THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former Peruvian President Fujimori weds

TOKYO -- Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, now under arrest in Chile, married his Japanese sweetheart Thursday by filing legal documents in Japan, a spokesman for the woman's company said.

Representatives of Fujimori and longtime friend Satomi Kataoka, owner of Tokyo's upscale Hotel Princess Garden, filed a marriage registration for the couple in the Japanese capital, said hotel spokesman Tetsuo Matsui.

In Japan, couples are officially married once the registration has been submitted to a municipal office. Kataoka resides in the Tokyo area.

Kataoka was in the Peruvian capital last month when she announced the couple's intentions to marry sometime before Peru's presidential election, scheduled for April 9. Kataoka was in Peru to support pro-Fujimori candidates.

Fujimori, who is of Japanese ancestry, fled to Japan in November 2000 as his decade-old authoritarian government crumbled amid corruption scandals.

Last November, he flew to Chile as part of a plan to launch a political comeback but was detained on an international arrest warrant at the request of Peru, which is seeking his extradition to face criminal charges.

The former president has denied any wrongdoing.

In February, Chile's Supreme Court rejected Fujimori's appeal to be released from prison or placed under house arrest while fighting Peru's extradition request.

Posted Sunday, Apr. 02, 2006
Among insiders, it's being called "the reboot." Although President George W. Bush stuck close to home when he chose Budget Director Josh Bolten to succeed chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. last week, officials consulted by the White House said the overhaul will be more consequential than it looked at first. These officials said Bolten, who comes on board April 15, plans to put some new faces in front of the public and on Capitol Hill. Bush, who retired to his Texas ranch for the weekend after a summit in Cancún, did not want it to appear that inside-the-Beltway carping had sparked a staff shuffle. Now it can be attributed to Bolten, who will add some meat to an election-year agenda that has disappointed even some of the President's most fervent supporters. Speaking of Bush's team, a Bolten friend said, "Josh thinks they need to communicate better, and need something better to communicate."

The new appointment has bought Bush some time, but allies of the White House say he must do more. They say Bush has the chance to right his second term if he is willing to follow through with a few more tough decisions, such as one to increase the social contact he has had with key lawmakers.

For all the blame Card was getting around Washington for the drifting of the second term, he was sufficiently beloved in the West Wing that some officials cried after he went before cameras in the Oval Office and told Bush in a choked voice, "Ecclesiastes reminds us that there are different seasons, and there is a new season." The staff had also embraced his wife Kathleene Card, a Methodist minister who often told reporters that she prays for the press.

Card did not want to go. But he "heard the tom-toms," according to someone who knows him well, and told Bush it was in the best interests of the team for him to leave, five months short of the record tenure in the job set by Sherman Adams under President Dwight Eisenhower. "People like Andy personally, but they're relieved, because this should have happened a year ago," a Bush confidant said.

It will be a bittersweet exit for a proud Massachusetts pol who started serving the Bush family in 1979, when he would pick up the President's father at Boston's Logan Airport in a red Chevette with rusty floorboards and drive the elder Bush, in his first bid for the Republican presidential nomination, to campaign stops throughout New Hampshire. Card, now 58, went on to become George H.W. Bush's last Secretary of Transportation, and remains "Secretary Card."

His other moniker, "the Chief," passes to Bolten, 51, a CIA agent's son and former investment banker who has a fancier résumé, a wry humor, less disdain for the press and more interest in policy. As policy director of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign and his first deputy chief of staff for policy, Bolten is steeped in the current system. In meetings, he often whips out a giant calculator to show the price when, as an aide put it, "someone wants to save a continent from malaria." He's self-assured enough that he has been known to tell underlings he didn't need to accompany them to meetings with the President. "He would stay out of meetings in the Oval if he thought the President would benefit more from a smaller discussion," says lawyer Jay Lefkowitz, who worked with Bolten under both Presidents Bush.

France

France faces the future

Mar 30th 2006
From The Economist print edition

The country's politicians need to level with the French people on the need to embrace change

“THE French constitute the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation in Europe and the best qualified in turn to become an object of admiration, hatred, pity or terror but never indifference.” Thus did a young Alexis de Tocqueville describe his motherland in the early 19th century. His words still carry a haunting truth. Over the past few years, as other western democracies have shuffled quietly along, France has by turns stunned, exasperated and bemused. This week's massive one-day protest, drawing 1m-3m people on to the streets, was no exception . This particular stand-off, between the centre-right government of Dominique de Villepin and those protesting against his effort to inject a tiny bit of liberalism into France's rigid labour market, may be defused. The Constitutional Council was due to rule on the legality of the new law on March 30th. But the underlying difficulty will remain: the apparent incapacity of the French to adapt to a changing world.

On the face of it, France seems to be going through one of those convulsions that this nation born of revolution periodically requires in order to break with the past and to move forward. Certainly the students who kicked off the latest protests seemed to think they were re-enacting the events of May 1968 their parents sprang on Charles de Gaulle. They have borrowed its slogans (“Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!”) and hijacked its symbols (the Sorbonne university). In this sense, the revolt appears to be the natural sequel to last autumn's suburban riots, which prompted the government to impose a state of emergency. Then it was the jobless, ethnic underclass that rebelled against a system that excluded them.

Yet the striking feature of the latest protest movement is that this time the rebellious forces are on the side of conservatism. Unlike the rioting youths in the banlieues, the objective of the students and public-sector trade unions is to prevent change, and to keep France the way it is. Indeed, according to one astonishing poll, three-quarters of young French people today would like to become civil servants, and mostly because that would mean “a job for life”. Buried inside this chilling lack of ambition are one delusion and one crippling myth.

The delusion is that preserving France as it is, in some sort of formaldehyde solution, means preserving jobs for life. Students, as well as unqualified suburban youngsters, do not today face a choice between the new, less protected work contract and a lifelong perch in the bureaucracy. They, by and large, face a choice between already unprotected short-term work and no work at all. And the reason for this, which is also the reason for France's intractable mass unemployment of nearly 10%, is simple: those permanent life-time jobs are so protected, and hence so difficult to get rid of, that many employers are not creating them any more.

This delusion is accompanied by an equally pernicious myth: that France has more to fear from globalisation, widely held responsible for imposing the sort of insecurity enshrined in the new job contract, than it does to gain. It is true that the forces of global capitalism are not always benign, but nobody has yet found a better way of creating and spreading prosperity. In another startling poll, however, whereas 71% of Americans, 66% of the British and 65% of Germans agreed that the free market was the best system available, the number in France was just 36%. The French seem to be uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them the world's fifth richest country and generated so many first-rate French companies. This hostility appears to go deeper than resistance to painful reform, which is common to Italy and Germany too; or than a desire for a strong welfare state, which Scandinavian countries share; or even than a fondness for protectionism, which America periodically betrays.

The limits to change by stealth

A common feature unites France's underclass rioters and the rebellious students, as well as the election of the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen into the run-off of the 2002 presidential election. This is the failure of the French political class over the past 20 years to tell it straight: to explain to the electorate what is at stake, why France needs to adapt, and why change need not bring only discomfort. This failure has bred a political culture of reform by stealth, in which change is carried out with one hand and blamed on outside forces—usually globalisation, the European Union or America—while soothing words about protecting the French way are issued on the other. After a while, the credibility gap tears such a system apart. The French voted for Mr Le Pen in part because they were fed up with the stale mainstream political class. The banlieues exploded because unemployed minorities were fed up hearing that they did not belong. The students and trade unions are in revolt because they do not trust the government to protect them.

Part of the blame for this lies squarely with President Jacques Chirac. He has presided for nearly 11 years, during which mass unemployment has never budged below 8%, France's wealth per person has been overtaken by both Britain's and Ireland's, and public debt has jumped from 55% of GDP to 66%. The liberal instincts he once betrayed as a reformist prime minister in the mid-1980s have long since evaporated. His support for the prime minister's new jobs contract has been tepid at best. His chief preoccupation seems to be to avoid shaking the conservative French consensus, and even that unambitious objective has been missed. It is a measure of how wasted his presidency has been that one of his own ministers, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a 2007 presidential hopeful, can today make speeches that deplore “two decades of immobility” and call for a “rupture” with the status quo.

But the president is not to blame alone. Nobody on the French left dares to challenge the prevailing paleo-socialist wisdom, and Ségolène Royal, the most popular of the would-be presidential candidates, was roundly derided for confessing faint admiration for Britain's Tony Blair. On the right, Mr de Villepin at least had the courage to try to counter the logic of job protection, but elsewhere has scarcely demonstrated an embrace of open markets. Perhaps the closest France has to a new-generation leader prepared to try to reconcile French public opinion with globalisation is Mr Sarkozy. This week he declared that France could no longer “maintain the illusory barrage of a so-called model that each day shows itself to no longer work, nor protect anything or anybody”. But even Mr Sarkozy has proved a hard-core national protectionist when it comes to special pleading by French industry. All the while, he and Mr de Villepin's obsessive rivalry over the succession continues to sap France's ability to get policy right.

History will judge France harshly if its political class fails to find the courage to help the country equip itself for the 21st century. More than that, France's turmoil has implications beyond its own borders. An uncertain France is an uncertain partner for its allies, both in Europe and beyond. Within the EU, having rejected its draft constitution last year, the French no longer seem to know what they want. They still seek to project their influence through Europe, but will have difficulty doing this while they are so consumed by internal strife at home, and while they still struggle to come to terms with Europe's internal market. Can countries like Ukraine or Belarus be blamed for wondering what Europe can offer them while France, a founder member, is so unsure itself? The worry is that the more that France struggles to define a role for itself in the world, the more it will in turn be tempted to fasten on its social model as its raison d'être, and so cling to a discredited creed.

The choice belongs to France. A bold effort at renewal that could unleash the best in the French? Or a stubborn defence of the existing order that will keep France a middling world power in economic decline? The latter would inspire neither admiration, nor terror, nor hatred, nor indifference, just pity.