After Tiger's fall, what hope is there for post-racial America?The golfer and the president both represented the promise of a fully integrated nation. But will the demise of one affect the other?Comments (67)  Patricia Williams The Observer, Sunday 13 December 2009 Article historyAs the great Tiger Woods steps down from the global stage, however temporarily, it is an interesting moment to consider the interplay of celebrity, sex, race and the corporatisation of sport. At first, I found all the hoopla difficult to understand. Tiger Woods always seemed so unremittingly phlegmatic that it's hard to imagine him as the "sexposed!" "horndog!" described in all the tabloids.But my image of Woods comes entirely from advertisements for Accenture, Gillette and Nike. My image is of Tiger the corporate logo, Tiger the symbol of well-executed "swoosh," Tiger the carefully designed avatar of business acumen, family values and gentlemanly athleticism.At the same time, he is a celebrity, heretofore a fairly subdued member of the velvet-roped elite, but a celebrity none the less. And sooner or later, there is nothing our culture loves more than ripping stars to shreds. If the role of the corporate sponsor is to gild our icons, the role of the paparazzi is to slice and dice those bodies beautiful into a million little quivering pathologised pieces.Add in the fact that Tiger Woods is the embodiment of America's complicated racial aspirations. He was the face of so-called "biracialism" before Barack Obama. No one is ever allowed to forget that his father was African American and his mother Thai. These things are still monitored closely in the United States. Our too-recent history of strict anti-miscegenation laws has endowed the offspring of such unions with a twitchy kind of unresolved attention.Only a few months ago, a justice of the peace in Louisiana refused to issue a marriage licence to a white woman and a black man because he thought such pairings were bad for the children. And just last week, Congress and the Justice Department were still debating whether to issue a posthumous pardon to Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion who, in the 1900s, married three white women and was prosecuted for transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes.Johnson was a complicated character, to be sure. Then, when boxing was still considered something of a white gentleman's pastime, Johnson's victories in the ring incited riots. Novelist Jack London issued the call for a "Great White Hope" who could best him; other voices issued the call to have him lynched. In recent history, it is the golf links that remain the playground of genteel white manfolk. Indeed, golf is the most racially segregated sport in America; access to courses is prohibitively expensive, so it remains the pursuit of the well-to-do executive class.  It should come as no surprise, then, that some measure of Woods's heroic status has been grounded…

  God is not the Creator, claims academicThe notion of God as the Creator is wrong, claims a top academic, who believes the Bible has been wrongly translated for thousands of years. By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
 The Earth was already there when God created humans and animals, says academic Photo: PA Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew. She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals. Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia. She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb "bara", which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate". The first sentence should now read "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth" According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the Earth out of nothing. Prof Van Wolde, who once worked with the Italian academic and novelist Umberto Eco, said her new analysis showed that the beginning of the Bible was not the beginning of time, but the beginning of a narration. She said: "It meant to say that God did create humans and animals, but not the Earth itself." She writes in her thesis that the new translation fits in with ancient texts. According to them there used to be an enormous body of water in which monsters were living, covered in darkness, she said. She said technically "bara" does mean "create" but added: "Something was wrong with the verb. "God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?" She concluded that God did not create, he separated: the Earth from the Heaven, the land from the sea, the sea monsters from the birds and the swarming at the ground. "There was already water," she said. "There were sea monsters. God did create some things, but not the Heaven and Earth. The usual idea of creating-out-of-nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is a big misunderstanding." God came later and made the earth livable, separating the water from the land and brought light into the darkness. She said she hoped that her conclusions would spark "a robust debate", since her finds are not only new, but would also touch the hearts of many religious people. She said: "Maybe I am even hurting myself. I consider myself to be…

 Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for potential 'global collapse' Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible "global economic collapse" over the next two years, mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction. By Ambrose Evans-PritchardComments 221 | Comment on this articleExplosion of debt: Japan's public debt could reach as much as 270pc of GDP in the next two years. A bullet train is pictured speeding past Mount Fuji in Fuji city, west of Tokyo Photo: Reuters  In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems. Overall debt is still far too high in almost all rich economies as a share of GDP (350pc in the US), whether public or private. It must be reduced by the hard slog of "deleveraging", for years. Related Articles'Debt levels risk another crisis' "As yet, nobody can say with any certainty whether we have in fact escaped the prospect of a global economic collapse," said the 68-page report, headed by asset chief Daniel Fermon. It is an exploration of the dangers, not a forecast. Under the French bank's "Bear Case" scenario (the gloomiest of three possible outcomes), the dollar would slide further and global equities would retest the March lows. Property prices would tumble again. Oil would fall back to $50 in 2010. Governments have already shot their fiscal bolts. Even without fresh spending, public debt would explode within two years to 105pc of GDP in the UK, 125pc in the US and the eurozone, and 270pc in Japan. Worldwide state debt would reach $45 trillion, up two-and-a-half times in a decade. (UK figures look low because debt started from a low base. Mr Ferman said the UK would converge with Europe at 130pc of GDP by 2015 under the bear case). The underlying debt burden is greater than it was after the Second World War, when nominal levels looked similar. Ageing populations will make it harder to erode debt through growth. "High public debt looks entirely unsustainable in the long run. We have almost reached a point of no return for government debt," it said. Inflating debt away might be seen by some governments as a lesser of evils. If so, gold would go "up, and up, and up" as the only safe haven from fiat paper money. Private debt is also crippling. Even if the US savings rate stabilises at 7pc, and all of it is used to pay down debt, it will still take nine years for households to reduce debt/income ratios to the safe levels of the 1980s. The bank said the current crisis displays "compelling similarities" with Japan during its Lost Decade (or two), with a big difference: Japan was able to stay afloat by exporting into a robust global economy and by letting the yen fall. It is not possible…

 Focus on leadershipSOTU for CEOsJeff Porro As a leader, you can't survive without communicating a vital vision. That means being more like Jobs, less like Obama.

 Fed boss Greenspan says no one saw the crisis coming. Really? Only in America. Only in America would it be possible to spawn a financial crisis so devastating that it would collapse the entire world economy. Read Article