies or American audiences looking for validation -- to have a guest Russian dancer with them.  And now the shoe is on the other foot," he said.

Hallberg will debut in "Giselle" at the Bolshoi in early November.

Theo www.voanews.com

Dior Turns to Raf Simons

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The Belgian designer Raf Simons was named late on Monday as the next artistic director of Christian Dior — a post that had been empty for more than a year since the dramatic departure of John Galliano in March 2011.

Giuseppe Cacace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Belgian designer Raf Simons acknowledged the audience at the end of Jil Sander Spring-Summer 2012 ready-to-wear collection last September in Milan.

By SUZY MENKES

Published: April 9, 2012

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"I feel fantastic," Mr. Simons said by telephone from his studio in Antwerp. "It is one of the ultimate challenges, and a dream to go to a place like Dior, which stands for absolute elegance, incredible femininity and utter luxury."

Mr. Simons, 44, began his career in men's wear in 1995 and went on to revitalize men's and women's lines at Jil Sander 10 years later.

Now he has been chosen by Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton to modernize Dior, the most classic of Parisian couture houses. In a statement, LVMH said that "Raf Simons' journey with the house of Dior will propel its iconic style into the 21st century."

Mr. Simons will be in charge of haute couture, women's ready-to-wear and accessories, starting with the couture show in July, while keeping his eponymous men's line.

Mr. Arnault and Sidney Toledano, Dior's chief executive, began searching for a new designer after Mr. Galliano was removed from the post because he had made anti-Semitic slurs in a bar in Paris.

Several designers said they had turned down the house, apparently seeing a post-Galliano role as a poisoned chalice.

The front runner, the American-born Marc Jacobs, design director of Louis Vuitton, decided to stay where he was. In the meantime, design direction at Dior was in the hands of Bill Gaytten, Mr. Galliano's former assistant. LVMH's financial figures for 2011 show that Dior's results were not affected.

Mr. Simons's name had been bandied about with other supposed contestants in recent months, particularly after his on-off courtship by the house of Yves Saint Laurent ended. The Dior appointment is being made as the designer Hedi Slimane, once a men's wear rival of Mr. Simons's, takes on the top job at Saint Laurent, the fashion house owned by PPR, a major LVMH rival.

The Christian Dior heritage began with the romantic Mr. Dior himself, a man who brought femininity to the postwar 1950s, building the tiny waists and sweeping skirts of his voluptuous "flower women" on his obsession with the Edwardian elegance of his early memories of his mother. He died suddenly in 1957 after only 10 years at the helm, to be followed by a young unknown, Yves Saint Laurent.

Mr. Simons's style could not be more different from that of the founder: He has a modernist vision and a spare, linear style based on fine tailoring. "My aim is a very modern Dior, but at the end of the day, I also look back," he said, referring to what he calls "mid-century modernism."

"I find that period between 1947 and 1957 extremely attractive, and there was a lot of modernity," Mr. Simons said of Christian Dior's designs. "There was the romantic appeal looking back to his mother and the belle époque, but there was also a constant evolution in shape, changing proportions and the ideas connected to the World War were revolutionary."

Mr. Simons comes from the Flemish town of Neerpelt, the only son of a modest family. His mother worked as a house cleaner and his father was on military night watch. Some of that uniform severity may have been worked into the spare lines of early men's collections, where the obsessive focus was the angst and tension of youth culture and the beat of the Belgian music movement.

"But my father was not a strict man, it was a warm nest," Mr. Simons said, adding that his interest in fashion was more about escaping from a Catholic background and a rigorous college full of students aspiring to become lawyers or doctors.

While Christian Dior embraced flower gardens and the decorative stage sets of his artist friend Christian Bérard, Mr. Simons trained as an industrial designer in Genk before trying men's fashion. His world was defined by one of his earliest shows for autumn winter 1996-97. In "We Only Come Out at Night," youths with skinny bodies, sculpted faces and sensual lips dragged on cigarettes and reveled in their adult-free world.

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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 9, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the town where Raf Simons trained as an industrial designer. The town is not Ghent, it is Genk.

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