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Fri Jan 20 09:03:19 2006 News:
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AS CONGRESS hurtles toward enacting new rules on lobbying and lobbyists, two contradictory risks should be kept in mind. One is that lawmakers won't do enough to rein in the excesses of the current system. The other is that, in their zeal to outbid each other, they will go too far. Strange as it may sound -- and looking at the competing plans unveiled this week by the two parties -- it may be that both will happen.
IF NO ACTION is taken, a pitiful parody of an international human rights commission will convene in Geneva in March under the auspices of the United Nations. Among the 53 delegates who will judge abuses of freedom around the world will be representatives of Zimbabwe, Sudan, China, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Nepal and Russia -- the very states that should be at the top of the commission's list for examination. As Secretary General Kofi Annan acknowledged a year ago, the world's most conspicuous abusers of human rights have pushed their way onto the panel to prevent it from acting effectively in their cases; in so doing, they have turned what was once one of the more worthy U.N. institutions into its greatest disgrace. Mr. Annan's attempt to end this travesty while preserving a U.N. human rights body is bogged down in a predictable impasse between democratic and autocratic states. At the least, they should be able to agree that the present commission will not meet in March, or ever again.
UNLESS THE FORCES of reason somehow prevail, a stampede of developers is on the verge of pillaging Loudoun County beyond repair. Banking on a Board of Supervisors that swoons at every application, developers swooped in during the final hours of 2005 with proposals to build more than 21,000 houses, townhouses and apartments in a strip of Loudoun west of Dulles International Airport. Will the supervisors roll over again and let the wrecking go unchecked?
FEW LEGAL ISSUES are more fraught with emotion than those involving the beginning and end of life. So when, in the space of two days, the Supreme Court decides cases involving each of those issues (one a New Hampshire abortion law, the other Oregon's assisted-suicide statute) and gets both of them right, with due respect for states' rights, while managing to dispose of the abortion case unanimously, it's worth pausing to appreciate the moment.
AMONG CONGRESS'S many bits of unfinished business is corporate pension reform. Both the House and the Senate have passed bad bills that the White House has threatened to veto; the chance to do better will come next month, when the bills go to conference. Unfortunately, the omens are not promising. Lobbies are pressing Congress to stick with its bad legislation, and the news from corporate America is likely to be twisted to suit the lobbyists' ends.
ONE OF THE wondrous things about the windfall surpluses plumping up state budgets across the country is that they allow conservative governors to look like rock-ribbed moderates -- all the more so in election years. So it is in Maryland, where Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., chief political beneficiary of $1.2 billion in extra state revenue, has been busily recasting himself with the help of a smorgasbord of spending proposals. Mr. Ehrlich, who dealt with three previous years of faltering revenue with zealous budget cutting, will approach this year's reelection campaign with what he will claim as centrist credentials.
IN THEIR ATTEMPTS to plan and manage real estate development, local governments in Virginia have long lacked meaningful authority. State laws, as well as the courts, have deferred to the rights of property owners, leaving counties, especially, with few tools to regulate the pace and shape of growth. That has contributed to patterns of development in Northern Virginia and elsewhere that are plain to see: ever-expanding bands of sprawl, lengthening commutes and a pervasive sense that when it comes to road capacity and land-use planning, the left hand and the right hand are not well acquainted.
SOUTH AMERICAN neighbors Chile and Bolivia have recorded groundbreaking presidential elections within weeks of each other. Last month Evo Morales became the first indigenous leader to take power as president of Bolivia; on Sunday, Michelle Bachelet was elected to become Chile's first female president. Both leaders call themselves socialists, and thus represent a Latin American movement that for decades was forcibly excluded from government. Yet in political substance, Mr. Morales and Ms. Bachelet could hardly be more different. The contrast between them illustrates how Latin American nations, unlike developing countries almost everywhere else in the world, remain mired in confusion over economic models.
THERE AREN'T a lot of things that could save half a million children annually, but an effective rotavirus vaccine could. This diarrheal disease is one of the world's top killers -- less murderous than AIDS (which caused an estimated 3.1 million deaths last year) or malaria (a bit over 1 million), but remarkable for the fact that its name is not widely known. Earlier this month the New England Journal of Medicine published the promising results of large-scale clinical trials for two rotavirus vaccines. It seems a breakthrough has arrived.
THE BUSH administration has taken a first step toward adjusting its relationship with Egypt following President Hosni Mubarak's flagrant violation of his promises to lead a transition to democracy. An Egyptian delegation that was to visit Washington this month to discuss a free-trade agreement has been disinvited, and the agreement itself was put on hold. Thanks to Mr. Mubarak's autocratic backsliding -- including his crude persecution and imprisonment of his leading liberal opponent, Ayman Nour -- Egypt will continue to lag behind Jordan, Morocco and other modernizing Arab states that enjoy tariff-free access to U.S. markets. For Egypt's business community and the reformist technocrats in its cabinet, the message should be clear: Egypt won't join the global economic mainstream unless it abandons its corrupt dictatorship.
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