The American Lawyerl- The Mighty Quinn

There's nothing subtle about Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges. Visitors discover this when they're greeted by a sign-"Quinn Emanuel-Trial Lawyers"-in the lobby of the firm's main office in downtown Los Angeles. Its message: We are not your usual big-firm litigators who don't know their way around a courtroom. The firm's reception area also makes a statement: We're not stuffy. With its espresso coffee bar, a flat screen television tuned to a sports channel, and flashy tropical fish cruising in two oversize aquariums, a guest might think she stepped into a wealthy frat house rec room. On one March morning, most of the people milling about the area and slumped in chairs watching TV are dressed in jeans and T-shirts, including one silk-screened with Charles Manson's face. It's impossible to tell messengers from lawyers. The person wearing the Manson T-shirt is partner Patrick Shields, 31, a former Harvard Law Review editor. In warmer weather most folks opt for shorts and flip-flops.

Down the hall, the office of managing partner John Quinn is comfortably messy, crammed with family pictures and mementos. Quinn had expected to be in trial this day, but the case-a high-stakes patent dispute for Monsanto Company over a bovine growth hormone-settled at the last minute. Lean and wiry, the 54-year-old lawyer perches on the edge of his chair like a terrier pausing before a burst of activity. He gets right to the point: "We want to be the preeminent business litigation firm. We've been saying that for a long time before we could credibly make the claim. Now there's some credibility to the claim."

 

http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTAL.jsp?hubtype=Cover+Story&id=1148547933484

From Uganda to Britain: Success follows Indians

Immediately after he pulled off his '72 coup against President Oboto in Uganda, strongman Idi Amin -- full title: His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular (and also, curiously, King of Scotland) --decreed Africa should be for Africans. One of his first decisions as lord of beasts and fishes was to eject all the Asians -- some 40,000 or so, who were third generation descendants of Indians who had come to work for the British colonial administration during the days of Empire and who, when the British Empire was dissolved, created commercial enterprises.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=050906A

Two generations of Asian immigrants have had an extraordinary impact on British business. The Daily Telegraph today publishes details of Britain's richest Asians, in association with Eastern Eye, Britain's biggest selling south-Asian newspaper.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml;jsessionid=X2VFZ1FTNR44BQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/money/2006/04/19/cnasian19.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/portal/2006/04/19/ixportal.html

What Ails Afghanistan? pakistan

By CHRIS PATTEN
May 10, 2006; Page A18

Four and a half years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan is still highly unstable. And it seems to be getting worse rather than better. Every few days now, the resurgent Taliban carry out another deadly attack on school children, aid workers, or local or international security forces. It is a grim return on the outside world's huge investment in Afghanistan. Yet while the international community has done an enormous amount to help the country recover from its failed-state condition, it has resisted tackling the problem at its very root -- Islamabad. Truth is, Afghanistan will never be stable unless Pakistan's military government is replaced with a democracy.

* * *

Pakistan's primary export to Afghanistan today is instability. On the most basic level, attacks in Afghanistan, including suicide bombings, are often planned and prepared at Taliban training camps across the border. Islamabad claims to be doing all it can to stop this infiltration. But President Pervez Musharraf's protests ring hollow when he has done so little to address the concerns raised by his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai, that Taliban leaders are operating out of sanctuaries in Pakistan.

One needs only to look at the military's close relations with religious radicals to understand how unreliable a partner it is in stabilizing Afghanistan. Militant Islamist groups that Mr. Musharraf banned under the international spotlight following 9/11 and the 7/7 London bombings still operate freely. Jihadi organizations have been allowed to dominate relief efforts in the aftermath of the October 2005 earthquake. The military has repeatedly rigged elections, including the 2002 polls, to benefit the religious parties over their moderate, democratic alternatives.

In short, Pakistan is ruled by a military dictatorship in cahoots with violent Islamist extremists. The military has no interest in democracy at home, so why does the outside world expect it to help build democracy next door?

If we are really going to get to the core of Afghanistan's instability, therefore, we must tackle Pakistan. Above all, this means returning the country to democratic rule. After seven years under the military, this is not an easy task, but some institutions are still surviving -- just. The judiciary, for example, has been badly degraded under Mr. Musharraf and his army colleagues; but there is enough left to give hope for some kind of gradual resuscitation.

Moderate political parties are also struggling to hang on; down but not yet out, they could recover relatively quickly if given a democratic chance. Pro-dictatorship voices regularly argue that those parties were highly corrupt and that it was their corruption that justified the 1999 coup that brought Gen. Musharraf to power. But they refuse to condemn or even acknowledge the military's large-scale, institutionalized corruption.

So much has been grabbed by the military that it will take years just to catalog it. The military has acquired vast tracts of state-owned land at nominal rates; its leaders dominate businesses and industries, ranging from banking to cereal factories. Their control of the economy has grown so great it will present an enormous challenge to any future democratically elected government.

That civilian government, when it comes, will also be moderate in character and far more inclined to tackle, in earnest, the scourge of Islamic radicalism. Even in the rigged 2002 election, the religious parties polled only 11% of the vote. A fully free and fair race will squeeze out radical forces that have thrived under military rule and which play havoc with Pakistan's weak neighbor to the northwest. In addition, unlike the military, which always thrives in a hostile environment, a civilian government will have a stronger interest in peace with India. And who wouldn't sleep safer knowing that Pakistan's nuclear bomb was in democratic hands?

Democratic governance would also bring a much-needed opportunity to overhaul the country's education system. As the state system has consistently failed young people for decades, madrassas have taken up the slack, with the most extreme religious schools helping to radicalize tens of thousands of Pakistanis -- and Afghans -- filling heads with intolerant visions of Islam, far from the mainstream of South Asian Muslim society. The country needs a properly funded, state-run, secular education system.

Bringing all this about is an enormous task, but demilitarizing and deradicalizing Pakistan is truly the key to bringing about stability in Afghanistan and the wider region. Governments now working so hard to support Afghanistan will only be spinning their wheels until they make Pakistan a top priority and apply maximum pressure on Islamabad to ensure the 2007 elections are actually free and fair, by applying clearly defined benchmarks and insisting on competent international observers. As long as the military and the madrassas rule just across the border, Afghanistan will never find peace.

Lord Patten, former EU commissioner for external relations, is chairman of the International Crisis Group and chancellor of Oxford University.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114722640638448531.html

The Other Immigration

By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

Published: May 7, 2006

If you were to set out to design a story that would inflame populist rage, it might involve immigrants from poor countries, living in the United States without permission to work, hiring powerful Washington lobbyists to press their case. In late April, The Washington Post reported just such a development. The immigrants in question were highly skilled — the programmers and doctors and investment analysts that American business seeks out through so-called H-1B visas, and who are eligible for tens of thousands of "green cards," or permanent work permits, each year. But bureaucracy and an affirmative-action-style system of national-origin quotas have created a mess. India and China account for almost 40 percent of the world's population, yet neither can claim much more than 7 percent of the green cards. Hence a half-million-person backlog and a new political pressure group, which calls itself Immigration Voice.

of the commonly expressed view that Americans are not opposed to immigration, only to illegal immigration. Immigration Voice represents the kind of immigrants whose economic contributions are obvious. It is not a coincidence that the land of the H-1B is also the land of the iPod. Such immigrants are not "cutting in line" — they're petitioning for pre-job documentation, not for post-job amnesty. And people who have undergone 18 years of schooling to learn how to manipulate advanced technology come pre-Americanized, in a way that agricultural workers may not.

But Immigration Voice could still wind up crying in the wilderness. As the Boston College political scientist Peter Skerry has noted, many of the things that bug people about undocumented workers are also true of documented ones. Legal immigrants, too, increase crowding, compete for jobs and government services and create an atmosphere of transience and disruption. Indeed, it may be harder for foreign-born engineers to win the same grip on the sympathies of native-born Americans that undocumented farm laborers and political refugees have. Skilled immigrants can't be understood through the usual paradigms of victimhood.

The economists Philip Martin, Manolo Abella and Christiane Kuptsch noted in a recent book, "As a general rule, the more difficult it is to migrate from one country to another, the higher the percentage of professionals among the migrants from that country." Often this means that the more "backward" the country, the more "sophisticated" the immigrants it supplies. Sixty percent of the Egyptians, Ghanaians and South Africans in the U.S. — and 75 percent of Indians — have more than 13 years of schooling. Their home countries are not educational powerhouses, yet as individuals, they are more highly educated than a great many of the Americans they live among. (This poses an interesting problem for Immigration Voice, which polices its Web forums for condescending remarks toward manual laborers.)

So how are we supposed to address the special needs of this class of migrant? For the most part, we don't. The differences between skilled and unskilled immigrants are important, but that doesn't mean that they are always readily comprehensible either to politicians or to public opinion. When high-skilled immigrants who are already like us show themselves willing to become even more so, jumping every hoop to join us on a legal footing, it dissolves a lot of resistance. But it doesn't dissolve everything. It doesn't dissolve our sense that people like them are different and potentially even threatening.

If we consider our own internal migration of recent decades, this will not surprise us. You would have expected that big movements of people between states — particularly from the North to the Sun Belt and from Pacific Coast cities to Rocky Mountain towns — would cause increasing uniformity and unanimity. But that didn't happen. Instead, this big migration has coincided with the much harped-on polarization between "red" and "blue" America.

Georgians take up jobs on Wall Street and New Englanders unload their U-Hauls in Texas. The sky doesn't fall — but neither do cultural or political tensions between respective regions of the country. Consider the diatribes that followed the last election, in which "red" America stood accused of everything from ignorance and bloodlust to knee-jerk conformity. Or consider North Carolina. As the state filled up with new arrivals from such liberal states as New York and New Jersey, political pundits predicted the demise of its longtime ultraconservative senator Jesse Helms. But Helms won elections until he retired in 2002, largely because many of those transplants voted for him enthusiastically. The sort of Yankees who moved to North Carolina had little trouble adopting the political outlook of their new neighbors. But you didn't notice North Carolinians begging for more of them.

While Immigration Voice looks like an immigrant movement that Americans can rally behind, its prospects are mixed. A recent measure sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to nearly double the number of H-1B visas was passed through committee, then killed and then revived. The fate of skilled immigrants hinges on public opinion, and that is hard to gauge. Even an employer delighted to sponsor an H-1B immigrant for a green card might have no particular political commitment to defending the program, or to wringing inefficiencies out of it. The arrival of skilled individuals arguably makes America a more American place. But not necessarily a more welcoming one.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing writer for the magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_lede.html

Females Don't Always Go for Hottest Mate

SCIENCE JOURNAL

By SHARON BEGLEY

 

May 5, 2006; Page B1

At first glance, the "sexy son hypothesis" makes perfect sense. According to this pillar of evolutionary biology, a female who chooses a high-quality male will have sons who inherit dad's allure. They, too, will therefore have their pick of females, allowing mom to hit the jackpot: grandmotherhood.

But when scientists followed male flycatchers whose dads were real catches (as judged by a forehead patch that is this bird's equivalent of perfect abs), they found no such thing.

The sons "did not inherit their father's ... mating status," the Swedish researchers wrote in the February issue of American Naturalist. As a result, mom got fewer grandkids than did females who settled for less-attractive males. The studs were so busy mating they had no time to raise offspring, causing their health and fecundity to suffer. Homelier birds were better dads, raising sons who had more mating success.

Poor Darwin. After he developed his theory of how organisms change through variation and natural selection, his thoughts turned to sex. Because females have few eggs (compared with males' limitless sperm), their best strategy is to select the highest-quality males for mates, he wrote in 1871. That way, their progeny also would have superior traits. The offspring would survive and reproduce better, making mom's fondest wish -- to become a grandmother -- come true. (In evolution, success means reproduction, not only for you but for your descendants unto the nth generation, too.)

The theory of sexual selection -- that females choose males with the best genes, causing those genes to become more prevalent in succeeding generations -- is invoked to explain why peacocks have rococo tails and bucks have huge antlers. Neither trait has real survival value, but females choose males that have them, exerting selective pressure for ever-showier versions.

Or so textbooks say. Just as Darwin's theory of natural selection is under attack by America's religious right, his less-known theory of sexual selection is catching flak from some biologists. "In a number of species, reproductive behavior does not conform to Darwin's theory of sexual selection," says biologist Joan Roughgarden of Stanford University. "The idea that females choose the genetically best males is wrong. Instead of choosing mates who will increase the genetic quality of their offspring, females make choices that will increase their number of offspring."

As in the flycatcher study, mating with "sexy" males isn't necessarily the way to a plethora of descendants. True, in species where males contribute nothing but genes to offspring, this strategy may work. But biologists are finding more and more examples where females benefit from a different strategy.

Female crickets mate with just about any male that asks, for instance. Through promiscuity, not choosing the "best" male, they increase the genetic diversity of their offspring, improving the chances that some will survive no matter what pathogens and enemies the kids encounter.

Other females are not as enamored of sexy traits as theory claims. While big-antlered red deer are busy fighting each other to show a female who has the best rack, the doe sneaks off to mate with less well-endowed stags. Female red-winged blackbirds are not easily impressed, either. Having the most macho plumage has no detectable effect on how many offspring a male sires, David Westneat of the University of Kentucky reported in American Naturalist this week.

Nor is flaunting their charms and competing against other males necessarily the best reproductive strategy, as Darwin thought. In some species, cooperation can bring greater success. Bluegill sunfish, for instance, form trios of one small female, one large territory-holding male and one small male that infiltrate that territory when the female releases her eggs. That lets the little scrawny guy, despite the lack of female-attracting heft, become a dad.

Such strategies, Prof. Roughgarden says, show that "each kind of male has its own way of going about its life. Each works out fine." As she and colleagues wrote in February in Science, "animals cooperate to rear the largest number of offspring possible."

Another problem with sexual selection is that it fails to explain the persistence of, shall we say, homely males. If females choose the male with the best traits, as claimed, then after enough generations every peacock should have a tail to die for. But they do not. Every flock has studs and duds. "Shouldn't all the tails be great?" asks Prof. Roughgarden.

Other scientists are not ready to jettison sexual selection, calling it (as biologist Jerry Coyne did in a review) "powerful and largely correct." But some aren't so sure. Primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (pronounced "herdy") calls it "ill-advised" to "give precedence to [females'] quests for supposedly the 'best' genes" when they choose a mate.

Mating can indeed be a competitive sport (see: spring break). But many traits that attract females have nothing to do with good genes. For mysterious reasons, females just developed an attraction for them. Men on a quest for perfect abs can take that as fair warning.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114678722314044356.html