By Mary Hennock

China's parliament is frequently dismissed as a rubber stamp body whose delegates agree with every government measure and avoid controversy. This year's session has seen a new trend at work. The two-week gathering of the National People's Congress has seen protesters lobbying hard against a key government policy. No, not Tibet independence activists, angry farmers, or unemployed workers, but company bosses. Many delegates are entrepreneurs, and they're objecting to China's new labor contract law, introduced just over two months ago. "The law is overly-protective of workers' rights," delegate Zong Qinghou told Reuters, adding, "It isn't reasonable." Zong is the chairman of Wahaha Group, China's biggest private soft drinks company.

By Mike Elkin
 
With Spanish national elections two days away, a former Socialist town councilor was assassinated around midday today. Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and opposition leader Mariano Rajoy agreed to cancel the remaining campaign events and have convened a parliamentary session at 7pm to respond to the attack. Government officials attributed to violent separatist group ETA, but no group has claimed responsibility.
 
“The Spanish democracy has shown that it won't allow challenges from those who defy its basic principles and its essential values," said Zapatero. "It hasn't allowed them in the past, it won't allow them now and it will never allow them. Together… we will defend our institutions and our freedoms.” 

The gunman shot dead 42-year-old Isaías Carrasco, who worked at a highway toll station and was a councilman in the town of Arrasate-Mondragón in the Basque Country between 2003 and 2007. He was shot three times as he left his home with his wife and daughter.
 
ETA hasn’t targeted a specific person for assassination since May 2003. It's widely believed that the group is trying to influence the outcome of the election. The separatists, who have killed around 850 people over the past 40 years, appear to be following the precedent set in 2004 when the Madrid train bombings by an Al Qaeda-inspired group tipped the scales in favor of the Socialists. Or perhaps ETA wanted to send a bloody reminder to the country that has been focusing its political attention on the ailing economy and immigration.

It’s hard to say how this attack will affect the elections on Sunday. The initial reaction from the Socialists and Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) has been one of solidarity in the face of a common enemy – a solidarity that has been absent since the Socialists won the last election. The political atmosphere of the past four years and especially this campaign has been tense and angry. And while the PP consistently attacked the government’s anti-terror policy, namely Zapatero’s decision in 2006 to open talks with ETA after it declared a ceasefire, a collective political response is more likely than not.

All the criticism of Russia's deeply flawed presidential election yesterday misses the point: the election was doubtless a farce, with no serious opposition to the Kremlin's man. But Vladimir Putin deserves credit for doing what no other Russian leader has ever done--he voluntarily ceded power at the height of his political career. Boris Yeltsin's 2000 resignation falls into a different category: there was no way he had the health or popularity to continue. Putin does. So for all the terrible things he has wreaked on Russia during his tenure--dismantling Russia's democracy chief among them--one must at least salute the man for keeping his word and respecting the letter, if not the spirit, of Russia's constitution.

The inheritance which he's passing to Dmitry Medvedev, the unsurprising victor of Sunday's vote by a landslide of over 70%, is a different matter. As this week's Economist argues, there are dark clouds on the economic horizon. Putin's reaped the benefits of three years of meteoric rises in oil and gas prices, which have allowed him the luxury, unknown to politicians in the West, of booming State revenues without any increase in taxation. But the flip side of Russia's oil-fuelled boom has been brutal inflation and a growing poverty gap.

How an exploration of Buddhists' forays into politics led to some surprising discoveries

The idea for the piece that became this week's cover story on Buddhist political activism came to me last fall, when I traveled to Southeast Asia to report on the monk-led "Saffron Revolution" in Burma (also known as Myanmar). The fact that Buddhist monks had decided to put themselves at the head of a Burmese opposition movement against the military junta in their country was intriguing. Because the government was refusing visas to journalists, I ended up doing much of the
reporting out of Bangkok, and along the way I also found myself fascinated by the situation in Thailand, where Buddhism has become an increasingly assertive political force in recent years.

Most people outside of the region probably don't tend to think of Buddhism as a political religion. When westerners think of Buddhists, the image that probably comes to mind most readily involves people sitting in the lotus position, calmly meditating in some blissful spot far-removed from the daily tumult of ordinary life. As one leading scholar, Ian Harris at the UK's University of Cumbria, put it to me, "This idea of the monk withdrawn in contemplation is to some extent an Orientalist construction," a cliché indulged by naïve Westerners. Buddhists, he pointed out, have always been deeply involved in the societies in which they live. In medieval times some served as close advisers to kings, while others fought injustice as warriors. In Southeast Asia monks played a major role in decolonization movements after World War II. Nor are Buddhists always noble oppositionists. In Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam Buddhist clergies are tightly subordinate to local governments, and few among the faithful seem visibly disturbed by the idea. "Monks are people, too," notes Thomas Borchert of the University of Vermont. "They're religion specialists but they're citizens. They may not be able to perform politics in quite the same way as other people, but they're still citizens."

And Buddhism, as a faith struggling to contend with the vagaries of twenty-first century life, is finding itself subject to many of the same pressures as other religions: globalization, and the rapid spread of values, information, and money that goes along with it, is challenging traditional beliefs in Buddhist cultures just as elsewhere. "Buddhist monks have to somehow come to terms with rapid changes," says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, one of Thailand's leading political analysts. "Some monks carry mobile phones; lots of monks sleep now in air-conditioned monasteries. This is not just Buddhism. You have a lot of religions that have fundamental beliefs challenged by modernity." Last November a Thai bank proposed an "e-merit-making service," offering users convenient, Internet-assisted ways to make donations to their favorite Buddhist cause and thereby reap a bit of positive karma. Thailand now has thousands of Buddhist websites.

For Sgt. Matthew Villalpando, Tuesday wasn't so Super in Baghdad. The California native has to be at the International Zone's Checkpoint Two by 6 a.m. every day for work, so when the results of the primaries started rolling in late Tuesday night, he was sound asleep in bed with his alarm set for 4 a.m. He didn't even have time to check on what had happened before heading out the door Wednesday morning.

Like Villalpando, most troops were too busy--or tired--to stay up to watch Super Tuesday's results as they unfolded back home. Few had the time to vote themselves, saying that, given their busy schedules, it was not a priority. While the Iraq war provides unprecedented means for soldiers to follow events back home--satellite television, cellular telephones, Internet and daily deliveries of the Stars and Stripes newspaper--there are still pockets that are out of touch. In a new base set up two weeks ago in an abandoned house in the Arab Jabour area, less than 100 soldiers live without any hook-up to the civilian world--they only have one room with electricity so far. Not only did most not know Super Tuesday was held yesterday, many still did not know the outcome of the Super Bowl.

Soldiers abroad vote by absentee ballot, which they can request over the Internet from their home states. Voting Assistance Officers at the U.S. Embassy can also help, but some still say the process should be made simpler.

By Barbie Nadeau

Even by Italian political standards, it was a bad week for Romano Prodi, Italy's now defunct prime minister. At various times over the past 20 months, it has seemed that the most Prodi's coalition had accomplished in power was, quite simply, not collapsing. Prodi's efforts to fight tax evasion and to reform various governmental entities were overshadowed by headlines about Neapolitan garbage and Spain bypassing Italian per capita GDP.  Was there really anywhere for the former economics professor to go but down?

With news of U.S. and Iranian ships passing uncomfortably close in the night off the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend, it's time once again to consider what's on the minds of the power-brokers in Tehran. Was the incident the result of rogue Revolutionary Guard ship commanders or part of a deliberate escalation by Iran? That the incident was announced by the Pentagon is noteworthy, as Iran might have been expected to toot its own horn, were it proud of the maneuvers. (Think of the drama it whipped up over the British seamen captured in the same waterway back in 2007.) This time, the official line from Tehran is that this was the "normal" kind of bumper-to-bumper traffic in the strait.

This is the foreign policy parlor game that used to be called "Kremlinology" during the old Cold War, and has no name at all now. But all intelligent guessing aside, one thing is clear: as a contentious symbol in the struggle between reformists and conservatives in Iran, America remains without peer. In legislative elections scheduled for March 14, conservative supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are attempting to maintain their dominance by appealing to a sense of nationalism -- specifically touting the president's success in countering U.S. threats and "intimidation." For their part, the reformists are playing on the suspicions of many Iranians that Ahmadinejad's provocations risk too much in the service of too little.

While the reformists have been distracted in recent days by the usual controversies over who can vote (the conservative parliament just passed a bill raising the voting age) and which of their candidates can run (an unelected government body can toss out any candidate deemed to be insufficiently "qualified"), the conservatives have, appropriately enough, had their analytic eyes trained on America.

Here's the revealing close to an otherwise windy tract in the January 5 edition of Iran's conservative Jomhuri-ye Eslami:

"Due to the continuous failures of the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan, the circumstance is extremely difficult for the Republicans inside America. The situation is so dramatic in the Republican camp that an unknown candidate like [Gov. Mike] Huckabee has won the internal Republican election [referring to the Iowa caucus]. Huckabee's victory sends this message to Bush and his administration that they have lost their popularity even amongst their own party members. The Democrats have also faced a similar situation. Due to their failure to take the Bush administration into account the people do not trust the main body of the Democrats anymore. ... The victory of Obama and Huckabee proves the failure of both leaders of the two main parties in America and a gradual deterioration of America's power in general."

The purpose of such agit-prop is unmistakable. To any voters worried about American reprisal in the face of Iran's nuclear policy, the message from Ahmadinejad's forces is that the U.S. electorate is sure to blink first and change political course -- like a ship in the strait -- as part of an increasing powerlessness. Therefore, a tack in the direction of Iran's own "agents of change" in the legislative elections would be not only unnecessary, but the renunciation of a great victory. In this light, it's not hard to understand how the decision to instigate some mischief on the Strait of Hormuz might have been conceived. And while there's no guarantee such stunts will continue to work on Iran's voters, Iran's conservatives must privately be weeping over the coming end to the era of such ready-made propaganda in the Bush 43 years. Just as we no longer have an analogue for "Kremlinology," so, too, will they be forced to discard some expired political language at approximately this time next year.

The U.S. is ratcheting up its opposition to an obscure Taiwan referendum. That's especially odd since the vote -- whatever its outcome -- will have no practical effect on Taiwan's standing or on the cross-strait status quo. The referendum, if it goes ahead as planned together with the presidential vote on March 22, will ask Taiwan voters if the island should seek to join the United Nations with the name "Taiwan."

Last Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the referendum a "provocative policy", adding, "It unnecessarily raises tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and it promises no real benefits for the people of Taiwan on the international stage." Certainly, the vote won't change Taiwan's status. With China on the UN Security Council and only 24 small countries recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign state, any Taiwanese bid for UN membership -- no matter which name it uses -- is doomed.

Latin America's rainmakers are not in the habit of eating humble pie. Until just the other day, after all, hyper-popular leaders like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could do just about what they pleased, leaving their political foes little choice but to stand by and stew in frustration. But if recent events are any indication, the Latin charismacrats may have to get used to an unsavory set of new rules.

Across the region, democracy is biting back. On Dec. 1, Venezuelans handed Chávez a stinging defeat by turning down a 69-point referendum proposing everything from curbing private property to unlimited reelection. It was El Comandante's first loss at the ballot box, and a sign that the ballyhooed Bolivarian revolution will not be implemented by steamroller. Nor are things looking so rosy for Chávez's closest disciple, Morales, the coca-leaf grower-turned-messianic leader, who vowed to recreate Bolivia by recasting the constitution to redeem the country's teeming poor and forgotten. Now he presides over a nation riven ethnically, between the destitute indigenous majority and the relatively well-heeled light skinned heirs of the Spanish colonialists; geographically, between the hardscrabble Altiplano and the fertile, oil-and-gas-rich lowlands; and ideologically, between the left-wing nationalists who blame foreigners for Bolivia's woes and the globalists who want desperately to connect to world markets. So volatile is the political climate, the constituent assembly had to finish drafting the new constitution under military guard.