Pope Benedict's visit to Cyprus could start reconciliation process

Could religion be the catalyst for settling the decades-long dispute between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus? That prospect was raised Saturday when the leader of the Roman Catholic Church met with Sheikh Nazim, head of the northern Cyprus-based Islamic Sufi Nagshbandi sect in Greece-controlled southern Cyprus. On a trip that had been billed as nonpolitical, Benedict found a way to meet with Nazim, who had to travel from Turkey-controlled northern Cyprus, according to the Reuters international news service. Cyprus has been split nearly in half since Turkey invaded the island in response to a coup by Greek Cypriots in 1974; a U.N. peacekeeping force patrols a buffer zone between the two Mediterranean countries. The Greece-aligned government in the south is recognized internationally while the Turkey-controlled government in the north is recognized only by Ankara. The European Union only recognizes the southern Cyprus government, complicating Turkey's long effort to join Europe's market. The two religious leaders made conciliatory statements to each other, with Nazim saying Benedict was "a great man" and that he hoped "our hearts are moving in the same direction," according to the Reuters international news service. They met in the Holy Cross Church in the U.N.-guarded buffer zone, Reuters said. In an earlier speech in southern Cypress, Benedict told Archbishop Chrysostomos, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cypress, that he wanted everyone to "find the wisdom and strength to work together for a just settlement." But even earlier in the day, Benedict heard charges from Cyprus President Demetris Christofias that churches and heritage sites in the north were being destroyed by Turkish forces, Reuters said. Turkish Cypriot leaders acknowledged some of the damage and said they were trying to restore the historic places, but also complained that Muslim places of worship in the south had been desecrated. On Friday, Chrysostomos accused Turkey of "ethnic cleansing" in northern Cypress, Reuters said.

New GM venture raises uncomfortable questions

Is anyone else uncomfortable about Friday's announcement by post-bankruptcy General Motors, still the largest U.S. automaker, that it would create new venture capital firm to invest in new technologies? The new GM, now 61 percent owned by the U.S. government, said it would put $100 million into a new company to help startup companies working on renewable fuels, advanced materials and other automobile-related ventures. The announcement, reported by the New York Times, came amid an almost unbelievable run of good fortune for the company, which was able to shed a list of troubled subsidiaries in its short trip to bankruptcy court. GM reported its first quarterly profit in three years while its chief rival, the usually unimpeachable Toyota Motor Co. -- is still preoccupied with the discovery of manufacturing defects that caused the recall of millions of cars worldwide and resulted in millions of dollars in fines, so far. “We are constantly looking for ways to deliver the best technology for our customers,” Stephen Girsky, a G.M. executive, said in a written statement. “Our goal is to nurture these innovative technologies to help bring them to market, and to ensure our customers have access to the best technology available.” Spokeswoman Sherrie Childers-Arb told the Times that the new subsidiary, General Motors Ventures, had already identified companies to invest in. But will it be the new, nimble, embarrassed and chastised GM that will be buying into startups with promising ideas, or the old GM that wants to buy new companies to block their products from gaining market share? That's what happened, we still can recall, to the early electric car and, even earlier, to transit systems across the country.

China puts the brakes on torture of suspects, witnesses

News that China had issued new rules discouraging the use of torture to encourage suspects to confess or witnesses to testify in court is a great development for the criminal justice system there, but should be a giant stop sign for western governments trying to open trade routes to the world's most populous country. Sure, the new regulations announced Sunday bring China more in line with western ideas of justice and human rights, and are welcome, but they are long overdue. China executes more people -- 1,700 a year is Amnesty International's estimate -- than the rest of the world's countries combined, according to the New York Times. Mistreatment of suspects and, sometimes, of reluctant witnesses is common in China, the Times said. What that says about Western companies and governments doing business with China is not good, since they are supporting a terrible system. Apparently, the central government's previous attempts to liberalize the system have met with mixed results, the Times said. So, the latest pronouncement by top Chinese law enforcement and judicial bodies, while positive on the surface, will only mean improvement if enforced nationwide. The new regulations, which bar the use of confessions obtained by torture and require police officers to testify in court if a defendant alleges mistreatment, were issued a few weeks after a farmer was released from prison after 10 years after he was convicted using a confession obtained through torture. The case came to light after the alleged victim turned up alive, and caused an uproar in the normally closed society -- a huge concern for the government in Beijing, which puts a premium on social order. “Judicial practice in recent years shows that slack and improper methods have been used to gather, examine and exclude evidence in various cases, especially those involving the death penalty,” the central government said in a statement, the Times said. Legal observers in China were optimistic over the new rules. “They have come just in time because the necessity is so great,” said Zhang Xingshui, a Chinese defense lawyer. “It is a good cure for loopholes, because legal workers are often under so much pressure to get cases closed no matter what it takes.” A professor at the government-owned Chinese People's Public Security University in Beijing told the Times that the provision requiring police to testify in court was revolutionary for China. “This may be common practice for police in the West or in Hong Kong, but it is a new thing for Chinese policemen to testify in court,” Cui Min said. “We have to cultivate a new mindset, one that accepts the idea of possibly setting free a criminal over wrongfully convicting an innocent man.” Of course, it would have been a lot better if Western countries had insisted on major reforms in China before opening their markets and integrating Beijing into the world economic system. But China appears to have fully embraced the idea that there is more to be gained from peaceful relations with the rest of the world than from aggressive isolation, even if it means liberalizing how the Communist Party runs the country. And that is very good news.

Israeli move to stop flotilla explodes into shooting and damaging rhetoric

It looks like Israel has a lot to answer for after its commandos killed at least nine activists trying to outmaneuver the county's blockade of the Gaza Strip territory controlled by Hamas. The commandos staged a predawn raid to try to stop the six-ship flotilla of 700 activists after it refused orders to stop. The flotilla was bringing thousands of tons of supplies to Gaza's isolated Palestinian population, but violence broke out before the boats could be secured and brought to the Israeli port of Ashdod to be searched, according to the Reuters international news service. European countries that had been steadily warming to Israel for two decades were quick with condemnations including, as expected, the usually hostile General Assembly of the United Nations. Turkey, the Muslim country that has been trying to join the European Union for years and has recently been facilitating negotiations between Israel and Syria, also joined the anti-Israel chorus. But Israel rightly contends that it had a right to enforce its blockade, which was imposed to prevent material that could be used to make weapons from reaching Gaza. Militants have fired thousands of missiles from the territory into southern Israeli cities. Egypt has cooperated with Israel in officially sealing the territory, but there have been reports of massive amounts of smuggling through tunnels under the border between Egypt and Gaza. But Israel is being sadly unrealistic if it ignores the magnitude of its miscalculation. That the commando raid went awry is not entirely Israel's fault, since the supposedly peaceful activists had obviously expected something to happen and came armed with, at least, crude weapons. But Israel did send paratroopers to seize control of the flotilla instead of using navy vessels to force the activists into Ashdod so the cargo could be searched. Israel will investigate the conduct of its soldiers and, hopefully, figure out what went wrong. But Israel will be forced to do it alone, since the rhetoric coming from the Palestinian Authority and other Arab states shows they are less interested in preventing violence than in scoring propaganda points against the Jewish state. Turkey called Israel's actions "terrorism," a comment so illogical it precludes any reasonable response. The Palestinian Authority called the attack on the flotilla "a massacre," which it obviously wasn't. Israel certainly did not expect its commando raid to go so terribly wrong. U.S. President Barack Obama got it exactly right when he said he regretted the loss of life and demanded a full accounting of what transpired at sea.

Obama's proposals for NASA fail to gain much altitude on Capitol Hill

Plans hatched in the Bush era for a new NASA moon landing may not have seemed terribly logical, since U.S. astronauts already visited there in the 1960s and 1970s. But changing those plans to advance human space travel in the future is turning out to be a lot harder than it should be. What else would explain the chilly reception the Obama-appointed head of the United States space agency -- Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr. -- faced, even from Democrats, when he went before Congress on Wednesday to explain the new administration's proposed 2011 budget? Obama has proposed boosting NASA's budget by $6 billion over five years and directing the extra funds toward aeronautic and climate research, and science missions using robotic ships, not astronauts, according to the New York Times. But U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee told Bolden that Obama's proposed spending was nowhere near enough to achieve the president's loftier goals, and it makes no sense to cancel the existing program to return to the moon without the money to do anything else. Obama proposed in a speech last month that NASA gear up to put astronauts on an asteroid by 2025 and on Mars by 2035, and to cancel the existing Constellation program and open travel to the moon and the international space station to private companies instead. “So far we have not seen any hard analysis from the administration that would give us confidence that it can be done for the amount budgeted,” Gordon said. Gordon said the administration's projections were far less than a NASA panel had estimated human travel to an asteroid and Mars would cost. “It does no good to cancel a program that the administration characterizes as ‘unexecutable’ if that program is simply replaced with a new plan that can’t be executed either,” he said. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, also a Democrat, said she was "very dubious" that NASA would continue to work on the Constellation program while Obama's proposals were pending, the Times said. But Obama also proposed that the Constellation program's proposed Orion crew capsule that was going to return astronauts to the moon be redeveloped into a "lifeboat" for space station astronauts. Bolden said at the hearing that NASA estimates the capsule will take five years and $4.5 billion to develop, the Times said.

Arrest of Indian leader sparks concern over U.S. ally Peru

Word from Lima that Indian leader Alberto Pizango had been taken into custody upon his return to Peru raises new worries about the future of one of South America's staunchest U.S. allies. Pizango was arrested at the airport after 11 months of exile in Nicaragua, where he fled to avoid sedition charges stemming from anti-development protests in the Amazon that turned violent, according to the Associated Press in an article published in the New York Times. More than 30 police officers and demonstrators were killed last June during protests against government decrees allowing exploration of potential oil and gas resources in the Peruvian rainforest, the Indians' ancestral lands. Violence broke out after authorities tore down roadblocks set up by the demonstrators in Bagua to block access to the rainforest, and Pizango was charged with fomenting the violence. Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega, granted Pizango political asylum. But Pizango said he had been away from Peru long enough. "I think that I have waited too long and will make this enormous sacrifice that has cost me and is costing me so much," Pizango said before he left Nicaragua. Groups of Pizango supporters rallied at the airport as his plane came in, backing his contention that the government should have consulted native groups before allowing the planned exploration. Opponents of Pizango also protested at the airport, urging the government to press charges against the Indian leader. Government officials claim potential discoveries could generate enough money to end poverty in Peru but, hopefully, not at the cost of the country's vibrant democracy.

Top U.S.official 'frustrated' by failure of oil spill cleanup

Nice to see that U.S. regulators are "frustrated" by the failure of oil giant BP to stop the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from one of its wells, but it's nothing short of astounding that the people who were supposed to be overseeing production by the oil companies operating in this country apparently weren't doing so. Why else would the massive U.S. regulatory apparatus been caught so unprepared? Yes, the oil spill was an accident and is a tragedy of probably incalculable proportions. And yes, a gusher at such a depth -- nearly a mile under the ocean -- is unprecedented. But no one in the industry or at the regulatory agencies should be permitted to pretend that it should not have been anticipated. The oil industry -- in this case, BP, formerly known as British Petroleum -- had to apply to the government for permission to operate in the Gulf of Mexico, they had to offer production estimates and pay taxes and they had submit plans for the drilling and for how they were going to take care of any emergencies that were sure to result. What were those plans? Where are those plans? If they didn't include what to do in the event of an explosion on a drilling platform, as occurred in April on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon platform, what did they include? What about other companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico or elsewhere? Do they have such plans? Why not, if their plans included drilling at such depths? And, if not, will they be required to have them now? What we're discussing, of course, is Sunday's statement by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar that he no longer has confidence that BP officials "know exactly what they're doing," according to Cable News Network (CNN). Add to that comments by Marcia McNutt, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, that BP's plans for stopping the gusher were probably infeasible. "I think everyone has to understand that the kinds of operations they're doing in the deep sea have never been done before," McNutt told CNN. But the problem is not that "everyone" has to understand that -- the problem is the regulators seem not to have understood it. Why even regulate oil production at all if obvious risks are not being planned for? Why have the regulators been doing all this time if we have to ask these questions now, when oil has begun washing up on some of the country's most beautiful beaches and contaminating some of the country's richest fishing and wildlife areas? If U.S. President Barack Obama's plans to revamp the federal government do not include better regulation of some of the country's biggest and most vital industries, he had better start explaining why not.