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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Afghans go to the polls in two days to elect a president but violence continues to mar the run-up to the vote. Today a suicide bomber killed 15 people in the capital Kabul including UN staff and a NATO soldier. Another explosion rocked the presidential compound. US Senator John McCain is in Kabul now. He spoke at a news conference today. He praised Washington’s efforts to encourage open and fair elections countering allegations of US interference.

JOHN MCCAIN: It seems to me the only organization in Afghanistan that wants to have an election disrupted and unfair is the Taliban. So I think if you look at the record there has not only not been United States interference but I think there’s been United States encouragement and material support to make sure as many people in Afghanistan are able to vote.

MULLINS: That was Senator John McCain in Kabul, Afghanistan. But there are concerns that the violence will keep people home on elect ion day. Rachel Reid is with the group Human Rights Watch in Kabul.

RACHEL REID: What we’re seeing in the last few days… We’ve seen several rocket attacks. We saw a big attack obviously, close to the US embassy, on Saturday. We are seeing a significant spike in insurgent attacks in these last few days in Kabul. So really it’s taking a turn to the worst and as this goes on voters will potentially be scared off from going to the polls.

MULLINS: What point do you believe that voters really will be turned off given the fact that they have had to deal with violence or the threats of violence for so long now? I mean what evidence do you look for to be able to predict that the election may not be free and fair?

REID: Well voter registration was a big indication. It took place in the spring of this year. And actually it was better than I think many people thought. Again given the deterioration that we’ve seen in this situation here the last few years, there was actually a pretty healthy registration and there were something like 5 million new voters added to the list so as that as an indicator was the [INAUDIBLE] one. And we’ve seen high levels of people putting their names forward as candidates, even women, even for an increase in women putting their names for the provincial council elections which are taking place at the same time as the presidential elections. So these were healthy signs and I think it shows just how much Afghans do really want democracy to take route and these elections to take place.

MULLINS: That was Rachel Reid with Human Rights Watch in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: Aside from the violence and intimidation Afghans also have to wrestle with rumors of vote rigging and fraud. Now a BBC investigation has obtained evidence of potential electoral abuses – voter cards for sale. Bilal Sarwary is part of the investigative team.

BILAL SARWARY: The BBC has Afghan staff so they are from the community, they know the people. And of our colleagues went undercover into the city and he was able to talk to several dealers. And finally a dealer agreed to sell us between 500 to 1000 votes each for $10 to $15.

MULLINS: How did the BBC even know where to go to find these voting cards? I mean who do you approach?

SARWARY: It’s a country where everything is based on relationships and information actually. So it wasn’t that big a task. One of the BBC’s local employees, through his contacts within the local community in Kabul, was able to go and actually find this guy.

MULLINS: And did the contact want to know who they were potentially selling these voting cards to?

SARWARY: Actually the BBC just approached this dealer and said that we were buying it for one of the candidates. We did not mention a name. And the guy actually at the other hand didn’t bother. All he was interested in was money. But he did admit to us that he’s had a lot of customers and he’s been having a good business which means he’s been selling this to a lot of other people.

MULLINS: Well maybe you can make clear exactly what it means to get one of these voter registration cards. I mean these are not ballots. These are cards that enable you to vote. But how can they be used to influence an election?

SARWARY: Well if, and I say because there’s a big if involved, if you have someone working for a candidate at the polling station could give you for example 100 ballots papers for 100 registration cards. But again that’s a big if.

MULLINS: So you’re saying that if you have 100 voter registration cards – these things that you can buy now – in hand when you go to a polling place if you can bribe I guess the person at the polls into taking all 100 then you’re candidate has 100 more votes?

SARWARY: That’s correct. But again how many people working at the polling stations will be involved in this sort of activity is only speculation at this stage. But there’s obviously room open for abuse so to speak. There’s room for fraud and there’s room for cheating.

MULLINS: And as it happens the head of the US electoral team in Afghanistan, Tim Carney, has also acknowledged that these voter cards are indeed in circulation but he also said this:

TIM CARNEY: Those cards are very difficult to use by individuals. An individual might have 100 cards but if they have their finger dipped in the reliable ink – and I’ve seen colleagues dip their fingers and have it persist for three weeks – that will ensure that a person may only cast one ballot. That seems to me to be an important aspect of limiting the use of these cards for a voter fraud.

MULLINS: Tim Carney speaking right there. Bilal I wonder if you agree with that. I mean can the ink curb or entirely prevent fraud?

SARWARY: I think I agree with everything Tim said there. But on the other hand we’ve spoken to people within the international community, within the civil society, and some within the Afghan government who say that there is a chance if someone is working for a specific candidate at a polling station he will basically you know be part of the fraud. And he’s going to execute this not an individual Afghan because an Afghan at any time can only vote once meaning that his finger will be dipped in the ink which will stay there for days.

MULLINS: Just one other question for you Bilal in terms of the big picture. I wonder how much this kind of fraud that you’ve been talking about will effect the election on Thursday.

SARWARY: Well I mean it’s difficult to say at this stage how widespread this is going to be and how much impact will this have on the final results. But one thing is very, very clear that Afghans are very, very optimistic about this election. For them election is about getting security. For them it’s about having a bridge for their village. So it’s a very different perception of election compared to the west.

MULLINS: Alright thank you. Speaking to us from Kabul, Afghanistan the BBC’s Bilal Sarwary – part of a team that documented attempts at election fraud in Afghanistan. Thank you very much Bilal.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: A newspaper man who covered elections in the United States for a half century has died. Right-wing columnist and TV host Robert Novak was 78 years old. He died of brain cancer. The World’s Katy Clark reports.

KATY CLARK: Novak was a legendary Washington columnist who relished his nickname – the Prince of Darkness. He said it was become of his unsmiling pessimism about the future of America. To TV audiences Novak was well-known as the long-time combative co-host of CNN’s Crossfire.

CROSSFIRE ANNOUCNER: Crossfire. One the left Tom [PH] Braydon. On the right Robert Novak.

CLARK: Novak made headlines himself in 2003. That’s when he revealed the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame was the wife of a former US ambassador who had voiced doubts about President Bush’s case for the war in Iraq. The leak eventually lead to a long-running criminal investigation into senior Bush administration officials. Novak always maintained he had done nothing wrong despite the fact that a CIA spokesman had asked him not to print Plame’s name.

ROBERT NOVAK: If anybody had said that I was endangering intelligence operations and if I was endangering anybody’s life I wouldn’t have written it. If Mr. Tenet, director of Central Intelligence – who I knew very well, had a good relationship with – if he had gone on the line with me and said I really don’t want you to write this I wouldn’t have put it in.

CLARK: Novak had many fans including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. In paying tribute today McConnell praised Novak for his tireless shoe-leather reporting and keen insight into Washington’s politics and personalities. But some believe that in that in the Valerie Plame case Novak let his audience down. Bob Steele teaches journalism values at the Pointer Institute.

BOB STEELE: He was a very savvy guy and he and many other journalists, particularly columnists, use those in the political arena all the time. And those politicians and government officials also manipulate and use the journalists all the time. And in that particular case one can’t help but think that Novak and some other journalists were less than wise in the way in which they played their cards in the Valerie Plame situation.

CLARK: Steele says unfortunately some will think less of Robert Novak because of the Plame story. He adds that Novak was truly a significant voice in American journalism. For The World this is Katy Clark.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: Despite Iraq’s central role in this story Iraqis probably did not pay a lot of attention to the Valerie Plame case and these days many Iraqi TV viewers are more likely to tune into lighter fare. The country’s most popular TV show is ‘Good Morning Iraq.’ And one of the highlights of the show is Iraq’s top celebrity chef. The BBC’s Natalia Antelava recently spent the day with Chef Feraz in Baghdad.

NATALIA ANTELAVA: It’s early morning in Baghdad and the smell of fried onions and meat fills the television studios – a sure sign that ‘Good Morning Iraq’ is live on air.

[MUSIC]

This show is Iraq’s top television program – the way that many people here start their day. And some tune in for just one reason – to learn the culinary secrets of Iraq’s best known chef. Everyday the round face of Chef Feraz pops up on screens across the nation. Today he’s cooking lamb.

CHEF FERAZ: [SPEAKING ARABIC]

TRANSLATOR: Usually I cook Iraqi food but sometimes I decide to cook a western dish. But I put some Iraqi and eastern touches on that dish.

ANTELAVA: Chef Feraz started his career in one of Baghdad’s restaurants back in the times of Saddam Hussein. He still remembers his first boss – a Scottish chef who taught him all about cooking.

CHEF FERAZ: [SPEAKING ARABIC]

TRANSLATOR: The guy was so tough that we feared him just like we feared Saddam Hussein because he was very tough.

ANTELAVA: It wasn’t easy for Chef Feraz to accept this job. TV celebrities have been killed and kidnapped here in the past and two of the chef’s predecessors fled Iraq.

CHEF FERAZ: [SPEAKING ARABIC]

TRANSLATOR: What I do lifts the mood. I make people a little happier.

ANTELAVA: The chef’s advisor on the show is the glamorous presenter Luna. Her input is important. Women dominate kitchens here. But Luna says she hopes Chef Feraz will manage to get Iraqi men to help.

LUNA: [SPEAKING ARABIC]

TRANSLATOR: Chef Feraz is so charming and funny that even men watch his show.

ANTELAVA: But while in charge of his on-air kitchen, at home Chef Feraz admits to being just another man.

CHEF FERAZ: [SPEAKING ARABIC]

TRANSLATOR: In Iraq men don’t go into the kitchen. At home I don’t go into the kitchen to even make a cup of tea.

ANTELAVA: So you cook all day at work but you don’t cook at home at all? You don’t help your wife in the kitchen?

CHEF FERAZ: [SPEAKING ARABIC]

TRANSLATOR: Absolutely not.

ANTELAVA: The food is ready and after the broadcast ends everyone joins Chef Feraz in his kitchen for a taste.

Mmm. Very nice. Mmm.

[MUSIC]

For many in Iraq this show isn’t just about cooking. It’s also a lighter, nicer way to start the day.

[MUSIC]

MULLINS: That’s the BBC’s Natalia Antelava in Baghdad.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Recently American and South Korean government websites suffered a series of cyber attacks. Now technically these are known as denial of service attacks. What that means is that thousands of computers around the world are flooding government servers with fake web traffic. While experts know a lot about this type of attack they don’t have a lot of effective strategies to neutralize it. But now some new research may provide answers. Cyrus Farivar reports.

CYRUS FARIVAR: First let’s get the jargon out of the way. That vast network of computers attacking a small set of computers – that’s called a botnet. Botnets work by installing malware, like viruses and worms. Once enough machines are infected they can be turned on at the flick of a switch to say steal credit card data or attack servers. And when botnets attack they’re generally successful.

FELIX LEDER: When you build a botnet there’s not much the defenders can do. From an economic point of view there’s a low chance that the botnet gets taken down so the chance for a high return investment for those people is very high.

FARIVAR: That’s Felix Leder, a PhD student at the University of Bonn in Germany. He’s been exploring ways to stop botnets and recently presented some of his ideas at an international cyber defense conference in Estonia. Leder says that until now the main way to stop a botnet has been to create a sort of digital moat. In other words, pull up the drawbridge and prevent the attacks from reaching your castle.

LEDER: We thought okay let’s try to be the white knight you know just for one botnet.

FARIVAR: That sounds simple. In order to stop a botnet, Leder says, you basically need to co-opt it and use its tactics against itself which in effect makes you a good-guy botnet. And that’s where ethical and legal issues start to pop up according to Leder’s colleague, Tillman Werner.

TILLMAN WERNER: So for instance if you see a botnet attacking your site and you want to take it down for instance by exploiting all the individual machines and installing a removal software then you would execute code on these machines without the user’s permission and this might be okay for Estonia or for one country, for your country, but it would probably be seen as a problem from other countries.

FARIVAR: That’s just one problem. Peter Eckersley can think of others. He’s with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tech advocacy group in San Francisco.

PETER ECKERSLEY: There’s a hugely complicated ethical problem about vigilantism as a response. Sure these researchers that you’ve mentioned in Germany may be genuinely well-intentioned and may genuinely have found a flaw in one particular botnet that they think they can use to shut the botnet down but who watches the vigilantes? How do we know that parties like that are actually making the situation better and even have the public’s interest at heart?

FARIVAR: While technical countermeasures continue to be pursued governments around the world are focusing on updating the laws on their books. Estonia’s government suffered a significant cyber attack in 2007. Since then Estonia has strengthened its laws against such crimes says Eneken Tikk. She’s the head of the legal team at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in Tallin, Estonia.

ENEKEN TIKK: So what we did we included in our penal code a provision on cyber terrorism, actually improved the existing concept of terrorism by including some wording about cyber crime.

FARIVAR: Tikk admits that there still aren’t many good legal solutions as to how to deal with cyber attacks. Since Estonia was attacked two years ago only one person has been prosecuted and he got away with only a small fine. For The World I’m Cyrus Farivar.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: Today a bomb – a very big bomb left over from the Second World War – exploded in Northern England.

SOUND CLIP: [EXPLOSION] Ooooohhhh.

MULLINS: It was a controlled explosion done by a trained bomb squad in a field in Yorkshire. Jill McKenzie is a reporter with BBC Radio York and she was there as that bomb was detonated. Jill first off, how did a World War II bomb every end up in a field in Yorkshire?

JILL MCKENZIE: Well it crashed. It was on an airplane, a Whitley bomber, which crashed in 1940 in October. And I’ve actually spoken to some people in the village who remember the night the plane came down. They went down to the filed. This isn’t a very big village. Only a few hundred people. So they went down to the field to see what was going on and spoke to some of the soldiers there who [INAUDIBLE] said look this plane’s come down. And the bomb was left over from that.

MULLINS: But the plane had come in from where? I mean why was it carrying this enormous bomb?

MCKENZIE: Well it had been over to Germany on a bombing raid. We don’t know why the plane still had a bomb on board. It had been to Germany. It was on its way back heading for a nearby airfield. It’s possible that they tried to jettison it and it got stuck and then when the plane crashed it just landed in the field with it and it was never found until this weekend.

MULLINS: Why were they looking now?

MCKENZIE: Well interestingly this field has been plowed several times since, you know every year since the plane came down. And during the course of the plowings people had found bits of plane. They’d found bits of engine, bits alloy. But they never unearthed this bomb. Now this weekend an amateur historian got permission from the Royal Air Force to dig around in the field and try and get some bits of plane for a local museum. He got a little bit more than he bargained for. He took a digger in there, dug down, and then up came this 500-pound World War II bomb.

MULLINS: Up it came and good thing it didn’t explode at that point or up he would have went. What’s the reason at that point that it hadn’t exploded? And why did they say it hadn’t exploded anyway until today’s detonation?

MCKENZIE: Well it hadn’t exploded. It was still live. So of course the first thing he did was call the police who called in the bomb disposal squad. And they actually left the bomb where it was, in the bucket of this digger. They spent Monday deciding exactly what to do with it and then once they’d decided, they decided that they needed to set up a one-mile exclusion zone. So actually needed to clear a huge area. They had to evacuate two entire villages – around about 1000 people all together. Some just went to friend’s houses. Some went to a village hole, a couple of villages down the road and some went up to the hill opposite the field to see the explosion for themselves.

MULLINS: And where were you yourself Jill?

MCKENZIE: I was with the people on the hill. I wanted to see this explosion. And I have to say it was spectacular. It was a huge brown cloud. There was some sand in there because they had piled sandbags on top of the bomb to contain the blast as much as possible. There were 100 one-ton sandbags there – all of them bright blue – so it was really showing up in this green and yellow field. And as soon as the bomb went off you could see this explosion. This huge plume of smoke. And then just a couple of seconds of later this enormous bang and the gasps from the crowd were incredible. It was quite exciting.

MULLINS: Could you feel it?

MCKENZIE: No I couldn’t from where I was because we were about a mile away. But I spoke to a lady who was watching it in a car and she said the car shook.

MULLINS: And she was pretty close I guess.

MCKENZIE: Well no she was about a mile away as well on this hillside so there must have been a fair old aftershock.

MULLINS: What was the area like where the bomb was detonated today after it was indeed exploded?

MCKENZIE: Well we did go down to have a look, and as I said before, there’d been a pile of sandbags. What was left was a few sandbags. There was this huge crater in the middle with a few bits of metal sticking out. Still hot to the touch an hour after in had gone off. And there were just a few piles of sand. There were bits of sandbag and sand strewn all over the field so the blast had gone quite far.

MULLINS: But presumably they had to also explode the digger, the mechanism that pulled it out from the earth.

MCKENZIE: Well fortunately for the digger owner they’d managed to disconnect the digger from the actual bucket so it was just the arm of digger and the bucket that was left holding the bomb. So the rest of the digger got out. So I think the owner was quite relieved about that.

MULLINS: Jill McKenzie is a reporter with BBC Radio York speaking to us from Ebberston, one of the villages that was evacuated today so a World War II era bomb could be detonated. Thank you Jill.

MCKENZIE: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. The strange tale of the ship Arctic Sea is getting a little bit stranger. The Russian-crewed cargo vessel disappeared last month. It was some place between Finland and its destination Algeria. The ship reappeared yesterday and now Russia says it has arrested eight hijackers. The BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse has been following the story and he says the Arctic Sea was reportedly seized in Swedish waters.

GABRIEL GATEHOUSE: What apparently happened was that a little dingy – a speedboat – raced up to the side of this ship and said it was in trouble. When the crew brought the people in the speedboat on board they threatened them with guns and made them sail down towards Africa with their navigational equipment switched off. Now this certainly would account for the reason why this ship disappeared off everyone’s radar for over two weeks until yesterday. A Russian navy vessel discovered it 300 nautical miles off the Cape Verde Islands which are off the coast off West Africa so quite some way off course. The Russians, as you mentioned, have now said they’ve arrested eight people on suspicion of hijacking. They’re investigating a criminal case but we don’t know who these eight people were; what they wanted. We don’t even know where they were arrested? Were they arrested on board the same boat? Or where they arrested somewhere else?

MULLINS: Now we don’t know this because the Russians haven’t apparently talked about it but is there anything known about why these people are in custody? What they did when they were on board the ship and where the crew is right now?

GATEHOUSE: Well the original supposition was that these eight people who were arrested on suspicion of hijacking were the same people who boarded the boat in Swedish waters on the 24^th of July. But Russia’s Ambassador to the Cape Verde Islands said earlier today that when the Russian Navy found the Arctic Sea only the crew was on board. They were not being guarded by anyone. So that seems to contradict that. Now as to who the hijackers were, we have no idea about that either. The Russian authorities are releasing information very selectively and slowly and the details are really raising more questions than they’re answering. What we can do is look at what was supposedly on board this ship. Now officially it was carrying timber to a value of just under $2 million. Two million dollars is a significant amount of money but it’s not the largest amount of money you might find on the high seas so we have heard all kinds of other rumors as to what might or might not have been on board this ship.

MULLINS: Is it unusual for a ship like this to be carrying timber from a place on the Baltic Sea to as far down as Algeria? I mean is that unusual? And also is it unusual to be hijacked in the Baltic?

GATEHOUSE: I don’t think it’s unusual for a ship from the Baltic to be carrying timber. There’s a lot of timber production that goes on around there but certainly hijacking ships in the Baltic is very unusual. This has led some people to suggest that perhaps it wasn’t a case of straightforward piracy but perhaps some kind of commercial dispute. Perhaps some kind of organized crime was involved. There’s even been suggestions of an insurance scam.

MULLINS: Gabriel you’re in Moscow right now. I wonder how this story is being reported there and what the questions are in Moscow in the circles there around what happened.

GATEHOUSE: Well it’s being watched very closely here of course not least because the crew of 15 were all Russian sailors. Now when the Russian defense minister came out yesterday and said that all the sailors had been rescued off this ship, that they were safe and well on board now a Russian naval vessel of course there was considerable relief. But the relatives of these people, most of whom are based in Arkhangelsk in northwestern Russia, don’t know yet, or at least we haven’t been told yet, when these sailors might be coming home.

MULLINS: There are so many questions that remain to be answered as you’ve said Gabriel. Is part of the interest in this because of the knowledge of the secrecy of the Russian government in the past? In other words, is that adding to some of the suspicions around what might have been transpiring on board the ship?

GATEHOUSE: I think that’s probably feeding into it. As you say the Russian authorities aren’t always the most forthcoming. They have a reputation for not always divulging the whole truth. If we think back to incidents like the sinking of the Kursk, that submarine off northern Russia, where information was very slow in forthcoming. And of course when there isn’t any concrete information that gives rise to speculation and rumor which is certainly what’s going on now.

MULLINS: Alright thank you very much. Gabriel Gatehouse in Moscow. Thank you.

GATEHOUSE: A pleasure as always.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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LISA MULLINS: A former president of South Korea, Kim Dae Jung, has died of pneumonia after a long illness. He was 85 years old. Kim Dae Jung was responsible for easing relations with North Korea after more than four decades of unrelenting hostility. Jason Strother reports from Seoul.

JASON STROTHER: In many ways Kim Dae Jung’s career follows the history of South Korea. Ed Reed of the Asia Foundation:

ED REED: He suffered under dictatorships, resisted dictatorship, fought for democracy, became president, opened a new era with North Korea. So that is the story of modern South Korea.

STROTHER: In 1971, after nearly defeating the military strongman Park Chung Hee in presidential elections, Kim Dae Jung was branded public enemy number one – a communist sympathizer. He survived an assassination attempt and fled to Japan. There the Korean Central Intelligence Agency kidnapped, drugged, and brought him out to sea. They intended to throw him overboard. It is believed he was saved only when the Japanese government and the US ambassador to South Korea stepped in. In 1980 Kim was put on death row for his alleged involvement in the Gwangju uprising which the military regime put down with deadly force. But after intervention by the Pope and Ronald Reagan his sentence was his sentence was commuted and Kim took refuge in the United States. Veteran South Korean journalist Shim Jae Hoon says Kim was grateful but had to reconcile his rescue with his opposition to US foreign policy in Korea.

SHIM JAE HOON: Kim Dae Jung was always critical of the United States. He was critical of the United States under Park Chung Hee because he claimed the US strongly supported Park in power which is true, quite true.

STROTHER: Kim Dae Jung became the leader of South Korea’s democrats but it wasn’t until 1977 he won election as president. He then began work on his long-held dream of engaging North Korea. The Asia Foundation’s Ed Reed:

REED: As I understand, his goal you know was not to be pro North Korea; it was to encourage change in North Korea. Providing incentives up front with the idea of long-term change.

STROTHER: Kim called his openings to North Korea the Sunshine Policy. Its climax came in 2000 when he and North Korean leader, Kim Jon Il, met in Pyongyang. And for his work Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize. But Washington thought Kim Dae Jung was naïve and misguided and the Sunshine Policy had some dark shadows. Again journalist Shim Jae Hoon.

JAE HOON: We now know that Hyundai Business Group had to hand over $500 million to get this summit off the ground. It was a sheer bribe. The question of what role, how much Kim Dae Jung played is still a question that has to be answered.

STROTHER: Shim says the scandal tarnished Kim’s reputation and wound up leaving the nation even more divided between those who support engagement and those who take a hard-line stance against North Korea. Kim Dae Jung spent his remaining trying to defend engagement with the north. At a news conference in Seoul in late 2007, he told The World’s Lisa Mullins that South Korean aid was having an impact on the people in North Korea.

KIM DAE JUNG: [SPEAKING KOREAN]

TRANSLATOR: Every year we are sending 400,000 tons of food aid and then 300,000 tons of fertilizers to North Korea. Nowadays, North Korean people secretly enjoy South Korea’s popular music, TV dramas, and even films. So that has caused a lot of change in the sentiment of North Koreans these days.

STROTHER: Even though Kim’s legacy may be mixed there’s little doubt that he helped ease tensions on the divided peninsula. But there’s still a long way ahead before the Korean war is finally over. For The World I’m Jason Strother in Seoul, South Korea.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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LISA MULLINS: Way south of London, France is considering a very ambitious project – the transformation of Paris. The project is called Grand Paris. It’s the brainchild of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The ideas include adding green spaces, improving access to troubled suburbs, even connecting the capital to the sea. The World’s Gerry Hadden has more.

GERRY HADDEN: French Presidents like to leave their mark on Paris. Francois Mitterrand built the pyramid at the Louvre. Jacques Chirac created a museum for primitive art along the left bank. But President Sarkozy is thinking bigger – a lot bigger. He wants to give the city itself a total makeover and extend its boundaries all the way to the Atlantic port of Le Havre, about 120 miles away. Actually Sarkozy’s borrowing Napoleon Bonaparte’s idea but when Sarkozy unveiled Grand Paris earlier this year he spoke like a visionary.

NICOLAS SARCOZY: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

HADDEN: He said in order to draw the center of Western Europe’s economy towards the south we must develop metropolitan Paris along the banks of the Seine River all the way to the sea in the northwest. By doing so he said we can reverse the flow of goods moving towards Northern Europe.

The Seine is already an important commercial waterway. Barges move along it all day long. But Sarkozy would boost its capacity and compliment it. He envisions high-speed passenger train lines along the same corridor and more freight hubs for goods. The city of Rouen would be such a hub. One longtime resident is an Englishman named Michael Towers. Towers works in international business. He welcomes Sarkozy’s idea. He says Rouen’s roads take too much of a beating as things stand.

MICHAEL TOWERS: If you look at that motorway there, that bridge there, this is the north-south link to go to England and Belgium and Holland with products from Spain and Portugal. So every single truck that comes through France probably crosses that bridge. That bridge never stops 24 hours a day. And you’ve got to think about these things you know. It can’t sustain continually maybe 500 trucks an hour. That’s impossible.

HADDEN: But Grand Paris isn’t just about moving freight; it’s ultimately about making Paris and its surroundings more livable. To that end, the new Seine corridor also calls for a chain of parks overlapping outdoor art installations. In short, one long, happy greenbelt. Rouen resident Nicole Buvy is out strolling the Seine. She says the local government has already improved parts of the river bank here. She hopes Grand Paris will finish the job.

NICOLE BUVY: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

HADDEN: She says lots of people now come down to the river to walk or rollerblade or ride bikes and now we need to do the same thing on the other bank.

But Grand Paris is not without its detractors. At a corner café in Rouen two locals who won’t give their names say they’re suspicious of any project coming from Paris.

ROUEN LOCALS: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

HADDEN: This is Normandy, they complain, and we want it to stay that way. When people from Paris show up with big plans taxes always go up. Grand Paris is not a good idea. France can’t afford this project they argue.

And they’re right. The economic crisis will likely temper the scale of Grand Paris considerably. Architects and analysts believe that most of the money for Sarkozy’s legacy will be spent within Paris itself where serious social problems exist.

SARCOZY: [SPEAKING IN FRENCH]

HADDEN: Sarkozy acknowledged this during Grand Paris’ unveiling. He said we know how to communicate instantly with anybody in any part of the world yet we have trouble living together in our own neighborhoods or tolerating those from other neighborhoods. The president was referring to the Parisian suburbs, or banlieus, where hug immigrant communities live isolated and frustrated. Police helicopters and patrols were out in the suburb of Bagnolet just last week. Young people burnt cars there after an 18-year-old was killed in a crash after fleeing a police check. Four years ago a similar police chase sparked weeks of riots and there’ve been regular disturbances since then. One of the burning problems in the suburbs is access to Paris is ringed by major highways and rail lines that literally cutoff the poor periphery from downtown. Grand Paris would address that issue by putting the transport lines underground and putting parks atop them – parks that would serve as bridges – both physical and psychological – into the burbs. Today one of the only ways into Bagnolet from downtown is over a concrete bridge that crosses an eight-lane highway. One Bagnolet resident named Marie crosses on foot.

MARIE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

HADDEN: She says she prefers the Grand Paris vision for the suburbs because she says Parisians hold a bad view of the people here. She says I don’t know exactly how Grand Paris will go but just image if this highway were underground in a tunnel with lots of trees on top. That would be beautiful. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden, Paris.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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