When you heard the words "sex tourism," one image usually comes to mind: a sleazy, older white man with a beer in one hand and an underage Asian girl in the other, strolling along some beach in Thailand. But now a new kind of sex tourism is on the rise. According to a recent Reuters story, older white women are now flocking to Kenya to seek out sex with younger African men. There are no official statistics, but locals in Mombasa tell Reuters they estimate one out of five single foreign female tourists are in search of sex.

Some argue that this is more acceptable than traditional sex tourism. As one commentator at Salon points out, the men are usually physically stronger and able to dominate their female "escorts" if necessary. Besides the swapping of gender roles, there's one other key difference between these women and the typical male sex tourist—what the women are doing is not illegal. That's because the guys they hook up with are adults, and the sex is consensual.  As one 56-year-old British woman told Reuters:

It's a social arrangement. I buy him a nice shirt and we go out for dinner. For as long as he stays with me he doesn't pay for anything, and I get what I want -- a good time. How is that different from a man buying a young girl dinner?"

Well, yeah, I suppose it's not that different; it's equally unsavory. No matter what, it's incredibly stupid to have casual sex with strangers in a country with a 6.9 percent AIDS rate. Moreover, there's still a major power differential. It's still about wealthy Westerners preying on the poor. 

...know that the luxury brand that made it is probably flunking the ethics test.

So says "Deeper Luxury," (pdf) a new World Wildlife Federation (WWF) report grading the social and environmental performance of the world's top 10 luxury brands. From safety in the workplace to reducing emissions and protecting human rights (a.k.a. steering clear of sweatshops), the social quality of the big 10 is decidedly unluxe.

Both Bulgari, the famed Italian jewelry and handbag line, and American leather goods brand Tod's get fat "F"s for their performance. L'Oreal, Hermes, and LVMH — the world's largest luxury goods conglomerate, with Fendi, Marc Jacobs, and Givenchy under its umbrella — all muster only average scores of C+.

From left: L'Oréal, Hermés, LVMH, Coach, Tiffany & Co., Swatch, PPR, Richemont, Bulgari, Tods

The report may be just potent enough to hold fashion's notoriously short attention span for more than a minute or two. But beyond that, I'm skeptical. The middle classes in India and China will explode in the next few decades, and these brands will have more than enough new customers who probably won't give two shakes about the life and death of the snake that made their bag.

But if appealing to the do-gooder side of consumers doesn't work, the WWF has an alternate plan: Guilt the celebrities. The report has a whole chapter pointing out that famous faces shilling diamond-encrusted, environmentally unfriendly watches are the same faces campaigning against climate change and AIDS. It even gets personal: 

[A]ctress Sienna Miller campaigns against climate change through her associationwith Global Cool. She also endorses Tods, which came bottom of our index of ESG perfomance. Tods may represent a liability to Sienna Miller’s reputation.

As if dating Jude Law didn't already do that.

CHINA OUT/Getty Images

Are Chinese authorities planning to ban the Bible at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing? According to the Catholic News Agency, they are. The report comes via an Italian newspaper, which referred to a Chinese government prohibition of  "promotion material used for religious or political activity" at the Games.

When asked about the matter, however, China's head of security couldn't give a definitive answer as to whether that restriction would apply to the Bible. (Primarily Christian) news outlets ran with the story and eventually caused the Chinese Foreign Ministry to release a statement. The ministry vehemently denied that foreign visitors would be prohibited from bringing Bibles for their own personal use into the country.

China does restrict religious expression, but standard Christian Bibles themselves are available in China, according to an investigation by the Canadian government. However, the U.S. State Department indicates that religious materials may be subject to confiscation by Chinese authorities and recommends that travelers contact the U.S. Embassy or a Chinese consulate to determine what specific items may be restricted.

While in this case the issue was overblown, the Bible controversy highlights the larger problem that China will face during the Olympics. Beijing wants to put on a friendly face to the world and will have to tread lightly when dealing with foreign visitors who want to make political statements during the Games. This is the exact problem addressed by FP Editor in Chief Moisés Naím in our last issue. Pass the popcorn—this is going to be one heck of a show.

Malcolm Nance, "a counter-terrorism and terrorism intelligence consultant for the U.S. government's Special Operations, Homeland Security and Intelligence agencies" and "an Arabic speaking interrogator and a master Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) instructor," says that waterboarding unquestionably is torture:

Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten[ed] with its use again and again.

This guy doesn't look like a wuss to me. Over to you, Mukasey.

(Hat tip: American Footprints)

Photo: National Security Archive

One of the oddest cultural trends of our time is the Cult of Che Guevara. I was just down in Peru, where street vendors proudly peddle Chinese-made tapestries and t-shirts bearing Che's image to U.S. college students. Hollywood—most notably Robert Redford—has glamorized Che on screen. And in more than one European hamlet will you find a "Che Guevara Bar," inevitably attracting hipsters with the same, sad tapestries, fake Cuban cigars, and cheap rum.

Today, the Cult of Che hit a new low, when a 3-inch lock of his beard and other items went up for sale at a Dallas auction house. The starting bid? $100,000. Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez is rumored to be among the potential interested bidders. The seller is Gustavo Villoldo, a retired CIA operative of Cuban heritage who was involved in Che's capture and was present when Che was buried. Villoldo says he cut the lock of hair because, "I wanted proof that I had completed my mission." His motive for selling it now appears to be profit. (This month marks the 40th anniversary of Che's death.)

MIKE CLARKE/AFP/Getty Images

It's disappointing to see Che glorified in this way. The man was a Marxist-Leninist of the worst kind: He presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads; he assisted in the persecution of homosexuals [see note below]; he imprisoned dissidents. Che preached a dangerous breed of martyrdom and hatred reminiscent of the most radical jihadists of today's Middle East. You may see some familiar themes in this, one of Che's choicest lines:

Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become...."

Today, we seem intent on remembering Che as a liberator in the Bolivarian vein, a freedom fighter. He was not. As Paul Berman has elegantly documented, Che inspired many middle-class Latin Americans to take up arms in insurgent campaigns that did nothing more than set the cause of Latin American democracy back decades. That a tiny lock of his hair can sell in Texas (of all places) for six figures is a sad comment indeed on just how severely his legacy has been distorted.

Editor's Note: This post was changed by the editor to avoid any confusion. It originally said that Che "assisted in the persecution of homosexuals and AIDS victims." Many readers asked about the original language. Mike explains here.

Late yesterday news broke that President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush will attend the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony for the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, at the U.S. Capitol next Wednesday. Now, ABC News is reporting that not only will Bush be attending the ceremony, he will be delivering remarks. It will be the first time Bush has made a public appearance with the Dalai Lama. Normally, the White House is careful to arrange "unofficial" meetings with His Holiness in the White House residence. No more. Bush will reportedly use his remarks to refer to His Holiness as, "a great spiritual leader who is seeking rights for the people of Tibet ... and to protect their land."

Beijing, as you might imagine, is furious. Even before news broke that Bush would be making remarks, China was denouncing the "so-called award," using state-controlled media to take pot shots at the Dalai Lama, and secretly accusing Tibetan Communist Party members of disloyalty. The Burmese junta can't be thrilled with this, either, given that the Dalai Lama is the spiritual shepherd of global Buddhism. Some folks, including the New York Sun's Nicholas Wapshott, are arguing that Bush is using the award as an opportunity to crank up the pressure on the junta. That may be so, although as Asia scholar Phillip Cunningham over at Informed Comment: Global Affairs points out today, interest in Burma is all but fizzled out. No doubt the first lady, who appears to be genuinely passionate about Burma, played a role in the decision to attend the event. Perhaps President Bush will take the opportunity to yet again condemn the junta's crackdown on Buddhist monks.

Judging from the brief excerpts of Bush's remarks released today, though, this looks mostly like a clever attempt by the White House to press the Chinese on human rights at a time when they have little choice but to sit back and take it. First, Beijing wants a quiet Communist Party Congress this year. In fact, Beijing is already cracking down on democracy advocates in advance of next week's sessions in order to ensure they go smoothly. And second, as was widely noted during the Burma protests, the bigwigs in Beijing don't want attention drawn to China's stance on human rights in advance of the Olympics.

So kudos to the White House for spotting a small window within which to deliver the message that booming exports and imports don't translate to democratic reform. Maybe the vaunted "freedom agenda" isn't dead after all.

GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images

Why is Australian Prime Minister John Howard consistently undermining international efforts to provide humanitarian help to the people of Sudan—even after his government has acknowledged that Darfur is one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters?

In addition to recently rejecting the U.N.'s request to send troops to Darfur (citing Australia's unpopular "war on terror" commitments), Howard has just announced that Australia will no longer accept refugees from Africa under its humanitarian refugee program until at least mid-2008. The government argues that this "freeze" is necessary due to the failure of many Africans, particularly Sudanese, to "integrate" into society. Instead, the government wants to take in more refugees from Asia. Given Howard's previous less-than-generous approach to asylum-seeking Asians, including falsely accusing a number of them in 2001 of throwing their children overboard a ship to blackmail the Australian government—the infamous Tampa incident—Howard's newfound concern for local refugees seems disingenuous, to say the least.

While critics have denounced Howard's refugee decision as racist, supporters argue that it's justified given the problems some Sudanese refugees have experienced settling into Australia, including a number of violent incidents. But are these incidents really surprising? Refugees, by definition, are fleeing from persecution. Many of them, particularly from Sudan, have been traumatized by violence. Instead of simply closing the door, these cases should prompt the government to analyze its refugee counseling programs to try to ensure that refugees are learning the skills, including language skills, to properly "integrate" into Australian society. It is, after all, intended to be a humanitarian effort.

Alas, that's not likely to happen. What's more likely is that Howard will—once again—continue to push Australia's xenophobic buttons in the run-up to Australia's election, just as he successfully did during the Tampa crisis before the 2001 election. Perhaps this time, though, Howard's support for the Iraq war will prove too unpopular for that tactic to succeed.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

I was gratified to read the recent comments of Doru Romulus Costea, who heads the United Nations' widely derided Human Rights Council. In an interview with Le Temps, a Swiss newspaper, Costea admitted that the Council had so far "failed" to handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict evenly, and said he agreed with U.S. President George W. Bush that, as Costea spun it, "It is necessary to constantly improve the functioning of the Council."

The AFP's summary of the interview (which was conducted and published in French) adds this context:

[The Council] has held four special sessions, three of which have concerned the Middle East and have ended up condemning Israel. The fourth related to Sudan, and one is planned next week following the crackdown on dissent in Myanmar.

It's important to remember that it's the 47 member states that make up the Council, not the U.N. itself, that is the source of the problem. Consider today's comments by Louise Arbour, the U.N.'s top human rights official. She urged the council to hold Myanmar's generals accountable for their actions and support a European Union resolution stating that the Council "strongly condemns the continued violent repression of peaceful demonstrations in Myanmar, including through beatings, killings and arbitrary detentions and urges the government of Myanmar to exercise utmost restraint and desist from further violence against peaceful protesters."

The vote is due to be held later today, and it will be a key test. If the Council can't sign on to this, what, then, is its purpose? 

(Thanks to Passport reader OA for sending this one along.)

SHAUN HEASLEY/Getty Images News

It was January 20, 2005, a heady time. U.S. President George W. Bush had just won reelection and believed the Bush Doctrine had handed him a powerful mandate. And he intended to run with it:

Today America speaks anew to the peoples of the world: All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

Oh, how times have changed. This was White House Press Secretary Dana Perino speaking to reporters yesterday:

I have a statement by the President on Burma that I will read out for him," she said, "and then a statement about the FAA.... I call on all nations that have influence with the regime to join us in supporting the aspirations of the Burmese people and to tell the Burmese Junta to cease using force on its own people who are peacefully expressing their desire for change."

In case you missed it, that was the vaunted "freedom agenda" lumped in with airport delays. To the tens of thousands of Burmese risking life and limb to demand freedom from their oppressors, Perino essentially said: We aren't really going to stand with you, but we'll definitely put a call in to China and Russia to see what they can do.

The hope of the Bush administration is apparently that increased sanctions—or the threat of them—and travel restrictions on a half dozen or so top junta leaders will bring the regime in Yangon crumbling down.

But just ask a Cuban how effective these kinds of sanctions are at toppling dictatorial regimes. The increased sanctions Bush announced at the United Nations on Wednesday are little more than symbolic. They will likely have almost no impact on the political situation, and the same goes for Europe's existing sanctions. As one European observer put it, "Stopping European companies from investing in a pineapple juice factory is laughable."

As for the now apparently universal belief that China can somehow be shamed into pressing the junta for democratic reforms, that's a joke—as Bill Overholt pointed out here on Wednesday. But let's step back for a second here: Is the United States really prepared to stake the hopes of freedom on the Chinese Communist Party? Is this what the Bush Doctrine has come to? 

The danger of the Bush Doctrine was always that people in places like Burma, Sudan, or Zimbabwe might take it seriously. That they would literally stand up for their freedom, expecting Team Bush to stand with them. "We either go to democracy or back to military dictatorship," one Burmese citizen wrote to the BBC this week. The Bush administration, apparently believing it has done enough, is prepared to sit back and watch the latter happen. More than 100,000 Burmese citizens a day are standing, and the Bush administration is sitting down.

That may be the saddest comment yet on the Bush Doctrine.

The inaugural Ibrahim Index of African Governance was released today. The survey, financed by the Sudanese mobile-phone entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim, ranks sub-Saharan African countries according to security, rule of law, human rights, and development. Two tiny island nations, Mauritius and the Seychelles, came out on top. Botswana, Cape Verde, and South Africa are the best-governed countries on the mainland, while unsurprisingly, Sudan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia were the worst. Ibrahim is also planning to give a $5 million prize next month to a former African head of state who exemplified good governance. The BBC examines some of the top candidates here.

One of the strengths of the index is that it includes retroactive data dating back to 2000, which allows readers to examine trends over time. Rwanda was the most improved nation, jumping 18 spots to 18th place. In fact, one American businessman has called the country "the most undervalued 'stock' on the continent and maybe in the world." Rwanda, however, is still categorized as "not free" in the most recent Freedom House Freedom in the World survey, which criticizes President Paul Kagame's government for its crackdowns on the press and opposition groups. This should raise some interesting questions about the role of democratization in good governance and whether it is even possible or advisable to fully democratize a country that still has the ethnic and recent historical baggage of Rwanda.

One of the index's weaknesses is that it only includes data as recent as 2005. Two years can be a lifetime in African politics, which partially explains Liberia's abysmal showing at 43 out of 48. In 2005, Liberia was still under the transitional government that followed the country's civil war and Charles Taylor's removal from power. It will be interesting to see what effect the presidency of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who took over at the end of that year, will have on the country's future ranking. Liberia was the most improved country in the 2007 FP Failed States Index.

I asked Brian Calvert, a reporter for Voice of America Khmer in Washington, to weigh in on today's news that a key lieutenant of the notorious Pol Pot had finally been taken into custody. Here's Brian's take:

The indictment and detention Wednesday of Nuon Chea, Pol Pot's chief lieutenant in the Khmer Rouge, for war crimes and crimes against humanity is the most significant action taken so far by a bedeviled tribunal that was established more than a year ago.

Whether or not his arrest will spell justice, and for whom, remains to be seen.

TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP

Nuon Chea, also known as Brother No. 2, was flown by helicopter Wednesday morning from his home in the mountains of northwest Cambodia and questioned in Phnom Penh, the capital, by judges of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the official name of the Khmer Rouge tribunal.

Nuon Chea has said he will happily face a trial. But it’s not because he regrets his actions. Rather, he sees a trial as a chance to exonerate his role in the Khmer Rouge, which called itself Democratic Kampuchea. In his view, Pol Pot’s regime was only defending the Cambodian people from Vietnamese agents and American bombs.

In reality, the Khmer Rouge used the fear of a Vietnamese takeover and of U.S. fighting in Indochina as fuel for their insurrection. After they took power, as many as 2 million people starved to death or were executed. The legacy of that regime and the civil strife that followed its ouster has been a war-battered people, a devastated infrastructure, and a country that still hasn't recovered.

Nuon Chea is widely believed to be a chief architect of the regime's murderous policies. According to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has been gathering evidence in Cambodia for potential trials for a decade, Nuon Chea held posts as deputy secretary of the Cambodian Communist Party's Central Committee and as a member of the Party's Standing Committee, the bodies most responsible for policies of the regime.

TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP

Given Cambodia’s bloody history, it may be hard for many to imagine why it has been so difficult to bring Khmer Rouge figures like Nuon Chea to justice. The joint tribunal has struggled since its inception, hamstrung by bickering among U.N.-appointed international jurists and their Cambodian counterparts. Nuon Chea is only the second man to be taken into court custody. Since July, the courts have been holding Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his revolutionary name, Duch, the head of S-21, Cambodia's infamous torture center. Also known as Tuol Sleng, it's now a genocide museum for tourists.

The courts are investigating at least three more suspects for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but their names have not been released.

Will there be justice for the Khmer Rouge's victims? We just don't know. The U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia, Joseph Mussomeli, recently told VOA Khmer that over the next one or two years, "we'll have at least, I would guess, somewhere around a dozen people being brought up on charges of genocide."

"There were hundreds of people who were guilty of genocide, but, frankly, you have to draw the line somewhere," he added. "You can't have the trial last for 20 years or 30 years, you can't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the trial, but you have to find at least the most responsible for genocide and bring them to trial, and I think we are now on the way to doing that."

We'll know soon enough if he is right.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

Sippenhaft is an old Nazi policy under which family members of criminals were held equally responsible and punished. Now a Swiss political party is using a racist and xenophobic poster to revive the practice.

The poster shows three white sheep booting out a black sheep, with a caption that translates to "for more security." It's part of an effort to drum up support for a deportation policy in which entire immigrant families would be kicked out of Switzerland if their children committed a violent crime, a drug offense, or benefits fraud.

It's not some fringe, extremist, right-wing political party that's trying to collect 100,000 signatures for a referendum on the policy. Rather, it's the country's largest party—the Swiss People's Party. Back in 2004, this party used the image of black hands reaching into a pot of Swiss passports to successfully campaign for stricter immigration laws. More recently, it proposed banning the construction of minarets.

It all seems part of a larger general trend of racism and anti-Semitism brewing in the region. Uniformed Austrian soldiers recently put a Nazi video on YouTube. Last month, eight men from India were chased down and beaten up by a mob of 50 Germans yelling "Foreigners out!" In eastern Germany, where far-right heckling is a "fact of life" at soccer matches, neo-Nazis took things to a new low in May by targeting a youth match and calling a 14-year-old goalkeeper a "Jewish pig." And last year when Germany hosted the World Cup, a former government spokesman warned dark-skinned visitors to avoid "no-go" areas where racism is a problem. The examples go on …

Obviously, not all Germans, Swiss, and Austrians are cold-hearted extremists, but history is replete with examples of populations that have been radicalized quite fast. This German-speaking part of the world should be kept on our radar screens.

JAIME REINA/AFP/Getty Images

Germans love to travel. Every year, some 44 million of them trek overseas. For hoteliers in places like the French Riviera, this mass exodus is a cash cow. For the Teutonic state, it's an untapped resource.

The government of Angela Merkel is appealing to German citizens traveling abroad to "look beyond the palm trees" and pester people about their governments' human rights records—from the moment they step off the aircraft. Günter Nooke, human rights envoy for the German foreign ministry, even wants in-flight magazines to profile the human rights record of destination countries. Many German tourists are oblivious to human rights abuses, he complains, and "[t]oo many travellers are uncritical, or have a false solidarity with the governments of the countries they visit."

So what might Nooke have German tourists do? For example, visitors to Turkey could "engage" the people on the problems with the country's press freedoms and legal system; tourists in Egypt could ask their taxi drivers why emergency powers have been in place for decades; and Olympic fans could organize "private meetings" with local citizens' groups in Beijing. Businessmen traveling to Dubai could also query luxury hotels about the employment conditions of their migrant workers.

Aside from the obvious criticism that this approach could endanger citizens as well as travelers, which Nooke acknowledges, it also smacks of arrogance. Think about it: How would the staff at JFK airport or the Waldorf Astoria react to being browbeaten about Iraq or Guantánamo? They'd probably become about as welcoming as Yankee Stadium on the night the Red Sox are in town.

MIKHAIL KLIMENTIEV/AFP/Getty Images

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a gulag survivor and the author of The Gulag Archipelago, the world's most famous literary denunciation of Soviet labor camps. The Gulag Archipelago is the reason Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union and was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature.

So I was surprised to read, in a recent interview with Germany's Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn's apologetics for Vladimir Putin, the man who is taking Russia back to the heyday of Soviet censorship (pdf). Why would Solzhenitsyn, an inspiration for dissidents everywhere and a past critic of Putin, do anything but bash the Russian president over his repressive policies and worsening human rights record?

It seems that even for Solzhenitsyn, who accepted a State Award from Putin in June, dictatorship is preferable to anarchy. When Putin came to power in 2000, Russians expected two things from their new leader: that he safeguard Russia's territorial integrity, and that he reverse their country's slide into chaos. Disintegration and internal implosion were seen as the unfortunate consequences of the Yeltsin era, with its wild economic liberalizations and breakneck federalist reform.

And so, Solzhenitsyn is merely echoing many of his compatriots when he tells Der Spiegel:

Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible -- a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favorably by other governments."

Solzhenitsyn's interview makes for a great ironic contrast with Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general who has harsh words for Vlad in today's Seven Questions. When did the freedom fighter become the apologist for dictatorship, while the spy became the dissident?