CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images

Brits hoping to buy an Apple iPhone this week (or next week, or the week after that) are out of luck. O2, Apple's exclusive carrier in the UK, has run out of iPhones. There's reportedly not a new phone to be had in the British Isles right now, as everyone eagerly awaits the 3G version, rumored to be launched this summer. (No doubt there are a few barely second-hand iPhones available out there for the right price.)

And Americans hoping to blow their $600 tax rebate checks on new iPhones might be in for a shock as well. Apple sales reps told PC World last weekend that both the UK and U.S. online stores are sold out. (Further evidence here.) Some iPhones should still be available in Apple stores, but all the disappearing acts have talk of the 3G phone going into hyperdrive.

In the current issue of FP, I have a short piece on the iPhone grey market, the million+ iPhones that have been unlocked for use all around the world. There's evidence that Apple not only didn't anticipate the extent of the underground market, but that as soon as it became apparent, they've used it to their advantage to test market in countries where the phone hasn't yet launched.

Their exclusivity agreements - with AT&T in the U.S., O2 in Britain - were always something of a puzzle, and it looks as though Apple is abandoning them as it becomes apparent that people are determined to get around them. A string of announcements in recent weeks suggests that iPhones will officially be available on a number of carriers in Australia, India, and Italy, among others. Can the U.S. be too far behind?

sudantribune.com

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is not pleased about last weekend's brazen attack by Darfur rebels. It was the first time fighting has reached the outskirts of Khartoum not just in the bloody five years of fighting in Darfur, but in  the decades of conflict in Sudan.

Bashir is so peeved that he's put an astonishing $250 million reward on the head of rebel leader Khalil Ibrahim (pictured). For reference, that's 10 times the reward for Osama bin Laden.

Why the enormous bounty? Perhaps Ibrahim's fighting words have Bashir concerned. Here's Ibrahim in an interview yesterday, according to the IHT:

This is just the start of a process, and the end is the termination of this regime...Don't expect just one more attack. This is just the beginning."

Bashir also cut diplomatic ties with Chad on Sunday, accusing Chadian President Idriss Deby, who is from the same tribe as Ibrahim, of backing the attack. This is going to get worse before it gets better. 

UPDATE: If $250 mil sounds like an absurd amount (and it does), then that's because it is. When it was reported by the Sudanese state media yesterday, it came across as just another attention-getting ploy, and that if someone actually caught Ibrahim, Bashir and his cronies would make the bounty hunter an offer he couldn't refuse, and he'd go away with far, far less. But try three zeros less: Apparently, there was currency confusion in the Sudanese government. The reward of 500 million Sudanese pounds (the equivalent of $250 mil) was offered in new Sudanese pounds, according to state media. The country revalued its currency last year, and the new pounds are worth 1,000 times the old ones. But the information office came out today and said that they're using old Sudanese pounds for some reason, so we're talking peanuts for Ibrahim: $250,000.

OMAR TORRES/AFP/Getty Images

The chaotic drug violence in Mexico continues unabated. With more than 6,000 killed in the past few years, today we can add yet another victim: the country's national police chief, killed by gunmen outside his home in Mexico City yesterday.

Edgar Eusebio Millán Gómez, the public face of Mexico's offensive against drug cartels, became the highest-ranking law enforcement official to be killed since the launch of the effort 17 months ago. The assassination could give new confidence to drug cartels blamed for 6,000 killings in the past 2 1/2 years, and embolden other anti-government groups in this violence-plagued nation.

"This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the risk of ungovernability," Luís Astorga, a Mexico City-based sociologist and drug expert, said in an interview. "It indicates terrible things, a level of weakness in our institutions -- they can't even protect themselves."

blog.ifeng.com

Zhang Ping, a senior editor of China's Southern Metropolis Weekly, recently penned several columns under a pseudonym about Chinese censorship of the situation in Tibet. One his pieces, "How to Find the Truth About Tibet," reflects on how both official and self-censorship among the Chinese media prevents Chinese readers from knowing the full story about Tibet, and laments that readers then focus their ire on perceived Western biases rather than agitating for more press freedoms. Here's an excerpt:

If the netizens [hyping inaccurate reports by foreign media] genuinely care about news values, they should not only be exposing the fake reports by the western media and they should also be challenging the control by the Chinese government over news sources and the Chinese media.  There is no doubt that the harm from the latter is even worse than the former.  When individual media outlets make fake reports about real events, it is easy to correct because just a few meticulous Chinese netizens can do the job.  When media control is exercised by the state authorities, the whole world is helpless.

There was a predictable nationalist-inspired backlash against Zhang, with Web forums labeling him a traitor and worse. Now, he's been fired.

Just after he was sacked, Zhang wrote a blog post titled, "My Cowardice and Impotence," in which he struggles with the work journalists are forced to produce in a place with so few press freedoms.

I am afraid of other people praising me as a brave newspaperman, because I know I am full of fear in my heart. I did write some commentaries on current affairs, and edited some articles that exposed the truth. I lost my job and was threatened for speaking the truth. However, to be honest, these were exceptional cases. They were my miscalculations. In my various media positions in the past decade, what I’ve practiced most is avoiding risk.

Self-censorship has become part of my life. It makes me disgusted with myself. Some of my peers are proud of their censorship skills, and like to show it off to employers. I have similar skills, and I am using them everyday. But I am deeply uncomfortable with it. I feel ashamed about it, just like an executioner knows that he is good at killing.[...]

[T]he media industry is different. I participate in telling lies to the public whenever I cancel a good news story, whenever I delete a sentence of truth, if we regard the media as a public good.[...] Even if I don’t have the courage and capacity to do more than I can do now, I should at least live honestly and conscientiously, and be aware of my cowardice and impotence.

Just a few ordinary days in modern Mexico...

This weekend:

Gunmen killed 17 people over the weekend in the southern coastal state of Guerrero in a wild hunt for the head of the state cattlemen’s association, who has gone into hiding, the authorities said Monday.

On Saturday morning, several men dressed as commandos and carrying assault rifles opened fire on a cattlemen’s meeting at a hotel in Iguala, killing seven ranchers but missing the leader of the group, Rogaciano Alba Álvarez.

The next day, eight trucks full of armed men pulled up outside a house on Mr. Alba Álvarez’s ranch in Petatlán. The men asked for the owner of the ranch. His family and ranch hands denied knowing his whereabouts.

The gunmen then lined people up against a wall and opened fire, killing 10 people, including two young sons of Mr. Alba Álvarez, Alejandro and Rusbel, a witness told The Associated Press. Then they kidnapped a teen-age girl believed to be Mr. Alba Álvarez’s niece or daughter and fled, authorities said.

Last week:

TIJUANA – A confrontation between rival criminal gangs left 13 dead and nine injured early yesterday in gunbattles that started along a major thoroughfare and continued near a private clinic where police exchanged gunfire with injured suspects.

Saturday:

Police have recovered the remains of seven men who were killed and dumped along a road in northern Mexico.

KHIN MAUNG WIN/AFP/Getty Images

The devastating cyclone that hit Burma this weekend, killing perhaps 22,500 people -- 40,000 more are still missing -- seems to have spared the country's new administrative capital, Naypyidaw. Deep in the heart of the country's interior and surrounded by mountainous jungle, the isolated new capital, only unveiled last year, suits the insular military junta just fine. But The Irrawaddy reports that civil servants and military officials, many of whom left family behind in Rangoon, are bucking orders from the junta to stay put. Instead, they've fled to look for lost family members in the cyclone's path:

We left our children in Rangoon, and we should be there with them now," the official said, adding that higher authorities have turned down all requests for leave until after the May 10 referendum.

Many of Burma's bureaucrats have homes in Rangoon, where they lived until the junta suddenly shifted the capital to Naypyidaw in November 2005. Telephone lines and Internet connections in Rangoon, which is still the country’s main commercial center, have been down since Friday.

Military personnel with relatives in the stricken area have also been returning to their homes without permission from their commanding officers.

Perhaps another sign that bungling relief efforts could weaken the junta's control?

In our latest issue, FP has teamed up once again with Britain's Prospect magazine to compile a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals. Our first effort in 2005 inspired quite the debate. Since then, dozens of new intellectuals have been added to the list: economists, clerics, neuroscientists, and environmentalists, to name just a few  -- all of them influential in shaping the ideas of our time. 

We're anxious to get your input. So, we want you to vote for your top 5 favorite intellectuals. Voting is easy -- just point and click. There's also a write-in option, to let us know who we should have included but didn't. We'll publish the results in our next issue.

Just what makes a public intellectual? You can check out our simple criteria, but better yet: Read about it straight from the horse's mouth. Christopher Hitchens, one of our top public intellectuals, has penned an essay on the burdens and pleasures of making a living by ideas in our modern age. Voting is free to all, but -- sorry folks -- you'll need to be a subscriber to read what Hitch has to say.

More Europeans now consider China a bigger threat to global stability than they do the United States, according to a Harris/FT poll out this week.

Granted, the poll was taken over the past few weeks, not the best time for the Chinese given how Tibetan protests and redirected torch relays have dominated the headlines. But there are still quite a few significant jumps in anti-China sentiment compared to last year.

Percent naming China the greatest threat to global stability:

Last year, all four ranked the United States a bigger threat. And within the United States, 31 percent of Americans listed China as the No.1 threat this year, more than Iran or North Korea. 

President Bush's call today to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 shouldn't be seen as any kind of White House policy shift.

If you think about it, he's really saying that it's fine for emissions to grow until then. Bush's speech today was a fairly vague and empty statement of intent, lacking in any plan to actually set specific emissions targets or reduce the United States' output. And when it does come time to halt growth, what Bush hails are the tired fallbacks: fuel-economy standards (not very helpful) and those frequently hyped and rarely identified "new technologies" that will surely do something. And since something's on the way, there's surely no need to reduce or cap today. Or so goes the thinking.

Bush devoted the majority of his remarks to what he still finds wrong with the emissions debate, making it clear how truly opposed he is to any type of regulation. He threw in a jab at the Supreme Court and its "unelected judges" for good measure:

The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act were never meant to regulate global climate change. For example, under a Supreme Court decision last year, the Clean Air Act could be applied to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

If these laws are stretched beyond their original intent, they could override the programs Congress just adopted, and force the government to regulate more than just power plant emissions. They could also force the government to regulate smaller users and producers of energy from schools and stores to hospitals and apartment buildings. [...]

Decisions with such far-reaching impact should not be left to unelected regulators and judges. (my emphasis)

In short, the climate speech doesn't really alter the political landscape on the issue. Not a surprise, really, though I'd expected something a little more ground-shifting this morning when I read the WSJ's advance on the speech and noticed the hilariously sad Bush hedcut included therein. That Bush looks like he's had to make concessions. Apparently, though, 3-D George didn't agree.

(On a side note about hilarious hedcuts, who at the WSJ hates Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai? Because this is not a flattering rendering.)

PATRICK HERTZOG/AFP/Getty

When I read today that Hillary Clinton is playing John Mellencamp's "Small Town" at her rallies this week, I had to laugh. Because, seriously? How literal are we going to get here? (Plus, I had to wonder whether Mellencamp, a former Edwards supporter, has endorsed anyone yet. He famously asked John McCain to stop playing his songs at rallies earlier this year.)

And in my 5-minute Google search to find out whether Mellencamp's made a pick, I discovered that Bruce Springsteen has just announced this afternoon that he's backing Obama. Here's what Mr. Working Class America said about Bittergate:

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I've envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that's interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where '...nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.'

Does this mean no more Springsteen songs at Clinton rallies?

UPDATE: A Getty Images search for "Springsteen Obama" brings this result:

TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images

Raise your hand if you're a campaign junkie but consider Bittergate the least controversial controversy the talking heads have concocted so far. (This is what happens when campaigns go too long.) Well, relief is in sight: Cindy McCain steals recipes.

Until early Tuesday morning, visitors to John McCain’s campaign Web site could find seven of "Cindy's Recipes," among them three elegant and healthful offerings: passion fruit mousse, ahi tuna with Napa cabbage slaw and farfalle pasta with turkey sausage, peas and mushrooms.

Only problem was, all three, listed as favorite family recipes of Cindy McCain, Mr. McCain's wife, were taken verbatim from the Food Network.

And don't worry -- heads are going to roll:

By midmorning, the McCain campaign had taken all seven recipes off the Web site and was pointing a finger at an intern who, tasked several months ago with contacting Mrs. McCain’s staff for favorite McCain recipes, had prowled the Internet instead.

"The intern has been dealt with," said Tucker Bounds, a campaign spokesman, who declined to provide details. Nonetheless, Mr. Bounds said, "we took away his zero pay."

Once again, Hillary's campaign is running up against what may be its most formidable adversary: Bill Clinton.

First, he flubbed big time last week by reviving -- and inaccurately describing -- the Bosnia sniper controversy. And now, just when Hillary wants to be seen as tough on China, comes an LAT piece yesterday that Bill's foundation has taken an undisclosed sum from a Chinese company accused of helping the government censor the Internet and crack down on Tibetan activists.

Alibaba, which owns Yahoo! China, asked Bill to speak at a 2005 executives' conference in China. In lieu of his usual speaking fee, often as high as $400,000, Bill asked for an undisclosed donation to his foundation. Last month, Yahoo! China's homepage ran "Wanted" posters of Tibetan activists the government accused of spreading unrest. Rebecca MacKinnon wrote recently of experiments she ran on Chinese search engines: Yahoo! China's was censored the most.

On the campaign trail, Hillary has gotten out in front of her opponents on the Olympics issue by calling on Bush to boycott the opening ceremony, "absent major changes by the Chinese government." But it certainly doesn't play well for her position when her husband's foundation receives large checks from a company so closely aligned with Beijing.

RAMZI HAIDAR/AFP/Getty Images

More than three years after a massive car bomb in Beirut killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, there's been scant progress on the U.N. investigation into the culprits behind the assassination. Conspiracy theories abound. One popular among Lebanese political leaders is that notorious Hezbollah leader Imad Mougniyah was killed in Damascus in February in exchange for cooling the pressure on the Hariri tribunal, which has implicated top Syrian leaders.

Now, a key witness who implicated pro-Syrian generals in the Hariri assassination has gone missing. The family of Mohammed Zuheir al-Siddiq, a Syrian intelligence officer who had been living under house arrest in France, accuses the French government of being involved in his "liquidation." It's no wonder that the new head of the U.N. investigation is saying that he needs his June deadine extended.

And on a side note: Mougniyah is getting his own postage stamp in Iran. First-class postage.

In what his spokesman swears is not a jab at Beijing but a way of saving taxpayer money, Gordon Brown announced today that he'll skip the August 8 Olympics opening ceremony, opting to attend the closing ceremony instead. Perhaps those loud protests in London had some effect? And I'd put money on a similar announcement from Sarkozy any day now.

JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

Call it poetic justice. Doug Feith's book, a fierce defense of the decision to invade Iraq by one of the war's chief architects, came out yesterday. Right in the middle of testimony by Crocker and Petraeus that troops can't be pulled because security in Iraq remains fragile and reversible. Not the most ideal publishing circumstances. We'll watch where he goes on Amazon's sales rank.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Tune into just about any episode of The Colbert Report, and you'll hear Stephen Colbert extolling the virtues of the "Colbert bump," the phenomenon wherein candidates, authors, and musicians appearing on his show experience an immediate surge in popularity and sales of whatever they happen to be hawking. Among the many bumps for which Colbert has claimed credit, see Toby Keith's #1 album last year, Salman Rushdie's knighthood, and the fact that the names Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee mean something to you.

Now, James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, has just completed a study demonstrating the "first scientific evidence of Stephen Colbert's influence on political campaigns." Yes, Virginia, the Colbert bump is real.

Fowler examined the rate and amount of fundraising done by House candidates who appeared on Colbert's show for his "Better Know a District" segment. Democrats who appear on the show raise 44 percent more money in the 30 days after appearing on the show than Dems that don't appear. But it's bad news for Republicans: No bump. Their donations stay flat.

Advice for Barack and Hillary, given that Colbert is taking his show on the road next week to Pennsylvania in advance of the presidential primary there: Get thee to the Report.

H/T: The Monkey Cage

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

After promising to do so for months, the Clintons have just released their tax returns. And they've made a pretty penny since Bill left office.

Total income since 2000: $109,175,175

Bill's cumulative speech income: $51,855,599

Last year, it was reported that Bill gave more than 350 speeches in 2006, but that only 20 percent (so, 70 speeches) were for personal income. Their 2006 returns show that he made about $10.5 million that year on speeches, or about $150,000 a pop. So, given that he's commanded far more than that for various events (as high as $450K a speech in '06), I'm actually surprised he hasn't made more.

This doesn't sound good:

Security agents and paramilitary police in riot gear are surrounding a Harare hotel housing foreign journalists.

A man answering the phone at the hotel says they are taking away some reporters.

The man refused to give his name but said about 30 police entered the hotel Thursday and were preparing to take away four or five journalists.

The elections definitely haven't been playing out according to Mugabe's script. If you're positioning yourself to steal a runoff, a good first step would be to lock up anyone who might call you out.

Update: One of the arrested journalists is reportedly the NYT's Barry Bearak.

AFP/Getty Images

India's foreign minister has given the Dalai Lama, who heads the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala in northern India, a warning: Don't mess up our relationship with China. Here's Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Indian TV:

India will continue to offer [the Dalai Lama] all hospitality, but during his stay in India, they should not do any political activity, any action that can adversely affect relations between India and China".

Tibet expert Robert Barnett recently told FP that Delhi is increasingly distancing itself from the Tibetans in order to solidify its ties with Beijing.

FP: Will India find it harder to tolerate the Tibetan government in exile?

RB: India is clearly moving in the direction of distancing itself from the exiles. Some people think it's preparing for the death of the Dalai Lama, and then it will distance itself even more. There were indications of a sea change after the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal in America last October. The Indians issued an order, presumably under pressure from China, that their cabinet ministers were not allowed to meet him or receive him upon his return. This was seen as very unusual. I don't want to suggest some major realignment, but the indications are very much that India is maintaining ambiguity but showing that it largely wants to engage with China. That said, it hasn't taken any irreversible steps yet in terms of the Tibetans.

Another question to my mind is, What happens to Dharamsala when the Dalai Lama dies? What's received little analysis in recent weeks is Beijing's long-term strategy of waiting out the Dalai Lama in order to control his succession. Traditionally, Tibetan Buddhism's No.2 figure, the Panchen Lama, helps determine the next Dalai Lama, believed to be a reincarnation of the former. But the Panchen Lama named by the Dalai Lama in 1995 was arrested by the Chinese and hasn't been seen since (he was 6 years old at the time of his arrest). China then named its own Panchen Lama, a teenager who just so happens to be a big fan of Chinese nationalism. How that succession issue shakes out will be of enormous importance, and how China handles it will determine to what extent the recent protests are a sign of things to come.

The Reyes laptop is the gift that just keeps on giving. Within a few days of killing FARC commander Raúl Reyes and seizing a laptop allegedly belonging to him, Colombian authorities began referring repeatedly to FARC's desire to obtain up to 110 kilograms of uranium and perhaps even a past purchase of 50 kilograms for a "dirty bomb," citing information obtained from the laptop.

On Wednesday, the purchased uranium was apparently found, but it's spectacularly unclear how dangerous the material really is. Informants apparently tipped off investigators to the uranium's whereabouts, which happened to be a few feet off a road in southern Bogotá. There, investigators uncovered about 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of uranium buried in plastic bags.

But just what kind of uranium? It certainly wasn't enriched uranium, which is what they would need for a dirty bomb. Some outlets are reporting it to be "impoverished," i.e. "depleted" uranium, which is the byproduct of enrichment, and far less dangerous. Nuke analyst Charles Ferguson told Bloomberg:

You could stand next to this material for days and nothing would happen to you, unless you dropped it on your foot,'' said Ferguson.

So, what did FARC want with depleted uranium? A Colombian security analyst told Reuters it was likely a money-making scheme. Other uses, according to Ferguson:

Possible uses for the FARC might include making armor- piercing conventional weapons or an ingestible poison, Ferguson said. Less likely, the metal could be used as a shield while handling more potent radioactive materials that would be used to make a dirty bomb.

I asked Matthew Bunn, senior research associate with Harvard's Project on Managing the Atom, what the significance of the find is:

[D]epleted uranium is pretty useless for terrorists, and there aren't variants of uranium that are even more so.

30 kg of either natural or depleted uranium is not of much interest, either from the point of the security threat it poses (almost none -- uranium is only very weakly radioactive, and unenriched material is useless for making a nuclear bomb) or from the point of view of its value (something like $6000 for natural uranium, at current commercial market prices in the range of $200 per kilogram of uranium, much less for depleted uranium). Depleted uranium is the waste from a uranium enrichment plant, but is also used for things that require very dense material, such as armor-penetrating shells and ships ballast.  How it ended up in Bogota is a bit unclear, but it's not controlled especially carefully, since it's not a material of much interest to anyone.

(The fact that in the original seized memo the quoted price was $2.5 million per kilogram suggests that the seller either was running a scam or was totally clueless about the value of what he had, and that the memo author was fairly clueless either about the nature of the material on offer or the value of it, or both.)

The only thing that IS potentially of interest in this whole story (in my view) is that a very professional terrorist organization like FARC, with a good deal of experience in smuggling, apparently was interested in getting involved in buying and selling nuclear material for money. That suggests that some one who had serious nuclear material (unlike this material) and needed to move it from one country to another might have been able to make use of the FARC's capabilities.

Watch this space.