Ben Fryer's blog

With only two weeks having passed since being inaugurated and beginning his second chance at running the country, Peru's Alan Garcia shouldn't be surprised that the presidential honeymoon is still going strong. Nonetheless, his approval rating of 71.8 percent is pretty impressive, considering that his first time in the driver's seat (1985-1990) ended when he ignominiously fled Peru under charges of corruption, after guiding the country into near civil war with the Shining Path guerillas while the economy went into four-digit inflation. If Garcia can keep up even a middling approval rating, it'll be fair to call his return to office the most successful (and theatrical) political comeback Latin America has seen for a long time.

His return to grace is even more incredible if you recall that Peruvians weren't too happy with either of their candidates just a short time before the election in June--some likened their electoral options to a choice between cancer and AIDS. (It wasn't clear which one Garcia was supposed to be.) 

It's hard to put former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in a political category. His views on some social issues--faith-based initiatives, for example--invite liberal ire, but the same people might praise him for his commitment to foreign aid or his role in urging President Bush to extend $15 billion to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. Gerson gets kudos from some Republicans for hawkish tendencies on security, but he has few fans in the small-government camp.

An unusual mix of social conservatism, foreign aid bigheartedness, and sheer political shrewdness, Gerson has been a strong voice in policy planning on issues as different as Darfur and debt relief. But even those without an ear in the White House have heard Gerson's voice through the numerous speeches he wrote for President Bush. FP spoke recently with Gerson--the man who brought the phrase "axis of evil" into the vernacular--about his many years with the Bush administration. Read him in his own words here.

If the security firm Flexilis has things right, you might want to think twice about trading in your old passport for one of the high-tech models set to come out in October. In a news release and video, the company has revealed that not only can the new Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-enabled passports be read by third parties from a distance, but they could also eventually be used to target passport holders for bomb attacks. 

It seems that the shield surrounding the information chip only protects it from being read when the passport is fully closed; a passport even slightly open in a purse or a pocket could easily be spied on. But more than privacy is at stake: one of the readily available, pint-sized devices that read RFID passports can be hitched to explosives rigged to set off automatically when the passport passes within a certain range.

Eventually, Flexilis says, terrorists could enable a reader to distinguish between the chips of different countries and target specific nationalities for attack.

The Flexilis video is slightly comical for its amateurish appearance--it features a mannequin strung from a clothesline and then blasted with model rocket engines--but it's an unsettling reminder that terrorists' methods can be almost as crude. 

In a related story, the UK-based tech monitor The Register offers a report on how to clone the new passport in a few easy steps.

Hugo Chavez has a new challenger in the upcoming presidential election, and no one's taking him seriously. But that shouldn't bother Benjamin Rausseo, a shoeshiner-turned-comedian who declared his candidacy on Friday. After all, people have been laughing at him all his life.

Running without any apparent qualifications but plenty of name recognition, Mr. Rausseo<!--StartFragment --> has slim hopes of winning.  But if nothing else, he'll add some humor to what is likely to be a humorless (and less-than-fair) race.  And even if he fails miserably, he can always go back to the funny business.

We're both ugly, we both have kinky hair, we both come from the lower class--but the difference is I live here in Venezuela"--candidate Benjamin Rausseo, alluding to Chavez' frequent trips abroad

People looking for a silver lining to global warming can now find solace in alcohol - glacier beer, to be precise. The world's first Inuit microbrewery has started producing frosty ales using water melted from Greenland's mammoth ice cap. The maker of Icecap Beer, located 390 miles south of the Arctic Circle, claims that using 2,000 year-old ice makes for a softer, cleaner-tasting beer. 

For now, would-be imbibers will have to travel to Denmark to find the stuff, since it's not yet available in other markets. But that could soon change as the company expands operations and as the chief ingredient - ice water - becomes more plentiful. And since some reports suggest that the great thaw of Greenland may be happening faster than anticipated, that can only mean one thing - well, aside from higher sea levels: more beer.

India's education ministry has decided to opt out of an MIT-inspired initiative to provide $100 laptops to school children across the developing world. Calling the plan "pedagogically suspect", India's Ministry of Human Resources Development determined that its money could be better spent on badly needed classrooms and teachers than on the impact-resistant, colorful machines designed to bring computer literacy, Internet access, and educational materials to kids in remote and underserved areas. 

The decision doesn't spell the end of the initiative - Nigeria has already signed up to buy 1 million of the gadgets - but it is certainly a challenge for the One Laptop Per Child campaign, which kicked off at Davos in January 2005. India was a potentially huge market, and the computers won't go into production until at least 5 million orders are received. Be sure to check out this article in Wired about how the computers were designed with developing-world constraints in mind: impervious to dust, extra-long battery life, and able to network with other computers up to 10 miles away.

It's not too often that psychologists makes headlines in the war on terror, but the American Psychological Association better think up a press strategy of its own - and soon. As Salon.com reports, the 150,000-strong professional organization will likely face a noisy internal revolt next month at its annual meeting in New Orleans, where outraged members of the organization plan to make a clamor over APA guidelines that condone members' participation in Guantanamo-style interrogations of terror suspects.

The controversy over the year-old guidelines is certain to grow with the revelation that six of the 10 psychologists who drafted the guidelines apparently have ties to the military. Some APA members are crying foul, claiming that the drafters' military positions led them to compromise their commitments as psychologists, whose job it is to heal people, not help inflict trauma. It's sure to be an interesting fight.

Never heard of the country of Abkhazia? Well, Georgia would like to keep things that way. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has been trying hard recently to contain the breakaway region, a slice of land along the Black Sea. But a few new actors have added themselves to the mix, and one of them is big neighbor Russia. It seems that Moscow has recently held talks with rebels from Abkhazia, including a local strongman who claims the right to govern a remote gorge in the region. 

In recent days, Georgia and Russia have accused each other of trying to start a war in the southern Caucusus. The presence of Russian peacekeeping troops in northern Georgia doesn't seem to be helping; Georgia now claims that Russia aims to annex Georgian territory.

All this could spell a border fight between giant Russia and tiny Georgia, undermining the struggling Tbilisi government and adding to the long list of territorial disputes around the world. In this week's List, FP takes a look at a few of the simmering border fights that don't often make the front pages.