They’re unknowns. Get a hawk’s eye view from our Articles Section. Also see how the physical world around us affects our sense of right and wrong. No, this isn’t the latest elaboration of Stanley Milgram’s work, but a snapshot of the impact of certain smells and the degree of light and darkness on our ethical behaviour. We look at the dilemma posed by Greece and its financial quandary. Greece falsified its data, but many countries do, and not just those in the Club Med belt. Moreover, banks and other financial institutions have encouraged Greece along the debt-default path and now are betting against recovery by selling short on the credit-swap insurance exchange. At some point, nations will have to rein in the financiers and it won’t get easier as time passes. We can’t neglect VANOC’s wretched treatment of other competitors in contrast to Canadian teams. Could it really be true that our athletes had ten times the practice runs in luge than other countries? Perhaps I’m wrong, and this was skiing rather than luge. Still, the egos of Ignatieff and other Own The Podium media slaves make melancholy reading. This country doesn’t belong to Canadians anymore, but a hybrid of fundamentalist Republican and Hollywood guru. The ethos of win-at-any-cost or it’s-OK-because-it’s-within-the-rules is, well, shameful.

2) Here’s a classic alphametric from 1924. What numbers do the letters stand for?

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The answers to February’s puzzles were supplied in the February issue.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) The man makes a chart of the possible ages, consisting of the three numbers whose combined product is 36.

There is only one case in which the neighbour needs additional information, and that is if the sum of the ages is 13. The neighbour concludes that when the woman gave the essential information it was to differentiate between the two cases where the sum is 13. The statement that the woman’s eldest daughter’s name is Jenny means that there is only one eldest daughter. This eliminates the possibility of twins age 6. The three ages are therefore 2, 2, and 9.

2)

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It turns out that some of the highest-paid financial executives in America work far from the canyons of Lower Manhattan, at companies that have largely avoided the outcry over the return of hefty paydays on Wall Street.

Topping the list is John G. Stumpf, head of Wells Fargo, the bank based in San Francisco, according to an analysis of 2009 compensation in the industry. Mr. Stumpf was paid a personal best of $18.7 million in cash and stock for 2009 — up 64 percent from 2007, just before the financial crisis struck.

Mr. Stumpf is making twice as much as Lloyd C. Blankfein, his counterpart at Goldman Sachs. Mr. Blankfein — who for many Americans has come to symbolize this new period of Wall Street riches — was paid $9.7 million for 2009, less than some expected.

It is a stunning reversal in the old pecking order of pay. Big names on Wall Street like Mr. Blankfein usually take home far more than staid bankers like Mr. Stumpf, whose bank’s biggest business is making home mortgages and loans to corporations.

But since the bailout, the rules of banker pay are bending. Some of the industry’s biggest names are being paid less than relative unknowns. Chief executives, who are usually at the top of the pay heap, are taking home roughly the same amounts as executives who work for them — and sometimes less.

Mr. Stumpf and other executives have moved up the pay ladder partly because the likes of Mr. Blankfein have moved down. And for all the focus on what top executives earn, what is most startling is how many six-, seven- and eight-figure sums are being awarded to Wall Street bankers and traders whose pay often is unnoticed — if it is disclosed at all.

How much senior executives earn, in cash and stock, is made public in corporate filings. This year, the results are surprising, according to an analysis by Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.

Leaders in the pay sweepstakes include the heads of the credit card giants Visa, Mastercard Worldwide, Capital One Financial and American Express. Joseph W. Saunders, who runs Visa, was paid about $15.5 million, a figure that vastly eclipses the compensation for top executives at Bank of America and Citigroup.

Ajay Banga, the president of MasterCard Worldwide; Laurence D. Fink, the chairman and chief executive of the giant money management company BlackRock; and Richard B. Handler, the boss at the Jefferies Group, a midsize investment bank that is virtually unknown outside financial circles, were each paid about $13 million. Executives at certain discount brokerages, insurance companies and regional banks were close behind.

The big money, as ever, is in Wall Street trading. But pay for employees with few executive responsibilities is typically exempted from disclosure requirements. Brokers and asset managers also land windfalls that are often undisclosed.

“There are probably thousands of people that are in the Millionaire Club — or even the Ten Millionaire Club — that have gotten no heat,” said Alan Johnson, a longtime Wall Street compensation consultant.

To be sure, a handful of prominent companies dominate the well-paid list. Senior managers from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs occupy many of the top spots. Few of those executives are boldface names, however.

While Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chairman and chief executive, appears to be the second-highest-paid banker, at $17.6 million, one of his subordinates collected nearly as much: Ina R. Drew, JPMorgan’s chief investment officer.

Ms. Drew, whose correct calls on interest rates helped the bank earn several billion dollars of profit, was paid about $13 million.

Despite the spotlight on Mr. Blankfein’s pay at Goldman, little was said about how much Gordon Nixon of Royal Bank of Canada received. His paycheck was roughly the same amount as Mr. Blankfein’s, $9.7 million, though he is hardly a household name.

The Equilar analysis provides an early peek at 2009 pay and is not a comprehensive review. For consistency, any stock or options that were subject to performance hurdles were valued at the target levels; in practice, many executives receive larger payouts for surpassing the company’s financial goals.

Wells Fargo posted strong results, even as it struggled to contend with rising mortgage and commercial real estate losses and accepted a bailout from the government in 2008.

As it rebounded last year, the bank dribbled out the details of its large stock grants for Mr. Stumpf. In August, Wells announced that he would receive $900,000 in salary and about $6.5 million in various types of restricted stock. On New Year’s Eve, Wells issued a statement saying that Mr. Stumpf would receive another allotment of so-called performance shares — worth up to $15.4 million.

That means his pay package could easily top $24 million in a year in which Wells was among the last of the big banks to repay the bailout money.

“We believe we have the very best leadership team in financial services today, and a key to retaining that talent for the long term is to compensate our senior leaders competitively and to align their interests with those of our shareholders,” Stephen W. Sanger, who leads Wells Fargo’s compensation committee, said in a statement last December.

On pay, Wall Street seems to have reverted to its old ways. James P. Gorman, Morgan Stanley’s new chief executive, could receive $11 million to $13 million, even though the company posted an annual loss.

Mark Lake, a Morgan Stanley spokesman, said that Mr. Gorman received that compensation because, as president, he was responsible for integrating the vast Smith Barney brokerage unit and was the prospective chief executive.

Bank of America’s highest-paid executive was the chief architect of its ill-fated acquisition of Merrill Lynch, Gregory L. Curl. He was awarded more than $9.2 million in stock, most of which will be paid out monthly over the next three years.

Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America’s new chief executive, will be paid about $6.1 million, thanks to a similar large stock grant.

Jefferies Group, a midsize investment bank that had a strong year, rewarded its top executives handsomely. And more pay is coming down the pike. In mid-January, Mr. Handler received a $39 million stock grant and another executive received about $29 million. The stock award, subject to certain performance goals, is payable over the next three years and will come on top of any salary and bonuses the executives get.

One of the highest-compensated financial executives for 2009 was paid well when he was employed — and then even more when he quit. After leaving Visa in July, Hans Morris, the company’s president, collected an exit package valued at $24 million.

“The ride is essentially over, and he is still getting grants,” said Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant.

(eric dash, New York Times, 10February2010)

Chen-Bo Zhong, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and his colleagues in the U.S. have conducted a series of small experiments designed to test how changes in an environment — differences in lighting or smell — can affect human behaviour.

In one experiment, participants were given $10 in change and 20 mathematical problems, and sent into either a room brightly lit with florescent lights or one with a third as many lights on.

The subjects were asked to complete as many of the problems as they could in five minutes and to keep 50 cents for each problem they solved. They were asked to put the rest of the change in an envelope when they were done.

Typically, the participants were able to complete seven problems in the time allowed, but since the test was anonymous, they could keep as much of the money as they wanted without getting caught.

While the tests had no names or numbers on them, the problems themselves revealed whether the participant had been in a brightly lit room or a dim one.

“What we found was that participants randomly assigned to the dimmer room … were more likely to lie or cheat compared with participants in the well-lit room,” Zhong said.

Zhong said that the rooms with the dim lighting created a sense of anonymity, what he calls illusory anonymity.

“The idea is that when we experience darkness, we disregard what other people may still be able to see or hear or observe,” he said. “The illusory sense of anonymity can license unethical behaviour.”

In interviews with the participants after the experiments about what happened and what determined their behaviour, few of the participants even noticed the difference in lighting.

In a similar study, participants were asked to wear either a pair of sunglasses or a pair of glasses with clear lenses.

“What we found was that wearing a pair of sunglasses led to greater self-interested behaviour,” said Zhong.

Zhong said the sunglasses didn’t make the participants anonymous or less visible, of course, but still had an effect on their behaviour, making them less likely to see themselves from another person’s perspective.

“We perceive ourselves to be anonymous even if the darkness only applies to ourselves, as in the case where we wear a pair of sunglasses or are in a room that is dim but not exactly dark,” Zhong said.

Zhong likened the sunglasses experiment to toddlers playing peek-a-boo.

“This is almost like kids playing a hide-and-seek game who will close their eyes and think that other people won’t be able to see them,” he said.

The subconscious changes in behaviour weren’t limited to visual changes. Zhong conducted similar experiments that used the sense of smell.

Participants were randomly assigned to rooms, some sprayed with citrus-scented window cleaner. In some of the experiments, the participants played a game of trust with an anonymous partner, again involving money.

The way the game typically works is that one partner is given a sum of money and told to put some or all of the money in an envelope. He is told his anonymous partner will receive triple that amount and will give some of the money back. Of course, the second partner could just keep all the money.

In Zhong’s experiment, the participants played the role of the second partner and were all told their partner had given them the full mount, $4, which was then tripled to $12.

The participants were free to anonymously return some or none of the money.

“What we found was that in the citrus-scented room, people were more likely to engage in good behaviours,” Zhong said. “They were more likely to honour the trust that other people displayed.”

Zhong said that it would be interesting to see how the findings would translate to real-world situations.

“Based on the experiments we have conducted and the findings we’ve found, I think it’s reasonable to speculate that people in a real environment, where they can smell these scents that are associated with purity and cleanliness, also may tend to be behave more ethically or socially,” he said.

In another paper published prior to Zhong’s, researchers found people eating cookies in a citrus scented room were less likely to leave crumbs behind than those in an unscented room.

Zhong said he wanted to take that finding to the next level, to explore the “metaphorical and psychological connections between physical cleanliness and moral purity.”

English is full of metaphors relating cleanliness to moral behaviour, from “clean conscience” to “money laundering” to “dirty jokes.”

In previous research, Zhong and his colleagues explored the connection between unethical behaviour and physical cleanliness, something Zhong called the Lady Macbeth effect, after the Shakespeare character who obsessively washed her hands because of her role in the murder of the king (”Out, damn spot. Out, I say!”).

“We asked people to recall unethical behaviours they have done, like lying to parents or betraying their friends,” Zhong said. Another group was asked about their prior ethical acts.

The participants were then asked to rate items on a list of products by how much they wanted them. The participants who were asked about their unethical behaviour were more likely than the other group to rate cleaning products higher than household products that have nothing to do with cleaning, such as CDs.

Zhong said these findings suggest that abstract concepts, such as morality, or even time, are connected to physical experience. We think “back” to the past and look “forward” to the future, for example.

“Human perception or cognition are not as abstract as we typically assume,” Zhong said. “We don’t simply store information in our brain. Instead, our cognition is much richer than that. For every abstract construct we associate physiological experience.”

The metaphorical connections could even transcend language barriers, although Zhong said there hasn’t been research to see if the behaviour is consistent across cultures.

“In Chinese, we refer to a pair of dirty hands, for example, to refer to someone who steals.”

(john bowman, CBC News, 15February2010)

There is the widespread view that Greece will be supported if default looks likely. After all, Joaquín Almunia, the former Monetary Affairs Commissioner, said as much at Davos. But the outlook became muddied at last week’s meeting of the Council of the European Union. There was clearly friction between Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, mindful of taxpayers’ resistance to bailing out Greece in the name of EU solidarity, and President Sarkozy of France, who not only supported a bailout but, taking the opportunity afforded by crisis to further political union, also pushed for a centralised “economic government”.

For seasoned euro-watchers the current crisis comes as no surprise. The obsessive determination with which Europe’s politicians drove the euro project forward in the 1990s was, I remember, quite alarming. As the 1980s had been the decade of the single market, the 1990s would be the decade of the single currency. End of story. The European project must proceed irrespective of economic or popular considerations. A united European Union was Europe’s destiny.

The 1992 crisis in the exchange- rate mechanism culminating in Britain’s eviction, provided a thousand warnings. Without true structural economic convergence and/or a centralised economic government, some would struggle with a regime of a single interest rate and a common exchange rate, being deprived of key economic weapons, including devaluation.

True, there were the “eligibility criteria” concerning convergence on debt, deficits, inflation and interest rates. But they were flawed. The eurozone’s economies began to diverge almost from its very launch in 1999. In the early 2000s German economic growth was weak and the European Central Bank kept rates low to accommodate Germany’s circumstances. But these rates were significantly too low for the peripheral countries of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland (sometimes known as the “Club Med”) and helped to fuel spending and property booms. Wage inflation was also a feature of the boom times, undermining competitiveness. The accession of the low-cost Eastern European countries exacerbated their plight. Meanwhile Germany, with Lutheran discipline, went on a cost-cutting spree, sharpening its international competitiveness and boosting its trade surpluses.

The Club Med’s public deficits, reflecting the recession, have exploded. And they are now being exhorted, in accordance with the rules of the eurozone, to cut their borrowing sharply. Even though still in recession they are facing tough fiscal retrenchment, which can only delay recovery further.

Economic salvation could come if Germany changed the habit of a lifetime and stimulated rapid domestic demand-led growth, but this is highly unlikely. Alternatively a huge extension of transfers from the richer EU countries to the poorer may be a way out but whether this would be acceptable to the taxpayers of Germany, the UK or the Netherlands is doubtful.

Then there is the special problem of Greece, which must be held responsible for much of its unique plight. It falsified vital data in order to join the euro, its public sector is bloated, tax evasion is a way of life and it has made little attempt to sharpen up its economy in order to thrive within the eurozone. Greece has, moreover, been generously subsidised by the EU. In 2008 it received net receipts from the EU budget of €6.2 billion, the most for any EU member state, €550 for each of its 11.3 million citizens.

The Greek Government said last October that public borrowing as a share of GDP was heading for 13 per cent in 2009 and, under pressure from Brussels, announced a stability plan to get borrowing down to 3 per cent of GDP by 2012. If a bailout is agreed, Brussels will insist that this fiscal consolidation goes ahead, as a minimum. Moreover, the Commission will strictly monitor and drive the programme, crippling Greece’s fiscal autonomy in the process. These developments will be politically unpalatable and probably trigger further industrial and social unrest. Unsurprisingly, the Greek Government is already resisting pressure for new austerity measures.

The eurozone is at a crossroads and, while the time is not ripe to address the fundamental problems of the euro, decisions over the Greek predicament are urgent. The EU broadly has two choices. It can guarantee a bailout for Greece, if needed, imposing tough conditions on the country. And it can hope that this will solve the current euro crisis. But this risks, as a minimum, demands from Spain, Portugal and Ireland for similar treatment.

Or, alternatively, it could bite on a very hard bullet and ask Greece to leave the eurozone, not least “pour encourager les autres”. (I am aware that there are apparently no formal procedures for this.) The financial repercussions would be tremendous, but financial crises eventually resolve themselves and if this boil has to burst, it’s better to do it sooner rather than later. The political fallout would, however, be shattering. The eviction of Greece would be the first serious retreat of the European project and would represent a terrific loss of political face for the believers in European integration and solidarity.

The EU, with Germany playing a pivotal role, can therefore be expected to support Greece this time. But, for the sake of the long-term viability of the eurozone, it would be far better to evict Greece now and direct the beleaguered country to the IMF for some long overdue economic discipline.

(ruth lea, The Times, 16February2010)

The military commander who is said to have developed the Taleban tactic of planting “flowers” – improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – along roadsides has been described by terrorism experts as even more cunning and dangerous than Taleban supreme leader (his old friend) Mullah Omar.

Mullah Badar has been credited for rebuilding the Taleban into an effective fighting force and has been running the group’s daily affairs for many years, since Mullah Omar was forced to take a less active role in the organisation due to his failing health.

Besides heading up Taleban military operations and running its budgets, he also ran the group’s leadership council, known as the Quetta Shura, named because its leaders have been thought to be hiding near Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s western province of Baluchistan. A photograph of him has yet to surface.

Born in 1968 in Weetmak, a village in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan Province, the young Mullah Baradar participated in the Afghan Mujahedeen war against the Soviet forces.

It was during this war that he came to know Mullah Omar; the pair fought alongside each other against the Communist forces and some reports suggest the two even married a pair of sisters.

After the withdrawal of the Soviet forces and collapse of the communist regime in Kabul in 1992 , Mullah Baradar and Mullah Omar both settled down in southern Afghanistan district of Maiwand where they ran their own madrassa.

When Mullah Omar started a revolt against the local warlords in 1994 with a force of some 30 men, Mullah Baradar was among its first recruits. This was the beginning the Taleban movement which swept Kabul in 1996, establishing a hard line conservative regime.

Mullah Baradar became Mullah Omar’s most trusted military commander. He first served as Taleban corps commander for western Afghanistan, and later as the Kabul garrison commander, where he directed the fight against rival mujahedin commanders in the north of the country.

He was at the side of Mullah Omar when U.S. bombs pounded Kandahar in November 2001. According to some reports it was Mullah Baradar who hopped on a motorcycle and drove his old friend to safety in the mountains.

Many terrorism experts described Mullah Bradar as the most skilled military leader who spearheaded the fighting in southern Afghanistan. His forces were responsible for inflicting heavy casualties on the Western forces last year.

He conducted the Taleban’s day-to-day operations, both military and financial. He allocated Taleban funds, appoints military commanders and designs military tactics,

Mullah Baradar was quoted last year as telling his fighters to not to confront US soldiers with their superior firepower, but to operate using guerrilla tactics.

Mullah Baradar was believed to have often travelled to Karachi to meet other members of the Quetta Shura who had moved to the port in recent months.

The sprawling city on the Arabia sea coast with a population of more than 16 million has become a haven for the Taleban leadership.

(zahid hussain, Times Online, 16February2010)

Werner Hoeger, who competed in the Turin and Salt Lake Games for Venezuela, said he lost consciousness and sustained a concussion during a botched training run on Nov. 13 after his sled caromed off an opening in the wall near the women’s start ramp.

His injury most likely prevented him from attempting to qualify for the Olympics, he said. In a volley of letters and e-mail messages sent to Canadian and international luge officials since his crash, Hoeger warned that the track was unsafe and raised the same issues — including a lack of access to practice runs — now being debated after Nodar Kumaritashvili of the Republic of Georgia died on Friday.

Hoeger was experienced — he competed in the past two Winter Games — but he was not a medal contender. His highest World Cup ranking was 52nd.

At age 56, he was trying to become the oldest competitor in these Games. Kumaritashvili was young and inexperienced. At age 21, he was ranked 44th in the World Cup standings this season.

He had completed 26 runs on the course at Whistler. The Canadian team’s luge athletes made an average of 250 runs.

Hoeger and athletes from other nations with small, underfinanced luge teams said Canadian officials were not sympathetic to their requests for additional practice time even as evidence mounted that the track was faster and more challenging than originally designed.

“For the smaller nations, there should have been more,” said Ioan Apostol, a former Olympic luge athlete from Romania who is the director of development for the International Luge Federation. “It is very fast and very technical at the same time.”

He added that he petitioned Canadian officials for extra runs at the course for the athletes he oversees. His division provides coaching and financial assistance to countries without strong luge teams, including Georgia.

Olympic host countries have traditionally guarded access to their tracks in the hopes of establishing home-course advantage, but some said what set the Canadians apart was their reluctance to grant extra time to developing athletes unlikely to challenge them for medals.

Meanwhile, athletes were attaining unprecedented speeds on the Whistler track. Designed for speeds of 137 kilometres per hour, or 85 miles per hour, the track was delivering speeds beyond 153 km/h., or 95 mph.

The Canadians’ position was all the more frustrating, the athletes said, because they had granted extra training runs to the powerful Russian team as part of a reciprocal arrangement in advance of the Sochi Games in 2014.

“There’s two groups of people: there’s the haves and the have-nots,” said Rubén González, 47, a member of the Argentine luge team who finished in last place in the men’s singles luge competition Sunday. “You know that going in.”

John Gibson, a spokesman for the Whistler Sliding Centre, said in an e-mail message that those who run the site have gone out of their way to allow athletes to train there, and an international luge official said the Canadians were within the rules for providing access to the track. “We have actually surpassed the requirements set forth by the international sport federations in terms of athlete access,” Gibson said.

A spokesman for the Canadian Luge Association declined to comment, but officials have said in the past that athletes have received almost three times the number of training runs than were offered in the run-up to the Turin Games in 2006.

Hoeger, who was born in Venezuela and moved to the United States when he was 16, was hoping to qualify for the Vancouver Games and become the oldest competitor at this year’s Games.

He is a former kinesiology professor at Boise State University and has written several textbooks on fitness.

His training was stalled in the fall of 2008, when he injured an ankle while training at the Lake Placid course. He did not recuperate from the injury in enough time to participate in international training at the Whistler Sliding Centre.

Requests for makeup runs were denied.

Hoeger returned to Whistler last February for training. After attempting to learn the course systematically from easier, lower starting points, then progressing to the harder starts, Hoeger said officials instructed him to make his seventh run from the most challenging, men’s start.

Hoeger refused, saying doing so “would be suicidal” because he had not yet learned the course.

“I knew the track was extremely difficult,” said Hoeger, whose highest World Cup ranking was 52nd. “I had heard enough horror stories. Every athlete treats this track with the utmost respect. Nearly every athlete is scared to death of this track.”

He returned a final time in November 2009 for the designated international training session. On his fourth run from the men’s start, he crashed because he said a barricade was not in place to prevent his sled from hitting the entrance ramp at the women’s start.

He believes he lost consciousness between Curves 2 and 3 and says he has no memory of traveling through Curves 3, 4 and 5 before coming to rest at Curve 6, about a third of the way down the course.

Medical officials transported Hoeger by ambulance to the Whistler Health Care Centre. Hoeger said he sustained a third-grade concussion and still deals with lightheadedness and a loss of balance.

The same day, officials sent a notice to athletes that the barricade “will be in place whenever men’s start is in use.”

“There should have been a wall up,” González said. “It’s not mandatory. Sometimes they put it up. Sometimes they don’t. It’s stupid that it isn’t mandatory on every track.” González said he felt safe on the track at Whistler.

Hoeger noted that although his accident was not as severe as the one that caused Kumaritashvili’s death, officials reacted similarly. “After the fact, they decided they were going to put up the wall,” Hoeger said. “These are the luge experts. They should know and understand the sport.”

Vancouver organizers and luge officials have said Kumaritashvili’s accident was caused by his errors and not by “deficiencies in the track.”

They said they made changes to the course the next day in part to reassure athletes that it was safe.

Hoeger’s chafing over the November accident and previous lack of access to the track escalated into a series of exchanges between him and officials from the International Olympic Committee, the international luge federation, the Vancouver organizing committee and the Canadian Luge Association.

At one point, Hoeger’s lawyer, Bryan Storer, also exchanged messages with officials. In an interview, Storer said Hoeger had not decided whether to sue.

Hoeger began the correspondence, copies of which he provided to The New York Times, after he was not allowed to make up training sessions. “I knew I was done after the crash,” Hoeger said of his goal to make the Vancouver Games. “I knew there was no way I would get back on the sled. I wanted to know why.”

He demanded that Ed Moffat of Canada be removed as race director for luge at the Olympics, that all athletes be offered equal runs in the future, that Canada forfeit the surplus runs negotiated for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi and that the Canadian Luge Association be reprimanded for unethical actions and failing to provide a safe sliding environment.

“I have to question the integrity of the Canadian Luge Association and the fairness of the next Olympic Games to be held on Canadian soil,” he wrote in a November letter to Moffat.

In a letter responding to Hoeger’s demands, Svein Romstad, secretary general of the international luge federation, said that Moffat had acted with integrity, that the Canadians had the right to enter into training arrangements with other teams, and that they had followed all international luge rules.

His request for make-up runs, Romstad wrote, could “only be defined as special treatment if it had been granted.”

Although Apostol said extra runs were eventually granted, they were scheduled for a week in January when most of his athletes were busy competing in events in Europe and could not afford to travel to Whistler.

He said he was drafting a proposal to allow more runs for less experienced teams and to limit speeds on future tracks.

“They made it really inconvenient,” said Michelle Despain Hoeger, Werner Hoeger’s daughter-in-law, who competed in luge for Argentina in 2006. She narrowly missed qualifying for the Olympics this year.

Romstad said the Canadians granted requests for additional training time after it became clear that athletes were attaining speeds in excess of 137 km/h, or 85 mph., the original estimate of the track’s maximum speed.

“In recognition of that, we did get extra training for the totality of the athletes that were available to participate in all of the training that we offered,” Romstad said.

He said the training in January was set aside for athletes from unseeded teams, with the intent of giving less experienced competitors additional time to train.

But ultimately, allocating track time is the responsibility of the Canadians, he said. “The F.I.L. does not own the track,” he said.

Although Romstad said he sympathized with athletes like Hoeger and others, “I have to go with what is right and wrong within our rules,” he said.

(jonathan abrams & katie thomas, New York Times, 18February2010)

Encore une fois, la Grèce est au coeur de cette affaire. Mais le pays est, semble-t-il, loin d’être le seul à avoir eu recours à des astuces financières conseillées par des banques de New York et de Londres. Le Royaume-Uni, l’Allemagne, l’Italie le Portugal ont, eux aussi, “optimisé” leurs comptes avec l’aide de Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Barclays ou encore “feu Lehman Brothers”.

Dans le cas grec, la très controversée Goldman Sachs aurait, selon la presse allemande et américaine, offert ses services à Athènes pour réduire, en 2001, ses déficits en utilisant des “swaps de devises”. Un outil qui permet de se protéger des effets de changes en transformant en euros la dette initialement émise en dollars et en yens.

“Légal !”, affirment les autorités grecques. Sauf que le taux de change utilisé ici aurait été exagérément favorable. Bilan de l’opération : 1 milliard d’euros de dette gommée pour le pays et 300 millions de commissions empochés par la banque.

“Ce serait une honte s’il s’avérait que les banques, qui nous ont déjà amenés au bord du précipice, ont également participé à la falsification des statistiques budgétaires de la Grèce”, a réagi la chancelière allemande, Angela Merkel, mercredi 17 février.

La Grèce a-t-elle triché ? Peut-être, mais dans les faits, le savoir-faire des banques américaines a profité à de nombreux pays. “Il s’agit d’opérations naturelles, qui participent de la bonne gestion de la dette”, assure un émetteur de dette souveraine en Europe. Les mécaniques sont variées. “Elles n’ont de limites que la créativité des financiers”, indique un ancien haut responsable de banque.

L’Italie a fait partie des pays les plus friands de cette ingénierie financière. Le pays a notamment multiplié les opérations de titrisation de sa dette. Autrement dit, l’Etat a revendu au marché ses créances sous forme de titres financiers pour se débarrasser de sa dette. La Belgique, de son côté, a titrisé des arriérés fiscaux, se souvient un opérateur sur le marché de la dette : “C’était en 2006.” Le pays a ainsi évité d’emprunter de l’argent, faute d’avoir perçu à temps les sommes dues par les contribuables.

Certains Etats ont vendu de la dette indexée “sur un peu n’importe quoi”, indique un opérateur de marché. Exemple : ces emprunts grecs émis en 2000, dont le remboursement des intérêts était adossé aux profits attendus de la loterie nationale !

“Quand on est “limite”, on a forcément la tentation d’utiliser ces astuces-là pour essayer de réduire sa dette, commente René Defossez, stratège sur le marché des taux chez Natixis . Ce n’est pas très orthodoxe, mais ce n’est pas forcément contestable.”

La France n’a pas été pas absente du jeu. Le pays assure n’avoir jamais eu recours aux services de Goldman Sachs. “Nous ne faisons sans doute pas d’opérations assez “funky’’sur la dette française”, indique-t-on au Trésor.

Mais jusqu’en 2002, le pays a utilisé des outils financiers complexes de couverture (des “swaps de taux”) pour modifier les échéances de remboursements de sa créance. A première vue, grâce à ces artifices, tout le monde est gagnant. “Pour les Etats, ces opérations permettent de reporter la dette à plus tard. Et pour les banques, ce sont des promesses de marges juteuses”, indique Emmanuel Fruchard, consultant en risques financiers. Les établissements empocheraient en moyenne 1 % voire plus des montants de dettes émis.

Sur ce “marché”, les banques anglo-saxonnes ont été particulièrement actives et recherchées. Du fait de leur savoir-faire, mais aussi “en faisant miroiter un accès direct à des investisseurs étrangers comme des fonds de pensions”, indique l’économiste Philippe Brossard, de l’agence Macrorama. Pour lui, “fignoler” de la sorte la structure des déficits publics n’est pas sans risque. Si l’Etat semble gagnant à court terme, il peut être contraint par la banque à rembourser des intérêts beaucoup plus lourds à long terme. Le New York Times raconte ainsi que le ministre grec des finances avait dénoncé, en 2005, l’opération de Goldman Sachs, se plaignant du fait que l’Etat devait rembourser de grosses sommes à la banque américaine jusqu’en… 2019. ” En utilisant des outils sophistiqués, les Etats se rendent dépendants des banques, ajoute M. Brossard. Certains avaient traité avec Lehman Brothers et se sont inquiétés lorsque l’établissement a fait faillite.”

Conscient du danger, Eurostat, l’institut européen de statistiques, censé valider ces opérations, a mis en 2008 le holà à certaines pratiques, en déconseillant, notamment le recours à la titrisation.

Est-ce assez ? Pour Michel Sapin, ancien ministre français des finances et secrétaire national du Parti socialiste à l’économie, “une régulation plus contraignante est absolument nécessaire sur le marché. D’autant plus qu’il s’agit ici de la signature d’un Etat”.

(claire gatinois et marie de vergès, Le Monde, 19February2010)

Read up on mysteries of science
Mysteries

Read still more mysteries of science
More Mysteries

Also in FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION, review the first of the New York Times’ series on negligence in radiation treatments, the awful effects and concealment of blunders by private institutions and government, failure of medical colleges to police themselves, and the foolishness of placing blind faith in doctors. These political and medical failures, motivated by greed and laziness, promise to be a big scandal. What’s the betting that Canada’s system is worse?

Science

Head to the Plaza Theatre February 4th to catch “The Sea Inside”, the latest Science in the Cinema flick. Tonight’s movie – made in Spanish with English subtitles – features a true story about a quadriplegic, who fought to end his own life. Two experts, Patrick Whelan, a senior scholar with Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, and Dr. Ian Mitchell, a bioethicist with the University of Calgary, will introduce the movie. After the movie, they’ll discuss the latest spinal cord research and the ethical issues broached in the film.

The event begins February 4th at 6:30 at the Plaza Theatre (1133 Kensington Rd. NW)

2) Why is a raven like a writing desk? Or, if Lewis Carroll’s famous conundrum doesn’t appeal to you, then answer this gentle query: you’re at a party. Can everyone at the party have a different number of friends present? For greater certainty, a person can’t be his or her own friend, and someone may have no friends.

The answers to January’s puzzles were supplied in the January issue.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) Hint: Albrecht Durer engraved a picture of this square, and the date of his engraving lies in the bottom row, central two boxes.

16 3 2 13
5 10 11 8
9 6 7 12
4 15 14 1

2) As to Lewis Carroll, he didn’t supply an answer, perhaps because there’s a “b” in both and an “n” in neither. As to friends and gatherings, at least two people will have the same number of friends at the party. The reason is that a friend is defined as someone else, not one’s self. In math terms, we can identify each person with a different number from A through (say) J. Assume person A has no friends in the gathering, person B has one friend, and so forth, through J who has J – 1 friends. But there is a contradiction between J, who counts A as a friend, and A, who claims to have none. To avoid the contradiction, J must have the same number of friends as one of the other people (J – 2 friends, or J – 3 friends, for example). Lest the issue of zero seem relevant, eliminate it and the result is the same. A has one friend, B has two, and so forth through J, who has ten. But this ten includes him or herself, which is excluded. J must therefore have the same number of friends as one of the other partygoers.

This is said to be the deepest image of the Universe ever taken in near-infrared light by the Hubble Space Telescope. The faintest and reddest objects (left inset) in the image are galaxies that correspond to times of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago. No galaxies have been seen before at such early epochs

The Hubble Space Telescope has peered further back in space and time than ever before to see baby galaxies that may have formed as little as 500 million years after the Big Bang.

Observations with a new camera installed on the orbiting telescope last year have revealed an ancient cosmic “undiscovered country” of primitive galaxies, which date back to the infancy of the Universe.

Astronomers estimate that three newly-identified galaxies, which are small and compact and glow a striking blue, are about 13.2 billion light years away. The starlight that Hubble has captured was thus emitted some 13.2 billion years ago, when the Universe was just 4 per cent of its present age.

If these preliminary calculations of distances and dates are confirmed, the galaxies would be the oldest and farthest away yet observed, offering new insights into the earliest years of the cosmos.

“With the rejuvenated Hubble and its new instruments, we are now entering unchartered territory that is ripe for new discoveries,” said Garth Illingworth, of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), who led the survey team.

He told the American Astronomical Society conference in Washington that the updated Hubble observatory provides an opportunity to “push back the frontiers of the searches for the first galaxies and to explore their nature”.

Further clues to the early Universe have been provided by a another remarkable image, a mosaic which combines pictures from Hubble’s new camera with an older survey taken in 2004, which was also presented at the Washington conference.

It gives a panoramic view of a slice of sky covering about a third of the diameter of the full moon, containing some 7,500 galaxies at many different stages of evolution.

The early galaxies detected by Dr Illingworth’s team were pinpointed from data collected by Hubble in August last year, following the installation of the telescope’s new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in May.

The instrument was pointed at a section of sky known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which was first surveyed in visible light in 2004 to provide one of the telescopes’ most iconic images — dark sky teeming with more than 10,000 galaxies. The WFC3 instrument has now repeated the exercise for infrared light.
The first analysis of the new 2009 Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF09), released last month, found faint objects that were formed about 600 million years after the Big Bang. Dr Illingworth’s team has now found evidence that three galaxies in the image date back still further, to about 500 million years after the dawn of the Universe.

As the distance travelled by light increases, its wavelength becomes shifted towards the red end of the spectrum because of the expansion of the Universe — a phenomenon known as redshift that scientists can use to calculate the age of galaxies.

Preliminary calculations have suggested that the redshift value for three very faint galaxies in the new Ultra Deep Field is 10, which equates to an age of about 13.2 billion years, or 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The research has not yet been peer-reviewed, though the scientists have posted a paper online and submitted it to the journal Nature. It has also been reported by the magazine Science News.

The primordial galaxies are much smaller than modern ones, and are thought to have coalesced to give birth to the much larger bodies that exist today, scientists said.

Marcella Carollo, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, another member of the research team, said: “They are the very building blocks from which the great galaxies of today, like our own Milky Way, ultimately formed.”
The stars that make up the primitive galaxies must have been formed still earlier than the galaxies themselves, but Hubble is not capable of looking back further into space and time to see them directly. The more powerful James Webb Space Telescope should be able to search for them when it is launched in 2014.

Rychard Bouwens, of UCSC, the lead author of the paper, said: “The faintest galaxies are now showing signs of linkage to their origins from the first stars. They are so blue that they must be extremely deficient in heavy elements, thus representing a population that has nearly primordial characteristics.”

“This is about as far as we can go to do detailed science with the new HUDF09 image,” Dr Illingworth said. “This shows just how much the James Webb Space Telescope is needed to unearth the secrets of the first galaxies.”

(mark henderson, Times Online, 5January2010)

It is a pointless distinction to most consumers, since the price is the same either way. But behind the scenes, billions of dollars are at stake.

When you sign a debit card receipt at a large retailer, the store pays your bank an average of 75 cents for every $100 spent, more than twice as much as when you punch in a four-digit code.

The difference is so large that Costco will not allow you to sign for your debit purchase in its checkout lines. Wal-Mart and Home Depot steer customers to use a PIN, the debit card norm outside the United States.

Despite all this, signature debit cards dominate debit use in this country, accounting for 61 percent of all such transactions, even though PIN debit cards are less expensive and less vulnerable to fraud.

How this came to be is largely a result of a successful if controversial strategy hatched decades ago by Visa, the dominant payment network for credit and debit cards. It is an approach that has benefited Visa and the nation’s banks at the expense of merchants and, some argue, consumers.

Competition, of course, usually forces prices lower. But for payment networks like Visa and MasterCard, competition in the card business is more about winning over banks that actually issue the cards than consumers who use them. Visa and MasterCard set the fees that merchants must pay the cardholder’s bank. And higher fees mean higher profits for banks, even if it means that merchants shift the cost to consumers.

Seizing on this odd twist, Visa enticed banks to embrace signature debit — the higher-priced method of handling debit cards — and turned over the fees to banks as an incentive to issue more Visa cards. At least initially, MasterCard and other rivals promoted PIN debit instead.

As debit cards became the preferred plastic in American wallets, Visa has turned its attention to PIN debit too and increased its market share even more. And it has succeeded — not by lowering the fees that merchants pay, but often by pushing them up, making its bank customers happier.

In an effort to catch up, MasterCard and other rivals eventually raised fees on debit cards too, sometimes higher than Visa, to try to woo bank customers back.

“What we witnessed was truly a perverse form of competition,” said Ronald Congemi, the former chief executive of Star Systems, one of the regional PIN-based networks that has struggled to compete with Visa. “They competed on the basis of raising prices. What other industry do you know that gets away with that?”

Visa has managed to dominate the debit landscape despite more than a decade of litigation and antitrust investigations into high fees and anticompetitive behavior, including a settlement in 2003 in which Visa paid $2 billion that some predicted would inject more competition into the debit industry.

Yet today, Visa has a commanding lead in signature debit in the United States, with a 73 percent share. Its share of the domestic PIN debit market is smaller but growing, at 42 percent, making Visa the biggest PIN network, according to The Nilson Report, an industry newsletter.

The Risk of Refusing

Critics complain that Visa does not fight fair, and that it used its market power to force merchants to accept higher costs for debit cards. Merchants say they cannot refuse Visa cards because it would result in lower sales.

“A dollar is no longer a dollar in this country,” said Mallory Duncan, senior vice president of the National Retail Federation, a trade association. “It’s a Visa dollar. It’s only worth 99 cents because they take a piece of every one.”

Visa officials say its critics are griping about debit products that have transformed the nation’s payment system, adding convenience for consumers and higher sales for merchants, while cutting the hassle and expense of dealing with cash and checks. In recent years, New York cabbies and McDonald’s restaurants are among those reporting higher sales as a result of accepting plastic.

“At times we have a perspective problem,” said William M. Sheedy, Visa’s president for the Americas. “Debit has become so mainstream, some of the people who have benefited have lost sight of what their business model was, what their cost structure was.”

Visa officials said the costs of debit for merchants had not gone down because the cards now provided greater value than they did five or 10 years ago. The costs must not be too onerous, they say, because merchant acceptance has doubled in the last decade.

The fees are “not a cost-based calculation, but a value-based calculation,” said Elizabeth Buse, Visa’s global head of product.

As for Visa’s market share, company officials maintain that it is rather small when considered within the larger context of all payments, where, for now at least, cash remains king.

While Visa may be among the best-known brands in the world, how it operates is a mystery to many consumers.

Visa does not distribute credit or debit cards, nor does it provide credit so consumers can buy flat-screen televisions or a Starbucks latte. Those tasks are left to the banks, which owned Visa until it went public in 2008.

Instead, Visa provides an electronic network that acts like a tollbooth, processing the transaction between merchants and banks and collecting a fee that averages 5 or 6 cents every time. For the financial year ended in June, Visa handled 40 billion transactions. Banks that issue Visa cards also pay a separate licensing fee, based on payment volume. MasterCard, which is roughly half the size of Visa, uses a similar model.

“It’s a penny here or there,” said Moshe Katri, an analyst who tracks the payments industry for Cowen and Company. “But when you have a billion transactions or more, it adds up.”

With debit transactions forecast to overtake cash purchases by 2012, the model has investors swooning: Visa’s stock traded at $88.14 on Monday, near a 52-week high, while shares of MasterCard, at $256.84 each, have soared by more than 450 percent since the company went public in 2006.

While there is little controversy about the fees that Visa collects, some merchants are infuriated by a separate, larger fee, called interchange, that Visa makes them pay each time a debit or credit card is swiped. The fees, roughly 1 to 3 percent of each purchase, are forwarded to the cardholder’s bank to cover costs and promote the issuance of more Visa cards.

The banks have used interchange fees as a growing profit center and to pay for cardholder perks like rewards programs. Interchange revenue has increased to $45 billion today, from $20 billion in 2002, driven in part by the surge in debit card use.

Some merchants say there should be no interchange fees on debit purchases, because the money comes directly out of a checking account and does not include the risks and losses associated with credit cards. Regardless, merchants say they inevitably pass on that cost to consumers; the National Retail Federation says the interchange fees cost households an average of $427 in 2008.

While the cost per transaction may seem small, at Best Buy, the biggest stand-alone electronics chain, “these skyrocketing fees add up to hundreds of millions of dollars every year,” said Dee O’Malley, director of financial services. “Every additional dollar we are forced to pay credit card companies is another dollar we can’t use to hire employees, or pass along to our customers in the form of savings.”

Weighing Rules on Merchants

The Justice Department is investigating if rules imposed by payment networks, including Visa, on merchants regarding “various payment forms” are anticompetitive, a spokeswoman said. Several bills have been introduced in Congress seeking to give merchants more ability to negotiate interchange, which is largely unregulated.

While interchange remains legal despite repeated challenges, a group of merchants is pursuing yet another class-action suit, this time in federal court in Brooklyn, against Visa and MasterCard that seeks to upend the system for setting fees.

“Visa and MasterCard have morphed into a giant cookie jar for banks at the expense of consumers,” said Mitch Goldstone, a plaintiff in the case.

Fees were not an issue when debit cards first gained traction in the 1980s. The small networks that operated automated teller machines, like STAR, Pulse, MAC and NYCE, issued debit cards that required a PIN. MasterCard had its own PIN debit network, called Maestro.

Merchants were not charged a fee for accepting PIN debit cards, and sometimes they even got a small payment because it saved banks the cost of processing a paper check.

That changed after Visa entered the debit market. In the 1990s, Visa promoted a debit card that let consumers access their checking account on the same network that processed its credit cards, which required a signature.

To persuade the banks to issue more of its debit cards, Visa charged merchants for these transactions and passed the money to the issuing banks. By 1999, Visa was setting fees of $1.35 on a $100 purchase, while Maestro and other regional PIN networks charged less than a dime, Federal Reserve data shows. Visa says the fee was justified because signature debit was so much more useful than PIN debit; at the time, roughly 15 percent of merchants had keypads for entering a PIN.

Merchants said they had no choice but to continue taking the debit cards, despite the higher fees, because Visa’s rules required them to honor its debit cards if they chose to accept Visa’s credit cards.

“Smart retailers take advantage and offer a ‘discount’ on debit purchases. Sharing the savings with the customers is a great incentive.”

Wal-Mart, Circuit City, Sears and a number of major merchants eventually sued. After seven years of litigation, Visa and MasterCard agreed to end the “honor all cards” rule between credit and debit and to pay the retailers a settlement of around $3 billion, one of the largest in American corporate history. Visa paid $2 billion, and MasterCard the remainder.

Since then, only a handful of retailers have stopped accepting Visa debit cards, an indication that the crux of the lawsuit was “much ado about nothing,” Mr. Sheedy says.

And while some merchants said they thought the lawsuit would pave the way to a new era of competition, a curious thing happened instead: while Visa temporarily lowered its fees for signature debit, it raised the price on PIN debit transactions and passed the funds on to card-issuing banks, and its competitors soon followed.

The current class-action lawsuit joined by Mr. Goldstone contends that Visa’s PIN debit network, called Interlink, is offering banks higher fees as an incentive to issue debit cards that are exclusively routed over this network. Interlink, which has raised its PIN debit fees for small merchants to 90 cents for each $100 transaction, from 20 cents in 2002, is often the most expensive, especially for small merchants, Fed data shows.

One large retailer, who requested anonymity to preserve its relationship with Visa, provided data that showed Interlink’s share of PIN purchases rose to 47 percent in 2009, from 20 percent in 2002, even as its fees steadily increased ahead of most other networks — to 49 cents per $100 transaction in 2009, from 38 cents in 2006.

Visa officials say its PIN debit network is taking off despite rising costs because it offers merchants, banks and consumers a level of efficiency and security that regional networks cannot match. “We are motivated as a company to try to drive value to each one of those participants so that they accept the card, issue more cards, use the card,” Mr. Sheedy said.

At checkout counters, meanwhile, consumers are quietly tugged in one direction or the other.

Safeway, 7-Eleven and CVS drugstores automatically prompt consumers to do a less costly PIN debit transaction. The banks, however, still steer consumers toward the more expensive form of signature debit. Wells Fargo and Chase are among those that offer bonus points only on debit purchases completed with a signature.

Visa says it does not care how consumers use their debit card, as long as it is a Visa. But for now at least, the company says the only way to ensure that a purchase is routed over the Visa network is to sign.

“When you use your Visa card, you have a chance to win a trip to the Olympic Winter Games,” a new Visa commercial promises.

The commercial does not explain the rules, but the fine print on Visa’s Web site does: nearly all Visa purchases are eligible — as long as the cardholder does not enter a PIN.

(andrew martin, New York Times, 4January2010)

President Grímsson’s decision to block a Bill that would repay Britain and the Netherlands the £3.6 billion their savers lost has triggered a storm of abuse. But the tiny nation of 320,000 people has a good case for saying it won’t pay back all the debt on the dates set out. It has an even better case for saying it can’t.

When Landsbankii, the parent of Icesave, collapsed in 2008, Iceland questioned whether it was obliged to compensate foreign savers. To cool the panic and demonstrate leadership, the British and Dutch governments decided to pay the savers right away, and try to get the money back from Iceland.

Under EU law it’s very debatable whether Iceland is obliged to pay them. It signed up to “passporting” rules that allow banks to operate across national borders if they take part in their home country’s system of guaranteeing deposits. But crucially, these guarantees vary between countries, in their level, and in who runs them. In Britain, the guarantee comes from the Government, and shortly before Landsbankii collapsed, was raised to £50,000. In Iceland, insurance was offered through the Depositors’ and Investors’ Guarantee Fund, set up by private banks, and in value equal to only 1 per cent of deposits. That was within EU rules, which did not foresee the simultaneous collapse of the country’s entire banking system.

In asserting that Iceland must repay in full, Britain is making two contestable assertions. The first is that if Iceland’s private fund can’t pay, the responsibility passes to the Government and taxpayers. EU rules do not say this, if only because they fail to provide for such dramatic circumstances. The second is that Iceland must pay not the amount set by its own guarantee rules nor even the British £50,000, but the full amount of British savers’ losses, even though the Government chose to pay out more than UK rules obliged.

It is hypocritical of Britain, with the Netherlands, to insist on the full £3.6 billion. Britain describes this as a loan to Iceland, but the “deal” in June that purported to set out the terms has never been agreed by Iceland’s parliament and President — hence this week’s drama.

Britain claims that responsibility for foreign activities of a bank falls on the taxpayers of a country in which its headquarters happen to sit. But while Britain has courted foreign banks assiduously, it is unthinkable that if it faced paying £720 billion to foreign savers (as, scaled up for the UK population, a comparable bill would be) it would pay without murmur. UK regulators also approved Icesave, and bear responsibility too.

What’s more, the UK, which now claims to advise the world on regulation after the financial crisis, is ignoring two key questions that the Iceland debacle has raised but the EU has not begun to resolve. The first is whether bank activities which benefit from a government guarantee should be walled off from those that do not. It’s certainly a live debate, but hard to say there is much real impetus to resurrect the barriers. The second is whether EU members want to agree a common level and model for deposit guarantees, backed, in the end and in every case, by government funds. The answer so far has been no.

Iceland is hardly blameless. Its bankers and politicians are entirely at fault for the greed, ignorance, vanity and cronyism which led to the implosion. National fury at Gordon Brown’s misappropriation of anti-terror laws to freeze Landsbankii’s UK activities was understandable, but has become a self-indulgent evasion. It is very hard to get Icelanders to look beyond this insult to acknowledge the real injury to British savers. Yet the best answer to these inevitable weaknesses of a very small country is to bring it within a club such as the EU, and under its scrutiny and regulation. But the row may put EU membership beyond reach. Yesterday, the escalating dispute was also jeopardising help from Nordic countries and the International Monetary Fund.

After all the legal rows, Iceland’s best card is that it can’t pay. A fall in the currency would make debt insupportable; a fall in population (and many graduates are now leaving) would make full payment impossible. EU finance ministers concluded in November 2008 that talks should respect Iceland’s need to rebuild itself.

The total bill amounts to hardly more than a third of Britain’s annual aid budget. The UK could afford to help out a tiny neighbour that has been an ally for 60 years. At the very least, it should not pursue its debatable claim in a way that prevents others pulling Iceland back from the brink.

(bronwen maddox, The Times, 9January2010)

The specialised unit would be charged with recovering the nuclear materials and securing them.

The move follows growing anti-Americanism in Pakistan’s military, a series of attacks on sensitive installations over the past two years, several of which housed nuclear facilities, and rising tension that has seen a series of official complaints by US authorities to Islamabad in the past fortnight.

“What you have in Pakistan is nuclear weapons mixed with the highest density of extremists in the world, so we have a right to be concerned,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer who used to run the US energy department’s intelligence unit. “There have been attacks on army bases which stored nuclear weapons and there have been breaches and infiltrations by terrorists into military facilities.”

Professor Shaun Gregory, director of the Pakistan security research unit at Bradford University, has tracked a number of attempted security breaches since 2007. “The terrorists are at the gates,” he warned.

In a counterterrorism journal, published by America’s West Point military academy, he documented three incidents. The first was an attack in November 2007 at Sargodha in Punjab, where nuclearcapable F-16 jet aircraft are thought to be stationed. The following month a suicide bomber struck at Pakistan’s nuclear airbase at Kamra in Attock district. In August 2008 a group of suicide bombers blew up the gates to a weapons complex at the Wah cantonment in Punjab, believed to be one of Pakistan’s nuclear warhead assembly plants. The attack left 63 people dead.

A further attack followed at Kamra last October. Pakistan denies that the base still has a nuclear role, but Gregory believes it does. A six-man suicide team was arrested in Sargodha last August.

Fears that militants could penetrate a nuclear facility intensified after a brazen attack on army headquarters in Rawalpindi in October when 10 gunmen wearing army uniforms got inside and laid siege for 22 hours. Last month there was an attack on the naval command centre in Islamabad.

Pakistani police said five Americans from Washington who were arrested in Pakistan last month after trying to join the Taliban were carrying a map of Chashma Barrage, a complex in Punjab that includes a nuclear power facility.

The Al-Qaeda leadership has made no secret of its desire to get its hands on weapons for a “nuclear 9/11”.

“I have no doubt they are hell-bent on acquiring this,” said Mowatt-Larssen. “These guys are thinking of nuclear at the highest level and are approaching it in increasingly professional ways.”

Nuclear experts and US officials say the biggest fear is of an inside job amid growing anti-American feeling in Pakistan. Last year 3,021 Pakistanis were killed in terrorist attacks, more than in Afghanistan, yet polls suggest Pakistanis consider the United States to be a greater threat than the Taliban.

“You have 8,000-12,000 [people] in Pakistan with some type of role in nuclear missiles — whether as part of an assembly team or security,” said Gregory. “It’s a very large number and there is a real possibility that among those people are sympathisers of terrorist or jihadist groups who may facilitate some kind of attack.”

Pakistan is thought to possess about 80 nuclear warheads. Although the weapons are well guarded, the fear is that materials or processes to enrich uranium could fall into the wrong hands.

“All it needs is someone in Pakistan within the nuclear establishment and in a position of key access to become radicalised,” said MowattLarssen. “This is not just theoretical. It did happen — Pakistan has had inside problems before.”

Bashir Mahmood, the former head of Pakistan’s plutonium reactor, formed the Islamic charity Ummah Tameer-e-Nau in March 2000 after resigning from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. He was arrested in Islamabad on October 23, 2001, with his associate Abdul Majeed for alleged links to Osama Bin Laden.

Pakistan’s military leadership, which controls the nuclear programme, has always bristled at the suggestion that its nuclear facilities are at risk. The generals insist that storing components in different sites keeps them secure.

US officials refused to speak on the record about American safety plans, well aware of how this would be seen in Islamabad. However, one official admitted that the United States does not know where all of Pakistan’s storage sites are located. “Don’t assume the US knows everything,” he said.

Although Washington has provided $100m worth of technical assistance to Islamabad under its nuclear protection programme, US personnel have been denied access to most Pakistani nuclear sites.

In the past fortnight the US has made unprecedented formal protests to Pakistan’s national security apparatus, warning it about fanning virulent anti-American sentiment in the media.

Concerns about hostility towards America within elements of the Pakistani armed forces first surfaced in 2007. At a meeting of military commanders staged at Kurram, on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a Pakistani major drew his pistol and shot an American. The incident was hushed up as a gunfight.

(christina lamb, The Sunday Times, 17January2010)

A German government delegation will head to Vancouver next month to set out the joint bid with Munich and a formal submission will be made to the International Olympic Committee in March.

But if the Germans are to stand a chance, they will have to conduct a serious re-branding of Garmisch, which is still wallowing in its past glories – and the time that Adolf Hitler came to stay.

On the surface, Garmisch resembles a typical picture postcard Alpine community, with wooden chalets, flower tubs and the ice-clad Zugspitze mountain looming over the valley, and it is still proud of the last time that it was the site of a Winter Olympics -1936.

In the 1930s, though, the town was rabidly anti-Semitic, so much so that worried sports managers ordered a cover-up lest bad publicity jeopardise the success of the Summer Olympics in Berlin which Hitler wanted to be a showpiece of Aryan superiority.

The organiser of the summer Olympics, Carl Diem, visited Garmisch in 1935 and did not like what he saw. Nazi party rallies were stirring up hatred against Jews, he said, and the anti-Semitic newspaper “Der Stuermer” was on sale everywhere.

“As a result there is concern that action taken against domestic and German Jews could not only cast a shadow over the Winter Games but also threaten the holding of the Summer Olympics,” said Mr Diem, in a letter to Karl Ritter von Halt who had been given the task of staging the Garmisch events.

What ensued was a comprehensive clean-up to present the sunny face of Nazi Germany. All anti-Semitic banners were removed from sports centres, Jews and foreigners were served again in pubs – apres-ski drinking was again allowed to be “cosmopolitan”- and Der Stuermer disappeared. Signs like “Jews forbidden” or “Business must not be conducted in the Jewish language” were unscrewed and stored for later use.

The Games were to be photographed by Nazi-Party approved German photographers. The Nazi censorship bureau the ruled on which pictures could be released to the foreign press. Any hint of repression against Jews was to be removed from the papers for the duration of the games in case foreign visitors get wind of a less-than-tolerant Germany. “It is strictly forbidden, in the light of the Winter Olympics, to report about any clashes with foreigners or with Jews, “ said a memo sent from the Propaganda Ministry to German editors on January 27, 1936.

Even after the end of the Games – with Germany coming second to Norway in the medals table – the propaganda ministry of Joseph Goebbels kept a tight watch on “anything that could be construed abroad as hypocrisy on our part.” German papers had within days of the end of the Garmisch games attacked the half-Jewish ice hockey player Rudi Ball. The British ice hockey team had infuriated German commentators by taking the gold medal, ahead of the Canadians.

By 1937, the mask had slipped. The “Jews not welcome here” signs were put up again, tourist brochures made plain that guest houses would not be opening their doors to Jews and on the Night of Broken Glass, in November 1938, with Nazi pogroms raging across the country, the last fifty Jews were driven out of town

The Garmisch games were hailed as a success and, indeed, the Germans were later approached with the offer of staging the 1940 Winter Olympics – the Games never took place because of the outbreak of war. This international accolade, rather than the elaborate propaganda spin operation mounted by the Nazis, is what Garmisch city elders still hold to be the most important outcome of 1936, and the reason why it would be a strong candidate for 2018. New hotels are to be built, the rail link with Munich improved.

“People here do not feel the need to look into that part of the town’s history, “ says Alois Schwarzmueller, a former Social Democrat councillor and a local amateur historian.

The 2018 bid is being led by the son of Willy Bogner who delivered the Olympic oath in the presence of Adolf Hitler. And a commemorative book about the Garmisch games, which is still being promoted by the town council, turns out to have been published by a historian who was under investigation by the German equivalent of Special Branch for allegedly printing a book by a Holocaust denier.

(roger boyes, Times Online, 22January2010)

The high-security compound on the outskirts of Kabul was designed with British and American help to convict Afghanistan’s most wanted drug lords — the untouchables at the top of the heroin cartels — and the results have been extraordinary. So good that more than 9,000 defence attorneys have gone on strike, claiming justice there is a sham.

“The judges just ignore the evidence, they don’t care,” said Rohullah Qarizada, the president of the Afghan Independent Bar Association. “They just convict. The role of the defence lawyers is merely symbolic.”

Conviction rates are more than 90 per cent. In the nine months to December, the Criminal Justice Task Force (CJTF) primary court convicted 310 out of 343 people. The appeal court convicted 394 of 427. The bar association says it is proof that defence lawyers have been sidelined. Court insiders say it is because the burden of proof is set high before the cases come to trial.

Built with $8 million (£5 million) of US money, the task force has 12 dedicated judges, 30 prosecutors and 35 investigators who all get generous salary top-ups from the UK and beefed-up personal security worth £1.2 million a year. The former chief judge was assassinated. “The judges and prosecutors get their salaries from the UK embassies so they just convict people to keep them happy,” Mr Qarizada said.

Defence attorneys have refused CJTF cases since January 9. Their strike is likely to fuel accusations that the West is guilty of its own corruption at a time when the international community is heaping pressure on President Karzai to root out graft and tackle the heroin cartels that permeate his own family.

Mr Qarizada said he defended a man at the CJTF who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in a case of mistaken identity. “I brought 50 people from his village, the mullah, the district governor and five members of parliament who all said he was Mahmood, not Ahmad,” Mr Qarizada said. “One policeman who arrested him said he’d heard his mother call him Ahmad, so the judge gave him 16 years in prison.”

At a trial in November, the primary court sat for less than two hours to convict five people to a total of 55 years in prison. After more than six months collecting telephone intercepts and forensic reports, there was no cross-examination of witnesses and attorneys simply read out opening statements to a panel of three judges. The verdict was recorded the next day, without calling court into session.

The defence lawyers are also angry at the way they are treated by the state authorities. Nasar Mohammed Helmandwal, who defended one of the most notorious smugglers to be convicted at the CJTF, said his offices were illegally raided by the police. “We just want respect,” he said. “The court accepts whatever the foreigners tell them. They don’t listen to us.”

A spokesman for the British embassy said they were aware of the dispute. “The role of defence lawyers is … extremely important. In any transparent and effective justice system a fair acquittal should have equal weight with a fair conviction.”

(jerome starkey, The Times, 28January2010)

Pandemics – Risks and Reactions to an Issue of Public Health

The topic of pandemic is especially pertinent at this time, as we are currently involved in the H1N1 flu pandemic. One of the important points made this evening was that we are not through with H1N1, even though it is no longer newsworthy, and there may be a third wave of the virus, as has been evidenced in the past with other pandemics.

The introductions were made by Dr. Paul Koobs, head of a new institute in Calgary, the Alberta Sepsis Network: Viral, Fungal, and Microbial. It’s housed in the new building on the grounds of the Foothills Hospital. He discussed how the major problem with the H1N1 virus was not the virus itself, but the body’s overreaction to the invasive phage. The hyperactive immune system condition, called sepsis, actually causes more damage than the virus does. This is how the great pandemic of the 20th century, the so-called Spanish Flu, killed its victims by proxy, when the white cells’ caustic chemicals used to kill phages turn against body tissues. Five hundred million people died, most of them young, fit, and healthy. Sepsis is so dangerous that the death rate today is 50%, while the death rate from a stroke is 20% by comparison. Twenty years ago, the sepsis death rate was closer to 100%. Some fascinating videos were shown on the PowerPoint presentation of white blood cells ‘searching and destroying’ invasive phages.

From Dr. Koob’s introduction on the microissue of what is happening in the body, Alberta’s Deputy Medical Officer of Health, Judy MacDonald, who made the case for Alberta’s preparedness, spoke about the macroissues of public health. Public health is a very big job, with timely and effective vaccine production and distribution one of the many responsibilities. The H5N1 virus was first detected in Hong Kong in 1997, later named the Bird or Avian Flu, as this was its animal vector, and resulted in an undetermined number of deaths before the Chinese government took the radical step of slaughtering 1.5 million fowl in the poultry markets. This was the first indication that an influenza phage, present in all migratory birds and most domestic ones, could be passed directly to people without the intermediary host of the pig, which serves as a ‘mixing vessel’ to incubate and transform the virus into one that can attack humans, due to the remarkable physiological similarities between humans and swine. Alerted to the possibility of a new, more dangerous flu, nations began cooperating on an unprecedented scale for pandemic contingency planning. In the midst of this, another shock as delivered in the form of SARS in 2002, which forced the issue of faster and better pandemic planning through the World Health Organization. Canada now has a dedicated manufacturer for antivirals as a result of this planning. The next virus arrived in mid-April of 2009, from Mexico, another version of swine flu, now called H1N1. Dr. MacDonald said that preparedness is expecting the unexpected from viruses because of their rapid mutation and today’s rapid travel, which can move a virus planet wide within days. By June 11, a pandemic was announced, with 28,774 confirmed cases in 74 countries, and 144 confirmed deaths. Canada’s antiviral manufacturing committed to producing a dose for all 36 million Canadians, with priority given to the ill and health care workers directly involved. A huge public messaging program for hand hygiene was developed, but the vaccine dosed didn’t arrive until October 26th, well after the initial surge of reported cases. So far, only 33% of Canadians have taken the dose, as the media have ignored the fact the pandemic is still on, and may produce a ‘third wave’ of renewed infections. One of the indicators are schoolchildren – the ‘canaries in the coal mine’. Once school absenteeism reaches 10%, school health officials are required to report that to Alberta’s Public Health as an outbreak. Winter is the high season for outbreaks of flu, but H1N1 chose summer of 2009, coming in at double the normal seasonal illness rate.

Dr. Chip Doig, AMA president for Canada and U of C intensive care specialist, discussed that H1N1 was more treatable with Alberta’s available 300 intensive care beds as it occurred through October, the ‘shoulder season’ when demand for intensive care was not as great. During the summer, ICU capacity hovers around 90% because of summer recreational injuries, and it was fortunate that October had the available space for those H1N1 victims. The white blood cells ‘overreact’ to the phage, and victims effectively drown in their own lung fluids. The process is not yet clearly understood, but the treatment is extremely intensive, long and very expensive. Heart attack victims use a cardio pulmonary bypass machine for perhaps 2 hours of surgery, while H1N1 victims need 14 days on the machine, in addition to a dialysis machine and ongoing, real time blood chemistry testing. The cost can exceed $10,000 a day for treatment, lasting over 2 weeks just for the victim to overcome the white cell overreaction and complications. Another 6 – 8 months of recuperative time is required before the victim is even close to the same fitness as before the attack. It’s a serious business. Dr. Doig assured the audience that Alberta’s health care is among the best in the world, despite media sensationalist reports to the contrary. In 20 years, we have moved from a non-survivable prognosis to survivable in most cases.

All in all, this Science Café was excellent, in both the content and presentation. If you’d like to learn more, Science Café is on the web as a co-production of the U of C and the Telus World of Science, and is presented the last Tuesday of each month, nine times a year, December and June and July excepted. Sign up for notifications via e-mail or Facebook. See you in February!

Jeff Pugh

Pigeon Humour (tip of the hat to Jeff Pugh):
Pigeon

Afghanistan, Lessons Unlearned from the Soviet War
Lessons Unlearned

Stone Age Amputation
Stone Age

Radiation Treatment
Radiation

For sheer fun and frolic, Mensa Calgary’s monthly schedule these days is tough to beat. Try our Second Tuesday, Hockey Night or beer evening, Science Café, Movie Matinee, Dinner Night, or any of the special tours and visits that mark our calendar. It’s an amazingly cheerful crowd you’ll encounter. Click on the Events Page to find more. You gotta love it. Mensa, my friend, is the in-place for 2010.

Science Café (November 24, 2009)(notes taken by Esther Huang)

On supernovae, dark matter, dark energy, etc

Guest speakers: Dr Christopher Pritchet from the University of Victoria, Dr Philip Langill from the University of Calgary. Dr Langill is director of research at Rothney Astrophysical Observatory. Dr Pritchet is involved in the Legacy Survey, the Galileo Lecture Series, and CANARIE (Canada’s Advanced Research Network).

The topics which they touched on included the arguments for and against dark energy and dark matter. You’d be at the cutting edge of astrophysics if you grasped these concepts. Einstein supported the steady-state theory, but this is rejected by most current thinkers. The notion of branes, multidimensional universes, and interface of cosmology and theoretical physics got a good working out at this session of the Science Café. See what you missed? You wouldn’t, for example, have to read Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages to see the current state of the standard model of particle physics.

Supernovae were discussed and related to great extinction events on earth. Is there a connection or isn’t there? The relative frequency and enormous brightness of these stellar explosions allow them to be yardsticks for cosmological evolution and a measure of expansion of the universe itself. In recent years, we’ve discovered that expansion is speeding up rather than slowing down. In the long run, this may be the single most important fact we’ve learned in the last hundred years.

The fabric of space itself is not energy-neutral, but rather contains a force or disposition which allows what we call matter to exist. Whence discussion of the Higgs Boson and the efforts at the LHC to discover same.

Dark matter hasn’t stopped the expansion of the universe, and dark energy isn’t necessarily speeding it up. The issues relate to cosmology, because at a very early age, the energy of the universe was so great that gravity was indistinguishable from electromagnetism, the weak force and strong force. The relative ubiquity of hydrogen would be very different – and we likely wouldn’t exist – if the early history of the cosmos had been even slightly different from what it was. We can trace cosmological history by studying particle physics and analyze the latter by examining the former. They all come together.

Learn more about all scientific subjects by turning up at the Science Café. Check our events calendar for date and time.

2) Every whole number can be obtained by multiplying a certain number of primes. For example, 48 requires 2×2x2×2x3, which is an odd number of primes. 49 requires 7×7, which is an even number. Every whole number is therefore odd or even in the number of primes required. By convention, 1 is considered even in this typology. As we rise through the whole numbers, do we encounter more even types, odd types, or are they equally balanced?

The answers to December’s puzzles were supplied in the December issue.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) The question is whether the odds are fifty-fifty that the bracelet lies behind one of the two unopened doors, and the answer is no. Work it through slowly. One time in three, the bracelet is behind the door you chose earlier. Two times in three, the bracelet lies behind the other unopened door.

2) The answer is peculiar. Except for #1, you find that you encounter either more odd types or an equal quantity of odd and even types. Until you reach 906,150,257. When for the first time you find that there have been more even types than odd. (We hope you didn’t test the numbers one by one.