WSJ.COM/The Morning Brief: Obama Pulls Farther Ahead -2

Last Update: 2/20/2008 8:01:45 AM

By Joseph Schuman
Of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

Barack Obama won his ninth and 10th consecutive primary-season contests Tuesday
in Wisconsin and Hawaii, or seen from another angle, Hillary Clinton failed to
upset his predicted victories there.

Either way, the results make it that much more important for Sen. Clinton to pull
a triumph out of the March 4 votes in Ohio, Texas and two other states to
maintain a viable shot at the Democratic presidential nomination. At the same
time, Sen. Obama’s winning streak - regardless of the low delegate counts in some
of the states he has won - is likely to make it tougher for Sen. Clinton to shine
before voters. As tallied by the Washington Post, the delegate count puts Obama
ahead just 1423 to 1297, but he is winning the perception battle by a
significantly wider margin.

On the Republican side, John McCain’s easy victories Tuesday over Mike Huckabee
put him closer to winning what now seems an inevitable majority of his party’s
delegates. In a speech last night he took a more aggressive tone against Sen.
Obama that builds on the arguments of Sen. Clinton. Questioning Obama’s
national-security experience, he asked whether the next president will have the
experience to counter the world’s threats, or “will we risk the confused
leadership of an inexperienced candidate, who once suggested bombing our ally
Pakistan and suggested sitting down without preconditions or clear purpose with
enemies who support terrorists and are intent on destabilizing the world by
acquiring nuclear weapons?” as The Wall Street Journal reports. In another
preview of the general-election debate - and one reminiscent of Novembers in 2002
and 2004 - other Republican lawmakers and officials this week have launched what
The Hill notes is a nationwide campaign criticizing Democrats as weak on national
security.

A Democratic ‘Storming’ of Fortress China?

Researchers at the Central Party School, the top Communist Party think tank in
China, have produced a report called “Storming the Fortress” that calls for
reduced media censorship, a more representative parliament and greater
democratization aimed at stemming corruption, the Financial Times reports. The
“Fortress” blueprint makes a point of saying Chinese political reform shouldn’t
be modeled after “Western-style general elections or a multiparty system” with
their inherent press freedoms. But it proposes reforms that have what the FT
calls “a Western flavor” that would help modernize the country’s economy.
“Without significant political reform, the report says, China’s economy would
become less efficient and productive,” the FT writes. It comes ahead of next
month’s annual session of the National People’s Congress, where a new government
is set to be chosen.

Judges Try To Lock Up, Extract Information

Recent days have brought two federal court decisions with disputed First
Amendment legitimacy. In San Francisco, District Judge Jeffrey White acceded to a
request by a Cayman Islands bank to shut access to the Web site Wikileaks.org,
which “invites people to post leaked materials with the goal of discouraging
‘unethical behavior’ by corporations and governments,” as the New York Times
reports. In this case, the bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust, accused “a
disgruntled ex-employee” of giving stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of
banking laws and a confidentiality agreement. Wikileaks says the documents
allegedly reveal structures the bank uses for hiding assets, tax evasion and
money laundering. Judge White granted a permanent injunction ordering Wikileaks’
domain-name registrar to disable its Internet domain name. But the Times says
that action “suggests that the bank, and the judge, did not understand how the
domain system works,” since the site can still be accessed at its Internet
Protocol address, http://88.80.13.160/, and its Wikileaks domains remain
registered in other countries.

In the other case, District Judge Reggie Walton in Washington ordered former USA
Today reporter Toni Locy to pay $500 per day after finding her in contempt of
court for refusing to identify sources who told her about a suspect in the 2001
anthrax attacks. The suspicions she reported indeed existed - former Army
scientist Steven Hatfill was publicly identified as a “person of interest” in the
case by the attorney general at the time - but Hatfill is suing the government
and arguing his reputation was destroyed by media leaks. Judge Walton agreed that
the sources of Loci - now a journalism professor - were important for Hatfill’s
suit, and he ordered her to pay the $500 a day until she names them and said the
amount would soon escalate to $5,000 a day, as USA Today reports. She has
declined to give up her sources, and Judge White postponed the penalty to allow
her to appeal the contempt ruling.

Separating A Greater Darkness From The Light

It’s the new black, literally. Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute in New York state have created a sheer new material made of hollow
fibers that “absorbs 99.955% of the light that hits it, making it by far the
darkest substance ever made - about 30 times as dark as the government’s current
standard for blackest black,” the Washington Post reports. “It’s very deep, like
in a forest on the darkest night,” Shawn-Yu Lin, a scientist who helped create
the material, tells the paper. “Nothing comes back to you. It’s very, very, very
dark.” The Post notes that like other recent “transformation optics” efforts
aimed at cloaking objects with invisibility, the new material is a result of
physicists’ increasing ability to manipulate light.

Also of Note

Reuters: Oil prices near $100 and delays in debt payments by an affiliate of
private equity giant KKR spooked financial markets in Asia and Europe Wednesday,
battering stocks and driving the cost of corporate debt insurance to all-time
peaks, though oil prices retreated a bit from yesterday’s record.

Associated Press: The militant Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr has threatened
to lift a six-month cease-fire widely credited with helping reduce violence in
Iraq, officials close to him said Wednesday, adding that if Sadr doesn’t publicly
extend it by Saturday the “freeze is over.” The U.S. military has welcomed the
cease-fire by Sadr’s Mahdi Army, one of the most powerful militias in Iraq,
calling it a major factor in decline of violence last year. But U.S. forces have
insisted on continuing to stage raids against what it calls Iranian-backed
breakaway factions of the Mahdi Army, angering Sadr’s followers, and influential
members of his movement have urged Sadr to let the cease-fire expire.

New York Times: The Iraqi trial of two former government officials widely seen as
a test of the impartiality of Iraq’s judicial system got off to an inauspicious
start when it was delayed because crucial witnesses failed to appear. The
officials are charged with using the resources of the Health Ministry to carry
out a campaign of sectarian kidnappings and killings, and the case has already
been dealt several setbacks, including the intimidation of witnesses, and
officials close to the court say one of the judges scheduled to hear the case had
reportedly already agreed to find the men not guilty.

BBC: NATO troops sealed the northern borders of Kosovo after Serbs angry at the
province’s weekend declaration of independence ransacked two crossings. Hundreds
of protesters torched customs and police posts at Jarinje and Banja, manned by
U.N. and Kosovo police, but the border closing is expected to further infuriate
both Kosovo Serbs and Serbia’s government.

Guardian: Tony Blair’s hopes of becoming Europe’s first president are running
into mounting opposition across the European Union, with Germany and others
determined to stymie the former U.K. prime minister because, as one European
ambassador put it, “his track record on EU matters is not so great” and “there’s
the Iraq thing.”

Financial Times: Dubai International Capital is stepping up its investments in
Asia with plans to invest about $5 billion in India, China and Japan during the
next three to four years. The current market turmoil would provide substantial
opportunities for DIC to invest in Asia, Anand Krishnan, the Gulf investor’s
chief operating officer, said in Tokyo.

Wall Street Journal: MBIA (MBI), the largest U.S. bond insurer, switched leaders,
hiring former CEO Joseph “Jay” W. Brown, who helped the firm build a presence in
the arcane world of mortgage debt. His new task is to lead a restructuring
centered on that now deeply troubled business, at a time when MBIA and rivals
FGIC and Ambac Financial Group (ABK) are under intense pressure from insurance
regulators and credit-rating services to strengthen their capital and demonstrate
they can manage the mountain of commitments made to back up shaky
subprime-mortgage investments.

Bloomberg: GMAC, the lender partially owned by General Motors Corp. (GM), is
scheduled to announce Wednesday that it will close about 75% of its
auto-financing offices in the U.S. and Canada after losing $2.3 billion last
year. GMAC plans to reduce the number of offices serving U.S. auto dealers to
four and eliminate three of four outlets in Canada, according to a letter from
Barbara Stokel, executive vice president of North American operations, set for
delivery to dealers Wednesday.

Variety: NBC Universal is once again beating the drums of change, unveiling plans
to overhaul the Peacock Network’s upfront pitch to Madison Avenue. While it will
still kick off upfront week with a May 12 advertiser event, NBC plans to shift
the focus away from its still-rebuilding broadcast network and will instead offer
an “interactive presentation” highlighting all of the conglomerate’s TV assets,
including cable and digital.

Washington Post: Women who live in neighborhoods with large amounts of nighttime
illumination are more likely to get breast cancer than those who live in areas
where nocturnal darkness prevails, according to an unusual study that overlaid
satellite images of Earth onto cancer registries. The finding adds credence to
the hypothesis that exposure to too much light at night can raise the risk of
breast cancer by interfering with the brain’s production of a tumor-suppressing
hormone.

National Geographic: Sharks follow well-traveled “superhighways” among feeding
hot spots, new research suggests, in a discovery that should allow scientists to
create better conservation strategies for the fish. Some great white sharks
travel predictable pathways, spending long winters in two areas near Hawaii,
according to the research led by Salvador Jorgensen of Stanford University in
California.

-For continuously updated news from The Wall Street Journal, see WSJ.com at
http://wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 20, 2008 08:01 ET (13:01 GMT)

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