NEWSWEEK: Media Lead Sheet/April 21, 2008 Issue (on newsstands Monday, ...(ching out to thehunters and anglers of A...),Health

http://www.newsweek.com/id/131760

IRAQ: "A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other" (p. 34). Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Dan Ephron and Special Correspondent Silvia Spring report on the Pentagon's Human Terrain System, a program that recruits academics whose area expertise and language skills can help the military wage a smarter counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. These specialists, among other things, are meant to map the population of towns and villages, identify the clans that matter and the fault lines within them, then advise U.S. commanders on the right approach for leveraging local support. The problem is, of 19 Human-Terrain members operating in five teams in Iraq, less than a handful can be described loosely as Middle East experts, and only three speak Arabic. The rest are social scientists or former GIs who are transposing research skills from their unrelated fields at home.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/131752

JONATHAN ALTER: "Boycott Opening Ceremonies" (p. 36). Senior Editor Jonathan Alter writes that the half a dozen European leaders and the Democratic presidential candidates urging a mini-boycott of Beijing's opening ceremonies are right to do so. "After promising Jacques Rogge and the International Olympic Committee that it would respect human rights ... the regime moved in the opposite direction," he writes. "While showing some important signs of maturity in joining regional efforts to deal with North Korean nukes, the government has found it hard to break bad habits: it took the bait in Tibet, indulging in stale denunciations of the Dalai Lama after cracking heads in the worst violence there in 20 years."