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Archive for the ‘President’ Category

Update: People within EMI are saying that they are lining up mainstream media exclusives for tomorrow either NY Times or WSJ and want to kill all blog coverage.

More brain drain at Google. Google CIO Douglas Merrill quits and becomes the president of EMI. I just confirmed from a source that Douglas Merrill sent out an email resigning from Google to join EMI as president. Word has it that he will be figuring out the next business models for EMI.

Douglas Merrill

Going to EMI is interesting in that the music industry is trying to become more relevant in their business models.

More as this develops. Here is Douglas Merrill talking about innovation at Google – now he’ll be at EMI trying to figure out innovation in an industry that needs innovation.

All Things D has the story. I like the quote that John P found…

Assad denied meddling in Lebanon as he hosted the summit boycotted by half of the region’s leader[AFP]

Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan president, poured contempt on fellow Arab leaders at a summit that was overshadowed by the absence of several key figures.

At the annual Arab summit, which opened on Saturday, he criticised Arab countries for doing nothing while the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and overthrew Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president.

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Gaddafi also repeated his frequently made proposal that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be settled by creating one democratic state where the two peoples live together, to be called Isratine.
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The Libyan leader’s undiplomatic railing at the disarray of Arab nations has become almost a tradition at the annual gathering.

Al Jazeera’s Middle East analyst, Lamis Andoni said: “Gaddafi says what many think, but do not say. His words reflect a prevailing sentiment in the Arab streets that is fed up with the failure of Arab leaders to rise up to challenges.

‘Your turn is next’

Gaddafi asked: “How can we accept that a foreign power comes to topple an Arab leader while we stand watching?”

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He said Saddam had once been an ally of Washington, “but they sold him out”.

“Your turn is next,” Gaddafi told the Arab officials gathered for the conference, some of whom looked stunned while others broke into laughter at his frankness.

In his speech, the Libyan leader also criticised Arab disunity and inaction on the region’s multiple crises.

“Where is the Arabs’ dignity, their future, their very existence? Everything has disappeared,” he said.

“Our blood and our language may be one, but there is nothing that can unite us.”

Gaddafi also mocked a plan by the Arab League to start Arab cooperation on a joint nuclear programme.

“How can we do that? We hate each other, we wish ill of each other and our intelligence services conspire against each other. We are our own enemy.”

Lebanon dispute

The deep divisions in the Arab League were already apparent after a number of Arab leaders chose to stay away from the summit in Damascus accusing Syria of “meddling” in Lebanon’s domestic affairs.

Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, used his opening address to deny that his country has been blocking the vote for a new Lebanese president.

Damascus is close to Lebanon’s
Hezbollah-led opposition [AFP]

“I would like to make a point with regards to Syrian interference in Lebanon,” he said.

“It is the contrary which is true because pressure has been exerted on Syria for over a year to interfere in Lebanon’s affairs but we have refused to do so.

“The key to a solution is in the hands of the Lebanese. They have their country, constitution and institutions,” he said.

The seat earmarked for Lebanon was left vacant after Fouad Siniora, Lebanon’s prime minister, said his government had decided to boycott the two-day conference because the country should be represented by the president.

Lebanon has been without a president since Emile Lahoud’s term ended in November as the government and Syrian-backed opposition have been unable to reach agreement.

The summit is due to re-endorse an Arab League initiative for Lebanon which calls for the election of Michel Sleiman, army chief general, as president.

In Beirut, university students tore up pictures of the Syrian president, branding him an “assassin” as he chaired the Arab summit boycotted by Lebanon.

US influence

The Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian leaders stayed away after Washington urged its allies to think twice before attending.

But Syria trumpeted the absence of US allies as a triumph over Washington’s influence.

Amr Moussa, the Arab league chief, spoke of how the summit had solidified the rift between Syria and US allies in the Middle East.

He also echoed words from in his speech from last year’s summit, in which he declared that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was dead.

Urging Arab foreign ministers to meet in mid-2008, Moussa asked for leaders attending the conference to reconsider their options on Israel and the current negotiations if no progress is seen in the next few weeks.

Assad also questioned how long Arab nations can keep offering Israel peace negotiations.

Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian president, repeated his request for international peacekeepers to be sent to the Gaza Strip, but Saturday marked the first time he had urged Arab countries to send troops.

The summit came as Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state arrived in the region this weekend for talks with Arab and Israeli leaders on the peace process.

Peace process

In his speech, Abbas took a pessimistic tone over the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations which were renewed in December.

“If we don’t reach a solution by the end of this year, it means the whole region will be on the verge of a new era of tension and loss of confidence
in peace”


Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian president

“The coming couple of months are decisive. If we don’t reach a solution by the end of this year, it means the whole region will be on the verge of a new era of tension and loss of confidence in peace,” he said.

He also criticised Israeli settlement expansion and the recent military assaults in the Gaza Strip aimed at stopping Palestinian rocket fire on Israeli towns.

The Palestinian president called on Arab leaders to renew the endorsement of the Arab peace initiative, pressuring Israel to stop settelement expansion, remove road blocks and lift the siege on Gaza.

Assad warned that Arab countries may have to seek alternatives to a 2002 Arab peace plan if Israel continues to refuse to accept it.

The proposal offers Israel full peace with Arab nations if it withdraws from Arab lands and allows the creation of a Palestinian state.

“The question is: Do we leave the peace process and initiatives hostage to the whims of successive Israeli governments, or do we search for choices and substitutes that can achieve a just and comprehensive peace?” Assad said.

Vice President Dick Cheney listens as President George W. Bush speaks to the media after meeting with the Bicameral Republican Leadership

Vice President Dick Cheney listens as President George W. Bush speaks to the media after meeting with the Bicameral Republican Leadership in the Oval Office of the White House February 15, 2008.

When it comes to power, the Bush Administration has always firmly believed two things: first, the President should have more of it; and second, international institutions like the U.N. should have less of it. In that respect, the landmark ruling on U.S. treaty commitments handed down by the Supreme Court Tuesday seems to be both good news and bad news for Bush and his hard-line colleagues in the office of the Vice President. The court slammed the door on a provocative power grab by the White House, but it also potentially undercut a whole category of treaties, in the process exposing America’s weak system for complying with international law.

From the start, the case turned conventional wisdom on its head. The Administration had argued that Jose Medellin, a Mexican national convicted of rape and murder in Texas but denied access to Mexican consular officials after his arrest, should get a retrial as ordered by the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The idea of Bush and Cheney arguing to take a foreigner off death row because the U.N. court ordered it had baffled right-wingers and internationalists alike. John Bolton, Bush’s former U.N. ambassador, called the Administration’s position “ridiculous,” “crazy,” and a “cave-in” to the State Department. But the big brains at the White House were working with an ingenious plan, or so they thought.

Back in 1969, the U.S. had joined the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, part of which requires countries to give arrested foreigners access to consular officials, as in the movies when a pin-striped diplomat soothes a worried American in some Third World dungeon. The Administration renounced that part of the treaty after the ICJ ruled Medellin should get a retrial. (The U.S. still abides by the parts of the Treaty governing immunity for embassy officials and sovereignty of embassy buildings.) Yet Bush told Texas to retry Medellin anyway — since the ICJ ruling came before the U.S. backed away from the treaty. In essence it was a double power grab: Bush wanted the right to unilaterally leave a treaty — and still order state courts to comply with obligations while the treaty was in effect. The move was supported by, among others, David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, a proponent of expanded presidential powers.

The Supreme Court had different ideas. In Tuesday’s 6-3 decision, the justices rejected outright Bush’s assertion that he could tell state courts what to do. But instead of issuing the final word themselves on whether Texas should retry Medellin, the justices said that was Congress’s job. Most treaties, the Court ruled, don’t automatically apply domestically unless the full Congress passes a separate law specifying how and when the treaty should be implemented.

Some liberals saw this double-tracking of treaty approval as an erosion of America’s respect for international law. Law professor Marty Lederman of Georgetown University, writing on the widely read Scotusblog after the decision was handed down, called the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts “an implausible interpretation” that was “potentially very troubling for construction of treaty obligations going forward.” He worried that by letting states ignore treaties unless Congress ordered them to abide by them, the Supreme Court had opened the door for chaos in compliance with all international law.

Others worry about America’s standing abroad. Though the U.S. abides by most treaty obligations, its reputation has been seriously damaged after eight years of high profile snubs by the Bush Administration — starting with the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, and peaking with Bush’s war on terror end-runs around the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. In fact, Bush’s attempts to expand presidential power, and now the Medellin ruling, have exposed to Americans and foreigners alike the real problem: the weakness of the U.S. system for complying with international law.

America approves formal international treaties differently from almost all other countries, requiring the President and two-thirds of the Senate, but not the House, to sign off on them. Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School, surveyed countries around the world and found that only the U.S. and Tajikistan allow just one part of their legislature to approve a treaty and make it the law of the land. “Most countries make international law the same way they make domestic law,” Hathaway says. The discrepancy has led American conservatives to argue that international law is anti-democratic and an abdication of sovereignty — and raises questions about when and whether Congress really intends Americans to comply with treaties.

Partly for that reason, most of America’s international agreements no longer go through the cumbersome constitutional process anyway, Hathaway found. Between 5 and 20 formal treaties a year have been enacted by the Senate and the President for the last century. More often, international agreements are passed by votes in both chambers of Congress and signed by the President — like a regular law. Treaties approved that way have multiplied from 11 in 1930 to over 300 in 2006. The most famous example is NAFTA, which was passed by both chambers — including the Senate with less than two-thirds supporting it — and was signed by the President.

With the Medellin case, the Supreme Court may have accelerated that trend. By ruling that most traditional treaties only become the law of the land if the full Congress “implements” them, the justices made it more likely that political leaders will opt to pass them as if they were a domestic law. (The Court has previously upheld the full enforceability of treaties passed in that manner.)

That may produce concern abroad in the short term, as foreigners worry any U.S. state can now ignore existing traditional treaties that haven’t been “implemented” by Congress. But by regulariziing American treaty approval in the future, the Court may clarify and even strengthen the force of international law at home. In that sense, the Bush Administration may have lost twice in the Medellin case ruling.


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