• President Obama’s Afghanistan plan: our coverage
• BBC coverage
• Monday’s interview with Ben Gilbert

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  Tonight’s the night President Obama will lay out his blueprint for the war in Afghanistan.  The president will reveal his strategy in his speech at the U.S. military academy at WestPoint in New York.  An administration official said today that Mr. Obama will announce plans to send about thirty thousand more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.  Many of them will be deployed in Kandahar.  Reporter Ben Gilbert is embedded with taskforce Kandahar, that’s a Canadian unit with U.S. forces under its command.  He spoke with some of the 4,000 U.S. troops already at Kandahar Air Base and sent us this report.

BEN GILBERT:  Kandahar Air Base is a sprawling, dusty center of the war efforts in Southern Afghanistan.  Fighter jets, helicopters and supply aircraft take off and land day and night.  Thousands of U.S. and NATO troops live and work here.  It’s also a place where troops based at four operating bases come for a little rest, relaxation and reflection.

At the French bakery here, one of the many shops and cafes on the Kandahar airbase’s boardwalk, 27 year old specialist Kyle Mitchell drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes after a long day.  He’s an Army combat engineer with an explosives and ordinance disposal unit.  That means he finds and clears roadside bombs.  He says he’s not planning to watch President Obama’s speech because it airs at 5:30 in the morning here but he does support the President’s decision to send more troops.

KYLE MITCHELL:  Oh, it’s a great thing.  It’s way, way, way undermanned here.  I tell my family all the time, like, you know, they ask my opinion on it and no, there’s not close to enough troops here.  You know to be on the roads all the time with what they’re doing, with 80’s and what not.

GILBERT:  Not everyone here thinks increased American commitment is a good idea.  A junior officer with the 82^nd Airborne, who didn’t want to be named because he can’t speak for the Army, says the U.S. should be focusing on problems closer to home.

SPEAKER:  My opinion would be we need to turn our efforts towards our own country and leave this to Afghan.  This is an Afghan problem.  We’re not going to be able to solve the Afghan.  We should turn inwards, our country, the United States, has problems.  It’s my personal opinion.  I probably shouldn’t say that to you but it is.  I don’t think there’s any need to shed more American blood for this country.

GILBERT:  His colleague, an enlisted soldier who also asked to remain anonymous, has mixed feelings.  He says more troops will help support the mission here but there presence won’t be a magic potion to bring the end to a quick close.

SPEAKER:  It’s a long-term commitment to stay here and I don’t have any issues with that, so I guess that’s my opinion.  As far as what the American public opinion is, I mean that’s obviously a different story.  I think the problem could be fixed but like I said, it will be a long-term commitment.

GILBERT:  That’s what concerns another enlisted man, a 27 year old sergeant who runs re-supply missions to outside bases.  This is his fourth deployment.  The other three were in Iraq.  One of the men in his 100 person unit was killed last month in an IED attack.  So he’s not sure increasing troop levels is such a good idea.  37 year old lieutenant Glen Robert Noranca couldn’t disagree more.  He’s with the striker brigade and leads a platoon of scouts from a base in the dangerous countrywide outside Kandahar.  He says more troops would help fulfill his mission of protecting the Afghan people.

GLEN ROBERT NORANCA:  It’s good and it’s bad.  It’s good to have more people and more help, then more chance for more soldiers to die.

GILBERT:  From your experience here, do you think that they’re needed?

NORANCA:  I think it’s a lost cause.  It’s a lose-lose situation.  No matter what we do, I don’t think it’s going to change much.  You can’t help nobody who don’t want to be helped.

GILBERT:  That fits with the apparent strategy behind the expected troop surge here.  Commanders hope to cut off Kandahar from the Taliban and secure the city and surrounding area, much like the strategy in Baghdad in 2007.  Although counter-insurgency doctrine says far more troops are needed than the expected 30,000, most here say no matter their personal feelings, the troop escalation can only help improve security and hold more ground.  For The World, I’m Ben Gilbert on Kandahar Air Base, Afghanistan.

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• BBC coverage
• Health related coverage on The World

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  Today is World AIDS day.  Politicians in many countries held photo-ops and gave speeches that sounded good but largely went unnoticed.  Yet in one country, remarks by the nation’s leader were closely watched.  South Africa is home to the largest number of HIV infected people in the world and that nation has been widely criticized for a feeble public health response that has caused thousands of unnecessary deaths.  On his first World AIDS day since taking office, South African President Jacob Zuma suggested a new era has begun for his nation and its fight against HIV.  The World’s Jason Margolis reports.

JASON MARGOLIS:  Jacob Zuma is an unlikely champion of AIDS prevention and treatment.  In 2006, he was accused and acquitted of raping an HIV positive woman.  At the trial, where Zuma claimed that sex was consensual, he said he had protected himself from HIV by taking a shower afterwards. That remark exposed a fundamental misunderstanding of the disease and caused him to be ridiculed by public health experts.  Today, Zuma looked to change his image.

JACOB ZUMA:  Let the politicians, all the politicization and the endless debates about HIV and AIDS stop.

MARGOLIS:  Zuma announced aggressive new steps for fighting HIV in South Africa.  He said anti-retroviral drugs will be made more readily available to pregnant women and there would be a new push to offer better treatments to people infected with both HIV and Tuberculosis.  And he announced universal treatment for children with HIV.

ZUMA:  All children under one year of age will get treatment if they test positive.

MARGOLIS:  Zuma urged all South Africans to be tested for HIV and he compared the fight against AIDS to the long struggle against apartheid.

PAUL ZEITZ:  This is just a remarkable shift in presidential leadership in South Africa.

MARGOLIS:  Paul Zeitz is executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance.  He says Zuma’s speech represents an important turning point.

ZEITZ:  You have to change the mindset.  You have to change the culture.  You have to de-stigmatize the disease.  He can bring this into a popular cultural movement which he launched today.

MARGOLIS:  For close to a decade, South Africans received a very different message about AIDS from then-President, Thabo Mbeki.  Mbeki argued that HIV did not cause AIDS and his health minister was ridiculed for recommending garlic and beet root as treatments.  Dr. Pride Chigwedere has studied the harm cost to South Africa by those policies.  He did his work while at the Harvard School of Public Health.

DR. PRIDE CHIGWEDERE:  We estimated that approximately 330,000 people died prematurely as a result of the policies that we implemented by the South African government from 2000 to 2005.

MARGOLIS:  Chigwedere says for many years, South Africans were denied access to anti-retroviral drugs, even when pharmaceutical companies gave the drugs for pregnant women to take to prevent transmitting the virus to their children.

CHIGWEDERE:  And the minister of Health responded by instituting restrictions when the use of the drug or the drug was donated free of charge and they restricted the use.

MARGOLIS:  Those days in South Africa now appear to be over.  Paul Zeitz of the Global AIDS Alliance says even before today’s speech, Zuma had made important changes.

ZEITZ:  He has appointed a new minister of health who has totally revamped the National AIDS response.  He has gotten the support of the U.S. government through the PEPFAR initiative, the emergency plan for AIDS relief.  They’ve announced a hundred and twenty million dollar donation today as well.  He has the UN system there.  This is a true national mobilization.

MARGOLIS:  Zuma will have his work cut out for him.  Each day roughly a thousand people still die from AIDS related illnesses in South Africa.  For The World, I’m Jason Margolis.

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Photo: Bob Dolby

One of Britain’s few remaining traditional red phone booths has been recycled into one of the country’s smallest lending libraries – stocking 100 books. Villagers from Westbury-sub-Mendip in Somerset can use the library around the clock, selecting books, DVDs and CDs. Users simply stock it with a book they have read, swapping it for one they have not. Marco Werman speaks with local resident Janet Fisher about the unusual library.

• BBC coverage
• Westbury book exchange

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MARCO WERMAN:  Phone booths are a thing of the past in most places.  The distant past, in fact, as in the time before cellphones.  Well the small village of Westbury sub-Mendip in England is still holding onto its one booth.  It no longer provides phone service but residents came up with a plan to save the phone booth or as they call it, the phone box. They’ve converted it into a miniature lending library.  The town recently lost its mobile library service and local resident Janet Fisher says the box was not getting much use for telephone calls.

JANET FISHER:  One person used it in 2008 so our village was given the option to buy this booth for a pound and we decided we’d have a tea party and all put our suggestions in and mine was to use it as this book exchange because of the lack of the mobile library and the fact that we wanted to do something useful with the box and so the suggestion was taken up and put into action.

WERMAN:  So where are the books coming from?

FISHER:  Well, the books are coming from everybody.  We started off with four empty shelves and within a very few days, the villages had brought books that they read and enjoyed and they didn’t bring any rubbish, it was all lovely stuff and they’re exchanged on a regular basis.  People bring a book and take a book.  It’s never locked so it’s open all the time and there are now DVD’s and CD’s and we have a box on the floor for the children’s books and that’s very popular so it’s just taken off.

WERMAN:  And how many books can you squeeze in to a British phone box?

FISHER:  Well I would say about 150 books are in there at the moment.

WERMAN:  Room for any more?

FISHER:  Unless we hang them from the ceiling, no, I think that’s about it.  But we’ve got a good variety.  We’ve got cookery books, thrillers.  We’ve got Shakespeare, poetry.  You name it, it’s there.  It’s a bit of everything.  It’s lovely.

WERMAN:  How many people have used the library so far?

FISHER:  It’s very difficult to say, Marco because we don’t keep any lists or any records.  There’s no rules and regulations and that’s one of the things that we find so endearing about it because every way you go these days, there’s somebody telling you how to do something so this is great.  It’s just there for everybody to enjoy.  But how many people use it, I don’t know but it is used because the books are constantly changing.

WERMAN:  Will this officially be the world’s smallest library?  Are you going to get a Guinness record for this?

FISHER:  Well maybe we will but probably I think after we’ve done it, there will be a lot more appearing on the British landscape because it seems to be quite a nice idea.  But whether it’s going to remain the smallest library in the world, I really don’t know.

WERMAN:  Tell me a little bit about your town, Westbury sub-Mendip.  What kind of …?

FISHER:  I’ll tell you about Westbury sub-Mindip.

WERMAN:  Yeah?

FISHER:  It’s an old Somerset village.  We’ve got about 800 people living here and it’s in the foothills of [SOUNDS LIKE] Demendet Hills which is in North Somerset.  It’s in the west of the country, between Cheddar where the cheese comes from and the smallest city in England called Wells so there we are, sitting in North Somerset and our little square is in the back quarter of the village and it’s surrounded by stone cottages and the school bus comes in, in the morning and picks the children up and drops them in the evening so it’s quite a busy little place at times during the day but it’s lovely.  It’s a really lovely place to be.

WERMAN:  And the phone box, the library is in the square, right?

FISHER:  The phone box is in the square and it sits in a little memorial garden so it’s a very pretty spot and it would have been a shame for that box to have gone into disrepair really.

WERMAN:  And our listeners can also see photographs of the phone box and I think also your cottage there in Westbury sub-Mindip, Janet Fisher.

FISHER:  Yes, the place that I’m speaking from now, is actually, you can see it.  There’s a picture of the phone box with a queue of people waiting to go in when it was inaugurated and my cottage is in the background.  There’s a bay window there and that’s where I am now.

WERMAN:  Janet Fisher, resident of Westbury sub-Mindip.  Thank you, good to talk.

FISHER:  Thank you, Marco.

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• BBC coverage
• Women of the Wall homepage

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  There are new tensions at Judaism’s holiest site, the Western Wall.  But these tensions are not between Israeli’s and Palestinians.  Instead, a group of women is challenging ultra-Orthodox control of the site, as Linda Gradstein reports.

LINDA GRADSTEIN:  A group of Finnish tourists listen carefully as their guide explains the history of the Western Wall.  Nearby, a group of junior high school students seem more interested in each other than in the Wall, the only remnant of the second temple in Jerusalem that was destroyed almost 2,000 years ago.  As you approach the craggy limestone bricks of the wall itself, the men and women’s prayer areas are separated by a tall fence.  Women are asked, sometimes politely, sometimes not, to dress modestly and given skirts to cover their legs if they are wearing shorts.  It was at this part of the site that an Israeli medical student, [SOUNDS LIKE] Nofrat Franco, was arrested during an early morning women’s prayer service.  Her crime, wearing a talis, a fringed prayer shawl usually worn by men and carrying a Torah scroll, a handwritten Old Testament read during prayer.  Traditionally, women did not wear the prayer shawl or read from the Torah scroll.  Anod Hoffman is the chairperson of the group called Women of the Wall, which organizes monthly women’s prayer services at the wall.

ANOD HOFFMAN:  We opened the bag, took the Torah out.  Nofrat marched with us a little bit and in a second, two men from the Foundation for the Preservation of the Wall came and very brutally, two thugs actually, told us to stop this immediately and before we could turn around, police showed up and the policemen, Vitale, started pushing Nofrat who was wearing a talis, a prayer shawl, holding the Torah, the Torah scroll in her hands, starting pushing her away from the group.

GRADSTEIN:  Franco was questioned for two hours and released.  She is not allowed to approach the wall for two weeks.  Rabbi Schmwell Rabinowitz who is in charge of the site, says the women were being deliberately provocative.

SPEAKER:  This is something that will get people all stirred up.  It will lead to disagreements.  The wall doesn’t belong to the Orthodox or to the secular, it belongs to everyone.  We’re trying to find a way that everyone can pray there without insulting anyone else.

GRADSTEIN:  In the early 1990’s, Women of the Wall appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court for permission to wear prayer shawls and read from the Torah scroll at the site.  After several years of deliberations, the court ruled 5-4 that they were not permitted to read the Torah at the wall itself.  But the court ordered the authorities to find an alternative site.  For years now, the women have started their monthly service at the wall itself and then moved to the alternative site known as Robinson’s Arch.  Anod Hoffman says she’s not happy with the compromise.

HOFFMAN:  It  really is insane that on the one side of the partition every man facing the wall was wearing a prayer shawl and we are disturbing the peace for doing the very same thing when according to Jewish law, absolutely no prohibition on a woman wearing a prayer shawl.  So yes, we were pushing the envelope, so to speak.

GRADSTEIN:  This is not the first time the women have sparked controversy.  In the past, they have been screamed at and had chairs and bottles thrown at them, often by ultra-Orthodox women praying nearby.  Hoffman says they will be there every month, pushing the envelope, until they are allowed to pray the way they want, at Judaism’s holiest site.  For The World, I’m Linda Gradstein in Jerusalem.

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MARCO WERMAN:  President Obama has considered the historical precedents and they are sobering.  Foreign generals have marched into Afghanistan since at least the time of Alexander the Great and their forays have all ended in failure.  But one of them didn’t have to.  That’s according to Mark Kramer who directs the Harvard Project on Cold War studies.  He’s in Sophia, Bulgaria.  He says the Soviet Union frequently had the upper hand in Afghanistan when Mikhail Gorbachev was in power in Moscow.

MARK KRAMER:  The depiction of Afghanistan as a complete failure for the Soviet Union was in part the effort of Gorbachev’s government to discredit everything that had been done by Lenin Brezhnev’s regime, including the invasion in Afghanistan.  It was a much more mixed result for the Soviet Union than it sometimes depicted.  It was far from a complete failure.

WERMAN:  But ultimately they left, they were chased out essentially, right?

KRAMER:  That’s correct.  I should add that because the war went on for nine years with Soviet troops there, the status of it changed quite a bit.  By mid-1983 or so, in other words you’re talking about three and a half years into the war, Soviet commanders shifted to a much more widespread counter insurgency strategy that emphasized quite brutal tactics and it came at a great cost to the Afghan population but it did achieve considerable progress and over the next few years, Soviet forces did gain considerable control of Afghanistan and in fact, by early 1986, several months or close to a year after Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power, Soviet troops were on the verge of annihilating the Afghan resistance but an important change happened at that point which was that political calculations in Moscow changed and it’s now clear from de-classified documents that as early as November, 1985, Gorbachev, at a Soviet party bureau meeting indicated that a decision had been made to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan.  So curiously enough, at the very time that military progress was being made, the political calculation changed the whole game and so from the on, it was really a question of when Soviet troops would be withdrawn, not whether they should be.

WERMAN:  So are you saying that by 1986 if the Soviets had stayed in Afghanistan, they would have won militarily if you had taken a political …?

KRAMER:  Yeah, I mean basically if you look purely, and again counterinsurgency was incorporating an important political element so I don’t mean to leave that out, but in terms of military progress, Soviet troops were on the verge of annihilating the Afghan resistance at that point, even after Soviet troops did pull out in early 1989, even though it’s now depicted as a failure.  In fact, the regime that they left in power, which was headed by pro-Soviet Communist leader, [SOUNDS LIKE] Nagi Buwa, that regime sustained itself in power for the rest of the Soviet period without Soviet troops on Afghan territory and that simply would not have been possible for the Afghan government at the time that Soviet troops moved in.

WERMAN:  Mark Kramer directs the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies.  He’s been speaking with us from Sofia, Bulgaria.  Thank you so much for your time.

KRAMER:  Thank you.

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WERMAN:  Turning our attention now to Iran, the Kremlin got a warning today from Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  He said Russia made a mistake last week when it voted for a UN resolution condemning Iran’s nuclear program.  He said any new sanctions would have no effect and anyone who took aggressive action against Iran would regret it.  Iran also issued a warning today on what could become another international dispute.  Tehran said it may take what it called strong action against five British sailors.  The five were detained last week after their racing yacht entered Iranian waters.  Now the British government is working hard to get them released.  The World’s Laura Lynch reports.

LAURA LYNCH:  The yachtsmen were en route from Bahrain to Dubai to take part in a race when their boat was seized in what Iran says was its territorial waters.  They’re not apparently being held on an island in the Gulf.  David Young is the father of one of the sailors.  He spoke to his twenty one year old son, Oliver, yesterday by phone.

DAVID YOUNG:  All of us were allowed to have a quick conversation to each of the families.  It was only a brief conversation but they did confirm they’re being well looked after, being well fed.  We believe they are ashore on an island and you know, quite bored now, wanting to see things resolve themselves, obviously.

LYNCH:  Their apparent boredom contrasts with the feverish efforts in Britain to secure their release.  The foreign secretary, David Miliband, has been trying to keep the incident from escalating.

DAVID MILIBAND:  Our contacts with the Iranian authorities suggest this is being dealt with in a professional and appropriate way.  This is a consular case which involves five young people and we certainly see it being treated as such.  We’re keen that this be resolved as soon as possible.  We understand that the five young people are being treated well which is obviously good and right.

LYNCH:  What’s more worrying are some of the remarks coming from Tehran about the sailor’s intentions.  [SOUNDS LIKE] Hashmat Tulah Fullaltishe is a member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission.

SPEAKER:  These people were arrested based on the international conventions.  If it’s felt that they’ve entered Iranian waters inadvertently, Iran will cooperate.  But if it’s determined that they did it on purpose, then Iran has the right to prosecute them.

LYNCH:  Britain’s efforts to keep politics out of this aren’t surprising.  Last July, Iran arrested three Americans who were hiking along the Iraq-Iran border. They’re now facing espionage charges. Iranian-American journalist, Husman Majed, says Iran’s actions are predictable, given how high tensions have become in the wake of the June election and the protests that have followed it.

HUSMAN MAJED:  So anytime an American or a British citizen ends up on the wrong side of the border, whether it’s a maritime border or whether it’s the hikers, the American hikers who crossed over earlier this summer, Iran is going to be very, very suspicious, maybe only momentarily but it is going to be suspicious given that there still is a tremendous amount of suspicious about British involvement and the potential involvement in the unrest following the election.

LYNCH:  Still, Majed thinks the sailors may be released soon.  Ali Ansari of the Iranian Institute at the University of St. Andrews disagrees.  Ansari says the sailors may serve a useful purpose.

ALI ANSARI:  The Iranians will say it has to go through a process; they’ll want to show that they’re doing that investigation and if we start to increase the pressure on this end, it may actually delay things.  My only concern I suppose is that some Iranians will see this as a useful distraction.  I mean the more we pay attention, it takes people’s attentions away from other problems that the government may be having.

LYNCH:  Already there’s word that some Iranian government supporters are planning a protest at the British Embassy in Tehran tomorrow against what they’re calling an illegal trespassing.  It’s a sign that despite Britain’s efforts, the yacht crew may yet become ensnared in a messy political standoff between the two nations.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in London.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Here’s another sign of change in South Africa’s approach to the AIDS epidemic.  The military is now allowing HIV positive soldiers to be promoted and to serve in foreign deployments.  That change comes after the nation’s high court overturned a longstanding bend by the South African National Defense Force.  The BBC’s Southern Africa correspondent, Karen Allen, reports from Johannesburg.

KAREN ALLEN:  On the southern edge of the Kalahari Desert, a fighting force is at work.  All jets flying above us have been bombing positions on the ground.  Some 6,000 members of South Africa’s National Defense Force are taking part in Exercise [SOUNDS LIKE] Saboka.  It comes just weeks after the military’s been forced to review its position in the recruitment, deployment and promotion of HIV positive staff.

LT. GENERAL VJ RAMLAKAN:  It’s not as if now that the flood gates are open for sick people to be deployed.

ALLEN:  Lt. General VJ Ramlakan is the Surgeon General of the South African National Defense Force.

RAMLAKAN:  If you are HIV and sick, clearly you will not be in the frontline.  If you are physically fit and you’re just HIV positive, then your HIV positive status would be minimized as [INDISCERNIBLE].

MERCER:  S’kumbuzo Maphumulo is the attorney who brought the test case.

S’KUMBUZO MAPHUMULO:  It means that people who are HIV positive in our military, who for instance, are on treatment and have stabilized on treatment, they meet minimum requirements, they will not qualify to be recruited and deployed and promoted which was not the case in the past.

MERCER:  It’s too early for the troops of the battle school to asses what this means but Helmoed Roemer Heitman, a defense analyst, says the move is a step too far.  Though the new rules mean that a HIV positive soldier has to meet the fitness requirements that matches a particular job, he considers it a breach of trust for the ordinary soldier.

HELMOED ROEMER HEITMAN:  One of the things the ordinary soldier does demand of his leadership is that we do not expose him to unnecessary risk and what we’re doing here is exposing him to unnecessary risk.  It’s bad enough we send them out to live under harsh conditions and get shot at, now we’re putting them in a situation where one of their own comrades could totally inadvertently infect them with a fatal disease.

MERCER:  Others argue the risk to fellow soldiers is small and the reality is that many who serve in the South African Defense Force are already HIV positive, whether they know it or not.  Studies have found that between twenty five and thirty percent of soldiers are infected with HIV and that most soldiers acquire the disease while on deployment.  On beach during his off duty hours, [SOUNDS LIKE] Dumisani Gumbi is being put through a tough fitness regime.  He discovered he had the AIDS virus eight years ago and is now on anti-retroviral drugs.  He’s a platoon sergeant in charge of some thirty six soldiers but his HIV status has hampered his career prospects and chances of doing peace keeping duties overseas.

DUMISANI GUMBI:  When we’re fighting, when you do peace keeping force, we are not biting the people.  But we are just being peace keeping force.

MERCER:  So there’s no extra [INDISCERNIBLE]?

GUMBI:  There’s no way.  And it means that we are also qualified.

MERCER:  For a defense force that’s had to adapt since the end of apartheid, it’s hard to find soldiers opposed to the change.

SPEAKER:  The people I work with, we’ve had this conversation.  It’s not really a problem.  We’d just like to know, nothing be a secret.

SPEAKER #2:  You’d always rather want to know if there’s someone amongst you that has, is infected with it because it makes it safer for the rest of the guys.

MERCER:  The military may have been forced to open its doors by the courts, but as one of the biggest troop contributing countries with 3,000 peace keepers in Darfur, Congo and Burundi, the South African Defense Force can’t afford to lose the experienced men and women in whom it’s invested so much.  In part, this new AIDS policy is a reflection of that.  For The World, I’m Karen Allen in Johannesburg.

WERMAN:  We checked in with the U.S. military to learn what its policies are toward people with HIV.  The Defense Department spokeswoman tells us that if you’re in the armed forces and test positive, you can continue to serve.  But if you test positive beforehand, you won’t be allowed to join the military.  And one more note on this world AIDS day, our colleagues at the BBC have put together an audio slide show you might want to look at.  It features posters from across the globe, designed to raise awareness of HIV AIDS.  Some are shocking, some are subtle, all of them are worth checking out.  That’s at TheWorld.org.

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.

MARCO WERMAN:  Representatives of nearly two hundred countries will converge on Copenhagen next week for talks on a new climate treaty.  The goal is a deal to sharply cut greenhouse gas pollution around the world.  But climate change skeptics haven’t given up hope that they can slow the momentum.  In late November, skeptics used stolen emails between leading climate researchers, to try to cast doubt on the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are an environmental threat.  More on that in a few minutes. Meanwhile, in Australia this week, the new leader of the country’s opposition is vowing to scuttle a government plan to cut greenhouse pollution.  Phil Mercer reports from Sydney.

PHIL MERCER:  The emissions trading scheme lies at the heart of efforts by Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, to cut pollution levels.  The program aims to make carbon based energy since as electricity produced from the country’s plentiful supplies of coal more expensive, creating an incentive for consumers and businesses to switch to renewal sources.  Rudd’s hope is to have the legislation passed before he arrives in Copenhagen for U.N. climate talks next week.  For that to happen, the government needs the support of conservatives in a hostile upper house of Parliament, the Senates.  Tony Abbott’s elevation as opposition leader makes that highly unlikely now.

SPEAKER:  Two ballots were held, Mr. Hockey was limited on the first ballot and the final ballot was won by Tony Abbott, forty two votes to forty one.

MERCER:  Tony Abbott believes the government is overreacting to the threat of climate change and insists that the emissions trading scheme would put unbearable pressure on the Australian economy by imposing punitive taxes on the energy industry.  Abbott exempts that man’s impact on warming temperatures has to be addressed, but he’s against rushing legislation through and is calling for a more considered debate.

TONY ABBOTT:  One of the things which I think has disconcerted a lot of people is the evangelical fervor of the climate change alarmists.

MERCER:  Many of Mr. Abbott’s right wing colleagues are climate change skeptics who believe that warming temperatures is simply part of a natural cycle and not the result of man-made pollution.  Senior conservative lawmaker, Nick Minchin, blames a left wing conspiracy for spreading environmental panic.

NICK MINCHIN:  For ten years the left internationally have been very successful in exploiting people’s united fears about global warming and climate change, to achieve their political ends.

SPEAKER:  The climate change issue is a good example of how we’re headed for a totalitarian regime.

MERCER:  There are plenty of climate change skeptics in Australia.  They have their own small political party and their ranks include a number of respected scientists such as Professor Bob Carter from James Cooke University in Queensland.  On a recent trip to the outback town of Roma, Professor Carter told the audience that the effects of climate change had been wildly overstated.

PROFESSOR BOB CARTER:  The temperature in 1958 is the same as the temperature in 1979 is the same as the temperature in 2005.  How many of you in this room are under 50?  There’s been no global warming in your lifetime.  None, zip, zero, none.

MERCER:  The election of Tony Abbott as conservative opposition leader is good news for opponents of the proposed emissions trading scheme.  But Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd isn’t conceding defeat yet.  His deputy prime minster, Julia Gillard, is still pushing for passage of the emissions trading scheme.

JULIA GILLARD:  [INDISCERNIBLE] may see Jesus in pool one, this is a scheme that is in the national interest.  We live on the hottest and driest continent on earth.  We’re going to be hit by climate change hardest.  That’s why we designed the carbon pollution reduction scheme.

MERCER:  If the emissions trading scheme is rejected by Australia’s conservative opposition, it would allow the Rudd government to call a snap election on climate change.  Opinion polls suggest most voters approve of Mr. Rudd’s plan, although there is concern that household energy bills would rise significantly as a result.  For The World, I’m Phil Mercer in Sydney.

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.

MARCO WERMAN: Now, about this Purloined Climate Science emails we mentioned a few minutes ago. Last month more than a decade’s worth of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists was posted online following a security breach at a U.K. research center.  Climate skeptics argued the emails prove climate scientists have been manipulating data about the extent of manmade climate change.  Now, the Director of the Center, the Climatic Research Unit, has taken a leave of absence pending an inquiry into those allegations. Other scientists around the world say the charges of data tampering are bogus, and that even if they were true, they wouldn’t diminish the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing dangerous climate change.  And it seems that that evidence is continue to accumulate today.  A new study by more than 100 researchers from eight countries is warning that the loss of ice in West Antarctica will likely lead to massive sea level rise by the end of the century projected at four and a half feet. Such a rise would swamp low lying coastal areas that are home to hundreds of millions of people, and leave several island nations unlivable.  More fodder for the negotiators headed to the Global Climate Summit starting Monday in Copenhagen.  This is PRI.

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.

That’s guitarist and composer Demir Demirkan and singer Sertab Erener. They are two of Turkey’s biggest stars. Erener won the Eurovision song contest for Turkey in 2003.

Demirkan — you metal heads out there may know his name — led the Turkish hard rock outfit Pentagram. In 2007, they got together — as Demirkan says — to set aside their pop and rock backgrounds, and create something new…an album called Painted on Water.

It’s new again for the US market, where it’s recently been released. This track, “Shut Up and Dance,” is kinda bluesy. But there’s more to the album than that.

A lot of Turks have enjoyed this duet CD “Painted on Water” because it is a mellow recording with musical devices that mirror Turkish traditional songs.

Take the title track. Erener has said that fans like it, but they scratch their heads when they hear it. The melody is familiar, but the English lyrics throw them off. The song is actually a traditional Turkish folk song called Ah Bir Atas Ver.

Selling very well in Turkey. And perhaps in English, Sertab Erener and Demir Demirkan will pick up some anglophone fans as well.