 | | Game in Washington | | DESPITE all the bluster about an impending default on the government's debt, most observers in Washington and on Wall Street still believe the two parties will reach a crisis-averting agreement.
That's because the practice of American politics assumes that all players will negotiate according to predictable patterns _ that they will realise they can get more from compromise than by demanding everything and winning nothing.
Under that assumption, President Obama is right to keep pressing for a compromise, because eventually the Republicans will fall in line. But as two wildly different fields _ game theory and the study of elephant mating patterns _ show, there are limits to the usual assumptions: Sometimes players simply refuse to play the game, and when that happens, the best advice for their opponents is to do the same.
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|  |  | | CAN'T THE US DO THIS RIGHT? | | THERE is only one thing worse than Republicans and Democrats failing to agree to lift the debt ceiling, and that is lifting the debt ceiling without a well-thought-out plan and with hasty cuts totalling trillions of dollars over a decade. What business do you know _ that is still in business _ that would operate this way: making massive longterm cuts, negotiated by exhausted executives, without any strategic plan? It certainly wouldn't be a business you'd expect to thrive.
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Indonesia flayed over light sentences for sect killings
DPA
JAKARTA INDONESIA drew international criticism on Thursday as a court handed down light sentences to 12 men convicted in connection with the killing of three followers of the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect.
The court in the western Java city of Serang sentenced the defendants to between three and six months for the February attack, in which dozens of Muslim radicals raided a house and killed three members of the minority sect.
It was the deadliest in a series of attacks against members of the sect, that has been branded heretical by many Muslims because it teaches that its founder, Mirza Gulam Ahmad, was the final Islamic prophet instead of Mohammed.
The United States, the European Union and New York-based Human Rights Watch condemned the verdicts, which found the defendants guilty on a range of assaultrelated charges, but stopped short of murder.
“We are disappointed by the disproportionately light sentences,” the US embassy in Jakarta said in a statement.
“The United States encourages Indonesia to defend its tradition of tolerance for all religions, a tradition praised by President Obama in his November 2010 visit to Jakarta,” it said.
The EU mission in Jakarta stressed the need for “dissuasive penalties” for violence against minorities as a deterrent.
“The EU Delegation shares the strong concerns voiced by many Indonesians that sentences imposed for violent crimes against religious or other minorities should always be commensurate with the gravity of the crimes committed,” it said.
Human Rights Watch said the verdict would send “the chilling message that attacks on minorities like the Ahmadiyya will be treated lightly by the legal system.”
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