Prime Minister\'s Ousting Complicates Strategy to Curb Mali\'s Islamists

LONDON - Slow-moving international efforts to confront an Islamist takeover of northern Mali, described at the United Nations this week as “one of the potentially most explosive corners of the world,” just got more complicated.

Early on Tuesday, a grim-faced Cheikh Modibo Diarra appeared on Mali's state television to announce what appeared to be his forced resignation as prime minister of the African desert state.

A former NASA scientist, Mr. Diarra had been arrested by soldiers as he was about to take a flight to France. They were from the same military group who staged a coup in Bamako, the capital, in March before handing power back to civilians the following month.

The early assessment of the prime minister's departure was th at he had upset the military by trying to establish his own political base ahead of future elections.

The March coup created a vacuum in the country that allowed a power grab in the north by separatist Tuareg tribesmen.

But these were soon pushed aside by radical Islamists, some linked to Al Qaeda, who have since imposed a brutal fundamentalist regime on a fiefdom the size of Texas.

It is funded with the proceeds of drug, cigarette and people smuggling. One of the key players in the north, a one-eyed jihadist named Mokhtar Bel Mokhtar El-Aouar, is also known as “Mister Malboro.”

Spain's El País reported this month that northern Mali had become a magnet for thousands of young Islamists from around the world, who wer e flocking to the region in pursuit of jihad and a secure income.

The newspaper quoted military experts as saying it would require six months to train a 3,000-strong intervention army at a cost of "70 million to oust the Islamists.

European and African governments, and the United States, are all too aware of the threat of an African “Afghanistan” emerging south of the Mediterranean. The challenge is what to do about it.

Differences among Africans, Europeans, the United States and the U.N., have so far stymied the formulation of a united and coherent policy.

The last time Rendezvous reported on the Mali crisis, in October, European Union states had just announced their readiness to send military trainers to Mali to prepare African troops for a planned intervention.

Since then, Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. Secretary-General, has re commended that the Security Council approve the deployment of an African peace enforcement mission. But he did not offer that the U.N. would pay for it.

He also warned that military intervention could “risk ruining any chance of a negotiated political solution to the crisis, which remains the best hope of ensuring long-term stability in Mali.”

The West Africa regional bloc, the Economic Community of West African States, has agreed to commit 3,300 troops for an international force.
However, the ECOWAS plan has been described as confused and incomplete by U.N. and European critics.

Mr. Diarra's ousting is a potential blow to a policy, espoused by the United States, to put political reform and early elections at the forefront of a strategy to combat th e extremists.

That has put Washington at odds with France, the former colonial power in Mali, which wants the United Nations to move quickly to back a military intervention by troops from neighboring African states.

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told the Security Council on Monday that it must be careful to address the crisis in Mali without destabilizing the entire Sahara region.

Johnnie Carson, the State Department's Africa spokesman, told a U.S. Senate subcommittee last week that what Mali needed more than ever was a strong democratic government “to restore its democratic tradition and provide the strong leadership necessary to negotiate a political agreement with northern rebels.”

He said such a government would reform the security sector, “and lead a military intervention in the north to restore and maintain Mali's territorial integrity.”

The vario us Islamist groups who hold sway in the north should not expect an offensive anytime soon.

Hervé Ladsous, the U.N.'s peacekeeping chief, said last week that, although international military intervention to oust the militants was almost inevitable, nothing would happen before next September.

Melee at the Opera: Catcalls for Paris \'Médée\'

Audiences fed up with a radical director's take on an opera usually save their rage till the final curtain calls. Monday night at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, in the first of four performances of Cherubini's “Médée,” the audience couldn't wait and interrupted the performance. There are limits, it would seem, on just how far a director can go, and for many those limits were breached.

Several points of departure by the director Krzysztof Warlikowski apparently had a cumulative effect that led to an eruption of jeers. According to a spokeswoman for the theater, people yelled, “Stop the desecration of opera,” and “I didn't pay money for this,” as well as vulgar epithets. She also said that the audience was split, and that the catcalls provoked cries in support of the production.

According to the opera's conductor, Christophe Rousset, who was reached by telephone Tuesday, the episode began brewing at the end of Act 1 and culminated at the beginning of Act 2, which follows without a break in this production borrowed from the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. As described by Mr. Rousset, in Mr. Warlikowski's interpretation, Médée's husband, Jason, still feels a powerful sexual attraction for Médée (sung by Nadja Michael), even though he has left her for another woman, Dircé, and this sexuality is emphasized in the duet for Jason and Médée that concludes Act 1.

Then, as an interlude before Act 2, pop music from the 1960s is heard in a recording (according the theater, the song “Oh, Carol!” by Neil Sedaka) during a party celebrating the forthcoming wedding of Jason and Dircé. Early in Act 2 Médée has a scene with Creon (king of Corinth and father of Dircé), for which Creon arrive s in jogging clothes and then goes on to make a pass at Médée. During a passage of spoken dialogue, catcalls grew to the point that Vincent Le Texier, the singer playing Creon, told the audience, “If you don't like it, go away.” After that, Mr. Rousset said, the audience settled down and the rest of the opera proceeded without incident.

Another factor undoubtedly feeding the rage was the spoken dialogue, which Mr. Warlikowski insisted on having rewritten and which is full of vulgarities and slang. According to Mr. Rousset, Mr. Warlikowski found the original dialogue, in Alexandrine meter, “stuffy.” (“Médée” was performed in its original French version with spoken dialogue rather than the later Italian version, which has accompanied recitative.)

A spokeswoman for La Monnaie expressed shock that the demonstration occurred, noting that the production was very well received when it was new in 2008, and at its revival last season.
Mr. Warlikow ski is well known for his capacity to provoke. In a 2007 production of Tchaikovsky's “Eugene Onegin” for Munich's Bayerische Staatsoper, he portrayed Onegin and Lensky as homosexual lovers.

And the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, of course, will forever be known as the stage where Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring” was first performed nearly 100 years ago to hoots and jeers.

Why Everyone Is So Certain About Hillary 2016

NEW YORK - The Hillary-in-2016 buzz has hit overdrive, and the political speculation game has gone viral. By ten o'clock Monday, I'd watched a variety of commentators on three cable news programs speculate, guess, opine and bet on the real and imaginary future of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Everyone's in fear of Hillary,” said one anchor, announcing a “Hillary Watch.”

“Wait, it's too early,” one female guest advised Hillary. “Don't believe the hype.”

“There's no limit to her potential,” crowed a partisan.

“It's a coronation,” said another, meeting no contradiction.

A few hours of this chatter, and everyone is echoing each other, every segment similar to the one an hour earlier, but we keep listening, just in case something new drops in.

Some try to guess what brave soul in the currently down-at-the-mouth Republican Party would dare to come up against a world heroine like Hillary. (The secretary of state, who is leavi ng her job in January, has forged an incontestable global position, especially among women, as my latest Female Factor column attests.)

So who would face off against Hillary?

There's Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida who is known as “the good Bush,” a more people savvy and centrist politician than his brother, the former president. There's Marco Rubio, the great Republican Hispanic hope, who may break ground as the first Latino presidential candidate. But can he beat Hillary? Really?

As for Vice President Joseph Biden, a onetime presidential candidate, few believe he would want to challenge her in a primary (a recent PPP poll said she would receive 58 percent of the vote in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, traditionally the first in the nation, while Mr. B iden trails far behind).

The way many Democrats and pundits see it is this: She declares her candidacy, and the waters part. That's how far out they're going on a limb.

Rampant guesswork - “she's going to go off the grid” - is totally permissible, and fun. Being on a bandwagon like the one that's off and roaring for Hillary is de rigueur. Pity the Republican (or clueless Democrat) who dares to suggest that she may not run at all. Buzz killer!

It's a pretty diverse crew, this political class. There are serious, bespectacled veterans and graying pols and a raft of lilting-voiced, sharp-tongued and clip-talking thirty-somethings whose eyes are on the shining prize, a cable political show of their own. There are familiar bylines from major newspapers and magazines, and Washington authors and Beltway insiders.

Political chatter is an industry all its own. It is Washington's obsession but it also infects power-mad New York, where politics meets fame , fashion and money.

An addictive parlor game, it's played in front of millions of political fanatics, like me, who can't resist tuning in and feasting on the dish. Like sports, politics offers plenty of opportunities to blow hard, to bet on the wrong team and to lose miserably.

But you can't help playing the game, even when your speculation, usually tinged with certitude, is often dead wrong.

All the talk today about the 2016 election - a veritable thousand lifetimes away in politics - is a little crazy. But for political junkies this is the stuff of life. Not to know the latest on such a riveting and important figure like Hillary Clinton can prove embarrassing, not to say unforgivable, in a place like Washington that breathes that air and drinks that water.

So I've got to go. “Andrea Mitchell Reports” is coming on.

Tangled in Punctuation

As we've noted before, dashes and colons can cause problems if used carelessly. And a profusion of such punctuation may suggest that a sentence is overstuffed or undercooked.

A few recent examples:

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Everyone knows this Jets team is far different from the one that went to the A.F.C. championship game twice, and despite the season-long shakiness of the Patriots' secondary - which played much better against the Colts, it is hard to imagine that the Jets have the weapons to pass their way to a victory Thursday.

We needed two dashes, not a dash and a comma, to set off this parenthetical clause. Better still, consider breaking the sentence up or paring it down.

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The movie also illustrates another thing: that politics is the best place to develop the highest virtues. Politics involves such a perilous stream of character tests: how l ow can you stoop to conquer without destroying yourself; when should you be loyal to your team and when should you break from it; how do you wrestle with the temptations of fame - that the people who can practice it and remain intact, like Lincoln, Washington or Churchill, are incredibly impressive.

Here, too, a pair of dashes was needed, not a colon and a dash. But once again, streamlining the passage may be the better choice. It's almost never a good idea to have colon constructions in two consecutive sentences. And when colons, dashes, commas and semicolons start to pile up, consider whether a sentence is veering out of control.

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Theirs is an improbable buddy act that is making for unlikely entertainment from campuses to corporations on a most serious subject: the federal debt. The proof of their appeal: some business groups pay them $40,000 each per appearance. Really. To discuss budgets and baselines.

Ladies and gentlemen, coming soon to your city or town (if they have not been there already, and maybe even if they have) are the latest odd couple of politics: the 67-year-old Democratic straight man, Erskine B. Bowles of Charlotte, N.C., and his corny 81-year-old, 6-foot-7 Republican sidekick, Alan K. Simpson of Cody, Wyo.

This was an amusing start to a profile of Bowles and Simpson. But colons in three consecutive sentences gave it a repetitive and jumpy feel.

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It's a combination that not only has Barbie building luxury mansions - they are pink, of course - but Lego promoting a line of pastel construction toys called Friends that is an early Christmas season hit. The Mega Bloks Barbie Build ‘n Style line, available next week, has both girls - and their fathers - in mind.

Here, too, having pairs of dashes in consecutive sentences seems like overkill. More important, the dashes in the second sentence don't work. A “both/and” construction is intended to tie two elements closely together, so it doesn't make sense to separate one element with dashes. (There is also a parallelism problem with the “not only … but” construction in the first sentence; the dashes may have thrown us off track.)

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From the first extreme close-up of Bella fluttering open her dark, feathery eyelashes, Mr. Condon makes this “Twilight” an intensely tactile and intimate experience. Taking his cues from the Golden Age of Hollywood - the close-ups of Bella and Edward bring to mind those of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in “A Place in the Sun.” He bathes his stars in a gleaming light that gives their pale faces a luxurious alabaster sheen.

Somehow we went off track here and ended up with a sentence fragment. Perhaps we intended to use another dash after “A Place in the Sun” and continue the sentence?

 
In a Word

This week's grab bag of grammar, style and other miss teps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.

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At Omtay Tso, Sangay bid us farewell as he awaited the arrival of the horse team over the pass.

The preferred past tense for this sense is “bade.”

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Yet from their first home game in Major League Soccer, the MetroStars/Red Bulls franchise has been beset, some of the club's fans believe, by its own hoodoo: the Curse of Caricola.

The Times's stylebook notes that this word is stilted and “best replaced by conversational synonyms like troubled or harassed.”

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Speaking mainly in English, a language he has a fluent if idiosyncratic grasp of, the president attempted to explain himself in terms Americans might understand - making reference in one answer to “Good Morning America,” Barbara Walters, the Iran hostage crisis, Charles Bronson and “Planet of the Apes.”

This verb is often stilted, as the styleb ook notes; “tried” is more conversational.

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Introduced in 2003, Skype encrypts each Internet call so that they are next to impossible to crack. It quickly became the pet technology of global organizers and opposition members in totalitarian countries.

The plural “they” doesn't work with the singular antecedent “call.”

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It should be noted, however, that this happens to shows with puny ratings about as often as cement shoes prove to be floatation devices.

Make it “flotation.”

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Robert Thomson, the top editor at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and a confidante of News Corporation's chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, is expected to be named chief executive of the media conglomerate's newly spun-off publishing company.

Make it “confidant” for a man.

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Listeners have speculated that air pockets or periodontal disease or even Bell's palsy account for his way of speaking.

When “or” or “nor” separates alternate subjects, the closest determines whether the verb should be singular or plural. Make it “or even Bell's palsy accounts for…”

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The 1986 paradigm has become an intellectual straightjacket, foreclosing considerations of the things we actually have to do.

The preferred spelling, in our stylebook, is “straitjacket.”

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Among the companies that analysts have said could make a bid to acquire The FT are Thomson Reuters, which has an editorial staff of thousands but no print publication.

Don't be fooled by “companies”; the subject of the verb is the singular Thomson Reuters, so make it “is Thomson Reuters.”

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So far this year, 47 people have died in residential fires, a pace that would mean the fewest number of such deaths sin ce New York City began keeping reliable counts early in the 20th century.

Make it “the smallest number” or “the fewest such deaths.”

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Cindy Michaels and Tony Consiglio came to work last Tuesday with a secret: this was going to be their last day co-anchoring the news together.

“Co-anchoring together” is redundant.

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“He will get well in time, but it's not the kind of illness where you can put a timetable on it,” a subdued Mr. Jackson told reporters outside his home here following the resignation.

In this construction, the stylebook prefers “after” as less stilted.

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They say Mr. Kerry has won their respect and that it is his foreign policy chops that give him an edge with them.

No need to rely on the faddish slang “chops.”

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Quebec's stringent language laws, first passed in 1977, have long meant that regardless of the name out front, all large retailers serve customers in French and post signs that are predominately, or entirely, in French along their aisles.

The stylebook and dictionary prefer “predominant” and “predominantly” for the adjective and adverb forms.

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Even before Hurricane Sandy, New York was sheltering more homeless people than any city in the United States

Logic dictates that we make it “any other city.”

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It is the flip side of the Mexico that the world is familiar with: the one in which drug barons hang bodies from bridges, evade the law in elaborate hideaways and funnel billions of dollars in narcotics across the border and around the world.

No call for the colloquial expression here.

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To be canonized as a saint, Day will face several major hurdles, according to the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Cente r.

It seems odd to describe Dorothy Day, long dead, as facing hurdles; it is the effort by others to have her canonized that faces hurdles.

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Still, in the 2012 election, it feels as if we've been neglected more than is absolutely necessary.

“A redundancy,” as the stylebook notes.

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There have been previous libel suits over comments posted on Twitter, a site that lets users write short messages to their followers.

Needless to say… it was needless to say.

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[Op-Ed] Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has been courageous to make global warming a subject of public debate, but will taxpayers support his proposal to build a levee in New York Harbor?

Abbreviate governor in a full first reference: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

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Not so, though, for a majority of patients diagnosed with cancers of the lung or colon that have spread well beyond their original site and are currently not curable by any drugs in the medical armamentarium.

From the stylebook:

diagnose. The disease, not the patient, is diagnosed. Do not write: She was diagnosed with cancer.

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Each of the five said that he hadn't participated in the rampage, and yet, after they were arrested for attacking Ms. Meili, most confessed to assaulting her. The confessions sealed their downfall.

We would be hard-pressed to find a better example for why we should not use this construction. The “arrested for” implies they did it.

The Oxymorons of \'Sustainable Overfishing\'

GENERAL SANTOS, Philippines - Fishtocrats from three dozen nations just met in Manila to protect imperiled Pacific tuna, but they barely budged the status quo. So I flew down to Mindanao to hobnob with fishermen. It looks as if we had best develop a taste for tofu tartar and seaweed sushi.
The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission banned reporters, as usual, from its five-day annual session last week. I went as an observer researching a book. But Pew Charities Trust, WWF and Greenpeace summed it up neatly:
“It is outrageous that once again the scientific recommendations have been completely ignored, and that members once again focused debate this week on how much overfishing to allow rather than how to effectively end it.”
The joint statement singled out bigeye tuna, as cherished as blue fin for top-grade sashimi, but yellowfin is also under heavy pressure. Even the ubiquitous skipjack that goes into cans is at the limit.
In General Santos, all three are landed as if there were no tomorrow. Elaborate restrictions apply across the west and central Pacific. Yet here, as in many ports and on the high seas, they are too often ignored.
The main catch is mostly yellowfin from the rich Coral Triangle, from the Philippines to Indonesia and up to Papua New Guinea. Each morning, boats bring in yellowfin too young to breed along with baby bigeye and skipjack the size of measly trout.
“Too many people are trying to catch too many fish,” John Heitz told me, shaking his head at a crate of yellowfin no longer than his arm. (It should have been as long as his leg.) An ex-Peace Corps volunteer, he settled in decades ago to export fresh high-quality tuna.
“If everyone would stop hammering this kindergarten class and follow the guidelines, tuna would be sustainable,” he said.
Even more than rampant overfishing at the b ottom, the problem is politics at the top. The WCPFC includes not only major players like the United States, the European Union, China, Japan and such, but also dozens of Pacific island and coastal states.

Government officials, a few of whom seem unable to tell a tuna from a turtle, dominate the delegations; they defend national interests. Other delegates are industry executives who want to fish. Many from both sides are serious about a sustainable long term. But all decisions must be unanimous.

The NGO statement noted the WCPFC pledged in 2008 to end bigeye overfishing by the end of 2011. Instead, it said, “overfishing has actually increased, and now this commission wants to delay another five years.” At each meeting, it said, talks focus on details, not the core problems.

Ironically, those 500-plus delegates debated the future of half the world's tuna behind closed doors. We credentialed researchers aren't supposed to report on their debates. So I'll leave the conclusion to the NGO statement:
“The Commission seems to be…constructing a Rube Goldberg machine that has a lot of levers, chutes, and lifts that produce a lot of noise and activity, but in the end achieves effectively nothing.”

“Nothing” may be pushing it. But over the past 18 months, I've seen plenty of evidence for that, not only within the WCPFC but also in other regional fisheries management organizations. To save fish, we need firm guidelines, clear limits and serious enforcement.

The crisis is clear enough here in Tuna Town, where six canneries now depend largely on fish brought from beyond depleted surrounding waters. Boats change flags at their convenience. Some of their holds disgorge undersized tuna.

In one working group in Manila, someone's slip of the tongue coined a new phrase: sustainable overfishing. When everyone laughed, he indicated that he'd meant that as a joke. I'm not so sure.