Vladimir Putin, Modern-Day Apostle?

There's an odd little story from the heartland of Russia about a group of women who worship Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Literally. The all-female group is described as a religious sect who have made Putin the object of their veneration, the group's leader, a woman calling herself Mother Fotina compares Putin with John the Apostle. Putin, she said, did some “unrighteous things” during his KGB career, but once he became president she claims he was “imbued with the Holy Spirit” and is now “wisely leading his flock”, in this case the nation of Russia. The sect's members dress as nuns, are vegetarians and conduct services where they pray for the success of Putin and sign patriotic Russian songs rather than hymns (A Kremlin spokesman said that Putin does not see himself as being on a mission from God...). A local Russian Orthodox priest, Father Alexei, dismisses the sect's teachings as “a nonsensical mixture of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, the occult, Buddhism and political information” (not sure how Catholicism and Buddhism make it into the mix there myself...), though Father Alexei adds that he doesn't think Mother Fotina herself is “a mad woman.”

Meanwhile on more earthly political matters, Putin is taking steps to bolster his position ahead of next year's presidential elections by calling for the creation of a “popular front” that would draw support from all corners of Russian society to select a candidate for next year's polls – one would assume that their popular choice would be Putin himself... It is another sign, political commentators say, that Putin intends a return to the presidency.

At the same time Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov has also thrown his hat into the political ring by taking control of the Pravoye Dyelo or “Right Cause” Party. Prokhorov may be best known in the United States as the new owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team, but he is also Russia's third-richest man, with a net worth of more than $22 billion and control of a large chunk of Russia's gold and nickel reserves. Prokhorov could be tempting fate, it has long been assumed that Mikhail Khodorkovsky's own entry into local politics in Siberia is what led to his downfall as chairman of the powerful energy conglomerate Yukos and his eventual imprisonment on tax fraud charges. So far Prokhorov has been careful to not openly challenge the Kremlin like Khodorkovsky did; Right Cause has positioned itself as a pro-business, anti-corruption party, without directly criticizing the current ruling regime. Prokhorov has promised that Right Cause will win the second-largest block of seats in this years elections for the Russian Duma (the Russian parliament). And with it's pro-business/anti-corruption platform, Right Cause could be the perfect vehicle for a 2012 presidential run for current Russian President Dmitry Medvedev should United Russia select Putin as their candidate and if Dmitry decides he wants to take on the Boss in the 2012 elections.

Al-Shabaab: This Time It's Personal

A quick follow-up now to Wednesday's piece on threats of revenge coming from al-Qaeda's Somali franchise al-Shabaab, they're at it again, only this time the threats are personal: Al-Shabaab is threatening to kill Barack Obama's paternal grandmother Sarah in retaliation for the killing of Osama bin Laden by US Navy SEALs.

Despite being the grandmother of the most powerful man on earth, 88-year old Sarah Hussein Obama lives a quiet life in rural Kenya. She also seems unfazed by al-Shabaab's threats, telling ABC News: “my life has not been affected in any way…it has not restricted my movement. If the government has decided to bring more security personnel, we are OK with it,” after Kenyan authorities flooded her rural village with security personnel.

Al-Shabaab is currently fighting African Union peacekeepers for control of southern Somalia, including the capital city, Mogadishu. Though al-Shabaab's activities have mostly been limited to southern Somalia, they were blamed for a bombing in Kampala, Uganda at a 2010 World Cup viewing party that killed more than 70 people. Ugandan troops make up the bulk of the African Union peacekeepers in Somalia.

Putin's Got Gas (Problems)

If Barack Obama were thinking of heeding the call of Donald Trump (and others) to order gas prices down, he needs to look no further than Russia, where Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has become a one-man gas crisis, to see what a colossally-bad idea that is. Russia has been facing widespread gasoline shortages, with two dozen regions reporting serious shortages and some places in Siberia running dry for awhile, all apparently thanks to Putin's efforts to wrest control of the nation's gasoline prices away from the open market.

Russia's problems started a few months ago when Putin signed a decree raising the taxes on gasoline in Russia. Of course Russians didn't like the increase at the pump and with presidential elections less than a year away, Putin felt a need to polish his populist credentials. Putin being Putin though, his solution was in February to simply order Russia's gas companies to lower their prices to make up for the rise caused by the new taxes. But the gas companies soon realized that they were getting the short end of the deal and that they could make far more profit by exporting gas to Europe rather than selling it at a loss or near loss at home, so they began to divert shipments from Russian gasoline stations to wholesalers in Europe. Soon stations across the country were experiencing shortages, with some in the Altai Region of Siberia where half of the gas stations ran completely dry.

This caused even more anger among Russia's driving public, so last week Putin stepped in again, this time “suggesting” that Russian oil companies halt gasoline exports for the month of May to put more product into the distribution system at home, state-run firms Rosneft and Gazprom, the giants of the Russian petroleum sector, soon complied, easing the shortages.

But one has to wonder if this is just kicking the can down the road a bit, since once June rolls around and the May moratorium ends, companies will still see the same profit in selling gas abroad (though Putin also ordered a raise in gasoline export taxes to cut into these profits). The reality is that gasoline prices are a function of market forces largely beyond government control. It is a good lesson for Putin, Trump and anyone else who thinks they can just “order” fuel prices around to learn.

From The Horn Of Africa, Vows Of Revenge

The Islamic Militant community was initially quiet following the death of Osama bin Laden on May 1, but they're starting to make up for lost time with statements vowing revenge for the killing of their spiritual head, and now the top Islamist group in the Horn of Africa has weighed in. According to regional media reports, Somalia's al-Shabaab (“the youth”) has said they will “take revenge for him [bin Laden]” in a videotaped statement by their media wing. Al-Shabaab's likely target won't be the United States or its forces but rather the “non-Muslim invaders” in Somalia – troops from the African Union's peacekeeping mission to the failed state.

One country that has been growing more wary of al-Shabaab is neighboring Kenya, which fears that the instability in Somalia could spread, both through direct terror attacks launched by al-Shabaab and through Somali refugees fleeing to Kenya to avoid fighting between al-Shabaab, the African Union peacekeepers and the militias supporting Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) - the internationally-backed attempt to bring governance back to Somalia after a two decade absence. Last month, Kenya offered their support to “Jubaland”, a new autonomous region in southern Somalia, which borders Kenya. In announcing their semi-independence, the government, so to speak, of Jubaland also pledged their determination to fight al-Shabaab. According to Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper though, Jubaland is less of an expression of self-governance than it is an attempt by Kenya to create a “buffer zone” within Somalia proper between Kenya and the forces of al-Shabaab. “The Jubaland initiative will be Kenya’s first major attempt to reassert its influence in a country that has posed a major social and security nightmare for the last two decades,” said Elias Bare Shil, a former member of Kenya's parliament, adding that Jubaland could not only help Kenya with security but also reopen a trade route to the Somali port city, Kismayu, which fell into al-Shabaab's hands several months ago.

Kenya's willingness to so overtly interfere in Somalia's internal operations is an expression of frustration over how long the international community has allowed the Somali situation to fester. While the TFG is a sincere attempt to establish a working government in Somalia, it has been underfunded by the international community and under-supported by the African Union, which has had difficulty in even finding member nations to send troops to the peacekeeping mission. As a result, the TFG militias and AU troops have had a difficult time just keeping control of just Mogadishu, Somalia's capital city, and have been wholly unable to bring law and order to the rest of the nation.

Kenya will likely face a stiff fight from al-Shabaab for control of Jubaland, while al-Shabaab will also look to make good on their public declaration of revenge in the name of bin Laden. It seems like it will be a tense next few months in the Horn of Africa.

Bad Reporting Is Even Worse

Last week I wrote about a bit of bad reporting surrounding the death of the typewriter – NBC News, among other outlets, reported that the last manufacturer of typewriters in the world, India's Godrej & Boyce, ceased production of the iconic office machine. The reality was that Godrej & Boyce in fact halted production of their typewriter line in 2009 and was only now nearing the end of their warehoused stock. Apparently though, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the typewriter's demise have been greatly exaggerated – and some sloppy reporting is even worse than originally thought.

The North Jersey Record tracked down Swintec Corp., a Moonachie, New Jersey-based company that still builds and sells typewriters. According to Swintec's General manager Ed Michael, they still have a fairly solid business selling electronic typewriters, with their main clients being “correctional institutions” who favor a funky version with a clear plastic case (presumably so the residents of said correctional institutions can't hide any contraband within the typewriter's casing). Michael adds that: “we sell to anyone who needs one [a typewriter].” He also tells the Record that he was surprised to read the stories about the death of the typewriter since he has recently been interviewed by media outlets, including the BBC, about Swintec's continued sales of typewriters.

So not only did a whole host of media sources get the initial story about Godrej & Boyce wrong – that they stopped manufacture of typewriters in 2009 not 2011, but Godrej & Boyce wasn't even the “world's last” manufacturer of typewriters in the first place. This might seem like a small story to get worked up over, but as my journalism professors at Gonzaga University taught me, if as a reader I can't trust you to get the small things right, why should I trust you on the big ones?

More Bad Reporting (I'm Looking At You CNN)

Okay, one final, final note on sloppy reporting for today. On today's “American Morning” on CNN, they did a little story about how 8-to-12-year olds were becoming the “face” of the site Facebook – since there are now 7.5 million Facebook users in that age bracket. Ok, 7.5 million sounds like a lot, but not when you compare it to Facebook's total user base of roughly 500 million people, then 7.5 million works out to be a whopping 1.5% of all users. This is about the same as saying that elderly Hawaiians are the “face” of the United States of America.

I can only assume that no one on the “American Morning” staff either bothered to take 30 seconds to do the math or even knew how many Facebook users there were in the first place. It reminded me of this piece from the satirical newspaper The Onion from a few years ago about Ted Turner sending himself back in time to prevent the TimeWarner/AOL, which was suppose to vault CNN into the age of "new media". If only Ted, if only...

The Week That Was

Not surprisingly, the news last week was dominated by coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden, with the odd report from Libya thrown in for good measure, but a lot of other things happened around the world, some of them with serious implications for global affairs. Foreign Policy did a nice job of recapping the week that was in this roundup. Among the highlights: an assassination attept against Turkey's Prime Minister; the beginning of trials in Egypt against former officials from the Mubarak regime, along with the suggestion that former President Hosni Mubarak could face the death penalty if he is found to have ordered security forces to fire on pro-democracy demonstrators; and signs of a power struggle within Iran's government, complete with charges of witchcraft.

You can say a lot of things about the world, but you can't say it's a boring place.

Gadhafi and Bin Laden's Strange Link

Quick quiz: name the first country to issue an international arrest warrant for the now-deceased Osama bin Laden. The United States you say? No. Kenya perhaps for the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi? Or Saudi Arabia? Great Britain? Spain?

Nope. It was Libya.

A comment on The Guardian's liveblog of developments in the bin Laden story reminded me of this fact, reported here by Sky News. Way back in March 1998, the government of Moammar Gadhafi (yes, that Gadhafi) issued an arrest warrant for bin Laden in connection with the murder of a German man named Sinvan Becker and his wife, who were supposedly visiting Libya as tourists. Only Becker wasn't merely a tourist, he was one of German intelligence's top analysts on Islamic threats in the Arab world. He and his wife were murdered by four gunmen in the town of Sirte in 1994. The Libyans claimed the gunmen worked for a group called "al Muqatila”, al-Qaeda's branch office in Libya. In 1998 the Libyans passed information about the murder, and bin Laden's supposed involvement, off to Interpol, which then issued the international arrest warrant against bin Laden.

It is a strange world…

Why No Love For Canada?

They had national elections in Canada this week, but unless you're a Canadian this news likely comes as something of a surprise to you. The elections received barely any coverage in the United States, which is disappointing since they turned out to be something of a game-changer for our neighbors to the north: The Conservatives, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, won a solid majority in Parliament; the perennially third-place New Democratic Party (NDP) became the official opposition party after the near collapse of the once powerful Liberals; meanwhile the separatist-minded Bloc Quebecois (which advocates independence for Quebec) lost almost all of their seats, while the Green Party elected a member of Parliament for the first time ever.

All in all, it was a pretty momentous election, which makes the lack of any meaningful coverage in the United States all the more confusing. The United States and Canada share the world's longest demilitarized border, and Canada is the United States' top supplier of imported oil - you would think that we in the US of A would then at least care a little bit about what's going on up there. But the United States has long had a parochial attitude towards Canada, as if their main responsibility was to dance to our tune, or as Homer Simpson once quipped when Bart suggested they go to Toronto: “why should I leave America to go to America Jr.?” From the other side of the border, the Canadians have also had fun with the idea of living in America's perpetual shadow, the comedy show Kids in the Hall once did a skit where a character described Canadians to an unknowing foreign foil as “an American without the gun.”

Unfortunately this comical attitude has a way of affecting serious issues, like our political discourse. Take for example recent moves by some members of Congress to block the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. As proposed, the pipeline would carry synthetic crude oil from the Oil Sands region of Alberta to refineries along the US Gulf Coast. But the crude production from the Oil Sands region has a reputation for being hard on the environment in northern Alberta and for being a major source of greenhouse gas emissions (though this claim is actively disputed). Environmentalists in the US, with the backing of a group of Senators, have been working to block the authorization of construction of Keystone XL on environmental grounds, with the implicit assumption being that without access to US markets, this crude from the Oil Sands just wouldn't be produced. The Canadians though have a different take on the matter and now are just looking into an alternative pipeline route that would carry the production from the Oil Sands westward instead to the Pacific Ocean and eventually onto China.

The point here is that despite our perception of Canada as our over-polite, over-eager little brother who is always glad to follow in our footsteps, Canada is in fact its own country with its own culture, motivations and politics. And their path isn't necessarily the same as ours, so maybe we ought to pay a little more attention to them.

Who Wants To Rule Russia?

There's a new chapter in the ongoing political soap opera “Who Wants To Rule Russia?”, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister (and former President) Vladimir Putin's wrangling over which one of them will run for the top job in next year's presidential elections. The Russian constitution bars anyone from serving more than two consecutive terms, which is why Putin had to turn over the reins of power to Medvedev. While the two publicly present themselves as a “ruling tandem”, conventional wisdom has been that Medvedev is only keeping the seat warm for Putin, who will run for President again in 2012, a job that he could then keep until 2024 after the completion of two more terms in office.

Not so fast, say some familiar with the inner workings of the Kremlin. Medvedev, they say, has grown into the job of president and sees himself as the only one who can push forward much-needed political and economic reforms in Russia, and he's now willing to stand up to The Boss. That's the word from Konstantin Zatulin, a respected member of the Duma (Russian parliament) and a member of Putin's political party, United Russia. Zatulin claims that Medvedev's political allies were working behind the scenes to undermine support for Putin, particularly within the parliament. Medvedev also seems to be asserting himself of late, and in the process taking on Putin. One high-profile action was Medvedev's decision to bar ranking government officials from also serving on corporate boards of directors, an action that seems aimed squarely at one of Putin's most powerful lieutenants, Igor Sechin, a deputy prime minister and also chair of the board of Rosneft, one of Russia's largest energy companies. Medvedev has taken aim at such arrangements, saying that Russia's largest companies are too closely tied with ranking members of the government – a situation that stifles economic growth and hampers foreign investment in Russia. Putin, meanwhile, supports the “statist” approach to governance, where the economy is driven by a few key corporations which themselves are intimately tied to an inner circle of power at the top level of government.

Other Russian political observers disagree with Zatulin’s assessment, either saying that the Putin-Medvedev tandem is strong and that a decision has already been made about which one will stand for election next year, or that Medvedev simply is not powerful enough to push Putin aside. One indication of where things may be headed is a rumor that some members of the Duma may split off from United Russia to form their own political party, likely named “Fair Russia” which could then be a vehicle for a Medvedev 2012 presidential run. And just in case you think there's no humor in this situation, check out the trailer for the disaster movie “2012”, reworked to tell the story of next year's Russian elections.