Table of Contents: August 16, 2010

IN THIS ISSUE EDITION: U.S. Vol. 176 No. 7

COVER
Inside The Minds of Animals (Science)
Science is revealing just how smart other species can be —and raising new questions about how we treat
them.
Photos: Smart Animals
A portfolio of creature portraits by photographer Finlay MacKay

NATION
An Rx for the Army's Wounded Minds (The Well / Nation)
An understaffed mental-health corps is struggling to fight the stigma of therapy and bring relief to
thousands of damaged soldiers
Photos: Treating Soldier Stress
The Army employs state-of-the-art technology at its Warrior Resiliency and Recovery Center at Fort
Campbell, Ky. to help bring relief to thousands of mentally damaged soldiers. Photographs by Gareth
McConnell for TIME

Russia's Long War (The Well / World)

Unlike Western nations confronting terrorism in their midst, the Kremlin has little time for legal niceties
and human rights as it deals with an Islamist insurgency. But does brutality work?
Photos: Dagestan and Russia's Long War
The tension between Moscow and Islamic insurgents spreads to other parts of the Caucasus, where the
Kremlin's brutal methods have left a trail of tears. Photographs by Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR for TIME

Cleaning the People's House (The Well / Nation)

Corruption-busting helped Nancy Pelosi's Democrats win back the House in 2006. But with two senior
members facing messy ethics trials, the issue may come back to bite them this fall

ESSAY
Iraq: Requiem for a Profound Misadventure (Commentary / In the Arena)
Obama's somber speech on Iraq is a reminder of when and why we should — and should not — go to war

Sit. Stay. Trust. Learn.

Some of life's most important lessons come from its least likely instructors

WORLD
Postcard from Parwan (Postcard)
After years of alleged abuse, a new U.S. prison in Afghanistan aims to improve conditions for its
detainees. Trying for a better kind of justice

Native Son. Expatriate. Activist. Musician. Ambassador. President? (The Well / World)
Wyclef Jean Enters the Race To Rescue a Battered Haiti
SOCIETY
Extreme Trampoline (Life / Sports)
If you build it (and pad the walls for safety reasons), they will jump

In-Flight Recycling's Slow Takeoff (Life / Going Green)

Coke, Diet Coke, landfill? Too many airlines keep trashing bottles and cans

Finding Mom on Facebook (Life / Web Watch)

For adoptive families, social networks can be a blessing and a complication

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

... But Is It Art? (Television)
How Bravo's latest reality series is riling up the art world
Photos: Artworks from "Work of Art"
A sampling of pieces produced by the artists participating in the hit Bravo series

Love Triangle (Books)

Mona Simpson's new novel explores the delicate relationships between parent, child and nanny

The Other Guys: Will Ferrell Grows Up (Movies)

His new comedy, The Other Guys, gives Will Ferrell a measure of maturity that's no less weird — or
funny

Q&A Rob Reiner

Short List
TIME'S PICKS FOR THE WEEK

PEOPLE
10 Questions for Mark Wahlberg (10 Questions)
The actor's new buddy-cop film, The Other Guys, is out now. Mark Wahlberg will now take your
questions

LETTERS
Inbox (Inbox)

BRIEFING
What Obama Didn't Tell Barbara Walters (Washington The Politics Page)

The Moment
8|3|10: New York

A Clinton-vs.-Obama Campaign Test (Washington The Politics Page)

The Skimmer
Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes

Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine

Verbatim

Mitch Miller (Milestones)

Sentenced (Milestones)

Brief History: Military Pullouts

Obama's Big-Business Blues (Washington The Politics Page)

Lolita Lebron (Milestones)

The World
10 ESSENTIAL STORIES
COVER

Inside the Minds of Animals

By JEFFREY KLUGER Thursday, Aug. 05, 2010

Kanzi, a 29 year old male bonobo photographed

at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa

Finlay Mackay for TIME

Not long ago, I spent the morning having coffee with

Kanzi. It wasn't my idea; Kanzi invited me, though he
did so in his customary clipped way. Kanzi is a fellow
of few words — 384 of them by formal count, though
he probably knows dozens more. He has a perfectly
serviceable voice — very clear, very expressive and
very, very loud. But it's not especially good for
forming words, which is the way of things when
you're a bonobo, the close and more peaceable
cousin of the chimpanzee.

But Kanzi is talkative all the same. For much of his day, he keeps a sort of glossary close at hand —
three laminated, place mat — like sheets filled with hundreds of colorful symbols that represent all the
words he's been taught by his minders or picked up on his own. He can build thoughts and sentences,
even conjugate, all by pointing. The sheets include not just easy nouns and verbs like ball and Jell-O and
run and tickle but also concept words like from and later and grammatical elements like the -ing and -ed
endings signifying tense.

Kanzi knows the value of breaking the ice before getting down to business. So he points to the coffee
icon on his glossary and then points to me. He then sweeps his arm wider, taking in primatologist Sue
Savage-Rumbaugh, an investigator at the Great Ape Trust — the research center in Des Moines, Iowa,
that Kanzi calls home — and lab supervisor Tyler Romine. Romine fetches four coffees — hot, but not
too hot — takes one to Kanzi in his patio enclosure on the other side of a Plexiglas window and then
rejoins us. Kanzi sips — gulps, actually — and since our voices are picked up by microphones, he listens
as we talk.

"We told him that a visitor was coming," Savage-Rumbaugh tells me. "He's been excited, but he was
stubborn this morning, and we couldn't get him to come out to the yard. So we had to negotiate a piece of
honeydew melon in exchange." Honeydew is not yet on Kanzi's word list; instead, he points to the glyphs
for green, yellow and watermelon. When he tried kale, he named it "slow lettuce" because it takes longer
to chew than regular lettuce.

The not-for-profit Great Ape Trust is home to seven bonobos, including Kanzi's baby son Teco, born this
year on June 1. Kanzi is by no means the first ape to have been taught language. The famous Koko,
Washoe and others came before him. But the Trust takes a novel approach, raising apes from birth with
spoken and symbolic language as a constant feature of their days. Just as human mothers take babies
on walks and chatter to them about what they see even though the child does yet not understand, so too
do the scientists at the Trust narrate the lives of their bonobos. With the help of such total immersion, the
apes are learning to communicate better, faster and with greater complexity.

All the same, today Kanzi is not interested in saying much, preferring to run and leap and display his
physical prowess instead. "Ball," he taps on one of his glossary sheets when he finishes his coffee.

"Tell him you'll get it for him," Savage-Rumbaugh instructs me and then shows me where the necessary
symbols are on a sheet I have in hand. "Yes-I-will-chase-the-ball-for-you," I slowly peck out, chase being
a word Kanzi uses interchangeably with get.

It takes me a while to find the ball in an office down the hall, and when I finally return, Savage-Rumbaugh
verbally asks Kanzi, "Are you ready to play?" He looks at us balefully. "Past ready," he pecks.

Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our chattel, our family
members and our laborers, our household pets and our household pests. We love them and cage them,
admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them.

Our dodge — a not unreasonable one — has always been that animals are ours to do with as we please
simply because they don't suffer the way we do. They don't think, not in any meaningful way. They don't
worry. They have no sense of the future or their own mortality. They may pair-bond, but they don't love.
For all we know, they may not even be conscious. "The reason animals do not speak as we do is not that
they lack the organs," René Descartes once said, "but that they have no thoughts." For many people, the
Bible offers the most powerful argument of all. Human beings were granted "dominion over the beasts of
the field," and there the discussion can more or less stop.

But one by one, the berms we've built between ourselves and the beasts are being washed away.
Humans are the only animals that use tools, we used to say. But what about the birds and apes that we
now know do as well? Humans are the only ones who are empathic and generous, then. But what about
the monkeys that practice charity and the elephants that mourn their dead? Humans are the only ones
who experience joy and a knowledge of the future. But what about the U.K. study just last month showing
that pigs raised in comfortable environments exhibit optimism, moving expectantly toward a new sound
instead of retreating warily from it? And as for humans as the only beasts with language? Kanzi himself
could tell you that's not true.

All of that is forcing us to look at animals in a new way. With his 1975 book Animal Liberation, bioethicist
Peter Singer of Princeton University launched what became known as the animal-rights movement. The
ability to suffer, he argued, is a great cross-species leveler, and we should not inflict pain on or cause
fear in an animal that we wouldn't want to experience ourselves. This idea has never met with universal
agreement, but new studies are giving it more legitimacy than ever. It's not enough to study an animal's
brain, scientists now say; we need to know its mind.

Conscious Critters
There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence — not the least being that
we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins
experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a
fly? Is anything going on there at all? A tiny brain in a simple animal has enough to do just controlling
basic bodily functions. Why waste synapses on consciousness if the system can run on autopilot?

There's more than species chauvinism in that question. "Below a certain threshold, it's quite possible
there's no subjective experience," says cognitive psychologist Dedre Gentner of Northwestern University.
"I don't know that you need to ascribe anything more to the behavior of a cockroach than a set of local
reflexes that make it run away from bad things and toward good things."

Where that line should be drawn is impossible to say, since our judgment is clouded by our feelings about
any given species. A cockroach likely has no less brainpower than a butterfly, but we're quicker to deny it
consciousness because it's a species we dislike. Still, most scientists agree that awareness is probably
controlled by a sort of cognitive rheostat, with consciousness burning brightest in humans and other high
animals and fading to a flicker — and finally blackness — in very low ones.

"It would be perverse to deny consciousness to mammals," says Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist
and the author of The Stuff of Thought. "Birds and other vertebrates are almost certainly conscious too.
When it gets down to oysters and spiders, we're on shakier ground."

Among animals aware of their existence, intellect falls on a sliding scale as well, one often seen as a
function of brain size. Here humans like to think they're kings. The human brain is a big one — about
1,400 g (3 lb.). But the dolphin brain weighs up to 1,700 g (3.75 lb.), and the killer whale carries a
monster-size 5,600-g (12.3 lb.) brain. But we're smaller than the dolphin and much smaller than the
whale, so correcting for body size, we're back in first, right? Nope. The brain of the Etruscan shrew
weighs just 0.1 g (0.0035 oz.), yet relative to its tiny body, its brain is bigger than ours.

While the size of the brain certainly has some relation to smarts, much more can be learned from its
structure. Higher thinking takes place in the cerebral cortex, the most evolved region of the brain and one
many animals lack. Mammals are members of the cerebral-cortex club, and as a rule, the bigger and
more complex that brain region is, the more intelligent the animal. But it's not the only route to creative
thinking. Consider tool use. Humans are magicians with tools, apes dabble in them, and otters have
mastered the task of smashing mollusks with rocks to get the meat inside — which, though primitive,
counts. But if creativity lives in the cerebral cortex, why are corvids, the class of birds that includes crows
and jays, better tool users than nearly all nonhuman species?

Crows, for example, have proved themselves adept at bending wire to create a hook so they can fish a
basket of food from the bottom of a plastic tube. More remarkably, last year a zoologist at the University
of Cambridge — the aptly named Christopher Bird — found that the rook, a member of the crow family,
could reason through how to drop stones into a pitcher partly filled with water in order to raise the level
high enough to drink from it. What's more, the rooks selected the largest stones first, apparently realizing
they would raise the level faster. Aesop wrote a tale about a bird that managed just such a task more
than 2,500 years ago, but it took 21st century scientists to show that the feat is no fable.
How the birds performed such a stunt without a cerebral cortex probably has something to do with a brain
region they do share with mammals: the basal ganglia, more primitive structures involved in learning.
Mammalian basal ganglia are made up of a number of structures, while those in birds are streamlined
down to one. Earlier this year, a collaborative team at MIT and Hebrew University of Jerusalem found
that while the specialized cells in each section of mammalian basal ganglia do equally specialized work,
the undifferentiated ones in birds' brains multitask, doing all those jobs at once. The result is the same —
information is processed — but birds do it more efficiently.

In the case of corvids and other animals, what may drive intelligence higher still is the structure not of
their brains but of their societies. It's easier to be a solitary animal than a social one. When you hunt and
eat alone, like the polar bear, you don't have to negotiate power struggles or collaborate in stalking prey.
But it's in that behavior — particularly the hunt — that animals behave most cleverly.

Consider the king of the beasts. "Lions do very cool things," says animal biologist Christine Drea of Duke
University. "One animal positions itself for the ambush, and another pushes the prey in that direction."
More impressive still is the unglamorous hyena. "A hyena by itself can take out a wildebeest, but it takes
several to bring down a zebra," she says. "So they plan the size of their party in advance and then go out
hunting particular prey. In effect, they say, Let's go get some zebras. They'll even bypass a wildebeest if
they see one on the way."

Last year, Drea conducted a study of hyena cooperation, releasing pairs of them into a pen in which a
pair of ropes dangled from an overhead platform. If the animals pulled the ropes in unison — and only in
unison — the platform would spill out food. "The first pair walked into the pen and figured it out in less
than two minutes," Drea says. "My jaw literally dropped."

For these kinds of animals, it's not clear what the cause-and-effect relationship is — whether living
cooperatively boosts intelligence or if innate intelligence makes it easier to live cooperatively. It's certainly
significant that corvids are the most social of birds, with long lives and stable group bonds, and that
they're the ones that have proved so handy. It's also significant that herd animals, like cows and buffalo,
exhibit little intelligence. Though they live collectively, there's little shape to their society. "In a buffalo
herd, Bob doesn't care who Betty is," Drea says. "But among primates, social carnivores, whales and
dolphins, every individual has a particular place."

Self and Other

It's easy enough to study the brain and behavior of an animal, but subtler cognitive abilities are harder to
map. One of the most important skills human children must learn is something called the theory of mind:
the idea that not all knowledge is universal knowledge. A toddler who watches a babysitter hide a toy in a
room will assume that anyone who walks in afterward knows where the toy is too. It's not until about age
3 that kids realize that just because they know something, it doesn't mean somebody else knows it also.

The theory of mind is central to communication and self-awareness, and it's the rare animal that exhibits
it, though some do. Dogs understand innately what pointing means: that someone has information to
share and that your attention is being drawn to it so that you can learn too. That seems simple, but only
because we're born with the ability and, by the way, have fingers with which to do the pointing.
Great apes, despite their impressive intellect and five-fingered hands, do not seem to come
factory-loaded for pointing. But they may just lack the opportunity to practice it. A baby ape rarely lets go
of its mother, clinging to her abdomen as she knuckle-walks from place to place. But Kanzi, who was
raised in captivity, was often carried in human arms, and that left his hands free for communication.

"By the time Kanzi was 9 months old, he was already pointing at things," says Savage-Rumbaugh. I
witnessed him do it in Iowa, not only when he pointed at me to invite me for coffee but also when he
swept his hand toward the hallway in a be-quick-about-it gesture as I went to get him his ball.

Pointing isn't the only indicator of a smart species that grasps the theory of mind. Blue jays — another
corvid — cache food for later retrieval and are very mindful of whether other animals are around to
witness where they've hidden a stash. If the jays have indeed been watched, they'll wait until the other
animal leaves and then move the food. They not only understand that another creature has a mind; they
also manipulate what's inside it.

The gold standard for demonstrating an understanding of the self-other distinction is the mirror test:
whether an animal can see its reflection and recognize what it is. It may be adorable when a kitten sees
itself in a full-length mirror and runs around to the other side of the door looking for what it thought was a
playmate, but it's not head-of-the-class stuff. Elephants, apes and dolphins are among the few creatures
that can pass the mirror test. All three respond appropriately when they look in a mirror after a spot of
paint is applied to their forehead or another part of their body. Apes and elephants will reach up to touch
the mark with finger or trunk rather than reach out to touch the reflection. Dolphins will position
themselves so they can see the reflection of the mark better.

"If you put a bracelet on an orangutan and put it in front of a mirror, it doesn't just look at the bracelet,"
says Bhagavan Antle, director of the Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species in Myrtle Beach,
S.C. "It puts the bracelet up to its face and shakes it. It interacts with its reflection."

With or without mirror smarts, some animals are also adept at grasping abstractions, particularly the
ideas of sameness and difference. Small children know that a picture of two apples is different from a
picture of a pear and a banana; in one case, the objects match, and in the other they don't. It's harder for
them to take the next step — correctly matching a picture of two apples to a picture of two bananas
instead of to a picture of an orange and a plum.

"It's called relations between relations, and it's a basic scaffold of intelligence," says psychologist Ed
Wasserman of the University of Iowa. Last year Wasserman conducted a study that proved some
animals have begun building that scaffold. In his research, baboons and — surprisingly — pigeons got
the relations-between-relations idea, correctly identifying the proper pairings with a peck or a joystick
when images were flashed on a screen.

Significantly, just as humans better understand an idea when they have a term to describe it (imagine
explaining, say, satisfaction if the word didn't exist), so do animals benefit from such labels. Psychologist
David Premack of the University of Pennsylvania found that when chimps were taught symbols for same
and different, they later performed better on analogy tests.
Beyond Smarts
If animals can reason — even if it's in a way we'd consider crude — the unavoidable question becomes,
Can they feel? Do they experience empathy or compassion? Can they love or care or hope or grieve?
And what does it say about how we treat them? For science, it would be safest simply to walk away from
a question so booby-trapped with imponderables. But science can't help itself, and at least some
investigators are exploring these ideas too.

It's well established that elephants appear to mourn their dead, lingering over a herd mate's body with
what looks like sorrow. They show similar interest — even what appears to be respect — when they
encounter elephant bones, gently examining them, paying special attention to the skull and tusks. Apes
also remain close to a dead troop mate for days.

Empathy for living members of the same species is not unheard of either. "When rats are in pain and
wriggling, other rats that are watching will wriggle in parallel," says Marc Hauser, professor of psychology
and anthropological biology at Harvard. "You don't need neurobiology to tell you that suggests
awareness." A 2008 study by primatologist Frans de Waal and others at the Yerkes National Primate
Research Center in Atlanta showed that when capuchin monkeys were offered a choice between two
tokens — one that would buy two slices of apple and one that would buy one slice each for them and a
partner monkey — they chose the generous option, provided the partner was a relative or at least familiar.
The Yerkes team believes that part of the capuchins' behavior was due to a simple sense of pleasure
they experience in giving, an idea consistent with studies of the human brain that reveal activity in the
reward centers after subjects give to charity.

Animal-liberationist Singer believes that such evidence of noble impulses among animals is a perfectly
fine argument in defense of their right to live dignified lives, but it's not a necessary one. Indeed, one of
his central premises is that to the extent that humans and animals can experience their worlds, they are
equals. "Similar amounts of pain are equally bad," he says, "whether felt by a human or a mouse."

Hauser takes a more nuanced view, arguing that people are possessed of what he calls humaniqueness,
a suite of cognitive skills including the ability to recombine information to gain new understanding, a talent
animals simply don't have. All creatures may exist on a developmental continuum, he argues, but the gap
between us and the second-place finishers is so big that it shows we truly are something special.
"Animals have a myopic intelligence," Hauser says. "But they never experience the aha moment that a
2-year-old child gets."

No matter what any one scientist thinks of animal cognition, nearly all agree that the way we treat
domesticated animals is indefensible — though in certain parts of the world, improvements are being
made. The European Union's official animal-welfare policies begin with the premise that animals are
sentient beings and must be treated accordingly. This includes humane conditions on farms and in
vehicles during transport and proper stunning before killing in slaughterhouses.

In the U.S., food animals are overwhelmingly raised on factory farms, where cattle and pigs are jammed
together by the thousands and chickens are confined in cages that barely allow them to stand. But here
too, public sentiment is changing. Roughly half of vegetarians list moral concerns as the chief reason for
giving up meat. Still, vegetarians as a whole make up only about 3% of the U.S. population, a figure that
has barely budged since before the days of Singer's manifesto. And there are three times as many
ex-vegetarians as practicing ones.

Even Singer doesn't believe we're likely to wake up in a vegan world anytime soon. For that matter, he
doesn't think it's morally necessary. Eating meat to avoid starvation is all right, he believes, and some
creatures are fair game all the time, provided they're grown sustainably. "I think there's very little
likelihood that oysters, mussels and clams have any consciousness, so it's defensible to eat them," he
says.

What's more, we're not going to quit using animals in other ways that benefit humans either — testing
drugs, for example. But we could surely stop using them to test cosmetics, a practice the E.U. is also
moving to ban. We could surely eat less meat and treat animals better before we convert them from
creature to dinner. And we could rethink zoos, marine parks and other forms of animal entertainment.

Ultimately, the same biological knob that adjusts animal consciousness up or down ought to govern how
we value the way those species experience their lives. A mere ape in our world may be a scholar in its
own, and the low life of any beast may be a source of deep satisfaction for the beast itself. Kanzi's
glossary is full of words like noodles and sugar and candy and night, but scattered among them are also
good and happy and be and tomorrow. If it's true that all those words have meaning to him, then the life
he lives — and by extension, those of other animals — may be rich and worthy ones indeed.

Photos: Animals That Can Think

Kanzi
A 29-year-old male bonobo, Kanzi has acquired an extraordinary vocabulary of close to 400 words. He
communicates by pointing to a series of colorful symbols that have been arranged for him on three cards
resembling place mats by the primatologists at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, where he
resides.

Bubbles
Photographed at the Institute of the Greatly Endangered and Rare Species (TIGERS) in Myrtle Beach,
S.C., Bubbles is a 29-year-old African female elephant. Elephants are noted for their very familial ways
and appear to mourn their dead.
Apsarah
Also photographed at TIGERS, Apsarah is a 4½-year-old female orangutan. Orangutans and bonobos
are among the few members of the animal kingdom that are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. "If
you put a bracelet on an orangutan and put it in front of a mirror, it doesn't just look at the bracelet," says
institute director Bhagavan Antle. "It puts the bracelet up to its face and shakes it. It interacts with its
reflection."

Portrait of a Bonobo
Kanzi's ability with language can be breathtaking. He can build thoughts and sentences, even conjugate,
all by pointing. The symbol sheets he uses include not just easy nouns and verbs like ball and run but
also concept words like from and later and grammatical elements like the -ing and -ed endings that
signify verb tense.
Bibi
Dogs, of course, have long been known to display all kinds of intelligent behaviors, but the most
impressive, say experts in animal cognition, is the canine's ability to understand what pointing means. No
other species understands that an extended finger indicates that there is something in that direction that
is worthy of its attention. Bibi, a resident of New York, is an 8-year-old female pug.

Just Hanging
Apsalah dangles for MacKay's camera. Orangutans are noted for their ability to create tools. Among
those noted by the University of Wisconsin's National Primate Research Center: using leafy branches as
flyswatters, collecting water in cups and modifying sticks to collect insects or leaves.

Trunk Show
A 2009 Japanese study of elephants in zoos found that the pachyderms have considerable numerical
skills; they are able to recognize, for example, the difference between two quantities of objects as they
are placed into buckets.
Hanuman and Apsarah
Orangutans are also noted for their ability to imitate human behavior. At TIGERS, orangutans have been
known to sit with people taking a tour of the institute, have tea with them and eat snacks. Apsarah is
joined in this photo by Hanuman, a 3½-year-old male.

Twist
All the things we love about our dogs — the joy they seem to take in our presence, the many ways they
integrate themselves into our lives — spring from social skills they have acquired by adapting to life with
humans. Six-year-old Twist, above, a cavalier spaniel, was photographed at TIME's offices in Manhattan.
Me in the Mirror
Kanzi checks out his reflection. Along with apes, elephants and dolphins can also pass the "mirror test":
all three species respond appropriately when they look in a mirror after a spot of paint has been applied
to their forehead or another part of their body. Apes and elephants will reach up to touch the mark on
themselves with their finger or trunk rather than reach out to touch the reflection. Dolphins will position
themselves so they can see the reflection of the mark better.

Ringo
The evolutionary record suggests that dogs descended from wolves, but that does little to explain the
symbiotic relationship that developed between them and humans. Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive
scientist at Barnard College and the author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know, has
suggested that when humans and wolves first came into contact, only the affable animals had the
temperament to earn the humans' trust, and they, in turn, were rewarded with food that the humans did
not want to eat. Once dogs became comfortable in our company, humans sped up their social evolution
by giving extra food to helpful dogs — ones that barked to warn of danger, for example. These, in turn,
got more rewards and eventually became partners with humans, helping with hunts or herding other
animals. Jack Russell terriers, like Ringo, above, a 3-year-old male, were ultimately bred for the very
specific task of hunting foxes.

Rupert
A recent study conducted by a zoologist at the University of Cambridge found that the rook, a member of
the crow family, can use reasoning to drop stones into a pitcher partly filled with water in order to raise the
water level high enough to drink from it.
Chillin'
Apsalah relaxes during her photo shoot with MacKay in South Carolina, one of three states the
photographer visited to make this portfolio.

Setting
TIME would like to thank the Institute of the Greatly Endangered and Rare Species for allowing MacKay
to make some of these wonderful images. For more information about TIGERS, please visit its website.
NATION

An Rx for the Army's Wounded Minds

By MARK THOMPSON Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

The base's medical team monitors the progress of

recovery by seeing how soldiers would handle
combat scenarios

Gareth McConnell for TIME

U.S. Army specialist Ethan McCord was one of the

first on the scene when a group of suspected
insurgents was blown up on a Baghdad street in
2007, hit by 30-mm bursts from an Apache
helicopter. "The top of one guy's head was
completely off," he recalls. "Another guy was
ripped open from groin to neck. A third had lost a
leg ... Their insides were out and exposed. I'd never seen anything like this before." Then McCord heard
a child crying from a black minivan caught in the barrage. Inside, he found a frightened and wounded girl,
perhaps 4. Next to her was a boy of 7 or so, soaked in blood. Their father, McCord says, "was slumped
over on his side, like he was trying to protect the children, but he was just destroyed." McCord couldn't
look away from the kids. "I started seeing images of my own two children back home in Kansas."

Ethan McCord's mind and thousands like his are the U.S. Army's third front. While its combat troops fight
two wars, its mental-health professionals are waging a battle to save soldiers' sanity when they come
back, one that will cost billions long after combat ends in Baghdad and Kabul. It is a high-intensity conflict:
Army troops, TIME has learned, are seeking mental help more than 100,000 times a month. That figure
reflects a growth of more than 75% from the final months of 2006 to the final months of '09, according to
Army data.

Army Lieut. General Eric Schoomaker, the surgeon general who oversees the mental and physical
well-being of the nation's soldiers, concedes he doesn't have the doctors and therapists he needs. "We're
in uncharted territory in respect to the strain on the force," Schoomaker said recently. Translation: he
needs help. According to the Army's estimates of its needs, 414 psychiatrists are 20% fewer than
Schoomaker should have. A study released by the Army on July 29 concluded that "numerous critical
shortages of care providers including behavioral health" personnel are hurting its efforts to curb suicides.
"The Army has been criminally negligent," says Captain Peter Linnerooth, an Army psychologist for
nearly five years until 2008, who notes that the service has had a difficult time finding psychiatrists to care
for combat vets, which puts even more pressure--"and way too much burnout"--on those who stay.

Interviews with dozens of mental-health experts at Army bases tell a similar story. Even though the Army
mental-health corps has increased about 60% since 9/11, demand is growing even faster. One
anonymous mental-health professional told researchers last year that he spends a quarter of his time on
"really sick people who never should have been let in [the military] to begin with." During the past year,
indeed, it has become clear that a shortage of mental-health care can be nearly as dangerous to troops
as any enemy. Last November, when Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan allegedly gunned down 13
people at Fort Hood, Texas, it forced the Army to ask some hard questions. Did supervisors overlook
Hasan's poor performance and alarming ideology because they are desperate for psychiatrists?

Without doubt, those in the specialty feel under pressure. Sergeant Brock McNabb, who left the Army in
2008, was a mental-health technician operating out of a base near Baghdad; he endured nearly a year of
12-hour-plus shifts without a day off. "My marriage is going to hell. The commands aren't listening to a lot
of the things we're saying when we're trying to take care of these guys," he recalls thinking. "It wasn't any
huge, dramatic thing. I just decided, 'Yeah, today's the day I'm going to die,' and I was O.K. with that." He
collapsed, fully clothed, on his cot. "I looked over at my 9 mm on this little hutch I'd made, and I started
laughing hysterically," he says. "I was so exhausted after 10 months of all the s___ I'd been through, I
was too tired to ... reach for the 9 mm and put it in my mouth." He passed out and awoke fine the next
day.

The Enduring Taboo

McCord Pulled the two kids out of the minivan--the boy was still alive--and helped get them to a hospital.
The Apache gunship killed a dozen men, including a pair working for the Reuters news agency; the
episode became a video sensation after WikiLeaks released footage of it in April. Back at his base,
McCord washed the children's blood off his uniform and body armor. That night, he told his staff sergeant
he needed help. "Get the sand out of your vagina," McCord says his sergeant responded. "He told me I
was being a homo and needed to suck it up." McCord says he never spoke to anyone about it after that
because he didn't want to get in trouble and instead did what soldiers have done forever. "I decided to try
to push it down and bottle it up," he says. But his anger, fueled by flashbacks to that day in Baghdad, kept
growing. Any misstep by one of the soldiers on his team would set him off. "It was like a light switch,"
McCord says. "They'd do something wrong and I'd be screaming at them."

Going to a psychiatrist is still seen as a sign of weakness in the Army; the chief fear is that it will work
against promotion. That may be why only about half of those needing help seek care, according to a
2008 Rand Corp. study. And only half of those--25% of the total who need help--get "minimally adequate
treatment," the Rand study found. Repeat deployments deepen the crisis. One in every 10 soldiers who
has completed a single combat deployment has a mental ailment; that rate jumps to 1 in 5 with a second
deployment and nearly 1 in 3 with a third. That means that more than 500,000 troops have returned
home to the U.S. in the last decade with a mental illness.

Complicating the Army's mental-health challenge is an increase in brain trauma. The two wars are
revealing a connection between physical wounds and mental ailments. Advances in body armor protect
soldiers' bodies but have left skulls and the gray matter inside them relatively defenseless. Schoomaker
says the wars' biggest surprise is how traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by roadside bombs has
unleashed mental trauma. Bruised brains trigger "persistent stress-hormone releases" that can cause
posttraumatic stress disorder. That, in turn, can lead to suicide. The Army has been battling a rising
suicide rate for the past six years; June saw 32 suspected suicides, one of the highest monthly totals in
Army history. Of those, 22 had served in combat, including 10 who had deployed two or more times.

The root cause is no mystery: repeat deployments drive up cases of posttraumatic stress, which makes
soldiers six times more likely to kill themselves. So, quietly, all over the world, the Army has opened 48
medical sites dedicated to treating soldiers' injured brains. Ground zero for this is Fort Campbell, Ky.,
home to the 101st Airborne Division. After 11 suicides at the base during the first five months of 2009, a
top general ordered a three-day halt to all activities to discuss the problem and issued an astonishing
order to the entire division: "Suicides at Fort Campbell have to stop now."

The Army has spent $7 million building at Fort Campbell what it calls its first behavioral-health campus
(soldiers call it "the mental-health mall") with a half-dozen new clinics filled with the latest technology for
diagnosing and treating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury. The fort's
mental-health staff has grown from 31 in January 2008 to 95 today. Yet suicides continued to rise. "The
way Fort Campbell deals with the soldiers are why there's so many suicides there," Sergeant James
Kendall, now studying to be an Army nurse at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, says. "Pretty much everyone
who went to mental health said the same thing I did--they're just shoving them out the door." Kendall, a
medic in the 101st, returned from Afghanistan in March 2009 and says he was brushed off when he
initially sought help. It was only after he downed a full bottle of Army-prescribed Vicodin, he says, that the
Army took his worries seriously. (His wife resuscitated him by injecting him with an antioverdose
medication he had stashed in his medic's bag.)

Dr. Bret Logan, a psychiatrist in charge of medical hiring at Fort Campbell, says few medical
professionals want to settle near the rural base--an hour north of Nashville--for far less money than they
could make in a big city. The post has hired several foreign-born doctors, which has created cultural as
well as language barriers. With only four suicides so far this year, the epidemic at Fort Campbell seems
to have abated. But the trend at the base remains clear; the workload per mental-health worker has
nearly doubled from 2008 to 2010, jumping from 19 to 32 visits per week.

A Patchwork Solution

McCord returned to Kansas five months after rescuing the children, but the nightmares continued. He
sought help, and after a two-week wait for his first appointment, he was told by his civilian Army
psychologist to calm his nighttime shakes with a blanket and a scented candle. Several weeks later, he
saw a civilian Army psychiatrist, who prescribed three antidepressants that McCord says turned him into
a zombie. Soon he began downing pills with whiskey and walking around his house brandishing his
military knife with its 7-in. (18-cm) blade. His wife tricked him into driving to the hospital, where an Army
counselor committed him to a private mental center.

Can the Army's mental-health corps heal itself? Not soon. Schoomaker has shifted some 100
physical-health jobs to mental-health billets, and combat tours for some medical specialists, including
psychiatrists, have been cut from 12 months to six. But the Army has been forced to hire regular civilians
to help, many of whom know little about the military and its culture. One soldier walked out on a civilian
therapist who thought an RPG--a rocket-propelled grenade, one of which killed his buddy--was a small
car.
Army mental-health providers have been receiving "provider resiliency training" since late 2008 to ward
off compassion fatigue. "The Army recognized they need to take care of their staff," says Major Chris
Warner, chief of behavioral medicine at Georgia's Fort Stewart. Psychologist Charles Figley, a former
Marine sergeant in Vietnam and pioneer in the study of burnout among military counselors, credits the
Army for taking some long overdue steps to help its healers. But there is no magic formula to fix the
damage to soldiers' minds--itself the product of wars that have lasted far longer than expected and are
being fought by volunteer troops. A bigger Army would mean fewer combat tours for each soldier, but
that's not going to happen.

One bright spot: as the demand for troops eases, soldiers will spend more time at home between
deployments, and such "dwell time" reduces mental ailments. There is also a growing network of private
counselors across the country listening to soldiers, often for free. Barbara Van Dahlen, a Washington
psychologist, launched the nonprofit Give an Hour organization in 2005 to offer free counseling to U.S.
troops and their families. "We decided to step up and help," she says, "because these are our folks too."

McCord got out of the mental hospital after four days and left the Army last June. His psychological
turmoil, he says, played a role in his 2008 divorce. He is no longer taking antidepressants. "The Army's
attitude was, 'Let's give this guy drugs and hope they work because we're overbooked and don't have
time to deal with it,'" he says. "If they had understood what I was going through, I think all of this could
have been avoided."

Treating Soldier Stress

Treating Soldier Stress

Behavioral Health Campus
To battle the growing ranks of soldiers struggling with the after-effects of war-related stress, the Army has
opened close to 50 medical sites all over the world. Perhaps the most advanced is located at Ft.
Campbell in Kentucky, home of the 101st Airborne Division. The base's Warrior Resiliency and Recovery
Center employs a variety of high-tech tools to help diagnose and manage soldiers' mental health. This
virtual reality simulator recreates the experience of being in combat. By seeing how soldiers handle the
scenarios, the base's medical team can monitor the progress of recovery.

Quantitative Electroencephalograph
A cap is placed on a soldier as part of a brain-wave analysis that checks for traumatic brain injury.
Virtual Dashboard
This simulator allows medical staff to observe soldiers as they make decisions in combat scenarios.

Balance-Management System
Distortion of balance is often a consequence of traumatic brain injury. This device, called a NeuroCom
Balance Manager, allows medical staff to track the loss of balance, and provide a way to measure the
pace of recovery.
Testing Ear Trauma
The rotary chair is used to assess middle ear injury of soldiers who may have experienced a concussion.
Middle ear injury is a common and very disabling problem in traumatic brain injurie.

Light-Board Vision Test

In this test, soldiers who have been traumatized undergo a coordination study that assesses their vision
and reaction times. Though the fort's mental health staff has grown from 31 in January 2008 to 95 today,
it is still far from enough to handle all of the cases.
Russia's Long War
By Nathan Thornburgh / Moscow Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Rasul Magomedov's daughter Maryam

Sharipova was one of the March 29
bombers

Yuri Kozyrev for TIME

On a Monday morning, March 29, suicide bombers attacked two metro stations in the heart of Moscow.
The detonations, timed 40 minutes apart during rush hour for maximum damage, in some ways
resembled the 2004 commuter-train attack in Madrid, the July 7 bombings in London a year later and
numerous other public acts of terrorism around the globe. These similarities were not lost on world
leaders, who were quick to express not just sympathy but also empathy. French President Nicolas
Sarkozy said, "When Moscow is attacked, we are all attacked." In June, just days before the exposure of
a U.S.-based Russian spy network, Barack Obama stressed unity with visiting Russian President Dmitri
Medvedev, saying that "terrorists threaten both our people, be it in Times Square or in Moscow."

But if Russia faces a similar threat, that does not mean it has the same approach to the war on terrorism.
In fact, in its long war against extremism, Russian leadership sometimes seems to act as the id of the
global community--uninhibited, revenge-minded, saying things European and U.S. leaders dare not. The
Kremlin and its generals have consistently prosecuted the war domestically in ways that seem both
brazen and brutal by international standards. Yes, the West has done its own rough work behind closed
doors--CIA renditions, the prison at Guantánamo--but in Russia, this work is almost celebrated. A
newspaper with ties to the Kremlin lauded a new state prosecutor as a "tough man" who operates "on the
edge of legality." Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has made intimidation a large part of his political persona.
But beyond the posturing lies a key question: Whose approach works better? If Western democracies are
struggling to reconcile openness with vigilance, does the freer hand of the Kremlin, whose rule is closer
to autocracy, give it an advantage in fighting its war on terrorism?

The Fortress City

Moscow was a fortress before it was ever a city. The Kremlin, sited on Borovitskaya Hill in 1156, was its
first grand building, made originally from pine, then oak, limestone and finally red brick. As its walls grew
thick, Moscow began the "gathering of Russia"--the conquering of principalities around it. It was the
beginning of an expansion that, at the zenith of Soviet power, encompassed not just Russians but the
world's largest tapestry of subject peoples: more than 100 ethnic groups speaking more than 200
languages, living in 11 time zones. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Moscow divested itself of
many of those entanglements, but some regions that agitated for more autonomy were located inside the
century-old border of Russia and could not be carved out. Chief among these was the North Caucasus, a
predominantly Muslim region that includes Chechnya, a tiny republic that fought two failed wars of
independence. Since 2007, Chechnya has been ruled by the strong hand of Ramzan Kadyrov, a
Kremlin-backed president who at first extinguished all open rebellion. But even Kadyrov's grip is slipping,
and the fight against the Kremlin has flared in neighboring republics, which have served as a base for
insurgent groups to mount successful attacks from southern Russia all the way to the fortress city on the
Moscow river.

The March 29 bombers, Dzhennet Abdullayeva, 17, and Maryam Sharipova, 28, were so-called black
widows--young women radicalized by the death or disappearance of their husbands--from Dagestan, a
tiny, mountainous republic south of Chechnya that, together with the rest of the North Caucasus, serves
as a strategically important buffer between Russia proper and its enemies (like Mikheil Saakashvili's
Georgia) to the south.

Dagestan's sorry recent history mirrors that of the rest of the region. The post-Soviet era was chaotic and
corrupt. Regional governments co-opted Sufism--a variant of Islam popular in Central and South Asia--by
building government Islamic schools and mosques, but their own venal appetites tainted the faith by
association. So when students and preachers began bringing Wahhabism--the strict Saudi version of
Islam--to the North Caucasus, it seemed clean, devout, otherworldly. The ensuing struggle between
Kremlin-backed Sufi authorities and the growing tide of Wahhabis has been bloody and clannish, and it
has reached far beyond the mountains of the Caucasus. In Dagestan, a Chechen former engineer
named Doku Umarov has declared himself the emir of the nonexistent emirate of the Caucasus. Umarov
claimed responsibility for the Moscow-metro bombings, telling Russians in a video message, "I promise
you that the war will come to your streets and you will feel it in your lives, feel it on your own skin."

It is not surprising to hear a terrorist leader making ghoulish threats, but in Russia, the authorities talk just
as tough. Putin, who flew to a Russian base in Chechnya shortly after becoming President in 1999 to
hand out daggers to the soldiers, was relatively restrained after the March 29 bombing when he said that
those responsible "will be eliminated." President Medvedev flew to Dagestan shortly thereafter and was
heard on national TV telling his commanders that although Russia had been able to "take the heads off
the most notorious gangsters," they may need to use "harsher" methods. Kadyrov was blunter yet, writing
in an editorial for the Russian paper Isvestia that "terrorists must be hunted down and found in their lairs,
they must be poisoned like rats, they must be crushed and destroyed."

Boris Dubin, a sociologist and pollster with the Levada Center in Moscow, says that Putin's rhetorical
flourishes over the years--he once promised to kill terrorists "in the outhouse," to scrape them from the
sewers--are calculated political theater. "There is a Russian code of political language," Dubin says.
"From time to time, you should use crude language." This bravura echoes on national television news,
which is largely controlled by the Kremlin. A characteristic of the Putin era is that TV news avoids
coverage of disaster. (It took several hours for the major networks to acknowledge the Moscow attacks.)
And when coverage does begin, it is carefully focused on acts of composure and resolve by the
authorities. "The general message of Russian television is that we--Putin and Medvedev--are in charge,"
says Masha Lipman, a media expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Russians seem to take comfort from this paternalistic message. Dubin's polling shows that Putin's
approval ratings hovered around 80% before and after the latest attacks, as it had through previous
national tragedies. "It's as if we had several Katrinas and the approval rating of the President and Prime
Minister remained at 80%," says Lipman.

The Downside of Paternalism

But faith in Medvedev and Putin doesn't extend to the institutions below them, which means few
Russians are inclined to play their part in the war on terrorism. New Yorkers are familiar with signs saying
"If you see something, say something," and it was a street vendor in Times Square who first alerted the
police to the smoldering SUV bomb that failed to detonate in May. Russians have little trust in their police:
in one survey, 55% said the government could do nothing to protect Russians from terrorism and 24%
said they think the security services themselves may have played a role in the metro attacks.

This mistrust of the authorities is even more acute in Moscow's immigrant communities, where Russian
law enforcement--unlike police in, say, New York City or London--has failed to cultivate informants and
maintain other useful relationships. Svetlana Gannushkina, a human-rights worker and advocate for
Moscow's immigrant communities, says that after earlier attacks, it was "simply a hunt" throughout
Moscow for Chechens, even Georgians--anyone from the Caucasus. Security analyst Andrei Soldatov
says xenophobia among officials is "the biggest problem" in the war on terrorism. "Law enforcement
intimidates the North Caucasians all the time. There's no trust," he says. "But if you want to fight terrorism,
you have to work closely with those communities."

A visit to Friday services at the Moscow Central Mosque shows just how marginalized the Muslim
diaspora in Moscow is. The barricaded street leading up to the mosque is not supposed to be prayer
space, but hundreds of worshippers roll out their prayer rugs on the asphalt. Head imam Ildar Alyautdinov
explains that in a city with 2 million Muslims, the authorities have allowed only three mosques. "You can
talk about human rights," he says, "but we are not allowed to worship here."

There are more acute injustices--particularly for those immigrants from Central Asia and the North
Caucasus who fall victim to xenophobic violence. SOVA, a human-rights group, counted 19 murders
committed by right-wing extremists in Russia in the first half of 2010, down from 50 during the same
period in 2009. The apparent decrease may be due to stepped-up pressure on extreme nationalist
groups, but Alyautdinov says the government still doesn't offer enough protection from vigilantes. When I
meet with leaders of the ultranationalist group Russky Obraz (Russian Way)--all carrying daggers, one
with a swastika tattoo on his calf--they say they don't encourage violence. But Evgeny Valyaev, one of
the leaders, says, "It's no secret that the North Caucasians are the foundation and root of terror in
Russia." Adds his compatriot Iliya Goryachev: "The [Muslim] community here does serve as an incubator
for terrorism ... They have to respect our human rights if they want us to respect theirs."

The Kremlin's statements after the March 29 bombings were surprisingly moderate in another respect: no
generals went on TV saying that Islam is a religion of violence, as had happened before. Alyautdinov
credits this, ironically, to Russia's reliance on Kadyrov: the handpicked Chechen president is a devout
Muslim. Moscow has given Kadyrov a free rein that has of late become increasingly unseemly. In an
unprecedented March meeting in the Kremlin, human-rights workers complained personally to Medvedev
about Kadyrov's threats against them. Medvedev seemed sympathetic, one participant told me, but in
July, rights groups again had to evacuate Chechnya after Kadyrov called them "enemies of the people."
Kadyrov's henchman have also been accused of assassinating dissidents and political opponents at
home and abroad. But Putin needs Kadyrov, and Russia has important trading partners in the Middle
East. The Kremlin, it appears, has ordered its generals to stop using terrorism as a pretext for verbal
attacks on Islam.

An Unquestioned Strategy

If the generals were muzzled, their guns were not. After the metro bombings, massive ground operations
were carried out in select Dagestani villages. Details are sketchy, but the local authorities are said to
have used overwhelming force. Journalist Yulia Yuzik was there and said that in one raid, police simply
blew up a house with two wanted men inside instead of apprehending them. TIME photographer Yuri
Kozyrev met many victims of the authorities in Dagestan, including a mother whose son was killed by
police, she said, after he was singled out for having a long beard.

But there was a media blackout on the offensive, and most Russians paid little attention to what was
happening in the mountains. "People forget they are living in a country at war," says Andrey Cherkasov,
of the human-rights group Memorial. Nor were lawmakers especially keen to know what was going on.
Among the "reforms" suggested by the Russian parliament right after the bombings was a proposition to
crack down on any media outlet that quoted Umarov or gave him a platform in any way.

The Kremlin's brute counterterrorism tactics are rooted largely in the fact that there is little free press or
political opposition to hold it accountable for the deaths of civilians. Imagine the clamor in Britain if a
police action against a terrorist group in London ended with scores of dead civilians. In Russia, Putin is
lauded by many for ordering the violent end to a standoff with hostage-taking terrorists in a Moscow
theater in 2002: 130 hostages died. Putin "deserves respect for being man enough to give the order to
storm the building," says Aleksey Filatov, a retired special-forces lieutenant colonel who runs an
association of veterans of Alfa Group, Russia's elite hostage-rescue unit. Putin likewise shook off
criticism two years later when another hostage situation--in an elementary school in Beslan--ended with
government forces charging into the premises, guns blazing: 334 hostages died, including 186 children.

Each terrorist attack, in fact, has been used as a pretext for even more Kremlin control. The Beslan crisis,
for example, was blamed on local authorities, and since then there have been no regional elections; all
governors are now loyal Kremlin appointees. Two months after the March 29 attacks, the parliament
approved a broad expansion of Russia's counterintelligence services, giving them the right to deliver
warnings to people who haven't committed a crime but are viewed as potential criminals or terrorists.

It is left to the country's beleaguered human-rights groups to collect eyewitness accounts in order to find
out what's happening in Dagestan. Memorial, which started out cataloging the past abuses of the Soviet
system, is now the main voice for victims of Kremlin-sponsored violence in places like Dagestan and
Chechnya. The organization's Cherkasov reckons that in all, at least 3,000 civilians have
disappeared--largely at the hands of Kremlin-backed security forces--since the end of the second
Chechen war in 2000. (One of these was Memorial worker Natalia Estemirova, who was kidnapped and
executed last summer.) The crackdowns happening now in the Caucasus are just a continuation of a
long and brutal strategy, he says, and even if the Kremlin wins, it would just be "the victory of one type of
barbarism over another."

The Endgame

Russia's war on terrorism is essentially a civil war. "Our Afghanistan is inside Russia" is how Lipman puts
it. Even so, on most days, the war feels far away. This may well be a credit to the Kremlin's powers of
misdirection and distraction. At a huge Moscow rally organized by Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group,
65,000 young Russians were bused in from all over the country to celebrate victory--not in the war on
terrorism but in World War II. The string of speakers hardly mentioned terrorism, choosing instead to
focus on other bogeymen: opposition leaders, foreign media and foreign leaders who had apparently
insulted the memory of Russia's sacrifice in the Great Patriotic War. Teenagers lined up by the dozens to
turn in books--ostensibly for return to the publishers--written by Kremlin opponents like the leaders of
Georgia and Estonia and opposition politicians like Gary Kasparov.

The authoritarian overtones of the rally, where everyone wore matching faux-military T-shirts and had
been issued replica Kalashnikov cartridges, were chilling. But there was an added component, an
orderliness that was breathtaking for Russia: 65,000 teenagers and not one of them smoking or drinking.
It reminded me of the allure of the Wahhabi extremists who recruit young people in Dagestan: in a
chaotic and muddy land, the clean-swept mosques and confident composure of the Wahhabi leaders is a
tremendous sales pitch.

The same can be said of the Kremlin. Its pitch is that Russian authorities are strong enough to muscle
their way to victory. But explosions continue to hit the North Caucasus on a daily basis, and Moscow
remains at risk. In mid-July, another six would-be suicide bombers were arrested before they could be
"deployed" to major Russian cities, according to police. This is the real indictment of the Kremlin's
strategy: its iron fist keeps striking the Caucasus, and the Caucasus keeps striking back.
Dagestan and Russia's Long War

A Father, Alone
Rasul Magomedov's daughter Maryam Sharipova, 28, was one of two suicide bombers who attacked the
Moscow subway system on March 29. Magomedov said she disappeared the day before the bombings,
and residents say they don't understand how she could have even gotten to Moscow in time to commit
the attacks. Her parents believe she was forced to carry out the deadly task.

Wife
Paramilitary abductions continue to be a leading tool used by the authorities in the North Caucasus
against their opponents. Subigat Gasanova, at right, provided evidence to the human rights organization
"Memorial" nine months ago, claiming her husband was abducted at the center of Makhachkala last
September by men in camouflage.

Cemetery
Magomed Shapi visits the grave where his son, Magomed Ali, is buried. Shapi believes his son was
murdered by Dagestani police in 2007.
Prayer
Worshippers pray at the central mosque of Makhachkala, Dagestan's capital. The fighting in Dagestan
has religious undertones: the republic is run by Sufis, a form of Islam popular in the Caucasus and South
Asia, while their opponents are Salafis (or Wahhabi, as the government calls them), followers of a stricter
form of Islam imported from Saudi Arabia.

Ritual
Followers of Sufi Islam practice outside of a mosque in Buinaksk.
A Mother's Loss
Taisa Satabalova, right, believes her son, Marat Satabalov, was beaten to death outside of Kazbekovsky
Police Station in Dagestan because of his long beard, which would be taken as a sign of his devotion to
Wahhabi Islam. Satabalova's wife, Luiza, is at left.

Fathers
Both Magomed Saidgadziev, right, and Magomed Shapi, far left, have given evidence to the human rights
group "Memorial" about the disappearance and subsequent murder of their sons. Memorial and other
rights groups have recently had to evacuate Chechnya because the Kremlin-back leader there called
them "enemies of the people," leaving them vulnerable to more government-back attacks on their staff.
Wanted
A Dagestani policeman looks through a list of photographs and names at a checkpoint in Kyzlyar.
Dagestan, along with the nearby republics of Ingushetia and Chechnya, has been the site of seemingly
endless tension and conflict since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Armed
A Dagestani police officer mans a checkpoint in Kyzlyar. Local policemen are under near-daily attack
from separatists and terrorists. Human rights monitors say policemen or their families often avenge these
attacks with extrajudicial killings.

Visit
Students of North Caucuses Islamic University Center of Education and Science travel to Buinaksk to
become followers of Sheikh Abdulzhalil-afandi. Unemployment rates of up to 90% often push young
people in the North Caucasus to take up roles on either side of the conflict.

Minaret
Locals in Balakhany and other villages fear that special operations forces targeting communities with
suspected links to the fighters will increase after the Moscow bombings. Operations looking for fugitives
or their supporters often end in bloodshed.

Subigat Gasanova
Her husband Rashid Gasanov was abducted on September 8, 2009.

Farida Ahmedova
Her husband Umir Ali Ahmedova was killed on September 17, 2009.

Gadzhiyav Musalaev
His son Gusein Musalaev was killed on December 16, 2009.

Ase'yd Aleeva
Her son Kirim Asadylaev was killed in January 2010.
Liza Dakaeva
Her son Belal Dakaev was abducted on August 9, 2009.

The Ethics Watchdog Making Democrats

Squirm
By Jay Newton-Small / Washington Thursday, Aug. 05, 2010

Leo Wise of the Office of Congressional

Ethics

Richard Carson / Reuters

It's safe to say that Leo Wise has made

more enemies than friends in his two years
on Capitol Hill. But as staff director and general counsel of the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE),
maybe that's the point.
Wise's leadership of the two-year-old independent office has rubbed many Democrats the wrong way
now that two unprecedented ethics trials — of Charles Rangel, former chairman of the House Ways and
Means Committee, and of Maxine Waters, senior member of the House committee that oversees banking
— are slated to take place just weeks ahead of the midterm elections. Democrats came into power
promising to "clean out the swamp," as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, and in some respects they
have been true to their word; the OCE has investigated more than 60 cases thus far, referring 12 to the
House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct for further review. But the airing of so much dirty
laundry before an election already fueled by anti-Washington fervor is about the last thing Democrats
want.

Caught in the crosshairs are Wise and the OCE. The office was created as a watchdog — it doesn't take
complaints, but rather monitors the news and investigates when it sees problems arise. The
investigations have to rise to a three-level standard of proof before they are voted on by the office's
independent board — made up of mostly former members of Congress — to refer the matter to the
House ethics committee for further investigation. The standard, says Wise, "is important because it
protects all parties involved against essentially the board recommending further action based on partisan
affiliation or other impermissible factors."

Still, members of Congress have complained that the OCE's reports are written more as an indictment
than a straight reading of the facts. They point to Wise's prosecutorial background — before joining the
OCE, he worked for the Justice Department, where he helped successfully litigate 12 cases against
some of the nation's worst white collar baddies, including Qwest's Joe Nacchio and Enron's Jeffrey
Skilling. Although the House ethics committee can decide whether it will investigate further, even if it
refuses, critics say, the OCE's report remains fodder for the press. "The referral [to the ethics committee]
itself can be very embarrassing to the member," says Brian Svoboda, an attorney with Perkins Coie, who
has represented members before the committee. "The rules say they're not supposed to draw a
conclusion."

But reformers say even those dead-end investigations have served the public. A February report on
dubious earmarks in the Pentagon budget process prompted the House to ban earmarks directly tailored
for private companies. OCE investigations also led Indiana Republican Mark Souder to admit an affair
with a staffer and resign. And though the Rangel case is still pending, the OCE report has already led to a
ban on earmarks for "monuments to me" nonprofits like the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service
at the City College of New York (for which Rangel secured $1.9 million in government funds). "Our report
is just fact-finding," insists Wise. "My position is that facts don't tarnish people's reputations. Facts are
facts."

Wise, 33, was picked as staff director when the OCE was formed, in 2008. A New Jersey native who put
himself through Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law School, he had a clerkship with Judge Jan DuBois of
the U.S. District Court for the eastern district of Pennsylvania before moving with his young wife and
grandmother to Washington. Colleagues say Wise is like an earnest Boy Scout — full of noble intentions
and dreams of making a difference, says Colleen Conry, a former Justice Department colleague and now
a partner at Ropes & Gray. Conry recalls that after Wise's grandmother fell ill, she moved in with the
newlyweds, living with them from 2004 until her death in 2008. "That was so him, always doing the right
thing without any concern about how it impacts his life," she says.
What really lit a fire under Wise, though, is the work he did in his final year at the Justice Department. He
served as counsel to the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the criminal division, where he worked
on the Jack Abramoff cases. Wise calls that "the most direct impetus" for his taking the job at the OCE in
October 2008.

Speaker Pelosi created the OCE after the ethics committee, formed in 1967, had become nearly dormant.
In the 1980s and '90s, House ethics had devolved into a vicious gotcha game, one that toppled
Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright in 1989 and reprimanded Republican Speaker (and Wright
tormentor) Newt Gingrich eight years later. An atmosphere of mutual assured destruction — in which
each side threatened to mount politically motivated ethics cases against the other — led to an uneasy
bipartisan truce and a full decade in which the ethics committee took virtually no action. In the meantime,
members of Congress ran wild. In the aughts, five Representatives were convicted of federal corruption,
an additional three were indicted and nearly a dozen were subjects of FBI probes — all while the ethics
committee mostly sat on the sidelines. For instance, the panel took no action against former Republican
Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham until he was already serving jail time for trading legislative
favors in exchange for bribes.

The aggressive approach that Wise has taken on members of Congress's conduct has been
unprecedented, leading to charges of overreach. "[The OCE] doesn't follow any known rules of
procedure and has not and does not follow the authorizing resolution's rules and directives," says
attorney Cleta Mitchell, who has represented a member before the ethics committee. "Abolish the OCE;
give to the [ethics] committee the money and staff that the OCE has been given; provide opportunity for
outside persons to file ethics complaints in the House [in the same way] as with the Senate. That will
make a huge difference, and then we will at least know what the rules are." Wise strongly disagrees. "I
think we have made a contribution, obviously," he says. If the OCE were disbanded, "I think there would
be a decrease in ethics enforcement in the House and a decline in the public information that's available
to the Congress and to the American public concerning ethics enforcement."

Yet some Democrats remain determined to undo their party's most significant ethics reform.
Representative Marsha Fudge of Ohio has introduced legislation, co-sponsored by 19 fellow members of
the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), to limit the OCE's power. Fudge, who has complained that the
OCE "is currently the accuser, judge and jury," wants to keep OCE reports that don't lead to formal
House action from being made public, and would prevent the office from acting on anything but a sworn
complaint from an individual with personal knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing. Watchdog groups say
those changes would effectively neuter the OCE.

But Pelosi apparently hasn't ruled out such changes. The Speaker met with frustrated CBC members in
May, according to a leadership source, and privately indicated that she would be willing to review some
ethics rules at the beginning of the next Congress. "The Speaker listened to the concerns of members
and stated that all House rules are reviewed at the beginning of every Congress," Nadeam Elshami, a
Pelosi spokesman, told reporters after the meeting. But there's no assurance that Democrats will get to
make the rules in the next Congress — not if, come November, the anger over corruption that helped win
Democrats a House majority ends up taking it away.
ESSAY
IN THE ARENA

Iraq: Requiem for a Profound Misadventure

By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Aug. 05, 2010

US soldiers walk past containers being transported at Camp Victory, a giant sprawling military base on
the edge of Baghdad airport, on June 24, 2010 as American troops sort through the mass of hardware
and supplies that must either be taken home, sent to Afghanistan, or destroyed.

Ahmad Al-Rubaye / AFP / Getty Images

It is a matter of some relief that Barack Obama did not announce the end of major combat operations in
Iraq under a banner that said "Mission Accomplished." He did it in a speech to the Disabled American
Veterans (DAV), the most grave and sober audience imaginable. And appropriately so, after a war that
should never have been fought, a war that by some estimates will cost $3 trillion before it's done
(including the health care services rendered to those represented by the DAV), a war whose casualties
number in the hundreds of thousands. Iraq hasn't been much in the news over the past year, but this is
an important milestone — even if our mission there will continue on a much smaller scale for 16 more
months — a moment for reflection and humility in the face of a national embarrassment.

There is no "victory" in Iraq, nor will there be. There is something resembling stability, for now. There is a
semblance of democracy, but that may dissolve over time into a Shi'ite dictatorship — which, if not well
run, could yield to the near inevitable military coup. Yes, Saddam is gone — and that is a good thing. The
Kurds have a greater measure of independence and don't have to live in fear of mass murder, which are
good things too. But Iran's position in the region has been strengthened. Its Iraqi allies, especially
Muqtada al-Sadr's populist movement, will play a major role — perhaps one more central than ours — in
shaping the future of the country. Our attempt to construct an Iraq more amenable to our interests will
end no better than the previous attempts by Western colonial powers. Even if something resembling
democracy prevails, the U.S. invasion and occupation will not be remembered fondly by Iraqis. We will
own the destruction in perpetuity; if the Iraqis manage to cobble themselves a decent society, they will
see it, correctly, as an achievement of their own.

There are other consequences of this profound misadventure. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan is
certainly one. If U.S. attention hadn't been diverted from that primary conflict, the story in the Pashtun
borderlands might be very different now. The sense of the U.S. as a repository of tempered, honorable
actions may never recover from the images of the past decade, especially the photographs from Abu
Ghraib prison.

The idea that it was our right and responsibility to rid Iraq of a terrible dictator — after the original casus
belli of weapons of mass destruction evaporated — turned out to be a neocolonialist delusion. The fact
that Bush apologists still trot out his "forward strategy of freedom" as an example of American idealism is
a farce. That feckless exercise in naiveté brought us a Hamas government in Gaza, after a Palestinian
election that no one but the Bush Administration wanted. It raised the hopes of reformers across the
region, soon dashed when the Bush Administration retreated, realizing that the outcome of democracy in
places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be the installation of Islamist parties that might prove more
repressive than the dictatorships they would replace. Freedom may well be "God's gift to humanity," as
Bush insisted, radiating a simpleminded piety that never reflected another of God's greatest gifts — the
ability to doubt, to think difficult thoughts and weigh conflicting options with clarity and subtlety. But I'm
pretty sure God never designated the U.S. to impose that freedom violently upon others.

It is appropriate that Obama's speech to the DAV will not be remembered as vividly as George W. Bush's
puerile march across the deck of an aircraft carrier, costumed as a combat aviator against a golden
sunset, to announce — seven years and tens of thousands of lives prematurely — the "end of combat
operations." Obama's announcement was no celebration. It was a somber acknowledgment that amends
will be made to those whose lives were shattered and that their courageous service in an unnecessary
cause will be honored. A national discussion about America's place in the world, and the military's
excessive place in our foreign policy, would also be appropriate in the wake of this disaster, but I'm not
holding my breath.

As for myself, I deeply regret that once, on television in the days before the war, I foolishly —
spontaneously — said that going ahead with the invasion might be the right thing to do. I was far more
skeptical in print. I never wrote in favor of the war and repeatedly raised the problems that would
accompany it, but mere skepticism was an insufficient reaction too. The issue then was as clear as it is
now. It demanded a clarity that I failed to summon. The essential principle is immutable: we should never
go to war unless we have been attacked or are under direct, immediate threat of attack. Never. And
never again.

Sit. Stay. Trust. Learn.

By NANCY GIBBS Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

My professor brother and I have an abiding argument about head and heart, about whether he
overvalues IQ while I lean more toward EQ. We typically have this debate about people--can you be
friends with a really smart jerk?--but there's a corollary to animals as well. I'd love it if our dog could fetch
the morning paper and then read it to me over coffee, but I actually care much more about her loyal and
guileless heart. There's already enough thinking going on in our house, and we probably spend too much
time in our heads. Where we need some role modeling is in instinct, and that's where a dog is a roving
revelation.

Twist

Finlay MacKay for TIME

I did not grow up with dogs, which meant that my

older daughter's respectful but unyielding
determination to get one required some adjustment
on my part. I often felt she was training me: from the
ages of 6 to 9, she gently schooled me in various
breeds and their personalities, whispered to the dogs
we encountered so they would charm and persuade
me, demonstrated by her self-discipline that she was
ready for the responsibility. And thus came Twist
(right), whom I sometimes mistake for a third
daughter.

At first I thought the challenge would be to train her to sit, to heel, to walk calmly beside us and not go
wildly chasing the neighborhood rabbits. But I soon discovered how much more we had to learn from her
than she from us, a truth now accepted by all members of our family except, perhaps, our cat.

If it is true, for example, that the secret to a child's success is less rare genius than raw persistence,
Twist's ability to stay on task is a model for us all, especially if the task is trying to capture the sunbeam
that flicks around the living room as the wind blows through the branches outside. She never succeeds,
and she never gives up. This includes when she runs square into walls.

Then there is her unfailing patience, which breaks down only when she senses that dinnertime was 15
minutes ago and we have somehow failed to notice. Even then she is more eager than indignant, and her
refusal to whine shows a restraint of which I'm not always capable when hungry.

But the lesson I value most is the one in forgiveness, and Twist first offered this when she was still very
young. When she was about 7 months old, we took her to the vet to be spayed. We turned her over to a
stranger, who proceeded to perform a procedure that was probably not pleasant. But when the vet
returned her to us, limp and tender, there was no recrimination, no How could you do that to me? It was
as though she already knew that we would not intentionally or whimsically cause her pain, and while she
did not understand, she forgave and curled up with her head on my daughter's lap.

I suppose we could have concluded that she was just blindly loyal and docile. But eventually we knew
better. She is entirely capable of disobedience, as she has proved many times. She will ignore us when
there are more interesting things to look at, rebuke us when we are careless, bark into the twilight when
she has urgent messages to send. But her patience with our failings and fickleness and her willingness to
give us a second chance are a daily lesson in gratitude.

My friends who grew up with dogs tell me how when they were teenagers and trusted no one in the world,
they could tell their dog all their secrets. It was the one friend who would not gossip or betray, could be
solemn or silly or silent as needed, could provide in the middle of the night the soft, unbegrudging comfort
and peace that adolescence conspires to disrupt. An age that is all about growth and risk needs some
anchors and weights, a model of steadfastness when all else is in flux. Sometimes I think Twist's abiding
devotion keeps my girls on a benevolent leash, one that hangs quietly at their side as they trot along but
occasionally yanks them back to safety and solid ground.

We've weighed so many decisions so carefully in raising our daughters--what school to send them to and
what church to attend, whether to let them drop soccer or piano at the risk of teaching them
irresponsibility, when to give them cell phones and with what precautions. But when it comes to what
really shapes their character and binds our family, I never would have thought we would owe so much to
its smallest member.
WORLD

Postcard from Parwan

By DOUG STANTON Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Officials have taken great pains to make the Parwan detention center the anti-Bagram

Adam Ferguson / VII Network

Please take a pair of safety glasses," said the tour guide. "Sometimes the prisoners throw feces at us. I
don't think that will happen, but to be safe ..." I was traveling through the new U.S. detention facility in
Parwan province, just north of Kabul. As the tour wound along a series of concrete walkways supported
by steel girders, the slap of a basketball drifted over from a nearby court: a pickup game among the
detainees.

It's the type of thing you never would have seen at the old prison, located a mile (1.6 km) or so away
across desert scrub at Bagram airfield. As "humane and transparent" as the new detention center at
Parwan is supposed to be, the old facility at Bagram is its dark doppelgänger. As recently as November
2009, reports circulated of detainees there being subjected to sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and
beatings. Housed in a former hangar and in use since shortly after U.S. forces set foot in Afghanistan in
2001, Bagram saw its share of controversies: it was a bad place where bad things were done to people in
the name of fighting al-Qaeda. Two detainees died there in 2002 after being interrogated, and the prison
was off-limits to the press. When I last visited in 2005, I wasn't allowed inside.

In January 2009, President Obama ordered a review of detainee operations, and Parwan, which cost $60
million, accepted its first prisoners last December. The facility is to be part of a larger complex called the
Parwan Rule of Law Center, where trials involving national-security threats will be conducted. By January,
the process of handing the facility over to the Afghan government will be under way, says U.S. Navy Vice
Admiral Robert Harward, commander of Joint Task Force 435, which oversees Parwan's operations.
Under the Obama Administration's new rules, Afghan authorities must be notified of a prisoner's
detention within 24 hours. "This was a complaint of all Afghan citizens and the Afghanistan government,"
says Harward. "They had no idea which citizens were being detained."

To get out of Parwan, detainees appear before a review board for a meeting that the rules stipulate must
take place within 60 days of their detention. Within the first 30 days, they are assigned a U.S. military
officer who advocates for their release by gathering information, reaching out to families about the
process.

"The new system at [Parwan] is a significant improvement over past U.S. practice," wrote Andrea Prasow
of Human Rights Watch. "Those detained at least [have] the chance to show up and be heard."
Eventually, Afghans will be able to decide these cases in their own courts of law. In June the first Afghan
court trial was held at the facility, and four insurgents were found guilty, two for building IEDs.

Fifty-six common cells hold about 24 men each (there are about 800 detainees on site), and parts of the
Parwan facility have the feel of a new suburban YMCA. The facility is outfitted with a library and offers
medical services, literacy training and instruction in agricultural practices and tailoring. I entered a room
where biometrics--photographs, fingerprints and iris scans--are collected from prisoners. This information
is loaded into a database and cross-checked against other biometric information from across Afghanistan.
This forensic activity, says Army Brigadier General Mark Martins, seems to be having a desired chilling
effect as insurgents discover that colleagues are being arrested at checkpoints.

Despite the improved conditions and attempts to win over Afghans, it's important to remember that this is
still a facility that holds prisoners deemed to have some affiliation with al-Qaeda or the insurgency. At one
point during the tour, we stood outside a small, well-lit intake booth monitored by audio and video feeds.
Inside sat a Pakistani man who made no movement indicating that he was aware of our presence. It was
then I realized the window was made of one-way glass. The tour guide mistakenly opened the door and
quickly shut it, flustered. Something snapped to attention in the air, like the feeling you get when opening
a live trap, the feeling you might get bitten.

Global Dispatch

Wyclef Jean to Run for President of Haiti

By Tim Padgett / Port-au-Prince Wednesday, Aug. 04, 2010
Correction Appended: Aug. 6, 2010

Hip-hop music, more than most pop genres, is something of a pulpit, urban fire and brimstone garbed in
baggy pants and backward caps. So it's little wonder that one of the form's icons, Haitian-American
superstar Wyclef Jean, is the son of a Nazarene preacher — or that he likens himself, as a child of the
Haitian diaspora, to a modern-day Moses, destined to return and lead his people out of bondage. Haiti's
Jan. 12 earthquake, which killed more than 200,000 people, was the biblical event that sealed his calling.
After days of helping ferry mangled Haitian corpses to morgues, Jean felt as if he'd "finished the journey
from my basket in the bulrushes to standing in front of the burning bush," he told me this week. "I knew I'd
have to take the next step."
That would be running for President of Haiti. Jean told TIME he is going to announce his candidacy for
the Nov. 28 election just days before the Aug. 7 deadline. One plan, loaded with as much Mosaic
symbolism as a news cycle can hold, called for him to declare his presidential bid on Aug. 5 upon arriving
in Port-au-Prince from New York, where he grew up after leaving Haiti with his family at age 9. "If not for
the earthquake, I probably would have waited another 10 years before doing this," says Jean, who is only
37. "The quake drove home to me that Haiti can't wait another 10 years for us to bring it into the 21st
century." Jean sees no contradiction between his life as an artist and his ambitions as a politician. "If I
can't take five years out to serve my country as President," he argues, "then everything I've been singing
about, like equal rights, doesn't mean anything."

Wyclef Jean, in New York City on Aug. 2, 2010

Peter Hapak for TIME

It's tempting to dismiss this as flaky performance art,

a publicity stunt from the same guy who just a few
years ago recorded a number called "If I Was
President." But Jean's chances, as well as his
motives, seem solid. And there are good reasons for
Haitians — and the U.S.-led international donor
community, which is bankrolling Haiti's long slog to
the 21st century — to take this particular hip-hop
politician seriously. Pop-culture celebrity hardly disqualifies one from high office. (The last time I looked,
an action hero was still running California.) And in Haiti, where half the population of about 9 million is
under age 25, it's an asset as golden as a rapper's chains. Amid Haiti's gray postquake rubble, Jean is far
more popular with that young cohort than the country's chronically corrupt and inept mainstream
politicians are, and he'll likely galvanize youth participation in the election.

More important, Jean stands to prove that fame can do more than lift voter turnout — or raise millions of
dollars for earthquake victims, as his Yéle Haiti (Haiti Freedom Cry) foundation has this year. His
presidential run, win or lose, could build a long-awaited bridge between Haiti and its diaspora: a legion of
expatriates and their progeny, successful in myriad fields, who number more than a million in the U.S.
alone. International aid managers agree that Haiti can't recover unless it taps into the education, capital,
entrepreneurial drive and love for the mother country that Jean epitomizes — even if his French (one of
Haiti's official languages) is poor and his Creole (the other) is rusty. "A lot of Haitians are excited about
this," says Marvel Dandin, a popular Port-au-Prince radio broadcaster. "Given the awful situation in Haiti
right now," he says, "most people don't care if the President speaks fluent Creole."

Accentuating the Positive

Jean's celebrity candidacy at least promises to keep an erratic media more regularly focused on Haiti's
awful situation. International donors have pledged some $10 billion in aid, but mountains of shattered
concrete still choke Port-au-Prince's streets, and more than a million people remain homeless, trapped in
squalid tent cities as a sclerotic bureaucracy and loosely organized aid groups struggle to relocate them
to decent temporary shelters. The Caribbean hurricane season, which reaches its peak in about a month,
threatens to make conditions even uglier.

Jean has spent most of his life trying to show the world the positive side of star-crossed Haiti. Despite his
Brooklyn and New Jersey upbringing — he recalls weekly "beat up a Haitian" days at his schools — he
proudly embraced the nation, even when, in the 1980s and '90s, Haiti was an abject byword for boat
people, AIDS and dictators. "A lot of us focused on assimilation in the U.S.," says Jean's younger brother
Sam, a New York City entertainment lawyer. "Clef was unabashedly proud to be Haitian long before it
was in vogue." So much so that Jean never took U.S. citizenship, instead carrying a Haitian passport on
his international concert tours.

Jean brought Haiti and its culture into his Grammy-winning music too. As a member of the
groundbreaking hip-hop group the Fugees (short for refugees ) in the mid-'90s and then as a solo act,
Jean built kompa, rasin and other Haitian rhythms into hits like "Gone Till November." His work earned
him a reputation as Haiti's Bob Marley, helping foreigners unearth a vibrant culture so often buried under
the misery. Not that he left out the misery: like Marley's songs, Jean's exude a raw but poetic social
content. The video for his 2007 hit "Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)," which examines exploitation both sexual
and national, is set in a camp for refugees facing deportation.

Now he wants to move beyond music. Jean has become so involved with not just the culture but also the
cause of Haiti that he feels it's only logical to follow other artist-to-statesman career trajectories. (He
mentions Ronald Reagan and former Czech President Vaclav Havel as examples of the type.) Yéle Haiti
has secured scholarships and aid for thousands of destitute Haitian kids. Since the earthquake, the Yéle
Corps has given Haitians jobs removing rubble and housing the displaced. Jean sits through the kind of
development conferences in Washington and Europe that would bore most do-gooder celebs to tears. "I
want to be part of a different kind of celebrity," he says, "one that thinks not just about charity but policy."
He's been noticed. In 2007, Haitian President René Préval appointed Jean an ambassador-at-large.

Yet serious doubts persist that Jean is ready for a role beyond that of goodwill envoy, most of them
focused on his management of Yéle Haiti. Shortly after the quake, when Jean had been all but canonized
for his Haiti work, skeptics pointed out that his foundation had been paying hundreds of thousands of
dollars to production companies owned by him or his associates. In Florida, where the charity has an
office, it failed to file its paperwork on time in four of the past six years, and watchdogs like Charity
Navigator have questioned it for filing tax returns that were "beyond late." Jean has acknowledged the
questionable payments but blamed them on accounting errors. He insists the problems have been fixed
since he hired a reputable Washington accounting firm to whip Yéle Haiti's books into shape. "I took
responsibility," he says. "I took the bullet.

More shots may be fired at his claim of eligibility for the presidency. A candidate is required to have
resided in Haiti for five consecutive years, and Jean's advisers insist that the nine years he lived in the
country after birth satisfy that criterion. But Haiti's political and business elites — who, after living through
the populist ordeal of former Roman Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide's two presidencies, aren't
exactly thrilled about a diaspora hip-hopper — are likely to grab any challenge they can throw at Jean.
That Haitian political class, it should be remembered, has its own epic shortcomings, whether measured
by incompetence or venality. (No other Haitian politician has yet declared for the presidency, although
Jean's uncle Raymond Joseph, Haiti's ambassador to the U.S., is reportedly planning to.) Haiti's
traditional elite has shown an utter failure — and a lack of will — to reform a medieval land-ownership
system, something that is vital to getting the country's crucial population-relocation project going. Most
Haitians consider President Préval to have been all but AWOL since the quake, and tales of bureaucratic
shakedowns to get foreign-donated relief equipment and supplies out of customs are appallingly
commonplace.

The Diaspora's Favorite

Against that backdrop, Haitian voters may well decide that Jean and his reformist party, Ansamn Nou Fo
(Together We Are Strong), could do no worse than the old guard and could shake things up for the better.
His campaign slogan, "Fas a Fas" (Face to face), he says, is a signal that "the old school will have to fall
in line with a new model. Haitian government will finally be conducted out in the open."

Outside Haiti, Jean has little trouble finding support. Many diaspora leaders are rooting for him. (He's
married to a Haitian American, New York fashion designer Marie Claudinette.) But given the elite's
long-held disdain for expats, the diaspora's hope is tempered. "I think Wyclef's candidacy is going to
surprise a lot of people," says former Florida state representative Phillip Brutus, a Haitian American from
Miami and a candidate for the U.S. Congress. "But I fear that if you parachute him into the Haitian
presidency, the culture of corruption and cronyism there may well eat him alive."

Jean insists he's not playing "the naive idealist." He gets much of his platform, he says, "right out of the
playbook" of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the U.N.'s special envoy to Haiti, whose pragmatic vision
of bringing business, government and civil society together for development ventures was bearing fruit
there before the earthquake hit. "I'm the only man who can stand in the middle and get the diaspora and
Haiti's elite families to cooperate that same way," says Jean. (It's not a ridiculous claim: if Ivory Coast
soccer phenom Didier Drogba could bring his country's warring factions together a few years ago, who's
to say Jean can't use his renown to succeed in Haiti?) Jean's priority — one he shares with Haiti's Prime
Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, who is widely respected but so deeply involved in the reconstruction effort
that he is unlikely to run for President — is to disperse both power and population from overcrowded
Port-au-Prince. Jean wants to revive Haiti's fallow agriculture with new rural communities tied to schools,
clinics and businesses.

His secret weapon, Jean says, is that Haiti's "enormous youth population doesn't believe in [its]
politicians anymore." On one Port-au-Prince street corner, Sydney Meristal, who is 23 and unemployed,
says he will vote for the first time in November because of Jean. "Wyclef loves Haiti. He has ideas for
Haiti," says Meristal, idling away the time on his motorcycle. "He'll win." But Steve Burr-Renauld, 23, who
hails from an affluent family in the capital, doesn't think a hip-hop star has the credentials to run. "What if
Jay-Z became President of the U.S.?" he asks. "That would never happen." If Jean were elected
President of Haiti, Burr-Renauld warns, it would be like another earthquake aftershock.

Jean admits that "it's a hard thing for people to take artists seriously" in the political arena. In the chorus
of "If I Was President" — "I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday, buried on Sunday, then go
back to work on Monday" — Jean makes you wonder if he takes politics all that seriously himself. But the
verses remind you that he's in Old Testament earnest about it: "The radio won't play this/ They call it
rebel music/ But how can you refuse it, children of Moses?"

— With reporting by Jessica Desvarieux / Port-au-Prince

Correction: The original version of this story had the name of Wyclef Jean's political party in French as
Ensemble Nous Faut; it should be in Haitian Creole as Ansamn Nou Fo. The party's slogan should also
have been in Creole as "Fas a Fas" instead of French "Face á Face."
SOCIETY

Extreme Trampoline
By ADAM FISHER Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Vertical action at a Sky Zone park in Sacramento

Jonathan Sprague for TIME

In the topsy-turvy world of trampolines, everything that goes down must come up again. Back in the
1960s, trampoline parks were, much like hula-hoop competitions, a big fad. But they were done in by
personal-injury lawsuits and had long been forgotten by most people, including the two men largely
responsible for their contemporary rebirth: the father-and-son team of Rick and Jeff Platt.

Eight years ago, Rick Platt was looking for something to do with the fortune he had made trading metals
in the commodities market and decided it would be fun to own a professional sport. "People own sports
teams. They own sports leagues. But an entire game?" says Jeff. "My father likes to think big."

Before long, the Platts bought the patent for Sky Zone, a combination of football, basketball, hockey and
gymnastics played atop a bunch of trampolines cabled together to create a super-trampoline roughly the
size of a basketball court. They rented a warehouse in Las Vegas and in 2002 installed a 130-by-70-ft.
(40-by-21-m) trampoline. For the next two years, they trained two 12-man teams to play Sky Zone, in
which points are scored by throwing a Nerf-like ball through a triangular net or by leaping through a
spinning hoop suspended 7 ft. (2 m) above the trampoline.

In 2004 the Orleans Arena in Vegas hosted the first exhibition Sky Zone game. It was a total flop. "Let's
just say that ESPN and Nike were not knocking down our doors," says the younger Platt.

But as luck would have it, the Sky Zone warehouse was right next to an indoor skate park, whose patrons
needed a safe place to practice their more extreme moves. "They'd knock on our doors all the time,
wanting to jump," says Jeff. So he and his dad bought a cash box and salvaged their enterprise by
charging skate rats $10 or so to bounce around for an hour.

The Platts have since opened two more Sky Zone jump centers, in St. Louis and Sacramento, with five
others being built and a dozen more slated to open in 2011. Sky Zone's success helped spawn a number
of competing chains, including Jump Street, Jump Sky High and the newest, House of Air, set to open in
San Francisco in September.

These parks are a lot safer than the ones in the 1960s. For starters, trampoline-covered walls make it
impossible to bounce off and onto the ground. Thick padding covers the springs, and there are safety
nets beneath the seams. Still, about 1% of Sky Zone's million or so visitors in the past six years have
logged injuries--mostly finger jams, sprains and the like. "As with any extreme sport," says Jeff,
"accidents are going to happen." And some will be serious. The worst so far is a woman who became
paralyzed after landing a flip wrong.

Flips, however, are the key to the trampoline park's comeback as a training ground for skate- and
snowboarders . House of Air is installing a DJ booth and giant video screen, and co-owner Paul
McGeehan says he expects to see a wide range of clientele: from couples on first dates to kiddies acting
out their Quidditch fantasies. "All ages," agrees Jump Sky High founder Jerry Raymond. "It's almost like
the new bowling alley." Or like hula-hooping coming around again.

GOING GREEN

In-Flight Recycling's Slow Takeoff

By KRISTA MAHR Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Illustration by Tamara Shopsin for TIME

I was on a Qantas flight over eastern Australia the other week when a flight attendant handed me what
looked like a fancy barf bag. It was in fact not a fancy barf bag but a fancy trash bag, in which I was
instructed to place everything that was not an aluminum can or plastic cup or bottle. The idea is for flight
attendants to collect and sort recyclable items and for you, the passenger, to hand over a bag of
nonrecyclables to be thrown out.
I hate to be a spoilsport here. Obviously, the scheme is well intended. Qantas launched its onboard
recycling program in December on selected domestic flights in an effort to reduce its landfill contributions
25% by 2011.

But why the individual paper bags, Qantas? The airline says the bags are partly biodegradable and that it
is working to develop a fully biodegradable version. Still, I have to wonder what the logic is in creating
more trash to sort your trash. Makes sense as a labor initiative--if I were a flight attendant, I would prefer
to collect neat little bags of trash from my sloppy charges--and maybe as a time-saving initiative. But as a
recycling initiative? I dunno.

I am not the first person to complain about in-flight waste management or the lack thereof. In February, a
report released by Green America slammed the airline industry for its failure to take action in this area.
The report, which estimates that each passenger generates about 1.3 lb. (0.59 kg) of waste per flight,
says U.S. airlines could be recycling up to 75% of onboard waste, compared with the 20% that is
recycled today. Though the 11 major carriers ranked in the report acknowledge that it's important to
recycle, none have a program to collect the four major categories of recyclables on board: paper, plastic,
glass and aluminum. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), each year U.S.
airlines throw out enough aluminum cans to build 58 Boeing 747s.

Although a few U.S. airports have sorting systems in place to separate planes' recyclables and waste,
the NRDC says that at most airports, if trash doesn't get sorted on board, chances are that all of it will
simply end up in landfills.

Here's what United, which is ranked 10th on Green America's list, has to say on its website about its
nascent recycling program: "As a first step, we recycle all aluminum and plastic beverage containers from
domestic flights that arrive in Hawaii. Next, we will be expanding our program to arrivals at other locations,
such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle-Tacoma airports."

Pretty weak, particularly considering that Horizon Air started its onboard-recycling program in the
consumers-gone-wild '80s. Today, the Seattle-based regional airline, which was not included in the
Green America rankings, recycles about 70% of all onboard waste.

But most airlines still have a lot of cleaning up to do. I am happy to do my part, whether that means
boarding with an empty bladder (as Japan's All Nippon Airways suggested last year to reduce weight and
fuel use) or separating my food scraps for composting. But do I need a separate bag for my soggy
tissues and other trash? No. In fact, I doubt we still need the barf bags either. But better safe than sorry.
Finding Mom on Facebook
By BELINDA LUSCOMBE Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

It took Lowrey, at home in Roseville, California, one

day to find the birth mother she had sought for 30
years

Robyn Twomey for TIME

Dana Lowrey has known she was adopted for as

long as she can remember. And for almost as long
— about 30 years — she had been looking for what
she calls her "first family." She combed through
county records, searched the online adoption
registries and enlisted the help of reunion experts.
On Jan. 10, she set up a Facebook page and asked the friends she had made in the adoption community
to help her search. Within 24 hours, she was in touch with her birth mother, Mary Stark. And by Jan. 15,
she had made contact with her biological dad, Kenny Morse.

In retrospect, Lowrey, a 41-year-old nurse who is raising two kids of her own in Roseville, Calif., is not
sure why it took her so long to use social-networking sites to trace her birth parents. In 2008 she used
MySpace to connect with the son, Tim Daugherty, she'd given up for adoption 19 years earlier.

Of all the relationships that are being changed by Facebook and other sites that trade on bringing people
together, the thorny, delicate bonds that connect what's known in adoption circles as the triad — the
biological family, the child and the adoptive parents — may be the most profoundly altered.

For older adoptees like Lowrey, who were raised in an era when talking about birth parents was generally
verboten, social networks are a boon, another way to put together the puzzle of their backgrounds. But
the methods Lowrey used could just as easily be employed by a curious adopted teenager or a birth
mother who regrets giving up her child. This is raising concern among some adoptive parents and
agencies. "We have not yet begun to wrap our mind around what the implications are," says Adam
Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research and policy
organization in New York City.

Most kids and adult adoptees have been told or can find out the names of their birth parents — and that's
the starting point for their Facebook searches. Contact can be made, often suddenly, without the
guidance of parents or adoption professionals. And since teenagers' Web savviness is often light-years
ahead of their emotional maturity, it can all head south pretty fast. "Even in the best of cases, you want a
little knowledge first," Pertman says of reuniting with birth parents. "You want to do this thoughtfully and
methodically. With Facebook, you don't have any of that."
In some ways, Lowrey was lucky. "I promised I wouldn't contact my son until he was 18," she says.
"When I first thought of trying to find him, it would have been a bad time, because his mom had significant
health issues." She held off for a couple of years and then sent a message through MySpace. He replied
within a week. Two months later, they met face to face.

Some people are not ready for this kind of contact and never will be. "Biological parents have called me
in tears and in fear" about being discovered, says Chuck Johnson, acting CEO of the National Council for
Adoption in Alexandria, Va. "They don't know what to do." Social networking's implications for children
whose birth parents' rights have been terminated are even more serious. In the U.K., where adoptions
are more often contested, birth mothers were reported to be using Facebook to contact kids who had
been taken away from them by child-protection officials.

In standard adoption cases, it's become less common over the past 20 years for newly adoptive families
and birth parents to have no contact at all. Most agencies encourage some form of communication, and
most birth mothers demand — as a condition of the adoption — such things as e-mailed pictures, annual
letters or a frequently updated website. But social networks are throwing wide open a door that used to
be merely ajar.

"I want my son to meet his birth mother," says an adoptive parent who lives in a New York City suburb
and who asked that we not print her name. "When he's old enough, we'll all go on a road trip." Every year,
she sends a letter and photos to the birth mother, but she worries that a birth-family member will contact
her 12-year-old on Facebook before she decides he's mature enough to handle it. "None of us are ready
yet," she says.

Mindful of what can go wrong, several adoption agencies have issued advisories on how to handle social
networking. The worst thing to do, they say, is to try to keep kids off the Web. A smarter strategy is to
keep an eye on children's online activities and help them understand the ramifications of finding their
birth parents, says Martha Henry, director of the office of foster care and adoption at the University of
Massachusetts Medical School. "Parents should figure out what steps they can take to join that journey
and try to create an environment where their kids feel safe to talk about it."

Henry says it helps to understand why a child is looking for his or her birth family. Some parents fear
being replaced in their child's affections, particularly during the relentless tussles of adolescence. Others
think their child will be overwhelmed. But whatever the reason, the situation is better faced, like
Thanksgiving, as a family, with professional help if necessary. "The search for the birth parent is not just
about the child," says Henry. "It's about all of you."

In January, when Lowrey discovered her birth father's identity, an intermediary ended up making the first
contact. "I was torn. I said, 'I'm going to have to pass on it,'" says Morse, a former musician and truck
driver. "I called the guy back five minutes later."

"I'm glad this came out to be a good thing," he says. Lowrey is still in touch with all three of her recently
located family members. Mostly she talks to them on the phone, although Daugherty has made a couple
of surprise visits. And thanks to Facebook, now they all know exactly where to find each other.
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Bravo's Work of Art Riles Up the Art World

By Carolina A. Miranda Wednesday, Aug. 04, 2010

A scene from Work of Art

Barbara Nitke / Bravo

Shortly before 10 p.m. on most

Wednesdays, some two dozen artists and
art aficionados can be found draped
across mismatched couches in the back
room of Soda, a bar in Brooklyn, waiting for the opening credits of Work of Art to appear on a big screen.
Bravo's latest foray into reality television, Work of Art has captivated — in the manner of a most excellent
train wreck — the artsy crew at Soda, which piles in to sip pints and hurl pithy observations at the screen.
"This construct is so false!" one viewer exclaims, as the contestants are judged on their art — a typical
comment for the evening.

As with most reality shows, the premise of Work of Art is simple: 14 sassy personalities — including a
painter with a penchant for removing her top and an installation artist with obsessive-compulsive disorder
— undertake the world's most preposterous art commissions. (Make a junk sculpture; you've got $100
and 48 hours.) Every week, a contestant is booted off with the icy phrase, "Your work of art didn't work for
us," spoken by host China Chow. The last artist standing gets $100,000 and a show at the Brooklyn
Museum.

With ratings of up to 1.2 million viewers since it launched in June, Work of Art (which is
co-executive-produced by Sarah Jessica Parker) is a modest success for the network that brought us
Project Runway and the Real Housewives shows. While not as successful as the foodie juggernaut Top
Chef, which draws an estimated 2.7 million viewers per episode, it's not bad for a debut cable-TV
program devoted to the fabrication of contemporary art — a topic not exactly known for its riveting mass
appeal. (In comparison, Project Runway averaged 1 million viewers in its first year.)

In the traditionally opaque world of art and art criticism, however, where opinions are usually safely
buried under layers of jargon, Work of Art has caused a sensation. On the one hand, its very existence
has ruffled art critics, who deride the concept as puerile. ("Vacant television piddle," scoffed Christopher
Knight in the Los Angeles Times, before dismissing the show's definition of portraiture as too 17th
century.) On the other, it is studied in microscopic detail by a bevy of culture blogs and mainstream
websites, from the Wall Street Journal online to ArtInfo.com, all of which offer detailed recaps brimming
with theoretical references and healthy doses of snark. While some bloggers and commentators have
hailed the program for its demystification of the artistic process, others trash-talk the show for its artifice
and vow never to watch.
Ah yes — but is it art? For most critics, the answer is an unqualified yes. "It's art if the artist says it's art,"
says Jerry Saltz, New York magazine's Pulitzer Prize–nominated art critic, who appears as one of the
show's four judges. Whether the work is any good, of course, is another question entirely — and one that
has been the subject of fiery debate. "The art world looks at a lot of the art on the show and thinks it's
crap," says Saltz. "But when I find myself going to [galleries in] Chelsea these days, I find that the art on
our reality TV show is not much worse or much better."

In a world where art is often about the complexity of the idea behind it, the challenges on the program
have taken heat for being too simplistic. Thus far, contestants have produced portraits, book covers and
"shock" art like that of Andres Serrano, who famously photographed a crucifix in a jar of urine in the '80s.
(The shock-art episode turned out to be rife with poop jokes.) "The challenges seem designed to pry
conflict and personal narrative out of the contestants," says Paddy Johnson, who regularly critiques the
show on the art blog she edits, Art Fag City. The episode in which the contestants had to work with
children's art supplies, for example, "was just an excuse for all of the artists to talk about their
childhoods."

Indeed, there's been some sensitivity over how the show portrays artists. "We get so little representation
in the larger culture," says Jennifer Dalton, an artist in New York City whose installations examine how
artists are perceived by society. "They've generally done a good job in showing people who look normal,
showing that artists don't all dress goth and act affected." However, Dalton notes, the show still
succumbs to clichés like that of "the tortured artist — Miles [Mendenhall] with his OCD" — or the brassy
performance diva, Nao Bustamante.

Some of the most pointed criticism has been reserved for the Brooklyn Museum, for granting the winner a
solo exhibition. "It's like the Harvard Business School turning over one of its classes to the contestants of
[The Apprentice]," says Tyler Green, a columnist for Modern Painters and writer of the museum-centric
blog Modern Art Notes. "It's a slightly pathetic departure from the best practices that govern the field."
Saltz, who says he was not aware of the museum's role until late in the production, agrees, stating on his
magazine's culture blog that its participation "doesn't pass the smell test." Others have suggested that it
would have been more appropriate to hold the show at a commercial gallery, not a publicly funded
institution. The museum counters that this will simply be another juried exhibit of the sort similar
institutions have long shown. "I know who the judges are, and they are people with respectable
credentials," says deputy director of art Charles Desmarais, adding that the Brooklyn's curator of
contemporary art, Eugenie Tsai, participated in the final selection process.

As the Aug. 11 season finale approaches, discussion surrounding the program is only getting more
heated. But the slings and arrows of the art world might not make much difference to the folks behind
Work of Art. "Our sights are on broad viewers," says Frances Berwick, Bravo's president, "people who
like to have pretty pictures on their walls but might not know what goes into it." The network has yet to
announce whether there will be a second season. Would art types tune in for another dose? "Hell, yes,"
says Johnson. "And I would participate in it too."
Artworks from Work of Art

"The Glory" by Abdi Farah

Work of Art is an elimination-style reality program in which 14 artists compete for a $100,000 prize and a
solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Each week, the contestants are challenged to produce a work of
art according to a specific theme. This work was produced for episode 5, in which the artists were asked
to make something reflective of their experience driving through Manhattan.

"Portrait of Nao" by Miles Mendenhall

This piece was declared the winner of episode 1, in which the artists were asked to make portraits of their
fellow contestants.

"Order and Chaos" by Nicole Nadeau and Abdi Farah

In episode 8, the artists were paired and asked to create something that was inspired by opposing forces,
like heaven and hell or male and female. In this case, one artist made a painting, the other a sculpture.

"A Complete Roll of Duct Tape Over a 4' x 6' Plane, Accompanied by 3 Rubber Band Balls" by
Miles Mendenhall
Shot in part at the Children's Museum of Art, episode 7 asked the artists to make something inspired by
their childhoods, using only kid-friendly materials.

"Dia de los Televisiones" by Mark Velasquez

In episode 2, the contestants were asked to make something using items — mostly discarded electronics
— found in a trash heap.
"Worst Place" by Miles Mendenhall
Miles won episode 2 — the one asking artists to use a trash heap as a canvas — with this piece.

"Portrait of John" by Trong Nguyen

Though he made it past the first episode, during which he created this portrait of fellow contestant John,
Trong was sent home at the end of episode 2.

"Neumaton" by Nicole Nadeau, Ryan Shultz, Mark Velasquez and Abdi Farah
The contestants were organized in two teams and asked to create an outdoor sculpture in episode 6.

"Rainbow" by Peregrine Honig

The artist won episode 7 with this installation inspired by her childhood.

"Turn it Up" By Jaime Lynn

The artist was eliminated from the show after producing this work, in which the task was to create
something inspired by the experience of driving through Manhattan.
Book Cover for "Frankenstein" by Miles Mendenhall
For episode 3, the artists were asked to create cover art for a classic novel.

"Baptism" by Abdi Farah

The artist won episode 9, which asked the contestants to create something inspired by nature, with this
piece.
Love Triangle
By MARY POLS Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Mona Simpson

Gasper Tringale

The central, unavoidable dilemma of the

relationship between working parents and
the people who care for their offspring is that
money is exchanged (usually in cash) in the
hopes that a bond of trust, caring and even
love will develop between the caregiver and the child, and at some point, this intense emotional
connection will end with two weeks' notice.

Mona Simpson's My Hollywood--her first book since her 2000 novella Off Keck Road--is a carefully
considered, vivid exploration of that relationship, told through the alternating perspectives of a mother
and the immigrant nanny she employs. Claire, a classical composer who has just moved to Los Angeles
with her sitcom-writer husband Paul, has ambitions that have overwhelmed any urge to stay home with
her infant son William. At a bus stop, she meets Lola, a 52-year-old Filipina, and--going with her
gut--hires her as a live-in nanny for $250 a week.

Claire is a sympathetic character but an anxious type. When mothering, she's distracted--always tapping
out rhythms on her arm--but when composing, she is beset by guilt over not being with William. Her
passionless marriage seems ill chosen, but her hiring instincts are dead on: Lola is warm, trustworthy and
almost painfully dedicated. Lola sends money back to the Philippines to educate her own children, but
when another couple offers to double her salary, she is too loyal to "Williamo" to take the offer. Instead,
she suggests they hire her protégé, Lucy; when Williamo can bear to part with Lola, she'll take over
Lucy's higher-paying job. That's the plan, anyway. The ultimate, heart-wrenching message is that even
when it comes to child care, no one is really irreplaceable.

Lola tells her story in somewhat uncertain English, and there's a fractured, abstract rhythm to her
thoughts that initially makes her chapters hard to digest. It seems a bit patronizing at first--surely she and
Lucy would speak to each other in Tagalog rather than pidgin English--but as Simpson draws us into
Lola's story, that sense fades. We're on the side of this silent observer, forgotten by her employers, who
conduct their personal lives before her as they would "in front of a pet."

Simpson's prose is gentle but leaves a trail of savage insights, including how unlikely it is for a parent,
child or nanny to walk away from this awkward triangle without bruises. This is a domestic novel
and--let's avoid the demeaning but here--a highly political one. Simpson is not judgmental about the
parents and nannies she presents, but it's clear she thinks America's child-care solutions aren't working.
Every mother, working and otherwise, will see some of herself in Claire. "We drank nonfat lattes, ice
blendeds, a dozen small consolations," she muses. "But for what, exactly, were mothers always being
consoled?"

Where My Hollywood excels is in the richness of its characterization of Lola, a woman no longer sure
where or to whom she belongs: in her native country, where she employed servants, or in the U.S., where
she is a servant? The holy words of America, Lola says, are There is--as in, Is there milk? "There is." She
is wise enough to understand her contribution to that abundance (Is there help? There is). But lucky for
Williamo, that hasn't made her cynical. Lola loves what she does. It doesn't seem a stretch to imagine her
as representative of good nannies everywhere in the U.S., anxious to work despite a skill set you'd call
limited. That is, until you saw her with your child.

The Other Guys: Will Ferrell Grows Up

By RICHARD CORLISS Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Detective Allen Gamble calls the shots: the star gets made over as a grownup

Macall Polay / Columbia Tristar

Will Ferrell became a star by incarnating a hallowed movie character: the big (6 ft. 3 in.) baby. He was
Santa's overgrown helper in Elf, a figure of preening immaturity in his sports comedies (Kicking &
Screaming, Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro) and, as one of the Step Brothers, a run-amok
10-year-old in a 40-year-old's body. His version of our last President, on Saturday Night Live and in the
Broadway and HBO stand-up show You're Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush,
portrayed a man stuck in bluster and emotional infancy. All these works hewed to a basic comedy
premise — id + idiocy = funny — and locked Ferrell into a permanently arrested preadolescence.

So it's almost a shock to see him playing a semifunctioning adult in his new action comedy, The Other
Guys. His Allen Gamble, a forensic accountant in the New York police department, is no Will child; rather,
he's almost mulishly mild-mannered, with a parson's forbearance and the temperament of a pocket
calculator. He feels no need to run around topless; the obligatory Ferrell nude scene is missing here.
Wild Will would stick his tush in someone's face; but here, Allen is on the butt end of humiliation, and he
takes it manfully, as if he were so accustomed to chagrin that he could suppress or ignore it. Allen's
reluctance to explode is almost as weird as Other Will's inability to keep the lid on, but it anchors him in
the world of psychological compromise that for most adults counts as real life.

His partner, Terry (Mark Wahlberg), is, true to the cop-movie dictum, Allen's polar, possibly bipolar,
opposite. A fiery detective born to prowl mean streets collaring perps, Terry has been rendered
deskbound by his precinct captain (Michael Keaton) since the day when, on a manhunt in the bowels of
Yankee Stadium, he accidentally gunned down Derek Jeter. ("You should have shot A-Rod," one officer
says.) No anger-management class can slake his itch for hard action. He'd love to be like the NYPD's
star cops, Highsmith and Danson (Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, in cool-dude cameos),
who'd still be catching killers and demolishing most of Manhattan if they hadn't, in a reprise of the first
scene from Kick-Ass, taken their superhero status too literally and jumped off a skyscraper roof to their
deaths.

So when Allen finds a case of tax evasion involving one David Ershon (Steve Coogan), a Bernie Madoff
type with an English accent, Terry joins the chase. It descends into quite a labyrinth, threading through
African zillionaires, Australian goons and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. The elaborate plot,
and the care lavished on car chases and crashes, are two clues that director Adam McKay and his
co-writer Chris Henchy don't just love parodying cop movies. They love cop movies.

Multiple Sarcasms
McKay, who was with Ferrell in his SNL days, also directed the star's best comedies, Anchorman and
Talladega Nights, plus Step Brothers. He knows the key to Ferrell's appeal as well as anyone; he must
also have seen it was time for a makeover. McKay and Henchy give Allen a backstory that includes a
college extracurricular in pimping as well as salvation by a gorgeous physician (Eva Mendes) who
married him and still adores him — a passion as unaccountable as it is quite admirably unexplained.

Terry too has a clouded past. In a furious confrontation with his dancer ex-girlfriend (Lindsay Sloane), he
suddenly performs a spectacular pirouette, later telling Allen he learned ballet as a kid to mock the
sissies. (Allen: "You learned to dance like that sarcastically?") It's one of the joys of a film with no
ambition other than to entertain that it leaves its knottier impulses to our imagination.

Like too many comedies these days, The Other Guys has a studiously ugly, slapdash look, as if to warn
the audience not to expect a finely crafted film. And there are sections in which, scene to scene, the
movie's IQ drops by double digits. The heroes do something stupid, like giving the evidence they'd
accumulated over to the bad guy's lawyer, then explain it away. ("We just gave all our evidence over to
the bad guy's lawyer.") But like some silly summer song that can't be shaken from the mind, this is a
catchy enterprise, no better than it tries to be and no less funny.
Q&A Rob Reiner
By BRYAN ALEXANDER Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Some 25 years after filming started on his classic coming-of-age movie Stand By Me, director Rob Reiner
has created a companion piece, Flipped — a school-aged romantic comedy — which begins rolling out in
theaters Aug. 7. Reiner spoke to TIME about his first crush and his personal bucket list.

Has this movie made you want to get in touch with your first crush?
It's funny, but it kind of has. I was the same age as the characters in the movie. We exchanged bracelets
and when I went to kiss her next to her house she hit me with a hairbrush. I never saw her since. She
lived not far from where I work now, so sometimes I'll go past and just look at her house.

She might be hiding in the kitchen.

No, they moved a long time ago.

What's the worst trouble you ever got into school?

I was a good boy and didn't cause a lot of problems. But in high school I was part of a regular poker game.
One of the parents decided they were going to teach us a lesson. They had the cops raid the poker game.
All I remember is the police actually said, "All right, this is a raid." We were taken to the jail and there was
about 25 kids all jammed into one cell. There was also a deck of cards. But it wasn't so funny when our
parents came down to pick us up.

Has the mug shot appeared on TMZ?

I was 16, so they expunge these things if you don't do anything bad. I've been pretty clean.

Most of your movies set out to prove that women mature much faster than men. Do they really?
It's a proven fact. It's scientifically measured by any scientist worth his salt.

Will you ever do a movie where the man has it all figured out?
No, because they never have it figured out. We're running around like idiots until we find a good woman
who can tell us what to do. And I've proven it time and time again in my films. From The Sure Thing to
When Harry Met Sally. It's the same in Flipped.

Why not do that mature-man movie, but call it fiction?

It would be science fiction — where the men are smart.

Former President Clinton recently talked about items on his "bucket list." Flattered?
Yes. I love it when my films become part of the vernacular. Like "I'll have what she's having" or "You can't
handle the truth."

What's on your list?

I just came back from the Serengeti. I had always wanted to go on safari, so I can check that one off. I'd
like to go to India and China.
Brownsville, Ore., where Stand By Me was filmed, celebrated the 25th anniversary with a pie
eating contest, how did you celebrate?
I heard. I was so honored. I celebrated by not eating pie.

Are we agreed that Jerry O'Connell's post-Stand By Me transformation is possibly the greatest
ever?
He was this chubby little kid Vern in the movie. Now he's married to Rebecca Romijn. He's a stud. I don't
get it.

You made Anthony Edwards a bad guy in Flipped. is that legal?

Sure it is. He liked playing that part — maybe too much. But he's the sweetest guy in the world.

The last time we saw Anthony Edwards in a Rob Reiner movie it was The Sure Thing and he was
excited about talking on a phone with no cord.
Yes, he says, "I'm talking to you cordless!" At the time it was a big deal. And it was this big, clunky phone.

Cody Horn is fantastic in Flipped. How big a factor was the fact that her father is Warner honcho
Alan Horn in her casting?
It was really zero. It was bizarre. There was another kid coming out to audition for the part, so she came
along to say hi. I looked at her and said, "My God, she's the perfect person for the part." So she came in
and read and she was perfect. Alan had no idea Cody was even in town. Then he started to talk me out of
it. He didn't want it to look like it had anything to do with him.

Will you follow up Flipped with a slasher film?

Absolutely. A slasher film set in the future with a lot of CGI and a lot of explosions. Hey, I did Misery. It
wasn't a slasher, but ankle-breaking was involved.

The Short List of Things to Do

WEEK OF AUGUST 6

The Suburbs

Now in stores
 Canadian underground darlings
turned arena-rock champions
Arcade Fire.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY SEAN
MCCABE FOR TIME; ARCADE FIRE:ERIC
KAYNE

Canadian underground darlings turned

arena-rock champions Arcade Fire can't
parallel-park without writing an anthemic
suite about it. Their third album's lush
bombast underscores its articulate
compassion for sad suburban kids who grow
into crushed adults.

Patricia Clarkson in
Cairo Time
Now in theaters

Patricia Clarkson in Cairo Time

beside Alexander Siddig

COLM HOGAN IFC FILMS

In a quietly dazzling star turn, Clarkson plays

Juliette, a magazine editor bestirred by an
encounter with her husband's former security
officer (heartthrob Alexander Siddig) during a
trip to Egypt. The film tends toward the chaste,
but Clarkson fills it with enigmatic passion.
Daffy Duck:
Frustrated Fowl
Now on DVD

Daffy Duck: Frustrated Fowl.

DVD release

COURTESY WARNER HOME VIDEO

"What's Humphrey Bogart got that I ain't

got?" asks the little black duck in Chuck
Jones' "Daffy Dilly." Not a thing, and Daffy's
funny too. These 15 shorts, new to DVD,
reveal the comic ferocity of old Warner Bros.
cartoons and the great Daffy in all his
manic-depressive glory.

Thumbplay
Available Now

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Presenting Sacha
Guitry
Now on DVD

Nathan Williams aka Wavves

FAT POSSUM RECORDS

Author of some 120 plays and 40 films,

Guitry was the definitive French
star-impresario. Now America gets a taste of
the master in this box of four legendary
1930s comedies: The Story of a Cheat, The
Pearls of the Crown, Désiré and Quadrille.
They're the essence of Gallic charm.
PEOPLE

10 Questions for Mark Wahlberg

By MARK WAHLBERG Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Mario Anzuoni / Reuters / Corbis

Would you make a good cop in real life? —Andrea Gaerlan, San Diego
Of course I would. I made a good crook. It's a very fine line between the two. I have friends who did
worse things than I did and actually went on to become cops. They just didn't get caught.

Do you prefer doing comedy or drama? —Dennis Cross, Dixon, Mo.

We'll see how this one plays out, but I want to be able to do it all. Coming from a dramatic background, if
you do a comedy and you stink, they'll hammer you. So I waited for the right opportunity. Acting in a
comedy is the most challenging, because you have to risk looking ridiculous day in and day out.

What's it like working with Will Ferrell? Is he out of control? —Zeke Jensen, Libertyville, Ill.
No, he's a sweetheart. I came into the situation being really shy, and [he and director Adam McKay]
encouraged me to open up, to be crazy. It was like pouring gasoline on a fire. And they never said to me,
"Hey, come on. Calm down. We've got to be serious now." I like working in a free environment.

Were you actually upset with Andy Samberg's Saturday Night Live impersonation of you?
—Danny Gill, Cincinnati
No. No. But did I do a good job? Did people believe that I was [angry]? I wasn't aware of the skit, and
then people showed it to me. I was like, Well, it's not that funny, but it's still flattering to be spoofed on
Saturday Night Live. I had been asked a number of times to host the show, so it seemed like a good way
to check it out.

Has being a rapper negatively or positively influenced how people view you? —In Kyung Yoo, Los
Angeles
Probably a little bit of both. I was always a bit more sensitive to it, especially when I started [acting].
Before Will Smith, most musicians who made movies were awful. When I decided to go into acting, I
definitely wanted to make people forget about my music career.

Would you be willing to drop a hot eight bars on a rap song if asked by the right artist? —Paul
Susuico, Austin
No. Not a chance. Actually, I'll take that back. If Justin Bieber asked me, I'd do that for my daughter. She
loves me to death, but she doesn't think I'm very cool, so that might turn it around.

You led a wild teenage life and were imprisoned. What advice do you give your kids so they avoid
making the same mistakes? —Adriana Alvarez, San José, Costa Rica
I made a lot of mistakes because I had a lot of free time. My parents both worked numerous jobs just to
put food on the table. So I want to make sure I'm involved in every aspect of my kids' lives. I really try to
instill values — faith being the most important.

How has being a practicing Catholic helped you in your career? —Ari del Rosario, Manila
Anything that's good in my life is because of my faith. A lot of people get in trouble, go to jail and find God,
and the minute they don't need God anymore, they're gone. But I spend a good portion of my day
thanking God for all the blessings that have been bestowed on me. If it all ended today, I'd be happy. I've
had such an amazing journey.

You've worked with visionary auteurs such as Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson and
David O. Russell. Which director challenged you most as an actor? —Ahnmin Lee, Staten Island,
N.Y.
I would have to say Martin Scorsese, because he's Martin Scorsese. He doesn't take anything less than
your best. Making The Departed, I felt like I was most comfortable, because I was familiar with [Boston]
— certainly with the police and the system. But he demanded a lot.

If you could redo your whole career, what would you change? —Jessica Spiegel, Winter Park, Fla.
The one thing I will say is that stupid book I did that I dedicated to my penis. I was trying to be funny and
sarcastic. Of course, it's something I get asked about all the time now.
LETTERS

Inbox
Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

School's Out for Summer

David Von Drehle's cover story makes a case against summer vacation [Aug. 2]. But one might just as
easily conclude that if summer "stealth learning"--in which kids are having fun and don't even know
they're being educated--lasted all year long, children would do better than they do in the deadly dull
test-prep factories that our schools have become.

Della Peretti, OAKLAND, CALIF.

Let's just add more anxiety and performance pressure to our children's lives. Having raised healthy adult
daughters--who experienced the downtime of a happy, restful summer, playing outside until the
streetlights came on--I treasure my grandson's summer days of playing trains for hours and splashing in
the pool.

Cheri L. Calsetta, GREAT FALLS, MONT.

During the summer, most public libraries have special reading programs for children. There are story
times, author visits and special events, all intended to entertain children and encourage them to keep
reading during their vacation--and it's all free!

Roz Rubinstein, WATERFORD, CONN.

Von Drehle assumes that camps and museum tickets can close the education gap--and in the process he
stereotypes low-income families. Money doesn't close the gap; good parenting does. My family maintains
a low income because we prioritize time with our child over time spent at work. Our literate 2-year-old is
proof that parental interaction is more important than socioeconomic status.

Juniper Russo Tarascio, GADSDEN, ALA.

I was delighted to see yet another fine illustrated cover on TIME. Please tell me this return to art is the
sign of a trend.

Tony Gleeson, LOS ANGELES

Beyond the Beltway

If Joe Klein believes things are really not so dire in the Democratic camp, he must be spending all his
time in New York City or inside the Beltway, places where folks tend to political delusions ["Apocalypse
Not," Aug. 2]. Klein supports another stimulus package and cites a Republican smear campaign? Really?
He is not objective.
Colonel Colin McArthur, U.S. Army (ret.), ST. HELENA ISLAND, S.C.

Why can't people cut the President some slack? Do they remember what he was handed? Did they
expect the economy to rise out of the ashes in the first year? Obama is obviously committed to health
care, the economy and other concerns. He's not out playing golf, vacationing at Camp David or quitting
halfway through his term like certain governors we know.

Randy Pettit, ELYRIA, OHIO

That's So Very Jerry

Jerry Brown has said it himself, in so many words: Been there, done that ["The Once and Future
Governor?" Aug. 2]. It's time we move on from recycled career politicians. How refreshing it would be to
elect someone new who knows how to create wealth. Plus, California has yet to have a woman governor.

Mary Ann Vigilanti, OAKLAND, CALIF.

Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling
BRIEFING
WHITE HOUSE

Obama's Midterm Campaign: A Long

Gestation
By MICHAEL SCHERER Thursday, Aug. 05, 2010

Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images

For the ladies of The View, President Obama played it coy. "We shouldn't be campaigning all the time,"
he said in his first daytime-talk-show interview as President, just before hosting two private Manhattan
fundraisers. "What we have tried to do over the last 20 months is to govern."

Sure, he has tried to govern. But the West Wing campaign to preserve Democratic control of the
Congress in the 2010 elections has also been running full throttle for more than a year. Back when the
economy was in free fall, deputy chief of staff Jim Messina and political director Patrick Gaspard began
holding regular huddles with political aides to prepare the midterm map. Secret Service records show
that starting in February, Obama's New York – based pollster Joel Benenson began making near
weekly trips through the White House gates. And then there are the Wednesday-night meetings in senior
political adviser David Axelrod's Logan Circle living room, where, over pizza or Thai takeout, aides
debate ways to re-energize those who voted for the first time in 2008 and put Republicans on the
defensive. "It's basically smart political people who everyone here trusts," says one insider, a group that
can still include departed communications director Anita Dunn, all-purpose wise man David Plouffe and
the 2008 campaign's paid media guru, Larry Grisolano. If Benenson can't make it, they pass around a
BlackBerry with his disembodied voice.

The mark of these political chess masters can be seen in many of Obama's moves, from the selling of
financial reform to the late push to change campaign-finance laws. For the coming weeks, Obama has
planned a dizzying series of fundraisers and candidate appearances, with a steadily increasing
combative tone. If the polls are right and Democrats lose big in November, one thing is certain: it won't be
for lack of White House effort.
The Moment
By BOBBY GHOSH Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

The last legal hurdle to an Islamic center near the World Trade Center site has been removed, but bigotry
and politics may prove more formidable obstacles. New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission
ruled that a building can be torn down to clear the way for Park 51, a cultural center and mosque. The
project's critics range from those who believe Islam was the malevolent force that brought down the
towers to opportunistic politicians. Ironically, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan, the
project's main movers, are precisely the kind of Muslim leaders conservative commentators should
welcome: modernists who condemn the death cult of al-Qaeda. Rauf is a Sufi, Islam's most mystical and
accommodating branch, yet he finds himself accused of extremist leanings. This browbeating of a
moderate Muslim empowers the al-Qaeda narrative that the West loathes everything about Islam. As
New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg said, caving to Park 51's critics "would be to hand a victory to the
terrorists." Rauf and Khan hope their project will promote greater interfaith dialogue. The furor underlines
how much it is needed.

COLORADO SENATE

A Clinton-vs.-Obama Campaign Test

By JAY NEWTON-SMALL Thursday, Aug. 05, 2010

Former President Bill Clinton visits the

National Service of Learning Center and an
exhibit of social programs supported by his
foundation in Soacha, south of Bogota.

William Fernando Martinez / AP

Is the gathering 2010 electoral tide about to sweep away another Washington incumbent? Democratic
Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado hopes not. But after months of leading in the polls, Bennet found
himself in some trouble before the state's Aug. 10 primary. A Denver Post poll shows Bennet, a former
state-schools official named to fill the seat vacated by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, trailing his
opponent, former state house speaker Andrew Romanoff, by 3 points. Romanoff is so buoyed that last
week he sold his house and poured another $325,000 into the race.
Also boosting Romanoff is the endorsement he got from former President Bill Clinton, a move that ticked
off White House officials who had backed Bennet. (Clinton was rewarding Romanoff for supporting his
wife in the 2008 primaries.) Obama is sticking with his man, calling in to a Bennet tele-town-hall meeting
on Aug. 3 to praise him.

Democrats are confident that either man can win in November. And Clinton is helping in other ways, like
planning to campaign for Pennsylvania's Democratic Senate nominee, Representative Joe Sestak. But
the White House would hate to see the current President lose a duel with a former one.

The Skimmer
By DAN FASTENBERG Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Hostage Nation

By Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes, with Jorge

Enrique Botero Knopf; 281 pages

Sometimes life really does resemble an action movie.

Journalists Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes had
already been working on a documentary about Ingrid
Betancourt--the Colombian presidential candidate
who was kidnapped in 2002 by FARC, the country's
cocaine-financed leftist rebel group--when the
guerrillas nabbed three U.S. defense contractors. The four high-profile hostages joined a cache of others
sequestered in the Colombian jungle in what was then the 44-year-old civil war's newest drama. In
recounting 2008's Operación Jaque (Operation Checkmate) hostage release--which, among other things,
saw soldiers posing as FARC members--the authors rightly address the context of the failed war on
drugs. And in a rarity, the foreign fixer actually gets his due: Jorge Enrique Botero, a co-writer, appears in
the narrative trying to deliver a copy of John McCain's Vietnam memoir to the prisoners. In the end, the
lessons of Hostage Nation resonate beyond Colombia: when it comes to asymmetrical warfare,
insurgents only need one small win.

READ

SKIM [X]

TOSS
Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine
By ALICE PARK Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Win-Initiative / Getty

BODY AND BRAIN

Healthy Hearts and Minds

New research shows that the pitter-patter of the heart could determine how quickly the brain ages. In a
study of more than 1,500 men and women ages 34 to 84, scientists found that people with weakly
pumping hearts had decreased brain volume--a marker of brain aging--compared with those with more
vigorous hearts. In magnetic-resonance-imaging scans, the brains of volunteers with the lowest cardiac
index--a measure of how much blood is pumped from the heart relative to body size--appeared two years
older than those of participants in the highest-cardiac-index group.

What surprised the scientists further was that even people whose cardiac index fell within the normal
range had diminished brain size compared with people with the healthiest hearts. That means that even
small reductions in blood flow to the brain may speed aging and potentially compromise cognitive
function. More research is needed to confirm the findings and to determine whether the threshold for a
healthy cardiac index should be shifted when considering brain age. "This [range] may be appropriate for
cardiac health, but it may be different for brain health," notes the study's lead author, Angela Jefferson, a
neurologist at Boston University.

REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

The Legacy of Pregnancy Pounds

Your risk of obesity may develop well b efore birth--in the womb. Mothers who gain more weight during
pregnancy tend to give birth to heavier babies, and high birth weight is associated with later obesity and
diseases like cancer. But until now, it hasn't been clear why extra maternal weight leads to big babies. Is
it the added pounds themselves, or are there genetic or lifestyle factors common to mom and baby that
contribute to the trend?

For the answer, scientists at Children's Hospital Boston and Columbia University looked at women who
had two or more singleton births between 1989 and 2003. By comparing pregnancies in the same women
over time, researchers could better isolate the effect of their weight. When women put on more than 53 lb.
(24 kg) during pregnancy, they were more than twice as likely to deliver a high-birth-weight baby than
when they gained 18 to 22 lb. (about 8 to 10 kg).The more women gained, the heavier their babies were.
(Doctors recommend that normal-weight moms-to-be add 25 to 35 lb., or about 11 to 16 kg, during their
nine months.)

Animal studies suggest that excess gestational weight can cause hormonal changes in the fetus that
affect fat development. Experts believe the same mechanisms may be at work in humans and that the
new study highlights an earlier chance to combat obesity--during pregnancy.

FROM THE LABS

Harbinger of Cancer

a common mineral could predict how aggressive a breast tumor will be and how likely it is to recur after
treatment. Researchers found that the most active tumors have low levels of a protein that regulates iron,
leading them to speculate that in the future, women might be tested for the protein, and those with higher
levels could be spared such invasive treatments as chemotherapy and radiation.

Preparing for H1N1

When flu season hits in a few months, doctors may be paying more attention to coughs and sniffles than
to fevers. A study of H1N1 cases from 2009 found that nearly half of those infected did not develop a
fever, the classic symptom of flu. To lower the risk of transmission, health officials recommend that
people 6 months and older get immunized with the H1N1 vaccine.

STEP FOR STEM CELLS

The first human trial of an embryonic-stem-cell-based therapy is back on track after a yearlong hold
imposed by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency halted the study of a treatment for spinal-cord
injury after some animals receiving the stem cells developed cysts. The company conducting the trial
provided additional safety data and new tests for detecting the unusual growths.

DATA SET

23%

Percentage increase in HDL, or good cholesterol, in people on a low-carb diet, compared with 12% in
low-fat eaters

Number of U.S. states with an obesity rate of 30% or higher, up from three states in 2007. More than 1 in
4 Americans is obese

Sources: Annals of Internal Medicine, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Association for
Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, CDC, Circulation, Geron, Science Translational
Medicine, the Lancet
Verbatim
Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

'We say to hell, hell, hell with them.'

ROBERT MUGABE, President of Zimbabwe, at the funeral of his sister, one of his closest allies,
denouncing Western powers that are critical of his 30-year rule of the country

'Tragically, we have locked ourselves into a cycle of violence where protest leads to death, leading to
further protests and further casualties.'

OMAR ABDULLAH, chief minister of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, as 1,900 new paramilitary
forces were dispatched to quell the latest in a weeks-long series of separatist protests

'He's just obsessed with the limelight, and I got played.'

BRISTOL PALIN, announcing that she and Levi Johnston, the father of her son, have ended their
engagement for a second time

'If I put fish in a barrel of water and poured oil and Dove detergent over that and mixed it up, would you
eat that fish?'

RUSTY GRAYBILL, commercial oyster, crab and shrimp fisherman, contesting government claims that
seafood harvested in the Gulf waters near the BP oil spill is safe to eat

'We want to create an egalitarian society through political means.'

ALFONSO CANO, leader of FARC, the violent Colombian rebel group, saying he is willing to hold talks
with the government of President-elect Juan Manuel Santos in an attempt to resolve the 46-year-old
conflict

'The international community, which Pakistan belongs to, is in the process of losing the war against the
Taliban.'

ASIF ALI ZARDARI, Pakistani President, responding to claims that his government is secretly negotiating
with militants. Zardari said that the war in Afghanistan is failing because "we have lost the battle for
hearts and minds"

'You are the chosen one dun dun dun.'

KANYE WEST, tweeting to the only person, a young British man, that he has chosen to follow on Twitter.
The rapper has amassed more than 435,000 followers since creating an account on July 28
TALKING HEADS

Leonard Pitts

Writing in the Miami Herald about the need for greater teacher accountability:

"When you can't get fired for doing bad work, what's your impetus for doing good? ... No, I don't hate
unions ... And no, I don't think teachers bear sole responsibility for the failure of our kids to excel ...
Ultimately, what is at stake here is not grades, not jobs and not blame. No, this is an argument about the
future--and whether this country will have one."

--7/31/10

Robert Reich

Describing in the Wall Street Journal what he calls Obama's "enthusiasm gap" with voters:

"Whatever the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections, the activist phase of the Obama
administration has likely come to a close. The president may have a fight on his hands even to hold on to
what he's already achieved because his legislative successes have been large enough to fuel strong
opposition but not big enough to strengthen his support. The result could be disastrous for him and
congressional Democrats."

--8/3/10

Jonah Goldberg

Warning against modern conservatives' nostalgia for an earlier era, in the Los Angeles Times:

"The heyday of the 'institution builders' was a low-water mark for conservatism's political success (that's
why they built institutions!). Conservatism hardly lacks for top-flight intellectuals these days, but the
intellectuals aren't the avant-garde anymore. Thanks to their success at ... spreading ideas, the battle
has been joined, and now is not the time to wax nostalgic for the planning sessions."

--8/3/10

Sources: Zimbabwe Guardian; Christian Science Monitor; People; AP; BBC; Guardian; Twitter
Mitch Miller
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Mitch Miller, the goateed bandleader who hosted NBC's Sing Along with Mitch in the early 1960s, died
July 31 at age 99. Miller's music and his show were before my time, but I've always found the
phenomenon of his program fascinating from the archival footage. Partly because Sing Along with Mitch
was, in a way, before its own time.

When the show debuted in 1961, Miller--originally an oboe player--was already a music impresario,
having produced hits for the Mercury label and then Columbia Records. Tony Bennett and Rosemary
Clooney were among the singers whose careers he boosted, and he's recognized as one of the first to
employ overdubbing, layering different tracks in the studio. As a musician, he'd played with George
Gershwin and recorded with Charlie Parker.

His own Sing Along albums led to his family music program. Featuring performances of wholesome
songs with onscreen lyrics to allow the home audience to join in, it was a bit of prerock culture in the early
rock era. Even as his show became popular, the growth of rock music (which Miller personally disdained)
was superseding the kind of novelty songs and standards the host preferred.

Sing Along took the same unjaded pleasure in the medium that many of the earliest TV programs did. It
was the kind of show that still found it simply amazing that there was this machine that could bring
pictures and music into your living room, all at the same time, just like that.

The show seems impossibly ancient and naive today. But it presaged a whole line of
something-for-everybody TV-music programs leading up to American Idol today, as well as being a
precursor of karaoke. Long before the Internet and video games, Miller showed that TV was a device that
people were going to want to interact with.

Sentenced
By ALEXANDRA SILVER Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

When Jacob Sello "Jackie" Selebi gave a speech upon becoming South Africa's police commissioner in
2000, he said tackling corruption would be a priority "so that we can fight crime with clean hands."
Unfortunately for South Africa, Selebi did make corruption a priority--just not combating it. In July the
former police chief and former president of Interpol was convicted of graft, and on Aug. 3 he was
sentenced to 15 years in prison. Selebi was found guilty of taking bribes from a drug lord and current
murder suspect who opted to testify for the prosecution. Judge Meyer Joffe admonished him as "an
embarrassment to all right-thinking citizens in this country." The high-profile, nine-month-long
Johannesburg trial followed years of investigation. It forced a spotlight onto the country's graft troubles,
which tie in to a seamy underworld. Selebi, an ally of former President Thabo Mbeki, is one of the most
senior government officials to be convicted of corruption. Selebi plans to appeal.

Brief History: Military Pullouts

By CLAIRE SUDDATH Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

These MRAP trucks are jus some of the

thousands of vehicles due to be transported
out of Iraq

Johan Spanner / The New York Times /

Redux

On Aug. 2, President Obama reaffirmed his plan to end the American combat mission in Iraq by the end
of the month and draw down the U.S. presence to a mere 50,000 troops, who will stay behind to "advise
and assist" Iraqi security forces. Disengaging from a conflict as complex as the one in Iraq requires
meticulous planning. It's more complicated than simply booking several thousand plane tickets home.

Originally, most wars were fought with the expectation that the loser would be conquered and possibly
colonized. The Romans, for example, controlled much of modern-day Britain for more than 350
years--until 410, when, facing attacks elsewhere in the empire, they simply packed their bags and left. Of
course, withdrawals commonly arrive on the heels of defeat. In 1812, Napoleon's 500-mile (800 km)
retreat from Moscow to France resulted in the death of 80% of his army. His troops were forced to
abandon their wagons and cannons, since there weren't any horses left alive to pull them. In less
dramatic cases, matériel gets ditched simply because the cost to ship it home is too great. Some of the
equipment used in the Pacific during World War II was abandoned by the U.S. only to be used again later
during the Korean and Vietnam wars. And when the U.S. left Vietnam, $6.5 billion worth of military
equipment stayed behind, according to a 1978 Pentagon estimate.

The nature of modern warfare often favors temporary invasions rather than permanent occupations. This
month, the U.S. will haul much of its equipment along a 300-mile (480 km) highway to Kuwait before
shipping it overseas. By the end of 2011, all U.S. troops are expected to be out of Iraq, and sometime
that year, a limited drawdown of forces is due to commence in Afghanistan. These days, a war's end can
often be as orchestrated as its beginning.

MIDTERM BATTLE

Obama's Big-Business Blues

MICHAEL CROWLEY Thursday, Aug. 05, 2010

Tom Donohue, president of the U.S.

Chamber of Commerce, speaks at a
summit on jobs in Washington, D.C.

Joshua Roberts / Bloomberg / Getty

Images

When Barack Obama took office, he tried to make nice with big business, naming his Chicago confidante,
Valerie Jarrett, as a liaison to corporations and holding regular meetings with CEOs. His early agenda
was also business – centric as he sought to rescue the economy.

But other Obama priorities, like health care and Wall Street regulation, have roiled corporate leaders. The
head of the Business Roundtable recently blasted Obama for "creat[ing] an increasingly hostile
environment for investment and job creation."

Democrats are bracing for the wrath of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In early August, it launched new
pro-GOP ad campaigns in Colorado and Pennsylvania and ran an Illinois spot ripping Democratic Senate
nominee Alexi Giannoulias and the Democrats' "record of failure." The chamber, under President
Thomas J. Donohue, may spend $75 million this fall — more than double his group's 2008 outlay.

Now Democrats grouse at such treatment after passing top priorities for the chamber, like the bank
bailouts, the automakers' rescue and the economic stimulus — ones many Republicans opposed. But as
they say, If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
Lolita Lebron
By FRANCES ROMERO Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

Call her a hero or call her a terrorist. But as the leader of a Puerto Rican nationalist group that stormed
the U.S. Capitol in 1954--shooting and injuring five Congressmen--Lolita Lebron, who died Aug. 1 at 90,
will likely be remembered as both.

In 1940, Lebron migrated to New York City as a young adult in search of opportunity. There she would
find a cause so attractive that she was willing to kill and be killed for it. With that romanticized notion
burning in her heart and a letter in her pocket that read, "My life I give for the freedom of my country,"
Lebron and three others stormed the House chambers and started shooting. She then unfurled her
one-starred red, white and blue flag and screamed, "Viva Puerto Rico libre!" in protest of her nation's
designation as a U.S. commonwealth only two years before.

Her punishment was a 56-year prison sentence, of which she served 25. She then embarked on a lecture
tour of Puerto Rican population centers in the U.S. in an attempt to further her cause. Yet in each of the
three plebiscites held since 1967 on the island's status, independence garnered no more than 4.4% of
the vote.

A recent House bill proposing another referendum, supported by Puerto Rico's pro-statehood governor
Luis Fortuño, doesn't foretell a realization of Lebron's dream. So the struggle to determine the island's
future continues. Hopefully in peace.

The World
By Harriet Barovick; Ishaan Tharoor; Alexandra Silver; Claire Suddath; Frances Romero; Kayla Webley;
Nate Rawlings Monday, Aug. 16, 2010

1 | Gulf of Mexico

Estimate Upped; Oil Lingers

As BP attempted to permanently seal the Deepwater Horizon leak that gushed oil into the Gulf of Mexico
for 87 days, a government-appointed group released a new estimate for the spillage: 4.9 million bbl.
Though the finding makes the BP spill the world's worst accidental leak at sea, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report concluding that almost 75% of the oil had
evaporated, dispersed or been eliminated. Still, that leaves the Gulf of Mexico with more than 1 million
bbl. of oil (four times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill) that could pose environmental and health risks.
While the effort to seal the well by pumping in mud initially seemed successful, engineers noted that it
would take at least a week to tell whether the well had been permanently plugged.

[The following text appears within a chart. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual chart.]

Where did the 4.9 million bbl. of oil go?

DISPERSED

8% Chemically dispersed

16% Naturally dispersed

25% Evaporated or dissolved

26% Still at sea or on shores

REMOVED

3% Skimmed

5% Burned

17% Recovered from wellhead

SOURCE: NOAA

2 | San Francisco

Prop 8 Overturned

On Aug. 4, U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that Proposition 8, the California voter initiative
passed in November 2008 that banned same-sex marriage, was unconstitutional. The decision was the
result of a lawsuit filed by two same-sex couples who claimed that Prop 8 infringed their constitutional
rights. Voters had originally approved the ban in response to a California Supreme Court ruling that
temporarily legalized same-sex marriage in the state. Walker's decision is expected to be appealed and
to eventually make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Currently, five states and the District of Columbia
allow same-sex marriage.

3 | Pakistan

Monsoon and Cholera

Rescue teams attempting to reach people trapped in northwestern Pakistan following the country's worst
floods in 80 years found themselves hindered by new rains. Some 1,500 Pakistanis have died in the
weeklong deluge that has affected 3 million people, many of whom have protested, calling the
government slow to respond. Various reports of cholera outbreaks emerged as officials continued to
warn Pakistanis of the high risk of waterborne diseases.

4 | Afghanistan

The Netherlands Becomes First NATO Country to Leave

The Netherlands ended its combat mission Aug. 1, removing its 1,950 soldiers from Uruzgan province.
Since 2006, Dutch troops have earned praise for their "3-D" counterinsurgency strategy, which focuses
on defense, development and diplomacy. Debate over a withdrawal timeline led to the collapse of the
Dutch coalition government in February. The Netherlands departs at the tail end of the two deadliest
months for NATO troops in the nearly nine-year Afghan war.

5 | Norway

Cluster Bomb Ban in Effect

The international Convention on Cluster Munitions, first signed in Oslo in 2008, took effect Aug. 1.
Thirty-eight of more than 100 signatories have ratified the treaty, which prohibits the use, manufacture
and sale of cluster bombs. Released bomblets can cover a wide area, and because not all of them
immediately explode, they can harm civilians who come upon them. The convention's supporters hope its
influence will extend beyond just its signatories, which do not include the U.S., China or Russia.

[This article consists of # illustrations. Please see hardcopy of magazine.]

Anatomy of a Cluster Bomb

1. Canister is dropped from aircraft

2. Bomblets are released

3. Bomblets float down to target

6 | Russia

ON FIRE

Record-breaking heat and the worst drought in decades have caused more than 500 wildfires to break
out across central Russia, killing at least 48 people since July 29, displacing thousands more and leading
the government to declare a state of emergency in seven regions. Dry winds sent clouds of smoke over
Moscow, while 250 miles (400 km) to the east, crews fought back flames that surrounded the Russian
Federal Nuclear Center, the country's top nuclear-research facility, in Sarov. At least one-fifth of the
nation's wheat crop has been destroyed, sending bread prices soaring.

7 | Israel
Lebanese Border Clash Kills Four

Israeli and Lebanese troops exchanged gunfire Aug. 3, killing a senior Israeli officer, two Lebanese
soldiers and a Lebanese journalist. UNIFIL, the U.N. peacekeeping force, supported Israel's assertions
that its soldiers were clearing brush on the Israeli side of the line when Lebanese troops opened fire. The
clash was the first along the border since the 2006 Israel-Hizballah war, in which nearly 1,200 Lebanese
and 160 Israelis died.

8 | Karachi

A Metropolis Under Siege

Rival gangs in the Pakistani city of Karachi began a rampage Aug. 2 that closed schools and businesses,
saw countless buildings torched and left more than 60 people dead in just two days. The violence was
sparked by the killing of Raza Haider, leader of a political party composed of émigrés originally from India
that controls Karachi and has long been at odds with other factions in the city. The government, blaming
the Taliban, has arrested some 20 suspected Islamic hard-liners, but land disputes and ethnic tensions
also underlie the violence.

9 | Jakarta

Parliament Watches Porn

On Aug. 2, internal TV screens in Indonesia's House of Representatives displayed a feed from a smutty
website for 15 minutes before being shut down. Authorities have yet to identify those behind the prank,
which happened ahead of an online-pornography ban that is due to take effect Aug. 11. The world's most
populous Muslim nation is grappling with new challenges posed by the Web, which is used by some 40
million of its citizens.

10 | Kenya

Voting on a Constitution

Kenyans headed to the polls Aug. 4 for a referendum on a new constitution that would shift more power
to local governments. It would also address such controversial issues as land reform, abortion and
Islamic family courts. Security forces were deployed to prevent the kind of tribal violence that broke out
after the disputed 2007 presidential election and left more than 1,000 people dead. The subsequent 2008
power-sharing agreement between President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, who became the country's
Prime Minister, precipitated this month's referendum.

* | What They're Banning in Abu Dhabi: Travelers going to the United Arab Emirates after Oct. 11 will
have to check their wi-fi devices at the border. The U.A.E. announced Aug. 1 that visitors and some
500,000 local subscribers will have to do without BlackBerry messaging and e-mail because of security
concerns. The U.A.E. has long battled with the smart phone's producer over the device's encryption,
which makes it virtually impossible to monitor content. Two days later, Saudi Arabia announced it would
follow suit.