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About year and a half ago, Passport blogged about the opening of the $40 million Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, funded by -- you guessed it -- Oprah. The project was launched in celebrity fanfare, highlighting Oprah for the cultural and economic world power she has truly become.

Much to Ms. Winfrey's dismay, however, extravagant spending has been followed by spectacular scandal. A former head mistress from the school is suing the famous talk-show host for $250,000.

About this time last year, allegations of sexual abuse in the school surfaced (Oprah weeped when she heard). Virginia "Tiny" Makopo -- then a school employee -- was arrested for counts of abuse to which she pleaded not guilty. But Oprah was not quite done cleaning house. Nomvuyo Mzamane, the former head mistress, was accused of covering up the scandal. Now jobless and "depressed," Mzamane is sueing Oprah for defamation. She says she never knew the abuses were going on.

The price tag on the lawsuit is barely a drop in the bucket for the $2.5 billion celebrity, but Oprah should worry a lot more about that the tougher-to-quantify damage to her brand.

Madonna, lover of all types of attention, kicked off her world tour on Saturday. Guess we know how she'll be voting in November:

The BBC reported that the two-hour show took a political turn when, in a lead-in to a remixed version of "Like a Prayer," a video sequence showed flashing images of destruction followed by pictures of Hitler, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and then Senator John McCain. Senator Barack Obama popped up in another video interlude, but his montage included Gandhi, John Lennon and Al Gore. The tour arrives in North America on Oct. 4.

In other seriously dumb arts news, Visit London featured a portrait of notorious English murderer Myra Hindley in a promotional video at a London 2012 event in Beijing. Can't wait for those games!

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Japan's chief cabinet secretary is disappointed that Carla Bruni, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, won't be attending this year's G-8 summit in Hokkaido.

I can't say I blame her. The supermodel-turned-singer has an album launch this coming Friday, and she'd rather prepare for it than sit around learning how to fold kimonos and sipping tea with the other G-8 wives.

Back in Europe, her album seems to be getting as much coverage as the summit itself. The British press is agog at the revelation that Mrs. Sarkozy has had 30 lovers, and the AFP reports that France's "gossip press" is "nearing fever pitch," and the album has gotten rave reviews thus far.

In case any French music critics are wondering how to handle the unusual task of critiquing their first lady's musical talents, Carla has a ready answer in "Ta Tienne" (Yours): "I am yours, if they diss me or damn me, I don't care a hoot."

On my way into work this morning, I spotted former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld walking past FP's offices on Massachusetts Avenue here in Washington. Accompanied by what looked like a Secret Service escort, Rumsfeld was looking hale and smiling, though he was carrying a cane. "Hello, Mr. Secretary, how are you?" I asked him. "I'm good," he responded. I couldn't ascertain where he was headed -- AEI and Johns Hopkins SAIS are good bets, though, and he might have been leaving the Carnegie Endowment or Brookings.

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You may have been wondering what Rudy Giuliani has been up to since the ignominious end of his presidential campaign. It turns out that "America's mayor" is getting back into urban politics...in Ukraine.

Giuliani was in Kiev on Tuesday, speaking with former world heavyweight boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko, who is running for mayor. Giuliani has signed on as an advisor to Klitschko's campaign. At yesterday's press conference he offered this advice:

"If Vitaly is elected mayor of Kiev, my first piece of advice for him would be to say ... no more corruption, corruption is over."

Klitschko is one of the front runners in a wild election that has drawn 79 candidates, but the ex-boxer known as Dr. Iron Fist has been mocked by his opponents for his perceived lack of intelligence and poor command of Ukrainian. (Like many Ukrainians, he grew up speaking Russian.) The former champ, who actually has a doctorate in physical education, seems to be longing for the simplicity of his sport:

"Sometimes I wish I could meet people inside the ring, where there are clear rules," said Klitschko, who has 34 career knockouts and literally towers over the political field at 6-foot-7 (2 meters). "But physical power decides nothing in politics."

Indeed, in addition to running for mayor Klitschko is training for a shot at retaking his title this summer, two goals that might seem contradictory.

But Giuliani seems confident in his new protege and sees parallels between Klitschko's rise and another slow-talking muscleman turned transformational leader, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Kiev's squeegee-men better watch out.

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British comedian Eddie Izzard made a stop in Washington last week, and I got a chance to see his show at, ironically, the Daughters of the American Revolution's Constitution Hall. (Ironic because Izzard is famous for doing shows in drag.)

Having seen Dress to Kill, his HBO special, I was psyched to hear some quality jokes about the European Union. Izzard is a big fan of EU integration, and he often weaves pro-EU commentary into his act. As he puts it in Dress to Kill, the EU is "the cutting edge of politics in an extraordinarily boring way." Or in 2006 for the Guardian, "The EU is like a huge rock festival: everyone has colour-coded passes and there are no wars." He even told Newsweek recently that he eventually wants to go into European politics on a platform of "logical governance." In his view, the stakes could not be higher:

We've got to make it work in Europe. People are very worried about sovereignty and the loss of sovereignty. I think the stakes are if we don't make the European Union work, then the world is screwed. End of story.

Instead of EU wisecracks, though, Izzard treated us to a long and extremely funny disquisition on Wikipedia, prehistory, and religion. In his encore, he did work in a quick plug for the European Space Agency, but that was about it.

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I've sometimes wondered if Paris Hilton's airheadedness is just an act. If that's the case, she's a brilliant actress. Here's her comment during a visit to Johannesburg this past weekend:

I love Africa in general - South Africa and West Africa, they are both great countries."

She's one of America's top exports, people.

Mohammed Abbas of Reuters reports on the ever-expanding influence of Chuck Norris:

Norris' appeal is not restricted to U.S. troops either. At an Iraqi police graduation ceremony in Falluja, graduates called out for their "Chuck Norris" to pose with them for photos.

"Truthfully, I didn't know who he was. I asked the Americans, and they said he was a great fighter, and that's why they named me after him. They showed me a video, and it's true, he's a great fighter" said police trainer Mohammed Rasheed. With his handle-bar moustache, Rasheed has a vague resemblance to Norris.

Another police trainer said Chuck Norris was a role model for the police in Falluja, which until 2007 was an al Qaeda stronghold and the scene of fierce battles with security forces. "I've seen his videos, he's a hero. He saves the city, he protects women and children and he fights crime wherever it is. We should all be like Chuck Norris," Khaled Hussein said.

Europe's top election-watchdog group may not have gotten the welcome it wanted from neighboring Russia, but Deep Purple—best known for its hit "Smoke on the Water"—is getting the presidential treatment. Gazprom, Russia's state-owned energy company, has invited the band to perform a concert celebrating Gazprom's 15th anniversary and the departure of company head Dmitri Medvedev.

Apparently Medvedev, Russia's president-to-be, says the '70s British rock group is his favorite band. And he's not the only Deep Purple fanboy among the Russian elite. Last year, Medvedev and 70 other Russian business and government leaders invited the band's former lead singer Joe Lynn Turner to Moscow for a secret concert during Turner's Russian tour.

The Moscow Times has reported that Putin is expected to make an appearance at the upcoming show, but it might not be his cup of tea:

Putin is known to enjoy patriotic Russian pop songs. It was not clear if the concert lineup would have anything to suit his tastes.

William Easterly

If there is a "bad boy of development studies," it's NYU economist Bill Easterly. When he spoke recently on a Davos panel with Bill Gates, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Paul Wolfowitz about the usefulness of foreign aid, moderator Fareed Zakaria gently poked fun at Easterly by calling him the "devil." He may not be the devil, but he's certainly the devil's advocate, constantly questioning whether traditional conceptions of foreign aid are actually helpful to poor countries. He's done it in the pages of FP, in "The Utopian Nightmare" a couple years ago, and more recently in "The Ideology of Development."

Now, Easterly is turning his contrarian guns on the United Nations, asking, "Are the Millennium Development Goals Unfair to Africa?" At a luncheon I attended today at Brookings, his answer was, unequivocally, yes. Virtually everyone agrees, he began, that by the time we hit the MDGs' deadline in 2015, Africa will have failed all of them. Africa will not have reduced its poverty rate by half; it will attain neither universal primary education nor gender equality in schools; child mortality will not be reduced by two thirds, and so on. Easterly then went down the list of goals, claiming they were all unfair and biased to begin with. Africans, he said, never had a chance of attaining them. His argument was pretty wonky—with lots of charts and graphs showing how the U.N. should be measuring rates of change and growth in Africa, rather than absolute figures, and how the MDGs were arbitrarily designed and made Africa look worse than it really is. I found it quite convincing. Eventually you'll be able to download a transcript here to judge for yourself, or you can download the original paper (pdf).

What Easterly said made sense, and yet I couldn't help thinking, "So what?" Easterly says the MDGs paint Africa unfairly. But does that really matter if more attention leads to more investment in Africa? And even if you think the MDGs are just another meaningless U.N. project, the fact that people pay attention to them must stand for something.

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Easterly is famous for opposing much of the research of anti-poverty crusader Jeffrey Sachs (in his talk, he even joked that he's mandated to take potshots at Sachs at least once in each speech), and for being highly skeptical of the efforts of celebrities like Bono, Madonna, and Angelina Jolie. He thinks they give off a neocolonial air, the sense that Africa needs the West for salvation. Asked if all the attention brought by such celebrities was helping, Easterly said he didn't think so. Quite the opposite: He thought the kind of attention Africa gets because of celebrities, or because of failing the MDGs, does more harm than good because it reinforces stereotypes that Africa needs to be dependent on the West to be lifted out of poverty.

What do you think? Do celebrities help or hurt? Is the U.N. setting unfair, arbitrary goals? Share your thoughts at passportblog@ceip.org.

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Serbia may be a shrinking country, but international eyes are keeping a close watch on its presidential elections, scheduled for Feb. 3. This Sunday, voters will be asked to choose between pro-European candidate Boris Tadic and Russia-leaning candidate Tomislav Nikolic.

Much is at stake in the elections. The next president must navigate Serbia's path to EU accession and respond to a likely declaration of independence from Kosovo, Serbia’s Albanian-majority southern province. William Montgomery, former U.S. ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro, says about Sunday's election:

[It] will determine whether Serbia continues on a path (slowly or rapidly) towards integration into 'Europe' or alternatively, becomes a 'Belarus of the Balkans,' belligerently looking East instead of West and in some state of confrontation with the EU, the United States and its new 'neighbor,' Kosovo."

But with Serbian voters facing a choice between Europe and Russia, it is American icons that are getting all the attention. For over a month now, images of great U.S. presidents—George Washington, Abe Lincoln, and JFK—have appeared on Belgrade's billboards, along with quotes from presidential speeches, tweaked to support Kosovo as a part of Serbia. For instance, beside the face of George Washington appear the following words (in Cyrillic):

'The time is near at hand which must determine whether we are to be free men or slaves.' Kosovo is Serbia!”

Hollywood stars have been sucked into the Kosovo debate, too. Last week, Serbian news outlets claimed that George Clooney, Sharon Stone, Richard Gere, and Sean Connery all stood in opposition to an independent Kosovo, even crediting Gere with poignant statements such as this:

There must be something in that Kosovo, if they will fight for it so hard."

The Hollywood stars have denied making such claims, but the occasionally sensationalist Serbian newspaper Blic claims to know better: Just as Serbia has a been a pawn of Western powers, Clooney too has succumbed to international pressure, denying his statement against independence for Kosovo only after "the UN exerted pressure on the actor."

The Writers Guild of America strike has been going on for nine long weeks and one day now, and so far there's no end in sight. True, David Letterman has been back on the air for a few days with writers, and Jay Leno without. And fake news stalwarts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were back on last night, with mixed results. (My verdict? Stewart: meh. Colbert: in fine form.) But this Sunday's Golden Globes awards show ceremony has been reduced to a news conference, and despite the premieres of several mid-season TV shows, fresh content is quickly running out.

The Writers Guild has created a series of ads called "Speechless" as part of their campaign to get their plight noticed. In the first spot, we see a depiction of what might happen if the strike continued indefinitely. What if the writers' jobs were sent to India?

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Fridays can be a slog. But tomorrow promises to be an especially tough day for Maria Carolina, one of Chile's most famous prostitutes. She has auctioned off "27 hours of love" to benefit the country's annual Teletón (TV telethon) campaign for disabled children. Carolina, who typically charges about $300 per 90 minutes, says customers jumped at the chance to do it all for the kids. All available time slots have been booked. One customer, so moved by the cause, even paid up front.

Prostitution is more or less legal in the predominantly Catholic country, but not everyone is happy with Carolina's erotic form of philanthropy. Teletón host Mario Kreutzberger (at right getting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame) — better known as Don Francisco, the gregarious host of Univision's "Sabado Gigante" — has said that Carolina's efforts are outside his moral boundaries, though he stopped short of saying that the money would be turned down. After all, as Carolina was quick to retort, "There are people who are going to be donating money that's a lot more questionable than mine." She's probably right about that.

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One of the tried and true techniques of opinion journalism is to find a public figure or thing (e.g. apple picking) that everyone loves and utterly skewer it. Nobody is better at this than FP contributor Christopher Hitchens, who has made a career out of swimming against the conventional wisdom. 

Take, for example, this passage from page 200 of Hitch's recent book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything: 

The Dalai Lama, for example, is entirely and easily recognizable to a secularist. In exactly the same way as a medieval princeling, he makes the claim not just that Tibet should be independent of Chinese hegemony – a “perfectly good” demand, if I may render it into everyday English – but that he himself is a hereditary king appointed by heaven itself. How convenient! Dissenting sects within his faith are persecuted; his one-man rule in an Indian enclave is absolute; he makes absurd pronouncements about sex and diet and, when on his trips to Hollywood fund-raisers, anoints major donors like Steven Seagal and Richard Gere as holy.

Interesting!!!, as former Slate editor Michael Kinsley, a past master of the contrarian take himself, might have put it. Almost everybody loves the Dalai Lama, who symbolizes for many the virtues of peace, wisdom, and resistance to oppression. Attacking him jars people out of their comfort zones; it's a sure way to get noticed. And in this instance, I think Hitch makes some good points. Why does this man, of all people, deserve a Congressional Gold Medal?

It's easy to take the contrarian strategy too far, though. Sometimes, the conventional wisdom is right, both logically and morally. Herewith, 10 arguments I never want to see:

1. The Case for Genocide
2. Let Them Eat Cake: How a Delicious Dessert Could Save the World's Poor
3. War, What Is It Good for? Absolutely Everything
4. We Could Use a Man Like Joseph Stalin Again
5. Steal Their Oil and Convert Them to Christianity? You Bet We Should
6. Martin Luther King: Overrated?
7. Sex Secrets of the Ayatollahs
8. How Dick Cheney Shot a Man in the Face ... and Saved a Nation
9. Why We Need More News about Britney Spears
10. Appeasement: Our Only Option