Coffee Talk Shop…

In less than three weeks, Republican voters in the Midwestern state of Iowa will attend caucus meetings to express their preference in the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.  Iowa will be the first test in what could be a lengthy battle for the party nomination that at the moment appears to be between two top contenders, former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

The latest batch of public opinion surveys gives Newt Gingrich a lead over Mitt Romney by margins ranging from 6 to 17 points.

Gingrich is also running well in some of the early-voting states like Iowa, South Carolina and Florida that play a major role in the presidential nominating process.

Romney and some of the other Republican presidential contenders have stepped up their attacks on Gingrich in hopes of slowing his momentum.

Gingrich says he wants to remain positive. “When I was down at the very bottom of the polls, I stayed positive.  Now that I’m the frontrunner, I’m staying positive,” said Gingrich.

Romney is attacking Gingrich, saying the former speaker has a history of being an unreliable conservative and that he will not hesitate to point out how he differs with Gingrich.

“This is, after all, politics.  There is no whining in politics,” said Romney.

Gingrich is also trying to fend off criticism of his personal life, especially previous admissions that he was not faithful in his two prior marriages.

Texas Governor Rick Perry noted that in a recent debate.

“I’ve always kind of been of the opinion that if you cheat on your wife, you’ll cheat on your business partner,” said Perry.

Gingrich has admitted personal failings and sought forgiveness, something that could appeal to evangelical Christian voters who are a major force in the Republican Party.

“And I think people have to render judgment.  In my case, I’ve said up-front openly that I have made mistakes at times.  I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness.  I’ve had to seek reconciliation,” said Gingrich.

But even some Republicans say that Gingrich had a divisive and difficult tenure as Speaker of the House in the 1990s.

New York Republican Representative Peter King is among those who question whether Gingrich has the right temperament to be president.

“I saw the damage he did to the Republican Party and to the Congress.  And I think I owe it to my constituents and to my country not to allow that to happen again,” said King.

Gingrich is the latest candidate to gain favor in the polls with conservative Republicans, says Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown.

“There are a large number of Republican voters, many who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters who are conservative Republicans, and they have been shopping for a candidate,” said Brown.

Brown adds that conservatives seem to be looking for an alternative to Romney, the man long considered the favorite to win the Republican Party nomination.

“For some reason, this group of conservative voters is not at this stage embracing Mr. Romney.  Perhaps they don’t think he is sufficiently conservative.  Whatever the reason, Mr. Romney does have a problem with this group,” added Brown.

The nominating process begins January 3 in Iowa with its presidential caucuses.  That begins a series of primaries and caucus votes that will run into June.  The process will conclude with the formal selection of a Republican nominee at the party’s national convention in Tampa, Florida, in early September.

Burma’s military-backed, but nominally civilian, government has surprised critics with its political and economic reforms this past year. The liberal moves resulted in a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in December. During her trip, VOA’s Daniel Schearf spoke with residents of the main city, Rangoon, about what they think of the changes, so far.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s December visit to Burma was both a reward and encouragement for authorities after a year of unexpected reforms.

President Thein Sein, despite being a former general, is slowly moving away from decades of military rule and economic problems.

Although still made up of former officers, his government ordered the release of hundreds of political prisoners, relaxed media censorship and held separate talks with ethnic rebel groups and pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Nobel Prize winner was released from 15 years of house arrest in 2010 and plans to run for parliament in next year’s by-election.

Meeting with Clinton at the home where she was detained, Aung San Suu Kyi sounded optimistic about the direction of the country.

“This will be the beginning of a new future for all of us, provided we can maintain it. And, we hope to be able to do so,” she said.

Related video story

Burma was once the star of Southeast Asia but, much like Rangoon’s British colonial-era buildings, crumbled under military rule. Just months ago most people in Burma were too afraid to talk openly about politics, especially to journalists, who are rarely allowed into the country.

But, since March, the new government’s moves toward reform are encouraging some to speak up.

Riding past Rangoon’s colonial Customs House, trishaw driver Maung Than Zaw says, despite reform efforts, he can barely make ends meet. Things have not gotten better for ordinary people like him;  it is getting worse, he says, adding that is difficult to earn four or five dollars per day.

Rangoon fruit vendor Mi Mi Aye says she worries about being arrested, but still wants to criticize the so-called civilian government. She says nothing has changed, the new government is just the same people as before.

There are others who say the economy and the government are improving.

At the Golden Palace jewelry store, in Rangoon’s Chinatown, a crowd of shoppers press against a long glass display case, clamoring for attention from sales staff.

Owner Aung Kyaw Win has one of Burma’s most famous chains of gold and gem stores.  He says business is good and would be even better if European Union and U.S. sanctions were lifted.

“I think our government, economically, they are trying to change a lot. We are sincerely hoping, because we heard from the newspaper and we can able to see they are changing.”

The government is slowly reducing cumbersome regulations and monopolies that crippled the economy. One key step is unifying the exchange rate to curb corruption. The official rate is seven kyat to the dollar. The actual market rate is 100 times higher.

A money counting machine flips through a stack of Burma’s currency.  At this currency exchange center in Rangoon, U.S. dollars are traded for bricks of kyat.

Many in Burma, like Lwin Aung Zaw, are paid in American dollars, but they are not legally allowed to possess foreign currency without a permit and have to exchange their salaries every month or risk jail.

He says they can exchange foreign currency at these counters. But, according to the law, they are not legally allowed to have foreign money.  He believes it would be better if authorities changed this rule.

At a tea shop in Rangoon a young man rolls dough balls into thin pancakes, called roti, and fries them in oil.

Tea shops are a center of Rangoon social life, where people meet for a snack, but also to talk business and about how Burma is changing. Taxi driver Tint Lwin says, like most people, he is focused more on earning a living than politics.

He says he sees a lot of developments.  Because he is a taxi driver he can only comment from a driver’s point of view. The roads are getting better, he says, but they still have heavy traffic jams.

Retired civil servant Thaung Htwe says he hopes Clinton’s visit will spur more reforms. He hopes that Burma will be developed more in the future.  And he  says by having good relations with the United States, they might see development in all sectors; economy, society, politics and so on.

Despite a more open environment, not everyone welcomes foreign journalists asking questions.

In a Rangoon market, an older man approaches VOA and demands we stop video taping, saying we need permission from local authorities.

“I don’t like it.  We don’t like it…Yeah, this [is] the poor area.  Not for news,” he says.  He recommends we go to a wealthier area to show how rich Burma is.

But locals in the market argue back that they are poor.

Although hopes are raised that Burma’s economy may revive and the country may finally turn the corner to democracy the road ahead is still uncertain. Rights groups point out military abuses continue in ethnic areas, including murder and rape.

And, despite reforms so far, there are still hundreds of political prisoners behind bars which authorities have yet to acknowledge.

InTurkey’s largest city, a revolution is occurring in its mosques. A project has been launched to make the mosques female friendly. But the initiative is not without controversy.

Kadriye Avci Erdemli is talking with one of Istanbul’s Imams over the state of the women’s section of his mosque. The small area is filthy and cramped. Erdemli is Istanbul’s deputy muftu, the city’s second most senior official responsible for administering the Islamic faith. She is in charge of a radical program to make mosques female friendly.

“This is the first project of its kind in the Muslim world.”  she said. “When a woman steps into a mosque she is entering the house of God and she should experience the same sacred treatment. In front of God, men and women are equal.”

Since March, Erdemli has sent out scores of teams to visit some 3,000 mosques in Istanbul to assess the facilities for women. Erdemli says the discoveries are shocking. “Many mosques had no toilets for women or indeed any place for them to wash,” she says. “The areas for women were either filthy or used as storage depots,” she said.

But it’s not just about cleaning up the mosques. Partitions separating men and women, whether it’s a wall or a curtain, are also meant to come down, although women will not be praying side-by-side with men, but behind them. The mosques have until February to implement the changes.  

But change isn’t always easy, especially in the realm of religion. And for the past couple of months Erdemli has held almost 40 meetings with imams and religious officials across the city to explain the reforms are in compliance with the Koran.

On the streets of Istanbul there appears to be broad support for the changes among religious women. Thirty-year-old Ayse Gul is typical. “The women’s sections are much smaller than the men’s – they’re almost like spaces left over, at the back or in the corner. It’s time women got more and cleaner areas to pray in,” she said.

Ayse Gul is part of Turkey’s rapidly growing Islamic middle class which emerged under the decade long rule of the pro Islamic AK party.

The AK party has also lifted or eased restrictions in education and employment for women wearing islamic headscarves.

Professor Istar Gozaydin an expert on religious affairs at Istanbul’s Dogus University says the opening up of mosques to women is being fueled by the growing number of professional women. “We see more and more (Islamic) women are getting educated in the universities women are attending work place and they’ve been able to become more visible in the society. Previously they were more in their homes previously took their traditional roles taking care of the kids. Now more and more women are participating in the professional lives. And they want to be part of the mosque system,” he said.

But not all are happy with such developments. Islamic newspaper columnists have strongly criticized the initiative accusing it of encouraging women to leave the home and adopting western lifestyles. And their criticism is being echoed by the male faithful.

The call to prayer at Istanbul’s Suleymania mosque summons worshippers. Many here have misgivings about the initiative. Fifty-year-old Mehmet Gul is a local shopkeeper who says, “I think the place for women is their home. They should practice their prayers at home. The mosques are not big enough even for men,” he says. “Especially on Friday prayers and during religious festivities there is not enough room for men. It’s not good for women to come.”

But even some women have reservations, especially over removing curtains and walls separating the male and female worshippers.

“Women must be separated from the men. There has to be a curtain. This is the  religious code of conduct,” said one woman. “The women are “mahrem”, [or] forbidden, and the men should not be able to see them.”

Deputy Muftu Erdemli acknowledges there is still much work to do in winning over the hearts and minds of the faithful, even among some women. But she’s also convinced there can be no turning back.

South Sudan became an independent nation in July, and it’s looking for business.  An international conference in Washington Wednesday and Thursday is focusing on the new country in Africa and featuring speeches from President Salva Kiir and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  But a South Sudanese American living in Washington says there’s much more to be done before economic development succeeds. 

The South Sudanese president greeted Washington, wearing his trademark American cowboy hat.  International investors welcomed him as a celebrity.

“I want to invite you today to come with me to South Sudan after this conference to help develop our potential in oil, gas and mineral resources,” Kiir stated.

The oil is a boon for the world’s newest country, but it’s also a strain.  South Sudan ended up with 70 percent of the oilfields in its independence break up.  But South Sudan is landlocked.  So it relies on Sudan to the north for pipelines.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said oil can lift South Sudan out of poverty.  But she warned of the prospect of poor management.

“You will fall prey to the natural resource curse which will enrich a small elite, outside interests, corporations, and countries and leave your people hardly better off than when you started,” Clinton said.

South Sudan became a new country after decades of war.  Continuing border violence has displaced hundreds of thousands. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army fought for the south’s independence.  Angelos Agok was one of them.  Now, he’s an American citizen,  

He’s proud he helped South Sudan win its freedom. And proud of his old boss who became president.  Still, he’s worried about how international companies do business in South Sudan.

“These companies bring these people from their country and employ them 100 percent. I will tell you, including those who clean the floor are not South Sudanese.   And so, it doesn’t create any economy,” Agok noted. “And doesn’t create job security for the people whom we fought for.”

To the South Sudanese, independence means more than a separate country, separate government. Agok says his countrymen have basic needs like food and jobs.  And, only then will they have true peace.

Scientists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland say they are encouraged by new data suggesting their Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful atom-smasher, is one step closer to finding an elusive sub-atomic particle known as the Higgs boson.  The so-called “God particle” was the object of a three-decades-long search by particle physicists at Fermilab’s now-idled Tevatron Accelerator in suburban Chicago. They greeted the news from Geneva with guarded optimism.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is just a few years old, but data streaming in after it smashes subatomic particles together at near-light speed has scientists around the world excited.

University of Florida professor Jacobo Konigsberg has contributed to CERN’s hunt for the “Higgs boson.” If they find it, he says, it would solve one of the most enduring mysteries of physics. “The mystery of mass in the universe is one of the most fundamental questions we have,” he said.

Konigsberg is on a quest to answer that fundamental question, halfway around the world from the machine that is likely to find it.

He is pouring through the results of the LHC’s latest findings at the Energy Department’s Fermi National Laboratory in suburban Chicago.

In a control room directly linked to CERN, Konigsberg watches test results and information.  He says the recent announcement by his colleagues in Geneva pinpoints a specific location where the Higgs is likely to exist, if it exists at all. “The number of events we expect in the data in this region is higher than if the Higgs [boson] wasn’t there.  So people are very excited about the possibility that this could be the beginning of unearthing, if you will, the Higgs [boson],” he said.

But at Fermilab, scientist Robert Roser greets the news with skepticism. “These are both kind of like one in 50, one in 100 probability that the background could fluctuate up to be a signal.  So not very compelling at all yet,” he said.

Roser visited the CERN laboratories in the days leading up to the announcement of progress in the search for the Higgs.  He says there is also caution in Europe about what the latest results mean. “And there was no popping of champagne corks… it was pretty much business as usual going on in there.  People were talking about their individual analyses and what’s going on… they weren’t giving each other high fives saying we got this thing settled.  So I think in Europe there is an air of caution,” he said.

“You cannot yet rule out that this small axis of events is from other processes that are mimicking the Higgs.  So unfortunately at the moment the situation is ambiguous,” said Konigsberg.

But the development demonstrates the LHC’s power. It has eclipsed Fermilab’s Tevatron Accelerator, which went offline in September. “The LHC was meant to surpass the Tevatron.  It was meant to eventually find the Higgs, and the Tevatron established a lot of the techniques that are today used by the LHC,” said Konigsberg.

There is still a chance the Tevatron could yield the results scientists are looking for.

Though it’s turned off, Roser and his team are still sifting through data and expect to release their findings in March.

If it exists at all, Roser expects the Tevatron or the LHC to find the Higgs boson soon.  “If it’s there, we will find it in 2012.  If it’s not there, we’ll say that too in 2012,” he said.

Roser says if they do find the Higgs boson, scientists could spend the next several decades trying to understand it.

A South Korean online radio show is one of the most downloaded programs on the Internet. It is a political satire that makes fun of President Lee Myung bak and criticizes many of his policies. But some observers say it crosses the line between comedy and conspiracy. From Seoul, reporter Jason Strother tells us more about it.

Nanun Ggom Su Da debuted earlier this year and has attracted a huge following in South Korea. The weekly podcast, which in English translates roughly as “I’m a Petty Minded Creep,” gets about two million downloads on the Apple iTunes network. The show mixes comedy with politics. And its sarcasm is apparent as soon as you hit play.

President Lee Myung Bak is the “Petty Minded Creep” of the show’s title. The four hosts of Na Ggom Su, as its known for short, lampoon the leader, referring to him mostly as “his highness”. They say they deliver news that is not covered by the nation’s conservative media.

Recently the show’s creators held a news conference in Seoul. One of the men, Chung Bong-ju, a former lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party, says that too many young Koreans have become apathetic to the nation’s politics. He says in Korean society, politicians are not trusted.  He says young people are not interested and only conservative people end up voting, because they do not see how politics affect their lives.  That is why he wants to popularize politics and shed a new light on it, he says.

The show’s rare political humor is one reason why so many listeners download the program.

Baek Ji-Min says that is why she became hooked on Na Ggom Su. The 39-year-old says before she started listening to the show, she did not care about what was happening in the South Korean government.

“They make fun of the leader of this country – that’s so not common, she said. “It’s so funny but later I really got into the content itself, I learned so many things from the show.”

Kim Young-chul, a politics professor at Busan University, says, given Korea’s current political climate, it is not surprising Na Ggom Su has become popular so quickly.

Kim says many Koreans feel left out of the political process. Na Ggom Su tries to speak on behalf of those people.  He says the show has created the image that they are telling Koreans the truth about politics.

But Kim says what Na Ggom Su says is the truth is more of a reflection of the show’s anti-conservative bias. Kim and other critics say the hosts sometimes cross the line between comedy and spreading conspiracies.

A continuing theme throughout Na Ggom Su is how a recently ratified trade deal between South Korea and the U.S. directly benefits President Lee.

Host Kim Ou-joon explains how the pieces all fit together. Kim says in the industries that are profiting from the free trade agreement there are a lot of people who are close or related to “his highness”, President Lee.   He says, if that was not the case, Lee would not have pushed for the FTA’s ratification.

Analyst Kim Young-chul says while Na Ggom Su has won many fans with its reporting of alleged government wrong doing, he does not feel the show alone will impact national elections in 2012.

Kim says Na Ggom Su’s political bias pretty much appeals to those who already share their ideals. He doubts that their message will sway voters enough next year during the National Assembly or presidential elections.

But Na Ggom Su’s reports have created legal problems for the show’s hosts.

They have been indicted for spreading rumors during October’s race for Seoul mayor.  One of the show’s creators has had his passport application rejected because of an ongoing lawsuit brought on by Lee Myung Bak himself.

Na Ggom Su creator Kim Ou-joon says the show’s creators will not be intimidated by lawsuits. He says the show will go on, at least until President Lee is no longer in office.

He says they will only be here for a moment, after the next presidential election they will just go away.

Kim promises that when President Lee’s term in office expires in February 2013, the jokes about him also will end.