No ending

Despite the brave talk of appeals, media post mortems reeked of resignation about a case that tests witnesses’s memories, in which investigations spanned three continents and most of the evidence lay at the bottom of the ocean. But there is support, as in the Toronto Star, for demands for a public inquiry ‘‘‘with a narrow mandate’’ into how the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Royal Canadian Mounted Police handled the case — ‘‘allegations of bungling that have dogged the Air-India case from the start have become more pressing and deserve a full public airing’’.

Neo con pomp

Wolfowitz at the door’’. The Guardian’s headline cleverly framed the gathering furore in the liberal media in America and Britain. The announcement of Paul Wolfowitz’s name as Bush’s nominee for World Bank president was reason for ‘‘shock and consternation’’ read the editorial, because of his reputation as the ‘‘neoconservative godfather of the Iraq invasion’’.

‘‘Why Paul Wolfowitz?’’ asked the New York Times’s editorial on the subject. Alongside the nomination of John Bolton as UN ambassador — he who famously announced in 2000 that the Security Council should have only one permanent member ‘‘because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world’’— the choice of Wolfowitz is a ‘‘slap at the international community’’ said the NYT.

The NYT appealed to Wolfowitz’s past nature. He was, after all, the American ambassador to Indonesia during the Reagan administration who wrote persuasively about how solutions to global conflicts lie more in poverty reduction and economic development than in arms control.

The choice of head of the World Bank is especially important now, wrote Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate, in the Guardian, because poverty in developing countries is finally being acknowledged as ‘‘our greatest problem and challenge’’. In this moment, the head of ‘‘the world’s most important multilateral organisation promoting development’’ must crucially enjoy the confidence of others, apart from the training or experience for the job. What is at stake, urged Stiglitz, is choosing the right general for a ‘‘global war on poverty’’.

Stiglitz also revived festering questions about the process of choosing leaders of international institutions among the G7. How can they expect to be taken seriously when they advise democratic reforms to countries when they are themselves opaque in their functioning?

So are the Wolfowitz and Bolton appointments a sure sign that the neo-cons are ‘‘back in their pomp after a dismal year’’ as the Economist put it? Could it really be a tsunami aftershock? More than one paper recalled how Wolfowitz was moved by the devastation in Asia to reinvent himself as the ‘‘harbinger of help, not conflict’’.

Fried by the fish

On the eve of the British Parliament passing a new law against incitement to religious hatred, Salman Rushdie wrote in the Guardian about why it is such a ‘‘bad law’’. The government of the ‘‘devoutly Christian and increasingly authoritarian Tony Blair’’, he wrote, is trying to ‘‘steamroller’’ it through in order to appease British Muslim spokesmen ‘‘in whose eyes just about any critique of Islam is offensive’’.

Rushdie wrote in defense of free speech and against what he called the ‘‘Mel Gibson view of the world’’. He warned against the ‘‘increasingly sanctimonious’’ timbre of American public discourse which even the defeated Democrats are now colluding in, in the hope of future electoral gain. In Europe, Rushdie pointed out, the warnings that the ‘‘secular principles that underlie any humanist democracy need to be defended and reinforced’’ have been heeded. But Britain, he said, is the exception to European secularism.

Sixteen years after the writer was forced underground by the bearers of religion, Rushdie’s concern is ‘‘religion is coming after us all, and even though most of us probably feel, as I once did, that we have other, more important concerns, we are all going to have to confront the challenge. If we fail, this particular fish may end up frying us’’.