Appeals for solidarity have been a pillar of Arab relations for many years. So it was striking when a subsequent war of words climaxed in what Arab analysts see as a stealthy Saudi call for regime change in Syria. After Syrian Foreign Minister Farooq Al Shaara suggested last month that they were U.S. lackies, the Saudis blasted Shaara for “discarding the traditions … governing relations between the brotherly Arab nations.” A few days later, Jamal Khashoggi, a newspaper editor and former top Saudi adviser, hinted in a TV interview that the Saudis might be working to depose Syrian President Bashar. “I think we’re moving in the direction of regime change,” said Khashoggi.
Such talk is the latest sign of the growing split between two rival Middle East factions—one allied with Washington, the other with Tehran. The Saudis aim to combat Shiite power in the region, which has been boosted by events in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sunni leaders in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other states fear a rising “Shiite Crescent” could end centuries of Sunni dominance in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. That has led to new hostilities with Damascus, an Iranian ally. Both Syria and Iran have been accused by the U.S. and the Saudis of supporting bloodthirsty Iraqi Shiite militants. Still, talk of regime change upsets an unwritten pact: ever since the 1970 war between Jordan and the PLO, Arab officials have sought to conceal internal feuds behind a diplomatic tent flap. Now tensions are spilling out in the open and the brothers are turning on one another in more threatening ways. Tremors from Iraq are radiating outward. Dominoes, anyone? —Stephen Glain
Minister Nobody When president Vladimir Putin picked an unknown to be Russia’s new prime minister, the world reacted with surprise and a bit of dread. Who in heck is Viktor Zubkov? The Kremlin is starting to look just as opaque as in Soviet days, when the line of succession was often ambiguous. The sense that Putin now need consult only himself when filling even the highest positions is confirmed by Zubkov’s own reaction to the news. According to a personal friend who did not wish to speak on the record, the promotion from head of the financial regulatory agency to head of government came as a “complete surprise” to Zubkov.
That probably also answers the next question: is Zubkov a quiet loyalist who will simply do Putin’s bidding, or a player who could one day rise from prime minister to president (as Putin did in 1999)? Clearly Zubkov was not angling for higher station. He is a member of the clan from St. Petersburg, Putin’s political home, who now dominates the Kremlin. Zubkov and Putin worked together in the St. Petersburg government in the early 1990s, and have addressed each other by the familiar “ty” (like the French “tu”) ever since. Not that they’re equals. —Owen Matthews
Until the iPhone Comes While most of the world still waits for Apple to launch its much-hyped phone, the company’s newly revised iPods should serve as tasty appetizers in the interim. Indeed, the top-of-the-line iPod Touch offers many of the iPhone’s features like its 3.5 inch “multi-touch” screen, a Web browser and Wi-Fi connectivity. It’s also about half as thick as the Phone, and can be had with twice as much storage space. Changes abound elsewhere as well. Among the most intriguing is the introduction of video to the tiny iPod Nano. The rest of the iPod lineup gets upgrades such as more storage space, better menus and new colors, without the annoyingly fanciful names Apple used to favor. Blue is now “blue,” not “Bondi.” —John Sparks
Missing Mingus If you had to tell an alien what jazz is, you could just sit him down and play “Charles Mingus Sextet With Eric Dolphy—Cornell 1964,” a two-CD set of concert recordings that had gone missing until the composer’s widow discovered them not long ago. The big-band sounds generated by bassist Mingus and sax man Dolphy—who would die tragically just a few months later—plus Johnny Coles, Clifford Jordan, Jaki Byard and Dannie Richmond show Mingus’s genius for getting the maximum out of every musician. Players never simply solo over chord changes. Instead, Mingus sets other musicians to work adding fills, counterpoint passages and deft harmonies, with glorious results. A quarter of a century after his death, Mingus’s problematic personality is forgotten, but his music is more majestic than ever. —Malcolm Jones
Reality Check Despite experiments with flexible scheduling, most workplaces still adhere to some version of fixed “business hours.” But a study published by the London School of Economics suggests they may simply be wasting time. Researchers who studied workers in a variety of industries found that their productivity is nearly 20 percent higher on a Tuesday than on a Friday. Among their suggestions: rethink work schedules and move public holidays to Fridays. —John Sparks
American Colonist With the vibrant art market in Berlin, German artists could be forgiven for choosing to stay home. But the career of Anna Schuleit shows that artists can find angels in America. At 32, the New York-based Schuleit is a rising star whose installations explore the theme of remembrance and who owes her success in part to a series of fellowships from the MacDowell artists’ colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. In “Landlines,” her latest work, Schuleit paid back this uniquely American institution on its 100th anniversary by creating an installation of vintage telephones hung from trees in the colony’s woods. By choosing phones, which the colony prohibits, Schuleit says she “violated MacDowell’s trademark privacy in order to bridge the inside to the outside, to lift the boundaries between the colony’s walls and those beyond.” —Vibhuti Patel
