FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

Over at China Rises, Tim Johnson reports that most Chinese "seem content" with their government's rescue efforts after the Sichuan quake on Monday. But Johnson also notes that, politically speaking, it's a "fluid situation" for China's ruling Communists.

Among the developments to watch in coming days is growing public anger over the shoddy construction of schools in rural China. Among the dead are a massive number of children. Many parents are already asking: Why did the schools collapse when other government buildings remained standing?

Answering that question could pose a potentially destabilizing challenge for the Beijing regime. The NYT's Jim Yardley has more in a must-read today:

[E]nraged parents interviewed at the morgue on Wednesday afternoon and early Thursday morning say local officials lied to the prime minister to hide the true toll at Xinjian, which they estimate at more than 400 dead children. Several parents blamed local officials for a slow initial rescue response and questioned the structural safety of the school building. They were also furious that officials forbade them to search for their children for two days and then allowed access to the bodies only after the parents formed an ad hoc committee to complain.... Several parents wanted an investigation into the construction quality of school buildings in Dujiangyan. They say six schoolhouses collapsed in the city, even as other government buildings remain standing. One man said officials built two additional stories on the Xinjian school even though it had failed a safety inspection two years ago — allegations that could not be verified.

Much of the questionable engineering and construction can probably be tied to local level corruption, and it will be interesting to see if anti-official sentiments continue to grow in this regard. At the Far Eastern Economic Review, Michael Zhao reports that they already are: "we are hearing increasing reports of discontent, even outrage, with officialdom’s response.... There is a powerful linkage in Chinese political culture, including at the populist level, between natural disasters and state failure...." Seems "Grandpa Wen" and his cohorts are hardly out of the woods just yet.

Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images

OK, not really:

Iraqi students of the University of Technology, Baghdad, pretend to drink alcohol as they drink soft drinks during a celebration of their university day on May 4, 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq.

Artyom Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty Images

Greetings from Salzburg, Austria, where I will be blogging this week from the Salzburg Global Seminar's session on Russia: The 2020 Perspective. I'm here thanks to the generosity of the Knight Foundation, which paid my way. I'm by no means an expert on Russia, but with Vladimir Putin's succesor now chosen and the NATO summit freshly ended, the timing couldn't be better for me to get up to speed.

One of the assigned readings for the session was "Putin's Plan," a fascinating  Washington Quarterly article by Brookings scholar Clifford Gaddy and CSIS Russia expert Andrew Kuchins. Gaddy and Kuchins got their hands on a dissertation Putin wrote for his 1997 graduate degree for the School of Mines in St. Petersburg. They argue that the thesis, "Strategic Planning of the Reproduction of the Mineral Resource Base of a Region," does much to explain Putin's behavior as CEO of Russia, Inc. Other scholars, notably the Carnegie Endowment's Martha Brill Olcott, have examined excerpts from the dissertation before, looking for clues to Putin's thinking about the relationship of energy companies to the state. But Gaddy and Kuchins extend the analysis to the Medvedev succession, arguing that Putin was looking above all for someone who could replace him as Russia's top "strategic planner."

In the course of his research, Gaddy discovered that Putin -- or whoever really wrote the disseration -- had actually lifted 16 of the document's 218 pages nearly verbatim from a Russian translation of Strategic Planning and Policy, a 1978 mangement tome written by University of Pittsburgh professors William R. King and David Cleland (though the author did include a reference to the book).

It's actually quite common for Russian politicians to beef up their resumes with questionable degrees and/or have ghostwriters pen their theses. It's also standard practice, I'm told, for intelligence officers to borrow analyses with attribution. Perhaps Putin was merely upholding the academic standards of the KGB, his former employer. Whatever the case, the outgoing Russian president obviously never suffered the fate of U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, whose presidential aspirations were doomed in 1987 by accusations of plagiarism. Instead, the Russian media leapt to Putin's defense and said that King and Cleland had gotten their ideas from Soviet economists. Still, Russia's CEO seems touchy about the topic. When Gaddy asked Putin about his dissertation a few years back, he tensed up and dodged the question.

As for Dmitry Medvedev, many analysts here seem to be searching for clues that the Russian president-elect won't simply "plagiarize" Putin's policies. Will he be his own man? How long will it be before he can stake out a different path? More on this important issue in the next installment.

Blake Hounshell is Web Editor of ForeignPolicy.com. He has been blogging this week from the Salzburg Global Seminar session on Russia: The 2020 Perspective.

(Editor's note: Please see update at bottom.)

Do you have a Ph.D. from a well-regarded American university such as Harvard, Cornell, or Caltech? If so, don't go to Germany and put the title "Dr." on your business card, Web site, or résumé. It's illegal, and you could end up in prison for a year.

Under a 1930s law from Nazi times, only people with Ph.D.'s and medical degrees from German universities can use "Dr." as a title, though the law was amended in 2001 to include degrees from EU countries too. (There is a way for non-EU degree holders to apply for permission to use the titles, but apparently, it's not worth the trouble.)

Recently, seven Americans -- all researchers at institutes of Germany's prestigious Max Planck Society -- were investigated for title abuse. One was an astrophysicist with a Ph.D. from Caltech. Another, Ian Thomas Baldwin, has a Ph.D. from Cornell. His colleagues have been calling him "Prof. Dr. Baldwin" for a decade, but apparently, the law says he instead should be "Prof. Ian Thomas Baldwin, Ph.D., Cornell University." (It looks like his Web page is in compliance, thank goodness.)

Honorifics are taken quite seriously in Germany, reports the Washington Post. (If any of you who have lived in Germany know about this sensitivity, please feel free to leave a comment.) Fortunately, though, prosecutors have now recommended against filing charges, but the Americans could still face a civil fine.

Meanwhile, German officials recently suggested changing the law to allow the "Dr." title to be used by people with Ph.D.'s and medical degrees from U.S. universities, but only if the university is one of the approximately 200 accredited by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

It all raises the question: Do Germans with Ph.D.'s and medical degrees expect to be called "Dr." when living abroad?

UPDATE: According to a post on the Marginal Revolution blog, the law mentioned in this post may have just been changed.

Former British prime minister wait-listed, encouraged to reapply next year:

Yale University is pleased to announce the appointment of Prime Minister Tony Blair as the Howland Distinguished Fellow for the next academic year. Mr. Blair will lead a seminar at Yale and participate in a number of events around the campus. The course in which he will participate with Yale faculty will examine issues of faith and globalization."

UPDATE: On a serious note, check out Passport contributor James Forsyth's comments on why giving Blair a sinecure at a U.S. university would be bad for America.

iStockPhoto

Q: Who was Adolf Hitler?

• A German kaiser
• A munitions maker
• The chancellor of Germany during WWII
• An Austrian premier

If you answered "C," congratulations! You are now as smart as one quarter of 17-year-olds in the United States.

A new survey released by the non-profit group Common Core found that teenagers in the United States live in "stunning ignorance" about history and literature. That's something we could have told you awhile ago. In "Lost in America," a feature story in the May/June 2006 issue of FP, Douglas McGray wrote:

[S]urrounded by foreign languages, cultures, and goods, [young Americans] remain hopelessly uninformed, and misinformed, about the world beyond U.S. borders."

In his piece, he writes that we hear all the time about how America's youth lags behind in science and math tests. But they lag equally, if not more, in the liberal arts and social sciences. And it's just as dangerous. As the world becomes more and more globalized, it's crucial that our citizens today and tomorrow have a deeper understanding of history and culture.

Thankfully, Common Core has taken on this cause. The organization is composed of both Democrats and Republicans, who may not agree with each other about education reform policy. But they do agree on one thing: America's schools need to teach more about the liberal arts. Right on.

Ben Sklar/Getty Images

We've finally gotten to the point where it's entirely plausible that the next U.S. president will have had a black father, a white mother, and a half-Asian sister. America has finally moved beyond race, right?

Not so fast. All you have to do is look to my hometown, "liberal" Boulder, Colorado, as this week's Exhibit A of how screwed up the United States still is when it comes to race. At the University of Colorado, a columnist for a student newspaper wrote that Asians should be rounded up with an "extra-large butterfly net," "hog-tied," forced to drink and eat sushi with a fork, and ordered to dance until their spirits are broken. Lovely, eh?

The university has issued an apology. So have the editors of the paper. They claim the column was meant to be a satire and a commentary on racism. But the column was never clearly labelled as a satire, and the columnist's writing skills are so poor, that... well, let's just say he will be getting employment at neither a reputable paper nor at The Onion. He may not even be really racist. But he's a total and complete idiot. I hesitate to bring his column to your attention because he's pulled immature, stupid, controversial stunts like this before.

But the bottom line is, there's a very real danger that readers of his column will take him seriously. It wasn't that long ago that 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were placed in internment camps in this country. The Jena Six incident, where nooses were hung on trees at a high school in Louisiana, took place only a few months ago. There are no excuses: Racial violence is not something to be taken lightly, whether you're a college student or not.

Check out this offering from Operationcheckpoint.com, a Web site devoted to "airport security education for children":

Scan It®is an educational and creative play toy that helps children become acclimated with airport and public spaces security. The device is both a fun toy and an educational tool.  It detects metal objects and simulates an X-ray scan via a functioning conveyor belt that glides articles over its metal detector path. When metallic items are present the unit beeps and lights up.

(Hat tip: Boing Boing)

But wait, there's more. Playmobil has a security checkpoint on Amazon.com:

Here are a few customer reviews:

I think this was good. I use it with my Playmobil getaway car al the time. I hope that they make a Playmobil Enemy Combatant Detention Center soon. That would be great!

One little oddity to point out is that the xray monitor displaying the bag contents shows what appears to be a fire extinguisher, a duck and several brown poo-shaped objects.

I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up.

Here's a story I missed earlier: 

Since February 2007, the value of India's stock market has doubled to 20000 points, and the biggest winners have been India's richest. Based on these gains, India's four wealthiest men are now worth more than China's 40 wealthiest combined. [...]

All told, India's 40 wealthiest businessmen are worth $351 billion, according to Forbes – easily the most in Asia. Its four richest – steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, [oil and supermarket magnate Mukesh] Ambani, his brother Anil Ambani, and [real estate baron Kushal Pal] Singh – hold more than half that sum.

No wonder Japanese mothers are scrambling to send their kids to Indian schools.

iStockphoto.com

Vermiculate. Lobscouse. Desuetude. Macerate.

Just about every American high school student who has planned to attend university has had to learn words such as these in preparation for the SAT exam that is used as part of the college admissions process.

Now, by learning these words, whether for fun or for test preparation, you can also help end hunger. A computer programmer created a Web site, Freerice.com, that throws multiple-choice vocabulary questions at you. For every one you answer correctly, the site donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. The first few questions are relatively easy, but as you answer questions correctly, subsequent ones become progressively more difficult.

Advertising income pays for the donated rice. The site averages close to 200,000 hits daily, and since October 7, 6.9 billion grains have been donated. How munificent.

The Economist has a great cover story about the rising price of food, a main reason for which is a U.S. policy that supports the development of ethanol made from corn (the rise of Asia is another major factor, but that's a good thing). Read the piece for the full account of what is going on and why it is so dangerous, but in the meantime, ponder this graphic:

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

A new study published Thursday by the American Institutes for Research shows that U.S. students still lag behind their peers in Singapore, South Korea, and Japan in the critical areas of math and science education. Numerous other reports over the last several years have purported to show the same mediocre quality of the U.S. education system. In 2005, Microsoft founder Bill Gates described the U.S. high schools as "obsolete." President Bush mentioned the need for greater emphasis on math and science achievement in his 2006 State of the Union address. And just last month, an influential group of tech-industry CEOs from such companies as Cisco and Sun Microsystems added their voices to the choir of business leaders demanding changes to the U.S. education system.

But what do these reports, studies, and rankings really tell us? Not a whole lot, according to Vivek Wadhwa, whose recent article in BusinessWeek debunks many of the common misconceptions about U.S. math and science education. Even Singapore's minister of education has downplayed the importance of such rankings, despite Singapore's first-place status:

[The U.S.] is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well--like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."

The World Economic Forum's recent 2007/2008 Global Competitiveness Report supports that conclusion. In it, the United States maintained its position as the world's most innovative economy despite the shoddy performance of its math and science education, which ranked 45th. Singapore, meanwhile, stayed in first place in math and science education but came in at a disappointing 23rd in capacity for innovation and 22nd for the availability of scientists and engineers—10 places below the United States in the same category.

Even if U.S. math and science education is not completely inadequate, there is still one area in which the United States can vastly improve: geography. Miss South Carolina's less-than-shining moment earlier this year was no fluke; National Geographic's 2006 Survey of Geographic Literacy found that 63 percent of young people in the United States could not find Iraq on a map and 50 percent couldn't even locate New York.

In Israel, hundreds of thousands of youngsters have been wandering the streets, and it's not because they're skipping school. Rather, it's because the country's public secondary schools have been shut down since their teachers went on strike on Oct. 9 to protest low salaries and poor working conditions. Starting teachers make $600 monthly (less than the rent for a decent one-bedroom apartment in Tel Aviv), and classrooms have 38 to 40 students.

On Monday, Knesset member Avishay Braverman called on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to help resolve the situation. "Mister prime minister, Annapolis is important. Finding a solution to this strike is more important than Annapolis," he said, referring to a Middle East peace meeting the United States is arranging in Annapolis, Maryland.

The strike is symptomatic of an educational breakdown that some say will hurt Israel's high-tech industries, which generate 12 percent of the country's gross domestic product and more than one third of its exports. In the 1960s, Israeli kids ranked near the top in international assessments of math and science. By 2002 though, Israel was 33rd out of 41 countries. Additionally, potential math and science teachers have been ditching schools for more lucrative jobs in the high-tech sector.

Israel's education problem extends to universities as well. Up to 3,000 professors have left for jobs abroad in the past decade. Meanwhile, funding for Israel's seven universities has fallen 20 percent in four years, and the number of instructors has held steady, while the number of students has jumped 50 percent in the last decade.

Let's hope Israel's low-paid teachers don't have to resort to what Cambodia's teachers have to do. At schools that are supposed to be free, they have been reduced to charging students "informal fees" to top up their salaries, which can be as low as $30 a month. In a country where one third of the people live on less than 50 cents per day, many Cambodian parents can't afford the fees—which for one student were almost 25 cents per day—and kids have to drop out of primary school.

Many of Passport's readers are college students who are looking to launch careers in foreign policy. As it's job-huntin' season on campus, here's a timely guest post from Peter W. Singer, a military expert at the Brookings Institution and the author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, on how to become a foreign-policy wonk.

We hope you find it helpful.

Frequently, I get e-mails from young students who want to know how to crack into the world of foreign policy. Below are the most frequent questions and my answers, which FP thought actually might be of use or at least amusement. Please judge their worth by the amount of money that you paid for them.

How did you decide to get into the foreign-policy world?

I've been interested in these issues since as long as I can remember. I was the weird kid in elementary school, who for book reports would choose Soviet Military Power (the Pentagon's somewhat overhyped annual report on the Red menace) rather than Sweet Valley High or The Boxcar Kids. Yes, it was totally nerdy. Guilty as charged. By the time I got to college, I applied to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as my major. If I didn't get in, my backup plan was to go into the history field. Fortunately, I did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. When it came time to figure out a job afterwards, I flirted a bit with the idea of becoming a management consultant. My thinking was that I could feed the beast by getting subscriptions to various political magazines to read in my off time, while I made scads of money merely for using words like "synergy," "leverage," or "optimize." But I soon realized that I didn't know what those words actually meant and I would shoot myself after a few months. So, I went into the foreign-policy business instead.

[If you're reading this from the main page, read on after the break]

InTrade has set up a betting market for the Nobel Prizes for economics and peace. The peace prize winner will be announced on Friday, with economics to follow on Monday.

I'm not sure where people are getting their information, but the consensus among InTrade users seems to be that Al Gore is the overwhelming favorite, followed by Inuit climate-change activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri, and veteran negotiator and former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari.

The economics field appears wide open, with no prospective candidate trading at more than 10 points (100 means that those betting believe there is a 100 percent chance that a given person will be named). Here are the top five:

• University of Chicago finance professor Eugene Fama
• Harvard economist Robert Barro
• University of Toulouse economist Jean Tirole
• Avinash Dixit of Princeton
• George Mason's Gordon Tullock

Harvard economist and former Bush administration official Greg Mankiw also handicaps the prize based on which economists are cited most often. "[I]f I had to bet a dollar on this year's prize," Mankiw writes, "I would put it on Fama, [Harvard's Marty] Feldstein, or Barro."

Breaking news: 

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited President Bush to speak at an Iranian university if the American leader ever traveled to the Islamic Republic, state-run television reported Friday.

So who's the Lee Bollinger of Iran? 

SPENCER PLATT/Getty Images

It seems that Angelina Jolie and hubby Brad Pitt have taken the advice of FP contributor Rob Long to heart and are deploying their star power in a major way. At a packed press conference at the annual conference of the Clinton Global Initiative this afternoon, Jolie helped launch a "historic education partnership for children of conflict" in partnership with CGI, UNICEF, Save the Children, and a number of other organizations. (Just to give you a sense of the atmosphere in the room, a casual flip of Jolie's hair set off every flash bulb in the room, not to mention a few camera phones.)

As for Brad, introduced earlier today as "the sexiest man alive," he debuted a plan in concert with famed green designer Bill McDonough to build 150 new "affordable and sustainable homes" in New Orleans's devastated Ninth Ward. (For you gossips out there, Angelina and Brad never appeared publicly in the same room today at CGI, as far as I know—though they did show up together last week for the New York premiere of "Darfur Now".) 

But my favorite moment today by far was when famed primatologist Jane Goodall proved that she can still speak chimpanzee. You can download or listen to the mp3 clip of Goodall here.

Aren't MIT students supposed to be smart?

An MIT student wearing what turned out to be a fake bomb was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said.

Star Simpson, 19, had a computer circuit board and wiring in plain view over a black hooded sweatshirt she was wearing, said State Police Maj. Scott Pare, the commanding officer at the airport. [...]

The battery-powered rectangular device had nine flashing lights, and Simpson had Play-Doh in her hands, Pare said.

The phrases "Socket to me" and "Course VI" were written on the back of her sweatshirt, which authorities displayed to the media. Course VI appears to refer to MIT's major of electrical engineering and computer science.

MAJID/Getty Images News

Something is seriously wrong with this picture: An American student enrolled at the University of Florida is denied his constitutionally-protected right to question an elected leader in a nonviolent way. He's tackled by a half dozen police officers, tasered, and thrown in jail. Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be given free reign to hold court before a group of students and faculty — and hordes of television cameras — at Columbia University next week.

So let me get this straight. Ahmadinejad, who is rumored to have taken Americans hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and whose country is a leading state sponsor of terrorism, has more rights than an American college student. Friends, all is not well in American academia.

Some pundits are lamely attacking Columbia for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak. But of all people, these neocon types ought to understand that freedom means giving the microphone to someone who makes your blood boil. More convincing are folks like Matt Cooper, who is pointing out the hypocrisy in Columbia's eagerness to welcome Ahmadinejad even as they ban the U.S. military's Reserve Officers Training Corps from campus. Cooper asks, "If discrimination [is] the standard for banishment from campus why not Catholic groups? After all, the church bans women from becoming priests."

What's more worrisome, however, is the realization that, while Ahmadinejad will enjoy and test the very limits of the freedoms Americans are supposed to enjoy, a U.S. citizen was denied this priviledge earlier this week. American universities, one is left to assume, value the insights of a man like Ahmadinejad more than they do those of their own students.