Publisher's Note: One good story after another in today's Times of London   From The Times of London
April 24, 2009 Tehran is terrified: America is being friendlyIran's hardline leadership has been knocked sideways by Barack Obama's conciliatory tone. But how will it affect the election? Richard Beeston  
In Tehran drivers dutifully wear their seatbelts but think nothing of racing through a red light. Women must cover their faces and bodies under strict Islamic laws, but young women stretch the rules to reveal designer clothes, dyed hair, heavy make-up and prominently displayed bandages from recent cosmetic surgery. The state-controlled media fill the papers and air waves with a solid diet of prayers, documentaries about the Iran-Iraq war and speeches from the country's leaders. In the privacy of their homes, most Tehranis watch illicit satellite television channels beaming Persian music videos from California and uncensored news bulletins or just read foreign websites. The very same Iranian who would chant “Death to Britain” at the end of Friday prayers would also regard English football as his second religion. Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney are household names and the visa queue at the British Embassy stretches around the block. Iranians are hospitable to a fault. But the same generous host can just as easily lapse into paranoid conspiracy theories about how British spies run the country and the Jews rule the world. Welcome to Iran, now marking 30 tumultuous years since the Islamic revolution and facing an identity crisis as it ponders middle age. True, the country is young and energetic and has a strong sense of its culture and heritage. It is also endowed with huge energy resources. But power still resides in the grey-haired clerics whose policies have provoked international sanctions and pariah…

  Fox News commentator calls Obama racist A Fox News Channel commentator, Glenn Beck, said he believed President Barack Obama was a racist.  
 
Beck made the statement during a guest appearance on the "Fox & Friends" morning show. He said Mr Obama had exposed himself as a person with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture".His remarks came during a discussion over Mr Obama's reaction to the arrest of the Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates junior Mr Gates is black and was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white policeman over a misunderstanding about a break-in at his home.A spokesman for Mr Obama said the White House had no comment.Beck's statement was challenged on the air by Fox's host, Brian Kilmeade, who noted that most of the people who work for the nation's first black president are white."I'm not saying he doesn't like white people," Beck said. "He has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist."Beck wondered, during the discussion, what other president would immediately jump on the police for their actions in the case. Mr Obama said in a news conference that he believed the police acted stupidly in the case, but later backtracked from the statement and invited Mr Gates and the police officer, Sgt James Crowley, to the White House for a conciliatory meeting later this week.Bill Shine, Fox News senior vice president of programming, told the TVNewser web site that Beck had "expressed an opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel. And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions."   

China’s six-to-one advantage over the US
By Spengler

America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. [1] In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States.[2] The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.

It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos - making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans - a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course - some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.

"Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China's 'piano fever'.

The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today’s world - surely not the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills - can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard,…