The state of Afghanistan In a exclusive interview,Afghan President Hamid Karzai talks about how far his embattled country has come

And how far it still has to go,It has been a rough few weeks for Afghanistan's president,Himid Karzai.Violence in his insurgency-wracked nation reached new level on Aug.18 when the Taliban attacked French troops belonging to the international Security Assistance Force just 30 miles from the capital Kabul,10 Frenchmen died and another 21 were wounded.The next day,militants massed against one of the biggest US bases in the country,launching a coordinated attack that included six suicide bombers.Just a week earlier,militants had killed three aid workers and Afghan driver,prompting international aid massions to reconsider how,and even if,they should be dilivering assistance to Afghan civilians in the face of a militant surge bent on forcing all foreigners out of the country.Time's Aryn Baker took advantage of a lull in the fighting to sit down with Karzai,50,in the garden of his fortified palace in Kabul to discuss the violence,the Aug.18 resignation of Pakistan's Prevez Musharraf,and widespread accusation of corrution in the Afghan government that are driving a wedge between the people and their leader,Just when unity is most needed.Excerpts from their two-hour conversation.



Time when we last met two years ago,Kabul's first major suicide bomb went off during our interview.Since then the militants have grown ever stronger.There have been many devastating attacks,plus an attempt on your life.The casulities will only get wrose,I fear.And did you see what's happening in Pakistan?Why would someone go and blow himself up in a hospital?Who are they,what are they?It cannot be justified.You can fight people anywhere,anyplace,but you don't kill people in a hospital.It's crazy.So how do you combat a movement that has only annihilation as its goal?In order to fix terrorism at large,we need to remedy the wrongs of the past 30 years.Remedy means to undo.The world pushed us to fight the Soviets.And those who did it walked away and left all the mess spread around.September II is consenquence of this.The bombing in Peshawar today is a consequence.The bombing in Algeria today is a consequence.Afghanistan was once a great place in perfect harmony with the rest of the world.Families sent their girls to university,wearing whatever style they wanted.And that family lived in perfect harmony with another family who was conservation and traditional.Both lived together and socialized.But in the years of fighting against the Soviets,radicalism was the main thing.Someone like me would be called half a Muslim,because we were not radical.The more radical you became the more money you were given,Radicalism became not only an ideological tool against the Soviets but a way forward economically.The more radical you presented yourself,that more money the West gave you.It wasn't just the West,it was Saudi Arabia,Pakistan.Everybody together I call the West,because they were led by the West.The moderates were undermined.Afghan history and nationalism were called atheism.The more you spoke of radicalsim,the better you were treated.That's what we are paying for now.





Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf,your longtime foe,stepped down yerterday.What does the mean for Afghanistan?Arrival and departure don't matter much-unless we correct the institutions,unless we change the mindsets that follow an old policy.For example,if Pakistan is using radicalism as a tool of policy for streategic depth in Afghanistan,well,I wish to tell them it won't work.The best strategic depth in Afghistan is friendship,cooperation.Afghanistan is willing to build that kind of relationship.cooperation,not weaponry,not sancturary,not undermining,not seeking a puppet state.That will not happen,period.You have accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intellignce agancy of supporting terroism in Afghanistan,particularly in the case of the recent Indian embassy bombing in Kabul.Do you think the new civilian government in Pakistan can rein in the ISI?Pakistan prime minister Yousaf Gilani is a good man. He has the right intentions.I hope he gets the tools of control.Today,the army chief of Pakistan was in Afghanistan,at Bagram air-force base.I called Kayani on the telephone to welcome him to my country,and to tell him that Afghanistan cannot achieve peace or prosperity without friendly relations with Pakistan.I hope he recognizes that what they are doing in terms of supporting militancy in Afghanistan is casuing immense damage to Pakistan itself.What will it take for this to happen?A proper analysis of the Pakistan national interest.A proper analysis of the course to be followed into the future.A different thinking about life itself.How do I want to live with my neighbor?Do I want to live a life undermining it or pushing it around,or do I want a neighbor who is prosperous and good and with whom I can work well?Afghanistan wants that life.And Pakistan will benefit from that life,too.



Pakistan has to recognize that Afghanistan has been in this part of the world for a long,long time.It's a good,old,sage man.It will not go away.Empires have tried and failed to conquer this place.And Afghanistan will guard its independence and sovereignty and its right to a relationship with others very jealously.We will have relations with India.We will have relation with Iran,with China,with America,with Russia,too.Strategic ones,strong ones,deep ones.There are relationships that will not be used against our neighbors.Not against Pakistan,not against Iran.We are not shadowy.Recently there has been a spate of incidents of ISAF troops causing civilian casualties.The Afghan Senate is trying to bring foreign forces under Afghan law so they can be tried for civilian casualties.Is that what you want?Afghanistan is grateful to our allies for having brought us liberation from terrorists,alQaeda and the Taliban.Their taxpayer money is being spent here in Afghanstan.It is money that the America and European people have worked hard to earn.The sacrifice in life by the men and women of America and our other allies-that is all recognized with immense appreciation by the Afghans.But the Afghan people have given a lot ,too,in this war against terroism.On a daily basis we are losing out lives,police,army engineers,teachers,even our children.

We've got to make sure that people understand the choices that are at stake.

Your speeches seem to be getting far tougher.Well,it's getting to be crunch time.Now is the time where people are going to start pay attendtion,leading up into the convention,and we've got to make sure that people understand the choices that are at stake....I think what we've been getting from John McCain has been nonstop attack against me and my character,which have distracted people from the issues.What I want to do is make sure the people understand that here are the choices,that you've got a candidate who is presenting policies that are identical to what George Bush has been doing for the last eight years,you've got somebody who intends to fundamentally change those policies so that they work for the average American family.And if people understand what those choices are,I think we will win.


There are Democrats who are nervous that you are not tough enough for the general election.I don't think that's just about me.I think they are congenitally nervous because we lost a bunch of presidential eletion where people felt that we should have won.But keep in mind that whatever concern people have about me,my campaign in particular,we heard those all through the primaries.And the reason-as I said the town-hall meeting-that I think we're going to be successful is,it's not about me.It's about the American people,It's about the fact that their wages and incomes have flatlined,their costs have gone up.Their costs have gone up,they are losing their health care.They are worried about the future.And the Republicans are going to want to try to focus this election on me.What I want to do is focus this election on the American people and who can actually deliver for them.



There has also been some criticism that you've helped fuel that idea that the election is about you-for example,with the huge rallies.I give full credit to the Karl Rove acolytes who are working for John McCain,and one of their general strategies is to try to turn strengths into weakness.The enthusiasm and involvement the grass roots that we've seen in my campaign,I consider a strength.That's one of the reasons we are able to compete in 18 battleground states.But those crowds and those rallies,those poeple have not come out bacause of my speechmarking.They've come out because they understand what's an stake in this election.And that's not going to change,and when when we have small town halls or we have roundtables like we had this morning,whatever the venue,the message is going to be the same,that somebody needs to be fighting for America's families in Wasington.We've got to stop haveing the agenda set by special interests and lobbyists,and I'm the person who's best quipped to bring that change about.

A work-class hero? Obama needs to win over voters who don't drive hybrids.It could be a long uphill fight.

Nothing makes me feel sorrier for the once powerful local bosses of each political party than the spectacle of a modern nomination convention.In their glory days,these wily neighborhood sloggers would listen to speeches,size up the appeal of each candidate against hometown tastes,wheel,deal and finally make the thousands of individual decisions that would eventually choose the nominee.Today there is only one big decision to be made,and the job belongs to be TV programmer,not a political boss.Conventions are little more than soundstage now.Everything from the backdrop to the musical choices asks the question,Who is the convention trying to reach?


For Barack Obama and the Democrats,It all comes down to this,Should Obama try to win by running up big numbers among the young liberals and well-off-independents who cheer his hip style of designer politics?Or should he concentrate on recapturing the older and decidedly unhip working-class voters who rejected him in droves during the primaries?It's not an easy puzzle.From its beginning,Obama's impressive campaign has reached upmarket.His tone is perfectly middlebrow,which has made him irresistible to the wine and cheese lovers of the self-consciously snesible center.Republicans saw troubling signs of this way back in January's Iowa caucues,when they discovered,to their shock,that Obama was actually pulling some moderate Republican voters away from the GOP caucus.His success in Iowa has been so complete that it may abandon its swing-state tendencies and move firmly into Obama's column.And it's not just Iowa.Last month I saw a poll showing Obama with a surprisingly strong lead in Detrioit's wealthiest suburban county.If he can ride the Democratic surge this year while scoring big with independents,the race will be his.



Still there are risks.John McCain will make his own claim on those independents.While Obama is likely to pick up the votes of almost everybody who voted in the Democratic primaries,there are plenty of older white working-class voters who are still far from sold on him,if not downright suspicious.Democratic strategists often make the mistake of assuming that these white,economically downscale voters will automatically make their ballot choices on the basis of class.In fact,many vote on culture.Obama's academic style is much of his problem.For many,Obama reminds them of the Ivy League whiz kids they've dealt with at work during the latest downsizing.They look at him and see another bloodless young achiever coming down from the top floor to fix the ailing machine-tool company.They listen to his polished pitch in the employee cafeteria,and he wins some converts.But after he is finished,a few old-timers exchange knowing glances and mutter to one another about how young this hot shot is.Somebody makes a cynical and unkind remark about affirmative action.Deep down,they think he'd rather hit the executive gym for a cardio workout during lunch hour than share a cheesesteak and beer with the hourly workforce.And they ask one another,why did he change his name in college back to Barack?What's wrong with Barry?



Unless Obama can break down the wall between him and these Barry-cratic voters,it will be very hard for him to seize the game-winning eletion prizes of Michigan and Ohio.The convention message and optics would be very good place to start.To that end,many of the old-school party regulars now assigned to loyally wave hope and change signs for the TV cameras in Denver would dearly love to see Obama switch out some of his together we can endive salad for a big populist pile of economic red meat.Last week Ohio governor Ted Strickland called for Obama to speak more clearly and specifically about the kitchen-table,bread and butter issues.While Obama has to be careful not to delve too far into Strickland's brand of Stone Age union economics,reconnecting with basic Democratic ecomonic issues is good advice.Obama cannot reclaim the lunch-pail wing of the Democratic Party simply by treating Hillary Cliton like a monarch at the cinvention,These voters are not hers to deliver,Obama has to earn them back on his own with a convention that reaches out to those hardworking Americans who don't drive a Prius,don't listen to NPR,don't buy syrah-and assure them that it is still very much their Democratic Party too.

The Novice Obama's critics tend to paint him two ways-related portraits but subtly different.The first is a picture of an empty suit

A man who reads pretty speeches fill of gossamer rhetoric.Just words,as Senator Hillary Clinton put it.And it's ture that Obama doesn't have a thick record of businesses he has built or governments he has run.For one thing,he has moved around too much.The restless-ness in his resume is striking,two years at Occidental College,two years at Columbia University.a year in business,three years as a community organizer and then law school.Obama's four two-year terms in the Illinois state senate are his version of permanence,but in two of those terms,he was busy running for higher office.


Voters accustomed to evaluating governors and generals may have a hard time deciding what value to place on a stint of organizing.But it was surely real work.Reading Obama's account of his efforts to organize the residents in a single Chicago neighborhood,with weeks of toil going into staging a single meeting,is like watching a man dig the Panama Canal with a Swiss Army knife.
As for his conventional training,friends of Obama's like to point out that 12 years as a lawmaker is more experience than Abraham Lincoln,the original beanpole from Illinoismhad in 1860.They note that the is sues Obama is most drawn to-health-care reform,juvenile justice,poverty-aren't the easiest.They tell the story of his artful arm-twisting and cajolery in the Illinois senate on behalf of bills to reform campaign-finance laws and require police to videotape interrogations.Obama worked his colleagues one by one,on the floor,on the basektball court,at the poker table,and managed to pass some difficuly legislation.He's unique in his ability to deal with extremely complex issues,to reach across the aisle and to deal with diverse people one Rebublican colleague,McCain supporter Kirk Dillard,told the Wall Street Journal.



That wasn't enough to impress Clinton in the primaries.She enjoyed nothing that Obama was chairman of a Senate subcommittee yet had never convened a substantive hearing.John McCain's campaign will not be any more dazzled.In a sense,the question of Obama's preparation hinges on data that are still being gathered,because his greatest accomplishment is this unfolding campaign.For a man given to Zen-like circularities-We are the change we seek-the best proof that he can unite people to solve problems might be his ability to unite them to win an election.


The radical others believe obama is like the clever wooden offering of the Greeks to Trojans,something that appears to be a gift on the outside but is cunningly dangerous within.They find in his background and in what he leaves unsaid telltale signs of a radical.Obama has worked on education issues in Chicago with William Ayers and has visited the home of Ayers and his wife Bernadette Dohrn.Both were leaders of the violent,leftist Weather Underground.But the indictment of Obama framed by his opponents starts years earlier in Hawaii,with the black man who told Obama that a ture friendship with his whit grandfather wasn't possible.The man's name was Frank Marshall Davis,and in the 1930s, 40's and early 50's he was a well-known poet,journalist and civil rights and labor activist.Like his friend Paul Robsen and others,Davis perceived the Soviet Union as a staumch foe of racism as he later put it in his memoirs,and at one point he jointed the Communist Party.I worked with all kinds of groups,Davis explained.My sole criterion was this.Are you with me in my determination to wipe out white supremacy?



The conservative group Accuracy in Media is eager to paint the radical picture.In press releases and website articles,aims calls Davis Obama's Communist Mentor,although by the time they met,Davis had been out of politics for decades,and mentor may exaggerate his role in the young man's life.Still,it's clear that Obama did seek advice from the old man and that what he got was undiluted.You're not going to college to get educated.You're going there to get trained,Davis once warned Obama.They'll train you so good.You'll start to believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the America way and all that's _?Did the future candidate take this to heart?Not according to him.It made me smile.Obama recalls,thinking back on Frank and his old black power dashiki self.In some way he as incurable as my mother,as certain in his faith,living the same 60s time wrap.


Obama's memoir displays more familiarity with the idea of the far left than most America politicians would advertise.His interest in Afraican independence movements led him to the seminal work of Frantz Fanon,a Merxist Sociologist,and he speaks in passing of attending socialist conferences at the cooper city in New York City.But as Obama told,this was inthe Reagan years,and he was also reading works by conservative giants like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.He browsed among the ideologues but never bought in,he said, I was always suspicious of dogma and the excesses of the left and the right.Not all Obama critics see red,of course.Some merely believe he is more liberal than he claims to be.They cite a National Journal Study,which Obama disputes,that rated him the most liberal member of the U.S. senate,and they aren't dissuaded by the candidate's recent positions in favor of gun owners and an electronic-surveillance bill loathed by civil libertarians.There is another Trojan-horse interprentation just below the radar.It is the idea that a man named Barack Hussein Obama might be hiding a Muslim identity.Obama has tackle this dozen of times.His Keyan grandfather was indeed a Muslim,his father enpoused no faith,Obama attended a Muslim school in Indonesia for a time as a boy because that's where he lived-Indonesia is a Muslim country.He believed in no religion until he moved to Chicago as a grown man and was baptized Christian by Wright.As campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs puts it,His Christian pastor and this Muslim thing-how can he have problems with both at the same?Pick one.


But that the problem with having five faces.There's more than one to choose from.The secret Muslim rumors about Obama may be scurrilous,but they survived the sudden fame of Obama's card-carrying Christian pastor.A recent poll found that 12% of Americans believe them.

The message doesn't work for everyone,so far,Obama's number in the national polls average below 50%.

But his enormous and enthusiastic audiences are evidence that many people are intrigued,if not deeply moved.Yes we can!turns out to be a powerful trademark at an time when 3 out of 4 Americans believe the country is on the wrong track.Many Democrats placed their political bets on anger in recent years,anger at the war,anger over the disputed election in 2000,anger at Bush Administration policies.Obama doubled down on optimism,beginning with his careermaking speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention.Hope in the face of difficulty,hope in the face of uncertainty,the audacity of hope.In the end,that is God's greatest gift to us,the bedrock of this nation,a belief in things not seen,a belief that there are better days ahead.



If you click deeply enough into Obama's website,you can find position papers covering enough issues to fill Congressional Quarterly.He has a specific strategy to refocus the military on Afghanistan.He backs a single payer health-care system.But it wasn't some 10-point plan that turned Obama into a politician who fills arenas while others speak in school cafeteria.He knows that detailed policies tend to drive people apart rather than bring them together.People arrived to hear him out of fervor or mere curiosity,and they stayed for the sense of possibility.They heard rhetoric like this ,from his speech claiming victory after his epic nomination battle.If we are willing to work for it and fight for it and believe in it,then I am absolutely certain that generation from now,we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless,this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last,best hope on Earth.


That's a pretty quick step from an eletion to nirvana,and Obama's opponents would like to turn such oratory againt him.No one does it more effecively than radio host Rush Limbaugh,with his judo-master sense for his foes vulnerabilities.Limbaugh rarely refers to Obama by his name.Instead,he drops his baritone half an octave and calls him the messiah.

The Healer

Dreams from my father is the story of a request-not for honor or fortune but for meaning.The book presents a wounded young man who has never felt entirely at home-not among whites or among blacks.neither in slums nor in student unions-and is haunted by the constant,crippling fear that I didn't belong.He wants to know how feel rooted and purposeful.At the end of his odyssey,he decides to take a leap of faith.For the young Obama,faith in other people becomes his home.


This is what he preaches,the seemingly unlimited power of people who are willing to trust,cooperate and compromise.Bring people together for action,what he calls organizing,holds the promise of redemption.And without exactly saying it,Obama offers himself as the embodiment of his own message,the one-man rainbow coalition.You don't believe white and black can peacefully,productively co-exist?Think the gulf between Chicago's South side and the Harvard Law Review can never be bridged?Do you fear that the Muslim masses of Africa and Asia are imcompatible with the modernity of the west or that cosmopolitan America and Christian America will never see eye to eye?Just look at me!It's not unusual to meet Obama supporters who say the simple fact of electing him would move mountains,changing the way the world looks at America,turning the page on the nation's racial history and so on.He is the change they seek.

If identity politics might gain some black vote for obama,it can also cost him votes elsewhere.

SO how many American will agree with Wright that race is still front and center?The number is notoriously slipery,because voters don't always tell pollsters the truth.At the weekly Standard,a magazine with a neocon tilt,writer Stanley Kurtz rejects Obama's postracial message because he suspects it isn't sincere.Probing the coverage of Obama's career as an Illinois legislator in the black-oriented newpaper the Chicago Defender,Kurtz concluded,the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious.Though Kurtz's message is aimed primarily at whites,it's not so different from one angrily whispered by Jesse Jackson.I want to cut his nuts off.Jackson fumed-because he believes that Obama's race ought to determine which issues the candidate raises and how he discusses them.Either way,whether an opponent claims that Obama remains race-conscious or a supporter says he ought to be,both are rejecting the foundation of his campaign.


Figures like Jackson and Wright have invested a lifetime in the politics of black identity.Obama's success,whether it culminates in the White House or not,signals the passing of their era.So it is no wonder that younger voters have been key to his candidacy.Having grown up in the era of Oprah Winfrey,Denzel Washington,Tiger Woods and ,yes,Henry Louis Gates Jr.,they are better able to credit Obama's thesis that there's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asia America,there's the United States of America.

When you look at this photo,what do you see?Black man. Healer .Novice. Radical .The Future. All of the above

If Barack Obama had not chosen a life in politics,he might have made a fine pshchotherapist.He is a master at taking what you've told him and feeding it right back.What I hear you saying is...Open his book the Audacity of Hope to almost any page and listen.On immigration,for example,Obama first mirrors the faces of this new America he has met in the ethnic stew pot of Chicago,in the Indian markets along Devon Avenue,in the sparkling new mosque in the southwestern suburbs,in an Armenian wedding and A Filopino ball.Then he pivots to give voice to the anxieties of many blacks and as many whites about the wave of illegal immigration,adding.Not all of these fears are irrational.He admits that he knows the frustration of needing an interpreter to speak to one's auto mechanic and in the next breath cherishes the innocent dreams of an immigrant child.


In other words,he hears America singing-and griping,fretting,seething conniving,hoping,despairing.He can deliver a pitch-perfect expression of the racial anger of many American blacks-as he did in his much discussed speech on race relations earlier this year-and,just as smoothly,unpack the racial irritations gnawing at many whites.To what extent does he share any of those emotions?The doctor never exactly says.Consciously or unconsciously,Obama has been honing this technique for years.During his time at Harvard Law School in the 1980s,the student body was deeply divided.In one heated debate,Obama so adroitly summarized the various positions without tipping his own hand that by the end of the meeting,as Professor Charles Ogletree told one newspaper,everyone was nodding,Oh,he agrees with me.


He has been called a window into the American psyche.Or you might say he's mirror-what you see depends on who you are and where you stand.Obama puts it this way.I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.But those metaphors all suggest that he is some sort of passive instrument,when in fact his elusive quality is an active part of his personality.It's how you square the fact that Obama once wrote the most intimate memoir ever published by a future nominee yet still manages to avoid definition.At his core,this is a deeply reserved and emotionally reticent man.Consider this anecdote from Dream from my father,as a young man in New York City,he lived next door to an elderly recluse who seemed to share my disposition.When he happend to meet his neighbor returing from his store,Obama would offer to carry the old man's groceries.Together,the two of them would slowly climb the stairs.never speaking,and at the top,the man would nod silently before shuffling inside and closing the latch...I thought him a kindred spirit,Obama concludes.

Where's the passion?Obama's measured style worked in the spring but hurt him over summer.It might cost him the election

A few days before Barack Obama was to announce his choice for vice president,he was asked at a North Carolina town meeting what qualities he wanted in a running mate.He wandered through a derisive.If desultory,critique of Dick Cheney,then switched gears.I want somebody...who shares with me a passion to make the lives of the American people better than they are right now,he said.I want somebody who is mad right now that people are losing their jobs.And I immediately thought,Uh-oh.


Memories of John Kerry in 2004 came flooding back,of how he tended to describe his feelings rather than experience them,of how he suddenly-and unconvincingly-started to say he was angey about this or that when his consultants told him that Howard Dean's anger about the war in Iraq was hitting home with voters.And then,in the general electio,Kerry kept repeating the word strength rather than demonstrating it.Clearly,Obama's consultants have given him similar advice,that he was on the short end of a passion gap-that it was time for emo.A day earlier,he had said wage disparities between genders made his blood boil.


One of the great strengths of the Obama candidacy has been the sense that this is a guy whose blood doesn't boil,who carefully considers the options before he reacts-and that his reaction is always measured and rational.But that's also a weakness,sometimes the most rational response is to rip your opponent's lungs out.On the same day as the North Carolina meeting.Obama spoke to the Veterans of foreign Wars and reacted with carefully prepared passion to John McCain's scurrilous campaign theme that Obama doesn't put America first.Let me be clear.I will let no one question my love of this country,he said,to the best applause he received from that skeptical crowd.It was an effective moment,but defensive.It was not how you win a presidential campaign.



Heading to the crucial moment in this race-his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention-Obama was failing as a candidate in two crucial areas.He had failed to define his opponent,and he was failing,in all but the most amorphous ways, to define himself.He desperately needed to do unto McCain what McCain had done unto him,hammer his opponent in a sustained,thematic way-not just a few tossed-away lines in a stump speech.That shouldn't be too difficult.An argument can be made that McCain is trigger happy overseas and out of touch at home.In fact,Matt Welch made a convincing trigger-happy argument against McCain in Reason magazine-a libertarian publication-cataloging all the times over the past 20 years that McCain has overracted to international crises,down to his recent ridiculous statement that the situation in Georgia was the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the cold war.After the past seven years,Americans are,rightfully,war-weary and McCain is a candidate who can't seem to go a day without proclaiming a crisis somewhere that demands an American military reaction.Indeed,this sould be the natural predicare for Obama's positive argument in this election,that America desperately needs to get its act together at home.



But Obama seems not to have fully assimilated what should be the message of his campaign.It's the economy,egghead.The economy was almost entirely message from his dialogue with Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Church-and there were more than a few opportunities to insert it.When Warren braced him on abortion,Obama fumbled around,attempting to sound reasonable.He should have said straight out,We're gonna disagree on this one.I respect your view on abortion.But I'm pro-choice...and you know,Pastor Rick,Jesus never mentions abortion in the Bible.He did say,though,that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven.Now,that's a metaphor-but it's also good tax policy.Unlike John McCain,I want to make it easier for rich people to go to heaven.



He might have mention that he favored the current biaprtisan energy proposal that would permit offshore drilling and invest in alternative energy,but McCain opposed it because it would raise taxes on the oil companies by closing loopholes.The last question at the North Carolina town meeting came from a homeless veteran who said more than half of the 200 people living in his shelter were veteran,too.Obama gave a solid,substantive answer.What he should have said was,That's outrageous.Why don't we go over there right now- I'd like to thank them for their service and see what we can do to help.That sort of spontaneity-that sort of real passion-is what's missing from this candidacy.I suspect Obama will have a hard time winning unless he finds some of it.

Postcard New Delhi.Protesters come from across the country to make their voices heard in the capital's only designated free-speech zone.

A tour of India's uneasiest street,the Jantar Mantar observatory,in the bustling heart of New Delhi.was built in the 1720s to monitor the celestical movements that India's royal rulers believed governed their fate.Today,the distinctive red structure is still an observatory of sorts-a vantage point for watching the workings of India democracy,a process every bit as complex,amd as inscrutable,as the progress of heavenly bodies.

For the past decade,the busy thoroughfare overlooking Jantar Mantar has served as New Delhi's officially designated protest zone.All otehr public spaces and government buildings are off-limits.As a result,the area surrounding Jantar Mantar hosts a rich daily marketplace of complaints,ranging from tribal members demanding compensation for lost land and farmers seeking better prices for their crops,to demonstrators demanding greater rights for woman and gays,and everyone in between.The 18th century observatory is now witness to what the writer V.S. Naipaul called India's million mutinies-the dizzying array of fault lines,small and large,that fracture this heterogeneous nation of 1.1 billion.


To stroll around the observatory on any given day is to sample the local grudges and global grievances that draw protesters from across India.A bureaucratic spelling error has brought a group of Dhangars,dressed in the red and yellow colors of their tribe,here for the fourth time from the western state of Maharashtra.We hope this time our voice will be heard,say the group's leader,Gunderao Bansode.Under India law,certain castes and tribes are guaranteed places in educational institutes and legislatures,as well as government jobs.The Dhangars are supposed to share these advantages.But they accuse officals in their home state of deliberately using a transliteration error-in Marathi,the language of Maharashtra,the name of their tribe is pronounced Dhangad-to deny them their due benefits,since Dhangad,unlike Dhangar,is not an officially recognized tribe.


A stone throw from the Dhangars camp stands a tent housing a dozen men dressed all in white.They're representing the Greater Cooch Behar People's Association,which is demanding that eight districts currently divided between the states of Assam and West Bengal be recognized as a separate state of Cooch behar.Our language and culture are different from these states,says Babua Barman,who,along with other COOCH behar activists,has been camping near Jantar Mantar for two years now.


Autonomy is a demand familiar to the Tibetan activists nearby,who have arrived from all over India to join a 24 hour hunger strike.As the protesters use loudspeakers to relay pro-Tibet speeches,a couple of cops stroll by,ogling the rosycheeked Tibetan girls.Police and protesters share mutual disdain.They hate us.Laughs Rachna Dhingra,an activist with the International Campaign for Justice for Bhopal,which has been camping here since March to demand legal action against the corporation responsible for the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster,which killed more than 3000 people.We're making the police earn their keep,Dhingra says,Life at Jantar Mantar isn't much fun,she admits.Public toilets are filthy and demonstrators have to go to a nearby Sikh temple to shower.Distrustful police and civic authorities Just want us to go away,she says,but protesters are buoyed by strangers who offer money and encouragement.



Scattered among the righteously aggrieved are also protesters whose vigils seem downright quixotic.Ramdev Kumar,for instance,claims that his wife left him for someone else and his brother usurped his house.For the past two years,Kumar has been agitating for some sort of recompense.I wnat the government to so something.he says simply.Outsideers might view the cacophony of complaints at Jantar Mantar as a metaphor for India's vital civil society,where even the loneliest petitioners are entitled to a soapbox.But many in the Jantar Mantar crowed are not so sanguine.Dhingra,the Bhopal protester,says that having this space is better than nothing,but sees Jantar Mantar as a symptom of flawes democracy.You must scream within there 500 meters,she says.And even then,you can't be sure you'll be heard.

Ageless,Hip,Erudite,Caustic,lovable,tough and hypnotic.

Jerry Wexler,who died Aug 15 at 91,was a one of a kind great man of music.Before helping shape the sound of the sound half of the 20th century,he was the billboard reporter who coined rhythm and blues to replace the category race music on the magazine's charts.With Ahmet Ertegun,he co-piloted Atlantic Records,once saying the label made black music for black adults.But that underestimated the impact of the classics he produced-Aretha Franklin's Respect,Percy Sledge's When a man loves a woman,Wilson Pickett's In the Midnight Hour and the Genius of Ray Charles.When I was president of Columbia Records in the late 1960s and early 70s,signing Janis Joplin,Santana and Earth,Wind&Fire,I knew I had some of age after Jerry reached out to spend time with me.We became friends.I would go to his house in East Hampton and listen to records and marvel at his commentary,always colorful,always mesemerizing and always smart.Artists from every genre would join us,but it was Jerry with his laugh,lexicon and turns of pharse who held center stage.He might have been the elder statesman among us,but when the music played,the years swept away and his youthful enthusiasm bubbled over.Music can lift the soul,change the mood,teach the mind and touch the heart.And the music Jerry Wexler produced will live on,affecting future generations in ways he never thought possible.

Former Soviet Repubics

Since the breakup of the Soviet union in 1991,Its former republics have attempted to take different political directions.Most came together in the Commonwealth of Independent States,which is still led by Russia.The Baltic nations joined NATO and the European Union in 2004-a course Ukraine and Georia have flirted with recently-while resource-rich central Asia republics have remained largely loyal to Moscow.But after the invasion of Georgia,former members of the U.S.S.R face an inescapable truth,you can't run from geography.Try as they might to move closer to Europe,many are now nervously eyeing a resurgent Russia on their borders.


The Baltics 1.Estonia 2.Latvia 3.Lithuania

Thriving,technologically advanced democracies with prickly relationships with Russia.Estonia blames Moscow for major cyberattacks in 2007.


Eastern Europe 1.Belarus 2.Ukraine 3.Moldova

Russia has held a grudge against Ukraine since the 2004 prodemocracy Orange Revoltion.Belarus has kept particularly close ties with Moscow,while Russia troops are currently stationed in a semidetached Moldovan territory.

The Caucasus 1 Georgia 2Armenia 3 Azerbaijan

A vital region for the west,which has high hopes for an oil pipeline through Azerbaijan.George W.Bush visited ally Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia in 2005.Tiny Armenia which borders Iran and Turkey,readily accept Russian protection.

Central Asia 1 Kazakhstan 2 Uzvekistan 3Turkmenistan 4 Kyrgyzstan 5Tajikistan

There states are wedged between Russia and China.Several are resource-rich and endure varying levels of autocratic rule,a few have let NATO use land for bases.

The Mekong's fatal floods

More than 160 people have died in northern Vietnam as a result of what is being called the worst flooding in a century.Two weeks of heavy rainfall swelled the Mekong River andits tributaries,causing mudslides and innudateing homes and rice paddies throughout Southeast Asia.At certain points of the Mekong-a 2700 mile about 4350km waterway that runs from China through Laos,Cambodia and southern Vietnam before reaching the South China Sea-water levels surged as far as 45 ft.about 14 m above the river's dry-season lows.Meanwhile,in Burma.Which is still covering from a cyclone that killed at least 84000 people in May,torrential rains have forced people to flee their homes-particularly residents of the Irrawaddy delta,one of the area hardest hit by the deadly spring storm.



Vermont Legalize it? College presidents from nearly 100 U.S. universities,including Duke,Tufts and Texas A&M,have signed a petition to lower the national drinking age,saying current laws encourage a culture of clandestine binge-drinking among students younger than 21.Known as the Amethyst Initiative,the coalition plans to run national ads calling for a debate among lawmakers.Members of Mothers Against Drunk Driving,however,say lowering the drinking age would only lead to more fatal car accidents.


Zimbabwe Real victims in a war of words Power-sharing talks between President Robert Mugabe and his politicak rival Morgan Tsvangirai are in danger of breaking down completely almost four weeks after they began,sources inside the negotiations say.Tsvangirai's party has agreed to convene parliament in an attempt to revive Zimbabwe's moribund government but won't allow Mugabe to appoint a Cabinet until an agreement is reached.Meanwhile,hundreds of thousands have fled the country to escape the economic crisis.More than 80% of the population is unemployed,45% is malnourished.The inflation rate topped 11.2 million percent in June-by far the highest in the world.



The ocean Living with Dead Zones According to a report published in the journal Science,the number of dead zones-area of the ocean with oxygen levels so low that marine life can barely survive- has doubled every 10 years since the 1960s as a result of a runoff polluted with nitrogen-rich crop fertilizer.There are now more than 400 such zones-from the Gulf of Mexico to the Black Sea see map above-which,the report's authors say,pose as great a threat to coastal ecosystems as overfishing and habitat loss.

Inbox Capitalism 2.0

I'm glad that people like bono and Bill Gates are endorsing the practice of spreading corporate profits among the world's disadvtanged and helping convince the business elite that it is in their interest to care about the world's less fortunate.Both individuals have used their influence to do great things and trigger lasting change.But let's forget that our elected representatives must be the ones held primarily responsible for protecting the poor.The mandate of a corporation can never be as binding as that of the state.Since the government must set a minimum wage for justice's sake,perhaps it can set maximums for corporate profits or individual salaries and offer incentives for the rich to give back.



Gate's article made me want to stand up and cheer,As he pharsed it,There are two great forces of human nature.self-interest and caring for others.By using his own wealth and influence to respond to world poverty in a meaningful way,Gates exemplifies the latter force.His initiatives sharing technology,providing small business loans,eradicating preventable disease make measurable differences.Thank you for providing a forum for him to share his ideas.




While Bill Gates does a fine job out-lining his creative capitalism initiative,his exclusive focus on developing nations at the expense of his own is a tremendous oversight.Corporations in developed countries certainly should feel socially responsible for those in developing ones.But if they ever want to be take seriously as agents of social change and as stakeholders in local communities,they need to consider their own domestic markets as well.Gates is fooling himself when he brushes over the U.S's economic woes so lightly,especially when creative capitalism could potentially solve some problems like our own oft-neglected poverty and inner-city urban blight.Only when America proves that capitalism can cure social ills within its own borders should it start looking to prove so abroad.





Hollywood's Ticking Time bomb I agree with James Poniewozik's assessment that Hollywood has yet to demonize China in the same way the news media have.However,one need only look at the parallels between negative new coverage and negative pop-culture depictions of Arabs and the Middle East during the past decade,or similar coverage of the Japanese during World War II, to see how closely one influences the other and how both influence the minds of the American people in different ways.The current political climate suggests that China is next.It may be only a mater of time before the delightful pandas take on a more ominous form.


A state of concern As a lifelong Michigan Resident,I have lived through this state's trials and tribulations.We are hardworking group of citizens who epitomize what it means to be American.This presidential election offers Michiganders an opportunity to seek the change that it so desperately needs.However,given the shenanigans of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpartick and the ineffective leadership of current Governor Jennifer Granholm,their support of Obama might make him guilty by association.I know I would not want the endrosement of any politician who represents regression in a state that needs all the forward-looking help it can get.

Through Agvaantseren,the organization buys there items from herding families and arranges to market them abroad

Participants must first sign a pledge to preserve snow leopards and their prey and to encourge neighbors to do the same.The arrangement boosts incomes by 10 to 15 percent,which elevates the status of the women and translates into more emphasis on education and health care.If no one in the community kills protected species over the course of a year,the program members receive a 20 percent bonus.In one of Agvaantseren's communities,a winer villege of herders in far northwestern Monogloa.a lively scene of trade took place on the floor of a ger heated by a stove fueled with yak dung.A Khazakh woman named Saulekhan Kekei had brought 17 felt rugs made over 68 days.She had six children and an ill husband to support.Those rugs would bring the equivalent of nearly three months wages in her job as a janitor and guard at the village school .I own only 12 sheep,Saulekhan said.I have to buy wool from neighbors.But I am able to provide for everyone at home now and pay for my eldest daughter to go to college.


An independent review in 2006 found no poaching of snow leopards in areas where SLE operates.Agvaantseren just added eight more communities and intends to expand a microcredit scheme that lets members borrow at a discount to buy items such as spinning wheels or material to improve corrals.People hear good report from neighbors,and they come to us now asking how to join,she said.In our imagination,snow leopards belong to realm beyond the dust and noise of human affairs.In reality,only about a fifth of their range lies within reserves,and many of these contain villages and livestock.Informal protected zones exist around many Buddhist monasteries,but the Western model of establishing nature sanctuaries in landscapes unoccupide by humans simply doesn't fit much of Asia.




Projects like the Homestays program in India and the handicrafts business in Mongolia,however,seem to fit very well.Though they cover only a small fraction of the species homeland so far,they make live leopards more valuable to more people each year,and in doing so they mark a path toward the conservation of high mountain ecosystems. I never minded not seeing snow leopards-not as long as I found plenty of their sign.It was my guarantee that I would soon come across other spectacular wildlife.And it meant that I could still dream of pulling myself up to the spine of a ridge,as Raghu once did,and meeting face to face with a snow cloud colored cat climbing from the other side.

Stanzin Pulit's yaks are his wealth,and in Ladakh's Zanskar Valley.

Herds are vulnerable to snow leopard attacks.Conservation groups help herders build protective corrals in return for their pledge not to kill snow leopards.Such aid gives locals economic incentive to preserve the predators-good news for the region's ecotourism initiatives,but mixed news for prey like blue sheep.One winter Dashdavaa Khulaa,a park ranger in the Turgen Range,watched a herd of 27 ibex take shelter in a cliff-face cave.A mother snow leopard with two partly grown cubs followed them in.Only 24 ibex made it out.For Khulaa,the tale is part of a large story.Though the Turgen Range,part of the Altay Mountains,saw some heavy wildlife poaching in the past,it has become a stronghold for ibex and their predators.One of the reasons is a grassroots antipoaching patrol in the Altay region known as the Snow Leopard Brigade.Ganbold Bataar,Former director of Mongolia's national park system here in the province of Uvs,is its founder and current chief.




With two employees for this whole province,we couldn't hope to keep up,Battar said.But we have more than 290 volunteers here.They were local herders,and their eyes were everywhere in the countryside.Whoever turned in a poacher stood to gain 15 percent of the fine as a reward.But that wasn't always the main incentive.Toward evening,three horsemen driving their flocks home galloped over to visit our camp.They all considered themselves volunteer members of the antipoaching brigade.They knew the mother snow leopard well,she'd had three cubs the previous year,they said.The two from her earlier little had gone off to establish territories of their own on the mountain slopes just across the river.One had appeared prowling the iron-red ledges there just recently.One of the horsemen said simply,I'm pround to live in a place with snow leopards.A small,soft-spoken woman named Bayarjargal Agvaantseren has found another way to enlist local communities in conservation.Twice every year,this former schoolteacher sets out from the Mongolian capital,Ulaanbaatar,to visit some of the 24 herder communities she has engaged in a handicrafts project tagged Snow Leopard Enterprises,a program of the snow leopard trust.



Most herder families used to sell the soft underfur of goats-cashmere-to middlemen,earning about 600$ a year.Thanks to Agvaantpseren,women in the community now also make an array of products using wool from their goats,sheep,yaks,and camels,skeins of soft yarn,felt and decorative rugs,seat pads,children's booties or Christmas tree ornaments shaped like snow leopards and ibex.My favorites were doll mice with whiskers of stiff yak tail hair-toys for little cats,designed to save big ones.

You can only climb so many slopes before you grow exhausted or encounter sheer cliffs.

It is just not possible to keep up.So Raghu tried capturing the cats to attach radios to them.He finally collared a female.But,like previous investigators,he was seldom able to monitor a signal for long before the animal dropped behind some ridge that blocked the transmission.Over the years,biologists reported snow leopards covering territories of five to fourteen square miles.But when American biologist Tom McCarthy first placed a satellite collar on one in Mongolia in 1996,he found it roaming 386 suqare miles.My guess is that the more sateillte collars we get out,the larger we'll discover snow leopard territories to actually be,said McCarthy,now the science and conservation director of Snow Leopard Trust.Ten years passed before the next satellite tag was put on,again by McCarthy,this time in Pakistan.By mid-2007 the cat wearing it had revealed its movements over a 115 square mile area and had moved across the border to Afghanistan.



Snow Leopard researchers need to together more than cat facts,because you can neither understand nor save a predator without doing the same for its prey.Snow leopards hunt chiefly Asia's high county array of hoofed wildlife,ibex,argali amd urial sheep,blue sheep,tahr,the goat-antelopes known as gorals and serows,Tibetan antelope,Tibetan and goitered gazelles,musk deer,red deer,wild boars,wild asses,wild yaks,and wild Bactrian camels.Marmots,hares,and mouse hares pikas are on the menu too,along with partidges and turkey-size snow cocks.On top of everything else,snow leopards rountinely add the tall,feathery shurb Myricaria and other plants to their diet.Curious,but then my house cat swallows grass and loves cantaloupe.




As the top carnivore of the alpine and subalpine zones,the snow leopard strongly influences the numbers and whereabouts of hoofed herd over time.That in turn affects plant communities and this shapes the niches of many a smaller organism down the food chain.The leopard's presence-or absence-affects competing hunters and scavengers too,namely wolves,wild dogs,jackals,foxes,bears,and lynx.This cascade of consequences makes Unica uncia a governing force in the ecosystem,what scientists term a keystone species.Since the range of the snow leopard overlaps those of so many other creatures,protecting its habitat also preserves homes for the majority of mountain flora and fauna.While we were exploring part of the Zanskar Range in Ladakh,Raghu and I crossed tracks that sent him racing off to an overlook.A few minutes later,a brown bear-the same species as North America's grizzly-galloped and slid down a high riverbank,swam across surging rapids,muscled halfway up a cliff wall,and finally lay down to dry its silver-tipped fur in the warm morning sun.We had found one of the last few dozen of its kind in that huge section of the Himalaya.Do snow leopards attack humans, as bears sometime do?No,never,Raghu says.He once watched a village girl pulling on one end of a dead goat,unaware that the other end,hidden by a bush,was snagged in a snow leopard's jaws.She came away unscratched.But a single leopard swatfest in a herd of livestock can plunge a family into desperate poverty.

Bound to high,cold,sweep terrain,snow leopards have always remained at fairly low densities

But became still more sparse during the past century because thousands were turned into pelts for the fashion trade.Though officially protected since 1975 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species,the spotted cats continue to be killed for their coat,worth a black market fortune.Demand for their bones and penis,hyped as tonics in eastern Asia,is increasing.Conflicts with livestock keep growing too,which leads to more persecution by herders.Bait,snares,pitfall traps,and poisons make it far easier to kill a snow leopard than to see one alive.The current population is estimated at only 4000 t0 7000.While these aren't hard figures,the number may be less than half of what it was a century ago.Some authorities fear that the actual number may already have slipped below 3500.Five of the countries in snow leopard range may have 200 or fewer.


There's no escaping the fact that most of the world's big cats are in deep trouble,from the heavily poached tiger to the last 30 free-roaming Amur leopards.Snow leopards are no exception.But here's some encouraging news,the rise of grassroots conservation efforts in a few locales to halt the snow leopard's downward spiral.Several community-base programs in India and Mongolia sounded especially promising-at least on paper.But how well do they really work?Saving an animal means getting to know it,and scientific information about the leopard is scare.Perhaps no other large,popular land mammal has so many details of its natural history still missing.Raghu,the regional director of science and conservation for the nonprofit Snow Leopard Trust,knows as much as anyone,and he has that sixth sense that researchers with years afield develop,an extra awareness that guides hime to the fragile leg bones of an infant blue sheep here in a ravine,or an ibex skull lying there,high on a slope where wind whips the wildflowers into blurs of color,and lets him say things like.At a fresh carcass,you call tell if a snow leopard with young made the kill.The ears will be gnawed off.Those are all the cubs can get at until she opens up the hide for them.Tall and fit,with a long-legged stride,Raghu is a wizard at trailing faint paw prints across stony ground.Buth the otherwise ghostlike predators also leave behind a surprising amount of more obvious clues.It helps to picture 80 to 120 pound cats in a colossal litter box.Dropping,together with scrapes made by the rear legs,reveal habitual routes that tend to follow ridgelines or the base of cliffs.Scrambling for footing day after day,I gradually realize that there travelers like to mark the same type of features that drawmy attention en route,solitary boulders,sharp corners along gullies,knolls,and saddles.Near tree line,they stripe the occasional trunk with long,vertical claw marks.




If my eyes are too busy taking in scenery to notice a fresh scrape,my nose will still register the acrid tang of leopard pee.Elsewhere,I'll catch a musky aroma sprayed from anal glands up onto an overhanging rock.Frequently used scent posts take on an oily sheen.Passing cats stretch to rub their cheeks against them,leaving white hairs for me to tuck in a pocket for luck scaling the next rock face.Fifteen,sixteen thousand feet,no matter how far up I climb,some villager will have gone higher and left stone cairns bearing prayer flags or stacks of horns.Later,the cats come by and leave their own markings on these offerings.A lot of research on snow leopard movements really tells you more about the limits of human abilities,says Raghu after crossing a cascade swollen with glacial melt.

Out of the shadows the elusive Central Asian snow leopard steps inot a risk-filled future.

Snow leopard don't care much for company.So to get close,Photographer Steve Winter deployed a series of camera traps that automatically snapped pictures whenever an animal crept near.The result is a set of intimate portraits that expands our vision of a legendary mountain recluse.Rub,scratch,urinate,defecate-a snow leopard marks its trail with often pungent graffti.The scent helps these solitary cats avoid confrontation in territory they share.During mating season.though,the scent is meants as magnet.As few as 3500 of these endangered cats may survive in the wild.To traverse rocky slopes and survive in cold mountain climes-even at altitudes as high as 18000 feet-snow leopards are well equipped.Long hair with thick underful,wide,well-padded paws,and big chest and strong lungs keep these cats running up where the air gets thin.



You almost have to turn away for a minute to tell the animal is going anywhere.If it knocks a stone loose,it will reach out a foot to stop it from falling and making noise.One might be moving right now,perfectly silent and perfectly tensed,maybe close by.But where?That's always the question.That,and how many are left to see?Raghunandan Singh Chundawat has watched snow leopards as often as anyone alive.The New Delhi biologist studied them closely for five years in Hemis High Altitude National Park in Ladakh,the largest,loftiest district of northern India,and carried out wildlife surveys in the region over nine traditional years.We're in the 1300 suqare mile park this evening,setting up camp in a deeply cleft canyon near 12000 feet.It's June,and the blue sheep have new lamps.We keep one eye on a group crossing a scree slope,the other eye on the cliffs at its top.Leopards are are ambush hunters that like to attack from above.While the common leopard of Asia and Africa relies on branches and leaves for concealment,the snow leopard loses itself among steep jumbles of stone.This is exactly the kind of setting one would favor.But I'm not holding my breath.Raghu has sighted only a few dozen in his whole career.



Lengthening shadows coalesce into dusk.Wild roses perfune the Himalayan canyon as passing squalls brush the ridgetops with new now.I imagine a leopard easing down the darkened slopes.It flows low to the ground,with huge gold eyes and a coat the color of dappled moonlight on frost.The body stretches four feet from nose to rump.It's tail,the most striking in the feline family,is almost as long,and so thick and mobile it looks as if the cat is being followed by a fuzzy python.The snow leonpard sometimes uses its tail to send signals during social encounters or to wrap partway around itself like a scarf when bedded down in bitter weather.But the main function of this plume is to add balance in an environment with thousand-foot drops.In Mongolia a park ranger once told me he'd seen snow leopards crouch and sway that plume in the air to lure curious marmots closer,just as hunters do with rags.Possible.But I heard a simpler explanation from Sodnomdeleg Bazarhuyag,a retired doctor in a community of herders in northwestern Mongolia.We went to search out snow leopard sign in a gorge glistening with river ice.When a bend of scimitar-horned wild goats ibex appeared on the skyline,Bazarhuyag scanned carefully around them saying,Snow leopards are good at hiding,but sometimes they forget about their tail.



Darkness claims the last crags.Raghu and I won't glimpse a snow leopard this day.It's not a disappointment.The great cat is only living up to its reputation for being impossible to find.Called shan in Ladakhi,irbis in Mongolian,and brafani chita-snow cheetah-in Urdu,the carnivore scientists label Unica uncia ranges across about a million square miles and portions of 12 nations.You'll never hear one give away its whereabouts by roaring,it lacks the throat structure,though it can hiss,chuffmmew,growl,and wail.Beside being secretive,well camouflaged,amd usually solitary,snow leopards are most active at night and in the twilight hours of dusk and dawn,amid the most formidable tumult of mountains on Earth,the Himalaya and Karakoram,the Plateau of Tibet and adjoining Kunlun,the Hindu Kush,Pamirsmand Tian Shan,the Altay,whose peaks define Mongolia's border with China,Kazakhstan,and Russia,and the Sayan chain west of Lake Baikal.

More reclusive nudibranchs,with nocturnal habits or small ranges

May opt for camouflagemfrom drab to brilliant,rather than contrast although many of those,too,have toxic defenses.Pigments matching sponges and other edible substrates on whihc they linger can make even the biggest slug varieties-the length of a man's forearm-vanish where they lie.Even the most keen-eyed diver may miss those cryptic species.But the brazen ones pop into view in bursts of Crayola colors,one munching coral,another glomming on to a rock face, a third riding a current along the seabed.A lucky sighting is a mass aggregation of dozens or even hundreds gathered at a food-rich locale to feed and mate,or a plate-size solar powered species that gets nutrients from photosynthetic algae farmed within its body.



Nudibranchs are blind to their own beauty,their tiny eyes discerning little more than light and dark.Instead the animals smell,taste,and feel their world using head-mounted sensory appendages called rhinophores and oral tentacles.Chemical signals help them track food not just coral and sponges but barnacles,eggs,or small fish-and one another.Hermaphroditic,nudibranchs have both male and female organs and can fertilize one another,an ability that speeds the search for mates and doubles reproductive success.Depending on the species,pairs may lay eggs in coils,ribbons,or tangled clumps,up to two million at a time.Not all adult encounters have such a fruitful outcome.Sometimes one nudibranch eats the other,particular if it is of another species.A cannibal slug rears up like a cobra to engulf its kin,using jaws and teeth to finish the job.Other nudibranchs rely on enzymes,rather than teeth,to break down prey.What else can devour a nudibranch without ill consequence?Certain fish,sea spiders,turtles,sea stars,a few crabs,some people consume them as well,after removing the toxic organs.Chileans and islanders off Russia and Alaska roast or boil sea slugs or eat them raw.Photographer David Doubilet likened the experience to chewing an eraser.




Humans have also studied sea slugs' simple nervous systems for clues to learning and memory and have raided their chemical armory in search of pharmaceuticals.Fashioning remedies from marine invertebrates has a long history.Pliny the Elder,For example,wrote in the first century A.D. of using ground snail mixed with honey to treat ulcerations of the head and sea urchin ashes for baldness.Scientists today are isolating chemicals that may help ailing heart,bone,and brain.A sea hare cousin to the nudibranch recently offered up a cancer-fighting compound that made it into clinical trials.Still,nudibranchs have hardly given up all their secrets.Scientists estimate that they've identified only half of all nudibranch species,and even the known ones are elusive.Most live no more than a year and then disappear without a trace,their boneless,shell-less bodies leaving no record of their brief,brilliant lives.

Nudibranchs crawl through life as slick and naked as a newborn.Snail kin whose ancestors shrugged off the shell millions of years ago,

They are just skin,muscle,and organs sliding on trails of slime across ocean floors and coral heads the world over.Found from sandy shallows and reefs to the murky seabed nearly a mile down,nudibranchs thrive in waters both warm and cold and even around billowing deep-sea vents.Members of the gastropod class,and more broadly the mollusks,the mostly finger-size morsels live fully exposed,their gills forming tufts on their backs.Nudibranch means naked gill,a feature that separates them from other sea slugs.Although they can release their muscular foot-hold to tumble in a current-a few can even swim freely-they are rarely in a hurry.



So why,in habitats swirling with voracious eaters,aren't nudibranchs picked off like shrimp at a barbecue?The 3000-plus known nudibranch species,it turns out,are well equipped to defend themselves.Not only can they be tough-skinned,bumpy,and abrasive,but they've also traded the family shell for less burdensome weaponry.toxic secretions and stinging cells.A few make their own poisons,but most pilfer from the foods they eat.Species that dine on toxic sponges,for example,alter and store the irritating compounds in their bodies and secrete them form skin cells or glands when disturbed.Other nudibranchs hoard capsules of tightly coiled stingers,called nematocysts,ingested from fire corals,anemones,and hydroids.Immune to the sting,the slugs deploy the stolen artillery along their own extremities.




Many mobile nudibranchs-vulnerable as they move in daylight between feeding spots-announce their weapons with garish colors and designs,a palette million of years in the marking.Contrasting pigment make them highly visible against a reef's greens and browns,a visual alarm that turns predators wary-bold nibblers quickly learn to avoid the color paterns that announces unpalatable flesh.Animals able to mimic the designs,including nontoxic nudibranchs and other invertebrates like flat-worms,are similarly left alone.

Yet even oil optimists concede that physcial limit are beginning to loom

Consider the issue of discovery rate.Oil can't be pump from the ground until it has been found,and yet the volume discovered each year has steadily fallen since the early 1960s-despite dazzling technological advances,including computer-assisted seismic imaging that allows companies to see oil deep below the Earth's surface.One reason for the decline is simple mathematics.Most of the big,easily located fields-the so-called elephants-were discovered decades ago,and the remaining fields tend to be small.Not only are they harder to find then big fields,but they must also be found in greater numbers to produce as much oil.Last November,for example,oil executives were ecstatic over the discovery off the Brazilian coast of a field called Tupi,thought to be the biggest find in seven years.And yet with as much as eight billion barrels,Tupi is about a fifteen the size of Saudi Arabia's legendary Ghawar,which held about 120 billion barrels at its discovery in 1948.


Worldwide,output from existing field is falling by as much as 8 percent a year,which means that oil companies must develop up to seven million barrels a day in additional capacity simply to keep current output steady-plus many more millions of barrels to meet the growth in demand of about 1.5 percent a year.And yet,with declining field sizes,rising costs,and political barries,finding those new barrels is getting harder and harder.Many of the biggest oil companies,including Shell and Mexico's state-owned Pemex,are actually finding less oil each year than they sell.As more and more existing fields mature,and as global demand continues to grow,the deficit will widen substantially.By 2010,according to James Mulva,CEO of ConocoPhillips,nearly 40 percent of the world's daily oil output will have to come from fields that have not been tapped-or even discovered.By 2030 nearly all our oil will come from fields not currently in operation.Mulva,for one,isn't sure enough new oil can be pumped.At a conference in New York last fall,he predicted output would stall at 100 million barrels a day-the same figure Total's chief had projected.And the reason,Mulva said,is ,where is all that going to come from?



Whatever the ceiling turns out to be,one prediction seems secure.The era of cheap oil is behind us.If the past is any guide,the world may be in for a rough ride.In the early 1970s during the Arab oil embargo,U.S. policymakers considered despreare measure to keep oil supplies flowing,even drawing up contingency plans to seize Middle Eastern oil fields.Washington backed away from military action then,but such tensions are likely to reemerge,Since Saudi Arabia and other members of the Organzation of Petroleum Exporting Countries control 75 percent of the world's total oil reserves,their output will peak substantially later than that of other oil regions,giving them even more power over prices and the world economy.A peak or plateau in oil production will also mean that,with rising population,the amount of gasoline,kerosene,and diesel available for each person on the planet may be significantly less than it is today.And if that's bad news for energy-intensive economies,such as the United State,it could be disastrous for the developing world,which relies on petroleum fuels not just for transport but also for cooking,lighting,and irrigation.



Husseini worries that the world has been slow to wake up to the prospect.Fuel-efficient cars and alternatives such as biofuels will compensate for some of the depleted oil supplies,but the bigger challenge may be inducing oil-hungry societies to curb demand.Any meaningful discussion about changes in our energy-intensive lifestyles,says Husseini,is still off the table.With the inexorable arithmetic of oil depletion,it may not stay off the table much longer.



Smaller fields also cost more to operate than larger ones do.The world has zillions of little fields,says Matt Simomons,a Houston investment banker who has studied the oil discovery trend.But the problem is ,you need a zillion oil rigs to get at them all.This cost disparity is one reason the industry prefers to rely on large fields-and why they supply more than a third of our daily output.Unfortunately,because most of the biggest finds were made decades ago,much of our oil is coming from mature fields that are now approaching their peaks,or are even in decline,output is plummeting in once prolific regions such as the North Sea and Alaska's North Slope.

Tapped out In 2000 a Saudi Oil Geologist named Sadad I.Al Husseini made a startling discovery.Huseini,

Then head of exploration and production for the state-owned oil company,Saudi Aramco,had long been skeptical of the oil industry's upbeat forecasts for future production.Since the mid-1990s he had been studying data from the 250 or so major oil fileds that produce most of the world's oil.He looked at how much crude remained in each one and how rapidly it was being depleted,then added all the new fields that oil companies hoped to bring on line in coming decades.When he tallied the numners,Husseini says he realized that many oil experts were either misreading the global reserves and oil-production data or obfuscating it.


Where mainstream forecasts showed output rising steadily each year in a great upward curve that kept up with global demand,Husseubu's calculations showed output leveling off,starting as early as 2004.Just as alarming,this production plateau would last 15 years at best,after which the output of conventional oil would begin a gradual but irreversible decline.That is hardly the kind of scenario we've come to expect from Saudi Aramco,which sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves-some 260 billion barrels,or roughly a fifth of the world's known crude-and routinely claims that oil will remain plentiful for many more decades.Indeed,according to an industry source,Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi took a dim view of Husseini's report,and in 2004 Husseini retired from Aramco to become an industry consulatant.But if he is right,a dramatic shift lies just ahead of a world whose critical systems,from defense to transportation to food production,all run on cheap,abundant oil.Husseini isn't the first to raise the specter of a peak in global oil output.For decades oil geologists have theorized that when half the world original endowment of oil has been extracted,getting more out of the ground each year will become increasingly difficult,and eventually impossible.Global outputmwhich has risen steadily from fewer than a million barrels a day in 1900 to around 85 million barrels today,will essentially stall.Ready or not,we will face a post-oil future-a future that could be marked by recession and even war,as the United States and other big oil importers jockey for acess to secure oil resources.




Forecasts of peak oil are highly controversial- not because anyone think oil will last forever,but because no one really knows how much oil remains underground and this how close we are to reaching the halfway point.So-called oil pessimists contend that a peak is imminent or has actually arrived,as Husseini believes,hidden behind day to day fluctuations in production.That might help explain why crude oil prices have been rising steadily and topped a hundred dollars a barrel early this year.Optimists ,by contrast,insist the turning point is decades away,because the world has so much oil yet to be tapped or even discovered,as well as huge reserves of unconventional oil,such as the massive tar-sand deposits in western Canada.Optimists also not that in the past,whenever doomsayers have predicted an imminent peak,a new oil-field discovery or oil-extraction technology allowed output to keep rising.Indeed,when Husseini first published his forecasts in 2004,he say optimists dismissed his conclusions as curious footnotes.



Many industry experts continue to argue that today's high prices are temporary,the result of technical bottlenecks,sharply rising demand from Asia,and a plummeting dollar.People will run out of demand before they run out of oil,BP's chief economist declared at a meeting early this year.Other optimist,however,are wavering.Not only have oil prices soared to historic levels,but unlike past spikes,those prices haven't generated a surge in new output.Ordinarily,higher prices encourge oil companies to invest more in new exploration technologies and go after difficult to reach oil fields.The price surge that followed the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s,for example,eventually unleashed so much new oil that markets were glutted.But for the past few years,despite a sustained rise in price,global conventional oil output has hovered around 85 million barrel a day,which happens to be just where Husseini's calculations suggested output would begin to level off.

In June 2003,Moscow prosecutors arrested Yuko's security on charges of organizing the execution of Petukhov.

Four months later they arrested Khodorkovsky on charges of fraud and tax evasion.Tax authorities seized the Neftyugansk subsidiary and handed it over to a Kremlin-controlled company called Rosneft.Khodorkovsky was convicted and carted off to jail in southern Siberia,where his face was slashed by an inmate.Meanwhile,the security chief was convincted in a trial heavily publicized on state television.In the lastest development,prosecutors announced last February that Yukos co-owner Leonid Nerzlin also would be charged in Petukhov's murder.



Perhaps it did happen the way the government claimed,but ask folks in Nefteyugansk about the murder,and they tend to shrug and say they don't know what to believe.The coordinated elements of the Yukos affair have the whiff of a Moscow plot hatched by the KGB types in control of the Kremlin.The result,in any case,is that a cash cow-and still the town's livelihood-has passed from the hands pf a Moscow oligarch into the hands of the Kremlin.What I show up in town,Sergey Burov has been mayor for four months.He was once a deputy director for Rosneft and before that a senior manager for Yukos.He,too,is no stranger to violence.In 2005,while walking to his car in the morning,he took a bullet to the stomach.It looked like another contract job,but prosecutors closed the case without finding a culprit.



Burov is a burly man whose wide shoulders stretch his suit.He is interested in talking about the town's future,not its bloody past.In parntership with Rosneft,he tells me,the city administration has ambitious plans to redevelop Nefteyyugansk.Come back in two years,he says,and I will see an entirely different town,maybe even a yacht club.After the interview his press secretary shows off an indoor sports facility with an Olympic-size swimming pool.In the central plaza,the onel littered with pipe just a few days earlier,workers are starting to install brick walkways and flower beds.



Are things finally looking up for Nefteyugansk?Residents seem skeptical.Maybe Roseneft feels better being here,Vasily Voroshilov,a 52 year-old oil well repairman,says.But we don't feel it.That skepticism is shared by many observers outside Russia,who say it's one thing to seize control of an oil company and quite another to run it.Says one analyst of the Kremlin's takeover of Russian oil,You can steal a Chevy,but that doesn't mean you know how to drive it.For all the wealth that oil can produce,it is often as much a curse as a blessing for countries such as Russia.Early in the 1990s,before the oil boom,Boris Yeltsin encouraged local provinces to grab what autonomy they could.This was when Russia's potential for political pluralism and Western-style grassroots democracy looked greatest.When oil prices rose toward the end of the decade,the Kremlin realized that this source of wealth could be used to bring about a humiliated Russia's global resurgence.Salvation by oil has since become an article of national faith.





Oil said a 16 year-old student at Khanty mansiysk's school for math whizzes,is the only way for our country to stand up,to survive.Actually,there are many ways that the Russians,a creative and educated people,can revive their country.But oil suggests national potency,and Russia's petroleun patrimony lends itself to patriotic incantations of an almost mystical kind.At the festivities on Oilers's day one of the songs,a salute to the collective might of the neftyaniki,proclaimed,We are the fingers pressed thightly into a fist.Russia's superpower status today comes from energy,not its military,says Julia Nanay,a senior director at PEC Energy,a global consultancy based in Washington D.C. The Kremlin determines what happens with oil in western Siberia.They want to control production and exports in order to maximize Russia's geopolitical relevance.Just as the tsars of old exercised monopolies on valuable commodities such as fur and salt,the Kremlin wants direct control over oil-and over the oligarchs who produce it.Those who come to heel survive,those who don't risk suffering Khodorkovsky's fate,or worse.




One of the survivors is Vagit Alekperov,president of Russia's biggest private oil company,Lukoil.Starting out working on the rigs near his native Baku,Alekperov was sent to Siberia in the late 1970s to manage an oil-production team.A notoriously strict paternalist, he angered his men by banning the sale of alcohol in the village.Several of them grabbed hunting rifles and fired shots at his cabin,but Alekperov,ever the survivor,wasn't there at the time.During the fina days of the Soviet Union,Alekperov forged Lukoil from prime oil assets in western Siberia.Today the company is a global multinational with hydrocarbon reserves second only to ExxonMobil-and some 2000 gas stations in the U.S. Though most of Lukoil's reserves are in western Siberia,Alekperov keeps his headquarters just two miles from the Kremlin.Like other survivors,he knows that he must be attentive to any change in political mood that could affect Lukoil's fortunes,for better or worse.A distinguished-looking man with bronze skin and a crop of steel gary hair,Alekperov dresses in impeccably tailored suits.A tough guy,he can also charm.When pressed on whether oil consumers around the world should feel comfortable now that Russia has a large finger on the globe's petroleum tap,he leaned back in his chair.smiled expansively,and asked,Do I look like a bear?I couldn't help laughing.We just want to make money.Having gobbled up Yukos,might the Kremlin want to swallow Lukoil next?I don't think either the government or the president of Russia will target such a company,Alexperov remonstrates.I decide not to mention that Khodorkovsky had told me the same thing not long before his arrest.



Lukoil's base of operaions in Khanty-Mansi is the town of Kogalym.A roadside floral arrangement spells out the company's name not far from the golden domes of a Russian Orthodox cathedral and the green minaret of a mosque.At a refurbished maternity house-what Russians call a roddom-Dr. Galina Pustovit,director of the gynecology department,show off new Western-standard medical equipment.In a country where many women deliver their babies in Soviet-era buildings reeking of sour cabbage and damp concrete,this gleaming facility rates four stars.When I mention the Pustovit that Russia's oil industry is known for being corrupt,the doctor gives me a sharp look.This is oil,she says,sweeping a hand around the gynecology ward.Oilers built this hospital.All of the objects in this city have been built with oil money,including our beautiful boulevard.Don't judge us too harshly,her looks say.Life in these parts has never been better.

Surgut might have fallen apart,as did some other Russia cities.

In the chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union.That it didn't is a testament to the rootedness and stability of its political and business leadership.I was born in Surgut,,my children were bron here,and my grandchildren were bron here,Alexander Sidorov ,the city's longtime mayor,proudly declares.Surgut's economic anchor,the oil company Surgutneftegas,Russia's fourth largest producer,is majority owned by local managers.And unlike most Russian oil barons,who rule their western Siberian empires from Moscow,Surgutneftegas's general director,billionaire Vladimir Bogdanov,makes his home in town.Though now a towering figure in Surgut,Bogdanov started out as a common neftyanik.


Surgutneftegas is using the oil boom to finance an ambitious modernization program.At the oil field management center,computer engineers have custom designed an enormous digital map to monitor and adjust the field's performance.The map displays real-time information sent by coded radio signal from pump stations,active wells,and pipelines.From this display,managers can tell how much electric power is being consumed,whether a well needs repairs,and whether a pipeline is leaking.Protection of the environment,barely a concern in Soviet times,is being part of the new ethos.It's not that the oil industry has suddenly become softhearted toward flora and fauna.Rather,high oil prices provide an incentive to minimize waste,as do license agreements that include big fines for spills.Moreover,as Russian oil firms have become global players,they've also become more sensitive to international concerns about the environment.Maintaining a good reputation is very important,says Alexey Knizhnikov of the World Wildlife Fund in Moscow.Otherwise,doing business becomes difficult.Lubov Malyshkina,director of the environmental department at Surgutneftegas,is a chemical engineer with an advanced degree in the science of corrosion protection and geoecology.She also serves as an elected offical in the regional parliament.In Soviet times,she says ,the oil ministry in Moscow,oblivious to local conditions,would send chemicals that proved useless to treat oil spills and other hazards.Now Malyshkina's department,drawing on a nearly 500 million-dollar budget,makes its own purchase.She shows me one,a Swedish-made Truxor vehicle with tanklike treads that break up oil saturated peat so that spills can be cleaned up.The company is also investing five million dollars in a new plant for recycling old tires into fibers that can be mixed into the asphalt used to pave company roads.



For more than ten years oil has been at the center of a violent and chaotic power struggle in Neftryugansk.The difficulties began in the mid-1990s,when a nouveau riche Moscow banker snagged one of Russia's prime oil producers-and the town's sole large employer-in a privatization auction.The banker,Mikhail Khodorkovsky,made the Nefteyugansk unit the core subsidiary in his new oil company,known as Yukos.But the antagonized the city be delaying tax payment,causing city workers to go unpaid for months.Mayor Petukhov,a former neftyanik,led pubic protests against the new Moscow owners,who,he said,spit into our faces,the faces of oilers.The mayor's murder,at the age of 48,outraged the townpeople,many of whom connected the deed to his stand against Yukos.This blood is on your hands,read anti-Yukos banners put up at city hall by Petukhov's mourners.



For five years no one was brought to justice.During this time the city was governed by a corrupt official who eventually was sent to jail for swindling oil workers out of their promised retirement homes in Russia's balm

Send me to Sineria oil transforms a Russian outpost

It's around midnight.and the couples on the dance floor at the palace restaurant are gently swaying to a slow one.Za nas,za neft-To us,to oil,the singer croons.Wherever life sends us,To us,to oil...We fill out glasses to the brim.It is Oilers' Day in the western Siberian province of Khanty-Mansi.This annual holiday,honoring the hard labor of the oil workers,falls early in September,after the worst of the summer mosquito season and before the first snowfall,in October.Hours earlier,as daylight faded,thousands crowded into a huge outdoor sports complex.A stage was framed bt a deep-green backdrop of unbroken forest.Balloon were released,torches were lit,and a troupe belted out a song.


Little wonder Russian are toasting oil.These are boom times.Global oil prices have increased tenfold since 1998,and Russia has pulled ahead of Saudi Arabia as the world's top crude oil producer.The Kremlin's budget now overflows with funds for new schools,roads,and national defense projects,and Moscow's nouveau riche are plunking down millions of dollar for mansion-scale dachas.The pumping heart of the boom is western Siberia's boggy oil fields,which produce around 70 percent of Russian's oil-some seven million barrel a day.For Khanty-Mansi,a territory nearly the size of France,the bonanza provides an unparalleled opportunity to create modern,even desirable living conditions in a region whose very name evokes a harsh,desolate place,Khaty-Mansi's regional capital,scene of the holiday revelries,is being rebuilt with oil-tax proceeds.The new structures include an airport terminal once a wooden shack with an outhouse,an art museum featuring paintings by 19th century Russian masters,and a pair of lavishly equipped boarding schools for children gifted in mathematics and the arts.Even the provincial town of Surgut,a backwater only a few decades ago,is laying out new suburbs and is plagued by traffic jams.



But the opportunity presented by oil could slip through the region's fingers.Despite the remarkable surge in oil price,oil production in western Siberia has leveled off in recent years.Output barely rose from 2004 to 2007-a period when the rulers of the Kremlin,a cold-eyed and control-oriented crew,seized choice fields once held by private oil barons.The oligarchs,as they were known,were rapacious sorts who jousted among themselves for spoils.But they also heavily invested in the fields in order to maximize production and profits.The Kremlin,by contrast,aims to exploit oil not only as a source of national wealth,but also as a political tool for making Russia a great world power once again.Its heavy-handed tactics have made foreign investors wary and could undermine the boom-and with it Khanyy-Mansi's chances for a brighter future.Western Siberia's great oil deposits lie under lands that an exiled Marxist revolutionary,suffering in the gulag,once called the waste places of the earth.But to someone visiting by choice,oil country looks fetchingly wild and pristine.The terrain is dominated by taiga-dense forest of spindly birch,cedar,and pine-and boloto peaty marsh that is frozen for most of the year and in spots bubbles with methane.There are no monutains and few hills,but there are numerous lakes,rivers,and streams.



Oil exploration began in earnest here in the mid-1960s.When geologists reported that large reserves of oil were waiting to be tapped,the Kremlin organized a frenzied military-style invasion of pioneers and bulldozers to ramp up production.Western Siberia,it turned out,had even more black gold than anyone had dreamed.More than 70 billion barrels have been pumped over the past 40 years.In the early days Siberia was all frontier says Khanty-Mansi's govenor,Alexander Filipenko,The governor appears older than his 58 years,with a shock of gary hair,watery eyes,and a mottled nose that has weathered its share of frost.Filipenko arrived in Khanty-Mansi in the early 1970s with orders to lay a bridge over the Ob River,which in the late 19th century was a route for squalid barges transporting prisoners to their final places of banishment.The bridge project took four years of toil under burtal conditions.Yet despite the hardships,the governor looks back at that time the way an old man might recall his first love for a beautiful young woman.




Filipenko is equally passionate about his latest project-the redevelopment of the provincial capital,Khanty-Mansiysk,a town of 60000.He attends to every detail,and he has the funds to remark the capital to his liking.The province's oil industury generates 40 billion dollars in annual tax revenues,4.5 billion dollars of which Khanty-Mansi gets to keep for its own use.The rest goes to Moscow.His party background notwithstanding Filipenko's vision is a distinctly non-Soviet one,The capital's leading architectural symbols include a shopping emporium topped by an enormous green dome in the shape of a chum,the traditional tent used by the region's indigenous people-the Khanty,Mansi,and others who herd reindeer,hunt and fish.That symbolism would have been unthinkable in Soviet times,when the state,with its ideological cult of the worker,denied the very idea of culturally derived identity.When Siberia's oil land came under development,native people were forcibly herded into villages and cut off from their hunting and fishing grounds.Following the breakup of the Soviet Union,the nomads won legal status as aboriginal people,with the right to roam the oil field.In spite of their new status and the architectural homage in the capital,their lot has hardly improved.Their numbers are small,about 30000 in all,their languages are nearly extinct,and they are heavily afflicted by the scourges of contemporary Russia-AIDS,alcoholism,and tuberculosis.Some oil tax money is being invested in medical ships that stop along the river to care for patients.But critics say these floating clinics diagnose disease,then leave patients with no means to get treatment.




Rural Russia is also being depopulated by the flight of young people to Moscow and other cities.To counter these trends,Filipenko has implemented ambitious plans to turn Khanty Mansi into a place young people will choose to live in rather than leave.And this effort,he boasts,is working.He notes that Khanty-Mansi has the third highest birthrate among province in Russia,and unlike the country as a whole,whose population is in decline,Khanty-mansi's has increased 18 percent since 1989,from a combination of births and immigration.Oil composes 90 percent of the capital's economy,which is not surprising given the surge in oil prices.But it points to a problem shared by all resource-dependent economices.At some point the resource will be exhausted,and new sources of prosperity will have to be found.Recognizing the need to develop economic prospects beyond oil,Filipenko persuaded some 80 top researchers from Akademgordok-a famed science and research town in southern Siberia capital to staff a new institute specializing in information technologies.The institute provides consulting servies to oil companies,but it also takes on projects in unrelated fields such as nanotechnology.



It's the start of a Silicon Taiga,says Alexander Sherbakov,a 60 year old mathematician with a gary walrus mustache.As the era of easy oil comes to an end,he say,we're going to grow our own scholars by creating information-age jobs for the younger generation.Unlike investment in oil,investment in science,he says,can guarantee an everlasting bright future for the region's economy and its people.That's undoubtedly an optimistic assessment.For one thing,the touted model,silicon valley,is located in temperate California.In Soviet times the Kremlin could simply order top scientists to move to remote research centers.In post-Soviet times Russia's top researchers can live and work wherever they choose,and most are choosing to living in prosperous cities such as Moscow and St.Peterburg.While the oil boom has yet to make Siberia a magnet for Russia's knowledge class,it is attracting many other newcomers,impoverished immigrants from beyond Russia's borders.Early one morning,in a vacant lot just off the highway to Filipenko's showcase capital,a group of about 15 shabbily dressed men ranging in age from their 20s to their 40s are waiting for offers of work.however menial.A white Nissan pulls up,and several of the men walk over to talk to the driver,who is looking for a few hands to dig potatoes.But his offering price,just under ten dollars a day,isn't enough,and he drives away without any takers.These men are what Russians,borrowing a German word,call gastarbeiters-guest workers.They are nearly everywhere in Khanty-Mansi.Most are Muslims from Tajikistan,the former Soviet republic in Central Asia whose economy was shattered by civil war in the mid-1990s.They come here in spring and return home before winter arrives.It's not every day they find a job,but when they do they can earn about $20 lugging bags of cement for a construction crew or doing household cleaning.They wire funds back to their families,and their employers avoid paying taxes on the wages.The man balk at my request to see their living quarters.One says he is ashamed to show me how he lives.I don't want you to get the wrong idea,he says.We are not bandits,we are civilized people.We just need work.





The men are supposed to obtain registration papers certifying their place of residence,but,as they tell me,they have no authorized place to live,bunking instead in unheated garages illegally rented to them.A work boss- a kind of Mafia figure-obtains papers for them by bribing the registration office,but those documents,listing a false address,leave the gastarbeiters at the mercy of the police.When they are found out ,they're sometimes forced to pay a spot fine read bribe,and repeat offenders may face deportation.Russia's feferal government recently put the burden on employers to register the workers and check their identifications,but such measures are unlikely to stem the tide so long as the oil boom continues.A flood of Russians from economically depressed cities west of the Urals is also swelling the oil towns of western Siberia.Forty years ago Surgut was a collection of wooden hovels,in a place where temperatures can plunge to minus 60 degress Fahrenheit and midwinter darkness lasts for all but a few hours a day.Today Surgut is one of the western Siberia's largest cities.with 300,000 people,The new arrivals are voting with their feet,a sign that Russia's new market economy is actually working.



The polisg and prosperity on view in Surgut were once unthinkable in Russia's hinterlands.A combined day care and preschool the city recently remodeled with 5.2 million dollars largely from oil revenue now has a heated indoor swimming pool and hydromassage whirlpool, an animal collection with rabbits,turtles,and parrot,and a room with a small wooden stage on which colorfully costumed children diligently perform fairy tales.When weather doesn't permit outdoor exercise,the children can ride around in toy cars in a large,glass-enclosed playroom kept at a moderately chilled temperature.And then the toddlers can be soothed by a hot drink from the herbal tea bar.I understand that the foreigner is being shown the finest kindergarten in town,but only so much can be faked.Stuck in Surgut's traffic jams are as many Hondas,Toyotas,and Nissans as inexpensive Russian-made lades.Two-car families are becoming more common with the rise in living standard.The housing stock of a typical Russian city consists of large and ugly multistoried concrete apartment blocks,Surgut boasts a suburban development of single-family town houses, aimed at a new upper middle class of oil company managers,bankers,and entrepreneurs.The red-brick houses,each with its own small plot of land,are being built along a tree-lined stretch of riverfront at an average cost of 400,000.Envious townspeople coined an ironic sobriquet for the elite community.Dolina Nischikh,Valley of the Beggars.

The old earthworls were now refashioned to highlight the northeast entrance

Thus confirming the import of monument's alignment with the solstices-an emphasis that perhaps reflected beliefs about the meaning of the stones in their location at Preseli,or perhaps the new beliefs of a changing age.At some later date the giant sarsens of hard sandstone were dragged in from the Marlborough Downs,20 to 30 miles away.Although subsequent ages would fiddle with the internal design,the erection of the sarsens-the great broad-shouldered guardians of the small stones from Wales-bestowed on Stonehenge its enduring aura of unassailable assurance.Mystifying as it is to us,there is no mistaking the confident purposefulness of its massive,monumental features.


Studies conducted by Michael Allen,an expert in environment archaeology,demonstrate that throughout the long period of stonehenge's construction,people of the area carried on with the mundane tasks of their lives.Charcoal remains,pollens of weeds associated with crops,and,most valuably,snail shells-which can be mathced to different habitats-slow that the Stonehenge landscape was cleared,grazed,and farmed.Whatever its function,Stonehenge was embedded in the community it served.I see it being used like a cathedral,or Wembley Stadium,Allen said Some days it was used to hold solemn rituals,other days for more ordinary gatherings.That so much has been found so recently on this historic landscape underscores how much may yet be revealed.Projected work on the avenue could establish when it was extended to the Avon,clarifying at what stage the river became ritually linked to the monument.Creation remain that were excavatedand reburied at the monument as long ago as 1935 could benefit from rigorous new analysis with up-to-date technology.In April Timothy Darvill and Geoffy Wainwright conducted a two-week dig in decades-hoping to pin down when the bluestone arrived.Their planned reexamination of skeletal remain from the Stonehenge region people had been in need of healing.Fieldwork already under way in the Preseli hills may yield datable burial finds,possibly shedding light on the significance of the Preseli stones.



To all those who seek to read the meaning of Stonehenge in its stones,ritual texts from the dawn of history offer cautionary tales.Take,for example,a random Late Broze Age text of ritual practice from the Luwians,who lived in what is now Turkey between roughly 1700B.C. and 800 B.C.,Then they hold it the sheep out to him and he spit into its mouth twice.The Old Woman speaks as follows,Spit out pain and woe,the god's anger....,Then they bring a piglet of dough and a living piglet.Thay wave the living piglet at some distance.It is fair to say that no diligent fieldwork or application of logic and reason could have led even a visionary archaeologist to reconstruct this ritual from artifacts like bones and ceramics.These are no texts to explain Stonehenge.Secure in its wordless prehistory,it can thus absorb a multitude of meanings ,temple to the sun-or the moon for that matter,astronomical calendar,city of the ancestral dead,center of healing,stone representation of the gods,symbol of status and power.The heart of its mystique is,surely,that it excites in equal measure both zealous certitude and utter bafflement.