Sunday Roundup - March 30, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at the happiest cities, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Iran nuclear talks, the US surveillance reforms, and Venezuela.

The Happiest Cities

Provo looking towards the mountains-from utahvalley.com website

Not sure what it is about the Spring but, in the past week, I've read two lists of "happiest cities" - one for the US and one for Italy.  Maybe it was occasioned by the UN declaration of March 20 as the International Day of Happiness.  Gallup teamed with Healthways to rank the US cities based on a "well-being index" that  looked at sense of purpose, social, financial, community, and physical well-being factors. [Gallup Poll website]   The top five US metropolitan areas using the well-being index are: Provo-Orem, Utah; Boulder, Colorado; Fort Collins-Loveland, Colorado; Honolulu, Hawaii, and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California.  The Italians, on the other hand, analyzed 40 million tweets, characterizing them as happy (or not) using the iHappy Index..  Corriere Della Sera reports: Analysis of more than 40 million tweets collected daily from Italy’s 110 provinces reveals that in 2013, Italy’s happiness capital was Genoa. The Ligurian capital’s province topped the rankings with 75.5% of its tweets classified as happy. Hard on Genoa’s heels was Cagliari with 75.1% while other top ten towns included Parma (fourth with 72.9%), Bari (seventh on 71.7%) and Bologna (71.4%), which came second in 2012 but last year slid down to ninth place.  It appears that, more than anything else, weather affects the people's happiness in Italy.  Monday is the saddest day of the week and Christmas is the happiest holiday, followed closely by Mother's Day.  Living further south in Italy or in a coastal city also increases people's happiness.

Genoa Bay - from miriadna.com website

  
Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process
John Kerry met with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in Amman, Jordan, in an attempt to rescue the faltering peace process.  As reported in the The Guardian on March 26: Kerry arrived in the Jordanian capital hours after an Arab League summit in Kuwait released a statement emphatically declaring that Arab leaders would never recognise Israel as a "Jewish state", a key demand Netanyahu has made of Palestinians.  Increasingly harsh rhetoric is coming from both sides centered around Israeli settlement building on Palestinian land and the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.  After months of deadlock Kerry has given up hopes of brokering a deal and is instead concentrating his efforts on convincing the sides to agree to extend talks.  Otherwise, the negotiations are planned to end in April.

Iran Nuclear Talks
Writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Arms Control Today, George Perkovich recommends the Obama Administration and Congress divert a fraction of the time and energy now spent debating whether to add sanctions on Iran to the more difficult challenge of figuring out how to cooperate in removing them if a final agreement is reached.  Perkovich notes that the US and its negotiating partners seem to have reached a general understanding regarding key components that should be included in a satisfactory deal.  Iran must significantly constrain its activities related to uranium enrichment, revise plans to build a heavy-water reactor, resolve outstanding questions with the IAEA about Tehran’s past activities, and implement additional protocols to strengthen the IAEA’s ability to carry out inspections in the country and...[to] require Iran to provide design information as soon as decisions are made to construct a nuclear facility. To these Perkovich adds four less talked about components that would result in a well-rounded nuclear deal: constraints on enrichment activities, irreversible safeguards, circumscribed R&D, and new transparency and verification measures.  These measures would help build confidence “that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek or develop any nuclear weapons” and thus open the way to the final removal of sanctions.

Surveillance Reforms
President Obama confirmed on Tuesday March 25 that US plans to end the NSA's bulk collection of telephone records.  The House Intelligence Committee is close to an agreement with the White House to revamp the surveillance program.  The bipartisan USA Freedom Act, under consideration in both the House and Senate, would, in addition to ending bulk record collection, put limits on Patriot Act practices targeting people in the US, require the government obtain a court order before using information about Americans collected during foreign intelligence operations, and create a public advocate to advise the secret surveillance court. [ACLU webpage]   

The Guardian was instrumental in bringing NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden's revelations to the world's attention. A Guardian March 25 article gave Snowden's and Obama's comments on the surveillance reforms:  In a statement through the American Civil Liberties Union, Snowden said the plans outlined by Obama were a “turning point”...Snowden said none of these reforms would have happened without the disclosures he precipitated. “I believed that if the NSA's unconstitutional mass surveillance of Americans was known, it would not survive the scrutiny of the courts, the Congress, and the people.” ...Obama said he believed that reform proposals presented to him by the US intelligence agencies were “workable”, and would “eliminate” the concerns of privacy campaigners. “I am confident that it allows us to do what is necessary in order to deal with the threat of a terrorist attack, but does so in a way that addresses people's concerns."
[The Guardian, March 25]


Venezuela

"Chavismo" pro-government rally in Caracas (Feb 2014) (axisoflogic.com)

Democracy is under attack in Venezuela as opposition leaders attempt to thwart the will of the Venezuelan people.  Misinformation in the Western press and on social media have added to the problems facing the Maduro government.  On March 14, Al Jazeera published an open letter from 46 experts on Latin America calling on US Secretary of State John Kerry to "stand by democratic institutions and the rule of law" and to respect the legitimacy of the Maduro government in Venezuela.  The authors note that Maduro won the Presidential election in 2013 by a greater margin than did Kennedy in 1960, Nixon in 1968 and Bush in 2000.  They continue: Just two months ago, Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and allied parties won a majority of municipal elections nationwide by a 10-point margin over the opposition. Those elections were widely seen by the Venezuelan opposition, the Venezuelan private media and the international media as a plebiscite on Maduro’s government, and the pro-government parties clearly won...It appears that a sector of the political opposition is determined to use those who want to protest peacefully as part of an effort to...overturn the results of democratic elections.  The authors note the histories of the two most prominent opposition leaders in trying to remove elected officials from office - in particular the role played by Leopoldo Lopez in the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez.  We are troubled to note that so far the U.S. government has taken the most aggressive and partisan stance of any country in the hemisphere regarding the recent violence....the U.S. State Department has made statements that will only encourage the most radical, violent sectors of the opposition to continue on their current path.

Links
Lists of Most and Least Happy US Cities [Business Insider, March 25] 

The Top 10 Places in the World for Beautiful Weather [care2.com based on March/April 2014 Weatherwise Magazine article]

Viña del Mar, Chile - #1 for best weather (care2.com)