June 22, 2006. Leamington, Canada. Photographer states :: This photo was taken today after we had torrential rains all day yesterday showing the rain water washing all the sand and silt out of the marina into Lake Erie on the southern shores of Ontario, just east of Leamington. 
June 22, 2006. Leamington, Canada. This photo was taken today after we had torrential rains all day yesterday showing the rain water washing all the sand and silt out into Lake Erie on the southern shores of Ontario, just east of Leamington. It is a very hazy day and we are expecting a chance of more severe weather.
June 22, 2006. Guymon, Oklahoma.
June 22, 2006. Guymon, Oklahoma. A line of severe thunderstorms moved across the Oklahoma Panhandle Thursday evening. I began to chase this one approaching Guymon, Okla. from the west, but it turned me around and chased me back into town. There was widespread damage from straight-line winds.
June 22, 2006. Guymon, Oklahoma. A line of severe thunderstorms moved across the Oklahoma Panhandle Thursday evening. I began to chase this one approaching Guymon, Okla. from the west, but it turned me around and chased me back into town. There was widespread damage from straight-line winds.
June 22, 2006. Flagstaff, Arizona. The Brins fire raging in Arizona's Oak Creek Canyon belches fire and smoke into Northern Arizona's evening sky.
The Rooster
Antarctica lost much more ice to the sea than it gained from snowfall, resulting in an increase in sea level. Credit: NASA/SVS
The Greenland ice sheet gained more ice from snowfall at high altitudes than it lost from melting ice along its coast. Credit: NASA/SVS
The New York Times
Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate
WASHINGTON, June 22 — A controversial paper asserting that recent warming in the Northern Hemisphere was probably unrivaled for 1,000 years was endorsed today, with a few reservations, by a panel convened by the nation's pre-eminent scientific body.
Related
National Academies Realclimate.org Climateaudit.org
Past Coverage
Two G.O.P. Lawmakers Spar Over Climate Study (July 18, 2005) Tree Rings Show a Period of Widespread Warming in Medieval Age (March 26, 2002) More Coverage: Global Warming
The panel said that a statistical method used in the 1999 study was not the best and that some uncertainties in the work "have been underestimated," and it particularly challenged the authors' conclusion that the decade of the 1990's was probably the warmest in a millennium.
But in a 155-page report, the 12-member panel convened by the National Academies said "an array of evidence" supported the main thrust of the paper. Disputes over details, it said, reflected the normal intellectual clash that takes place as science tests new approaches to old questions.
The study, led by Michael E. Mann, a climatologist now at Pennsylvania State University, was the first to estimate widespread climate trends by stitching together a grab bag of evidence, including variations in ancient tree rings and temperatures measured in deep holes in the earth.
Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/science/22cnd-climate.html?hp&ex=1151035200&en=0a54c8d7866e2fe6&ei=5094&partner=homepage
A Rain-Forest Census Takes Shape, Tree by Tree (Almost Leaf by Leaf)
By NANCY BETH JACKSON (NYT) 1738 words
Published: June 6, 2006
PANAMA - In 1979, two ecologists at Midwestern universities who knew each other only through their research came up with an audacious plan. They wanted exclusive rights to the top of Barro Colorado, a six-square-mile research island that had become one of the most studied spots on earth.
The island, a biological reserve in the Panama Canal, was administered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, so the two scientists, Robin Foster, then at the University of Chicago, and Stephen P. Hubbell, then at the University of Iowa, approached the institute's director, Ira Rubinoff, and proposed mapping and measuring every tree every five years to monitor population changes and to test conflicting theories about diversity in tropical forests.
Their audacity lay in their asking to bar all other scientific inquiries from their plot, to prevent tiny seedlings from being squashed by scholarly boots.
''I wasn't happy about that,'' Dr. Rubinoff recalled, but after hearing their argument, he agreed. They paced out a parcel of 50 hectares (about 124 acres), which the next year became the first in a global network of plots where scientists now track the fate of three million jungle trees. The network is run by the Center for Tropical Forest Science, created at the institute in 1990, and it coordinates 17 other plots -- now called ''earth observatories'' -- in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with more to come.
In October the center headquarters moved from Washington to Panama, and a new director was appointed, Stuart J. Davies, an Australian ecologist, who had been science director of a joint program in Asia with the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard. Since Sept. 11, 2001, non-American scientists have found it easier to travel to meetings in Latin America or Asia than to the United States, Dr. Davies said.
One of the greatest research benefits of the plots has been to allow scientists to measure, instead of guess, geographical ranges and population fluctuations in tropical forests.
For example, Richard Condit, the center's scientific director, has monitored the effects of drought at the Barro Colorado site on two tree species since he arrived as a postdoctoral student in 1988. Dr. Condit has found that two species, common along the west coast of South America, declined ''more rapidly than anyone imagined.''
''We know because we can show detailed information very precisely. With the 25-year scale in watching the forest, we know that forests and other nature systems change and can change pretty quickly.''
Data from the plots have provided the basis for a wealth of analysis. Working across borders and plots, scientists have been able to see a bigger picture of what is happening. A recent paper had 44 authors, reflecting the geographic reach of the research.
Findings have also led to new theoretical models. Nature called Dr. Hubbell's book, ''The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography,'' published in 2001, ''the bible of neutrality,'' a controversial theory suggesting that chance determines species survival rather than successful adaptation to an environmental niche. Before the Barro Colorado research began, most plots dedicated to tropical forest study were in Asia, measured less than a couple of acres and were devoted to improving lumber harvests rather than investigating the way species regenerate.
Dr. Foster, now at the Field Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Hubbell, now at the University of Georgia, sought a larger area to account for tree migration as seeds hitchhiked on the breeze or animals and for the great diversity found in all tropical forests.
Their open-air laboratory allowed them to study 300 species and some 300,000 trees from seedlings less than half an inch around to the giants of the forest canopy.
''Barro Colorado was the only place to do something like this,'' Dr. Hubbell said, pointing to decades of base-line research and terrain protected from incursions by poachers, farmers, lumberjacks and developers.
Now, with the worldwide network of plots, Dr. Rubinoff said, ''The program has come into its own and is already a global think tank. Everyone wants to go into the plots once they are mapped.''
At a recent workshop in Panama, researchers from the various plots gathered, each with a laptop, to crunch numbers collected in coordinated, long-term research. ''A little United Nations in a room with the same data sets,'' Dr. Davies said.
Studies of such reach would have been impossible in the early days. ''We didn't have the computing power. No way. On the first plot, we used I.B.M. punch cards on a mainframe. I don't want to go there again,'' said Dr. Hubbell, who is also senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian TropicalResearch Institute.
New technologies speed, simplify and expand the work at the plots. Census takers can find their way in the forest with global positioning devices and access and enter information on their personal digital assistants. Canopy towers, photos from airplanes and satellites, and DNA analysis are other tools now being tapped by plot researchers.
At some camps, however, even basics are lacking. Scientists make do without electricity, wash their clothes in rivers and cook over open fires.
Researchers still trek into the field to record the numbers. In the seedling census now under way on Barro Colorado, young biologists doing the tallies bound like ocelots up the steep path above Laboratory Cove through an idyllic forest where howler monkeys dangle and orchid bees hover.
When the biologists reach the plot, they work alone, noses to the ground, rarely disturbed because the area remains off limits to most scientists and the small groups of tourists permitted to visit the island. Only an occasional slash of red paint, a tree tag or a metal rod hints at boundaries and subdivisions.
The work is intensive, hard on the knees when surveying seedlings and requiring climbing when the circumference of a tree on buttress roots needs recording. But at the mother site, the biggest danger the researchers face is chigger bites.
At other plots, stretched around the Equator like a belt, plot science takes on Indiana Jones dimensions. Deep in the forest, scientists can encounter tropical diseases, toxic ant bites, spitting cobras, smugglers and armed insurgents. More than one scientist from the forest center has had a close call.
Corneille E. N. Ewango, monitoring the 100-acre Ituri Forest plot established in 1994 in Congo, received the Goldman Environmental Prize last year for hiding data on 600 species and 380,000 trees during a civil war. He himself hid in the forest for three months rather than desert his post.
''Though my country has the largest forest in Africa, it is one of the least known. We don't have so much research in botany in the Congo, except what we are doing,'' he explained when the prize was announced.
Many of the world's lush rain forests and dry tropical forests remain uncharted even though more than half of all plants and animals live there in the greatest display of biodiversity on the planet. In the Amazon basin, perhaps the most diverse of all, a hectare of land (2.5 acres) can have 40 to 300 tree species compared with 4 to 25 in North American forests.
The Center for Tropical Forest Science's sites, totaling 1,159 acres, monitor 6,000 species, or only about 10 percent of all known tropical tree species.
Scientists estimate that tropical forests cover only 6 percent of the planet, less than half of what they once occupied. The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, founded to foster the exchange of ideas among scientists working in tropical environments, notes unprecedented changes, with 1.2 percent of the remaining area disappearing every year.
The shrinking forests remain essential components in the global carbon and hydrological cycles. As elementary school children learn, trees act as a carbon reservoir, taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, although some studies suggest that the forests will not be able to absorb carbon from increased levels of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, and may even release more into the atmosphere.
Mapping and measuring individual trees over time and across continents will help scientists have a clearer understanding of how global change will affect the forests and what to do about it.
''We expect changes to accelerate,'' Dr. Hubbell said. ''Data sets are absolutely irreplaceable at this point. We need more of them.''
Frank H. Levinson, who earned a doctorate in astronomy before founding Finisar, a fiber-optics communications company, agrees. ''Are we a world in crisis? My gut says maybe, but my scientific head says get the data.''
He has pledged $10 million, hoping to leverage it fourfold through government and private financing, to expand the program and to give the tropical forest center ''real long-term sustainability'' through an endowment.
''Biology is today where astronomy was 100 years ago. Today it is possible to collect very large data sets and for that data to be published and analyzed across the world by various people with various points of view. But without data there can be no honest debate,'' Dr. Levinson wrote in an e-mail message from Singapore, where he has set up a foundation called Small World Group.
Dr. Levinson also volunteers as a self-described ''nerd,'' sharing his engineering expertise with Smithsonian biologists. ''I give money, but I also give time, because I am still a scientist myself. As a biological and ecological outsider, perhaps it is possible to offer some fresh perspective.''
He helped set up a wireless network to collect data in the Barro Colorado forest. ''From that work we asked, What if we had a WiFi network as part of the infrastructure of every C.T.F.S. earth observatory? Would that help us collect better data? And so it goes.''
The Center for Tropical Forest Science is abuzz with such projects. Still unpacking at his office at the Smithsonian's Tupper Center in Panama, Dr. Davies has begun sketching out plans to expand the network with a short-term goal of monitoring at least 25 percent of the tropical land-based biodiversity, including unique environments like Madagascar.
New plots would be the first additions in a decade. He wants to look backward through paleontological studies and forward by mapping DNA for each species in the plots.
''Some of the original questions are still there,'' said Dr. Rubinoff, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, as he appraised Barro Colorado data charts on which tree species were scattered like so much confetti.
''We've fine-tuned a lot,'' he said, ''but there are still lots of things we don't understand.''
Photos: MINING DATA -- Barro Colorado Island, top, in Panama, where in 1980 two ecologists began a vast study of tropical trees. The project has since expanded to 17 other plots and three million trees. Above, workers measure growth and examine a plot. (Photos by Christian Ziegler/S.T.R.I. [top]; Marcus Guerra/S.T.R.I. [above left]; Christian Ziegler/S.T.R.I. [above right])(pg. F1); (Illustration by David Constantine/The New York Times)(pg. F4)
Chart/Map: ''The Forest and the Trees''
Scientists in Panama have plotted and measured more than 300,000 trees and 300 species growing in a 124-acre area. The resulting data, gathered every five years, is giving them new insight into tropical forest population and diversity.
SOME FINDINGS
TREE HEALTH
Poulsenia armata -- This large canopy tree is dying off in the wake of a drought in the 1980's.
HABITAT
Elaeis oleifera -- A palm tree that prefers growing in the swamp.
Hybanthus prunifolius -- A shrub that occurs everywhere except the swamp.
SEED DISPERSAL
Rinorea sylvatica -- This shrub has explosive seed dispersal causing the plants to grow in clusters.
Maps of Panama and the surrounding area highlight Barro Colorado I.
(Sources by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute; Digital Globe [satellite photo])(pg. F4)
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F50F1FFC3F550C758CDDAF0894DE404482
Iceland's Ring Road: The Ultimate Road Trip
WE lift off from J. F. K. at 9 in the evening, headed toward Reykjavik, and by the time the bars back in New York have closed, we are tucked in lava rock, submerged to the neck in a hot blue pool with sulfurous steam clouds bursting up around us. It's the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and the sky surrounding us never darkens.
The week ahead promises us 168 hours of uninterrupted daylight in which to drive the Ring Road around Iceland. Though it's not a particularly long distance, I already sense that seven days will be about half as long as I would have hoped for. And so we have bolted straight from the airport to the nearby Blue Lagoon.
Here, the phosphorescent saltwater, the bright and flat Atlantic sky and the backdrop of industrial smokestacks give the place an otherworldly feel, which is as it should be: the lagoon is entirely man-made. Icelanders generate power geothermally, boring into the ground for the steam that spins the turbines as it blasts toward the surface; then they recapture that steam as water, pump it to a soaking pond, and charge 20 bucks a head. We are the first to arrive, in the early morning, and by noon the place is packed with Europeans, Japanese and Americans. We crawl between steam cave and hot pot, smeared in a gray silica mud bath.
On this trip last summer, I was traveling with my friends Mathew Gross and Melony Gilles. We lived for many years in a remote nook of the Utah desert where we developed a taste for isolated places and geological oddities. So Iceland was the perfect place for us.
http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/travel/18ring.html?ex=1151208000&en=0302c833227fcecb&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Up, Up and Away: New Towers, and Ambitions to Match
ALMATY, Kazakhstan, June 21 — In a country overrun with construction cranes, where new buildings tend to look like Persian carpets with lobbies, a sleek high-concept building design has city boosters excited.
Multimedia
The building, which broke ground in March, will be the tallest in Central Asia. But few people in this booming city of 1.2 million seem animated by its height.
Rather, Almaty is aglow over its style. The six-building mixed-use project, known as the Marriott building because the tallest tower, 38 stories, will house the luxury Almaty JW Marriott Hotel, is notable for its modern lines, light steel and glass encasement, clever geometric corners, and a near total lack of kitsch.
The project is not slated for completion until next year, but already many have declared it a symbol of the city's coal-hot potential, an iconic structure that reflects Almaty's potential economic might.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/world/asia/22almaty.html
World Cup Ends for the United States
By JERE LONGMANPublished: June 22, 2006
NUREMBERG, Germany, June 22 — The United States was eliminated from the World Cup today in a 2-1 defeat to Ghana. The Americans tied the score with a goal late in the first half, only to fall behind again minutes later on a controversial call that awarded Ghana a penalty kick.
The United States needed to win today's game to have any chance of advancing to the second round. But Ghana converted the disputed penalty and regained the lead as the first half extended into extra time.
The goal served as a huge emotional and mathematical punch in the gut for the Americans, forcing them to score at least twice to sustain any hopes for getting beyond group play.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/sports/soccer/22cnd-soccer.html?hp&ex=1151035200&en=078fbb6bee7ae0a3&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Senate Rejects Democratic Efforts on Iraq
By DAVID STOUTPublished: June 22, 2006
WASHINGTON, June 22 — The Senate voted today against measures calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, after a long and emotional debate that was in some ways reminiscent of the Vietnam War era.
The votes, 86 to 13 on one measure and 60 to 39 on the second, reflected not only deep divisions between Republicans and Democrats but within the Democratic ranks as well. The bitterness of the debate, and some comments afterward, made it clear that Iraq would be a dominant issue in this year's Congressional elections, and perhaps in the 2008 presidential race.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/washington/22cnd-cong.html?hp&ex=1151035200&en=51d41a8dd9b966f6&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Abbas and Olmert Embrace at Informal First Meeting
PETRA, Jordan, June 22 — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert held informal and inconclusive talks over breakfast here today, the first meeting between the two since Mr. Olmert assumed full leadership.
They embraced and promised to accelerate preparations for a substantive summit meeting in the next few weeks, both men said afterward.
Their reluctant meeting was orchestrated by Jordan's King Abdullah II and Elie Wiesel, the writer and winner of the 1986 Nobel peace prize, at a conference the two sponsored here of nobel laureates.
"I think we pushed them to get moving," said Mr. Wiesel. "They didn't want to meet at all. They were talking about meeting some time but nothing was happening, and I was afraid the stalemate would continue."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/world/middleeast/22cnd-mideast.html?hp&ex=1151035200&en=7a907f767971c21f&ei=5094&partner=homepage
A Gaza Political Figure Says He's Become a Scapegoat
GAZA, June 16 — Not long ago, Muhammad Dahlan was the most powerful figure in Gaza. Picked by Yasir Arafat to head the preventive security force and the then-ruling Fatah party, he had few rivals.
Today, Mr. Dahlan remains Fatah's most powerful figure here, but that makes him the man the new ruling party, Hamas, most likes to despise. It accuses him of collaborating with the Americans and the Israelis to foment chaos and undermine the Hamas government.
Mr. Dahlan, 44, a trim man who rose to power and comparative wealth from the slums of the Khan Yunis refugee camp here, tosses off the criticism, saying Hamas is simply looking for a scapegoat for its own mounting difficulties.
"The main reason for recent clashes is the sense of Hamas's failure," he said Wednesday in a 90-minute interview in his well-guarded office, referring to the internecine Palestinian battles. "Hamas is in a crisis, and thus the Palestinians are in a crisis, and they try to push this crisis onto others."
Mr. Dahlan was in full flow, speaking with steady contempt. "They used to run a club here and a foundation there, and they thought governing would be easy," he said. "They thought dealing with Israel would be easy. They thought they could concentrate on the Arab world and the rest didn't matter."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/world/middleeast/17gaza.html?ex=1151208000&en=44eff0dcf9fc7add&ei=5070&emc=eta1
MIDEAST TURMOIL: SUCCESSION; 6 Men Who Could Be Contenders to Lead the Palestinians if Arafat Goes
By JAMES BENNET AND JOHN KIFNER (NYT) 1651 words
Published: June 14, 2002
Correction Appended
JERUSALEM, June 13 - Yasir Arafat has remained the Palestinian leader for more than 30 years in part by not cultivating a long-term lieutenant, avoiding a threat to his pre-eminence by dividing up power beneath himself and encouraging rivalries among his top political and security aides.
That strategy has also left him without a clear successor.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has called Mr. Arafat a terrorist and wished him exiled. President Bush has harshly criticized Mr. Arafat, but the United States has so far blocked any Israeli move to harm him.
Some senior Israeli security officials and Palestinian politicians argue that there is no alternative to Mr. Arafat, who they say would dominate Palestinian affairs in the West Bank and Gaza even from exile. His death, they say, could bring on bloody civil conflict. It could also lead other Palestinian factions outside Mr. Arafat's organization, like the militant movements Islamic Jihad and Hamas, to vie for prominence.
Despite Mr. Arafat's maneuverings, a varied, experienced group of potential leaders waits in the wings. They include older men who lived decades in exile with Mr. Arafat and younger ones who grew up fighting the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza and studying Israeli society at close hand.
If the objection to Mr. Arafat has been his involvement in terrorist activities, few among these leaders -- most of whom have spent years in Israeli jails -- would be exempt from similar charges. But none have Mr. Arafat's combination of international standing, broad constituency, financial resources and the raw power of guns.
Mahmoud Abbas
Lawyer and historian, late 60's
Mahmoud Abbas, who is known as Abu Mazen, has long been known as Mr. Arafat's No. 2. Along with Mr. Arafat, he is one of the few remaining founders of Fatah, first organized in the late 1950's by a group of young Palestinian professionals working in the Persian Gulf.
In 1980 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He is now secretary general, which in the overlapping and somewhat makeshift governing structure makes him the second-ranking Palestinian leader, even though he has no post in the cabinet.
Regarded as a moderate and pragmatic voice, he played a leading role in encouraging contacts between Palestinians and left-wing Israelis as far back as the 1970's.
Mr. Abbas was born in 1935 in Safad, a town in Galilee, and became a refugee in Syria in 1948 with the birth of Israel. In addition to a law degree earned in Damascus, he holds a doctorate in history from the Moscow Oriental College; his topic was Zionism. He was an important figure in the negotiations leading up to the Oslo accords and is regarded as having good contacts with both Israelis and Americans.
Marwan Barghouti
Politician, 42
Marwan Barghouti is now the second-most-popular Palestinian leader after Mr. Arafat, according to a recent poll that placed his support at 19 percent, compared to Mr. Arafat's 35 percent. It has not hurt Mr. Barghouti's standing that he is once again in an Israeli prison, having been arrested in April on accusations of masterminding terrorist operations by Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement.
Until the current conflict, Mr. Barghouti, who is fluent in Hebrew and English, had close ties to Israelis and a growing reputation as an advocate of reconciliation. A wry and subtle man given to blue jeans and leather jackets, he has positioned himself as the common man's alternative to corrupt, aging ministers around Mr. Arafat whose roots in the West Bank are not as deep.
Mr. Barghouti, who is 42, was raised in a West Bank village outside Ramallah and is a member of a large, well-known clan. He logged six years in Israeli prisons, even before his recent arrest, having first been arrested by Israel at 16.
He was deported in 1978. He returned five years later, became chairman of the student council at Bir Zeit University -- where much later he earned a masters in international relations -- and was then deported again. He returned to the West Bank in 1994 under the Oslo peace accords, winning a seat in the Palestinian Parliament and the office of general secretary of Fatah in the West Bank.
Mr. Barghouti has always called himself a political leader, not a military one. He has advocated violence only against Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza, insisting that once Israel evacuated those territories, the warring peoples could live in peace.
Muhammad Dahlan
Security official, 40
At 40, Muhammad Dahlan is among the youngest of the senior Palestinian leaders. In anticipation of Mr. Arafat's reorganization of his government, he resigned recently as chief of the preventive security forces in Gaza, and is seeking a job as a senior political adviser to Mr. Arafat, which would broaden his portfolio while insulating him from criticism if his old force begins to crack down on Palestinian militants.
The move is in keeping with Mr. Dahlan's reputation as a sophisticated politician. Mr. Dahlan says he was jailed 10 times by Israel, for a total of six years, but Israeli officials say his jail time was considerably less.
He was deported in 1987. ''The Israelis deported me to Jordan,'' Mr. Dahlan said in sketching his résumé during an interview in November. ''The Jordanians deported me to Egypt. The Egyptians deported me to Iraq.''
It may seem paradoxical, but one of Mr. Dahlan's assets is that he has excellent relations with Arab states, and solid ties as well to American and even some Israeli officials.
Mr. Dahlan speaks English and began studying Hebrew when he returned to Gaza in 1994. Since then, he has struggled to extend his influence beyond Gaza.
Ahmed Qurei
Economic adviser, mid-60's
Ahmed Qurei, better known as Abu Ala, is the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council and regarded as one of the main authors of the Oslo agreement.
He was born to a wealthy family in 1937 in Abu Dis, on the Mount of Olives, then an Arab village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. He is regarded by some Palestinians as an aristocrat rather than a revolutionary. Much of his activity has been in the economic sphere, and he has been the mainstay of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, the main development agency.
He joined Fatah, Mr. Arafat's mainstream faction, in 1968 and was director of foreign investment for the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Mr. Qurei led the Palestinian delegations to the secret negotiations that led to the Oslo agreement in September 1993, and to talks afterward on its implementation.
He has been critical of corruption in the Palestinian Authority and the cabinet. Under the Basic Law -- passed five years ago but only just signed by Mr. Arafat -- he is officially designated as the person to take over as president of the Palestinian National Authority.
Jibril Rajoub
Security official, 49
Jibril Rajoub, the gravel-voiced, pragmatic chief of preventive security in the West Bank, has for years had the advantage and burden of being one of Israel's favorite Palestinians. Lately this distinction has become a millstone, though Mr. Rajoub retains a strong geographic power base around Hebron, where he grew up.
First arrested at 15, Mr. Rajoub, who just turned 49, was sentenced to life in prison in 1970 for throwing a grenade at a convoy of soldiers, then released in a prisoner exchange with the P.L.O. He served a total of 17 years in Israeli prisons before being deported to Lebanon in 1988, during the first intifada.
He became a close lieutenant of Mr. Arafat and spent seven years in exile with him before returning to the West Bank. Mr. Rajoub, who speaks Hebrew and English, has strong ties to American and Israeli security officials, having taken part in trilateral meetings for years.
But Mr. Rajoub's security compound, paid for at least partly by the United States, was shelled during Israel's incursion into Ramallah in March. Without accusing Mr. Rajoub directly, Israeli officials later claimed to have found disguises linking the office to suicide attacks.
Mr. Rajoub's popularity has declined in the West Bank, and it is not yet clear what role he might play as Mr. Arafat reorganizes his government in response to American pressure.
Sheik Ahmad Yassin
Hamas's spiritual leader, mid-60's
Sheik Ahmad Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, the main Islamic fundamendalist organization, is the most charismatic rival to Mr. Arafat functioning outside the framework of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Crippled from a childhood injury, he is frail, uses a wheelchair and speaks in a high squeaky voice.
But his uncompromising denunciations of Israel from his spartan headquarters in Gaza thrill many and inspire suicide bombers.
Sheik Yassin calls for the recovery of historic Palestine, that is, the abolisment of the State of Israel, and the establishing of an Islamic state.
His early origins are unclear, but he was born around 1937 and became a refugee in the cramped, squalid Gaza Strip with the birth of Israel in 1948. Although lacking in formal religious education, he was strongly influenced in his youth by Ikhwan -- the radical Muslim Brotherhood founded in Egypt -- and became a compelling preacher.
He founded the Islamic Center in Gaza in 1973, which soon controlled all religious institutions there.
In 1991 he was sentenced to life plus 15 years on charges of abetting terrorism, but was released in a prisoner exchange in 1997 for Mossad agents caught in Jordan trying to assassinate a Hamas official by pouring poison in his ear. Sheik Yassin was greeted as a hero on his return to Gaza.
Correction: September 17, 2002, Tuesday An article on June 14 about potential successors to Yasir Arafat and one on Aug. 15 about the indictment of Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader who is being tried by Israel on murder charges, misstated the history of his arrests and deportation. He was first arrested in 1978 at the age of 19, not 16. He was deported once, in 1987, not twice, and returned to the West Bank in 1994, not 1993. (A reader reported the errors by e-mail on Sept. 2; this correction was delayed for fact checking.)
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F70C12F63E580C778DDDAF0894DA404482
Blood Flows With Oil in Poor Nigerian Villages
By LYDIA POLGREEN (NYT) 2257 words
Published: January 1, 2006
CORRECTION APPENDED
OBIOKU, Nigeria - At first glance, it is hard to imagine anyone fighting over this place.
Approached by a creek, the only way to get here, a day's journey by dugout canoe from the nearest town, it presents itself as a collection of battered shacks teetering on a steadily eroding beach.
On Sunday morning, the village children shimmy out of their best clothes after church and head to a muddy puddle to collect water. Their mothers use the murky liquid to cook whatever soup they can muster from the meager catch of the day.
Yet for months a pitched battle has been fought between communities that claim authority over this village and the right to control what lies beneath its watery ground: a potentially vast field of crude oil that has caught the attention of a major energy company.
The conflict has left dozens dead and wounded, sent hundreds fleeing their homes and roiled this once quiet part of the Niger Delta. It has also laid bare the desperate struggle of impoverished communities to reap crumbs from the lavish banquet the oil boom has laid in this oil-rich yet grindingly poor corner of the globe.
''This region is synonymous with oil, but also with unbelievable poverty,'' said Anyakwee Nsirimovu, executive director of Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in the Niger Delta. That combination is an inevitable recipe for bloodshed and misery, he said. ''The world depends on their oil, but for the people of the Niger Delta oil is more of a curse than a blessing.''
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F40E16F93B540C728CDDA80894DE404482
Gas, Debris Surge From Indonesian Volcano
Filed at 10:19 a.m. ET
MOUNT MERAPI, Indonesia (AP) -- Indonesia's Mount Merapi sent avalanches of searing hot gas and debris roiling down its scorched slopes Wednesday, and a scientist warned that the peak's fragile lava dome still posed a threat to thousands of villagers.
The 9,700-foot volcano has been at a near-continuous state of high alert for seven weeks, forcing the evacuation of thousands of villagers in a government-designated danger zone.
More than half a dozen avalanches carried gas and volcanic debris more than two miles down the peak's flanks, said Subandrio, a government scientist who used only one name.
Magma has swelled into a volatile lava dome on the southern crater, he said, and there is a likelihood that it will collapse, causing an avalanche of the hot gas and volcanic debris trapped within it.
The government has ordered the evacuation of all residents living within about four miles of the peak, but says it cannot force them to leave or prevent villagers from returning to check their houses and crops. Hundreds have refused to go.
Another possible threat is posed by rain forecast for coming days that could wash millions of tons of ash and rock fragments down Merapi's steep slopes in powerful mudslides.
Two people died last week when hot gas shot down the mountain.
Searing gas clouds killed more than 60 villagers in 1994 and more than 1,300 people died in a a major eruption in 1930.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Indonesia-Volcano.html?ex=1150948800&en=1b9e8b2dcfbfd4ed&ei=5070&emc=eta1
A Hole in the World
Published: June 13, 2006
At this very moment, twin satellites -- part of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or Grace -- are in polar orbit above the earth. They were built in Germany, launched from Russia in March 2002, and their mission home is at the University of Texas. One purpose of the mission is to map fluctuations in earth's gravity.
Like so much of science, what sounds matter of fact takes a lot of imagination to grasp. Recently, researchers using data from Grace announced that they had found the possible remains of an enormous crater a mile below the East Antarctic ice sheet -- the result of an impact that may have wiped out 90 percent of life on earth some 250 million years ago.
To look back to that catastrophe -- called the Permian-Triassic extinction -- you have to imagine all of earth's continents merged in a single great land mass surrounded by a single great ocean. It's possible that the collision that caused this newfound crater -- four or five times as big as the crater from the impact that is believed to have extinguished the dinosaurs 65 million years ago -- may have helped create a rift that began to drive the continents apart.
These findings are tentative. Thanks to tectonic activity -- the gradual recycling of the planetary crust -- earth has erased most signs of the devastating events that shaped its early history. To understand the history of life we have to understand the relation between the expanding, diversifying thrust of evolution and the cataclysmic events that have altered its direction.
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0C17FB38550C708DDDAF0894DE404482
Autism's Parent Trap
By CAMMIE McGOVERN
Published: June 5, 2006
IN recent weeks, three stories have hit the news with grimly similar plotlines: parents accused of killing their autistic children.
On April 12, in Hull, England, Alison Davies and her 12-year-old son, Ryan, fell to their deaths from a bridge over the River Humber, in an apparent murder-suicide. (A note was found in Ms. Davies's kitchen.) On May 14, in Albany, Ore., Christopher DeGroot, 19, was trapped inside a burning apartment. He died in a Portland hospital five days later, and his parents are charged with murder, accused of locking their son in the apartment alone. And on the same May Sunday, in Morton, Ill., Dr. Karen McCarron admitted to the police that she had, the day before, suffocated her 3-year-old daughter, Katherine, with a plastic garbage bag.
Family and friends have come to the defense of two of the parents involved. "Ryan was the focus and the purpose of her life," Alison Davies's sister told The Sunday Times, calling the double bridge jump "an act of love."
A friend of Dr. McCarron's — a fellow member of her local autism-support group — told a columnist for The Journal Star of Peoria, Ill., that Dr. McCarron had devoted her life to Katherine. "She never took a night off," the friend said. "She read every book. She was trying so hard, pursuing every lead."
Chilling words to any parent of a child with autism who remembers, as I do, reading every book, pursuing every lead and never taking a night off — because autism feels like a war you re-arm yourself nightly to wage. The comments suggest the parents may have been trying too hard. Perhaps they were frustrated that their efforts did not lead to greater improvement in their children. That would not be surprising, because dramatic improvement is what too many parents are led to expect.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/opinion/05mcgovern.html?ex=1151121600&en=390c913b8f16cfe6&ei=5070
Putin Dismisses Russia's Chief Prosecutor
By STEVEN LEE MYERSPublished: June 2, 2006
MOSCOW, June 2 — President Vladimir V. Putin dismissed Russia's chief prosecutor, officials said today, only a week after the prosecutor had promised to disclose "new so-called high-profile criminal cases" involving government corruption.
Wide-ranging coverage of Russia and the former Soviet republics, updated by The Times's Moscow bureau.
The dismissal was unexpected and, typically for the Kremlin, largely unexplained. That prompted a flurry of speculation over Mr. Putin's underlying motives.
Officials in or close to the Kremlin hinted at a larger government shakeup still to come, while outside analysts suggested that a struggle for power within the Kremlin was spilling into public view ahead of presidential elections in 2008.
The prosecutor, Vladimir V. Ustinov, was appointed in 1999 by Mr. Putin's predecessor, Boris N. Yeltsin, and was the longest-serving figure in the current administration. In general, Mr. Putin has dismissed relatively few high-profile officials, other than his first prime minister, Mikhail M. Kasyanov. But three weeks ago, he removed the head of Russia's customs service and a dozen other officers in what was described as a newly energized fight against a deeply corrupted bureaucracy.
At a Minsk conference just last week, Mr. Ustinov declared that the fight was unending. "So far as concrete work on the fight against corruption is concerned, I believe it was, is and will remain a pressing issue for Russia," he said, promising new cases to come.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/world/europe/02cnd-russia.html?ex=1151121600&en=8313f79737972287&ei=5070
Studies Portray Arctic as Sultry In Distant Past
By ANDREW C. REVKIN (NYT) 1192 words
Published: June 1, 2006
CORRECTION APPENDED
The first detailed analysis of an extraordinary climatic and biological record from the seabed near the North Pole shows that 55 million years ago the Arctic Ocean was much warmer than scientists imagined -- a Floridian year-round average of 74 degrees.
The findings, published today in three papers in the journal Nature, fill in a blank spot in scientists' understanding of climate history. And while they show that much remains to be learned about climate change, they suggest that scientists have greatly underestimated the power of heat-trapping gases to warm the Arctic.
Previous computer simulations, done without the benefit of seabed sampling, did not suggest an ancient Arctic that was nearly so warm, the authors said. So the simulations must have missed elements that lead to greater warming.
''Something extra happens when you push the world into a warmer world, and we just don't understand what it is,'' said one lead author, Henk Brinkhuis, an expert on ancient Arctic ecology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
The studies draw on the work of a pioneering 2004 expedition that defied the Arctic Ocean ice and pulled the first significant samples from the ancient layered seabed 150 miles from the North Pole: 1,400 feet of slender shafts of muck, fossils of ancient organisms and rock representing a climate history that dates back 56 million years.
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0C11FA3D550C728CDDAF0894DE404482
Arctic Once Felt Like Florida, Studies Say
By ANDREW C. REVKINPublished: May 31, 2006
The first detailed analysis of an extraordinary climatic and biological record from the seabed near the North Pole shows that 55 million years ago the Arctic was much warmer than anyone had thought — a Floridian year-round average of 74 degrees Fahrenheit.
The findings, in three separate papers in the issue of the journal Nature that comes out on Thursday, show how much remains to be learned about climate change, both natural and human-caused. But experts say that if anything, the papers suggest that scientists have greatly underestimated the power of greenhouse gases to warm the planet.
Computer simulations done without the benefit of the seabed sampling do not reproduce an ancient Arctic nearly that warm, the authors said, and thus must be missing elements that lead to greater warming.
"Something extra happens when you push the world into a warmer world, and we just don't understand what it is," said one lead author, Henk Brinkhuis, an expert on ancient Arctic ecology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/science/earth/31cnd-climate.html?ex=1151121600&en=6e40d40c1df7aa57&ei=5070
Swift Boating the Planet
By PAUL KRUGMANPublished: May 29, 2006
A brief segment in "An Inconvenient Truth" shows Senator Al Gore questioning James Hansen, a climatologist at NASA, during a 1989 hearing. But the movie doesn't give you much context, or tell you what happened to Dr. Hansen later.
And that's a story worth telling, for two reasons. It's a good illustration of the way interest groups can create the appearance of doubt even when the facts are clear and cloud the reputations of people who should be regarded as heroes. And it's a warning for Mr. Gore and others who hope to turn global warming into a real political issue: you're going to have to get tougher, because the other side doesn't play by any known rules.
Dr. Hansen was one of the first climate scientists to say publicly that global warming was under way. In 1988, he made headlines with Senate testimony in which he declared that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now." When he testified again the following year, officials in the first Bush administration altered his prepared statement to downplay the threat. Mr. Gore's movie shows the moment when the administration's tampering was revealed.
In 1988, Dr. Hansen was well out in front of his scientific colleagues, but over the years that followed he was vindicated by a growing body of evidence. By rights, Dr. Hansen should have been universally acclaimed for both his prescience and his courage.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/opinion/29krugman.html?emc=eta1
A Test of Our Character
By PAUL KRUGMANPublished: May 26, 2006
In his new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore suggests that there are three reasons it's hard to get action on global warming. The first is boiled-frog syndrome: because the effects of greenhouse gases build up gradually, at any given moment it's easier to do nothing. The second is the perception, nurtured by a careful disinformation campaign, that there's still a lot of uncertainty about whether man-made global warming is a serious problem. The third is the belief, again fostered by disinformation, that trying to curb global warming would have devastating economic effects.
I'd add a fourth reason, which I'll talk about in a minute. But first, let's notice that Mr. Gore couldn't have asked for a better illustration of disinformation campaigns than the reaction of energy-industry lobbyists and right-wing media organizations to his film.
The cover story in the current issue of National Review is titled "Scare of the Century." As evidence that global warming isn't really happening, it offers the fact that some Antarctic ice sheets are getting thicker — a point also emphasized in a TV ad by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is partly financed by large oil companies, whose interests it reliably represents.
Curt Davis, a scientist whose work is cited both by the institute and by National Review, has already protested. "These television ads," he declared in a press release, "are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate." He points out that an initial increase in the thickness of Antarctica's interior ice sheets is a predicted consequence of a warming planet, so that his results actually support global warming rather than refuting it.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/26/opinion/26krugman.html?emc=eta1
The Cannes Landslide for Al Gore
By FRANK RICHPublished: May 28, 2006
LET it never be said that the Democrats don't believe in anything. They still believe in Hollywood and they still believe in miracles. Witness the magical mystery comeback tour of Al Gore.Barry Blitt
Like Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" before it, Mr. Gore's new documentary about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," has wowed the liberal caucus at Cannes (who needs landlocked Iowa?) and fueled fantasies of political victory back home. "Al Gore Takes Cannes by Storm — Will the Oval Office Be Next?" Arianna Huffington asks on her blog, reporting that the former vice president was hotter on the Croisette than Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis and Penelope Cruz. In a "fantasy" presidential poll on the liberal Web site Daily Kos, Mr. Gore racks up a landslide 68 percent, with the closest also-ran, Russ Feingold, at 15. Liberal Washington pundits wonder whether the wonkishness that seemed off-putting in 2000 may actually be a virtue. In choosing a president, Margaret Carlson writes on Bloomberg.com, maybe "we should give a rest to that old saw about likeability."
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/opinion/28rich.html?emc=eta1
Warning of Calamities and Hoping for a Change in 'An Inconvenient Truth'
By A. O. SCOTTPublished: May 24, 2006
CANNES, France, May 23 — "An Inconvenient Truth," Davis Guggenheim's new documentary about the dangers of climate change, is a film that should never have been made. It is, after all, the job of political leaders and policymakers to protect against possible future calamities, to respond to the findings of science and to persuade the public that action must be taken to protect the common interest.
But when this does not happen — and it is hardly a partisan statement to observe that, in the case of global warming, it hasn't — others must take up the responsibility: filmmakers, activists, scientists, even retired politicians. That "An Inconvenient Truth" should not have to exist is a reason to be grateful that it does.
Appearances to the contrary, Mr. Guggenheim's movie is not really about Al Gore. It consists mainly of a multimedia presentation on climate change that Mr. Gore has given many times over the last few years, interspersed with interviews and Mr. Gore's voice-over reflections on his life in and out of politics. His presence is, in some ways, a distraction, since it guarantees that "An Inconvenient Truth" will become fodder for the cynical, ideologically facile sniping that often passes for political discourse these days. But really, the idea that worrying about the effect of carbon-dioxide emissions on the world's climate makes you some kind of liberal kook is as tired as the image of Mr. Gore as a stiff, humorless speaker, someone to make fun of rather than take seriously.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/movies/24trut.html
An Autopsy Of Katrina: Four Storms, Not Just One
By JOHN SCHWARTZ (NYT) 1583 words
Published: May 30, 2006
Most people believe that a single Category 3 hurricane, Katrina, devastated New Orleans on Aug. 29 of last year. The flood protection system for the New Orleans area was designed to protect the city from a direct hit by a fast-moving Category 3 storm.
Yet Hurricane Katrina, a Category 4 storm that did not strike the city directly, overwhelmed systems in dozens of places and cost more than 1,500 lives and billions in property damage.
Why? In part, say experts who studied the disaster, because the hurricane was more like four storms -- at least -- that battered the area in different ways. They say the system in New Orleans was flawed from the start because the model storm it was designed to stop was simplistic, and led to an inadequate network of levees, flood walls, storm gates and pumps.
The 2006 hurricane season begins Thursday, with four to six major storms predicted for this year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And experts say that understanding the failings is essential in planning the next generation of flood protection for a rebuilt New Orleans, and for systems nationwide.
''This is a national issue,'' said Raymond Seed, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a stinging report released last week. That report has identified flaws in design, construction and maintenance of the levees that contributed to the failures. But underlying it all, the report stated, were the problems with the initial model used to determine how strong the system should be.
With the right hurricane protection, he said, the result of Hurricane Katrina would have been different: ''we call it 'wet ankles.' ''
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0B14FD345A0C738FDDAC0894DE404482
At 12, a Mother of Two
We're now marking the 25th anniversary of the detection of AIDS, and it has been a sad chapter in the history of humanity. It's been a quarter-century of self-delusion, dithering and failure at every level.
In America, we may think of AIDS as something that is behind us, but this year it will kill almost three million people worldwide. And a new victim is still being infected every eight seconds.
Southern Africa is becoming the land of orphans, kids like Nomzamo Ngubeni, a fifth grader who is now the head of her household.
Nomzamo is 12, a soft-spoken schoolgirl with close-cropped hair here in central Swaziland, the country with the highest H.I.V. infection rate in the world. Two out of five adults here have the virus, and very few get the antiretroviral medicines that can save their lives.
Although Nomzamo probably does not have the virus (although it's hard to be sure because she's never been tested for it), her life is entirely framed by the epidemic. Her parents both died of AIDS, so she and her two younger sisters moved in with an aunt — only to find that the aunt was dying of AIDS as well.
Nomzamo nursed the aunt for months and buried her last year. So at the age of 11, she found herself in charge of the family and its thatch-roofed hut, which has no electricity or running water. She is now both mother and father to her little sisters, Nokwanda, 9, and Temhlanga, 7.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/opinion/28kristof.html?emc=eta1
F. Y. I.
By MICHAEL POLLAK (NYT) 614 words
Published: May 21, 2006
Stonehenge in the City
Q. I've heard about a ''Manhattan solstice,'' when the sun supposedly lines up along the streets. Is it for real? When does it happen?
A. Here's the lowdown on the sundown, courtesy of Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. Next Sunday and on July 13, the sun will fully illuminate every Manhattan cross street (not the curved or angled ones) on the street grid during the last 15 minutes of daylight, and it will set on each street's center line. The sight is breathtaking.
This is a special photo opportunity, with parts of Manhattan's canyons getting illumination they normally don't get.
If the Manhattan street grid ran north-south and east-west, the alignment days would be the spring and fall equinoxes, the two days when the sun rises due east and sets due west. But the Manhattan grid is angled 30 degrees east from geographic north, shifting the days.
There are two corresponding mornings of sunrise right on the center lines of the Manhattan grid, Dr. Tyson wrote in an e-mail message: Dec. 5, 2006, and Jan. 8, 2007.
Those four solstice days will shift no more than a day over four years as a result of leap days, Dr. Tyson wrote. But the shift is so small that if you went out only on these dates, you would see the effect just fine. ''In fact the effect is good for a day on either side of the advertised days, typically offering a range of weather choices for the avid viewer,'' he wrote.
As for the sunset next Sunday and on July 13, Dr. Tyson wrote, the sun will line up on the center lines just as its falls halfway below the horizon. The official sunset, when ''the sun's last smidgen sets below the horizon,'' lines up on slightly different days, but this one makes for a nicer photo.
An Amusement Blip
Q. I've read and heard about an Ulmer Park in Brooklyn in the early 1900's. What happened to it? It seems to have disappeared.
A. It was a short-lived amusement park in Bath Beach, the seaside Brooklyn neighborhood named after the English spa of Bath, and it owed its existence to a beer company (as did many things in Brooklyn, then the city's brewing center).
According to ''The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn,'' edited by Kenneth T. Jackson, Ulmer Park was opened in 1893 by the Ulmer Brewery of Brooklyn and advertised as a family resort. It offered rides, a dance hall and swimming. A residential community grew up there and remained after the park closed in 1899.
Ulmer Park survives as the name of a bus depot in Bath Beach and a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.
An AIDS Landmark
Q. In Chelsea on West 22nd Street, there is an attractive red-brick building labeled ''Colonial House.'' Can you tell me about it?
A. The Colonial House Inn, at 318 West 22nd near Eighth Avenue, is a landmark in the fight against AIDS.
Built in the 1850's, it was a single-occupancy hotel until 1982, at the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Mel Cheren, a painter and music producer who had bought the building in the 1970's and was converting it into apartments, donated a room to a new group, the Gay Men's Health Crisis.
The group soon expanded beyond one room, then to three-quarters of the house. In 1984, the headquarters moved to a larger space, and Mr. Cheren transformed the building into a guesthouse.
A plaque on the building testifies to its role in gay health advocacy. MICHAEL POLLAK
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F60D13FC385A0C728EDDAC0894DE404482
Skiing Beyond Safety's Edge Once Too Often
By NATHANIEL VINTON (NYT) 1944 words
Published: May 17, 2006
LA GRAVE, France, May 15 - Many skiers who brave La Meije, a 13,068-foot peak that towers over this village, pack ropes and harnesses so they can lower themselves onto the steepest runs or rappel when the descent becomes treacherous. Most carry beacons that emit electromagnetic signals in case they need to be dug out after an avalanche.
No boundaries or patrols keep skiers from veering off safe routes. A long tramway simply deposits them at the top of the French Alps, leaving life-and-death decisions to the guides who accompany most of them on the way down.
This wild, unfettered setting is what drew Doug Coombs here from Wyoming. Over the past decade, he transformed himself from a famous daredevil skier to a conscientious mountain guide, making a home with his wife, Emily, and their 2-year-old son, David. They earned a living shepherding skiers around crevasses and away from slopes that creak under the snow's weight.
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0D17FE395A0C748DDDAC0894DE404482
The Higher Cost of Breathing
A federally mandated shift to a more ozone-friendly version of the hand-held inhalers used to quell asthma attacks is creating spot shortages of the devices, because production of the older versions has declined even before producers of the new inhalers ramp up fully. The shift is also giving a few drug makers the rare chance to introduce brand-name medicine into a market long dominated by low-cost generics.
The drug at issue is albuterol, the leading prescription treatment used to open constricted airways during an asthma attack. Because the new inhalers are covered by patents, they are commanding high prices — $30 to $60 each, including the drug inside, compared with as little as $5 to $25 for the older generic versions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/business/12inhale.html?ex=1151121600&en=8579038eb5b8b81e&ei=5070
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Neil Young Is Angry About War and Wants Everyone to Know It
By JON PARELES (NYT) 1122 words
Published: April 28, 2006
Neil Young unleashes a digital broadside today. His new album, ''Living With War'' (Reprise), was recorded and mostly written three to four weeks ago and now can be heard in its entirety free on his Web site, www.neilyoung.com, and on satellite radio networks.
Mr. Young half-jokingly describes ''Living With War'' as his ''metal folk protest'' album. It's his blunt statement about the Iraq war; ''History was a cruel judge of overconfidence/back in the days of shock and awe,'' he sings, strumming an electric guitar and leading a power trio with a sound that harks back to Young albums like ''Rust Never Sleeps'' and ''Ragged Glory.''
Some songs add a trumpet or a 100-voice choir, hastily convened in Los Angeles for one 12-hour session. During the nine new songs he sympathizes with soldiers and war victims, insists ''Don't need no more lies,'' longs for a leader to reunite America and prays for peace.
In a song whose title alone has already brought him the fury of right-wing blogs, he urges, ''Let's Impeach the President.'' It ends with Mr. Young shouting, ''Flip, flop,'' amid contradictory sound bites of President Bush. But Mr. Young insists the album is nonpartisan.
''If you impeach Bush, you're doing a huge favor for the Republicans,'' he argued, speaking by telephone from California. ''They can run again with some pride.''
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30617F9385B0C7B8EDDAD0894DE404482
Wildfire Continues to Spread North of Sedona
By JOHN DOUGHERTY and JEREMY W. PETERSPublished: June 22, 2006
SEDONA, Ariz., June 22 — A menacing wildfire continued to spread through the hills north of Sedona overnight and early today, but for the moment remained behind the line that firefighters consider to be critical in containing it.
The fire, which officials said was only 7 percent contained this morning, grew by nearly one-third since yesterday, to affect about 3,256 acres. Firefighters concentrated on keeping the fire on one side of U.S. Highway 89A and away from a populated part of Oak Creek Canyon where hundreds of homes and businesses are situated.
The United States Forest Service said that today was "a critical day in fire suppression efforts."
At sunrise, heavy smoke blanketed Sedona, a popular tourist town, as fire trucks from across the state rolled through the main streets. Crews have come to the area from across the West to help fight a blaze that threatens to destroy one of Arizona's most important scenic areas. Nearly 700 people, and 11 helicopters have joined the fight.
The forbidding topography in and around Sedona is making fighting the fire more difficult. In many wildfires, airplane tankers are used to dump massive quantities of water on the flames. But here, where the terrain is rugged and steep, firefighters must use helicopters even though they deliver less water.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/us/22cnd-fire.html?hp&ex=1151035200&en=05d758d6e71c8303&ei=5094&partner=homepage
High Court Affirms Award in Discrimination Case
WASHINGTON, June 22 — Nine years ago, Sheila White says, she was made to feel very unwelcome as the only woman working in the maintenance department of a railroad yard in Memphis. And today, the Supreme Court said a jury was right to award her $43,000 for complaining about her treatment.
In a 9-to-0 ruling, the justices sided with Ms. White and against the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway, and in so doing broadened the protections for workers who sue their employers for retaliation after lodging complaints.
Writing for the court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that "we believe it is important to separate significant from trivial harms." An employee's decision to report discrimination "cannot immunize that employee from those petty slights or minor annoyances that often take place at work and that all employees experience," he emphasized.
But the court found that what Ms. White went through went beyond the trivial and the annoying.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/washington/22cnd-scotus.html?hp&ex=1151035200&en=694afb8a50113093&ei=5094&partner=homepage
A Protest Suppressed With a Massacre
Published: June 22, 2006
On May 13, 2005, the Uzbek government suppressed an uprising in the eastern city of Andijon with a bloody assault that left hundreds dead, shattered relations with the United States and sent tremors throughout Central Asia.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States cultivated closer relations with Uzbekistan and its autocratic president, Islam A. Karimov, establishing an air base on Uzbek soil and projecting its influence deep inside former Soviet territory. The expanded relationship was both praised as realpolitik strategy and criticized as a shortsighted gesture of support for a dictator with a chilling human rights record.
The partnership soured after the crackdown, during which Uzbek troops opened fire on a mixed crowd of gunmen, escaped prisoners and thousands of unarmed civilians. The United States openly criticized Mr. Karimov, who responded by evicting the Americans from the air base, establishing closer relations with Moscow and encouraging other countries in the region to do the same.
Newly available videotape of the uprising, the most extensive visual accounting of the events yet, provides fresh insight into the events of that day, casting new light on the activities of the authorities and the crowd, many of whose members were soon to die.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/world/asia/22andybox.html
The Andijan Uprising, Akramiya and Akram Yuldashev
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=18453&prog=zru
In Congo, Hunger and Disease Erode Democracy
AVEBA, Congo — The first time the Congolese Army tried to take this village back from the militias that have fought for it since the civil war supposedly ended in 2002, the government soldiers cut and ran. That was January.
The second attempt, a month later, also failed, despite heavy backing from United Nations peacekeepers trying to stabilize the nation before elections in July, the first in more than 4 decades. Instead of fighting the militias, the soldiers mutinied and looted the peacekeepers' base here.
It was only after the third try, in May, that the militia was finally chased away, deep into the equatorial forest.
But while the state may have wrested control, for now, the push to do so has spawned a crisis of its own. Thousands of people have flooded the village, exhausted and haggard from waiting out the battles in the bush, perpetuating the hunger and disease that has continued to grip Congo in the aftermath of its deadly five-year civil war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/world/africa/23congo.html
Iraqi Police Free Some Factory Workers
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 22 — A day after a large group of gunmen seized scores of Iraqis from a factory, a police raid freed 17 of them, but 34 hostages remained unaccounted for, Fawzi al-Hariri, the Iraqi Minister of Industry, said today.
The Reach of War
The abduction, involving 40 or 50 gunmen, some wearing police uniforms, represented a sharp escalation of a tactic that has become increasingly common in the continuing violence here.
The gunmen arrived at the factory in northwestern Baghdad at the end of the day shift on Wednesday in a large number of minibuses, then herded workers and their family members onto buses owned by the company, according to Iraqi officials and to a bus driver who escaped. The buses were normally used to take the workers to Shiite neighborhoods around Baghdad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/world/middleeast/22cnd-iraq.html
Poll Finds Discord Between the Muslim and Western Worlds
By MEG BORTIN
Published: June 23, 2006
PARIS, June 22 — Non-Muslim Westerners and Muslims around the world have widely different views of world events, and each group tends to view the other as violent, intolerant and lacking in respect for women, a new international survey of more than 14,000 people in 13 nations indicates.
In what the survey, part of the Pew Global Attitudes Project for 2006, called one of its most striking findings, majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey — Muslim countries with fairly strong ties to the United States — said, for example, that they did not believe that Arabs had carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
The findings illustrating the chasm in beliefs follow another year of violence and tension centered on that divide. In the last 12 months there have been terrorist bombings in London; riots in France by unemployed youths, many of them Muslim; a global uproar over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad; and no letup in the war in Iraq.
This led majorities in the United States and in countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East to describe relations between Muslims and people in Western countries as generally bad, Pew found.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/world/23pew.html
Ghana Sends Punchless U.S. Team Home From World Cup With Defeat
By JERE LONGMANPublished: June 23, 2006
NUREMBERG, Germany, June 22 — Stung by a borderline penalty kick awarded late in the first half, the United States exited from the World Cup on Thursday with a 2-1 defeat to Ghana. Bruce Arena may also soon depart as manager. But any tournament obituary for the Americans will have to list numerous causes of expiration.
Disputed officiating aside, the United States did not prove that it deserved to advance beyond group play. The familiar qualities of hard work and grit and determination were present, but the proficiency of soccer was deeply lacking.
"This is where the entire world is watching," said Sunil Gulati, president of the United States Soccer Federation. "This is where you measure yourself. That didn't come out well."
The Americans (0-2-1) won no games, produced one meager goal of their own and put the ball on target only four times in three matches. Italy put a ball into its own net; otherwise the United States produced as few goals as it did in 1998, when it finished last in the 32-team field.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/sports/soccer/23ghana.html?hp&ex=1151035200&en=159e8f3e258afcb3&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Play About Gaza Death to Reach New York
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSONPublished: June 22, 2006
After an Off Broadway production was derailed, resulting in a theatrical uproar, "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the solo show about an American demonstrator for Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, has found another New York theater.
Pam Pariseau and Dena Hammerstein, partners in James Hammerstein Productions, are bringing the play, critically acclaimed in London, to the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Previews are to begin on Oct. 5, with an opening scheduled for Oct. 15. The play is to run for 48 performances, closing on Nov. 19.
"We both saw the play and both responded to it very strongly," Ms. Hammerstein said in a telephone interview yesterday. "We identified with the material in terms of being mothers and were struck by the production and the theatricality."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/theater/22corr.html
S.E.C. Is Reported to Be Examining a Big Hedge Fund
By WALT BOGDANICH and GRETCHEN MORGENSONPublished: June 23, 2006
One of the nation's most prominent hedge funds, Pequot Capital Management, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible insider trading, according to government officials briefed on the case.
The S.E.C. declined to confirm or deny that it was investigating Pequot, a $7 billion fund overseen by Arthur J. Samberg, 65, a leading money manager and philanthropist. But a lawyer who once led the agency's investigation has told Congress that the fund's trading had repeatedly aroused suspicion among stock exchange officials, prompting them on 18 occasions to refer cases to the S.E.C. for further investigation, records show.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/business/23fund.html?hp&ex=1151121600&en=23c204a51076bca7&ei=5094&partner=homepage
NASA
Impact of Climate Warming on Polar Ice Sheets Confirmed
03.08.06
In the most comprehensive survey ever undertaken of the massive ice sheets covering both Greenland and Antarctica, NASA scientists confirm climate warming is changing how much water remains locked in Earth's largest storehouse of ice and snow.
Other recent studies have shown increasing losses of ice in parts of these sheets. This new survey is the first to inventory the losses of ice and the addition of new snow on both in a consistent and comprehensive way throughout an entire decade.
The survey shows that there was a net loss of ice from the combined polar ice sheets between 1992 and 2002 and a corresponding rise in sea level. The survey documents for the first time extensive thinning of the West Antarctic ice shelves and an increase in snowfall in the interior of Greenland, as well as thinning at the edges. All are signs of a warming climate predicted by computer models.
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/ice_sheets.html
Sun Star
US envoy's Davao visit set June 22
UNITED States Ambassador to the Philippines Kristie A. Kenny will come to Davao to launch the United States Agency for International Development (Usaid)-supported anti-trafficking project.
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/dav/2006/06/18/news/us.envoy.s.davao.visit.set.june.22.html
How can a 'nation,' not just a town, defend against the influence of terrorists networks better armed than the authorities enforcing the law? It seems a very simple and very diplomatic gesture by the USA to supply law enforcement agenies with weapons to enforce the law in countries at high risk for terrorist elements.
Arroyo ‘resolves’ lack of guns for cops Posted on Wednesday 21 June 2006
PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo dealt with the PNP’s firearms shortage problem by imposing her own computations on PNP Chief Arturo Lomibao, the same way she did to acting Education Secretary Fe Hidalgo over the classroom shortage
This was shortly after the presentation of police officers who rescued kidnap victim Sonia Lim Sanchez and Lomibao’s update on how the police is spending the P1 billion that Arroyo ordered released for the agency’s needs. This was held at the Presidential Security Group (PSG) compound.
Lomibao said the PNP has earmarked P151 million to buy handguns or Glock and Taurus pistols and long firearms for policemen who do not have firearms.
He said the police have issued handguns to 96,714 out of about 118,000 policemen. He said if the 5,881 handguns that the PNP bought would be delivered, it would translate to a fill-up rate of 86 percent or a shortage of 16,357.
He also said if the PNP buys an average of 5,000 handguns a year, the shortage of pistols would be covered in about three years.
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/blogs/citizenwatch/?p=544
Resigned Marine faces raps for complaint v. military
MANILA -- Military officials threatened to file charges against Marine Colonel Orlando de Leon who resigned from the Marine Corps last week citing the "politicization of the military" as his main reason.
In a press briefing, Armed Forces public information office chief Tristan Kison said de Leon, erstwhile Marine chief of staff, might be charged for violation of some provisions in the Articles of War.
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/net/2006/06/22/resigned.marine.faces.raps.for.complaint.v..military.html
Military admits it can't wipe out communists in 2 years
THE Armed Forces said it could not decimate the communist New People's Army (NPA) in the "critical areas" in Southern Luzon, Central Luzon, and Sorsogon Province in two years as earlier projected by Malacañang.
Armed Forces public information office chief Tristan Kison said the most the military could do is to reduce the strength of the communist movement in those areas to an "insignificant level."
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/man/2006/06/22/news/military.admits.it.can.t.wipe.out.communists.in.2.years.html
Bishop urges city execs to observe integrity
By Liway C. Manantan-Yparraguirre
DAGUPAN CITY -- Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz on Tuesday encouraged local officials here to continue nurturing the virtue of integrity.
Cruz, guest speaker during the 59th Agew na Dagupan (Dagupan Day) celebration, said: "My dear fellow public servants, if we want the city to become more progressive, more economical and prosperous, then the only response to that is for us public servants to nurture the virtue of integrity."
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/pan/2006/06/22/news/bishop.urges.city.execs.to.observe.integrity.html
US ship unloads tons of humanitarian supplies in ZamboUS soldiers count cargoes unloaded from the United States Navy vessel HSVJoint Venture, which docked Wednesday in Zamboanga City and unloaded tons of fresh humanitarian supplies for poor Muslim areas in the restive southern Philippines. (Sunnex/Al Jacinto)
ZAMBOANGA CITY -- A United States Navy High-Speed Vessel, HSV-Joint Venture, arrived Wednesday in Zamboanga City and unloaded fresh supplies to support an ongoing joint humanitarian mission between American and Filipino soldiers in the troubled southern Philippine region.
The 11,000-ton vessel, Joint Venture, was visiting the Philippines to support a joint humanitarian and civic project effort dubbed as "Project Bayanihan."
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/zamboanga/index.html
The Cheney Observer
Cheney has a curious, shifting history on issues of blame and responsibility. He was vice chair of the congressional committee that spent 11 months investigating the Iran-Contra affair and author of its minority report. As John W. Dean highlights in a recent essay, the 500-page majority report concluded the entire affair "was characterized by pervasive dishonesty and inordinate secrecy." But Cheney's report said the Reagan administration's repeated breaking of the law were "mistakes ... were just that — mistakes in judgment and nothing more."
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20358
Reporting that Rove avoided indictment, broadcast networks left out his, White House's false statements during CIA leak investigation
Summary: Broadcast networks covering the news that special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald reportedly told White House senior adviser Karl Rove that he does not anticipate charging Rove in connection with the CIA leak investigation left out key information concerning Rove's conduct and the false and misleading information put out by the White House concerning the matter. Rove's history of falsely claiming that he was not involved in disclosing CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity was ignored or downplayed, as was the White House's false denials of Rove's role.
Broadcast networks covering the news that special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald reportedly told White House senior adviser Karl Rove that he does not anticipate charging Rove in connection with the CIA leak investigation left out key information concerning Rove's conduct and the false and misleading information put out by the White House concerning the matter. June 13 reports on NBC's Nightly News and the CBS Evening News failed to note that Rove falsely told reporters during the course of the investigation that he was not involved in disclosing CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters or that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan also relayed Rove's false claim to reporters. While ABC's World News Tonight aired footage of Rove denying he leaked Plame's name, it was portrayed as being offset by Rove returning to the grand jury and "saying he had forgotten the conversation" with a reporter; ABC also did not note the repeated denials by Rove and the White House. By contrast, reports in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press all included Rove's falsehoods in their June 14 reports.
AP staff writer Pete Yost noted that "[t]he decision not to charge Karl Rove shows there often are no consequences for misleading the public." Yost further noted that, "by misleading reporters, the White House saved itself from a political liability during the 2004 presidential campaign":
In 2003, while Rove allowed the White House to tell the news media that he had no role in leaking Valerie Plame's CIA identity, the presidential aide was secretly telling the FBI the truth.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200606150001
Industry influence on EPA stormwater rule?
WASHINGTON — Environmentalists are criticizing the recently-enacted US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oil/gas stormwater discharge rule, saying an oil industry executive appealed to White House senior advisor Karl Rove to help loosen restrictions for big oil and energy companies, according to a June 13 Los Angeles Times report.Texas oil executive Ernest Angelo, who is also a Republican activist, wrote a letter to Rove in 2002 complaining that an early version of the rule was causing many in the oil industry to "openly express doubt as to the merit of electing Republicans when we wind up with this type of stupidity," the report said.According to the report, Rove passed the letter along to top White House environmental advisors, asking them to "get a response ASAP"; environmentalists say politics have influenced policy under the Bush Administration, because a decision about the rule should have been made by scientists and career regulators. In an interview with the LA Times, Angelo said, "I'm sure that his [Rove] forwarding my letter to people that were in charge might have had some impression on them," but admitted no wrongdoing in sending a letter to Rove rather than the EPA.
http://www.watertechonline.com/news.asp?mode=4&N_ID=62092
Thou Shalt not Disagree
By Alan Lidstone
June 15, 2006
Thursday
All America shares the difficulty the President and Administration face in trying to bring the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to a successful conclusion and introduce the hope of peace in the Middle East.
Dana Milbank wrote in the June 14th edition of the Washington Post that "Rove told a New Hampshire audience Monday night that Democratic critics of the Iraq war such as John Kerry and John Murtha, both combat veterans, "give the green light to go to war, but when it gets tough, they fall back of that party's old platform of cutting and running."
As a retired Naval Reservist, I ask the following questions:
(1) Did Karl Rove ever serve in the Armed Forces?
(2) Did Karl Rove's spouse, brothers, sisters, or children ever serve in the Armed Forces?
Talking tough is easy if you never have to fight the fight or share the pain of death or injury.
If Mr. Rove did not serve in the Armed Forces and his family members remain outside the fray, then perhaps he should look in the mirror when talking about "cutting and running."
The role of a major Presidential advisor should be resolve problems, not excoriate anyone who disagrees with Administration policy.
Alan Lidstone
Venice, FL - USA
About: Retired Naval Reservist and freelance writer about the RV lifestyle
http://www.sitnews.us/0606Viewpoints/061506_alan_lidstone.html
How hideous is this? A Cable News Network that can put absolutely anything on the aire is blaming an entire political party for the problems in Iraq. ?????? I didn't know the Democrats were backing the insurgents? Caches of weapons with greeting cards from the DNC must flow like water in Iraq. Amazing. I never watch FOX News. It's a waste of intelligence.
In Tandem With Karl Rove, FOX News Blames Democrats For Problems In Iraq
Reported by Ellen - June 17, 2006Terry Pennington returned to Hannity & Colmes last night (6/16/06), ostensibly to talk about the detention of his Marine son in Camp Pendleton after allegedly killing an Iraqi civilian. But Pennington's real appeal soon became clear – to blame Congresman Murtha for his son’s detention and praise Sean Hannity and Dick Cheney for helping. What a coincidence that all this should happen just days after Karl Rove urged Republicans to use Iraq against the Democrats.
Alan Colmes was disappointingly muted in his advocacy for Murtha. As he did during Pennington’s first appearance, Colmes was the one who brought up Murtha. “You said when you were on the show the other day, there was political pressure that caused this to happen. You don’t think for a second that Hagey (sp?) and you mentioned Murtha or Natansky (sp?) listened to Jack Murtha or anybody else in politics and make their decisions based on what a politician says?”
“I do believe that. I believe that’s exactly what happened,” was Pennington’s unsurprising answer given that it’s more or less what he said the last time. Then he took that opening and ran with it. “Political pressure from the anti-war forces in this country are causing them to behave in very strange ways. You would not have seen a MacArthur or a Patton yield to this kind of pressure.”
Oops, Colmes’ time was up, so no rebuttal was given against the attack on Democrats.
http://www.newshounds.us/2006/06/17/in_tandem_with_karl_rove_fox_news_blames_democrats_for_problems_in_iraq.php
Lieberman/Rove campaign video?
Posted by Evan Derkacz at 11:44 AM on June 17, 2006.
The worst campaign ad ever...
Responding to a series of setbacks and the surging Ned Lamont campaign, Joe "BushKiss" Lieberman turns to the attack ad. Jane Hamsher writes:
"Since Holy Joe seems to be channeling the ghost of Lee Atwater of late, some are speculating that Bush’s favorite Democrat has taken on Karl Rove as a campaign strategist."
This abomination of an ad ends with the (legally mandated) "I'm Joe Lieberman and I approve of this message":
Referring to speculation that Lieberman may run as an independent if he loses the primary or, as I suspect, become a Republican, Hamsher continues:
"Since he’s collected the prestigious endorsement of Bill O’Reilly you have to wonder at the wisdom of this — what will he do without all his Republican pals to back him up?"
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/37729/
WHITE HOUSE WATCH
Despite Rove being cleared, Bush mum on details
President, who pledged to reveal all, now calls it 'a chapter that has ended'
By JULIE MASON
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Now that the investigation into Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove's involvement in the CIA leak case is wrapped up, White House officials suddenly are less eager than promised to talk about the probe.
Rove, President Bush's top political strategist, was under a legal cloud for more than a year while federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald probed whether he leaked the identity of a covert CIA operative to the media. Last week, Rove's attorney announced that Fitzgerald had cleared Rove of wrongdoing. As the saying goes: Case closed.
So, apparently, are mouths. Rove isn't giving interviews. Former spokesman Scott McClellan is gone from the White House. What about Bush?
In July 2005, Bush said he was eager to tell all, but the ongoing investigation made it impossible.
Now that it looks like the investigation into Rove is complete, Bush has had a change of heart.
"It's a chapter that has ended," Bush told reporters Wednesday. Later the same day, Bush made clear that he had no interest in returning to the matter.
"I've made the comments I'm going to make about this incident, and I'm going to put this part of the situation behind us and move forward," Bush said.
But what about those pledges to provide a transparent accounting of what happened?
"I appreciate the job that the prosecutor did. I thought he conducted himself well in this investigation," Bush said. "He took a very thorough, long look at allegations and rumors. And I, obviously, along with others in the White House, took a sigh of relief when he made the decision he made. And now we're going to move forward."
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/3977601.html
Murtha on Rove: ‘He’s Sitting in His Air-Conditioned Office on His Big, Fat Backside, Saying Stay the Course’
Karl Rove attacked Rep. John Murtha during a speech last week in New Hampshire. Rove described Murtha’s Iraq plan as “cutting and running,” and suggested that the 37-year Marine combat veteran would “be with you at the first shots” but not “for the last, tough battles.”
Murtha defended himself this morning on Meet the Press:
MURTHA: He’s in New Hampshire. He’s making a political speech. He’s sitting in his air-conditioned office on his big, fat backside, saying stay the course. That’s not a plan. … We’ve got to change direction. You can’t sit there in the air-conditioned office and tell troops carrying 70 pounds on their backs, inside these armored vessels hit with IEDs every day, seeing their friends blown up, their buddies blown up — and he says stay the course? Easy to say that from Washington, DC.
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/06/18/murtha-rove/
FOX News Bigotry And Bias In Black And White
Reported by Ellen - June 18, 2006FOX News must have decided the legal system is for other people. When it comes to the cases its conservative pundits care about, their decisions rule, not those of a judge or jury. It’s a pretty simple system. White conservatives: Not guilty. Black Democrats: Always guilty.
The disparity in treatment could not have been plainer than in the zillionth rehash of the second-most important legal case in the FOX News hierarchy (after the Duke lacrosse case), Cynthia McKinney’s scuffle with a police officer. There were two FOX News alerts during Friday night’s (6/16/06) Hannity & Colmes to let us know the gravity of the decision by the grand jury not to indict Cynthia McKinney. It was almost but not quite as important as the decision not to indict Karl Rove. But whereas Rove’s non-indictment was saluted as an outright acquittal (despite the fact that there has been no official statement), the decision not to indict McKinney was treated like a grave miscarriage of justice. Meanwhile, the investigation into FOX News’ regular guest Ann Coulter’s possible voter fraud, tax fraud and allegations of plagiarism has gone largely unmentioned during any of her numerous recent appearances plugging her new book.
http://www.newshounds.us/2006/06/18/fox_news_bigotry_and_bias_in_black_and_white.php
Letter writers break rules of civil debate, JOHN WARNER, Warner - Letter
June 21. 2006 8:00AM
One of the pleasures of living in the Concord area is the opportunity for a lively public discourse about important issues. However, the quality of many letters on the Monitor's editorial page concerns me.
Here are some writing methods that seem too often to replace a reasoned argument and therefore contribute nothing to the debate: 1. Attacking the person on the other side rather than his arguments (the "ad hominem" attack). 2. Arbitrarily defining the other side's arguments as "hate speech." 3. Questioning another person's patriotism while smugly displaying one's own. 4. Attributing extreme points of view to a person (or group) that in fact they do not hold (the "false alternative").
Van Mosher recently used methods 1-3 against a whole class of people. In "Democrats give aid and comfort to the enemy," he questioned the patriotism of the Democratic Party in New Hampshire, called Democrats extremists and accused them in general of hate speech.
Method number 4 was used liberally (pun intended) in Bill Bunker's recent letter, "No one should sign up for this contract," wherein he simply recycled tired old debating points created by Karl Rove, the Republican Party's minister of propaganda.
Samuel Johnson's famous definition of patriotism as "the last resort of scoundrels"could apply equally well to each of these four tactics, as could the statement by H.L. Mencken that "even worse, it is the first, last and middle range of fools."
http://www.cmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060621/REPOSITORY/606210351/1029/OPINION03
Troops echo frustration with war critic
KIMBERLY HEFLING
Associated Press
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. - While Staff Sgt. Randy Myers was dodging roadside bombs in Iraq, his congressman was calling the war a lost cause.
Sixteen-term Rep. John Murtha, a decorated Vietnam veteran and military hawk, has become the face of the Democrats' anti-war movement since he called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops last fall. His oft-repeated criticism of the Bush administration's war policies also has earned him the wrath of Republicans.
In Murtha's southwest Pennsylvania district, however, many share the war critic's views.
At a welcome home ceremony this week for Myers and other troops from the Johnstown, Pa.-based 876th Engineer Battalion, the crowd cheered when a Murtha aide welcomed the troops on the congressman's behalf.
Myers said he backs Murtha, an opinion echoed by a number of other troops and their families. Several share his frustration with the conflict.
"I'm not sure we're doing a whole lot of good," Myers, 46, said of the U.S. presence in Iraq. "Everybody thinks we are. We're trying to, but we're not going to change what they want to do, and if they don't want to change, they're not gonna."
Said Sgt. 1st Class George Wozniak, 36, of Murtha: "He's definitely for a strong military and he definitely supports the troops."
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/14867281.htm
Turkey’s Airports and Ports Remain Closed for Republic of Cyprus
17 June 2006 10:21 FOCUS News Agency
Istanbul. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated that until the isolation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is lifted Turkey’s ports and airfields will remain closed for the ships and planes of the Republic of Cyprus, online edition of Sabah newspaper reads.
In a speech before the Istanbul Chamber of Industry the Prime Minister pointed out that Turkey is even ready to discontinue its talks with the EU.
“We told all 25 member-states, including the one that presides over the bloc, that until the isolation of the TRNC is lifted they should not expect from us to sign the additional protocol, neither to open our ports and airfields,” the newspaper cites Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
http://www.focus-fen.net/index.php?catid=127&ch=0&newsid=90504
Babacan Stands by Erdogan on Greek Cyprus
By Cihan News Agency
Published: Sunday, June 18, 2006
zaman.com
Turkey's Chief EU Negotiator Ali Babacan stood by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said Turkey would open its ports to the Greek Cypriot traffic, saying that Erdogan's remarks reflected Turkey's stance.
"Turkey fulfilled her commitments. It is not realistic to expect Turkey to take more steps," Ali Babacan said to CNNTurk on Sunday.
On Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan rebuffed the EU's calls for the opening of Turkey's ports and harbors to Greek Cypriot traffic, stressing that Turkey would not take the step as long as the isolation imposed on Turkish Cypriots was not removed.
The European Union has issued a strong warning to Turkey, saying that it risks damaging its bid to join the union if it refuses to open its ports to Greek Cyprus.
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=hotnews&alt=&trh=20060618&hn=34092
Ports authority approves $154 million budget plan
By JAMES D. McWILLIAMS
jmcwilliams@thestate.comThe S.C. State Ports Authority approved a two-year, $154 million capital-spending plan this week. The plan will pay for the first major expansion of state ports since April 1995.
Expansion is necessary because twice as much cargo moves through the port now as did shortly after that last expansion, said spokesman Byron D. Miller.
The ports moved 1 million shipping-container units in 1996, and about 2 million in 2005, Miller said. The authority expects 8.5-percent growth in container volume during the next fiscal year.
The ports already handle the fourth-largest container volume in the nation, and the second-largest of any ports on the East Coast or Gulf Coast states, Miller said.
Thus, the authority plans to expand the port at the former Charleston Navy Base and to do port development on the Savannah River in Jasper County. The Jasper County development alone will cost $1.6 million, and the authority also has ordered $64 million in new equipment.
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/business/14840179.htm
Hong Kong group may enter AB Ports bidding fray
Last Update: 10:50 PM ET Jun 18, 2006
LONDON (MarketWatch) -- A consortium led by Hong Kong's biggest infrastructure company, Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings, or CKI (1038.HK), has hired bank Rothschild to examine a possible bid on Associated British Ports PLC (ABP.LN), The Business reports without citing sources.
Nobody could be reached for comment at CKI and Rothschild.
The U.K. ports operator is already at the center of a takeover battle between groups led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Macquarie Bank Ltd. (MBL.AU), which have both offered GBP2.58 billion.
Newspaper Web site: http://www.thebusinessonline.com
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=google&guid=%7B29B6A147-8189-4F15-A27C-62509738630C%7D&keyword=
HK's Cheung Kong Infrastructure official declines comment on AB Ports bid talk
- HONG KONG (XFN-ASIA) - A Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings Ltd (CKI) official declined to comment on media reports that the group is considering putting in a bid for Associated British Ports Holdings PLC (ABP).
'I cannot confirm or deny or say anything about these media reports,' said
Singapore-based Sng Sow-Mei, an independent non-executive director of CKI and a
member of its audit committee.
Other officials of CKI were unavailable for comment.
A media report in the UK over the weekend said that CKI is considering leading a consortium that will join the bidding for control of AB Ports, the UK's largest ports operator.
According to the report, the Asian consortium has hired investment bank Rothschild to help it put together a bid.
AB Ports is currently already the subject of a takeover battle between groups led by US investment bank Goldman Sachs and Australia's Macquarie Bank.
jun.concepcion@xfn.com
http://www.lse.co.uk/FinanceNews.asp?shareprice=&ArticleRef=4130&ArticleHeadline=HKs_Cheung_Kong_Infrastructure_official_declines_comment_on_AB_Ports_bid_talk
Japanese companies study refurbishment of Lobito and Namibe ports in Angola
[ 2006-06-19 ]
Luanda, Angola, 19 June – The rehabilitation of the ports of Lobito and Namibe is valued at a total of US$65 million, with US$35 million for Lobito and US$30 million for Namibe, according to a study on the rehabilitation and modernization of Angola’s ports, drawn up by Japanese consultants, daily newspaper Jornal de Angola reported.
The proposal is part of a short-term Rehabilitation Plan set to be completed by 2010, for the two ports after a survey is carried out to establish the work needed to be done in order to deal with cargo, which is expected to double by 2010.
The newspaper also said that for the ports of Lobito and Namibe theer was no need to expand the size of the ports and work would focus on refurbishing the current facilities.
The study, drawn up by Japanese company Overseas Coastal Area Development Institute with the support of the Japanese Agency for International Development also proposes the construction of a new container terminal at Luanda’s port, in order to reduce congestion at existing terminals.
The new terminal, according to the proposal, would be built on the East side of the Port of Luanda.
According to the study, the general cargo and container terminals at Luanda Port are lacking in overall space.
The study covers the ports of Luanda, Lobito, Cabinda and Namibe, which are currently suffering from a lack of maintenance and operating capacity. (macauhub)
http://www.macauhub.com.mo/en/news.php?ID=1502
FTSE makes modest gains
Share prices in London made modest gains today as investors ventured back into the market following the recent turmoil.
Takeover talk and cost-saving news helped take the top flight FTSE 100 Index back on to positive ground, starting the week with a 28.7-point rise to reach 5626.1.
But nervousness remained and across the Atlantic Wall Street’s benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average was around 15 points off its opening mark as trading in London closed, while the Nasdaq also hoveed just inside negative territory.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/breaking/story.asp?j=3960675&p=396x69x&n=3960767
Borders left wide open with posts unmanned
By Richard Ford, Stewart Tendler and Fran Yeoman
MINISTERS were accused yesterday of leaving Britain’s borders wide open to drug smugglers, criminal gangs and terrorists because too few customs officers operate at ports and airports.
The Government’s anti- terror watchdog criticised a new method of border control that has left some of the busiest airports unmanned in a switch to mobile patrols.
Lord Carlile of Berriew, QC, said that customs officers were “too thinly spread” and was supported by police chiefs voicing private concerns that ports of entry were left unprotected.
His comments were a further blow to the Government’s law and order policies, following controversies over sentencing powers for dangerous offenders, the running of the immigration service and the failure to deport foreign criminals.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2233417,00.html
Nigeria: Congestion: Minister Orders Ships to Eastern Ports
Daily Champion (Lagos)
June 19, 2006
Posted to the web June 19, 2006
Willy Eya
Lagos
Minister of Transport, Dr. Abiye Sekibo, has directed ships awaiting berth in Lagos to proceed to any of the Eastern ports.
Dr. Sekibo who gave the directive at the weekend said the move is to forestall further congestion of ports in the Lagos area.
Daily Champion investigations reveal that private operators who took over the ports are finding it difficult to cope with the level of cargo traffic hence the current problem of congestion.
Dr. Sekibo who doubles as chairman of Presidential Committee on Port - Decongestion said as an interim measure ships awaiting berth should move to ports in Onne, Port Harcourt or Warri.
He explained that the concessionaires are yet to have on ground equipment to handle the level of cargo traffic in the affected ports but noted that they (concessionaires) were making efforts to solve the problem.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200606191439.html
The Department of Homeland Security must abandon its laissez faire belief that markets by themselves will meet broader society's security requirements. Corporate America, and the investing public, must view security as a core mission, not a market option.
Improved port security not out of reach
P.J. CROWLEY AND ROBERT HOUSMAN
GUEST COLUMNISTS
When the Dubai Ports World controversy surfaced in February, politicians focused on the wrong end of the supply chain. If a bomb or other dangerous material is placed in a shipping container, discovering it after it is unloaded in Seattle is too late. The plot needs to be foiled before it blows up the global trading system, instantly generating hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses.
Congress is now considering what to do about port and supply chain security. It should adopt legislation, sponsored by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., that passed the House last month and is pending in the Senate. Smart shipping containers would be scanned to detect a nuclear weapon or dangerous material. Real-time tracking data and container imagery would reduce enable political leaders to better manage the consequences should such an attack still occur.
But Congress must go further and require higher economic security standards. The Department of Homeland Security must abandon its laissez faire belief that markets by themselves will meet broader society's security requirements. Corporate America, and the investing public, must view security as a core mission, not a market option.
The real supply chain security vulnerability exists overseas where the goods are manufactured, assembled, stuffed into shipping containers and transported to foreign ports. However, where the greatest infiltration threat exists, private sector cooperation is voluntary and government enforcement is weak.
After 9/11, the United States launched the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism. While a good concept, on-site validation of security procedures are subject to advance notice, company cooperation and performed only once. No independent efforts are made to ensure that companies are actually implementing their security plans.
Such optional approaches leave the U.S. economy vulnerable to the lowest corporate denominator. Security costs are overhead, which Wall Street frowns upon. The further we get from 9/11, the less the private sector is investing in security. To adequately protect supply chains -- the lifeblood of our just-in-time business environment -- private markets must place a higher value on risk mitigation. Reduced uncertainty would allow the insurance industry to offer terrorism risk coverage more widely at reduced rates.
Five additional steps will improve port and supply chain security greatly and serve as a model for other economic sectors:
Set mandatory standards. C-TPAT participation should be required, not voluntary, for any company directly involved in global trade. C-TPAT should be internationalized through the World Customs Organization.
Strengthen enforcement. More U.S. customs agents should be stationed overseas. Foreign ports, manufacturing sites and supply chains should be subject to random, no-notice site inspections.
Trust but verify." Global corporations should conduct independent annual security audits of their manufacturing and transportation networks, and have corporate leadership certify them.
Use market measures to promote security. Public companies should disclose in annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings their assessment of security trends, including how threats affect operations; actions taken; compliance with homeland security regulations; and an estimated security budget.
Reward real security. In return for greater oversight, the government should cap liability for corporations that meet stronger supply chain security standards. The challenge of port and supply chain security should not be a false choice between security and efficiency. And the right answer is not what the United States does parochially but what governments and the private sector do globally.P.J. Crowley is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and Robert Housman is a homeland security consultant, both in Washington, D.C.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/274509_portsecurity20.html
Deaths feared in Nigerian fuel-tanker blast
Lagos, Nigeria
21 June 2006 01:40
Several people were feared dead after an oil tanker exploded while discharging fuel at Nigeria's main seaport in Lagos, a spokesperson said on Wednesday.
"It is still difficult to [tell] the exact number of dead, but there were indications that could have been several human and material casualties," Christopher Borha, public relations manager of the Nigerian Ports Authority, told Agence France-Presse.
He said the oil tanker was discharging fuel at a private jetty at Apapa port when it suddenly developed an engine problem.
"The engineers tried to fix the fault and in the process the tanker exploded," he said.
A combined team of ports firefighters and experts from the German construction firm Julius Berger succeeded in towing the vessel from the jetty, Borha added.
"We did this to prevent the fire from spreading to other fuel farms," he said.
The Lagos port is Nigeria's main seaport, handling dozens of passenger and cargo vessels daily. -- Sapa-AFP
http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/&articleid=275058
Shahid Rajaii and Imam Khomeini ports to become major trade hubs
TEHRAN, June 21 (MNA) -– Iran’s southern ports of Bandar Shahid Rajaii and Bandar Imam Khomeini will become the hub ports for foreign trade and container transshipment.
Currently acting as the A-class major ports, Bandar Shahid Rajaii and Bandar Imam Khomeini are expected to turn into hub ports by the end of the nation’s 20-Year Outlook Plan (2015), Iran’s Ministry of Roads and Transportation said in a statement.
Also, the port cities Bandar Anzali and Bandar Amirabad, currently rated among low-class ports, will perform as the A-class ports in the future, the report added.
While the ports of Bandar Bushehr and Shahid Bahonar located in southern Iran, will become the nation’s B-class major ports, Noshahr and Chabahar ports are planned to upgrade their positions to Iran’s second level major ports.
A number of other small trade ports located both in the north and south of the country are expected to account for 1.9 percent of the nation’s maritime trade in total, the report further explained.
http://www.mehrnews.ir/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=342937
21 June 2006
Jamaica Teams with United States To Secure Ports
U.S. program installs radiation monitors to detect smuggled nuclear cargo
Washington -- The United States says Jamaica is joining international efforts to prevent smuggling of nuclear and other radioactive materials by ship.
Officials of the Jamaican government, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the National Nuclear Security Administration signed a declaration of principles June 20 that will bring two U.S. security programs to Jamaica. Those programs are NNSA's Megaports Initiatives and CPB’s Container Security Initiative, according to a June 20 NNSA release.
NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks called the megaports program "critical for U.S. national security and the national security of our international partners." Cooperating with Jamaica, he added, will enhance international nonproliferation efforts.
"Preventing the smuggling of illicit nuclear weapons and radiological materials" is the highest priority of the Customs and Border Patrol, said Commissioner Ralph Basham. He termed the container security program "a brilliant idea" that helps facilitate trade and security.
http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2006&m=June&x=20060621143423adynned0.7376673
Pakistan Offers Central Asia Access to Sea Ports
Routes through war-ridden Afghanistan seen as obstacle
Muhammad Aslam Khan (aslam)
Published 2006-06-22 17:28 (KST)
In a strategic diplomatic move, Pakistan has offered Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member countries corridor facilities for energy, transport and trade through land routes.
Central Asian states such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, member countries of SCO, are landlocked and have no access to sea ports.
Only Pakistan can provide economically viable land routes to the warm waters of the Arabian Sea via the Karachi and Gwadar ports.
A two-month deadline was set for the conclusion of tri-party talks over a natural gas mega project. Experts from stakeholder countries Iran, India and Pakistan are negotiating the proposed price of gas.
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=299895&rel_no=1
Pardon talk for Libby begins
BY TOM BRUNE
Newsday Washington Bureau
June 17, 2006, 10:48 PM EDT
WASHINGTON -- Now that top White House aide Karl Rove is off the hook in the CIA leak probe, President George W. Bush must weigh whether to pardon former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the only one indicted in the three-year investigation.
Speculation about a pardon began in late October, soon after Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald unsealed the perjury indictment of Libby, and it continued last week after Fitzgerald chose not to charge Rove.
"I think ultimately, of course, there are going to be pardons," said Joseph diGenova, a former prosecutor and an old Washington hand who shares that view with many pundits.
"These are the kinds of cases in which historically presidents have given pardons," said the veteran Republican attorney.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uspard0618,0,467087.story?coll=ny-leadnationalnews-headlines
Bumiller stated she's "totally in favor of" Libby's NIE leak, which included false info
Summary: On the Chris Matthews Show, Elisabeth Bumiller noted that President Bush had ordered Vice President Dick Cheney to authorize I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak portions of the National Intelligence Estimate on prewar intelligence. Bumiller then stated: "I'm totally in favor of leaking of any kind." But Bumiller neglected to mention that Libby testified that he had been authorized to leak false information to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence.
During the June 18 edition of the NBC-syndicated Chris Matthews Show, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller noted that President Bush had ordered Vice President Dick Cheney to authorize his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to leak portions of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on prewar intelligence to reporters. Bumiller then stated: "And just for the record, I would like to say I'm totally in favor of leaking of any kind. ... And I'm not going to denounce leaks as a reporter." But Bumiller neglected to mention that, according to special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Libby testified during the investigation into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity that he had been authorized to leak false information to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller in an effort to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200606190010
More Than $2M Raised for Libby's Defense
06.20.2006, 07:08 PM
Supporters of Vice President Dick Cheney's indicted former chief of staff have raised more than $2 million since late last year for his legal defense in the CIA leak case.
Former Cheney spokeswoman Mary Matalin was hosting a fundraiser at her home Tuesday night to help pay the legal expenses of I. Lewis Libby, who is charged with five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI in the Valerie Plame affair.
The $2 million figure came from Barbara Comstock, a member of Libby's legal team. Among the co-hosts for the event at Matalin's home were former Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, former Rep. Bob Livingston and oil industry executive and former Commerce Secretary Don Evans.
http://www.forbes.com/work/feeds/ap/2006/06/20/ap2828995.html
A Hardball double standard, part II: Media Matters compares O'Donnell's interviews of Dean, Mehlman
Summary: A day after interviewing Howard Dean, MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell sat down with his Republican counterpart, Ken Mehlman, affording Media Matters for America the opportunity to make a direct comparison of the two interviews.
On the June 20 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, guest host and MSNBC chief Washington correspondent Norah O'Donnell interviewed Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Ken Mehlman. As Media Matters for America noted, O'Donnell had aired an interview with Mehlman's Democratic counterpart, Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Howard Dean, on the previous evening's edition of Hardball, posing significantly more challenging questions to Dean than to Sen. George Allen (R-VA), whom she also interviewed on the program. O'Donnell's June 20 interview of Mehlman offers the opportunity to make a direct comparison of O'Donnell's interviews with the two parties' chairmen.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200606220002
MergerTalk: Middle East money flows into buyout funds
By Michael Flaherty and Will Rasmussen
NEW YORK/DUBAI, June 22 (Reuters) - With oil revenues climbing, Middle Eastern institutional investors are putting more of their money into Western buyout funds.
That's a shift from the past few years, when these investors mostly kept their money local as Middle Eastern markets soared on the back of record high-oil prices.
But overheated stock prices triggered a correction earlier this year, and the Middle Eastern markets tumbled, prompting investors to look westward for opportunities. The Saudi stock exchange, the largest in the region, is down about 40 percent since late February. Dubai's market has fallen 55 percent this year.
Much of the Middle Eastern money is headed to the U.S. private equity funds, which buy companies and sell them later. The sector's huge returns and a friendly debt market have led to record inflows and profits at these funds.
The Middle East has old ties to Western buyout funds, but more money than ever is leaving its cities and landing in New York, according to private equity managers and investors.
"The numbers they are committing are much larger than what they have been in the past," said Harry Alverson, a managing director at U.S. buyout firm Carlyle Group.
http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2006-06-22T180009Z_01_N22302659_RTRIDST_0_COLUMN-MERGERS-SCHEDULED-WEEKLY-COLUMN-PICTURE.XML
Wetlands in peril
Now that the Roberts court has begun to issue significant rulings on civil liberties and the environment, "It could've been worse" is a phrase you may hear liberals saying often -- if they're lucky.
Turns out luck, or maybe just reason, was on their side this week, as the Supreme Court came close to -- but fell short of -- rolling back critical parts of the Clean Water Act.
The Court ultimately sided with two Michigan developers who wanted to build on wetlands close to, but not bordering, "navigable waters" protected under the act. But swing-vote moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy rightly parried his conservative colleagues' attempt to permanently remove protections for millions of acres of similar wetlands.
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060621/OPINION01/606210517
U.S. Chief Justice buys in Port Clyde
ST. GEORGE (June 21): The Chief Justice of the United States is the newest resident of the Midcoast, according to county land records.
John G. Roberts Jr., and Jane S. Roberts, of Chevy Chase, Md., have purchased property for an undisclosed sum on Hupper Island, in the mouth of Port Clyde Harbor.
John Roberts was named chief justice of the country's highest court in September, 2005.
The Chief Justice declined to comment on the purchase Wednesday when contacted through the United States Supreme Court.
The Roberts were represented locally in the sale by Rockland attorney Jim Brannan. When contacted Wednesday, Brannan also said he must politely decline to comment.
A native of Indiana, Roberts is a graduate of Harvard University and the country's 17th Chief Justice. He was named to replace late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, after Rehnquist passed away on Sept. 3, 2005.
Roberts, 51, was confirmed on Sept. 29. He and wife Jane, a partner in a Washington D.C. law firm, have two adopted children, Josie and Jack.
http://knox.villagesoup.com/community/story.cfm?storyID=74537
The End of the Bush Revolution
Philip H. GordonFrom Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006Article preview: first 500 of 4,334 words total.
Summary: The Bush administration's "revolutionary" foreign policy rhetoric has not changed, but its actual policies have: after squandering U.S. legitimacy, breaking the domestic bank, and getting the United States bogged down in an unsuccessful war, the Bush doctrine has run up against reality and become unsustainable. The counterrevolution should be welcomed -- and, if possible, locked in.
Reading over President George W. Bush's March 2006 National Security Strategy, one would be hard-pressed to find much evidence that the president has backed away from what has become known as the Bush doctrine. "America is at war," says the document; we will "fight our enemies abroad instead of waiting for them to arrive in our country" and "support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture," with the ultimate goal of "ending tyranny in our world."
...The reversal of the Bush revolution is a good thing. By overreaching in Iraq, alienating important allies, and allowing the war on terrorism to overshadow all other national priorities, Bush has gotten the United States bogged down in an unsuccessful war, overstretched the military, and broken the domestic bank. Washington now lacks the reservoir of international legitimacy, resources, and domestic support necessary to pursue other key national interests.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060701faessay85406/philip-h-gordon/the-end-of-the-bush-revolution.html
Industry backs limited foreign-ownership reviews
By WILLIAM MATTHEWS
June 21, 2006
Business groups were worried this spring when Congress demanded greater scrutiny of foreign entities buying U.S. companies. But now they say they’re satisfied that legislation moving through the House increases oversight without being overbearing.
The House Financial Services Committee unanimously approved legislation June 13 requiring more thorough, higher-level scrutiny of planned foreign purchases of U.S. companies when the purchases raise national security concerns.
Among other things, the legislation requires certain foreign purchases of U.S. companies to be reviewed and approved by the Homeland Security secretary.
The secretary would become vice chairman of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which approves or rejects foreign purchases of U.S. companies when the purchases raise questions about national security.
http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=1875427
FDR Would Have Laughed At This AP Item
Posted by John Matthews on June 20, 2006 - 21:44.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt read the newspapers he kept his eye out for what he called “howlers.” They were false or just downright foolish news items that gave him at least a chuckle and sometimes left him howling with laughter. He loved sharing “howlers” with friends.
I thought of FDR when I read an Associated Press report of the recent Iowa Republican convention The AP said:
Generally cast as a moderate, [Gov. Mitt] Romney sounded a theme of social conservatism before delegates at the state convention who are generally more conservative than most Republicans. "The family is the absolute foundation of our culture," Romney said.
OK, so we know what social conservatives believe is "the absolute foundation of our culture."
But the AP, as usual, didn’t provide balance. It failed to tell us what social liberals believe is "the absolute foundation of our culture."
So we’re left to wonder. Is it Hollywood? George Soros’ money? The Constitution of France's Fifth Republic?
http://newsbusters.org/node/6002
U.S. cautious about Japan beef-trade deal
By LIBBy QUAID
AP FOOD AND FARM WRITER
WASHINGTON -- U.S. beef shipments to Japan could resume within weeks under a new agreement, but the Bush administration cautioned Wednesday that the deal to restore trade interrupted by Japanese mad-cow disease concerns could still fall through.
"I don't want this to be regarded as something bigger than it is," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns told reporters in his office. "It's a step along the way, certainly a helpful step, but we still don't have beef there."
Hours earlier, Japan announced it would end a ban on importing U.S. beef pending inspections of American meat processing plants. Audit teams will arrive this weekend and complete their work by July 21, Johanns said.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1310AP_US_Japan_Beef.html
"The Dark Side"
"A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies," Cheney told Americans just after 9/11. He warned the public that the government would have to operate on the "dark side."In "The Dark Side," FRONTLINE tells the story of the vice president's role as the chief architect of the war on terror, and his battle with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet for control of the "dark side." Drawing on more than 40 interviews and thousands of documents, the film provides a step-by-step examination of what happened inside the councils of war.
Early in the Bush administration, Cheney placed a group of allies throughout the government who advocated a robust and pre-emptive foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq. But a potential obstacle was Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration who had survived the transition by bypassing Cheney and creating a personal bond with the president.
After the attacks on 9/11, Cheney seized the initiative and pushed for expanding presidential power, transforming America's intelligence agencies and bringing the war on terror to Iraq. Cheney's primary ally in this effort was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"You have this wiring diagram that we all know of about national security, but now there's a new line on it. There's a line from the vice president directly to the secretary of defense, and it's as though there's a private line, private communication between those two," former National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke tells FRONTLINE.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/view/
Behind Closed Doors
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/view/2.html?&c=2wm
THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ; How Iraq Police Reform Became Casualty of War
THIS ARTICLE WAS REPORTED BY MICHAEL MOSS, DAVID ROHDE AND KIRK SEMPLE AND WRITTEN BY MR. MOSS.; MICHAEL MOSS AND KIRK SEMPLE REPORTED FROM BAGHDAD FOR THIS ARTICLE, AND DAVID ROHDE FROM NEW YORK. QAIS MIZHER CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM BAGHDAD AND SULAIMANIYA, AND AN IRAQI EMPLOYEE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES FROM BASRA. (NYT) 4559 words
Published: May 22, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Jon Villanova had just arrived in Basra last spring to help build a police force in southern Iraq when bodies began piling up. Twenty or more Iraqi civilians were dragged from their homes, shot in the head and dumped in the streets.
The evidence pointed to some of the very people he and his team of foreign police advisers were struggling to train: a cluster of senior officers working out of a station called Jamiat.
But local officials resisted efforts to prosecute the officers. By the time officials in Baghdad intervened nine months later, the corruption in Basra had gotten so bad that the 135-member internal affairs unit, set up to police the police, was operating as a ring of extortionists, kidnappers and killers, American and Iraqi officials said.
''There we are, trying to build a police force that people can believe in, and they are committing murders,'' Mr. Villanova said. ''It was a quagmire.''
So was much of the rest of Iraq. An initial effort by American civilians to rebuild the police, slow to get started and undermanned, had become overwhelmed by corruption, political vengeance and lawlessness unleashed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
A year later, with the insurgency spreading with an unimagined ferocity, the United States military took charge of a second, broader campaign to reconstitute the police. On the ground, however, the military's plan for police units that could help restore order in Iraq would be no match for the forces tearing at the country in places like Basra and Baghdad. And along the way, it would help fuel some of those forces.
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F20C1FFF3B5A0C718EDDAC0894DE404482
THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE PRESENTATION; How Powell's Evidence Compares to Findings From Prior Intelligence
Published: February 7, 2003
The main purpose of the presentation that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made to the United Nations Security Council was to demonstrate that Iraq was not complying with United Nations demands that it abandon its programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Powell sought to explain what intelligence had led the Bush administration to make earlier charges that Iraq was seeking to develop biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, as well the missiles, aircraft and drones to deliver them. In so doing, he offered new information.
Outlining what he said were Iraq's deceptions, he made these charges:
*Iraq had shifted and evacuated material from at least 30 chemical weapons and other munitions sites before inspectors arrived and that it possessed at least 7 mobile biological weapons laboratories and biological agents that are unaccounted for.
*Iraq had bulldozed and removed earth from sites to hide evidence of chemical weapons development.
*Iraq had removed hard disk drives from computers, dispersed files related to programs and removed references to weapons of mass destruction from all documents.
*Iraq was ''relentlessly attempting to tap'' the communications of weapons inspectors and to monitor their activities.
*Iraq had tried to switch, conceal and intimidate scientists and other officials with knowledge of prohibited weapons programs.
The Link Between Al Qaeda and Iraq
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30817FE3E5F0C748CDDAB0894DB404482
Bank Data Secretly Reviewed by U.S. to Fight Terror
WASHINGTON, June 22 - Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.
The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas or into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/washington/22cnd-intel.html?hp&ex=1151035200&en=3653468f88851bcd&ei=5094&partner=homepage
'The Road to Guantánamo' Offers Grim Chronicles That Anger and Stir
THE release of "The Road to Guantánamo" comes shortly after the suicides of three prisoners held in American custody in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in the midst of renewed concern, in the United States and abroad, about the mistreatment of detainees and the policy of holding suspected terrorists at the detention camp. In a sense, then, the film, which is based on the testimony of three British Muslims captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and held at Guantánamo for more than two years, does not tell us anything new. It is nonetheless a wrenching and dismaying account of cruelty and bureaucratic indifference, a graphic tour of a place many citizens of Western democracies would prefer not to think about.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/movies/23guan.html?8dpccontinued …
