Ethnically it is highly diverse, with more than 300 local languages. The people range from rural hunter-gatherers to a modern urban elite.

Indonesia has seen great turmoil in recent years, having faced the Asian financial crisis, the fall of President Suharto after 32 years in office, the first free elections since the 1960s, the loss of East Timor, independence demands from restive provinces, bloody ethnic and religious conflict and a devastating tsunami.

Sophisticated kingdoms existed before the arrival of the Dutch, who consolidated their hold over two centuries, eventually uniting the archipelago in around 1900.

After Japan's wartime occupation ended, independence was proclaimed in 1945 by Sukarno, the independence movement's leader. The Dutch transferred sovereignty in 1949 after an armed struggle.

Long-term leader General Suharto came to power in the wake of an abortive coup in 1965. He imposed authoritarian rule while allowing technocrats to run the economy with considerable success.

But his policy of allowing army involvement in all levels of government, down to village level, fostered corruption. His "transmigration" programmes – which moved large numbers of landless farmers from Java to other parts of the country – fanned ethnic conflict.

Suharto fell from power after riots in 1998 and escaped efforts to bring him to justice for decades of dictatorship.

Post-Suharto Indonesia has made the transition to democracy. Power has been devolved away from the central government and the first direct presidential elections were held in 2004.

But the country faces demands for independence in several provinces, where secessionists have been encouraged by East Timor's 1999 success in breaking away after a traumatic 25 years of occupation.

Militant Islamic groups have flexed their muscles over the past few years. Some have been accused of having links with Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation, including the group blamed for the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed 202 people.

Lying near the intersection of shifting tectonic plates, Indonesia is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. A powerful undersea quake in late 2004 sent massive waves crashing into coastal areas of Sumatra, and into coastal communities across south and east Asia. The disaster left more than 220,000 Indonesians dead or missing.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel chats with members of her cabinet during the weekly German government cabinet meeting on May 2, 2012 in Berlin, Germany.

Read A Different Opinion Who Hold Power Within The EU

Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University.

When Francois Hollande, the newly elected president of France, arrives today in Berlin for his first meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, it will kindle memories of the long history of Franco-German partnership in leading the European Union. In France, it may even trigger the traditional condescension Parisian politicians feel towards their neighbors: The lumbering German economic giant that relies on French diplomatic, military, and nuclear savoir faire to achieve political clout.

Increasingly, however, such sentiments are mere nostalgia. Yes, when the financial crisis broke out in 2007 and 2008, the relationship between France and Germany — and between Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy (or “Merkozy” as they were dubbed) — took its usual place at center stage. But the real story since then has been Germany’s increasing comfort in claiming the spotlight for itself. It is a story that has left a riveted continent guessing what Germany’s ultimate intentions are.

It’s important to point out that this shift has been a long time in coming. It was prefigured by the famous photo from the cemetery at the great World War I battlefield of Verdun, which depicted the massive figure of Chancellor Helmut Kohl holding hands with the diminutive President Francois Mitterand. But what irrevocably altered the balance in the Franco-German pairing was German unification in 1990. Germany’s addition of territories with a new population of some 16 millions upset the almost precise demographic equality of the European area, which until then had contained four large countries with almost the same population and economic size (the other two were politically unstable Italy and politically semi-detached Great Britain). For a time, the implications of the addition were hidden because of the enormous financial cost of rebuilding the eastern German territories, run down by the legacy of catastrophic communist central planning.

But the extent of German power was also masked because of the insistence of that country’s political establishment on acting through multilateral institutions. Germany’s habit of making constant diplomatic reference to the alphabet soup of international organizations — EEC, NATO, WEU, CSCE — even had its own name, Genscherism, after the long-serving German Foreign Minister and co-architect with Kohl of German unification, Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

Given modern Germany’s history as an aggressor, it is perhaps no surprise that foreigners are troubled by the new country’s new assertiveness in imposing harsh austerity conditions on southern Europe.

In that way, the clearest evidence of Germany’s newfound comfort with its power is the language now used by Frau Merkel. Sometimes she addresses the European situation, and the need for austerity to be imposed on southern Europe, with a bluntness of language that reminds of nobody so much as Otto von Bismarck. In May 2010, pleading to the German parliament, the Bundestag, to accept the first Greek rescue package, Merkel explained that “the rules must not be oriented toward the weak, but toward the strong. That is a hard message. But it is an economic necessity.” It had overtones of the Iron Chancellor’s 1862 “iron and blood” speech to the Budget Commission of the Prussian parliament, in which he explained that German unity would be achieved through demonstrations of Prussian strength, not Prussian liberalism. Three wars followed in short order, and German was, indeed, unified.

Given modern Germany’s history as an aggressor, it is perhaps no surprise that foreigners are troubled by the new country’s new assertiveness in imposing harsh austerity conditions on southern Europe. In Greece, radical populist parties of the left and right routinely portray Merkel as a new Hitler. The technocratic prime ministers of Greece and Italy are often portrayed in the media of those countries as German puppets, and French electors have just booted Sarkozy from office in part because of his identification with Merkel. But the dismay about the new Germany is shared even in more rarified circles. Senior British officials and politicians do not hide their frustration with the “bloody Germans.” The Obama administration, meanwhile, is terrified that German insistence on austerity will provoke a new round of financial panic and economic crisis, which would not be confined to Europe, and which might turn the November election against the President.

These anxious observers scrutinize the new European Uberpower’s economic strategy in hopes of gauging its political ambitions. Technical debates about trade balances are thus seen as potential power bids by a new potential hegemon that wants to mould a new world with new rules. Just as Chinese trade and current account surpluses are thought to be discrediting multilateral institutions on a global level, German surpluses are threatening the political institutions that manage the process of European integration. (The German issue looks even more pressing today that that of China, in that China’s surpluses are rapidly shrinking, while the German level is only falling very slightly.) On the global level there is a fear of a new Chinese order, in which China develops patronage relations with a new quasi-empire in Africa and Latin America; and on the European plane, there is fear of a German Europe. Indeed, southern Europeans complain that German fiscal austerity is creating surpluses that come at their expense, that Germany is imposing deflation on the whole of Europe to exert its control over the continent.

Some critics see Europe’s monetary arrangements as the key to a German master plan stretching back decades. The former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, who clashed with Germany in the 1970s over German unwillingness to provide sufficient stimulus to the European economy, recalls a conversation with the most senior German Finance Ministry official, Manfred Lahnstein. Lahnstein told Healey that the idea of a fixed exchange rate arrangement (then called the European Monetary System) was that other European countries, with higher rates of wage increases, would progressively become uncompetitive relative to the German export machine. That would allow Germany’s social democracy to survive, but at the expense of unemployment and political and economic crisis elsewhere in Europe. Healey used this rationale as the explanation of why Britain should never allow itself to be drawn into such a scheme. When — so the conspiracy theory goes — the European Monetary System collapsed in a series of financial crises in the early 1990s, the Germans had a stronger than ever motivation to press ahead with a stronger version of the scheme, monetary union and the creation of the Euro. Germans thus turned multilateralism and Genscherism into a tool for securing German dominance.

But it’s hard to believe that monetary union was simply a disguise for Germany’s lust for power; indeed, if it was, it seems destined to be a rather counter-productive exercise. (To be sure, the same can be said of Germany’s real rapaciousness in the first half of the twentieth century.) German firms may be able to do relatively well catering to demand from the rapidly growing emerging markets in Asia and the Middle East for machine tools, high performance luxury cars, and other engineering products. But it is unlikely that such success can be repeated forever. At some point Germany will face the problem of being a super-competitive economy surrounded and trapped in an impoverished region that is too poor to buy German products. That periphery would also be socially and politically unstable because of the ravages following from mass unemployment and especially from the destruction of the skills and potentials of a generation of young people. As with the German folk tale of Little Red Riding Hood, the greedy wolf is eventually fated to receive his comeuppance.

But imperialistic conspiracy theorizing aside, there is a way to explain what is motivating Germany’s use of power. German attitudes of today are the product of a peculiar postwar success story. When American soldiers and diplomats made the postwar settlement, they believed that German political life had been destroyed because of inadequate constitutional guarantees. Adolf Hitler had used the emergency powers of the Weimar Republic’s federal constitution to destroy the power (which included control of the police) of individual German states, and also to stimulate the economy through monetary inflation. So Germany needed extremely secure bulwarks to secure constitutional and monetary stability. The two creations of the postwar era that have been most successful — and which also are regularly rated in opinion polls as commanding the greatest respect from Germans — are the Federal constitutional Court and the independent central bank, the Bundesbank.

Both the Federal Constitutional Court and the Bundesbank are central to the current situation, and they constrain Merkel’s room for maneuver. The Federal Constitutional Court receives complaints about the political and democratic consequences of European rescue packages, that improperly impose commitments on German states that they have not themselves agreed on. Its ruling in September 2011 upheld the German federal government’s commitment to European rescue mechanisms, but at the same time drew a line, stating that further action would violate the German constitution, by transferring to much sovereignty from German citizens to supranational institutions (such as those created as a way of solving the Eurocrisis.) The Bundesbank and its representatives, meanwhile, have taken a parallel position, based on a strict interpretation of the treaty-based mandate of the European Central Bank. Two German board members left the ECB board after warning that direct purchases of government securities would be a violation of the ECB’s statutes and the Maastricht treaty.

Americans often like to think of themselves as pragmatists: If there is a bad crisis, you need to do what it takes to solve it. But the legacy of the postwar remaking of Germany was a deep commitment to legal rules — that a crisis is precisely when you need to create a workable system. The rather legalistic approach is at the core of the European process, not just of German postwar developments; and its constraints make a quick response to a sudden crisis impossible.

But it bears reminding that not all European states find Merkel’s vigorous defense of the export model problematic. The more dynamic central European states, or the Baltic republics, see in Germany a model for emulation (in the same way as many Asian states based their development model on Japan.) One of the big surprises of recent months was a plea from the Polish Foreign Minister for a stronger and more assertive rather than a weaker Germany.

Current account surpluses are in fact not simply a German phenomenon. Outside the EU, where it is impossible to argue that a kind of artificial currency manipulation is producing the effect of an artificial boost to competitiveness, the surpluses of Norway and Switzerland as a proportion of GDP (respectively estimated at 14.8 and 12.1 percent for 2010) are much higher than that of Germany (5.2 percent). The other Eurozone members with a German type of economy — Austria and the Netherlands — also have current account surpluses. In fact, if an observer looked at Europe ignoring political boundaries, they would see a dynamic area stretching north from the Alps (including not only Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland but also parts of central France and northern Italy) with a powerful tradition of skilled industry and the export of niche products. These areas are where German productivity is not perceived as a threat, but rather as a sign of hope that Europe has a strong role in the world economy.

Still, Germany knows that the resentments against it will persist unless it can devise some enhanced measure of fiscal redistribution on the European level (as there has been between states in the United States since the Great Depression.) Its only realistic option to that end may be to devise some sort of European tax (or even more radically perhaps a European social security regime) that would act as an absorber of regionally specific shocks. An obvious starting point for Europe would be to set some standard limit up to which national debt would be federalized — perhaps the notorious 60 per cent of GDP from the Maastricht convergence criteria, perhaps a lower limit. Debt exceeding that amount would be left to the responsibility of the national states.

Germany’s current muscle flexing should be properly understood as a way to open up the bargaining for such a deal. It resembles, in fact, the position that Virginians took in 1790 in resisting the Hamiltonian assumption of state debts arising out of the war of independence. In the end, Virginia extracted big concessions — a limit to its liability and the moving of the federal capital. The new compact could also be made palatable to German voters, if it were structured in a way that would make the Europeanization of German interests clear. Germans could for instance be given tax incentives to buy assets in southern Europe: Companies could invest and bring in new business practices; households might think about buying some of those empty Spanish houses and apartments.

There should no doubt: Germany is powerful, and Frau Merkel knows it. But the sources — and thus, the uses — of that strength have been misunderstood. It’s not just because of the success of a particular economic model — one strongly driven by export performance — but also because of a constitutional and legal order. None of this translates straightforwardly into political power in the way Merkel’s critics sometimes claim. But observers should not be so surprised that she is trying to remake Europe, however marginally, in her country’s image. Germany’s traditions, after all, have proven successful, and there’s reason to believe they can influence Europe for the better. Merkel’s actions don’t smack of imperialism, then, but of leadership.

“The question that she asked related to the policies that he had supported when he was a young man — and his reply centered on his view that, though idealistic at the time, they had resulted in the unacceptable injustices of apartheid,” said the foundation, whose founder and chairman is de Klerk.

In the CNN interview, de Klerk would not back off his belief in the validity of the original concept of “separate but equal” nation states.

That remark provoked criticism, including on Twitter where some South Africans said de Klerk isn’t worthy of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize he shared with Nelson Mandela for ending South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Said de Klerk on CNN this week: “I don’t apologize for saying that what drove me as a young man, before I decided we need to embrace a new vision, was a quest to bring justice for black South Africans in a way which would not — that’s what I believed then — destroy the justice to which my people were entitled. My people, whose self-determination (was) taken away by colonial power in the Anglo-Boer War.”

That, de Klerk said, is how he was raised.

“And it was in an era when also in America and elsewhere, and across the continent of Africa, there was still not this realization that we are trampling upon the human rights of people. So I’m a convert.”

The foundation’s subsequent statement elaborated on de Klerk’s position, saying “there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea that the problems of territories that include different peoples should be addressed on the basis of territorial partition.

“This, after all, is what has happened in such societies all over the world — in the territorial divisions of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and more recently in Sudan. It is the solution that has long been advocated for Israel/Palestine,” the foundation said.

South Africa’s apartheid system was born out of “by the loss of the right of Afrikaners to self-determination in the Anglo-Boer War,” the statement said.

“However, as De Klerk pointed out, the National Party’s application of territorial partition was a complete failure because the territorial division was manifestly unfair (something that De Klerk opposed as a young politician),” the statement said.

“The Amanpour interview dealt with De Klerk’s views as a young man. He tried, as frankly as he could, to explain what motivated him at the time. What motivated him as a young man ceased many years ago to motivate him as a political leader,” the statement said. “Since the mid-eighties he has accepted that the policies that he supported as a young man were wrong and that there was not any possibility of justly settling South Africa’s complex problems on the basis of territorial partition.”

CNN’s Joe Sterling contributed to this report.

The family released a statement saying, “We deeply regret the death of our beloved sister Mary, whose radiant and creative spirit will be sorely missed by those who loved her. Our heart goes out to her children who she loved without reservation.”

The Bedford Police Department earlier confirmed they were investigating a possible unattended death at an address owned by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Authorities found a deceased individual inside “an out building” on the property, police said in a statement.

Regarding her marital status at the time of her death, Mary Kennedy wasn’t divorced from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., her family attorney, Kerry A. Lawrence, told CNN.

Mary Richardson Kennedy was “a tremendously gifted architect and a pioneer and relentless advocate of green design who enhanced her cutting edge, energy efficient creations with exquisite taste and style,” Robert F. Kennedy’s family said in a statement.

She advocated finding a cure for food allergies and asthma and was a co-founder of the Food Allergy Initiative, which is the world’s largest private source of funding for food allergy research, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s family said.

“It is with deep sadness that the family of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. mourns the loss of Mary Richardson Kennedy, wife and mother of their four beloved children. Mary inspired our family with her kindness, her love, her gentle soul and generous spirit,” the husband’s family’s statement said.

The couple married in civil ceremony in 1994 when Mary Richardson, a designer, was six months pregnant, according to the Westchester County Journal News. One month prior to the wedding, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. divorced his first wife, Emily Black, the mother of his two oldest children, the newspaper reported.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent environmental lawyer who’s a professor at Pace Law School in White Plains, New York, is the third of 11 children born to Ethel and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated when campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.

Details of the couple’s private lives were exposed after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed for divorce in Westchester County on May 12, 2010.

The next evening, according to police records, Bedford police responded to a 911 call. When police arrived at the Kennedy residence they found the couple in an argument over taking their four children to a carnival at St. Patrick’s School.

According to a “domestic incident” report filed by the officer on the scene, “Mr. Kennedy stated that his wife was intoxicated and was acting irrational so he took the children to the carnival to remove them from the situation.”

No one was injured, the report said.

Two days later, Mary Kennedy was arrested for driving while intoxicated. At the time, Bedford Police Lt. Jeff Dickans told CNN that Mary Kennedy was arrested around 9:15 p.m. on May 15, 2010. Dickans said that a Bedford police officer saw Kennedy’s 2004 Volvo swerving onto the curb of Greenwich Road in Bedford and asked her to pull over.

Kennedy had slurred speech, and a blood-alcohol content above 0.08 percent, the legal limit in New York. She was charged with driving while intoxicated.

Kerry Lawrence, Mary Kennedy’s family attorney, said the case resulted in a reduction to a violation, the criminal charge was dismissed and her driver’s license was suspended for 90 days.

A second arrest occured in August of the same year in the town of Pleasant Valley, in which she was charged with driving while impaired by prescription drugs, Lawrence said. Those charges were dismissed completely in July 2011 because all the drugs were prescribed and taken as her physician advised, the attorney said.

As a designer, Mary Kennedy specialized in green architecture, and in a book entitled “Kennedy Green House” and co-authored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he describes how he and his wife restored their flooded, black-mold-infested home into an eco-friendly residence.

In the book, her husband wrote that Mary Kennedy had worked for the design firm Parish-Hadley and worked on the renovation of the Naval Observatory in Washington, the official residence of the U.S. vice president.

“We know from a history of this family, it’s very hard being a Kennedy, either being a blood Kennedy or being married to one,” Laurence Leamer, a Kennedy biographer, told CNN.

]]> http://cplpcienciassociais.org/mary-kennedy-wife-of-robert-kennedy-jr-found-dead/feed 0 http://cplpcienciassociais.org/adding-a-dash-to-tradition http://cplpcienciassociais.org/adding-a-dash-to-tradition#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 08:00:07 +0000 DenManiko http://cplpcienciassociais.org/?p=5187

By MELANIE GRAYCE WEST

Byron Smith for The Wall Street Journal

The French toast offered at Empellón

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Byron Smith for The Wall Street Journal

Chilaquiles, a hangover cure

It isn’t always easy to get a prime-time dinner reservation at Empellón Taqueria, the year-old Mexican hot spot in the West Village. But for brunch, the restaurant takes a relaxed tone, perfect for a long meal with friends.

The menu is diverse, but a good start is guacamole ($12) and margaritas. Chilaquiles, a traditional Mexican hangover cure that is typically made from leftovers, eggs and salsa-soaked fried corn-tortilla strips, is dressed up here with meaty maitake mushrooms ($14). Another everyday Mexican breakfast dish, eggs with chorizo, is also made special ($14), as is challah French toast with smoked maple syrup ($13). Get a side of refried beans and tortillas for the table ($5 each).

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Byron Smith for The Wall Street Journal

Empellón Taqueria’s Chef de cuisine Alexis Samayoa.

Service on a recent visit was attentive and friendly. Reservations are recommended; try to snag one of the prime window-side seats for people-watching and sunshine. Empellón Cocina, the sister-restaurant in the East Village, also serves brunch.

Empellón Taqueria, 230 West Fourth St. at West 10th St., serves brunch weekends from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; (212) 367-0999.

Write to Melanie Grayce West at melanie.west@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page A19 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Adding a Dash to Tradition.

The scheme is aimed at getting people into a working routine if they need an additional "push" to find a job.

The Department for Work and Pensions has been auditing its commercial relationships with A4e after receiving an allegation against the company earlier this year.

Mr Grayling said: "While the team found no evidence of fraud, it identified significant weaknesses in A4e's internal controls on the Mandatory Work Activity contract in the South East.

"The documentation supporting payments was seriously inadequate, and in a small number the claim was erroneous. There was also a high incidence of non-compliance with other relevant guidance (including A4e's own processes).

"The process established prior to March fell significantly short of our expectations. As a result, the department has concluded that continuing with this contract presents too great a risk and we have terminated the Mandatory Work Activity contract with A4e for the South East."

Mr Grayling added that "contingency plans" were in place to ensure "continuity of support for participants".

But the company welcomed the "positive findings" of the Department for Work and Pensions' audit, and another by the Skills Funding Agency, saying: "Both confirmed they identified no evidence of fraud, systemic, attempted or otherwise, in relation to any audit completed of the contracts they hold with A4e."

Chief executive Andrew Dutton said: "These findings demonstrate what I have always maintained to be true – that there is no place for fraud at A4e and make it clear that A4e has strong controls around its flagship contract the Work Programme.

"Our immediate task is to further enhance our controls to cement our position as a trusted provider of front-line public services."

He added: "As a company, I recognise that we haven't got it right all of the time, but we are committed to taking responsibility for our mistakes and remedying them.

"No other provider has undergone such a thorough and forensic review of its contracts, and the positive outcome speaks for itself – this is huge reassurance for taxpayers and our customers."

A4e started in South Yorkshire more than 20 years ago to provide retraining to large numbers of Sheffield steelworkers who became redundant when the industry started to decline.

Its former chairman, Emma Harrison, was appointed by Prime Minister David Cameron to be the government's "family champion" in 2010.

She resigned from that role, and the chairmanship, in February, saying she did not want the "media focus on me to be any distraction for A4e".