Facebook Users Who Are Under Age Raise Concerns

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — The fake ID has gone digital, and spread to elementary school. Across the nation, millions of young people are lying about their ages so they can create accounts on popular sites like Facebook and Myspace. These sites require users to be 13 or older, to avoid federal regulations that apply to sites with younger members. But to children, that rule is a minor obstacle that stands between them and what everybody else is doing. Parents regularly go along with the age inflation, giving permission and helping children set up accounts. They often see it as a minor fib that is necessary to let their children participate in the digital world. Plenty of people fudge the truth about their age, whether to buy beer or project a younger image to potential mates. But researchers and other critics say allowing children to break the rules sends the wrong message. And, they argue, it sets children loose in a digital world they may not be prepared for — exposing them to the real-life threats of inappropriate content, contact from strangers and the growing incidents of bullying by computer. “Not only are kids lying about their age, but more often than not, parents teach them to lie about their age,” said Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft. Ms. Boyd said this ran counter to the goal of getting parents more constructively involved in children’s online activities, which was one aim of the legislation that spawned the age restrictions in the first place. At the same time, the practice is hard to stop, say Web sites and federal officials. Sites try to catch under-age users — “We are not burying our head in the sand,” said Joe Sullivan, the chief security officer at Facebook — but verifying a young person’s age over the Internet is a task that ranges from tricky to near impossible. Cristina Flores, 44, a nurse in San Francisco, said she had decided to allow her 11-year-old son to get onto Facebook rather than deny it to him and risk that he would sign up behind her back. Besides, she said, she did not realize there were any age restrictions on the site. “It’s not like there’s a legal age limit for being on the Internet,” Ms. Flores said. Her son Jake said he had told Facebook that he was 15: “I just picked something random.” In one of Jake’s fifth-grade classes at Commodore Sloat Elementary school, 15 of the 30 students said they had Facebook accounts. “And you should see all the third-graders who are on,” said Aundrea Kaune, the class’s teacher. Last year, she went onto Facebook and was shocked by how many students from the school were there. “It’s lying — and about age,” Ms. Kaune said. “What happens when they want to drink beer?” The risks for under-age members of social networks are not theoretical. Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer of Myspace, who now runs an Internet safety consulting business, recounted a recent incident from his business. In New York State, he said, an 11-year-old boy accepted a friend request on Facebook from a girl in his class. But the girl’s account was fake, and the person behind it began posting images of the boy on sex-oriented sites, along with nasty comments. When the boy’s images started showing up in Google searches, the school suspected that he had posted them and summoned his parents. Other children began picking on him. “It can be a living nightmare for an 11-year-old who just wanted to hang out with his friends,” Mr. Nigam said. In 2006, 31 percent of 12-year-olds in the United States were using social networks, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. That figure grew to 38 percent by mid-2009, when the survey was last conducted. ComScore, a firm that measures Internet traffic, estimates that 3.6 million of Facebook’s 153 million monthly visitors in this country are under 12. Some of those visitors may not have Facebook accounts and may simply be visiting public pages, comScore said. (It reached that figure by cross-referencing its own traffic analysis with household demographics.) Internet companies have set up the rules against under-age users because they must comply with the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, passed in 1998, which says Web sites that collect information from children younger than 13 must obtain parental consent. Obtaining that consent is complex and expensive, so companies like Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube , reject anyone who tries to sign up using an age below 13. Google, Facebook and Yahoo all declined to talk about how many children jump the barriers, but they say they try to enforce the rules. Mr. Sullivan of Facebook said the company blocked new registrations or deleted the accounts of thousands of under-age users every day. But some children’s advocates say these companies are not publicly owning up to the scope of the problem. “There is no question that Facebook has to be aware that they have a very large number of under-13 members on the site,” said Larry Magid, a co-director of ConnectSafely, a nonprofit group that provides information to parents and children. Mr. Magid and other researchers say the social networks fail to provide under-age users with tools that might protect them. “Facebook has no resources to help the younger kids, and that’s not good,” he said. Facebook does have measures to protect older teenagers from predators, but children who pretend to be older than 18 are bypassing even those safeguards, which place restrictions on how widely minors can share information and who can contact them on the site. The Federal Trade Commission, which is charged with enforcing the child protection act, acknowledges the problem. But Mary K. Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the commission, said there was no good solution. In 2008, state attorneys general concerned about child predators helped set up a task force to research online age verification. It concluded that creating a reliable system would be extremely difficult. “I don’t think anyone knows how to prevent a kid from lying about their age,” Ms. Engle said. Victoria Lai, 14, a ninth grader at Galileo Academy of Science and Technology in San Francisco, is a repeat offender. “The first one was Yahoo, in second grade,” said Victoria. “I did it to play games.” She followed up by faking her birth date to join Myspace, Facebook and YouTube. “I always say I was born in 1986, not 1996, because it’s just one number different. Easy to remember.” In Victoria’s fifth-period honors English class, all 32 students said they had faked their birth year to gain access to one site or another. Victoria’s father, Brian Lai, an airline mechanic, said young people “have to have experience using the Internet. It’s the future.” He said Victoria told him she was going onto the sites, and he told her: “It’s not good to lie, but you can make an exception.” Jerry Ng, Victoria’s 14-year-old cousin, agreed. “It’s one thing to lie to a person,” he said. “But this is lying to a computer.” Jerry and Victoria said they were using the sites responsibly: chatting with friends, checking out videos and playing games. And Victoria said her fib had caused only one real hiccup; she appears to be stuck with her incorrect age. After she turned 13, she tried unsuccessfully to turn her birth date back to her real one. “It wouldn’t let me,” she said. “So I guess I’ll just leave it at that.”


An Early Peek at What Might Be Under the Tree

Abstract: Halloween isn’t even here yet, yet many retailers have Christmas on the brain. And no wonder: Holiday sales could spell the difference between recession and recovery for them. According to a new survey by the NPD Group, 30 percent of consumers plan to spend less money on holiday gifts this year than they did a year ago. Eleven percent plan to spend more, while 59 percent expect to spend around the same amount. Which companies will be the biggest beneficiaries of what looks to be a somewhat restrained giving season? Thirty-four percent of consumers surveyed planned to buy toys, followed by movies, books, electronics, accessories and music. No. 1 on the giving list? Nearly 50 percent of those surveyed said they planned to buy apparel. That probably means that makers of the dreaded Christmas sweater are likely to stay in business for yet another year.

Christmas
Sales
Gifts
Shopping and Retail


With the Mideast a Priority for Both Campaigns, McCain Intensifies His Attack

Abstract: ROCHESTER, N.H. — Senator John McCain and his campaign sharply stepped up criticism of Senator Barack Obama on Tuesday as a craven and naïve traveler to the Middle East who, as Mr. McCain put it at a raucous town-hall-style meeting here, “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, vigorously condemned Mr. Obama for refusing to say, even as Mr. Obama acknowledged that security in Iraq had improved, that the surge in United States troop strength he opposed during the primaries had worked. “He was wrong then, he is wrong now, and he still fails to acknowledge that the surge has succeeded,” Mr. McCain said. “Remarkable.” Mr. McCain’s advisers, who are seething about the extensive news coverage of Mr. Obama’s trip, went further in a conference call on Tuesday when Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s chief foreign policy aide, sarcastically asked if Mr. Obama’s foreign policy credentials were based on his attendance at a junior high school in Indonesia or a trip he took to Pakistan during spring break in college. Mr. Scheunemann added that Mr. Obama “seems to forget that we have elections in this country, not coronations.” But at the public forum at the Opera House here, Mr. McCain also displayed the bumpy and sometimes hapless nature of his own effort to prove that he is the candidate with the sterling foreign policy credentials. While he calmly fielded angry questions about his Iraq policy from a member of the audience — and invited her twice to follow up as the audience booed her — he also referred, for the third time this month, to Czechoslovakia, a country that has not existed since 1993 when it was split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This time Mr. McCain caught himself, although he was a few seconds too late. “I’m very concerned about Russia,” he told an overwhelmingly friendly crowd. “I’m very concerned that just recently, because the Czechs agreed with us on a missile defense system, that they cut the gas supplies, the oil supplies, to the Republic of Czechoslovakia — excuse me, the Czech Republic.” Mr. McCain then added: “The Czech Republic is a very staunch ally and friend. And as you know, the Czech Republic and Slovakia split years ago and from time to time some of us misstate and say Czechoslovakia, when the fact is, it’s the Czech Republic.” Mr. McCain’s advisers said he would talk this week about jobs and other bread-and-butter issues of concern to voters while Mr. Obama met with heads of state overseas, but Mr. McCain’s campaign has in fact been in constant reaction mode to Mr. Obama’s lavishly covered foreign trip, which continues on to Israel on Wednesday. (All three network news anchors are traveling to the Middle East and Europe for interviews with Mr. Obama. In contrast, no anchors and only two network correspondents traveled to Colombia and Mexico with Mr. McCain earlier this month, and no network anchors traveled for Mr. McCain’s trip to the Middle East and Europe in March.) In response, the McCain campaign on Tuesday released a video on its Web site called “Obama Love,” which was set to the tune of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” by Frankie Valli and featured some of the more enthralled comments about Mr. Obama from television journalists in recent months. Late last night, the McCain campaign kept it up when aides handed out luggage tags to the traveling press that read “McCain Press Corps: JV Squad, ‘Left Behind to Report in America.’ ” The words were translated into French on the opposite side. And in what appeared to be an effort to attract some news media attention to Mr. McCain’s modestly covered foray this week to the swing states of Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania, his campaign did little to tamp down speculation that he might announce his vice-presidential pick as early as Tuesday. The rumors centered largely on Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who ran against Mr. McCain in the primaries. The buzz began Monday when the columnist Robert D. Novak posted an item saying that sources close to the McCain campaign were “suggesting” he would announce his selection this week. On Monday night, en route from Buffalo to Manchester, N.H., reporters went to the front of Mr. McCain’s plane to get a response. Mr. McCain’s initial reaction was not encouraging. “What do you want, you little jerks?” he asked, using what his staff members say is a term of endearment. When asked if he was going to announce his running mate on Tuesday, Mr. McCain grinned and waved off the question. His traveling press secretary, Brooke Buchanan, then said cryptically, “We have no announcements today.” On Tuesday, as the rumors ricocheted through political and news media circles, Mr. Novak went on Fox News to say that he might have been used by the McCain campaign to drum up interest in his candidacy during Mr. Obama’s big week. Mr. Novak told Fox that he had received the tip from a “very senior McCain aide” and that the campaign had “suggested I put it out.” Since then, he said, he had been told by “certain people” that it might have been a ruse. But Mr. McCain nonetheless talked up Mr. Romney at the forum here as someone who appears on television and “does a better job for me than he did for himself.”

Middle East
Presidential Election of 2008
United States International Relations
McCain John
Obama Barack
Scheunemann Randy


Obama Says He Can Envision Nuclear Deal With Iran

Abstract: WASHINGTON — President Obama said Saturday that he could envision a final diplomatic agreement with Iran that would let the country’s government enrich nuclear material for power production with enough restrictions to assure Israel and the rest of the world that it could not produce a nuclear weapon. But Mr. Obama said there was no guarantee that such a deal would emerge as Iran and Western nations negotiate during the next six months. “I wouldn’t say that it’s more than 50-50,” Mr. Obama said during a conversation at a conference run by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, part of the Brookings Institution, in Washington. “But we have to try.” The president was interviewed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American film and television producer who has been a longtime Democratic donor and the founder of the center that bears his name. Mr. Saban pressed the president to respond to Israeli skepticism about the negotiations. Mr. Obama repeatedly acknowledged that Iran’s leaders should not be trusted and said that the United States and Israel were united in their intentions to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He said Western nations should assume that the ideology of Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, is “one that is hostile to the United States and Israel.” But he contrasted his own views with those of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Mr. Obama said Mr. Netanyahu believed that further sanctions and threats of military action would eventually cause Iran to cave to Western demands for it to dismantle its nuclear program. Mr. Obama said the idea that Iran might someday simply give in “does not reflect an honest understanding of the Iranian people, the Iranian regime.” Answering a question from an Israeli journalist in the audience, Mr. Obama declined to discuss the conversations about Iran he has had with Mr. Netanyahu, who is also known as Bibi. But the president conceded that the two men were not always in agreement. “I will say that Bibi and I have very candid conversations,” Mr. Obama said. “There are occasionally significant tactical disagreements.” Mr. Netanyahu is to appear at the conference by satellite on Sunday. During the 40-minute conversation, Mr. Saban also asked the president about the chances for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Mr. Obama said he believed that a framework for progress could be reached within the next several months. “That gets us to a point where everybody recognizes that it’s better to move forward than to go backward,” Mr. Obama said. The president said Gen. John R. Allen, who led the coalition effort in Afghanistan before his retirement this year and is now advising the State Department, had concluded that it was possible to preserve Israeli security even with the creation of a Palestinian state. But he said that it would be up to the Israelis and the Palestinians to reach an agreement that both sides could live with. “There are people of good will on both sides that recognize the status quo is not sustainable over the long term,” he said. Secretary of State John Kerry, who returned on Friday night from his eighth trip to Israel and the occupied West Bank as the top American diplomat, followed Mr. Obama with a speech that sought to persuade Israel’s supporters that a comprehensive peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians was not only possible but would make Israel more secure. “I am not a masochist,” said Mr. Kerry, who acknowledged that there were many experts who believed that his Middle East diplomacy would ultimately fail. “I am undertaking this because I believe in the possibilities.” “We approach this challenge believing Israel has to be strong to make peace, but that peace will also make Israel stronger,” he added. Elaborating on this argument, Mr. Kerry referred to the ideas for establishing security on the West Bank under a security plan that he and General Allen presented to Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday. Mr. Kerry said that the plan developed by General Allen would “make sure that the border on the Jordan River will be as strong as any in the world, so that there will be no question about the security of the citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, living to the west.”

Iran
Nuclear weapon
Hassan Rouhani
Benjamin Netanyahu
Barack Obama
US Foreign Policy


Former N.F.L. Players Seek Extension on Opting Out of Concussion Settlement

Abstract: Several former players who sued the N.F.L. for hiding the dangers of concussions from them asked the judge overseeing the settlement of the case to extend the date for opting out of the settlement. All retired N.F.L. players have until Tuesday to approve or opt out of a settlement that includes up to $5 million to players with severe neurological conditions. Players who accept the settlement forgo the right to sue the league over concussions. Plaintiffs can preserve that right by opting out. Lawyers representing Dave Duerson and other former players asked the judge, Anita B. Brody of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, to allow them to opt out after Tuesday because the benefits that players may receive in the settlement are still unclear. According to a filing with the court last week, nine players have opted out so far. All 20,000 or so retired players are covered by the settlement. Brody has scheduled a fairness hearing for Nov. 19, when she will hear arguments for and against the settlement, which was provisionally approved in July. PETERSON TO PLEAD NOT GUILTY Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson plans to plead not guilty to a child abuse charge at a court appearance in Texas, a spokeswoman for his lawyer said Tuesday. Peterson was scheduled to be in court Wednesday in Conroe. Mary Flood, a spokeswoman for Peterson’s lawyer, Rusty Hardin, said that if asked at the hearing, Peterson would plead not guilty to a charge of injury to a child. Peterson is accused of spanking his 4-year-old son with a small tree branch earlier this year. If convicted, Peterson faces up to two years in prison. (AP) ACCUSED VIKING PRACTICES Minnesota Vikings defensive tackle Tom Johnson is practicing with the team as usual following his weekend arrest on trespassing and disorderly conduct charges. Johnson said his status is “business as usual” while his case is pending. Coach Mike Zimmer said the team is “still collecting facts” about the situation, which police said involved the use of chemical spray and a stun gun to subdue Johnson early Sunday when he refused to leave a downtown restaurant after closing time. (AP) LASER POINTER COMPLAINT Two Buffalo Bills players said someone shined a laser pointer at them Sunday at Detroit’s Ford Field and the N.F.L. is looking into their complaint. The league spokesman Michael Signora said the N.F.L. is investigating and attempting to identify the person responsible. Quarterback Kyle Orton and holder Colton Schmidt said they had a laser directed at them during Buffalo’s 17-14 win over the Lions. The league will share the results of its investigation with the police, Signora said. All four North American major professional sports leagues bar the use of laser pointers at their facilities. (AP)

Concussion
Adrian Peterson
Bills
Football
Lawsuits
NFL
Super Bowl
Super Bowl 2015
Detroit Lions


Isner and Tsonga Cruise at Winston-Salem Open

Abstract: John Isner, the defending champion, and top-seeded Jo-Wilfried Tsonga had straight-set victories to set up a semifinal match at the Winston-Salem Open in North Carolina. Isner had 21 aces in beating David Goffin, 7-6 (7-5), 6-3, and Tsonga eased past sixth-seeded Marcel Granollers, 6-1, 6-2. In the other quarterfinals, second-seeded Tomas Berdych rallied against Steve Darcis, 4-6, 6-2, 6-0, and seventh-seeded Sam Querrey beat fourth-seeded Alexandr Dolgopolov, 7-5, 4-6, 7-6 (7-3). ¶ Caroline Wozniacki fought through an injury to her right knee to beat Dominika Cibulkova, 6-2, 6-1, in the quarterfinals of the New Haven Open. Wozniacki, seeded third, advanced to a semifinal against Maria Kirilenko, who beat Olga Govortsova, 6-1, 6-2. Petra Kvitova clinched the United States Open Series title with a 6-3, 6-3 victory over Lucie Safarova. Kvitova is eligible for a bonus of up to $1 million, depending on her placement in the United States Open next week. Kvitova will next play fourth-seeded Sara Errani, who beat fifth-seeded Marion Bartoli, 6-4, 6-2.


Curt Schilling Sock Sold at Auction

Abstract: A bloody sock worn by Curt Schilling while pitching for the Boston Red Sox in Game 2 of the 2004 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals was sold for $92,613 at an auction in Manhattan. Schilling had loaned his sock to the Hall of Fame’s museum, but he decided to sell it after his video game company went bankrupt. At the same auction, the jersey worn by Mike Eruzione in the United States team’s victory over the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics was sold for almost $660,000.

Curt Schilling
Auction
Red Sox
World Series
Olympics
Baseball
Collecting
Souvenir


North Dakota: Pipeline Rupture Spills 3 Million Gallons of Saltwater

Abstract: Earthen barriers have been set up across a creek and water was being tested Thursday around the site of a nearly three-million-gallon leak of saltwater generated by oil drilling, the largest spill of its kind in North Dakota’s current oil rush. The berms were built at Blacktail Creek to prevent potentially contaminated water from flowing out of the creek and into a bigger body of water that leads into the Missouri River. The pipeline operator, Summit Midstream Partners, and state inspectors will keep testing the soil and water at Blacktail Creek and the larger Little Muddy Creek. The saltwater produced by oil and natural gas production is much saltier than seawater and may also contain petroleum and residue from hydraulic fracturing. The spill was detected Jan. 6 during a periodic inspection by the company, which said Thursday that the cause of the rupture in the pipeline and when exactly it happened were still unknown.

North Dakota
Pipelines
Summit Midstream Partners
Water pollution
Oil and Gasoline
Fracking


Parker Helps Spurs Take Series Lead

Abstract: Tony Parker had 23 points hours after the birth of his first child and the host San Antonio Spurs never trailed in a 109-103 victory over the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday, taking a 3-2 lead in their first-round series. Manu Ginobili had 19 points and Tiago Splitter added 17 points and 12 rebounds as the Spurs regained home-court advantage against their intrastate rival. Tim Duncan added 16 points and 12 rebounds and Kawhi Leonard had 15 points for San Antonio. Vince Carter scored 28 points, making numerous heavily contested shots for Dallas, which will host Game 6 on Friday night. After averaging 16 points in the first four games of the series, the Mavericks’ Dirk Nowitzki found his shot and scored 26 points. Carter’s 3-pointer with three minutes left pulled Dallas within 98-94 but Parker followed a minute later with his only 3-pointer of the game, punctuating the shot with a loud scream. Parker had his finest start since the series opener despite playing on little sleep after his fiancée Axelle Francine gave birth to their son, Josh, in the early morning. Parker mixed in three driving layups and two midrange jumpers to start the game shooting 5 for 7. “Coming into the game, I told him this is perfect for you,” Duncan said. “This is what he does in situations like this where he doesn’t get a lot of sleep or is in a stressful situation.” ROCKETS 108, TRAIL BLAZERS 98 Dwight Howard had 22 points and 14 rebounds to help host Houston win and stay alive against Portland. Jeremy Lin added 21 points for the Rockets, and Chandler Parsons had 20. Wesley Matthews had 27 points and Damian Lillard scored 26 for the Trail Blazers, who will host Game 6 on Friday night with a 3-2 series lead. SHARE OF NETS FOR SALE Even with the Nets ascendant, Bruce C. Ratner is looking to sell his and his company’s remaining stake in the team. A spokesman for Ratner confirmed a Wall Street Journal report that he had hired Evercore Partners to advise him on the sale of 20 percent of the team, which he owns with Forest City Ratner, Forest City Enterprises and other investors. Ratner led a group that paid $300 million for the Nets in 2004. The Nets were part of Ratner’s broader strategy to build the Atlantic Yards complex in Brooklyn and move the team from New Jersey to Barclays Center. In 2009, Ratner sold 80 percent of the team and 45 percent of the arena to the Russian billionaire Mikhail D. Prokhorov. RICHARD SANDOMIR

Spurs
Mavericks
Basketball
Bruce C Ratner
Brooklyn Nets


Lack of Attention to Farming Is Catching Up With India

Abstract: BAMNOD, India — The 50-year-old farmer knew from experience that his onion crop was doomed when torrential rains pounded his fields throughout September, a month when the Indian monsoon normally peters out. For lack of modern agricultural systems in this part of rural India , his land does not have adequate drainage trenches, and he has no safe, dry place to store onions. The farmer, Arun Namder Talele, said he lost 70 percent of his onion crop on his five-acre farm here, about 70 miles north of the western city of Aurangabad. “There are no limits to my losses,” Mr. Talele said. Mr. Talele’s misfortune, and that of many other farmers here, is a grim reminder of a persistent fact: India, despite its ambitions as an emerging economic giant, still struggles to feed its 1.1 billion people. Four decades after the Green Revolution seemed to be solving India’s food problems, nearly half of Indian children age 5 or younger are malnourished. And soaring food prices , a problem around the world, are especially acute in India. Globally, floods in Australia and drought in China have helped send food prices everywhere soaring — on fears the world will see a repeat of shortages in 2007 and 2008 that caused food riots in some poor countries, including Egypt . While India’s agricultural problems are part of this bigger global puzzle, in many ways India’s food challenges are more entrenched and systemic than those faced elsewhere. Western investors may take eager note of India’s economic growth rate of nearly 9 percent a year. But that statistic rings hollow in India’s vast rural areas. Agriculture employs more than half the population, but it accounts for only 15 percent of the economy — and it has grown an average of only about 3 percent in recent years. Critics say Indian policy makers have failed to follow up on the country’s investments in agricultural technology of the 1960s and ’70s, as they focused on more glamorous, urban industries like information technology, financial services and construction. There is no agribusiness of the type known in the United States , with highly mechanized farms growing thousands of acres of food crops, because Indian laws and customs bar corporations from farming land directly for food crops. The laws also make it difficult to assemble large land holdings. Yet even as India’s farming still depends on manual labor and the age-old vicissitudes of nature, demand for food has continued to rise — because of a growing population and rising incomes, especially in the middle and upper classes. As a result, India is importing ever greater amounts of some staples like beans and lentils (up 157 percent from 2004 to 2009) and cooking oil (up 68 percent in the same period). Food prices are rising faster in India than in almost any other major economy — and faster than they did during the 2007-8 surge. In December 2010, India’s food prices jumped 13.7 from the year earlier, while inflation for all commodities, heavily weighted by the food number, stood at 8.4 percent. A snapshot number released in mid-January showed Indian food prices rising even faster — more than 17 percent over the same period in 2009 — as the cost of onions, fruit, eggs, milk and other commodities rose. Food inflation hits especially hard here because Indians — most of whom live on less than $2 a day — spend a bigger portion of their disposable incomes on food than people in other big, developing economies like China and Brazil . “This is the worst form of taxation on the poorest of the poor,” said Ashok Gulati, Asia director for the International Food Policy Research Institute. Indian government officials have scrambled to make up the shortage of vegetables like onions by importing them. These short-term efforts have helped; onions are now available at 20 rupees a kilo (about 20 cents a pound) in Mumbai , down more than 70 percent from their recent highs. But experts say the widening gap between agriculture’s anemic supply and the rising demand for food calls for fundamental changes in farming policies. During the Green Revolution the government invested heavily in rural agriculture, with an emphasis on hybrid seeds, fertilizers and irrigation canals. More recent policy makers have not built on that early success. Most Indian farmers still do not have irrigation systems, and waste and inefficiency have severely depleted precious ground water. Although many farmers have access to free or subsidized electricity that can be used to pump water, few receive power for more than a few hours a day. Mr. Talele, the farmer in Bamnod, gets only four hours of electricity during the day and four hours at night. During those periods he pumps well water that he then floods into his fields because he cannot afford the sprinklers or drip irrigation that would more efficiently and effectively water his crops. And rural India has far too few temperature-controlled warehouses that could help farmers and the nation build up reserves as a hedge against poor growing seasons. When Mr. Talele’s vegetables are ready for harvest he immediately takes them to wholesale markets, which are controlled by committees of local traders. “Whatever the market decides, that’s the price we get,” he said. Indian officials acknowledge that the country needs to increase investment in irrigation, encourage competition in wholesale and retail markets, and provide targeted food subsidies to the poor. And they also have to provide more education and jobs to villagers, so fewer people are forced to live off the land. Experts say India needs to make changes like some of the ones China made, beginning in the late 1970s, when it started investing heavily in agriculture and eased regulations on farming. As recently as 1977, Chinese and Indian farmers harvested roughly the same amount of wheat for each acre that they planted. But by 2009, United Nations data shows that wheat yields were 1.7 times higher in China than in India. Kaushik Basu, a Cornell University professor who is also the chief economic adviser to India’s finance minister, says he now sees more willingness by Indian officials to reform agriculture policies. But outside experts like Mr. Gulati are skeptical that real change will come from the government. The ruling coalition has been hobbled by corruption scandals, and an energized opposition last year effectively blocked proceedings in Parliament. Some Indian farmers are investing on their own, finding ways to circumvent the government when necessary and using subsidies when they are available. About 10 miles from Mr. Talele’s farm in the village of Pahur, Sandeep Ram Karshanbakr’s farming income has jumped to 200,000 rupees ($4,400) a year, from 80,000 rupees ($1,800) three years ago. He credits the improvement to a drip irrigation system he bought from an Indian company, Jain Irrigation. The government paid half the 128,000 rupees ($2,800) cost of the system. That has cut the amount of water and electricity Mr. Karshanbakr uses by about half on his three acres, while improving yields twofold to fivefold on his crops of chilis, cauliflower, eggplants, tomatoes and cotton. Mr. Karshanbakr says he is now considering buying or leasing more land. But many farmers, like Mr. Talele, say they simply cannot afford such irrigation equipment — even with government subsidies as high as 50 percent of the sticker price. “It’s still too expensive,” he said. Anil Jain, managing director at Jain Irrigation, said India needs to help farmers like Mr. Talele invest. “Agriculture can grow at 6 to 8 percent,” he said. “But we have to create opportunity and income in rural areas.”

India Agriculture Food Price Malnutrition


Verdict Due Monday in Chinese Murder Trial

Abstract: BEIJING — A Chinese court is expected to issue a verdict on Monday in the murder trial of Gu Kailai, the wife of a prominent politician, who is reported to have all but confessed to killing a British businessman during what prosecutors say was a dispute over money. The case, replete with international intrigue and accusations of betrayal and an official cover-up, upended the career of Ms. Gu’s ambitious husband, Bo Xilai , and shook the ruling Communist Party as it prepares for a politically delicate transfer of power to a new generation of leaders. Zhang Mingwu, vice director of the Anhui Province government information office, confirmed that a verdict would be announced Monday morning by the Hefei Intermediate People’s Court. Ms. Gu was tried Aug. 9 by the court along with a trusted family aide, both of whom are accused in the poisoning death of the Briton, Neil Heywood, in a hotel room in Chongqing, the municipality run by Mr. Bo until he was deposed in March. During the trial, which lasted one day, Ms. Gu acknowledged that she got Mr. Heywood drunk on whiskey in November and then poured poison into his mouth after he became sick and asked for water, according to an account of the trial released by the official Xinhua news agency. Ms. Gu, the account said, plotted to kill her longtime friend and business associate because she feared he would harm her son if he did not receive the 14 million pounds, or about $22 million, he claimed was owed to him from a failed real estate deal. Her government-appointed lawyers have also said Ms. Gu suffered from bouts of mental illness. The official account has not been independently corroborated and some analysts have questioned some of the details released by Xinhua. The British government has declined to comment on the trial. Legal experts do agree on one thing: Ms. Gu will be found guilty but will probably escape execution; her accomplice, Zhang Xiaojun, will probably be treated more leniently given that Ms. Gu acknowledged having procured and administered the poison, a commercially available product used to exterminate animals. A day after Ms. Gu’s trial, four police officials from Chongqing were tried in the same court on charges that they helped cover up the crime. No verdict has been announced. With Ms. Gu’s case out of the way, party leaders are expected to begin tackling the other, more politically delicate aspects of the scandal. The next figure to go on trial will be Wang Lijun, the former Chongqing police chief who briefly sought refuge in the American Consulate in Chengdu last February and reportedly divulged incriminating details of the murder to American officials. Mr. Wang, who was said to have feared Mr. Bo’s wrath, voluntarily departed the consulate in the custody of officials from Beijing. He is expected to be tried on a variety of charges, including treason. Mr. Wang will probably be defended by Wang Yuncai, a lawyer who has represented him in previous legal proceedings. Reached by phone on Friday, Ms. Wang, of the Longan Law Firm, declined to discuss the case but said she had yet to receive word about a start date. After Mr. Wang’s case is adjudicated, party elders will have to grapple with the fate of Mr. Bo, the son of a revered revolutionary and a so-called princeling whose enduring popularity calls for a well-considered punishment. Mr. Bo, who also lost his spot on the Politburo, has not been heard from since he was detained last spring. So far, he has been accused only of violating party rules.

Gu Kailai
Bo Xilai
Decisions and Verdicts
Murders and Attempted Murders
Heywood Neil
China


Open Network Foundation Pursues New Standards

Abstract: MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Acknowledging that so-called cloud computing will blur the distinctions between computers and networks, about two dozen big information technology companies plan to announce on Tuesday a new standards-setting group for computer networking. The group, to be called the Open Networking Foundation, hopes to help standardize a set of technologies pioneered at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, and meant to make small and large networks programmable in much the same way that individual computers are. The changes, if widely adopted, would have implications for global telecommunications networks and large corporate data centers, but also for small household networks. The benefits, proponents say, would be more flexible and secure networks that are less likely to suffer from congestion. Someday, they say, networks might even be less expensive to build and operate. The new approach could allow for setting up on-demand “express lanes” for voice and data traffic that is time-sensitive. Or it might let big telecommunications companies, like Verizon or AT&T, use software to combine several fiber optic backbones temporarily for particularly heavy information loads and then have them automatically separate when a data rush hour is over. For households, the new capabilities might let Internet service providers offer remote services like home security or energy control. The foundation’s organizers also say the new technologies will offer ways to improve computer security and could possibly enhance individual privacy within the e-commerce and social networking markets. Those markets are the fastest-growing uses for computing and network resources. While the new capabilities could be crucial to network engineers, for business users and consumers the changes might be no more noticeable than advances in plumbing, heating and air-conditioning. Everything might work better, but most users would probably not know — or care — why or how. The members of the Open Networking Foundation will include Broadcom, Brocade, Ciena, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Facebook, Force10, Google, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Juniper, Marvell, Microsoft, NEC, Netgear, NTT, Riverbed Technology, Verizon, VMWare and Yahoo. “This answers a question that the entire industry has had, and that is how do you provide owners and operators of large networks with the flexibility of control that they want in a standardized fashion,” said Nick McKeown, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford, where his and colleagues’ work forms part of the technical underpinnings, called OpenFlow. The effort is a departure from the traditional way the Internet works. As designed by military and academic experts in the 1960s, the Internet has been based on interconnected computers that send and receive packets of data, paying little heed to the content and making few distinctions among the various types of senders and receivers of information. The intelligence in the original Internet was meant to reside largely at the end points of the network — the computers — while the specialized routing computers were relatively dumb post offices of various size, mainly confined to reading addresses and transferring packets of data to adjacent systems. But these days, when cloud computing means a lot of the information is stored and processed on computers out on the network, there is growing need for more intelligent control systems to orchestrate the behavior of thousands of routing machines. It will make it possible, for example, for managers of large networks to program their network to prioritize certain types of data, perhaps to ensure quality of service or to add security to certain portions of a network. The designers argue that because OpenFlow should open up hardware and software systems that control the flow of Internet data packets, systems that have been closed and proprietary, it will cause a new round of innovation focused principally upon the vast computing systems known as cloud computers. ”This is a pragmatic solution,” said David Farber, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon who was one of the pioneers of data networking technology. “The idea of moving intelligence to the end points of the network was one of the original design points of the Internet,” Mr. Farber said. But he noted that as the network evolved to offer sophisticated advanced services through centralized cloud computers, including the delivery of digital voice and video, it became less feasible to continue relying on decentralized network design. Mr. Farber noted that there have been other research projects aimed at redesigning the Internet. For example, the National Science Foundation, in addition to supporting the OpenFlow initiative, has financed the Global Environment for Network Innovations , or GENI. Open Flow appears to have generated broad industry support, he said, but it must still prove itself in the market. A number of networking companies, including Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper, have already produced prototype systems that support OpenFlow technology. Morever, at least one Silicon Valley start-up, Nicira Networks , is now testing OpenFlow products that are meant to enter the cloud computing market later this year. “If you look at really big companies like Google and Amazon, they take really smart programmers and give them a problem like search or automating storage and then turn the crank and out pops a great system,” said Martin Casado, Nicira’s chief technologist and one of the members of the OpenFlow research project at Stanford. But Mr. Casado noted that in the past the one part of the system that could not be programmed was the network. “This customizes the network to the applications that are actually being run.”

Open Network Foundation
Cloud Computing
Computer Security
Computers and the Internet
Standards and Standardization


Motive in Double Killing 42 Years Ago Is Revealed

Abstract: STAUNTON, Va. (AP) — When she was a teenager working part time at an ice cream parlor in 1967, Sharron Diane Crawford Smith shot two co-workers in the head after they mocked her for being lesbian, a terrible secret at the time. Ms. Smith confessed to the crime, and revealed her motive, when she was terminally ill last November, and the police made the information public Friday, four days after Ms. Smith died. Ms. Smith ensured some mystery would outlive her, however, when she also claimed that the lead detective in the case, who is now dead, helped her bury the murder weapon. Investigators said on Friday that they would try to verify that accusation and to find out why one of their own might have hidden Ms. Smith’s guilt in a case that has practically become folklore in this city of 25,000 in the Shenandoah Valley. “If he had anything to do with covering this thing up,” the commonwealth’s attorney, Raymond C. Robertson, said as residents lined the City Council chambers to hear the news, “we are hell-bent on finding out what it was and why.” Ms. Smith, 61, died Monday, more than a month after her arrest in the deaths of the victims, Constance Smootz Hevener, 19, and her 20-year-old sister-in-law, Carolyn Hevener Perry, on April 11, 1967. Ms. Smith told investigators she shot both women in the head in the back room of the ice cream shop because they teased her about being homosexual, Mr. Robertson and the police chief, Jim Williams, said. “That was different in 1967 than it is today, extremely different,” Mr. Robertson said. “It would have been a matter that it would have had different ramifications that it would today if it had been made public.” Ms. Smith told the police she gave the .25-caliber pistol she used to shoot the women to the detective, David Bocock, and they buried it. Detective Bocock died in 2006, leaving a wife who is now in a nursing home. The police are investigating his involvement, although they said other aspects of Ms. Smith’s confession had checked out. “We know that’s what she told us,” Mr. Robertson said, “and we’re trying to corroborate every aspect of her confession.” He did not know the extent of the relationship between Ms. Smith and Detective Bocock, though he said she had practiced shooting at Detective Bocock’s farm. Ms. Smith took $138 from the store as she fled, which led the police to think it was a robbery. The police initially focused on William Thomas, who told them he saw two men running from the scene. Mr. Thomas was tried for one of the murders and acquitted, but the other murder indictment remained on his record until Dec. 30, when Mr. Robertson said the police were satisfied that he had nothing to do with the murders. Mr. Thomas said it was tough to have that hanging over his head for 40 years, though it could have been worse. “My loss is not comparable to what happened to those families,” he said recently. Ms. Smith moved away for a long time after the killings, got married and had two daughters, both of whom have declined to speak with The Associated Press. About two decades after the killings, Ms. Smith returned to Staunton without her husband and moved in with a woman, living with her new partner until her death. Her partner also has refused interview requests. The investigation meandered until last summer, when the police heard from Joyce Bradshaw, who worked with Ms. Smith at her other job in 1967. Ms. Bradshaw said she went out to grab a burger with Ms. Smith about a week before the shootings and that Ms. Smith showed her a gun and told her she had two bullets — one for her stepfather, who had sexually abused her, and one for “that Hevener girl.” After the shootings, Ms. Bradshaw said, she told Detective Bocock about Ms. Smith’s statements. The detective came back to her a couple of days later and told her that Ms. Smith had taken a polygraph test and passed it, and that the bullets did not match Ms. Smith’s gun. Ms. Bradshaw said Detective Bocock also mentioned that Ms. Smith was a good shot, something she took as enough of a threat that she was afraid to go back to police after that. “I tried 41 years ago, but it just didn’t work out,” Ms. Bradshaw said. “But I always knew that she was the one.” Chief Williams said the police had not focused on Ms. Smith until recently because their records indicated she had been cleared. Carolyn Perry’s widower, Danny Perry, said he was glad that he knew at least who the killer was. “We’ll just have to wait and see down the road the real why and if there was a cover-up,” Mr. Perry said. Mr. Robertson said that he worked with Detective Bocock for more than a decade and that he always knew him to be a “genuinely good, responsible and competent police detective.” The authorities promised to continue to seek the truth. “While we are continuing to investigate this matter,” Chief Williams said, “the fact remains that there will likely be questions surrounding this case we will never be able to answer.”

Confessions
Murders and Attempted Murders
Staunton (Va)


In Saudi Arabia, Royal Funds Buy Peace, for Now

Abstract: RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — As one nation after another has battled uprisings across the Arab world, the one major country spared is also its richest — Saudi Arabia , where a fresh infusion of money has so far bought order. The kingdom is spending $130 billion to pump up salaries, build housing and finance religious organizations, among other outlays, effectively neutralizing most opposition. King Abdullah began wielding his checkbook right after leaders in Tunisia and Egypt fell, seeking to placate the public and reward a loyal religious establishment. The king’s reserves, swollen by more than $214 billion in oil revenue last year, have insulated the royal family from widespread demands for change even while some discontent simmers. Saudi Arabia has also relied on its unusually close alliance with the religious establishment that has long helped preserve the power of the royal family. The grand mufti, the highest religious official in the kingdom, rolled out a fatwa saying Islam forbade street protests, and clerics hammered at that message in their Friday sermons. But the first line of defense in this case was the public aid package. King Abdullah paid an extra two months’ salary to government employees and spent $70 billion alone for 500,000 units of low-income housing. As a reward to the religious establishment, he allocated about $200 million to their organizations, including the religious police. Clerics opposed to democratic changes crowed that they had won a great victory over liberal intellectuals. “They don’t care about the security of the country, all they care about is the mingling of genders — they want girls to drive cars, they want to go the beaches to see girls in bathing suits!” roared Mohamed al-Areefy, a popular young cleric, in a recent Friday sermon. Financial support to organizations that intellectuals dislike “was a way to cut out their tongues,” he said. Saudi Arabia, a close ally of the United States , has struggled to preserve what remains of a regional dynamic upended by the Arab Spring — buttressing monarchies and blocking Iran from gaining influence. While the United States has pressed other Arab nations to embrace democratic changes, it has remained largely silent on Saudi Arabia and the kingdom’s efforts to squelch popular revolts in neighboring Bahrain and Oman . Saudi Arabia’s efforts have succeeded in the short run, at home and in its Persian Gulf backyard. But some critics call its strategy of effectively buying off public opinion unsustainable because it fails to address underlying problems. “The problem is that some leaders do not understand what is going on and do not learn the lessons while these things are unfolding in front of their eyes; they do not learn the lessons of history,” said Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, 79, a brother of the king. The prince, whose 14 living children include the billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, said: “These people want to preserve their power, their money and their prestige, so they want to keep the status quo. They are afraid of the word change. This is a problem because they are shortsighted, but the difficulty is I don’t know how to change their way of thinking.” The monarchy has not completely escaped calls for change. There have been at least three petitions, with a group of youths and even some members of the Sahwa, the staunchly conservative religious movement, calling for an elected consultative council. The only major street protest scheduled for March 11 largely fizzled — its organizers were anonymous, and its stated goal of toppling the government lacked broad appeal. In the largely Shiite eastern provinces, though, police officers arrested scores of protesters. The ruling princes have also moved against dissent in other ways, like imposing a new press law with punishments including a roughly $140,000 fine for vaguely defined crimes like threatening national security. Saudis of all stripes say that they are less concerned about democratic elections than about fixing chronic problems, including the lack of housing, unemployment that is officially 10 percent but likely 20 percent or more, corruption, bureaucratic incompetence and transparency on oil revenues. The demand for change in the kingdom long ago evolved into a struggle between puritans and progressives over the country’s future. So the debate prompted by the Arab uprisings is coursing through familiar battle lines here that pit Saudi against Saudi rather than Saudis against their government. The ruling Saud clan has maintained absolute power by ensuring it remains the sole referee in that tussle, so change must emerge from the top. But even senior princes doubt that the very top is interested. The four or five senior royals with real power have also been slowed by illness. “Unfortunately, there is a minority in the royal family who doesn’t want to change; they are a minority, but they are influential,” said Prince Talal, long the family gadfly, nicknamed the “Red Prince” in the 1960s. King Abdullah, 87, is personally widely popular as a kind of national grandfather. His government has put in place what Saudi activists describe as random acts of reform — like improving elementary school education to include English and better science. Elections for more than 200 municipal councils, postponed since 2009, have been rescheduled for Sept. 29. The councils have little power and half their members are appointed, so many Saudis consider them an empty democratic facade. Women who organized a campaign starting more than year ago to win the right to vote were particularly incensed when the government rolled out an old excuse to ban their participation — the difficulty of separating polling stations by gender, as custom dictates. But other groups hope to capitalize on the opening the election could provide. A group called Jidda Youth to the Municipal Council, designed to win a youth seat, has spread to other cities. Some 7,000 young people in Jidda turned out spontaneously as volunteers when floods devastated the city in January, killing 13 people. Fouad al-Farhan, a founder of Jidda Youth and a well-known blogger, said grass-roots action like that is the taproot of change, although forming public organizations remains illegal. “We want to say that we are a third voice; we are so bored of this game of liberals versus conservatives,” he said. The open question is what kind of impact they will have. Among a group of former political prisoners who gather regularly, there is a measure of bitterness that years of confronting the monarchy has not changed much. “They are frustrated and disappointed,” Mohammad F. Qahtani, a human rights activist, said of the men. “They feel that they made one sacrifice after another. They went to jail multiple times, and there has been no response from the public.”


Mexicans Are the Nafta Winners? It’s News to Them

Abstract: APODACA, Mexico — In 30 years at Whirlpool, working at the company’s manufacturing plant in this industrial Mexican town, José Luis Rico has witnessed some pretty major changes. The work force has grown, churning out refrigerators that look more like robots than the simple models of his early career. Fueling the changes was a free-trade agreement among Mexico, Canada and the United States that promised to lift Mexico into the future. What did not seem to go up, however, was Mr. Rico’s salary. After a handful of raises, he still earns well under $10,000 a year — a sum, he argues, that hardly makes Mexico the big winner of the North American Free Trade Agreement that President-elect Donald J. Trump says it is. In fact, to Mr. Rico and many other Mexican workers, politicians and economists, Nafta does not feel much like a win at all. “It’s more like survival,” Mr. Rico said. “I thought it would make my life better, that this agreement would create opportunities for everyone.” “Maybe it has,” he added, nodding toward the Whirlpool logo on the entrance to the complex. “Just not for us.” Mr. Trump made questioning the virtues of Nafta a centerpiece of his campaign, at one point calling it “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere,” and he has not slowed down since his election. On Tuesday alone, he criticized General Motors for shipping cars made in Mexico to the United States, claimed credit for a decision by Ford to cancel plans for a new factory in Mexico, and named a well-known advocate of protectionist policies, Robert Lighthizer, his chief trade negotiator . His argument has driven the narrative that where the American worker lost, the Mexican economy gained. But here in Mexico, there is an increasing belief that Nafta, despite drawing an enormous amount of investment to the country, has been a big disappointment. “At the end of the day, as a development strategy, it should have led to higher sustained growth, generated well-paid salaries and reduced the gap between Mexico and the United States,” said Gerardo Esquivel, an economist at the Colegio de México. “It has remained well below what was hoped for.” Mexico’s economy has grown an average of just 2.5 percent a year under Nafta, a fraction of what was needed to provide the jobs and prosperity its supporters promised. More than half of Mexicans still live below the poverty line, a proportion that remains unchanged from 1993, before the deal went into effect. Wages in Mexico have stagnated for more than a decade, and the stubborn gap between the nation’s rich and poor persists. A majority of workers in Mexico toil in the obscurity of under-the-table jobs at workshops, markets and farms for their survival. New technologies, meanwhile, have cut many jobs while increasing productivity, which is good news for businesses but a blow to the work force. “Mexico is seeing exactly the same phenomenon as in the United States,” said Timothy A. Wise, a research fellow at Tufts University. “Workers have declining bargaining power on both sides of the border.” In part, Nafta’s failure to achieve its potential falls on the Mexican government’s shoulders, experts say. Rather than use the agreement as a launching point to grow and invest in many sectors of the Mexican economy, successive governments viewed the trade deal as a silver bullet for the country’s economic woes. All of this is not lost on Mexicans, despite their government’s defense of Nafta. A recent poll by Parametría, a respected Mexican pollster, found that more than two-thirds of respondents believed that Nafta had benefited American consumers and businesses, while just 20 percent believed it had been good for them. The poll, consisting of 800 interviews in people’s homes, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. “There is a grand narrative in the United States that Mexico was the great winner of Nafta,” said Fernando Turner Dávila, the secretary of the economy and labor in the industrial state of Nuevo León. “Meanwhile, here in Mexico, they only see the benefits, which are glorified. They never see the downsides, much less talk about them.” Mr. Turner cited the loss of nearly two million jobs in the agricultural industry because of the treaty, which benefited highly subsidized industries in the United States like corn to the detriment of Mexican farmers. And while the federal government lauds the increase in manufacturing exports, Mexico still relies on a tremendous number of imports from the United States. “The Mexican government has not established policies to protect Mexican businesses,” said Mr. Turner, himself a businessman, with factories in a half-dozen countries. That said, even critics like Mr. Turner do not want to see Nafta gutted. It is an imperfect deal, one that has failed to deliver on its promise, he said. But to terminate the treaty would be a disaster, he said, hurting both Mexico and the United States and creating even more job losses. It would also not happen easily, critics contend. After two decades, the two economies are tightly braided together. Goods manufactured by companies operating in both countries — whether speakers, cars or airplanes — cross the border multiple times during production, a shared manufacturing process that, if destroyed, would mean shared job losses. “A lot of people are taking solace in the reality that it’s very difficult for the U.S. to impose tariffs on Mexico without damaging the U.S. economy as well,” said Christopher Wilson, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute. “You need something to replace Nafta. Otherwise you’re going to leave a lot of American workers out in the cold.” The agreement has certainly brought positive changes to Mexico, economists note. Since it went into effect at the beginning of 1994, billions of dollars in investment has been pouring into Mexico every year. Sleepy provincial towns have become manufacturing hubs. Workers assemble Ford Fusion Hybrid cars in the city of Hermosillo and Whirlpool refrigerators outside Monterrey. Tijuana sends flat-screen televisions across the border and the state of Querétaro hammers out parts for helicopters and corporate jets. For two decades, those exports have been the main driver of growth in Mexico, which is why Mexico’s government is so eager to defend the country’s trade relationship with the United States. Without the agreement, the foreign investment that creates new jobs will slow, or even vanish, some fear. Mexicans got a forewarning of the possible effect this week. After poor sales and criticism from Mr. Trump, Ford announced that it would cancel a planned car plant in San Luis Potosí, a state that Nafta has transformed into a hub for auto manufacturing. “Mexico has done a lot right,” said Gordon H. Hanson, a trade expert at the University of California, San Diego. “It has a lot to be proud of. It has developed a middle class that lives in cities, that educates their children. It’s not the Mexico of 1993.” The image of these bustling factories feeds the idea that Mexico is responsible for the hollowing out of America’s industrial heartland. But the reality has turned out to be much more complicated. While American companies moved jobs to lower-wage Mexico to remain competitive, some new jobs emerged in the United States, in design or engineering, or in plants to make parts for the Mexican factories. In the end, “Nafta did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters,” the Congressional Research Service concluded in 2015. In Mexico, the hope was to mimic the success of East Asia’s so-called tigers, using free trade as the catalyst to modernize and overhaul the economy through exports. Instead, Mexico produced the exports, but not the growth. It even fell behind most other countries in Latin America during the 2000s. But Nafta was not necessarily the problem. Much of the misstep, experts say, was the Mexican government’s belief that the agreement would be enough to transform the economy all by itself. Thinking of the trade deal as a panacea, the government failed to come up with a broader policy or make the investments needed to use the trade agreement as a lever to transform the whole economy. Investments in research and development, for instance, have failed to materialize in both the public and private sectors. Government spending on infrastructure has dropped to its lowest level in seven decades, experts say, leaving an unreliable network of ports, highways and even internet connections across the country. Burdensome regulation and corruption stifled investment, while the nation’s banks lent far less than their Latin American peers, leaving small companies to scramble for credit. Even where Nafta is succeeding, it is not pushing wages up, or creating enough needed jobs. Rodolfo de la Torre, an economist with the Espinosa Yglesias Center for Studies in Mexico City, said officials initially hoped Nafta would bring jobs to the mass of poorly educated workers in Mexico. But by the early 2000s, much of that low-skilled work had left for China, where labor was cheaper. Jobs for better-educated workers in Mexico remained, in part because of the technological advances in the industrial plants. Now, in many of the manufacturing hubs of Mexico, wages, and hopes, have been frozen. For 10 years, Jorge Augustín Martínez has driven a forklift for Prolec, a joint venture with General Electric that makes transformers. A father of two, he earns about $100 for a six-day workweek. Though he has received modest cost-of-living increases, his last raise was five years ago, when gas, food and household items were far cheaper, he said. It was also before his second son was born. Between housing, insurance, savings and other requisites, he is left with about $40 a week to buy food and other necessities for his family, he said. Some of the engineers in the plant make more, he said, but no one is thriving. “We’re all the same, fighting to make ends meet,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who is very comfortable.”

NAFTA
Mexico
Donald Trump
International trade


8 Months After He Was Stricken, a Slowed Senator Returns

Abstract: SIOUX FALLS, S.D., Aug. 28 (AP) — Senator Tim Johnson, speaking slowly and slurring some words more than eight months after a life-threatening brain hemorrhage, announced Tuesday to South Dakotans, “I am back.” In his first public appearance since falling ill, Mr. Johnson, a 60-year-old Democrat, spoke for about 15 minutes to a cheering crowd at the Sioux Falls Convention Center. His face and speech clearly showed the effects of the trauma, but in assuring supporters that he would return to the Senate as early as next week, he displayed a sense of humor. “Hard work is something in which I take great pride, so let me say this tonight going forward: I am back,” he said to loud applause. “Of course, I believe I have an unfair edge over most of my colleagues right now. My mind works faster than my mouth does. Washington would probably be a better place if more people took a moment to think before they spoke.” Mr. Johnson’s right side was paralyzed when he was stricken last December. Brought out in a wheelchair on Tuesday, he waved his left arm to the crowd, then rose to his feet. He did not move his right arm. The senator, who has not officially said whether he will run for re-election next year, hinted that he would. “My will to keep fighting for you has never been stronger,” he said. Two Republicans have said they will seek Mr. Johnson’s seat: State Representative Joel D. Dykstra and Sam Kephart, a self-employed businessman. Senator John Ensign of Nevada, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has said Mr. Johnson, who won election to a second term in 2002 by just 524 votes, remains a target. Mr. Johnson was taken from his Senate office to George Washington University Hospital in December after becoming disoriented during a conference call with reporters. He underwent emergency surgery for arteriovenous malformation, a condition that causes arteries and veins in the brain to grow abnormally large, become tangled and sometimes burst. During his recovery, he remained in the Washington area but made no public appearances. He has been undergoing speech and physical therapy and is expected to use a scooter to travel longer distances in the Capitol. He was stricken a month after November elections that gave the Democrats a one-seat majority in the Senate, and the attack raised the possibility that if he died or resigned, Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, would appoint a successor from his own party, returning the Senate to Republican control.


After Attacks and a Killing, Fear Stalks Napa State Hospital

Abstract: Napa State Hospital, a 135-year-old facility for the mentally ill, sprawls over hundreds of acres in wine country, its grounds dotted with palm, oak and redwood trees. But in this pastoral setting, an epidemic of violence has scared staff members and patients, leading state legislators to call for emergency financing to help make the hospital safe. In October, a psychiatric technician was strangled inside the hospital’s “secured treatment area,” where the criminally insane live. Last Saturday, a rehabilitation therapist sustained four skull fractures when he was assaulted, allegedly by a patient who, days earlier, was accused of attacking a custodian. In interviews, staff members describe an environment in which predatory patients prey upon the more vulnerable. The secured treatment area, which is surrounded by a fence topped by razor wire, is rife with gang activity, methamphetamine use, pimping and extortion, staff members say. Yet, hospital police officers are prohibited from carrying firearms or Tasers. “Every single unit is contaminated in its atmosphere with a culture of violence,” said Patricia Tyler, a psychiatrist at the hospital since 2006. In many ways, the brutality at Napa State Hospital reflects changes that have occurred at mental institutions statewide. Since the early 1990s, thousands of mentally ill patients have been moved from state hospitals to community settings, opening up beds for patients who have been ordered there by criminal courts. The Department of Mental Health reports that 92 percent of patients in state mental hospitals were referred by the criminal justice system; 15 years ago it was just 20 percent. “Our mental health hospitals, basically, in the state are an extension of the criminal justice system,” said Ken Murch, the chief negotiator for the California Association of Psychiatric Technicians. In Napa, 86 percent of approximately 1,150 patients were committed by the criminal courts; many were deemed incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity. “Now we get people who have committed murders, and they are housed in facilities that were designed for perhaps depressed grandmas,” Dr. Tyler said. Over the past two years, there were 224 instances when injuries inflicted by patient assaults caused Napa hospital staff members to miss at least one day of work, Deborah Moore, the hospital’s public information officer, wrote in an e-mail. Last year, 1,580 crimes — including 1,275 batteries and 103 felonies — were reported at the hospital, according to the police officers’ union and the hospital administration. The vast majority of those cases never led to prosecution. “You have really vulnerable patients who are severely mentally ill who get victimized by these manipulating individuals who have a prison mentality,” said Crystal Johnson, a psychiatric technician. “We really don’t have any way to protect them.” Ms. Johnson said she was choked by a patient in 2008 but escaped when she fought back and managed to hit her alarm, causing the patient to flee. She suffered a black eye and a sore neck and back and missed work for three weeks. Staff members say the recent attacks underscore the need to overhaul security that is still designed for dealing with a less volatile population. Napa State Hospital’s stated therapeutic approach is a model that emphasizes “wellness and recovery.” Since 2006, the mental hospital and others in California have operated under a federal court order to improve conditions for patients. Napa accepts patients deemed a low- or medium-security risk, but that designation refers to the risk of flight, not a propensity to harm others. In addition, staff members say, some patients have faked mental illnesses to avoid long prison terms and win transfers into the more comfortable hospital environment. As a result, violent patients — some of whom are mentally ill — are mixed in with more vulnerable patients and staff members. Sean M. Bouchie, a 24-year-old patient charged in last weekend’s assault on George Anderson, a rehabilitation therapist, had a reputation for violent behavior, including a recent attack on a custodian, staff members say. Mr. Bouchie has pleaded not guilty. Dolly Matteucci, the hospital’s interim executive director, said she made an urgent request to the Department of Mental Health for 20 more police officers after a patient strangled Donna Gross, a psychiatric technician, last October. Jess W. Massey, 37, has been charged in the killing but has not entered a plea, pending an examination. “I want nothing more than for our staff to be safe,” Ms. Matteucci said in an interview in the administration building, which sits well outside the secured treatment area. Ms. Matteucci took over in February, when Claude E. Foulk was fired as the executive director after he was arrested on charges of child molestation. Mr. Foulk has pleaded not guilty. After last weekend, two Napa legislators, State Senator Noreen Evans and Assemblyman Michael Allen, called on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gov.-Elect Jerry Brown to “use the power of the governor’s office to immediately allocate the necessary resources to secure the hospital.” With California facing a $28 billion budget deficit, Department of Mental Health officials say they have taken action with the resources at their disposal, prohibiting patients from walking the grounds unescorted and establishing a shuttle service for employees. “The department is in the process of reviewing the recommendations offered by employees and the unions, and has conducted a security audit” of hospital grounds, Jennifer Turner, a department spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail. The Union of American Physicians and Dentists, which represents psychiatrists in the Napa hospital, has recommended that patients who have displayed very aggressive behavior be housed and treated in their own heavily secured unit. “Everyone knows the bad actors in the state hospitals,” said Sue Tredennick, 66, a nurse who said she had been attacked by patients four times in her 19 years at Napa. “They should be put on another unit where there are police officers and taken out of the mix.” Strategy documents and meeting notes from the hospital show that such a plan was extensively explored at Napa in 2006, but it foundered on the question of how to provide security for the specialized unit. The hospital is due for a visit from the Joint Commission, a nonprofit organization that accredits hospitals, in 2011. Ken Powers, a spokesman for the commission, said that it did not announce its accreditation visits, but that Napa last had a full on-site survey in October 2008 and that the surveys typically occurred every 18 to 36 months. Safety will be reviewed as part of its accreditation. For now, though, Napa State Hospital remains in a virtual lockdown, administrators and staff members say. Staff members can no longer escort patients on the grounds alone, and patients are more frequently confined to their units. Escorting patients can leave those units understaffed, creating additional security problems, said Mindy Musch, an organizer for Service Employees International Union Local 1000, which represents 1,100 workers at Napa, including registered nurses . “There’s more tension in the units, because there’s less activities and more staying inside,” said Odell Phipps, a 53-year-old patient. “So, at some point, there’s going to be a combustion of violence somewhere. It’s inevitable.”

Napa State Hospital
Assaults
Medicine and Health
Mental Health and Disorders
Security and Warning Systems
Rationing and Allocation of Resources
Napa (Calif)


Dissent on Panel Creating First Responder Network

Abstract: WASHINGTON — A $7 billion nationwide public safety communications network, conceived to address the failures of Sept. 11, 2001, is still in the planning stages. But one member of the board overseeing the effort says it is already rife with problems. Sheriff Paul Fitzgerald of Story County, Iowa, delivered that assessment on Tuesday in blistering remarks to his colleagues at a meeting of the board of FirstNet , the First Responder Network Authority, created by Congress to oversee the building of the system. Sheriff Fitzgerald said that the planning effort had already been tainted by secret meetings of small groups of directors, the withholding of financial information from some board members, conflicts of interest in the hiring of consultants and the exclusion of police and fire officials from the planning process. “In my view, the processes thus far employed by FirstNet are killing our credibility,” Sheriff Fitzgerald told the board, according to a written copy of his remarks circulated at the meeting. Other board members deny those charges and say that the process is working well. They point to a 14-to-1 vote by the board on Tuesday to table a resolution submitted by Sheriff Fitzgerald aimed at addressing his complaints. Among those who voted against him were the three other public safety representatives on the board. Nevertheless, the board will review the accusations and make public the results, said Jeffrey Johnson, a board member and retired fire chief from Oregon who is chief executive of the Western Fire Chiefs Association. “Our highest priority has always been, and continues to be, serving the public safety community,” Mr. Johnson said. Several public safety trade groups, including the International Association of Fire Chiefs, the Metropolitan Fire Chiefs Association and the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a police group, issued statements after the meeting supporting the board and its outreach process. Sheriff Fitzgerald’s accusations, which were first reported by the Web site fiercebroadbandwireless.com, are noteworthy because public safety officials were crucial to getting Congress to approve the system’s financing in February 2012. But they are outnumbered on the board, holding four seats compared with six members who are former executives of telecommunications companies, including the board’s chairman, Samuel Ginn. He started a wireless company that was a predecessor to Verizon Wireless. Telecommunications companies stand to reap billions of dollars from the construction and operation of the system. The remainder of the board includes a former mayor of Denver; a government information technology expert; and representatives from the Homeland Security and Justice Departments and the Office of Management and Budget. Sheriff Fitzgerald said that the board’s former telecommunications executives were driving the planning of the network, possibly in a way that favors “their commercial vision rather than the vision of the public safety users,” according to a written copy of his remarks circulated at the meeting. “This is supposed to be our network.” One of the board’s first acts last year was to structure a Public Safety Advisory Committee to solicit feedback from first responders, who will be using the network to respond to emergencies. The network is necessary, proponents say, to allow first responders from disparate jurisdictions or departments to communicate with one another at the site of an emergency. During the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, New York Police Department commanders at the World Trade Center could not communicate by radio with Fire Department officials because their systems were incompatible. The same problem surfaced when emergency personnel from other cities responded after Hurricane Katrina and other disasters. Before the FirstNet board organized the public safety advisers group, however, preliminary design alternatives for the FirstNet system were outlined and presented to the board by F. Craig Farrill, a former telecommunications executive who once served as chief technical officer for Vodafone AirTouch, also a predecessor to Verizon Wireless. The board then put out its alternatives for public comment. One plan called for the network to be built through partnerships with the companies that operate many of the commercial wireless systems that are already in place. Sheriff Fitzgerald said that the board produced no analysis of alternatives to the plan’s “heavy dependence upon commercial wireless carriers.” But board members say that no decisions about the system’s structure have been made, and that any systems sketched out so far are more akin to outlines than blueprints. “The board has been really aggressive about engaging the Public Safety Advisory Committee,” said Mr. Johnson, who was appointed as the board’s liaison to the public safety advisers. “As a member of public safety, I feel listened to.” Sheriff Fitzgerald also alleged conduct — like private meetings of groups of directors — that could violate federal laws requiring government bodies to make their actions transparent to the public. The FirstNet board has met publicly five times so far. Mr. Johnson said that all of the board’s meetings “have followed that guideline” requiring a transparent process.

First Responder Network Authority FirstNet


Saudi Arabia: Iranian Defense Minister Is Invited

Abstract: Saudi Arabia has invited Iran’s foreign minister to visit, Saudi officials said Tuesday, a move that would hint at the possibility of a thaw between two bitter rivals. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said at a news conference that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had been invited but did not say when, or if, Iran had formally responded. Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, has adopted a conciliatory tone toward its neighbors since taking office last year, but while Mr. Zarif has visited other Arab gulf states, he has not been to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia
Iran
Mohammad Javad Zarif
Saud al- Faisal
International relations


Earl Lloyd, N.B.A.’s First Black Player, Dies at 86

Abstract: Earl Lloyd, who became the first black player to appear in an N.B.A. game when he took the court for the Washington Capitols in October 1950, three and a half years after Jackie Robinson broke modern major league baseball’s color barrier, died on Thursday in Crossville, Tenn. He was 86. His death was announced by West Virginia State University, where he played before joining the N.B.A. When Lloyd made his N.B.A. debut, pro basketball was an afterthought on the national sports scene. Lloyd’s milestone appearance received little attention. But Lloyd and three other black players who appeared in N.B.A. lineups soon afterward were nonetheless pioneers, enduring racist jeers from spectators in some cities as well as segregated hotel and restaurant accommodations. A rugged 6-foot-6, 220-pound forward, Lloyd played in the N.B.A. for nine seasons . He was a strong rebounder and was so tenacious on defense that he sometimes guarded the Minneapolis Lakers’ 6-foot-10 center, George Mikan, the league’s first superstar. In 1955, Lloyd and Jim Tucker, also a forward, became the first two black players on an N.B.A. championship team, playing for the Syracuse Nationals. Lloyd was named the Detroit Pistons’ head coach in 1971, becoming the fourth black head coach in N.B.A. history, after Boston’s Bill Russell, Seattle’s Lenny Wilkens and Golden State’s Al Attles. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 2003 for breaking the N.B.A. racial barrier. Lloyd said he had never encountered racial animosity from teammates or opposing players, but he remembered taunts from spectators, particularly in St. Louis; Baltimore; Fort Wayne, Ind., where the Pistons were based until 1957; and Indianapolis, where the Pistons played their home games in the 1955 N.B.A. finals against Syracuse. “Those fans in Indianapolis, they’d yell stuff like, ‘Go back to Africa,’ ” Lloyd told The Syracuse Herald American in 1992. “My philosophy was: If they weren’t calling you names, you weren’t doing nothing. If they’re calling you names, you were hurting them.” Lloyd recalled how a hotel manager in Baltimore refused to give him a room during a Nationals trip in the early 1950s and how his coach, Al Cervi, protested loudly to no avail. Lloyd left the hotel to avoid trouble. “I owe Earl a lot of thanks,” Cervi, who coached him for four seasons, told Ron Thomas in the book “They Cleared the Lane: The N.B.A.’s Black Pioneers.” Image Lloyd was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003. Credit Paul Sancya/Associated Press “He’s an unsung star. Anybody can score. Lloyd was an excellent defensive player. That was No. 1 on my roster.” Earl Francis Lloyd was born on April 3, 1928, in Alexandria, Va., where his father worked in a coal yard and his mother was a domestic worker. After playing at a segregated high school, he starred for historically black West Virginia State. When the N.B.A., going into its fifth season, prepared for its April 1950 draft, many club owners continued to resist signing a black player. Apart from the prejudices of the time, some owners feared that Abe Saperstein, the owner of the all-black, crowd-pleasing Harlem Globetrotters, would pull them from appearances in N.B.A. arenas if his roster were raided, depriving the financially hard-pressed league of a gate attraction. But everything changed when the Boston Celtics’ owner, Walter Brown, selected Chuck Cooper , a black player from Duquesne, in the second round of the 1950 draft, and Ned Irish, running the Knicks, said he planned to purchase the rights to the highly regarded Sweetwater Clifton from the Globetrotters. The Capitols followed their leads, picking Lloyd in the ninth round. On the evening of Oct. 31, 1950, Lloyd made his debut when the Capitols opened their season on the road against the Rochester Royals at Edgerton Park Arena. He scored 6 points and pulled down a game-high 10 rebounds. Cooper, a forward, made his Celtics debut the next night, and Clifton, a forward and center, appeared in his first Knicks game three days after that. Both went on to have fine careers in the N.B.A. A fourth black player, Hank DeZonie , played in five games with the Tri-Cities Blackhawks during the 1950-51 season. Lloyd entered the Army after seven games with the Capitols, who went out of business in January 1951. He later played six seasons for Syracuse, complementing the high-scoring Dolph Schayes, then played two seasons for the Pistons. He retired after the 1959-60 season with career averages of 8.4 points and 6.4 rebounds per game. Lloyd became the Pistons’ coach a few games into the 1971-72 season. They finished last in the Midwest Division, and he was fired after a 2-5 start the next season. He later held an executive position with Chrysler, supervised youth leagues for the Detroit Police Department and counseled students in the city’s school system. Lloyd, who retired to Crossville after living in Detroit, is survived by his wife, Charlita; his sons, Kenneth, Kevin and David; and four grandchildren. In reflecting on his experience as the N.B.A.’s first black player, Lloyd said he had been “in the right place at the right time.” “I don’t play it up or down,” he told Mr. Thomas, the author. “I just hope I conducted myself where I made it easier for others, and I think I did.”

Earl Lloyd
Basketball
Obituary
Black People,African-Americans
NBA


Gunmen Kill 16 at Nursing Home in Yemen Started by Mother Teresa

Abstract: AL MUKALLA, Yemen — A nursing home founded by Mother Teresa and run by Christian nuns in the southern Yemeni city of Aden was transformed into an execution ground on Friday, when four gunmen tied up at least 16 people inside and killed them, officials said. The victims were Indian, Ethiopian and Yemeni citizens, and they included six nuns, plus guards and the gardener, said Ayoub Abu Baker, the director of the local Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, which runs the nursing home along with a group called the Missionaries of Charity. The 60 residents of the nursing home were not harmed, officials said. Aden has been battered by expanding violence over the last few months as a result of the war that has engulfed the country, the Arab world’s poorest, pitting the Houthi rebel movement against a Saudi-backed Yemeni government. Local armed groups have been competing for power and Sunni extremists belonging to the Islamic State and Al Qaeda have carved out a presence, punctuated by assassinations and larger-scale deadly attacks. But even amid the growing mayhem, the killings on Friday provoked outrage and shock, with pictures of the prone bodies of the nursing home workers circulating on social media. In a statement, Yemen’s United Nations mission called the slaughter a “cruel and heartless act” and suggested that Islamic State militants had been responsible, asserting that the perpetrators possessed “nothing of humanity or Islam.” There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the killings recalled other recent attacks on Christian sites in Aden, which was known in previous eras for its tolerance and mix of religious faiths. The city’s residents now face episodic warfare and increasingly capricious attacks. Forces allied with the Saudi-backed government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi took control of the city last summer, driving out the Houthis, who control much of northern Yemen. But the government has not been remotely successful in pacifying the city — or even protecting its own officials, with Mr. Hadi’s presidential palace coming under repeated attack. Local media accounts of the nursing home massacre said the gunmen might have posed as visitors to gain entry. Mr. Abu Baker said the assailants had isolated their victims in a room and bound their hands before killing them. The nursing home was one of several care facilities in Yemen established by Mother Teresa beginning in the 1970s, according to an article about her work in Yemen posted on the website of the Indian Embassy. Mr. Abu Baker said that other nursing homes were operating in at least three other cities around Yemen. News of the killings came as United Nations human rights officials warned of the sharply escalating civilian death toll from airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition in northern Yemen. The United Nations recorded a total of 168 civilians killed and 193 injured in February, double the number of the previous month and the highest monthly casualty toll since September, said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. Two-thirds of the casualties came from coalition airstrikes, mostly in Sana, the capital, Mr. Colville said, adding that one air attack on a market in the city’s northeast on Saturday had killed at least 39 civilians, including nine children. An airstrike on a cement factory in Amran, northwest of the capital, killed 14 civilians and injured 39, he said. The human rights office said indiscriminate shelling by Houthi forces and army units loyal to the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, had left 49 civilians dead in February, mostly in the fiercely contested city of Taiz. The latest casualty figures raised the number of civilian deaths documented by the United Nations since the Yemen conflict began a year ago to 3,081, with 5,733 injured. Increasingly angered over the disproportionately high civilian casualties caused by the Saudi-led bombings, the European Parliament recently voted by a large majority for an embargo on weapons exports to Saudi Arabia . The top humanitarian aid official of the United Nations, Stephen O’Brien, told the Security Council on Thursday that all parties to the conflict had attacked civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and schools. The Security Council is weighing a possible resolution to push for more emergency aid to Yemen, which may be circulated to members as early as next week. But the Saudis signaled on Friday that they opposed such a measure. “We don’t think that a resolution is needed at this time,” the Saudi ambassador to the United Nations, Abdallah al-Mouallimi, said at a news conference.

Nursing home
Yemen
Mother Teresa
Nun
Aden
Houthis
Civilian casualties
Saudi Arabia
Fatalities,casualties