The New York Times

Justices Rule Against Bush Administration on Emissions

By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, April 2 — In one of its most important environmental decisions in years, the Supreme Court ruled today that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases in automobile emissions.
The court further ruled that the agency cannot sidestep its authority to regulate the greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change unless it can provide a scientific basis for its refusal.
The 5-to-4 decision was a strong rebuke to the Bush administration, which has maintained that it does not have the right to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and even if it did, it would not use the authority. The ruling does not force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate auto emissions, but it would almost certainly face further legal action if it fails to do so.
Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said that the only way the agency can “avoid taking further action” now is “if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change” or provides a good explanation why it cannot or will not find out whether they do.Beyond the specific context for this case — so-called “tailpipe emissions” from cars and trucks, which account for about one-fourth of the country’s total greenhouse-gas emissions — the decision is highly likely to have a broader impact on the debate over government efforts to address global warming.
Court cases around the country had been placed on hold to await the decision in this case. Among them is a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s refusal to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, now pending in the federal appeals court here. Individual states, led by California, are also moving aggressively into what they have seen as a regulatory vacuum.
Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, said that by providing nothing more than a “laundry list of reasons not to regulate,” the Environmental Protection Agency had defied the Clean Air Act’s “clear statutory command.” He said that a refusal to regulate can be based only on science and “reasoned justification,” adding that while the statute leaves the central determination to the “judgment” of the agency’s administrator, “the use of the word ‘judgment’ is not a roving license to ignore the statutory text.”
The court decided a second Clean Air Act case today, adopting a broad reading of the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority over factories and power plants that add capacity or make renovations that increase emissions of air pollutants. In doing so, the court reopened a federal enforcement effort against the Duke Energy Corporation under the Clean Air Act’s “new source review” provision. The vote in the second case, Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy Corp., No. 05-848, was 9 to 0.
The two decisions left environmental advocates exultant. Many said they still harbored doubts about the federal agency and predicted that the decision would help push the Democratic-controlled Congress to address the issue. Even in the nine months since the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 05-1120, and accelerating since the elections last November, there has been a growing interest among industry groups in working with environmental organizations on proposals for emissions limits.
Dave McCurdy, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the main industry trade group, said in response to the E.P.A. decision that the alliance “looks forward to working constructively with both Congress and the administration” in addressing the issue. “This decision says that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will be part of this process,” he said.
If the decision sowed widespread claims of victory, it left behind a prominent loser: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who argued vigorously in a dissenting opinion that the court never should have reached the merits of the case or addressed the question of the agency’s legal obligations.
His dissent, which Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. also signed, focused solely on the issue of legal standing to sue: whether the broad coalition of states, cities and environmental groups that brought the lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency four years ago should have been accepted as plaintiffs in the first place.
This was the issue on which the coalition’s lawsuit had appeared most vulnerable, given that in recent years the Supreme Court has steadily raised the barrier to standing, especially in environmental cases. Justice Scalia has long been a leader in that effort, and Chief Justice Roberts made clear that, as his statements and actions in his prejudicial career indicated, he is fully on board Justice Scalia’s project.
Chief Justice Roberts said that the court should not have found that Massachusetts or any of the other plaintiffs had standing. The finding “has caused us to transgress the proper — and properly limited — role of the courts in a democratic society,” he said, quoting from a 1984 decision. And, quoting from a decision Justice Scalia wrote in 1992, he said: “This court’s standing jurisprudence simply recognizes that redress of grievances of the sort at issue here is the function of Congress and the chief executive, not the federal courts.”
Chief Justice Roberts complained that “today’s decision recalls the previous high-water mark of diluted standing requirements,” a 1973 decision known as the SCRAP case. That was an environmental case that the Supreme Court allowed to proceed on a definition of standing so generous as to be all but unthinkable today. “Today’s decision is SCRAP for a new generation,” the chief justice said, not intending the comparison as a compliment.
The majority addressed the standing question by noting that it was only necessary for one of the many plaintiffs to meet the three-part definition of standing: that it had suffered a “concrete and particularized injury,” that the injury was “fairly traceable to the defendant,” and that a favorable decision would be likely to “redress that injury.”
Massachusetts, one of the 12 state plaintiffs, met the test, Justice Stevens said, because it had made a case that global warming was raising the sea level along its coast, presenting the state with a “risk of catastrophic harm” that “would be reduced to some extent” if the government undertook the regulation the state sought.
In addition, Justice Stevens said, Massachusetts was due special deference in its claim to standing because of its status as a sovereign state. This new twist on the court’s standing doctrine may have been an essential tactic in winning the vote of Justice Kennedy, a leader in the court’s federalism revolution of recent years. Justice Stevens, a dissenter from the court’s states-rights rulings and a master of court strategy, in effect managed to use federalism as a sword rather than a shield.
Following its discussion of standing, the majority made short work of the agency’s threshold argument that the Clean Air Act simply did not authorize it to regulate greenhouse gases because carbon dioxide and the other gases were not “air pollutants” within the meaning of the law.
“The statutory text forecloses E.P.A.’s reading,” Justice Stevens said, adding that “greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of air pollutant.”
The justices in the majority also indicated that they were persuaded by the existing evidence of the impact of automobile emissions on the environment.
The agency itself “does not dispute the existence of a causal connection between man-made gas emissions and global warming,” Justice Stevens noted, adding that “judged by any standard, U.S. motor-vehicle emissions make a meaningful contribution to greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Justice Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, disputed the majority’s statutory analysis.
The decision overturned a 2005 ruling by the federal appeals court here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/washington/02cnd-scotus.html?ex=1176177600&en=dfd85a525f8dfb18&ei=5070&emc=eta1



Scientists Detail Climate Changes, Poles to Tropics

By JAMES KANTER and ANDREW C. REVKIN
BRUSSELS, April 6 — From the poles to the tropics, the earth’s climate and ecosystems are already being shaped by the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases and face inevitable, possibly profound, alteration, the world’s leading scientific panel on climate change said Friday.
In its most detailed portrait of the effects of climate change driven by human activities, the panel predicted widening droughts in southern Europe and the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the American Southwest and Mexico, and flooding that could imperil low-lying islands and the crowded river deltas of southern Asia. It stressed that many of the regions facing the greatest risks were among the world’s poorest.
And it said that while limits on smokestack and tailpipe emissions could lower the long-term risks, vulnerable regions must adjust promptly to shifting weather patterns, climatic and coastal hazards, and rising seas.
Without such adaptations, it said, a rise of 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century could lead to the inundation of coasts and islands inhabited by hundreds of millions of people. But if steady investments are made in seawalls and other coastal protections, vulnerability could be sharply reduced.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/science/earth/07climate.html?hp



Even as Africa Hungers, Policy Slows Delivery of U.S. Food Aid

By CELIA W. DUGGER
MULONDO, Zambia — Traveling to school in wobbly dugout canoes, Munalula Muhau and her three cousins, 7- and 8-year-olds whose parents had died from AIDS, held onto just one possession: battered tin bowls to receive their daily ration of gruel.
Within weeks, those rations, provided by the United Nations World Food Program, are at risk of running out for them and 500,000 other paupers, including thousands of people wasted by AIDS who are being treated with American-financed drugs that make them hungrier as they grow healthy.
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” said Jeffrey Stringer, an American doctor who runs a nonprofit group treating more than 50,000 Zambians with AIDS, “but it will result in the death of some patients.”
Hoping to forestall such a dire outcome, the World Food Program made an urgent appeal in February for cash donations so it could buy corn from Zambia’s own bountiful harvest, piled in towering stacks in the warehouses of the capital, Lusaka.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/africa/07zambia.html?hp



A Top Aide to Gonzales Resigns, Becoming Latest Fallout Casualty

By DAVID STOUT and DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, April 6 — A top aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales resigned on Friday, becoming another casualty of the political storm that has rocked the Justice Department in the aftermath of last year’s dismissals of eight United States attorneys.
The aide, Monica Goodling, had helped to coordinate those dismissals with the White House, an episode that has provoked demands for Mr. Gonzales’s dismissal. Even Mr. Gonzales’s allies, including President Bush, say the dismissals were bungled from a public relations and political standpoint.
Ms. Goodling, who has been on leave as the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, notified the Senate Judiciary Committee through her lawyer on March 26 that she would invoke her constitutional right not to testify in the panel’s inquiry about the dismissals — not because she had anything to hide, the lawyer said, but because she did not expect fair treatment in the current climate of political hostility.
In a three-sentence resignation letter, Ms. Goodling wrote to Mr. Gonzales, “May God bless you richly as you continue your service to America.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07goodling.html?hp



Britons Say They Feared for Lives in Iran Captivity
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, April 6 — Their greatest scare, they recalled, came on the second day, when they were flown to Tehran, blindfolded and backed up against a prison wall while their Iranian captors fiddled with weapons, cocking rifles and making them fear for their lives.
“We thought we were going to the British Embassy but we got taken to a detention center," said Royal Marine Joe Tindell, 21, one of 15 British sailors and marines seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in disputed waters in the Persian Gulf on March 23.
At the detention center, the mood turned drastically, as their captors changed from military dress into all black, their faces covered.
“We had a blindfold and plastic cuffs, hands behind our backs, heads against the wall,” Royal Marine Tindell said in an interview with the BBC. “Someone, I’m not sure who, someone said, I quote, ‘Lads, lads, I think we’re going to get executed.’
“After that comment someone was sick, and as far as I was concerned he had just had his throat cut. From there we were rushed to a room, quick photo, and then stuffed into a cell and didn’t see or speak to anyone for six days.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/europe/07britain.html?hp



Democrats’ Rise Has Pluses, Say G.O.P. Centrists

By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
WASHINGTON, April 6 — If the Democratic ascendance on Capitol Hill was supposed to usher in dark days for Republicans, it is hard to tell from talking to moderate ones like Mike Ferguson, who represents a suburban district in central New Jersey.
As the new Democrat-led House rushed to complete its business before adjourning for spring break this week, Representative Ferguson was marveling at the many bills that had been passed in Congress’s first 100 days, including one that would make it easier for unions to organize and another that would increase the minimum wage.
“Under the Republican majority, those bills would have never gotten to the floor,” he explained before heading back to his district. “Now they have been brought to the floor, and I’ve voted for them.”
Mr. Ferguson’s enthusiasm captures a peculiar political reality in the Capitol: many Republicans from swing districts in the Northeast are finding that life under Democratic rule has its advantages.
During the 12 years that Republicans controlled the House, moderate Republicans were the stepchildren of their party, expected to vote with their conservative leadership on crucial issues, even if it meant taking positions that could anger centrist voters back home.
In fact, the Democrats made some of their deepest inroads last year in the Northeast. A total of 10 Republican incumbents in the House were defeated in four states — New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania — where the challengers aggressively tried to tie the incumbents to President Bush and his conservative allies on the Hill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07moderates.html?hp


Networks Condemn Remarks by Imus

By DAVID CARR
On Wednesday morning, Don Imus called the students who play for the Rutgers University women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed ho’s.”
Even for Mr. Imus, a nationally syndicated radio host who knows his way around an insult, it was a shocking remark, one that seemed to impugn both the physical and moral characteristics of a team composed mostly of black players.
What followed was a familiar dance for Mr. Imus and the media companies that profit from his ability to shock his way to big audiences: outrage, indignation and, eventually, the expression of deep regret.
And so on Thursday, Mr. Imus wondered aloud on his show what the big deal was, saying people should not be offended by “some idiot comment meant to be amusing.”
But as often occurs in a modern media drama, Mr. Imus’s remarks were picked up on the Web, in this case by the Media Matters for America site (mediamatters.org). And by Friday, both his radio and television outlets were getting out 10-foot poles.
MSNBC, which simulcasts Mr. Imus’s show on cable television, issued an apology, noting that the program is not a production of the network; NBC, its parent company, called the comments “deplorable.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/arts/television/07imus.html?hp



A Setback Then a Reprieve for Vonage in Courts

By LAURIE J. FLYNN
Vonage Holdings, the Internet phone company, had a wild ride in the courtroom yesterday.
First, a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., barred Vonage from signing up new customers for its Internet phone service.
Then hours later, a federal appeals court gave Vonage a temporary stay of that injunction, allowing the company to continue to enroll customers while it sought to overturn the lower court ruling.
Vonage, based in Holmdel, N.J., has been entangled for years in a patent dispute with Verizon Communications, which had accused it of violating three patents covering technology that allows low-cost voice calls to be made over the Internet.
Yesterday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington issued its temporary stay in response to a request from Vonage. The move came after Judge Claude M. Hilton of the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., issued a partial injunction that said Vonage could service existing customers but not new ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/technology/07vonage.html?hp


Bush Chides Democrats Over War Bill

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:13 a.m. ET
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) -- President Bush criticized Democrats on Saturday for going on vacation without first giving him what he wants: a war spending bill free of orders to pull troops home.
''I recognize that Democrats are trying to show their current opposition to the war in Iraq,'' Bush said in his weekly radio address from Crawford, where he is on a break of his own.
''They see the emergency war spending bill as a chance to make that statement,'' Bush said. ''Yet for our men and women in uniform, this emergency war spending bill is not a political statement, it is a source of critical funding that has a direct impact on their daily lives.''
Bush has asked Congress for more than $100 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year. The House and Senate have approved the money, but their bills aim to wind down the war by including timelines for troops to come home -- something Bush won't accept.
The Senate bill would require a U.S. troop exit in Iraq to begin within 120 days, with a completion goal of March 31, 2008. The House bill orders all combat troops out by Sept. 1, 2008.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html


Katrina’s Scars Still Etch the Face of New Orleans
By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune
NEW ORLEANS
You got a strong stomach?" The question came one early morning from a young black woman in a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "War is not the answer." She was standing on a sidewalk outside her home, not far from this battered city's fabled French Quarter.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because there's a dead cat here and I don't want to move it." She smiled, a little embarrassed. "I just covered it with this garbage can."
The inverted trash container stood nearby. There were, she explained, many stray animals in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in August 2005 and sent much of its pre-storm population of 455,000 into flight. "It's a big cat," she added.
Kirsten McGregor - we later got introduced - was right about that. The dead cat was large and rigid and heavy. I dropped it into a garbage bag she held open. It was a relief to get the animal off the street.

http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2007/04/06/us/IHT-06globalist.1.html



Looking Beyond the Brass Ring
Tags: achievement, college, girls
I still remember the day when I was in my mid-20s that Cate, my best friend from college, told me her cousin had gotten into Harvard.
She laughed as I expressed my congratulations. “She doesn’t know that it’s all downhill from here,” she said.
I’ve thought about this exchange many times in the course of my adult life. It came to mind, most recently, when I read Sara Rimer’s intriguing piece in The New York Times last Sunday about the “amazing girls” of Newton North High School.
These were girls who took multiple Advanced Placement classes while playing multiple sports and musical instruments, winning top prizes, starring in plays, helping the homeless and achieving fluency in one or two foreign languages. More amazing still: despite all this incredible accomplishment, they weren’t guaranteed access to their first-choice colleges.
I felt a bit sick at heart, at first, when I read this.
And then I thought: It’s probably the best thing that could have happened to them.

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/looking-beyond-the-brass-ring/



A Great Year for Ivy League Schools, but Not So Good for Applicants to Them

By SAM DILLON
Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point averages. Needless to say, high school valedictorians were a dime a dozen.
It was the most selective spring in modern memory at America’s elite schools, according to college admissions officers. More applications poured into top schools this admissions cycle than in any previous year on record. Schools have been sending decision letters to student applicants in recent days, and rejection letters have overwhelmingly outnumbered the acceptances.
Stanford received a record 23,956 undergraduate applications for the fall term, accepting 2,456 students, meaning the school took 10.3 percent of applicants.
Harvard College received applications from 22,955 students, another record, and accepted 2,058 of them, for an acceptance rate of 9 percent. The university called that “the lowest admit rate in Harvard’s history.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/education/04colleges.html?em&ex=1176091200&en=2e58161b2ab23a9d&ei=5087%0A



Federal Official Put on Leave in Student Loan Investigation

By KAREN W. ARENSON and JONATHAN D. GLATER
A senior Education Department official who owned stock in a student loan company while helping oversee the federal lending program was placed on leave yesterday, the department said.
The New York attorney general also widened his investigation into the industry, subpoenaing one of the nation’s largest student lenders for a list of all former employees who had worked for the federal department in the past six years.
The moves came a day after the Education Department said it would investigate the shareholdings of the senior official, Matteo Fontana, general manager in a unit of the Office of Federal Student Aid and a department employee since 2002.
A 2003 prospectus for a stock offering filed by the Education Lending Group, the parent company of Student Loan Xpress at the time, showed that Mr. Fontana planned to sell 10,500 shares in the company valued at about $100,000.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07loans.html


Battle Grows Over Renewing Landmark Education Law

By SAM DILLON
When President Bush and Democratic leaders put together the bipartisan coalition behind the federal No Child Left Behind Act, they managed to sidestep, override or flat out ignore decades of sentiment that education is fundamentally a prerogative of state and local government.
Now, as the president and the same Democrats push to renew the landmark law, which has reshaped the face of American education with its mandates for annual testing, discontent with it in many states is threatening to undermine the effort in both parties.
Arizona and Virginia are battling the federal government over rules for testing children with limited English. Utah is fighting over whether rural teachers there pass muster under the law. And Connecticut is two years into a lawsuit arguing that No Child Left Behind has failed to provide states federal financing to meet its requirements.
Reacting to such disputes in state after state, dozens of Republicans in Congress are sponsoring legislation that would water down the law by allowing states to opt out of its testing requirements yet still receive federal money.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/education/07child.html



Chlorine Gas Attack by Truck Bomber Kills Up to 30 in Iraq

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
BAGHDAD, April 6 — A suicide truck bomb loaded with chlorine gas exploded in Ramadi on Friday, killing as many as 30 people, many of them children, a security official said.
The explosion burned victims’ lungs, eyes and skin. Dr. Ali Abdullah Saleh, of the main Ramadi hospital, said 30 people had been admitted with shrapnel wounds and 15 had been sent to a second hospital in the city. He said 50 people had been admitted for breathing problems.
It was at least the sixth chlorine bomb detonated in Anbar Province since late January and the most lethal, though it appears that most victims were killed by the explosion rather than the chlorine. Insurgents have also used chlorine bombs in the northern part of Baghdad, the capital, and near Taji, a town about 20 miles to the north.
The attacker in Ramadi struck in the late morning of the Muslim day of prayer, when children off from school usually play in the street and adults run errands and visit before going to the mosque at midday.
The truck, a fuel tanker loaded with the toxic gas, sped toward an Iraqi police checkpoint, according to witnesses and Col. Tareq al-Dulaimi, the head of security for Anbar Province. The police officers opened fire and the truck swerved toward a residential area, where the bomb exploded, he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/middleeast/07iraq.html



The Real Fumble in Damascus

There is at least one point on which we and the critics of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Damascus can agree: It is the White House, not the speaker of the House, that should be taking the diplomatic lead. But the Bush administration has far more appetite for scoring political points than figuring out whether talking to Syria might help contain the bloodletting in Iraq or revive efforts to negotiate peace.
So long as Mr. Bush continues to shun high-level discussions with this troublesome but strategically located neighbor of Israel, Lebanon and Iraq, such Congressional visits can serve the useful purpose of spurring a much needed examination of the administration’s failed policies.
Ms. Pelosi and the five Democrats and one Republican who accompanied her are scarcely the first to raise such questions during the three years that Mr. Bush has instructed his top envoys — and reportedly Israel as well — to avoid negotiations with Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Plenty of other Republicans and Democrats have been taking similar trips and offering similar advice. They were ignored, but spared the White House’s ridicule.
In the administration’s perverse view, the only legitimate time for negotiations would be after the most contentious and difficult issues — Syria’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah, its meddling in Lebanon and open border with Iraq — have already been resolved. Thus, what ought to be the main agenda points for diplomatic discussions have been turned into a set of preconditions designed to ensure that no discussions ever take place. As the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, Congressional representatives of both parties, this page, and many others have pointed out, Washington should be eager to raise just those issues, along with the possibility of a land-for-peace deal with Israel, directly with Syrian leaders.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/opinion/07sat1.html


22 Brands of Dog Biscuits Are Added to Pet Food Recall

By KATIE ZEZIMA
A recall of pet food tainted with melamine, a chemical used to make plastic products, has been widened to include 22 types of dog biscuits, the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday.
The biscuits, made by Sunshine Mills Inc., contain wheat gluten imported from China that contained melamine, said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the F.D.A.
Sunshine Mills, of Red Bay, Ala., manufactures branded and private label dry pet food and biscuits. The recalled biscuits include Nurture Chicken and Rice Biscuit, Ol’ Roy Peanut Butter Biscuit and Pet Life Large Biscuit.
Conrad Pitts, a lawyer for Sunshine Mills, said 80 percent of the tainted biscuits were sold by Wal-Mart, under the Ol’ Roy brand. Mr. Pitts said that the company had produced about 24 truckloads of biscuits with the contaminated gluten, and that the majority of the product was large biscuits. He said wheat gluten accounted for less than 1 percent of the total weight of the biscuits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/us/06petfood.html?em&ex=1176091200&en=6a90c819c45cc7b9&ei=5087%0A


To the Editor:
Even though the Army provides benefits to soldiers that liberals might wish our country provided for all of its citizens, we shouldn’t forget the questionable ends for which our Army is often deployed.
Nor should we forget the underfinanced social programs that the trillions in military spending represent.
Mark Johnson
Kirkland, Wash., April 3, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/opinion/l07army.html


My Life in the Army
By ROBERT WRIGHT
Published: April 3, 2007
In one sense, I was well positioned to enjoy the summer of love. In 1969, I was living in San Francisco, epicenter of hippiedom, antiwar fervor and utopian hope for perpetual peace.
Circumstances kept me from sharing the spirit. The part of San Francisco I lived in was the Presidio, which was then a military base. I was 12, and my father was an Army officer. I remember my family once driving toward the Presidio’s Lombard Street gate past tens of thousands of protesters who seemed to think my father was part of a very bad outfit.
I was sure they were wrong, and I still am. In fact, the whole, larger stereotype — that the military is a right-wing institution, best viewed with skepticism if not cynicism by the left — is way off. Growing up in, or at least amid, the Army helped make me a liberal — not because I reacted against my environment, but because I absorbed its values. If all of America were more like the Army, it would be a better country.

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/opinion/03wright.html



Karzai Says He Has Met With Some Taliban Members in an Effort at Reconciliation

By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 6 — President Hamid Karzai said Friday, for the first time, that he had held meetings with members of the Taliban as part of a reconciliation effort, but he ruled out talks with the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, or foreign militants fighting with the Taliban.
He made the comments as the Taliban claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the capital that killed six people, and as NATO battled Taliban forces for control of an important town in southern Afghanistan.
“We’ve had representatives from the Taliban meeting with the different bodies of the Afghan government for a long time,” Mr. Karzai said at a news conference at the presidential palace. “I’ve had some Taliban coming to speak to me as well, so this process has been there for a long time.” Mr. Karzai set up a reconciliation commission in 2005 to woo Taliban members over to the government, but it has had limited success.
“Afghan Taliban are the sons of this soil,” he said. “As they repent, as they regret, as they want to come back to their own country, they are welcome.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/world/asia/07afghan.html



Op-Ed Contributor
A United Front Against the Taliban

By MUNIR AKRAM
AS the spring fighting season opens, Afghanistan faces many challenges: terrorism, the Taliban, Islamic extremism, drugs and criminals, warlords and factional friction, weak government and an inadequate national and international security presence.
This is a good time to make an objective assessment of the Afghan and regional environment and to put together a strategy to overcome those challenges. This strategy should be comprehensive, combining military containment with political reconciliation, administrative control and rapid socio-economic development. It must build peace through a bottom-up approach — village by village, district by district — by offering incentives and disincentives to secure the support and cooperation of local populations.
Winning the hearts and minds of the people is even more important than killing or capturing insurgents. Military tactics that cause collateral civilian casualties and damage property may kill 10 terrorists, but they will create 100 more. Most important, no strategy will succeed without accelerated reconstruction and economic development. It must offer hope to the people — hope for peace, jobs and better lives for themselves and their children.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/opinion/07akram.html



HUD Institutes Changes to Speed Storm Repairs

By LESLIE EATON
Louisiana homeowners may get faster access to rebuilding grants after a federal decision late last month that is forcing the state to change its slow-moving $7.5-billion “Road Home” program to repair houses damaged or destroyed by hurricanes in 2005.
But the changes, which should be detailed next week, have raised concerns that some homeowners will not use their grants of up to $150,000 for repairs or could lose them to fraud or debt, potentially leading to increased blight in hard-hit areas.
The program has been criticized around the state for its slow pace in handing out the money, which was provided by the federal government. As of April 3, more than 121,000 families had applied to Road Home, but roughly half had still not had been told how much money they could receive.
Just 6,100 families — 5 percent of applicants — had actually reached the “closing” stage and been given access to the cash by early April. And the money has been doled out through banks only as homeowners proved that rebuilding was in progress.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/us/07rebuild.html


McCain Says He Erred on Iraq Security

By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON, April 6 — Senator John McCain has issued an apology of sorts for his remarks after visiting a Baghdad market last weekend, saying he misspoke when he declared that his ability to walk freely around the marketplace was a sign of a significant improvement in security in Iraq.
He led a Congressional delegation through the Shorja market under tight security, with 100 heavily armed American troops guarding the group and attack helicopters and snipers watching over them. Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, and another member of the delegation, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, said the conditions showed that the decision to deploy more than 20,000 additional American forces to Iraq was having the intended effect.
Baghdad residents expressed astonishment at Mr. McCain’s rosy remarks, saying that he visited the marketplace, the scene of numerous deadly bombings, under unrealistic conditions. Democrats and antiwar bloggers ridiculed him for blindly supporting the administration’s so-called surge policy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/washington/07mccain.html


The Complicated Power of the Vote to Nowhere
By SCOTT SHANE
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON
SO it’s yes to timetables for Iraq, both the House and the Senate have now said. But don’t schedule the welcome-home parades yet.
For a start, the two very different spending bills passed in the last 10 days have yet to be reconciled and President Bush has promised a veto, with a veto override quite unlikely.
But that isn’t to say the votes were meaningless, judging from the last slow-motion collision of a wartime president and the antiwar voices in Congress.
Historians of the Vietnam era suggest that those who look to Congress for decisive action to end the current war will be disappointed. But they say that today, just as in the 1960s and 70s, Congress both reflects and amplifies public disillusionment; its votes, however symbolic, could set political limits on the president’s options.
“Congress becomes the public voice of opposition,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, who has dissected the interaction of Congress with both Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. “And it’s happening more quickly this time because Iraq stands in the shadow of Vietnam.”
Vietnam certainly cast a deep shadow over the recent debate, both for those who demanded a swift pullout from Iraq and those who warned against it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/weekinreview/01shane.html


Detroit Decides to Help Shape, Not Resist, Regulation of Emissions

By MICHELINE MAYNARD and NICK BUNKLEY
The New York International Auto Show, which opened to the public yesterday, is a picture of an industry with a cloud over its head.
While the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center abounds with flashy new vehicles like the big Lexus LX 570, a sport utility vehicle equipped with 19 speakers and 10 air bags, and the high-powered Ford Mustang 500 GT KR, created by the longtime racing designer Carroll Shelby, the carmakers are also contending with the possibility that such gas-guzzling vehicles may soon become harder to sell.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from automobiles. The primary way that can be done, carmakers and environmentalists say, is to increase automobile fuel economy.
In normal times, that would raise hackles from Detroit carmakers, which have a long history of fighting regulations covering both fuel economy and tailpipe emissions. But this week, company executives were saying something different.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/business/07emissions.html



Wrestling With Songs Tougher Than the Rest

By NATE CHINEN
Bruce Springsteen, finally taking the stage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night, started out by assuring the crowd that he was still alive. Or maybe he was reassuring himself. The evening had felt, he said, “a little bit like that dream everybody has, where you’re invisible and you’re floating above a room, and all these people are talking about you.” The kicker, of course, is that it turns out to be your funeral.
Mr. Springsteen was the surprise twist in “The Music of Bruce Springsteen,” and the only logical conclusion. He had observed roughly a third of the concert’s 20 performances from the vantage of a mezzanine box: floating above the room, if hardly invisible. What he heard was a raft of artists grappling with his songs and, a bit more arduously, his style.
Some of them managed the task brilliantly; nobody made it seem easy. Mr. Springsteen’s songs occupy various stations in the emotional expanse between defiant and defeated, and they don’t take kindly to revision. Robin Holcomb’s piano-and- vocal take on “Brilliant Disguise,” with its cloak of strange new tonalities, was among the concert’s most inventive turns; that it wasn’t too enjoyable was only partly Ms. Holcomb’s fault. Another pianist, Uri Caine, devised a jazz abstraction of “New York City Serenade.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/arts/music/07bruc.html



To Fortify China, Soybean Harvest Grows in Brazil

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
RONDONÓPOLIS, Brazil — For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese have turned soybeans into tofu, a staple of the country’s diet.
But as its economy grows, so does China’s appetite for pork, poultry and beef, which require higher volumes of soybeans as animal feed. Plagued by scarce water supplies, China is turning to a new trading partner 15,000 miles away — Brazil — to supply more protein-packed beans essential to a richer diet.
China’s global scramble for natural resources is leading to a transformation of agricultural trading around the world. In China, vanishing cropland and diminishing water supplies are hampering the country’s ability to feed itself, and the increasing use of farmland in the United States to produce biofuels is pushing China to seek more of its staples from South America, where land is still cheap and plentiful.
“China is out there beating the bushes,” said Robert L. Thompson, a professor at the University of Illinois who is a former director of agricultural and rural development at the World Bank. The goal, he said, is “to ensure they have access to long-term contracts for minerals and energy and food.”
Once, the biggest bilateral food trade flowed between the United States, the world’s largest food exporter, and Japan. But countries with vast arable land available for expansion, particularly Brazil, are now racing to meet demand in China, whose population of 1.3 billion is 10 times that of Japan’s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/business/worldbusiness/06soy.html?ex=1176436800&en=138a6ebd57e667f7&ei=5070&emc=eta1>



An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and KIRK JOHNSON
A Western drought that began in 1999 has continued after the respite of a couple of wet years that now feel like a cruel tease. But this time people in the driest states are not just scanning the skies and hoping for rescue.
Some $2.5 billion in water projects are planned or under way in four states, the biggest expansion in the West’s quest for water in decades. Among them is a proposed 280-mile pipeline that would direct water to Las Vegas from northern Nevada. A proposed reservoir just north of the California-Mexico border would correct an inefficient water delivery system that allows excess water to pass to Mexico.
In Yuma, Ariz., federal officials have restarted an idled desalination plant, long seen as a white elephant from a bygone era, partly in the hope of purifying salty underground water for neighboring towns.
The scramble for water is driven by the realities of population growth, political pressure and the hard truth that the Colorado River, a 1,400-mile-long silver thread of snowmelt and a lifeline for more than 20 million people in seven states, is providing much less water than it had.
According to some long-term projections, the mountain snows that feed the Colorado River will melt faster and evaporate in greater amounts with rising global temperatures, providing stress to the waterway even without drought. This year, the spring runoff is expected to be about half its long-term average. In only one year of the last seven, 2005, has the runoff been above average.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/us/04drought.html?ex=1176350400&en=0597f317e88b7736&ei=5070&emc=eta1>


Stay on Track

Americans made 10.1 billion trips on public transportation last year, the highest that ridership has risen in nearly half a century. That’s good for congestion on the roads as well as the pollution that goes with it. But any mass-transit renaissance will come to a grinding halt unless a commensurate investment is made in upkeep and expansion.
As Libby Sander reported recently in The Times, Chicago’s elevated train system, known as the El, appears to be near a breaking point. The second-largest public transit system in America after New York’s is suffering from rising commute times as the century-old system deteriorates.
Public transit systems are financed through a combination of federal and local money, so parochial priorities play a big role in underinvestment. For instance, the Chicago Transit Authority’s financing formula hasn’t changed since 1983. But at the same time, the federal gas tax — which contributes money for public transportation systems as well as highways — hasn’t changed since 1993. That means it hasn’t even kept up with inflation in maintenance and construction costs, much less rising demand.
Part of the trouble with financing for mass transit is that the upfront costs always appear prohibitively large (for the next five years, Chicago’s regional authority is seeking $10 billion in state and local money) while the benefits are long term and extremely diffuse. As a result, projects often linger. Planners have been trying to build New York’s Second Avenue Line since the 1920s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/opinion/04weds4.html?ex=1176350400&en=68883f5abbccec18&ei=5070&emc=eta1


French Train Breaks Rail Speed Record

By ARIANE BERNARD
BEZANNES, France, April 3 — A French high-speed train broke the world speed record on rail on Tuesday, reaching 357 miles an hour (574.8 kilometers) in a much publicized test in eastern France, exceeding expectations that it would hit 150 meters a second, or 540 kilometers an hour.
The train, code-named V150, is a research prototype meant to demonstrate the superiority both of the TGV high-speed train and of its probable successor, the AGV, which is also manufactured by the French engineering group Alstom. The performance on Tuesday came close to but did not break the world speed record for any train, set by an electromagnetic train in 2003.
The French railroad company SNCF and Alstom publicized the event as a test of “French excellence,” building on national pride for the 25-year-old bullet train.
The train reached its maximum speed in about 16 minutes at a site about 125 miles from Paris on a specially chosen sector of tracks of the new Eastern Europe TGV line, which will begin service between Paris and Strasbourg in June. The V150 train, with a reduced number of train cars and larger wheels, incorporates technological elements from the AGV.
SNCF and Alstom insist that the demonstration does not fulfill any immediate commercial purposes, but others say the speed could serve as a selling point in Asia and other markets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/business/worldbusiness/04train.html?ex=1176350400&en=e9c3c3b347aac71e&ei=5070&emc=eta1


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