Gordon Brown insists Afghan war being won                      

 Obama grows weary of the global stageRather than risk a one-term presidency with more failures than victories, he has put foreign goals aside to focus on the domestic Olivia Hampton guardian.co.uk, Saturday 6 March 2010 18.00 GMT Article historyWeeks and months of non-stop mudslinging over healthcare have taken their toll on President Obama and placed his foreign policy agenda on the back burner.An anxious world is asking what has become of all Obama's promises to solve the thorniest and most entrenched problems, from the Middle East conflict to closing the internationally reviled Guantánamo prison camp and halting Iran's nuclear defiance. As the flood of words dissipates with little concrete change to show, hope has faded, leaving disillusionment in its place.Nowhere is this more true than in the Middle East. Arab capitals were buoyed when Obama initially dared confront Israel over settlements. But when pressure mounted in Washington and around the country against harming US relations with Israel, the president quickly backed down and made amends – somewhat – with hawkish Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.With his poll ratings slipping, Americans still rattled by their thinning wallets and worried about a possible Republican revival in crucial mid-term elections, Obama the bold, the daring, has adopted a more populist tone and become more risk averse than ever before.More than a year since he was swept to office riding on waves of hope from a tired people, Obama has angered and frustrated his most liberal and most conservative supporters by bowing to internal political pressures. He is now reportedly on the verge of yet another about-face, this time reneging on his decision to try the 9/11 suspects in federal criminal courts and bringing them instead before Bush-era military commissions.

After months of shuttle diplomacy from secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Washington's top Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, the Palestinians and the Israelis appear close to resuming long-stalled negotiations, albeit indirect ones brokered by the US.

The Palestinians, who have long insisted that any conditions be predicated on a return to pre-1967 borders, had dragged their feet for over a year in part because they lacked the political cover from key regional powerbrokers Egypt and Saudi Arabia. With the Arab League now giving its blessing to indirect talks, the onus is now on Washington to prove it can play a vital role as honest broker and realise a peace deal that has eluded Obama's predecessors. But the path is riddled with landmines, and last-minute setbacks can be expected at every turn.Obama may have extended his hand to Tehran, but the Islamic Republic has yet to unclench its fist and halt uranium enrichment. At best, the outreach has managed to give him political cover to push for slapping a fourth round of UN sanctions on Iran for its continued defiance over its suspect nuclear programme.…

  Obama may grow into his Nobel speechIt is not Barack Obama’s fault that he won the Nobel peace prize before his time. It is not even his fault that he accepted the award when, in fact, he had done little to earn it. It was not his fault that when he cited Martin Luther King, who had won the prize in 1964, or Mahatma Gandhi, who never won the prize, or Aung Sang Suu Kyi, who won the prize in 1991 and yet remains under house arrest in the former Burma, he was making an inescapable and unfortunate comparison to himself: He is not yet one of them.Obama’s Nobel prize acceptance speech had many good elements. He defended just wars, he acknowledged the presence of evil in the world, he defended humanitarian intervention, such as the one in the Balkans, and he rued the “disconnect between the efforts of those who serve and the ambivalence of the broader public.” This Obama defied the ridiculous caricature of his critics on the right: Here was no leftie peacenik.But neither was this a man who could point to his own life as an example of almost anything. He has not, like King or Gandhi, spent a night in jail or risked his life in the service of his cause. He has not even, like Albert Schweitzer, whom he also cited, devoted his life to the poor and the sick. This Obama was an arriviste. The more he walks with giants, the smaller he seems.It is symptomatic of our times that celebrity or fame gets taken for accomplishment. In this regard, we have put the cart before the horse.Obama’ s time may come, but he is not yet a great man. He is merely a famous man -- a very famous man. He had no right to give this speech and the Nobel committee had no right to ask him. Someday, Obama may grow into the speech he gave. It was a good speech -- but like a young wine, served before its time.  

 Under Weight of Its Mistakes, Newspaper Industry Staggers
The list of two-newspaper towns got shorter on Friday, the last day for Denver's 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News. (By John Moore -- Getty Images) By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 1, 2009; A04Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper recalls getting "a feeling in the pit of my stomach" when he learned that the Rocky Mountain News was shutting down."Even when they were uncovering corruption in the city, even when they were embarrassing us or causing us discomfort, they were making the city better," he says. "It's a huge loss."The grim echoes of the nearly 150-year-old paper's demise Friday could be heard in newsrooms and communities across the country. Although the Denver Post will still cover Hickenlooper's region, some cities -- most notably San Francisco -- are facing the prospect of life without a major newspaper. Others, from Philadelphia to Chicago to Minneapolis, have watched their papers slide into bankruptcy, while still others are being served by dailies with newsrooms that have shriveled by half.Why a once-profitable industry suddenly seems as outmoded as America's automakers is a tale that involves arrogance, mistakes, eroding trust and the rise of a digital world in which newspapers feel compelled to give away their content."Most of the wounds are self-inflicted," says Phil Bronstein, editor at large of the San Francisco Chronicle, which Hearst Corp. has threatened to close unless major cost savings are achieved or a buyer is found. Rather than engage the audience, he says, "the public was seen as kind of messy and icky and not something you needed to get involved with."As the newsroom staff has shrunk from 575 when Bronstein took over as editor in 2000 to 275 now, "it's objectively true that there's less in the paper," he says. "You can't deny a loss is a loss."Tom Fiedler, the Miami Herald's former executive editor, says if that paper folds -- McClatchy Newspapers is looking for a buyer -- "nobody else will step in and do the occasionally extraordinary reporting that newspapers do. The difference that a good newspaper makes to the quality of life in any community is vital. It's like a healthy heart."Fiedler, now dean of Boston University's College of Communication, says the Herald's newsroom staff has dwindled from about 420 to 260 in nine years. "My fear is that newspapers will become what local television became a long time ago," he says. "When there's yellow tape around it or the county commission meets to take a vote, we'll cover it."At a time when such companies as General Motors, Home Depot and Citigroup are ordering mass layoffs, the loss of 12,000 newspaper jobs last year may seem small. But the industry's woes -- plunging advertising revenue, declining circulation and burgeoning high-tech competition -- seem to be worsening by the week. And that has critics questioning why newspaper companies didn't adapt to the Internet more quickly."Years ago," says Jeff Jarvis, a blogger who has worked for the Chicago Tribune,…