A Century Ago, Yet Strangely Familiar

Yesterday I stumbled across the New York Times "TimesTraveler" blog, the idea is that the blog looks back at what was in the Times 100 years ago to the day. The funny thing is how many of the big stories seem strangely familiar: the President warning against imposing trade tariffs; the United States worrying about the government of a Central American state - Nicaragua this time, not Honduras, though an official named "Zelaya" is common to both; and a warning about terrorists coming to our shores, only 100 years ago it was the Black Hand instead of al-Qaeda.

It's interesting how times change, and how they don't.

First-Person Account of Russian Night Club Tragedy

The BBC has published a harrowing first-person account of the disastrous night club fire in Perm.

A businessman identified only as "Sergei" said he narrowly avoided being a victim of the fire at the Lame Horse club because, he admits, he was too drunk to leave the bar he was at to join his friends in heading over to the other bar. Sergei received news of the tragedy on his cellphone and headed over to the club, outside he said he saw "30 to 40 people were lying in the street in front of the club." He would later discover that his three friends all died in the fire.

Sergei says that the fire safety measures were "very bad" and that the local government will just "cover its own back...everyone knows that bribes and corruption take place in Russia so nothing will really change."

According to Russia's RIA Novosti this morning, the death toll from the fire had risen to 125, and is expected to climb further since many victims suffered severe burns. The regional governor for Perm has resigned because of the tragedy.

Energy Company's Boast About Melting Glaciers

Today energy companies fund huge advertising campaigns to promote just how environmentally-friendly (or "green") they are, but that wasn't always the case. Check out the ad below, it's a glossy two-page magazine spread from the early 1960's where Enco (a subsidiary of Humble Oil, which later became part of ExxonMobil) boasts about supplying enough energy to melt seven million tons of glacier each day.


Of course 40-odd years later, if Enco were still around, they'd likely be running spots on TV touting their bio-fuels research efforts and employing lobbyists to question whether there really is a link between fossil fuels and global climate change. Funny how times change...

Bad Times in Perm

By now you've probably heard about the terrible night club fire in the Russian city of Perm that has killed over 100 people so far (dozens more are reported to be in critical condition so sadly that total is likely to rise). While the initial fear was the Perm club disaster was another act of terrorism, the blame is now falling on lax fire code enforcement and careless owners. The managers of the Lame Horse nightclub had apparently been cited twice by city officials for violations of the fire code in the recent past and using fireworks inside a club like theirs was another violation. The Lame Horse's owners have all since been arrested and President Dmitry Medvedev is promising they will face the "maximum punishment."

Yesterday's New York Times piece on the disaster though makes note of the fact that it's been a hard couple of years for the Ural mountain city. Last year an Aeroflot plane crashed just outside the city, killing 88; in October, a pedestrian's near escape from an out-of-control bus became one of the top viral videos on the Internet; and last month there was the story of the homeless men outside of Perm who, allegedly, killed and ate one of their compatriots, and then sold the left-overs to a kabob shop (think about that next time you visit a street-food cart).

It's enough to make you hope that Perm has a much better 2010.

The Next Fashion Center: North Korea?

An odd little story from the Associated Press, North Korea is apparently trying to break into the fashion world. Even though the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-Il rarely appears in public not clad in a "Members Only" style jumpsuit, North Korea has entered into an agreement with a Swedish firm to produce designer jeans that will be sold under the "Noko Jeans" label.

The North Korean jeans were scheduled to go on sale this weekend in Stockholm and online as well. One place you won't see Noko Jeans, for sale at least, is in North Korea itself where jeans are viewed as a symbol of American "imperialism".

Terror Claims in Russian Rail Crash

On Thursday, nearly a week after a bomb caused the derailment of the Moscow-to-St. Petersburg Nevsky Express, killing 26 people, a Chechen rebel group claimed responsibility.

The Armed Forces of the Caucasus Emirate said they were behind the bombing and promised that it was just part of a larger campaign of attacks against key infrastructure points across Russia. The group is led by Doku Umarov, the self-styled "emir" of the caliphate of the Northern Caucasus. Umarov is a different kind of Chechen leader. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has fought two wars against would-be separatists to keep Chechnya within Russia. As part of their campaign, Russia managed to kill off much of the old Chechen leadership and buy off the ones they couldn't (like the Kadyrov clan who are Chechnya's current pro-Moscow leaders). But these old Chechen rebels were separatists at heart, they wanted an independent homeland; Umarov is more in the bin Laden mold, he sees himself fighting a war to create a pure fundamentalist Islamic state.

Though many fingers have pointed towards the Caucasus region as the likely source of the Nevsky attack, there are those who doubt that Umarov has the ability to carry out a mission so far from his base of operations. And his group does have a history of claiming responsibility for things they didn't do; they also claimed to be behind the explosion that killed 75 people this summer at Siberia's Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant (a faulty turbine was the true cause of the disaster).

The Nevsky Express is a luxury train favored by Russia's business and political elite (two high-ranking government officials were among the dead last Friday), for that reason I think you can't ignore the possibility that far-right, ultra-nationalist groups might be behind the attack. In fact one ultra-nationalist group "Combat 18" claimed responsibility soon after the attack. Groups like "Combat 18" are critical of the Russian government for Russia losing the "empire" it once had as the Soviet Union and for, what they think, are lax immigration policies. These kind of groups have in the past been content with assaulting, and sometimes killing, immigrants from Africa, Central Asia, and anyone else they deem not Russian enough for their liking. But something like the Nevsky Express, a mode of transport favored by the political/economic elite and tourists, would be a tempting target for them.

Meanwhile part of the blame for the death toll in the crash is falling on Germany - more specifically on the German-made seats in the train's coaches. Many of the deaths and serious injuries were said to have come from the last car of the train, which violently derailed. Rescue workers said that many were killed not by the bomb, or by fire, but by being crushed when their seats broke loose and piled into each other. The Kommersant newspaper said that the seats' lightweight aluminum construction led to their collapse and that the heavier, steel-framed, Russian-made seats common on other Russian trains would have fared better in the crash, meaning there would have been fewer casualties.

Brazil's Mystery of The Twins

On Thursday, The Week magazine jumped into an odd conspiracy theory making the rounds on The Internet - why a small town in Brazil has so many sets of twins?

In fact, the village of Cândido Godói has about 1,000 percent more twins than the global average, and many of them, supposedly, are blond-haired and blue-eyed, also genetic rarities in Brazil (and the photo editors at The Week show that they really know how to illustrate a story). The conspiracy theory is that the boom in Nordic-looking twins is in fact the result of secret genetic experimentation by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who fled to South America after the end of World War II.

And how could a story that juicy not be an Internet sensation? But in their round-up The Week cites one source that says the twin birth boom in Cândido Godói goes back to 1927, well before the alleged arrival of Mengele. A secondary conspiracy theory suggests that Mengele didn't experiment on people in the village, but on their cows, whose milk and meat was eaten by villagers, thus producing an abundance of twins (the 1927 part though still isn't explained). And at least one person in The Week's comment section noted that in the National Geographic report that sparked the whole story, most of the twins shown are neither blond or blue-eyed.

The take-away here is to remember on The Internet, stories are often too good to believe.

America's Last WWI Vet Is On A Mission

I think that if Frank Buckles, America's last surviving veteran of World War I, makes a trip to Capitol Hill, the least we can do is talk about why he went.

Mr. Buckles, 108, traveled to Washington to lobby Congress to finally create a monument to all those who fought and died in World War I. It's amazing to think, but nearly a century after the end of the conflict, there's still no national memorial to "The Great War". Mr. Buckles has endorsed a Congressional effort to change that, and to do it in a way that means he may even live to see the memorial dedicated. The "Frank Buckles World War I Memorial Act" would rededicate an existing memorial on the National Mall for soldiers from Washington DC into the national memorial for all Americans who served in WWI.

It is a cheap and easy solution to a long-standing problem, so of course there's opposition to it from Congress. Politicians in DC, and their allies in Congress, are opposed to the federal government taking over their memorial; while another group from Missouri wants to see a monument in Kansas City dedicated in 1921 by the commander of American forces Gen. John Pershing rebranded as the national WWI memorial.

Frankly, they seem like silly reasons to oppose what seems like a very sensible solution to the lack of a national WWI monument. Hopefully Congress will act to designate an official memorial, while there's still a WWI vet left to visit it.

Brother, Can You Spare A Won?

The North Korean government briefly threw their country into chaos as they announced a revaluation of the North Korean currency, the won. North Korea is basically taking the Zimbabwean approach to controlling inflation - they're just dropping zeros off the end of their currency, in the case of North Korea, two zeros - so your 1,000 won note is now a 10 won note.


North Korea is actually ordering people to exchange their old won for new, but capping the amount they can exchange at between 100,000 and 150,000 won. The problem for North Korea is that many people, according to the New York Times, stockpiled won to buy necessities during the lean winter months, they're now likely to be stuck with a lot of now useless paper.

The currency revaluation is also widely seen as a move to rein in North Korea's booming black market, since the black marketeers will not want to get stuck with huge piles of soon to be worthless old won that they can't exchange. In recent years the black market in all sorts of goods has boomed as the state-run economy has faltered. Because of years of failed harvests and economic sanctions, the North Korean government has put tight controls in over what items are available for sale in the marketplace, who can buy them, and when - all factors that drive the black market.

(photo Yonhap News, South Korea)

Pirate Stock Exchange

Every now and then you read a story that just blows your mind...I was about to post a link to my latest piece over at The Mantle, the topic this time is the Somali pirates and how they could affect the future of international relations (check it out when you finish here), then I saw this story from Reuters about the Somali Pirate Stock Exchange.

Yes, you read that right, in the port city of Haradheere, a stock exchange was founded earlier this year, built around the pirate economy. Investors buy a "share" of a future pirate mission, if it is successful and the pirates capture a ship, investors then get a cut of the eventual ransom payment - it's like Lloyds of London in reverse. Reuters told the story of Sahra Ibrahim, a divorcee who bought a share of a pirate mission by donating a rocket-propelled grenade she received as an alimony payment (and wouldn't you have loved to have sat in on that divorce hearing?). Her mission was a success, the pirates captured a Spanish fishing trawler, later ransomed for more than $3 million, which netted Ms. Ibrahim $75,000 for her investment.

Apparently the exchange has been a runaway success. Its organizers say that in the four months since its founding, the number of "maritime companies" (groups of investors) has grown from 15 to 72, and pirates are now asking for larger ransoms to pay back their shareholders.

The exchange is also a good PR move. The Somali pirates, like pirates throughout history, have tended to spend their windfall profits on wine, women and song - all no-nos in traditional, Islamic Somalia. This has made some tribal elders speak out against the pirates and pledge to kick them out of their territories. But a cut of the profits from the Haradheere Pirate Stock Exchange goes directly to the local district to fund public infrastructure projects like schools and clinics - considering that Somalia basically doesn't have a functioning national government to pay for projects like these, this "pirate tax" will likely buy a lot of good will.

So in Haradheere we have a self-organizing capitalist system with a social welfare component, it's pretty amazing really.