Taking Blows From All Sides and Weighing When to Punch Back

Abstract: LORAIN, Ohio — Senator Barack Obama of Illinois is getting the customary greeting that the political tribe accords to apparent front-runners: He has taken rhetorical mortar shots from all sides. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, his opponent in tight Democratic presidential primary races in Ohio and Texas next week, sarcastically described his message on Sunday as naïve and suggestive of “magic wands” and “celestial choirs.” Ralph Nader, who on Sunday announced his plan to run for president, said Mr. Obama leaned toward the “pro-corporate side.” And conservative blogs and television commentators accuse Mr. Obama of all manner of unpatriotic derelictions. Mr. Obama has fired back a few shots of his own, even as his advisers say they and the candidate weigh on a daily basis when it is wisest to remain silent. “Senator Clinton has gotten mad because I said she supported” the North American Free Trade Agreement, he told an overflow crowd of 10,000 supporters on Sunday in Toledo, Ohio. “I said, ‘Well, hold on a second. The Clinton administration passed Nafta, signed Nafta.’ ” “You can’t just take credit for the good things,” he added. As for criticisms that have re-emerged that he is unpatriotic for declining to wear a flag lapel or for failing once last autumn to put his hand on his heart during the national anthem, Mr. Obama offered a tight smile. He was asked about it during a news conference in Lorain. “Well, look, there is always some nonsense going on in a general election,” he said. “First it was my name that was a problem. Then there was the Muslim thing, and that hasn’t worked out so well. Now it’s the patriotism thing.” Counter-punching, as Mr. Obama’s advisers are quick to say, is a tricky business. If Mr. Obama goes toe-to-toe too often, he risks appearing edgy and even defensive, not to mention turning off those supporters who harbor affection for his rival. But let too many blows go unmatched, and he risks appearing passive, not to mention ending up unconscious. Mr. Obama faces a third dilemma: He must occasionally swing back at the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, without appearing to overlook Mrs. Clinton. His advisers survey the rumors, and discuss attack and counterattack, nearly every day. “The worst thing you could do is be presumptuous,” said David Axelrod, chief strategist for the Obama campaign. “Mrs. Clinton is very formidable.” “It’s more an art, an alchemy,” Mr. Axelrod said about the moment when a candidate decides to toss a jab. “There is a certain amount of instinct involved.” Mrs. Clinton’s angry criticism on Saturday about fliers that the Obama campaign had sent to voters in Ohio may have owed something to the dramatic arts. But his campaign has in fact sent out leaflets attacking her positions on health care and international trade, accusing her of backing a trade agreement she insists she does not support. And before walking into a hospital in Columbus, Ohio, where Mr. Obama would hold a round-table meeting on health care and insurance, his campaign staffers told reporters that his remarks would contain implied but clear shots at Mr. McCain’s free-market approach to health care. Both the Obama and Clinton campaigns rely on hand-picked surrogates to offer much rougher words about the rival campaigns. Other times, they go it alone, as when Mrs. Clinton tossed the gauntlet at her opponent’s feet on Saturday, saying, “Meet me in Ohio.” In fact, both candidates were in Ohio at that very moment. By Sunday, Mrs. Clinton was in Providence, R.I. — that state also has a primary election next week — and her tone was filled with sarcasm, as she parodied her opponent’s message at an event that attracted several thousand people. “Now I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s get everybody together, let’s get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing,’ ” she said to a smattering of giggles. “And everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect.” What is needed, Mrs. Clinton told the crowd, is a tough candidate for a hard world. “You are not going to wave a magic wand and make the special interests disappear,” she said. Mr. McCain, for his part, lobbed a few shots over the weekend into the Democratic Party ranks. If either Democrat withdrew troops from Iraq as proposed, he said in a speech Saturday night before the Republican Governors Association in Washington, Al Qaeda would “celebrate to the world that they have defeated the United States of America.” The Republican attacks, whether from Mr. McCain or the conservative blogosphere, present a trickier challenge for Democrats. When Mr. Obama tried to ignore the unfounded rumor that he is a Muslim (he is, in fact, a practicing Christian), the charge even appeared in mainstream news outlets. In 2004, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic nominee for president that year, and his campaign also tried to ignore unfounded rumors besmirching his war record in Vietnam — a move that former aides now describe as a mistake. “I’m not saying you can ignore patented smears,” said Mr. Axelrod, the Obama campaign strategist. “But the danger is that you take your eye off your knitting.” Attacks on Mr. Obama’s patriotism took flight again recently, when his wife said that this campaign had made her proud of the country for the first time. Mr. Obama said his wife was talking about the nation’s politics. Asked about these attacks Sunday, Mr. Obama suggested the outline of his counterattack in a general election. He said he would be glad to compare his patriotism with that of a Republican Party whose president failed to get troops enough body armor in Iraq, that did not give proper benefits to wounded veterans and that has engaged in “illegal wiretapping.” “We’ll see what the American people’s definition of patriotism is,” Mr. Obama said in Lorain.

Rumors
Presidential Election of 2008
Obama Barack
Axelrod David
Clinton Hillary Rodham
McCain John


Congo: Fighting Increases Number of Refugees

Abstract: A new United Nations report says the number of refugees fleeing the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo swelled by more than 350,000 in just the past few months as fighting escalated, pushing the number of people uprooted in the long-running conflict to three million. The Congo conflict is a spillover from the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Hundreds of Hutus who participated in the slaughter escaped into Congo and still fight there. The report to the Security Council released Monday said that as of the end of August, about 440,000 Congolese had become refugees in Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda. A report three months ago put that number at 70,000. An estimated 2.6 million Congolese have been driven from their homes but remain in the country.

War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity


With New York Real Estate, Just $10 Million Starts to Sound Reasonable

Abstract: Talking about the excesses of the New York real estate market can be like marveling over summer weather in Phoenix: The exceptional is so routine that you easily start to sound tedious recounting or obsessing over it. “On Thursday it was a bone-dry 108 degrees — as it was on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This morning, a deal closed on a $30 million glass high-rise penthouse in Midtown Manhattan. Similar deals were cut three more times before lunch.” Of course $30 million is a fantastical number, arbitrarily deployed as rhetorical device — an enormous penthouse in a new glass high-rise on or around 57th Street would change hands for two or three times that, as we have all repeatedly been made aware. The conventional wisdom holds that the market for these properties, even as it has slowed in recent months in part because of expanded inventory , is distinctly separate from the rest of the luxury arcade in the city, which belongs to people who actually live here. Realtors see little correlation between what might happen in a building like 432 Park Avenue, the 1,396-foot-high attenuated middle finger, and what might happen on East 74th Street, in a sense because the investment banker who grew up in Connecticut and went to Princeton wants to live near the venture capitalist who grew up in Westchester and went to Yale, not next to the 26-year-old D.J. who is the nephew of a Taiwanese land speculator and is around for 73 days of the year. And yet the markets are clearly related to the extent that the bloated, board game figures that attach to sales in Midtown, or the Upper East Side, or the West Village or TriBeCa, and that receive disproportionate attention, produce a disorienting psychosocial effect, habituating us so that it starts to seem completely reasonable, and modest really, for someone to be spending three or four or even five million dollars on a place to live. These are the budgets of quiet, hard-working people, what Russian oil barons surely spend every year on takeout. This recalibration of perspective is in some part responsible for the appearance of astronomical prices in neighborhoods known in recent years merely for high ones. Last month a 20-room co-op, taking up an entire floor of 404 Riverside Drive, a prewar building in Morningside Heights at 113th Street, arrived on the market at $16 million . For roughly that price a buyer could have secured the apartment Bruce Willis recently did on Central Park West in the 80s. Another apartment at 404 Riverside Drive is listed at $9.3 million (a price that the appraisal firm Miller Samuel would categorize simply as “super luxury”; the term “ultra luxury” is reserved for properties of $10 million and above). Image In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a home bought in the 1980s for $170,000 is listed for $6 million. Credit ÁngelFranco/The New York Times The developers of 215 Chrystie Street, a condominium complex that in its marketing materials quotes Leonardo da Vinci, apparently regard the Lower East Side as the new uncharted territory for $18 million housing stock. Ian Schrager, who is behind the project, has called it “tough lux,” because “the building is made out of very honest, authentic materials,” or maybe because no one buying there now would have gone to Chrystie Street in 1989 without the protection of someone who vaguely resembled Steven Seagal . The phenomenon is not limited to Manhattan. A 17,000-square-foot brownstone recently went on the market in Brooklyn Heights for $40 million, and a $6 million mansion in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was purchased by the current owner in the 1980s for less than $170,000, has been for sale for several months. The owner, who has spent decades restoring the house, has refused offers from developers and those who have wanted to turn the house into a bed-and-breakfast, her broker told me. Despite the popularity of Bedford-Stuyvesant and the magnificence of the house itself, the asking price is still roughly three times the cost of a great brownstone in a Brooklyn neighborhood where the number of robberies, assaults and burglaries this year is more than two and a half times the number in Park Slope. In Park Slope it is still possible to buy a brownstone off Prospect Park for under $4 million, no matter how absurd the phrase “still possible to buy something for under $4 million” might have been 10 years ago. “There are people who are shopping for trophy properties who are architecture buffs and real estate buffs and they are shopping in a way that is much less specific to neighborhood,” Leslie Marshall, who is with Corcoran and is one of Brooklyn’s top-selling brokers, told me. That is certainly true. The Brooklyn houses have distinctive histories and are unlike anything else. But the prevailing atmosphere also leads sellers to believe that anything might be possible. Last April, I paid a visit to a $5.3 million apartment in a glass tower in Long Island City in Queens because the price for the area was unprecedented. The owner of that apartment only just accepted an offer under the asking price, the broker told me. A modernist pile in Mill Basin in Brooklyn that arrived on the market more than a year ago at $30 million is now listed at $17 million. “A rising tide lifts boats, but it also lifts aspirations,” Frederick Warburg Peters, the president of Warburg Realty , told me. And in the face of even recent history, it lifts those aspirations unrealistically. Over a two-year period ending in January, Manhattan sales of condominiums and co-ops over $10 million represented only 1 percent of the market . To the question, Who will spend $30 million to live in Mill Basin, “the answer,” Mr. Peters said, “turns out to be no one.”

Real Estate
Housing
Manhattan
Price
Real estate broker
NYC


Knicks Defiant in Face of Miami Heat’s Star Power

Abstract: For all Miami’s star power and success, there will be one thing lacking when the Heat plays the Knicks on Thursday night: fear. “We all love big stages,” said Amar’e Stoudemire, who carved his own path to the Knicks last summer. “This is nothing special. Nobody is afraid of the Miami Heat.” Stoudemire chose defiance instead of deference Wednesday when considering LeBron James’s versatility, Dwyane Wade’s shot-making ability and Chris Bosh’s post work. Miami has beaten the Knicks twice this season and will aim for a third straight victory when it makes its final appearance of the season at Madison Square Garden. The night will probably include Stoudemire, James and Wade being announced as starters for the All-Star Game . All were on pace for starter’s berths in the latest voting, and the results will be announced by TNT before the game. Bosh may be selected as a reserve. Still, players like Stoudemire have been reluctant in their praise for Miami, the respect instead delivered to proven winners like the San Antonio Spurs, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics. When the Heat assembled the free-agent trinity, there was little doubt Miami would perform like a sleek sports car, with plenty of flash and firepower. The season has revealed what is under the hood: the pains in overhauling an entire roster, dealing with injuries and finding the perfect rotation and lineup. Nearly every quality franchise, with the exception of the well-oiled Spurs, has dealt with similar bumpy patches this season. They are as predictable as they are unavoidable. Miami began the season wobbly, then won 21 out of 22 games, including the two defeats of the Knicks. “What they turned into there was a great defensive team and a very, very unselfish offensive team,” Jeff Van Gundy, the former Knicks coach and current ESPN analyst, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “They were living at the free-throw line with James, Wade and Bosh, and that really helped out their defense.” He added, “With those three healthy, I have no doubt they are going to have a real shot at it, championship-wise.” Miami arrives having lost four of five games while dealing with injuries to James, Wade and Bosh. Wade is expected to play Thursday after missing a game with a migraine. Bosh stayed in Miami and will miss a third straight game with a sprained left ankle. “I hope we’re not comfortable,” Miami Coach Erik Spoelstra said at his team’s practice Wednesday. “Where we are right now, I don’t think is good enough.” He added: “What we’ve talked about is getting to a level of greatness and that’s true consistency. We’ve been great at times, but we’ve been nowhere near our greatness.” Spoelstra said the team had neared its peak performance on occasion. With more than half the season over, however, he is still figuring out rotations and lineups. The league has most likely not seen Miami at its best and probably will not until the playoffs. “I think that’s fairly accurate with all the injuries they’ve had,” said Steve Kerr, the former reserve player and general manager of Phoenix, who is now a TNT analyst. Wade’s hamstring injury wiped out his preseason. Mike Miller and Udonis Haslem, considered the team’s fourth- and fifth-most important players, sustained serious injuries. Miller had his best game of the season Saturday, with 32 points against Toronto, but Haslem is not expected to return from a foot injury until late in the season, if at all. By the Heat’s 10th game of the season, Spoelstra had moved center Zydrunas Ilgauskas into the starting lineup in place of Joel Anthony. Against Toronto, point guard Mario Chalmers replaced Carlos Arroyo in the starting lineup, a move that is expected to be permanent. Miami has used eight starting lineups this season. The Spurs have used one, while the Lakers have employed two. Because of its major trades, the Orlando Magic has shown 10 different combinations. Because of injuries, Boston has used seven. “We knew they were going to be good,” Kerr said. “In spite of all that turmoil or whatever you want to call it. They’ve got one of the best records of the league.” That may be the most daunting sign of all: despite the mend-on-the-fly efforts and the acclimation of a new group, Miami enters the Garden at 31-13, behind only Boston in the Eastern Conference. But it will take until the playoffs, and possibly beyond, for the defiance of opponents to shift to deference.


General’s 1962 Memo Addresses Nuclear Combat on Cuba

Abstract: WASHINGTON — In a previously undisclosed memo to President John F. Kennedy in the closing days of the Cuban missile crisis, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff said his forces were prepared to use nuclear weapons in an American invasion of the island if the Cubans used nuclear arms to resist. The top secret memo from the chairman, General Maxwell D. Taylor, dated Nov. 2, 1962, underscored the continuing danger of a nuclear conflict between the superpowers even after the Soviet Union agreed to remove nuclear missiles from the island. American military officials advocating an invasion to topple Fidel Castro only suspected it at the time, but Soviet forces in Cuba had nearly 100 smaller tactical nuclear weapons as well, a fact that came to light only three decades later. “We must accept the possibility that the enemy may use nuclear weapons to repel invasion,” General Taylor wrote. “However, if the Cuban leaders took this foolhardy step, we could respond at once in overwhelming nuclear force against military targets.” The National Security Archive, a research organization at George Washington University, found the three-page memo in government archives and posted it on its Web site on Monday night. General Taylor also told the president that military planners were expecting up to 18,500 American troops killed and wounded in the first 10 days after an invasion. But he cautioned that the estimate applied only to a non-nuclear conflict. “If atomic weapons were used, there is no experience factor upon which to base an estimate of casualties,” General Taylor wrote. “Certainly, we might expect to lose very heavily at the outset if caught by surprise, but our retaliation would be rapid and devastating and thus would bring to a sudden close the period of heavy losses.” Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, which has published several collections of declassified documents related to the crisis, said the memo added another stroke to the picture of global danger in 1962, which is still being filled in half a century later. “The American generals were eager for an invasion, and even the possible presence of tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba didn’t give them a sense of caution,” Mr. Blanton said. Kennedy, by contrast, was distrustful of the military brass and very cautious, he said. Michael Dobbs, an historian and author of “One Minute to Midnight,” a 2008 account of the crisis, said some American military leaders still favored invading Cuba at the time the memo was written, but Kennedy probably had ruled out that possibility. “By November 2, things would have had to go very, very wrong for the U.S. to launch an invasion,” he said. The Taylor memo, which a handwritten notation says he hand-carried to the White House, is among a number of previously secret documents from 1962 that are still coming to light in connection with the 50th anniversary of the crisis. Many historians see the missile crisis as the closest the world came to a Soviet-United States nuclear exchange during the cold war. Though the crisis has been studied intensively and is the subject of many books, new evidence and new interpretations continue to emerge. The conventional notion of a tough President Kennedy whose unyielding stance caused the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev to “blink” has given way to a more nuanced portrait of a Kennedy who prevented war through careful negotiation and secret concessions, including his agreement to remove American nuclear missiles from Turkey. According to a new book, even after Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles, Mr. Castro, the Cuban leader, tussled with Soviet leaders over what would happen to the scores of tactical nuclear weapons on the island. The book, “The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis,” was written by the late Sergo Mikoyan, whose father, Anastas Mikoyan, was a Soviet statesman who negotiated with Mr. Castro in Cuba in 1962, and it was edited by Svetlana Savranskaya, a researcher at the National Security Archive. Since they were kept secret by the Soviets, the smaller tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba were not part of Khrushchev’s agreement to remove the missiles. And Mr. Castro desperately wanted to keep them on the island. Documents preserved by Sergo Mikoyan , who served as his father’s secretary, record the exchanges between the Cuban leader and Soviet officials, who became convinced that the impulsive Mr. Castro could not be trusted with the weapons. Anastas Mikoyan suggested, implausibly, that the Soviet Union had a law that would prevent it from leaving the tactical weapons in Cuba. “So you have a law that prohibits transfer of tactical nuclear weapons to other countries?” Mr. Castro asked, according to notes of the conversation. “It’s a pity. And when are you going to repeal that law?” The Soviet official was noncommittal. “We will see,” he said. All the weapons were later removed.

Nuclear Weapons
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
Taylor Maxwell D
Kennedy John Fitzgerald


I.R.S. Gave Bonuses to Workers Owing Back Taxes

Abstract: The Internal Revenue Service has paid more than $2.8 million in bonuses to employees with recent disciplinary problems, including $1 million to workers who owed back taxes, a government investigator said Tuesday. More than 2,800 workers got bonuses despite facing a disciplinary action in the previous year, including 1,150 who owed back taxes, said a report by J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. The bonuses were awarded from October 2010 through December 2012. Mr. George said that the bonus program did not violate federal regulations, but that it was inconsistent with the I.R.S. mission to enforce tax laws. “These awards are designed to recognize and reward I.R.S. employees for a job well done,” he said. “However, while not prohibited, providing awards to employees who have been disciplined for failing to pay federal taxes appears to create a conflict with the I.R.S.’s charge of ensuring the integrity of the system of tax administration.” Other examples of misconduct by workers getting bonuses included misusing government credit cards for travel, drug use, violent threats and fraudulently claiming unemployment benefits.


Prado to Ride Casino Drive; Big Brown Hits the Track

Abstract: It was an eventful morning at Belmont Park on Wednesday as Edgar Prado was selected to ride Casino Drive, the wonder horse from Japan, in the Belmont Stakes, and Big Brown turned in his first strong gallop since sustaining a quarter crack (stress fracture) over the weekend. Nobutaka Tada, the racing manager for the owner, Hidetoshi Yamamoto, said Prado was chosen to ride the undefeated Casino Drive because of his familiarity with the racetrack on Long Island and his success in the Belmont Stakes, the race known as the Test of the Champion. Prado won the 2002 Belmont with Sarava, and the 2004 edition with Birdstone. Prado rode long shots each time — Sarava was 71-1, and Birdstone 36-1. In each instance, Prado, who will be inducted into the National Museum of Racing’s Hall of Fame in August, thwarted Triple Crown bids, denying War Emblem, then Smarty Jones. This time, Casino Drive is considered a formidable challenger, having won both his starts, but is the likely second choice behind the Kentucky Derby and Preakness champion, Big Brown. Casino Drive has pedigree and history on his side: in 2006, his half brother Jazil won the Belmont; last year, his half sister Rags to Riches won it, becoming the first filly in 102 years to win the grueling mile-and-a-half marathon. In fact, Tada acknowledged that Yamamoto had his pick of the best jockeys in America — except for one. Big Brown’s regular rider, Kent Desormeaux, was in the irons for Casino Drive’s impressive five-and-three-quarter-length victory in the Peter Pan Stakes 19 days ago at Belmont Park. “There are so many good jockeys here, and it was a very difficult decision to pick up the right one,” Tada said. “The reason we decided on Edgar was his experience in the Belmont Stakes. I think he is the best choice for the Belmont Stakes.” Big Brown bounced around the Belmont oval in full gallop for a mile and an eighth four days after a slight quarter crack appeared in his left front hoof. Big Brown missed three days of training while under the care of Ian McKinlay, a hoof specialist. On Tuesday, Big Brown returned to the track for a jog, but McKinlay said it was clear that the big bay colt wanted more. “Today, the foot has cooled out and he’s getting pretty antsy, as you can see, in the barn, so the best thing for him is to get him to the track and let him do what he wants to do,” McKinlay said. On Monday, McKinlay repaired a five-eighths inch-long crack, lacing it together with stainless steel wires. On Wednesday morning, he seemed pleased with the healing process. “You can go around the hairline and where there was an abscess, it drained, so you have a pocket and physically you can feel a little hole,” McKinlay said. “It’s definitely improving. Both feet are the same temperature. When one foot is warmer than the other is when you have a problem. The skin is drying right out and the horse seems fabulous.” McKinlay said there was no hurry to patch the crack on the hoof with acrylic adhesive and some fiberglass mesh. “As far as patching now, we’ll come back Friday and look, but I don’t think we’ll do it then,” he said. “We’re just trying to stay out of the way and let nature take its course.”

Belmont Stakes
Big Brown (Race Horse)
Horse Racing


HSBC Adds Former Chief Executive of Standard Life to Board

Abstract: LONDON — HSBC said on Wednesday that it would add the former chief executive of the insurer Standard Life as a director, as the British lender continues to shake up its board. David Nish, who was the chief executive of Standard Life from 2010 to 2015, will join as an independent director in May. “David brings considerable relevant experience in financial services as well as in financial accounting and reporting,” Douglas Flint, the HSBC chairman, said in a news release . “His tenure at Standard Life was marked by business transformation delivering value creation, a combination which HSBC is similarly targeting from its current strategy,” Mr. Flint added. The announcement came just days after HSBC said that it had begun searching for a successor to Mr. Flint. The bank, which is based in London but generates about half of its profit in Asia, hopes to find a successor by next year. The new chairman would then lead the search for a replacement for Stuart Gulliver, the bank’s chief executive. Mr. Nish, 55, previously served as finance director at Standard Life and Scottish Power. He will be the third director to join HSBC’s board this year, after Paul Walsh, the former chief executive of the spirits maker Diageo, and Henri de Castries, the chairman and chief executive of the French insurer AXA. Mr. de Castries announced on Monday that he planned to retire this year.

David Nish
Appointments and Executive Changes


Labeled as a Bailout, Plan Was Hard to Sell to a Skeptical Public

Abstract: WASHINGTON — When the Bush administration announced its $700 billion plan to shore up the nation’s shaky financial system, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. called it the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Everyone else called it the bailout . And from that point on, its fate may have been set. The politics of governance in Washington is as much about marketing as anything else, and from the beginning, the plan often came across as a taxpayer-financed parachute for high-flying Wall Street tycoons. The fact that its most prominent public advocate was Mr. Paulson, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs, probably did not help shake the image. By the time it was rejected by the House on Monday, those selling the plan — the White House, Congressional leaders and both presidential candidates — had long since lost the perception battle to critics on the Internet and radio and television talk shows. And if there was any broad agreement on Tuesday, a fractious, finger-pointing day in Washington, it was that the plan needed to be rebranded to have any hope of resurrection. “The hurdle is overcoming the word ‘bailout,’ ” said R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce. “It has continued to be used by members of Congress. You see it in the press today all over the place. This is not a bailout; this is Treasury buying toxic assets that they will dispose of over a period of time and resell.” Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, offered the same analysis in a morning interview as he discussed where to go from here. “The first thing I’d do is say, ‘Let’s not call it a bailout. Let’s call it a rescue,’ ” he said on CNN. “Because it is a rescue. It’s a rescue of Main Street America.” As they sifted through the wreckage, the administration and its Congressional allies concluded that in their rush to fashion an enormously complicated, enormously expensive package, they did not do a good enough job explaining to the public why it should matter. They said they should have done more to make the case that upheaval on Wall Street would hurt businesses and consumers around the country. “Hopefully we can do a better job of making clear just what our goal is and what we’re trying to fix,” said Tony Fratto, a White House deputy press secretary. “Maybe more American people will be able to see that and hopefully more members of Congress.” Deeply unpopular in the polls, President Bush let Mr. Paulson be the public face of the plan at first, hoping his credibility would close the deal. But Mr. Paulson by his own admission is not a politician. His term, the Trouble Asset Relief Program, did not catch on. Since he unveiled the phrase on Sept. 19, it was used in just 23 television talk shows or public hearings transcribed in the Nexis database. By contrast, a Nexis search found 508 mentions of the phrase “Wall Street bailout” in that period. Mr. Paulson became a lightning rod for critics who viewed the plan as a power grab by the Treasury secretary and demanded more detail and accountability for how he would purchase and resell so many risky securities. “The messaging was about as wooden and wonkish as it could be,” said Patrick Griffin, a former White House lobbyist for President Bill Clinton. “Poor Paulson — that was not his forte. And they started behind the eight ball. I never understood why they took so long to have the president engage.” Peter H. Wehner, a former Bush White House aide, said he doubted the terminology made the difference. “If someone could have called it a rescue plan the first day instead of bailout, do we really think that would have changed anything in a fundamental way?” he asked. “I don’t think so. I think the public viewed this from the beginning as a bailout of Wall Street and I don’t think moving around the deck chairs would have changed that.” If there was blame to be apportioned for the marketing failure, it cut across party lines. The final leadership message delivered on the House floor as the vote drew near came from Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, who rather than sticking to the bipartisan script, delivered a scathing attack on Mr. Bush. Whether or not it cost Republican votes, as some argued, it poisoned the atmosphere. “It would have been given by the shrillest, most insignificant back bencher, but never, never should have been delivered by a speaker attempting to pass a difficult but critical measure,” said Karl Rove, the former deputy White House chief of staff. “This was a time that called for being a big leader, not a small and petty partisan.” Either way, the administration fell behind from the beginning. When it wants to roll out a major new economic initiative, it traditionally lines up allies in the business community, organizes surrogates to speak and develops a vocabulary for presenting the idea in the most appealing light. In this case, the plan came together heading into a weekend and the usual allies were not rallied until the following Monday. “We had less time for that than normally,” said Michele Davis, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Treasury, who help devise communications strategies. “The situation that Wednesday and Thursday in the credit markets was so horrific, and with the short Congressional schedule ahead of us, we had to get out fast.” For economic issues, the administration typically reaches out to two particularly influential opinion leaders whose views carry great weight with Congressional conservatives — Paul Gigot, editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial pages, and Lawrence Kudlow, the syndicated columnist and CNBC host. In this case, both men embraced the plan, but for once they did not sway other conservatives. That was clear to anyone browsing the Web or listening to talk shows. “There has been this big, tremendous rush to spend hundreds of billions of your dollars to buy out these bad loans from these banks,” Sean Hannity said on his nationally syndicated radio show last week. “This is a manufactured crisis,” Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show as the House vote began Monday. The viral emotion was evident in the Internet traffic. Yahoo Finance, the most popular financial news site, reported a 40 percent increase in message board postings. A CNNMoney.com blog post about the Bush plan announcement generated 2,200 comments, with greed being the most common theme. The site’s news story about those comments was headlined, “Mad as hell.” CNNMoney.com recorded 44 million page views on Monday, including 6.4 million during the hour of the House vote, setting new records for the site, as did CNBC.com , The Journal, The New York Times and other news organizations. Millions of e-mail messages overwhelmed House servers. Freedom Works, an organization affiliated with Dick Armey, a Republican and former House majority leader, created its own Web site, NoWallStreetBailout.com , and collected thousands of electronic petition signatures within hours. “The biggest problem they had trying to peddle this package is they just didn’t have the credibility,” Mr. Armey said. “They said, ‘The world’s going to fall apart if we don’t get what we want.’ And the voting public and many members said, ‘We’ve heard this before and we’re not going to buy it.’ ”

Troubled Asset Relief Program (2008)
United States Politics and Government
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Public Opinion


U.S. Women’s Open Win by Pak in 1998 Resonated in South Korea

Abstract: KOHLER, Wis. — Every morning, South Korean television signs on with the national anthem, accompanied by video and images that help evoke national pride, such as soldiers marching, warships sailing, fishermen and tradesmen working, and athletes succeeding. One of the videos that used to be shown in the montage was of Se Ri Pak removing her shoes to hit a shot from the edge of a water hazard on the 18th hole at Blackwolf Run. That image shows how important Pak’s 1998 United States Women’s Open victory is to South Korea’s national image. When Pak won that tournament here in a 20-hole playoff, defeating another 20-year-old, Jenny Chuasiriporn, in the longest playoff in Open history, she opened the floodgates for the so-called Asian Invasion of women’s golf. Pak was one of three South Koreans entered in that United States Open 14 years ago. When the tournament began Thursday, 28 South Koreans were in the field. But that is not the only indication of the transformation of the sport, which 20 years ago was almost exclusively an American club. Since Pak’s victory in 1998, there have been four more United States Women’s Open champions from South Korea, including the defending champion So Yeon Ryu . All four of those championships have come in the last seven years. Currently in the Rolex women’s world golf rankings , South Koreans hold 4 of the top 10 spots, 10 of the top 25 spots and 36 of the top 100 spots. Only 16 Americans are ranked in the top 100. The South Korean dominance is reflected on the L.P.G.A. ’s official money list. Through last week’s Northwest Arkansas Championship, South Koreans occupied 3 of the top 10 spots. Of the L.P.G.A. ’s 128 full-time players, 42 are South Korean. But Pak’s 1998 victory seems to have influenced players beyond South Korea. Fifteen of the players on the L.P.G.A.’s top 20 money list are Asians, including No. 1 Ai Miyazato ($1,035,727) of Japan and No. 2 Yani Tseng ($1,005,527) of Taiwan. Of the last 50 majors, nine Americans have won 12 times, nine South Koreans have won 11 times, and the remaining 27 titles are divided among players from other parts of the world. South Koreans have averaged seven L.P.G.A. wins a season since 1998. Pak, 34, said she never expected the amount of success she had achieved. She has won 25 L.P.G.A. events and has been inducted into the Hall of Fame. She said her victory in 1998 “was the turning point for Korean golf.” “When I heard I inspire all those young players in Korea, it put so much pressure on me,” Pak said. “I was very proud of what I did, but at the same time, I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing for those kids. I feel like Se Ri Pak was born in 1998 on July 6 at Blackwolf Run.” Ryu, who is seventh on the money list, is the most successful South Korean on the tour these days, but she is quick to credit Pak, whose nickname is the Legend. “It’s definitely the 1998 U.S. Women’s Open,” Ryu said when asked what pointed her in the direction of professional golf. She said of her victory in last year’s Open: “It was huge for me, because she’s my hero. So that moment is really, really special for me.” Ryu also said that Pak’s playoff victory over Chuasiriporn, a daughter of Thai immigrants, was the turning point for South Korean golf. “Before 1998,” Ryu said, “golf was actually not a famous sport in Korea. But after she won, golf is now a really famous sport, and that’s why I am here.” For Ryu, Pak’s 1998 victory was a life-altering event. At the time, she had just turned 8 and was an aspiring violinist. According to her official biography, she traded her violin for golf clubs because of Pak. “Actually, yes, that’s true,” Ryu said. “At that moment, just golf is my hobby and violin my dream. But now violin is my hobby, golf is my dream, my job. So totally changed.” If there is a resentment of the South Koreans’ success, it is strictly below the surface and kept inside the recesses of the players’ locker room. But there are cultural differences, perhaps the greatest being the all-consuming, all-business attitude of the South Koreans. Most of the South Koreans, like Ryu, are chosen at a young age to be golfers. They spend countless hours on the practice range, perfecting their swings under the watch of a strict parent or coach. When players graduate to the L.P.G.A. or the developmental Symetra Tour, they are almost always accompanied by a parent, usually their father, who serves as a caddie and guardian. Ostensibly, the parent is there to help the player adjust to the rigors of travel and a foreign culture, but they also are there to make sure the player does not cut corners on the practice range. The doggedness of some of the parents may be acceptable in Korean culture, but it has raised questions in the United States. At the Open this week, the American golfer Juli Inkster discussed the differences between the approaches in the two countries. “When I was raising my kids, I had them in ballet, dance, music, sports — they were in everything,” she said. “Over there, if you play golf, you play golf. That’s what you do. And you do it all day. “And whether that’s right or wrong or indifferent, or whatever, that’s just the way they are brought up. Technically, they are brought up very sound. They just go to the driving range and they hit balls and they hit balls. And their swings are perfect. They’re just great golfers. That’s what they do.” Inkster, the winner of eight majors in her 30-year pro career, added: “‘Ninety-eight. That set Asia on fire as far as women’s golf. It’s been nonstop ever since.” With the rock star status South Koreans enjoy in their native land and the success they are having in the United States, it is unlikely their golf craze will be scaling back anytime soon.

Golf
United States Women's Open (Golf)
Pak Se Ri
Ladies Professional Golf Assn
Ryu So Yeon


In Nigeria, Chinese Investment Comes With a Downside

Abstract: Emeka Ezelugha was excited to open a computer training center. He could teach his countrymen some skills and earn a living. But soon after the center opened in a rough, two-story concrete building in Lagos, a blaze broke out in the main classroom. The flames incinerated 30 desktop computers, as well as televisions and air-conditioners. The culprit was unmistakable: one of two dozen power strips in the classroom. The faulty equipment was made in China, even though the salesman said it was British. “The guy tried to convince me it was from the U.K. — I was surprised when it happened,” Mr. Ezelugha said. Across this populous African nation, low-cost Chinese goods are everywhere, evidence of Beijing’s growing dominance in global trade. The trade flow has helped keep life affordable for millions of Nigerian families, at a time when the country is struggling with economic stagnation and plunging prices, as well as the deadly costs of the Boko Haram insurgency. But shoddy or counterfeit products are a national problem in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, where impoverished consumers have few alternatives. Some shoddy goods are benign, like the Chinese-made shirts, trousers and dresses with uneven stitching and stray threads that fill street markets. But electrical wiring, outlets and power strips from China, ubiquitous in new homes and offices, are connected to dozens of fires a year in Lagos alone. The relationship between China and Nigeria is a complex web of dependency, one replicated in dozens of developing countries around the world, like Chile, Ethiopia and Indonesia. Such ties are integral to China’s global ambitions. President Xi Jinping of China, who was in Africa this week emphasizing economic diplomacy, just committed $60 billion in development assistance to the Continent. But such efforts also pose new and unpredictable challenges for Beijing. China has lent heavily to commodity-exporting countries, which are now struggling with low commodity prices. At the same time, China’s highly competitive manufacturing sector has devastated many smaller-scale rivals across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Mr. Xi’s pledge in Africa, in part, seemed aimed at quelling criticism over what some see as a lopsided relationship that largely benefits China. To support its swelling trade in Nigeria, China is funneling billions of dollars to build roads, rail lines, airport terminals, power plants and other desperately needed infrastructure. China is the top lender to Nigeria, where political instability and violence have made Western interests skittish. Nigeria, in turn, has become the biggest overseas customer of Chinese construction companies. It is an important market for Beijing, at a time when China’s own growth is slowing. But China’s extensive reach is now meeting resistance in Nigeria, part of the broader risks for Beijing’s global strategy. In Abuja, the capital, the new government is conducting anticorruption investigations into large Chinese construction contracts signed by the previous leadership. Nigerian state governments are struggling to pay for many of those projects, exposing China to potentially heavy losses. In Kano, angry protesters in the streets blame widespread joblessness on China, which is manufacturing African fabric designs in shimmering hues more cheaply than Nigeria. Employment in Nigeria’s textile and apparel sector has plummeted to 20,000 people, from 600,000 two decades ago. In Lagos, authorities are trying to stamp out subpar Chinese electric goods. Imported power strips and wiring have inadequate copper to handle Nigeria’s 240-volt system, said Wanza Kussiy, the chief safety officer of the Nigerian government’s Standards Organization. Zhang Sen, the vice secretary general of China’s government-controlled Electronic Product Association, said that the group was reviewing Nigeria’s fires. “We still need to do some research before we can say the quality of the Chinese products is to blame,” he said. Nigerian authorities are stymied. Corruption is endemic, making it more difficult to enforce safety standards. And Chinese goods are so dominant that consumer have few other choices. In Lagos, Mr. Ezelugha borrowed heavily to reopen his computer training center after the fire. But the power strips are still made in China. He couldn’t find anything else. Idle Factories, Idle Hands Kano’s cloth industry started in the walled ancient city, a labyrinth of mud brick houses and dirt roads. The city’s blue dye has long been made from the leaves of local indigo plants, which are crushed and mixed with cooking ashes and potassium. Swaths of white cotton fabric are dunked in the dye, which fills six-foot-deep pits lined with animal skins. But employment at the centuries-old dye pits has dropped to 250 people, from nearly 1,500 a decade ago. Chinese companies produce virtually identical patterns of fabrics using synthetic dyes, and their sales now dominate in Kano’s open-air market. “They are learning our arts and taking them to their country and doing them similarly to us, and bringing the goods back to Nigeria and selling them to our people,” said Bala Ibrahim, 45, who has labored in the pits since his early teens. Now he spends whole days idle. Such stories are common across Nigeria’s garment industry. The city’s tanneries, which made Moroccan leather from goatskins for centuries, have laid off most of their staffs. Dozens of modern fabric factories on the outskirts of Kano have closed. In theory, Nigeria should have a manufacturing edge, at least in labor-intensive industries like sewing. With high unemployment in Nigeria, factory owners can easily find workers willing to accept the minimum wage, just $80 a month. By comparison, garment factories in coastal China now pay around $550 a month and still can’t find enough workers. Despite the high cost of labor, it remains cheaper and easier to mass-produce garments in China. One obstacle to setting up a large-scale sewing industry like Bangladesh’s is that Nigeria imposes significant tariffs on imported fabric, a legacy of its past as a big producer of hand-woven fabric and as a large grower of cotton. Another challenge is that electricity from Nigeria’s national grid is unreliable. So operations must rely on diesel generators, buying fuel at a cost per kilowatt-hour generated that is six times what garment makers in China pay. The Nigerian government wants to revive manufacturing, particularly given low prices now for its oil exports. Abdulkadir Musa, the recently retired permanent secretary of Nigeria’s ministry of industry, trade and investment, said the government was mulling reductions in tariffs on garment materials that are not produced in Nigeria, possibly including buttons. “We want to start that all over now that oil is no longer at a high price,” Mr. Musa said, adding that overreliance on oil exports “has been more of a problem for us than a solution.” For now, Nigerians just can’t compete. Chimezie Cyril Okwuosa scrimped for years to set up his own small garment factory near Lagos in 2005. He had 25 sewing machines, 30 workers and a noisy diesel generator. The factory failed within five years. “I was spending so much on diesel that at the end of the day, I had no profit — and some days, there was no diesel at all, and I could not operate,” Mr. Okwuosa said. Mr. Okwuosa now runs Greentomato Apparels, a small-scale importer of children’s trousers. He pays $2.50 a pair to a factory in Guangzhou, China, and then only 10 or 12 cents a pair for shipping. He sells the pants for about $3.25 a pair, leaving him a small profit margin. The collapse of manufacturing is more than just a financial issue. It has also fanned worries about the possible spread of Boko Haram, an insurgency condemned for its large-scale abductions and sexual enslavement of women and girls. Boko Haram has drawn young men to its ranks in destitute northeastern Nigeria, the country’s poorest region. Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II, the traditional ruler of Kano in northern Nigeria, has seen the devastation up close. Outside his palace, a low maroon building with battlements, is a large burn mark. Late last year, a group linked by the government to Boko Haram set off three bombs in a large crowd and then used automatic weapons to spray bullets at the survivors. As many as 500 people were killed. “The Chinese basically copy every textile product in Nigeria,” Emir Sanusi said. “I worry about what could happen to Kano when we have a large number of youths and large numbers of industries are down.” A Flood of Chinese Steel At a Lagos steelyard of Dorman-Long Engineering, the only activity on a recent afternoon was the welding of an oil storage tank. With the steep drop in world oil prices, longtime customers like Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell are no longer commissioning as many helipads and footbridges for their offshore drilling platforms. The locally owned engineering firm had expected Chinese construction companies operating in Nigeria to help offset the slump. But Chinese construction companies, mostly state-owned, have largely imported their steel girders, reinforcing beams and other materials from home. “I just don’t see a lot of local content in what they do,” said Timi Austen-Peters, the company’s chairman. Infrastructure financed and built by China was supposed to be the great hope for Nigeria. Nigeria endured coups and a civil war in the 1960s, then effectively nationalized many foreign-owned companies in the 1970s. Nigeria developed a reputation for breaking or renegotiating contracts, antagonizing many foreign partners. The risks have prompted Western companies to demand very fat profits before putting money into the country — returns on the order of 25 to 40 percent a year. Their Chinese counterparts have been willing to accept 10 percent or less. “Unless the West changes its risk assessment, the Chinese will beat them to the African market,” said Osadebe Osakwe, a former Nigerian banker who is now the managing director of North China Construction Nigeria. The company is a subsidiary of a state-owned enterprise in Beijing. “The Chinese are trying to prove that they can do what the Western companies can do and they can do it better.” Chinese companies have piled into the country. Mostly state-owned Chinese construction companies have started $24.6 billion worth of projects since 2005, the highest of anywhere in the world, according to the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group. The World According to China China’s enormous overseas spending has helped it displace the United States and Europe as the leading financial power in large parts of the developing world. “Africa has a real demand for infrastructure and industrial developments — in those areas, China has strong ability and surplus capacity to invest and build,” China’s prime minister, Li Keqiang, said during a visit to Nigeria last year. But as demand at home falters, Chinese companies have been shipping huge quantities of steel girders, piping and other industrial materials at extremely low prices to emerging markets like Nigeria. So there is little benefit for local players like Dorman-Long Engineering that used to fabricate much of this equipment. Executives at Chinese construction companies say they do buy some local materials. But they add that China’s exports are often more readily available and better made, so they can be quickly and reliably included in complex projects. The new Nigerian government is starting to question whether all the construction projects are in the country’s best interest. Many projects, like new international or refurbished airport terminals in Lagos, Abuja, Kano and Port Harcourt, help the country’s elite but may do less for the poor. The new government is now searching for signs of fraud, corruption or other misconduct in existing contracts. President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria announced on Aug. 10 that his government had already found that hundreds of millions of dollars were mysteriously diverted from one Chinese-backed rail project to other government projects, although it was not immediately clear if corruption was involved. Bullet Train Boondoggle The pride of the previous Nigerian administration, which left office in May, was supposed to be a new passenger train line that links Abuja to Kaduna. With trains traveling at nearly 120 miles per hour, the $874 million line is supposed to cut the three-hour highway trip in half. But the line may not draw many passengers. A graceful new train station is a 40-minute drive from downtown, surrounded by cornfields and cow pastures. The extension of the line into downtown Abuja has been severely delayed, and money is running short for its completion. And even though Nigeria desperately needs more freight trains, the rail line with its fragile-looking bridges is too lightly built to support heavily laden cargo cars. The fate of the line — like dozens of Chinese projects around Nigeria — is a potential problem for Beijing. Infrastructure projects in Nigeria have been fueled by the same manic lending that has also created mountains of debt for China’s economy at home. State-controlled Chinese banks have lent money at rock-bottom interest rates in deeply indebted Nigeria. They have done so based on the assumption that the Chinese government will repay them if Nigeria cannot. A little-known Chinese government agency, Sinosure, has guaranteed the loans. Sinosure insured $427 billion worth of Chinese exports and overseas construction projects around the world in 2013, the most recent year available. The Export-Import Bank of the United States, by comparison, issued just $5 billion worth of credit in each of the last two years. Nigeria is a particularly shaky bet for China. The corruption investigations could prompt the government to cancel contracts outright. Government revenue has dropped by more than half since the fall in world oil prices, so the country may not have the money to make good on the Chinese deals. The riskiest projects of all may be those like the high-speed rail line that are widely viewed as the previous administration’s vanity projects. A Chinese construction manager at the new station on Abuja’s outskirts, who identified himself only as Mr. Zhang, said the project would be finished by next March. It was only behind schedule, he added, because of shipping delays. “We’re waiting for materials from China,” Mr. Zhang said, “like toilets.”

Nigeria
China
Price
Economy
Manufacturing
International trade
Foreign Investment
Jobs


For Masters Champions, Only a Year to Throw on the Green Jacket

Abstract: AUGUSTA, Ga. — Some topics never go away at the Masters. One of them is the many things that newly crowned champions do with the green jackets they are awarded. For the first year after their victory, winners can take the jacket with them wherever they please. Adam Scott of Australia took it around the world. Bubba Watson took it to his high school, his elementary school, his middle school and the University of Georgia. Watson also said that when he kept the jacket at his home, he would hide it from visitors. “I don’t let anybody see or touch it,” he said. “I’m very protective of it.” Phil Mickelson has taken a vastly different approach. He wore it to all the corporate outings he was invited to, and to any event. And then he used it as a surprise golf prop. “I would put it in my golf bag and if it was chilly in the morning, I would pull it out,” Mickelson, a three-time Masters champion, said. “It’s fun to do that with that jacket. I wouldn’t carry three jackets around with me, but I would say, ‘I’ve got two more, if you’re cold as well.’ “But that’s just being rude. You’ve got to be careful who you say that stuff to. Some people can take it, some people can’t.” The champions’ jackets remain at the Augusta National Golf Club after the first anniversary of a player’s victory. Scott said he slips it on whenever he goes to the club, even for practice rounds. Image Mickelson and his caddie, Jim Mackay, during a practice round for the Masters on Tuesday. Credit Ezra Shaw/Getty Images “I’ll go to the club and wear it to dinner,” Scott said, smiling. “It’s a great feeling. I put it on, check that it still fits. It feels very good. I look forward to it. “You know there’s only so many of them in the world.” SEEKING SWAGGER Phil Mickelson began his appearance at a news conference on Tuesday by describing his recent play. “The last year and a half has not been my best,” Mickelson said. He paused, then added: “It’s been terrible.” But Mickelson believes he is regaining some of his confident swagger. “I’m getting my aggressive play back, and that’s what I need for my game,” he said. “It lets me go for birdies, and that’s what I need to do. “I feel like I’m coming around. I don’t know if it’ll be in time this week, but I hope so.” Mickelson said he was healthy, in part, because he was working out more often. “Last year, I had some back tightness,” he said. “My spine and everything is healthy, but I had muscle tightness and it was because I didn’t put in the time working out. As I get older, I need to put in more time than I used to. So this off-season I did, and now my back has been great.” GROUPINGS SET The pairings for Thursday’s first round were announced Tuesday. One of the featured groups will no doubt be Phil Mickelson, Rory McIlroy and Ryan Moore, who ranks ninth on the PGA Tour money list. Adam Scott will be playing with Dustin Johnson. Three top contenders are in one group: Jordan Spieth, Billy Horschel and Henrik Stenson. Tiger Woods will tee off in the penultimate grouping of the day, starting at 1:48 p.m., with Jimmy Walker and Jamie Donaldson. That tee time will assure that Woods is finishing near the conclusion of the live broadcast on national television. But the marquee grouping will be the last to play. It features three of the best players not to have won a major championship: Jason Day, Sergio Garcia and Rickie Fowler.

Bubba Watson
Phil Mickelson
Golf
Masters Golf,Masters


E.P.A. Delays Tougher Rules on Emissions

Abstract: The Obama administration is retreating on long-delayed environmental regulations — new rules governing smog and toxic emissions from industrial boilers — as it adjusts to a changed political dynamic in Washington with a more muscular Republican opposition. The move to delay the rules, announced this week by the Environmental Protection Agency , will leave in place policies set by President George W. Bush. President Obama ran for office promising tougher standards, and the new rules were set to take effect over the next several weeks. Now, the agency says, it needs until July 2011 to further analyze scientific and health studies of the smog rules and until April 2012 on the boiler regulation. Mr. Obama, having just cut a painful deal with Republicans intended to stimulate the economy, can ill afford to be seen as simultaneously throttling the fragile recovery by imposing a sheaf of expensive new environmental regulations that critics say will cost jobs. The delays represent a marked departure from the first two years of the Obama presidency, when the E.P.A. moved quickly to reverse one Bush environmental policy after another. Administration officials now face the question of whether in their zeal to undo the Bush agenda they reached too far and provoked an unmanageable political backlash. Environmental advocates are furious. They fear a similar delay on the approaching start of one of the most far-reaching regulatory programs in American environmental history, the effort to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But in a striking turnabout, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute — which have been anything but friendly to Mr. Obama — are praising his administration. “Clearly, the agency has heard the calls from manufacturers,” said Keith McCoy, vice president for energy and natural resources at the manufacturers’ group. “We hope this week’s announcements signal that the E.P.A. is slowing down on overly burdensome and unnecessary rules that will crush economic growth and job creation.” White House officials said that no plan was under way to retreat from the president’s aggressive environmental agenda. And some Democratic policy analysts said the environmental agency was simply exercising its usual caution, albeit in a new political climate. “The E.P.A. always operates under the caricature of environmental zealots, and the reality is that economic concerns and the ability for business to continue operating is always a significant consideration,” said Joshua Freed, director of the clean energy program at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “The administration’s number one goal over the next two years is going to be expanding economic growth. The environmental regulatory process has always played out in that context, and that’s not going to change.” The delays come as the president is reaching out to a newly empowered Republican Party on tax policy, a move that is angering his own Democratic base. He must now decide whether to make similar efforts on environmental issues. “Obama has already signaled that in his quest for re-election he’s more than willing to turn against his base in order to make a compromise with his adversaries,” Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, an advocacy group, said in an e-mail, responding to the rules delay. Mr. O’Donnell said the administration was clearly “running scared” from the incoming Congress and said he suspected that it was willing to moderate its stand on a variety of environmental regulations, including pending greenhouse gas rules aimed at reducing the pollutants that contribute to global warming . The E.P.A. has said that it will begin regulating carbon emissions from power plants and other major stationary sources on Jan. 2, as a prelude to broader regulation of carbon dioxide in future years. Delaying that program would undercut much of what officials are trying to do in international negotiations like the United Nations climate talks now under way in Cancún, Mexico. “Look, in January there will be appropriations battles and a whole lot of other tough fights,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, head of the E.P.A.’s air quality office in the recent Bush administration and now a lobbyist for industry. “The administration is going to be feeling a lot of pressure, and they would be better off to do some sort of a deal acceptable to the Republicans to delay this rather than having to threaten a veto.” The delayed smog rule would lower the allowable concentration of airborne ozone to 60 to 70 parts per billion from the current level of 75 parts per billion, putting several hundred cities in violation of air pollution standards. The agency says that the new rule would save thousands of lives per year but cost businesses and municipalities as much as $90 billion annually. The boiler rule would affect 200,000 industrial boilers, heaters and solid waste incinerators and is intended to cut emissions of mercury and other dangerous pollutants in half. Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, described the rules delay as a technical and tactical decision. She said she was delaying them for a matter of months merely to get “further interpretation” of scientific and health studies of their effects. An agency official said the delays were not a response to Congressional threats to curb the agency’s power or cut its budget. Still, the threats are looming. Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who is in line to become the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has made limiting E.P.A. authority one of his main objectives and has promised a steady round of hearings questioning the basis of agency actions. Mr. Upton suggested recently that Ms. Jackson should be given her own parking place on Capitol Hill because she would be testifying so frequently in the coming year. In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Upton called for the environmental agency to “stand down altogether” from the rules, which he said would “send a devastating economic shockwave coast to coast.” Mr. Upton and Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate panel that oversees the E.P.A., followed up Thursday evening with a letter to Ms. Jackson in which they said they were “gravely concerned” about the direction the agency is taking. They vowed to conduct a thorough oversight investigation of the new rules.

Environmental Protection Agency
Air Pollution
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
United States Politics and Government
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry
Obama Barack


French Charity in Dispute Over African Children

Abstract: PARIS, Oct. 30 — An attempt by an obscure French charity to fly 103 African children from Chad to France was escalating into a diplomatic dispute on Tuesday after nine French citizens were indicted on charges of attempted kidnapping and fraud. The charity, called l’Arche de Zoé, or Zoé’s Ark, has denied wrongdoing, saying that the children were orphans from neighboring Sudan and that it had kept the French government abreast of its campaign to place them with host families in France. But since six of its members, three journalists and seven air crew members were arrested ushering the children into a Boeing 757 near the border with Sudan last Thursday, the organization has been enmeshed in a controversy that could have cascading consequences for France’s diplomatic and military influence in the region. The dispute erupted less than a month before a French-led European Union peacekeeping force was scheduled to be deployed in eastern Chad and the northeast of the Central African Republic, with a mission to protect civilians and aid workers from the violence spilling over from the Darfur region in western Sudan. It has quickly become politicized. President Idriss Déby of Chad, who only grudgingly accepted the idea of peacekeepers based on his soil, said last week that the Europeans might have wanted to sell the children to pedophiles or kill them and sell their organs for transplant. President Nicolas Sarkozy telephoned Mr. Idriss on Sunday and condemned the group’s operation as “illegal and unacceptable.” Mr. Idriss in turn assured him that the peacekeeping operation would not be at risk. “We have been assured that the two issues are not linked,” said Hugues Moret, a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry. “For now no one suggests that this affair will hinder the troop deployment.” But privately, French diplomats said that the mood remained tense. France, the former colonial power, will provide about half of the 3,000 troops to the peacekeeping force and is currently in delicate negotiations with other European countries about their supplying the rest. French diplomats were pressing the authorities in Chad to at least release the three journalists, who were indicted on the same charges as the members of Zoé’s Ark. There was some hope that an expected transfer of the case from the court in Abeche, where the Europeans are being held, to another jurisdiction in Ndjamena might change the indictment. The nine in custody are facing up to 20 years in prison. The seven Spanish crew members on the plane were charged with complicity in abduction. Questions also remained about the intentions of Zoé’s Ark after United Nations officials and French diplomats said many of the children appeared to be from Chad, not Sudan, and many were not orphans. According to news media reports, some children told aid workers and journalists that their parents were alive and that they were lured from their villages with offers of sweets. All 103 of them are in an orphanage in Abeche and are being looked after by representatives of Unicef and the Red Cross. Zoé’s Ark, founded in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Asia, describes itself as a “refuge for children.” It raised money for Indonesian children orphaned in the tsunami, set up temporary encampments on site and took one boy who needed medical attention to France for an operation, the Parisien newspaper reported Tuesday. Contacted by Zoé’s Ark about its plans first in May and again in July and September, the French Foreign Ministry said it issued several warnings and told the group that what it was planning was illegal. In July, the ministry asked the public prosecutor to examine whether there was reason to believe that the group was planning to be an intermediary for illegal adoption. Neither Sudan nor Chad allows international adoptions. That preliminary examination became a formal investigation on Oct. 24. “We did our job,” said Mr. Moret, the ministry’s spokesman.

Chad
France
Children and Youth
International Relations
Deby Idriss
Sarkozy Nicolas


Venezuela Moves to Block Foreign Aid to Some Groups

Abstract: CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The National Assembly, which is dominated by supporters of President Hugo Chávez , has passed a bill banning foreign financing for nongovernmental organizations and political parties, adding to a series of measures that critics say are intended to stifle dissent. The law approved by the National Assembly late Tuesday puts in jeopardy human rights groups and other organizations that get money from abroad, critics say, in part because it authorizes fines of as much as double the amount received by political parties or civic organizations. It is one of many contentious laws that Mr. Chávez’s government is pushing through in the final weeks of the current assembly, in which there are only a token number of opposition lawmakers. A new legislature with a much larger opposition bloc will take office Jan. 5. Human Rights Watch condemned the new law preventing groups and parties from accepting international donations, saying that it not only blocks financing for human rights activists but also “severely limits their ability to foster public dialogue with foreign experts who are critical of Chávez’s policies.” The law specifies that it applies to groups that defend “political rights.” It also establishes penalties for groups that invite foreigners who publicly give “opinions that offend institutions of the state” or that offend senior officials. Organizations can be fined for such statements, and political parties can be fined and prevented from participating in elections for five to eight years. Carlos Lusverti, who leads Amnesty International in Venezuela , said the law was vaguely worded and puts nongovernmental organizations at risk. He said his group received much of its financing from Amnesty International chapters in other countries. If his group must survive only on what it can raise within the country, Mr. Lusverti said, “our activities are going to be severely reduced.” Mr. Chávez has said that the new measures are needed to prevent foreign intervention, particularly by the United States government and organizations based in the United States. Mr. Chávez asked last month why his government should permit Venezuelan political parties and civic organizations “to continue to be financed with millions and millions of dollars from the Yankee empire?” The National Assembly also passed a bill on Tuesday that would allow for the suspension of lawmakers who leave their political party while in office.

Venezuela
Politics and Government
Chavez Hugo


New Fighting a Bid for Leverage as a Gaza Cease-Fire Expires

Abstract: GAZA CITY — Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip resumed cross-border air assaults after a three-day cease-fire expired on Friday, but the renewed violence seemed less about meeting military goals than about jockeying for leverage in talks that had made little progress toward a more durable truce. Militants led by Hamas, the Islamist faction that dominates Gaza, sent a rocket soaring toward southern Israel exactly as the agreed-upon pause expired at 8 a.m., and fired about 50 throughout the day, wounding one soldier and one civilian and damaging a house in the border town of Sderot. Israel, which withdrew its ground troops earlier this week, responded quickly with airstrikes and artillery shelling that by day’s end had hit nearly 50 targets and killed five people, including three children. But Israel showed no signs of seeking to re-invade Gaza or escalate its airstrikes. The cause of the fighting appeared to be Hamas’s frustration that it could not get what it considers meaningful concessions from Israel and Egypt at the talks in Cairo. Image A girl inside a United Nations school hosting displaced Palestinians in Gaza City, where plastic bottles stood empty, awaiting the return of the water supply. Credit Siegfried Modola/Reuters The Egyptian foreign ministry asserted that the parties had reached agreement on “the great majority of topics” and urged an extension of the cease-fire to address “the very limited points still pending.” But Palestinian officials said the Israeli delegation had hardly addressed their demands to open border crossings, remove restrictions on trade, establish a seaport and release prisoners. Palestinian and Israeli analysts alike said that after a month of death and destruction, Hamas could not stop fighting without a tangible civic achievement, and was finding it difficult to climb down from an ambitious agenda in the face of a strong Egyptian-Israeli alliance. The conflict on the ground between an advanced, high-tech military and a guerrilla group appeared to find an echo in diplomacy, as Egypt, Israel and the United States all pushed for President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority to take a leading role in running and rehabilitating Gaza. That would be a blow to Hamas, which took control of the territory in 2007 , and tricky for Mr. Abbas, whose perceived cooperation with Israel has already hurt his credibility among Palestinians. Ahmed Yousef, a former Hamas leader who remains close to the movement, likened the renewed fighting to two people biting each other’s fingers to see who would surrender first. Image Ibrahim Dawawsa, 10, was killed in a strike from an Israeli drone as he played in the yard of a mosque. Credit Hatem Moussa/Associated Press “This is like a game, a chess game — you have all the time to continue, to show your enemy that you stay strong,” Mr. Yousef said in an interview at a seaside hotel in Gaza City. “For three days we couldn’t have a solid answer from the Israelis, so you have to go back to fighting. Your legitimate demand is not answered, so you have to put pressure on the other side.” Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who specializes in Arab affairs, said, “Hamas is in a bind because they have set such a high bar with their demands. “But you can see today Hamas and Israel exchanged blows but on a low scale — they were not firing all that they can,” Mr. Yaari noted. “Everybody understands there may be an extension or a new cease-fire.” A senior Palestinian official briefed on the Cairo negotiations said that Israel and Egypt had essentially dismissed all talk of a seaport or restored airport in Gaza, and only agreed to ease limits on travel and imports. In exchange for these concessions, Israel and its international backers demanded the demilitarization of Gaza, something the Palestinians said would come only with the establishment of an independent state. In Gaza, a Pattern of Conflict Similarities and differences in the last three major conflicts between Israel and Hamas. “As Palestinians, we don’t want escalation, but it is our right to defend ourselves,” Azzam al-Ahmed, a negotiator who is close to Mr. Abbas, said in Cairo. “We won’t stay here indefinitely,” he added, referring to the talks. Kobi Michael, former head of the Palestinian desk at Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry, said the negotiations so far had proved “a very humiliating treatment of Hamas by Egypt.” The country’s new president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, views Hamas as an enemy because it sprang from his main domestic rival, the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt’s role is critical not only as a broker of the talks, but because it controls Gaza’s gateway to the world, the Rafah border crossing, which has been closed much of the past year. Cairo has indicated that having Mr. Abbas’s security forces back on the border, as they were before Hamas wrested control of Gaza in 2007, would be required to get it reopened. “The Egyptians don’t bother with political correctness — they are very direct,” Mr. Michael said. “The Egyptians have a long memory, and like to serve up revenge cold.” Image In the shadow of a minaret toppled by an airstrike, residents in Gaza City gathered for the Friday Prayer. Credit Khalil Hamra/Associated Press Except for the weapons so central to its identity, Hamas has little to offer at the bargaining table. Renewing the rocket fire not only sent Israelis scrambling into bomb shelters on another sunny Friday. It also returned the world’s attention to the killing of nearly 1,900 Gaza residents since July 8, most of them civilians, including a 10-year-old boy felled by a drone Friday morning as he played at a mosque under construction near his home. The day’s exchanges, however, were much less aggressive than before the cease-fire. An afternoon airstrike hit a Gaza City home belonging to a Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, injuring three, witnesses said. A strike in Al Qarara, a village near Khan Younis, killed three cousins, ages 10, 12 and 22, who were in a crowd of people waiting outside a grocery store to fill bottles with clean water. The Israeli military reported that two rockets were fired into southern Israel even before the cease-fire expired, but the barrage began exactly at 8 a.m. for maximum public-statement effect. The rockets continued for hours, but none went beyond southern Israel, a contrast from a month in which a few sirens sounded in the Tel Aviv area most days. “This is not a worsening of the conflict — this is a tactical move, and we need the perspective of time to understand whether this is also a strategic move,” Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, said on Israel Radio. “Military Hamas did not absorb a strong enough blow in order to have it agree to the conditions the Egyptians and Israelis are trying to force on it.” Assessing the Damage and Destruction in Gaza The damage to Gaza’s infrastructure from the current conflict is already more severe than the destruction caused by either of the last two Gaza wars. Mkhaimer Abusaada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, said that firing a few dozen rockets into Israel was not, “from a rational way of thinking,” likely to move Israel on core issues it considers a threat to its security. The audience for Friday’s display, he said, was really the beleaguered population of Gaza, where whole neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, displacing nearly a quarter of the 1.7 million residents, and virtually everyone has buried a loved one. “Hamas is trying to send a macho message to the Palestinian people — that we bring Israel to the negotiating table and we are still launching missiles,” Mr. Abusaada said. “The problem is, Hamas is acting like a superpower. We know that Israel is the superpower, and Hamas can only annoy the Israelis, but Hamas is not in a position to put enough pressure on Israel to make concessions.” Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, called the renewed rocket fire “unacceptable, intolerable and shortsighted.” A senior Israeli government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate diplomacy, said the Palestinian militants “have taken away the premise” for the Cairo talks — “an unconditional cease-fire.” But Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American business consultant and political commentator, said the Cairo process was inherently flawed because Israel and the Palestinians did not come to it on equal footing after 47 years of occupation. “The sheer use of the word ‘cease-fire’ is insulting — it depicts an artificial symmetry,” Mr. Bahour wrote on the blog Middle East Eye , “even though reality on the ground is totally contrary.” Pointing to Egypt’s border restrictions on Gaza, he added: “To be conducting these ‘cease-fire’ talks in the capital of a country that participates in the siege of the Gaza Strip should be an embarrassment to every member of the Palestinian negotiating team, first among them Hamas.”

Israel
Palestinians
Gaza Strip
Military
Hamas


Governor Hopes Speech Will Obscure a Scandal

Abstract: In a political high-wire act, Gov. Chris Christie will try on Tuesday to refocus attention from a controversy over a vindictive traffic jam to the day-to-day work of governing, by outlining plans to extend the school day, lower taxes for homeowners and reduce urban crime. Mr. Christie’s State of the State address, with all its pomp and formality, offers him a welcome if awkwardly timed opportunity to present himself as a policy-purveying statesman, without having to answer questions. It will be a far cry from his last turn at the podium, when he appeared before voters as an angry, humiliated and, in his words, “heartbroken” man who accepted responsibility for his staff’s role in closing traffic lanes to the George Washington Bridge. In the speech, Mr. Christie will call for a renewed spirit of bipartisanship and cooperation throughout the state, an optimistic message with obvious appeal to a national audience that could sound jarring to many Democrats closer to home, given the wave of revelations that the governor’s office had sought to punish local officials who failed to support him. Aides said that Mr. Christie would acknowledge the scandal over the gridlock in Fort Lee, N.J., but would argue that it should not overshadow a four-year record of working well with officials from both parties. Excerpts from the roughly 30-minute speech, provided by Mr. Christie’s staff, suggest he will emphasize improving his state’s education system, a perennial policy goal of the Republican governor. Besides a longer school day, he will call for an extended academic year, a proposal whose popularity has grown in urban school districts across the country. “Life in 2014 demands something more for our students,” Mr. Christie is expected to say. Much of Mr. Christie’s focus will be on cities, like Camden and Newark, that long have had troubled schools and stubbornly high crime rates. The school superintendents from both cities are expected to attend the speech. But even as Mr. Christie talks policy, the lane closings will loom large. There is little precedent for a governor delivering such a major government speech amid a still-smoldering scandal. “This is not the opportunity for him to recreate himself,” said Brigid Callahan Harrison, a professor of political science and law at Montclair State University in New Jersey. “It’s too close to the scandal.” She added: “The reality is that this governor has to muddle through this one.”

Chris Christie
George Washington Bridge
New Jersey
NJ State of the State


Wife of Barry Bonds’s Ex-Trainer Backed Out of Deal to Cooperate

Abstract: The wife of Greg Anderson, Barry Bonds ’s former trainer, agreed last year to cooperate with federal prosecutors leading the perjury investigation of Bonds, but shortly before she was scheduled to meet with them she backed out, according to several people briefed on the matter. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a federal investigation. Anderson spent a year in prison for refusing to talk to a grand jury investigating Bonds, and it is expected that he will refuse to testify at Bonds’s perjury trial, which is scheduled to begin March 2. His refusal to cooperate has led authorities to pressure him by threatening to charge his wife, Nicole Gestas, with criminal conspiracy and his mother-in-law with financial wrongdoing. Prosecutors came close to gaining Gestas’s cooperation. Gestas, through her lawyer, conveyed to the prosecutors that she was willing to talk to them about what Anderson had told her about his relationship with Bonds and what interactions she observed between the two men, the people said. Gestas, they said, also agreed to talk about financial matters regarding Anderson’s relationship with Bonds, particularly how Anderson was paid by Bonds. Gestas has been under investigation by authorities since November 2007. The people briefed on the investigation said they were not sure why Gestas backed out of the agreement. Several years ago, it was revealed earlier this week, prosecutors sent an undercover female agent to join the gym where Gestas worked. The authorities hoped that the agent would befriend Gestas and get her to talk about Bonds, but the effort did not prove fruitful. Gestas’s ultimate decision not to cooperate is just another example of the difficult path that prosecutors have encountered over the past three years as they have tried to win Anderson’s cooperation. The effort to get him to talk began shortly after Anderson was released from prison in 2006 after serving several months in connection with a guilty plea in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative steroid-distribution case. At that point, Anderson refused to testify before a grand jury that was hearing evidence about whether Bonds perjured himself when he testified before the Balco grand jury in 2003 that he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs. As a result, Anderson was held in contempt and went back to prison for over a year. He was released only after Bonds was indicted Nov. 15, 2007. The next day, prosecutors sent a target letter to Gestas, threatening to charge her with conspiracy to commit a crime. Then the authorities went further, threatening to charge her mother, Madeleine Gestas, with crimes connected to her finances. Prosecutors, according to one person briefed on the matter, made it clear to the lawyers representing Nicole Gestas that if Anderson testified, the government would drop the investigations of both her and her mother. Then, last month, federal agents raided the California home of Madeleine Gestas and seized a variety of documents. Still, through it all, there has been no indication that Anderson is backing away from his refusal to talk. The importance of Anderson to prosecutors was underscored two weeks ago when the judge overseeing Bonds’s perjury trial indicated that she was inclined to throw out several pieces of key evidence — including alleged doping calendars and positive drug tests — because there was no one who could testify about their authenticity. Although United States District Judge Susan Illston did not state the name of the person who could testify about the documents, she was clearly referring to Anderson. Illston could rule as early as Wednesday on whether to exclude the evidence. Anderson has been subpoenaed as a witness at Bonds’s trial. Illston said Tuesday that she planned to hold a hearing before the trial to question Anderson and determine whether he would cooperate with the authorities at the trial. If Nicole Gestas had agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, anything she told them about what her husband had said about Bonds could not be used at the Bonds trial because it would be considered hearsay. But prosecutors could use such statements as a doorway to obtain other evidence. But whatever Gestas told prosecutors about interactions she observed between Anderson and Bonds and her knowledge of how Anderson was being paid by Bonds could be used at the trial because it would have been considered firsthand knowledge. In exchange for her cooperation, prosecutors had told Gestas’s lawyer that they would give her a letter providing her with immunity from any statements she made about her wrongdoing, the people said.

Doping (Sports)
Steroids
Anderson Greg
Bonds Barry


Jury Recommends 30-Day Sentence for Sergeant in Death of Pvt. Danny Chen

Abstract: FORT BRAGG, N.C. — A military jury recommended on Tuesday that a sergeant be sentenced to 30 days in prison for mistreating and assaulting Pvt. Danny Chen , whose suicide in Afghanistan last year drew attention to the standing of Asians in the United States military. The jury also said the sergeant, Adam M. Holcomb, should be reduced one rank, to specialist, and be fined $1,181.55. Sergeant Holcomb had faced a sentence of up to two years in prison and a punitive discharge. On Monday, the jury found him guilty of two counts of maltreatment and one count of assault. But he was acquitted on charges of negligent homicide, reckless endangerment, communicating a threat and hazing. The verdict was a blow to military prosecutors, who had sought at the court-martial here to show that Sergeant Holcomb’s treatment of Private Chen, which the prosecutors said included hazing and racial taunts, led directly to his suicide. Supporters of Private Chen’s family, who reacted with disappointment to the verdict, expressed more dismay over the sentencing, calling it too lenient. During the sentencing hearing, a military prosecutor, Maj. Stephen Hernandez, told the 10-member jury of Army officers and enlisted soldiers that they had an opportunity to help redress the suffering of Private Chen, a Chinese-American from Lower Manhattan, and other “little people” in the military. “You answer for that weak soldier who couldn’t have a voice,” he said. “Danny Chen, ladies and gentlemen, is an American soldier. And today you bring justice to that American soldier.” But in a dramatic moment, the military judge, Maj. Bret Batdorff, cut off Major Hernandez before he could finish. Major Batdorff said Major Hernandez had committed three violations in his remarks, including accusing Sergeant Holcomb of failing to apologize directly to Private Chen’s parents, an argument that the judge said was prohibited. Major Hernandez was not allowed to continue, and as a result, the prosecution did not have an opportunity to make a formal sentencing request. The defense, in turn, asked for leniency for Sergeant Holcomb, citing testimony about his accomplishments as a soldier and a family man. “He regrets his actions,” one of his lawyers, Capt. Dennis Hernon, told the jury. “Suffice it to say, Sergeant Holcomb has been punished enough.” Under military law, the jury sends its recommendation to Lt. Gen. Daniel B. Allyn, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps and the base commander at Fort Bragg, who can either ratify it or modify it. Elizabeth R. OuYang, president of the New York chapter of OCA , a civil-rights group, expressed dismay and sadness at the recommended sentence. “I, in good conscience, could not suggest or promote enlistment in the military when a sergeant convicted for racial maltreatment has been allowed to stay in the Army,” she said. “This is a very sad day.”

Hazing
Holcomb Adam M
Chen Danny
Courts-Martial
Decisions and Verdicts
Suicides and Suicide Attempts
Asian-Americans
Fort Bragg (NC)
Murders and Attempted Murders
Afghanistan War (2001- )


Cleveland Browns at St. Louis Rams Preview

Abstract: Browns (2-4) at Rams (2-3) 1 p.m. Line: Rams by 4 N.F.L. Week 7 scores and highlights In a game that pits two of the best teams in the league with losing records against each other, this looks on paper to be a quite favorable matchup for the Rams and running back Todd Gurley, who ran for 146 and 159 yards in his last two games, since the Browns currently have the N.F.L.’s worst run defense. The last three games Cleveland has played have been decided by a field goal, but this one could get ugly if the Browns do not find a way to prevent Gurley, who is looking increasingly like the back he was in college, from running wild. PICK: RAMS


World Bank Sees Slump in Russia Worsening

Abstract: MOSCOW — The World Bank released a grim report on Russia on Monday, projecting a 4.5 percent contraction in the economy in 2009 and warning that the financial crisis would push 5.8 million Russians into poverty unless the government shifted more spending to poor families. The report was a sharp revision of the World Bank’s November forecast , which predicted an increase of 3 percent in gross domestic product in 2009. World Bank analysts also took a more pessimistic view than the Russian government, whose experts are predicting a 2.2 percent contraction. The report praised the government’s $85 billion anticrisis program, which stabilized Russia’s banks and prevented financial panic. But it said too little had gone to households — a hazard in a society where 37 million people, a quarter of the population, lives near the poverty line. “It is a somewhat disturbing development that we would like to draw attention to,” said Zeljko Bogetic, the World Bank’s chief economist on Russia. “The challenge is now to act quickly.” During the hours after the report was released, the ruble slipped to about 34.2 per dollar, its lowest rate in 10 days, and both of Russia’s main stock indexes dropped more than 3 percent. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov told reporters that he believed that the World Bank report was too pessimistic and said the government had asked experts to review the forecast. Among the bank’s discouraging conclusions was that Russia cannot expect the kind of vibrant, “V-shaped” recovery that it saw after its 1998 currency crisis. Though Russia weathered the “rapid tsunami” that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September, Mr. Bogetic said, lower household spending and a pileup of collapsing corporate loans could develop into a “silent tsunami,” suppressing global markets until at least the middle of 2010. “As the crisis continues to spread to the real economy around the world,” the report said, “initial expectations that Russia and other countries would recover fast are no longer likely.” The World Bank report addresses a particular worry of Russian authorities: that unemployment will translate into civil unrest. Already, nearly 6.4 million Russians are unemployed and 1.1 million are on forced leave or working part-time schedules. By the end of 2009, unemployment will probably reach 12 percent, the World Bank predicts. The poverty rate will climb to 15.5 percent, erasing some of the gains made in the last decade, when poverty fell to 10 percent from about 20 percent, the report said. The report recommends a package of payments, including increases of 70 percent in unemployment subsidies and 220 percent in child welfare payments, which Mr. Bogetic said “could alleviate some of this social pain.” “These instruments are better than all the others in reaching the poor,” he said. “You need to jack them up sufficiently.” The report gives high marks to Russia for “responding fairly massively” to the onset of the financial crisis, spending a projected 6.7 percent of its G.D.P. on anticrisis measures when the internationally recommended rate is 2 percent. As a result, Russia avoided a wave of bankruptcies and bank closings, an achievement that “somewhat surprised” most foreign analysts, Mr. Bogetic said. The World Bank revised its forecast for the price of crude oil to $45 a barrel, increasing slightly to $53 in 2010. The average price of a barrel of oil in 2008 was $97.

World Bank
Russia
Gross Domestic Product
Economic Conditions and Trends