November 27, 2000

Microsoft Challenges Antitrust Verdict
"Peacekeepers" for Palestinians?
Intervention Gives New Life to Old Politics

Microsoft Challenges Antitrust Verdict

Microsoft Corp. will argue against findings that it violated antitrust law and an order that the company be split in two in a filing due today with the U.S. Court of Appeals, according to Reuters. The Redmond, Wash.-based company's brief is the first of written arguments due over the next three months, ahead of oral presentations by Microsoft and the government to the court, scheduled for late February.

"Our brief will outline a full and powerful argument for why the District Court's judgement should be reversed and judgement should be granted for Microsoft," said company spokesman Jim Cullinan.

In "Microsoft's Appealing Case," legal scholar Robert A. Levy and economist Alan Reynolds offer a preview of what Microsoft's arguments in the appeal will most likely be--and find Microsoft positioned to win. They write that the original trial, presided over by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, was so plagued by procedural irregularities, erroneous fact-finding, unsupportable legal conclusions and destructive remedies that it will be difficult for the appellate court not to overturn it.

"Peacekeepers" for Palestinians?

U.N. human rights boss Mary Robinson called today for an "international monitoring presence" to be set up in the occupied Palestinian territories, where she accused Israel of using "excessive force," according to Reuters.

In a report to the U.N. General Assembly, she also called on both Israeli security forces and the Palestinians to spare civilian lives and property and renew their efforts to halt the "current dangerous escalation" of violence.

In "U.S. Should Stay Out of Arab-Israeli Conflict," Research Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies Leon Hadar argues that the conflict does not threaten any significant national interests and that the United States would be best served by staying out of the looming war.

Intervention Gives New Life to Old Politics

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former populist priest who became Haiti's first democratically elected leader a decade ago but has been out of power since 1996, appeared headed for an overwhelming victory in presidential elections today, frightening the country's business leaders and creating a new headache for the United States, according to The Washington Post.

Aristide was toppled by a military coup in 1991, seven months into his first administration. Despite misgivings over his years of preaching liberation theology, with its Marxist components, the United States sent 20,000 troops to Haiti to return Aristide to power in 1994. Because the Haitian constitution does not allow consecutive terms in office, he stepped down reluctantly in 1996, making way for the first democratic handover of power in Haiti's 200-year history. But the deep class divisions that gave rise to the coup remain stubbornly in place, despite a $2.2 billion investment by the United States in police training, economic development and other pro-democracy projects.

In "Doing What We Can for Haiti," Director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty Ian Vásquez wrote that "As desirable as political democracy and economic liberalism may be, recent and not-so-recent experience in Haiti suggests that using coercion to impose those systems is futile... If genuine, stable democracy is to flourish in Haiti, it will have to spring from civil society, which requires a functioning economy. The United States should welcome such a development, but it cannot accelerate, much less impose, it."

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