Table of Contents: August 9, 2010

IN THIS ISSUE EDITION: U.S. Vol. 176 No. 6

COVER
Afghan Women And the Return of The Taliban (Cover)
As the U.S. searches for a way out of Afghanistan, some policymakers suggest negotiating with the
Taliban. But that would spell disaster for half the country's population: Afghan women
Living Under the Taliban Threat
Photographer Jodi Bieber meets the extraordinary women of a war-torn nation

ESSAY
A Double Dip Recession? Who Cares? (Commentary / The Curious Capitalist)
There won't be a second recession for a lot of people — because their first one hasn't ended

Beyond the Leaks: Our Pakistan Problem (Commentary / In the Arena)

Forget the secret documents and even Afghanistan. What counts is how we deal with Pakistan

Private Spies: Rubicon Make 24 Look Sunny (Tuned In)

Conspiracy thriller Rubicon replaces Jack Bauer's heroics with a dark story of post-9/11 intelligence for
hire

Aw, Nuts! (Commentary)

I had an airtight, zero-tolerance stance on nut allergies. Then my son developed them

NATION
The Battle for Ohio (The Well / Nation)
Two tight races in the Buckeye State reveal a 2010 Democratic survival strategy: blame Bush and bash
Wall Street. And with Barack Obama's political fate also at stake, the White House is watching closely
Battleground Ohio
Photos: Leading up to November elections, Democrats in Ohio and beyond hope voters are angrier at
Republicans than at them

The Spill's Psychic Toll (The Well / Environment)

For all the environmental and economic harm caused by the disaster in the Gulf, the most lasting--and
least visible--damage could be inflicted on the mental health of its victims
Crabbing in the Gulf after the BP Oil Disaster
Photos: A glimpse into the daily life of the Landrys of St. Bernard Parish, who navigate through daily
closures and openings to find crab grounds that haven't been impacted by the spill

Big Spill, Little Damage? (The Well / Viewpoint)

So far, the predictions of ecological catastrophe on the Gulf Coast seem overblown

Funny or Die: How the Web Is Changing Comedy (The Well / Comedy)
Funny or Die is helping reinvent comedy for the Web — and everyone from Oscar winners to teen stars is
clamoring to jump on board
Behind the Scenes at Funny or Die
Photos: Everyone from Oscar winners to teen stars is clamoring to work with the hottest comedy site on
the web

WORLD
WikiLeaks's Julian Assange: The Wizard From Oz
Who's the man behind WikiLeaks, the website that's caused so much trouble? An itinerant Australian
hacker

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Rock Steady (Music)
Mainstream pop may be struggling, but indie marches on--with Pitchfork Media leading the way
The Pitchfork Music Festival
Photos: Mainstream pop may be struggling, but indie rock marches on, and Pitchfork Media is leading
the way

Q&A Kevin Kline

Short List
TIME'S PICKS FOR THE WEEK

BUSINESS
How to Make Cars And Make Money Too (Assignment Detroit)
By keeping it simple, Ford's Alan Mulally has led the industrial comeback of the decade

SOCIETY
Building a Better Playground (Life / Parenting)
Swings and slides don't foster much creativity. Why cities are joining the loose-parts revolution

Big-League Chew (Life / Sports)

Some pros swear by high-tech mouth gear. Is the key to a better golf score in your jaw?

The Doctor Is in — and Online (Life / Health)

New pilot programs boost doctor-patient e-mailing

The Origin of Cougar Sex Drives (Life / Behavior)

A new evolutionary theory on why women's libidos ramp up premenopause

PEOPLE
10 Questions for Jorge Ramos (10 Questions)
The Noticiero Univision anchor has a new book, A Country for All, out now. Jorge Ramos will now take
your questions

TO OUR READERS
The Plight of Afghan Women: A Disturbing Picture
This week's cover is disturbing, but the reality it shows in Afghanistan is something from which we
cannot turn away

LETTERS
Inbox (Inbox)

BRIEFING
The Moment
7|24|10: Iowa

The World
10 ESSENTIAL STORIES

Mark Halperin's Take: The Digital President Loses Two Rounds

GOP Goes (Lame) Duck Hunting

Dems Hedge a Florida Bet

Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine

Verbatim

Brief History: First Family Weddings

First Family Weddings
Photos: As former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton heads into her wedding weekend, TIME takes a look
at other presidential kids and their nuptials

The Skimmer
Book Review: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach

Daniel Schorr (Milestones)

Alex Higgins (Milestones)

Overturned (Milestones)
COVER

Afghan Women and the Return of the

Taliban
By ARYN BAKER Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010

Photograph by Jodi Bieber / INSTITUTE for TIME

The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight,

demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running
away from her husband's house. They dragged her to
a mountain clearing near her village in the southern
Afghan province of Uruzgan, ignoring her protests that
her in-laws had been abusive, that she had no choice
but to escape. Shivering in the cold air and blinded by
the flashlights trained on her by her husband's family,
she faced her spouse and accuser. Her in-laws
treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her.
If she hadn't run away, she would have died. Her
judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Later, he would tell Aisha's uncle that she had to be
made an example of lest other girls in the village try to do the same thing. The commander gave his
verdict, and men moved in to deliver the punishment. Aisha's brother-in-law held her down while her
husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose. Aisha passed out
from the pain but awoke soon after, choking on her own blood. The men had left her on the mountainside
to die.

This didn't happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year. Now hidden
in a secret women's shelter in the relative safety of Kabul, where she was taken after receiving care from
U.S. forces, Aisha recounts her tale in a monotone, her eyes flat and distant. She listens obsessively to
the news on a small radio that she keeps by her side. Talk that the Afghan government is considering
some kind of political accommodation with the Taliban is the only thing that elicits an emotional response.
"They are the people that did this to me," she says, touching the jagged bridge of scarred flesh and bone
that frames the gaping hole in an otherwise beautiful face. "How can we reconcile with them?"

That is exactly what the Afghan government plans to do. In June, President Hamid Karzai established a
peace council tasked with exploring negotiations with Afghanistan's "upset brothers," as he calls the
Taliban. A month later, Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, a
New York — based NGO, flew to Kabul seeking assurances that human rights would be protected in the
course of negotiations. During their conversation, Karzai mused on the cost of the conflict in human lives
and wondered aloud if he had any right to talk about human rights when so many were dying. "He
essentially asked me," says Malinowski, "What is more important, protecting the right of a girl to go to
school or saving her life?" How Karzai and his international allies answer that question will have
far-reaching consequences. Aisha has no doubt. "The Taliban are not good people," she says. "If they
come back, the situation will be worse for everyone." But for others, the rights of Afghan women are only
one aspect of a complex situation. How that situation will eventually be ordered remains unclear.

As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, the need for an exit strategy weighs on the minds of U.S.
policymakers. The publication of some 90,000 documents on the war by the freedom-of-information
activists at WikiLeaks — working with the New York Times, the Guardian in London and the German
newsmagazine Der Spiegel — has intensified international debate. Though the documents mainly
consist of low-level intelligence reports, taken together they reveal a war in which a shadowy insurgency
shows determined resilience; where fighting that enemy often claims the lives of innocent civilians; and
where supposed allies, like Pakistan's security services, are suspected of playing a deadly double game.
Allegations of fraud and corruption in the Afghan government have exasperated Congress, as has
evidence that the billions of dollars spent training and equipping the Afghan security forces have so far
achieved little. In May, the U.S. death toll passed 1,000. As frustrations mount over a war that even top
U.S. commanders think is not susceptible to a purely military solution, demands intensify for a political
way out of the quagmire.

Such an outcome, it is assumed, would involve a reconciliation with the Taliban or, at the very least,
some elements within its fold. But without safeguards, that would pose significant risks to the very women
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised in May not to abandon. "We will stand with you always,"
she said to female members of Karzai's delegation in Washington. Afghan women are not convinced.
They fear that in the quest for a quick peace, their progress may be sidelined. "Women's rights must not
be the sacrifice by which peace is achieved," says Fawzia Koofi, the former Deputy Speaker of
Afghanistan's parliament.

Yet that may be where negotiations are heading. In December, President Obama set a July 2011
deadline for the beginning of a drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. That has made Taliban
leaders feel they have the upper hand. In negotiations, the Taliban will be advocating a version of an
Afghan state in line with their own conservative views, particularly on the issue of women's rights, which
they deem a Western concept that contravenes Islamic teaching. Already there is a growing acceptance
that some concessions to the Taliban are inevitable if there is to be genuine reconciliation. "You have to
be realistic," says a senior Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We are
not going to be sending troops and spending money forever. There will have to be a compromise, and
sacrifices will have to be made." Which sounds understandable. But who, precisely, will be asked to
make the sacrifice?

Stepping Out
When the U.S. and its allies went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 with the aim of removing the safe haven
that the Taliban had provided for al-Qaeda, it was widely hoped that the women of the country would be
liberated from a regime that denied them education and jobs, forced them indoors and violently punished
them for infractions of a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Under the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from
1996 to 2001, women accused of adultery were stoned to death; those who flashed a bare ankle from
under the shroud of a burqa were whipped. Koofi remembers being beaten on the street for forgetting to
remove the polish from her nails after her wedding. "We were not even allowed to laugh out loud," she
says.
It wasn't always so. Kabul 40 years ago was considered the playground of Central Asia, a city where girls
wore jeans to the university and fashionable women went to parties sporting Chanel miniskirts. These
days the streets of Kabul once again echo with the laughter of girls on their way to school, dressed in
uniforms of black coats and white headscarves. Women have rejoined the workforce and can sign up for
the police and the army. Article 83 of the constitution mandates that at least 25% of parliamentary seats
go to female representatives.

During Taliban times, women's voices were banned from the radio, and TV was forbidden, but last month
a female anchor interviewed a former Taliban leader on a national broadcast. Under the Taliban, Robina
Muqimyar Jalalai, one of Afghanistan's first two female Olympic athletes, spent her girlhood locked
behind the walls of her family compound. Now she is running for parliament and wants a sports ministry
created, which she hopes to lead. "We have women boxers and women footballers," she says. "I go
running in the stadium where the Taliban used to play football with women's heads." But Muqimyar says
she will never take these changes for granted. "If the Taliban come back, I will lose everything that I have
gained over the past nine years."

It would be easy to dismiss such fears as premature. The Taliban leadership has not yet shown any
inclination to reconcile with Karzai's government. But a program to reintegrate into society so-called
10-dollar Talibs — low-level insurgents who fight for cash or over local grievances — is already in place.
Koofi worries that such accommodations may be the first step down a slippery slope. Reintegrating
low-level Taliban could mean that men like those who ordered and carried out Aisha's punishment would
be eligible for the training and employment opportunities paid for by international donors — without
having to account for their actions. "The government of Afghanistan needs to make it clear, not just by
speaking but by action and policy, that women's rights will be guaranteed," says Koofi. "If they don't, if
they continue giving political bribes to Taliban, we will lose everything."

Clinging to the Constitution

Both the U.S. administration and Karzai's government say such worries are overblown. Afghanistan's
constitution, they insist — which promotes gender equality and provides for girls' education — is not up
for negotiation. In Kabul on July 20, Clinton said that the red lines are clear. "Any reconciliation process ...
must require that anyone who wishes to rejoin society and the political system must lay down their
weapons and end violence, renounce al-Qaeda and be committed to the constitution and laws of
Afghanistan, which guarantee the rights of women."

Afghan women cling to such promises like a talisman. But ambiguities abound. Article 3 of the
constitution, for example, holds that no law may contravene the principles of Shari'a, or Islamic law. What
constitutes Shari'a, however, has never been defined, so a change in the political climate of the country
could mean a radical reinterpretation of women's rights. Karzai has already invited Taliban to run for
parliament. None have done so, but if they ever do, they may find some like-minded colleagues already
there. Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal, the Minister of Economy and leader of the ideologically conservative
Hizb-i-Islami faction, for example, holds that women and men shouldn't go to university together. Like the
Taliban, he believes that women should not be allowed to leave the home unaccompanied by a male
relative. "That is in accordance with Islam. And what we want for Afghanistan is Islamic rights, not
Western rights," Arghandiwal says.
Traditional ways, however, do little for women. Aisha's family did nothing to protect her from the Taliban.
That might have been out of fear, but more likely it was out of shame. A girl who runs away is
automatically considered a prostitute in deeply traditional societies, and families that allow them back
home would be subject to widespread ridicule. A few months after Aisha arrived at the shelter, her father
tried to bring her home with promises that he would find her a new husband. Aisha refused to leave. In
rural areas, a family that finds itself shamed by a daughter sometimes sells her into slavery, or worse,
subjects her to a so-called honor killing — murder under the guise of saving the family's name.

Parliamentarian Sabrina Saqib fears that if the Taliban were welcomed back into the fold, those who
oppress women would get a free ride. "I am worried that the day that the so-called moderate Taliban can
sit in parliament, we will lose our rights," she says. "Because it is not just Taliban that are against
women's rights; there are many men who are against them as well." Last summer, Saqib voted against a
bill that authorized husbands in Shi'ite families to withhold money and food from wives who refuse to
provide sex, limited inheritance and custody of children in the case of divorce and denied women
freedom of movement without permission from their families. The law passed, and that 25% quota of
women in parliament couldn't stop it. Saqib estimates that less than a dozen of the 68 female
parliamentarians support women's rights. The rest — proxies for conservative men who boosted them
into power — aren't interested.

Despite her frustrations with her parliamentary colleagues, Saqib is a firm supporter of the constitutional
quota. "In a society dominated by culture and traditions," she says, "we need some time for women to
prove that they can do things." If the constitution were revised as part of a negotiation with the Taliban,
she says, the article mandating the parliamentary quota "would be the first to go." Arghandiwal, the
Economy Minister, would love to see the back of it. "Throughout history, constitutions have changed, so
we have to be flexible on this," he says. The quota for women, he claims, "makes them lazy."

Threats in the Night

For many women, debates over the constitution are an abstract irrelevance. What matters is that
mounting insecurity is eroding the few gains they have made. Taliban night letters — chilling missives
delivered under the cover of darkness — threaten women in the south of the country, a Taliban
stronghold, who dare to work. "We warn you to leave your job as a teacher as soon as possible otherwise
we will cut the heads off your children and shall set fire to your daughter," reads one. "We will kill you in
such a harsh way that no woman has so far been killed in that manner," says another. Both letters, which
were obtained by Human Rights Watch, are printed on paper bearing the crossed swords and Koran
insignia of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the name of the former Taliban government. Elsewhere,
girls' schools have been burned down and students have had acid thrown in their faces. In May,
mounting violence in the west of the country prompted the religious council of Herat province to issue an
edict forbidding women to leave their homes without a male relative. The northern province of
Badakhshan quickly followed suit, and other councils are considering doing the same.

The edicts are usually justified as a means of protecting women from the insurgency, but Koofi, the
member of parliament, says there is a better way of doing that: improved governance and security. That
will not just protect women but also strengthen the Afghan government's hand in the course of
negotiations. "We need to marginalize the Taliban by focusing on good governance," she says, fearing
that a quick deal would bring only a temporary lull in the violence — enough to permit the international
coalition a face-saving withdrawal but not much more than that. Afghanistan's women recognize that
dialogue with the Taliban is essential to any long-term solution, but they don't want those talks to be
hurried. They want a seat at the table, and they worry that Afghanistan's friends overseas are tiring of its
dysfunctional ways. "I think it is possible to make things better if the international community supports
good governance," says Koofi, "but they are too focused on an exit strategy. They want a quick solution."

For Afghanistan's women, an early withdrawal of international forces could be disastrous. An Afghan
refugee who grew up in Canada, Mozhdah Jamalzadah recently returned home to launch an Oprah-style
talk show, which has become wildly popular. Jamalzadah has been able to subtly introduce questions of
women's rights into the program without provoking the ire of religious conservatives. "If I go into it
directly," she says, "there will be a backlash. But if I talk about abuse, which is against the Koran, and
then talk about divorce, which is permitted, I am educating both men and women, and hopefully no one
notices." Jamalzadah says her audience is increasingly receptive to her message, but she knows that in
a deeply traditional society, it will take time to percolate. If the government becomes any more
conservative because of an accommodation with the Taliban, she says, "my program will be the first to
go."

That would be Afghanistan's loss. Jamalzadah's TV show is an education for the whole nation, albeit
sometimes in unexpected ways. On a recent episode, a male guest told a joke about a foreign human
rights team in Afghanistan. In the cities, the team noticed that women walked six paces behind their
husbands. But in rural Helmand, where the Taliban is strongest, they saw a woman six steps ahead. The
foreigners rushed to congratulate the husband on his enlightenment — only to be told that he stuck his
wife in front because they were walking through a minefield.

As the audience roared with laughter, Jamalzadah reflected that it may take about 10 to 15 years before
Afghan women can truly walk alongside men. But once they do, she believes, all Afghans will benefit.
"When we talk about women's rights," Jamalzadah says, "we are talking about things that are important
to men as well — men who want to see Afghanistan move forward. If you sacrifice women to make peace,
you are also sacrificing the men who support them and abandoning the country to the fundamentalists
that caused all the problems in the first place."
Women of Afghanistan Under Taliban Threat

Fawzia Koofi
The former deputy speaker of parliament, Koofi is very outspoken on women's issues. "Reconciliation will
not bring peace to Afghanistan," she says. "Peace is a result of democracy. You have to include everyone
in that process, including women." She is running for a second term in parliament but fears that new
election rules may make it more difficult to succeed and that outspoken women like her will be sidelined.

Robina Muqimyar Jalalai

In 2004, Muqimyar was one of Afghanistan's first two female representatives at the Olympics. She is now
running for parliament.

Sabrina Saqib
Saqib, Afghanistan's youngest parliamentarian, says having women in parliament was a huge step
forward. "Women came back to life after the Taliban."

Mozhdah Jamalzadah
Part Oprah, part Hannah Montana, The Mozhdah Show, hosted by Jamalzadah, is the latest sensation to
hit Afghanistan's television screens.

Mahbooba Seraj
Women gather at a training conference for parliamentarians. "Women have just as much a right to take
part in leading Afghanistan now as they did then," says Seraj, standing, referring to historical female
heroes in Afghanistan. "We must not compare women in Afghanistan to women in France or Sweden. We
have to compare women now to women in 2001. And we have made huge progress."
Sakina
When Sakina was 14, her family sold her into marriage with a 45-year-old man who had a
carpet-weaving business. "I didn't know about marriage," she says. "I didn't know about relations
between men and women." He used her as an indentured servant and beat her with weaving tools when
she didn't work fast enough. Once, when she dropped some tea glasses, the family cut off all of her hair.
She ran away. Now she is trying to get a divorce, which her in-laws refuse to grant because, they say,
they paid good money for her.
Islam
Family conflict and a husband addicted to drugs pushed Islam to pour diesel fuel over herself in a suicide
attempt. Her mother-in-law tried to extinguish the flames.

Prisoners
Nasimgul, left, and Gul Bahar, holding another inmate's child, are serving time in the Afghan women's
detention center in Kabul. Even under the new government, Afghan society still imprisons women for
crimes that are never ascribed to men, like running away and adultery, further stunting women's progress.
Shirin Gul
Convicted of murder and hijacking, Gul says she fell into a life of crime under pressure from her husband;
she had six children, so she followed his wishes. Her husband, son and brother-in-law have all been
hanged in connection with their crimes.

Zohal Sagar
Sagar lost her father and two brothers in the war. Her mother hopes they can leave Afghanistan and find
a new life in Canada.
The Abadini Family
Though Afghan women are no longer required to wear burqas, as they were under Taliban rule, many
women still wear them out of tradition or fear. The younger generation of Afghan women want more
liberal and open ways of living in Afghan society.

Aisha
Aisha, 18, was dragged from her home by the Taliban after running away from her husband. Despite her
pleas that her in-laws had been abusive, that they had treated her like a slave, that she had no choice but
to escape, a Taliban commander said she must be punished, lest other girls in the village try to do the
same thing. Aisha's family members carried out the punishment: her brother-in-law held her down while
her husband sliced off her ears and nose, then left her to die. She is now hidden in a secret women's
shelter, where she was taken after receiving care from U.S. forces.
ESSAY

A Double Dip Recession? Who Cares?

By ZACHARY KARABELL Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Illustration by Harry Campbell for TIME

Though global equities have rallied modestly after a sharp plunge in May and June and companies have
announced strong earnings, sentiment about the future remains gloomy. In response to intense concerns
about a looming double-dip recession, business leaders have complained to White House officials that
government policy is inhibiting job creation and that uncertainty about new regulations is discouraging
them from investing their $1.8 trillion in accumulated corporate cash. On the flip side, Democrats in
Congress effectively cornered the Republicans to extend unemployment benefits yet again, a direct
response to the undeniable fact that the unemployed are facing a severe challenge to find work.

What should be most striking about these concerns, however, is how little they matter. A double dip is a
period of economic contraction that follows a brief recovery after a recession. It's a useful prop for
framing economic and political debates but doesn't describe what's actually happening across the
country. The reality is that if you are doing well in this economy, either as a company or an individual, you
will continue to do well regardless of a statistical double dip. If you are doing badly, you will continue to
struggle whether or not the economic data are improving.

GDP has been expanding since the third quarter of last year, graced by government spending and a
steady though diminished level of domestic consumption. But as we all know, that growth — 5.6% in the
fourth quarter of last year and 2.7% in the first quarter of this year — has been accompanied by high
unemployment and little job creation. In short, this has been an economic recovery that has felt like a
continued recession.

That's because for a significant portion of the population, it is a continued recession. Not only is the real
unemployment rate (combining workers who have dropped out of the workforce and the headline
numbers, together with workers classified as marginally attached to the workforce) in the midteens, but
the amount of hours worked has declined, as have many incomes. If you combine that with the scarcity of
consumer credit and the uncertainty about the social safety net, tens of millions of Americans are facing a
grave economic future. Particularly for men who lack a college education and were or are in an industry
that depends on manual labor (construction and manufacturing above all), this is a perilous time.
But for tens of millions of others, there is no recession. For the college-educated, the unemployment rate
is 4.4% (for college-educated women, less than that). For them, wages have been rising, since
more-skilled workers command higher salaries and industries ranging from technology to health care
have been hiring and expanding. Those workers are enjoying — in relative moderation — the fruits of
modern society, including owning homes, buying millions of cool gadgets like iPhones and BlackBerrys,
taking summer vacations, sending their children to costly but worthy colleges and worrying over their
retirement accounts, which means that they have retirement accounts to worry about.

And then there are millions of others who fall on the spectrum in between. Very few of these groupings
will be altered by a double-dip recession. If the economy expands by 3% over the next quarters, there is
little indication that the millions currently struggling or the many more in limbo will suddenly be less in
limbo. Nor is there any reason to suppose that companies will suddenly start hiring again. They have
integrated productivity-enhancing technologies, understand the dynamics of inventories and had been
trimming workforces for years before the 2008-09 crisis. Better policy from Washington won't change that;
nor is worse policy truly the cause of it, though it is a convenient excuse.

On the flip side, if the economy contracts a bit, there is no reason to expect fewer iPads will be bought.
After all, save for a brief few months at the very end of 2008 and the very beginning of 2009, the
economic activity of the haves showed remarkable resilience. While contraction will lead to more
negative sentiment, sentiment is already negative and is not a reliable indicator of activity. People can
feel bad and spend money — and often do.

So the double-dip question is yet another rabbit hole that distracts from the structural realities and
challenges that the U.S. — and the rest of the world — faces. The debate speaks to a false belief that our
macro statistics tell us something truly meaningful when in fact they are no better than shadows of
shadows that offer at best a blurry facsimile. Until we begin to have a discussion about the multiple
economies that constitute the U.S., our attitudes and our answers will fail to generate the desired — and
shared — outcome of a more secure and prosperous future for all.

IN THE ARENA

Beyond the Leaks: Our Pakistan Problem

By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010

United States Marines from Bravo Company

of the 1st Battalion of the 2nd Marines fire
machine guns for suppression during a
gunbattle.

Kevin Frayer / AP
The release of 91,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan by WikiLeaks turned out to be your
classic media bang-fizzle. The first-day bang was caused by the spectacular breach of security and the
promise of devastating revelations, especially about Pakistan's clandestine support for the Taliban. The
second-day fizzle was caused by the absence of much that was new in the documents. By the third day,
it was pretty much over. But the war goes on, futilely at the moment. Indeed, the actual situation on the
ground is worse than the secret documents describe — a fact that was made plain in testimony to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the third day of the story by David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency
expert close to General David Petraeus.

"We need to kill a lot of Taliban," Kilcullen said, a statement that stands well outside the humanitarian
spirit of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. But then, Kilcullen admitted, the Afghan government is too
unstable for COIN to work very well — a major concession from a charter member of the Petraeus camp
and a signal, perhaps, of a change in U.S. tactics. As for the Taliban, he said, there was no question that
they were being supported by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Kilcullen recommended that the
committee members read a recent paper by Matt Waldman of Harvard University's Carr Center for
Human Rights Policy called "The Sun in the Sky."

The paper is astonishing. From February to May this year, the author conducted separate interviews with
nine active Taliban field commanders in Afghanistan and 10 former Taliban officials. The commanders
are unanimous in their belief that the ISI is running the show. It is a field-level view of the hierarchy and
probably an exaggeration, but even at half-strength, the commanders' accounts of direct ISI involvement
are entirely convincing. Some of them received training and protection in Pakistani camps run by the ISI.
"[The ISI has] specific groups under their control, for burning schools and such like," one commander
says. "The ISI [also] has people working for it within the Taliban movement. It is clearer than the sun in
the sky." The commanders insist the ISI is opposed to any negotiations between the Taliban and Hamid
Karzai's government; several cite as proof the February arrest by Pakistani operatives of Taliban
second-in-command Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was involved in informal peace talks with the
Afghans.

Why on earth are elements of the Pakistani military supporting the Taliban? In a word, India. India is, first
and last, the strategic obsession of the Pakistani military. The U.S. has come and gone from the region in
the past; the perceived Indian threat is eternal. With the defeat of the Taliban by U.S. forces in 2001,
there was fear that the new government in Kabul would be sympathetic to India and provide a strategic
base for anti-Pakistan intelligence operations. And so, despite professions of alliance with the U.S. by
Pakistan's then dictator Pervez Musharraf, a decision was made to keep the Taliban alive. A spigot of
untargeted military aid from the George W. Bush Administration helped fund the effort. A commander of
the vicious Haqqani Taliban network tells Waldman that their funding comes from "the Americans — from
them to the Pakistani military, and then to us." Waldman reports that the commander receives from the
Pakistanis "a reward for killing foreign soldiers, usually $4,000 to $5,000 for each soldier killed."

This is devastating and outrageous, but slightly outdated — and decidedly incomplete. In the months
since Waldman completed his research, the relationship between Pakistan and the Karzai government
has warmed considerably. Karzai removed his intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, whom the Pakistanis
considered an Indian agent. There is talk of a reconciliation deal in which the Haqqani network will stand
down militarily. Most important, the Pakistanis' sense of the perceived threat has changed dramatically
over the past 18 months. After a series of spectacular terrorist attacks, the army launched a major
campaign against the indigenous Pakistani Taliban. More Pakistani army personnel have been killed in
this fight than U.S. forces in Afghanistan by the Taliban.

Are you confused yet? Let me make things more complicated: Afghanistan is really a sideshow here.
Pakistan is the primary U.S. national-security concern in the region. It has a nuclear stockpile, and lives
under the threat of an Islamist coup by some of the very elements in its military who created and support
the Taliban. The one thing the U.S. can do to reduce that threat is to convince the Pakistanis that we will
be a reliable friend for the long haul — providing aid, mediating the tensions with India; that we will help
stabilize Afghanistan; that we will support the primacy of Pakistan's civilian government. Over time, this
could reduce the extremist influence in the military and Pakistan's use of Islamist guerrillas against its
neighbors. If it does not — well, the alternative is unthinkable.

Private Spies: Rubicon Make 24 Look Sunny

By JAMES PONIEWOZIK Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Illustration by Francisco Caceres for TIME; Rubicon: Craig Blankenhorn / AMC

The most implausible thing in the series 24 was, in retrospect, not the effectiveness of Jack Bauer's
torture methods or the improbably fast travel through L.A. traffic or the lack of real-time bathroom breaks.
It was the competence.

Time after time, over eight seasons, staffers at Bauer's Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) would go to a wall of
computers, plug in a cell-phone card, check some databases and — bingo! — pull up a picture and GPS
location of a terrorist plotting an attack. In real life, the U.S. government proved unable to stop a guy
trying to blow up his underwear, much less the 9/11 plotters.

Last spring, 24 went off the air. The illusion of omniscient intelligence ended years before that. A
two-year Washington Post investigation into the post-9/11 security complex revealed a sprawling "Top
Secret America," as the paper called it, in which spy operations churned out too many reports to process
and security was farmed out to hundreds of thousands of private contractors with little accountability.

This world of intel for hire is the setting for Rubicon (AMC, Sundays), a dark, wonkish conspiracy thriller
set at a private intelligence firm. And it makes 24 look like a sunny tale of optimism.

Rubicon is an entertainment first, a 1970s-style paranoid corruption story. Will Travers (James Badge
Dale) is a young analyst with the American Policy Institute (API), a private think tank that analyzes raw
intelligence for U.S. agencies. He stumbles on evidence — hidden in newspaper-crossword clues — of a
conspiracy with its tentacles in the API and God knows where else.

No one is going to mistake Will for Jack Bauer: he's a book-lugging data nerd in a V-neck sweater who
looks as if he'd have a hard time breaking a pencil, let alone a neck. And the gloomy, academic API
offices have none of the high-tech flourishes of CTU's headquarters.

But executive producer Henry Bromell, whose father was an intelligence operative and who interviewed
ex-spies to prep for the show, says that's the point. There are no magic computers, just too much
information in too many different hands with too little coordination.

"Since 9/11," Bromell says, "you're not just looking for a suspicious lump in the Iranian desert. You have
to be looking bloody everywhere." There are millions of eyes and ears — wiretaps, satellites, data mining
— but no single brain to synthesize all those nerve endings. When API head Truxton Spangler (Michael
Cristofer) travels to Washington with Will to drum up business, he tells Will their job is to remind the
national intelligence bigwigs that "the information they gather is useless unless they have us to make
sense of it."

In 24, there were moles and bad apples, but the system, ultimately, was intended to keep us safe.
Rubicon suggests that the intelligence complex itself is a danger: a shadow government that may be
rotting from within because of its reach, power and prerogatives.

In 24 at least, the implied trade-off for Jack Bauer's entertaining civil rights violations was security. In
Rubicon, it's not clear we're getting anything except the illusion of certainty. In one episode, a group of
API analysts are assigned to determine whether the military should blow up a possible terrorist safe
house — in an apartment block full of families. The attack could take out a mastermind who has
murdered scores of innocent children. Or it might not. The team of brilliant minds crunch and debate the
data, but in the end their ruling, they admit, is a "WAG": a wild-ass guess.

It's a somber picture of national security, and it won't appeal to everyone. Since 24, most new spy shows
have moved in the opposite direction, toward retro escapism. NBC's upcoming Undercovers is a light
romantic drama about a married spy team, à la Hart to Hart. Chuck, Burn Notice and Covert Affairs offer
espionage with comedy and kung fu, high tech and short skirts. Their touchstones are less the murky
networks of Top Secret America than the recent Keystone Kremlin bust of suburban Russian agents —
comical diversions that are as much Maxwell Smart as James Bond. Rubicon, on the other hand, looks
not to the swinging '60s or the Reagan years but to the mistrustful Watergate era and '70s thrillers like
The Parallax View. Though set in the present, it's almost a period piece, like AMC's Mad Men, likewise
substituting realism for nostalgia.

Rubicon's argument is not that our international enemies are fake. Bromell hints that Rubicon's
conspirators most likely have very good reasons for their actions. But the show — like so much real-world
reporting — suggests that in the name of security we've created a monster: powerful, unrestrained and
with far too many heads for even Jack Bauer to knock together.

Aw, Nuts!
By JOEL STEIN Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Illustration by John Ueland for TIME

Years ago, sitting on an ear doctor's examining table after causing my inner ear to bleed for days by
puncturing it with a Q-tip, I looked up to see a framed copy of a column about how stupid it is to put Q-tips
in your ears. It was a column I had written. When you publish hundreds of obnoxiously self-righteous
proclamations, some of them are going to cause you embarrassment. Which doesn't seem all that big of
a deal when you also have blood leaking from your ears.

At the beginning of last year, I wrote a column that questioned whether the increase in food allergies
among children was a matter of overreporting. It began with this carefully calibrated thought: "Your kid
doesn't have an allergy to nuts. Your kid has a parent who needs to feel special." After that, I got a little
harsh.

The column was not the first thing that came to mind after my 1-year-old son Laszlo started sneezing,
then breaking out in hives, then rubbing his eyes, then crying through welded-shut eyes, then screaming
and, finally, vomiting copiously at the entrance of the Childrens Hospital emergency room an hour after
eating his first batch of blended mixed nuts. But it was the second thing. Because after my nut-allergy
column came out, many parents wrote me furious e-mails saying they hoped that one day I would have a
child with life-threatening allergies. I realized I was learning a terrible but valuable lesson: it's really mean
to wish food allergies on a kid who isn't even born yet.

After some Benadryl, instruction on using an EpiPen and shock at the fact that the Childrens Hospital
contains a McDonald's, we went home. Sitting up at 3 in the morning, I found myself totally believing in
the nut-allergy epidemic. I was ready to ban nuts from schools, parks and all the blue states, since I was
unlikely to go to any of the other ones. I started to think that Jenny McCarthy was right about all kinds of
things, even acting choices. Also, oddly, I really wanted some nuts.

My lovely wife Cassandra luckily did not blame Laszlo's reaction on karma for my column. Instead, she
blamed the fact that if one parent has an allergy, like my hay fever, his child has up to a 50% greater
chance than average of having any allergy. Specifically, she said, "I'm sorry I married a Jew." I cannot tell
you how relieved I was.

Six weeks later, a blood test showed that Laszlo was very allergic to pistachios and cashews, pretty
allergic to a bunch of other nuts and seeds and totally pissed at his father. At the end of our appointment
with allergist and immunologist Dr. Rita Kachru, I told her about my column. And then hid behind my
1-year-old.

"I don't take offense," she said. "There is a lot of craziness going on. There's a lot of 'science' that's not
really science, where doctors tell them to hold the food in their hand and see how they feel."

She said no one knew why food allergies were growing so quickly but that one factor might be improved
hygiene. "Our immune system has developed over time to be protective. In third-world countries where
they don't have a lot of allergies, they're fighting viruses and parasites, and their whole immunity is built
up. But the mortality rate is very high. People on farms who are exposed to poop tend to not be allergic. If
they can survive all that, they'll have a stronger immune system." I'm pretty sure Dr. Kachru was saying
that, at some point in Laszlo's infancy, I should have pooped on him.

Unfortunately, having only friends who don't farm meant I knew a lot of people with kids who had nut
allergies, all of whom were still mad at me. So I started by telling my friend Heidi Miller, who writes the
blog Living Well with Food Allergies. She said, graciously, that she was deeply upset to find out about
Laszlo's reaction. "Laszlo is not the one I wanted to get a food allergy," she said. She added that she was
hurt by my column, because, after all her fear and suffering with her daughter--who is five times more
allergic to pistachios than Laszlo is--she thought I made it sound as if Heidi had been faking it for
attention. Largely because that's exactly what I wrote. "I blog about food allergies because I can. Not
because I crave the attention," she told me. "That is what my baking blog is for."

We're not banning nuts from our house, and we aren't going to send Laszlo to a nut-free school. But
knowing my son can never be a superspy because the enemy can so easily poison him with candy bars
made in facilities that may produce other candy bars with nuts, I realize that the more I understand of
other people's difficulties, the less funny they are. I only hope that Laszlo doesn't grow up to be a
good-looking jock. I can't give up making fun of those guys.
NATION

Good News for Obama in Ohio?

By MICHAEL CROWLEY Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010

Ohio Governor Ted Stickland meets with

supporters at a home in Massillon, Ohio.

Danny Wilcox Frazier / Redux for TIME

On a sweltering mid-June afternoon, Barack Obama stood at a construction site in Columbus to tout the
10,000th project funded by his economic-stimulus plan. But to Ohio Democrats, another number was just
as important: it was Obama's seventh visit to their state.

It's not the scenery that keeps the President coming back. It's the stakes — for both Obama and his party
— in two closely watched races this fall. Ohio's Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, and his lieutenant
governor, Lee Fisher, who is the party's U.S. Senate nominee, are facing what ought to be brutal election
fights. The Strickland-Fisher administration has presided over the loss of 400,000 jobs here since 2007.
Ohio's unemployment, at 10.5%, runs higher than the national average. And Fisher has the dubious
honor of being the state's economic-development director, which these days is like being BP's top
environmental executive.

Yet early polls show that both Strickland and Fisher actually stand a chance in November. How is that
possible? However frustrated with Democrats voters are right now, they're still dubious about a GOP
brand that's skunky from the Bush years. A July TIME poll shows that likely voters nationwide are no
more inclined to vote Republican than Democratic in November's congressional elections.

And in Ohio, even wounded Democrats fare all right when matched up with individual Republicans
lugging politically toxic baggage. "This cannot be an up or down vote on Barack Obama or the Democrats
or the economy," says a Democratic Party strategist. "It has to be a contrast."

That said, Ohio's governor doesn't have much to brag about. Strickland took office in 2007 promising to
expand Ohio's economy, but it's been mostly downhill since. Still, Strickland, 68, hails signs of recovery:
Ohio added almost 50,000 jobs this spring. "There is a difference now. There is less doom and gloom,
and there is more hope," he explains. But the governor admits the obvious: "It's going to take some time."

And that's not a luxury Strickland can afford now that he's facing a seasoned opponent: John Kasich, a
former Republican Congressman known in the 1990s as one of Washington's toughest budget hawks.
Fiscal discipline is just the theme Kasich hopes will define the race. The Republican Governors
Association set the tone in June with a TV ad featuring a pair of hardened construction workers who call
Strickland "a bad governor" who "blames everyone else" for Ohio's huge job losses.

The ad doesn't mention Kasich, so Strickland tries to do so at every turn. "The question is not Ted
Strickland against the economy," the governor says. "It's Ted Strickland against John Kasich." There's a
reason for that. The son of a steelworker from an Appalachian Ohio town, Strickland comes from origins
that are wholesome (Roy Rogers grew up nearby) and humble (his family briefly slept in a chicken coop
after a fire). He's also a former Methodist minister and an ex-Congressman with a culturally moderate
record that appeals beyond cities such as Cleveland and Columbus. (He's been endorsed by the
National Rifle Association.) "I like to talk about the difference between Ohio values and Wall Street
values," Strickland says.

That's a not-so-veiled attack on Kasich. During the 18 years he represented the Columbus area in
Washington, Kasich, 58, cut a profile as a financially conservative working-class hero. He has his own
up-by-his-bootstraps story, but soon after leaving Congress, Kasich took a job as a managing director at
the ill-fated banking giant Lehman Brothers. And Democrats are making sure voters see him as a Wall
Street Republican. "John Kasich got rich while Ohio seniors lost millions," declares an ad funded by a
liberal independent group. Strickland has also hit Kasich for arranging meetings between Ohio pension
officials and Lehman staffers. (Those meetings did not yield investments, but state public-pension funds
did lose hundreds of millions through Lehman.)

Kasich insists the attacks are both unfair and bound to fail. "I was one managing director in a company of
30,000 employees, and I ran a two-man office in Ohio," he protests. "Frankly, what we need more of are
politicians who understand how to create jobs." But Kasich was concerned enough to air a response ad
of his own: "I didn't run Lehman Brothers," he tells the camera.

It's a similar story in the race to succeed the retiring Ohio Republican Senator George Voinovich. In Lee
Fisher, 58, Democrats have a candidate who is no one's idea of a star — a career politician who lacks
Strickland's folksy touch. Nor has Fisher proved much of a fundraiser in this race. His Republican
opponent, former GOP Congressman and Bush Administration official Rob Portman, had nearly $9
million on hand (to Fisher's $1.3 million) as of June 30. Some Washington Democrats call Fisher the kind
of candidate they would typically consign to the can't-win bin.

But for the moment, they're still giving Fisher short odds. One reason is that Portman, like Kasich,
presents a wide target for Democratic counterattacks on economic themes. True, Portman, 54, is one of
Ohio's most respected political figures, known for an even temperament and a sharp mind. But after 12
years of representing Cincinnati in the House, he served as George W. Bush's Trade Representative and
then Budget Director. In Fisher's eager telling, then, Portman is a Washington insider and Bush sidekick
who promoted Bush's free-trade policies — particularly those involving U.S. steel trade with China — that
killed Ohio jobs. Portman calls those charges off base, pointing to cases he filed with the World Trade
Organization against Chinese trade practices. Promoting his jobs plan, he accuses Fisher of harping on
the past to divert attention from the state's dismal economy. "The message is pretty clear: if you're happy
with the status quo, then I'm probably not your candidate," Portman says. His lopsided financial
advantage may yet swamp Fisher (though union spending will narrow that gap). But for now, Democrats
are thankful for such an easy chance to start a conversation about Bush's economic legacy.
Economics, strictly speaking, isn't the only issue here. Democrats pilloried Kasich for his indifferent
attitude toward whether NBA megastar LeBron James would leave the Cleveland Cavaliers. ("We've lost
400,000 jobs out here, and the last guy I worry about is LeBron James," Kasich huffed in a radio interview.
Not that Strickland's cameo in a Web video urging LeBron to stay managed to keep him from going to
Miami.) After a June rally in Lima, meanwhile, a local TV reporter confronted Strickland with another
pressing question: What was he doing about the state's bedbug epidemic? (Yes, bedbugs.)

But even if the issues can get picayune, these races have broad political importance. Outside groups are
expected to spend millions to sway voters, to say nothing of the cash both parties are committing. Partly,
that is a warm-up as they build their ground games for the next presidential election. Ohio, after all,
remains the grand prize of presidential politics. Obama can lose every red state he turned blue in 2008
and still win re-election as long as he holds on to the Buckeye State. And that will be far easier with a
Democrat in the governor's mansion. "It's more likely that Obama will win Ohio if I'm re-elected,"
Strickland says.

That's why the President has already scheduled another trip to Ohio, in mid-August. However much
Democrats say the races here are about the past, they are also about Obama's future.

Battleground Ohio

Tough Fight
Having presided over a cratering economy, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland faces a difficult path to
reelection, a dilemma that mirrors the troubles faced by the Democratic Party as a whole. Here, he meets
with supporters at a home in Massillon, Ohio.
Up
To his advantage, Strickland can claim an inspiring personal story. The son of a steelworker, he grew up
poor. Once, after a fire ruined their home, his family slept briefly in a chicken coop.

Pros
Strickland later worked as a guidance counselor at a children's home and taught psychology before
entering politics. "Strickland comes across as a likeable, caring guy," says Herb Asher, a political science
professor at Ohio State University.
Cons
Still, Strickland has little to brag about. The state has lost 400,000 jobs since 2008.

Challenger
Former Republican Congressman John Kasich is vying for Strickland's position. He is introduced here at
a campaign stop by his running mate, Ohio Auditor of State, Mary Taylor.
Baggage
Though Strickland's job loss numbers are so bad, early surveys show him running even with his
opponent. A June Pew poll found that most voters still believe Democrats are "more concerned about
people like me," and "can bring about the changes the country needs." It doesn't help that Kasich used to
be a managing director at Lehmann Brothers, the former Wall Street banking giant whose 2008 meltdown
was a key domino that set off the world financial crisis.

Rebuttal
"I was one managing director," Kasich protests, "in a company of 30,000 employees and I ran a two man
office in Ohio." Pressed on the topic, Kasich quickly returns to his core issue: "Frankly, what we need
more of from politicians are people who understand how to create jobs." These Kasich supporters
outside of Cleveland seem to agree.

Hard Times
The stakes in the election could not be higher. Cleveland, once a manufacturing powerhouse, has lost
half its population since 1960. Thousands of houses have foreclosed; the city's poverty rate is amongst
the highest in the country.
Federal
The governorship isn't the only seat up in the air. Former Republican Representative and George W.
Bush trade policy architect Rob Portman (center right) is trying to get the spot currently held by retiring
Senator George Voinovich (far right). His Democratic opponent is the current lieutenant governor, Lee
Fisher.

Consideration
Guests attend a Republican event at which Portman spoke. Although he is known for his intellect and
even temperament, Portman's opponent presents him as a Washington insider who helped Bush
implement economy-wrecking policies, like free trade measures (NAFTA, for example) and "fast-track"
authority for international trade agreements, both anathema to union workers.

Implications
The Obama White House is paying close attention. Not only would a Congressional shake-up affect
Obama's legislative efforts over the next two years, but a loss for Strickland would also make an Obama
reelection in 2012 much more difficult.

The Spill's Psychic Toll

By Bryan Walsh / New Orleans Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

The Landry Family

Matt Slaby for TIME

At J.F. Gauthier Elementary School, east of New Orleans, the kids of St. Bernard Parish are doing what
kids are supposed to do in the summer: playing. Some of the older boys are shooting hoops; others are
throwing a football to — well, at — one another. Younger children are getting a faceful of finger paint.
Nearly all of them are buzzing with energy; an attempt by some of the adults on hand to gather them for
lunch is futile.

But look closer. The friendly woman serving potato salad at the lunch line is a counselor, here to talk with
anyone who needs it. The finger painting? It's art therapy, to help the kids get in touch with their feelings
about the BP oil spill, now more than 100 days old. This impromptu summer camp has been arranged by
the St. Bernard Project, a community group that has begun augmenting its main work, rebuilding houses
for Hurricane Katrina victims, with classes in stress relief.

"The kids look all right," says Parker Sternbergh, a social worker at Tulane University, as she scans the
children at play. "But sit down with them and you can feel the stress they're all under."

These children may be the youngest victims of the disaster, but they're hardly the only ones. You can
read the stress in the tired, worried faces of their mothers too. They fear for their husbands in the fishing
industry, who face a bitter choice between unemployment and taking a cleanup job with BP, the company
they hate. They fear for their kids, who have been living with the spill since spring and will continue to do
so for months and years to come. "There's so much tension in the family now, and the wives have to deal
with all of it," says Yvonne Landry, a St. Bernard native who helped organize the camp. "All you can do is
take it day by day — but you can't recover from what hasn't ended yet."

It was cheering to see BP finally record some success over the past few weeks in fixing its blown well, but
for Gulf residents, that seeming ending is little more than a continuation of the beginning. And just as the
worst environmental impact of the spill could be occurring out of sight, in the depths of the Gulf, the most
lasting potential social damage is invisible too: anxiety and anger that erode community ties and the very
psyches of the residents.

Already there's a spike in demand for counseling, as well as increased reports of stress, excessive
drinking and domestic violence. For a region that was still recovering from the serial traumas of
hurricanes Katrina, Ike and Gustav, the spill couldn't have happened at a worse time. "These people are
in crisis, and it's not coming across in the images we see on TV," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of
the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and the co-founder of the
Children's Health Fund. "This is ground zero for psychological catastrophe."

Disaster Déjà Vu
Though the psychological trauma of the Gulf spill is just starting to become apparent, disaster experts
know what to expect, because they've seen it before. The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill inflicted a psychic
wound on the residents of Alaska's Prince William Sound that still aches more than 20 years after the
tanker ran aground.

Like southern Louisiana, Alaskan towns were full of fishermen whose way of life was threatened.
Residents saw coastal waters fouled by millions of barrels of oil, and they raged against an incompetent
response from government and industry. Previously close-knit communities were divided — those who
took well-paying cleanup jobs with Exxon were decried as "spillionaires" profiting from the catastrophe.
And the wounds did not heal with time: a recent study found that stress levels among Alaskans involved
in the oil-spill litigation were as high in 2009 as they were in 1991. "There are still significant levels of
depression and posttraumatic stress," says J. Steven Picou, a sociologist at the University of South
Alabama. "It was a constantly renewing disaster."

By its nature, a man-made disaster like an oil spill differs from a natural one like an earthquake — and it
can cause far more psychological havoc. The difference, in a word, is blame: while no one can really be
at fault for a natural disaster, victims of man-made catastrophes have plenty of places to point fingers.
That creates anger, and as it builds and builds, it leads to what Picou calls "corrosive communities."

Further, in natural disasters, the suffering is more egalitarian, with everyone affected more or less equally.
That can help a community rebuild, as happened to an extent after Katrina — even if the fecklessness of
the federal response complicated things. But that's not the case after an oil spill; fishermen see their way
of life destroyed, while other residents are barely affected. A sense of injustice stokes anger, which, says
Dr. Elmore Rigamer, the medical director of Catholic Charities in New Orleans, "is a killer emotion. It's
like going around with a closed fist full of crunched glass."

That sharp, chronic pain can quickly turn into depression — something that's already occurring in Gulf
Coast fishing communities. Darla Mooks, a 47-year-old shrimp-boat captain from Port Sulphur in
southeastern Louisiana, says she's barely sleeping these days. With no shrimp to catch, she has only
one other potential source of income: a cleanup job with BP — but Mooks hasn't been able to get one
because, she charges, of gender discrimination. "I don't know how I'm going to get through it," she says
while smoking a cigarette outside a town-hall meeting in Port Sulphur. "We have to, but I don't know
how."

The trauma would be bad enough if, as with the Exxon Valdez, there had been a single spill. But the BP
disaster has gone on for weeks, each day — until recently — bringing a fresh supply of oil. The
underwater-camera feeds were an around-the-clock reminder of that. For Gulf residents, it was as if
they'd been mugged and then forced to watch a video of the crime on an endless loop.

After just a little bit of this, trust erodes: Who in the Gulf believes BP when it says it will make things right
or the government when it promises that chemical dispersants aren't toxic? Finally — inevitably — comes
the fracturing of the community. Travel around southern Louisiana and you'll hear complaints that BP isn't
handing out cleanup jobs fairly, that some captains are getting all the work and others are getting nothing.
"We're a community," said Acy Cooper, vice president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, at a hearing
in New Orleans for the national oil-spill commission. "This isn't fair, and it has to change."
How to Heal

Complicating things further, most Gulf communities lack the mental-health resources to help spill victims
recover from emotional damage. The folks at J.F. Gauthier Elementary School may be doing wonderful
work, but it's hardly typical of the region. Plaquemines Parish, in southeastern Louisiana — home to
hard-hit fishing ports like Venice — has just a handful of available counselors, and while local
governments have asked BP for money to fund mental-health programs, very little has arrived. (The
company, characteristically dilatory, says it is considering what to fund.) Gulf states like Louisiana were
already in the red before the spill; they don't have the funds to pay for the mental aftercare that will be
needed. "Nongovernmental organizations and others are trying to provide services," says Dr. Ben
Springgate, executive director of community health at the Tulane School of Medicine. "But there's simply
no financial support so far."

In the meantime, psychologists and other experts are working to determine where help should go when it
becomes available, launching studies to track the social impact of the spill and gauge the mental-health
needs of communities. "We're trying to utilize all the information we can," says Dr. Howard Osofsky, head
of the psychiatry department at Louisiana State University. "We have to do whatever possible to help
these families."

Until that help arrives, Gulf residents have to do what they've done before: take care of their own needs
— and remember that they're capable of doing so. One of the most damaging effects of the spill is that it
takes away victims' sense of power. They feel helpless before BP and the government — and even the oil
itself, with its habit of disappearing and reappearing without warning. "That eats away at people," says
John Trumbaturi, a social worker in Plaquemines. "We want to help them improve their own coping
skills."

That's the thinking behind the work of the St. Bernard Project and a similar community mental-health
center opening in Plaquemines. Yvonne Landry knows that her friends and family in the region's tight-knit
fishing community are hurting, but that doesn't mean they want to open up. "The men will never talk to a
counselor," she says. But if they're leery of professionals, local men might be willing to open up to one
another in peer counseling sessions like the kind she's been involved with in the St. Bernard Project. "We
can talk to each other, just sit down and breathe," Landry says.

Indeed, if anyone can bounce back from the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, it is the people
of this region, who've survived hurricanes, corrupt state governments, the once hopeless New Orleans
Saints and more. But surviving and eventually thriving may require residents to let go of their anger and
perhaps even put aside a quest for legal justice. One of the most surprising findings from Picou's Exxon
Valdez research was that the biggest predictor of sustained stress years after the event wasn't whether
you were a fisherman or lived close to the spill but whether you were involved in a lawsuit. Fighting Exxon
in court led to what Picou calls a "secondary disaster," as litigants were forced to relive the spill over and
over.

That's why traumatized Gulf residents might be smart to listen to Kenneth Feinberg, the gruff Boston
lawyer overseeing the $20 billion spill-compensation fund. "The people of Louisiana are pretty resilient,"
he said at a town-hall meeting in Port Sulphur recently. "Get a check, and move on as best you can." It's
not fair, but for the sake of their psyches — and their children's — it might be the best advice they are
going to get.
Crabbing in the Gulf after the BP Oil Disaster

Fishing Family
Raymond Landry Jr., his son, Raymond III, work the waters off of St. Bernard Parish. The spill occurred at
the height of the crabbing season.

On Board
Raymond III, 12, and his uncle, deckhand John Pohlmann, sort blue crab on the family's boat.
Daily Catch
The Landrys count and sort their haul after a morning at sea. The local fisherman worry about the
potential toxic effects of the spill on the sea life they rely on to make a living.

Crab Boil
The Landrys prepare corn and crab for dinner.
Feast
Raymond Jr.'s wife, Yvonne, her nephew Aaron Pohlmann, 14, Tommy Landry, 4, and Raymond III, eat
blue crab caught off the family's fishing boat.

Front Yard
The kids play in front of the Landry home.
Reading Material
After running to the corner store to pick up newsprint on which to eat the crab dinner, the Landry children
and their friends read through some of the coupon papers they found.

Comings and Goings

The Landrys share their home with a number of cats and dogs.
The Bayou
Though the Landrys and other fisherman continue to work the waters near St. Bernard Parish, it is
unclear what long-term effects the oil spill will have on their livelihood.

VIEWPOINT

The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been

Exaggerated?
By Michael Grunwald / Port Fourchon, La. Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010

President Obama has called the BP oil spill "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,"
and so has just about everyone else. Green groups are sounding alarms about the "catastrophe along
the Gulf Coast," while CBS, Fox and MSNBC are all slapping "Disaster in the Gulf" chyrons on their
spill-related news. Even BP fall guy Tony Hayward, after some early happy talk, admitted that the spill
was an "environmental catastrophe." The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a
rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it "the leak" — is anything less than an ecological calamity,
scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.

Well, Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers
who died on the rig, and it's no leak; it's the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It's also inflicting serious
economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling.
But so far — while it's important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable
for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe
environmental damage. "The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared," says
geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in
Louisiana.

An extensive network of oil booms surround marshland off the coast of Louisiana on July 18, 2010

Mario Tama / Getty Images

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in
Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we've heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response
teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh
restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region's fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the
restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the
destruction of Louisiana's disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but
so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was
already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year.

The disappearance of more than 2,000 sq. mi. of coastal Louisiana over the past century has been a true
national tragedy, ravaging a unique wilderness, threatening the bayou way of life and leaving
communities like New Orleans extremely vulnerable to hurricanes from the Gulf. And while much of the
erosion has been caused by the re-engineering of the Mississippi River — which no longer deposits
much sediment at the bottom of its Delta — quite a bit has been caused by the oil and gas industry, which
gouged 8,000 miles of canals and pipelines through coastal wetlands. But the spill isn't making that
problem much worse. Coastal scientist Paul Kemp, a former Louisiana State University professor who is
now a National Audubon Society vice president, compares the impact of the spill on the vanishing
marshes to "a sunburn on a cancer patient."

Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden, another former LSU prof, who's working for a spill-response contractor,
says, "There's just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster. I have no interest in making BP
look good — I think they lied about the size of the spill — but we're not seeing catastrophic impacts." Van
Heerden, like just about everyone else working in the Gulf these days, is being paid from BP's
spill-response funds. "There's a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it."

The scientists I spoke with cite four basic reasons the initial eco-fears seem overblown. First, the
Deepwater oil, unlike the black glop from the Valdez, is unusually light and degradable, which is why the
slick in the Gulf is dissolving surprisingly rapidly now that the gusher has been capped. Second, the Gulf
of Mexico, unlike Alaska's Prince William Sound, is very warm, which has helped bacteria break down
the oil. Third, heavy flows of Mississippi River water have helped keep the oil away from the coast, where
it can do much more damage. And finally, Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient. Van Heerden's
assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay, where new shoots of Spartina
grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I've
ever seen that were actually black. "It comes back fast, doesn't it?" van Heerden said.

Van Heerden is controversial in Louisiana, so I should mention that this isn't the first time he and Kemp
have helped convince me that the conventional wisdom about a big story was wrong. Shortly after
Hurricane Katrina, when the Army Corps of Engineers was still insisting that a gigantic surge had
overwhelmed its levees, they gave me a tour that debunked the prevailing narrative, demonstrating that
most of the breached flood walls in New Orleans showed no signs of overtopping. Eventually, the Corps
admitted that van Heerden and Kemp were right, that the surge in New Orleans was not so gigantic and
that engineering failures had indeed drowned the city. But there was still a lot of resentment down here of
van Heerden and his big mouth, especially after he wrote an I-told-you-so book about Katrina. He made
powerful enemies at LSU, lost his faculty job, and is now suing the university. Meanwhile, he's been
trashed locally as a BP shill ever since he downplayed the spill in a video on BP's website.

But van Heerden and Kemp were right about Katrina, and when it comes to BP, they're sticking to the
evidence gathered by the spill-response teams — which all include a state and federal representative as
well as a BP contractor. So far, the teams have collected nearly 3,000 dead birds, but fewer than half of
them were visibly oiled; some may have died from eating oil-contaminated food, but others may have
simply died naturally at a time when the Gulf happened to be crawling with carcass seekers. In any case,
the Valdez may have killed as many as 435,000 birds. The teams have found 492 dead sea turtles, which
is unfortunate, but only 17 were visibly oiled; otherwise, they have found only one other dead reptile in
the entire Gulf. "We can't speak to the long-term impacts, but Ivor is just saying what all of us are seeing,"
says Amy Holman, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) director for Alaska who
is working on van Heerden's assessment team in the Gulf.
The shoreline teams have documented more than 600 miles of oiled beaches and marshes, but the
beaches are fairly easy to clean, and the beleaguered marshes don't seem to be suffering much
additional damage. Oil has blackened the fringes of the marshes, but most of it stayed within a few feet of
the edge; waves from a recent tropical storm did carry more oil a few meters inland, but very little of it
infiltrated the wetland soils that determine the health of the marsh.

LSU coastal scientist Eugene Turner has dedicated much of his career to documenting how the oil
industry has ravaged Louisiana's coast with canals and pipelines, but he says the BP spill will be a
comparative blip and predicts that the oil will destroy fewer marshes than the airboats deployed to clean
up the oil. "We don't want to deny that there's some damage, but nothing like the damage we've seen for
years," he says.

It's true that oil spills can create long-term problems; in Alaska, for example, shorebirds that ate
Exxon-tainted mussels have had diminished reproductive success, and herring fisheries have yet to fully
recover. The potential long-term damage that underwater oil plumes and an unprecedented amount of
chemical dispersants that BP has spread in the area could have on the region's deep-water ecosystems
and food chains might not be known for years. Some scientists worry that the swarms of oil-eating
bacteria will lower dissolved oxygen levels; there has been early evidence of modest reductions, though
nothing approaching the dead zone that was already proliferating in the Gulf because of agricultural
runoff in the Mississippi River basin. "People always fear the worst in a spill, and this one was especially
scary because we didn't know when it would stop," says Michel, an environmental consultant who has
worked spills for NOAA for more than 30 years. "But the public always overestimates the danger — and
this time, those of us in the spill business did too."

It's easy to overstate the policy implications of this optimistic news. BP still needs to clean up its mess;
federal regulation of deep-water drilling still needs to be strengthened; we still need to use fewer fossil
fuels that warm the planet; we still don't need to use more corn ethanol (which is actually dirtier than
gasoline). The push to exploit the spill to gain a comprehensive energy and climate bill in Congress has
already stalled anyway — even though the planet still needs one.

The good news does suggest the folly of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's $350 million plan to build
sand berms and rock jetties to protect marshes and barrier islands from oil. Some of the berms are
already washing into the Gulf, and scientists agree that oil is the least of the problems facing Louisiana's
coast, which had already lost more than 2,000 sq. mi. of wetlands before the spill. "Imagine how much
real restoration we could do with all that money," van Heerden says.

Anti-oil politicians, anti-Obama politicians and underfunded green groups all have obvious incentives to
accentuate the negative in the Gulf. So do the media, because disasters drive ratings and sell magazines;
those oil-soaked pelicans you saw on TV (and the cover of TIME) were a lot more compelling than the
healthy ones I saw roosting on a protective boom in Bay Jimmy. Even Limbaugh, when he wasn't
downplaying the spill, outrageously hyped it as "Obama's Katrina." But honest scientists don't do that,
even when they work for Audubon.

"There are a lot of alarmists in the bird world," Kemp says. "People see oiled pelicans and they go crazy.
But this has been a disaster for people, not biota."
Funny or Die: How the Web Is Changing
Comedy
By RICHARD ZOGLIN Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Production chief Mike Farah, center, with

the Funny or Die staff

Jeff Minton for TIME

How many comedy writers does it take to make a Hollywood star laugh? A half-dozen staffers for the
comedy website Funny or Die are sitting around a conference table on a recent Tuesday afternoon taking
a stab at it. Their target: 23-year-old actress Camilla Belle (When a Stranger Calls), the latest Hollywood
celeb to make the unlikely pilgrimage to a modest suite of offices on Hollywood Boulevard to discuss
starring in a Funny or Die video.

The writers come armed with ideas pegged to Belle's résumé along with a few pet projects in need of a
star. Belle appeared in the prehistoric adventure film 10,000 B.C. and had a role in The Lost World:
Jurassic Park. How about a sketch in which she insists she won't do another film unless it has prehistoric
animals in it? She's into dance, and her mother is Brazilian — maybe a parody of Dirty Dancing using
Brazilian fight dancing? The pitches come as fast as Belle can utter her polite, encouraging responses
("That's funny" ... "uh-huh" ... "yeah, yeah, yeah"). A celebrity photo shoot in which the pretentious
photographer wields a cheesy cell-phone camera? A commercial for a line of anatomically revealing
women's jeans? A fake TV promo for a girls' classic like Little Women or Anne of Green Gables done up
in the style of The Hills?

A dozen or so ideas later, Belle is out the door, and Mike Farah, 31, Funny or Die's president of
production, has retreated to his office, a couple of writers tagging along, to check on some other projects
in the works. He jabs at the speakerphone and puts in a quick call to Charlize Theron's manager to see if
they can get her for a cameo in a World Cup bit they're shooting in South Africa. "She loves you guys,"
says the voice on the phone. "Can you just send me an e-mail?" A writer tells Farah there's a chance
they can hook up with NBA star Dwyane Wade in Chicago for a piece they want to shoot at a
sporting-goods store. Then an update on the search for a female star to make a cameo in their upcoming
Glee takeoff: Meryl Streep said no.

When they launched Funny or Die, or FOD, three years ago, comedy star Will Ferrell and his producing
partner Adam McKay envisioned a clearinghouse for amateur comedy videos and a place "for our friends
to play." But who knew they had so many friends? Since the website's first hit video, "The Landlord" — a
two-minute masterpiece in which Ferrell is a deadbeat tenant arguing with his bullying, profane landlord,
played by McKay's 2-year-old daughter — FOD has become a celebrity magnet to rival Vanity Fair's
Oscar party. Justin Bieber popped by to shoot a batch of videos casting him as an out-of-control teen star.
(He bought the website and renamed it Bieber or Die.) Oscar winner Marion Cotillard starred in a video
wearing a pair of fake breasts on her forehead. Paris Hilton used Funny or Die to respond to John
McCain's jabs at her during the 2008 presidential campaign, Heidi Montag did one poking fun at her
plastic surgery, and seven current and former Saturday Night Live impressionists got together for a
"presidential reunion" sketch directed by Ron Howard to urge support for Obama's financial-reform bill.

Now agents and managers are jamming the Funny or Die phone lines, offering up their clients for a
chance to be part of the hottest comedy site on the Web. The pay isn't much — nothing, to be precise —
but there are other rewards: the publicity boost when a video goes viral and the chance to show you can
make fun of yourself and still be a star while doing it. "This is where people come between paying jobs,"
says Farah. "It shows the power that this piece of the whole entertainment pie now commands. It's
become a real part of these people's careers, another way to position themselves."

Funny or Die launched in February 2007, after Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's top venture-capital
firms, approached Ferrell and McKay about starting a website devoted exclusively to comedy. At first it
was filled mostly with amateur videos. (Users can vote each one up or down — "funny" or "die" — with
the top picks featured on the home page.) But after "The Landlord" created a sensation (it has been
viewed more than 72 million times), the operation got professional fast. Andrew Steele, a 13-year veteran
of SNL, was brought in to oversee the creative shop, and Dick Glover, a former exec for ABC and
NASCAR, took over as business chief. Today the site has a staff of nearly 50, produces about 20 original
videos a month (in addition to some 100 a day uploaded by users) and draws an average of 7 million
unique visitors a month. With the help of a growing roster of advertisers — not to mention a bare-bones,
nonunion staff and free acting talent — the site is actually turning a profit: a typical FOD video costs about
$2,000 to make and generates at least $3,000 in ad revenue, much more if the video is a hit. Inevitably,
the brand extensions have begun: a weekly series on HBO, a pilot for Comedy Central, a live comedy
tour, a movie in development and talk of producing low-budget films for download. "We think there's an
opportunity to redefine what comedy is, how it's made and distributed," says Glover.

Clubhouse for Comedy

At the very least, Funny or Die has managed to harness the explosion of comedy on the Web, give it a
professional coat of paint and bring it — for better or worse — some Hollywood cachet. Ferrell and
McKay, who spend most of their time making movies together, are largely absentee owners, though
McKay checks in daily and Ferrell stars in the occasional video. But in building a comedy clubhouse that
harks back to such collaborative satire as Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows or the early days of
Saturday Night Live, they've created the go-to comedy site for Generation LOL.

FOD's success is also emblematic of a sea change in comedy. Stand-ups still whine about bad dates;
sitcom plots keep getting rehashed; sketch comedy continues to limp along on Saturday Night Live. But
the real cutting edge has shifted to a new form: short Web videos. Many of these are simply home-movie
inanities — cats acting like people or toddlers dancing to Beyoncé. But the Web has also spawned a new
generation of comedy creators and an array of distinctive styles, ranging from SNL-type skits like "The
Landlord" to parodies, mashups and assorted other goofs on familiar media formats — TV promos, movie
trailers, music videos, iPhone commercials, viral videos. They show up on YouTube (and on sites like
Barely Political, College Humor and the Onion), circulate via blogs and social-networking sites, spawn
fresh variations. In the Jack Benny era, these memes — the Web-favored term — would have been
known as running gags. Now everybody gets to run with them.

There was, for example, the slew of "Hitler Reacts" videos: re-edits of the climactic scene from the
German movie Downfall in which the Führer goes ballistic after his generals give him bad news, with the
subtitles rewritten to reflect whatever outrage is dominating the news at the moment — from Hillary
Clinton's imploding presidential campaign to NBC's dumping of Conan O'Brien from The Tonight Show.
So many Web smarties chimed in with their own versions that the film's distributor, Constantin Films,
finally demanded that they be taken down because of copyright infringement.

The beauty of the Hitler videos was that they could have been done nowhere but on the Web. Other
popular comic themes are less unique to the medium but have reached their apotheosis there: the
remixed TV promo, for example (Lost re-edited so it looks like Friends or Baywatch, or Seinfeld redone
as a horror film), or the superliteral music video (old MTV hits with new lyrics that describe in ridiculously
literal terms the outlandish imagery onscreen). The Internet itself has provided some of the ripest targets.
Mel Gibson's recent telephone outbursts were combined, inevitably, with Christian Bale's audiotaped
tirade on the set of Terminator: Salvation. A loopy video of a dude raving ecstatically over a rainbow in
Yosemite National Park spawned a mashup with the Muppets song "Rainbow Connection."

This is comedy perfectly suited to the Internet: short, democratic, endlessly self-referential — a running
satiric commentary on the media stew we're all swimming in. "What I love about this job is that the
Internet is everything," says Funny or Die writer-actor Seth Morris, who, like several other FOD staffers,
came from the Upright Citizens Brigade improv troupe. "It's highs and lows. Jon Gosselin,
scum-of-the-earth reality-show people, Oscar winner Ron Howard. I feel like I'm closer to the times I'm
living in."

Fending Off Stars

Funny or Die has been smart about generating buzz, especially by combining celebrities with political
advocacy. (Jack Black, John C. Reilly and Neil Patrick Harris appeared in an elaborate 2008
high-school-musical spoof to protest Proposition 8, California's gay-marriage ban.) But the influx of
Hollywood star power has its downside as well: providing made-to-order videos for celebrities shopping
for buzz is hardly in the renegade spirit of the Web. "If someone has a bad idea, we'll probably figure out
a way not to do it," says Steele. "On the other hand, we don't like to reject people when they're putting
themselves, and their own minds and creativity, out for free."

Still, the site manages to subvert the Hollywood ethos even as it buys into it — as in Zach Galifianakis'
portrayal of a surly, inept cable-talk-show host in his brilliant "Between Two Ferns" or Brett Gelman's
superunctuous star encounters in his "Mr. Celebrity" series. And even as the productions grow more
elaborate (like "Brostitute," a slick, funny docu-parody in which Tim Roth stars as a pimp for guys cruising
for male buddies), FOD hasn't lost its scrappy, spontaneous spirit. When an aspiring Alabama agriculture
commissioner named Dale Peterson caused an Internet sensation with an over-the-top campaign ad,
writer-director Jake Szymanski found a horse, cast himself in the lead role and turned around a parody in
a day.
"Sometimes it's better to do a video at 80% right now than 100% if it takes five days," says Szymanski, a
Northwestern University grad who started uploading videos to Funny or Die when it launched, then got
hired as the site's third full-time employee. "It's that vibe of picking up on the first funny joke you heard
from your friend. You're grabbing on to the collective unconscious." And sometimes, of course, getting
grabbed by it. "The Internet is the modern-day freak show," says Szymanski. "Your funny, smart,
three-minute video can always get beaten by a cat with a printer." Yeah, but mash it up with Mel Gibson
and you've got a comedy classic.

Behind the Scenes at Funny or Die

Laugh Factory
Launched in February 2007 by comedy star Will Ferrell and his producing partner Adam McKay, Funny or
Die has quickly evolved from a site largely populated by amateur videos to a small scale production outfit
with a staff of nearly 50, producing about 20 videos a month. The site has featured videos with such stars
as Justin Bieber, Marion Cotillard and Tim Roth.
Editing Bay
Typical Funny or Die pieces are produced on a shoestring. The stars get paid nothing and production
costs come in at around $2,000 per video.

Pitch
Actress Parker Posey comes to the office to exchange ideas.
Founders
Though Ferrell stars in the site's first hit video, "The Landlord" — a two-minute masterpiece in which he
plays a deadbeat tenant arguing with his bullying, profane landlord, played by Adam McKay's 2-year-old
daughter — he and McKay are largely absentee owners these days.

Jewel
On the day that photographer Jeff Minton visited the offices, singer Jewel was getting made up for a
video in which she would pretend to be a homely businesswoman at a karaoke bar who chooses to sing
— what else? — one of her own songs.

A New You
Stars like to appear in Funny or Die videos because of the publicity boost, but also because it gives them
a chance to show they can make fun of themselves and still be a star while doing it.

Writers' Room
The success of the site has led to projects that will take FOD out of the realm of the Internet. There are
offers for a weekly series on HBO, a pilot for Comedy Central, a live comedy tour, a movie in
development and more. "Funny or Die is all about that vibe of picking up on the first funny joke you heard
from your friend," says staff writer Jake Szymanski. "You're grabbing on to the collective unconscious,
(but) the Internet is the modern-day freak show. Your funny, smart, three-minute video can always get
beaten by a cat with a printer."
WORLD

WikiLeaks's Julian Assange: The Wizard

From Oz
By EBEN HARRELL Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Dead drop WikiLeaks founder Assange claims to have invented a system that solves the problem of
press censorship

Kate Peters for TIME

Julian Assange is about to sit down to explain how his website, WikiLeaks.org, came to publish more
than 90,000 secret reports from the war in Afghanistan when he starts to get restless. His chair is made
of soft leather, and Assange doesn't like it. "There's no hard surface to slam my fist on and say, 'F______
bastards! I will crash them all!'" he says, smiling.

It's hard to tell whether Assange is joking. A tall, wan, white-haired former computer hacker, Assange is
so soft-spoken, it is sometimes difficult to hear him. But just a day earlier, his website released a log of
documents that exposed in unprecedented detail the difficulties NATO troops face in Afghanistan. (See
TIME's top 10 leaks.)

Nothing gives Assange more pleasure than embarrassing the powerful: he founded WikiLeaks in 2006 as
a sort of dead drop for whistle-blowers to anonymously post confidential material. And with six years of
the Afghanistan war on display — including many reports of civilian casualties and suspicions that
Pakistan's intelligence service and the Taliban are in collusion — Assange has his biggest scoop to date.
"I am a journalist, a publisher and an inventor," Assange says. "I have tried to invent a system that solves
the problem of censorship of the press and the censorship of the whistle-blower across the whole world."

That's a big claim, but like they say, it ain't bragging if you can do it. In the past few years, WikiLeaks,
which consists of six full-time volunteers and about 1,000 part-time encryption experts (the site's main
server is in Sweden, though the operation is global), has published a manual from Camp Delta at
Guantánamo Bay, an internal report commissioned by oil-trading company Trafigura detailing the
dumping of potentially toxic material off the African coast and a video of a 2007 American helicopter
attack that killed two Reuters journalists in Baghdad — which Reuters had lobbied unsuccessfully for
years to have released. WikiLeaks' release of documents alleging corruption in Kenya won the site an
award from Amnesty International. And with the Afghan papers, Assange "has basically guaranteed that
think tanks, academics and analysts will study his website for some time. It's history right there on the
Internet for everyone to see," says Paul Rogers, a British academic and security correspondent for the
website OpenDemocracy.net. (See a video of WikiLeaks' founder reviewing TIME's top 10 leaks.)

Assange says he is motivated to "protect victims." His website's stated guiding belief is that
"transparency in government leads to reduced corruption," and he's happy to take the fight to those
governments that he thinks cover things up. Assange says he likes "intellectual combat," and he certainly
knows how to throw and dodge a punch. Despite its growing notoriety and prominence, WikiLeaks has
only one public spokesman: Assange. The material it posts is not always unfiltered. An abridged version
of the 2007 helicopter attack posted on WikiLeaks — which had been edited by Assange and titled
"Collateral Murder" — was criticized for failing to show that one of the men fired on by the chopper was
carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Assange's tactics are part of the reason some open-government campaigners are wary of WikiLeaks
even as they remain astonished by its scoops. "It is not journalism. It's data dissemination, and that
worries me," says Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
"Journalists will go through a period of consultation before publishing sensitive material. WikiLeaks says
it does the same thing. But traditional publishers can be held accountable. Aside from Julian Assange, no
one knows who these people are."

Assange, an Australian, 39, who studied physics at the University of Melbourne as an adult student,
moves between four bases — which he does not specify, citing security concerns. Assange's story is
unique to the Internet age. His early career was as a hacker, using the handle Mendax, from the Latin
splendide mendax, or "nobly untruthful." In 1991, at age 20, he broke into the master terminal of Nortel,
the Canadian telecom company. Assange was caught and pleaded guilty to 26 charges; six other
charges were dropped, and he paid only a small fine after the judge commended his "intelligent
inquisitiveness."

Assange has retained a hacker's mentality. He works from secret bunkers on major leaks and is
convinced he is under surveillance from government intelligence agencies that tail him when he travels.
There's a touch of paranoia in his style, but say this for Assange: he takes his work seriously. In
discussion with TIME, he offers lengthy and reasoned arguments about U.S. jurisprudence and the
importance of the First Amendment.

It's a paradox. While Assange might like to pummel the U.S. for its performance in Afghanistan, he also
understands that his work is founded on principles of which the U.S. and its Western allies remain
important protectors. "We must make the default assumption that each individual has the right to
communicate knowledge to other individuals," Assange says of his decision to publish the Afghanistan
papers. "And the U.S. First Amendment is clear that publishers have the right to tell the people what is
going on."
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Rock Steady
By CLAIRE SUDDATH / CHICAGO Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Front row fans dance to Major Lazer at the Pitchfork Music Festival

Lauren Fleishman for TIME

Big Boi isn't indie. Or is he? As one-half of the rap duo OutKast, he has sold some 18 million albums, won
six Grammy Awards and appeared on more hit songs than even he can keep track of. Yet there he was
on July 18 at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, playing alongside bands only a fraction as
successful. As thousands of writhing, fist-pumping fans swarmed the main stage and climbed on top of
fences to get a look at the hip-hop megastar, thousands more were across the park, stomping and
dancing to the largely unknown noise-pop act Sleigh Bells (album sales: 47,000). That doesn't usually
happen to Big Boi.

But this festival is hosted by Pitchfork Media, the online music magazine that in recent years has become
a commanding authority within the indie-music scene. Over three days in July, 46 acts — ranging from
the recently reunited 1990s rock band Pavement to the weird, raunchy Jamaican-inspired dance group
Major Lazer — blew the collective minds of 54,000 people (average age: 27) in Chicago's unglamorous,
nonlakefront Union Park. "Rock used to be one living cell," says Victoria Legrand, vocalist for the dreamy
pop duo Beach House, which performed on the third day of the festival. "It was all grunge or all metal. But
I'm glad it's not like that anymore. The cells are dividing."

The numbers back her up. U.S. album sales have dropped 38% in the past decade — but at the same
time, there's more music out there than ever before. In 2005, according to Nielsen SoundScan, 60,000
new albums were released in the U.S.; by 2009, the number had risen to almost 100,000. Factor in the
millions of songs being downloaded for free on file-sharing systems like BitTorrent or being swapped on
social-networking sites like MySpace and you've got a picture of how most industry insiders see the
music business: fragmented, lawless and less and less profitable. Yet flourishing among those fragments
is Pitchfork.

On a Scale of 1 to 10
In 1995, Ryan Schreiber was a 19-year-old Minneapolis record-store clerk who wanted to publish a
rock-music fanzine but lacked access to a photocopier. Instead, he started a website, called it Pitchfork
and began posting his thoughts on bands like Sonic Youth, Fugazi and the Pixies — groups whose songs
rarely (if ever) appeared on the radio or MTV. It was the first golden age of "indie" artists, back when the
word was shorthand for music released on independent record labels, signifying the artistic freedom and
cachet that came from operating on the fringes.

By 2000, Schreiber had moved the site to Chicago, acquired some freelance writers and codified the
Pitchfork review into a signature formula — a long, rambling personal opinion of an album, accompanied
by a rating on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0. But the site's readership was still, to use his word, "negligible."
That changed in October of that year, when Pitchfork posted a fawning, grandiloquent 10.0 review of
Radiohead's experimental rock album Kid A. Critic Brent DiCrescenzo's paean included lines like
"butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky" and became
an Internet sensation — for all the wrong reasons. "The writing was so purple, so outrageous. People
passed it around because it was funny," Schreiber says. Pitchfork's readership jumped exponentially, to
about 5,000 hits a day.

Then an odd thing happened: people made fun of the prose, but they kept reading Pitchfork. Schreiber
and his writers knew what they were talking about; Kid A., which later debuted at No. 1 on Billboard,
really was a 10.0 album. Pitchfork's reviews of artists previously considered unknown or underground —
like xylophone-prone Icelandic band Sigur Rós and harmonizing rockers Modest Mouse — began to act
as stepping-stones to mainstream coverage. In 2000, Modest Mouse moved from independent label Up
Records to Sony-owned Epic; by 2005, they had performed on Saturday Night Live, been nominated for
two Grammys and guest-starred on Fox's teen drama The O.C. Their songs are now used in car
commercials.

Bands like Modest Mouse still weren't as big as Pearl Jam or U2, but then again, neither was anyone else.
Last year, only 11 artists released new albums that received a platinum certification from the Recording
Industry Association of America; as recently as 2006, there were 56. "There isn't really such a thing as
mainstream rock anymore," says Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork's editor. "There are a lot of bands who
shouldn't be considered indie rock, like Modest Mouse, but they still are because you can't hear them on
commercial radio."

That doesn't mean you can't hear them at all — far from it. Over half the top-billed acts at the Pitchfork
festival are on major labels. Singer-songwriter St. Vincent, who took the stage right before Big Boi, is
featured on the Twilight: New Moon sound track.

Indie rock never had its Beatles-on-the-Ed Sullivan Show moment; it seemed to seep slowly into
listeners' ears, one song at a time. By 2004, when a rave Pitchfork review of Funeral, the debut album by
a small Montreal band called Arcade Fire, helped turn it into the biggest-selling record in the 21-year
history of its label, indie — and Pitchfork — were on a roll. Record companies courted reviews. Stores
used them to make purchasing decisions.

"If they give a really high number to a new band, that puts it on our radar because we know people will
come in and request it," says Doyle Davis, a co-owner of Grimey's, an independent record store in
Nashville. "We definitely pay attention to Pitchfork." That goes for hip-hop stars too. In his high-rise hotel
room before the festival, Big Boi said he hadn't heard of Pitchfork until last year. "They reviewed one of
my songs," he said, "and my manager got excited and said that was important."

Taking It Outside
Pitchfork started its music festival in 2006 for largely the same reasons that Schreiber founded the
website: no other venue was showcasing the type of music he and his friends wanted to hear, for a price
they were willing to pay. At $40 a day, admission costs less than half that at Lollapalooza. And while this
summer has been a dismal one for many artists — overall ticket sales are down 17% so far, according to
industry trade magazine Pollstar, and some tours like Lilith Fair have had to cancel dates — Pitchfork's
festival sold out months in advance.

It's here at Union Park that the evolution of the term indie most clearly manifests itself. After nearly 20
years of changing tastes and label consolidation, indie has become a catchall that suggests less what the
music sounds like than the type of people who listen to it. The music may be rock or dance or hip-hop,
but it all appeals to Pitchfork's shaggy-haired, skinny-jeans-wearing crowd, sitting on blankets with eyes
closed in the summer sun.

But when the sun sets, people get on their feet and start to move. Some watch Big Boi speed-rap his way
through OutKast's 2000 hit "B.O.B.," while others opt for the unpolished, unfamous Sleigh Bells, the
Brooklyn-based band praised by Pitchfork before they'd even released a single. "I wanted to see if they
were as good as Pitchfork said," explained Nick Mayor, 24, from Chicago. "I came [here] for stuff I hadn't
heard before."

The Pitchfork Music Festival

Rock On
This year's Pitchfork Music Festival featured 46 acts, drawing 54,000 people to Chicago's Union Park.
Guitar Hero
Among the many acts that appeared were indie stars like Modest Mouse, Major Lazer, Pavement and
Wolf Parade, above.

Groovy Scene
During the day, many of the concertgoers enjoyed picnics in the grass.
Face Paint
Hannah Beller and Cameron Benton came from Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the show.

Indie Nation
One of this year's top draws was Big Boi, one of the rappers from the hip-hop group Outkast, who
entertained the crowd, above, with a string of the band's radio hits.
Rapt
LCD Soundsystem, one of the festival's highly anticipated performers appeared as the final act on the
Saturday night of the festival.

Excitement
The raunchy Jamaican-inspired dance group Major Lazer entertains the crowd on the festival's last day.
Downtime
A couple rests on the second day of the festival.

Fan
Maxwell Palmer was photographed outside the festival grounds.
Closing
Though Pitchfork has always been associated with indie rock, it is hard to say, after three days of
performances, what exactly that means. "Rock used to be one living cell," says Victoria Legrand, vocalist
for the dreamy pop duo Beach House, which performed on the third day of the festival. "It was all grunge
or all metal. But I'm glad it's not like that anymore. The cells are dividing."

Q&A Kevin Kline

By BRYAN ALEXANDER Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Matt Carr / Getty Images

A Oscar-winning actor who can move effortlessly

from sensitive guy (The Big Chill) to absurd
eccentric (A Fish Called Wanda), Kline is flying
his freak flag high again as playwright Henry
Harrison, a penniless social escort to wealthy
widows, in The Extra Man. Kline spoke to TIME
about cross-dressing, Shakespeare and the
global sock crisis.
The filmmakers said they immediately thought of you for this part — a broke, outlandish social

sponge. Were you flattered?

Who wouldn't be flattered? Funny, they told me they wanted me because I was a man of the theater. I'm

enraged.

Your character's dance is so odd and fantastic. Is it part of your morning routine?

I skipped it this morning because I had a very full day. Actually, it's not. I'd be in the hospital. My

character basically moved whatever he felt was rotting. So we just assumed everything was rotting. I did

the dance for like three or four minutes, and you see about 30 seconds. Maybe it will be in the DVD in the

entirety. Dance is the best exercise there is.

I thought Thigh-Master was the best exercise.

What is that?

Suzanne Sommers sells them on television, for stronger thighs.

I see. I feel a degree of mastery over my thighs as it is.

Your character uses dark paint for socks to save money, have you tried that?

I have not. I have never been that far down. But I love my character's inventiveness.

It would actually solve the worldwide one-missing-sock crisis.

Exactly. But rather than paint, why not just wear different colored socks? What is this uniformity of sock

color? I may try to introduce that as a trend.

I'll push that in the piece.

Okay, but I want a piece of the action. I want everyone to send me the other sock they are not using.

Done. Your costar, Paul Dano, dresses in drag. What's the appropriate on-set compliment?

What do you say? 'Nice teddy?' You don't want to say, 'Jesus, what has happened to your career?' You

want to be encouraging, but there is even chagrin at getting complimented for wearing women's clothes.

I've dressed as a woman a couple of times on film. And I have to say I make an extraordinarily ugly

woman. Hideous. Even clean-shaven.

If I was an aspiring drag queen, what advice would you have for me?

I'd say go for individual style rather than following fashion. Because clearly you have issues that are
unique to you that you need to work through. But hey, I'm for socks of a different color; it's a gateway

move that could lead to cross-dressing.

You play Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's secretary of war, in Robert Redford's The Conspirator. That's

serious facial hair.

I have seen Civil War movies that become about bad facial hair. So we did a modified version of the

Edwin Stanton beard. There are two to three pictures of Stanton and we can assume in between those

shots he trimmed his beard. And that's the one I give you. I think Mr. Redford eschewed the idea of too

much beardage.

Is it your beard or the prop department's beard?

No, it's me. It's different. It's so different that Woody Harrelson visited the set and I was talking to Mr.

Redford and he came over. And after five minutes I said, "It's me — Kevin." He didn't recognize me.

Roger Ebert said that when I do comedies I wear a mustache and when I do drama I don't wear a

mustache. Interestingly, you'll see in "The Conspirator" that that changes. Wait a minute. It's a beard, but

no mustache. Never mind. But I did do a part in an Ivan Reitman comedy with no facial hair.

You've done Shakespeare so many times. What's your dream Bard project?

I've always wanted to play Othello. And I have only done Hamlet twice. One really can improve the third

time around.

Could you make it a happy ending this time?

It is a happy ending, because everyone's so sick of him grousing for four hours. They are happy he's

dead. Hamlet's last line is, "the rest is silence." It's almost to assure the audience that I'm shutting up

now.

The Short List of Things to Do

WEEK OF JULY 30
Dinner for Schmucks
Now in theaters

Tim (Paul Rudd) has one big chance to

impress his boss: by bringing an idiot —
Barry (Steve Carell), who makes mouse
dioramas — to a dinner at which mockery is
the main course. Director Jay Roach's
remake of a French farce neatly juggles big
laughs with the subtler ribaldry of acute pain.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY SEAN MCCABE FOR

TIME

Huge
Airs on ABC Family

What stands on the fault line between the

child-obesity crisis and the teen-body-image
crisis? Fat camp. ABC Family's dramedy
would be special just for featuring
nonemaciated bodies on a teen soap. But its
snarky wit and big heart make it a plus-size
pleasure.

BRUCE BIRMELIN / ABC FAMILY

Super Sad True
Love Story
Now in stores

Gary Shteyngart, the absurdist behind

Absurdistan, gives us a dystopic world whose
citizens are obsessed with digital media, their
credit scores and living forever. It's funny with
a side of bleakly familiar. But if love can't find
a way among these ruins, it's not for lack of
trying.

Hugh Hefner:
Playboy, Activist
and Rebel
Now in theaters

He still refers to women as girls, still keeps a

harem at the mansion and, at 84, still runs
America's most famous men's magazine.
Brigitte Berman's doting doc focuses on Hef's
censorship busting and philanthropy while
making room for the centerfolds.
The Kim Novak
Collection
Now in stores

In the '50s, this lavender blonde with the

sullen sensuality was "the next Marilyn
Monroe" and probably made more good
movies. Here are five — dramas (Picnic,
Jeanne Eagels, Middle of the Night), a
comedy (Bell Book and Candle) and a
musical (Pal Joey) — all smartly restored.
BUSINESS

How to Make Cars And Make Money Too

By Bill Saporito / Dearborn Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Alan Mulally

Gregg Segal for TIME

Listen to Ford Motor Co.'s excitable CEO, Alan Mulally, for five minutes and you are almost ready to
march down to the assembly line, grab a torque wrench and start knocking bolts into Mustangs. "We are
fighting for the soul of American manufacturing," he begins. "We are leading the way on, What does it
take for America to compete in the global economy? That's what this is about. And it starts with making
the best products in the world. That's why we can have this lifestyle — because you have to earn it."

Ford is certainly earning quite a bit of it. After the industrial Armageddon that left GM and Chrysler in
bankruptcy and the car industry's 5,000 top suppliers hanging by a fraying fan belt, Ford is flying the flag
of resurgence. The company earned $2.6 billion on sales of $31.3 billion in its second quarter. Its pretax
operating profit — a measure of how well the core business is running — was $2.9 billion, vs. a loss of
$424 million a year earlier. Ford's market share jumped 1.4 points, to 17.5%, at the expense of GM and
Chrysler. In rankings compiled by Kelley Blue Book, an auto-marketing research firm, Ford recently
claimed the top spot from troubled Toyota as the best-regarded auto brand in the U.S.

Pulling off the biggest business turnaround of the Great Recession has been a pretty good second act for
Mulally, who turns 65 on Aug. 4. The CEO arrived at Ford in late 2006 after 37 years at Boeing, amid
some sniping that he wasn't a "car guy" — as if the car guys in Detroit were doing a bang-up job. Yet if
Ford is going to change gears from world-class survivor to world-class manufacturer, Mulally will have to
show that he is indeed a car guy — just his own kind of one.
He's about to get the chance. This year the company is introducing new models that will reflect Ford's
strategic direction and test its ability to create cars that Americans want to buy even without getting a
discount. The Fiesta, which debuted in May, is evidence of Ford's commitment to producing profitable
small cars. The Fiesta is a spiffy-enough $13,300 subcompact, available in four-door sedan and five-door
hatchback models. The car was largely designed in Germany but meets the demands of American
buyers: it's sporty, smart, thrifty, cool. "The old Fiesta was total crap," says Patrick Olsen, editor in chief
of Cars.com "This one looks better and is more solidly built than any of their previous small cars" — even
if the rear seat in the sedan version "is too small for most humans."

In late July, Mulally traveled to Manhattan to reveal the new Explorer, an SUV reborn as a more
mom-friendly, stable, fuel-efficient vehicle built on a Taurus platform, as opposed to the gas-gulping truck
frame it once inhabited. The company plans to export the Explorer to 90 countries from its Chicago plant,
where it will create 1,200 assembly jobs and 600 supplier jobs, underlining Mulally's commitment to
manufacturing on the global playing field.

Ford's most important new family member arrives later this year, when the company unwraps the latest
version of the Focus, which will be the first global car built from the ground up based on Mulally's
signature strategy, known as One Ford. In its broadest sense, One Ford means selling the same model,
built the same way, in all markets. About 85% of the Focus' parts will be common to all regions. One Ford
is possible because the world's consumers are becoming more alike: they value quality, safety, fuel
efficiency and design. This allows Ford to meet global needs with fewer models and thus ratchet costs
down, since the company can engineer a single Focus to sell everywhere.

If One Ford works, Ford can sell each model at a higher volume, with costs that are as much as 20%
lower than for earlier versions. Although Ford will still be building such purely American cars as the
Mustang and the highly profitable F-150 pickup series, One Ford means that the very definition of what a
Ford is — steering, handling, the sound of a door slamming shut — may change as the company's global
DNA evolves. One spin in a Fiesta will tell you as much: it's as much Milan as it is Milwaukee.

For a manufacturing enterprise, One Ford is radical simplification. Ford was a company with too much of
everything: brands, models, engines, platforms, factories, people. Mulally has reduced it to a
manageable core. He delights in presenting the company's entire strategy — its products, standards and
operating plan — to a visitor on a single 11-by-17-in. piece of paper.
SOCIETY

Building a Better Playground

By HARRIET BAROVICK Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Kids build and dismantle giant foam structures at a New York City playground

Gus Powell for TIME

I know I am supposed to like play grounds. But my happy childhood memories of spontaneous
kick-the-can games on suburban lawns make me a little wistful whenever I watch my twin 6-year-old sons
in our local urban park. Sure, it's fun to swing and slide, but after a while there's not much new to glean.

Turns out, there are other parents feeling unsatisfied by the same old playground equipment. Fortunately,
one of them is the restless, preternaturally intelligent architect David Rockwell, designer of theater sets
(Hairspray), restaurants (Nobu) and hotels (W). He was so frustrated by the fixed nature of the
playgrounds his kids frequented that he set out to reinvent them. Rockwell spent five years consulting
with experts on children and play, testing out his ideas at schools and then working pro bono with New
York City officials to produce a play space that does something revolutionary: instead of prescribing
activities — climb this, sit on that — the water-friendly environment encourages kids to be creative,
messy, constructive and, yes, even destructive as they build with and topple giant foam blocks.

Some of the 350 bright blue blocks at the Imagination Playground, which opened July 27 in a former
parking lot in Manhattan, are shaped like wheels, others like cogs or giant noodles. The blocks can be
used to make anything children can think of — a car, a river, a fort, a flower — and are deliberately big so
kids will be more likely to assist each other with them.

Visitors probably won't even notice that there are no swings or seesaws. The 12,000-sq.-ft. (about 1,100
sq m) multilevel space has plenty of room for running, climbing and other gross-motor activity: ropes
dangle underneath the ramps that sweep around one side of the peanut-shaped playground. But the
blocks and other movable materials provide ample opportunity to exercise the mind as well. A giant
sandpit and nearby shallow pool are not just for digging and splashing but also for utilizing pulleys,
wheelbarrows, plastic pipes and other tools. A gleaming steel crow's nest with a spiral staircase offers a
quiet spot from which to view the action — and doubles as a storage site for the blocks, shovels, fabrics,
etc.

Rockwell's design, which was inspired in part by European "adventure playgrounds" where supervised
kids can get creative with a wide variety of objects, follows the prevailing theory that free, child-initiated
play is a critical component of healthy social, emotional and intellectual development. A leading
missionary for that idea, Darrell Hammond — who heads the nonprofit Kaboom!, the largest builder of
playgrounds in the U.S. — was so excited by the Imagination Playground concept when it was
announced in 2007 that he cold-called Rockwell to suggest they create portable versions to enhance
existing play sites around the country. In 2008, two years before the opening of the New York City park,
Rockwell and Hammond unveiled Imagination Playground in a Box, a walk-in-closet-size container with
at least 75 foam blocks, among other components. The portable sets, which start at $6,150, now
complement play spaces in such cities as Chicago; Honolulu; Yuma, Ariz.; and Winston-Salem, N.C.,
and have prompted calls from several mayors eager to build permanent Imagination Playgrounds.

One additional expense is that both the portable and permanent versions need to be staffed by grownups.
These so-called play associates are tasked with making sure kids use the equipment safely and, with any
luck, keeping helicopter parents from hovering too close. Associates can also help prevent people from
walking off with the loose parts. New York City has a mix of public and private sources to fund the staffers,
who require training and earn at least $14.90 per hour. Other cities have relied on grants or volunteers.

To Hammond, the greater cost would be not making a priority of this sort of children's play. "We view this
as the start of a movement," he says. "When kids are the experts who design, tear down and rebuild their
own scenarios, when there's no right or wrong way to play, it helps them deal with everything that
happens in their worlds, and it builds a foundation for healthy, active lives."

Most parents won't be thinking quite that deeply. But they seem to appreciate happy chaos when they
see it. "It's good that it's messy," Molly Weinberger said recently as her two boys dug into an Imagination
Playground in a Box that had been wheeled into an otherwise ordinary Manhattan park. "Not many kids
now get to just go out and play with things that don't go beep or boop. " Her 4-year-old had used the
blocks to fashion a 4-ft.-long (1.2 m) car with oddly shaped wheels and interior seating. He inserted a
noodle into a hole in the side of the vehicle, but when I caught up with him to ask what he had been
pumping, he responded quickly, "Now I'm finished with that." And he was. He was busy helping another
boy spray water through a window in a fort they had just made.
Big-League Chew
By STEPHEN GANDEL Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Danny Kim for TIME

If you've read other stories of mine but think this one is better, here's why: I'm writing it while wearing a
high-performance mouth guard.

I recently spent two weeks doing everything, aside from sleeping and eating, with a thin piece of plastic
and two large yellow bite pads snapped over my lower teeth. Mouth guards are common in football,
hockey and boxing, but a growing number of pros in noncontact sports have been wooed by claims that
jaw-positioning retainers can improve strength, power and accuracy as well as help them think more
clearly under pressure. Derek Jeter wears one. So does Shaq.

I tested a $495 model made by Bite Tech, a Minneapolis company that began selling its patented
technology in September through the sports brand Under Armour. Canadian firm Makkar sells a similar
device for $695. Both products require a trip to the dentist to have a mold of your teeth made. But starting
in January, Under Armour plans to sell a Bite Tech model for $60 that can be fitted at home. Boil the
mouthpiece, bite down for 30 seconds and your jump shots will start dropping like the Dow.

Or so the theory goes. Clenching your teeth pinches the nerves that run through the temporomandibular
(jaw) joint, causing the body to produce the hormone cortisol, which increases your heart rate and blood
pressure--and can trigger a fight-or-flight response. That's good when you're actually in danger but
distracting when you're playing softball. Bite Tech aims to improve your physical and mental performance
by preventing you from clenching. It also moves your lower jaw forward. The combination opens the
throat, improving breathing. (Some dentists recommend the gear for night grinders too.)

I noticed a slight difference. On a stationary bike, I typically go 6.3 miles (10.1 km) in 30 minutes. With the
mouthpiece, I easily made 6.6 miles (10.6 km). My golf score dropped a few strokes, but my wife still beat
me at Scrabble. I called golfer Hunter Mahan to find out how long it took him to see results. Turns out
Mahan, whose picture and testimonials about Bite Tech take up most of the company's home page,
wears the mouthpiece when he practices but not during tournaments. Maybe he doesn't want to lisp in
public?
Studies that Bite Tech funded show a small improvement--less than 10 milliseconds--in subjects'
response times. Shawn Arent, director of exercise science at Rutgers University, got similar results when
he tested 22 athletes wearing a Makkar mouthpiece vs. a generic $20 protector. The athletes were able
to jump higher with the Makkar, by one inch. That's not a heck of a lot, but Arent concedes, "For top
athletes, that little bit extra might matter." So, uh, can I take this thing out now?

Mouthing Off

The Doctor Is in — and Online

By KATE PICKERT Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Illustration by Oliver Munday for TIME

Have you ever felt slightly under the weather, called your doctor for advice and been asked to drag
yourself to her office — only to be told to rest up and drink lots of fluids? Or, worse, have you ever spent a
day playing phone tag so you could get the results of an important diagnostic test?

Chances are these inconveniences could have been avoided if your doctor used a simple, ubiquitous tool:
e-mail. A study published in the July issue of Health Affairs indicates that patients who use e-mail to
communicate with their doctors not only save time and money but also have healthier outcomes. The
authors reviewed more than 500,000 patient-doctor e-mails sent within the Kaiser Permanente network
and found that people with hypertension or diabetes (or both) who e-mailed their doctors managed their
blood pressure and blood sugar better than non-e-mailers.

Given this news and given that millions of Americans have had e-mail accounts for more than a decade,
why is it that only a small percentage of physicians report that they use the tool with patients? One
reason is that primary-care providers, the doctors most likely to be able to coordinate care via e-mail,
generally get paid $60 to $100 per office visit and $0 per e-mail. This kind of electronic communication is
not recognized as a billable activity by Medicare, Medicaid or most private insurers.
Kaiser is a special case in that the people it insures receive care at Kaiser-owned facilities where the
doctors are essentially paid per patient, not per procedure. Its physicians "don't get paid by generating
more visits, so they find a more efficient way," says study co-author Terhilda Garrido. "It's in their best
interest to use e-mail."

The new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act could help spread the use of e-mail, since the law is
funding pilot projects similar to the Kaiser system. Dr. Fred Ralston, president of the American College of
Physicians and an internist in private practice in Tennessee, is one of thousands of doctors across the
country experimenting with such a model. The extra funding — which, in Ralston's case, comes from
BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee — could allow more primary-care doctors to fully embrace e-mail.

"It's a wonderful thing," he says. "You can spend probably 30 seconds and give patients commonsense
advice."

Most doctors who e-mail don't use Gmail or Outlook. To comply with federal privacy laws, they contract
with software vendors to set up secure independent websites. Some private insurers will reimburse for
secure, third-party electronic communication but won't do so for standard e-mail. Cigna, for instance,
pays doctors about $25 for an "eVisit," in which patients, rather than writing free-form messages, fill out
discrete Web-page fields.

Dr. Richard Baron, a Philadelphia internist, takes a different approach. Patients can log on to his
practice's secure website and write as much as they like. "When people want to interact with their doctor,
they want to do it in a conversational mode," he says. Thanks, Doc. :)

The Science of Cougar Sex: Why Older

Women Lust
By JOHN CLOUD Friday, Jul. 09, 2010

Frederic Cirou / Es Photography / Corbis

Men who cheat on their spouses have always enjoyed an expedient explanation: Evolution made me do
it. Many articles (here is one, and here is another), especially in recent years, have explored the theory
that men sleep around because evolution has programmed them to seek fertile (and, conveniently,
younger) wombs.

But what about women? If it's really true that evolution can cause a man to risk his marriage, what effect
does that have on women's sexuality?

A new journal article suggests that evolutionary forces also push women to be more sexual, although in
unexpected ways. University of Texas psychologist David Buss wrote the article, which appears in the
July issue of Personality and Individual Differences, with the help of three graduate students, Judith
Easton (who is listed as lead author), Jaime Confer and Cari Goetz. Buss, Easton and their colleagues
found that women in their 30s and early 40s are significantly more sexual than younger women. Women
ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies)
than women ages 18 through 26 but also having more sex, period. And they are more willing than
younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands. In other words, despite the girls-gone-wild
image of promiscuous college women, it is women in their middle years who are America's most sexually
industrious.

By contrast, men's sexual interest and output, usually measured by a reported number of orgasms per
week, peaks in the teen years and then settles to a steady level (an average of three orgasms per week)
for most of their lives. As I pointed out in March, most men remain sexually active into their 70s.
According to the new study, as well as the study I wrote about in March, women's sexual ardor declines
precipitously after menopause.

Why would women be more sexually active in their middle years than in their teens and 20s? Buss and
his students say evolution has encouraged women to be more sexually active as their fertility begins to
decline and as menopause approaches.

Here's how their theory works:

Our female ancestors grew accustomed to watching many of their children — perhaps as many as half —
die of various diseases, starvation, warfare and so on before being able to have kids of their own. This
trauma left a psychological imprint to bear as many children as possible. Becoming pregnant is much
easier for women and girls in their teens and early 20s — so much easier that they need not spend much
time having sex.

However, after the mid-20s, the lizard-brain impulse to have more kids faces a stark reality: it's harder
and harder to get pregnant as a woman's remaining eggs age. And so women in their middle years
respond by seeking more and more sex.

To test this theory, Buss and his students asked 827 women to complete questionnaires about their
sexual habits. And, indeed, they found that women who had passed their peak fertility years but not quite
reached menopause were the most sexually active. This age group — 27 through 45 — reported having
significantly more sex than the two other age groups in the study, 18 through 26 and 46 and up. Women
in their middle years were also more likely than the younger women to fantasize about someone other
than their current partner. The new findings are consistent with those of an earlier Buss paper, from 2002,
which found that women in their early 30s feel more lustful and report less abstinence than women in
other age groups. In both studies, these findings held true for both partnered and single women, meaning
that married women in their 30s and early 40s tend to have more sex than married women in their early
20s; ditto for single women. Also, whether the women were mothers didn't matter. Only age had a strong
affect on women's reported sexual interest and behavior.

And yet there are a few flaws with the data in the new paper. Chiefly: some three-quarters of the
participants in the study were recruited on Craigslist, a website where many go to seek hookups,
meaning there was a self-selection problem with the sample. (The other participants were students at the
University of Texas in Austin.) The authors also note that there are some alternative explanations for why
women in their 30s and early 40s might be more sexual. Many of them may simply be more comfortable
with sex than women in their teens and early 20s. Still, that raises the question of why they are more
comfortable: perhaps evolution programmed that comfort.

Buss is the author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, now in its fourth edition, and
has become associated with evolutionary explanations for sexual behavior. His theories help explain why
men can be cads — and why women can be cougars.
PEOPLE

10 Questions for Jorge Ramos

By JORGE RAMOS Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Jorge Ramos

Univision

As a Mexican-born, naturalized U.S. citizen, what is your take on the immigration debate?
—Ndukwe Kalu, LOS ANGELES
The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal, but right now millions of men and
women in Arizona and in other parts of the U.S. are not being treated as equals, and I can't believe that.
Countries are judged by the way they treat the most vulnerable, and the most vulnerable population in
the U.S. right now is undocumented immigrants.

Do you think U.S. borders need to be better secured? —Erik Davalos, RENO, NEV.
Border security is not enough. We have to have immigration reform. It doesn't matter how many guards
you send to the border. It doesn't matter how high the fence is going to be, because almost half of all
undocumented immigrants who come to the U.S. come by plane. It's an economic problem.

Do you see an end soon to the drug war in Mexico? —Sandra Chávez, CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO
President Felipe Calderon is losing the war on drugs. This problem is not going to be solved — because
of corruption and because it's not the right strategy. On the other hand, there is violence and drug
trafficking in Mexico in part because there's a huge market for drugs in the U.S. Mexico cannot win this
war alone.

Do you think Mexico would ever allow U.S. military intervention? —Albert Morales, WASHINGTON
Mexico will never accept U.S. military intervention. Mexicans always remember 1848. That's when
Mexico lost more than half its territory [in a war with the U.S.]. Having said that, I think that the presence
of U.N. soldiers in parts of Mexico, including Ciudad Juárez, should be a possibility.

What does it take to be the anchor of Noticiero Univisión? —Miguel Cortina, SUGAR LAND, TEXAS
I laugh when I remember that there was a news director in Los Angeles who told me that I would never
work in this country because Latinos weren't going to assimilate. At the end, he lost his job, and I got
mine. It's a privilege to work as an anchor for Univision, but more important, I am amazed by how Latinos
are transforming America.

What advice do you have for someone hoping for a similar career in journalism? —Angelica
Montes, MAYWOOD, CALIF.
My only advice is, follow your dream, and do whatever you like to do the most. I chose journalism
because I wanted to be in the places where history was being made.

What was your impression of President Obama when you first interviewed him? —Sonia
Hernandez, SAN ANTONIO
I spoke with Obama when he was running for President. He needed the Hispanic vote. He promised us
that he was going to have an immigration bill during his first year in office. And President Barack Obama
broke his promise. He gave Latinos a lot of hope, and right now many are deeply disappointed.

Whom would you like to interview whom you have not yet interviewed? —Maria de La Luz Sierra,
WILLIS, TEXAS
Nelson Mandela. He always understood that injustice cannot last forever, and that same message is one
we can now apply in the U.S.

Hispanics are now the largest U.S. minority and growing. In your view, what is the most important
implication of that fact? —Benjamin Figueroa Pereira, SAN JUAN, P.R.
The process of change is well under way. The U.S. is the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world,
with the exception of Mexico. It means — and I am completely convinced of this — that the first Hispanic
President has already been born.

What is preventing Latinos from uniting to exercise their power in this country? —Kyoko Tsuru,
NEW YORK CITY
It's lack of political representation. We are 15% of the population, and we have only one Senator. We
need not only one Cesar Chavez; we need a thousand Cesar Chavezes.
TO OUR READERS

The Plight of Afghan Women: A Disturbing

Picture
By Richard Stengel, Managing Editor Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010

Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old
Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing
her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban
resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few
years. Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women
have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a
Taliban revival.

I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of TIME. First, I wanted to make
sure of Aisha's safety and that she understood what it would mean to be on the cover. She knows that
she will become a symbol of the price Afghan women have had to pay for the repressive ideology of the
Taliban. We also confirmed that she is in a secret location protected by armed guards and sponsored by
the NGO Women for Afghan Women. Aisha will head to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery sponsored by
the Grossman Burn Foundation, a humanitarian organization in California. We are supporting that effort.

I'm acutely aware that this image will be seen by children, who will undoubtedly find it distressing. We
have consulted with a number of child psychologists about its potential impact. Some think children are
so used to seeing violence in the media that the image will have little effect, but others believe that
children will find it very scary and distressing — that they will see it, as Dr. Michael Rich, director of the
Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston, said, as "a symbol of bad things that can
happen to people." I showed it to my two young sons, 9 and 12, who both immediately felt sorry for Aisha
and asked why anyone would have done such harm to her. I apologize to readers who find the image too
strong, and I invite you to comment on the image's impact.

But bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. In the end, I felt
that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that
affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban's treatment of women than
ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its
allies should do in Afghanistan.

The much publicized release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate
about the war. Our story and the haunting cover image by the distinguished South African photographer
Jodi Bieber are meant to contribute to that debate. We do not run this story or show this image either in
support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the
ground. As lawmakers and citizens begin to sort through the information about the war and make up their
minds, our job is to provide context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of
our time. What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000
documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and
the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.

To learn more about Aisha and her reconstructive surgery in the U.S., visit
www.GrossmanBurnFoundation.org and www.WomenForAfghanWomen.org.
LETTERS

Inbox
Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Home Economics

Michael Crowley's "The Good and Bad Economy" clearly points out that a solid majority of Americans
favor reducing spending for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq [July 26]. Only 12% favor reducing the
deficit by cutting Social Security. Yet Crowley disregards his own data by concluding that President
Obama's deficit commission will propose "long overdue cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security
and Medicare." How about going to national security for deficit reduction and letting seniors receive the
Social Security benefits they earned and deserve?

Edward Ferreira, NEW SHARON, MAINE

Your article pushes consuming to revive the U.S. economically. Many citizens are moving in another
direction--using fewer resources, raising our own food, and using solar panels for hot water and a bicycle
and legs for travel. We should not return to being the consuming culture that we were. Catch up to the
times, TIME.

Bill Denneen, NIPOMO, CALIF.

The stimulus package has been great and staved off great turmoil. But if the President really wants to
double down, he should do two things. The first: bottom out interest rates on 30-year mortgages to 4%
and lend directly to the public. Then everyone would stop waiting for interest rates to fall, borrow money
and refinance their lives. The second: tax oil and spend the proceeds directly on energy. Taxing gasoline
at the pump and oil as it is imported into this country would generate steady revenue for years to come.

Chris Green, FALMOUTH, MASS.

My Bonnie Is the Bomb

Re "And Now, Your Moment of Men" [July 26]: I have two words to deliver us from the late-night
talk-show man cave: Bonnie Hunt. Jay Leno is an uncomfortable interviewer, and David Letterman's
sarcasm has lightened only a bit with age. But I watch Bonnie Hunt from beginning to end. She's a great
listener, and she's hilarious. Plus, she's a gifted singer and actor and manages to make me think and
laugh without sacrificing kindness. Men seem to love her too. Bring us Bonnie!

Mary Dittoe Kelly, COLLEYVILLE, TEXAS

A Jolt from the Volt?

As you describe in "Can the Volt Charge GM?" electric cars are finally heading to the market, and this is a
good thing [July 26]. There always seems to be one detail that doesn't get much attention, though.
Unless that electric car is plugged into a solar, hydro or wind source of electricity, there's a pretty good
chance a coal-fired power plant will be at the other end, so the only result is moving the source of
pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant. We need to continue to perfect the electric car while
developing clean and nonpolluting sources of electricity. That will be the real achievement and the real
solution.

Sid Darden, PENROSE, COLO.

Of Mama and Baby Bears

By calling herself a mama grizzly, Sarah Palin implies that she would stop at nothing to defend her young
from attack ["A Foot in the Race," July 26]. However, in 2008 she chose the opportunity for personal
advancement, knowing full well that by doing so she would expose her pregnant 17-year-old daughter to
national embarrassment and ridicule. I have a daughter a few years older than Bristol, and I cannot
imagine a scenario in which I would throw my child to the wolves. Palin has every right to follow her
dreams, but her self-righteous posturing to generate political buzzwords is hypocritical.

Bethany Parsons Perry, GROSSE POINTE WOODS, MICH.

It comes as no surprise to me that Palin is having success reaching out to the "mom vote." Too often the
Democratic Party has allowed stay-at-home moms to be characterized as uneducated and unmotivated.

Kelly Cahill Thompson, GRASS VALLEY, CALIF.

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

The Moment
By STEPHEN GANDEL Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

As Washington fights over whether to extend assistance for millions of out-of-work Americans, it is easy
to forget where our money is going. A pair of late-July dam breaks--one at Arizona's Tempe Town Lake
and the other at Iowa's Lake Delhi--offered a wet reminder. The latter was by far the bigger disaster,
flooding hundreds of homes, submerging 6,000 acres of farmland and causing millions of dollars in
damage. The American Society of Civil Engineers says 4,095 of the nation's 85,000 dams are in need of
repair, including 1,826 that could cause loss of life if they failed. That same group says our nation's
infrastructure, everything from highways to sewers, is in need of a $2.2 trillion upgrade, while our ports
and transportation systems are far less productive than many emerging nations', a fact that is hobbling
our already ailing manufacturing sector. In the highly political and philosophical debate over which will
cost the U.S. more--crumbling bridges or rising deficits--the bursting of two little-known dams serves as a
stark reminder that ignoring our infrastructure is not a strategy that can long hold much water.

The World
By Harriet Barovick; Ishaan Tharoor; Alexandra Silver; Claire Suddath; Frances Romero; Kayla Webley;
Nate Rawlings Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
1 | London

Too Little, Too Late

Nearly 100 days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, BP announced July
27 that its embattled CEO will step down. Tony Hayward, who has become the public face of the disaster,
will be replaced Oct. 1 by American executive Robert Dudley. The oil giant also said it will set aside $32.2
billion to cover the long-term costs of the spill, the worst in U.S. history. The news came as the company
posted a $17 billion loss for the second quarter of 2010--one of the largest losses in British corporate
history. For his part, Hayward will leave with benefits valued at $18 million and a potential job with the
company's joint operation in Russia. "Life isn't fair," he told reporters.

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

Sinking Stock. BP's fall since the rig explosion

4/20 Explosion on Deepwater Horizon

DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE

DOW JONES OIL & GAS TITANS 30 INDEX

BP STOCK PRICE*

* HIGH: 4/20, $60.48; LOW: 6/25, $27.02; 7/26, $38.65.

SOURCE: YAHOO! FINANCE

2 | Arizona

Judge Blocks Law's Key Provisions

Less than a day before Arizona's immigration law, known as SB 1070, was to take effect on July 29, U.S.
District Court Judge Susan Bolton blocked some of its most disputed parts. The injunction applies to
sections that call for officers to check immigration status when enforcing other laws and that require
immigrants to always carry papers. Seven lawsuits, including one by the Justice Department, have been
filed against SB 1070. The law's opponents have argued that it could lead to racial profiling, while its
proponents say the state must address the influx of illegal immigrants because the federal government
has not.

3 | San Francisco

Lutherans Welcome Gay Clergy

On July 25, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America formally accepted seven openly gay pastors
who had previously been barred from serving in the ministry, making it the largest Protestant church in
the U.S. to admit noncelibate, openly gay clergy. The 4.6 million--member church voted last year to allow
gay clergy in monogamous relationships to serve. Since then, 1% of its congregations have left the
denomination; more are expected to sever ties in the coming months.

4 | Uganda

African Leaders Agree on New Rules in Somalia

At a July 27 meeting in Uganda attended by leaders from across the continent, the African Union (A.U.)
agreed to expand the size and mandate of a peacekeeping force deployed in the troubled state of
Somalia. The A.U. contingent had previously been barred from firing at the country's Islamist militias,
including fighters from al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab, unless provoked. Now they can strike first.

5 | Cambodia

Khmer Rouge Torture Chief Found Guilty

More than three decades after the Khmer Rouge's murderous reign came to an end, its torture chief,
Kaing Guek Eav (known as Duch), was found guilty by a U.N.-backed tribunal July 26 of crimes against
humanity. The radical regime, which ruled Cambodia's Killing Fields from 1975 to 1979, oversaw the
deaths of some 1.7 million by execution or as a result of torture, overwork and starvation. Under Duch's
watch at Tuol Sleng prison, at least 14,000 people lost their lives. His 35-year sentence, which was
reduced to 19 because of time served and other factors, means Duch, 67, may one day walk free--a fact
that made surviving victims and their families weep with rage. Duch plans to appeal.

6 | Pakistan

DEADLY PLANE CRASH

All 152 people aboard a Pakistani passenger plane were killed July 28 in the worst air disaster in the
nation's history. Airblue Flight ED 202, which was traveling from Karachi to Islamabad, crashed near the
end of its journey in the midst of poor weather conditions in the Margalla Hills, north of the capital.
Rescue workers searching the site found no survivors. The Pakistani government declared July 29 a
national day of mourning.

7 | Serbia

Kosovo? No

In response to a July 22 U.N. court decision, which ruled that Kosovo is an independent state and that its
2008 secession from Serbia did not violate international law, Serbian lawmakers passed a resolution
announcing that they would never recognize the former province's sovereignty. Serbia plans to send 55
envoys to foreign countries to ask for support. Currently, 69 countries, including the U.S. and most of the
E.U., recognize Kosovo.

8 | Spain

Catalonia Exits the Bullring

Bullfighting has long been a cornerstone of Spanish culture, but not all parts of the country still welcome
matadors. On July 28, the legislature of Catalonia, based in Barcelona, voted to outlaw the sport. The
ban, which is set to take effect in 2012, is a victory for animal-rights activists but is also seen as a feather
in the cap of the Catalan movement for greater autonomy.

9 | Honduras

Nike Pays Its Dues

A year and a half after closing two Honduran factories, Nike finally succumbed to pressure to create a
$1.5 million fund for its laid-off workers. Having initially denied them severance wages, the sports-apparel
company was forced to take action when the Washington-based Worker Rights Consortium persuaded
U.S. colleges to threaten to cancel Nike contracts. United Students Against Sweatshops also agitated in
favor of the workers.

[The following text appears within a map. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual map.]
Many nations vie for control of the South China Sea

CHINA'S CLAIMED TERRITORIAL WATERS

BOUNDARIES SUGGESTED BY A U.N. CONVENTION

DISPUTED ISLANDS

SOURCES: U.N. CONVENTION ON THE LAW OF THE SEA; CIA

10 | Hanoi

A Confrontation at Sea

As U.S. warships conducted war games off the Korean coast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waded
into other troubled waters this week, declaring at a regional summit in Vietnam that a multilateral
resolution of age-old disputes in the South China Sea was in the U.S.'s "national interest." Such a call,
though seemingly benign, rankled China, which claims the sea in its entirety and is irked by the U.S.'s
continued regional primacy.

* | What They're Seeking in Kenya: A team of Chinese archaeologists arrived in Kenya on July 26 to
begin a three-year mission in search of a nearly 600-year-old shipwreck. The vessel is believed to have
been part of the trading armada led by Ming-dynasty admiral Zheng He. According to DNA analysis, a
few survivors may have swum to shore and formed a medieval Afro-Chinese community.

HALPERIN'S TAKE

Mark Halperin's Take: The Digital President

Loses Two Rounds
Mark Halperin's Take: The Digital President
Loses Two Rounds

Photo-Illustration by Wes Duvall for TIME;

Obama head: Rod Lamkey Jr./ AFP / Getty
Images; Obama Body: Saul Loeb / AFP /
Getty Images; Crist: Lynne Sladky / AP
Ever since the computer trounced the television as America's main information source, our Presidents
have been confounded in their efforts to navigate the perils of digital media. Bill Clinton and George W.
Bush both struggled in this new arena. Clinton was nearly ruined by Matt Drudge, while Bush was
reduced to a cartoonish, smirking warmonger by bloggers and YouTube.

Barack Obama set out to conquer the digital age. As a candidate, he was all high-tech cool, from
Facebook to inspirational viral videos (think the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am) to electronic voter outreach.
Obama's White House team has outdone its predecessors in spreading an e-message, even blogging
from the West Wing.

But the past two weeks have shown the limits of Obama's info-age wizardry. When Drudge disciple
Andrew Breitbart posted a video clip of African-American Department of Agriculture employee Shirley
Sherrod that made it seem as if she had discriminated against a white farmer, the Administration
panicked and forced Sherrod out — though even a cursory check of her full remarks would have revealed
a tale of racial tolerance. It was a low point for a team that claims to transcend the slash-and-burn tactics
of the new-media freak show.

A few days later, Obama took another digital sucker punch when news organizations reported on
thousands of leaked Pentagon documents obtained by the website WikiLeaks detailing the true chaos of
the Afghanistan war. The President denounced "the disclosure of sensitive information from the
battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations," but he knew full well he was
powerless to stop it.

Obama is as tech-savvy as he is coolheaded. But despite his early successes, he has proved no more
able than his predecessors to tame the digital hydra.

Are the Democrats Planning a Lame-Duck

Donnybrook?
By Jay Newton-Small / Washington Wednesday,
Jul. 28, 2010

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Representative

Paul Kanjorski, Senate majority leader Harry
Reid and Senator Chris Dodd attend the
signing of the financial-reform bill in
Washington, July 21, 2010
Charles Dharapak / AP
If you listen to Republicans, the lame-duck session of Congress — a special session held on Capitol Hill
between the November midterm elections and the seating of a new Congress in January — will be filled
with scary Democratic attempts to pass controversial climate-change legislation, tax hikes and union
sops before the party loses some or all of its majority. Listen to Democrats, and that lame-duck session
promises to provide a brief, postpartisan window in which there's a chance of addressing some of the
country's most pressing issues such as immigration, global warming and the skyrocketing federal deficit.
In reality, the much anticipated lame-duck session is likely to be far less eventful than advertised.

The GOP alarm bells play well with a base petrified of further Democratic spending and convinced the
Dems will use any obscure tactic to ram through controversial bills. Republican parties in several states
are going so far as to look into ways the state laws can be interpreted so that winners might be seated
immediately after the midterms — for example, special elections for the Senate seats in Delaware, New
York, Colorado and Illinois.

As Republican chances of taking back the House — and maybe even the Senate — have increased, the
dire warnings are also an attempt to delegitimize any potential legislation Democrats may attempt. House
minority leader John Boehner has already called upon Democratic leaders to promise not to pursue a
"sour grapes" session after the election, and on Tuesday he asked voters to join him in that effort by
pressing Democrats on the matter over the August recess. "A couple of weeks ago I challenged [House
Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and [House majority leader Steny] Hoyer to pledge right now that they won't use a
lame-duck session to pass controversial bills like a job-killing national energy tax," Boehner told the press.
"We should all be calling on the Democrats to pledge that they won't do this." Representative Chris Van
Hollen, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to
Congress, on Tuesday denied the existence of any secret plan to pass climate-change legislation in a
lame-duck session.

Still, some in the party may have other ideas. Democrats have floated the idea of passing the Employee
Free Choice Act, a controversial bill that makes it easier for unions to organize, as well as voting on
recommendations from President Obama's deficit-reduction commission during the lame-duck session.
And Senator John Kerry, who's leading the Senate efforts on climate change, says he hopes to pass a
bill to regulate greenhouse gases. "We will continue to try over the next weeks, but if it is after the
election, it may well be that some members are free and liberated and feeling that they can take a risk or
do something," Kerry told Bloomberg News.

It may be a long shot, but Kerry does have some reason for hope. In past lame-duck sessions, the results
of the elections have sometimes freed members to take controversial votes they might have avoided
before — like in 2004, when the large GOP wins persuaded some in Congress to help push through a
debt-limit increase and the 9/11 commission's recommendations. Some major pieces of legislation have
passed in previous lame-duck sessions, including raising the gas tax and immigration reform in 1982 and
passing the Clean Air Amendments of 1970. But it's highly unusual for a party that has lost one or both
chambers to ram through controversial legislation in the waning days of their power. More often the
session has led to bipartisan agreements: in 1994 Republicans worked with President Clinton to pass the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and in 2002, when Democrats lost control of the Senate, they
worked with President George W. Bush to push through the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security as well as the Defense and Intelligence Authorization Acts. The most controversial lame-duck
measures have come not in legislation but in actions like the 1998 House impeachment of President Bill
Clinton, the 1954 Senate censure of Senator Joe McCarthy and the 1974 confirmation of Nelson
Rockefeller as Vice President.

In any lame-duck session, the Democrats would still have one important problem: having less than the 60
votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster in the Senate. Finding GOP votes for a climate-change bill
appears unlikely; it's equally doubtful any Republicans would vote for raising taxes, even if recommended
by the bipartisan Deficit Reduction Commission. And to pass the union bill, Democratic Senator Blanche
Lincoln, a staunch opponent, would have to have a sudden change of heart.

Still, a lame-duck session will almost certainly take place this year, for a very practical reason. With
Republicans latching on to Democratic spending as a campaign issue, Dems are postponing passage of
next year's funding bills until after the election to avoid providing the GOP with more political fodder. That
will likely mean that the lame-duck session will feature a noncontroversial resolution that continues
funding the government, until Congress can pass the delinquent spending bills in a new session next
year — after a new Congress is seated.

Dems Hedge a Florida Bet

By MICHAEL SCHERER Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

When President Obama last visited Florida, he walked Pensacola's white-sand beaches with Governor
Charlie Crist to talk about the Gulf oil spill. Photos of the two leaders strolling through paradise looked like
a campaign ad for Crist, the Republican turned independent running for the Senate.

Now, irritated Democrats, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, are demanding that
Obama do more to aid Democrat Kendrick Meek. "Come on down and show me that you mean it," says
Florida Representative Alcee Hastings. Although Meek already has Obama's endorsement, Hastings
says, "I need to see him say it."

But a photo op may not save Meek. After a weak start, he's in a primary fight with billionaire Jeff Greene.
Meanwhile, Crist is leading in the polls. And some cagey political hedging is at work, as two key
Democratic advisers have joined Crist's team. Democrats quietly hope that if Crist wins, he'll vote with
them in the Senate — a possible bright spot in an otherwise dismal election year.
Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine
By ALICE PARK Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

CHILD BEHAVIOR

How Routine Can Help Kids Stave Off Anxiety

Keeping young children on a stable schedule of activities — with consistent wake and sleep times,
regular play periods and reliable intervals between meals — can make them less anxious about new
situations and environments as they grow older. That's the conclusion of a unique new study led by
Timothy Monk at the University of Pittsburgh. Monk asked the parents of 59 1-month-old babies to
document when they performed specific tasks, such as feeding, changing, playing with and comforting
their infants. Over the next 13 years, the parents answered periodic questionnaires about their children's
developing mental state, including how often they cried or felt fearful about new situations in school.

Monk found that babies who had more dependable routines at 1 month were less likely to be anxious at
age 10. He thinks the reason may have to do with both physiological factors — like the levels of the
hormones cortisol and melatonin, which help regulate sleep and eating — and environmentally
influenced ones like sociability, which is encouraged in children who feel secure in their daily routines and
interactions with their parents.

DRUG POLICY

Veterans Get the Go-Ahead to Use Medical Marijuana

The U.S. department of Veterans Affairs has issued a long-awaited directive allowing its patients to use
marijuana for medical reasons without jeopardizing their access to government-sponsored health care.

Until now, physicians and patients were unclear on whether veterans using medical marijuana, even in
the 14 states where it is legal, were breaking federal law — which prohibits possession or use of the drug
for any reason — and thus were ineligible to participate in VA-based pain-management programs. The
uncertainty made some VA physicians reluctant to treat medical-marijuana users and led patients to
avoid seeking care there.

With the official policy clarification, VA patients who register for a medical-marijuana card in states where
such use is legal may use the natural painkiller to alleviate conditions including nausea caused by
chemotherapy, chronic pain, insomnia and anxiety. VA physicians still cannot prescribe, dispense or
endorse cannabis use for any reason, in accordance with federal law. But patients who obtain the drug
for medicinal purposes outside the VA system in a state where it is legal may discuss the use of
marijuana with their doctor as part of their pain-management program.

FROM THE LABS

Risk at the RegisterBisphenol a (BPA), the estrogen-mimicking compound found in plastic, also coats
many cash-register receipts, according to a new study by the Environmental Working Group. Tests found
that 40% of receipts from gas stations, fast-food outlets, grocery stores and other retailers contained
significant amounts of the potentially cancer-causing chemical. But experts note that while BPA can rub
off paper when handled, it's not clear how much is actually absorbed by the body.
Clues to Alzheimer's
Researchers at MIT have found a protein in the sirtuin family that interrupts the formation of sticky protein
plaques in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's disease. Sirtuin has also been associated with longevity in
mouse studies, though drugs that boost the protein do not appear to extend life.

ON CALL: BEDBUG CZAR

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg redirected $500,000 to fund a war on bedbugs to rein in the
city's exploding rates of infestation. But New York is hardly the only town with a pest problem: a new
survey finds that nearly 95% of U.S. exterminators have responded to bedbug calls in the past year —
from residences, hotels, offices, laundromats and even movie theaters — compared with only 25%
before 2000. Global travel is largely to blame, say experts.

Verbatim
'We are at war with al-Qaeda.'

FRANÇOIS FILLON, Prime Minister of France, a day after news broke that French aid worker Michel
Germaneau ( right ) had been murdered by the terrorist network's North African branch

'They're making more than the President.'

CORY CHRIST, a resident of the Los Angeles suburb Bell, where three top city officials resigned after
they admitted to severely inflating their salaries; one of the trio was earning nearly $800,000--about
one-fifteenth of the city's entire budget

'I can't sing forever.'

WYCLEF JEAN, the Haitian-born musician, cryptically responding to reports that he is planning to run for
President of the earthquake-ravaged country in its Nov. 28 election

'It's an audacious blend of eccentricity, artistry and rebellion, changing the general perception of beer one
stuffed animal at a time.'

JAMES WATT, a co-founder of BrewDog, a Scottish brewer that has created what it claims is the world's
strongest beer, dubbed the End of History; each bottle comes inside a taxidermied animal

'Even if we have to eat stones, we would stop sending oil to the United States.'
HUGO CHAVEZ, Venezuelan President, threatening to cut oil supplies to the U.S. in the case of a
military attack by Colombia, an American ally that Chávez broke diplomatic ties with on July 22;
Venezuela gets more than 90% of its export income from oil sales, mostly to the U.S.

'I'm here to give this law some teeth.'

ERIN ANDREWS, ESPN reporter who was victimized by a stalker last year, supporting a new law that
makes it easier to prosecute stalkers and increases the maximum jail sentence for offenders

'It is just wrong to say that Turkey can guard the camp but not be allowed to sit in the tent.'

DAVID CAMERON, British Prime Minister, arguing on a July 27 visit to Turkey that the country should be
allowed into the European Union because, as a member of NATO, it has defended Europe and has a
military presence in Afghanistan

TALKING HEADS

Lisa A. Goldstein

A deaf journalist, writing in USA Today on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act:

"Though the ADA established rights, it has not reduced the need for advocacy. People with disabilities
have always had difficulty finding jobs. In fact, there is a 42% employment gap that separates
working-age people with and without disabilities ... Right now, a real problem is the gap in the ADA
regarding the Internet. People with sensory loss are routinely being left out when it comes to online
content ... It has been 20 years. Why are we still struggling?"

--7/26/10

Peter Lauria

On the Daily Beast, explaining why Shark Week has become so popular:

"Perfectly combining education and camp--a giant, inflatable shark currently sits on top of Discovery's
headquarters--it was an immediate hit with audiences ... Shark Week has also helped clear up many of
the fears associated with the animal and misconceptions about why they sometimes attack humans ... [It]
is also a powerful platform to raise awareness about the dangers sharks face from commercial fishing."

--7/26/10

Clyde Haberman

Setting the record straight in the New York Times about a planned Muslim cultural center near Ground
Zero:
"That it may even be called a mosque is debatable. It is designed as a multi-use complex with a space
set aside for prayer--no minarets, no muezzin calls to prayer ... It would seem to qualify as a mosque
about as much as a chapel in a Roman Catholic hospital qualifies as a church."

--7/26/10

Brief History: First Family Weddings

By ALEXANDRA SILVER Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Tricia Nixon was the only child of a President to be married in the Rose Garden, in 1971

Co Rentmeester / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

Weddings can pose logistical problems for any couple, but Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky had the
added challenge of keeping the details of their July 31 wedding under wraps despite ravenous media
interest. Though the bride's father had been out of the Oval Office for nearly a decade, Chelsea, like
many presidential children before her, was faced with reconciling matrimonial privacy and publicity,
intimacy and grandeur.

First Family weddings have typically been major social events, especially those rare ones that have
taken place in the White House. Nine presidential kids have gotten hitched there, starting with Maria
Monroe in 1820. Nellie Grant's 1874 nuptials were much hurrahed: after all, Walt Whitman may have
celebrated all Americans, but he didn't write poems for just any bride. Nellie's day was trumped, however,
by Alice Roosevelt's spectacular 1906 wedding, at which at least one guest fainted and Teddy's famously
boisterous daughter cut her cake with a sword. Luci Baines Johnson's 1966 wedding sparked intense
network coverage, and comedian Edie Adams quipped that only "the immediate country" had been
invited.
But for all the presidential kids who've reveled in America's version of a royal wedding, there are also
those who've shunned the strictures of Washington. Jenna Bush headed down to the family ranch in
Crawford, Texas, for her ceremony, perhaps inspired by her aunt Dorothy (daughter of George H.W.
Bush), who tied the knot at Camp David in 1992. JFK Jr. managed to have a secretive wedding with
Carolyn Bessette on Georgia's Cumberland Island in 1996, and that same year, Amy Carter was married
outside Plains, Ga., with less pomp and circumstance than most. The 39th President was present, but
Jimmy didn't give his daughter away. Amy said she "didn't belong to anyone." Least of all, the public.

Chelsea's Big Day: A Brief History of White House Weddings

Nellie Grant, 1874

Ulysses S. Grant's only daughter wed in the White House at the age of 18, in "perhaps the greatest
American social event of the nineteenth century," according to presidential historian Doug Wead. Nellie's
romance, which captivated the nation with its storybook overtones, began when she met Englishman
Algernon Sartoris on an Atlantic cruise.
Alice Roosevelt, 1906
Upon returning from the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt's famously boisterous daughter announced her
engagement to the much-older Congressman Nicholas Longworth. At the wedding reception, fearless
Alice cut her wedding cake with a sword.

Jessie Wilson, 1913

The same year her father Woodrow Wilson took office, Jessie married Harvard Law graduate Francis B.
Sayre in the White House — in the same spot (the East Room) as both Nellie Grant and Alice Roosevelt.
The couple's engagement went largely unnoticed by the press, and to make up for lost time, the
Washington Post used its entire front page to cover the details of the wedding.

Eleanor "Nellie" Wilson, 1914

Despite turning down Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo's first proposal of marriage, Nellie
accepted when he asked again. After a quiet courtship — Nellie stole away to the Blue Room to teach
McAdoo how to foxtrot during her sister Jessie's wedding without anyone noticing — the two married and
soon became a Washington power couple.
FDR Jr., 1937
The family's golden boy, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. married Ethel DuPont, the first of his five wives, in 1937
in Delaware. The news of the couple's engagement sparked controversy, as DuPont was an heiress to
one of the nation's prominent Republican families. The ceremony was hailed as the "wedding of the
decade."

Margaret Truman, 1956

Margaret opted to have her wedding in the same Independence, Mo., church as her parents, though
without any of the "hurly-burly," as she called it. She spent a week in seclusion before the big day,
emerging from the Truman home only a handful of times, including once to partake in a small press
conference.

Luci Baines Johnson, 1966

Luci and her mother planned for a Texas-size ceremony in D.C. At one point, the guest list included 700
people and her seven-tiered wedding cake weighed 300 lb. She was only 19 years old when she married
Patrick Nugent.
Patricia Nixon, 1971
Despite fears of rain, Patricia, or Tricia, as she was called, insisted that her wedding be in the White
House Rose Garden — the first and only wedding ceremony hosted there. Tricia married Edward Cox, a
Harvard Law student, and appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine in her wedding dress.

Caroline Kennedy, 1986

After graduating from Columbia University with a law degree, Caroline took a job at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where she met her future husband Edwin
Schlossberg. Jackie Kennedy planned their Massachusetts wedding, and Caroline was walked
down the aisle by her uncle Teddy.

Amy Carter, 1996

Amy met her husband while she was an employee at an Atlanta bookstore where he was the manager.
Her wedding, outside of Plains, Ga., was as stubbornly low-key as she was. Amy refused to let her father
Jimmy Carter give her away and baked her own cake for the reception, and the couple drove off in a car
with a pro-choice bumper sticker.
America's prince John F. Kennedy Jr. married his girlfriend Carolyn Bessette in secret on an island off the
coast of Georgia. Forty guests were in attendance, excluding most of the Kennedy clan — they would
draw too much attention. The chapel in which the small ceremony was held didn't have electricity.

Jenna Bush, 2008

Jenna met Henry Hager while he was working for her father's 2004 re-election campaign. Jenna chose to
have a private ceremony on the family ranch in Texas rather than a White House celebration. When
asked if he was helping with the wedding plans, George W. Bush said, "They're letting me spend money."
The Skimmer
By GILBERT CRUZ Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

By Mary Roach

W.W. Norton; 334 pages

Mary Roach sure is a curious person. The author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex has once again discovered a winner of a subject with
her latest effort, which delves into the ins and outs of zero-gravity living. "Everything one takes for
granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed," writes Roach of those who are lucky (or are
they?) enough to go into space. While she touches on topics from simian astronauts to the ideal shape
and configuration of space food, Roach saves the bulk of her exploration for questions that often remain
undiscussed outside schoolyards and NASA experiment rooms. What happens if you vomit in your
helmet during a space walk? Is it possible to have sex in space? How exactly does one defecate in a
zero-gravity toilet? Roach's strange enthusiasm for all things oddball (combined with her sometimes
annoying, though mostly amusing, tic of ending paragraphs with rim-shot-worthy punch lines) makes
Mars a more than worthy destination.

READ [X]

SKIM

TOSS
Daniel Schorr
By Donald A. Ritchie Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Aggressive reporting put Daniel Schorr on a presidential enemies list, got him investigated by Congress
and cost him jobs with CBS and CNN, but his insightful analysis captured audiences for six decades.
Schorr, who died on July 23 at 93, was recruited into news broadcasting by Edward R. Murrow. He
entered the profession as veteran radio reporters were resisting the switch to television, which they
dismissed as little more than putting pictures to headlines. Their reluctance opened the way for Schorr's
generation of television newscasters.

CBS sent him to Moscow in 1955 and then to Washington in 1966. Rising through the ranks at CBS
News' Washington bureau, Schorr jockeyed for airtime within a squad of talented correspondents.
Finding the regular beats at the White House and Capitol already covered, Schorr claimed his own
territory by covering Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. During Richard Nixon's presidency,
Schorr won Emmys for his reporting on the Watergate scandal.

At the peak of his television career, Schorr obtained and passed along a leaked copy of the Pike report
on illegal activities by the CIA and FBI. He refused to divulge his source to congressional investigators,
and while he managed to avoid a contempt citation, the incident ended his employment at CBS. Schorr's
pull-no-punches approach to the news also shortened his stint as an analyst for Ted Turner's CNN in the
'80s. But Schorr found his true niche on National Public Radio, where for the rest of his life, he served
listeners with a voice, wit and depth of experience that remain unmatched.

Ritchie, historian of the Senate, is the author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the
Washington Press Corps

Alex Higgins
By KAYLA WEBLEY Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

Had "Hurricane" higgins never picked up a cue, snooker as we know it may not exist. As a young punk
with a quick stroke and an even quicker temper, he elevated the unpopular, old man's game from a sport
played in dark, dank billiard halls to one played under the glare of television cameras. Higgins, who was
found dead July 24 at age 61 in his Belfast home, sank even the toughest shots with ease. When asked
how he did it, he shrugged his shoulders, unsure of where his innate talent came from. He simply took
aim, and the balls followed suit.

From working-class roots in Northern Ireland, he stumbled upon a snooker hall at age 11 while taking a
shortcut home; 12 years later he was a world champion (which at the time made him the youngest player
ever to hold the title). He went on to win the title a second and final time in 1982, in a series of matches
still featured in highlight reels.

Higgins' trademark fedora and flamboyant swagger loosely garbed a proclivity for raising hell. Nicknamed
Hurricane for both his fast style and his destructive habits, he once head-butted a tournament director
when asked to take a drug test. But it was that mix of charisma and intensity that made him a joy to watch,
made snooker a British phenomenon and put sponsorship money in players' pockets. Remembering his
legacy, fellow snooker pro Adrian Gunnell said, "We all owe our careers to him."

Overturned
By FRANCES ROMERO Monday, Aug. 09, 2010

In his second legal victory this summer, on July 27, Warren Jeffs--the polygamist leader of the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS)--saw the Utah Supreme Court
reverse two convictions against him of complicity to rape. Just a month and a half earlier, an Arizona
judge dismissed similar charges against Jeffs that originally plunged him into national headlines in 2006.
The Utah court ruled that the jury in the case had received incorrect instructions before convicting Jeffs
for his role in the "spiritual marriage" of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old first cousin. Prosecutors are
considering whether to retry Jeffs, who was serving two consecutive terms of five years to life in a Utah
state prison. While the reversal is significant and could make a retrial problematic, Jeffs still has a long
legal road ahead. He also faces extradition to Texas on charges of bigamy and sexual and aggravated
assault stemming from evidence found during a 2008 raid on the Texas FLDS Yearning for Zion ranch.
Defense attorney Walter Bugden cheered the Utah order, calling Jeffs a victim of "religious prosecution"
and "religious persecution."