Our old friend ex-Field Marshal and current Egyptian presidential candidate Abdelfatah Al-Sisi just recently gave a very revealing television interview to leading Egyptian journalists. I found out via a mention on German radio, but it was hard then to find some corresponding printed article about it, whether in the German press or elsewhere. Ultimately it was the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that came through (where few others did), and my admiration for them extends to their revealing headline, Sisi warns about freedom of expression..

The piece states that the interview was in fact for a “private TV broadcaster” (what – closed-circuit TV or something?), and of course it was conducted in Arabic, so that helps explain why it almost slipped by European attention. No doubt the good ex-Field Marshal wishes that it had: I usually don’t like to include extensive quotations, but the two first paragraphs just state things so clearly.

The Egyptian presidential candidate Abdelfatah al-Sisi warned of the dangers of too much democratic freedom. In a talk with news-editors he called upon them not to insist too much on freedom of expression or other rights, for national security could thereby be put in danger. Egypt cannot be compared with stable Western lands, and a full democracy is an “idealistic” goal that possibly can be attained in 25 years, the former military chief said . . .

Sisi demanded that the approximately 20 editors of Egypt’s biggest newspapers not “scare” people or supply “skepticism.” The press should contribute to people getting behind the “strategic” aim of “protecting the Egyptian State,” he stipulated. According to his assertion, there should be “a balance between practice and freedom and national security.”

Well, there you have it! More dictatorial dumbing-down of discourse here, straight from before World War II, if not earlier. Don’t scare the people with your freedom of expression! Full democracy is still 25 years away!

Does that latter mean – something that has been cited before in an Arab electoral context – “one man, one vote, one time”? The article does acknowledge Sisi’s promise during the interview to step down if Egyptians ever rose up against him – oh sure, but the over 1,200 death sentences recently imposed on regime opponents would seem to argue against this. (Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi apparently made the same “I’ll step down” pledge when he was elected president.)

In light of that interview, it is refreshing to see the following from Al-Arabiya’s English twitter-feed:

The linked article is of course also in English, and raises the question as to whether Egypt’s media landscape (or its population) is really as immature and in need of protection as the general asserts. It seems two Twitter parody accounts – one for Al-Sisi, the other purporting to represent his only rival in the presidential election, Hamdeen Sabahi – are going at each other with wild comic abandon. I’d love to give you a flavor of the repartee, but unfortunately they are in Arabic.

It is also interesting from the Al-Arabiya piece that the two parody accounts initially were @Alsisiiofficial and @HamdeenSabahi – too close to reality for someone, for they both quickly switched to the more truth-in-advertising handles @AlsisiParody and @HamdeenParody. Was that official pressure already? Whether it was or not, you know that Al-Sisi would shut them down – or at least the Al-Sisi parody account – immediately if he wasn’t in the middle of trying to fool all of the people all of the time in a presidential election campaign. You can be sure that, once he is elected, he’ll be in contact with the right officials at Twitter to do so.

The Al-Arabiya piece at least reports one recent tweet from the @AlsisiParody account in English (everything here is [sic]):

Those who will elect @HamdeenParody re-tweet this tweet…so I can jail you all once I become a president

Ain’t that the truth though?

UPDATE: The English site of Al-Arabiya has come through with an excellent piece about the interview(s) entitled Sisi’s electoral interviews: Was he a man or a marshal? The consensus among the interviewers – but not 100% – was “Yes, here we have someone just waiting to be a dictator.”

And let me give you the final paragraph:

This interview, and others to follow, will be the means by which Sisi’s program is made public, Mughazi [his campaign spokesman] added. “Sisi’s electoral program won’t be printed, but will reach the people through a series of interviews since interaction is always more effective,” he said. [Former president from the Muslim Brotherhood] Mursi “had a printed program that contained big dreams, none of which came true. Sisi, on the other hand, is a man of action.”

You’ve heard of Lenovo, right? Chinese company . . . bought IBM’s Thinkpad laptop division back in 2005 – right, that one. Ah, but you still don’t know the half of it, as reporter Henning Steier of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung found out in Beijing:

Zu Besuch bei Lenovo in Peking: Wie die Chinesen den Smartphone-Markt aufrollen wollen und warum das schwierig wird: http://t.co/s4PMencv2l

March 25, 2013 11:06 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@nzzdigital

Henning Steier

In the first place, with a 16% worldwide market-share as of QIV 2012 Lenovo is contending head-to-head with Hewlett-Packard for top position as the world’s largest personal computer-seller. Granted, that is equivalent to fighting the last war, considering that PC sales are now in steady retreat (with the new Windows 8 operating system doing little to stem the losses, as Steier mentions).

Far more impressive is what Lenovo intends to do in the area of smartphones, which these days is truly where it’s at commercially. In fact, they already sell them – maybe you’ve never heard of products such as the company’s flagship K900 smartphone (pictured), but that’s because they have mainly been active in the Chinese market (25 million sold in 2012; #2 there behind Samsung). and in other non-Western lands such as Russia, India and Indonesia (soon to include Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria).

They will be coming to the US and European smartphone markets, to be sure, by 2014 at the latest. Get ready, because their ambition is to be at least #3 in smartphones worldwide within 18 months, and they will upping their yearly production of new models from last year’s 42 to do that. There’s even a rumor that they have their sights set on acquiring the ailing Canadian firm RIM, maker of the Blackberry; CEO Yang Yuanqing seemed quite annoyed when reporters at a Beijing press conference raised that possibility.

By the way, Lenovo sells phones using Android, but with three models coming out this year that run on the Windows Phone system. It also relies to a much greater degree than most other smartphone makers on Intel chips to power its devices – it already has a solid relationship with the California-based chipmaker for its computer business.

Wow: a $1 billion cash-and-stock pay-out (although there are rumors it could have been double that) for a firm with only 13 employees and a 17-month history! The spectacular cash-in of Instagram has eyes ringing like cash registers all over, and not just in the US:

Start-ups: Gründen per Mausklick – ein kurzer Vergleich von CH, D, USA und GB: http://t.co/SpTvVPyB

April 18, 2012 7:05 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@nzzdigital

NZZ Digital

Here, Juliane Leopold of the leading German-language Swiss paper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, takes a look at comparative conditions in her country, versus the UK and the US, when it comes to encouraging start-ups to thrive and to strive for a similar jackpot.

The short verdict: Switzerland has come a long way, but still lags behind. There happens to be a portal there designed to ease the way for start-ups, called StartBiz, but it won’t actually get your company registered – you’ll have to do that the old-fashioned, forms-and-visiting-offices way. The usual business form adopted, the GmBH, is also legally-speaking not as attractive from the standpoint of investors buying equity interests in a company as is, say, the Limited Company one can form in the UK.

Similarly, there are of course institutions set up in Switzerland to bring inventors and investors together, such as VentureKick (and what do you know, that site is even in English!). But there are similar set-ups in most other places. Compare that to the UK’s Enterprise Investment Scheme, which offers tax-breaks to investors in start-ups. (The article also mentions a “Start-Up Pact” program there that supposedly grants £1,500 to new companies, but I was unable to find any on-line confirmation.) Oh, and it is true that one can do everything towards setting up one’s new company there on-line.

Then there is the US, specifically Silicon Valley. There is no tax-relief scheme in effect there to encourage start-up investments (that I know of; and none is mentioned in the article), but that is probably not needed in view of the many other advantages that continue to make this the world’s premier entrepreneurial hothouse. Foremost among these, as Leopold mentions, is the sheer quality of personnel that gravitate to the business scene there, whether one needs programmers, interface designers, or business executives. Added to that is the remarkably high tolerance for risk present – probably aided by the fact that, in the US, bankruptcy is often a badge of honor while in Europe it is a more devastating failure. There is also an ultra-open networking environment where – if Leopold’s article and the quotes she includes from those who have been there are to be believed – no one worries about whether their great new business idea is going to be stolen. Instead, everyone is just glad to offer a critique and encouragement.

Back for a moment to Libya. (From Letterman, Top Ten Thoughts That Went Through Herman Cain’s Mind During The ‘Libya’ Moment: 10. “Libya? I remember Lydia, but I don’t remember a Libya!”)

As in any revolution, people were called upon to make a serious choice one way or another: revolt or support Qaddafi? If your side did not emerge victorious, you were sure to be in serious trouble. That was most gravely true for Libyan residents, but other parties had a similar dilemma, especially once the tide started to turn against the rebels starting around March and the prospect of civilian massacres started to arise. Much of NATO – including, crucially, the Obama administration, although the lead was taken by France and the UK – then chose to intervene, and managed to get passed UN Security Council Resolution 1973 to justify (somewhat) that intervention. Others held back – and the most prominent of these was Germany, which made no contribution to that NATO military effort and in fact abstained in the Security Council vote on Resolution 1973.

Well, now Qaddafi is dead and gone, and the winners and losers are clear. Germany is a loser (although not as badly as the regime supporters). In that light, @swissbusiness has come up with a fascinating interview in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

«Die Nato ist keine Weltpolizei» http://t.co/Vz5Qoswd

November 15, 2011 11:42 am via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@swissbusiness

swissbusiness

(more…)

The New York Times recently featured a piece particularly interesting to those of us obsessed with cataloguing US-Europe cultural differences, one by Elisabeth Rosenthal headlined Across Europe, Irking Drivers is Urban Policy. “The methods vary,” Ms. Rosenthal writes, “but the mission is clear – to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally-friendly modes of transportation.” Why, how dare they?

The article is datelined Zurich (sic; the place properly spells its name “Zürich”), and most details about this supposed pan-European conspiracy against the automobile do come from out of that city. But now Zürich has caught notice and offers a reply, in the form of this editorial by Martin Meyer in its flagship newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, for which the headline writer – probably not Meyer himself – latches onto the available racy double-meaning to craft the snappy title “Zürich, Red-Light District.”

Goodness sakes – to paraphrase the way Meyer starts out his piece – Zürich is front-page news on the International Herald Tribune*! How come? Why, it’s because of the “torture” (Folter) we impose on our drivers! Making them stop repeatedly at deliberately-unsynchronized red lights! Slowing them down to a snails’ pace – when they’re allowed at all – near main city squares! He remarks on the behutsam empörte Verblüffung (“circumspectly indignant bewilderment”) of Ms. Rosenthal’s writing-tone, saying that “like Gulliver in the Land of the Giants, she gradually submits to a morality that, in the name of a philosophical superiority, knows what is right and what is wrong.”

Then again – is Zürich truly in the avant-garde when it comes to “transforming cold asphalt on-the-move into blooming zones of [pedestrian] comfort”? as Meyer asks elsewhere. His civic modesty here is touching, but he also has a real point: other European cities would have made better case studies. (You have to pay just to drive into Oslo, for example, or into London for that matter!) In other words, there was really no need for Zürich to gain this minor, but still probably undesired international notoriety in the eyes of the IHT’s/NYT’s affluent, influential readers.

* Yes, it’s strange that Meyer mentions the IHT when in reality Ms. Rosenthal’s article originated with the New York Times, which provides most of the IHT’s content! Was it just a mistake, or can it really be that the IHT name still carries more prestige in European circles?

Verily, the massive Wikileaks document-dump of thousands of US State Department confidential cable-traffic dispatches has turned out to be the sort of pre-Christmas gift that keeps on giving. Its sheer size militates against any “instant analysis” of what the materials mean, requiring instead ongoing examination to digest them properly and gradually (and with unpredictable timing) uncover the really interesting stuff. On the other hand, so far their effect has mainly been analogous to the classic case of a politician “misspeaking” – i.e. unwisely letting his guard down in public and actually speaking the truth that everyone knows or assumes, but which never was to be formulated publicly.

Take the “mystery” of Abelbasset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted for planting a bomb on the Pan Am flight that crashed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie back during Christmastime, 1988. He was released from prison by order of the Scottish authorities in August, 2009, free to go back home, because he had only about three months more to live before he would die from cancer anyway. Yet somehow as of this date he is still alive and living in a villa somewhere in the outskirts of Tripoli.

As reported now in the Neue Züricher Zeitung, American diplomatic dispatches unearthed by Wikileaks show that this was but a cover-story. First of all, it was top officials of the UK government in London, not Scottish officials in Edinburgh, who were actually in the driver’s seat in this matter (although al-Megrahi had indeed been convicted in a Scottish court and was incarcerated in a Scottish jail). Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi was aware of that from the start, for it was clearly a high-intensity campaign of threats and intimidation from him against these officials which is what sprung al-Megrahi. Whatever levers Qaddafi knew he had available to himself, he used – namely threatening (in case al-Megrahi should ever die in UK custody) not only to cut off all British economic activities in his country, but also to violate the safety and well-being of British nationals there, including diplomatic personnel.

Why would we be finding all of this out necessarily by means of American diplomatic documents? Well, clearly there was an American interest here, in that the vast majority of those killed on that ill-fated Pan Am flight heading to JFK airport in New York City were American nationals. In essence, American authorities were reliant on British/Scottish justice for the conviction and punishment of those people’s murderers. Naturally, then, there was outrage from the American side in August of last year when al-Megrahi was released, including rumors of Congressional hearings on the matter (which faced a substantial obstacle in the fact that the British officials US representatives most wanted to question were under no obligation, as foreign nationals, to appear before them). “He’s about to die anyway” was the main operative fig-leaf trotted out to try to tamp down the outrage – even while, as the released documents further show, no less than the then-UK Secretary of State for Justice, Jack Straw, had secretly admitted the year before to US diplomats that al-Megrahi probably had at least five more years to live.

Have you heard? The 2010 World Exposition will be held in Shanghai, China, from May 1 through October 31 this year. And yes, there will be a US pavilion there, even though through much of last year that issue was touch-and-go: it seemed no one really wanted to pay for one, least of all the US Government, but a solution was finally found involving a broad away of corporate sponsors.

But enough of that; the Neue Zürcher Zeitung has a truly mesmerizing article up now by Mattias Messmer about the preparations in Shanghai itself (Pajamas back in the closet). His key point: this is going to be a Chinese world exposition, after all, the first one ever, so you know it is going to be rather different from the last one (which was held in Zaragoza, Spain in 2008, in case you don’t remember) or indeed any other. As Messmer puts it, “In this country politics, national pride and cultural differences play a much more significant role, especially regarding great international events.” I should not surprise us at all – at least those of us who were paying attention during the 2008 Peking Summer Olympics – but it is clearly the aim of the Chinese authorities that this World Exposition be the biggest and indeed the best ever.

Also similarly to Peking two years ago, those authorities are also determined that from 1 May – and even before – Shanghai will present its best face to the world. Messmer’s article is basically devoted to describing the initiatives being taken to that end. Cost is no object: once again, whole streets are being ripped up (often because of the new subway lines being built under them), unsightly neighborhoods are being razed, often to be replaced for the most part with attractive parks, and in those neighborhoods allowed to continue to exist as before the house-facades are being spruced up.

But it doesn’t stop there. Those in charge are determined not just to make a new physical city, but also a new, improved sort of Chinese citizen to go along with it. That means that a behavior-modification campaign is now in place to “civilize” Shanghai citizens in preparation for all the encounters they are sure to have with visiting foreigners starting May 1, a campaign pursued through ubiquitous street-posters – usually featuring “Haibao,” the Expo’s little blue mascot, pictured above – reminding people to behave themselves, backed up by an enhanced police presence. These banners make it clear that there is to be no more spitting; no more littering, no more “wild jostling,” such as apparently is ordinarily the Chinese norm at bus- and train stations; and no more wandering around town in your pajamas. (Thus the title of Messmer’s piece, and it’s a shame: apparently middle-aged women wandering around town in their pajamas, with their hair in curlers and a lap-dog under their arm, is a proud Shanghai tradition.)

Interestingly, the Shanghaiers are also supposed to cut out the use of their local dialect (Shanghaihua) and just speak regular Mandarin. But that’s not all: bank clerks (presumably only the females) are being prepared to pretty themselves up for work during the Expo-period using the same uniform makeup arrangement, and it’s also said that other local young lovelies are being recruited to take over bus-ticket sales along certain high-traffic routes.

As usual, Messmer reports, the city residents are fine with all that. They’ll stop their spitting; they’ll put away their pajamas. They’ll even enter a state-sponsored contest on the theme “Knowledge of the Expo and Civilized Behavior” to get the chance to win free tickets to the event. Because, in the final analysis, they’re proud that the World Exposition is coming to their city.