Table of Contents: January 11, 2011

IN THIS ISSUE EDITION: U.S. Vol. 177 No. 1

COVER
The First Lady Of Freedom (Cover) Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi is a profile in courage, but can she bring democracy to a troubled land? In a revealing interview, she talks of her hopes and fears

ESSAY
The Year of Living Predictably (Commentary / In the Arena) While the media hyperventilated, nothing all that surprising really happened Two Cheers for 2011 (Commentary / Worldview) Despite an unsettled year politically and economically, things are looking up Jingle Bell Bump (Commentary / The Curious Capitalist) Holiday spending was the highest it has ever been. So why are we still so pessimistic about the economy? Joel Stein's Predictions for 2011: Pimento Cheese?! (Commentary) And other exciting new trends for 2011, as predicted by experts and me

NATION
The Odd Couple (The Well / Nation) They have little in common and have never been friendly, but Barack Obama and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell are Washington's new power pair Foster Care: Extreme Edition (The Well / Nation) An innovative program in St. Louis is making big strides in matching hard-to-place kids with adoptive families, on a fast track

WORLD
Can Sudan Split Without Falling Apart? (The Well / World) Southern Sudan is set to become the world's newest nation. But a peaceful divorce from the north could still descend into war Eyes in the Skies (World) Satellites and some star power will put Sudan's crisis in the spotlight George Clooney in Sudan The actor visits the volatile region to draw attention to the dangers that could result should southern Sudan vote to separate from the north

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

On Her OWN (Television) With a new cable channel, Oprah tries to spread her star power and self-power gospel over 24 hours

Can Spider-Man Fly on Broadway? (Theater) It's Broadway's juiciest backstage drama in years: Can the new Spider-Man musical overcome its troubles and soar? Q&A Duran Duran (Q&A) Short List TIME'S PICKS FOR THE WEEK

SOCIETY
Rage Against the Machine (Life / Cash Crunch) Smart meters will tell us more about our energy use, unless consumers mutiny first Fat-Cat Football (Life / Sports) Who wants to keep the college-football bowl system intact? The guys running the games Get Wellness (Life / Health) As insurers focus on lifestyle, doctors are scrambling to become better nutrition and exercise coaches

PEOPLE
10 Questions for Jeff Bridges (10 Questions) The Oscar-winning actor stars in TRON: Legacy and True Grit. Jeff Bridges will now take your questions

BRIEFING
The World 10 ESSENTIAL STORIES Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine All in a Year's Work (Richmond Memo) How Virginia's attorney general became a Tea Party star Verbatim Teena Marie (Milestones) The Moment Snowpocalypse Carlos Andrs Prez (Milestones) Fred Foy (Milestones) Milestones (Milestones)

LETTERS
Inbox (Inbox)

COVER

Aung San Suu Kyi: Burma's First Lady of Freedom

By Hannah Beech / Rangoon Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2010

Platon for TIME The special branch had chased us across the city for hours, through the haunted, betel-nut-stained streets of old Rangoon, past street-side tailors hunched over ancient sewing machines and open-air bookstalls selling worm-eaten copies of Orwell and Kipling. Unable to shake the latest batch of state security men following us by foot, we jumped into a wheezing taxi of mid-20th century vintage. The young driver's eyes widened at the foreigners who hurled themselves in the back and ordered the car to move fast. As we lurched into motion, he showed us where he stood by reaching into his shirt pocket and pulling out a laminated picture. It was, of course, of the Lady. Aung San Suu Kyi, the 65-year-old Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was released from house arrest on Nov. 13, was not in the taxi with my two colleagues and me. But she is always carried in the hearts and her image in the pockets, lockets and secret hiding places of millions of Burmese. Among the most oppressed and impoverished people on the planet, they draw sustenance from this graceful woman who, armed only with the principle of nonviolent resistance, dares to stand up to the generals who have controlled Burma for nearly five decades. For 15 of the past 21 years, the military regime kept her locked up. But if the generals wished for Suu Kyi to fade into obscurity, they failed. Continued confinement turned her into the world's most famous political prisoner. Emerging from her most recent stint of seven years in detention, she is just as determined to fight for the civil liberties of Burma's 50 million people. "What we are calling for is revolutionary change through peaceful means," she told me when we recently met in Rangoon. "I'm not afraid to say it, and I'm not afraid to ask for all the help I can get." The extent to which the junta has gone to try to foil the Lady, as Suu Kyi is fondly and universally known in Burma, is remarkable. For refusing to participate in a rigged election in November that the junta's proxy party won, Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), was stripped of its political rights. The NLD overwhelmingly won at the polls in 1990, which presumably would have made Suu Kyi the

nation's Prime Minister. But the junta ignored the people's verdict then, and a new constitution contains clauses specifically designed to keep her from ever serving as Burma's leader. Since 1962, Burma's battle-hardened generals have faced down communist insurgents, ethnic armies, even the Western governments that impose economic sanctions on the regime. But they still act as if there is no greater enemy than this slight woman with flowers in her hair. Their fear of Suu Kyi is not entirely misplaced. "We think our leader is the ideal woman, not just for Burma but for the whole world," says Aye Aye Nyein, a teacher and member of the NLD's youth wing. "We Burmese live in a prison. She teaches us how to fight for our freedom." And the public's desire for freedom, of course, is why security agents were hunting us, snapping pictures with telephoto lenses fit for Hollywood paparazzi. Earlier that day, a total of at least a dozen special-branch officers trailed us, calling in our movements on their cell phones. It took the taxi driver only a couple of minutes to figure out we had a tail. Pointing back at a car practically on our bumper, he grinned and gunned the engine. For more than half an hour, our high-speed chase wound through the streets of Burma's moldering former capital, past the carcasses of Victorian-era government buildings abandoned when the junta mysteriously moved the seat of power to a remote redoubt five years ago. We circumnavigated the massive golden spire of Shwedagon pagoda, Burma's holiest site, and careened by the hulk of Insein prison, where Suu Kyi was once jailed and where some of the country's 2,200 political prisoners still languish. Dusk was falling. Screeching through an open-air market, the taxi finally shook our pursuers. Gratefully, we bid our driver goodbye. He reached into his pocket again, offering me Suu Kyi's picture as a gift. I was touched, but it was his talisman to cherish. I could leave Burma. He needed the Lady to keep him safe. An Unending Struggle Her carriage is regal, her English accent impeccable. The blossoms she customarily wears in her hair never seem to wilt, even as everything else droops in Burma's sullen heat. In the NLD office, with its intermittent electricity and maps of mildew spread across concrete walls, Suu Kyi floats like some otherworldly presence, calm and cool as others are flushed and frenetic. Ever since she was released in mid-November, Suu Kyi's days have been divided and subdivided into one-hour or 15-minute increments, during which she has met a dizzying array of people: foreign diplomats, AIDS patients, NGO directors, local economists, U.N. officials and the families of political prisoners. She even chatted by phone in December with former First Lady Laura Bush, who had championed the Burmese cause. But even as the world watches Burma with renewed interest in the wake of Suu Kyi's release, she has not yet met the people with whom she most wants to talk. The regime has ignored her repeated offers for national reconciliation dialogue. Since releasing her, the junta has dealt with Suu Kyi by acting as if she didn't exist, expunging mentions of her from the local press and hoping that, despite her busy calendar and the huge crowds that gather wherever she goes, she will somehow dwindle into irrelevance. "I wish I could have tea with them every Saturday, a friendly tea," Suu Kyi says of the generals, who refused to allow her dying husband one last visit to Burma in 1999. And if they turn down a nice cup of tea? "We could always try coffee," she says wryly.

Far from being a simple morality tale of good vs. evil, the Lady against the generals, what happens in Burma carries global significance. Jammed between Asia's two emerging powers, China and India, Burma is strategically sensitive, a critical piece in the new Great Game of global politics. This is no totalitarian backwater like North Korea. Even though many Western governments have imposed sanctions on Burma's military regime for its atrocious human-rights record, a new competition is unfolding in this crossroads nation: regional powers are scrambling for access to Burma's plentiful natural gas, timber and minerals. Already, resource-strapped China is building oil and gas pipelines across Burma to create another vital artery to feed its economic engine. Beijing's cozy ties with Burma have spooked democratic India, which has exchanged earlier condemnation of the junta for trade missions a stance that earned President Barack Obama's public disapproval when he visited India in November. For Burma's top brass who have at their disposal a 400,000-strong military corps and a record of institutionalized rape, torture and forced labor democratic reform would mean not only ceding political supremacy but also surrendering the opportunity to siphon wealth from ever growing state coffers. Unlike South Africa's apartheid government when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Burma's dictatorship is not in its death throes. If anything, because of burgeoning foreign investment in Burma, especially over the past five years, the junta is even more entrenched than when Suu Kyi was last free, in 2003. Two previous attempts at popular protest have ended with the crackle of gunfire and the silence of a cowed populace. The most recent tragedy came in 2007 when soldiers ended weeks of monk-led protests by mowing down dozens of unarmed civilians. The other foiled democracy movement was in 1988, when Suu Kyi found herself literally thrust on the political stage. The daughter of assassinated independence hero Aung San, she spent much of her early life overseas in India, the U.S., Japan, Bhutan and England. In the 1980s she was content to focus on academic research and serve as the mother of two sons and the wife of a British academic at Oxford. On picnics in the English countryside, Suu Kyi wore shorts and drank soda; she gave little hint of the democracy icon she would become. In 1988 the dutiful Asian daughter went home to care for her ill mother. That Rangoon summer grew into Burma's version of a Prague spring. The generals' mismanagement had turned what was once one of Asia's breadbaskets into an economic basket case, and students, monks and workers gathered by the hundreds of thousands to call for the regime's downfall. The army fired on the protesters, some of whom tried to fight back. As the child of the revered general who had vanquished the colonial British, Suu Kyi thought she might have the authority to prevent further clashes. In front of half a million people, she made her first public address, mixing Buddhist values with Gandhian principles of nonviolent resistance. Less than a month after Suu Kyi's plea for peace, the army unleashed another crackdown, killing hundreds. Two years later, the electoral victory of the NLD, the party she helped found, was disregarded. It was as if time stopped in Burma. Multiple Fronts Today, despite Suu Kyi's release and the influx of foreign investment that has brought the occasional Hummer and day spa to Rangoon, Burma is still a country preserved in amber. Tropical totalitarianism is deceptive. In North Korea, the broad, desolate avenues and drably dressed citizens make for a perfect tableau of authoritarianism. Burma's sprays of bougainvillea, its gilded pagodas and the sway of schoolgirls dressed in the sarongs called longyis all create a false sense of contentment. But life in

Burma is not easy. Roughly 40% of the national budget is spent on the army, while just around 1% each is reserved for health and education. The new capital in Naypyidaw, which means "abode of the kings," was built with billions of dollars, even as nearly a third of Burmese live below the poverty line. For farmers, a hand-to-mouth existence is made worse by routine land seizures and orders to work without pay for the military. Even in Rangoon, power outages are as common as junta informants; both leave the populace in the dark. In a sign of just how removed the generals are from their subjects, confidential U.S. embassy cables released by WikiLeaks refer to the junta lavishing money on a nuclear program with alleged help from North Korea, while junta supremo Than Shwe pondered spending $1 billion on Manchester United at the behest of his soccer-loving grandson. Although Suu Kyi's moral imprimatur helped bring Western sanctions against the regime, the fact that many ordinary Burmese also feel their effects hasn't escaped her. "I am ready to reconsider my support of sanctions if it's for the benefit of all of us," she told me with surprising vehemence, countering critics who think her too unyielding. "I'm not afraid to consider change." Her openness will surely ignite further debate in Washington, where there is a growing recognition that sanctions on Burma, despite their moral appeal, have not worked. But the most immediate revolution is needed within Suu Kyi's party. Ever since the unfair outcome of the 1990 elections, the NLD has been stuck in a time warp, endlessly arguing over arcane policy and political theory even as many of its leaders get grayer and more stooped. There is a strange parallel between Burma's geriatric opposition leaders, known as the Uncles, and the junta's clutch of aged generals. In a 2008 cable released by WikiLeaks, an American diplomat in Rangoon bemoaned, "The way the Uncles run the NLD indicates the party is not the last great hope for democracy and Burma." Since then, a leadership reshuffle has reinvigorated the party to a certain extent, and Suu Kyi's release has galvanized a new generation of political youth. But it's no wonder that a younger NLD faction called the National Democratic Force defied the NLD's (and Suu Kyi's) call for an electoral boycott and contested the November polls. Suu Kyi says she's not worried about a possible split in the opposition. "We are all fighting for democracy," she says. "Our goals are the same." Suu Kyi, a woman who first used a cell phone on the day of her release, says she's committed to nurturing a new generation of technologically savvy political youth. "The advantage is they're very electronic. They can communicate with the world," she says, referring to the NLD youth wing's members who use Facebook to debate politics when there's enough electricity to power computers. "Everything goes on the Internet. Did you know that?" The equalizing power of the digital revolution ties in nicely with the philosophy that has inspired Suu Kyi, that of Czech dissident and fellow Peace Prize laureate Vaclav Havel, who wrote of "the power of the powerless." "My very top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves," she says. "Then we can do it together. Then we'll be home and dry." A Heavy Burden It's a lot to ask of one woman: rejuvenate her banned party, persuade the generals to talk, make the cause of Burma a global priority, minister to the sick, comfort the families of political prisoners. Serving as an icon of democracy is hard enough, without having to deal with the nitty-gritty of everyday political life. Add to that the real worry that Suu Kyi may be operating on borrowed time. "Our people are in and out of

prison all the time," she says. "All I have to say is, 'Is so-and-so in or out?' and they know exactly what I mean." For now, she is out. But there's little doubt that if the junta sees in her any realistic challenge to its authority, she will be sent in again on whatever spurious charge the military can concoct. "I want to do as much as I can while I'm free," she says. "I don't want to tire myself out, but we never know how much time we have." Beyond the possibility of rearrest, Suu Kyi's safety is an even more fundamental concern. The army has shown it is quite prepared both to lock her up and to endanger her life. On three occasions, Suu Kyi and her supporters have been attacked by mysterious thugs, with resulting fatalities. "She is like her father in that she has no qualms about losing her life," says Win Htein, an NLD elder who was released in July after 14 years in jail. Suu Kyi gasps when I ask her whether she would consider wearing a bulletproof vest. "I wouldn't dream of it," she says. "Then it would look like I'm trying to protect myself from the people who support me." Suu Kyi may cherish her interactions with ordinary Burmese, but there is a distant quality to her, a sense that she lives most comfortably in her head, not among the crowds. Part of her remove is born of circumstance. She speaks proudly of being her father's favorite child, yet he was assassinated by political rivals when she was just 2. For so much of her recent life, Suu Kyi has been sequestered from normal human contact; noble ideas and fine words have kept her company. While under house arrest, she obsessively read books ranging from biographies to spy thrillers. "People think that I had nothing to do [while in detention]," she says. "But I spent five or six hours listening to the radio every day. If you're under house arrest and you miss one item, there's no one there to tell you about it, so I listened very carefully." Even her taste in classical music speaks to her sense of discipline and composure. Mozart, she says, makes her happy, which is all well and good. But she prefers Bach. "He makes me calm," she says. "I need calm in my life." Right now, Suu Kyi is in the eye of a storm, a place of deceptive tranquility. Rangoon is a city of whispers, and while the people I met there used different words a honeymoon, a window, a reprieve their hushed intent was the same: this, they felt, was the calm before the crackdown. The November elections were part of what the generals call a transition to a "discipline-flourishing democracy." One thing is certain: when the fig leaf of civilian government arrives in 2011, there will be no place in it for the Lady. Still, for all her years of imprisonment and whatever travails may come, Suu Kyi considers herself lucky. It's not because of the people's adoration of her but because of their respect a value she believes stems from a generosity of spirit. "In my life, I have been showered with kindness," she says. "More than love, I value kindness. Love comes and goes, but kindness remains." When her son Kim was in Rangoon to see her for the first time in a decade, his kindness came in the form of a gift, a puppy to keep her company. "He's my guard dog," she jokes, even though the tiny mutt hasn't shown much bark or bite. "He has an active tail and lets me know when someone is coming. That should be enough, don't you think? A little wag of the tail?"

ESSAY
IN THE ARENA

Media Noise: The Year of Living Predictably

By JOE KLEIN Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2010

Illustration by Stephen Kroninger for TIME Nothing much happened in 2010. Oh, I know there was a lot of frothing and screaming. There was outrage aplenty. There was an election. Wars were fought. Humongous pieces of legislation were passed, but with the exception of health care reform few broke new ground and many, like financial reform, were compromised and massaged to the point of lugubrious semirelevance. Even the enactment of health care reform, a true American milestone, was kicked down the road to 2013. Indeed, compared with earth-shattering 2008, or even the forces marshaled in 2009 to arrest an economic cataclysm the bailouts and stimulus package, which really did do their respective jobs 2010 will be regarded by historians, I fearlessly predict, as something of a neon hologram. The Republicans did win a grand victory in the midterms this year. But that was historically inevitable given the stalled economy, unemployment of 9.8% and the President's questionable decision to spend an inordinate amount of time and political capital enacting health care reform. In 1994, Bill Clinton, who overreached on the very same issue, lost both houses of Congress with unemployment at a mere 5.6%. Still, despite the Republican tsunami, Obama's approval rating remained remarkably stable, in the mid-40s, not bad at all given a putrid zeitgeist and a half-crazed, screechy opposition. There was the illusion of progress in Congress's lame-duck session, although it's hard to describe politicians voting for tax cuts as even vaguely heroic. We have now had two stimulus packages of relatively equal size in two years one Democratic, one Republican. Both were flawed: the Democrats wasted too much on their pet governmental projects (and lavished money on the profligate states with too few strings attached); the Republicans, brilliantly hypocritical, squandered tax cuts on people who didn't need the money after spending the entire election season screaming about deficit reduction. In 2011, we'll see if the Republican brand of stimulus produces anything better than the muted results of the Democratic plan (and it may well, building atop the economic hole the first stimulus filled). A new, modest arms-reduction treaty with the Russians passed, with the support of conservative Republicans like the two Senators from Tennessee, who refused to listen to the radical xenophobes who control their party. Homosexuals were allowed to serve openly in the military, which was good; but the children of illegal

immigrants were denied a pathway to citizenship by completing college or military service, which was bad. This was a curious historical marker: homosexuals now seem to be more "acceptable" than children who, through no fault of their own, grew up undocumented in this country a grudging step forward, a spite-filled step back. Not much happened overseas, either. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq proceeded as planned; the Iraqi leadership huffed and dawdled, as expected, before forming a government. Afghanistan drifted along inconclusively, although David Petraeus brought a sense of order to the American military effort and his autumn sweep through the Taliban heartland set the stage for the possibility of a more stable 2011. Iran remained intransigent, but some very creative diplomacy by the Obama Administration built an international coalition and led to tough economic sanctions dedicated to stopping Iran's nuclear program. The North Koreans acted crazy. The Chinese and Indians (and, more quietly, the Brazilians) advanced toward center stage in international affairs. The Europeans began to confront the consequences of their overly generous welfare state. And yet, if you watched the news especially the epileptic seizure that passes for news on cable television (and in certain precincts of the blogosphere) you'd think that we were facing Armageddon, Sodom, Gomorrah and the last days of Pompeii all at once. This was especially true of Fox News, which emerged in 2010 as a full partner and funder of not just the Republican Party but also of that party's loony-tunes conspiratorial extreme. On the other side of the barricades, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann had more than a few moments of solipsistic self-righteousness (and his contributions to political candidates were no less questionable than Rupert Murdoch's, if not nearly as large). Even modest, moderate CNN continued its descent into breathless irrelevance, overwhelmed by a thundering horde of hoary political consultants, overanalyzing every quotidian hiccup and microscopic movement in the polls. The effect of all this noise is to make it seem as if something drastic is happening, even when nothing really is. It becomes near impossible for us to accurately gauge the state of the nation and it becomes utterly impossible to deal with abstract long-term threats like climate change, a flaccid educational system and the economic cancer caused by financial speculation. This is the precise opposite of what the media should be doing. It is a far greater threat to the Republic than the Sarah Palin circus or the anarchy of Julian Assange. It gets worse with each passing year, and I see absolutely no cure for it.

WORLDVIEW

Why 2011 Will Be a Happier New Year

By FAREED ZAKARIA Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2010

2010 was a tough year, not just for Barack Obama, not just for America, but for the West. Whether one looked at the U.S. or Greece or Ireland, the images were of unemployment lines, political protests and general despair. Every few months, a new crisis cropped up, threatening to once again derail the global

economy. Many problems persist, and crises will come again, but let me tell you why I think the year ahead will prove to be a lot better than 2010. Call it my glass-half-full column.

Illustration by Oliver Munday for TIME First and most important, the American economy is likely to improve. It's perilous to try to make specific predictions, but most experts believe that in 2011 it will grow 2% to 3%, with some arguing even higher numbers. If that's true, it will add to growth everywhere. Let's remember that the American economy remains the world's biggest. At $15 trillion, it is still three times as large as China's. And as the economy expands, almost all the short-term problems in the U.S. become more manageable. Tax revenues go up, budgets look better, and fears of state bankruptcies recede. Europe will survive. It has taken the Europeans much time and many crises to come to the realization that they will have to bail out their spendthrift and unlucky partners in Greece and Ireland and perhaps in Portugal and Spain as well. Germany can afford the bill, and truth be told, despite what some German officials imply, Germany benefits mightily from the euro. The politics of making this all work out are very difficult, as Chancellor Angela Merkel has found, but the real news from 2010 is that Europe's governments have come to understand that they can save the euro, and in the end, they should and will. Europe will grow at a decent pace, as will Japan. So the entire global economy will be in recovery. The new year might also bring a moderation of China's new arrogance, which will then dampen tensions in East Asia. Over the past year, China booming while the West has been reeling has been assertive with regard to Japan and South Korea and even the U.S. Since Obama took office, his Administration has made a series of overtures to Beijing and received almost nothing in return. But senior Chinese officials seem to recognize that they might have overplayed their hand, and perhaps they will spend 2011 signaling their benign intentions to East Asia and being more cooperative with the U.S. In the most recent tensions on the Korean peninsula, Beijing has been more helpful than in the past in talking tough to its ally in North Korea. In Afghanistan, the Taliban's momentum will be broken. There are already some signs that the Taliban are being defeated in some of their traditional strongholds, like Helmand province. Other reports from Pakistan suggest that the notorious Haqqani, the deadliest terrorist network that operates in the region, has been degraded significantly. The Afghan army is in better condition than before and thus could well succeed in holding on to places that the U.S. Army clears of the Taliban.

Iraq will stay stable enough to not create an international crisis and to not require any return of American combat troops. That doesn't mean Iraqi democracy will look pretty. It's a tough, sectarian system with many deeply anti-American forces in ascendancy. But it won't create regional or global instability. Iran will continue to be checked by a large group of regional and global powers. As the WikiLeaks cables showed, Israel, most Arab nations and the Western powers are united in trying to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear arsenal. That containment strategy will keep Iran in a box, raising the cost of aggression for the regime. The government, facing significant internal economic and political challenges, will focus its energy more internally than externally. There will be no American or Israeli strike. In 2011 the U.S. will have greater global credibility. Once a real recovery is under way, the U.S. economy will begin to regain some of the luster it lost during the financial crisis. The American model will begin to shine again, and in retrospect, American policymakers will look pretty good compared with their counterparts in Europe and Japan: they acted fast and aggressively, averted a great depression and stabilized the U.S. system at a substantially lower cost than the savings-and-loan bailout of 1989. Given that the world has just one superpower right now, only an America with credibility can act to propose global solutions to global problems, whether on terrorism, trade or climate change. I realize that much of this good news could be temporary, that real problems lie underneath and might even be growing. But that's for another week, not one that ushers in the New Year.

CURIOUS CAPITALIST

Holiday Spending Spree: Where's the New Austerity?

By ZACHARY KARABELL Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2010

Shoppers carry their purchases on the day before Christmas at the Bridgewater Commons Mall in Bridgewater Township, New Jersey.

Matt Rainey / Getty Images In closing the books on 2010, the best that might be said was that it was better than 2009. This was a year that cemented a certain narrative of the past decade, one that has coalesced since the fall of 2008 and could be heard from the lips of everyone from Oprah to Obama: Americans had been living beyond their means, using their homes and cheap credit as a piggy bank, and with the Great Recession, the bill has come due. What lies ahead is years of belt tightening to compensate for those years of excess. That sentiment is widely shared, yet that doesn't make it true. For all the supposed austerity, you need look no further than this holiday season to realize that Americans are about as austere as Augustus Gloop. Overall holiday sales were up more than 4% from last year to approximately $525 billion, according to estimates compiled by the National Retail Federation. They are now at an all-time high, nearly $10 billion more than before the recession. E-commerce has seen explosive gains during the past two years with $36 billion in sales this year alone, up 15.4% from last year. The online figure is telling, and the percentage was especially high in apparel, such as clothing and shoes. Buying apparel used to require going out and trying stuff on. But in a period when we have scolded ourselves with tales of inappropriate spending, the availability of online shoes (Zappos, anyone?) and clothing means you can escape the quandary of shopping when the cultural message is not to. The belief that Americans overconsumed and are now tightening their collective belts has, of course, some basis in fact. In the two decades before 2008, the amount of debt carried by Americans did go up significantly, and in the two years since, the savings rate has gone from a low of 1% to nearly 6%. And in the past two years, millions have suffered for the debts they took on in the flush years. Mortgage delinquencies soared and are now nearly 10% of outstanding loans. Credit-card default rates went up as well, to more than 9%. Those are troubling numbers, but they do not add up to a picture of an entire nation that lived beyond its means and now faces the consequences. Even at the height of the credit bubble, the percentage of income the average American had to pay to service debt rose only from between 10.6% and 12.4% in the 1980s and 1990s to a high of 14% in 2007, the highest on record but lower than similar rates in Great Britain. In addition, U.S. household debt relative to income, even at its peak, was lower than in countries such as Japan, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands hardly proof that America was exceptionally profligate. To put this in lay terms: if a U.S. household making $45,000 a year had to pay $5,400 a year on credit cards, car loans and mortgage payments in the mid-1990s, it paid $6,300 in 2007 a whopping increase of $900. Meanwhile, incomes also went up, offsetting some of that increase. Hardly a picture of a nation run amok in debt. Even more telling, if a generalization is something that applies to the bulk of whatever we're generalizing about, what are we to say about a populace where 90% are current on their mortgages and credit card payments? Sure, it used to be even more, but 90% ain't bad. The most accurate generalization is that Americans have been living within their means, taking on debts they can afford, and spending responsibly. Yet that statement flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

None of this changes the fact that tens of millions are unemployed or underemployed, nor that many millions have seen or will see their homes foreclosed, their assets seized and their credit ruined. But the crisis however widely shared emotionally has hit only a fraction materially. It has hit the poor, those with inadequate health insurance and those who truly bought more on credit that banks should never have extended. Yet as this holiday season demonstrates, it has not radically shifted the spending trajectory of the vast majority of us, aside from a period in 2008 and 2009 when fear and uncertainty altered behavior. How then to explain why so many of us think otherwise? There is a strong strain of modest Puritanism in our culture, one that has always been uncomfortable with the material excesses that erupt from era to era: consumption is a vice and has a price. But it's also important to note that this bout of self-flagellation is taking place against a different global backdrop, one that sees countries from China to Brazil blazing their own trails while the U.S. seemingly plods along. It's been shown that people assess themselves in relative terms, by how much they have compared with their neighbors more than by how much they have. Today, Americans have a surfeit, but relative to the world as a whole, the slice is shrinking. Those new economic powerhouses are spending, too, but in smarter ways. They're pouring money into education and infrastructure. That in turn has led to increased personal consumption born of the fruits of those efforts. The contrast with the U.S., which struggles with political gridlock that makes it difficult to pass similar measures, is striking. That, more than the balance on our credit cards, should fuel legitimate American pessimism.

The Year of Pimento Cheese!

By JOEL STEIN Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

Photo-Illustration by John Ueland for TIME

The purpose of a prediction column isn't to be accurate a year from now. No one remembers what I write the day after they read it. No, the purpose is to brag about how much I know right now. It's so I can look in disdain at my idiot friend happily eating a chocolate bacon cupcake and inform her that this year, it's all about pie. To make the most informed and obnoxious predictions possible, I called a bunch of experts. Adam Rapoport, the editor of Bon Apptit, told me about the pie thing. He also said that pimento cheese would be big and that "rabbit is having a moment," though we agreed that it won't be much of a moment unless chefs call it something other than rabbit. It's always important to know what cool new drugs teens are into so you can scare their parents. I called the Drug Enforcement Administration, hoping they'd mention stuff like Bromo-Dragonfly, K2, Meow Meow and NRG-1, all of which would keep the anxious parents who read this magazine Googling for hours. Unfortunately, David Ausiello, the DEA's public-affairs specialist, told me that 2011 will be all about boring prescription drugs like OxyContin. That's because "56% of teens believe that prescription drugs are easier to get than illicit drugs." The Internet really is making our kids lazy. The kids are also going to be talking crazy. Slang expert Tom Dalzell told me they will start to talk in Leet, that geeky online-gamer language where they replace e with 3 and t with +. So now they'll actually say stuff like "n00b," "lulz" and, I'm predicting, "un3mpl0y+." For politics I asked TIME columnist Joe Klein, partly because he's so knowledgeable but mostly because he often gets mail meant for me. "The Tea Party rank and file are going to want to have the Tea Party members of Congress tarred and feathered," he said. Joe also said that Pakistan will further destabilize once we push the Taliban from Afghanistan into Northern Waziristan, not realizing there's a huge difference between impressing people with your knowledge and boring the crap out of them. Along with politics, it's important to know what's going to happen in Kardashians. Jeff Jenkins, the executive producer of E!'s Keeping Up with the Kardashians, predicts that Khlo Kardashian Odom and Lamar Odom will get pregnant with twins. This was an incredibly specific prediction, which made me ask Jenkins if the 26-year-old was taking fertility drugs just to have twins. "I can't comment on that," Jenkins said. You don't get a lot of practice ducking the press when you hang out with Kardashians. Michael Purves, the head of derivatives research at BGC Partners, predicts that banks will start selling a global volatility index instead of one tied only to the S&P 500. "Given how interconnected markets are, not just geographically but among asset classes, we need to move beyond the VIX," Purves said. I totally agreed. The VIX was very 2010. He also said that gold would become popular as a digitized currency, so you won't have to move bars of it. I totally agreed with that too. Moving gold was very Mr. T. It's tough to predict the future, but it takes real guts to predict the past. Professor James Kloppenberg, the chair of Harvard's history department, told me that in 2011, historians are going to be "using sophisticated quantitative methods to show how language and ideas change over time." By which I believe he means that history professors are going to learn how to use computers. In fashion, Elle creative director Joe Zee predicts that we're going back to the Belgian invasion of the early 1990s, which I missed the first time. As much as I pressed him, he would not predict that women will dress much, much

sluttier. "We had a slutty moment a couple of years ago," he said. "Where were you in '09?" Only fashion editors think that two years is a short period between sluttinesses. For my sports predictions, I called someone to whom the outcomes of big games really matter: Art Manteris, the vice president of race and sports book operations for Station Casinos in Las Vegas. Manteris disagrees with his own odds--which are largely determined by supply and demand--on nearly everything, picking the Saints over the Patriots, the Connecticut men's basketball team over Duke and the Yankees over the Phillies. I am thinking about betting Art personally on all those things. As well as on pimento cheese, OxyContin parties and people dressing like Belgians. Though that would have been a great recipe for a New Year's Eve party.

NATION

Can Obama and Washington Work?

By MICHAEL SCHERER Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2010

McConnell

Make

Illustration by Lou Beach for TIME; McConnell: Tom Williams - Roll Call / Getty Images; Obama: Jewel Samad - AFP / Getty Images It wasn't unusual that Barack Obama used 11 ceremonial pens to sign his name to the new $857 billion tax-cut bill in December. Or that he gave one as a souvenir to Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who was standing nearby in a polka-dot tie, showing, as is his custom, virtually no emotion. What was unusual, though, was that during the signing ceremony, Obama called McConnell "extraordinary," a far cry from the adjectives among them, cynical and deceptive that the President had been using to describe him for much of the year. McConnell, for his part, had been giving the President as good as he got for most of that time too. He traveled the country warning of Obama's plans to "basically Europeanize America" and encouraged his colleagues to unanimously oppose Obama's biggest priorities. As the most powerful Republican in the Senate, McConnell had declared his own top priority to be Obama's defeat in 2012. And yet here they were, two bitter foes together on a stage, celebrating a shared victory. There was no evidence of personal chemistry, no brief embrace, no signs of warmth at all. But there was also no mistaking the turn of events. The rivals had discovered that they could stare each other down and each find a reason to blink. Over the next year, no relationship in Washington is likely to shape the course of events more than the fraught and tenuous alliance between Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr., born in 1942 in Tuscumbia, Ala., and Barack Hussein Obama, born in 1961 in Honolulu. While Republican control of the House of Representatives is sure to produce a flurry of bills, the Senate remains the body that will decide which of those become law. And with 45 Republicans in his caucus, McConnell will enjoy a comfortable margin with which to block progress in a chamber where 60 votes are needed to get almost anything done. For months, Democrats have tried to paint McConnell as the very embodiment of what's wrong with Washington a knife-eyed obstructionist more interested in scoring political points and milking

high-dollar campaign contributors than moving the country forward. But McConnell has always drawn strength from such cartoonish vituperations, which he collects and then displays on his Senate office wall. The reality is that Obama's new governing partner is more nuanced than the caricature of him would suggest. During his 26 years in the Senate, McConnell has established himself as a consistent conservative and a fierce partisan, a foe of campaign-finance reform, a foreign policy hard-liner and an accomplished deliveryman of appropriated pork. His sensitivity to political concerns has at times piqued some in his own party. Both George W. Bush and top adviser Karl Rove have recalled that McConnell pressured them to pull troops from Iraq in 2006, when the war's popularity was plummeting, though McConnell says their memories are inaccurate. Those who know him best say policy positions are far less important to understanding McConnell than his intense and enduring appreciation for the ways of the Senate. By all available evidence, the job of Senator is basically the only one McConnell ever coveted. His family moved to Kentucky when he was young. In his fifth-grade class picture, he wore an "I Like Ike" button. At the age of 22 in 1964, when Obama was 3 McConnell was already a Senate intern, and he quickly became a student of parliamentary procedure and cloakroom strategy. He worked for two Kentucky Senators before becoming one himself in 1984, earning a reputation as a Machiavellian gamesman who always made sure his handshakes meant something. What he lacked in backslapping charisma, he made up for in determination and patience, a practice he ascribes in part to his struggle in overcoming childhood polio. He won praise "for his feel for the institution" from the likes of Ted Kennedy. "He's a good listener," says Trent Lott, the former majority leader. "He will sit and listen and listen and listen." McConnell never had much in common with Obama, who arrived in the Senate in 2004 more interested in the possibility of a presidential campaign than in the institution's elaborate pecking order. One of the first times they really talked was in 2008, shortly after the election, when the President-elect called while McConnell was grocery shopping at a Louisville Kroger. A rapport never really developed. As recently as December, Obama goofed by calling the Senate leader "Mike" in a speech and then failed to notice or correct the mistake. But the two men now find their interests aligning just when the stakes are highest. How long that will last is unclear: Obama is determined to win back independent voters over the coming year by demonstrating that he can channel the partisan furies in Washington into productive, bipartisan policies. And McConnell, a consummate legislator, does not view compromise as a synonym for surrender, especially if Obama is willing to make deals with the Republican side of the aisle. "The work on the tax package was a good example of an area where we can do some business," McConnell told TIME over the holiday break. "And in the future, if the President is willing to move in a different direction, taking positions that I and my members hold anyway, why would we reject that?" To bridge the gap, Obama has relied on Vice President Joe Biden to be the interpreter for both men. Biden knows Obama's needs and limits but shares with McConnell more than two decades in the Senate and the ways and means of backroom dealmaking. McConnell aides say they were surprised and pleased when Biden called to propose private negotiations over a tax-cut deal. The details were worked

out over a week of discussions and sealed with private verbal assurances. "What they say is what they mean," explains one senior White House official familiar with these conversations. McConnell has already signaled his willingness to work with the White House on energy policy, particularly nuclear and coal subsidies, as well as long-range entitlement reform. White House aides are pushing for bipartisan cooperation on further education reforms. But if there is room for such cooperation, no one expects the two leaders to become friends. McConnell will have to cope with a freshman class of incoming Tea Party Senators who are looking to shake up the Senate's old ways. One of those, Kentucky's Rand Paul, overcame opposition from McConnell himself to get the state GOP nomination in 2010. Meanwhile, the conservative wing of McConnell's caucus, led by his deputy, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, has already made clear that there are some compromises they will not abide. After the midterm elections, McConnell reversed course and supported a two-year moratorium on earmarks and even lined up votes against a spending package that included millions in special projects for Kentucky. McConnell has already pledged to try to repeal key parts of Obama's health care plan and to institute broad-based spending cuts that are sure to enrage the Democratic base. His pledge to make Obama a one-termer has not been rescinded. McConnell has also made clear that his appearance at Obama's side will not soften his sometimes acid tongue. Just days after the tax-cut signing ceremony, McConnell joked with a Capitol Hill reporter about Democrats who have complained about his hard-charging tactics in the Senate. "If they think it's bad now," he said, with a chuckle, "wait till next year." With reporting by Jay Newton-Small

Foster Care: Extreme Edition

By Curtis Sittenfeld / St. Louis Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

Claire, right, with her adoptive mother Stephanie on their front stoop Daniel Shea for TIME In many ways, Claire was a typical 14-year-old. Her favorite store was Forever 21, her favorite food was macaroni and cheese, and her favorite TV show was Bad Girls Club. As a ninth-grader living in St. Louis, she was a member of her school dance team, and she was (of course) on Facebook. A pretty and stylish girl, Claire was a strong student whose long-term goal was to become a lawyer. In other ways, however, Claire's life was decidedly not typical, and the odds were seriously stacked against her. At age 6, she entered foster care after evidence of abuse and neglect surfaced in her home. She then lived in six different settings, including foster homes and group residences; her current home was a facility. Although she navigated those challenges with remarkable grace, her prospects were, statistically speaking, bleak. She would "age out" of the foster-care system when she turned 18, at which point she would have to fight to keep her head above water. There are nearly half a million American children in foster care; one 2007 survey found that of the young adults who age out, about half don't complete high school, about a third are arrested, and almost as many struggle with homelessness. Only 38% of those working at age 18 are employed a year after leaving foster care, and among the women, roughly half are pregnant within 12 to 18 months. But in November 2009, Claire got a lucky break: her case was randomly selected to be part of an innovative program known as Extreme Recruitment. Pioneered by a 23-person St. Louis based agency called the Foster & Adoptive Care Coalition, Extreme Recruitment seeks out the foster children who are the hardest to find homes for kids older than 10, kids with special needs, sibling groups and African Americans and not only matches them with permanent adoptive families but also does so in a fraction of the time such matches usually take. Success depends on close coordination of a professional team one that includes detectives who track down enough potential adoptive relatives to fill a small dance hall. Although half of all foster kids wait in custody for one to five years, Extreme Recruitment aims for a match in 12 to 20 weeks; instead of finding "forever families" for 40% of the children they work with, as the agency did before 2008, Extreme Recruitment finds families for 70%. "We think it's the best thing since sliced bread," the coalition's executive director, Melanie Scheetz, says of Extreme Recruitment. "But until we can prove it as an evidence-based practice, it's just that nice little program that people are doing out in St. Louis." In 2008 the coalition partnered with the state of Missouri on a five-year federal grant to compare Extreme Recruitment's family-matching methods with foster-care business as usual an evaluation Scheetz welcomes. As interest in the program rises and the coalition hosts visitors from around the country eager to observe and replicate its methods, Extreme Recruitment might remain just a nice little program out in St. Louis, or it might pave the way to revolutionize the foster-care system in America. The Need for Speed Extreme recruitment came about while its creator was waiting for Desperate Housewives to come on TV. That is the "very embarrassing but very true" story, as Scheetz describes it, of how she decided to dramatically shift the way her agency approached finding homes for children. She was sitting in front of

the television in her family's living room on a Sunday night in March 2008, impatiently watching the last few minutes of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. "How can they build a house that fast?" she remembers wondering. "If they can do that and they do it not because they use any new technologies or processes; they just coordinate their massive team of professionals and volunteers in a highly effective way the question is why can't we do that too in finding homes for kids?" Of the 424,000 American children currently in foster care, according to the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families, close to a quarter will remain in care for more than three years. At the coalition prior to Extreme Recruitment, a social worker typically checked in with a child's caseworker once a month, and the various other players the educational advocate, the therapist, the court-appointed special advocate were rarely in the same room. But under the Extreme Recruitment model, team members are in constant contact, with weekly 30-minute meetings propelled by checklists of action items. Among the team members are the coalition's not-so-secret weapons: two full-time private investigators employed by the agency who track down dozens of members of a child's biological family. The old assumption was that if a child's parents couldn't care for her, everyone else in the family would have a similarly negative influence that the apple didn't fall far from the tree. The new conventional wisdom is that having contact with family is critical to a child's identity, and if you haven't found any family members who can be a positive influence, then you haven't looked hard enough. "There are," Scheetz says, "lots of apples." In 2008, George W. Bush signed family finding into federal law as part of the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act. While different states have implemented the law at different speeds, within Extreme Recruitment, the significance of family finding can't be overestimated. "We're talking about these kids being reconnected to support systems, family, their roots," says Sheila Suderwalla, a coalition social worker. "For our kids, when they enter foster care, their primary label, their primary identity, is a foster child." But a foster child reconnected to his family becomes Aunt Rita's nephew or Johnny's cousin. "He is someone who's cared about," Suderwalla says. On a practical level, Scheetz says, relatives are likelier than strangers to be unfazed by a kid's special needs. Say a 10-year-old foster child has been diagnosed as bipolar. It's possible that bipolar disorder runs in the family and that the great-grandmother considering adopting the child is already familiar with the condition because her niece has it too. "The family knows how to deal with it," says Scheetz. Her claims are borne out by a recent Cornell University study showing that of people who take an adoption-preparation course, only 4% of those who do not have a prior connection to a child will ultimately go through with adoption, but a whopping 53% of people with a connection will. As foster-care consultant Kevin Campbell, who is credited with inventing the practice of family finding, puts it, "Before giving kids to strangers, we should be making sure they don't have family members who can take care of them. Children and young people need to be afforded the dignity of knowing their family story where they come from, the strengths and challenges in the family. For me, it's a human-rights issue." Rather than following the steps to permanent placement sequentially for example, identifying a family for a child and then making sure the child is mentally and physically ready to live with that family Extreme Recruitment pursues all the preparations for adoption simultaneously. It also pursues multiple

adoptive families at once instead of waiting for one not to work out before moving on. "What happens if we find more than one preadoptive family?" Scheetz asks. "Great!" Where once social workers would locate just a handful of relatives per child, these days the social workers and private investigators working in tandem find a minimum of 40 per child, though the number is usually closer to 60. The Internet, especially public databases like publicrecordsnow.com and virtualgumshoe.com has made the job easier, though there's no replacement for old-fashioned pavement pounding. In one extraordinary week, coalition social worker Ian Forber-Pratt and private investigator Russell Smith identified a staggering 113 family members of a child; then Forber-Pratt attended a wake where he found 15 more. For putting faces with the names on a family tree, it turns out, nothing beats a funeral. Finding the Gems For each child's case, the goal is to find the two individuals who, Scheetz swears, exist in every family: the informant, who knows who lives where, who has been married or divorced or imprisoned and what everyone's phone numbers are; and the family gem, to use Scheetz's term, the cousin or uncle or grandparent who is both emotionally and logistically prepared to open his or her home to a young relative. The sign that he's found the family gem, says Carlos Lopez, one of the coalition's investigators, is when the person opens the door, hears why he's there and immediately says, "I'm so glad you've found me. What do I need to do?" Regularly, Lopez and Suderwalla, who work together often, must apologize to family members who feel they have been failed by the foster-care system and quite possibly believe that the child ended up in foster care against their will. In one instance, a great-aunt berated Lopez and Suderwalla for three hours before she was willing to divulge any family information. "She had to grieve," Suderwalla says. Despite the challenges, Suderwalla and Lopez both say they love their jobs. A former juvenile detective, Lopez was accustomed to encountering kids, often the same ones over and over, when they were in trouble and being unable to truly address the underlying problems in their lives. Now, he says, he can make a difference. It was by knocking on doors that Lopez found Stephanie, 31, whose ex-husband is Claire's cousin. When Claire's file came to the coalition, it contained the names of six relatives. Claire's Extreme Recruitment team managed to find over 80 more, one of whom was Stephanie. (Claire is still a ward of the state, and Claire and Stephanie are not their real names, though they are pseudonyms the two picked for themselves.) A police officer who was recently promoted to detective and a divorced mother of three, Stephanie hadn't seen Claire for close to a decade but remembered her well. "She used to come around, and she was the cutest little girl," Stephanie says. "She always had these long beautiful ponytails." When Lopez appeared out of the blue and told Stephanie the coalition was gathering information about Claire's family, Stephanie immediately wanted to know more. After a series of conversations with a coalition social worker and extensive prayer "I'm a woman of the faith," Stephanie says she decided

she wanted to become Claire's adoptive mother. "She's family," Stephanie says. "And I feel like I have the resources. Why not?" In early August, shortly after her 15th birthday, Claire moved into Stephanie's rental town house, sharing a room with Stephanie's 8-year-old daughter. The plan is that after the required six-month period, Stephanie will legally adopt Claire. Though Claire is related by blood to Stephanie's children, Claire and Stephanie are not biologically related. But they both say this makes no difference. Stephanie maintains a friendly relationship with her ex-husband and several of her former in-laws and is eager for Claire to see them frequently. And one of these days, Claire will get to meet Stephanie's brother, who works in New York City as a lawyer the profession Claire hopes to pursue. Although they reconnected less than a year ago, it's hard to pinpoint the differences between Stephanie and Claire and other mother-daughter duos. Stephanie brags about Claire's 3.875 grade-point average, chides her for something she posted on Facebook (which neither of them, despite much pleading, would divulge to a reporter) and shares Claire's fondness for reading the Bible. Claire was quiet as a little girl, Stephanie recalls, but "she's very outspoken now. I love that, though, 'cause she's just like me." Not all Extreme Recruitment cases unfold as smoothly as Claire's: 50% of the planned first matches don't pan out, leading the team to look for a second, third or fourth match. "It's not magic," Scheetz says. "You've got to keep trying." In some cases, the team simply can't find any appropriate family members willing to consider adoption, though a nonfamily adoption isn't deemed a failure. Ideally, the child still develops relationships with family members without living with them and receives the family's blessing for a nonkinship adoption, thereby surmounting the uneasiness about disloyalty that can cause teens in particular to claim they don't want to be adopted. Even in Claire's case, there are many unknowns. But the evidence so far suggests that Stephanie is exactly the sort of family gem whose existence Extreme Recruitment is built on and who gives credence to Scheetz's belief that many more such gems are out there waiting to be discovered by those willing to search. The program is being watched closely and in some cases copied by family-service professionals across the country. Using investigators is "a stroke of genius," says Rana O'Connor, who works for the Maine division of Casey Family Services, which serves 4,000 children in seven states annually. "Detectives have access to information or skills that social workers don't necessarily have." O'Connor plans to hire three full-time private investigators this year and mirror the intense focus and compressed timetable that Extreme Recruitment has developed. All of which means that this big program from a small agency could not only change the way foster care works in America but could also do so very quickly and if it does, well, won't that be fitting? Sittenfeld is the author of the novels Prep and American Wife (Random House)

WORLD

Can Sudan Split Up Without Falling Apart?

By Alex Perry / Abyei Saturday, Jan. 08, 2011

Southern Sudanese police escort civilians across the border Dominic Nahr / Magnum for TIME What kind of life Achai Chol and her husband Majok Alae would build in the world's newest country came down to how much they could fit on the bus. In late November, the couple and their nine children climbed aboard a battered 44-seater outside their house in Dongle, in the far north of Sudan, and rode south across the Sahara for nine days. On the roof: 11 beds, 11 mattresses, five suitcases, a gas cooker, a fan, a television and much, much more. The family was part of an exodus of hundreds of thousands of southerners from northern Sudan before a Jan. 9 referendum on southern independence. Camping in the dust and heat by the side of the road in Abyei, just south of the effective border dividing Sudan, Achai could see nothing but good times ahead. "We are in our place," she said, beaming. "Even if we have no money, nothing bad can happen. We are on our land." Two days later, in the nearby village of Tagalei, headman Mijak Kuol, 47, would use the same words to explain why war was imminent. "We are in our place," he said. "This is where our ancestors lived and died. We must fight for it." Is Sudan witnessing the birth of a new nation or the restart of an old war? In the run-up to the referendum, in which southerners are expected to vote overwhelmingly to carve Africa's biggest country in two, it's possible to discern both. Africa meets Arabia in this vast land, and the two halves of the nation differ in culture, race and religion. Over two centuries, the Arab north oppressed the African south, raiding it for slaves well into the 20th century. Sudan's two long civil wars since its independence from Anglo-Egyptian control in 1956 have claimed some 2 million lives. The uncertainty that past evokes is stoking tensions among Sudan's 44 million people. Stakes are high for the wider world too. Conflict in Sudan would spill over its borders, with refugees fleeing the fighting. And Sudan attracts global economic interest: its oil reserves are significant, as are its minerals, from copper to gold. Peaceful separation between north and south is possible. In 2005 the U.S. brokered a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to end more than half a century of conflict, creating an autonomous southern

region and holding out the option of secession if the south so chose. That event at first seemed unlikely, not least because it was opposed by the south's longtime leader John Garang. But with his death in 2005, and Khartoum's continued discrimination against Sudan's regions, separation has become the south's choice. This "is the final part of our journey," said the man destined to be southern Sudan's first President, Salva Kiir Mayardit, in a speech last January. There are reasons to share his optimism. The referendum process faces a tight timetable but one that can be met, say monitors from the Carter Peace Center. Both north and south are showing diplomatic restraint: Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has promised to let the south leave Sudan if it chooses to, and when northern bombers strayed into southern territory in December, the south did not respond in kind. Zach Vertin, Sudan specialist at the International Crisis Group, argues that Sudan's oil can be a force for peace. "The oil is largely in the south, and the infrastructure to export it runs through the north," he says. "So there is mutual reliance." But if Sudan's history makes dividing the nation seem an obvious solution, drawing a line in the sand is not as easy as it sounds. Northerners can be dark-skinned, southerners can be Muslim, and the southern capital, Juba, is the southernmost Arabic-speaking town in the world. The toweringly tall Ngok Dinka tribe, whose members live around Abyei and of which Mijak Kuol is a leader, is a case in point. Though black African in appearance, the tribe has historically sided with the richer Arab north. Today, upset by Khartoum's marginalization of Sudan's regions, they want to secede along with the south. The north vehemently objects. So do the Misseriya, a tribe of cattle herders who have traditionally moved south into Ngok Dinka land during the northern dry season and who want to remain part of Sudan. And Abyei also has oil. The dispute has already sparked violence. In 2008 the northern army leveled Abyei and killed about 100 of its residents. In 2010 the Misseriya attacked three villages nearby. To try to stop the Abyei dispute from wrecking the entire peace process, the CPA's framers included a separate, simultaneous referendum on whether to join the north or south. But a deadlock over who should be allowed to vote whether to include the Misseriya alongside the Ngok Dinka means that poll will not happen. With the Abyei process broken, more killing seems likely. The Ngok Dinka are backed by the main southern rebel force, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which is moving fighters into the area. Claire McEvoy, a Sudan specialist at the Small Arms Survey, which monitors conflicts, says the north is doing the same. "Anything could happen," she says. Avoiding Dj Vu So how does the world prevent another Sudanese meltdown? By using what, for decades, has been unthinkable in Sudan: diplomacy. Last fall, with the referendum looming, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Council on Foreign Relations that Sudan is a "ticking time bomb of enormous consequences," adding that the loss of the south "is going to be a very hard decision for the north to accept, so we have got to figure out some ways to make it worth their while." In November, Senator John Kerry visited Khartoum on the Obama Administration's behalf. If the north were to allow a peaceful referendum, said Kerry, the U.S. would remove it from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Progress in other areas, notably Darfur, the scene of bitter fighting between rebels

and the regime, would lead to an end to economic sanctions and relief of Sudan's $35 billion of foreign debt. Kerry is optimistic: "We're very hopeful," he says. "All sides are really focused on trying to avoid more conflict." The softer Washington line on Sudan is being reflected in other capitals too. For the past 18 months, former South African President Thabo Mbeki, representing the African Union, has been the lead international mediator in talks between the north and south. The government of Qatar is hosting peace talks over Darfur. And Beijing, which extracts and imports the lion's share of Sudan's oil, is helping diplomatically too. All of this has set the scene for unparalleled international coordination, says Scott Gration, a retired Air Force major general who is the U.S. special envoy to Sudan. "We did not come together by accident," he says. "We have the same mission: creating an environment where the parties themselves pull this off." All the same, there are plenty of ways the north and south can still blunder back into war. Besides Abyei, lines between the two are blurred in at least six border disputes. Other points of contention to resolve before separation would become formal in July include how to split that $35 billion in debt, the oil, the national army, the waters of the White Nile, and grazing and land rights. Even if deals can be reached, doubts remain over whether either north or south can thrive alone. For the north, divorce could mean a crushing alimony: most of Sudan's oil, currently accounting for 60% of Sudanese government revenue, is in the south. There is also concern about the north's political stability. The south's departure may encourage other rebel movements, and the loss of territory might be a cue for hard-line Islamists or generals to unseat al-Bashir. If al-Bashir has worries in the north, so does the government in the south. McEvoy has been watching four warlords who, disappointed with their likely roles in an independent nation, last year broke with the SPLA and took their men into the bush. One such group killed 20 SPLA soldiers on Dec. 20. Kiir, the south's leader, is trying to buy off all four warlords with government positions. "These guys don't pose a huge threat today," says McEvoy, "but the potential in the future is huge." Then there's the south's economic viability. Khartoum is a city of chic cafs and gleaming skyscrapers, but most southerners still live in mud huts and make do with little industry or agriculture, few roads and almost no electricity. And foreign aid doesn't do much. Last February, World Bank investigators found that their team in Juba had spent just $217 million of the $526 million they were managing in a multidonor fund to assist south Sudan's construction. In the run-up to its anticipated inauguration as a new capital, Juba has become a boomtown, drawing a motley crew of chancers: logistics experts, car salesmen, development workers and working girls. But an economy in which the big money from aid and oil goes to foreign contractors or foreign bank accounts held by southern-Sudanese officials leaves most ordinary people basing their hopes for future prosperity on the wallets of a few thousand foreigners and bureaucrats. David Gressly, the U.N.'s regional coordinator in Juba, says it will take a generation before southern Sudan is fully formed. "Real success will take 20 to 25 years," he says.

So many and varied are the issues facing Sudan that most observers decline predictions. Asked about Sudan's outlook, a senior Western diplomat in Juba replies, "Damned if I know. There are an astonishing range of problems that are going to wash over this place." Failure in the form of war will be easy to spot. Success will be less obvious: slow, messy and with endless setbacks. But that is also a description of diplomacy. And the surprising news from Sudan is that, so far, diplomacy is working.

Clooney's 'Antigenocide Watching Sudan

By MARK BENJAMIN Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2010

Paparazzi':

George Clooney visits Sudan to draw attention to the dangers that could result should southern Sudan vote to separate from the north Tim Freccia / Enough Project George Clooney and John Prendergast slumped down at a wooden table in a dusty school compound in southern Sudan. It was Oct. 4, and the two men were in the hometown of Valentino Achak Deng, whose experiences wandering the desert as a refugee during Sudan's last civil war were the basis for the best-selling book What Is the What. Clooney, the actor, and Prendergast, a human-rights activist with 25 years of experience in Africa, had heard enough on their seven-day visit to know that a new round of atrocities could follow the January referendum on independence. If it did, the likelihood was that no one would be held accountable. Why not, Clooney asked, "work out some sort of a deal to spin a satellite" above southern Sudan and let the world watch to see what happens? Three months later, Clooney's idea is about to go live. Starting Dec. 30, the Satellite Sentinel Project a joint experiment by the U.N.'s Operational Satellite Applications Programme, Harvard University, the

Enough Project and Clooney's posse of Hollywood funders will hire private satellites to monitor troop movements starting with the oil-rich region of Abyei. The images will be analyzed and made public at www.satsentinel.org (which goes live on Dec. 29) within 24 hours of an event to remind the leaders of northern and southern Sudan that they are being watched. "We are the antigenocide paparazzi," Clooney tells TIME. "We want them to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get. If you know your actions are going to be covered, you tend to behave much differently than when you operate in a vacuum." You don't have to be a spook to have an eye in the sky anymore. Private firms with names like GeoEye, DigitalGlobe and ImageSat International have a half-dozen "birds" circling the globe every 90 minutes in low-Earth orbit, about 297 miles (478 km) up. The best images from these satellites display about 8 sq. in. (50 sq cm) of the ground in each pixel on a computer screen. That is not enough granularity to read a car's license plate or ID a person, but analysts can tell the difference between cars and trucks and track the movements of troops or horses. "It is Google Earth on lots of steroids," says Lars Bromley, a top U.N. imagery analyst. But you need money for it. A hurry-up order of what Bromley calls a "single shot" from a satellite covers an area of about 105 sq. mi. (272 sq km) and costs $10,000. A rush job on a "full strip" image of land roughly 70 miles (115 km) long and 9 miles (14 km) wide could run nearly $70,000. Sentinel is launching with $750,000 in seed money from Not On Our Watch, the human rights organization Clooney founded along with Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, David Pressman and Jerry Weintraub. Clooney predicted he won't have much trouble raising more money once the project goes live. Prendergast's group, the Enough Project, is the human-rights arm of the liberal Center for American Progress; it recruited Bromley's team at the U.N. and brought in analysts from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative to pore over the images as they arrive. "Generally, what we have done in the past is an after-the-fact documentation exercise," Bromley explains. "This is proactive, wide-area monitoring," he says. Clooney, who has made four trips to Sudan since 2006, believes Sentinel might have applications in other global hot spots. "This is as if this were 1943 and we had a camera inside Auschwitz and we said, 'O.K., if you guys don't want to do anything about it, that's one thing,'" Clooney says. "But you can't say you did not know."

George Clooney in Sudan

Journey to Sudan For one week in October, actor George Clooney traveled to Sudan with documentary filmmaker Ann Curry (standing beside him on the boat, above) and John Prendergast, co-founder of the human-rights group the Enough Project, to study signs of mounting tension in the region as it prepares for a Jan. 9 referendum on whether the southern part of the country should gain independence from the north. Though the vote is a condition of an agreement the south signed with the Sudanese government after a brutal, decades-long civil war, many fear that the Sudanese government will not allow the oil-rich south to split off, which could trigger another conflict.

Welcome Clooney and Curry are greeted by students upon their arrival in the village of Marial Bai in southern Sudan.

Listening Displaced people share their stories with Clooney in Abyei, a town in the oil-rich region. Located near the north-south border, the town was razed in 2008 and could be a flashpoint for violence during and after January's referendum.

Fact-Finding Mission Heavy security accompanies Clooney and Curry as they ride into Abyei.

Horror Stories Clooney talks with a man who was displaced during clashes in Abyei in 2008.

Village Elder Clooney meets a resident of Lul, another village.

Attuned Clooney has frequently linked himself to the issues that plague Sudan. The October visit was his fourth trip to the region since 2006.

Sharing The actor shows a villager images on a digital camera. In part because of Clooney's efforts, activities in Sudan after Dec. 30 will be monitored by satellite. The Satellite Sentinel Project is a joint experiment by the U.N.'s Operational Satellite Applications Programme, Harvard University, the Enough Project and

Clooney's supporters in Hollywood. The project will use private satellites to monitor troop movements in the region. "We are the anti -genocide paparazzi," Clooney tells TIME. "We want them to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get. If you know your actions are going to be covered, you tend to behave much differently than when you operate in a vacuum."

Of Actors and Politicians When he returned to the U.S., Clooney spoke to President Obama, among others, about the dangers lurking in Sudan.

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Can Oprah Stand Out from the Cable Crowd?

By JAMES PONIEWOZIK Sunday, Jan. 02, 2011

Robin Layton / OWN On Jan. 1, Oprah Winfrey launches her cable channel, OWN (for Oprah Winfrey Network). But you could argue that Oprah has actually been running her own network for years. A successful, long-running daytime show like Oprah's is a TV network in microcosm, bundling several "shows" in the form of regular segments: it is at once an interview show, a self-help show, a game show, a reality show, a personal-finance and literature and fashion show all built around a common brand and themes. In the case of The Oprah Winfrey Show, those themes are self-actualization and celebrity. Or maybe self-actualization through celebrity: the idea is that by adopting the best personal habits and studying the life and spiritual practices of Oprah and Oprah-approved role models, you can, as she says, "be your best self." That too is the overarching credo of OWN, her basic-cable joint venture with Discovery Communications, which will, after Oprah's syndicated show ends this year, become the chief repository of the Word of Oprah on earth. Or at least in the roughly 80 million households (out of over 100 million with cable or satellite) that will receive it at launch. Some of OWN's higher-profile shows, like talker The Rosie O'Donnell Show, won't start until later in the year. (Oprah BFF Gayle King debuts a daily talk show the channel's first week.) But the handful of shows previewed for critics represent a kind of aggregate mosaic of Oprah's favorite things: famous people, inspirational stories and famous people with inspirational stories. In Master Class, one of a few shows in which OWN's founder and chief asset will appear, Oprah narrates a biography-and-interview show about stars Condoleezza Rice, Maya Angelou, Simon Cowell who embody qualities she admires. When Oprah talks about, say, Jay-Z, it sounds as if she is also talking about herself: "If you don't know who you are before fame hits, you will definitely end up losing yourself in all the opinions around you." But Oprah's gift is to make it seem as if she is also talking about you. "When the odds are against you and you have the depth of clarity to listen to your own instincts and follow what is true for you," she

narrates, "you may not become a Jay-Z, but you will become the best that you can be." You are not just watching a cable bio about a zillionaire rap mogul. You are growing as a person. Oprah sprinkles the second person throughout Master Class, as if to imply that you too could be personal friends with Diane Sawyer: "She's a great writer. When she sends you a note, even if it's just an e-mail, you have it framed." I will do that! Other celeb-oriented OWN shows will include Ask Oprah's All-Stars, in which Dr. Phil, Suze Orman and Mehmet Oz will field live-audience questions like a team of life-improvement Superfriends. Dr. Phil, Orman and other Oprah personalities will later aid Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson in Finding Sarah, a celebreality show Fergie says she's doing "to heal my mind, body and spirit" (the reality-TV-as-spa approach). But there are also a number of non-celeb shows that mirror the lifestyle offerings of cable channels like TLC with an Oprah spin. There's a house-decluttering show, Enough Already! with Peter Walsh, whose real focus is on unloading pathos and unpacking emotional baggage. There are two kinds of clutter, Walsh says: "memory clutter," which recalls the past, and "I might need it" clutter, which anxiously anticipates the future. Each one "robs you of the only thing that you have, which is now." Suddenly my pigsty office is 10 times as depressing as it already was. The themes get more overtly spiritual in The Miracle Detectives, in which a Mulder-and-Scully believer-and-skeptic pair investigate miraculous claims (spoiler alert: it's all about how you want to see it!). In the first episode of Our America with Lisa Ling, the former co-host of The View profiles a purported faith healer. Your Best Self, Soon It all sounds like, well, another cable channel. Whether OWN can distinguish itself is a big question, because while Oprah has ruled syndication for 25 years, cable has been learning from her and adapting her offerings (for instance, on channels like Oxygen, in whose founding Oprah played a role a decade ago). Its launch hasn't been entirely smooth: OWN has tried to extract premium rates from carriers and advertisers, to some resistance, and its first programming chief was replaced before the channel even launched. Even if it's a business success, it may not have the thunder-from-Olympus cultural clout that one daily hour of concentrated Oprah does now. The key to Oprah's bid to stand out lies in OWN's ingenious name: building on her quarter-century relationship with the audience to imply a feeling of personal ownership in the network. So it's unsurprising that one signature program will be Your OWN Show: Oprah's Search for the Next TV Star, in which she and her various protgs will guide contestants in creating TV pilots. The winner, of course, gets to launch a series on OWN. Your best self, it turns out, is a self with a show on Oprah's network.

Can Spider-Man Fly on Broadway?

By RICHARD ZOGLIN Friday, Jan. 07, 2011

A scene from the musical "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" during a rehearsal in New York Sara Krulwich / The New York Times / Redux Thirteen years ago, when she was a critically acclaimed but commercially untested director doing an ambitious new Broadway musical, Julie Taymor spent a grueling summer in Minneapolis, trying to fix The Lion King. A gigantic Pride Rock wasn't rising the way it was supposed to; the wildebeest stampede didn't look right, and actors were fighting off back problems thanks to the oversize headgear and life-size puppets they were lugging around. A few months later, however, the show had worked out its kinks, opened on Broadway to rave reviews and changed theater history. Those, as the devil in Damn Yankees might have put it, were the good old days. Taymor is back on Broadway, wrestling again with balky scenery, injured actors and a raft of big-budget expectations. But what she's dealing with now makes The Lion King look like, well, a Disney cartoon. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark isn't just the most expensive musical in Broadway history, with a price tag of $65 million; it's the juiciest backstage drama in recent memory. The show has also become a kind of crucible for the future of a flagging Broadway: Can a hugely successful superhero franchise be turned into a satisfying stage spectacle, complete with flying webslingers soaring on wires over the audience? Can a band of outsiders the show's lead producer is a rock impresario, and the score was written by U2's Bono and the Edge show the clubby world of Broadway some new tricks? Will this be musical theater's next breakthrough hit or a flop for the record books?

Padding around her capacious lower Manhattan apartment in mid-December, Taymor appears surprisingly calm, confident and animated. Co-writer Glen Berger is due for dinner (linguine with clam sauce, cooked by her companion, composer Elliot Goldenthal) to go over script changes in the second act, which she admits has "clarity" issues. And she's waiting for a new web special effect to be inserted into the show's climactic final scene, which has left audiences underwhelmed. All of which is being done under the brutal glare of New York City's press and its theater community: since so much of Spider-Man's expensive technical wizardry was custom built for its theater, a traditional out-of-town tryout was not an option. "I have said from Day One, this is not a normal musical," says Taymor, 58. "This is a circus-rock-'n'-roll-drama. We took a gamble. What we're doing with flying just isn't done. Where I'm stressed is, obviously we want to make changes. And the technical demands of the show are such that it takes a lot of time to fix those things." Indeed, four days later the show announced that it was delaying its official opening for a second time, to Feb. 7. A few days after that, cast member Christopher Tierney (one of several who perform Spider-Man's flying stunts) fell more than 20 feet into the orchestra pit after an improperly attached harness gave way, and he was rushed to the hospital with back injuries, broken ribs and internal bleeding. Two performances were canceled so new safety procedures could be adopted, and the show has resumed without further incident. So far. Spider-Man's public travails began in mid-2009, when the costly show ran out of money and had to postpone an opening originally set for February 2010. A new producer, Michael Cohl a promoter of rock extravaganzas for U2 and the Rolling Stones eventually came on board, lined up more investors and got the show back on track. Then, as the technically demanding rehearsals began, came tales of mishaps, technical snafus and "chaos" as a New York Post columnist put it behind the scenes. Two cast members suffered bone fractures while performing stunts, and co-star Natalie Mendoza, who sustained a concussion in November after some scenery conked her on the head backstage, has just announced she is leaving the show. Taymor, who since The Lion King has flitted between theater (The Green Bird), opera (The Magic Flute) and movies (The Tempest), is weary of defending her show against the doomsayers. Though "devastated" by Tierney's fall, she points out that injuries to dancers are hardly uncommon in theater; the New York State department of labor, which returned after the accident, has given the safety O.K. to all of Spider-Man's stunts. Expense? Some Cirque du Soleil shows a better comparison, Taymor claims, than conventional musicals cost upwards of $100 million and take at least a year to rehearse. Besides, The Lion King was the most expensive Broadway musical of its day and has since grossed an estimated $742 million. "Where are we going with this money thing?" asks Taymor. "Just see if the show works. The people who invested in this want the show we're creating. In a recession, we actually are keeping a lot of people working. So if the [critics] are happy to see it fail, they're happy to see Broadway fail." Also a little blindsided by the bad vibes is Bono, who was first shown the idea for a Spider-Man musical by producer Tony Adams (who died of a stroke in 2005, just as the contracts were being signed surely the gods' first warning signal). Bono and his songwriting partner, U2 guitarist the Edge, had been wanting to take a stab at musical theater, a genre long snubbed by rock composers. "We have to go humbly

before the Broadway community, because they have a tradition that goes back way before us," says Bono, who grew up amid Dublin's theater scene and as a kid loved musicals like Oliver! "We really feel we've a shot at something very special here if they give us a chance. If they want that kind of influx of new energy and talent out there." The bad publicity has had at least one positive effect: performances are selling out. Still, Taymor has much work to do. She has jammed a lot into the show Greek mythology (she has added the character of Arachne, the expert weaver turned into a spider by the jealous goddess Athena), favorite villains like the Green Goblin, a "geek chorus" that comments on much of the story, dream sequences, some 45 scene changes and perhaps more plot than the audience (Taymor is coming to realize) is able to grasp. "This is a musical that's got surrealism and poetic concepts woven into a drama," she says. "So it is a tall order." Of course, Taymor didn't revolutionize Broadway by thinking small. But audiences aren't going to crown her a superhero once again unless she can get this Spider-Man to fly.

Q&A Duran Duran

By TIM MORRISON Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

Duran Duran

Alexander Ho The white jackets and skinny trousers may be gone, but Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes still know how to rock the eyeliner. The members of seminal '80s group Duran Duran talked to TIME about their new album, All You Need Is Now, produced by Mark Ronson, as well as their early fashion choices. Ronson has called All You Need Is Now "an imaginary follow-up to Rio"--your hit 1982 album. Whose idea was that? Le Bon: Mark comes from a fan's perspective. He said that he was a little disappointed as a kid because [our third album] didn't really seem to fulfill our promise. Mark wanted to get back to the sense of experimentation from our first two albums. He would say, "No, that's too normal, too normal. I want you to be more out there." Do you feel that your audience has changed over the years? Rhodes: The Internet has changed the way people consume music. Kids now are likely to have some of our music, some Beatles, some Kanye. They mix it all up a lot more. Do you have second thoughts about your early fashion choices? Le Bon: People ask this question a lot. And I look at them and think, O.K., maybe it looks strange now. But at the time it was cool. Rhodes: I've still got all my clothes from the videos. Museums are calling me up all the time. The band is named after the villain in the movie Barbarella. Does Jane Fonda know? Le Bon: Absolutely. I saw her recently, and she said, "At first, I thought you were having a laugh at my expense. But later on, when I was in a more humorous relationship, I saw the funny side of it."

The Short List of Things to Do

WEEK OF JANUARY 10

Blue Valentine
Now in Theaters

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams dazzle in a drama that traces the ebb and flow of hope and desire in a marriage without taking sides. Naturalistic and sexy (but undeserving of its original NC-17 rating, now a more reasonable R), Blue Valentine is uncompromising and touching.

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story

Now on DVD

In the Vietnam War era, as the nation swirled toward revolution or anarchy, a renegade production company created films with an anti-Hollywood streak. Head, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show: they reveal old values lost and new ones briefly, brilliantly born.

From the Land of the Moon

Now in Stores

In Milena Agus' best-selling Italian novel, newly available in English, a woman remembers her wildly romantic grandmother, who dreamed of love and found compromise in Agus' home of Sardinia. Slim but powerful, it conjures up the spirit of Roberto Rossellini.

The Films of Rita Hayworth

Now on DVD

The '40s bombshell said, "Men go to bed with Gilda" her sultriest role "but they wake up with me." This five-film set includes <I<>, a nifty musical with Gene Kelly, and the grand, trashy Gilda. There you'll see the titian goddess who turned men into wolves.

World of Goo for iPad

Now in the App Store

The goal of this hit indie game is to shepherd cute, gelatinous globs through hazard-filled levels by arranging them into architectural shapes. On Apple's tablet, World of Goo's dramatic music, cartoony visuals and perfectly executed touch controls feel fresher than ever.

SOCIETY

Rage Against the Machine

By TOM MCNICHOL Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

Protesters in San Francisco and elsewhere in the U.S. don't want utilities to install more smart meters Brant Ward / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris When Claudia Salada opened her utility bill earlier this year, she went into sticker shock. Salada, an administrative assistant in Fremont, Calif., was accustomed to paying about $500 a month for gas and electricity for the three dwellings her family inhabited on a single lot. But her jaw dropped when she saw her July bill: $2,000. "I thought it was a mistake," says Salada. "Paying $2,000 for utilities is ridiculous, and I don't have that kind of money." Salada's big bill arrived a month or so after the local utility installed so-called smart meters on her property. These devices, millions of which have been deployed nationwide, wirelessly transmit information about household energy use to utilities. The system is designed to cut costs in two ways: it eliminates the need to send out meter readers, and it provides real-time consumption data, which enables utilities to charge lower rates during off-peak hours. The idea is to encourage consumers to change their energy-intensive ways; a decision as simple as when to run the dishwasher can have a significant effect on the bill. But the smart-meter rollout, which is being funded as part of a $3.4 billion upgrade of the nation's power grid, has been met with thousands of complaints from customers across the country for a variety of reasons. Class actions have been filed alleging overcharging. Tea Party members in Cleveland have decried the meters as a breach of privacy. Three communities in Maine passed resolutions asking the local utility to halt installations until residents can get more information about the potential health hazards of the radio waves emitted by the devices. The loudest protests are coming from California, where Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has installed some 7 million smart meters. When the state's public-utilities commission recently voted down a request to stop deployment of smart meters, one opponent stood up and shouted at the commissioners, "How do you

sleep at night?" In December, protesters blocked trucks from leaving a smart-meter installation yard and shut down a customer-service center for a few hours. Utilities have responded to the outcry by insisting that the meters are accurate. A recent analysis by an independent research firm concluded that the meters worked well and that the higher bills were the result of rate hikes, increased usage during extreme weather and, in some cases, smart meters' replacing malfunctioning units that had been undercharging customers. The companies also say that the smart meters comply with federal safety standards and that the amount of radiation they give off is comparable to what cell phones, microwave ovens and other common household devices emit. As installations continue, a spokesperson for PG&E says the utility is "evaluating options" for customers who say they don't want smart meters. That possibility comes too late for Salada, who complained to the public-utilities commission but was told that it could find no obvious error in her bill. "We eventually had to move because we couldn't pay the utility bills," she says. "Now I have a $9,000 bill on my credit report."

Bowl Game CEOs: College Football's Big Winners

By SEAN GREGORY Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010

The opening festivities of the Allstate Sugar Bowl are seen at the Louisana Superdome on January 1, 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana Chris Graythen / Getty Images If you need one more reason to despise the college football bowl system as if depriving fans of a real playoff to determine a true national champion isn't enough check out the salaries of bowl CEOs.

While universities and athletic departments across the country have had to slash budgets even entire sports because of the harsh economy, bowl directors are earning more than $300,000 for games that last all of four hours, tops. These are games, such as the Chick-fil-A Bowl, that don't help decide a national champion. Crowning college football's king is still done by the hated Bowl Championship Series (BCS), the system that relies on a confounding mix of human voting and fuzzy computer math to determine which two teams will play for the college football national championship. Fans have clamored for a playoff forever. But the intensity has picked up so much that last year the BCS hired Ari Fleischer, whose job it once was to defend the policies of President George W. Bush, to stand up for the current setup. Think it was hard defending FEMA? Try vouching for the importance of the GoDaddy.com Bowl or the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl. These games are nothing more than exhibitions. A new book, and a report from a political action committee that's trying to change college football, has tied together the college bowl system and excessive executive pay to give us all more reason to be irked. The book, Death to The BCS which, despite its hyperbolic title, offers the most thoroughly researched, reasoned, and readable argument for a college football playoff to date digs into federal tax records and says that in 2007, nearly two dozen bowl directors earned more than $300,000 a year. Many bowl organizations are non-profit entities. "The fabulous salaries of bowl directors was a surprise," says Dan Wetzel, the national columnist for Yahoo! Sports who, along with Josh Peter and Jeff Passan, co-authored the book. "But it perfectly explained why we now may use losing teams to fill the 35 bowl games. Everyone wants a payday like that." It's not just the executives of the most prominent games, like the Fiesta Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, and the Orange Bowl, who are raking it in. Death to the BCS points out that Rick Baker, the executive director for the Cotton Bowl, made $490,433 in 2007. Derrick Fox, who runs the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio, a lower-tier event, took in $438,044. The head of an even more obscure game, the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, took in $320,492 in fiscal 2008. That amounted to 11% of the game's revenue, according to the book. If the CEO of a for-profit company like Walmart got 11% of the revenues, he'd be making $44 billion (according to forbes.com, Walmart CEO Mike Duke will earn $19.2 million in total compensation in 2010, or .005% of the company's revenues). A recent report from the Playoff PAC, a Washington-based BCS-opposition group supported by some members of Congress, puts CEO pay in some additional perspective. John Junker, CEO of the Fiesta Bowl, made $592,418 in total compensation in fiscal 2009, while Paul Hoolahan, who runs the Sugar Bowl, got $645,386. The report, entitled "Public Dollars Serving Private Interests: Tax Irregularities Of Bowl Championship Series Organizations," cites a compensation survey from the NonProfit Times; while Junker and Hoolahan made north of a half million dollars, non-profits with budgets comparable to the Fiesta and Sugar Bowls between $10 and $24 million pay their CEOs, on average, $185,270. The highest-paid non-profit CEO in this comparison group made $383,500. A 2009 study from Charity Navigator found that organizations almost six times larger than the Fiesta and Sugar Bowls paid their CEOS, on average, $462,037 still less than the guys in charge of a football game.

As Death to the BCS points out, while the CEO of the Sugar Bowl earns nearly $650,000, the executive director of a non-profit of more import, the New Orleans chapter of Habitat of Humanity, earns $95,000. TIME asked to speak to the directors of five bowls the Sugar, Fiesta, Cotton, Alamo, and Kraft Fight Hunger in order to get a sense of what they do to earn that money. Only one, Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl executive director Gary Cavalli, agreed to an interview, through email. The Cotton Bowl directed TIME to its tax consultant, Bruce Bernstien, who explained that the compensation of a non-profit bowl CEO would not violate any tax laws if it falls in line with that of similar organizations. The only non-profits most similar to bowl games, however, are other bowl games. So as long as all bowl CEOs are making tons of money, everything is legal. It's the same way in the corporate world, but that doesn't make it fair, nor answer the fundamental question: what do the CEOs do? Cavalli described his responsibilities in a list of 35 bullet-points, which included tasks like soliciting sponsors, negotiating contracts with sponsors and television partners, managing bowl week volunteers, and arranging the half-time entertainment. He noted that his organization had only two full-time employees, so the bulk of the logistical work fell on him. In response to TIME's interview requests, several organizations issued statements through their communications offices. "Looking at the Sugar Bowl side-by-side with Habitat for Humanity may not offer the best comparison," writes John Sudsbury, spokesman for the Sugar Bowl, "although both have provided service to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Habitat at the micro level and the Sugar Bowl at the macro level. College athletics, and in particular college football, are big business where competition is keen and multi-million dollar athletic budgets, television contracts and administrators/coaches salaries are the norm. Like it or not, this is the world we compete in every day." To justify salaries, Sudsbury, and other bowl executives, all cite studies that quantify the economic impact of their respect games. A study prepared by a University of New Orleans economist, for example, found that the 2010 Sugar Bowl generated $137 million in economic impact for the city. But for years, economists have been questioning the real monetary value of sports. In the case of the Sugar Bowl, for example, many football fans are replacing tourists and conventioneers who would normally be in New Orleans if the Sugar Bowl wasn't squeezing them out. More importantly, if Hoolahan earned, say, $150,000 instead of $650,000, would that $137 million change? Would fewer football-crazy fans of Ohio State, which will play Arkansas in the Jan. 4 Sugar Bowl, travel to New Orleans and spend less money? "Lower executive salaries wouldn't change the economic impact one iota," says one prominent sports consultant who has seen bowl executives work firsthand, and has working relationships with several CEOs. "The idea that it would is laughable." The bowls insist that their executive directors work year-round. They say the CEOs have to negotiate sponsorship, marketing, and merchandising deals. And some bowl organizations are responsible for more than one event Junker, for example, also runs the Insight Bowl; and the Sugar Bowl runs several satellite events like college basketball, lacrosse, and volleyball tournaments, among others, in conjunction with the big game. Are they worth the money, then? "They are way overpaid, absolutely," says the consultant. "What they are doing over the course of the year is minimal."

College football may never see its longed-for playoff. But if the game wants to regain some integrity, stakeholders can take one simple step. The suits who run the bowls, like the rest of higher education in America, can take a pay cut.

Wellness: Does Your Doc Know What To Look For?

By FRANCINE RUSSO Saturday, Jan. 29, 2011

Jeffrey Hamilton / Getty Images Has your doctor ever given you an Rx for exercise? June Chapman got one last summer, a first for the 87-year-old retiree in San Marcos, Calif. "You sit on a chair, arms at your side," she says of the exercise her internist prescribed, "then rise up and sit back down on it. Every day. Repeat as often as you can." Chapman's doctor was a little ahead of the curve in recommending this kind of chairobic activity. Starting Jan. 1, all 46.6 million Medicare beneficiaries become eligible for wellness visits. Unlike a physical, in which a doctor is mainly looking for big-time problems and may spend only a minute or two scolding you for not eating right or exercising more a wellness visit is designed to promote health and include lessons in how to make better lifestyle choices so you can avoid or reduce the effects of conditions like hypertension, diabetes and heart disease. Medicare recipients will be able to get this kind of coaching free once a year. And if the health care reform law kicks in as scheduled, many private health plans will be required or, in some cases, given incentives to offer expanded wellness benefits by 2014. "For the first time, doctors will be reimbursed by Medicare for talking to patients on an ongoing basis about healthy behaviors," says Dr. Edward Phillips, director of the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine (ILM), an education and advocacy group co-founded in 2007 by Harvard Medical School and Boston's Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. The only downside: the current crop of physicians isn't nearly as good at improving patients' routines as it is at treating sickness. "The average doctor is hamstrung by lack of time, training and interest," says Dr. Alex Lickerman, former director of primary care at the University of

Chicago. "How many sit down with patients and talk about the barriers to losing weight? Most doctors are not there [yet]." The new wellness benefit tasks doctors with creating "personalized prevention plans," which ideally will be tailored to each patient's daily routine, psyche and family life. And if that sounds more like a nanny-state mandate than medicine, consider that some 75% of the $2.47 trillion in annual U.S. health care costs stems from chronic diseases, many of which can be prevented or delayed by lifestyle choices. There's no question Americans need to stop smoking, eat less junk food and get more exercise. But can physicians many of whom have little training in nutrition or exercise coaching succeed in altering behaviors? "We are working our buns off trying to get these people to change their lifestyle," says Dr. Ann Sheffels, a family physician in a Minneapolis suburb. "But the public hasn't bought into it yet." Literally. Private insurers and corporate wellness initiatives have even resorted, with limited success, to offering cash, gifts and reductions in insurance premiums in an effort to motivate people to change their ways. Some firms, in trying to bring down health care costs, have hired health coaches to reach out to the sedentary or overweight to get them moving more. Others use interactive voice-response systems to keep tabs on participants' progress. In a study, Aetna set out to see whether it could reduce hypertension and the attendant risks of stroke, heart attack and kidney failure among its Medicare Advantage members. More than 1,100 participants were given automated blood-pressure cuffs and told to call in with readings at least monthly. They also got quarterly reminders to dial in. When they did so, an automated system run by Silverlink Communications provided immediate feedback, explaining what the readings meant and where to call for further advice. Alerts were also sent to nurse managers when readings were dangerously high. The result: of the 217 people who started out with uncontrolled hypertension and stuck with the program for a year or so, nearly 57% got their blood pressure under control. This kind of prodding is too labor-intensive for physicians to take on alone. And if they're going to lead a team of dietitians, exercise physiotherapists and other health professionals, many doctors will need more training. That's where the nascent field of lifestyle medicine comes in. For example, in 2009, Chapman's internist, Dr. Brian Meyerhoff, took an ILM course called Active Doctors, Active Patients: the Science and Experience of Exercise, which not only teaches physicians to be better role models by increasing their own fitness level but also helps them prescribe exercise regimens tailored to a patient's age and health. Nutrition is on the medical menu too: Harvard's upcoming continuing-education course Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives: Caring for Our Patients and Ourselves sold out five months in advance. The key to getting doctors to bone up on these kinds of topics is reimbursement, says Dr. Dean Ornish, the California-based physician who has spent three decades showing how altering patients' habits can reverse heart disease. "Doctors don't learn this in medical school because they're not paid for it," he says. But that is beginning to change. In August, Medicare doubled coverage of Ornish's cardiac rehab programs, to 72 one-hour sessions with a hospital-based team whose specialties include exercise, yoga and psychology. The catch is that all the sessions have to be completed within 18 weeks.

Intensive lifestyle interventions are not easy, but they can have big payoffs. In 1985, when San Francisco restaurateur Mel Lefer had a massive heart attack at age 53, he could barely walk a block and was not expected to live out the year. After enrolling in one of Ornish's team-based programs, he started doing yoga and eating a low-fat, vegetarian diet. He lost weight and strengthened his heart along the way. Now 78, Lefer says, "I can toss my grandchildren in the air. I have a wonderful life." But it took a lot of coaching and lifestyle changes to get him there.

PEOPLE

10 Questions for Jeff Bridges

By JEFF BRIDGES Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

Rune Hellestad / Corbis How does it feel to be back in the TRON universe after some 20 years? Denice Barnes, CHICAGO Wow. It's 28 years, actually. In a way, it seems like we had a long weekend and just got back to work, because Steve Lisberger, who wrote and directed the first one, was on set all the time. I think Disney was very smart to include him. In another sense, so much has changed. When we did the first one, there was no Internet, and now this movie makes that old one look like a black-and-white TV show. You spend much of TRON: Legacy as a younger character, thanks to CGI. What do you think about directors' using that same technology to revive deceased actors? Wilson Vega, BOGOT I don't know quite how I feel about that. I guess it's progress. You can't slow that thing down. I imagine they'll soon be able to if they don't do this already take a little De Niro, a little Brando, a little Bridges and just a drop of Julie Andrews and shake that up. It's gonna get weird. TRON: Legacy has a pretty unique take on a father-son relationship. Is there something in particular that your father, the late actor Lloyd Bridges, imparted to you? Jerry LaBuy, CALEDONIA, ILL. Certainly all of the acting basics. The main thing I learned from him was his approach not only to his work but also to his life. He was a very joyful guy, and that joy spread when he would come on set. How does it feel to play the role John Wayne won an Oscar for in the original True Grit? Matthew Maass, DE KALB, TEXAS I really wasn't playing that role. One of the things I asked the Coen brothers when they asked me to come on board was why they wanted to make True Grit again. They said, The movie we're making is referring to the book by Charles Portis. We're not concerned with doing a remake of the movie. That was a relief to me because I didn't have to get into the Duke's boots. In light of all the remakes being produced, has Hollywood run out of ideas? Phil Macek, BALTIMORE I don't think so. I think the industry has gotten a little safer, but we also have some wonderful low-budget films that aren't looking for big tent-pole business.

You're known for taking pictures on your movie sets. Do you do that to pass the time, or are you inspired? Josh Tregenza, BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA Both. I took some pictures during True Grit. I make these books of photographs as a gift for the cast and crew. It's wonderful to look back at them and remember all those great times. Which role pushed you the hardest? Why? Berkay Ozkul, SEATTLE One that really comes to mind is Crazy Heart because music is so dear to my heart. I really wanted to make sure I didn't let that beautiful long pass drop from my hands. We had such a great script, such a great team that [writer-director] Scott Cooper brought together. I just wanted to do justice to that opportunity. Is there a role you've played that expresses your own personality? Dawn Turner, MUNCIE, IND. Each role I play has some sort of connection to my personality, an aspect of myself that's part of creating these characters. That's one of the first things I do, is think what aspect of myself I can apply to this guy, what aspect I want to kick to the curb. If you weren't acting, what would you be doing? Lorena Marks, AUSTIN Well, Lorena, you live in a real music town there. Gosh, I probably would be a musician. I love music. Love to play. Would love to play in Austin. Is it impossible for you to go bowling and not be bombarded by Big Lebowski references? Dan Hawkins, TROY, N.Y. [Laughs.] I don't think I've been bowling since Lebowski. But now as I say that, I must have been bowling. Fifteen years, no bowling? A lot of people dig the Dude. I get that a lot, wherever I go.

BRIEFING

The World
By Harriet Barovick; Ishaan Tharoor; Alexandra Silver; Frances Romero; Kayla Webley Monday, Jan. 10,
2011

1 | Pakistan
Suicide Attack Hits the Hungry On Christmas Day, a female suicide bomber in Bajaur, one of Pakistan's restive tribal agencies along the Afghan border, hurled grenades and detonated her explosive vest, killing 45 and injuring more than 100. Many of the victims had been standing in line at the entrance to a World Food Programme distribution center. The U.N. organization swiftly suspended operations in the area, where some 300,000 people are said to be in urgent need of food supplies. While aid distribution may restart soon, experts say the bombing illustrates a shift in the tactics of the Pakistani Taliban, who--rather than attempting to win over the local populace--seem willing to strike at any vulnerable target. Elsewhere in the tribal areas, separate Pakistani military and CIA drone strikes killed nearly 60 suspected militants. 2 | Ivory Coast Incumbent Stays Put Three West African leaders arrived in Ivory Coast Dec. 28 in an attempt to persuade incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo to step down from office following his loss in a November election. The U.S., E.U. and U.N. all recognize opponent Alassane Ouattara--a Muslim backed by many in the once rebellious north--as the proper winner. Gbagbo, who has served five years past his initial term, was President during the 2002-03 civil war that split the country in half. The fault lines of the earlier civil war REBELS IVORY COAST GOVERNMENT SOURCE: BBC 3 | Moscow Putin Rival Gets Extra Jail Time A court convicted Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former gas tycoon who has been jailed since 2003 on charges of fraud and tax evasion, of stealing oil from his company and embezzling funds. Originally due to be released in 2011, Khodorkovsky will most likely see his sentence extended to 2017. Once one of

Russia's richest men, he used his assets to support opposition to then President (now Prime Minister) Vladimir Putin. As a result, backers claim, Khodorkovsky is a political prisoner; his lawyer branded this second trial a "farce." Both the E.U. and the Obama Administration have condemned the verdict. 4 | Rome Anarchists Target Embassies Just days after letter bombs sent to the Swiss and Chilean embassies detonated, injuring two people, disposal experts defused a similar device mailed to the Italian capital's Greek embassy. The Informal Anarchist Federation has claimed responsibility for all the explosives. Suspicious packages received recently at other embassies proved to be false alarms. Authorities are investigating potential links between anarchist groups in Italy and Greece, where similar bombings took place in November. 5 | Australia When It Rains, It Floods An estimated half of the state of Queensland was declared a disaster zone following torrential rains that arrived in the wake of a tropical cyclone. Swollen rivers flooded towns and farms. About 1,000 people were evacuated or forced to leave their homes as waters continued to rise. Queensland is known for its extreme weather, and parts of the state have been crippled by years of drought. 6 | Estonia Euro Zone Expands Despite the worst economic crisis in its history, the euro continues to lure new adopters. On Jan. 1, the Baltic state of Estonia will become the 17th country in the euro zone. Other euro-using states suffered in 2010: Greece and Ireland required emergency bailouts to avoid bankruptcy. Estonian officials believe, though, that swapping the kroon for the euro will bring jobs and faster economic growth. 7 | India SPACE-PROGRAM SETBACK The explosion of a communications satellite near the southern Indian city of Chennai marked the second setback in 2010 for the country's space program. The satellite was intentionally blown up after it veered from its path; in April, a rocket plunged into the Bay of Bengal after its rotor seized and turbine casing ruptured. The latest incident casts further doubt on plans for a manned space mission in 2016, which officials estimate will cost approximately $2.8 billion. India's space program, originally championed by the country's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, has long been a source of great national pride and receives lavish funding despite the nation's many social needs. 8 | Beijing

China Hails African Ties Beijing published its first ever policy paper outlining China's economic role in Africa, claiming that total bilateral trade between China and 45 African countries in the first 11 months of 2010 stood at $114.8 billion, eclipsing a record of $108 billion set in 2008. The report also indulged in a bit of self-congratulation, heralding China's efforts to bolster development in Africa (it is the continent's largest trading partner). Many observers, including some U.S. diplomats, have voiced concerns that China's Africa policy is motivated only by economic gain and has filled the coffers of more than a few dubious regimes. China's bilateral trade with Africa, then and now 1950 $12.4 MILLION 2010 $114.8 BILLION SOURCE: CHINA'S STATE COUNCIL INFORMATION OFFICE 9 | Buenos Aires Tension in the Capital Argentine President Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner, up for re-election this fall, faces a growing political crisis following several weeks of violent clashes between immigrant squatters (mostly Bolivians and Paraguayans) and residents of southern Buenos Aires. While politicians point fingers at one another, the social unrest--which has already resulted in the deployment of police--continues to rise, with the squatters showing no signs of budging from their locations. 10 | Afghanistan U.N. Maps Tell Security Story Just over a year after President Obama ordered a 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan, the nation's security situation belied the Administration's positive assessments, according to confidential U.N. maps obtained by the Wall Street Journal. The two maps show how the level of risk in the country's districts changed from March to October 2010: almost all of southern Afghanistan remained at "very high risk," while many areas in northern, central and western Afghanistan lost their "low risk" status because of increased violence. A November Pentagon report cited a 70% increase in attacks since 2009, yet officials there (as well as in the Administration) still claim slow but steady progress.

Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine

By ALICE PARK Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

Martin Barraud / Getty Images TEENAGERS AND NOISE Can You Hear Me Now? Teens aren't known to be the greatest listeners, but a new study reveals that their hearing may be just fine. While more and more adolescents are using headphones to listen to music, researchers at Harvard Medical School found no significant increases in hearing loss among 12-to-19-year-olds since the 1990s. The most obvious sources of noise exposure, the scientists found, were recreational--like loud concerts--or occupational, like working around heavy machinery. That still doesn't mean that teens' listening habits are safe for the sensitive cells in their ears that translate sound energy into electrical impulses that can be interpreted by the brain. Damage to the cells is cumulative, and the study did not track the teens into adulthood. In addition, when the Harvard team analyzed their sample group by gender, they found that to the extent that there are detectable increases in hearing loss, the problem is greater in girls, suggesting that gender equality now extends to the ear-punishing activities that were once the province mostly of boys. The solution to the problem: earplugs in high-noise environments, which can reduce exposure by 20 decibels. THE PLACEBO EFFECT Powerful New Uses For the Completely Useless Pill At the heart of medicine's placebo effect is the brain's ability to think away symptoms and concoct treatment out of belief. And until now, researchers have been able to achieve this only by misleading subjects--telling them that a fake pill is a real one. But a new study from Harvard Medical School suggests that the placebo effect may work even if patients are entirely aware of what they're taking. When a group of patients with irritable-bowel syndrome (IBS) were told they were taking a completely inert substance that would reduce their symptoms "via a mind-body self-healing process," 59% reported feeling better, compared with 35% of a similar group who received no treatment at all. Other work

showed that patients who believe they will benefit from a placebo show more activity in regions of the brain associated with the anticipation of pleasure and the dulling of pain. Tapping into these neurological networks may be a way to help those suffering from disorders beyond IBS, providing real relief with no real chemistry. And the latest data hint that it may be possible to do this even when the last bit of trickery the Harvard team used--acknowledging that the pill was a placebo but telling the patients it would work--is left out. FROM THE LABS Anxious Mom, Anxious Baby Expectant moms may be passing along more than just their genes. In a lab study, quails that carried fertilized eggs and were routinely moved to new environments developed more signs of stress and aggressive behavior than other birds did. Their chicks seemed to acquire their mother's stress as well, showing more fearful behavior in novel situations. The Genetics of Deliciousness Researchers have decoded the genomes of two foods that make a delicious dessert combination: strawberries and chocolate. Knowing their genetic blueprints should make it possible for scientists to develop heartier and even tastier varieties of strawberries and high-quality cacao plants. Many current hybrids are bred to resist disease, at a cost to their natural flavor. MEDICAL MULTITASKING Depression is difficult enough to treat on its own, but it can be even more challenging when it occurs alongside other chronic illnesses. A new study found that a team-based approach involving a dedicated nurse to help patients manage their depression and coexisting conditions such as diabetes or heart disease led to improvement of all symptoms.

All in a Year's Work

By ALEX ALTMAN Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

Since taking office a year ago, Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, has sued the federal EPA over its plan to regulate greenhouse gases, argued that the state can regulate abortion facilities as it can hospitals, advised that public colleges lack the authority to bar discrimination against gays and lesbians, tweaked the state seal to cover the naked breast of the Roman goddess Virtus and subpoenaed a state university to probe for evidence that a former professor manipulated climate-science research.

In mid-December, Cuccinelli notched his biggest victory yet when a federal judge ruled that the individual mandate in Barack Obama's health care reform bill was unconstitutional, upholding a suit that Cuccinelli filed minutes after the President signed the bill into law. By then he had launched a new crusade, circulating a letter to fellow attorneys general that pushes for a constitutional amendment that would void any federal law or regulation if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states supported its repeal.

Andrew Cutraro Redux for TIME There is nothing new about a state AG who uses an office designed for law enforcement as a lever for political change. California's Jerry Brown, New York's Andrew Cuomo and Kansas' Phill Kline have all done it in recent years. But Cuccinelli is on a tear that makes the tenures of those men look plodding. His moves have propelled him from the ranks of little-known state officials into the constellation of national conservative stars. "This guy was Tea Party before anybody came up with the idea," says Mark Rozell, a public-policy professor at George Mason University. "He doesn't back down and doesn't compromise. And his enemies consider him all the more dangerous for those reasons." Cuccinelli argues that his opponents give him no choice. The EPA prompted his suit, he says, by violating its own rules. His judgment that colleges should strike policies protecting gays from discrimination--which moved Virginia's Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, to prohibit all discrimination in the state's workforce--came after multiple colleges sought clarification. The health care law, he said at a Sept. 12 Tea Party rally, is an affront to American liberty perpetrated by an Administration with less respect for the concept than King George. "It's not so much that they wanted to trample [the Constitution]," Cuccinelli tells TIME. "It's that they didn't care." Cuccinelli, 42, was born in New Jersey and moved as a toddler to northern Virginia. He attended the University of Virginia and earned law and master's degrees at George Mason before going into private practice as an attorney. A devout Catholic who says gay marriage clashes with natural law, Cuccinelli commutes 95 miles (153 km) to Richmond from his home in Prince William County, where his wife homeschools three of the couple's seven children. It was at her urging that he made his first foray into politics, winning a state-senate seat in 2002. Seven years later, he won 58% of the vote in the AG election after a bruising race in which opponents warned he would embarrass the commonwealth. The Cuccinelli Doctrine comes with asterisks. He boasts of bucking the gun lobby when he affirmed George Mason's right to limit firearms on campus. And he lined up with civil libertarians when he was one of just two state attorneys general to decline, on First Amendment grounds, to file an amicus brief in

support of a father whose son's military funeral was picketed by anti-gay bigots from the Westboro Baptist Church. But it's his small-government bent that's made him the darling of activists in the Old Dominion State, where attendees at a recent Tea Party convention sported CUCCINELLI FOR PRESIDENT stickers. He seems to be running for something, but a likelier target is the statehouse in 2013. After the health care ruling, he took a victory lap, launching a fundraising drive to "help defend Ken against the liberal media's attacks"--while making the media rounds to explain his philosophy. "I am universally skeptical of the gathering and exercise of government power," he says. To the dismay of critics, Cuccinelli has gathered some power of his own.

Verbatim
Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

'We promise that we will go again and again to Gaza until Gaza and Palestine are free.' DROR ELIMELECH FEILER, an Israeli-Swedish activist, speaking in Istanbul to a crowd that welcomed back the Mavi Marmara; nine Turkish activists died last May during an Israeli raid on the ship, which was attempting to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip 'I'm driving east on 26, and beyond that, it's a new adventure.' MARK SANFORD, departing South Carolina governor, giving few details about his postoffice plans other than his desire to hit the interstate; Sanford was nearly ousted from the position more than a year ago following the revelation of his affair with an Argentine woman 'They're dead. They're gone.' EMILY BRUNKHURST, biologist with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, on the state's bats; in 2009, New Hampshire lost half its hibernating bats to white-nose syndrome, an ailment that has killed bats across the U.S. 'It's certainly not going to close in the next month.' ROBERT GIBBS, White House press secretary, responding to questions about a timeline for shuttering the federal prison at Guantnamo Bay; President Obama had originally promised to close the detention center by the end of January 2010 'Fear of war is never helpful in preventing war.'

LEE MYUNG-BAK, South Korean President, vowing to retaliate against North Korea if provoked again 'If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game?' ED RENDELL, governor of Pennsylvania, saying that the U.S. has become a "nation of wusses" after the NFL postponed a game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Minnesota Vikings on account of a mere 5 in. (13 cm) of snow on the field 'It does not scare me because I believe in the intelligence of the American public.' OPRAH WINFREY, when asked if the prospect of a presidential run by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin frightened her TALKING HEADS Fred Hiatt Defending the First Lady's antiobesity campaign in the Washington Post: "Obama has not endorsed nanny-state ... remedies such as ... imposing soda-pop taxes. Instead, she is pushing for [more] recess and physical activity, more playgrounds, more vegetable gardens, fresher food in schools and grocery stores, better education on the issue for parents and children. All of this makes total sense, and historians will marvel [that] anyone could doubt it." --12/26/10 Ray Takeyh Writing in the International Herald Tribune about the understated strength of the Iranian opposition: "The ... victory of the Green movement is to hollow out the state and demonstrate to its loyalists that they are not defending a transcendent orthodoxy but craven and cruel men addicted to power at all cost. In the words of the reformist cleric, the late Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri, in the violent crackdown following the elections in June 2009, the Islamic Republic ceased to be either Islamic or a republic." --12/27/10 Gregory Rodriguez Discussing in the Los Angeles Times the Senate's failure to pass an immigration measure: "The DREAM Act was meant to benefit ... the already Americanized children of illegal immigrants [who] did not themselves break the law to come here. [It]would have legally conferred Americanness on individuals who were already rooted ... in the United States, and in the promise of the American dream." --12/27/10

Teena Marie
By ALEXANDRA SILVER Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

The cover of her debut album, released by Motown in 1979, didn't feature her picture. The label was afraid, Teena Marie later said, of turning off its fan base. But it was her voice, not her appearance, that mattered most, and she was beloved by African-American audiences. "I'm a black artist with white skin," she said in 2009. "At the end of the day, you have to sing what's in your own soul." Teena Marie, born Mary Christine Brockert but also known as Lady T and the Ivory Queen of Soul, was found dead Dec. 26 at 54. She had sung what was in her soul--funky hits such as "Lovergirl" and "Square Biz" and duets like "Fire and Desire" with mentor and onetime romantic partner Rick James--over the course of a successful recording career that spanned three decades. In the early '80s she left Motown during a famous dispute that resulted in the Brockert Initiative (or Teena Marie law), an artists'-rights act aimed at keeping labels from holding musicians and their work hostage. A songwriter, a producer and an arranger as well as a Grammy-nominated singer, Teena Marie released many more albums over the ensuing years, most recently 2009's Congo Square. "She had so much soul," said Motown founder Berry Gordy after her death. "The only thing white about her was her skin."

The Moment
By BRYAN WALSH Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

It's no consolation to the refugees huddled in airports around the world, but the truth is that the global air-travel system is a technological marvel, capable of getting you to the other side of the planet in less than a day. Just not these days, thanks to a series of late-December wintry blasts that shut down swaths of Western Europe, immobilized Moscow's airports and buried the northeastern U.S. Air travelers had it the worst, especially those who wanted to get to or from New York City, where all three of the area's airports--which handle about one-third of U.S. flights--were shut down for a time. Thousands of flights were canceled, and the ripples quickly spread worldwide, leaving passengers stranded in Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson, London's Heathrow and Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok. It was inevitable. Airlines have cut their schedules to the bone, leaving no wiggle room to cope with weather madness, let alone true catastrophe. In time, of course, the snow will melt and the runways will clear, but the storms served as a cold reminder: air travel may be a miracle, but it's a fragile one.

Carlos Andrs Prez

By DAN FASTENBERG Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

Before the recent rise of the Latin left, South American countries were led by men like Carlos Andrs Prez, who equated good governance with the country's bottom line and international standing. By that metric, Prez (or CAP, as he was known throughout his political life) was every bit a success during the first of his two tenures as President of Venezuela. Entering office in 1974 during the global oil crisis, Prez, who died Dec. 25 at 88, displayed a pragmatic side in nationalizing the country's formidable petroleum sector to take full advantage of high prices. The era, which came to be known as Venezuela Saudita, enabled Prez to demonstrate an independent streak on the global stage, as he pushed the U.S. to relinquish control of the Panama Canal and lobbied for an increased profile for OPEC. A lifelong democrat, Prez had gone into exile as a 26-year-old over his opposition to a military dictatorship. And when term limits prevented him from running for office again in 1978, he waited a decade before returning to the presidency. Ruling this time without an unprecedented oil windfall, Prez resorted to a neoliberal agenda of austerity. He also accepted loans from the International Monetary Fund in an about-face from his campaign, in which he called the IMF a "neutron bomb that killed people but left buildings standing." Anger over those measures wasn't helped by reports of his corruption, designer suits and inauguration, at which 650,000 hors d'oeuvres were served. Social inequality--slum dwellers often went without access to hospitals--led to street protests in February 1989. In response, Prez ordered a crackdown, and hundreds were killed in the so-called Caracazo. These injustices roused an idealistic paratrooper into action; though Hugo Chvez failed to topple Prez in a 1992 coup attempt, he was elected President in 1998.

Fred Foy
Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

Many knew his voice, if not his image. For Fred Foy, who died Dec. 22 at 89, delivered the memorable introduction to The Lone Ranger. For years it was he who famously said, "A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty 'Hi-Yo, Silver!' ... the Lone Ranger!" Foy became the show's announcer and narrator in 1948, first for the radio program and later for the television series as well. He also worked on The Green Hornet and The Dick Cavett Show and was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2000.

Milestones
By ALEXANDRA SILVER Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

ENGAGED Unfazed by a mere 60-year age difference, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, 84, proposed to Playmate and Mansion roommate Crystal Harris, 24, announcing their engagement via the even younger Twitter. "This is the happiest Christmas weekend in memory," he tweeted. It will be the third marriage for Hefner, who celebrated his first nuptials in 1949. Harris, Playboy's Miss December 2009, recently appeared as Hef's "No. 1" girlfriend on E!'s show The Girls Next Door.

LETTERS

Inbox
Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

Back, Mama Grizzly Given TIME's rich history of substantive reporting, I am perplexed by your infatuation with Sarah Palin ["What Does She Want?" Dec. 20]. My success as a CEO is predicated on being able to evaluate senior-management talent. Palin's ability to resonate with middle America by spewing invective and bromides at the Washington establishment is no substitute for having the economic and geopolitical savvy to guide the world's largest economy. Peter Smith, BADEN, PA. If I wanted to read a valentine to Palin, I would raid her mailbox on Feb. 14. Dewi L. Faulkner, PALO ALTO, CALIF. After a long life of service to his nation, John McCain, it now appears, will leave as a legacy his thoughtless infliction of Palin on the American people. John W. DeArman, ST. LOUIS A Sound Wall "Palestinians, Contained," leaves me scratching my head [Dec. 20]. Basically, you say that after years of suicide bombings in Israel committed by Palestinians, to which Israelis responded by erecting a wall, the Palestinians want the Israelis to come out and play. You then suggest that the youth, the ones who are taught hatred of Israel and Jews in their homes and schools, do not know their Israeli counterparts--and it's all Israel's fault. Your article makes no sense and smacks of your one-sided reporting of this situation. H. Alster, EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. Once again, Karl Vick chooses to ignore the underlying reasons for Middle East issues. It's not the separation that is causing younger Palestinians to be more distrustful of Israelis. It's the unremitting incitement, beginning almost at infancy, by their leaders that is turning this new generation into one filled with more hate and distrust than the current one. Allan Kandel, LOS ANGELES Thank you for your fair assessment of the plight of the Palestinians in the West Bank and their life behind the new Iron Curtain. I wish more U.S. news sources were willing to report on this issue in such an informative and balanced way. Dennis Allen, CHICAGO

Elizabeth Edwards' Life I don't know whom David Von Drehle was looking at when he referred to Elizabeth Edwards as a "wreck" ["Appreciation," Dec 20]. Edwards' body was ravaged by the cancer that took her life, and her marriage was indeed shredded. But her essence was most certainly not a wreck. She faced her challenges with courage and grace. Nancy Smathers, LAGRANGE, GA. It is demeaning and shallow to view Edwards from such a chauvinistic point of view. It was not her reputation that was eaten away, as Von Drehle states; it was her husband's. Her reputation stands intact. She led her life honorably. Katie DeLuca, BATH, MICH. Debating Assange The uproar over WikiLeaks and Julian Assange reminds me of the controversy surrounding the release of the Pentagon papers, when Daniel Ellsberg was nailed to the cross but turned out to be a hero for stepping up and risking everything ["The War on Secrecy," Dec. 13]. Rather than calling for the head of Assange, we should be urgently asking how a private first class in the U.S. Army could gain access to all this secret material, download it and then distribute it to whomever he so desired. Alice A. Grimes, WATERTOWN, MASS. Assange is a cyberterrorist who has made the work of American troops and civilians around the world much harder at a time when the U.S. is fighting a multiple-front war on terrorism. The revelations in some of these cables will cost lives. Mark Stuart Ellison, BROOKLYN The harsh reaction of the U.S. and many other governments toward Assange is entirely predictable. We wouldn't need WikiLeaks if we had enough aggressive, honest and independent journalists to ferret out the truth. Lacking that, WikiLeaks is the next best thing. Arlen Grossman, MONTEREY, CALIF. Leak Damage Fareed Zakaria may be right about the leaks' demonstrating American diplomatic skill, but he misses the point ["It's Not So Bad," Dec. 13]. The leaks have caused short-term damage to some important diplomatic relationships and may cause longer-lasting damage to our interests and reputation globally. How do we expect other countries' representatives to speak frankly with us if they have no assurance their words will be kept in confidence? Trust is a cornerstone of every relationship. William Fay, BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.

Nobody Puts Baby In a Corner I found your "Best of 2010" section immediately suspect because of an inexplicable omission from the five best film performances [Dec. 20]. In this year's Love and Other Drugs, Anne Hathaway proves beyond any doubt that in less than a decade, she has reached the epitome of dramatic expertise on film. And her confidence in her profession shines through--clothed or otherwise. Admit your glaring oversight and you are forgiven. Mike Gerald, HATTIESBURG, MISS. Wage Variations The misleading statistic comparing average federal pay with that of all private workers is an apples-and-oranges red herring [The World, Dec. 13]. Public employment is dominated by people developing, analyzing and delivering tasks and services like highway-safety engineering and air-traffic control. Private employment has a fairly large component earning at or near the minimum wage. You'd help the debate far more by digging deeper into the figures to compare equivalent works in the private and public sectors. Then you'd find them roughly equal overall. William Wade, CHICAGO The Debt Debacle Re "The Sacred Cows" [Dec. 13]: I think Michael Crowley is wrong to suggest cutting Social Security payments. Most Americans have paid into the fund their entire working lives, some starting as young as 14. There would be plenty of money there, except that both parties have dipped into the fund for other projects. Maybe we should make it easier for a poor person to become a Congressperson. Phyllis Hagmaier, WILLIAMSBURG, VA. The real culprit was borrowing when we didn't have to. Financing the tax cuts and spending sprees with massive borrowing--including Social Security cash surpluses--set us on a course for hard times. Bill Howard, CHESTERFIELD, MO. Crowley refers to the Pentagon's Tricare health program, "whose $460 annual premium is unheard of in the private sector." Our son currently serves, deploys from his family often, performs hazardous duty and subordinates himself to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, where it's a federal crime to quit without permission--all for a salary unheard of in the private sector. John Perryman, HUNTINGTOWN, MD. Smells like Team Spirit As a onetime male chauvinist, I take my hat off to the winning University of Connecticut women's basketball team and coach Geno Auriemma ["Guy Coach, Girl Team, No Losses," Dec. 13]. Unlike in

men's basketball--and in spite of past stars like Diana Taurasi, Tina Charles and now Maya Moore--the UConn women have always operated as a team devoid of showboating and one-woman acts. Go UConn girls. Kenneth Chain, GUILFORD, CONN. Equal-Opportunity Wars Re the Moment, which refers to the objections among some U.S. military to the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell" [Dec. 13]: As the gay son of a World War II POW who was unconditionally loved by his father, I would say that if a soldier cannot effectively fight alongside a gay soldier, maybe it is that person, not the gay soldier, who is not tough enough to be handed a weapon and serve in this country's armed forces. I'm pretty sure there are greater stresses on the battlefield than one's thoughts on whom a neighboring soldier prefers to sleep with. Mike Dalena, KANSAS CITY, MO. Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling