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Posted: Tue., Dec. 5, 2006, 6:59pm PT
Braun leaves post at Yahoo
Company to be split into three new operating units
By BEN FRITZ
After two embattled years on the job, Lloyd Braun has ankled his post as head of Yahoo's Media Group amid a massive reorg at the world's biggest Internet company.
CEO Terry Semel announced the changes Tuesday, near the end of a tough year that has seen Yahoo face intense public criticism and a 31% drop in its stock price.

Starting in the first quarter of 2007, company will divide into three groups focused on audience segments in an attempt to streamline and better compete with fast-growing rivals like Google and News Corp.'s MySpace.

Chief operating officer Dan Rosensweig is also leaving, effective in March.

New operating structure would have diminished Braun's standing in the company, apparently prompting him to resign.

Previously, Braun reported directly to Rosensweig.

But Santa Monica-based YMG, which encompasses all of the Netco's content sites, such as Movies, TV, Music and News, is now part of the Yahoo Network division of the Yahoo Audience Group. Yahoo Network, which also encompasses search, user-generated media, and the Yahoo front page, will be led by Jeff Weiner, previously the head of search.

Netco is looking for an exec to lead the Audience Group, overseeing Weiner and several other execs and reporting directly to Semel.

Braun likely wanted the job atop the Audience Group and didn't like the idea of having additional layers added between him and Semel. His departure wasn't included in Yahoo's reorg announcement, indicating that he resigned in response to the changes, rather than as part of them.

Remaining senior management at YMG, such as head of entertainment and games Vince Broady, music topper Dave Goldberg and head of news and information Scott Moore, will now report directly to Weiner.

David Katz, who previously headed sports and the Yahoo Studios original content group, ankled late last week in a move that now looks like it was connected to the internal shake-up (Daily Variety, Dec. 4).

Rumors of Braun's imminent departure started circling the former ABC prexy within months of joining Yahoo two years ago. His appointment was surprising, as he had no experience in online media.

His initial efforts to bring TV-style event programming to the Netco, such as a failed attempt to develop ABC project "The Runner" for the Web, were ultimately stymied.

After what seemed like more than a year of inaction, Braun recently settled on a more conservative strategy, bringing on a senior management team recruited from other Netcos and focusing on redesigns for existing sites, launching sites focused on food and technology, and low-cost, low-risk original programming such as viral video roundup "The 9."

Tuesday's changes strengthen the position of chief financial officer Susan Decker, who many believe is being positioned to take over for Semel. She is leaving her job as CFO to head the new Advertiser & Publisher group, which will oversee all advertising and business partnerships. Netco has had particular troubles this year with delays in a new advertising technology that caused it to lower its financial guidance.

Yahoo plans to create a new advertising network that joins all its sites with its thousands of distribution partners in an effort to better appeal to marketers, who have been increasingly turning to sites like Google, YouTube, and MySpace.

Third division in the new structure will be the Technology Group, headed by chief technology officer Farazad Nazem, which will oversee engineering and tech development.

Yahoo was previously divided by product group, rather than by audience segment. That led to some some frustrating internal divisions for execs. Many at YMG, for instance, wanted to work more closely with Yahoo Video (user-generated videos) and Flickr (for photos), but those sites were previously in a different product group. They are now joined together in the Network division of the Audience Group.

Semel seemed to acknowledge that Yahoo has in recent years fallen from its leadership position and described the changes as a way to seize that mantle from younger competitors.

"The Internet is continuing to grow and evolve at a rapid pace, and we're reshaping Yahoo to be a leader in this transformation, just as we did successfully five years ago," he said, referring to the time when he first joined the company after having co-led Warner Bros. for many years. "Our strategy capitalizes on big emerging trends and leverages our core strengths in search, media, communities and communications. We believe having a more customer-focused organization, supported by robust technology, will speed the development of leading-edge experiences for our most valuable audience segments."

Company emphasized that its new primary goals will be to create social media environments that encourage users to participate, rather than just consume; to take the lead in next-generation advertising platforms; and to better compete for top talent.

In a statement, Braun said YMG "has developed and launched a groundbreaking template for the next generation of media experiences on the Internet" and noted that "I am proud to have led this team of extraordinary professionals." He told the Los Angeles Times that he is "really ready for another challenge, perhaps one that combines old media and new media."

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Richest 2% hold half the world’s assets
By Chris Giles, Economics Editor in London
Published: December 5 2006 13:13 | Last updated: December 5 2006 13:13
Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth.

A survey released on Tuesday shows that middle-income countries with high growth rates still have a long way to go before they have a hope of catching up with the levels of prosperity of the richest.

Adults with more than $2,200 of assets were in the top half of the global wealth league table, while those with more than $61,000 were in the top 10 per cent, according to the data from the World Institute fpr Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-Wider).

To belong to the top 1 per cent of the world’s wealthiest adults you would need more than $500,000, something that 37m adults have achieved.

So much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in few hands that if all the world’s wealth was distributed evenly, each person would have $20,500 of assets to use.

Almost 90 per cent of the world’s wealth is held in North America, Europe and high-income Asian and Pacific countries, such as Japan and Australia.

While North America has 6 per cent of the world’s adult population, it accounts for 34 per cent of household wealth.

The concentration of wealth in different countries varies considerably, with the top 10 per cent in the US holding 70 per cent of the country’s wealth, compared with 61 per cent in France, 56 per cent in the UK, 44 per cent in Germany and 39 per cent in Japan.

According to Anthony Shorrocks, the director of UNU-Wider, the number of wealthy individuals in a country depends on the size of the population, the average wealth and its inequality.

“China fails to feature strongly among the super-rich because average wealth is modest and wealth is evenly spread by international standards”, he said.

As countries grow richer, their population changes how it holds wealth, according to the report.

In developing countries, property, particularly land and farm assets are important, while cash savings tend to dominate in middle-income counties.

Only in certain advanced countries such as the US and the UK with developed financial sectors is there a strong appetite for holding equities and other more sophisticated financial assets.

Debt is also low in poor countries because financial institutions do not exist to allow people to borrow.

In contrast, the authors say “many people in high-income countries have negative net worth and, somewhat paradoxically, are among the poorest people in the world in terms of household wealth.”

Wealth is difficult to measure even in the most advanced countries, so the research was based on painstaking compilation of aggregate and survey data for the 38 countries of the world where it exists and statistical models for the rest of the world.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

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Iraq: Top Dem Wants More Troops
As the debate over Iraq intensifies, leading Democrat Silvestre Reyes is calling for the deployment of more U.S. troops.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 3:33 p.m. AKT Dec 5, 2006
Dec. 5. 2006 - In a surprise twist in the debate over Iraq, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the soon-to-be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops as part of a stepped up effort to “dismantle the militias.”

The soft-spoken Texas Democrat was an early opponent of the Iraq war and voted against the October 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush to invade that country. That dovish record got prominently cited last week when Speaker designate Nancy Pelosi chose Reyes as the new head of the intelligence panel.

But in an interview with NEWSWEEK on Tuesday, Reyes pointedly distanced himself from many of his Democratic colleagues who have called for fixed timetables for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Coming on the eve of tomorrow’s recommendations from the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission, Reyes’s comments were immediately cited by some Iraq war analysts as fresh evidence that the intense debate over U.S. policy may be more fluid than many have expected.

“We’re not going to have stability in Iraq until we eliminate those militias, those private armies,” Reyes said. “We have to consider the need for additional troops to be in Iraq, to take out the militias and stabilize Iraq … We certainly can’t leave Iraq and run the risk that it becomes [like] Afghanistan” was before the 2001 invasion by the United States.

Reyes also stressed that there needed to be greater “political accountability” demanded of the Iraqi government. But on the core issue of the U.S. commitment, Reyes—a Vietnam War veteran who partially lost his hearing in that conflict—even compared his position to that of another Vietnam vet, Sen. John McCain, a staunch supporter of the Iraq war. Like Reyes, McCain also has called for an increase in U.S. troop strength. When asked how many additional troops he envisioned sending to Iraq, Reyes replied: “I would say 20,000 to 30,000—for the specific purpose of making sure those militias are dismantled, working in concert with the Iraqi military.”

When a reporter suggested that was not a position that was likely to be popular with many House Democrats, Reyes replied: “Well again, I differ in that I don’t want Iraq to become the next Afghanistan. We could not allow Iraq to become a safe haven for Al Qaeda, for Hamas, for Hizbullah, or anybody else. We cannot allow Iran or Syria to have a free hand in there to further destabilize the Middle East.”

Reyes added that he was “very clear” about his position to Pelosi when she chose him over two rivals—Rep. Jane Harman of California and Rep. Alcee Hastings—to head the critical intelligence post. One widely cited reason that Harman, a moderate Democrat who supported the war, didn’t get the nod from Pelosi is that the Speaker-designate wanted somebody who would be more aggressive in standing up to the Bush White House—which Reyes promises to be on other issues like domestic wiretapping and CIA secret prisons.

But when asked what he told Pelosi about his thinking on Iraq, Reyes replied: “What I said was, we can’t afford to leave there. And anybody who says, we are going pull out our troops immediately, is being dishonest … We’re all interested in getting out of Iraq. That’s a common goal. How we do it, I think, is the tough part. There are those that say, they don’t care what Iraq looks like once we leave there. Let’s just leave there. And I argue against that. I don’t think that’s responsible. And I think it plays right into the hands of Syria and Iran.”

Reyes also said he is eager to see the recommendations Wednesday from the bipartisan panel headed by former secretary of State Jim Baker and former Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Lee Hamilton. By some accounts, the panel is set to recommend an adjustment of course that will include the beginning of troop withdrawals pegged to progress on the ground along with other political and diplomatic initiatives. But Reyes said such ideas are not likely to substantially change his own views on the subject. “I’m very interested in reading what their recommendations are. But this is my position.”

Reyes’s comments were immediately blasted by one Iraq war critic who expressed concerns that they would give new respectability to an idea that has lost considerable support in official Washington as the violence in Iraq has escalated. “I think he [Reyes] needs a course in Insurgency 101,” said Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who has been active in an anti-war group called the Steering Group for Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. “Have they learned nothing from Vietnam? If he pushes this and gets some support for it, and with McCain in the Senate, it could become more respectable … I think Reyes has got a lot to learn.”

Yet one prominent Iraq war supporter, Cliff May, the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy who served on an advisory panel that worked with the Baker-Hamilton group, said he was stunned and pleasantly surprised by Reyes’s views. “Wow, that’s remarkable,” May replied when NEWSWEEK told him of Reyes’s comments. “Whenever anybody like myself suggests that we need more troops, we get told that it’s not politically feasible. But if you have a leading Democrat saying it, that strikes me as very significant …. I think it’s dawning on a lot of people that the price of a U.S. defeat would be dire.”

One source familiar with aspects of the Baker-Hamilton panel’s deliberations said that the idea of an increase of U.S. troop strength of 20,000 to 30,000 had been pushed by some U.S. military commanders for some time. However, Democratic members of the commission were unwilling to go along with any proposal that would indicate an expansion of the U.S. mission in that country, according to the source, who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters.

Yet another member of the Baker-Hamilton advisory panel praised Reyes for proposing the idea of increasing troops, saying it showed that he “doesn’t just fall back on political reflex.” But, added Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who formerly served as a U.S. political advisor in Iraq, Reyes’s ideas were unlikely to bear fruit unless accompanied with a far more extensive strategy that included a “political and diplomatic” initiative to reorder and rebuild support for the Iraqi government. “You can’t sustain an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 troops for very long—maybe four to six months,” Diamond said. “Can you really secure progress on the ground in terms of knocking out death squads and militia activity in four to six months? It won’t make sense unless it’s combined with very intensive political and constitutional activity. Otherwise putting in more troops is like putting more fingers in the dyke … I don’t think there is any magic bullet.”

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16062351/site/newsweek/page/3/

© 2006 MSNBC.com

December 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
China’s Sunshine Boys

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
So here’s a little news quiz: Guess who’s the seventh-richest man in China today, with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.43 billion?

Answer: Shi Zhengrong. Now guess what he does. Real estate? No. Banking? No. Manufacturing for Wal-Mart? No. Construction? No.

Mr. Shi is China’s leading maker of silicon photovoltaic solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity. Yes, the seventh-richest man in China is a green entrepreneur! It should only happen in America.

Mr. Shi thinks, as I do, that renewable clean power — wind, solar, bio-fuels — is going to be the growth industry of the 21st century, and he wants to make sure that China and his company, Suntech Power Holdings, are the leaders. Only 43 years old and full of energy himself, Mr. Shi hopes to do for solar energy what China did for tennis shoes: drive down the cost so that millions of people who could not afford solar photovoltaic panels will be able to do so.

As an environmentalist, I wish him well. As an American, I worry that if we don’t start doing everything we can to develop our own clean power, we’re going to miss out on the green industrial revolution. Today, most of our hybrid cars are imported from Japan. Tomorrow, if Mr. Shi has his way, most of our solar panels will come from China.

What Mr. Shi understands is that China is going to have to go green. Its rivers and air are becoming so polluted it has no choice. In fact, as he and I spoke in his 66th-floor office in Shanghai, the air was so dirty you could barely make out the skyscrapers down the street. America, alas, still seems to think it has a choice in going green. So while China will be compelled to move into this industry, U.S. companies may or may not, depending on whether states, or Washington, require power providers to generate energy from renewables.

For years our brain-dead Congress thought it was helping our power companies and manufacturers by not imposing tough energy-efficiency standards on them. In fact, it was just helping some of them commit suicide. Congress’s idiotic decision not to impose higher mileage standards on U.S. carmakers helped Detroit miss the market and almost go bankrupt. China already has higher mileage standards for its autos than we do.

“People at all levels in China have become more aware of this environment issue and alternative energy,” said Mr. Shi. “Five years ago when I started the company people said: ‘Why do we need solar? We have a surplus of coal-powered electricity.’ Now it is different; now people realize that solar has a bright future. But it is still too expensive.”

Mr. Shi founded Suntech in Wuxi, China, near Shanghai, after earning a Ph.D. in engineering in Australia in 1992. As The Wall Street Journal put it in a recent profile, Suntech combines “first world technology and developing world prices” — so effectively it has become one of the world’s four top solar manufacturers, along with Sharp and Kyocera of Japan and BP.

The key, Mr. Shi explained to me, is that he uses more low-cost Chinese labor, rather than high-tech machines, to make his solar modules and handle the fragile silicon, and he takes advantage of the subsidies offered by different Chinese provinces dying for him to open a Suntech factory in their region.

Roughly 90 percent of his business today is abroad. But as he brings the price down, the China market will open up, and he expects to use that to gain much greater scale and drive the price of his solar modules down further.

“If we have a market here, we feel confident we will be a cost leader,” he says. “Now we are at around $4 per watt. In 10 years time, I’m pretty sure we will be below $2 per watt,” which would make solar competitive and scalable.

Thanks to Suntech’s success, “now there is a rush of [Chinese] business people entering this sector, even though we still don’t have a market here,” added Mr. Shi. “Many government people now say, ‘This is an industry!’ ” To help, the Chinese government just passed a law mandating that China get 10 percent of its energy from renewables, like solar, by 2020.

China is setting high standards for renewables, but is still weak on enforcement. America is better at enforcement, but still weak on setting high standards. We need to get our act together, because eventually China will bring its enforcement in line with its regulations — or it won’t breathe. And when that happens, China’s emerging green power entrepreneurs could clean our clock in the clean power business.

Oh, well, you can always buy a share. Suntech is already listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

U.S. Army Battling To Save Equipment
Gear Piles Up at Depots, Awaiting Repair
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 5, 2006; A01

ANNISTON, Ala. -- Field upon field of more than 1,000 battered M1 tanks, howitzers and other armored vehicles sit amid weeds here at the 15,000-acre Anniston Army Depot -- the idle, hulking formations symbolic of an Army that is wearing out faster than it is being rebuilt.

The Army and Marine Corps have sunk more than 40 percent of their ground combat equipment into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to government data. An estimated $17 billion-plus worth of military equipment is destroyed or worn out each year, blasted by bombs, ground down by desert sand and used up to nine times the rate in times of peace. The gear is piling up at depots such as Anniston, waiting to be repaired.

The depletion of major equipment such as tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and especially helicopters and armored Humvees has left many military units in the United States without adequate training gear, officials say. Partly as a result of the shortages, many U.S. units are rated "unready" to deploy, officials say, raising alarm in Congress and concern among military leaders at a time when Iraq strategy is under review by the White House and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is lobbying hard for more money to repair what he calls the "holes" in his force, saying current war funding is inadequate to make the Army "well." Asked in a congressional hearing this past summer whether he was comfortable with the readiness levels of non-deployed Army units, Schoomaker replied: "No."

Lt. Col. Mike Johnson, a senior Army planner, said: "Before, if a unit was less than C-1," or fully ready, "someone would get fired." Now, he said, that is accepted as combat-zone rotations are sapping all units of gear and manpower. "It's a cost of continuous operations. You can't be ready all the time," he said.

Across the military, scarce equipment is being shifted from unit to unit for training. For example, a brigade of 3,800 soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division that will deploy to Iraq next month has been passing around a single training set of 44 Humvees, none of which has the added armor of the Humvees they will drive in Iraq.

The military's ground forces are only beginning the vast and costly job of replacing, repairing and upgrading combat equipment -- work that will cost an estimated $17 billion to $19 billion annually for several more years, regardless of any shift in Iraq strategy. The Army alone has 280,000 major pieces of equipment in combat zones that will eventually have to be fixed or replaced. Before the war, the Army spent $2.5 billion to $3 billion a year on wear and tear.

At Anniston, the sprawling lots of tanks and other armored vehicles are just the start of a huge backlog in broken-down gear.

"There's stuff, stuff everywhere," Joan Gustafson, a depot official, said as she wheeled her brown Chevrolet van through a landscape of rolling hills lined with armadas of mobile guns.

"There's another field of M1s," she said, motioning toward a swath of M1A1 Abrams tanks next to the winding road. "We're just waiting for someone to tell us what to do with them."

The Army's five depots carry out the highest level of maintenance for Army gear ranging from rifles and other small arms to tanks, helicopters and missile systems. Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Army has left behind hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment in Iraq and has relied heavily on field maintenance facilities in Kuwait.

But as the war has continued, Army leaders have recognized that they cannot afford to wait for a drawdown of troops before they begin overhauling equipment -- some of it 20 years old -- that is being used at extraordinary rates. Helicopters are flying two or three times their planned usage rates. Tank crews are driving more than 4,000 miles a year -- five times the normal rate. Truck fleets that convoy supplies down Iraq's bomb-laden roads are running at six times the planned mileage, according to Army data.

Equipment shipped back from Iraq is stacking up at all the Army depots: More than 530 M1 tanks, 220 M88 wreckers and 160 M113 armored personnel carriers are sitting at Anniston. The Red River Army Depot in Texas has 700 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 450 heavy and medium-weight trucks, while more than 1,000 Humvees are awaiting repair at the Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania.

Despite the work piling up, the Army's depots have been operating at about half their capacity because of a lack of funding for repairs. In the spring, a funding gap caused Anniston and other depots to lose about a month's worth of work, said Brig. Gen. Robert Radin, deputy chief of staff for operations at the Army Materiel Command at Fort Belvoir.

"Last year we spent as much time trying to find available money as managing our program," he said. "We don't want to go into the next rotation . . . with equipment that's at the far end of its expected life."

Responding to urgent requests from the Army and Marine Corps, Congress approved an extra $23.8 billion in October to replace worn-out equipment in fiscal 2007. With the money, the Army plans to double the workload at its depots, which will repair and upgrade 130,000 pieces in 2007, up from 63,000 last year. This will include a quadrupling of the number of tanks, Bradleys and other tracked vehicles overhauled, from 1,000 to 4,000.

At Anniston, which will handle 1,800 combat vehicles in fiscal 2007, a cavernous 250,000-square-foot repair shop is humming as damaged tanks are rolled in one by one and disassembled with the help of giant cranes. Removing an M1 tank's turret alone takes a day and a half, and the entire overhaul requires 54 days and costs about $1 million, said Ted A. Law, the depot's vehicle manager.

Earnest Linn, 58, a heavy-mobile-equipment mechanic who as of January will have worked at Anniston for 30 years, said that "it's never been like this" since the end of the Vietnam War.

In October, Anniston became the official repair facility for the Army's newest armored vehicle, the Stryker. Repairs for those vehicles will soar from eight in fiscal 2006 to 75 this fiscal year -- including 58 that received some level of battle damage, said Gregory McMath, program manager for Stryker repair.

"This one hit a triple-stacked land mine," he said, peering up into the underbelly of a Stryker ripped open by the blast. Some of the Strykers are coming in with 40,000 miles on their odometers, he said.

Workers at Anniston take pride in patching, rebuilding and testing the broken-down gear and returning it to like-new condition. Often, they must innovate by taking parts from wrecked vehicles if new parts do not exist or have not been ordered in time.

"The supply system can't keep up with us," said Rodney Brodeur, division chief for turbine engines, speaking over the clang and whir of his workshop. It is projected that in 2007, Anniston will rebuild 1,400 turbine engines for M1 tanks, compared with 800 this year.

Fine sand and heavy use erode the blades on the tank engine rotors, eventually leading the blades to snap off and stall the engines. Such erosion, which is invisible to the Army's field mechanics, can lead to catastrophic failure without timely maintenance.

"If your Cadillac stops by the side of the road, that's an inconvenience," Brodeur said. "If the tank quits in the middle of the fight, that's a hard target."