Independent Intellect

Google News: Pele reopens Maradona feud

2010-07-01T18:40:00.000-04:00

ESPN - ‎1 hour ago‎

By Soccernet staff Brazil legend Pele has launched a scathing new attack on Diego Maradona, blasting the Argentina coach for his "bizarre lifestyle".

Head games: Germany's Lahm trashes Argentina The Associated Press

Maradona says Schweinsteiger must be nervous USA Today

Reuters - Sydney Morning Herald - Reuters Africa - Times of India

all 2,069 news articles »

A different game

2010-06-12T15:29:00.000-04:00

A black South African and an Afrikaner, both around 40 years of age, began talking at a bar prior to boarding a flight to Johannesburg. It was thanks to the Afrikaners, the people of chiefly Dutch extraction who ran the apartheid state, that black men like this one had no right even to a vote until 1994. But the two men chatted about the World Cup, business and politics with amiable ease, revealing not a hint of historical resentment or racial stress. The thought struck that the black South African would have been unable to connect as easily with a Nigerian, a Rwandan or a Mozambican; the Afrikaner would not have found as much in common with a Dutchman, an Englishman or an American.

That could change, though, as Mr. Pienaar conceded when he said that South African politics found itself at a "crossroads"; that after the World Cup fun was over a battle would resume within the ANC between the Malema camp, whose mix of half-baked Marxist rhetoric and race-tinged populism appeals to disaffected youth (60% of under-35s in South Africa are unemployed); and those "real leaders," as Mr. Pienaar calls them, who carry the Mandela flag of principled "nonracialism."

Contrary to much received opinion, it's more of a challenge to divide the races in South Africa than it is to unite them. Anyone who doubts it should ask the black player on the 1995 rugby team, Chester Williams, and the white player on the 2010 soccer team, Matthew Booth. Mr. Williams is married to a white woman; Mr. Booth, to a black one. Each couple has two small children.

—John Carlin is the author of "Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation," the book that served as the basis for the film "Invictus."

Oil disaster

2010-06-03T20:24:00.001-04:00

A sea bird was coated in oil at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast Thursday.
Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

It is not a spill; it is much more than a spill.

The White House is planning to send BP a bill for $69 million to cover the costs of cleaning up the spill, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday.
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

The White House is so far behind the eight ball on this issue it is pathetic.

Have you seen this man?

2010-05-15T14:54:00.000-04:00

Item in today's Journal, New York section:

Manhattan: Bald Man With Backpack Sought in Bank Robbery

Police are searching for a bald bank robber who stuck up a midtown bank this week. Just before noon on Thursday a man in sunglasses wearing a dark-gray hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans and sneakers walked into Valley National Bank at 295 Fifth Ave. The man, who was also carrying a backpack, handed a note to the teller. The teller gave him an undetermined amount of money which he put in the backpack before turning and walking out of the bank, police said.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477). Tips can also be submitted to the Crime Stoppers website at www.NYPDCrimeStoppers.com or by text messages at 274637 (CRIMES) and then entering TIP577.

Guess he didn't have the hood of his sweatshirt on his head. Bright?

A New York Bloc on the Supreme Court

2010-05-12T14:43:00.000-04:00

Clockwise from top left, Ruth Fremson/The New York Times; bottom left, Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times - Clockwise from top left, childhood homes of Antonin Scalia, in Queens; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in Brooklyn; Elena Kagan, in Manhattan; and Sonia Sotomayor, in the Bronx.

There will, perhaps, be little that the 4 native New Yorkers will agree on, but they do have their provenance in common. And, curiously, they are each from a different borough.

The Supreme Court has some justices who are liberals and some who are conservatives. It has some who see themselves as strict constructionists and some who probably do not. And then it has the justices who grew up riding the subway and the ones who grew up turning right on red. It has the justice who was the treasurer of the Go-Getters Club at James Madison High School in Brooklyn. It has the justice who watched “Perry Mason” on television in a housing project in the Bronx and decided that the star defense lawyer was less important than the judge. It has the justice who took part in a junior military training program at Xavier High School in Manhattan and carried his rifle home on the train to Queens. If the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is confirmed, she would join three others in a distinct bloc. For the first time in the court’s history, said William Treanor, the dean of Fordham Law School, it would have four justices who grew up in New York City.

Two Jews, an Italian and a Puerto Rican: that expresses well what New York is, and has been.

Other notable justices spent all or part of their youth in the city, including Felix Frankfurter and Benjamin N. Cardozo. But if Ms. Kagan takes the seat being vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens, a Chicagoan, it will be an unusual moment for a city whose political influence has been slowly shrinking since the nation outgrew the original 13 colonies.

It has been a long time since New York's political power declined. Political not just as in elected representatives, but governmental.

Justice Scalia grew up in Elmhurst, in what he once called “a really mishmash sort of a New York,” with Germans, Irish and Puerto Ricans. He went to Public School 13, where he got straight A’s, and Xavier, the Jesuit school in Manhattan, where he was first in his class and was in the military program.

Elmhurst is now Indian, Latino, but more Colombians that Puerto Ricans.

He said he realized that New Yorkers were assertive when his high school band went to march in a parade in Washington “These people just stood there and looked at us, you know?” he told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2008. “In New York, people say, ‘Hey, play something for us, you know? You bums, why don’t you play something?’ They were — they were alive, they were confrontational.”

So is he, assertive, and acerbic (which I think is a very common adjective used when describing his style of questioning in the Court).

Three of the four New Yorkers — Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor and Ms. Kagan, if she is confirmed — would form the court’s liberal wing with Justice Stephen G. Breyer. Professor Bonventre of Albany Law School said that the “ethnic-gender-religious composition of the liberals on the court” would underscore their differences with the conservative majority. “For most New Yorkers, they will look at the liberal minority and say, ‘That’s us, that’s our America,’ ” Professor Bonventre said, “and so when the court renders liberal decisions and you have all of those four, the three women and the Jewish guy, it will make complete sense to New Yorkers, whereas for the South and the Bible Belt, people are going to say, ‘They don’t understand the rest of America.’ ”

But Martin Flaherty, a professor at Fordham Law School who knew Ms. Kagan when they were undergraduates at Princeton, said that being a judge from New York did not mean “everyone is going to be a liberal or a conservative. “Witness Scalia,” Mr. Flaherty said. “But there’s a certain toughness, mental toughness, to spending time in New York. That is true of all four New Yorkers. None of them is a pushover.”

Learn From the BP Disaster. Then Drill Again.

2010-05-07T10:26:00.002-04:00

Nansen Saleri, president and CEO of Quantum Reservoir Impact in Houston, was formerly head of reservoir management for Saudi Aramco. He seems to think, no, he does think, and contend, that after learning our lesson, we should drill again. The Palin crowd might well agree, and surely will, but that hardly constitutes responsibility, wisdom, and prudence.

But Hardship Endures in Alaskan Zone Hit by Valdez Spill.Not as easy as wishing something were true.

Anti-Gay Preacher Caught with Male Hooker

2010-05-04T20:18:00.002-04:00

Anti-Gay Preacher Caught with Male Hooker

Not this again: George Alan Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leader of the anti-gay movement, was caught in a Miami airport with a male escort whose online profile at Rentboy.com advertises his “smooth, sweet, tight ass.” It appears that Rekers, who founded the Family Research Council with James Dobson, took the escort on a 10-day trip to Europe. Reached for comment, Rekers said, "I had surgery, and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him." (People who saw Rekers at the airport note that Rekers was carrying luggage when he and the escort returned to the United States.) Reached for comment, that escort did not want to disparage his client but made it clear that they met on Rentboy.com.

Read it at Miami New Times

Baseball revenge

2010-04-24T11:00:00.005-04:00

In Cuba, baseball has always been political. When the sport was introduced in the 1860s by a Cuban returning from studies in the U.S., Cubans saw it as a way to distance themselves from their Spanish colonial rulers, who favored bullfighting. U.S. teams traveled to Havana for spring-training games, and Cuban players thrived in the U.S.

This is from an utterly fascinating article in today's Journal about historical memory, both on a personal and national level, political and sports fanaticism, human tragedy and suffering, human arrogance and hubris, and about baseball.

The romaticism attached by some to Fidel Castro's name on a macro level is, as is so often the case, damaged (to say the least) when examined on a micro level. The one aspect of the Cuban Revolution that has always stuck in my craw is the need for Cuban authorities to prevent people from leaving the island if they so choose. That changes political revolution to military dictatorship, and whether by the vanguard of the proleteriat or any other person or group, dictatorship is dictatorship.

Solar plane

2010-04-07T20:41:00.001-04:00

AVIÓN SOLAR — El Solar Impulse, con la misma envergadura de alas de un Boeing 747, pretende ser el primer avión a energía solar que de la vuelta al mundo en 2012; este día voló con la velocidad de una bicicleta durante una hora y media | Ver nota (Foto: Reuters)

On Thursday, this picture appeared of the airplane in the Journal.

SOLAR SHADE: The solar-powered prototype aircraft “Solar Impulse” took its maiden flight at the military airport in Payerne, Switzerland, Wednesday. The project aims to circumnavigate the world with an aircraft powered only by solar energy. (Laurent Gillieron/Associated Press)

Elton at Chichén

2010-04-01T20:30:00.007-04:00

Saw an item in El Universal's website about an Elton Joh concert at Chichée Itzá. I recognized the archeology. It might be this one

Classic April Fool's hoaxes

2010-04-01T20:18:00.002-04:00

Big Ben Goes Digital (1980)

In 1980, the BBC unveiled a gem in its series of excellent April Fool’s Day jokes when it told listeners that Big Ben was going to have its iconic analog clock faces replaced with digital displays. Listeners were aghast. The BBC’s Japanese service took the prank even further, announcing that the hands would be sold to the first four listeners to phone in with a bid. Calls poured in from the gullible, including one from a Japanese sailor in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Classic April Fool's Day hoaxes in Daily Beast. Some real gems. Pat Sajak and Alex Trebec switch places.

Would the Founders Love ObamaCare?

2010-04-01T18:49:00.000-04:00

A right-wing columnist at the Journal, Daniel Henninger, had the temerity to use that headline in his screed. In his usual way, he bashes lefties, Obama and every President in the last century (he does not exclude Reagan).

The left-wing critics are right: The rage is not about health care. They are also right that similar complaints about big government were heard during the New Deal and the Great Society, and the sky didn't fall. But what if this time the sky is falling—on them. What if after more than a century of growth in the national government, starting with the Progressive Era, the American people are starting to push back. Not just the tea partiers or the 13 state attorneys general seeking protection under the 10th Amendment and the Commerce Clause. But something bigger than that.

The rage is a tempest in a teapot that Republicans are trying to ride, to control, and to use as a substitute for a party platform that includes more than the word NO. Fringe and marginal people are organizing themselves into mobs and rabble that hold signs equating the President with Hitler, scream Socialism, dress up as Colinials in a Hollywood depiction of 1776, and have the temerity to hold flags that say Don't tread on me. These yahoos can manage to equate themselves with Colonials rebelling against taxation without representation. They are disaffected, lost, clueless, and otherwise idiotic. And Henninger throws in his two cents worth of lunacy.

Who are the American people that he so shamelessly assumes he can quote? Ten percent of the population? Twenty five? What about the rest of us?

Amendment 10 - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Attorneys General who sued the federal government are, save one, all Republicans. All of them would love to get enough publicity to ride a wave of popularity to higher office.

The American people can and do change the nation's collective mind on the ordering of our political system. The civil rights years of the 1960s is the most well-known modern example. (The idea that resistance to Mr. Obama's health plan is rooted in racist resentment of equal rights is beyond the pale, even by current standards of political punditry.)

He uses the civil rights struggle to legitimize his extremism, shamelessly. He is completely wrong. That struggle was fought by individuals banded together in a movement to end overt racism, legitimate and legal discrimination, and a century of racial animus sanctified by law. His tea parties are not close to being in the same league.

Faced with corporate writedowns in response to the reality of Congress's new health plan, an apoplectic Congressman Henry Waxman commanded his economic vassals to appear before him in Washington.

These corporate writedowns priovided Henninger and his crowd of prevaricators and liers an opportunity to again twist fatcs for their own purpose. A story has some of the details: The legislation prevents companies from deducting tax-free subsidies they receive from the government for providing prescription-drug benefits to retirees. The charges are noncash, meaning companies won't have to write a check, but ultimately their tax bills will be higher without a change in tax treatment of the drug-benefit subsidy, assuming their benefits don't change. The health-care overhaul doesn't eliminate the subsidy, but starting in 2013, companies can no longer deduct the part of the benefit that is paid for by the subsidies.

A non-cash charge, or an acounting entry, is all. And what is being changed is: companies were given a subsidy, and allowed to deduct that subsidy from their taxes. That was unfair, and is being ended.

Faced with a challenge to his vision last week, President Obama laughingly replied to these people: "Go for it." They will. As to the condescension and sniffing left-wing elitism this opposition seems to bring forth from Manhattan media castles, one must say it does recall another, earlier ancien regime.

Wonder if the Manhattan media castles he sniffes against include News Corp's?

Playas sin mosquitos

2010-03-26T17:43:00.001-04:00

PLAYAS SIN MOSQUITOS

Autoridades de Acapulco arrancaron el programa de fumigación y abatización en playas, con el objetivo de combatir el dengue | Ver nota | Gráfico

+	Ampliar foto

(Foto: Adriana Covarrubias)

Nuristan

2010-03-26T09:16:00.003-04:00

An article on Afghanistan discusses the pullback of US troops from Nuristan leading to reconciliation between the area's Afghanis with Kabul and their repudiation of the Taliban.

Unmapped until the 1940s and peopled by blue-eyed tribes that claim descent from Alexander the Great, Nuristan is known for hostility to outsiders. Its inhabitants adopted Islam, shedding their ancient pagan beliefs, only about a century ago. A Hezb-i-Islami stronghold, Nuristan was one of the few parts of the country that remained outside Taliban control before the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

2010-03-25T14:32:00.001-04:00

Looks like the eagle will have to wait a bit longer to come back to its landing place on pocket change. The U.S. Mint unveiled five new designs for quarters to be minted in 2010, this time honoring national parks and sites. The Mint's America the Beautiful Quarters Program will continue through 2021 and eventually release 56 coins, one for each state, the District of Columbia and the five U.S. territories.

"Like how the 50 State Quarter Program educated a generation of children on geography and state history," said U.S. Mint Director Ed Moy during the unveiling at the Newseum in Washington, "we hope that the America the Beautiful quarters will reconnect Americans to our country's national parks and sites."

US MINT - The Yellowstone National Park quarter features the Old Faithful geyser with a mature bull bison in the foreground. Slideshow

While the head of George Washington will remain on one side, as it has since 1932, the other side will carry majestic views of public lands belonging to all Americans in the order the sites were established. The first quarter, to be released April 19, will honor Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas. The Mint plans to make five quarters per year for about 10 weeks each. The Secretary of the Treasury can extend the program for another 10 years, or 56 coins, or Congress could pass legislation authorizing a new program. If not, Mr. Moy said, "the quarter reverse will revert back to the American eagle in 2022."

The Mint's state quarters program attracted about 147 million collectors to the hobby and garnered the Mint $4.1 billion in revenue and $3 billion in seigniorage, or money that the government was able to use instead of borrowing, according to the Mint. It costs between 7 and 8 cents to produce a quarter, meaning the government makes between 17 and 18 cents in profit per coin, according to David L. Ganz, a past president of the American Numismatic Association.

How many of each quarter the Mint decides to make depends on the demand of commerce in the nation, it said. The Mint issued 34.3 billion state quarters. That sheer volume is the reason these coins will probably not be good long-term investments, say experts.

"Coins that are common now will remain common in the future," said Scott Travers, author of "The Coin Collector's Survival Manual." "Coins that are scarce will become scarcer and rare. Coins that are rare will become rarer."

In the short term, however, the program promises to be a bonanza for collectors willing to engage in a bit of arbitrage. Mr. Travers suggests a strategy of sifting through fresh bank rolls of coins, sending only the best to get graded and sell immediately in the secondary market.

Coins such as these graded as perfect can be sold for hundreds of dollars a piece, said Mr. Travers. But it is important to note that a grading service such as PCGS has never assigned a perfect grade, a mint state 70, to one of the state quarters the Mint strikes for circulation.

"A Rhode Island quarter graded mint state 69 has a value of $4,000," said Mr. Travers. PCGS assigned the grade of MS-69 to three of them. A New York quarter graded MS-69 is valued at $2,150; PCGS assigned such a grade to 13 of them.

Separately, Mr. Moy said the mint would start producing one-ounce silver coins for collectors as soon as it satisfies demand from bullion investors, as it must by law. Demand has soared in recent years. In 1996, the Mint sold 3.6 million ounces of one ounce silver coins; in 2009, it sold 30.5 million ounces. "When this happens," Mr. Moy said, "we will make silver proof eagles."

By ALEJANDRO J. MARTINEZ

Operativo por Clinton

2010-03-23T21:23:00.000-04:00

Secreatry of State Clinton travelled to Mexico for bilateral discussions on anti-drug cartel actions. Needless to say, securityu was exceedingly tight. Travelling with her were Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, Secretary of Defense Gates, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen and Director of national intelligence Blair.Both the NY Times and El Universal had stories on the trip; clearly for Mexico it was a much more important deal. The Mexican media outlet had video reports, pictures, and stories. One picture caught my eye.

ANALIZAN LUCHA ANTINARCO

La reunión que encabezan la canciller Patricia Espinosa y la secretaria de Estado de EU, Hillary Clinton, tiene como fin revisar la estrategia conjunta contra el crimen organizado | Ver nota (Foto: NTX)mex

Las ratas ayudan

2010-03-16T20:49:00.001-04:00

Fascinating piece in El Universal's website about drainage in the Valley of Mexico City.

Brin shaped Google's China stand

2010-03-16T19:45:00.001-04:00

* The Wall Street Journal

* TECHNOLOGY
* MARCH 12, 2010

Soviet-Born Brin Has Shaped Google's Stand on China

By BEN WORTHEN

As a boy growing up in the Soviet Union, Sergey Brin witnessed the consequences of censorship. Now the Google Inc. co-founder is drawing on that experience in shaping the company's showdown with the Chinese government.

Mr. Brin has long been Google's moral compass on China-related issues, say people familiar with the matter. He expressed the greatest concern among decision makers, they say, about the compromises Google made when it launched its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, in 2006. He is now the guiding force behind Google's decision to stop filtering search results in China, say people familiar with the decision.

Google acknowledged that the call to stop filtering—which was announced in January and set off negotiations with Beijing—could lead to its withdrawal from the fast-growing market.

The move is the clearest manifestation yet of a tension that has always existed at Google.

The Internet company, on one hand, is analytical: It built its core search business on algorithms that determine the relevance of Web sites and has tried to apply quantitative analysis to traditionally subjective parts of a business, such as hiring decisions. On the other hand, Mr. Brin and co-founder Larry Page have passionately touted Google's ability to spread democracy through access to information, and adopted the unofficial and now-famous motto, "Don't Be Evil."

"At its best, Google is data-driven with an ethical trump card," said Larry Brilliant, who headed up the company's philanthropic efforts until 2009. Always it was the founders, Messrs. Brin and Page, who could play that card, he added.

Google declined to make Mr. Brin or any other executives available for an interview.

Mr. Brin was born in Moscow in 1973. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1979, he has said, in part because of anti-Semitism there before the fall of the Soviet Union. He has said in past interviews that the move and its circumstances had a profound impact on his life.

Mr. Brin was asked about the compromises necessary to do business in China during a 2004 interview with Playboy magazine. "There are difficult questions, difficult challenges," he said. "One thing we know is that people can make better decisions with better information," he said, adding that he was aware of cases where finding information through Google's search engine had saved people's lives.

When Google launched its Chinese site, it agreed to filter out results that the Chinese government found objectionable, including some political speech and pornography.

Mr. Brin wasn't completely comfortable with that decision and would sometimes say Google should never have agreed to Beijing's conditions, a person familiar with his thinking said. But his objections were never enough to reverse Google's policy.

"I actually feel like things really improved" in the first years after Google entered China, Mr. Brin said at a technology conference in February. "We were actually able to censor less and less, and our local competitors there also censored less and less."

But following the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, he said, "there's been a lot more blocking going on."

In December, Google detected cyber attacks that it traced to computers in China. It said some of its intellectual property was stolen, adding that it had evidence that attackers were trying to access the accounts of Chinese human-rights activists on Gmail, Google's email service.

Mr. Brin personally supervised Google's subsequent investigation, even moving his office into the building where Google's security team was operating, said a person familiar with the investigation.

The Wall Street Journal reported in January that in debates over how to respond, Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, argued the company could do more good by keeping its search engine in China. Mr. Brin said Google had already taken that approach. and that it could no longer justify giving in to China's requirements to censor search results.

A Silicon Valley executive who knows Mr. Brin said his Soviet upbringing made him particularly opposed to state use of technology to spy on citizens. This person suspects that the apparent attempts to spy on Gmail users may have been as important in Google's reaction as the issue of censorship. "That tripped Sergey," this person said.

Why Bibi Humiliated Biden

2010-03-16T13:27:00.000-04:00

by Martin Indyk

Netanyahu sensed a political advantage, and he's pressing it. Martin Indyk, former American ambassador to Israel, explains Netanyahu's remarkable decision to taunt his country's most important ally. What happened to Vice President Biden this week in Jerusalem was egregious but hardly new. Right-wing governments in Israel have regularly embarrassed high-level U.S. officials by making announcements about new settlement activity during or just after their visits. But it usually happens to secretaries of state. It infuriated James Baker, confounded Condoleezza Rice, and appalled Madeleine Albright.

They know they can get away with it.

When I served as Albright's ambassador in Israel, during Bibi Netanyahu's first term as Prime Minister, he announced a major extension to an existing West Bank settlement as she departed Israel after one of her efforts to move the peace process forward. When she heard the news, she called me on an open line and shouted: "You tell Bibi that he needs to stop worrying about his right wing and start worrying about the United States." It was good advice, but it went unheeded. Antagonizing the Clinton administration eventually contributed to Netanyahu's downfall. Israeli voters punished him for mishandling the relationship with Israel's only true ally.

The second time around, one might have expected Netanyahu to be more circumspect about his relations with the Obama administration, especially because Israel is now so dependent on the United States to deal with the growing threat from Iran.

Has it ever not been dependent on the US?

But three developments seem to have emboldened Netanyahu. First, Obama lost the Israeli public by convincing them—through his Cairo speech and customary cool—that he wanted to distance the United States from Israel in order to curry favor with the Arab World. For the first time, Netanyahu found himself in the unusual position of being more popular at home than the U.S. president (Clinton and Bush enjoyed 70-80 percent public approval ratings in Israel).

Second, the Republicans have started making a comeback in Washington, raising the possibility of using Congress to constrain the president. That was something Netanyahu deployed to considerable advantage once Clinton lost control of the House to the Israelis' close friend Newt Gingrich. He probably savors the opportunity to do it again.

Third, Obama purposely delinked the peace process from Iran, making clear to Netanyahu that, despite their deep differences over settlement activity, they would be completely coordinated on the strategic issue of curbing Iran's nuclear program.

So Bibi won by losing, or, simply won another one. He lost nothing.

So my guess is this fortuitous combination generated sloppiness in the prime minister’s office. That's the only way I can explain the humiliation of the vice president of the United States on the very day that he came to Jerusalem to try to persuade the Israeli public, using Biden-esque hyperbole, that the Obama administration really does love them. The excuse that Netanyahu was blind-sided by settler gremlins in the Interior ministry strains credulity. That's because his aides have spent a good deal of time lately reassuring Washington that Israel would avoid provocative actions in Jerusalem that might sabotage the indirect Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that were launched this week.

Now that hard-won, nine-month American effort to get Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table is in serious jeopardy. If the indirect talks collapse before they even start, Netanyahu will inevitably be blamed. The Palestinians surely sense that they have an opportunity to turn the tables on Israel, so Netanyahu has very little time to get himself out of this self-generated mess.

There is one way to repair the damage to U.S.-Israel relations and to his own standing with the Israeli public. He could immediately declare that in order to boost the chances for negotiations, he is calling a halt to all provocative acts in Jerusalem—including announcements of new building activity in east Jerusalem, housing demolitions, and evictions. He should also establish a mechanism in the prime minister's office to ensure that his decision is implemented. Such actions would both demonstrate his commitment to the negotiations and to repairing the damage to his friendship with Joe Biden and the United States.

Having just explained why PM Netanyahu did not do what the writer is proposing, the writes proposes that the PM do what he has not done. Further: establish a mechanism to make sure his decision is implemented? Isn't that a matter of course, that the government implements the Prime Minister's decisions?

Can't do it because of his right wing? This time Netanyahu should listen to Albright’s counsel.

Why should this time be different than any other time? The Israel lobby in the US is already making noises about the US government ceasing to pressure Israel. Noise from that lobby and its Congressional allies will only get louder.

Martin Indyk is the vice president and director of foreign policy at The Brookings Institution and author of the recently published Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (Simon & Schuster 2009).

Examiner: Lehman Torpedoed Lehman

2010-03-12T14:09:00.003-05:00

A scathing report by a U.S. bankruptcy-court examiner investigating the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. blames senior executives and auditor Ernst & Young for serious lapses that led to the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In the works for more than a year, and costing more than $30 million, the report by court-appointed examiner Anton Valukas paints the most complete picture yet of the free-wheeling culture inside the 158 year-old firm, whose chief executive Richard S. Fuld Jr. prided himself on his ability to manage market risk.

Fuld's arrogance was boundless. He even told a House member to let him finish, when the politician had the temerity to interrupt his testimony before a Congressional committee. Fuld was used to such deference.

The document runs thousands of pages and contains fresh allegations. In particular, it alleges that Lehman executives manipulated its balance sheet, withheld information from the board, and inflated the value of toxic real estate assets. Lehman chose to "disregard or overrule the firm's risk controls on a regular basis,'' even as the credit and real-estate markets were showing signs of strain, the report said.

Getty Images - Lehman's top executives, including CEO Richard Fuld, were aware of accounting chicanery and failed to disclose it, the report said. Above, Fuld testifies before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in October 2008.

Mr. Valukas, chairman of law firm Jenner & Block, devoted more than 300 pages alone to balance-sheet manipulation, accusing Lehman of using accounting methods to move assets off its books.

Coincidentally, the firm is domicilied at 919 Third Avenue.

The examiner said that Lehman—anxious to maintain favorable credit ratings—engaged in an accounting device known within the firm as "Repo 105" to essentially park about $50 billion of assets away from Lehman's balance sheet. The move helped Lehman look like it had less debt on its books.

Seems misleading, to say the least.

In an ordinary repo transaction, Lehman would raise cash by selling assets with a simultaneous obligation to buy them back within days, according to the report. The transactions would be accounted for as financings, and the assets would remain on Lehman's balance sheet. In a Repo 105 transaction, Lehman did the same thing. But because the moved assets represented 105% or more of the cash it received in return, accounting rules allowed the transactions to be treated as "sales" rather than financings. The result: Assets shifted away from Lehman's balance sheet, reducing the amount of debt it showed to investors.

Misleading, and allowed. Nice.

"In this way, unbeknownst to the investing public, rating agencies, Government regulators, and Lehman's Board of Directors, Lehman reverse engineered the firm's net leverage ratio for public consumption," says the report.

Bloomberg News - Erin Callan, Lehman's former financial chief, in an April 2008 interview.

Lehman's own global financial controller, Martin Kelly, told the examiner that "the only purpose or motive for the transactions was reduction in balance sheet" and "there was no substance to the transactions." Mr. Kelly said he warned former Lehman finance chiefs Erin Callan and Ian Lowitt about the maneuver, saying the transactions posed "reputational risk" to Lehman if their use became publicly known.

In a November 2009 interview with the examiner, Mr. Fuld said he had no recollection of Lehman's use of Repo 105 transactions but that if he had known about them he would have been concerned, according to the report.

Plausible deniability?

One party singled out in the report is Lehman's audit firm, Ernst & Young, which allegedly didn't raise concerns with Lehman's board about the frequent use of the repo transactions. E&Y met with Lehman's Board Audit Committee on June 13, one day after Lehman senior vice president Matthew Lee raised questions about the frequent use of the transactions.

In a statement, Mr. Fuld's lawyer, Patricia Hynes, said, "Mr. Fuld did not know what those transactions were—he didn't structure or negotiate them, nor was he aware of their accounting treatment."

Difficult to believe that such a hands-on CEo didn't know a blessed thing about such an important matter. And if true, then he wasn't awatre of a very important matter.

As Lehman began to unravel in mid-2008, investors began to focus their attention on the billions of dollars in commercial real estate and private-equity loans on Lehman's books. The report said that while Lehman was required to report its inventory "at fair value," a price it would receive if the asset were hypothetically sold, Lehman "progressively relied on its judgment to determine the fair value of such assets."

General strike grinds Greece to halt

2010-03-12T09:36:00.000-05:00

Demonstrations by Unions Against Government Austerity Measures Hobble Transit Services, Spark Clashes With Police

ATHENS—Flights were grounded and trains suspended amid a nationwide general strike Thursday, as Greek police fought running street battles with anarchist youths in fresh and violent signs of anger at the government's austerity plans. Unions called a strike to protest wage and benefit cuts being put in place to trim Greece's swollen budget deficit as the country draws closer to a financial reckoning. An estimated 50,000 people took to the streets.

What is the alternative?

Greece must refinance a chunk of its giant debt next month, and Greek leaders are leaning hard on counterparts in richer European states to provide some measure of support that could ease those debt sales. Eyes are on European Union finance ministers' meetings early next week.

In the capital city Thursday, masked and hooded youths went well beyond protest—throwing rocks and bottles, smashing shop windows, setting alight trash cans and burning at least one private car. Police fired tear gas and detained more than a dozen people. There were also separate clashes outside the Greek parliament, Agence France-Presse reported. Greece has a history of sometimes-violent anarchist protesters, though they are well outside the mainstream.

Greece's two umbrella unions, for private- and public-sector workers, called the strike to protest the €4.8 billion ($6.55 billion) package of spending cuts and tax increases that the government announced March 3, which was voted into law days later. The communist-backed PAME union held a separate protest that drew an estimated 15,000 people.

Communists? They're still around? Haven't they gotten the news?

"There is a big turnout today and that shows people are concerned," said Dimitris Papageorgiou, a 49-year-old worker at the Bank of Greece. "Today's protest is because of the austerity measures. Why do the people always have to pay? Who is at fault? It's the foreign speculators and the useless policies of previous governments."

Recent polls show that the Greek public is divided over the austerity plan. While the public opposes some measures, such as an increase in Greece's fuel and value-added taxes, analysts say there is a broad acceptance that something must be done. "No one really expects the measures to be withdrawn. They were adopted by the government to avoid even worse consequences," said Lefteris Eleftheriadis, 48, a biologist who works in Greece's agriculture ministry and participated in Thursday's protest.

The strike affected public transport, government ministries and state-owned companies. All flights into and out of the country were grounded and all ferry and rail services suspended. On the streets of Athens Thursday, normal workday activity was muted. Street lights and road signs were festooned with strike posters. Usual morning news shows on local television were replaced with alternative programming. Many businesses were shut amid fear of violence, and police blocked main thoroughfares around the city center. Just off the city's central square, a group of about 200 police and fire officials also staged a sympathy protest, challenging the government to fulfill its pre-election promises to protect workers' salaries.

How?

Under pressure from the EU and financial markets, Greece's socialist government last week presented the latest in a series of austerity packages to trim the budget deficit to 8.7% of gross domestic product this year, from an estimated 12.7% last year. Among other things, the package raises Greece's top value-added tax rate to 21% from 19%, freezes public-sector pensions, cuts civil-service entitlements and bonus pay, and raises taxes on fuel, alcohol and cigarettes.

The general strike follows several days of escalating labor actions by a variety of smaller unions.

— By ALKMAN GRANITSAS. Charles Forelle contributed to this article.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A13

Israeli Faith in Iran's Opposition Gains Favor

2010-03-11T19:03:00.001-05:00

Israel's oldest civil servant, 83-year-old Ministry of Defense adviser Uri Lubrani, has spent his career defying conventional wisdom on Iran. Today, Israel's political and military establishment appears to be tilting toward one of his long-ignored views: Israeli support for Iran's opposition movement—and not a miltary strike—is the best way to combat the regime in Tehran.

A voice of reason and moderation, a much needed one.

"A military strike will at best delay Iran's nuclear program, but what's worse, it will rally the Iranian people to the defense of the regime," says Mr. Lubrani, who was ambassador to Iran from 1973 to 1978 and is now a special adviser to Israel's minister of defense. "We must do everything possible to help (the protest movement) do the job."

All the Right Places: A few Lubrani career highlights

* Pre-1948: Fought for Israel's pre-statehood militia.
* 1952-1961: Senior aide to Prime Minister Ben Gurion.
* 1963-1967: Ambassador to Uganda. Survived plane crash with Idi Amin.
* 1967-1971: Ambassador to Ethiopia. Smuggled first Ethiopian Jew to Israel.
* 1973-1978: Iran ambassador.
* 1983-2000: Managed the Israeli government's activities in Lebanon.

Rafi Eitan, an adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, says the protests "changed people's attitudes here. They started to understand that this should be done the way Lubrani has been saying it should be done."

He has quite a track record of understanding Israel's neighbors.

Heading Israeli government activities in Lebanon since 1983, he was one of the first to warn of Iran's growing influence among the country's Shiites. His recommendations were largely neglected and Hezbollah soon emerged as one of Israel's most potent foes. "Lubrani was one of the few, the very few, to identify that Israel should find a way to the Shiites before Iran did," recalls retired Brig. Gen. Shimon Shapira, who was an intelligence officer in Lebanon at the time. More recently, as Iran's nuclear program grew and Washington and Israel hardened their views, Mr. Lubrani's calls to support what appeared to be a beaten-down opposition seemed out of touch.

Admirers point to his track record as reason to heed his advice. Mr. Lubrani was named ambassador to Iran in 1973, after a string of posts as envoy to countries neighboring Israel's Arab enemies. In 1977, Mr. Lubrani was summoned to the Shah's private resort island of Kish—giving him a first-hand look at the bubble of decadence the Shah had retreated into, he says. Kish had a landing strip serving a Concorde jet that airlifted delicacies to the island each day from Paris and kept the island's boutiques stocked with the latest French fashions, recalls Mr. Lubrani. After returning to Tehran, he ran into Iran's long-time prime minister, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, who openly called the island "a pit of corruption and decadence," a striking breach of diplomatic protocol, says Mr. Lubrani.

The US did not then, and one wonders if it does now, understand the negative meaning of the Shah, how hated and corrupt he was; what the US was an anti-communist ally, and ignored the dirty details of his corruption.

Mr. Lubrani warned Israel's foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, that the regime's days were numbered, according to Mr. Lubrani and senior government officials at the time. Harold Rhode, who retired last month after 28 years as a Pentagon analyst, much of it focused on Iran, says "Lubrani's warning got back to Washington, and the CIA laughed at it. The U.S. told Israel it's not true." Mr. Lubrani's successor was evacuated just weeks after arriving in Tehran, as the Islamic Revolution swept the country.

"Uri is by far the best authority Israel has on Iran," says Bernard Lewis, the influential Middle East historian and a decadeslong friend of Mr. Lubrani. "He's demonstrated that on more than one occasion by being right when everybody else was wrong, and he still has difficulty getting anyone to listen to him."

Aftershocks rattle Chile during Inauguration

2010-03-11T14:00:00.004-05:00

Martin Bernetti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images -Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, accompanied by his wife, Cecilia Morel, during his inauguration ceremony at the Congress in Valparaiso on Thursday.

The new Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera, had not even taken office on Thursday when major aftershocks rocked the central coast of this earthquake-ravaged country. But within hours of his inauguration, he appeared on television to announce that troops, relief supplies and even Mr. Piñera himself would be heading immediately to the quake zone.

In rushing to respond aggressively to the tremors, it seemed that Mr. Piñera was trying to avoid the missteps of his predecessor, Michelle Bachelet, whose response to a devastating Feb. 27 earthquake was criticized as halting and ineffective. Mr. Piñera said he would fly to the hardest-hit areas later Thursday, and promised to “deploy all of the troops that may be necessary starting this evening to guarantee calm and public order.”

In the legislative seat of Valparaíso, about 90 miles from the quakes, dignitaries who gathered for the inauguration of Mr. Piñera made nervous jokes and glanced at the shuddering ceiling of the National Congress building as the quakes hit, according to news reports.

Mr. Piñera, however, showed no sign of acknowledging the tremors, and continued to shake hands with leaders and supporters before taking the oath of office. But the building was evacuated after the inauguration.

Claudio Santana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images From left, Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay and Rafael Correa of Ecuador during a 6.9 magnitude aftershock during the inauguration ceremony of Chilean President Sebastián Piñera on Thursday.

The United States Geological Survey reported that the first quake on Thursday struck the coast to the west of Rancagua and was quickly followed by one of 6.7 magnitude at 11:55 a.m., and another of 6.0 magnitude at 12:06 p.m. Scores of strong aftershocks have rattled Chile’s interior and its coastline since the Feb. 27 quake, one of the most powerful on record. That quake killed hundreds of people, toppled apartment buildings and bridges, and stirred up powerful waves that erased entire fishing villages hugging the southern coast of the country.

Burla

2010-03-10T22:30:00.002-05:00

BURLA La bancada del PRI llevó una piñata de Pinocho al salón de sesiones, asegurando que era César Nava. La diputada María Estela de la Fuente la trasladó a la zona de curules del PAN \| Nota \| Fotogalería

(Foto: Lucía Godínez /EL UNIVERSAL)

Venetian winter

2010-03-10T22:26:00.000-05:00

Foto: EFE 10 de marzo de 2010

NEVADA EN ITALIA

El país vive un invierno más frío a los que está acostumbrado; varias góndolas se pueden ver cubiertas por la nieve en uno de los canales de Venecia | Ver nota | Ver fotogalería

Slim es el hombre más rico del mundo: Forbes

2010-03-10T22:24:00.002-05:00

Gates and Buffet have had rough years, Slim has not. Even though he's aplutocrat, Mexico (some of it, anyway) takes pride in a Mexican being the richest man in the world. On paper, but the richest.

Slim es el hombre más rico del mundo: Forbes

El magnate mexicano desbanca a los estadounidenses Bill Gates y Warren Buffet con una fortuna de 53 mil 500 millones de dólares 16:58

El Chapo repite entre los millonarios de Forbes 19:30

El Chapo, empatado con Harp Helú 20:26

En muestra de confianza en México: Elías Ayub 19:45

Entérate Los nueve mexicanos en la lista de Forbes

Entérate Los 10 más ricos según Forbes

Fotogalería Los 10 nuevos millonarios de Forbes

Fotogalería Los mexicanos más ricos del mundo

Video Slim desplaza a Gates como el más rico del mundo

Entérate Los criterios de Forbes para lista de millonarios

Perfil: Carlos Slim Helú

Prensa internacional destaca fortuna de Slim

Beaches and Reggae and Jews

2010-03-09T11:58:00.001-05:00

Page One article in the March 9, 2010 edition of the Wall Street Journal. The web version's page title is Famous for Jerk Chicken and Jammin', Jamaica discovers its Jews

Jamaica's New Tourism Spiel: Beaches and Reggae and Jews
Island Lures Travelers With Hidden History; Moses Cohen Henriques, Pirate of Caribbean

By TAMARA AUDI

KINGSTON, Jamaica—This island nation boasts miles of pristine beaches, reggae music and the Western hemisphere's largest butterfly. Now, it's promoting a new asset to tourists: its Jews. From the tourism minister on down, Jamaican officialdom has embraced a plan to market the nation's Jewish history as a way of wooing a new segment of travelers. New tours of Jamaica will offer travelers a rare look at the history of Jews on this Caribbean island.

No matter that Jamaica has just one synagogue and no rabbi, or that its Jewish community is down to around 200 people. It was once home to a Jewish pirate named Moses, according to one account. A global economic downturn and "ferocious" competition from Mexico, says Jamaican tourism director John Lynch, mean that every traveler counts these days. Jamaica's Jewish history, he concedes, has "been a well-kept secret."

Mr. Lynch wants to put together a tourism package that includes stops at historic Jewish cemeteries, a visit to the island's synagogue and a traditional post-worship repast with Jewish families—with some beach time thrown in. Since most of the island's Jewish history is centered around Kingston, the strategy fits the government's desire to boost tourism in the scruffy capital city most vacationers skip. In January, Kingston hosted a five-day conference on Jewish-Caribbean history that drew 200 academics, genealogists and history buffs from Israel to Oregon.

Jewish Jamaica: Some of the stops on an itinerary for Jewish travelers. Interactive

But Jamaica is still finding its way in this new market. Two conference attendees negotiated a kosher meal with a waitress at a Kingston restaurant, insisting that a fish not touch a cooking surface that might have been used to cook meat. "You'll wrap the fish in two pieces of foil?" a diner shouted as reggae music crackled in the background. "Yeah, mon," she said.

Ainsley Henriques, an energetic 70-year-old who organized the conference, says Jamaica's Jewish community does have a rich history. Mr. Henriques, with blue eyes and a lilting Jamaican accent, catches many off guard. "When I travel, people say to me, 'What, you're Jamaican?' And then, 'What, you're Jewish? There are Jews in Jamaica?' They have no idea we've been here for 350 years."

Tammy Audi/The Wall Street Journal - Norma Haddad passes out prayer books before services at the Kingston synagogue.

An ancestor arrived in Jamaica from Amsterdam in 1740. He now serves as the unofficial Jewish historian, and is Israel's honorary consul in Jamaica. "I wear many hats. That's why I'm bald," Mr. Henriques says.

Starting in the 17th century, Jews fleeing the Inquisition arrived in Jamaica from Portugal and Spain. By the end of the 19th century, Jamaica had six synagogues and around 2,000 Jews. Some thrived as merchants in the shipping trade.

Over generations, many of the island's Jews married locals and stopped practicing Judaism. Others left to help establish nascent Jewish communities in the American colonies. Recently, young Jews have left to work in Australia, the U.S. and Canada. The remaining Jews worship at their Kingston synagogue. With no rabbi, services are led by lay people. The synagogue is one of the few in the world with a sand floor—a feature some believe dates from days when Jews had to worship in secret and used sand to muffle footsteps.

Tammy Audi/The Wall Street Journal - Philadelphia lawyer Eli Gabay looks at graves of Jewish Jamaicans.

Other Caribbean nations also claim Jewish roots. Curaçao says it is among the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere. Its sand-floor synagogue is a popular tourist attraction. With such a small Jewish community, Jamaica's Jewish-tourism boosters had to get creative with the visitors' itinerary. A tour for conference attendees included a stop at Kingston's Hillel school. The school runs on a Jewish calendar and has 750 students; around 20 are Jewish. It also included a kosher lunch at Strawberry Hill, a mountain resort above Kingston owned by Chris Blackwell, founder of music label Island Records. Born in London, he grew up in Jamaica and his mother was Jewish. Mr. Blackwell told the tourists that while he wasn't raised Jewish, he finds the island's Jewish history fascinating.

Jamaica may have claim to one unusual historical chapter: Jewish pirates. Among them: Moses Cohen Henriques, who attacked Spanish ships loaded with silver, according to Edward Kritzler's "Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean." Mr. Kritzler, who attended the conference, is an American who has been in Jamaica on and off since the late 1960s. He's fond of wearing a Star of David pendant over shirts studded with skull and crossbones.

Many Jewish pirates, he writes, were "secret Jews" who converted to Catholicism in name only to survive the Inquisition, then fled to the Caribbean. "Jamaica was at one time the largest Jewish community in the Caribbean," said Jane Gerber, director of the Institute for Sephardic Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "It was a hub of Jewish commerce that had a triangular trade with colonial America and England. Jamaica was where they came to get kosher stuff."

Gabriel Solomon - Reggae musician Behn "BennyBwoy" Goldis

Today, finding a kosher kitchen can be tough. But the island is used to preparing vegetarian meals for its religious Rastafarian population—some of whom consider themselves a lost tribe of Israel and follow Jewish dietary restrictions forbidding shellfish and pork. One Kingston hotel recently purchased new cooking tools dedicated to kosher meals for guests.

Eli Gabay, a Philadelphia lawyer who attended the conference and tour, marveled at a tombstone with his family name on it. Mr. Gabay said he doesn't know if his family has direct ties to Jamaica, but added, "It brought history to life."

Behn Goldis, a New York reggae artist and orthodox Jew whose stage name is BennyBwoy, calls himself "the original Jewmaican."

A former Wall Street analyst, he was invited to the conference to perform. He did so wearing a yarmulke knitted in the colors of the Jamaican flag, braided hair and sunglasses decorated with gold snakes. "I'm not Jamaican. I just love the music and the people," Mr. Goldis said. "But I really am Jewish."

Chile rattled on path to development

2010-03-06T12:35:00.000-05:00

Associated Press - Residents of Constitución, a seaside town in Chile that was pounded by a post-earthquake tsunami, wait in line to receive melons Friday.

SANTIAGO, Chile—Chile's earthquake has had an unexpected aftershock—shaking the country's confidence in its march to the ranks of developed nations. For many people here, the massive earthquake exposed deep social and economic fault lines in the country, triggering complaints that poor barrios were hit hardest by the temblor and speculation that rampant looting was partly their revenge on wealthier Chileans.
Sociologist and blogger Lucia Dammert dubbed it "a social earthquake" that revealed "a fractured country, socially divided with a population that feels excluded and as a result acts with a lack of community values."

In Santiago, the capital, wealthy neighborhoods to the northeast suffered little or no damage as a result of sturdy, modern architecture that complies with some of the strictest building codes in the world. Abraham Senerman, architect of a 52-floor building soon to be inaugurated in Las Condes, one of the city's poshest neighborhoods, boasted to local media that the tower survived unscathed. Across town, in the working-class suburb of Pudahuel, Celia Aliaga's three-bedroom home, a former farmhouse made of adobe, crumbled. "This was all I had, and there's nothing for me to rebuild with," said Ms. Aliaga, a 56-year-old housekeeper, who has been sleeping with her family under a tin roof in the backyard since the quake.

The economic divide in Chilean society has been a festering problem even though free-market policies have helped propel the country to an extended period of growth and stability. The richest fifth of Chilean households earn around half of national income, compared to the poorest fifth's 5%. Chile recently became the first South American nation invited to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but a report by the exclusive group of advanced economies noted Chilean inequality remained "very high," by the group's standards. Chile's government acknowledges that inequality remains a problem, and that people in poorer, rural areas did have to wait longer for relief to arrive because of the logistical challenge of reaching them.

Watching televised reporting from Chile, I was struck by the poverty in some quarters. Naively I had assumed that such poverty would not exist there, and I have to wonder why I thought so.

But citing the magnitude of the quake, felt by over 80% of Chile's population, Pilar Armanet, spokeswoman for president Michelle Bachelet, said, "the earthquake was very democratic." She noted that the tsunami that hit people living in poor settlements along the coast after the quake also affected many middle and upper-class vacationers.

This really speaks directly to the lack of understanding and sensitivity in some: what comparison can be made between having one's living quarters and one's vacation? A ruined vacation? Well, go home, and wait for the next vacation.

Still, differences in economic status appeared to go a long way toward determining how well people came out of the earthquake. Santiago officials have denounced some builders for cutting corners in less affluent barrios. In Maipú, a middle-class suburb in southwest Santiago, Mayor Alberto Undurraga spent the past week meeting with residents of two apartment complexes that buckled in the quake and are now condemned to be razed. Apartments constructed by the same builder in more affluent neighborhoods, angry residents point out, didn't collapse. The residents, with the city's help, are now suing the builder and pursuing other legal action via a consumer protection agency. Attempts to reach the builder were unsuccessful.

Further south, near the epicenter, Chileans' economic status also influenced their view of the post-quake looting. Gustavo Rivera, founder of the MultiCentro department store chain, said the looting was fundamentally a problem of public order and the government's delay in sending troops onto the streets. "This is a country that respects authority," he said, as workers swept up glass from the broken windows of a MultiCentro outlet looted in the city of Constitución. "Without authority, it's chaos." He said it was clear that not all the looters were poor people, and some stole non-essential items like TVs and stereos and not just food.

Televised reports did show people hauling boxed goods in shopping carts. So not all looters were desperately seeking food and sustenance. Yet of those that were looting wantonly, what can be said? Simply that they are thieves, degenerates that took advantage of socal chaos to rob and steal? Were that it were that simple.

But other people suggested deeper social inequities lay behind the looting. José Rafael Alegría, a quake victim holding up a sign asking for food on a roadside near Constitución, said profiteering by some merchants after the quake helped explain why poorer Chileans might resent them. He said some merchants had doubled the price of a sack of flour in the disaster's aftermath.

That is not shown, nor discussed.

President elect Sebastian Piñera, who has pledged to turn Chile into a developed nation by 2018, will now have to spend his first two years in office occupied with rebuilding damaged areas, said Otto Granados, a Mexican academic who served in that country's government during the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and was later ambassador to Chile.

Mr. Granados said he thinks Chile managed the quake pretty well and that some of the disruption and looting had to do with human nature rather than defects in Chilean society. He cited a Mexican saying: "when the arca [vault] comes open, even the most honest will sin."

WSJ article By MATT MOFFETT and PAULO PRADA

World War II's unsung women pilots

2010-03-06T12:16:00.000-05:00

Unsung? I've never heard of them. Unsung: Not honored or praised; uncelebrated.

World War II's Unsung Women Pilots
The trailblazing Women Airforce Service Pilots will finally receive the honors due them on March 10, when they are awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

By AMY GOODPASTER STREBE

The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) of World War II will finally be given the recognition and honor they deserve on March 10. That's when they will receive the Congressional Gold Medal in a ceremony to be held at the United States Capitol. These pilots were trailbrazers, a group of 1,102 female civilians that flew military aircraft under the direction of the United States Army Air Forces. They flew more than 60 million miles in 78 different types of aircraft, from the smallest trainers to the fastest fighters and the largest bombers. They undertook every type of mission except combat. Thirty eight of them gave their lives in the service of their country.

From 1942 to 1944 the WASP ferried aircraft from factories to air bases throughout the United States. They were stationed at 120 Army air bases across America, and many also towed targets for antiaircraft gunnery training. The Army Air Forces trained the women to fly the fleet's largest bombers to prove to the men these planes were safe to fly. Despite their outward appearance as official members of the U.S. Army Air Forces, the WASP were actually considered civil servants during the war. In spite of a highly publicized attempt to militarize them in 1944, the women pilots were not granted veteran status until 1977.

When a WASP was killed the women pilots received no formal recognition, no honors, no gold star in the window, and no American flag on their coffin. Fellow pilots contributed money to help bring the body and belongings home—the United States Government refused to pay for the remains to be shipped to their families. When the WASP were unceremoniously deactivated in December 1944, five months before the end of the war, they never received the military status they were promised, even though many of them were sent to officers training school. Even today the WASP can only be buried at Arlington National Cemetery as enlisted members of the military, not with officers' honors. Finally these intrepid women will be honored for their heroic service.

The surviving members of the WASP, who are now grandmothers and great-grandmothers, will unite for the last time in Washington, D.C. They will proudly take their place in history among the unsung heroes of World War II. Fueled by patriotism and a love of flying, their example will continue to inspire future generations of women aviators.

Ms. Strebe is the author of "Flying for Her Country: The American and Soviet Women Military Pilots of World War II" (Potomac Books, 2009). She is on the board of directors of the National WASP World War II Museum, located in Sweetwater, Texas.

Se parte glaciar

2010-03-04T20:15:00.001-05:00

Item found on El Universal website: NASA reports that an iceberg the size of Luxembourg (how many people have any idea what size that is? I don't. I'll look around for a measurement: the CIA World Factbook puts it at 2, 586 square kilometers, slightly smaller than Rhode Island) crashed with the glacier Mertz in the east of Antarctica, loosening another iceberg of near-equal size.

La NASA publicó imágenes del choque de un iceberg, del tamaño de Luxemburgo, con el borde del glaciar Mertz en el este de la Antártida y desprendió otro iceberg de tamaño casi igual | Ver nota

Foto: Tomada de la NASA 04 de marzo de 2010

IBM Researchers: chip design advance

2010-03-04T18:13:00.002-05:00

Project Seeks to Replace Copper Wires With Lasers and Tiny Silicon Circuits; Intel and Universities Have Similar Efforts
By PAUL GLADER And DON CLARK

Researchers at International Business Machines Corp. are claiming an important advance that could change the way computer chips communicate, sharply boosting speed while lowering energy consumption. The goal is to use pulses of light rather than copper wires to exchange information between chips—and to build the needed components out of silicon rather than costly, esoteric materials.

IBM's advance involves a key component called an avalanche photodetector, which converts light into electricity. The researchers say they used silicon and the element germanium to create a photodetector that is among the fastest and least power-hungry of its kind. They are publishing their findings in the scientific journal Nature. IBM isn't alone in the pursuit. Researchers at universities and companies including Intel Corp. and start-up Luxtera Inc., have also been working on improving chip performance using silicon-based optical components.

"This is the next wave of computing," said Richard Doherty, an analyst at market-research firm Envisioneering Group and a patent holder in optical communications. "By 2020, it may be the dominant way Google, governments, banks and other large users are doing their computing." Optical communications involve encoding information on streams of light particles generated by lasers. The technology uses thin glass fibers rather than bulky cables, yet creates connections that allow more data to flow at higher speed.

Such benefits are the reason long-distance phone wires were replaced with fiber-optic cables, a technology developed in the 1970s. Companies like Luxtera already sell silicon-based optical devices for linking up computers. Researchers are racing to miniaturize optical components so they can be built into microprocessors.

Intel has built a series of optical components from silicon and related materials, including a prototype avalanche photodetector it announced in December 2008. IBM says its version can detect 40 gigabits of data a second—four times the speed of Intel's—and operates at 1.5 volts rather than 30 volts. "That can save a huge amount of power," said Yurii Vlasov, the lead scientist on the IBM research. He said IBM's photodetector can detect weak pulses and amplify them without adding unwanted noise, a previous problem with the technology.

Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's photonics technology lab, called IBM's advance another sign of progress in the field. "As a scientist, I think this is all great," he said. "It just drives more competition."

Mr. Vlasov said it could be five years until the technology makes its way into chips for high-end server systems. It could take another five years before it is used in consumer products such as cellphones, he said.

* TECHNOLOGY
* MARCH 4, 2010

IBM: IBM scientists Fengnian Xia, Yurii Vlasov and Solomon Assefa were part of the team behind the research.

As impressive as the chip is, I love this picture: a Chinese, a Russian, and an Ethiopian; that the US at its best.

Yucatán

2010-03-03T22:13:00.000-05:00

Foto: NTX 03 de marzo de 2010

TOMAN PRECAUCIONES

La entrada del frente frío número 35 sobre la Península de Yucatán, ha ocasionado fuertes vientos, bajas temperaturas y cielo nublado

Chile temblor tilts Earth

2010-03-03T11:57:00.002-05:00

Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images - Firefighters searched for victims in the debris of a house in Curanipe.

AMERICAS NEWS - MARCH 3, 2010

Temblor Tilts Earth by Inches

By GAUTAM NAIK

The earthquake that struck Chile was so powerful it shifted the planet's axis enough to make it spin slightly faster, meaning our days will be shorter by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to preliminary calculations by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"This is an esoteric effect that physics says has to happen," notes David Kerridge, the British Geological Survey's head of natural hazards, who studies earthquakes. "It's interesting, but it has no particular consequence on anything."

View Slideshow

See details on the deadliest and strongest earthquakes world-wide.

Scientists have long noted that just about any event that shifts a large amount of mass from one part of the planet to another will have a tiny—and sometimes measurable—effect on the Earth's rotation. Such events include changes to ocean currents, big shifts in the atmosphere, earthquakes, and possibly even the creation of more and more reservoirs from the damming of rivers.

The 8.8-magnitude temblor that struck Chile on Saturday is one of the largest quakes in a century. It was the result of an ocean tectonic plate—a shard of the earth's crust—sliding under the South American plate; over time, the two became locked together. When the pent-up energy overcame the forces of friction and the South American plate sprang upward, it unleashed a huge amount of energy in the form of the quake.

The planet was jolted to its roots. A chunk of the Earth's mass was redistributed vertically, which caused the planet's figure axis—on which the Earth's mass is balanced—to move by about three inches, according to calculations by NASA scientist Richard Gross. The net effect of that mass redistribution made the earth spin slightly faster, just as a figure skater speeds up when she pulls in her arms.

"It's important for us to know how the earth's rotation changes," said Dr. Gross, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It helps us figure out where a spacecraft is and to navigate it for a precise pinpoint landing" on Mars, the moon or another planet. Dr. Gross and his colleagues had conducted a similar analysis following the even bigger 9.1-magnitude quake in Indonesia. They found that the 2004 temblor decreased the length of a day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted the North Pole by a few centimeters.

For a long time, earthquakes have been gradually changing the shape of the earth as well. Calculations suggested that the earth's oblateness—the way it is flat on top and bulges at the equator—had decreased by a tiny amount following the Indonesian earthquake. In other words, the world is getting slightly rounder.

Dr. Gross said that though the Chilean quake was less powerful than the 2004 Indonesia temblor, it likely changed the position of the figure axis a bit more. (The planet's figure axis is separate from the north-south axis; they are about 33 feet apart.)

The vertical redistribution of mass caused by the Chilean quake had a slightly greater impact in shifting the figure axis because the quake happened near the mid-latitudes, NASA concludes. Plus, the fault in Chile dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle, which again has a greater effect on shifting the figure axis.

The Haiti quake, by contrast, didn't make the Earth wobble in quite the same way, according to Dr. Kerridge. The Haiti quake was caused by one tectonic plate sliding past another, not above or under it. "There was almost no vertical movement there when the quake happened, so you wouldn't expect the same effect," says Dr. Kerridge.

ETA leader arrested in France

2010-02-28T22:58:00.000-05:00

ETA leader Ibon Gogeascoechea has been arrested in northern France Photo: AP

One of the most incomprehensible struggles is the Basque radicals and their quest; what their quest is remains elusive for me to understand. This guy is a fairly young man; 30s? He is the next generation of leadership of this separatist movement, that has been fighting the fight for decades. 1959, an article states. Fifty years.

An article in the London Telegraph tells of the arrest of this man, Ibon Gogeascoechea, in Cahan, Normandy (France).

Aftermath

2010-02-28T15:49:00.000-05:00

From El Universal.com.mx:

SAQUEOS, ROBOS, DESASTRE

Mientras socorristas tratan de rescatar víctimas atrapadas bajo los escombros, decenas de personas saquean supermercados y roban bancos, después del terremoto de 8.8 grados que ayer sacudió a Chile | Ver nota

Skinhead Puts on Skullcap

2010-02-28T13:10:00.002-05:00

Adam Lach for The New York Times - Pawel in the Warsaw synagogue. A former truck driver and neo-Nazi skinhead, Pawel, 33, has since become an Orthodox Jew, covering his shaved head with a yarmulke and shedding his fascist ideology for the Torah.

February 27, 2010
Changing Face in Poland: Skinhead Puts on Skullcap
By DAN BILEFSKY

WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.

“I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.”

Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family.

Quite a transformation; from one extreme to another.

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland, of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past.

Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.

Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews “our elder brothers,” had finally entered the public consciousness.

Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered.

“Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ” Rabbi Schudrich said. “But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn’t correspond to the Poland of 2010.”

The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II.

In the past five years, Warsaw’s Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250. The cafes and bars of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow brim with young Jewish converts listening to Israeli hip hop music.

Michal Pirog, a popular Polish dancer and television star, who recently proclaimed his Jewish roots on national television, said the revelation had won him more fans than enemies. “Poland is changing,” he said. “I am Jewish and I feel good,” he said.

Pawel’s metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute.

“Oy vey, I hate to admit it, but we would beat up local Jewish and Arab kids and homeless people,” Pawel said on a recent day from the Nozyk Synagogue here. “We sang about stupid stuff like Satan and killing people. We believed that Poland should only be for Poles.”

One day, he recalled, he and his friends skipped school and took a train to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, near Krakow. “We made jokes that we wished the exhibition had been bigger and that the Nazis had killed even more Jews,” he said.

Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said that he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His churchgoing father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets.

“One time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, ‘If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!’ ”

Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel’s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents.

When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust.

“I went to my parents and said, ‘What the hell’? Imagine, I was a neo-Nazi and heard this news? I couldn’t look in the mirror for weeks,” he said. “My parents were the typical offspring of Jewish survivors of the war, who decided to conceal their Jewish identity to try and protect their family.”

Shaken by his own discovery, Pawel said he spent weeks of cloistered and tortured reflection but was finally overcome by a strong desire to become Jewish, even Orthodox. He acknowledged that he was drawn to extremes. He said his transformation was arduous, akin to being reborn. He even forced himself to reread “Mein Kampf” but could not get to the end because he felt physically repulsed.

“When I asked a rabbi, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ he replied, ‘The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.’ ”

At age 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He and his wife are raising their two children in a Jewish home.

Pawel noted that he was still singled out by the same anti-Semites who once counted him among their ranks. “When younger people see me on the street with my top hat and side curls they sometimes laugh at me,” he said. “But it is the old ladies who are the meanest. Sometimes, they use the language I used when I was a skinhead and say, ‘Get out and go back to your country’ or ‘Jew go home!’ ”

And now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. “I am good with knives,” he explained.

Joanna Berendt contributed reporting.

Terremoto

2010-02-27T12:12:00.000-05:00

Earthquake in Chile. Found this graphic on the website if London's Daily Telegraph.

New York to St. Croix

2010-02-25T12:50:00.001-05:00

Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times - Walt Frazier has owned property in Christiansted on St. Croix since 1979, and spends his days supervising projects there.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact time that Walt Frazier’s stylish alter ego known as Clyde more or less ceased to exist. But it might have been the September day in 1989 when Hurricane Hugo threatened to do away with both. Mr. Frazier, a Hall of Fame player for the New York Knicks basketball team, was relaxing on the living room sofa with a girlfriend, watching football on television, when the first terrifying winds tore the awnings off his vacation home on St. Croix. The television went dark. The large picture windows blew out. Mr. Frazier and his girlfriend scurried for the bathroom, where they spent the next 12 hours, cowering and praying.

Slide Show

From renowned hedonist to home-building horticulturist, he described the personal gain as priceless. “I remember Dave DeBusschere and the other guys on the team used to say that I would have the toughest transition to make going into retirement because of being Clyde and coming down from all that,” Mr. Frazier said, recalling the days when his wide-brim hats and flashy suits inspired comparisons to the Warren Beatty character in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“It didn’t happen right away, and it wasn’t easy,” he added. “But I was fed up with New York and that scene, the nightclubs and the cars. I didn’t want to vegetate as Clyde. I was searching for something. I didn’t know what it was until I came here.”

Even Clyde got tired of New York; something to think about. Old #10. How I remember that team.

Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times - Entrance room to the Main House, his residence
Playmaker’s Paradise

“I began to sense there was something for me to do here, and then I realized doing all this work was what was going to keep me young,” said Mr. Frazier, who will celebrate his 65th birthday next month and remains fit and youthful looking, despite thinning hair. “I look back now and I can see that I was going through a metamorphosis, a change for the better.”

As part of his repudiation of the nightclubbing Clyde, he changed his lifestyle. The lifelong city dweller became a nature lover. He learned to sail, bought a boat and became a licensed captain. And he found the garden calling to him many mornings at sunrise.

Patricia James, who is his girlfriend and helps him manage the property and rental business, said the style fits all occasions. “We’ll be going out to dinner, I’ll have a dress on and I’ll say to him, ‘You’re not going to change?’ ” Ms. James said. A self-described perfectionist, he is not easy to work for, she said, and Mr. Frazier agreed, noting that he once fired his son, whom he had hired to manage the property during his absences.

Fired his own son? Now, that's a tough taskmaster.

Going Gaga

2010-02-25T12:23:00.000-05:00

Douglas Friedman for The New York Times

What can one possibly say about such fashions? You either wear them, or think ... well, that you'll never wear them, to say the least.

Financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire

2010-02-25T12:14:00.000-05:00

Bets by some of the same banks that helped Greece shroud its mounting debts may actually now be pushing the nation closer to the brink of financial ruin. Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.

These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.

And reform is dead in the US Senate; a repeal of the laws allowing banks to use their own capital for investment banking will not pass. What will it take for reform to pass? The US economy almost fell off the edge. Greece is teetering, and if it falls the repercussions in Europe will be awful.

Lincoln Brought to Life

2010-02-25T11:19:00.000-05:00

Fascinating story about a fascinating exhibit of Lincolnalia from the WS Journal on 24 February.

With Charity for All. Indiana Sate Museum. Through July 25. Alas, I shan't be getting to Indiana before summertime.

This is not quite the picture accompanying the newspaper story; alas, the story online did not have the picture.

Fortunately, I did find the picture online, at the Indiana State Museum website.

In 1905, Arthur Hall, president of the fledgling Lincoln National Life Insurance Co., wrote Robert Todd Lincoln, the lone surviving son of Abraham Lincoln, requesting permission to use the late president's image on advertising and stationery. Lincoln complied and graciously sent Hall an original photo of his father.

As decades passed, this gift, supplemented by the company's acquisition of thousands of additional pictures, prints and personal effects, grew into one of the world's great Lincoln collections: the Lincoln Museum, located in Fort Wayne, Ind. But in 1999 the business, reconstituted as Lincoln Financial Group, changed ownership and left Fort Wayne for Philadelphia. In 2008 LFG officially ended its financial support of the Lincoln Museum, which closed its doors shortly thereafter. LFG then decided to donate the museum's $20 million in artifacts to another institution and launched a search for a suitable recipient.

The company did not have far to look. Despite competition from the Smithsonian Institution and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, ultimately a Hoosier alliance of Fort Wayne's Allen County Public Library and the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis crafted a winning pitch and was awarded the collection in December, 2008.

Indiana State Museum

The mystery of Norway

2010-02-25T10:59:00.000-05:00

Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway competes during the men's giant slalom. Getty Images

Medal Count


Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
United States	7	9	12	28
Germany	7	10	7	24
Norway	6	6	6	18
Canada	7	6	2	15
Russian Federation	3	4	6	13
South Korea	5	4	1	10
Austria	4	3	3	10
France	2	3	5	10
Switzerland	6	0	2	8
China	4	2	2	8

Full Medals Table

As of 24 February 2010

Vancouver, British Columbia -- By the end of these Olympic Games, the Norwegians will have pulled off what is, arguably, one of the finest performances in the modern history of sports. The only problem is that nobody outside Norway seems to take them seriously.

Ignoring them, or jealous of them? The US media is preoccupied with US athletes, though it does find a story or two to milk that is not of an US athlete.

Norway's Olympic team has won 17 medals in Vancouver so far, enough to place it third overall and only one gold medal behind the leaders. The country grabbed three medals Tuesday, including silver and bronze, respectively, for Kjeitil Jansrud and Aksel Svindal in the men's giant slalom. The haul is expected to continue throughout this final week.

Norway has won more Winter Games medals than any other nation. Last week it became the first country to win 100 Olympic gold medals, and Tuesday it hit the 300-medal milestone (the U.S. is second on the all-time list with dozens fewer.)

What makes its performance hard to fathom, however, is that Norway has only 4.7 million people to choose from. It's as if the American team finished third in Vancouver after limiting the athlete pool to people living in metropolitan Detroit. To find a country smaller than Norway, you have to travel down the medals table to Latvia, which is tied for 18th with two medals.

The Norwegian obsession with the Winter Games is nearly unbridled. When biathlon aired in Norway during prime time one recent evening, 1.75 million households tuned in, according to Mr. Lea. "There's a lot of pressure on us," he says After those first four days, Norway roared back, winning medals of every color in the sports it cares about most—cross country, biathlon, ski jumping and alpine skiing.

1.75 million of 4.7 is 37% of the country's population; Census.gov shows the US population as of 25 February 2010 to be 308,756,226; 37% would be 114,962,424 (more than watched the Super Bowl? or roughly equivalent).

Not that they've been bragging or anything. After crossing the finish line Tuesday, Mr. Jansrud didn't beat his chest or pump his fist or mug for the international TV feed—instead he took two deep bows to his applauding countrymen.

Alien to North Americans.

Danes Buck Broader Antiwar Trend

2010-02-24T14:41:00.001-05:00

In the newspaper article a chart detailing ratios of soldier deaths as % to soldiers sent shows Denmark's ratio as 4.1: 31 deaths, 750 troops. Also accompanying the article was a picture of Denmark's Crown Princess Mary with troops in November.

Denmark's forces in Afghanistan—along with Britain, the Netherlands, Estonia and Canada—have formed a rump of non-U.S. allies essential to the U.S.-led war effort that do battle in Helmand province and other Afghanistan hot spots, contributing to high casualty rates for these countries' contingents.

Curious sentence structure.

* EUROPE NEWS
* FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Danes Buck Broader Antiwar Trend
As Afghan operation's popularity wanes elsewhere, Danes support effort amid high casualties

By ALISTAIR MACDONALD

Among allied forces fighting in Afghanistan, few countries have deployed a bigger share of their armed forces than Denmark, and fewer still have taken higher levels of casualties. But the small Scandinavian country is emerging as an unlikely example of how to maintain public support for the war.

The popularity of the international campaign in Afghanistan has fallen across Europe and in the U.S. On Tuesday, the Dutch government set a June 9 date for general elections, nearly one year ahead of schedule. The move followed the unraveling of the Netherlands' coalition government last weekend after it failed win support to extend the mandate of the nation's 1,600 troops in Afghanistan, presaging a likely withdrawal this year.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned Tuesday that the NATO military alliance is facing "very serious, long-term, systemic problems" sparked by European nations' unwillingness to adequately fund their militaries.

"I believe we have reached an inflection point, where much of the continent has gone too far in the other direction," Mr. Gates told an audience at Washington's National Defense University.

Amid this shift, the Danes have largely maintained public support for the effort, selling the mission as a humanitarian effort rather than simply protection against a terrorist threat, and building consensus among political parties. They have reaped the benefits of a largely supportive media and the country has, to some degree, rediscovered its pride in an active military.

"The key to sustaining public support is an elite consensus that includes politicians in government and opposition as well as key opinion leaders: influential intellectuals, academics and columnists," says Peter Viggo Jakobsen, a security expert at the University of Copenhagen.

Denmark has paid a high price in Afghanistan. Its 750 troops represent almost 5% of its entire military, including reserves—among the highest in Afghanistan. Of the total, 31 Danish troops have died there, an allied casualty rate behind only Canada and Estonia, which has just 150 soldiers fighting.

Yet throughout a difficult 2009, polls consistently showed around half of Danes surveyed by TNS Gallup believed Danish troops should be in Afghanistan; only one-third said they didn't. In NATO nations such as the U.K., Germany and Netherlands, meanwhile, polls reveal over half wanting troops back home.

"If you can't win the public opinion, you have lost the war," Danish Defense Minister Søren Gade said in a recent interview.

Mr. Gade, who has led Danish efforts to maintain public support, announced Monday he is stepping down. Mr. Gade's ministry has been accused of leaking news of the deployment of Danish special forces to Iraq and he said this was attracting attention away from Afghanistan.

Denmark's forces in Afghanistan—along with Britain, the Netherlands, Estonia and Canada—have formed a rump of non-U.S. allies essential to the U.S.-led war effort that do battle in Helmand province and other Afghanistan hot spots, contributing to high casualty rates for these countries' contingents.

Now some of those nations are growing weary of the effort. The Netherlands and Canada have set pullout dates, and some foreign armies remain reluctant to fight in restive regions like Helmand. British politicians face hostile media that chronicle the return of every dead soldier's coffin.

Mr. Gade, a former Danish army officer, said a key to winning the public was giving reporters deep access to soldiers, who were allowed to talk.

When troops say, " 'We did a job and we did it good, and it is worth doing,' then it is very hard indeed for a lot of people to oppose, because those are the men and women who risk their lives," he said.

That doesn't mean the public doesn't struggle with the country's involvement. Frank Erik Carlsen says that on "down days," he questions why Denmark is in Afghanistan, where his brother Henrik lost his life to a roadside bomb in August 2009. Doubts pass, he says, when he thinks of the terrorist threat from Afghanistan and of Denmark's efforts to build wells and schools there.

"It is too easy to stay at home, and Denmark is doing its part," he said. Next month, Mr. Carlsen begins training for his own deployment to Afghanistan.

Denmark only recently returned to military action following a long stretch of neutrality that followed its 1864 defeat to Prussia, in modern-day Germany. With the end of the Cold War, Danish forces, long tasked with home defense, had little to do.

A stint in NATO's military intervention in Kosovo saw a Danish tank force rout a Serbian attack in 1994. Suddenly Danish politicians found it advantageous for the military to punch above its weight internationally and become a point of national pride, Dr. Jakobsen says.

—Yochi J. Dreazen contributed to this article.

Bernanke forecasts Low Interest Rates

2010-02-24T14:23:00.001-05:00

Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, signaled on Wednesday that he did not plan to begin raising interest rates anytime soon, saying the economic recovery would remain halting for months to come. In presenting the Fed’s semiannual monetary report to Congress, Mr. Bernanke did not waver from the Jan. 27 statement of the central bank’s key policy making board, or from a Feb. 10 statement in which he explained to Congress the strategies for gradually reducing the vast sums that banks hold in reserves at the Fed.

When the Fed raised the emergency loan rate for banks, panic and forecasts flew out the Wall Street windows, founts of knowledge that entirely missed the financial crisis. What do they know now? About as much, I'd have to say.

Look at that chart in the background: Net worth of US households - $17.5 trillion of wealth destroyed from July 2007 to March 2009 on the downward trajectory. The perpendicular green arrow indicates when the stimulus bill was signed, February 17, 2009. The upward trajectory indicates $5 trillion recovered since the stimulus. That leaves a net of 12.5 trillion dollars of wealth lost. Surely it is not yet time to raise interest rates and put a brake on the economic recovery. Wonder why those sages who forecast for Wall Street firms can not figure that one out.

While Mr. Bernanke did not change his outlook on interest rates or the economy, he did announce two significant steps to improve transparency and accountability of the Fed, after a period in which the central bank has faced considerable criticism. Significantly, Mr. Bernanke said that the Fed would “support legislation that would require the release” of the names of borrowers that used the extraordinary lending programs the Fed created in 2008 to prop up the markets for commercial paper, money market funds and even consumer loans. The Fed lent to investment banks for the first time and helped arrange the sale of the investment bank Bear Stearns and the rescues of the American International Group and Citigroup.

Sun, Stimulus and a Sneeze

2010-02-23T12:45:00.000-05:00

The tendency to sneeze when suddenly exposed to sunlight or other bright light may be caused by an extra-sensitive visual cortex, the part of the brain that receives visual signals, according to a study in PLoS ONE. The so-called "photic sneeze reflex" or ACHOO (Autosomal Cholinergic Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst) syndrome affects an estimated one in four people. The study, which compared the reactions of 10 photic sneezers and 10 control subjects, appears to be the first to examine the condition. The researchers measured the electrical activity of the participants' brains while they were shown a shifting pattern of white and black squares. At around 60 milliseconds after each shift and again 140 milliseconds later, the visual cortices of sneeze-prone subjects showed significantly higher activity than those of the control subjects.

Caveat: A larger study is needed to verify the findings. More precise measurements are needed to identify which particular areas of the visual cortex drive the response.

Read the Study: When the Sun Prickles Your Nose: An EEG Study Identifying Neural Bases of Photic Sneezing

Cumbre en Riviera Maya

2010-02-23T11:48:00.003-05:00

Presidentes aprueban nueva integración latina
Jorge Ramos y Silvia Otero / Enviados
El Universal
Riviera Maya.-
Martes 23 de febrero de 2010

Raúl Castro dijo que espera que se definan los estatutos y la forma de operación de la comunidad de estados latinoamericanos y caribeños en la cumbre de Río en Venezuela el próximo año

Los presidentes de América Latina y del Caribe aprobaron un nuevo organismo, sin Estados Unidos ni Canadá, que se crea la “comunidad de estados latinoamericanos y caribeños”.

Raúl Castro, presidente de Cuba, calificó el hecho como trascendental porque existen las condiciones para ello.

Ayer en el almuerzo, sino país por país participante. Raúl dice que el nombre puede ser lo de menos y que quizá en Venezuela, en la cumbre de integración, y en Chile, probablemente en Santiago, podemos visualizar un nombre definitivo, pero es importante dar identidad”, dijo Calderón.

Castro dijo que se deben definir estatutos y forma de operación y que esperan que se defina esto en la cumbre de Río en Venezuela en el 2011.

Aún esperan llevar a cabo la reunión de Río en Chile en el 2012, independientemente de cómo avance el nuevo mecanismo aprobado esta mañana a las 9:45 horas.

Calderón y Castro... cada quien agarró a su “gallo”
Jorge Ramos y Silvia OteroEnviados
El Universal

Martes 23 de febrero de 2010

politica@eluniversal.com.mx

RIVIERA MAYA, QR.— Lapresencia de los presidentes de Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, y de Cuba, Raúl Castro, a la Cumbre de la Unidad de América Latina y el Caribe del Grupo de Río, a la que fueron invitados por el presidente mexicano Felipe Calderón, cerró la página de desencuentros vividos en los últimos años.

Contento desde su arribo la noche del domingo, cantando, Chávez ayer gritó: “¡Viva México!” ante Calderón, durante la salutación a los jefes de Estado y de Gobierno que asisten a los trabajos de la Cumbre de Río.

Sonriente, lanzando besos a las cámaras, Chávez saludó efusivo a Calderón y a Margarita Zavala.

El último en llegar fue el presidente de Cuba, Raúl Castro.

Aunque los tres últimos presidentes mexicanos han tenido desencuentros con Cuba, la presencia del líder cubano en territorio mexicano aparace como un nuevo intento por retomar la relación bilateral.

Después de semanas de especulación acerca de la asistencia de Chávez y Castro a la cumbre, finalmente ambos estuvieron ahí para trabajar en conjunto con Felipe Calderón.

Ayer, los tres mandatarios no sólo intercambiaron saludos y posaron para las cámaras: los tres presidentes —en polos ideológicos opuestos— tratan, junto con los demás mandatarios de América Latina y el Caribe, de crear una organización americana en cuyas decisiones Estados Unidos no tenga injerencia.

Calderón y Chávez se reunieron 25 minutos en privado para hablar sobre detalles de la nueva organización, que será lanzada en México y nacerá formalmente en Venezuela.

Castro y Calderón incluso tuvieron que apagar un fuego: aseguran los asistentes a esta cumbre —totalmente cerrada a medios de comuniación— que llegó un momento durante el almuerzo en que los presidentes Chávez, de Venezuela, y Uribe, de Colombia, se trabaron en una dura confrontación.

Según asistentes, el choque estuvo a punto de reventar la cumbre. Chávez acusó a Uribe de tolerar grupos paramiliatres y delincuenciales que comprometen la seguridad de la región y de que el colombiano lo había mandado a matar. Cuando Chávez se levantaba para abandonar la cumbre Uribe dijo: “Sea varón, quédese aquí, porque a veces usted insulta en la distancia, pero cuando estamos cara a cara no hablamos”.

Fue entonces que intervinieron Castro y Calderón. Cada quien agarró a su “gallo” y la cumbre pudo continuar, luego de que se acordó integrar un grupo de países amigos de Colombia y Venezuela para resolver con diálogo los diferendos.

Oil, Falklands, Malvinas

2010-02-23T11:40:00.000-05:00

European Pressphoto Agency - Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, right, is trying to get Latin American leaders to sign a statement backing Argentina's claim to the islands

A British oil rig started drilling in disputed waters off the Falkland Islands on Monday, as Argentina tried to rally support from Latin American nations for a diplomatic statement backing Argentina's claim to the islands and criticizing the U.K. for violating Argentine sovereignty.

The move by British oil companies to initiate exploration off the Falklands has stirred passions over the remote South Atlantic islands to perhaps their highest point since 1982, when Argentina lost a brief war to Britain over control of the islands. No one predicts armed hostilities this time, but nationalist rhetoric has been flying on both sides of the Atlantic. If Britain finds large amounts of oil, relations could get stickier.

Can't see Gordon Brown doing a Thatcher.

Argentina's leftist President Cristina Kirchner was in Cancún, Mexico, on Monday working on a diplomatic response during a previously scheduled summit of Latin American leaders. Mrs. Kirchner was trying to get regional leaders to sign a statement condemning the U.K. and backing Argentina's claim to the islands, known in Spanish as the Malvinas.

Argentina was getting support from some quarters, such as Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chávez. "In case of aggression against Argentina, rest assured that the Argentine nation will not be alone" as it was in the 1982 war, Mr. Chávez said Sunday.

On Univision's broadcast last night a clip was shown of Hugo telling the Queen of England that the era of empires has ended. Wonder if Elizabeth was watching.

Bill Rammell, the U.K.'s minister of state for the armed forces, said the Falklands had a "legitimate right" to develop an oil industry within its waters and that Britain had made Argentina aware of its determination to protect that right.

"We do, we have, and we will take whatever steps are necessary to protect the Falkland Islands—and our counterparts in Argentina are aware of that," he told the House of Commons.

The government has to stand strong; Brown can not afford to look weak. Surely the Tories are holding his feet to the fire.

Mrs. Kirchner had ratcheted up pressure over the islands last week, issuing a decree that ships traveling to the Falklands must first seek permission from Buenos Aires before entering Argentine waters.

This is manna from heaven for Presidenta Kirchner, an external crisis.

Argentina emphasized that it was intent on pursuing its objectives by peaceful means. No one in Argentina seemed eager for a repeat of the shooting war that started in April 1982, when Argentina's dictatorship, facing deepening discontent at home, seized the islands in a surprise attack. The U.K. government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent a naval task force across the Atlantic and retook the Falklands, at the cost of 649 Argentine and 255 British servicemen killed.

In the nearly three decades since the war, Argentina has gone from a military dictatorship to a democracy. Argentine political scientist Rosendo Fraga wrote on Monday that Argentina has cut military spending by a greater amount than any other South American country since Mrs. Kirchner's husband and predecessor, Nestor Kirchner, took office in 2003. Nevertheless, analysts say that putting forth a vigorous diplomatic defense of Argentina's historic claims to the Falklands could help Mrs. Kirchner politically at a time when she has sunk far in the polls because of the flagging economy.

Exactly.

For some Argentines, the oil dispute has reopened an old wound. On Sunday, computer hackers launched a cyber attack on the Web site of the Falklands newspaper Penguin News, posting an Argentine flag, a patriotic march and a manifesto affirming Argentina's claim to the islands. In the U.K., Argentina has been on the receiving end of potshots in the press. The Sunday Telegraph has dubbed Mrs. Kirchner the "Botox Evita."

What's in a name

2010-02-23T10:47:00.000-05:00

A brief article in today's Wall Street Journal caught my eye. The picture appearing in the newspaper itself is not online, alas, but the article is still of interest.

Refinery Strike Prompts French Gas-Station Lines

Workers at oil giant Total SA's French refineries continued their strike Monday with no resolution in sight, prompting long lines at gas stations in France amid panic buying by car owners. Total suspended operations at its 137,000-barrel-a-day Flanders refinery on Sept. 15, after it said weak European product demand and depressed refining margins made it uneconomic to continue refining activities there.

Workers at Total's French refineries first walked out last Tuesday to protest the company's move to postpone until the end of June a decision on whether to permanently shut down refining activities at the Flanders facility, near Dunkirk, in northern France.

Dunkirk.

French union Confederation Generale du Travail, or CGT, said that the industrial action at Total's refineries in France continued, with all of its six refineries still affected. Unions warned the strike could disrupt the country's refined-products supplies. On Monday, French Junior Minister for Industry Christian Estrosi insisted the government "will take measures so that France will not get stuck." He didn't elaborate.

Banking fees

2010-02-23T09:50:00.000-05:00

February 23, 2010
Banks Apply Pressure to Keep Fees Rolling In
By ANDREW MARTIN and RON LIEBER

For many households trying to improve their finances, tossing out pitches from the bank has become almost automatic. But in recent weeks, Chase has been fanning special letters out to consumers with an offer that it urges them not to refuse.

“Your debit card may not work the same way anymore, even if you just made a deposit. Unless we hear from you,” the message, emblazoned in large red type, warns. “If you don’t contact us, your everyday debit card transactions that overdraw your account will not be authorized after August 15, 2010 — even in an emergency,” with “even in an emergency” underlined for emphasis.

As the government cracks down on the way banks charge fees for overspending on debit cards, the industry is mounting an aggressive campaign aimed at keeping billions of dollars in penalty income flowing into its coffers. Chase and other banks are preparing a full-court marketing blitz, which is likely to include filling mailboxes with various aggressive and persuasive letters, calling account holders directly, and sending a steady stream of e-mail to urge consumers to keep their overdraft service turned on.

Starting this summer, banks must get consumers to agree, or “opt in,” to a service covering purchases on a debit card when there is not enough money in their account. The Federal Reserve has ordered the same restriction for banks that want to let people withdraw more than their balance at an automated teller machine. Many banks now automatically provide such coverage for fees of up to $35 or more.

So many people now dip their balance below zero that banks generated an estimated $20 billion from overdraft fees on debit purchases and A.T.M. transactions in 2009, according to Michael Moebs, an economist who advises banks and credit unions. All of this revenue is potentially at risk, since these are the two areas that the new Federal Reserve regulations cover. (Banks generate an extra $12 billion by covering checks and recurring bills; under the new rules, they can still cover those and charge fees without customers’ consent.)

Over the last decade, these fees have become an increasingly important source of income for banks as consumers have turned to debit cards to pay for a wide variety of their purchases, whether monthly bills or a pack of gum. (Many banks also offer less controversial overdraft programs in which consumers sign up to cover shortfalls in their checking account by pulling money out of a savings account or a credit card.)

The persuasion campaigns, which are just getting under way, come at a precarious time for many banks and credit unions as they scramble to find new revenue streams amid an economic downturn and new laws and regulations that threaten profitability. For instance, new credit card laws that went into effect Monday limit banks’ ability to raise interest rates on existing balances.

Given the billions at stake, consultants are urging banks and credit unions to hire them to help. “Your fee income will take a substantial ‘hit’ if you don’t start getting consumers to ‘opt-in’ for POS/ATM overdrafts NOW!” Mike Sobba, president of Strunk & Associates, a financial institution advisory service, warned banks in a pitch on the company’s Web site.

Some are even lobbying banks to focus their pitch on the minority of customers who are responsible for the vast majority of overdraft fees. According to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study in 2008, 93 percent of overdraft fees come from the 14 percent of people who exceed their balances five times or more in a year.

“Doesn’t it make sense to try and protect this revenue stream and encourage these customers to opt-in?” said Eric Wittekiend, strategic adviser at Raddon Financial Group, in a report aimed at banks and credit unions. “Right now I’m favoring an aggressive opt-in strategy to protect as much revenue as possible,” he said.

Another consultancy, Pinnacle Financial Strategies, advises an “Opt-in Total Solution” program for banks and credit unions trying to stem losses in overdraft fees. Pinnacle’s briefing paper urges an “account holder identification process” to zero in on consumers who pay such charges repeatedly and persuade them to keep the status quo.

The banks’ marketing campaigns range from subtle to alarming. In recent weeks, Chase has tested several direct-mail pitches to see whether an assertive or alluring tone will drive people into a branch to sign up for overdraft coverage. “Watch your mailbox so you can say ‘Yes’ to continue Chase debit card overdraft coverage,” read one note, a toned-down version of an alternate letter warning consumers that their debit card might not cover unexpected emergencies, like a highway tow.

A spokesman for Chase said: “We have begun to reach out to customers and are encouraging them to sit down with a branch banker to make sure they understand overdraft services, which can be confusing. We want them to make an informed decision.”

When consumers get to the bank, another pitch awaits. Mark Sorenson went into a Dallas branch of Bank of America to turn off the overdraft function on his debit card recently and got a distressing response.

Beware, his banker cautioned. If Mr. Sorenson used the card to buy gas, the station might place a hold on his account and he might not be able to fill up at all, even if he had enough money in the bank to cover a full tank.

“My impression was that it was something he’d been briefed on,” said Mr. Sorenson, an architect who said he had tired of paying multiple fees when the bank automatically covered shortfalls on his debit card. “He was trying it out on me.”

A Bank of America spokeswoman said that its efforts, including giving consumers a document called “Opting Out of Overdraft Coverage,” were not meant to encourage customers to remain in overdraft services but to make sure they understood the complexity of the issue.

Rebecca Borné, policy counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending, said banks still had “tremendous incentive to get as many consumers to opt in as possible.” That is because new Federal Reserve regulations taking effect this summer would still allow banks to charge high fees for overdraft, with no limit on the number of times they impose the penalty.

Twinned with the blitz is a lobbying campaign in Washington by community banks and credit unions against several Congressional measures that would impose tough limits on overdrafts. They argue that their overdraft fees tend to be less than the large banks, and that overdraft provides a valuable service to customers, helping them overcome short-term money woes and saving them from the embarrassment of having a card rejected.

Several members of Congress have proposed legislation that would allow banks to charge just one overdraft fee a month, and six a year, and prohibit the reordering of transactions from largest to smallest to maximize fees. But while Democratic leaders insist overdraft legislation remains a priority, the bills have languished as lobbyists have pushed for delay and Congress focused on other financial issues.

“The ultimate strategy was not delay for delay’s sake,” said Steve Verdier, director of congressional affairs at the Independent Community Bankers Association. “The strategy was to ask Congress for enough time to explain the complexity.”

Amid a growing public outcry over these fees, several large banks announced changes to their overdraft policies last year. Bank of America said it would not charge a fee when customers exceeded their balance by $10 or less per day and would limit overdraft fees to four per day. At the end of March, Chase is eliminating overdrafts for customers whose accounts are overdrawn by $5 or less and has already limited overdrafts to three per day.

But even with those changes, customers could still incur more than $100 in fees a day if they opt to take overdraft coverage.

At least one credit union is using the new Fed rules to try to differentiate itself from its competitors. On its Web site, the UW Credit Union in Madison, Wis., says, “While we expect some financial institutions may aggressively market the idea of a consumer ‘opt in’ within the boundaries of this regulation, we have no such plans.”

Well, Naturally We're Liberal

2010-02-22T10:45:00.002-05:00

Dave Cutler for The Chronicle Review

February 7, 2010

Well, Naturally We're Liberal

By Jere P. Surber

I've never understood why some people find it so hard to explain the "liberal bias of the academy." A recent article in The New York Times walks us through a virtual museum of contemporary theories, most employing some of the shiniest state-of-the-art statistical and conceptual tools that current social research has to offer.

True, common sense puts in an appearance now and again, but any actual member of the academy will come to feel that it's a case of swatting a fly with a front-loader. For most of us, at least in the liberal arts, the answers are obvious and part of our everyday existence.

I add the qualification in that last sentence because it doesn't make sense to speak of the political persuasions of the academy as a whole. Anyone who has been to a faculty meeting lately, at an institution of any size, knows that faculty members from business schools are typically the most conservative, followed, in order, by the natural sciences, the social sciences, and finally those pesky liberals in the liberal arts.

Of course, not every liberal-arts professor is politically liberal, nor is every business instructor politically conservative. But by and large, this alignment is pretty clear to all of us without a lot of expensive research. If the academy seems to list to the liberal side in comparison with the general population, it's certainly not thanks to an overabundance of liberal business professors, pinko natural scientists, or Marxist social scientists. Rather, academe leans left because it takes a proportionally significant number of liberal-arts professors to hone the basic intellectual skills that we expect of college graduates: things like interpretive reading, cogent writing, critical thinking, and a sense of a shared historical tradition and the major issues currently confronting our society and world. If those abilities and insights aren't addressed by the liberal arts, then they certainly won't be in Introduction to Finance, Calculus II, or Biochemistry.

So the real question isn't why academe is so liberal, but rather, Why are instructors in the liberal arts so, well, liberal? I think there are three basic reasons, all of them what common sense might predict, all rather obvious, and none in need of fancy research involving such things as "occupational role modeling" and "vocational engendering."

First, as the Times article notes, virtually all instructors in the liberal arts are aware of the disparity between their level of education and their financial situation. There's no secret that the liberal arts are the lowest-compensated sector of academe, despite substantially more advanced study than business instructors and the equivalent of those in the natural sciences. Just as important, there are few opportunities for liberal-arts scholars to supplement their incomes by serving on government and corporate boards, filing patents and licenses, and, of course, obtaining generous research grants. You don't have to be a militant Marxist to recognize that people's political persuasions will align pretty well with their economic interests. It's real simple: Those who have less and want more will tend to support social changes that promise to accomplish that; those who are already economic winners will want to conserve their status.

I don't mean to suggest that issues of conscience beyond the confines of crass self-interest don't play an important role for many in the liberal arts, but their basic economic condition virtually assures that those in the liberal arts will be natural-born liberals. Who, after all, would want to preserve a situation in which others who are equivalently educated and experienced—doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, colleagues in other areas, and, yes, chief executives—receive vastly more compensation, sometimes by a factor of 10 or 100? I wonder what would happen to the academic political spectrum if liberal-arts professors were compensated the same as those in other areas. If an enterprising sociologist wants to conduct such an experiment, I'll certainly volunteer as a subject.

Such an experiment, however, isn't necessary. Just look at countries where college and university professors across disciplines are paid more or less the same. In Germany, where I did a good deal of my graduate work and have been a visiting professor on numerous occasions, compensation is determined by civil-service rank rather than academic field. Probably because German conservatives have rarely attacked academe as a hotbed of liberalism, and privacy laws prevent such polling of civil servants, the sort of studies reported on in the Times aren't generally available. But my own experience indicates that German professors and instructors are paid roughly equivalently across disciplines and in comparison with other nonacademic professionals, so they tend, for the most part, to be moderate or even conservative. Although here in the United States we hear about radical European professors—Derrida and Habermas come to mind—they are notable precisely because they are so exceptional.

.
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher born in Algeria, who is known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy. Derrida's best known work is Of Grammatology.

Jürgen Habermas (b June 18, 1929) is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory pragmatism. and

A second reason that liberal-arts professors tend to be politically liberal is that they have very likely studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics. Conservatives, who tend to evoke the need to preserve traditional connections with the past, have nonetheless contributed least to any detailed or thoughtful study of history. Most (although, of course, by no means all) prominent historians of politics, literature, the arts, religion, and even economics have tended, as conservatives claim, to be liberally biased. Fair enough. But if you actually take the time to look at history and culture, certain conclusions about human nature, society, and economics tend to force themselves on you. History has a trajectory, driven in large part by the desires of underprivileged or oppressed groups to attain parity with the privileged or the oppressor.

Consider the Greek struggle against Persian tyranny, the struggles to preserve the Roman Republic, the peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages, the American and French revolutions, the abolitionist and civil-rights movements, and now movements on behalf of other groups—women, Latinos, homosexuals, and the physically impaired. As President Obama recently put it, any open-minded review of history (and perhaps especially American history) teaches at least one clear lesson: There is a "right side of history," Obama said—the side of those who would overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition.

If you don't study history, whether because it doesn't pad quarterly profits, isn't sufficiently scientific or objective, or threatens your own economic status, then you won't know any of that. But most of those in the liberal arts have concluded that there really isn't any other intellectually respectable way to interpret the broad contours of history and culture. They are liberal, in other words, by deliberate and reasoned choice, based upon the best available evidence.

Finally, most liberal-arts professors come from a background of liberal education, which emphasizes the role that values play in human affairs. (I admit that "values" is sort of a tired, old-fashioned notion, but no other word covers the same territory.) More important, they've learned that values inevitably conflict, and they have developed the skills to interpret these clashes with nuance, envisioning various forms of resolution or mediation. In a certain sense, from Plato to Hegel to Derrida, philosophy—the paradigmatic liberal art—has been engaged with nothing but those questions.

It is this open perspective on what types of values can be considered legitimate, the various ways they can be approached, and the different redefinitions or reconfigurations that they may assume that most differentiates liberal-arts faculty members from their colleagues in business, law, medicine, or the natural sciences. (I don't mention the social sciences here, because there is no longer any really meaningful line that can be drawn between the humanities and the social sciences.) All of those other fields are structured around specific values that remain relatively fixed: profit and exchange in business; justice and social utility in law; health and wellness in medicine; objectivity, explanation, and prediction in the natural sciences. The liberal arts are distinctive because they are open to considering any of those values outside their narrow professional contexts.

Despite all the panicky alarms sounded not so long ago by some conservatives against the "relativism," if not "nihilism," implicit in the (alleged) poststructuralist hijacking of the liberal arts, it turns out that there has proved to be much more agreement on what constitutes the good life than most of the critics realized. Or maybe they have realized: It is, just as they charge, some sort of a broadly liberal point of view.

It is because we liberal-arts professors have a personal stake in our relative economic status; we have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us are liberals. Most of us agree with President Obama that there is a "right side of history," and we feel morally bound to be on it. Although we'd like to see some parity in compensation with our colleagues, we chose our fields with full awareness of the tradeoff. Part of our compensation lies in knowing that our studies can complement our standing on the "right side," rather than having our basic commitments dictated to us by the limitations of other, narrower professions.

So all you journalists and researchers: Enough with this assumption that liberal-arts professors are liberal as a result of naïveté, as if our tweed jackets and pipes, as the Times article put it (how much of that do you really see these days?), render us ignorant of the ways of the world. Drop this idea that we were somehow coerced into being liberals by peer pressure or role models. And most of all, don't condescend to suggest that we may just be, as one expert quoted by the Times did, free spirits (read: malcontents and misfits) who couldn't cut it in the serious professions (like Dick Cheney, Kenneth L. Lay, and Jeffrey K. Skilling did?) and found our impecunious niche in teaching the liberal arts.

We're here and mostly liberal by practical deliberation, factual investigation, and rational and moral conviction. We don't mind the lower pay (well, not that much), but don't demean us, when most of our conservative critics would be hard-pressed to make anything remotely approaching the same claims. Remember that one of our most vigorous critics, Sarah Palin, was reportedly unclear about significant events in American history (the First World War? Hmm, lemme think ...) and had to be given grammar-school geography lessons by her campaign staff. But who knows, if Palin had more of a grounding in the liberal arts, she might have ... nah!

Jere P. Surber is a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver.

Judge Keeps His Word

2010-02-19T09:58:00.000-05:00

Todd Heisler/The New York Times - From left, Mr. Wu’s mother, Floren Wu-Li; his sister Jenny Gong; and his fiancée, Anna Ng. Mr. Wu, 29, an executive who came here at age 5, faces deportation for muggings when he was 15.

The judge and the juvenile had grown up on the same mean streets, 40 years apart. And in fall 1996, they faced each other in a New York court where children are prosecuted as adults, but sentenced like candidates for redemption. The teenager, a gifted student, was pleading guilty to a string of muggings committed at 15 with an eclectic crew in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The judge, who remembered the pitfalls of Little Italy in the 1950s, urged him to use his sentence — three to nine years in a reformatory — as a chance to turn his life around.

“If you do that, I am here to stand behind you,” the judge, Michael A. Corriero, promised. The youth, Qing Hong Wu, vowed to change.

Mr. Wu kept his word. He was a model inmate, earning release after three years. He became the main support of his immigrant mother, studying and working his way up from data entry clerk to vice president for Internet technology at a national company.

But almost 15 years after his crimes, by applying for citizenship, Mr. Wu, 29, came to the attention of immigration authorities in a parallel law enforcement system that makes no allowances for rehabilitation. He was abruptly locked up in November as a “criminal alien,” subject to mandatory deportation to China — the nation he left at 5, when his family immigrated legally to the United States.

Mr. Wu with his fiancée. When he was jailed last fall, he reminded Judge Corriero of his old promise to stand by him.

Now Judge Corriero, 67, retired from the bench, is trying to keep his side of the bargain. “The law is so inflexible,” said Judge Corriero, now executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City and the author of “Judging Children as Children: A Proposal for a Juvenile Justice System.” The 2006 book calls for a justice system that reduces future crime rates by nurturing those who can learn from their mistakes, instead of turning them into career criminals.

That was his aim, he said, when he presided over the special court known as the Manhattan Youth Part, his views shaped by his own childhood. The son of a longshoreman and a factory seamstress, he grew up in a tenement across the street from the Tombs — the Manhattan House of Detention — and was schooled by both Roman Catholic missionaries in Chinatown and the Mulberry Street Boys. While he avoided serious trouble, he saw how easily a careless choice could lead to culpability instead of accomplishment.

Weymouth JournalWeymouth Journal

2010-02-19T09:40:00.000-05:00

A man who was stopped for not wearing a seat belt discussed the matter with Sgt. Lee Savage, left, and Police Constable Graham Pinney on Thursday in Britain’s Dorset County.

The officers cautioned another Dorset driver against tailgating.

One after the other, the motorists were caught blatantly violating the law. One after the other, they tried to talk their way out of it with elaborate diversionary narratives.

Though he had been spotted exiting his driveway with no seat belt, the man in the Isuzu Trooper stated that he had unbuckled the belt just that instant, in preparation for entering a gas station. Though his cellphone registered an outgoing call, the man in the Mitsubishi L200 Animal claimed that he had merely answered the phone, almost as an afterthought, as he rounded a traffic circle. And the woman in the silver Vauxhall boldly asserted that she had left her BlackBerry at home and that anyone who observed her typing while driving was sorely mistaken.

Oops. “I’m sure your mum told you never to lie to a policeman,” said Sgt. Lee Savage, a traffic officer with the Dorset Police Department, casting doubt on her credibility by locating the BlackBerry — open to Facebook — on the passenger seat and fining her £60, about $90.

Special pleadings are not acceptable in the “No Excuse” initiative being run here in Dorset, a largely rural county on Britain’s south coast. The yearlong, $1.25 million project — a combination of advertising, education and increased police patrols — is an effort to reduce the number of accidents caused by driver inattention, a common problem across the car-driving world.

The New York Times - In Dorset County, inattentive drivers are being watched.

violations include things like changing CDs, fiddling with the radio, folding maps, programming GPS navigation devices, dialing hands-free phones, looking for stray French fries in fast-food bags and steering with one’s elbows while pouring a cup of coffee.

I'd like to see that one: pouring coffee whilst steering with one's elbows.

The drivers caught that day tended to employ the “I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy” defense, admitting only to part of the misdeed. Stopped for making a call while driving to his job as a window repairman, a man in a dusty Vauxhall tried to claim in mitigation that he had just bought his phone and had not yet had time to activate his plan to install a hands-free system. His assertion was undercut by the obvious elderliness and grubbiness of the phone.

It gets better.

Mr. Smith, the road safety manager, said that the campaign’s name was a homage to motorists’ endless litany of fruitless rationalizations. “I was out about a year ago and we stopped a lady who had three children in the back of the car,” he related. “The officer said, ‘Why aren’t these children belted in?’ and she said, ‘They’re not my children.’ ”

Or worse.

Leave driving to us

2010-02-19T09:21:00.002-05:00

Ángel Franco/The New York Times - Bus theft is not common, but it does happen occasionally. In some cases, the thieves have been reported to pick up passengers — and pocket the fares.

A question that doesn’t come up all the time but does come up every now and then is: What do you do once you’ve stolen a bus? It’s not like with cars, which people who disrespect the law are always stealing. You can’t just change the plates or repaint it and drive it around as your vehicle. It’s very hard to park. And even in New York, where pretty much anything goes, people will notice that you’ve got a bus.

The question comes to mind in light of the fact that someone stole a Greyhound bus in Manhattan the other day. Exactly when it was stolen is unclear. The bus was last accounted for very early Sunday morning at the Greyhound maintenance garage at West 30th Street and 12th Avenue. According to the police, a driver from another bus company spied the empty bus about 2:15 Wednesday morning parked on the street in Astoria, Queens, and called a Greyhound dispatcher. This alerted Greyhound that it was short a bus.

Greyhound workers went out to the bus, but could not start it and had to return to the depot. When they came back with a mechanic at 3:45 a.m., they got lost and could not find the bus. The police were not notified until 9 a.m. and located it about 12:30 in the afternoon still parked where it had been. Since the thief remains unidentified and at large, it’s not possible to determine his motive. Was he fond of your larger vehicles? Did he have a big family? Was he tired of waiting for the bus?

Ángel Franco/The New York Times - Karl Besancon, who drives for Martz Trailways, could think of only one motive: “For giggles.”

More bus-theft knowledge might be forthcoming over at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where big buses chug in and out all day. A few Greyhound drivers were relaxing in the drivers’ lounge but said they were not allowed to talk. They said they did not know much about stolen buses, only that you couldn’t just put one in your garage. Down on the platforms, a Greyhound driver on the Atlantic City route said he did not know anything either, but had an annoying problem of somewhat less magnitude to deal with. Someone had stolen his hat.

Karl Besancon, 56, drives for Martz Trailways, going between New York and Wilkes-Barre, Pa. “In 21 years, I’ve only heard about four stolen in the New York area,” he said.

Why would someone take a bus?

He thought hard before coming up with the only answer that made sense to him: “For giggles.”

The tricky thing is holding on to a stolen bus, Mr. Besancon agreed. A few years ago, however, he said, a bus stolen in Bayonne, N.J., was missing for three weeks. It had about 4,000 miles run up on it, but not a scratch. “The company that owned it said, ‘Hire the guy,’ ” Mr. Besancon recalled. “But they didn’t catch him far as I know.”

On Dec. 19, 2009, a New Jersey Transit bus was snatched from the parking lot of the Livingston Mall in New Jersey. The driver had gone to the bathroom. A half-hour later, it was found abandoned in West Orange.

In January 2007, the tour bus of the country singer Crystal Gayle was swiped in Nashville by a convict who had escaped in South Carolina. He was not caught until he got near the Daytona International Speedway in Florida. Before helping himself to the bus, he had stolen other vehicles to make his way on the cheap. One of them was a Wal-Mart truck.

Now, that a certain kind of talent.

One thing to do with a stolen bus is try to make a few bucks for bail money. That’s what a 15-year-old boy did in October 2006 in Orlando, Fla. After taking a bus from the Central Florida Fairgrounds, he drove it along a conventional bus route, picking up passengers and collecting fares. One of the more keenly observant passengers, though pleased enough with the ride, thought the boy looked youthful for a bus driver and dialed the police.

Peter Pantuso, president of the American Bus Association, the trade group for the private bus industry, said: “I remember a few years ago someone stole a bus out west, and the people operated it in charter service for a couple of weeks. So sometimes it’s a business model.”

Back at the Port Authority, some New Jersey Transit drivers were talking about how it’s one thing to steal a bus. Then you have to drive it. “If you’ve only driven cars, you could drive it,” said Sergio Gomez, 46. “But you’d be wrecking everything, hitting poles and cars and curbs and people. You’d be sticking out like a sore thumb, swerving all over the place.”

Jose Valle, 53, was loading up his bus to head to New Jersey. Given the recent bus theft, the culprit still on the lam, was he keeping a closer eye on his bus so no one took it? He gave a weird look. “No,” he said. “I don’t think anybody will take my bus. It’s really big. Nah, nobody’s going to take my bus.”

In Crisis, Ties With Neighbor Improve

2010-02-18T16:15:00.001-05:00

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic—President Leonel Fernández paid an unannounced visit to his Haitian counterpart, René Préval, less than 48 hours after last month's earthquake devastated the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Mr. Préval had regrouped with surviving members of the Haitian government in a grimy one-story police station near the airport. "I found him alone in a darkened office," says Mr. Fernández in an interview in an ornate gilded hall of the presidential palace here. "We quickly began to make plans to see what immediate measures we could take" to help.

For two centuries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been the most uneasy of neighbors. The two countries share the small island of Hispaniola, but speak different languages, and their bloody and confrontational histories have made each distrust, fear and resent the other. In the aftermath of the Jan. 12 quake, people on both sides of the border see an opportunity to improve relations.

In addition to millions of dollars in government and private aid, the Dominican Republic has sent 15 bus-size field kitchens to Haiti that each serve more than 60,000 hot meals a day, as well as dozens of generators and teams of electrical workers to help turn on the lights in Port-au-Prince. Dominican doctors turned a planned clinic on the border into a hospital where thousands of injured Haitians have been treated.

"The Dominicans were the first to arrive with help, with doctors, food and aid," says Alice Blanchet, a special adviser to Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. "They were stellar."

"I think the tragedy has had the blessing of bringing our countries closer," says Mr. Fernández. Still, he warns, if a mass of Haitians cross the border, it would pressure strained public services, potentially threaten the Dominican government—and could turn into a regional security problem for the U.S. "We could turn into failed states," he says, referring to the possibility of Haitian collapse.

Race has been an important factor in the island's history. Haiti's black slave revolutionaries, who wrung independence for their nation from Napoleon's grenadiers in 1804, quickly overran the eastern, Spanish part of the island. It was only in 1844 that the Dominican Republic won independence from Haiti. Spanish-speaking and relatively light-skinned, Dominicans simultaneously looked down and feared their Creole-speaking, predominantly black neighbors.

Did not know that history.

Generations of Dominicans were brought up on the national narrative of how Haitian troops slaughtered Dominicans during the country's war of independence. In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered the massacre of an estimated 30,000 Haitian migrants, most of whom worked in cane fields.

The Dominican Republic has made steady progress since it began to emerge from the shadow of the 31-year Trujjillo dictatorship in 1961, but Haiti has plunged into chaos again and again after 29 years of dictatorship by the Duvalier family ended in 1986. Haiti's gross domestic product is less than $6 billion. The Dominican Republic has a GDP of $45 billion.

Mr. Fernández says he hopes the international community will invest the billions needed to "re-found" Haiti. But he and others here fear international attention will wane, and the pressure of a failed Haiti will spur migration. The quake has spurred an outpouring of support from individuals as well as businesses.

"We see in this tragedy an opportunity for development on the island," said Fernando Capellan, a Dominican businessman who is president of Grupo M, which operates a free-trade zone on the Haitian side of the border where some 4,000 workers assemble items of clothing.

Lisandro Macarulla, spokesman for Conep, a Dominican chamber of commerce, says there are opportunities for Dominican companies. But he echoed Mr. Fernández's worry that the international community will lose interest. "The situation presents both an opportunity and a danger," he says.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A14

Americas News
February 18, 2010

Voters, Too, Grow Dismayed

2010-02-18T11:19:00.005-05:00

Grow? I already am.

February 18, 2010
Senator Retires, and Voters, Too, Grow Dismayed
By SUSAN SAULNY

HAMMOND, Ind. — Brent Kruse, a retired railroad conductor, says he is an independent-minded, loosely affiliated Democrat who “votes for the man, not the party.” In the last presidential election, he said, he flirted with the idea of casting a ballot for a Republican, Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, before throwing his support behind Barack Obama. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana was part of the reason Mr. Kruse chose Mr. Obama.

“This is a Republican state and he’s a Democrat, so that tells you what people think of him,” said Mr. Kruse, 69. “He’s been a very good man for this state, and I do wish he had stuck it out.”

Of all the elected officials, political analysts, and party bosses across the country who were stunned by Mr. Bayh’s announcement on Monday that he would not seek re-election to a third term, perhaps no group was left more flabbergasted than Mr. Bayh’s constituents, particularly here in the working-class towns of northwest and central Indiana that helped make it a blue state — at least temporarily — in 2008.

Now, with Mr. Bayh planning to leave Congress, citing his disillusionment with unyielding partisanship and legislative gridlock, a good bit of disillusionment has settled on Indiana, too.

“This shocked me. Honest to God, it did,” Mr. Kruse said. “I did not see it coming. And every time we lose a good Democrat, it hurts the system as far as getting anything done.”

Mr. Bayh, 54, a centrist former governor and son of a former senator, was among those Mr. Obama considered for vice president. He campaigned across the state for Mr. Obama, introducing him time and again, and the personal touch from such a respected local figure seemed to help turn the tide for the Democrats. What will happen here in the next presidential cycle is anyone’s guess now, as is the more pressing Congressional primary this spring.

“It’s very disappointing that someone so dedicated has reached the point that he’s disenchanted with politics,” said Vivian Sallie, 59, a television executive in South Bend, who described herself as a longtime supporter of Mr. Bayh. “I feel let down by the situation our country is in. I feel that it’s our state’s loss and a loss for the country.”

JoAnna Clay, a homemaker in South Bend, added: “It’s a really sad situation. He was the voice for a lot of us, and you got the feeling that he really cared. I think there are not many people in Washington who really care, and that’s the problem. They’d rather fight. But he got tired of fighting. There’s definitely some discouragement here,” she said.

Kate Blakely, a cafe manager from Mishawaka, struggled with the timing of the announcement, just days before Mr. Bayh was scheduled to film a campaign commercial at her workplace. “One day he was coming, and the next thing we heard, everything was off,” said Ms. Blakely, 25. “It just seemed kind of random.”

And Tyler Bergin, who works in sales for a cellular company, said he also found it hard to accept Mr. Bayh’s timing. “I can’t understand why he stepped down,” Mr. Bergin said. “It’s unfortunate. If he didn’t want to run again, I guess it’s his choice. He doesn’t owe us anything. But,” Mr. Bergin, 28, continued, “it was not a very good strategic move because it leaves the seat open at such a bad time for the Democrats.”

Excellent point.

The filing deadline to qualify for the ballot was Tuesday, and, left with one day to scramble, Democrats failed to submit the petitions needed to qualify for the Senate race, meaning that no Democrat will be on the primary ballot. Instead, party leaders will pick a general-election contender later this year.

Was he sticking it to the party?

Barrett Berry, the chairman of a nonprofit economic development group in South Bend, said he was troubled that Mr. Bayh’s decision did not leave time for anyone to run for the seat. “I’m going to be loyal, but I am bothered that he didn’t give others the opportunity,” Mr. Berry said, echoing concerns of other Indiana Democrats.

Meanwhile, five Republicans qualified for the primary, among them former Senator Daniel R. Coats, Mr. Bayh’s predecessor. Republicans expressed optimism about recapturing a seat in a state that traditionally leans to the right and about possibly adding an Indiana example to a national narrative that shows Democrats struggling to hold on to their majorities in the House and Senate in the 15 months since Mr. Obama’s election.

“I had a very positive reaction to his decision,” said Ben vonBergen, 18, as he sipped coffee with a friend, Mike Houghtaling, 35, who also seemed pleased. “Sometimes I get the impression that elected officials are just trying to hold on to their jobs,” said Mr. Houghtaling, who works at a camp for underprivileged children in South Bend and describes himself as politically conservative. “If he really wanted to see change, I’m glad he did something about it” by not running.

Mr. Houghtaling said he shared a sense of frustration about Washington and could understand Mr. Bayh’s personal dilemma about being an unhappy participant in a dysfunctional system, particularly as Democratic leaders pushed over the past year for big-budget legislation. (Mr. Bayh had grown increasingly isolated as he warned Democratic leaders that costly legislation was bothering independent voters.) “The problem for me,” Mr. Houghtaling said, “is that Republicans tax and spend as much as anyone. It’s frustrating.”

For her part, Ms. Clay, 22, said she used to see Mr. Bayh as part of the solution, but not anymore. “True enough, if he felt like nothing was getting done,” she said, “then he should have stayed to get things done.”

Census of Early Humans

2010-02-18T11:19:00.004-05:00

January 19, 2010
Genome Study Provides a Census of Early Humans
By NICHOLAS WADE

From the composition of just two human genomes, geneticists have computed the size of the human population 1.2 million years ago from which everyone in the world is descended. They put the number at 18,500 people, but this refers only to breeding individuals, the “effective” population. The actual population would have been about three times as large, or 55,500.

Comparable estimates for other primates then are 21,000 for chimpanzees and 25,000 for gorillas. In biological terms, it seems, humans were not a very successful species, and the strategy of investing in larger brains than those of their fellow apes had not yet produced any big payoff. Human population numbers did not reach high levels until after the advent of agriculture.

Geneticists have long known that the ancestors of modern humans numbered as few as 10,000 at some time in the last 100,000 years. The critically low number suggested that some catastrophe, like disease or climate change induced by a volcano, had brought humans close to the brink of extinction. If the new estimate is correct, however, human population size has been small and fairly constant throughout most of the last million years, ruling out the need to look for a catastrophe.

The estimate, reported in the issue on Tuesday of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was made by a team of population geneticists at the University of Utah led by Chad D. Huff and Lynn B. Jorde.

The human population a million years ago was represented by archaic species like Homo ergaster in Africa and Homo erectus in East Asia. The Utah team says its estimate of 18,500 implies “an unusually small population for a species spread across the entire Old World.”

But that estimate would apply to the worldwide population only if there were inbreeding between the humans on the different continents. If not, and if modern humans are descended from just one of these populations, like Homo ergaster in Africa, then the estimate would apply only to that. Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford, said it was hard to believe the population from which modern humans are descended was as small as 18,500 “unless they were geographically restricted to Africa or a small part of it.”

There is no independent way of assessing a genetics-based estimate of population size at this period, Dr. Klein said, although archaeologists have developed ways of assessing ancient populations of more recent times.

The Utah team based its estimate on the genetic variation present in two complete human genomes, one prepared by the government’s human genome project and the other by J. Craig Venter, the genome sequencing pioneer. The government decoded a single copy of a mosaic genome derived from a medley of people, apparently of European and Asian origin. Dr. Venter decoded both copies of his own genome, the one inherited from his father and the one from his mother.

The Utah team thus had three genomes to work with and looked at ancient elements known as Alu insertions, the youngest class of which appeared in the human genome around a million years ago. The amount of variation seen in the DNA immediately surrounding the Alu insertions gave a measure of the size of human population at that time.

Their estimate agrees almost exactly with an earlier one, also based on Alu insertions but with sparser data. The insertions tag ancient regions of the genome that are unaffected by the recent growth in population, Dr. Huff said.

Buffalo and Moravia duke it out

2010-02-18T09:49:00.003-05:00

Buffalo and Moravia, N.Y., are vying for a piece of the Millard Fillmore action. The two communities both claim this mostly forgotten president, whose very name is associated with mediocrity, and whose oft-cited greatest achievement—installing a bathtub in the White House—was a hoax perpetrated by the writer H.L. Mencken . The U.S. Mint this week is releasing the Millard Fillmore presidential dollar coin, with an official launch ceremony on Thursday in Moravia (pop. 4,000), near his birthplace. Some people in Buffalo are miffed.

Fillmore, you see, is buried in Buffalo, where he made his mark as the first chancellor of the University at Buffalo, founding member and first president of the Buffalo Club, and founder of the Buffalo Historical society.

Members of Moravia's historical society say there's more than enough Millard Fillmore to go around. Buffalo can claim Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president, who began his career there. "As a small town, we just have a few moments of history that are ours—and Fillmore is one of them," says Roger Phillips, president of the Cayuga-Owasco Lakes Historical Society.

This has to prove that there is a website for nearly everything.

Joyce Hackett Smith, former president of the historical society and a distant cousin of Fillmore's, notes that the 13th president is more apt to be overlooked in a big city like Buffalo, which has a population of about 272,600, while every child at Millard Fillmore Elementary School in Moravia learns a lot about Fillmore

A quarter of a million a big city? What does that make NYC?

"We spent quite a lot of time in history class going over the things that Fillmore did," says 57-year-old Lee Conklin, a lifelong Moravian and owner of an auto-parts store there. The late Robert Scarry, a Moravia history teacher, wrote a book detailing the president's life.

Long Beach Library owns the book.

Millard Fillmore was born on Jan. 7, 1800, several miles outside Moravia in what is now Summerhill and became president following the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850. Fillmore's presidency is marked by his signing and enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act providing for the return of runaway slaves. History has punished him for that, but supporters say it was his way of trying to keep the country united. Fillmore made an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1856 as a member of the American party, derisively known as the Know-Nothing party, after his former party, the Whigs, fell apart over the issue of slavery.

Not a great record.

His name is attached to cartoonist Bruce Tinsley's "Mallard Fillmore" comic strip, which features a right-leaning duck reporter who goes after the media, not to mention liberal politicians. And Fillmore's reputation for being ignored takes center stage in George Pendle's fictional and tongue-in-cheek account of Fillmore's life in "The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President," published in 2007.

Fillmore did get a burst of recognition in 2008 from auto maker Kia Motors and its "Unheard of Presidents' Day" sale. The commercial made reference to the bathtub "legacy," and featured a Millard Fillmore soap-on-a-rope. The historical society in Moravia got its hands on a box of soaps-on-a-rope for its collection, says Mr. Phillips.

One self-proclaimed Fillmorephile, Jeff Amdur of Baltimore, has been anticipating the launch of the Fillmore dollar, even though he won't be able to make it to either of the two ceremonies.

"After I got a Zachary Taylor dollar in change last year, I knew Millard's time was coming up," he says.

Unsustainability

2010-02-17T16:42:00.003-05:00

It's not our debt that's unsustainable, it's our politics

By Matt Miller
Wednesday, February 17, 2010

As a debt worrywart who devoured one of Pete Peterson's doomsday books on my (first) honeymoon, and who came to Washington to help balance the budget in the 1990s, I take a back seat to no one when it comes to deficit hawkery. But the current panic over the national debt is a little mad. Yes, it's a fine thing that President Obama is naming Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to head up the fiscal commission he'll unveil Thursday. And Republican glee and Democratic fear over the political fallout from trillion-dollar deficits are understandable. But, at least for now, the policy consequences are modest and manageable.

Alan Simpson never shied away from a political bout, and was as partisan as anyone, I well remember. Yet even he is sick of today's political fighting. Get this quote from the former Senator: “There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Mr. Simpson said in a telephone interview Tuesday just before word of his role got out. “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”

How can I say that? Because even the most debilitating debt is racked up only one year at a time. And that means the staggering $9 trillion in fresh debt that President Obama has projected over the next decade is only a number on paper for the moment. If they came to pass, these levels of debt would be country-wrecking, next-generation-crushing and downright wrong. Is the president's forecast of such debt proof of the White House's unwillingness to lead on hard choices? You betcha. Does it mean we'll actually incur this debt? In a word, no.

The beginning of wisdom here is to remember that what "everyone knows" about the economy often turns out to be wrong. I was an aide in the room when respected economists on Bill Clinton's team told the president in 1994 (as has been reported elsewhere) that he couldn't possibly seek to balance the budget any faster than in seven to 10 years. Reducing government demand more swiftly might capsize the economy! Three years later, the budget was in surplus and the economy was humming. The moral: Always balance the advice of experts with the counsel of common sense.

Common sense today starts with the fact that the economy is recovering from the worst downturn in decades. With unemployment high, and business investment and consumer spending still lagging, government has to run big deficits to keep the recovery on track. Once we're on stabler ground, and seeing ample job growth again, deficits on this scale won't be justified. For now, as Obama rightly argued in a speech Wednesday marking the first anniversary of the stimulus bill, they're unavoidable -- and indispensable.

The good news from the Clinton experience is that the chronicle of debt foretold in Obama's budget is perfectly consistent with a return to fiscal sanity much sooner. The bad news is that our bipartisan blend of fiscal dishonesty and political calculation has reached the point where it's hard to know who will spark the debate we need about the real choices America faces.

Republicans act as if near-term deficits are a bad thing, when in fact the flood of spending both from the stimulus and the Federal Reserve's creative liquidity injections brought the economy back from the brink. The new Republican "it" boy on fiscal policy, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, indulges in the mathematical and political fantasy that we can keep taxes at their historic level of 19 percent of GDP while doubling the number of people on Social Security and Medicare.

Politics is all it is. Preach to the people that they need fear the cataclysm that the other side is bringing on, and that their salve is what will work, and people will respond.

Democrats, meanwhile, are boxed in by Obama's unsustainable pledge not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $250,000 -- a policy that only "works" if we think we can borrow all the cash for the baby boomers' retirement from China. Nor will Democrats explain to their liberal base that trimming Social Security benefits for better-off retirees will be a progressive way to fund better teachers for poor children in the era of permanent fiscal pressure ahead.

They should. Liberals need to stop whining, and learn the act of compromise, of the possible, and of governing.

It's such a surreal moment that admissions of cowardice somehow pass for evidence of fiscal rectitude. Whatever its merits -- and let's all wish it well -- the very need for Obama's new fiscal commission amounts to an extraordinary confession.

"We refuse to risk our hold on power," our leaders are essentially telling us, "by coming clean on our own about the tax increases and spending cuts we know are needed to pass a sound nation to our children." Thus "political leadership" becomes an oxymoron. Odds are we'll fix the budget once enough of us show our leaders it's safe to do what needs to be done; think Perot getting 20 percent of the vote in 1992. But the price of having to wait for good "followership" instead of real leadership is high. For now, this price includes the reality that neither major party has a political strategy that includes solving our biggest problems. And that, more than our rising debt, is scary.

Hugo's loyalists

2010-02-17T14:21:00.000-05:00

February 17, 2010
Purging Loyalists, Chávez Tightens His Inner Circle
By SIMON ROMERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — News travels fast in this city, and rumors even faster. So when a billionaire banker named Ricardo Fernández Barrueco learned that his home had been searched by agents from the feared secret intelligence police, he might have suspected that the rumors of a purge of magnates loyal to President Hugo Chávez were true.

Being one of Venezuela’s richest and most influential men, Mr. Fernández, 44, went to the headquarters of the Disip intelligence police to clear up the matter directly with the agency’s powerful spymaster.

Then a surprising thing happened, especially in a nation that had grown accustomed to the unfettered activities of pro-Chávez tycoons like Mr. Fernández. The self-described socialist revolution of Mr. Chávez notwithstanding, the prominence of these moguls was so well known it inspired a nickname — the Boligarchs — for their fast accumulation of wealth and their ties to the government, which reveres Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century aristocrat who won Venezuela’s freedom from Spain.

Those are great ironies: Bolívar was an aristocrat, and these modern-day Bolívarians are, too.

But instead of dismissing the matter, the intelligence chief imprisoned Mr. Fernández last year and ordered agents to start detaining other pro-Chávez magnates. Some slipped into hiding abroad and are still being sought. Several others and their associates were arrested and put in cells adjacent to Mr. Fernández’s. The purge has revealed a power struggle at the highest levels of government, leading to the fall of some of Mr. Chávez’s military comrades and reports of secret dossiers on businessmen compiled here by intelligence agents from Cuba, Venezuela’s top ally.

At a time when Mr. Chávez struggles with public ire over electricity shortages and an economy in recession, the arrests show his ability to nimbly consolidate power while crisis swirls around him. To do so, Mr. Chávez is using tactics like secret-police raids and expropriations of some of his most powerful supporters’ businesses, relying on a dwindling number of military loyalists to carry out his orders.

“We are witnessing the battle between competing mafias who prospered at Chávez’s heel,” said Ismael García, a leftist legislator who broke with the president in 2007. “Chávez still has the cynicism to camouflage his rule in socialist rhetoric, but anyone with a brain sees that his loyalists are in it for just two things: the power and the money.”

Same old story, new labels.

Some bankers here apparently acquired too much of both. The rise of a shadowy group of pro-government tycoons had for years been an embarrassment to Mr. Chávez as he was promoting anti-capitalist values. Included in the Bolibourgeoisie (another name for the so-called Bolivarian moneyed class) were men like Arné Chacón, a former navy lieutenant who took part in Mr. Chávez’s failed 1992 coup attempt. In newspaper photographs back then, Mr. Chacón, like Mr. Chávez, looked like a skinny idealist. But Mr. Chacón amassed a banking fortune, appearing in newspaper photographs here with more girth and a selection of the more than 40 purebred racehorses he owned.

Now Arné Chacón is just another jailed magnate, joining Mr. Fernández and eight other imprisoned bankers and state regulators as investigations into their activities slowly advance. Mr. Chávez himself announced that officials had seized Mr. Chacón’s properties, including his prized horses. The justification for the imprisonment of Mr. Chacón and other tycoons involved accusations of irregularities in bank acquisitions.

Reports by nongovernmental outlets here point to other motives for the crackdown. Teodoro Petkoff Malec, a former Marxist guerrilla and one of Venezuela’s leading intellectuals who now edits Tal Cual, a left-wing opposition newspaper, reported that a dossier prepared by Cuba’s intelligence service might have crystallized the purge. The intelligence report, Mr. Petkoff said, was delivered to Mr. Chávez by yet another former military officer, Ronald Blanco, now Venezuela’s ambassador in Cuba; he passed it along as a form of retaliation after Mr. Fernández tried to have Mr. Blanco’s brother-in-law ousted from his post as the government’s superintendent of banks, Mr. Petkoff reported.

How Soviet.

Mr. Chávez’s government has remained silent about the existence of a Cuban dossier. The president’s information minister, Blanca Eekhout, did not respond to requests for an interview. But Mr. Chávez has clearly continued the purge, issuing warrants through Interpol for at least nine bankers thought to have fled Venezuela, and seizing 11 of their financial institutions to fold them into a new state banking company under his control. The fallout from the purge continued this month, when Mr. Chávez named a former army captain who took part in his 1992 coup attempt to oversee the seized banks. Mr. Chávez is also relying more on his Cuban allies to address other issues. This month, he brought in Ramiro Valdés, Cuba’s 77-year-old vice president and a founder of its Soviet-inspired state intelligence apparatus in the 1960s, to advise him on the electricity shortages, an appointment that has further angered Mr. Chávez’s critics here.

None of the fallen Boligarchs have gripped the public fascination here like Mr. Fernández, who was arrested at the start of the purge. “Fernández Barrueco made the fundamental mistake of believing he was powerful,” said Juan Carlos Zapata, an investigate journalist who is writing a book on the Boligarchs. “By taking him out, Chávez sent a message to anyone who aspires to power in Venezuela.” Mr. Fernández rose from obscurity to put together a web of 270 companies in industries as diverse as tuna-fishing and banking, amassing a fortune of about $1.6 billion by 2005, according to study by the Caracas affiliate of the KPMG accounting firm. He thrived in rural Venezuela, where Mr. Chávez’s dominance goes largely unchallenged, acquiring an interest in a pro-government newspaper in Barinas, a state that is a Chávez family bastion. Still, Mr. Fernández remained an enigma as his wealth increased. Today, he resides in a military intelligence holding cell.

Other resignations in January from within Mr. Chávez’s ruling cadre followed the bankers’ arrests. Vice President Ramón Carrizalez and Eugenio Vásquez, the minister of public banking, left the government. It remains unclear whether their exit was related to the earlier purge. Those who remain in Mr. Chávez’s good graces provide a glimpse into the president’s priorities. They include former military officers like Diosdado Cabello, who as chief communications regulator engineered the removal last month of RCTV, a television network critical of Mr. Chávez, from cable channels.

As for those swept out by the purge, Mr. Chávez has made few apologies. “I’m not a judge,” he said on national television referring to the arrest of the magnate, Mr. Fernández. “But I have enough evidence to say that he’s a criminal.”

María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting.

Gridlock

2010-02-17T13:59:00.002-05:00

“I used to think it would take a global financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one,” said G. William Hoagland, who was a fiscal policy adviser to Senate Republican leaders and a witness to past bipartisan budget summits. “These days I wonder if this country is even governable.”

Not that easy

2010-02-17T13:33:00.003-05:00

February 17, 2010 - Political Memo

G.O.P. Hopes for Senate Control Face Hurdles

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON — The retirement of Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana has raised Republicans’ hopes of capturing a significant number of Democratic Senate seats in November. Some Republicans and analysts are even suggesting that the party might take control of the Senate. In theory, at least, that is possible, given the number of Democratic retirements, soaring public disillusionment with Congress and an unemployment rate that seems unlikely to diminish appreciably before November. But a review of the political map suggests how daunting the Republican task would be, requiring both a continuing barrage of bad luck for Democrats and nothing short of a flawless performance by the Republican Party.

That is a lot to get done all at once; flawless is not an adjective often associated with politicians. But the Democrats seem intent on mucking up everything, and have been doing it consistently.

“As the map stands now, if we run the table of competitive races, we can get there,” said Rob Jesmer, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “We hope to get a few more races in play over the next couple months, which would give us some margin for error.” Democrats control the Senate 59 to 41. Because Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. casts the tie-breaking vote if the Senate is split 50-50, Republicans would need to pick up 10 seats to gain control.

For argument’s sake, factor in the possibility that Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent whom Democrats have counted as one of their own, switches his party affiliation if Republicans are on the verge of taking control, a move that Democrats do not rule out. Then Republicans would have to win every one of the eight Democratic-held seats viewed as vulnerable — in Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, North Dakota and Pennsylvania.

Republicans can probably put North Dakota in the bank today, after Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a Democrat, decided not to seek re-election. Republicans also appear to be in strong shape in Delaware, where Mr. Biden’s son Joseph R. Biden III, known as Beau, decided not to run, yielding the stage to Representative Michael N. Castle. Mr. Bayh’s retirement makes Republicans justifiably comfortable about their prospects of taking back a state that tilts Republican. An open seat in Illinois means Republicans have a good shot at winning the Senate seat once held by President Obama. In Colorado, where Ken Salazar gave up his Senate seat to become interior secretary, Republicans are hopeful about toppling the appointed senator, Michael Bennet.

Republicans say they have a strong chance of winning in Pennsylvania, where Senator Arlen Specter, who changed his party registration to become a Democrat, is wheezing as he faces a strong primary challenge from the left. And two Democratic senators are clearly in trouble: Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, though a self-identified Tea Party candidate could divide the anti-Reid vote.

If Republicans win all those races, that would put them one seat away from control. But they are not only playing offense. There are seven open seats that were held by Republicans, including four that appear highly competitive: in Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio.

“We feel we’re going to pick up states on their side of the ledger, and that is going to make it harder for them,” said J. B. Poersch, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

In Kentucky, the Republicans’ prospects in the general election have been threatened by a primary battle. Rand Paul, who has the support of the Tea Party, is running strong against Trey Grayson, the secretary of state; Republicans think Mr. Paul could easily win a Republican primary but stumble in a general election.

In Missouri, Democrats said the Republican candidate — Roy Blunt, a former Republican whip in Congress — would have trouble overcoming his past association with President George W. Bush. Republicans are less worried, pointing out that Senator John McCain of Arizona, the party’s presidential nominee in 2008, squeaked out a victory in Missouri over Mr. Obama.

Assuming that Republicans held on to all seven of the open seats and picked up all eight held by vulnerable Democrats, they would still need to pick up one Democratic seat in decidedly less competitive races in California, Connecticut, New York, Washington and Wisconsin.

But the old rule of politics is you can’t beat somebody with nobody. And so far, Republicans are struggling to find top-tier candidates in New York, Washington and Wisconsin.

Shot in head, Walks away

2010-02-16T10:58:00.000-05:00

FEBRUARY 15, 2010

U.S. Marine Walks Away From Shot to Helmet in Afghanistan

By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS

MARJAH, Afghanistan—It is hard to know whether Monday was a very bad day or a very good day for Lance Cpl. Andrew Koenig.

On the one hand, he was shot in the head. On the other, the bullet bounced off him.

In one of those rare battlefield miracles, an insurgent sniper hit Lance Cpl. Koenig dead on in the front of his helmet, and he walked away from it with a smile on his face.

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BULLET
Bryan Denton for the Wall Street Journal

Lance Cpl. Andrew Koenig shows the spot on his helmet where a Taliban bullet struck, almost centered, between the eyes.
BULLET
BULLET

"I don't think I could be any luckier than this," Lance Cpl. Koenig said two hours after the shooting.

Lance Cpl. Koenig's brush with death came during a day of intense fighting for the Marines of Company B, 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment.

The company had landed by helicopter in the predawn dark on Saturday, launching a major coalition offensive to take Marjah from the Taliban.

The Marines set up an outpost in a former drug lab and roadside-bomb factory and soon found themselves under near-constant attack.

Lance Cpl. Koenig, a lanky 21-year-old with jug-handle ears and a burr of sandy hair, is a designated marksman. His job is to hit the elusive Taliban fighters hiding in the tightly packed neighborhood near the base.

The insurgent sniper hit him first. The Casper, Wyo., native was kneeling on the roof of the one-story outpost, looking for targets.

He was reaching back to his left for his rifle when the sniper's round slammed into his helmet.

The impact knocked him onto his back.

"I'm hit," he yelled to his buddy, Lance Cpl. Scott Gabrian, a 21-year-old from St. Louis.

Lance Cpl. Gabrian belly-crawled along the rooftop to his friend's side. He patted Lance Cpl. Koenig's body, looking for wounds.

Then he noticed that the plate that usually secures night-vision goggles to the front of Lance Cpl. Koenig's helmet was missing. In its place was a thumb-deep dent in the hard Kevlar shell.

Lance Cpl. Gabrian slid his hands under his friend's helmet, looking for an entry wound. "You're not bleeding," he assured Lance Cpl. Koenig. "You're going to be OK."

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Bryan Denton for The Wall Street Journal

Marines took cover after coming under attack during the Marjah offensive Monday.

Lance Cpl. Koenig climbed down the metal ladder and walked to the company aid station to see the Navy corpsman.

The only injury: A small, numb red welt on his forehead, just above his right eye.

He had spent 15 minutes with Doc, as the Marines call the medics, when an insurgent's rocket-propelled grenade exploded on the rooftop, next to Lance Cpl. Gabrian.

The shock wave left him with a concussion and hearing loss.

He joined Lance Cpl. Koenig at the aid station, where the two friends embraced, their eyes welling.

The men had served together in Afghanistan in 2008, and Lance Cpl. Koenig had survived two blasts from roadside bombs.

"We've got each other's backs," Lance Cpl. Gabrian said, the explosion still ringing in his ears.

Word of Lance Cpl. Koenig's close call spread quickly through the outpost, as he emerged from the shock of the experience and walked through the outpost with a Cheshire cat grin.

"He's alive for a reason," Tim Coderre, a North Carolina narcotics detective working with the Marines as a consultant, told one of the men. "From a spiritual point of view, that doesn't happen by accident."

Gunnery Sgt. Kevin Shelton, whose job is to keep the Marines stocked with food, water and gear, teased the lance corporal for failing to take care of his helmet.

"I need that damaged-gear statement tonight," Gunnery Sgt. Shelton told Lance Cpl. Koenig. It was understood, however, that Lance Cpl. Koenig would be allowed to keep the helmet as a souvenir.

Gunnery Sgt. Shelton, a 36-year-old veteran from Nashville, said he had never seen a Marine survive a direct shot to the head.

But next to him was Cpl. Christopher Ahrens, who quietly mentioned that two bullets had grazed his helmet the day the Marines attacked Marjah. The same thing, he said, happened to him three times in firefights in Iraq.

Cpl. Ahrens, 26, from Havre de Grace, Md., lifted the camouflaged cloth cover on his helmet, exposing the holes where the bullets had entered and exited.

He turned it over to display the picture card tucked inside, depicting Michael the Archangel stamping on Lucifer's head. "I don't need luck," he said.

After his moment with Lance Cpl. Gabrian, Lance Cpl. Koenig put his dented helmet back on his head and climbed the metal ladder to resume his rooftop duty within an hour of being hit.

"I know any one of these guys would do the same," he explained. "If they could keep going, they would."

Big, Bad Machine

2010-02-11T13:53:00.000-05:00

Channing Johnson for The Wall Street Journal - This piece of Vammas snow removal equipment can plow, brush and blow snow off runways, eliminating the need for multiple pieces of equipment. Crews began coordinating early for a snow storm at Logan International Airport on Wednesday in Boston, Mass.

Vammas Snow Removal

* THE MIDDLE SEAT
* FEBRUARY 11, 2010

Big, Bad Machine in Boston Keeps Runways Clear at Logan

If you want to keep an airport open through a massive snow storm, you better get a mighty big shovel. And that's what Boston's Logan Airport has.

Logan, which was spared heavy snow Wednesday, hasn't officially closed the airport since the Blizzard of '78, thanks in part to a massive snow mover called Vammas.

Manufactured in Finland and used by only a couple of airports in North America, the 68-foot-long machine has a huge blade on the front for plowing, a giant sweeper brush in its midsection and a blower in its tail that spits out air at 451 miles per hour. A staggered line of 10 Vammas machines can clean a runway down to bare pavement in about 10 to 20 minutes, depending on how heavy the snow is.

"It's a pretty unique piece of equipment," said Gary Tobin, director of facilities for the Massachusetts Port Authority, which operates Logan.

A double whammy of two major snow storms in one week buried much of the East Coast, closing airports, forcing cancellation of thousands of flights and disrupting the plans of hundreds of thousands of travelers. At many airports, the snow overwhelmed efforts to keep runways safe and open, and impassable roads meant neither workers nor travelers could get there. Like schools, airports simply closed down for entire days.

Most airports aren't equipped to handle several feet of snow at once. But Boston, which typically gets about four feet of snow each year, attacks the white stuff with a vengeance. "Snow removal is an art," said Thomas Kinton, chief executive of Massport. "No one airport is the same in fighting Mother Nature in the winter."

In recent years, airports have become better equipped at battling blizzards because of a de-icing chemical called potassium acetate (airports can't use salt because it's corrosive to airplanes) and because of improved plowing technology like the Vammas.

The Vammas rolls when runways get one-quarter inch of slush, one-half inch of wet snow or one inch of dry snow. Runways are closed when they have more than half an inch of slush or wet snow, two inches of dry snow or any report from a pilot describing braking action as "poor" or "nil." The Vammas machines clear it, and flights resume.

Each Vammas gets a nickname painted on the side, usually reflecting its assigned driver. Kevin Finn, the lead driver of the Vammas conga line, has named his the "Flying Finn." The Vammas, which Logan started putting in operation in 1998, operate by computer and a joy stick, and the long machine pivots so it can turn in tight radius, much like a hook-and-ladder fire truck.

"What the plow misses the broom gets. What the broom misses the blower gets," Mr. Finn said.

Logan has a special vehicle to measure the friction on the surface of a runway—key for planes to be able to brake without skidding. Airport managers patrol the field during storms and monitor pilot reports of braking trouble. Electricians follow plows and fix any runway lights that get broken.

Sometimes, officials take airline pilots out to runways in cars to let them stand on the surface and see whether it is slippery. Portable snow melters are positioned over storm drains and snow is dumped into giant vats to be melted so it doesn't stack up in terminal areas and block gates.The airport tries to keep two runways and associated taxiways open during storms, but when snow is coming down hard, crews focus on keeping one runway open.

"Snow is within our control since we've had the Vammas," said Ed Freni, Massport's aviation director. "Even with what Washington had to deal with, we're equipped for one-runway operation."

Airports actually compete every year for a snow-removal award sponsored by an airport trade association. Airlines and air-traffic controllers vote, and Logan has won the award two of the past four years.

Though safety is airlines' first concern, passenger bookings play a role in deciding whether to cancel flights. This past week was lightly booked, making it easier to cancel flights and reaccommodate customers. But passenger loads will be heavy in Boston beginning Thursday because of a school-vacation period. To compensate for cancellations Wednesday, several airlines planned to fly extra trips into and out of Boston on Thursday. after thinning out schedules Wednesday

At a planning meeting with airline-station managers Wednesday morning, Mr. Freni had airport officials run through plans for the day, then polled airlines on how many flights they planned to cancel, how many planes would be on the ground overnight and other contingencies. They reviewed plans for helping airlines get people off planes that sit for long periods.

The forecast for the airport was for heavy, wet snow—the most difficult to move. That, coupled with high winds, had officials concerned. But because of Logan's snow prowess, most airlines planned to operate at least two flights an hour into the afternoon at the forecasted peak of the storm, and bring in enough planes late in the day to have a full flight schedule Thursday morning. "Keep communicating with us," Mr. Freni said at the end of the meeting, "and good luck."

Keeping Faith, Courting Conservatives

2010-02-07T14:55:00.000-05:00

Obama's Willingness to Continue Bush Approach to Religious Charities Aims to Woo Evangelicals but Vexes Liberals

This story tells a great deal about politics, both contemporary and in general.

President Barack Obama's willingness to keep Bush-era policies on government-backed religious charities has angered many liberals but is helping to woo traditionally Republican evangelical leaders who can influence key blocs of voters. The approach, according to conservative leaders and liberal critics alike, is part of a broader strategy by Mr. Obama and fellow Democrats to regain credibility with centrist and conservative voters who tend to be more religious and have supported the GOP in recent polls and elections.

Cold calculations tell: the President needs support from more than the left wing of the Democratic Party to keep power.

Mr. Obama has left in place a contentious Bush policy permitting charities that receive federal aid to hire employees based on their religious beliefs—a policy that civil-liberties groups consider unconstitutional and that candidate Obama had criticized.

Candidates say many things to get elected, but, once in power, recalibrate. It is always done. Liberals insist on ideological orthodoxy, as if simply being rigidly liberal is going to accomplish a great deal politically. It would not. Obama is not as liberal as liberals thought he would be, as they thought they saw him being. He woos liberals, yes, but he is not as liberal as conservatives and right wing nuts charge him with being. And, anyway, what is so bad about faith-based programs? Liberals have their own litmus test; why shouldn't others have their own? Liberals are far too sanctimonious.

From Queens to the NBA

2010-02-06T09:45:00.001-05:00

He was before my time. I do remember his name, and remember his brother, Al, as a coach (college? Marquette, I believe.).

February 6, 2010
From a Home Court in Queens to the N.B.A.
By COREY KILGANNON

They called it the Rockaway Game, basketball the way it was played in the 1940s on blacktop courts along the Atlantic Ocean in Rockaway Beach, Queens.

The games were tight, half-court affairs fueled by hustle and heart and marked with selfless teamwork as preached by the stern coaches in the local St. Francis de Sales Catholic Youth Organization leagues, where the catechism was the give-and-go, the pick-and-roll, moving without the ball, finding the open man, amen.

This was before slam-dunk contests and chest-thumping displays of hubris. Games were won with precision passing and aggressive defense. Flashy play and ball-hogging left you on the sidelines. Outside shooting was discouraged because of the ocean breeze, and fouls were called the Irish-Catholic way: on oneself.

The master of the Rockaway Game was Dick McGuire, whose basketball fortunes rose during his adolescence when his family moved in the late 1930s from the Bronx to a bustling area in Rockaway known as Irish Town. The family bought Rohr’s restaurant on Beach 108th Street, renaming it McGuire’s bar. It was a block from the blacktop that would propel Dick and his brother Al to legendary careers with the New York Knicks.

Mr. McGuire, who died on Wednesday at 84 of an aortic aneurysm, was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, where he joined his brother.

The family slept above McGuire’s bar during the winter but moved into the basement each May and rented out the upstairs to boarders spending summers among the cluster of bars and bungalows from Beach 116th Street to Rockaways’ Playland. The area was known as the Irish Riviera, a summer refuge for Irish New Yorkers seeking escape from hot tenements.

“It was all churches and bars,” John McGuire, the eldest of the three McGuire brothers, recalled by phone on Thursday. “When the band stopped, you went to another bar. If you had a fight, it was with your fists.”

There is still a bar at the McGuire’s former location: Gallagher’s Snug Harbour, owned since 1971 by Frank Gallagher, who on Thursday sat looking out the window at what was no longer Irish Town. Many locals still call his place McGuire’s, and on Thursday, it felt like McGuire’s again, with the phone on the bar ringing off the hook.

“They all want to know about the wake, the funeral arrangements,” Mr. Gallagher said.

The McGuire boys were fascinated by the Rockaway basketball scene, dominated by the likes of Dutch Dehnert and Joe (Poison) Brennan, said a local, Kevin Boyle, 51, who does some coaching at St. Francis and still has a phone number for Ed Baccales, an old-timer from the 108th Street court.

Reached by telephone, Mr. Baccales described the genesis of the half-court games on “the McGuire playground,” a blacktop pitch next to the ocean boardwalk, with netless rims mounted on metal backboards.

“Dick and I used to shovel snow off the court so we could shoot baskets in the winter,” Mr. Baccales said.

The games were always three on three, and if you scored, you regained possession of the ball — “winners out.” Games were played to 7: losers sat; winners stayed on. Al and Dick McGuire both dominated, but it was Dick who became known as Tricky Dick for his ball-handling, his passing and finesse, his peripheral vision, his seeing-eye bounce passes and his intuitive sense of the court, skills that would help make him an N.B.A. All-Star several times over. He could cut and feint, even fresh from Sunday Mass, in suit and shoes.

Because of the ocean breeze, Dick preferred to pass or drive to the basket rather than to shoot. He developed a condition known as Rockawayitis, a chronic reluctance to shoot the ball, for which he was teased throughout his career, despite starring at La Salle Academy in Manhattan and then at St. John’s University.

“It was so hard to shoot down here, he let someone else do it,” Mr. Boyle said. “You would develop trick moves to get to the basket.”

Mr. Baccales, however, gained fame for being able to adjust his set shot to the prevailing wind.

“I had a great set shot, but Dick was a great passer,” Mr. Baccales said.

John McGuire recalled, “We never had any players over 6-3, and if you got hacked hard, you called the foul.”

Throughout the 1950s, the level of play attracted top high school, college and professional players from New York City and even Long Island and New Jersey. Sunday afternoon games would draw Queens players like Bob Cousy, from nearby St. Albans, and Ray Lumpp from Forest Hills. Dolph Schayes would come from the Bronx, as well as Ray Felix from Manhattan and Tommy Heinsohn from New Jersey.

The popular Fitzgerald’s bar faced the court, and crowds would gather to watch the games on Sundays when the young men played for kegs of beer.

“This is where the top competition was at that time, and the best ballplayers from New York and beyond would come down,” Mr. McGuire said.

The Rockaway Game was imported by such players into the N.B.A., where it helped foster a winning formula. When Dick McGuire and Mr. Cousy teamed up in the backcourt for the Eastern Division in the 1954 N.B.A. All-Star Game at Madison Square Garden, the crowd cheered their magical playmaking chemistry.

Dick McGuire was drafted by the Knicks in 1949 and guided them to three straight NBA finals, from 1951 to 1953. But even during those years, the Beach 108th Street blacktop remained his home court in the summer, recalled his widow, Teri, 76, who met Dick on Rockaway Beach in the summer of 1955. The couple lived in a bungalow near the bar until Mr. McGuire was traded to the Detroit Pistons in 1957, she said.

“Every morning, he would walk from the bar to the court and play all day,” she said. “I’d spend the day on the beach while he played.”

An Offensive Tackle Named Shlomo

2010-02-05T14:30:00.003-05:00

Alan Veingrad, who played for the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, at the Chabad House in Los Angeles.

This is a great story.

February 6, 2010 - On Religion
An Offensive Tackle Named Shlomo
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

LOS ANGELES — After practice one late-summer day in 1986, Alan Veingrad strode into the Green Bay Packers’ locker room, feeling both spent and satisfied. An undrafted player from an obscure college, he had made the team and then some. On the next Sunday, opening day of the N.F.L. season, he would be starting at offensive tackle.

In his locker, Mr. Veingrad found the usual stuff, his street clothes and sweatsuit and playbook. On a small bench, though, lay a note from the Packers’ receptionist. It carried a name that Mr. Veingrad did not recognize, Lou Weinstein, and a local phone number.

Alone in a new town, too naïve to be wary, Mr. Veingrad called. This Lou Weinstein, it turned out, ran a shoe store in Green Bay, Wis. He had just read an article in the paper about a Jewish player on the Packers, and he wanted to meet and welcome that rarity.

A few days later, Mr. Veingrad joined Mr. Weinstein for lunch at the businessman’s golf club. There Mr. Weinstein invited the player to accompany his family to Rosh Hashana services at Cnesses Israel, a synagogue near the site of the Packers’ original home field, at City Stadium.

It had been a long time since Mr. Veingrad had spent much time in shul, nearly a decade since his bar mitzvah. He knew the date of the Packers’ Monday night game against the Chicago Bears better than he did Yom Kippur. “But when I heard the Hebrew,” he recently recalled of that service in Green Bay, “I felt a pull.”

Maybe it was a presentiment, maybe it was the sort of destiny that Yiddish calls “goyrl.” Whatever the word for it, something stirred into motion. And that something brought Mr. Veingrad into the Chabad House — a Jewish center run by the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement — near the University of Southern California campus here five nights before the 2010 Super Bowl.

A promotional flier announced the evening’s subject as “Super Bowl to Super Jew.” There was truth in that advertising. Mr. Veingrad goes these days by his Hebrew name Shlomo. He wore a black skullcap and the ritual fringes called tzitzit; he wore the Super Bowl ring he won in 1992 with the Dallas Cowboys and the Rolex watch that was a gift from Emmitt Smith, the team’s star running back.

Within his 6-foot-5 frame, Mr. Veingrad embodies two Jewish archtypes that do not often meet. He is the ba’al guf, the Jewish strongman, and the ba’al teshuva, the returnee to the faith. While two Jewish boxers on the scene now — Yuri Foreman and Dimitriy Salita — also are prominently observant, Mr. Veingrad may well be the only Orthodox athlete from America’s hugely popular team sports.

“I believe I played in the N.F.L. and have that ring so I can share my story with other Jews,” Mr. Veingrad, 46, said shortly before the U.S.C. event. During it, he told a spellbound capacity audience, “The Torah is a playbook for how someone can live their life.”

Were Mr. Veingrad a Christian, like virtually all his teammates over the years, such God-talk would be as ordinary as an extra-point kick. With prayer circles at midfield and Bible verses on their eye-black, Christian football players have routinely used their fame for evangelism and witness. One of the major subplots of this year’s Super Bowl is the anti-abortion commercial featuring the college star Tim Tebow.

For Jews, abundant as fans but uncommon as top players, the visibility of a Shlomo Veingrad serves both reassuring and cathartic roles. Having a Jew to root for — whether Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax or the Israeli N.B.A. rookie Omri Casspi — “has a lot to do with our desire to define ourselves as Americans in the most American way, which is sports,” said Jeffrey S. Gurock, a history professor at Yeshiva University and the author of “Judaism’s Encounter With American Sports.”

At a deeper and more anxious level, American Jews continue to grapple with the stereotypical view of the Jew as egghead, nerd, weakling. That dismissive portrayal was a staple not only of anti-Semites, but also of early Zionists, who envisioned their “new man” with his plow and rifle as the antidote to the “golus Yid,” the exilic Jew unable even to defend himself.

“I don’t think those feelings are as conscious as in prior generations, but they still have some resonance,” Professor Gurock said in a telephone interview. “So there’s a residual pride of someone achieving in this very secular world of sports.”

The story Mr. Veingrad tells in about 40 speeches a year attests to a ferociously competitive spirit. He started playing high school football as a teenage beanpole in Miami, could only get a scholarship from a Division II school, East Texas State, and was cut by his first two N.F.L. teams.

A full year later, he caught on with the Packers, beginning a six-year career with Green Bay and Dallas. From high school through the pros, he defied the odds with a rigorous program of weight training and a relentless study of technique.

“He was a storybook player,” recalled Rich Moran, a Packers teammate, “the undrafted guy who proves he can play.”

In retirement, Mr. Veingrad brought a comparable focus and intensity to his emerging religious life, which was nurtured by Moshe Gruenstein, an Orthodox rabbi in South Florida, with whom he studied the Torah for eight years, and then by several Chabad rabbis.

Among those who came to hear this saga at Southern California was Spencer Kassimir, a 26-year-old graduate student in East Asian studies.

“I drove all the way to Orange County to get this,” he said, showing Mr. Veingrad an official N.F.L. football. Mr. Veingrad obligingly signed with his name, his uniform number, and his message: “Jewish Pride!”

Mr. Veingrad as a tackle with the Green Bay Packers in 1989.

Alan Shlomo Veingrad, with beard, showing his Super Bowl ring Tuesday to students at the Chabad House in Los Angeles.

U.S. Scientists Given Access to Cloud Computing

2010-02-05T14:20:00.001-05:00

February 5, 2010
U.S. Scientists Given Access to Cloud Computing
By JOHN MARKOFF

The National Science Foundation and the Microsoft Corporation have agreed to offer American scientific researchers free access to the company’s new cloud computing service.

A goal of the three-year project is to give scientists the computing power to cope with exploding amounts of research data. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing system, which the company recently introduced to compete with cloud computing services from companies like Amazon, Google, I.B.M. and Yahoo. These cloud computing systems allow organizations and individuals to run computing tasks and Internet services remotely in relatively low-cost data centers.

The new program was announced on Thursday at a news conference in Washington.

Neither Microsoft nor the foundation was willing to place a dollar amount on the agreement, but Dan Reed, the corporate vice president for technology strategy and policy at Microsoft, said that the company was prepared to invest millions of dollars in the service and that it could support thousands of scientific research programs.

Access to the service will come in grants from the foundation to new and continuing scientific research. Microsoft executives said they planned eventually to make the new service global.

The government has traditionally supported a group of scientific computing centers at universities and laboratories around the country. These centers have typically housed supercomputers capable of solving scientific and engineering problems quickly. In recent years, however, increasing emphasis has been placed on computing systems capable of storing and analyzing vast amounts of data.

“It’s all about data,” said Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director of computer and information science and engineering directorate at the science foundation. “We are generating streams and rivers of data.”

Genetic sequencing systems are capable of generating as much as a terabyte, 1,000 gigabytes, of information a minute, Dr. Wing said.

Microsoft made its commitment to scientific computing two years after a similar service was introduced by Google and I.B.M. Several scientists familiar with the Microsoft project said the software company was hoping to differentiate the new service by offering scientists a set of custom applications that simplified access to Azure and the use of older software applications like Microsoft Excel.

“We’re trying to figure out how to engage the majority of scientists,” said Dr. Reed, who directed several of the nation’s scientific computing centers before joining Microsoft.

Simplicity of use is one Microsoft goal. Programming modern cloud systems for full efficiency has been difficult. The company is trying to overcome this difficulty in creating a variety of software tools for scientists, said Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer scientist who works with the Microsoft researchers.

Dr. Lazowska said the explosion of data being collected by scientists had transformed the staffing needs of the typical scientific research program on campus from a half-time graduate student one day a week to a full-time employee dedicated to managing the data. He said such exponential growth in cost was increasingly hampering scientific research.

Israeli Minister Adds Heat to Exchange With Syria

2010-02-05T14:11:00.001-05:00

Metal soldier cut-outs in the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau that Syria lost to Israel in 1967.

February 5, 2010
Israeli Minister Adds Heat to Exchange With Syria
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Israel’s blunt-talking foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, warned Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, on Thursday that the Assad family would lose power in any war with Israel, ratcheting up bellicose exchanges between the countries in recent days.

In a speech at Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv, Mr. Lieberman said: “I think that our message must be clear to Assad. In the next war, not only will you lose, you and your family will lose the regime. Neither you will remain in power, nor the Assad family.”

That had to be the message, Mr. Lieberman added, because “the only value truly important to them is power.”

That is absolutely true.

In an effort to calm the atmosphere, an aide to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that Mr. Netanyahu was “ready to go anywhere in the world, at any time, to open peace talks with Syria without preconditions.”

The aide, Nir Hefetz, added that Israel did not rule out assistance from any “fair third party” that could advance a peace process with Syria.

Mr. Lieberman was responding to strident comments from Syria on Wednesday. Mr. Assad told the visiting Spanish foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, that Israel was “not serious about achieving peace” and that the facts indicated that “Israel is pushing the region toward war, not peace,” according to the Syrian news agency SANA.

Furthermore, the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, said Wednesday that “Israel should not test Syria’s determination,” adding, “Israel knows that war will move to the Israeli cities.” He implied that a conflict beginning in South Lebanon could also lead to an all-out war.

Mr. Moallem made his comments in response to a strong statement made by Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, to senior Israeli Army officers on Monday, warning that “in the absence of an arrangement with Syria, we are liable to enter a belligerent clash with it that could reach the point of an all-out, regional war.” Israelis understood Mr. Barak’s remark as a plea for the Israeli government to start new peace negotiations with Syria, but the Syrians apparently interpreted it as warmongering.

Israel’s northern borders with Lebanon and Syria are quiet, but tense. The last Israel-Syria war was in 1973; Israel last fought Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia that receives support from Syria, in Lebanon in 2006.

Israeli military officials have warned repeatedly that Hezbollah has been rearming, and they assert that Syria has been preparing its military to move from the conventional battlefield into missiles that can be aimed at Israeli cities.

Mr. Lieberman said the Syrians had issued a “direct threat” to Israel that “crossed a line.”

“We cannot continue with business as usual,” he said.

Shaul Mofaz, a former Israeli Army chief and defense minister, and now a senior member of the opposition centrist Kadima Party, described Mr. Lieberman’s statements as “irresponsible.” “They are liable to lead to verbal escalation or other types of escalation,” Mr. Mofaz told Israel Radio. Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly said that he is ready to talk to the Syrians without preconditions on either side. But Syria expects a guarantee from Israel up front that it is willing to withdraw from the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau that Syria lost in the 1967 war.

There are sharp differences within Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, not least over whether a deal with Syria would succeed in removing Syria from the Iranian sphere. “Those who think that territorial concessions will cause a severance of the ties between Syria and the axis of evil are deluding themselves and avoiding reality,” Mr. Lieberman said Thursday, referring to Iran with a term used by former President George W. Bush. Syria, he added, “will have to give up on its ultimate demand for the Golan Heights.”

Yet with the Palestinian peace process at an impasse, there have been increasing voices in Israel for a refocus on negotiations with Syria. “Because of the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the only chance for generating change lies in the north,” wrote the commentator Ari Shavit in Thursday’s issue of the newspaper Haaretz. “There is no certainty at all that peace is in the offing,” he continued. “But if it is, it is to be found not in Ramallah but in Damascus.”

The previous Israeli government, under the lead of Ehud Olmert of Kadima, held indirect talks with Syria through Turkish mediators, but they ended when Israel started its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza. The Palestinians have refused to engage in direct talks with Mr. Netanyahu’s government unless it carries out a total freeze of settlement construction, at least for a few months, including in East Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu hinted on Wednesday that he was ready to engage instead in “proximity” talks with the Palestinians, via American mediation.

“In the Middle East it sometimes takes three to tango, or at least to start to tango,” Mr. Netanyahu told an audience at the annual Herzliya Conference. “Afterwards,” he said, “I assume we can go on to dance as a couple.” The Palestinians have not yet stated whether they are ready for indirect talks.

Clinton Strays From Script

2010-02-05T14:10:00.003-05:00

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton only partly repeated herself Wednesday at a news conference. Some saw that as significant.

February 5, 2010
Bit of a Stir as Clinton Strays From Script on Mideast Peace
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — With an inadvertent bit of shorthand, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton set off a buzz in diplomatic circles on Wednesday, and may have offered a glimpse into how the Obama administration hopes to revive the stalled peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Answering a question at a news conference about how the talks might be revived, Mrs. Clinton said, “Of course, we believe that the 1967 borders, with swaps, should be the focus of the negotiations over borders.” Such a concept is not new. For a generation of Middle East peacemakers, Israel’s borders before the Arab-Israeli war are the obvious starting point for negotiations over the shape of a Palestinian state.

But Mrs. Clinton’s mention of them went farther than the Obama administration’s standard script on the Middle East: that the positions of Israel and the Palestinians can be reconciled. Analysts said it could augur a new American emphasis, after a frustrating year in which President Obama failed to jump-start the peace process by pressuring Israel to halt construction of settlements.

In particular, Mrs. Clinton’s reference may appeal to the Palestinians, who have long declared that the 1967 borders should be the basis for negotiations. The United States is trying desperately to persuade the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, to return to the bargaining table.

“The reason why this is important is the context,” said David Makovsky, director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “To have it formulated this way, at this sensitive juncture, gives it a kind of significance.”

A spokesman for the State Department, Philip J. Crowley, said that Mrs. Clinton had not been signaling a shift in policy. She has mentioned 1967 borders before — notably in a statement after Israel announced a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank — though always in the context of the Palestinian position. This time, he said, she was merely speaking in shorthand. “The secretary was reiterating our established policy on borders,” Mr. Crowley said. “She was not sending a signal.”

Earlier in the same news conference, with the foreign minister of Bahrain, Mrs. Clinton recited the full version of the policy. In addition to referring to the 1967 borders, “with agreed swaps,” she mentioned Israel’s goal of a “Jewish state with secure and recognized borders.”

“Agreed swaps” mainly refers to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, some of which would be legally granted to Israel in return for Israeli territory that would become part of a new Palestinian state. The Israeli government has resisted entering negotiations on the basis of 1967 borders because it believes that would constrain its room for negotiation. On Thursday, Israeli diplomats said they had taken note of Mrs. Clinton’s words but did not want to jump to any conclusions. “There’s an intense effort being made with the administration to resume negotiations, but we’re still at a preparatory stage,” said Jonathan Peled, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

Mr. Abbas, who is also known as Abu Mazen, has refused to enter negotiations with Israel until it freezes all construction of settlements, including in East Jerusalem, something it has refused to do. Some Palestinians said it was unlikely that Mrs. Clinton’s comments, by themselves, would bring him around. “Abu Mazen seems to be averse even to getting U.S. commitments,” said Ziad J. Asali, the president of the American Task Force on Palestine. “It will take commitments that are credible.”

In the absence of a breakthrough, the United States is trying to encourage indirect talks between the sides, with its special envoy for the Middle East, George J. Mitchell, serving as intermediary.

Germany rebuffs scholars

2010-02-05T14:08:00.003-05:00

February 5, 2010
Rebuffing Scholars, Germany Vows to Keep Hitler Out of Print
By NICHOLAS KULISH

MUNICH — In Germany, an author is granted an ironclad copyright for 70 years after his death, apparently even if he is subsequently regarded as one of the greatest mass murderers in history and a dark stain on the national character.

Hitler’s copyright on “Mein Kampf,” in the hands of the Bavarian government since the end of the Nazi regime, has long been used to keep his inflammatory manifesto off the shelves in Germany. But with the expiration date looming in 2015, there is a developing showdown here over the first German publication of the book since the end of World War II.

Experts at the respected Institute of Contemporary History in Munich say they want to prepare a critical, annotated version of the book for release when the copyright expires 70 years after Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker.

“We hope to prevent neo-Nazi publications by putting out a commented, scholarly edition before that,” said Edith Raim, a historian at the institute. “‘Mein Kampf’ is one of the central texts if you want to explain National Socialism, and it hasn’t been available in a commented edition at all in Germany.”

But the Bavarian government opposed the idea, citing respect for victims of the Holocaust. In a statement Thursday, the Bavarian Finance Ministry said that permits for reprints would not be issued, at home or abroad. “This also applies to a new annotated edition,” said the statement, adding that the state would use “all means at its disposal to proceed against any violations.”

There was also disagreement as to whether the book might be banned as Nazi propaganda. The Bavarian government said that even after expiration of the copyright, “the dissemination of Nazi ideologies will remain prohibited in Germany and is punishable under the penal code.”

But Ms. Raim said that diaries by prominent Nazis like Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler were already available.

Unofficial copies of “Mein Kampf” are easily accessible on the Internet already, and the book is legally published abroad, including in the United States.

Hitler wrote the book, which detailed his hatred of Jews, his desire for revenge against the French and the need for more space or “Lebensraum” in the east for Germans, while in Landsberg prison in Bavaria after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The first volume of the book was published in 1925 and the second the next year.

More than 12 million copies of “Mein Kampf” were in circulation by 1945. The cities of Munich and Nuremberg, among others, gave it away to young couples as a wedding present, according to the Bavarian state library.

Stephan J. Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany in Berlin, said the publication of “Mein Kampf” continued to split the Jewish community in Germany, with many Holocaust survivors opposing its publication. “I have the highest respect for this opinion, but on the other hand I’m saying very openly: The copyright is going to be waived anyway. It’s a matter of time before the book is available in shops and libraries,” Mr. Kramer said.

Mr. Kramer said that with the book available on the Internet, it was important to have the work put in context by a responsible group like the Institute of Contemporary History. “Those who are already on the wrong side already have the book and already read it from their own point of view,” he said. “Let’s get it out there, and let’s get it out there with a commentary.”

Quid pro quo

2010-02-03T13:57:00.001-05:00

Three days after awarding a lucrative state contract to a company connected to the Rev. Floyd H. Flake, one of New York’s most influential black pastors, Gov. David A. Paterson summoned Mr. Flake to his Harlem office Monday morning and sounded him out about his political support.

Pure coincidence, surely.

Mr. Flake said in an interview that while the two men discussed whom he might back in the governor’s race this year, there had been no quid pro quo and no commitment about a formal endorsement. He also said it was his first conversation with Mr. Paterson since he was sworn in nearly two years ago.

Right.

How Bambi Met James Bond

2010-02-02T10:58:00.001-05:00

Voter's remorse?

2010-01-28T09:27:00.000-05:00

As President Barack Obama began his first State of the Union address Wednesday night, Kevin Fischer glanced at the television above him and compared his 2008 vote for the president to ordering from an infomercial. "You listen to the sales pitch and you're so excited and then it arrives and you open the box and it just crumbles," Mr. Fischer said. "It turns out you didn't get what you thought you were going to."

Exactly how I feel. He can give a good speech, but, where's the beef?

Mr. Fischer, 30 years old, is among many voters here who spoke Wednesday of a creeping unease with Mr. Obama that has supplanted the enthusiasm they once felt. At the same time, many of those same Obama voters said that, given the dire condition of the U.S. when he was sworn into office, not enough time has passed to judge him fairly.

It is only a year, indeed, and he has stanched the economic bleeding, yet I feel a deep unease. The health care reform debacle demolished my confidence, both in the President and the Democratic party. It has also left me angry.

Regret for supporting a Democratic presidential candidate is an unusual sensation in this quiet, snow-covered prairie city. That's because heading into the 2008 election, no Democratic presidential candidate had won here since 1964. Nebraska was second only to Utah in its red-state reliability.

Well, for me the Republicans are none the better, and, in fact, worse: all they have done, down to the very last Republican Senator, is say no. No to everything.

Mr. Fischer said when he voted he believed Mr. Obama would draw down U.S. troops abroad, close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and help get the economy back on track.

"None of that has happened," he said. "I feel duped."

It's a good way of putting it, and duped is a powerful word.

Chief of Staff Draws Fire From Left as Obama Falters

2010-01-27T18:14:00.001-05:00

This is a perfect example of the inanity of liberals. They seem to think that their agenda, based on their interpretation of liberalism, is what the President should be following.

President Barack Obama's liberal backers have a long list of grievances. The Guantanamo Bay prison is still open. Health care hasn't been transformed. And Wall Street banks are still paying huge bonuses.

He's tried to move to close Guantanamo, and has gotten fierce opposition from the Right. And, what to do about those not-very-nice people inside? Health care reform failed because the Democrats messed up the chance to reform it.

But they are directing their anger less at Mr. Obama than at the man who works down the hall from him. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, they say, is the prime obstacle to the changes they thought Mr. Obama's election would bring.

2010-01-23T16:42:00.000-05:00

Two stories tell a great deal about what is going on now in national politics: Obama Calls Team From 2008 for Races in Fall

January 24, 2010
Obama Calls Team From 2008 for Races in Fall
By JEFF ZELENY and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama is reconstituting the team that helped him win the White House to counter Republican challenges in the midterm elections and recalibrate after political setbacks that have narrowed his legislative ambitions.

Mr. Obama has asked his former campaign manager, David Plouffe, to oversee House, Senate and governor’s races to stave off a hemorrhage of seats in the fall. The president ordered a review of the Democratic political operation — from the White House to party committees — after last week’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, aides said.

In addition to Mr. Plouffe, who will primarily work from the Democratic National Committee in consultation with the White House, several top operatives from the Obama campaign will be dispatched across the country to advise major races as part of the president’s attempt to take greater control over the midterm elections, aides said.

“We are turning the corner to a much more political season,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, who confirmed Mr. Plouffe’s role. “We are going to evaluate what we need to do to get timely intelligence and early warnings so we don’t face situations like we did in Massachusetts.”

As Mr. Obama prepares to deliver his State of the Union address on Wednesday and lay out his initiatives for the second year of his presidency, his decision to take greater control of the party’s politics signals a new approach. The White House is searching for ways to respond to panic among Democrats over the possible demise of his health care bill and a political landscape being reshaped by a wave of populism.

Yet improving the tactical operations addresses only one part of his challenge. A more complicated discussion under way, advisers said, is how to sharpen the president’s message and leadership style.

The reinforcement of the White House’s political operation has been undertaken with a sense of urgency since Tuesday when a Republican, Scott Brown, won the Massachusetts Senate seat that had been held by Edward M. Kennedy. The White House was caught off guard when it became clear that Democrats were in danger of losing the seat, and by the time alarm bells sounded from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, it was too late.

The president summoned Mr. Plouffe to the Oval Office hours before the polls closed in Massachusetts and asked him to assume the new role because of the implications the midterm elections hold. Mr. Plouffe built a reputation in 2008 as a master of the nuts and bolts of campaigns, and will assemble a team to provide unfiltered political information that serves as an early-warning system so the White House and party officials know if a candidate is falling behind.

The day-to-day political operation will be run by Jim Messina, a deputy White House chief of staff, but Mr. Plouffe will coordinate the effort.

The party is trying to become less reliant on polls conducted by candidates, which can often paint a too-rosy picture of the political outlook. The president’s leading pollster, Joel Benenson, will be among those conducting research for Mr. Plouffe, aides said, along with others who will divide the country by regions.

Mr. Plouffe, who did not follow Mr. Obama to the White House last year, has remained in the president’s tight circle of advisers and has frequently worked on projects for the party.

The first indication of Mr. Plouffe’s more prominent role came in an op-ed article he wrote for the Sunday issue of The Washington Post, presenting a blueprint for how Democrats could avoid big defeats in the fall. He acknowledged the challenges ahead, saying, “We may not have perfect results, but November will be nothing like the nightmare that talking heads have forecast.”

Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said he had “no interest in sugarcoating” the defeat in Massachusetts. Several party leaders said they expected Mr. Menendez to remain in his position for the rest of the election cycle, but the move by the White House had the effect of subverting at least some of the committee’s authority.

“Our own political operation will be more rigorously in communication with the other elements, so we can compare notes,” Mr. Axelrod said. “What we learned from Massachusetts is that we need to be more assiduous about getting our own data and our own information so we have a better sense of where things stand.”

The White House intends to send Mr. Obama out into the country considerably more in 2010 than during his first year in office, advisers said, to try to rekindle the relationship he developed with voters during his presidential campaign.

His first big chance will come when he delivers his State of the Union address.

Rather than unveiling a laundry list of new initiatives, advisers said, Mr. Obama will try to reframe his agenda and how he connects it with public concerns. In particular, he will focus on how his ideas for health care, energy and financial regulation all fit into the broader economic mission of creating what he calls a “new foundation” for the country, the key words being “rescue, restore and rebuild.”

While presidents typically experience rough patches, this one is particularly challenging for Mr. Obama. Liberals have grown disenchanted with what they see as his unwillingness to fight harder for their causes; independents have been turned off by his failure, in their view, to change the way Washington works; and Republicans have become implacably hostile.

The long and messy legislative fight over health care is a leading example of how Mr. Obama has failed to connect with voters, advisers say, because he appeared to do whatever it would take to get a bill rather than explain how people could benefit.

“The process often overwhelmed the substance,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “We need to find ways to try to rise above the maneuvering.”

The discussion inside the White House includes at least two distinct debates: Should Mr. Obama assume a more populist or centrist theme in his message? And should the White House do what it takes to pass compromise legislation or should it force votes, which even if unsuccessful can be used to carry an argument against Republicans in the fall?

It remains an open question how much new legislation will pass Congress, but the coming months will help frame the campaigns. While some form of financial regulation and job creation measures may pass, Obama aides said, the larger initiatives like health care, a cap on carbon emissions and an immigration overhaul may have to wait, even though the White House denies trimming its ambitions.

“I wouldn’t say the door is shut on trying to find some places where you can develop a strategy for a bipartisan vote in the Senate,” said John D. Podesta, a former White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton who advises the Obama team.

But he said Republicans appeared determined to oppose any initiative Mr. Obama offers. “They would try to deny him passing the Mother’s Day resolution,” he said.

Some veterans of the Clinton White House have advised their friends in the West Wing to take a breath and not make lasting decisions in the immediate aftermath of the election, when it might be tempting to overreact.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff and himself a Clinton alumnus, gave a pep talk at the senior staff meeting last week. “These things go in cycles,” participants recalled him saying. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. Keep your head up and keep going.”

Obama's Power Outage
by Leslie H. Gelb
January 22, 2010 | 9:27pm

BS Top - Gelb Obama Defeatism Alex Brandon / AP Photo One Senate upset, and the president seems ready to deal away health care. Leslie H. Gelb on how he needs to stop prattling on about institutions, grab the reins, and lead.

If you want to grasp instantly why President Obama faces the abyss, look no further than his bizarre commentary a day after Tuesday’s Massachusetts senatorial election.

First, study his explanation of what went wrong in his first year in office. "If there's one thing that I regret this year,” he opined, “[it] is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values. And that I do think is a mistake of mine." President Warren G. Harding could not have said it better. Neither could Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, generally regarded as the most inarticulate White House spokesman ever (with the exception George W. Bush’s Dana Perino).

Obama has to make a fundamental personal and strategic choice: Either continue to do a little of this and little of that and call it pragmatism, or take on the fight to make the nation face up to its economic crisis.

I thought the president already was dealing with our core values and priorities. He was spending most of his time bailing out the banks (without restricting compensation for bank executives and without incentives to lend the bailout money to ordinary citizens); the war in Afghanistan (without any clear plan for how to end it); and health-care reform and cost-cutting (without actually reforming or cost-cutting). If those weren’t real “immediate crises” or top priorities, I’m a spoil sport. Obama’s chief priority, of course, was the economy and job creation, and no one knows the outcome on that front yet. As for how he would now remedy the unfortunate situation he describes (“matching up” our core values with our institutions), my guess is that only a few dozen professors will have the foggiest idea what he is talking about. And not even they will grab the American flag and man the barricades to fight for “matching.”

Second, he instantly sold out almost a year’s worth of effort—his own, and that of his fellow Democrats—spent on passing health-care reform. Here’s what he said: “[I]t is very important to look at the substance of this package ... I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health-insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost-containment because if we don't, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements of, to this bill.” (Typically, Mr. Obama reacts to cataclysms with major new decisions within hours, only to redefine or recolor them within days.)

• Roger Martin: Obama’s Real Wall Street SchemeUnless I’m misreading where Mr. Obama is going or unless he changes his explanation of “core,” this statement feels like virtual capitulation to Republicans—without even waiting a few days to establish a bargaining position. Why on earth give the “core” away before even starting the bargaining? Truth be told, I’d prefer a tight bill that zooms in on portability of coverage, opens up insurance companies nationwide to competition, offers insurance protection for previous conditions, establishes store-front clinics as neighborhood “hospitals,” provides catastrophic insurance, and puts forth medical information programs to cut costs, and takes a few other practical small steps. But it offends my sensibilities to watch the president throw in the towel before the give-and-take even begins anew. And it certainly has offended his fellow Democrats.

These remarks show, once again, that the Obama team does not excel at managing policy or the power of the White House. The clarion call of “matching” values with institutions will not do. The only overriding goal that will provide both focus and power to the White House is to strengthen the economy and create good jobs. And the only way to leverage that objective with the American people and Congress is to forcefully make the case that the United States is in an economic crisis. And we are, in the most profound sense. The actual jobless rate is not 10 percent. If you include those who have abandoned the search for jobs, the figure stands closer to about 17 percent. In net numbers of jobless, that’s more than during the Great Depression. Our public-school system ranks lowest among industrial democracies. Our infrastructure ranks about the same. Far more home-mortgage foreclosures and personal bankruptcies are expected in the next two years. This is a crisis. And if Mr. Obama can convince Americans of this reality, he’ll be better positioned to push through tough and necessary regulatory measures to corral runaway greed and conflicts of interest on Wall Street, as well as new funds and tough procedures to rebuild human, technological, and physical infrastructure. The president must convince the public that the crisis is real. Only then can he draw the necessary power to fix it.

He can also make the point he made at the end of his West Point speech on Afghanistan: that the American economy is the basis of American democracy, of American economic competitiveness, and of American military and diplomatic power in the world. Washington has lost more power in the world in the last three years than at any time since the end of World War II. That’s because leaders around the world take a major power less seriously when it is on the economic decline. Most other nations are already discounting the ability of the United States to sustain its global responsibilities. So, they heed us less.

The economic crisis also should drive American leaders to reevaluate how big and how long the nation’s military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan should run. Counting all kinds of costs, the direct drain of these wars still exceeds $200 billion and will continue to rise. America’s economic crisis is not an argument for isolationism; it is an argument for using our power in more creative ways, as our leaders did during the Cold War. Containment with allies, coupled with deterrence and continued military and economic support to those truly willing to fight terrorism, is a far less expensive and more effective national-security policy than we now have.

Obama has to make a fundamental personal and strategic choice: Either continue to do a little of this and little of that and call it pragmatism, or take on the fight to make the nation face up to its economic crisis, make the tough political decisions to get the job done—and make the necessary adjustments in his foreign policy to free up the funds and the time for determined and steady leadership. It takes time, relentlessness, toughness, and a lot of political skill to prevent America from sinking. Mr. Obama’s confusing rhetoric about matching and weak bargaining sense on health care suggest that he has yet to grasp the point: Great presidents don’t run away from crises; they use them to pound home necessary fixes in American government and society.

Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ven, gringuito

2010-01-23T10:17:00.000-05:00

With Jonathan Bornstein's goal in October, the United States tied Costa Rica and set off celebrations in Honduras.

January 23, 2010
U.S. Soccer Player Is National Hero (in Honduras)
By BILLY WITZ

CARSON, Calif. — With the United States trailing by a goal in the waning seconds, Jonathan Bornstein looked at his fellow defender Steve Cherundolo as the team prepared to take a corner kick.

“I was like, hey, dude, one of us should go inside the box,” Bornstein said. “We both don’t need to stay back here.”

And so off Bornstein went, sprinting toward Costa Rica’s goal, where he was about to find out just how far a little initiative could resonate.

When Bornstein headed Robbie Rogers’s corner kick into the net in October, it set off an emotional celebration at R.F.K. Stadium in Washington. Although the result of the final World Cup qualifying match meant little to the United States, which had already advanced to South Africa, the Americans took inspiration from their teammate Charlie Davies, who lay in a nearby hospital after he was involved in a fatal car accident a day earlier.

The interim president, Roberto Micheletti, declared a holiday after Honduras secured its first World Cup berth since 1982.

But the real roar emanated from Honduras, which, with Bornstein’s goal moments after it had beaten El Salvador, 1-0, clinched a berth in the World Cup for the first time since 1982. A country that had been torn by a political coup found a reason, at least for the moment, to coalesce. Hundreds of thousands of people emptied into the streets of the capital, Tegucigalpa. The interim president, Roberto Micheletti, declared the next day a national holiday.

Micheletti, who had been installed as the country’s leader after an army-backed coup ousted President Manuel Zelaya last July, ordered a parade rerouted in front of the presidential palace so that he could pose for photographs with the team.

But he did not forget Bornstein. He offered an all-expenses-paid trip to the resort area Islas de la Bahia.

“We’ll bring this gringuito who scored on the header,” Micheletti said. “He doesn’t need a visa to come here to Honduras.”

On Saturday night, Hondurans will have an opportunity to express their gratitude personally, when Honduras plays the United States in an exhibition here. Bornstein is expected to be at his familiar left back position.

“Growing up, you score goals in club soccer or in college and they maybe help your team win,” said Bornstein, whose goal knocked Costa Rica into a playoff, which it lost to Uruguay. “This goal against Costa Rica had a real impact on a whole nation. It doesn’t just affect me or the team, it affected three countries. That a simple soccer goal could do that is very surreal.”

[highest bid for shoes currently $1,125; 10am, 23 January 2010]

Bornstein has autographed the shoes he wore against Costa Rica, and on Friday he began auctioning them on eBay, the proceeds going to disaster relief in Haiti. The bidding runs until Wednesday, by which time his teammates may stop ribbing him. Some wondered if he would play a half for each team Saturday.

“You might hear some Johnny Bornstein chants,” said Benny Feilhaber, a midfielder for the United States who grew up playing with Bornstein. “They’re in love with Johnny right now.”

Over the last three months, Bornstein’s Facebook page has been peppered with messages thanking him, and a page named Gracias Jonathan Bornstein has been set up. During the United States team’s three-week January training camp, he has been stopped several times leaving the field by Honduran fans who wanted to pose for a photograph with him.

“People are going to remember that name for a long time,” said Alfonso Rosado, a Honduran who has lived in the United States for 14 years.

Rosado was watching the United States-Costa Rica game with friends at his apartment in Long Beach, Calif., fearing the worst. Honduras was on the verge of World Cup berths in 1986 and 2002, only to lose its final qualifiers at home, to Canada and to Trinidad and Tobago.

“When the U.S. scored, we couldn’t believe it,” said Rosado, who watched Honduras work out Thursday night in a cold rain. “We were all jumping up and down. I got a call at 7 the next morning from friends in Honduras, who had been out drinking all night, yelling, ‘Can you believe it?’ ”

For a country that is still plagued by political problems, corruption and crime, the World Cup berth has given Hondurans a rare common cause.

“At that moment, in that day, everyone forgets about all the problems — the crime, the politics — and everyone is together,” Rosado said. “You wonder why we can’t do that on a daily basis, but we know there is at least one thing that can bring us together.”

Bornstein’s goal has opened windows for himself as well. He had understood what it was like to walk onto a soccer field in Central America as an unwelcome visitor, dodging coins, cups of beer and worse. Now he knows of at least one place where he can return to a warmer reception. He has looked into the Islas de la Bahia; a cabana amid the palm trees, sandy beaches and warm tropical waters does have its appeal.

So, about that next vacation?

“Maybe forever Honduras will be a good spot to go,” Bornstein said. “I’m going to keep those options open.”

Supreme Court Memo

2010-01-23T09:41:00.001-05:00

January 23, 2010
Supreme Court Memo
Justices Turn Minor Movie Case Into a Blockbuster
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — So much for judicial minimalism.

Thursday’s big campaign finance decision, arguably the most significant of the Roberts court, showed just how bold that court can be. The majority converted a minor and quirky case about a movie almost nobody had seen into a judicial blockbuster.

“Essentially,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the dissenters in the 5-to-4 decision, “five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”

Justice Stevens certainly disagreed with the substance of the majority opinion from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, which said corporations have a First Amendment right to spend money to support or oppose political candidates.

But much of Justice Stevens’s 90-page dissent was devoted to complaints about how the majority got to that result. Those points drew a defensive and defiant concurrence from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

The chief justice’s decision to respond separately indicated that “he felt the sting of Stevens’s dissent,” said Heather Gerken, a law professor at Yale.

The dialogue between the two justices about how the court conducts its business revealed the depth of the divisions on the court and the jurisprudential juggernaut that the Roberts court may be in the process of becoming.

Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, said Thursday’s decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, was a telling indicator of the direction of the court.

“This is a deeply divided court with a strong pro-corporate wing,” Professor Karlan said, pointing also to a 2008 decision slashing the punitive damages award in the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.

That is a big shift, she said, from the sort of conservatism espoused by the Rehnquist court. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died in 2005, “was not someone who thought corporations had strong rights claims,” Professor Karlan said.

Justice Stevens’s bill of particulars on Thursday had three major elements. He said the court had reached out to decide questions not properly before it, had issued a needlessly broad ruling when narrower grounds were available and had failed to show due respect for precedent.

The court certainly surprised the parties last June, when it set down the case, first argued in March, for a second argument in September during the court’s summer break. It asked the parties to submit additional briefs on whether two major precedents should be overruled.

Even so, it would not have been hard for the court to rule narrowly in favor of the filmmakers.

It could have said, for instance, that the campaign finance laws were not meant to reach 90-minute documentaries like the one at issue in the case, “Hillary: The Movie.” Or it could have said that Citizens United, the nonprofit advocacy corporation that made the documentary, was not the sort of group the laws were meant to cover.

“There were principled, narrower paths that a court that was serious about judicial restraint could have taken,” Justice Stevens wrote. Put slightly differently, the courtly Justice Stevens was accusing his colleagues of judicial activism.

Chief Justice Roberts agreed that the court should rely on narrow grounds when it can. “Indeed,” he said, “that is precisely the approach this court took” in June in a major voting rights case, “when eight members of the court agreed to decide the case on statutory grounds instead of reaching the appellant’s broader argument.”

The breadth of Thursday’s decision, the chief justice said, was a consequence of “the absence of any valid narrower ground.” He added: “We cannot embrace a narrow ground of decision simply because it is narrow; it must also be right.”

As for respect for precedent — lawyers call it “stare decisis,” Latin for “to stand by things decided” — Justice Stevens said he was not an absolutist. “But if this principle is to do any meaningful work in supporting the rule of law,” he said, “it must at least demand a significant justification, beyond the preferences of five justices, for overturning settled doctrine.”

At his confirmation hearings in 2005, Chief Justice Roberts, then an appeals court judge, said “adherence to precedent promotes evenhandedness, promotes fairness, promotes stability and predictability.”

“It is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,” he said. But he added that adherence to precedent was not an “inexorable command” and that unworkable decisions may be revisited.

That is what happened Thursday, said Samuel Issacharoff, a law professor at New York University. “Roberts has the better of the debate,” Professor Issacharoff said. The main decision overruled by the court, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, was a much-questioned outlier, he said, and the court had a duty to clarify the law.

In his concurrence Thursday, Chief Justice Roberts said respect for precedent must have limits. Otherwise, he wrote, “segregation would be legal, minimum-wage laws would be unconstitutional and the government could wiretap ordinary criminal suspects without first obtaining warrants.”

The Citizens United decision has only a few rivals as the most significant one of the Roberts court. Two others come to mind: District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 decision finding for the first time an individual right to bear arms, and Parents Involved v. Seattle, a 2007 decision that limited the ability of public school systems to take account of race to promote integration.

Like Citizens United, Heller and Parents Involved were 5-to-4 decisions breaking along the usual ideological fault lines. All three took bold steps, and all three had Chief Justice Roberts in the majority.