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The pernicious rivalry between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his de facto No. 2, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, has become a fixture of the Labour Party's nearly eight years in office. Since 1997 they've had public spats about everything from tax policies to hospital funding. Last week they were at it again. Blair scheduled a press conference at the exact same time Brown was to unveil his so-called Marshall Plan for Africa. "A coincidence," said a Blair spokesman. A "conspiracy" to deprive the chancellor of the limelight, said one of Brown's.
With an election likely in the spring, the increasingly dysfunctional Blair-Brown partnership could have damaging repercussions. It isn't likely to cost Labour the election and, despite talk of dark-horse challenges from the Blairite wing of the party, Brown is expected to succeed Blair sometime during the P.M.'s third term. But the chattering classes are now wondering what will happen to Labour--one of the most electorally successful center-left political machines in Europe--once Blair leaves.
There are two schools of thought. One is the "Blair is the problem" school. Its adherents argue that Blair's departure will help heal the deep disagreements over the war in Iraq. This might bring Brownites and Blairites together--especially those who, unlike the prime minister, the chancellor and their closest acolytes, were not forever scarred by the infighting that broke out after Blair outmaneuvered Brown for the party leadership in 1994.
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The second school of thought is less optimistic. Brown's the problem, they argue. Peter Riddell, author of "The Unfulfilled Prime Minister: Tony Blair and the End of Optimism," says that if Brown, once he's become prime minister, cannot be "emollient" to hard-core Blairites, the "fault lines" will widen, possibly splitting the party in two.
That would be devastating to the Labour Party's long-term prospects. Blair and Brown have much in com-mon as modernizers. But they differ most crucially on the role of private enterprise in revitalizing Britain's dilapidated public services: Blair is in favor of public-private partnerships, Brown against them. Unreconciled, those differences could start a Labour civil war. In extremis, this could bring about the party's worst nightmare: the return to power of the currently hapless Conservatives, who, after an 18-year reign, were demolished by the Blair-Brown army in 1997.
Most observers have praised Sunday's presidential election in the West Bank and Gaza as a significant step by Palestinians toward democracy. But one Israeli cabinet minister, Natan Sharansky, is unimpressed. He spoke to NEWSWEEK's Dan Ephron.
These elections are an isolated event and have nothing to do with democracy. It depends what happens after the election... I want to see what [Mahmoud Abbas] will do with [Palestinian] refugees. When he builds new housing for them, we'll see things are moving. I want to see him allowing private-business initiatives that would create jobs... I want to see him change the culture of hatred.
If they do all this, we must embrace them with a new Marshall Plan and everything else, and within two or three years everything will change.
BUSINESS: Is China Overcooling? Remember the fears about China's overheating? Well, the new consensus is that, with higher interest rates and lending curbs, Beijing has engineered the softest possible landing. The threat of inflation has receded, while most forecasts put 2005 growth between 8 and 9 percent--right on Beijing's target. The state-run China Daily crows that all this is "a testament to the quick thinking of the top brass."
But just as the corks are popping, out comes a report from Merrill Lynch highlighting what it calls a source of insight that gets past China's unreliable official data. A December survey by the Japan External Trade Organization shows gloom about the prospects for early 2005 across East Asia. The poll of 845 Japanese businessmen shows falling expectations just about everywhere, including south, east and northeast China, with sentiment dragged down by price pressures and a weakening outlook for export manufacturers. Merrill warned that with U.S. demand likely to fall further in 2005, the optimism about East Asia "may need to be rethought." Brass in Beijing may need to rethink fast, too.
For two men at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the relationship between U.S. President George W. Bush and Bill Clinton has grown surprisingly warm and personal of late. Clinton has endorsed Bush's approach to the tsunami catastrophe, defending him against criticism about his initial response as well as raising cash alongside the president's father. During Clinton's recent health crisis, Bush called twice to share what one of the former president's aides called "good, funny conversations." And in November, at the opening of Clinton's presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas, both the president and his father delivered praise that Clinton ate up.
While aides on both sides say there's still a political chasm between the two presidents, they also point to a common style: both are Southern politicians who love to woo crowds, and whose qualities were underestimated by Washington's establishment. There's also Bush's future membership in one of the smallest elites on the planet: the ex-presidents' club. "And they're members of an even more exclusive club--the two-termers," noted one senior administration official. "To go back to the people for affirmation and be there for eight years puts them in a different class." Bush's aides said the president is already thinking of his own presidential library plans as well as his own role after 2008, as another relatively young ex-president.
Just don't expect the working partnership to extend to Hillary Clinton, whose supporters want her to run in four years. "Honestly, I don't think getting together with George Bush is what she needs," said one ex-Clinton aide.
Never mind that this year, the Dakar Rally began in Barcelona. Le Paris-Dakar, the 17-day, 9,000-kilometer trek to Senegal, is about as French as you can get. Imagine the relief in France when the early leader, American NASCAR driver Robby Gordon, crashed in Mauritania last week. An American win would have punctuated France's loss of dominance in sports it all but invented. Olivier Panis has retired, leaving France without a Formula One driver for the first time in 40 years, and seven-time Tour de France mountains champ Richard Virenque has called it quits. But not all is lost. French citizen Tony Parker, a.k.a. Le Petit Prince du Texas, stars for the NBA's San Antonio Spurs. And in November Le Mans-born Sebastien Bourdais became the first Frenchman to win the U.S. Champ Car series. Maybe they can give France its flash back.
What struck me about last week's Consumer Electronics Show--the huge annual gadget bacchanalia convening, naturally, in Las Vegas--is the buzzword people don't say anymore. Only a few years ago people breathlessly uttered "convergence" as sort of a catchall mantra. It embodied the elusive idea that different media, including every variety of sound, image and data, could be served up together and consumed like a giant main-course salad, with fantastic benefits in the process. Now you rarely hear it, because the concept is so here and now that it would be like commenting on air.
Though the miles of aisles at the humongous show were filled with everything from cars pimped with half the inventory of an electronics store to plasma television screens so wide you couldn't squeeze them into a McMansion, to me, the flagships of this year's event were handheld devices that have become this century's version of Swiss Army knives.
Someone would hand you a cigarette-box-size chunk of plastic with a little screen and then proceed to explain what it was. A music player, of course, and a camera-slash-camcorder. A radio. Oh, and it records radio too. As well as recording your voice. And next year we're putting in Wi-Fi so you'll surf the Net with it, and, of course, use it as a VOIP (voice-over-Internet-protocol) telephone. Because of the utter fungibility of digital, everything can do anything. (Making it easy to use is another matter.)
A related force, similarly relentless, is the Internetizing of everything, preferably without wires. This allows, in theory at least, for people to move all their entertainment and personal content from one device to another. "For the past few years, the big influence was time-shifting, but this year it's about space-shifting," says Brad Sugar of the start-up company 2 Wire. "It's watching anything you want on everything you want." But with a billion ways to get media, 24/7, will people still say, "Nothing good is on"?
In aiming for mass appeal, pop songs too often recycle material that has hit the mark before. That's why listening to 30-year-old Parisian singer-songwriter Keren Ann Zeidel is such a thrill: her compositions flirt with cliche but never cross the line. "Nolita," her fourth album, routinely transforms the recognizable into the revelatory. Take "Que n'ai-je?": its hushed vocal and breezy pace recall the work of Brazilian chanteuse Astrud Gilberto, but Zeidel's spectral production tinges that Ipanema sunshine with just the right amount of shadow. Ditto for "Chelsea Burns," which improves on its Velvet Underground blueprint by inserting a fiddle solo where Lou Reed would've put another electric guitar. It seems Zeidel, who spent her childhood shuttling between Israel and the Netherlands before settling in France, never gets too comfortable for her own good. Now she's gotten more gorgeous pop songs to show for it.
Everyone knows ethnic hatred between Hutus and Tutsis was the main reason for Rwanda's 1994 genocide. Everyone but Jared Diamond, that is. In his new book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," the UCLA geography professor and Pulitzer-winning author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" acknowledges the ethnic strife but insists that a more elementary factor was ecological. A vast population explosion had left Rwandan farmers unable to feed their families, making them desperate and primed for violence. To prove his point, Diamond cites a study from the Kanama district, where farms had shrunk to postage-stamp size and rampaging Hutus murdered more than 5 percent of the local populace. The number of Tutsis among the victims: one.
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" charted the environmental factors that allowed European and Asian societies to conquer the world. "Collapse" explores the reverse: how some complex, successful societies have courted ecological suicide by abusing their natural resources. Most Easter Islanders starved to death after a competitive frenzy between chiefs to erect the famed giant stone statues led them to cut down every tree on the island. Descendants of the Vikings who settled Greenland died out after they squandered valuable fields for sod houses and hay to feed impractical cows rather than copy their Inuit neighbors and eat fish. When the climate turned colder, the Vikings perished. The Inuit survived.
Diamond looks to the past and present to sound a warning for the future. "These cases raise the question: if they collapsed, what about us?" he says. (The book cites instances where foresight prevented disasters: the 17th-century Japanese shoguns stopped rampant deforestation caused, in part, by the building of ostentatious wooden palaces.) Diamond also warns against thinking that advanced technology leaves us immune. Several years ago, he says, Bill Gates told him he believed technology would prevent environmental disaster. Diamond disagreed, but at the time he hadn't formed a solid rebuttal. Now he has.
It seems "Fahrenheit 9/11" director Michael Moore is doing his next documentary on the health-care industry, and six American pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, recently told their employees to watch out for what a Pfizer spokesman called "a scruffy guy in a baseball cap." If he approaches, employees are apparently supposed to tell him to peddle his papers over at corporate communications. (How about just dosing him with Vioxx?) "Being screwed by your HMO and ill served by pharmaceutical companies is the shared American experience," Moore has said. When his film, to be called "Sicko," comes out a couple of years from now, it ought to spread the pain around more equitably.
The rumors have started already. Moore sightings have been reported at multiple locations--at the same time--and he's having to deny paying doctors to help set up hidden cameras. ("I didn't need to. So many doctors have offered to help, for free.") As a flack for AstraZeneca puts it, "Michael Moore is becoming an urban legend."
But don't get the idea that Moore has given up on politics. Lately he's been saying that the Democrats should run Tom Hanks or Paul Newman for president in 2008. (Something like this worked for the Republicans back in the '80s.) And he plans to film Bush's Inauguration this week as part of his footage-gathering operation for a "Fahrenheit" sequel, called "Fahrenheit 9/111/2."
In an increasingly secular age, it may take art to remind many of us what role religion continues to play in our lives. A new exhibit at the Tate Liverpool called "Seeing Is Believing" does just that. As church pews emptied during the late twentieth century, artists turned back to religious subjects, creating fresh, imaginative interpretations of spirituality and exploring themes--death, creation and divinity--that underlie all the world's religions. Bridget Riley's 1993 "Nataraja," a patchwork of slanted rectangles referring to the Hindu God Shiva in his form as "Lord of the Dance," sizzles with energy and movement. "The Last Supper," a selection of screen prints created in 1999 by British artist Damien Hirst, questions our attitude to food and medicine. In his witty work Hirst alters medicine labels to replace the names of drugs with those of comfort foods like steak and kidney pie. Do we find in food and Prozac the solace we once took in faith? Artist and farmer William Johnstone, who fought in World War I--and whose dark, luminous work "Golgotha" is one of the new exhibit's highlights--once wrote that through the yearly round of sowing and harvesting crops, the birth of lambs and their death, "I learned whatever happens there will always be a rebirth. I sensed the primeval eternity of the land that was there long before I was born and would continue long after I was dead. The land itself taught me a deep faith." The Tate's show honors such abiding, human faith by opening up more questions than it answers. Just as art should.
Superman flies, Spider-Man scales buildings. But, according to his packaging, Bob's got real superpowers: "Every day he goes to work and sits at a desk surrounded by four gray walls and stares at a computer monitor for eight long hours with a half-hour unpaid lunch break." Who is this man? He's one of the four principal office drones that form the Cubes, new in action heroes that retail for $12.95 at cubefigures.com.
The fun comes in building and decorating their work areas and determining whether your employee is a corporate asset or a liability. Bob can be hard at work on a spreadsheet--or a game of solitaire. Your call, boss. The Cubes' cubes come with cheesy motivational posters, lame signs (never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether) and stickers that form wonderfully generic job titles like Deputy Purchasing Coordinator or Level B Mar-keting Analyst. It's something to play with in between crunching those numbers.
Fans: Rock On, Fraggles Note to obsessive fan sites everywhere: you're being watched. That's what Warrick Brownlow, a fan of the 1980s series "Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock," recently learned. In April 2002 Brownlow launched an online petition, pleading to have the series released on DVD. After he'd garnered more than 30,000 e-signatures, HIT Entertainment, a London-based licensing partner of the Jim Henson Co., announced that this month it would release selected episodes from the first season. "This is the direct result of fan support," says Lauren McCabe, a HIT representative. That's news to Brownlow, who learned of his impact from NEWSWEEK. "Well, that's brilliant," he says. "We knew they were watching us, but we didn't think they'd do anything about it." Studios usually don't, says Tom Adams, president of California-based Adams Media Research, though that's beginning to change. Fox's "Family Guy" and Sci Fi's "Farscape" are both back in production after American fans demonstrated considerable support. Henson co-CEO Brian Henson says the studio's now considering filming new "Fraggle" material. Let the petitioning begin.
He's played a Holocaust hero and a Jedi knight. Now Liam Neeson is tackling an even more delicate role: sex researcher. In "Kinsey" he plays Alfred Kinsey, whose 1948 study "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" revolutionized American thinking about sex. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Nicki Gostin.
You share a kiss with Peter Sarsgaard. Was that awkward? No, I've worked with him before. And we were filming four and five scenes every day on a limited budget, so there was no time to feel uncomfortable. A few years ago you were in a motorcycle accident. A deer ran into you? The deer ended up climbing over the motorbike--its front paws were over the handlebars. We were both locked into each other's eyes. It was just bizarre. You were a boxing champ as a teenager. What's harder, going into the ring or onto a stage? There was a survey done in Britain on stress. They found the top three stresses for men were exactly the same: Christmas shopping an hour before closing, a fighter pilot in battle and an actor delivering a monologue. You weren't a fighter pilot. Have you gone Christmas shopping at the last minute? I have. It was very stressful. Do you try to live like a regular guy? As long as I have the right sushi chef and helicopter pad, I'm happy. No, all that doesn't seduce me. I don't go out with my measuring tape and compare my trailer to someone else's. But I know people who do.
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