Tokyo's Transformation

The earthquake and tsunami that struck northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, caused almost unimaginable damage and misery. In a surge of floodwater that lasted just two minutes, Japan lost nearly as many people as a proportion of its population as the United States did during the entire Vietnam War. The subsequent meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactors deepened the crisis.

But some see a silver lining to these dark tragedies. After 20 years of economic stagnation, the crisis could bring the Japanese together, catalyze much-needed reforms, and reverse decades of malaise. Many in the United States predict that the disaster will give a welcome boost to the U.S.-Japanese alliance. In an interview with Japan's national public television network on March 22, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed, "Our alliance, which was already strong and enduring, has become even more so." Indeed, the U.S. response to the disaster showcased its lasting commitment to Japan, as well as the unique logistical and material capabilities that the U.S. military forces stationed in the Pacific can provide. In what was dubbed Operation Tomodachi (Operation Friendship), the United States mobilized some 20,000 service members to assist with relief activities. It was the largest joint operation in the history of the alliance, and it generated widespread public support in both countries.

Despite the warmth of that the moment, however, deeper trends portend a far less certain future for the U.S.-Japanese relationship. Japan is undergoing profound changes aimed at empowering the political leadership at the expense of its historically preeminent bureaucracy. But rather than bringing about a clean transfer of institutional authority, the reforms have triggered battles among politicians and between politicians and bureaucrats, creating a power vacuum and undermining the government's ability to make policy. Complicating matters further are Japan's piecemeal policymaking institutions, a hypercompetitive media environment, and an increasingly dire fiscal outlook. The result has been uncertainty and gridlock, which are affecting alliance policymaking and are unlikely to disappear in the years ahead.

Referent	Line #	What does it Refer to?	Anaphoric or Cataphoric
The	-	United States	Cataphoric
Our	-	U.S. – Japanese Alliance	Anaphoric
Its	-	show the commitment to Japan	Anaphoric
its	-	bureaucracy	Cataphoric
Which	-	The result	Anaphoric

Document of Word With Lines #


By Eduardo Isea

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The Black Swan of Cairo

Why is surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic elite? In 2007-8, when the global financial system imploded, the cry that no one could have seen this coming was heard everywhere, despite the existence of numerous analyses showing that a crisis was unavoidable. It is no surprise that one hears precisely the same response today regarding the current turmoil in the Middle East. The critical issue in both cases is the artificial suppression of volatility -- the ups and downs of life -- in the name of stability. It is both misguided and dangerous to push unobserved risks further into the statistical tails of the probability distribution of outcomes and allow these high-impact, low-probability "tail risks" to disappear from policymakers' fields of observation. What the world is witnessing in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya is simply what happens when highly constrained systems explode.

Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to "Black Swans" -- that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers.

Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems.

Seeking to restrict variability seems to be good policy (who does not prefer stability to chaos?), so it is with very good intentions that policymakers unwittingly increase the risk of major blowups. And it is the same misperception of the properties of natural systems that led to both the economic crisis of 2007-8 and the current turmoil in the Arab world. The policy implications are identical: to make systems robust, all risks must be visible and out in the open -- fluctuat nec mergitur (it fluctuates but does not sink) goes the Latin saying.

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Defending Democracy in Côte d'Ivoire

In early April, in the final days of Côte d'Ivoire's torturous four-month-long political crisis, French and UN helicopters bombarded the presidential residence in Abidjan. This military operation sealed the fate of the incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo, paving the way for Alassane Ouattara, the widely recognized winner of the November 2010 presidential elections, to claim office. But the French and UN action had another effect: it triggered commentary and outrage about international interference -- in particular on the part of France -- in African affairs. Ivoirian newspapers backing Gbagbo fulminated about France's desire to retake its former colonies. The French press, meanwhile, obsessed about whether France's military intervention spelled a new era of Françafrique, the term, first introduced in the 1950s, for French interference in the internal affairs of its former African colonies. The New York Times ran a story about France's "long shadow" over its former colonies, and pundits around the world worried that these international actions could doom Ouattara's legitimacy. 

Such a Eurocentric focus, however, both mischaracterizes the internal dynamics of the conflict and misses the more significant diplomatic development -- namely, the role of African regional organizations. In the end, France and the UN did not win the war for Ouattara and his self-styled "Republican Forces." By the time France and the UN intervened, Ouattara's forces controlled 90 percent of the country and were on the verge of taking the commercial capital, Abidjan. International forces did manage to hasten Gbagbo's demise: in effect, accomplishing the inevitable and preventing a final attack on Abidjan, which would have resulted in a terrible humanitarian crisis.

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The Leadership Secrets of Bismarck

In 1848, a wave popular revolutions rocked Europe's authoritarian regimes. How those upheavals played out holds lessons for the future of the Arab Spring.

Over the last two decades, a distinctive regime type has emerged across the developing world, one that scholars have come to call competitive authoritarianism. This sort of political system allows for the contestation of power among different social groups, but with so many violations of electoral fairness and so little regard for liberal norms that it cannot be called a true democracy. From Russia to Peru, Cambodia to Cameroon, such regimes are now located in almost every region of the world, and how they develop will determine the shape of the twenty-first century.

One of the best ways to gain insight into the future paths of these political systems, ironically, is to look backward rather than forward, because the past can be prologue. Wilhelmine Germany is a particularly interesting point of comparison, because it had many similar characteristics. Like many of these regimes, it, too, experienced late, rapid growth and social transformation. It, too, developed a competitive form of politics that fell short of full-blown democracy. And potentially like some of today's emerging powers, Germany had a domestic political crisis that was capable of shaking the world.

The larger-than-life figure who presided over Germany's rise was Otto von Bismarck, foreign minister and minister-president of Prussia during the 1860s, architect of German unification in 1871, and chancellor of a unified German empire from 1871 to 1890. Given Bismarck's role in German history, a vast amount has already been written about him, so one might question what more there is to say. However, in Bismarck: A Life, Jonathan Steinberg, a respected historian with a long career at Cambridge University and the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a first-rate biography that combines a standard historical narrative with an intriguing account of Bismarck as a personality.

Incorporating reflections from the man himself, as well as from his friends, enemies, and coworkers, Bismarck offers a fresh and compelling portrait of a fascinating character. Steinberg shows how the German political climate Bismarck fostered -- marked by deference to authoritarianism, an aversion to compromise, and reactionary antimodernism -- contributed to the country's disastrous course in the decades after Bismarck's fall from power. And in doing so, he indirectly sheds light on the prospects of competitive authoritarian regimes in the contemporary era. The thing to keep an eye on, it turns out, is less the character of the classes rising from below than the willingness of elites at the top to loosen their grip on power.

BISMARCK'S POLITICAL GENIUS

Bismarck was born in 1815 to that stratum of Prussian nobility, the Junkers, that combined hardscrabble farming in the rye belt east of the Elbe River with an ethic of disciplined and often militarized service to the Hohenzollerns, Prussia's ruling family. He was educated, witty, and highly intelligent (although not an intellectual). Like many Junkers, his politics were reactionary; he was antidemocratic, antisocialist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic.

Bismarck first rose to prominence during the revolutions of 1848, when nationalist and democratic uprisings challenged Europe's political status quo. As a new member of the Prussian legislature, he forcefully defended the monarchy's desire for unfettered executive power. Thanks in part to his maneuvering then and later, the dynasty survived the tumult and went on to rule for seven more decades -- a period during which Prussia unified Germany around it and blossomed into an industrial and military powerhouse.

Germany's economic development was relatively late by European standards. Social scientists such as Alexander Gerschenkron and Barrington Moore have noted that its embrace of capitalist modernity and rise to power were predicated on a new pattern of authoritarian development -- in Moore's words, a "revolution from above." This meant using industrial policy to push development in those sectors that enhanced state power and simultaneously suppressing or co-opting all political opposition. In order to catch up with the more advanced economies of the West, the government protected heavy industries essential to the nation's military strength, as well as Junker agriculture, with tariffs.

The transformation of a largely agrarian and rural society into an industrial and urban one always involves major changes in social structure. Social change, in turn, almost inevitably leads to the rise of new political actors demanding a voice and a share of power. Although Steinberg does not dwell on the larger socioeconomic or theoretical picture, he does a good job of presenting the specifics of how this story played out in the German case. The success of the German economy led to the expansion of three groups: the bourgeoisie, the middle class, and the working class. These groups challenged Junker dominance through the Catholic Center Party, various liberal parties, and the Social Democratic Party. Ultimately, following Germany's defeat in World War I, these parties would abolish the empire and declare a republic. But Bismarck, by playing these forces off one another and selectively granting policy concessions, managed to keep them at bay for decades.

Font: www.foreignaffairs.com

ING Verbs

By: Karen Maguilbray

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Chasing the Dragon in Tehran

Behind its façade of Muslim piety, Iran is one of the most drug-addled countries in the world.

BY ROLAND ELLIOTT BROWN | NOVEMBER 18, 2011

TEHRAN – On June 26, Iranian state media reported that 20,000 former drug addicts had assembled at Tehran's Azadi Stadium to mark the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended, and used the podium to portray narcotics as an implement of Western predation. "Today," he said, Western countries "have begun harming nations, especially the Iranian nation, by drugs. Arrogant states masquerade themselves behind the so-called humanitarian masks and they want to stir a sense of inability in other nations. They put on masks of freedom-seeking, human rights, and protecting people but in fact they are the biggest criminals in the world."

Tehran is one the higher capitals on the earth's surface, and not only in terms of altitude. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports that Iran has 1.2 million "drug-dependent users," and that 2.26 percent of the population aged 15-64 is addicted to opiates. The organization's director, Yuri Fedotov, has praised Iran for having "the world's highest rate of seizures of opium and heroin," and for developing effective treatment and prevention programs. Human Rights Watch, by contrast, has criticized Fedotov for glossing over the country's inadequate legal proceedings and executions of drug offenders. Most alarmingly, people arrested during opposition demonstrations, such as the Dutch-Iranian Sahra Bahrami, have occasionally been hanged as "drug smugglers." 

Today's Islamic Republic offers premonitions of a narcodystopia. Take a car ride through Tehran at night, and your driver may tell you that the underage girls in chadors who offer esfand -- seeds that are burned to ward off the evil eye -- along the highways are really selling sex to enable addicted fathers. Ride the metro, and you will see battered children pitching trinkets and fortunes to sustain their parents' habits. Visit a poor southern suburb like Shahr-e Rey, and you might see a cigarette vendor in the bazaar with a sideline in used needles. Walk through Khaju Kermani Park on the capital's southeastern outskirts, and you might witness young girls smoking crystal meth in full view of park authorities, while in the background a tall, badly sunburned man with track marks on his arms staggers around in an ill-fitting, woman's blouse.

Yet the Iranian drug scene is not an exclusive feature of the country's decadent capital, or solely of its abject underclass. Its roots run deep and wide: For example, when I was visiting the tomb of the 12th-century poet Saadi, a tourist attraction in the southern city of Shiraz, Azad, a local literary critic who was showing me around, gestured beyond the garden walls to the adjacent neighborhood, named Saadieh after the poet. This he identified as a hub for the region's thieves, traffickers, and drug addicts. "Would you like to visit? It's very easy to visit, but you might not come back alive," he joked. I had seen enough Iranian skid rows to demur, but, intrigued by the apparent intersection of drugs and high culture, I pressed him for insights.

In a display of Persian hospitality, he invited me to the home of a learned opium enthusiast to witness a display. Opium, Azad told me, is Iran's oldest and most entrenched drug, and was used medically in the region by Avicenna, the great Persian philosopher-scientist, 1,000 years ago. In ensuing centuries, it was extolled by the poets of the Persian canon. The best-loved of these, Hafez, measured his ecstasies against it, writing, in the genre of love:

"A wound from you is worthier than salve from others/Your poison, sweeter than the opium they render."

When we entered the front room of a large house on the city's periphery -- shielded from the street by high walls -- there lay arranged on the floor a metal brazier full of coals, an opium pipe, and other paraphernalia, along with plates of watermelon (your reliable narrator partook only of the fruit). 

Font: www.foreignpolicy.com

Referent	Line #	What does it Refer to?	Anaphoric or Cataphoric
He	-	President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad	Anaphoric
They	-	Arrogant states	Anaphoric
That	-	Iran has 1.2 million "drug-dependent users,"	Cataphoric
Who	-	the underage girls	Anaphoric
He	-	Saadieh	Anaphoric
I	-	The Author	Anaphoric
The	-	Great Persian	Cataphoric
We	-	Author and Partners	Anaphoric

Document of Word With Lines #

By Eduardo Isea

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Lord of War " The appearance of Viktor Bout, the so-called "Merchant of Death," in a Manhattan courtroom this week represents a milestone in the long battle to stop the black market arms trade. "

U.S. prosecutors insist that the trial of accused Russian arms broker Viktor Bout, which opened in Manhattan federal court this week, is an open-and-shut case.

During a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sting operation in Bangkok in March 2008, the alleged arms dealer, known as the Merchant of Death, was caught on tape describing his plan to sell millions of dollars in weapons to the Colombian rebel group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to "kill American pilots."

"This is not a complicated case," Assistant U.S. Attorney Brendan McGuire told a federal jury on Wednesday, Oct. 12, during his opening argument, before itemizing a shopping list of weapons Bout pledged to supply to the rebels. "It's all on tape.... This man, Viktor Bout, agreed to provide all of it to a foreign terrorist organization he believed was planning to kill Americans."

Sure, it may be a slam dunk. But Bout's lawyer, Albert Dayan, provided by far the more dramatic narrative, weaving together a complex opening argument this week that seemed like it came straight out of a David Mamet play.

It's true, Dayan said, that federal informants lured his client into entering into discussions about a plan to purchase for the FARC 100 surface-to-air missiles, 20,000 AK-47 rifles, 20,000 fragment grenades, 740 mortars, 350 sniper rifles, five tons of C-4 explosives, and 10 million rounds of ammunition. But he said Bout was playing his own con, luring them into purchasing two cargo planes he was trying to unload for $5 million while holding up the promise of supplying weapons that would never be delivered.

"The simple and very profound truth is that Viktor Bout never wanted, never intended, and never was going to sell arms," Dayan said, a Queens, N.Y., criminal attorney. "He played a perfect sucker to catch a sucker."

The success of Dayan's trial strategy will require jurors to imagine a world in which nobody can be trusted and everyone -- including the good guys -- is motivated by selfish interests. That's not such a tall order, given the remarkably opaque nature of the illicit arms trade, which occurs outside the reach of international laws and regulations and relies on the cooperation of a far-flung network of shady entrepreneurs willing to make a buck off the backs' of some of the world's most desperate people.

From: Foreign  Policy Magazine

Verb Tense	Function	Meaning
pledged to supply	Past + infinitive	Se comprometió a suministrar
agreed to provide	Past + inifinitive	Acordó proveer
believed was planning to kill	Past + past continuous + infinitive	Creyó que estaba planeando matar
was trying to unload	Past continuous + infinitive	Estaba tratando de descargar
would never be delivered	Complex modal – passive voice	Nunca sería entregado
can be trusted	Complex modal – passive voice	Puede ser confiado

By Valerie Gomes

 

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Obama to go multilateral on trade

The White House finally submitted three long-awaited free trade agreements to Congress today, and will now turn its focus to the multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), with the goal of finalizing a framework for the 8-country pact by the time the Asia Pacfic Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit convenes in Honolulu in November.

"The series of trade agreements I am submitting to Congress today will make it easier for American companies to sell their products in South Korea, Colombia, and Panama and provide a major boost to our exports," President Barack Obama said in a statement. "These agreements will support tens of thousands of jobs across the country for workers making products stamped with three proud words: Made in America."

The agreements were submitted to Congress this week because the Senate successfully passed a related bill implementing a Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which is designed to help workers impacted by the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The House Rules Committee was working on that bill on Monday night; the full House is expected to pass it this week.

The FTAs are also expected to gain bipartisan support and pass in short order.

"These agreements will level the playing field for American businesses, including many in South Florida. The billions of dollars in increased sales that will result will enable these companies to create tens of thousands of jobs for hard-pressed Americans," House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) said in a statement. "These agreements are also of great importance to our national security interests in Latin America and East Asia."

If and when these three FTAs pass, that will be the end of bilateral trade agreements for a while. A senior administration official told reporters on a conference call that the administration will then turn its focus to the TPP, a regional trade agreement currently being negotiated with Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam.

"This president has a bias toward multilateralism," the senior administration official said. "The TPP would give us a critical foothold in the most dynamic market.... We will be working to try to get the bone structure of that substantially in place prior to President Obama hosting the APEC leaders in Honolulu."

"This is not the end of the Obama administration's trade policy," the official said, adding that the administration was open to other trade agreements but was not working on any other bilateral pacts as of now.

The senior administration official said that the three FTAs will result in more than $13 billion in exports each year and the creation of tens of thousands of jobs. Obama will host South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in Washington and throw a state dinner in his honor later this month.

  

Activity:

1. I am submitting: 

Line: #6
FORM: present continuous. 
TRADUCCION: estoy ingresando

2. Making: 

Line: #10
FORM: PPC 
TRADUCCION: que hacen 

3. Implementing:

Line: #13
FORM: PPC 
TRADUCCION: implementando

4. Working:

Line: #15
FORM: Continuous in past 
TRADUCCION: trabajando

5. Playing:

Line: #18 
FORM: adjective. 
TRADUCCION: campo de juego

6. Including: 

Line: #18 
FORM: PPC 
TRADUCCION: Incluyendo

7. Being: 

Line: #27
FORM: PASIVO 
TRADUCCION: siendo

8. Working:

Line: #31
FORM: Continuous in past 
TRADUCCION: trabajando

9. Hosting: 

Line: #32
FORM: PPC 
TRADUCCION: Recibiendo

10. Adding: 

Line: #34
FORM: GERUND PHRASE 
TRADUCCION: Agregando

11. Working:

Line: #35
FORM: Continuous in past 
TRADUCCION: TRABAJANDO 

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