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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.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp. This is The World. Hamid Karzai is getting a reality check as he begins his second term as president of Afghanistan. A day after his inauguration a suicide bomber on a motorcycle in southwest killed more than 20 people today. A lawmaker named Abdul Rasul Sayyuf escaped a separate bombing on the outskirts of Kabul.

Today Karzai condemned the attacks as brutal and unforgivable. Kathy Gannon is with the Associated Press and is in Kabul. Kathy who is this lawmaker who narrowly escaped death?

KATHY GANNON: Abdul Rasul Sayyuf. He’s a [INDISCERNIBLE] and he’s also a former warlord – a fairly significant one – and was backed by the US during the 1980s invasion of Afghanistan by the Russians. And he’s been named by the Human Rights Watch as a war criminal and was very close actually to a lot of the Arab fighters including Osama Bin Laden. That he’s the [INDISCERNIBLE] alliance and was against the Taliban. And when the Taliban were driven out he was returned to power along with several other warlords.

SHARP: What did it feel like in Kabul today, just a day after the inauguration, and now with all the election brouhaha behind everyone?

GANNON: Yeah a few things were back to normal. It is Friday. Friday is a holiday in Afghanistan. And yesterday because of the inauguration and the number of [INDISCERNIBLE] that were here the city was pretty much in a lockdown. Roads were blocked. People were given holidays. They were asked to stay off the road. So the security was so very intense yesterday. Where today things are back to normal. Traffic was flowing and a lot of the smaller shops were open.

SHARP: And Kathy Gannon what will you be watching most closely in the next few days and weeks?

GANNON: Well I think there the government goes in terms of making good on its promises and President Karzai had certain things that he said in terms of you know responsible people, tackling the corruption and then the whole culture of impunity. The question is now how does he implement it? Does he implant it? How does his government move forward? Who does he choose for his cabinet? I think all those things are being watched into the next few weeks.

SHARP: Kathy Gannon of the Associated Press. Thanks very much.

GANNON: You’re very welcome. It was a pleasure.

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.

Read the Transcript
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.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp. This is The World. In Mexico the war against the country’s drug cartels makes headlines every day. There are stories about suspected cartel members getting arrested for example. But more often it’s bad news. Daylight shootings, kidnappings, and extortion have become common all over Mexico. That’s the case in Camargo, a once tranquil and mostly agricultural town. It’s six hours south of the Texas border in the state of Chihuahua. Monica Ortiz Uribe recently visited the town to learn how life there has changed.

MONICA ORTIX URIBE: To find the heart of most small towns in Mexico you go to la placita, or little plaza. This is where people go to hang out, buy some toasted pumpkin seeds, a soda, or freshly popped popcorn. La placita in Camargo still seems peaceful. On a recent night a clown in baggy, polka dot pants entertained a crowd of children.

[CLOWN ENTERTAINING]

Nearby grownups and adolescents sat chatting on park benches. A pig-tailed toddler with a mustard and ketchup mustache straddled a toy tractor.

[CLOWN ENTERTAINMENT]

This is the Camargo lifelong residents know and love. But lately this town of 50,000 residents has been battered by never-before see violence. Just this year some 50 people have been murdered here. Alejandro Perez Talamantes is the solemn-faced police chief in Camargo. This year three of his officers were murdered on the job.

PEREZ TALAMANTES: [SPEAKING SPANISH]

URIBE: He says the homicide rate in Camargo has increased dramatically since he’s been in office by something like 400%. Just last week the police chief’s own bodyguard was murdered along with the man’s 13 year old daughter. They were gunned down in their car by gunmen wielding AK-47s. Three weeks earlier the target was the head of a state police unit based in Camargo. He survived but lost a leg as a result of the attack. And this summer a wealthy business owner was kidnapped. His body was later found along a nearby riverbank bound and duct taped. None of these crimes have been solved.

[CHEERING]

Outside Camargo’s rodeo arena Mayor Genaro Solis Gonzales sits on the bed of his red pickup truck. He said there are two types of violence threatening his city. One is drug related and the other is common criminals taking advantage of the overall lack of security.

GENARO SOLIS GONZALES: [SPEAKING SPANISH]

TRANSLATOR: We’re talking about fighting people who are well-armed and ready for anything. Our municipal police department is only equipped to prevent crime. We’re just incapable of confronting organized crime in a battle like this one.

URIBE: They shouldn’t have to. In Mexico the battle against drug traffickers and other organized crime falls under the jurisdiction of state and federal police. But there’s no question that local officers are getting caught in the middle. Solis says three other towns have had their police chief murdered or severely wounded in an attempted murder. He says at least 10 other small town mayors in Chihuahua are grappling with rising violence just as he is in Camargo.

GONZALES: [SPEAKING SPANISH]

TRANSLATOR: There are some mayors who have told me if I had known things would be this way I would never have run for office. But that’s not true in my case. Obviously I’m under great pressure but I feel it’s in our best interest to keep fighting, to restore peace in our towns.

URIBE: Solis has tried several countermeasures. He purged his police department of 30 officers suspected of corruption and doubled the number of patrol cars on the streets. This September local police arrested some 20 suspects they accuse in a series or armed robberies to local homes and businesses. But the crime wave continues affecting nearly everyone in town.

[PEOPE SPEAKING SPANISH]

This man owns a ranch on the outskirts of Camargo. We’ll call him Joel but that’s not his real name. He’s visiting a neighbor in town to talk about a problem he’s having. Joel is the victim of extortion.

JOEL: [SPEAKING SPANISH]

URIBE: Joel says he was the last one leaving the ranch one evening when a masked man accosted him. The man demanded that Joel pay him the equivalent of $1500 or else he would kill Joel’s son. The rancher says he’s too afraid to call police to report the extortion. So he plans to deposit the money in a bank account as instructed by his assailant.

JOEL: [SPEAKING SPANISH]

URIBE: Joel says he could care less about the money. It’s his son’s wellbeing he’s worried about. Money comes and goes, he says, but life does not. For The World I’m Monica Ortiz Uribe in Camargo, Chihuahua.

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.

JEB SHARP: Meanwhile to another aspect of life in India you may not think about much – electricity. It’s a huge problem for the country’s government since almost half of all Indians, especially the rural poor, still don’t have electricity. But even in the relatively prosperous capital, New Delhi, the electric grid struggles to keep up and power outages are a regular part of life. One reason has to do with a longtime black market commodity in New Delhi – free, un-metered electricity pulled illegally from the grid. Reporter Elliot Hannon has the story of a power company that’s fighting back.

ELLIOT HANNON: On a dark, empty street in an industrial neighborhood in New Delhi, Maneesh Aurora and his men sit in a small van outside a crumbling factory. Aurora suspects it’s illegally stealing power from the grid. The business only operates at night so Maneesh and his crew have gathered a team to try to catch the factory workers in the act. Maneesh’s are all wearing dress shirts and slacks. By day they’re engineers for BSES, one of New Delhi’s private power companies. Tonight they bring a police escort incase things go wrong in the raid. Finally they muscle open the door and with pliers in hand they enter a windowless room. It smells like burning plastic. Maneesh and his engineers shine their flashlights on every dangling wire. The factory only has two workers who seem confused and just return the machine in the corner. It spits out spaghetti-like cords of aqua-blue plastic in a tub of water then dices them into bits that will later be turned into plastic bags. They take out a video camera and begin describing the evidence for their case.

MANEESH AURORA: These are illegal wires which is feeding all the complete load. Supply is feeding to this mixer.

HANNON: What Maneesh and his crew have found here isn’t at all unusual in New Delhi. Kamaljeet Rattan is spokesman for BSES. He says the Indian capital has long been a city of power thieves.

KAMALJEET RATTAN: Everyone. I mean you can’t blame those who stay in the slums. You can’t just blame the industry. You can’t just blame the traders and the shop owners. You can’t just even blame the elite of the elite. I mean everyone was into power theft. That’s why you had a situation that almost 64% of the power supply was never got billed.

HANNON: Until seven years ago the Indian government ran the power companies here and the energy sector was awash in corruption. For 50 rupees or about a dollar, customers could have a private electrician help them bypass their meters. As a result the utility was starved of funds to improve its infrastructure and electricity was scarce.

RATTAN: People have short memories. But the fact is Delhi used to have power cuts for 8 to 12 to 13 hours every day. Suddenly the lights would go off.

HANNON: By 2002 the state-run power company found itself three billion dollars in the hole so the government finally privatized the distribution of power. The company BSES took control of two thirds of the city’s grid and began investing heavily in infrastructure. They replaced old wires and installed new meters. Along with that came a new crackdown on power theft.

Back at the plastics factory the crew from BSES hack away at an illegal meter. They’ll need it for evidence in court. So they rip it from the wall. By now the factory no longer has electricity so Maneesh Aurora and his crew leave it in the dark. They head back to write a police report and to get ready for another raid tomorrow. For The World I’m Elliot Hannon in New Delhi.

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.

JEB SHARP: Another thing that people watching and waiting for is President Obama’s decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. Part of his deliberation may involve coming up with a new definition for what success in Afghanistan means. Another critical question is what failure would mean there. The World’s Katy Clark has more.

KATY CLARK: Steve Coll of the New Yorker posed the question what if we fail in Afghanistan in a recent blog post. But he says first we have to actually define what failure means.

STEVE COLL: Part of the problem with this policy dilemma is that US security interests have been defined as located almost completely around al-Qaeda whereas the Taliban are also a factor in the war and maybe in Afghanistan the main factor. And so you have to decide what you think about the Taliban.

CLARK: Coll says that in his mind the primary goal of US policy in Afghanistan ought to be to prevent a second Taliban revolution there. That he says would make it very difficult for the US to achieve its objectives in this war. Coll says a second Taliban revolution would be disastrous.

COLL: We’ve seen this movie before. It unfolded during the 1990s. There was a long-running, low-grade civil war that never finished when 9/11 arrived. So we would go back to that war and I think we can forecast that the war would be more intense than it was because the international community is much more deeply involved in the region now than it was in the 1990s.

CLARK: Coll goes on to predict that if the Taliban were to regain control of major Afghan cities such as Kandahar or Kabul it would energize the Taliban in Pakistan. The net effect, he argues, could possibly be Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of Islamic extremists. There could be increased Islamist violence against India and an energized Taliban could strengthen al-Qaeda which in turn could lead to more terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States. Samina Ahmed is Southeast Asia project director with the international crisis group. She’s based in Islamabad, Pakistan. Ahmed agrees that a US loss in Afghanistan could have devastating consequences.

SAMINA AHMED: You are going to create a piece of real estate that will be exploited by every bad guy in the business. So it extends beyond just the regional actors to folks who have trans-national links.

CLARK: Perhaps so says Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich. But Bacevich is more skeptical about such forecasting. He says predictions generally miss the mark and he equates them to scaremongering.

ANDREW BACEVICH: The analysis assumes that were the Taliban to prevail in Afghanistan that countries affected by the Taliban’s success would have no alternative but to somehow endure a whole host of negative consequences.

CLARK: Bacevich argues that even if the Taliban were to regain power in Afghanistan the United States would still have economic and political tools at hand among other things to suppress any threat they posed. Bacevich adds that it’s simply wrong to think that action or inaction on the part of the United States determines any larger trajectory of events in the world.

BACEVICH: The world is a complex place. Whatever turns out to be the fate of Afghanistan will be determined by Afghans; will be determined by a variety of other players in the region. The notion that what we do or what we don’t do is necessarily decisive is completely false.

CLARK: Steve Coll is the first to admit that what he writes is largely speculative. But he maintains it doesn’t take much to connect these worrisome dots and he hopes policy makers in Washington are considering all possibilities as they weigh their next move in Afghanistan. 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.

JEB SHARP: A news story out of Peru is getting a lot of attention around the globe. And we should warn you it involves some gruesome details. Peruvian authorities have arrested four people on suspicion of murder. The suspects are alleged members of a gang operating in the Peruvian jungle. Police commander, Angel Toledo, offered more details.

ANGELA TOLEDO: [SPEAKING SPANISH]

TRANSLATION: We’ve broken up a criminal organization dedicated to trafficking bodily tissues, human fat.

JEB SHARP: That’s the gruesome part. The gang is accused of killing people in order to extract and sell their body fat for use in cosmetics. The police dubbed the gang, the piztacos, after an ancient Peruvian myth. We asked Harvard professor Gary Urton to tell us more. He traces the myth back to the early days of the Spanish conquest.

GARY URTON: It was said that Europeans who came into Peru and came elsewhere into the Andes that one of the things they were looking for was they were looking for body fat to extract from Indians to be used for cosmetics and various purposes like that. In the present day ideas about piztacos are very common in the Andean Highlands. The piztacos are usually people who are associated with modern life, with machinery, with advanced technology. A piztaco will be a tall man, in the leather coat, with a felt hat and tall boots and who carries a knife. The piztaco will find an Indian in an isolated place, meet him on trail for instance, cut his head off and extract the body fat. The stated reason for this is usually in some way to oil the machinery of industry. So for grease for airplanes or automobiles or various things that usually are associated with the advance modern world.

SHARP: And is there a real basis in the original stories? I mean it just sounds like your worst kind of fear and that it would serve some function about fear and strangers as a story. But was there a reason that this story began in the first place?

URTON: Well I think you make a very good point is that it spoke to a time when Native people were in fact being severely abused by foreigners when their land was being taken, when they were being pressed into service for this colonial project, or that, when they were being killed also outright, and when diseases were rampant through the country. And it is I think probably form early colonial times to the present day a general set of beliefs saying be careful of what’s from outside.

SHARP: Do you believe the current news story out of Peru?

URTON: If you’re asking me personally if I believe them, no I don’t believe. I have heard too many of them in my years. I’ve lived for some five years or so in villages in the Andes and I’ve heard them time after time and every time one tries to track down the truth of one or another story it always sort of dissolves into the mist of folklore or myth or someone’s mischievous or fearful account. To me there are various things about this that I found very interesting. One that it’s being played up so much by the press. I can understand why it is. I mean it seems that in Peru that the identity of the bottles of supposed body fat were confirmed by the police. I’d be interested to see those lab reports.

SHARP: This is pretty loaded then – to call these defendants piztacos and yet these are true-life alleged murderers. So what do you do with the real part of the story?

URTON: Well I guess that’s where I would want to reserve judgment on the sort truthful nature of the accounts until we actually learn that these guys did kill 60 or more people and did cut of their heads and their arms and hung them upside down on hooks and drained the body fat out. I would just like to see what we learn over the days and weeks to come.

SHARP: Now what’s interesting about this story is that it involves Peruvians going after other Peruvians and the telling of the myth suggests it’s usually reserved for strangers and others. What do you make of that?

URTON: But remember that when we say Peruvians there are Peruvians and then there are Peruvians. So the piztaco story has always really turned on the opposition between native, local, so-called Indian people and people from the outside. So although these are Peruvians I mean you know it remains to be determined. I haven’t seen these guys or heard them talk or know anything about their personal histories, but I suspect that they’re probably mistisos, people who are sort of mixed ancestry and mixed culture. That is they know something about the countryside but they’re also intimately familiar with urban ways of doing things. Those are also outsiders.

SHARP: Finally Gary Urton, I’m just curious about how myths like the piztaco myth are perpetuated. I mean is it about these occasional flourishings in contemporary life? Is it that they rear their head once in a while and that story gets retold or re-imagined?

URTON: Well I think that to answer that you would really have to look at stories like this in many different contexts from those rare contexts like we are living through now where this very common myth is being told internationally. Here we are talking about it in Boston. To everyday tellings of it and various versions of it in small, local communities. I think that the sort of engine of it, let’s say, is not the big media event like this – because this will die down. This will go away and attention will move somewhere else. But when you go back to the Peruvian countryside you will still see that the mother is still concerned with the safety of her child and one of the most effective tools that she will have at her disposal will be to tell that child be careful of strangers. They can do these terrible things to you.

SHARP: Gary Urton is the Dumbarton Oaks professor of pre-Columbian studies at Harvard University. Thanks very much.

URTON: 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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JEB SHARP: Since the 1960s the US government has not allowed most of its citizens to travel directly to Cuba. There’s now proposed legislation in Congress to lift that ban. Yesterday the House of Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on the issue. One campaign against the ban though has been underway since May. It was launched by the online travel company Orbitz Worldwide. Barney Harford is the company’s president and CEO.

BARNEY HARFORD: At Orbitz we believe passionately in the power that travel has to transform lives and in the way that bringing people together of different cultures can bring together people and create peace and prosperity. So believe that giving Americans the freedom to travel to Cuba has the potential to bring together both Cuba and the United States as countries and enrich Americans lives as they visit the country of Cuba.

SHARP: So why get involved in this as a company as Orbitz Worldwide?

HARFORD: Well Orbitz is a leading travel company around the world. Our business is helping people to travel. And we believe that Americans should have the freedom to travel wherever they choose. Today, Cuba is the only country in the world that Americans can’t travel to. If you’re an America you can travel to Iraq. You can travel to Iran. You can travel to North Korea. You can travel to the Sudan. You can’t travel to Cuba. That doesn’t make sense.

SHARP: And obviously it’s a great market for Orbitz if the travel ban is lifted. But what about the view that it’s important to keep the pressure on the Castro regime, to curb human rights abuses and that by dropping the travel ban you’re taking the pressure off.

HARFORD: Well look the ban’s been in place for almost 50 years. It’s pretty broadly agreed that it hasn’t had its desired effect. I think it’s important to separate freedoms for Americans from foreign policy goals of America. I draw the example to China. America removed the ban on travel to China in the early 70s and since then, in the last 40 years almost, we’ve seen the development of probably the most important diplomatic relationship in the world today between China and the United States. And while the United States and China may not see eye to eye on all issues, it’s still a very important relationship and as a result of that relationship I think there’s been significant travel between the two countries and that’s been a key part of bringing those two countries together. So while it’s certainly the case that the United States and Cuba may not see eye to eye we don’t believe that’s a reason to ban Americans from traveling there.

SHARP: How are you going to persuade the leading critics though? I mean people who are worried that billions of dollars of tourist money are going to flow to the Cuban regime.

HARFORD: Well you know I think what the open Cuba campaign does is give voice to Americans who want to share their opinion. It is the largest grassroots campaign on this issue. And to date we’ve had over 100,000 people think that it’s calling on politicians across the spectrum to support the freedom to travel act which is before both the house and the senate right now and has seen very broad support in terms of co-sponsors from politicians across both sides of the house.

SHARP: Well Barney Harford, president and CEO of Orbitz Worldwide. Thanks for talking to us.

HARFORD: 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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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. There’s a new world leader on the block who represents 500 million people. But you’ve probably never heard of him – Herman von Rompuy. Last night leaders of the European Union’s 27-membe nations chose him to be the first president of the European Council. And they named an equally low profile foreign minister to serve at his side. The World’s Laura Lynch reports.

LAURA LYNCH: After nearly a decade of discussions and arguments over how to boost the profile and influence of the European Union the leaders pulled back from the brink. Instead of choosing a high-profile candidate like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair they chose compromise and got Herman von Rompuy. Belgium’s prime minister arrived at a news conference last night promising to be subservient to the interests of the European countries he now leads.

HERMAN VON ROMPUY: Our journey may be to watch a common destination but we will all bring along different luggage. Denying this would be counterproductive.

LYNCH: At his side was the EU’s new foreign minister. Cathy Ashton of Britain. Suddenly one of the most powerful women in the world Ashton didn’t seem to see it coming.

CATHY ASHTON: If I can begin by saying it’s perhaps a measure of my slight surprise that I don’t have a written speech for you but I’ve never been short of words to say and this evening is no exception.

LYNCH: Ten years ago Ashton’s biggest responsibility was running a local health authority in a district in southern England. Last year, she was named the EU’s trade commissioner. She rejects suggestions she doesn’t have enough foreign policy experience.

ASHTON: It’s not the case at all. I mean of course there are foreign ministers I haven’t met but I’ve already had a call from my opposite number in my previous job in trade from the United States and he’s put out a very supportive press release. I’ve worked alongside ministers from across the world. So it’s not so unusual in that sense for me to be thinking about taking on this role.

LYNCH: These two choices, low-key, low-profile, consensus-driven politicians, seem to suggest EU leaders want to remain in charge. But it’s come at a cost. The former US ambassador to the EU, Rockwell Schnabel, says it was a mistake to reject Tony Blair.

ROCKWELL SCHNABEL: I think personally if you’d had a choice of the former leader of Great Britain, for instance, the world instantly known who they would have to deal with. And I think that might have been more interesting at the moment.

LYNCH: Von Rompuy may yet become more than just a mouthpiece for the 27 European leaders in the union. Cathy Ashton may yet take a star turn on the international stage. But Simon Taylor of the magazine European Voice says that for now being boring is probably a good thing.

SIMON TAYLOR: I think the decision has been one of these classical European Union sort of compromised decisions. No one’s upset. We could have probably have had some more exciting, enthralling choices, but we’ve got people that everyone can live with and will probably do a good job but not in a sort of flashy way.

LYNCH: For all the talk of being dull, being predictable, there is one thing about the new president on the block that stands out. Von Rompuy likes to write haiku poetry. Just a few weeks ago he recited one at a press conference highlighting cooperation among Belgium, Spain, and Hungary. Three waves, it began, roll into port together. The trio is home. Herman von Rompuy may be sharpening his presidential pencil even as I speak. For The World I’m Laura Lynch in London.

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.

JEB SHARP: For all the talk about the new EU leadership that’s not the story that’s got most Europeans hot under the collar today. The real story in Europe this week is still this one.

[SOCCER ANNOUNCERS]

SHARP: We talked about it yesterday. Earlier this week France and Ireland played for a spot at next year’s soccer World Cup tournament. France came out the winner but only by one goal and that goal was marred by an obvious hand ball by one of the French players. Now obviously that’s not allowed and today that controversy continues right?

WILLIAM TROOP: You bet. You bet.

SHARP: That’s The World’s soccer aficionado, William Troop. He’s back. What’s the latest?

TROOP: Well the latest is that the Irish are still furious about it and they’re still demanding that the game be replayed and it’s gotten a lot of politicians involved. Ireland’s prime minister has come out and said by all means this game should be replayed. It’s the only fair solution. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has entered the fray himself and said well you know I’m sorry about what happened but we politicians should stay out of it. It’s up to the soccer authorities to rule on the matter. And guess what? Today FIFA, the world governing body of soccer, came out again and said no way. The call by the referee who did not see the hand ball is final.

SHARP: Just as you said yesterday. It’s just sacred. You must obey the referee.

TROOP: And that’s how soccer authorities want to keep it. Meanwhile the player who touched the ball with his hand, Thierry Henry, has come out himself and said I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed that we won this game that way. I think that the only fair solution is to replay the match. So he’s come out in favor of that now that soccer authorities have said no way.

SHARP: And what do you think? I mean is there another way?

TROOP: Well luckily we asked our listeners for some suggestions on how to solve this yesterday and they did come back with a lot of comments. Several listeners thought it might be a good idea to bring in the dreaded TV replay to allow video evidence to be used by officials at the field to review controversial calls like this one. But there are plenty of people, including some listeners who say don’t touch it. Soccer is fine the way it is. No video review. Long live the beautiful game, said one of our listeners.

SHARP: And I gather William that I was taken to task in the e-mails for referring to you as The World’s resident soccer geek.

TROOP: Yes one listener wrote in to say maybe I wasn’t offended by that but I should have been and that that’s not generally considered a nice thing to call someone a geek.

SHARP: Well William my sincere apologies. Thanks for coming in. The World’s resident soccer nerd, William Troop, thanks.

TROOP: You’re welcome I guess.

SHARP: Tell us what you think. Our discussion about how to fix glaring missed calls in soccer continues at The World dot org.

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