Indonesia   - It used to be malaria that gave people fevers in Indonesia's remote, mosquito-infested peatlands.
 

Now it is carbon.

Investors around the world are dreaming of the billions the festering carbon-rich bogs could bring in as the world battles global warming. Peat bogs are the new black gold, some say.

Science has long known that Indonesia's 20 million hectares (50 million acres) of dense, black tropical peat swamps, formed when trees, roots and leaves rot, are natural carbon stores, explained University of Nottingham peat expert Professor Jack Rieley.

"They are 50 to 60 percent carbon. Peat stores more carbon than all of the planet's vegetation combined," he said.

Now the dots have been joined between peatlands and the massive amounts of climate change-related carbon emissions they release when burnt or drained to plant crops such as palm oil.

Peat is a potential gold-mine, said Marcel Silvius, Senior Program Manager of Wetlands International NGO.

"This science was not available before," said Silvius, the co-author of a November 2006 report that found Indonesia's peatlands emit two billion tons of carbon dioxide each year -- more than the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Japan or Germany.

Years of lucrative deforestation for timber and palm oil plantations has entrenched the practice of burning vast areas of Indonesian land, smothering neighboring Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei in annual choking smoke clouds, known as haze.

Now, in a sudden reversal, keeping Indonesia's forest cover intact is a hot investment ticket in a warming world, said Silvius.

"(The world's peatlands) emit eight percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, equal to what all the Annex One (industrialized) countries need to decrease (under the Kyoto Protocol). Tens of billions could be invested to achieve this," said Silvius.

Around $30.4 billion of carbon credits -- representing 1.6 billion tons of CO2 -- were bought and sold last year in Europe by companies seeking to trade off business-related carbon emissions for emissions reductions achieved elsewhere.

Already, investors are knocking on doors in towns close to peat swamps, such as Palangkaraya, in Central Kalimantan.

Within the million hectares of the nearby ex-Mega Rice Project peatlands, Rieley's scientists have been offered funding from Climate Care for tree planting and fire-fighting. Shell Canada is bank-rolling NGO-led peat rehydration and the Dutch government has invested 5 million euros ($6.7 million) in dam-building.

"They are all coming to visit the same people in Palangkaraya," said Daniel Murdiyarso of the Bogor-based Centre for International Forestry Research.

"There's so much interest - we are in the eye of the hurricane."

DEFORESTATION FEVER

Emissions cuts from forest areas such as peatlands are not yet eligible for trade, because they were excluded from the Kyoto Protocol's first, 2008-2012, round. But many predict they will be in six months' time, after the UN climate meeting in Bali hears a report on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation

(RED).

"It has to enter the agenda so that developing nations such as Indonesia can benefit," Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar told Reuters.

"We are ready. We have a grand plan to identify and restore or conserve our forest areas. We have also prepared the financial side of the deal," he said.

Meanwhile, the voluntary market is "developing rapidly," as investors hope carbon futures will evolve into tradable credits said Jorund Buen, the director of Point Carbon analysis group.

"Discussions on including avoided deforestation are among the most advanced with regards to post-Kyoto commitments," he said.

As home to 60 percent of the world's threatened tropical peatlands, and among the world's top three carbon emitters when peat emissions are added in, Indonesia is in the spotlight.

"While the details are still in the works, the 'big story' is becoming more clear," said Meine van Noordwijk, principal scientist for the World Agroforestry Centre.

"If this stays outside of the international discussions a huge opportunity will be missed... If accepted in principle, this will become part of the 2012-2017 international regime," van Noordwijk, who is based in Indonesia, said.

However, speculators descending on Indonesia's peat-towns are finding locals less up to speed on the intricacies of carbon trading and peatlands protection, said Murdiyarso.

"It's not easily understood by people -- the confusion is overwhelming... The papers here say, 'Central Kalimantan is clearing up the air of Canada'," he laughed. "The publicity from the local media is appalling."

PEOPLE VS. PEATLANDS?

While RED's exact stakeholders are murky, its plan to help save the planet by making conservation profitable is likely to be nationally based, rather than project-based, and to involve governments, the private sector and NGOs, analysts say.

But stitching up peat swamp carbon deals without involving local communities risks raising real tensions, said Jutta Kill of FERN, the Forests and the European Union Resource Network.

"Because the focus is narrowly on keeping the carbon stored, the incentive to police is increased," she said from Britain. "In Uganda, people have been shot at by forest rangers to defend carbon forestry projects."

This kind of market-led carbon trading is not the only way to safeguard forest carbon, she said.

"Northern countries could do a lot by not pushing deforestation through (expanding) palm oil and biodiesel (developments)."

"It certainly is a big policy incoherence if one part of the climate discussion is to reduce emissions from deforestation, and the other leads to an incentive to deforestation," she said.

Whatever eventuates, if perennial peat land problems such as poverty and fires aren't tackled, Indonesia's forests could go up in smoke, taking carbon traders dreams with them, Rieley said.

"A lot of things are supposed to happen at a high level. The problem is the low level -- how are you going to stop fires on the ground?"

"None of these schemes will work if the fires aren't stopped," he said. "You'll not only lose your forest, you'll lose your peat and its ability to function as a carbon store."

The first test-tube baby created from an egg matured in the laboratory and then frozen has been born in Canada, in a breakthrough offering hope to women with cancer and others unsuited to normal IVF treatment.
 

The baby is doing well and another three women are pregnant by the same method, researchers told a medical meeting in Lyon, France, on Monday.

Conventional in vitro fertilization (IVF) involves using high doses of expensive hormone drugs to stimulate the ovaries to produce multiple mature eggs.

But some women seeking to preserve their child-bearing capacity may not have enough time to undergo ovarian stimulation or may have a condition that makes it dangerous, such as hormone-sensitive breast cancer.

For these patients, ripening eggs in the lab -- so-called in vitro maturation (IVM) -- makes sense. Until now, however, scientists have never frozen, thawed and then fertilized a lab-matured egg. This multi-step process increases significantly the flexibility of fertility treatment.

"We have demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to do this and, so far, we have achieved four successful pregnancies, one of which has resulted in a live birth," Hananel Holzer of the McGill Reproductive Center in Montreal said in a statement.

The research is still at an early stage and has not yet been proven in cancer patients, he told the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE).

But Holzer and other experts believe it has the potential to become one of the main options for fertility preservation.

Women diagnosed with cancer are likely to be the main beneficiaries, since cancer treatment can make them sterile and they often have no time to take fertility drugs.

At present, there is the experimental option of having ovarian tissue removed, frozen and transplanted back later. But this brings with it a theoretical risk of re-introducing cancer.

Holzer tried his new technique on 20 infertile women with polycystic ovary syndrome, a leading cause of infertility.

Joep Geraedts, ESHRE's chairman elect, said the resulting four pregnancies, or 20 percent success rate, was "quite good."

"If this works in cancer patients, it might ultimately be possible to do this in all women that undergo IVF or assisted reproduction because then you don't need to bother them with hormones," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

It could also save money, since treatment with hormone drugs can cost thousands of dollars. Leading makers of fertility drugs include Merck Serono and Akzo Nobel's Organon unit, which is being acquired by Schering-Plough.

Geraedts said there should now be large-scale clinical trials to assess the new procedure definitively.

A mechanical monster grabs the F-14 fighter jet and chews through one wing and then another, ripping off the Tomcat's appendages before moving onto its guts. Finally, all that's left is a pile of shredded rubble — like the scraps from a Thanksgiving turkey.
 
click here

The Pentagon is paying a contractor at least $900,000 to destroy old F-14s, a jet affectionately nicknamed "the turkey," rather than sell the spares at the risk of their falling into the wrong hands, including Iran's.

Within a workday, a $38 million fighter jet that once soared as a showpiece of U.S. airpower can be destroyed at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Ariz., the military's "boneyard" for retired aircraft.

"There were things getting to the bad guys, so to speak," said Tim Shocklee, founder and executive vice president of TRI-Rinse Inc. in St. Louis. "And one of the ways to make sure that no one will ever use an F-14 again is to cut them into little 2-by-2-foot bits."

The Defense Department had intended to destroy spare parts unique to the F-14 but sell thousands of others that could be used on other aircraft. It suspended sales of all Tomcat parts after The Associated Press reported in January that buyers for Iran, China and other countries had exploited gaps in surplus-sale security to acquire sensitive U.S. military gear, including F-14 parts.

Among other tactics, middlemen for the countries misrepresented themselves to gain access to the Defense Department's surplus sales or bought sensitive surplus from U.S. companies that had acquired it from Pentagon auctions and weren't supposed to allow its export.

Investigators also found some sensitive items accidentally slipping into surplus auctions rather than being destroyed as they were supposed to be. In an unusual move when dealing with retired aircraft, the Pentagon is trying to shut off all avenues for Iran's parts purchasers by demolishing the F-14s, then combing through the scraps to make sure nothing useful remains.

Iran is the only country trying to keep Tomcats airworthy. The United States let Iran buy the F-14s in the 1970s when it was an ally, long before President Bush named it part of an "axis of evil."

Shocklee's company won a three-year, $3.7 million contract to render surplus equipment useless for military purposes. The work includes the recent demolition of 23 Tomcats in Arizona, accounting for about $900,000 of TRI-Rinse's contract. The military is considering using the same process on its other F-14s.

The company has developed portable shredding machinery so the Pentagon can have sensitive items destroyed on a base instead of shipping them long distances to be shredded.

The Tomcat was a strike fighter with a striking price tag: roughly $38 million. By the 1980s it was a movie star with a leading role in the Tom Cruise classic "Top Gun." But as the planes are mangled into unrecognizable metal chunks, the jets with a 38-foot wingspan appear small and vulnerable.

The shearing machine, which uses pincers to rip apart the planes, weighs 100,000 pounds. The shredder is 120,000 pounds. An F-14 weighs about 40,000 pounds.

Among the shredded victims in Arizona: a plane flown by the "Tophatters" squadron, which led the first airstrike in Afghanistan when the U.S. invaded in October 2001.

The Pentagon retired its F-14s last fall. At last count, the military's boneyard in Arizona held 165 Tomcats, believed to be the only ones left out of 633 produced for the Navy. The others were scavenged for parts to keep others flying, went to museums or crashed, said a spokeswoman for the air base, Teresa Vanden-Heuvel.

As powerful as the grinding machinery is, not all of the F-14 can be shredded. The landing gear — built to withstand the force of slamming onto an aircraft carrier's deck — must be cut by hand with a demolition torch. It's made from steel with parts of titanium, so the shears can't cut it and the shredder can't chew it.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., considers the F-14 demolitions a good effort, but wants to go further and outlaw the sale of F-14 parts to anyone except museums. Wyden sponsored legislation that also would ban export licenses for F-14 components, which he believes will be more effective than Pentagon policies that he said have changed over time.

"I don't think internal rules — these internal initiatives — based on the track record of the Department of Defense, are sufficient," Wyden said.

The House passed similar legislation in June; a Senate vote is expected later this summer. The White House hasn't said whether Bush supports the idea.

F-14 preservationists said the Pentagon is handling the Tomcats they obtain differently.

As a Navy pilot, retired Capt. Dale Snodgrass delivered an F-14 to Iran — flying nonstop from the United States with roughly No. 68 of about 80 planes that Iran ordered.

Snodgrass said only key computers were taken out and ejection systems disabled on planes delivered to museums in past years. This year, when an F-14 went on display at a Miami museum, virtually everything was removed, leaving only a shell with the canopy painted black, said Snodgrass, who lives in St. Augustine, Fla.

Snodgrass is part of F-14 history. He flew Tomcats for roughly a quarter-century and amassed the most flight time in them of any pilot: more than 4,800 hours. He was named Navy pilot of the year around the time "Top Gun" hit theaters.

Snodgrass said he understands the Pentagon's destruction of F-14s but said it would be nice to see some preserved. Pilots dubbed the Tomcat "the turkey" because of its ungainly, turkey-like look when landing on aircraft carriers.

"When I first started it," Snodgrass said, "it was the biggest, the fastest, the most impressive, the most maneuverable fighter on the planet Earth."

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, drawing on his memories of Soviet oppression, recently declared that the global warming hysteria had replaced Communism as "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity."
 

The environmentalists continue to do their best to prove him right.

In making the parallel to Communism, President Klaus cited the use of environmentalism as a justification for global central planning. But it is not just the vast scale of the controls proposed by environmentalists that is so revealing; it is also the detail. There is no aspect of life too trivial or intimate (as Sheryl Crow infamously reminded us) to fall outside of this new ideological regimentation.

A bit of the flavor of the coming environmentalist police state is provided by a new Australian television show titled "Carbon Cops." In a bizarre inversion of the typical American home improvement show, the experts in this show descend on the hapless homeowners to measure their "carbon footprint," the amount of fossil fuels involved in the manufacture and use of every item in their house. The "carbon cops" are shown rummaging through a family's smallest household items, searching for global warming contraband--and then scolding them for "polluting" the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Each week they don their orange monogrammed shirts to cordon off the toxic home of an Australian family. They arrive with energy-auditing gadgetry, sobering statistics, and lips and eyebrows curled in withering admonishment. They rate these people, shame them, then challenge them to do better.

And what sort of things are these people supposed to be ashamed of? One family, the Barries, are scolded for their overuse of light bulbs, "Dad's overseas business travel, their swimming pool and boat," while the Lane family is taken to task for their "six TVs, three DVD players, five or six computers, 12 freshly laundered towels a day."

In case you don't get the message, the author of this report sums it up for you: "Taken together, the case studies are not about individual scapegoats as much as an indictment of Western affluence, negligence, and self-obsession." Ah yes, the inexcusable self-indulgence of wanting to bathe with freshly laundered towels. How can we live with ourselves?

The victims on this television show are voluntary, the only weapon used against them is social disapproval, and the whole thing could be laughed off--if not for the fact that our political leaders are preparing the way for the real carbon cops who will enforce the "carbon taxes" and impose the "cap and trade" rationing scheme needed to meet the environmentalists' goal of constricting the world's energy use. Australia's "carbon cops" may be fictional, but they are the harbinger of a real attempt to use the power of the state to strip us of the accoutrements of prosperity: our light bulbs, our cars, our televisions, our freshly laundered towels.

Part of what Vaclav Klaus was sensing--what gives this all the faint whiff of totalitarianism--is the global warming alarmists' eagerness to reach into the smallest details of our private existence and re-arrange our lifestyle to fit the austere requirements of their political ideology. A recent article in the Sacramento Bee captures the paternalistic fervor in the California statehouse:

Besides the light bulb bill [a de facto ban on the sale of incandescent light bulbs], the Assembly voted this month to require toilets that use less water, ban restaurants from using trans fats, and to create a $250 million program to subsidize sales of solar water heaters costing $6,000 apiece. The Assembly considered, but rejected under pressure from the auto industry, legislation designed to benefit the environment by assessing a $2,500 surcharge on the sale of gas-guzzling vehicles to fund rebates for fuel-efficient models.

But those with a lust to control every detail of human life are not content merely to control what we do. They also want to control what we think.

We have seen in recent decades the largest peacetime outpouring of government propaganda, all devoted to convincing us that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing a global warming catastrophe. The German government, for example, has begun paying authors to inundate Wikipedia with articles boosting "renewable resources." So much for the Internet as the ultimate free marketplace for ideas: now one cartel will be supported by government subsidies.

Along with the campaign to subsidize government-approved speech, there always comes an attempt to suppress speech that challenges the official line. The designation of those who challenge the global warming scare stories as global warming "deniers"--smearing them as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers--has introduced the hard edge of dogmatism and character assassination to the public debate. The implications of this phrase were made clear by another Australian. (Apparently Australia, like Britain, is a few steps ahead of America in how seriously it takes its global warming dogma.) Referring to a British historian who was jailed for denying the existence of the Holocaust, leftist Australian journalist Margo Kingston growled: "David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial. Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offense--it is a crime against humanity after all." (This quote appears at Kingston's former blog; see item #8.)

Kingston is a leftist provocateur and has gone beyond what the mainstream of the left has so far contemplated--but only a little beyond. Back in the United States, the left is still gingerly working to prepare the ground for green censorship, with Al Gore branding right-wing dissent an "assault on reason" that has "broken" the marketplace of ideas--which requires government intervention to fix. The fix is now being prepared in the form of a regulatory assault on right-leaning talk radio, among other initiatives.

For those seeking to justify this kind of all-encompassing government control, global warming is the best candidate to come along since the collapse of Marxism. Like Marxism, environmentalism steals the "scientific" aura of an established field--but in this case it has invaded the "hard sciences," which carry greater prestige than economics. And unlike previous environmentalist crusades, global warming is a threat that is global in scope and total and all-encompassing in its detailed application to human life. Other pollution scares--DDT, acid rain, the ozone layer--required only the banning of a single product or control over a single industry. None was big enough to require control of the entire economy over the period of a century, nor could any claim to be so urgent as to make dissent an "irresponsible" act that is not to be tolerated.

Global warming provides a basis for all of these claims: urgent action is needed, we are told, or the catastrophic effects will be irreversible. But to reverse global warming will require massive reductions in our use of power, requiring a total restructuring of the economy--and the deployment of the "carbon cops" to police every parsimonious detail of our everyday lives.

And this global warming police state has one big advantage over Marxism: it makes a virtue of the chronic shortages and privation that were such a mortal embarrassment to Communism. This time, the left won't have to explain away the lines at the stores, the decade-long waiting lists for tin-can automobiles, even the scarcity of decent toilet paper. These are not failures of the system: they are the goal of the system. They are all necessary to reduce our "carbon footprint."

A perceptive reader suggested to me recently that when left claims that "the science is settled" in the global warming controversy, what they really mean is that the political science of the issue is settled. The global warming hysteria reinforces all of their settled anti-capitalist prejudices--and it provides an open-ended justification for the central, dominant, overpowering role they think government ought to play in the individual's life.

No, we haven't arrived at a green dictatorship--we're nowhere near it. But with all of the environmentalists' talk about the long-term consequences of our actions decades or centuries from now, we should subject their agenda to the same scrutiny. What ideological direction are they taking us, what kind of political and economic system are they seeking to impose--and what will happen to our liberty and prosperity, the day after tomorrow?

ASPEN, Colo. — Some brokers have to shout to sell real estate in a glutted market, or employ ever more tortured elocutions of spin. Joshua Saslove whispers.
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Michael Brands for The New York Times

One of several living spaces at Hala Ranch, northwest of Aspen, Colo.
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Michael Brands for The New York Times

Joshua Saslove, a real estate broker, at the indoor swimming pool at Hala Ranch. The home was built for Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia.

His company’s premier listing, called Hala Ranch, is a 95-acre estate built in 1991 for the family of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former ambassador to the United States from Saudi Arabia and the home’s only (occasional) occupant.

At $135 million, Hala, just northwest of downtown Aspen, is the most expensive single-family residential property in the nation on the market, Mr. Saslove said. Selling it mostly consists of saying no.

Mr. Saslove has received about 1,000 requests to tour the home since last October when it went on sale, and he, along with lawyers for the prince who review every call, have granted just 11 of them. This is what high-mountain hideaway money in Aspen has come down to: Even the ordinary rich can no longer press their noses to the glass.

In the marketing of Hala, which means “Welcome” in Arabic, nonbillionaires need not apply. Hala will almost certainly, Mr. Saslove believes, be a new owner’s second, third or fourth home.

Money on that scale does not just stumble in off the street. There are 946 billionaires, according to this year’s tally by Forbes magazine, keeping Mr. Saslove’s list of potential buyers relatively short.

He and Hala’s property manager, Martha Grimes, 57, who came to Aspen right after college, saw the place at its zenith, or others might say its nadir, as elements of the old hippie counterculture and Hollywood celebrity style melded. Ms. Grimes worked as a waitress and later a horse wrangler on the very ranch land that later became Hala.

“I remember this hill, this very hill, because I used to ride my horse through here,” she said as she led a tour through the house for a reporter and a photographer on a recent afternoon. “The 70s were really magical,” she added. “But the characters from those days are disappearing.”

Mr. Saslove said that people like Prince Bandar, who is now the secretary general of the Saudi National Security Council and is not spending as much time in the United States as he once did, helped establish Aspen’s newer style, which is much more about family, culture and art — and wealth that even Hollywood stars cannot match.

“I don’t see as much braggadocio as I used to,” said Mr. Saslove, a gruff 66-year-old with longish hair and a nonstop Blackberry.

In his 22 years as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, a tenure that ended in 2005, Prince Bandar was a powerful ally to a succession of presidents. Most recently, however, British media accounts have said that a major British arms contractor paid more than $2 billion clandestinely into bank accounts in Washington controlled by Prince Bandar. The prince has denied the allegations.

At 56,000 square feet, Hala is bigger than the White House, with a staff of 12. It has 15 bedrooms, 16 baths, a private barbershop and beauty salon just off the master suite and enough space for a party of 450 people.

Many of the rooms are huge, with banks of windows overlooking the Aspen valley and the mountains beyond. There are few proclamations of grandiosity beyond the occasional artwork, like the Albert Bierstadt painting that hangs over the main fireplace. (It does not come with the house.) Dark, gleaming wood beams, all with notched construction and not a single nailhead showing, pale plaster walls and television screens dominate the decor.

It is not a house for a family that putters in the kitchen, which is in the basement, the province of professional chefs with its stainless-steel everything and rows of hanging pots. Housekeepers were ironing the sheets in the nearby laundry, feeding them through a giant pressing machine.

Aspen certainly still has its glossy celebrities, of a sort. One of Prince Bandar’s nearest neighbors, for example, is Barbi Benton, the former Playboy playmate and actress who starred in B-movies like “Hospital Massacre” and “The Deathstalker” in the early 1980s. But the rising costs are rapidly squeezing out mere wealth.

Mr. Saslove, whose company, Joshua & Company, is an affiliate of Great Estates, the real estate arm of Christie’s auction house, said homes that cost about a million dollars in the 1970s now might sell for nine times that. On Aspen’s coveted west side, an ordinary lot, 60 feet by 100 feet, costs $3.5 million.

So far, through coincidence or not, Mr. Saslove said, a majority of the serious shoppers for Hala have come from old money, fortunes gained at least a generation ago. He is not sure why, and of course, he would not say who.

“There are a lot of stories that go along with it,” he said, “but in the interest of privacy and confidentially, I can’t talk about it.”

Malaysia dismissed on Monday possible U.S. sanctions over human trafficking and warned Washington of alienating Muslims after it blacklisted mostly Islamic countries.
 

The U.S. last month ranked Muslim states -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran, Malaysia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Qatar -- as among the worst human trade offenders, and said they may face sanctions.

"We are not bothered about...the sanctions," Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said. "I don't think we need to respond to that sort of pressure."

"The U.S. really needs to be friendly to Muslim countries," he told retired Malaysian diplomats. "This is not a good development as they have just appointed a special envoy to OIC." Malaysia heads the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Conference.

U.S. President George W. Bush said last week in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the Islamic Centre in Washington that the appointment would demonstrate to Muslim communities "our interest in respectful dialogue and continued friendship."

In its annual report on human trafficking published last month, the U.S. State Department named 16 countries subjected to possible sanctions, including the loss of U.S. aid and U.S. support for World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans.

Syed Hamid said Malaysia would introduce a new law soon to prevent human trafficking.

"In Malaysia's case, we do not need to be apologetic," he said. "We have moved to the right direction. The law against human trafficking is going to be passed by parliament in this current session."

Still, Indonesia and other countries that supply most of the workers say Malaysia has not done enough.

In May, Kuala Lumpur ruled out laws to enforce better working conditions for foreign maids.

Asked if laws were needed to specify working conditions for the maids, Home Minister Radzi Sheikh Ahmad said: "We cannot have maids having a holiday, weekends off. It's up to the employers to give time to the maids to rest."

With Malaysians reluctant to take up menial jobs, the country is one of Asia's largest importers of foreign labor, which makes up a quarter of a workforce of about 10.5 million, particularly on plantations, in construction and as maids.

Malaysians got a harrowing glimpse into the treatment of some domestic workers when newspapers reported the death in April of an Indian migrant worker after eight months of being beaten, chained up and starved by his employers in a sauce business.

India and Malaysia are hammering out a draft agreement to ensure better protection for Indian workers in Malaysia.

Although the southeast Asian nation does not employ maids from India, many Indian workers who take up jobs in construction and manufacturing in Malaysia say employers change their contract terms after they have begun their jobs.

Human rights group have long urged Malaysia to plug loopholes in labor and immigration laws that expose migrant workers to the risk of abuse and exploitation by employers and recruiters.

Indonesian maids in Malaysia often work a grueling 16 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and earn less than 25 U.S. cents an hour, U.S. group Human Rights Watch has said.

Asian countries put the humiliation of the 1997 financial crisis behind them on Monday, arguing they were in a better position to deal with the sort of meltdown that crippled the region a decade ago.
 

Regional economic chiefs warned against complacency but nevertheless struck a defiant note at a forum in Manila to mark the 10th anniversary of a crisis that saw currency and asset prices plummet, governments topple and millions fall into poverty as investors withdrew capital at lightning speed.

Taking a swipe against the powerful Western-dominated global lenders such as the International Monetary Fund, Thailand's finance minister called for Asia to take more control of its economic destiny by setting up a monetary fund to promote exchange rate stability.

Since the crisis, Asian central banks have built up trillions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves, much of which is invested in Western assets such as U.S. government debt, putting it in pole position to lead the international financial community, Chalongphob Sussangkarn said.

"It's important that we make sure that we do not become overconfident that a crisis can never happen," Chalongphob said.

But he added: "Looking ahead, we need to take responsibility. Asia now needs to be the one to manage the global financial system.

"We cannot let debtor nations manage the global financial system. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is more like a debtor monetary organisation, we need a creditor monetary organisation."

On July 2, 1997, Thailand gave up the fight to defend the baht after years of current account deficits and announced a managed float, triggering massive capital flight.

The contagion spread rapidly around the region and the erstwhile Asian "Tiger Economies" were forced to go cap in hand to the IMF, whose harsh prescriptions generated anti-Western sentiment and political turmoil.

HAUNTING MEMORIES

Analysts say Asia's economies are now in much better shape. Most countries have competitive currencies and a big surplus in their current accounts, making the region a huge exporter of capital.

But Haruhiko Kuroda, president of the Asian Development Bank that hosted the forum, said this global economic imbalance was a risk.

"We have the potential for more bouts of financial market volatility," he said.

"Capital flows have ramped up significantly over the past several years as increased global liquidity, Asia's economic resurgence and dynamism, along with the search for yield has drawn in and out large amounts of investment capital."

In Thailand, where less than one in 10 property firms survived the crisis, The Nation newspaper splashed a tombstone on Monday's front page inscribed with the names of the 56 finance companies and six banks that went under.

"Despite diverse efforts to avoid a repeat of history, no one can guarantee that it will not happen again," The Post Today, a Thai-language newspaper, said in an editorial.

BOOMING AGAIN

Within a year of the meltdown, Indonesia's long-ruling President Suharto was out of power after the crisis sparked widespread rioting in his nation. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad famously fell out with his deputy Anwar Ibrahim.

The crisis also brought down the South Korean and Thai governments.

Ten years on, Asia is booming once again, but investment and growth are largely centered on China and India.

Although the region is much richer it is still home to most of the world's poor as economic growth rates in many of the countries worst hit by the crisis lag their pre-1997 levels.

In an interview with Reuters on Sunday, Chalongphob said an East Asian monetary fund would be established within five years to help promote further stability.

But Duck-Koo Chung, a former minister of commerce, industry and energy in South Korea, cautioned that the question of which country should lead a fund still had to be ironed out.

"We need some political agreement first," he said.