news blog from Cindy

By Shashi Tharoor The opinions expressed are his own When the Commonwealth heads of government meet in Australia later this month, one prominent leader is almost certain to be conspicuously absent: India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. India is a strong backer of the association of former British colonies (and some new entrants without that shared heritage, notably Mozambique and Rwanda), so no displeasure with the Commonwealth is implied. Instead, rumours in New Delhi suggest that the decision to send a delegation led by India’s ceremonial vice-president, albeit an able former diplomat, might be a not-so-subtle rebuke to the summit’s host, Australia. On the face of it, it is hard to imagine two countries with less cause for conflict. United by the English language, similar democratic political institutions, and a shared passion for cricket, and divided by no significant issues of contention, India and Australia seem obvious candidates for the sort of benign relationship of which most diplomats dream. Two years ago, a sensitive area did emerge, when reports of Indian students being brutally attacked in “hate crime” incidents in Melbourne and Sydney inflamed India’s excitable media and threatened to derail the relationship. But this has been dealt with successfully, mainly through adroit diplomacy on both sides and effective preventive policing by Australia. The Commonwealth summit might well have provided an opportunity to celebrate the restoration of bonhomie. Instead, relations have been strained by the continuing refusal of Australia’s Labour Party government to sell uranium to energy-starved India for its civilian nuclear program. A regular supplier of uranium for China’s extensive nuclear-weapons program (while overlooking its record of facilitating Pakistan’s clandestine weapons development), Australia nonetheless justifies its stance on the grounds of India’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). India’s stance was based on principle: the NPT is the last vestige of apartheid in the international system, granting as it does to five countries the right to be nuclear-weapons states while denying the same right to others. If nuclear weapons are evil — and India agrees with Australia that they are — then no one should have them. What is the moral, ethical, or legal basis for suggesting that some can and others cannot? What virtue do the “official” nuclear powers possess that democratic India lacks? A long-time advocate of global nuclear disarmament, India’s position on the NPT enjoys near-consensus backing within the country. If everyone disarms, India will gladly do so, too. The issue is, above all, one of strategic common sense: China, which went to war with India in 1962, has nuclear weapons pointed at it, making it irresponsible to sign a treaty that would disarm India unilaterally. Moreover, unlike Iran and North Korea, which signed the NPT and then violated its provisions through clandestine nuclear-weapons programs, India has breached no international obligation, openly pursued its own nuclear development, and has a clean record on proliferation: it has never exported its technology or leaked a nuclear secret. Its nuclear program is strictly in civilian hands. And its nuclear doctrine rests on deterrence, backed by a credible retaliatory threat, rather than a destabilising first-strike capacity, which India has not developed even against a superior potential adversary like China. India does not dispute that the risk of nuclear conflict over the next 20 years has increased with the potential emergence of new nuclear-weapon states and the threat that terrorist groups could acquire nuclear materials. Pakistan’s willingness to allow its territory to be used for attacks against India, like the assault on Mumbai in November 2008, inevitably carries the risk of sparking a larger conflagration, and its refusal to sign a “no first-strike” agreement with India is a serious cause for concern. There are also genuine questions regarding the ability of a state like Pakistan to control and secure its nuclear arsenal in the event of internal disruption. This helps explain why Singh has made such an extraordinary effort to sustain dialogue with Pakistan — and why India remains a strong proponent of universal nuclear disarmament. India’s approach is based on the belief that non-proliferation cannot be an end in itself; rather, it must be linked to nuclear disarmament in a mutually reinforcing process. Effective disarmament must enhance the security of all states — not, as the NPT ensures, merely that of a few. India set out its goals regarding nuclear disarmament as far back as June 1988, when then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi presented to the United Nations an Action Plan for ushering in a nuclear-weapons-free world. He argued that the “alternative to co-existence is co-destruction.” Even today, India is perhaps the only nuclear-weapons state ready and willing to negotiate a treaty leading to global, non-discriminatory, and verifiable elimination of these deadly armaments. So Australia’s refusal to emulate the United States in recognising that India merits an exception on nuclear supplies rankles Indians. In fact, India has all the uranium it currently needs from other suppliers; the issue is one of principle. Just four years ago, India, Australia, and the U.S. participated in joint military and naval exercises, together with Japan and Singapore. It is safe to assume that Australia will need to rethink its position on uranium exports before anything like that happens again. This piece comes from Project Syndicate

It never even made it to its first birthday. FT Tilt, the high-priced emerging-markets blog launched with some fanfare in January, has now quietly died. This is a sad day: Tilt was run by the FT’s two most innovative journalists, Paul Murphy and Stacy-Marie Ishmael, and was a bold attempt to view the developing world from a novel perspective. The FT could and should learn a lot from Tilt’s innovations, not least the rich and various forms of engagement it had with its readers. The FT should also learn from Tilt’s failures, which are to be found in the business model rather than in the journalism. Tilt was a blog run by a small team of smart young journalists — but it was priced at thousands of dollars a year, and I could never understand where the value was meant to lie. Those journalists had amazing sources and language skills in countries around the world, but they were ring-fenced from the FT itself, and didn’t really contribute noticeably to the newspaper. Ironically, they might actually contribute more now, going forwards, in the wake of Tilt’s execution: FT spokeswoman Darcy Keller tells me that the newspaper is trying to find jobs for them. I hope it does; as Stacy says, they have done tremendous work, and deserve to be rewarded for it. The model of charging very large amounts of money for information about global markets which is relatively cheap to collate just doesn’t seem to work — Tilt is now dead, and Roubini.com is up for sale. The fact is that smart, economically-literate people are never going to be that cheap — so you need to have some kind of decently-sized market for what they do. And both Tilt and Roubini.com have been priced way too high to reach even a four-digit subscriber base. What’s more, these kind of services get better as their audience grows — they learn from their audience. Keeping the audience artificially tiny by implementing a massive paywall is self-defeating. No startup ever achieves success in less than one year, so the FT’s decision with respect to Tilt does seem hasty. What they should have done is make Tilt free to all FT subscribers, and see if it took off that way. FT Alphaville has proved that bloggy brand extensions can be extremely successful, if done right, and Tilt’s material was certainly of great interest to a very important part of the FT’s global audience. It’s good for media companies to experiment, and it’s necessary that some of those experiments fail. But I don’t think that FT Tilt failed, in terms of its core journalistic output. I think that the FT got greedy for subscription revenues from day one, and never let Tilt grow and thrive as it could and should have done. I absolutely blame the overlords for this one, not the people who did the real work. Update: Richard Desai-Green, Roubini’s CFO, responds: We have 1,000 clients. You seem to be treating info published in the media as fact but in fact the CNBC journalist had his numbers wrong. We are cash flow positive. We’re well capitalized. We are continuing to hire people. We just opened an office in India and hired 9 people. We’re continuing to grow our business. We can never say we won’t sell the company but I can say at this time we don’t have any offers and the executive team of our company is as committed as ever. September was a record sales month for us and we’ve started October really well and expect our growth to continue.

Oct 14 (Reuters) - British media group Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) said it agreed to merge its online property business with Zoopla Ltd, a property search and information firm, as it looks to gain market share from Rightmove , Britain’s most visited property website.As part of the deal, the consumer media business of DMGT, A&N Media, will retain a 55 percent stake in the newly-formed company, with Zoopla holding the rest. Zoopla operates the property search website Zoopla.co.uk.”In a market that has had a single dominant player in Rightmove for many years, this will create a viable and effective alternative for estate agents and housebuilders across the UK,” DMGT said in a statement.The company, whose flagship Daily Mail newspaper is Britain’s top-selling mid-market tabloid, warned last month that it expected full-year earnings to be at the lower end of forecasts after weak advertising, particularly in travel and retail, hit its consumer business.In August, the company agreed to sell its U.S. retail trade show management business for about 106 million pounds to private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.DMGT’s shares, which are down almost 30 percent since the beginning of the year, were trading up about 1 percent at 398.8 pence by 0956 GMT on Friday on the London Stock Exchange, outperforming a 0.7 percent rise in the FTSE mid-cap index .