This article by Christian Davenport of the Washington Post is as dry as used cooking parchment and could have been taken from the pages of a contemporary American novel. Nice one Christian. His story of military incompetence and corruption in the burial of the dead and the subsequent scandals over favoured reservations has to be seen as an allegory of modern American life…..you can’t get away from these issues even when you die for your country.

Officials at Arlington National Cemetery — still unable to fully account for who is buried where at the nation’s premier military resting place — are struggling to determine who has reserved plots and whether some of those grave sites are already in use.
Years of sloppy recordkeeping have left officials with no reliable data on how many reservations have been made for plots in the 624-acre cemetery. The problem — along with the discovery that an unofficial reservation system for VIPs continued for decades in violation of Army regulations — is yet another challenge for the cemetery’s new leaders.
Last year, Army investigators found that graves were mismarked and unmarked, that burial urns had been unearthed and dumped in a dirt pile, and that millions of dollars had been wasted on failed attempts to digitize the cemetery’s paper record system. As a result, the Army ousted the cemetery’s top two leaders, Superintendent John C. Metzler Jr. and his deputy, Thurman Higginbotham.
Since then, more problems have emerged, including the discovery of people buried in the wrong plots and a mass grave that held eight sets of cremated remains.
The cemetery’s new leaders are dealing with the reservations mess — an issue that highlights how deeply some care about not only being interred at Arlington but also about where in the cemetery they are buried. The reservations were made under a little-known system that ended in 1962, as the cemetery grew in popularity and officials decided that its coveted plots should be offered without regard to rank or status.
But not all of the cemetery’s 70 sections were created equal. Some sit atop hills with views of Washington and are full of Medal of Honor recipients and high-ranking officials. Others are in out-of-the-way corners rarely visited by tourists. Some of the most prestigious are close to the Tomb of the Unknowns or the eternal flame at John F. Kennedy’s grave.
The cemetery’s inability to keep track of the reservations is causing heartache and anger among family members who had long thought the final resting places were secure.
Kathryn Condon, who was appointed executive director of the Army National Cemeteries Program last year in the aftermath of the scandal, said that the cemetery has 3,500 reservations on file but that there could be more.
“As part of our accountability, we’re going to look at all of those reservations,” she said.
Cemetery officials have no idea how many of the reservations on file are still valid, Condon said. Officials aren’t sure whether everyone on the list is still alive — some reservations date to the late 1800s — or still wants to be buried at Arlington. They also don’t know how many plots are marked as “reserved” on cemetery maps. But the number could be substantial. The Washington Post counted nearly 300 such plots in a prestigious section near the Memorial Amphitheater that had 1,361 grave sites.
Another problem has been that although Arlington honors reservations made before 1962, it does so only if the person meets current eligibility requirements for burial at the cemetery. The criteria have become stricter since the 1960s: Veterans now must have died while on active duty, be entitled to retirement pay or have received a top award such as the Medal of Honor.
But the cemetery hasn’t always told families that their reservations may no longer be valid.
‘Very upsetting’
The letter, dated Feb. 1, 1954, declared that based on his five years of service, Carl Bauersfeld and his wife were eligible for burial in a national cemetery; the superintendent of Arlington would be advised to set aside two graves near those of Bauersfeld’s parents — 602-4 and 602-5 in Section 34.
The Bauersfelds kept the letter for decades, and when Carl died in 2009, his son, who is also named Carl, presented it to the cemetery.
But the cemetery declined to honor the reservation, even though the plot was still available. Although the elder Bauersfeld had been eligible in 1954 for burial, the rules had changed, and he did not meet the current requirements. That came as a shock to family members, who said they were never notified that the reservation was no longer valid. Now, in addition to dealing with his grief, the younger Bauersfeld found himself unable to fulfill his father’s wish.
“My father asked me to handle his burial at Arlington,” he said. “This whole thing is very upsetting to me, because I have not been able to do what I have been asked to do.”
Ultimately, the cemetery agreed that Carl Bauersfeld could be buried there, but not in his own grave. He was interred in the same plot that held his father’s remains.
“They say they changed the rules, but they never contacted him during his life,” the younger Bauersfeld said. “Only in death do we find out. . . . This is a clear case of not honoring their commitments.”
John Britton feels the same way about how his family was treated.
In 1960, the Britton family was granted reservations for 10 contiguous burial plots by the Army’s quartermaster general. They were in a choice section so close to the Tomb of the Unknowns that you can hear the clicking of the soldiers’ heels during the changing of the guard.
For years afterward, the cemetery honored those reservations, burying Brittons in their set-aside graves. But in 2001, John Britton visited his family’s grave sites and discovered that the cemetery had buried other people in five of the remaining plots.
“I was madder than a hoot owl,” the 79-year-old Fauquier County man said.
Eventually, the cemetery admitted the error, which Metzler wrote was “due to an administrative oversight.” The Brittons were offered several other plots nearby.
But according to a map of the section, three of those new graves had been reserved for other people, and one was marked as obstructed. Not wanting to take spaces that had been promised to others, the Brittons refused.
Late last year, the cemetery’s new administration offered the Brittons several other grave sites, but all of them are marked on the maps as obstructed.
The cemetery declined to discuss the specifics of the offer but said that obstructed graves can be reviewed over time and deemed available. The Brittons still want their original plots, but most of the families of those buried there don’t want their loved ones to be moved, and without their consent, the cemetery will not disinter them.
‘De facto reserved’
Although the cemetery stopped formally taking reservations in 1962, the practice of reserving choice grave sites continued, if unofficially, under Raymond J. Costanzo, who was superintendent from 1972 to 1990. Metzler, his successor, who ran the cemetery until he was forced to retire last year, also apparently allowed people to pick areas of the cemetery where they wanted to be buried, Army officials said.
The Army, which investigated the matter two decades ago and is looking into it again, has a list from 1990 with “senior officials” who have plots that “were de facto reserved in violation of Army policy,” according to a memo obtained by The Post under the Freedom of Information Act. Some of those officials were driven around the cemetery by Costanzo, who told investigators that he had allowed them to pick their spots.
“I take the position that if there is anything I can do positively for a person, I will try to do that as long as it is not a serious violation of any rule, regulation or law,” he told investigators at the time.
Five months after receiving a request from The Post, the Army has declined to release the 1990 list of people with reservations. It has not released documents, found by Condon, that appeared to show that Metzler also pre-assigned grave sites or promised availability in certain sections. She has since turned the documents over to the Army inspector general. (The revelation that graves were reserved unofficially was first reported by Salon.com last year.)
Superintendents of national cemeteries, especially those with limited space, are often under pressure to find choice spots for important people, none more so than Arlington’s, said Roger Rapp, a former deputy undersecretary for operations with the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Cemetery Administration.
“I’ve been with Jack, and he’s told me the amount of calls he got from senators and high-ranking officials — people concerned about would they have a spot or a particular spot in the cemetery,” said Rapp, who has been friends with Metzler for 30 years. “I know he was under tremendous pressure.”
To accommodate that pressure, cemetery directors have to keep graves in sought-after sections “in your hip pocket,” he said. “If a Supreme Court justice dies and if the cemetery director does not put them in an area where the other Supreme Court justices are, it makes him look like he’s not doing his job. Most cemetery directors know where they can find burial space. That’s just the way it is.”
Metzler, who has repeatedly declined to give interviews, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Condon said the cemetery would not honor any reservations made after 1962.
“We do not do reservations, and anyone who claims to have a reservation post-1962, we do not accommodate them,” she said. “When the loved one or veteran passes, that’s when we determine where we’ll bury them.”
In the eight months that she has been running the cemetery, Condon has turned down several people who said they had been promised a burial plot.
“I’m off a lot of people’s Christmas card lists,” she said.
Condon said the cemetery does “accommodate families in their time of need” by allowing survivors to choose an area of the cemetery for their loved one as they plan the funeral. If there is an available grave site in that area, she said, the family would be granted the spot.
Section 7A, near the Tomb of the Unknowns, is full of generals and Medal of Honor recipients. Lee Marvin, the actor and a World War II veteran, and Joe Louis, the boxing champion, are buried there. So are Costanzo and Metzler’s father, who was Arlington’s superintendent from 1951 to 1972.
Cemetery officials said that if the younger Metzler is buried at Arlington, he would be treated like everyone else: unable to reserve a site but allowed to request a general area of the cemetery, as long as there are grave sites available.
There aren’t many left in Section 7A. But the plot in front of his father’s grave is vacant.

This story in today’s Telegraph is one of many about Japan’s impending nuclear disaster, but I think the simple and poignant image of the railway station is one which will stay with me for a while.

The railway station at Nasushiobara, the last one still operating near Japan’s  nuclear crisis area, was jammed with frightened people. In this ghost town of closed shops and offices, pedestrian-free pavements, and empty petrol pumps, the station was the only place still alive, and the only escape route that most had left.

The Tokyo highway a mile to the west was busy, too – but you needed a lot of petrol to get to Tokyo. At the only garage which still had it, there was a five-hour queue. With radiation now leaking from the stricken plant just down the road, there might not be five hours to spare.

From the town and the whole surrounding region, on foot, by bicycle and using the last fuel in their tanks, the people came to the railway station, a river turning into a flood as word spread of just how serious the danger now was.

“I couldn’t sleep and I was watching TV,” said Noriyuki Fukada, an English teacher. “Then it was announced that there would be a government statement at 6.30. I thought, if the government announces something at 6.30am, it cannot be good.”

It wasn’t. Radioactive fuel rods in one of the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactors, the official spokesman admitted, were now “fully exposed”, at risk of meltdown, and radiation had escaped into the atmosphere. Ninety per cent of the plant’s own staff were evacuated, leaving only a skeleton team fighting off catastrophe. Most serious of all, an explosion the previous day – the plant’s third – might have damaged a reactor containment vessel.

The containment vessels are the last barriers between the reactors’ cores and the outside world, the very things the government has spent the last several days promising will protect us. A few hours later, the chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, appeared on television.

“Now we are talking about levels [of leakage] that can impact human health. I would like all of you to embrace this information calmly,” he said. But the beads of sweat were clearly visible on his own brow.

By that point, however, I, and a good part of the population of the district around Koriyama, the major town closest to the stricken plant, were getting out. Mr Edano was telling us to stay indoors and keep our windows closed. But old habits of deference to authority were breaking down after days of conflicting and partial information, evacuations and evasions. Many were taking matters into their own hands.

Koriyama’s own station has been closed for days, but the word was that there were still a few trains, for the moment, at Nasushiobara, 25 miles away. In another humbling example of Japanese kindness and hospitality, the family I stayed with on Monday night decided to use some of their precious petrol to drive me there – and would accept no payment. We joined a line of cars heading south.

Arriving at the station, it was a vast relief to see the long white snout of a bullet train. Japan’s reputation in nuclear matters might have taken a knock, but at least they can lay on a fast getaway vehicle.

Inside the booking hall, there was Japanese-style panic – whose symptoms are not the same as those of Western-style panic. Even without the shouting and fighting, people were clearly under great strain. Many had flared nostrils and terrified eyes.

The electronic departure board showed only two more trains that day, far too few for the swelling crowd. This caused a nasty moment, a low murmur of anger when the mood threatened to turn markedly ugly, but the board turned out to be wrong, as white-gloved railway officials hastily explained through little loudhailers. The TV screens showing the latest 24-hour rolling news were tactfully switched off.

A quarrel broke out in the ticket queue when one man tried to pay by credit card, holding everybody up. But there still was a ticket queue, and a queue to board, even though it was about half a mile long. Most people were too stressed to talk, or had no English. “Very happy,” said one man. “Very happy to get out.”

Two slightly grubby European backpackers – the only other Westerners there – looked every bit as pleased, but were swept away in the crowd before I could talk to them. Other people’s backpacks, and suitcases, were of a size suggesting they expected to be away for a while. There were big family groups, too, with children and old people.

Fascinatingly, while thousands were waiting to leave, a small trickle of people actually arrived on the inbound express from Tokyo. Had they not heard the news?

The train left without an inch of spare standing space in any doorway or aisle. As we charged away from the reactor at 110mph, the atmosphere became noticeably lighter, and I felt my own spirits lifting. The difference between fear and relief was only about 75 minutes – though, with the wind blowing towards Tokyo, and higher radiation levels already present in the city, the feeling of deliverance may well be an illusory one.

Mr Fukada, the English teacher, said: “People are fed up with being told what to do and treated like fools. The problem with radiation is that you cannot know anything – you depend on the government for the information to save your life. Now we are acting for ourselves, but the worry is that we left it too late.”

Perhaps we did. But the train, at least, arrived precisely on time.

This was published yesterday from an internal memo to Nokia employees from Chief exec Stephen Elop about abrupt changes in the fast moving world of the smart phone. Brilliant stuff. Found on a blog called iClarified.

There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.

As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a “burning platform,” and he needed to make a choice.

He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times – his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a “burning platform” caused a radical change in his behaviour.

We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.

Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you what I’ve heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I’m going to share what I’ve learned and what I have come to believe.

I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.

And, we have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us.

For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.

In 2008, Apple’s market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.

And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core.

Let’s not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally – taking share from us in emerging markets.

While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.

The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.

We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.

At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.

At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.” They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.

And the truly perplexing aspect is that we’re not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we’ve lost market share, we’ve lost mind share and we’ve lost time.

On Tuesday, Standard & Poor’s informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody’s took last week. Basically it means that during the next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness.

Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It’s also down in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on.

How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?

This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally.

Nokia, our platform is burning.

We are working on a path forward — a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future.

The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.

Stephen.

This article caught my interest from the Washington Post today. Where will unrest in the Middle East actually stop?

AMMAN, Jordan — Jordan’s King Abdullah II fired his government Tuesday in the wake of street protests and asked an ex-prime minister to form a new Cabinet, ordering him to launch immediate political reforms.

The dismissal follows several large protests across Jordan- inspired by similar demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt – calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Samir Rifai, who is blamed for a rise in fuel and food prices and slowed political reforms.

A Royal Palace statement said Abdullah accepted Rifai’s resignation tendered earlier Tuesday.

The king named Marouf al-Bakhit as his prime minister-designate, instructing him to “undertake quick and tangible steps for real political reforms, which reflect our vision for comprehensive modernization and development in Jordan,” the palace statement said.

Al-Bakhit previously served as Jordan’s premier from 2005-2007.

The king also stressed that economic reform was a “necessity to provide a better life for our people, but we won’t be able to attain that without real political reforms, which must increase popular participation in the decision-making.”

He asked al-Bakhit for a “comprehensive assessment … to correct the mistakes of the past.” He did not elaborate. The statement said Abdullah also demanded an “immediate revision” of laws governing politics and public freedoms.

When he ascended to the throne in 1999, King Abdullah vowed to press ahead with political reforms initiated by his late father, King Hussein. Those reforms paved the way for the first parliamentary election in 1989 after a 22-year gap, the revival of a multiparty system and the suspension of martial law in effect since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

But little has been done since. Although laws were enacted to ensure greater press freedom, journalists are still prosecuted for expressing their opinion or for comments considered slanderous of the king and the royal family.

Some gains been made in women’s rights, but many say they have not gone far enough. Abdullah has pressed for stiffer penalties for perpetrators of “honor killings,” but courts often hand down lenient sentences.

Still, Jordan’s human rights record is generally considered a notch above that of Tunisia and Egypt. Although some critics of the king are prosecuted, they frequently are pardoned and some are even rewarded with government posts.

It was not immediately clear when al-Bakhit will name his Cabinet.

Al-Bakhit is a moderate politician, who served as Jordan’s ambassador to Israel earlier this decade.

He holds similar views to Abdullah in keeping close ties with Israel under a peace treaty signed in 1994 and strong relations with the United States, Jordan’s largest aid donor and longtime ally.

In 2005, Abdullah named al-Bakhit as his prime minister days after a triple bombing on Amman hotels claimed by the al-Qaida in Iraq leader, Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

During his 2005-2007 tenure, al-Bakhit – an ex-army major general and top intelligence adviser – was credited with maintaining security and stability following the attack, which killed 60 people and labeled as the worst in Jordan’s modern history.

Interesting little article which came out yesterday in the Guardian – especially as many first time buyers are struggling to get a small mortgage.

A lawyer and his doctor wife who blazed a trail through Ireland’s property boom on the back of colossal credit – buying up several London trophy buildings on the way – now owe more than €800m (£670m) to banks around the world, it has emerged.

The eye-popping scale of Brian and Mary Pat O’Donnell’s debts has been laid bare in a court case brought by Bank of Ireland in relation to some €70m (£58m) in debts it is trying to recover.

The couple, from Killiney, county Dublin, are fighting the case and say the bank is trying to make them sell one of their prime London assets – Sanctuary Buildings, used by the Department for Education and Skills – without legal entitlement.

The office block is just metres from the Houses of Parliament and was the first of many audacious moves made by the solicitor and his wife into the property market at a time when Ireland’s banks were making huge loans that have since brought the country to its knees and forced Dublin to accept a bailout from the EU and IMF.

The Bank of Ireland loaned the O’Donnells €26.7m towards the £170m purchase price in 2006. The couple then went on to expand their empire to Stockholm, where they bought the city’s biggest office block, Fatburen for €285m.

In April 2008, when the worldwide credit crunch was beginning to bite and had already claimed the likes of Bear Stearns in New York, the couple were still able to access funds.

With the strength of the euro in their favour, the O’Donnells managed to outbid a group from Dubai to pay a record $172.5m (£87m) for an office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, just a few blocks from the White House.

This was what the O’Donnell’s Vico Capital described as “trophy class” with “sweeping views of the White House, the Monuments and the Potomac River”. Its tenants included a law firm and a merchant bank and it was described in the local property press as a smart buy.

Vico Capital set a record, paying $867 (£436) for every square foot of the their Washington investment. The previous record in the American capital was $827.

Arguably, even more audacious was the acquisition of two buildings in London’s Canary Wharf – the purchase of 17 Columbus Courtyard in 2005 for £125m and 15 Westferry Circus for £140m. The first building is home to Credit Suisse and the second to Morgan Stanley.

For years, it probably seemed nothing could go wrong. The O’Donnells live in a clifftop home in one of Ireland’s most salubrious suburban roads and count the U2 frontman Bono among their neighbours.

The O’Donnells’ rise in the property sector mirrors that of dozens of other investors who got sucked in during the Celtic Tiger years when credit was cheap and capital yields, or profit on buildings, meant millions could be made, often in just a number of weeks.

But unlike many other middle-class professionals of their ilk who dabbled in the property market with a few buy-to-lets, this couple became major players and amassed an international property portfolio of more than €1.1bn (£921m) with a rent roll of some €150m (£125m).

They are, however, a low profile couple, and are aghast that their private financial affairs are now being made public. It is understood that as recently as last weekend, they tried to get a court approved mediation process underway.

“Most people in Dublin wouldn’t know what they looked like. They are an extremely private family and would have hoped to have continued to conduct their business in private,” said a source close to the couple.

Their case is the latest in a series of court actions being instigated against property developers now bearing the brunt of Ireland’s financial collapse.

According to informed sources there are two other private investors in the O’Donnells’ Sanctuary Buildings in Westminster and there are concerns that the court case will lead to “value destruction”. However the O’Donnells are determined to tough it out and have been given three weeks to put together a case for a fuller court hearing.

O’Donnell, 58, is one of Dublin’s leading commercial lawyers and ironically is on a list of 64 potential legal advisers approved by Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency – the new state bank which has been charged with clearing the mountain of bad debt amassed by property developers during the good times. Nama said O’Donnell had not been used in any case.

His practice, Brian O’Donnell solicitors, has the usual run of commercial expertise including mergers and acquisitions, corporate restructuring, insolvency and tax structuring. His practice, however, is not high profile in the media.

He first diversified into a serious property business back in 1999 and, with access to funds from a string of banks including Bank of Ireland, Ulster Bank and Anglo-Irish, made his audacious moves in London, Scandinavia and the US.

Ten years later he and his wife, now 56, who are relatively low-key on the Dublin social circuit, were listed on the Sunday Times Rich List – 178th richest in Ireland, alongside another, more high profile property investor Derek Quinlan.

Quinlan, a former tax inspector who also caught the property bug, ended up with the crown jewels of London’s hotel and retail trade including the Savoy Hotel, Claridges and a retail block between Harvey Nichols and Knightsbridge in London.

I love the New Scientist predictions for the coming year. The idea of the Superman robot we could send on missions to do a job for us whilst we were otherwise engaged has been around for as long as —well Superman comics. 2011 preview: Enter the robot self – tech – 29 December 2010 – New Scientist.

This could be the year when we quit dragging ourselves to work and send remote-controlled robot avatars instead

Why drag yourself to work through rush-hour traffic when you can stay at home and send a remote-controlled robot instead?

Firms in the US and Japan are already selling robot avatars that allow office workers to be in two places at once. So 2011 could be the year when many of us find ourselves sitting across the desk from an electronic colleague.

Californian company Willow Garage is developing a so-called telepresence robot called Texai, while Anybots, also in California, recently launched the QB office bot.

The QB, which looks like a small Segway vehicle with a robot head on top, can travel at 6 kilometres per hour, using a laser scanner to avoid books and other office clutter.

It can be controlled via a web browser from anywhere in the world and has camera eyes to allow you to navigate your robot’s surroundings and see who you are talking to. A small LCD screen on the head means your colleagues can see you too.

You could argue that if you were planning to talk to people in other offices you could just use a videoconferencing system rather than a $15,000 robot. But logging into a robot bodyMovie Camera allows people to move around in a relatively normal way, says Trevor Blackwell of Anybots.

“If you have a bunch of people who are all used to talking to each other wherever they want to, it is a bit of an imposition to say, ‘OK, from now on all conversations have to be in the videoconferencing room’.”

Talking to a robot colleague might feel strange at first, but people seem to get used to it quite quickly. “Someone recently came to the office asking for me, and a colleague told them they had just seen me,” says Blackwell. “But actually it was the robot they had seen. I was still at home.”

This is a fabulous article by Lev Grossman in The Men Who Stole the World -TimeFrames- Printout – TIME.”>Time magazine. He charts four killer moments in technological development over recent years- including one I haven’t yet tried but certainly am about to….

A decade ago, four young men changed the way the world works. They did this not with laws or guns or money but with software: they had radical, disruptive ideas, which they turned into code, which they released on the Internet for free. These four men, not one of whom finished college, laid the foundations for much of the digital-media environment we currently inhabit. Then, for all intents and purposes, they vanished.

In 1999 a Northeastern University freshman named Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thereby pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing and a new paradigm for consuming media without the intermediary of a big studio or retailer. TIME put him on its cover, as did FORTUNE. He was 19 years old. (See the 50 Best Inventions of 2010.)

That same year, a Norwegian teenager named Jon Lech Johansen, working with two other programmers whose identities are still unknown, wrote a program that could decrypt commercial DVDs, and he became internationally infamous as “DVD Jon.” He was 15.

In 1997, Justin Frankel, an 18-year-old hacker in Sedona, Ariz., wrote a free MP3 player called WinAmp, which became a fixture on Windows machines and helped mainstream the digital-music revolution. During its first 18 months in release, 15 million people downloaded it. Three years later, Frankel wrote Gnutella, a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol so decentralized that, unlike Napster, it could not be shut down. Millions of people still use it.

In 2001, Bram Cohen, then 26, wrote a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol called BitTorrent that featured an elegant new architecture optimized for handling large files. BitTorrent has become the standard for distributing big chunks of data over the Internet.

In the first half of the 2000s, TIME interviewed each of these programmers. At the time, it looked as if they were poised to dismantle the entire media-entertainment complex and bring about a digital apocalypse that would make it impossible to charge money for movies, music or TV ever again. Artists would no longer get paid for their work, and the huge entertainment conglomerates, Time Warner among them, would be bombed flat. The pirates were coming for corporate America.

“After all,” we wrote in 2003, “you can’t have an information economy in which all information is free.” And if the apocalypse was coming, Fanning, Johansen, Frankel and Cohen were the four horsemen.

Apocalypse Not
So that didn’t happen. Change has come to the entertainment industry, but it’s been a lot more complicated and gradual than we expected. And the story of what did happen, and what the pirate kings have done since then, is highly instructive if you want to understand what’s going on in the digital world right now. Fanning, Johansen, Frankel and Cohen are all running small, legal Silicon Valley software firms. They’ve gotten out of the pirate business — if they were ever really in it at all.

See the All-TIME 100 gadgets.

Fanning, the only one of the four who didn’t respond to requests for an interview, quit the media-apocalypse business early. In 2001, Napster shut down under the weight of lawsuits that claimed it was aiding and abetting copyright infringement. And in 2002, Fanning founded a new service, Snocap — his attempt to take file sharing legit. With the cooperation of the record companies, Snocap was going to give consumers the power to compensate the artists whose work they downloaded.

But by then, free file-sharing programs were growing virally, and consumers were high on the rush of swapping music hard drive to hard drive for nothing. They traded more than 3 billion files in August 2001 alone. Attaching dollars to those transactions proved to be impossible. It’s hard to compete with free. Fanning had created a monster even he couldn’t beat. (See a video about the new music biz.)

So he stopped trying. Fanning’s next project was a social network for gamers called Rupture, which he sold to Electronic Arts in 2008 for something on the order of $15 million — his first serious payday. His current start-up, Path, which launched in November, is an iPhone-based photo-sharing service.

And Napster? It still exists. The brand was sold at a bankruptcy auction and then sold again, but it has never been restored to anything approaching relevance. It’s currently operated by Best Buy as an also-also-ran competitor to iTunes under the slogan “More than just a music store.”

The Pirate Who Wasn’t
As the author of Gnutella, Justin Frankel was Fanning’s rightful successor. Unlike Fanning, he got his payday early in the game. In 1999, after WinAmp hit it big, AOL bought both it and Frankel’s company, Nullsoft, for something in the neighborhood of $100 million. That made Frankel a very rich 20-year-old. It also made him an AOL employee.

It wasn’t a great match. With Nullsoft, Frankel’s modus operandi had been to write the best software he could, then give it away for nothing. At AOL the business of selling software threatened to overwhelm the software itself. “The products that I worked on, it was very much like, We want to make this money out of this. We’re doing this deal with these other companies, and so the product is going to do this as a result,” he remembers. “No one cared about how users actually experienced it.”

Meanwhile, Frankel was writing Gnutella in his spare time. It was a brilliant hack: unlike Napster, it was genuinely distributed, with no central server and therefore no off button for the lawyers to push. He posted it online in March 2000 with a note: “See? AOL can bring you good things!” But reinventing Napster did not endear Frankel to AOL, a huge Internet company that was trying to merge with a major media company, Time Warner, that was in the middle of suing Napster. He left AOL in 2004.

Then he did something funny: instead of glorying in the success of his creations, he walked away. He doesn’t use Gnutella, and he never made a dime off it, even though 10 years later, LimeWire — the most popular Gnutella client — still claims 50 million users. “When I wrote it, it was primarily as a sort of, This is proof of what is possible. Let’s not all go profit from it,” he says. “So it made sense to not even have anything to do with it. It was more of a concept.”

See pictures of the movies’ most evil computer villans.

Frankel, who recently moved from San Francisco to New York City, now works full time at his company, Cockos (don’t ask), which is focused on an audio-production suite called Reaper. He constantly improves it, and he stays in close touch with his customers, who number in the tens of thousands rather than the millions. “There’s no goal of growing a certain amount or having an exit strategy,” he says. “It’s just about enjoying the process and doing the right thing.” He would certainly never describe himself as the world’s most dangerous geek, as Rolling Stone did in 2004. “I don’t see piracy as really being that dangerous,” he says. “Ultimately, people who have business models that depend on strong controls for everything — those are flawed models. And I say that as a software developer, where there’s a certain level of piracy.” Gnutella is ancient history to him. “Digital piracy: Has it destroyed the music industry? No. Has the music industry had to adapt? Sure, and many would say for the better. You have people focusing more on quality, smaller bands, things like that.”

“As far as the big business of hits and pop music, did that suffer?” he continues. He shrugs and laughs. “I hope so.” (See the all TIME 100 albums.)

Four-Eyed Monsters
Of the four horsemen, Bram Cohen is the only one who still works on the same project he started 10 years ago. He is the co-founder and chief scientist of BitTorrent, a respectable San Francisco firm that pursues commercial applications for Cohen’s stunningly effective content-distribution technology.

It’s a curious company: a legitimate business built on a technology that is still used to violate copyright on a grand scale. Even though BitTorrent has an installed base of something like 80 million users, it functions a lot like a start-up. A relatively small slice of what goes on on BitTorrent is legal — one recent study put it at 11%. A relatively small slice of that small slice generates income for BitTorrent. (See the all TIME 100 albums.)

Just as Fanning did with Snocap, Cohen tried to move his creation out of the realm of mass piracy and into the legit world of trading bits for money. In 2007, in what was at the time a shocking development, BitTorrent partnered with 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. and MGM, among others, to form the Torrent Entertainment Network, offering movies, TV shows and video games for purchase and rental.

Like Fanning, Cohen learned that getting out of the piracy business is harder than it looks. “Everything about it was a disaster,” he says. The Torrent Entertainment Network shut down at the end of 2008. In retrospect, you can see why it didn’t work. BitTorrent isn’t user-friendly enough for a mass audience, and on a deeper level it’s just too efficient. It moves huge amounts of data quickly and virally. When you want to attach dollars to data, you have to slow the bit stream down, track it and control it using inelegant technologies like digital-rights management (DRM), which restricts what users can do with what they buy.

“I learned a lot of lessons from that failure,” Cohen says ruefully. His strategy now is to work with people who want what he has to offer: rapid, viral digital distribution. “Instead of going to major content holders and paying them up front for the privilege of trying to leverage our channel, we’re just taking the very large channel we have and going to people who are interested in doing things in a much more open manner.”

See pictures of a brief history of the computer.

So far, the interested parties include the makers of an indie film called Four Eyed Monsters and the creators of an independent TV show called Pioneer One, which to date consists of one episode, though there are a couple more on the way. It’s frustrating: Cohen is sitting on a fire hose, the kind of runaway technological success story that coders dream of, and the big players don’t want to play.

Why does he bother? As a coding legend, Cohen could easily find employment at a big corporation. But that’s not his style. “I need a certain amount of freedom,” he says. He’s now working on something wholly new: a peer-to-peer system designed for streaming real-time data instead of discrete files. It’s a project that could have enormous potential as a way to distribute live media, like news or sports, over the Net. He still maintains BitTorrent, but it doesn’t take up that much of his time. “I kind of got it right when I first made it,” he says. (Watch the TIME 100 Social Media Roundtable.)

The Easy Way Out
So what ever happened to the pirate apocalypse of yesteryear? In the U.S., piracy hasn’t turned out to be quite as bad for content producers as everybody thought. A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office released last April labored mightily to establish a strong link between piracy and lost sales, but the results were inconclusive.

What’s striking about the pirate kings is that they’ve been much less successful in the straight world than they were as pirates. An anarchic worldview coupled with brilliant code doesn’t travel as well as you’d think in the bean-counting world of legitimate commerce. Good code empowers users by giving them choices and options, but empowered users aren’t necessarily good for business. What you need to hit it really big in legitimate commerce is an authoritarian sensibility that limits users to doing what you want them to.

Which brings us to another important reason the media apocalypse never happened: Steve Jobs. On April 28, 2003, the very day TIME published a grand excursus on the explosive growth of file sharing, Apple unveiled the iTunes Music Store. At the time, it was difficult to see why iTunes would succeed where Snocap, among many others, had failed. Because, again, how do you compete with free?

But iTunes did succeed. Apple’s relentless emphasis on simple, attractive user interfaces, backed by Jobs’ steely negotiating power in dealing with music studios, produced a streamlined, curated service with which you could download and transfer music with a minimum of fuss. And we did — even though it cost us money and our purchases were bogged down with DRM that constrained what we could do with them.

It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy. Napster, Gnutella and BitTorrent never attained the user-friendliness that Apple products have, and nobody vets the content on file-sharing networks, so while the number of files on offer is enormous, the files are rotten with ads, porn, spyware and other garbage. When Jobs offered us the easy way out, we took it. Freedom is overrated, apparently — at least where digital media are concerned. (See the top 10 Apple moments.)

It’s a lesson that the youngest of the pirate kings has studied very carefully. Like Fanning, Frankel and Cohen, Jon Lech Johansen was never really a pirate at all. He didn’t help crack the encryption on DVDs because he wanted to crush Hollywood. He did it because he wanted to watch movies on his computer. His computer ran the Linux operating system, and in 1999 there was no DVD-playing program for Linux. So he and his partners decided to make one, and to do that, they had to figure out how to decrypt DVDs.

When the Motion Picture Association of America found out, it complained about Johansen to the Norwegian government, which duly arrested him. He stood trial in Oslo not once but twice on hacking charges. He was acquitted both times. It turns out it’s not against the law to decrypt a DVD that you bought and paid for.

But Johansen was genuinely interested in preserving what he sees as the right of consumers to do whatever they want with the digital media they buy, the same way we do with, for example, a physical book — use it repeatedly or lend it out as we choose. In 2005, Johansen moved to California, where he reverse engineered FairPlay, the DRM software Apple was using to protect its media files. By then he’d noticed how attractive the Apple user experience was, and he thought it should be possible to bring that to the wider, more chaotic world of non-Apple products. “We saw there were a lot of devices out there, and none of them worked as well as they should,” says Johansen, who at the ripe age of 26 is as good a pitchman as he is a coder. “So we set out to build a system that will allow these devices to interoperate and provide consumers with a great media experience.”

By “we,” Johansen means his company, doubleTwist, which he co-founded in 2007. The doubleTwist software, which is free, is a kind of Rosetta stone for digital-media files: it can translate, reconcile and organize files from about 500 different devices and bring them together into one elegant interface. In June, doubleTwist introduced an Android app, and some 500,000 people have since downloaded it. Last year, doubleTwist scored a piratical coup by taking out an ad that read: “The Cure for iPhone Envy. Your iTunes library on any device. In seconds.” It ran on the side of the building that houses San Francisco’s flagship Apple store.

Johansen rejects any attempt to associate him with piracy. “As far as I’m concerned, it has nothing to do with me,” he says. “I support fair use, which means that when you actually legally acquire content, you should have the right to use that content on any of your devices, using any application.” For Johansen as for all of the pirate kings, it was always about writing good code, and what good code does is give power to the people who use it. That’s the real reason the pirate apocalypse never happened. The pirates never wanted music and movies and all the rest of it to be free — at least, not in the financial sense. They wanted it to be free as in freedom.

I had to say I was surprised that the BBC panorama team had chosen this exact moment to publish their findings about corruption within the FIFA organisation. We are a mere 48 hours away from the 2018 World Cup decision. They could have revealed the story last month, or in one month’s time. Enough to make you think that the whole business has been engineered to thwart England’s chances of hosting the World Cup in 2018 — and if not then what other motive from intelligent people like the BBC panorama editorial team?

Whistleblowing may be all the rage at the moment, but this Panorama exposé was dividing opinion long before it aired on Monday night.

Did the programme actually present new evidence, or was it just a facetious re-hash of existing information timed to damage England’s chances of hosting the 2018 World Cup?

In the opening moments, Jeremy Vine admitted that allegations of bribery within the organisation were nothing new, but he promised that the fearless Andrew Jennings had damning new evidence against Fifa.

And he had indeed obtained a document that apparently listed almost two hundred secret payments made in the 1990s by a sports marketing company called International Sports and Leisure (ISL) to Fifa.

One of the Fifa officials named was Paraguayan Nicolas Leoz – but as Jennings conceded, he has already been exposed as having accepted two previous bribes, so this was not exactly brand new information.

Fellow Fifa bosses Issa Hayatou and Ricardo Teixeira also came under fire, but it was Vice-President Jack Warner who was presented as the real villain, accused of involvement in the re-sale of World Cup tickets on the black market.

Jennings ran around the world, haranguing the accused and getting nothing but vitriol in return. Warner even called Jennings ‘garbage’ and expressed his desire to spit on the journalist in a stunning display of over-defensiveness.

However, since Jennings mentioned that he had already uncovered Warner’s underhand activity following the 2006 World Cup, once again the allegations hardly constitute new information.

Compelling evidence it may have been, but the revelations simply weren’t revelatory enough to warrant Jennings’ smugness at having televised them.

So, will Fifa prove its annoyance at this English journalist and deny his countrymen victory in three days’ time?

The truth is, the significance of this Panorama programme may not yet be apparent.

via Panorama: Did Fifa officials and Jack Warner protest too much over bribes? | Metro.co.uk.

Today the Guardian published an article from the head of Penguin books, John Makinson – a man with an interesting career path, more varied than most in the publishing world – showing that the growth of ebooks seems to be following the same path as, say, digital music or digital movies. Me, I still got my vinyl, still got my books. As I said my colleague Andrew earlier today with books I like the navigation….

John Makinson says that if people want to read using new technology, that’s what publishers must give them

Penguin this week celebrates its 75th year and is marking the anniversary by repackaging a series of seminal books from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although the company might afford itself a brief look backwards, it feels as though there is little room for nostalgia in book publishing now, as the industry turns its face firmly – and apprehensively – to the future.

Amazon last week announced sales of ebooks on its US site had outnumbered hardbacks for the first time, stunning casual observers, even if it had not been entirely unexpected in the trade.

The launch of the iPad has added a sense of urgency. Where music went first, books are set to follow, although Penguin and other publishers would hope without the same devastating effects. Amazon this week launched a cheaper, more lightweight version of its Kindle ebook reader and a digital store on its UK site, while others, including Google, are muscling in. Digital book sales are still less than 1% of Penguin, but the direction of the market is clear. In the US, digital books already account for 6% of consumer sales.

Penguin chief executive John Makinson says he is a convert. The day after we meet he is on his way to India, as part of David Cameron’s delegation, and had loaded titles on to his iPad, including a manuscript by John le Carré and some Portuguese classics (in English) ahead of Penguin launching a range in Brazil. He is also reading Lord Mandelson’s diary. It simply makes sense, he says, instead of carting an armful of books in your carry-on luggage.

Innovation

“It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us,” he says. “Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers.”
Publishing, he says, must embrace innovation: “I am keen on the idea that every book that we put on to an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn’t come naturally to book publishers. We publish a lot of historians, for example. They love the idea of using documentary footage to illustrate whatever it is they’re writing about.”

The very definition of a book is up for grabs he says, although the company has just published a version of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth for the iPad in the US that might provide clues – and horrify traditionalists. It includes scenes from a TV adaptation embedded in the text, as well as extras including the show’s music soundtrack and Follett’s video diary during the making of the series.

For now, Makinson says, digital books are expanding the market; hardback sales in the US are up this year, despite the march of ebooks. Piracy is not yet a significant issue and lessons have been learned from the music business.

“You have to give the consumer what the consumer wants – you can’t tell the consumer to go away. So we didn’t participate in this experiment where a number of publishers deferred publication of the ebook until a certain number of months after the hardcover publication. I thought that was a very bad idea. If the consumer wants to buy a book in an electronic format now, you should let the consumer have it.”

He has added confidence, because with tablets such as the iPad, consumers are used to paying a subscription to the wireless operator and for “apps”, creating a more benign environment than the wild west of the PC, where users are used to getting everything for free.

Penguin’s profits more than doubled to £44m in the first half of the year. The company gained market share, but one reason for the dramatic improvement was the outsourcing of some design and production to India last year; the company now has around 100 designers in Delhi making books for Dorling Kindersley, belying the idea that Britain can at least live off its creative industries. Makinson defends the decision and says DK is now back in profit, which means it can reinvest in Britain: “We can’t pretend we can do everything here. In order to be internationally competitive, some work needs to be done in other places.”

About 8% of the publisher’s sales are from its classics, including Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and revenues are still growing, despite much of the copyright being in the public domain. It is launching the range in Mandarin, Korean and Portuguese. But it is not all highbrow. What would Penguin’s founder, Sir Allen Lane, whose aim was to publish quality paperbacks for the masses, have made of Penguin putting out books “by” Peter Andre or Ant & Dec?

“Allen Lane’s view was that we should publish good writing of all kinds for all audiences at affordable prices,” Makinson says. “I’m not saying he would necessarily have approved every single publishing decision we take, but would he have approved of Penguin being a very democratic publishing company, publishing for lots of different tastes? I think he would definitely have approved.”

Makinson has long been mentioned as a successor to Dame Marjorie Scardino, who runs Pearson, Penguin’s parent company. Her departure has been a perennial question, though she has defied the investment community’s chattering classes by staying in her post for well over a decade. She has also confounded expectations by keeping Penguin and the Financial Times in a group dominated by educational publishing. Makinson says it now makes more sense than ever for Penguin to remain part of the group, as the digital era draws each division closer.

He says there will still be the need for publishers in the digital world: “I used to have this discussion with [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author] Douglas Adams. He created this thing called the digital village, an online publishing platform. Douglas’s argument was, ‘all of my friends will come along and publish on digital village and you the publishers will be disintermediated, you will be irrelevant’. Well, it hasn’t happened. I am not aware of any successful direct to consumer publishing model that exists.

“The reason it doesn’t work is that the publishers do actually perform quite a useful service: they edit the book, then they publicise it.” In the physical world, they make sure it is stocked in bookshops, he adds.

Clubbable

Makinson, 55, perhaps feels more adaptable than some of his counterparts because he arrived at Penguin as an outsider. A clubbable character, he has taken an unusual career path, from a journalist on the Financial Times, to working for the Saatchis, setting up his own investment consultancy, running the Financial Times and then becoming Pearson finance director, despite having no training as an accountant.
But his passion for books is evident. Five years ago, he and his brother bought a bookshop in the small Norfolk town of Holt. For an out-of-the-way independent, the Holt Bookshop attracts a starry line-up of authors for events, including Stephen Fry, due to talk about his new autobiography, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is published by Penguin.

“We are all terribly sentimental about books,” Makinson insists. “It is terribly important to me that we sell lots of wonderful books in my little independent in Norfolk, and when I talk about digital I do sometimes worry that it looks as though I am neglecting all this,” he points to the books on the shelves behind him, “which I am not.”

This disturbing article from the Washington Post, which consistently knocks British papers into a cocked hat for the quality of its reportage, shows that Mexican drug gangs have become a force powerful enough to subvert the progress of democracy in Central America.

SAN SALVADOR — Drug cartel violence in Mexico is quickly spilling south into Central America and is threatening to destabilize fragile countries already rife with crime and corruption, according to the United Nations, U.S. officials and regional law enforcement agents.

The Northern Triangle of Central America — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — has long been a major smuggling corridor for contraband heading to the United States. But as Mexican President Felipe Calderón fights a U.S.-backed war against his nation’s drug lords, trafficking networks are burrowing deeper into a region with the highest murder rates in the world.

The Mexican cartels “are spreading their horizons to states where they feel, quite frankly, more comfortable. These governments in Central America face a very real challenge in confronting these organizations,” said David Gaddis, chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

U.S. attention has mostly focused on Mexico. But the homicide rate there — 14 for every 100,000 residents — is dwarfed by the murder statistics in the Northern Triangle, where per-capita killings are four times higher and rising.

In El Salvador, the region’s most violent country, homicides jumped 37 percent last year, to 71 murders per 100,000 residents, as warring gangs vied for territory and trafficking routes. Police and military officials in El Salvador said cartels are increasingly paying local smugglers in product, rather than cash, driving up cocaine use and the drug dealing and turf battles that come with it.

“The more pressure there is in Mexico, the more the drug cartels will come to Central America looking for a safe haven,” Gen. David Munguía Payés, El Salvador’s defense minister, said in an interview here.

The amount of cocaine moving through the region has risen sharply, although the overall volume entering the United States is falling. Cocaine seizures in Central America nearly quadrupled between 2004 and 2007, according to the most recent U.N. data.

The United States has allocated $258 million in anti-narcotics assistance for Central America since 2007 as part of the three-year, $1.6 billion Merida Initiative. But a report this month by the Government Accountability Office found that only 9 percent of the money promised under the initiative has been spent and that U.S. officials had no reliable way to determine whether it was making a difference in the drug war.

‘A paradise for criminals’

In remote, lawless regions of Guatemala, the Mexican organized crime syndicate known as the Zetas is setting up training camps and recruiting elite ex-soldiers to serve as assassins, arming them with weapons diverted from the country’s military arsenals.

Last month, four human heads were left near the Guatemalan Congress and elsewhere in the capital. The national police spokesman, Donald González, said the grisly display was the work of the Zetas and other Mexican traffickers.

“Guatemala has become a paradise for criminals, who have little to fear from prosecutors owing to high levels of impunity,” the International Crisis Group, a conflict research organization, said in a June report. “High-profile assassinations and the government’s inability to reduce murders have produced paralyzing fear, a sense of helplessness and frustration.”

Over the past two years, Guatemala’s top anti-narcotics official, two national police chiefs and the former president have been arrested on charges related to drug trafficking or corruption. Two former interior ministers are fugitives. In May, the Guatemalan president appointed, then removed after international protests, an attorney general who U.N. prosecutors say has ties to mobsters.

In Honduras, where a military coup last year toppled the president, Mexican cartels have established command-and-control centers to orchestrate cocaine shipments by sea and air along the still-wild Caribbean coast, often with the help of local authorities, according to DEA and U.N. officials. Ten anti-narcotics officers were caught smuggling 142 kilos of cocaine last July. In December, Honduras’s drug czar, Gen. Julián Arístides González, was killed after trying to shut down clandestine landing strips allegedly operated by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

Police in El Salvador say traffickers are cultivating ties to street gangs such as MS-13 and 18th Street, building alliances that could eventually help those groups mature into international syndicates.

“Organized crime has penetrated the government,” said Jeannette Aguilar, a crime expert at San Salvador’s University of Central America, citing recent arrests of police commanders and prominent politicians. “We’ve made strides toward democracy, but this threatens to reverse that progress.”

According to Steven S. Dudley, a consultant for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the high homicide rates signal the expanding presence of Mexican drug cartels. Investigators are finding more corpses bearing marks of torture or execution in well-coordinated hits by assassins armed with high-caliber weapons, trademarks of Mexican crime gangs.

The newspaper El Diario de Hoy in El Salvador recently counted 35 bodies found in plastic bags over a six-month span.

A U.N. report found that the highest homicide rates were not in the largest cities, but in provinces with strategic value to drug traffickers: along borders, coasts and jungles.

Some victims had ties to the drug trade; others were simply in the way. In Honduras, in the Caribbean province of Atlantida, one of every 1,000 residents was murdered last year.

Central American migrants, interviewed at three shelters as they crossed Mexico on the way to the United States, said they left their countries not only because of economic desperation but also to escape soaring violence.

Undermining democracy

The expansion of cartel power in the Northern Triangle threatens to undermine democratic gains made since the end of civil conflicts here in the mid-1990s. Analysts say the lucrative profits of the drug trade wield powerful influence in these countries, where half the people live in poverty.

“The Guatemalan government is weak, and the drug cartels provide services that the state does not,” such as health clinics, soccer fields and schools, said Fernando Giron Soto, a researcher at the Myrna Mack Foundation, a human rights organization in Guatemala City whose doors are guarded by armed sentries. “It’s the same thing that Pablo Escobar used to do in Medellin” during the 1990s in Colombia, he said.

In many areas of the Northern Triangle, police are ineffective, if they exist at all, experts say. Guatemala and Honduras have fewer than half as many police per capita as Mexico, U.N. data show. In Guatemala, as many as seven of the country’s 22 provinces appear to be under the control of criminals, according to the International Crisis Group report.

The region is awash in weapons left over from the Cold War, making it an important source of arms for the Mexican cartels. Before Guatemalan gun laws changed last year, anyone could legally buy up to 500 rounds of ammunition a day, said Sandino Asturias, a crime analyst for the Center for Guatemalan Studies.

A special U.N. prosecutor’s office has been working in Guatemala since 2007 to break the country’s culture of impunity, but it faces enormous obstacles. Of 6,548 murders last year, 423 suspects were arrested. However, that was a significant improvement over the previous year, when 128 homicide arrests were made, Asturias said.