Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Terror Trial Witness Ties Pakistan to 2008 Attacks
David C. Headley, who claims he scouted Mumbai for a terror group, said he had help from Pakistan’s spy agency.
Monday, May 30, 2011
In Europe, Rifts Widen Over Greece
Fissures among Europe’s currency partners are deepening, raising new doubts about whether the group can resolve a regional debt crisis.
British Lawmakers Join Fray as Twitter Tests Law
Lawmakers may adjust a privacy injunction after Twitter’s gleeful circumvention of a ruling.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Union Effort Turns Its Focus to Target
The retailer’s employees are unhappy with about low wages and short workweeks.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Radio Host Says Rapture Actually Coming in October
California preacher Harold Camping said Monday his prophecy that the world would end was off by five months because Judgment Day actually will come on Oct. 21.
Friday, May 27, 2011
A Rush to Protect Patients, Then Bloody Chaos
Rescuers worked to find people still alive after a tornado destroyed much of Joplin, Mo., including a hospital.
Democrats Try to Woo Consumer Advocate to Run
Officials want Elizabeth Warren to run for Senate in Massachusetts rather than set up a consumer financial protection bureau.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Memo From East Africa: Border Town Incursion Poses Big Risk for Sudan
Soon before they were to declare independence, southern leaders watched the north take over a disputed town.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
NATO Hits Tripoli in Heaviest Strikes Yet
More than 20 airstrikes in less than a half-hour shook the Libyan capital.
Evidence Said to Tie Ex-I.M.F. Chief to Housekeeper
Evidence from a housekeeper’s work clothes were said to have matched the DNA of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
DealBook: Jimmy Choo Sold to Labelux for About $800 Million
Labelux, a privately held luxury group, said Sunday that it had agreed to acquire the high-end shoe and accessories company Jimmy Choo from TowerBrook Partners, a private equity firm, for an undisclosed sum.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Europeans Focus on Retaining Leadership of I.M.F.
Officials rallied around Christine Lagarde despite calls from emerging markets for a transparent process.
Revolutionary Cuba Now Lays Sand Traps for the Bourgeoisie
Now, 50 years later, foreign developers say the Cuban government has swung in nearly the opposite direction, giving preliminary approval in recent weeks for four large luxury golf resorts on the island, the first in an expected wave of more than a dozen that the government anticipates will lure free-spending tourists to a nation hungry for cash.
The four initial projects total more than $1.5 billion, with the government’s cut of the profits about half. Plans for the developments include residences that foreigners will be permitted to buy — a rare opportunity from a government that all but banned private property in its push for social equality.
Mr. Castro and his comrade in arms Che Guevara, who worked as a caddie in his youth in Argentina, were photographed in fatigues hitting the links decades ago, in what some have interpreted as an effort to mock either the sport or the golf-loving president at the time of the revolution, Dwight D. Eisenhower — or both.
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who maintains close ties with Cuba, has taken aim at the pastime in recent years as well, questioning why, in the face of slums and housing shortages, courses should spread over valuable land “just so some little group of the bourgeois and the petit bourgeois can go and play golf.”
But Cuba’s deteriorating economy and the rise in the sport’s popularity, particularly among big-spending travelers who expect to bring their clubs wherever they go, have softened the government’s view, investors said. Cuban officials did not respond to requests for comment, but Manuel Marrero, the tourism minister, told a conference in Europe this month that the government anticipates going forward with joint ventures to build 16 golf resorts in the near future.
For the past three years, Cuba’s only 18-hole course, a government-owned spread at the Varadero Beach resort area, has even hosted a tournament. It has long ceased to be, its promoters argued, a rich man’s game.
“We were told this foray is the top priority in foreign investment,” said Graham Cooke, a Canadian golf course architect designing a $410 million project at Guardalavaca Beach, along the island’s north coast about 500 miles from Havana, for a consortium of Indians from Canada. The company, Standing Feather International, says it signed a memorandum of agreement with the Cuban government in late April and will be the first to break ground, in September.
Andrew Macdonald, the chief executive of London-based Esencia Group, which helps sponsor the golf tournament in Cuba and is planning a $300 million country club in Varadero, said, “This is a fundamental development in having a more eclectic tourist sector.”
The other developments are expected to include at least one of the three proposed by Leisure Canada, a Vancouver-based firm that recently announced a licensing agreement with the Professional Golfers Association for its planned resorts in Cuba, and a resort being designed by Foster & Partners of London.
The projects are primarily aimed at Canadian, European and Asian tourists; Americans are not permitted to spend money on the island, under the cold-war-era trade embargo, unless they have a license from the Treasury Department.
Developers working on the new projects said they believed Cuba had a dozen or so courses before the revolution, some of which were turned into military bases. Cuba and foreign investors for years have talked about building new golf resorts, but the proposals often butted against revolutionary ideals and red tape. Several policy changes adopted at a Communist Party congress in April, however, appear to have helped clear the way, including one resolution specifically naming golf and marinas as important assets in developing tourism and rescuing the sagging economy.
“Cuba saw the normal sun and salsa beach offerings and knew it was not going to be sustainable,” said Chris Nicholas, managing director of Standing Feather, which negotiated for eight years with Cuba’s state-run tourism company. “They needed more facets of tourism to offer and decided golf was an excellent way to go.”
The developers said putting housing in the complexes was important to make them more attractive to tourists and investors, and to increase profits.
Still, John Kavulich, a senior adviser for the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, said Cuba had a history of pulling back on perceived big steps toward freer enterprise and might wrestle to explain how such high-dollar compounds could coexist with often dilapidated housing for everyone else.
“Will Cuba allow Cuban citizens to be members, to play?” he said. “How will that work out? Allowing someone to work there and allowing someone to prosper there is an immense deep ravine for the government.”
But Mr. Macdonald said political issues were moot, given that Cuba already had come to terms with several beach resorts near Havana that generally attracted middle-class foreign travelers.
“It’s not an issue for them,” he said. “It’s tourism. It’s people coming to visit the country.”
If the projects are built as envisioned, the tourists will enjoy not just new, state-of-the-art courses and the opportunity for a second home in Cuba, but shopping malls, spas and other luxury perks. Standing Feather, which calls its complex Estancias de Golf Loma Linda (Loma Linda Golf Estates), promises 1,200 villas, bungalows, duplexes and apartments set on 520 acres framed by mountains and beach.
The residences are expected to average $600,000, and rooms at the 170-room hotel the complex will include may go for about $200 a night, a stark contrast in a nation where salaries average $20 a month.
Standing Feather said that to build a sense of community and provide the creature comforts of home among its clientele, the complex will include its own shopping center, selling North American products under relaxed customs regulations.
“It is in the area that Castro is from, in Holguin Province,” added Mr. Cooke, the golf course architect.
North Sudan Takes Contested Town on South Border
The seizure of Abyei is a serious military escalation with the potential of igniting civil war, Western officials said.
Steady Decline in Major Crime Baffles Experts
The rate of violent crimes in the United States was at a nearly 40-year low last year, confounding expectations that economic distress would lead to a rise.
Critic’s Notebook: Cannes Gives Top Prize to ‘The Tree of Life’
The Palme d’Or went to the film by the American director and writer Terrence Malick.
Talk Show Ends, and Oprah Moves On
Oprah Winfrey’s last show will be the biggest such moment since Johnny Carson left “The Tonight Show.”
Iceland Shuts Main Airport After Volcano Eruption
Officials said Sunday that it appeared there would be no wider threat to European air travel for the next 24 hours.
Obama Challenges Israel to Make Hard Choices Needed for Peace
President Obama repeated his call for Palestinian statehood based on Israel’s pre-1967 borders adjusted for land swaps in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the nation’s foremost pro-Israel lobbying group.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Militants Attack Pakistani Base
Islamist militants attacked a naval base in the Pakistani city of Karachi late Sunday, rocking the base with explosions and battling commandos.
Justices, 5-4, Tell California to Cut Prisoner Population
Conditions in overcrowded prisons violate the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled.
The Media Equation: TV Justice Thrives on Fear
On Nancy Grace’s television show, the presumption of innocence has found a willful and angry enemy.
The Caucus: Daniels Decides Against Republican Presidential Bid
Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana said he decided against running because of family considerations.
Gates Warns Against Big Cuts in Military Spending
Budget pressures must not limit spending such that the military is unable to defend American interests, the defense secretary told graduates at Notre Dame.
18 Reported Killed in Series of Blasts in Baghdad
Twelve explosions shook Baghdad over the span of two hours on Sunday morning, according to an Iraqi security official.
City Room: Oscar Winner Facing Sex Charges Is Found Dead
The writer of “You Light Up My Life,” who was awaiting trial, is believed to have killed himself, the police said.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Mideast Questions Likely to Surface in Obama’s Trip to Europe
The president will visit Ireland and London before heading to a meeting of the Group of Eight world powers in Deauville, France.
DealBook: Grassley Investigating Trades Made by SAC Capital
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is examining 20 stock trades by the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, a spokesman for the lawmaker said Saturday.
The inquiry is the result of a letter sent by Mr. Grassley on April 26 to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority asking it to provide information on the “potential scope of suspicious trading activity” at SAC, the hedge fund run by the billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen.
Mr. Cohen’s firm, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, has become ensnared by the government’s vast investigation into insider trading at hedge funds. The investigation resulted in the conviction earlier this month of Raj Rajaratnam, the head of the Galleon Group.
As part of an investigation separate from the one involving Mr. Rajaratnam, two SAC portfolio managers have pleaded guilty to making illegal trades based on secret corporate information. Neither SAC nor Mr. Cohen has been charged with any wrongdoing. A firm spokesman has said that SAC was “outraged” by the conduct of the two portfolio managers, Noah Freeman and Donald Longueuil.
Steve Marcus/Reuters SAC Capital Advisors, run by Steven A. Cohen, is one of the largest hedge funds in the world.In his letter to the financial authority, known as Finra, Mr. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that “while SAC Capital itself has not been charged, these allegations raise serious questions about the corporate culture at SAC Capital and undercut investor confidence in a fair and balanced playing field.”
Finra provided Mr. Grassley with details of SAC’s trading last week. The stock transactions were made over the last decade and previously were referred to the Securities and Exchange Commission. They included trades made around the time of merger announcements or other market-moving events.
News of the SAC trades that Finra provided to Mr. Grassley was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this month, SAC executives, including Peter Nussbaum, the firm’s top lawyer, and its outside counsel met with staff members in Mr. Grassley’s office to discuss his inquiry.
“We welcomed the opportunity to meet with the staff to educate them about the firm and our compliance efforts, and had an entirely appropriate, professional and cordial meeting. We will continue to cooperate in any way we can,” SAC said in a statement provided Saturday by a firm spokesman.
Mr. Grassley’s aggressive stance toward SAC follows the senator’s past criticism of the S.E.C. for not being vigilant enough in its pursuit of illegal activity on Wall Street, including its failure to uncover frauds including Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Now Mr. Grassley’s attention has turned to insider trading.
“The use of nonpublic information for insider trading purposes is sadly alive and well in our nation’s financial markets,” Mr. Grassley wrote in his letter to Finra. “More must be done to investigate and bring these criminals to justice.”
In Belated Inauguration, Ivory Coast’s President Urges Unity
Mr. Ouattara called for reconciliation and peace in a country that was once one of Africa’s richest but that has been devastated by years of unrest, political division and civil war.
“The time has arrived for Ivorians to come together,” Mr. Ouattara, a former economist and banker, said in a speech that did not deviate from his habitually austere manner. “Dear brothers and sisters, let’s celebrate peace. Like the great people we are, we are going to reunite. Yes, we are going to come together. Let us learn to live together again.”
The country is still reeling from a four-month armed standoff that killed as many as 3,000 people, according to officials and human rights groups, and that sent tens of thousands of refugees fleeing violence into neighboring lands. About 160,000 are still in exile in Liberia, according to the International Rescue Committee.
Sanctions imposed by the European Union, the United States and regional governments had crippled the economy as President Laurent Gbagbo, who decisively lost the presidential election in November, refused to give up office.
Life is slowly returning to a semblance of normalcy. Banks have reopened, the nation’s vital cocoa exports have resumed and civil servants have returned to their desks with two months’ back pay.
Mr. Ouattara must govern under the burden of multiple handicaps. The country is still split between his supporters and those of Mr. Gbagbo, who received 46 percent of the vote in the election; whole villages and cocoa farms in the west remain devastated; and Mr. Ouattara was installed largely by foreign forces.
Months of African diplomacy proved ineffectual in dislodging Mr. Gbagbo, and Mr. Ouattara’s fighters played a secondary role. Ultimately, it was the French missile attacks against Mr. Gbagbo’s heavy-weapons installations that led to his defeat.
France’s central role was recognized at the ceremony in Yamoussoukro when its president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the audience, was the first head of state to be saluted by Mr. Ouattara, and received sustained applause. Yet much of the population, especially Mr. Gbagbo’s supporters, resent the former colonial master and consider Mr. Ouattara as France’s man.
About 20 heads of state attended the ceremony, including African leaders who have clung to office for decades and are themselves beneficiaries of disputed or fraudulent elections. The event took place in Yamoussoukro, the native village of Ivory Coast’s founding president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, and its official capital, although Abidjan is the main commercial city and center of government.
Mr. Gbagbo remains under house arrest in the northern town of Korhogo, where he has been interrogated by Ouattara officials with a view to possible prosecution, and about 200 members of his government are also to be questioned, according to officials.
Mr. Gbagbo’s wife, Simone, a powerful influence in his government, has been interrogated in a separate location.
Mr. Ouattara has promised a South African-style “dialogue, truth and reconciliation” commission to look into the conflict, and he has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes committed “since Nov. 28,” the date of the election whose result Mr. Gbagbo refused to acknowledge.
Mr. Ouattara’s call for the investigation to include “all of Ivorian territory” reiterates his position that any atrocities committed by forces that eventually declared their loyalty to him, including a massacre in which hundreds died in Duékoué in the west, should also be punished. Nonetheless, according to Human Rights Watch, “the majority of abuses during the first three months were by forces under Gbagbo’s control” and “probably amounted to crimes against humanity.”
Indeed, the civilian population in Abidjan was repeatedly attacked, over the course of months, by uniformed men directly under Mr. Gbagbo’s control, in what appeared to be deliberate state policy. The killings of Gbagbo supporters that took place at the end of the conflict were carried out by ragtag forces that only belatedly swung to Mr. Ouattara.
Mr. Ouattara, a former prime minister and deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, faces the immense task of rebuilding a country damaged by civil war, 10 years of what is widely acknowledged as the corrupt leadership of Mr. Gbagbo and fierce ethnic divisions. The new government filed suit in Swiss courts this month against Mr. Gbagbo and his entourage to recover tens of millions of dollars in assets.
It was less than three weeks ago that the last pro-Gbagbo mercenaries were finally rooted out of Abidjan, fleeing across the lagoons to the west and killing dozens as they went. United Nations investigators later discovered a mass grave containing some 68 bodies in the neighborhood where the Gbagbo forces had been entrenched.
Guard Dog to the Stars (Legally Speaking)
IT started with a fortune cookie. Two of them, actually.
Martin D. Singer still carries in his wallet the slip he plucked from the first in 1980, on the day he decided to join John H. Lavely Jr. to start their law firm, Lavely & Singer. It reads: “Your intuitions in business decisions are good.”
On the firm’s first anniversary, Mr. Singer recalls, he and Mr. Lavely went out for Chinese again. And he got the same fortune.
Somebody knew the stars were in the market for a pit bull.
Since then, Mr. Singer and his firm of 15 lawyers have emerged as Hollywood’s foremost protectors of the unlikeliest of underdogs: celebrities who seem to have it all.
A growing tabloid culture, coupled with the brutal economics of a contracting entertainment industry, has left a surprising number of the glamour set feeling picked on — and looking for someone to even the score. That is often Mr. Singer, a stocky, bespectacled 59-year-old litigator. More than 30 years ago, he began taking odd jobs that were beneath established firms, then built what might have been a niche practice — shielding stars and their adjuncts from annoyance — into a Hollywood mainstay.
“He’s ferocious and fearless, he really is,” says Sylvester Stallone, one of the first in an expanding list of entertainers, executives and even political figures who have turned to Mr. Singer for help with contracts gone wrong, business relationships gone bad or most any other sort of problem.
“I think I was having trouble with a dinosaur, that’s how far back we go,” jokes Mr. Stallone when asked how he initially connected with Mr. Singer. “There was a dinosaur making some sexual innuendos.”
Lately, Mr. Singer has taken up the cudgels for Charlie Sheen with a lawsuit in which Warner Brothers Television and the producer Chuck Lorre are said to have illegally thrown Mr. Sheen off the hit television show “Two and a Half Men.”
“I really believe Charlie Sheen is a victim,” says Mr. Singer, voicing what seems to a core conviction: that even the rich and famous can be abused. And when that happens, they are apt to call in a heavy.
When Jeremy Piven dropped out of a Broadway production of “Speed-the-Plow” in 2008, Mr. Singer was there — to argue that Mr. Piven had been forced out by mercury poisoning from eating too much fish.
(In a union arbitration with producers, Mr. Piven prevailed.)
Mr. Singer helped save Arnold Schwarzenegger, while he was California’s governor, from two lawsuits by women who contended that they were smeared by political aides — one suit was settled, one dismissed — and this week has been keeping tabs on new reports that Mr. Schwarzenegger fathered a child outside his marriage.
In 2006, Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the majority leader, hired Mr. Singer to deal with a news report that criticized a land transaction. (Mr. Singer says he doesn’t recall what he did for his reported fee of $25,000, and a spokesman for the senator did not respond to queries.)
Less grandly, Mr. Singer in March filed suit for Quentin Tarantino against a neighbor and a fellow writer, Alan Ball, contending that Mr. Ball’s screeching macaws were keeping Mr. Tarantino from getting his work done.
“That’s been resolved,” Mr. Singer says. Mr. Tarantino has since finished his latest screenplay.
“Some people said it’s the best script he’s ever written, because he had the peace and quiet,” Mr. Singer says.
IT is a Monday afternoon in early May. Just outside the door of Mr. Singer’s office, on the 24th floor of a Century City tower, he can be heard growling orders for corrective action against yet another journalist who, in his view, has done a client wrong.
“Let’s demand a retraction,” comes the low, throaty command.
Mr. Singer is remarkable for transformations that turn what Mr. Stallone describes as a warm and fuzzy friend — his full face and jocular smile recall the comic singer Allan Sherman — into a foam-flecked attack dog.
“If you rattle his cage, you’re in for a fight,” says Mr. Stallone, who has had Mr. Singer go to bat for him in court.
Lionel Messi: Boy Genius
Messi's goals against Real Madrid in the Champions League were a product of his myriad talents.
BARCELONA, Spain — Given a rare night on the Barcelona bench last Sunday, Lionel Messi yanked on the seat in front of him, hunched his shoulders over the chair back and kicked it with his cleats. He seemed not so much the world’s best soccer player as a restless kid in a movie theater.
He Doesn’t Live There
by Robert Lalasz
Brilliant!
Magic!
Aaaaaaaagh!
Absolute genius again
From Messi!
They tried
To kick him
They tried
To plow him into the ground
And what you do then?
You try to put
Fire out
With gasoline!
Don’t look for him
In the X’s and O’s
He doesn’t live there.
He doesn’t live in
The tactical world
Or the technical world
He lives in the
Magnetic spectrum
Of genius.
You could corral him with
A dozen alligators
And still he’d weave
His way out.
The Times's soccer blog has the world's game covered from all angles. Messi, at last year's World Cup with Diego Maradona, Argentine legend and his national-team coach, has struggled internationally.
He is 23, with a grown-up’s income reported to exceed $43 million this year. Yet Messi still has a boy’s floppy bangs, a boy’s slight build and a boy’s nickname, the Flea. Even the ball stays on his feet like a shy child clinging to his father’s legs.
It is a boy’s fearlessness, enthusiasm, calm and humility, too, that help explain why Messi is already considered one of the greatest ever to play the world’s game. In the space of 18 tense days from April to early May, Barcelona played four Clásicos against its archrival, Real Madrid. The Madrid strategy was to strangle beauty out of the matches, to use nasty muscle against Messi, to shoulder him down or shiver him with a forearm or take his legs in scything tackles. Once, he was sent rolling as if he had caught fire.
Messi made small appeals for fairness with his eyes and hands, but he remained unflappable and without complaint. He did not yell at the referee or clamp a threatening hand around an opponent’s neck or fake a foul and dive to the ground. He remained apart from ugly words and scuffles and expulsions that marred the matches. Instead, he trumped cynicism with genius.
With a boy’s ardor, Messi put Barcelona in the final of the Champions League in Europe — the world’s most prestigious club tournament — to be played against Manchester United on Saturday at Wembley Stadium in London. He delivered both goals in Barcelona’s 2-0 victory in the first leg of the semifinal round against Real Madrid. This gave Messi a startling 52 goals in his first 50 matches of a season in which he also leads the Spanish league in assists. The first goal was merely outstanding in its timing and clever anticipation. The second was a masterpiece of acceleration, power, balance, agility, vision and darting virtuosity.
“I think this genius is impossible to describe,” Pep Guardiola, Barcelona’s manager, said. “That’s why he is a genius. He has instinct. He loves to live with pressure. He is one of the best ever created.”
That defining Champions League semifinal match was played April 27 at Estadio Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid. Nine months earlier, stars from Barcelona and Real Madrid joined to give Spain its first World Cup title. Together, they lifted the winner’s trophy in South Africa. But now they played for club, not country. Temporary brotherhood fissured. Blood rivalry resumed. Madrid, the capital, was once the base of Franco’s dictatorship and is now the seat of Spain’s constitutional monarchy; Barcelona sits in the heart of the autonomous Catalan region, with its own language and cultural (and soccer) identity.
An Argentine, Messi was not born into these tensions. He came to Barcelona at 13, when the club agreed to pick up the costs of treatment for a growth-hormone deficiency. As the story goes, his contract was written on a napkin. At the time, he was about 4 feet 7 inches. He now stands 5-7. If his lack of size made him shy and self-conscious as a boy, his low center of gravity made him spectacularly elusive as a soccer player.
“We thought he was mute,” said Gerard Piqué, the lanky Barcelona center back who played with Messi in the club’s youth academy. “He was in the dressing room, on the bench, just sitting. He said nothing to us for the first month. We traveled to Switzerland to play a tournament, and he started to talk and have fun. We thought it was another person. He was really good, but he was really small and thin. His legs were like fingers. One coach said, ‘Don’t try to tackle him strong, because maybe you will break him.’ And we said, ‘O.K., but don’t worry because we cannot catch him.’ ”
View the original article here
BARCELONA, Spain — Given a rare night on the Barcelona bench last Sunday, Lionel Messi yanked on the seat in front of him, hunched his shoulders over the chair back and kicked it with his cleats. He seemed not so much the world’s best soccer player as a restless kid in a movie theater.
He Doesn’t Live There
by Robert Lalasz
Brilliant!
Magic!
Aaaaaaaagh!
Absolute genius again
From Messi!
They tried
To kick him
They tried
To plow him into the ground
And what you do then?
You try to put
Fire out
With gasoline!
Don’t look for him
In the X’s and O’s
He doesn’t live there.
He doesn’t live in
The tactical world
Or the technical world
He lives in the
Magnetic spectrum
Of genius.
You could corral him with
A dozen alligators
And still he’d weave
His way out.
The Times's soccer blog has the world's game covered from all angles. Messi, at last year's World Cup with Diego Maradona, Argentine legend and his national-team coach, has struggled internationally.
He is 23, with a grown-up’s income reported to exceed $43 million this year. Yet Messi still has a boy’s floppy bangs, a boy’s slight build and a boy’s nickname, the Flea. Even the ball stays on his feet like a shy child clinging to his father’s legs.
It is a boy’s fearlessness, enthusiasm, calm and humility, too, that help explain why Messi is already considered one of the greatest ever to play the world’s game. In the space of 18 tense days from April to early May, Barcelona played four Clásicos against its archrival, Real Madrid. The Madrid strategy was to strangle beauty out of the matches, to use nasty muscle against Messi, to shoulder him down or shiver him with a forearm or take his legs in scything tackles. Once, he was sent rolling as if he had caught fire.
Messi made small appeals for fairness with his eyes and hands, but he remained unflappable and without complaint. He did not yell at the referee or clamp a threatening hand around an opponent’s neck or fake a foul and dive to the ground. He remained apart from ugly words and scuffles and expulsions that marred the matches. Instead, he trumped cynicism with genius.
With a boy’s ardor, Messi put Barcelona in the final of the Champions League in Europe — the world’s most prestigious club tournament — to be played against Manchester United on Saturday at Wembley Stadium in London. He delivered both goals in Barcelona’s 2-0 victory in the first leg of the semifinal round against Real Madrid. This gave Messi a startling 52 goals in his first 50 matches of a season in which he also leads the Spanish league in assists. The first goal was merely outstanding in its timing and clever anticipation. The second was a masterpiece of acceleration, power, balance, agility, vision and darting virtuosity.
“I think this genius is impossible to describe,” Pep Guardiola, Barcelona’s manager, said. “That’s why he is a genius. He has instinct. He loves to live with pressure. He is one of the best ever created.”
That defining Champions League semifinal match was played April 27 at Estadio Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid. Nine months earlier, stars from Barcelona and Real Madrid joined to give Spain its first World Cup title. Together, they lifted the winner’s trophy in South Africa. But now they played for club, not country. Temporary brotherhood fissured. Blood rivalry resumed. Madrid, the capital, was once the base of Franco’s dictatorship and is now the seat of Spain’s constitutional monarchy; Barcelona sits in the heart of the autonomous Catalan region, with its own language and cultural (and soccer) identity.
An Argentine, Messi was not born into these tensions. He came to Barcelona at 13, when the club agreed to pick up the costs of treatment for a growth-hormone deficiency. As the story goes, his contract was written on a napkin. At the time, he was about 4 feet 7 inches. He now stands 5-7. If his lack of size made him shy and self-conscious as a boy, his low center of gravity made him spectacularly elusive as a soccer player.
“We thought he was mute,” said Gerard Piqué, the lanky Barcelona center back who played with Messi in the club’s youth academy. “He was in the dressing room, on the bench, just sitting. He said nothing to us for the first month. We traveled to Switzerland to play a tournament, and he started to talk and have fun. We thought it was another person. He was really good, but he was really small and thin. His legs were like fingers. One coach said, ‘Don’t try to tackle him strong, because maybe you will break him.’ And we said, ‘O.K., but don’t worry because we cannot catch him.’ ”
View the original article here
Ex-Governor of New York Will Not Face Perjury Charge
Former Gov. David A. Paterson of New York will not be charged with perjury in connection with accusations that he lied to the State Commission on Public Integrity about taking free World Series tickets from the New York Yankees while he was in office.
The Albany County district attorney, P. David Soares, who had been investigating the episode, informed Mr. Paterson’s lawyer on Wednesday that his office had decided not to pursue criminal charges.
An inquiry last year by the commission found that Mr. Paterson had violated state ethics law by soliciting and accepting free tickets to the first game of the 2009 World Series from the Yankees, who have a wide range of matters before the state.
The commission and an independent counsel, Judith S. Kaye, the former chief judge of the State Court of Appeals, found that Mr. Paterson had misled ethics officials when he suggested in sworn testimony that he had intended all along to pay for the tickets, which were worth $425 apiece.
In a letter, Mr. Soares did not challenge the findings by the earlier inquiries, but said their conclusions were based only on the standard that there was a “reasonably likely” chance that Mr. Paterson intentionally lied in his testimony.
“By contrast, a criminal conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard for which contemplates a far more exacting analysis than that required of either the P.I.C. or the independent counsel,” Mr. Soares wrote. “We have determined that such a standard cannot be met in this case.”
Mr. Soares’s letter, which was reported by The Daily News on Saturday, was released by Heather Orth, a spokeswoman for Mr. Soares.
The decision effectively puts an end to the most significant outstanding legal problem from the tumultuous administration of Mr. Paterson, a Democrat who assumed office upon the resignation of Eliot Spitzer and decided not to seek election last year to a full term.
In February, Mr. Paterson paid a $62,125 fine to the commission for accepting the tickets, a penalty imposed in the last month of his administration.
Last year, the commission asked Mr. Soares and the state attorney general’s office to consider whether Mr. Paterson had committed perjury.
The attorney general at the time, Andrew M. Cuomo, who succeeded Mr. Paterson as governor, turned the matter over to Ms. Kaye. She found in August that Mr. Paterson had been “inaccurate and misleading” when he testified under oath about the tickets, but she left it to Mr. Soares to determine whether Mr. Paterson should face criminal charges.
Mr. Paterson, for his part, has kept a low profile since leaving office.
He has started lecturing at New York University, where he will teach courses in government this fall, and he was a guest host for the New York sports talk radio station WFAN-AM in March.
Last weekend, he delivered the commencement address at Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks.
In his speech, Mr. Paterson told the graduates not to “be deterred by setbacks.”
The Rail: Shackleford Takes 136th Preakness Stakes
Mike Stewart/Associated PressShackleford, right, ridden by Jesus Castanon, won the 136th running of the Preakness Stakes on Saturday. Animal Kingdom finished second.Shackleford, who appeared agitated before the race, collected himself to edge the Derby winner Animal Kingdom by three-quarters of a length, winning the Preakness Stakes on Saturday at Pimlico Race Course. Astrology finished third.
It is the first triple crown victory and first Preakness start for the jockey Jesus Castanon, who has been aboard Shackleford in all five of his starts this year. Shackleford paid $27.20 on a $2 bet to win.
“He gave me his best,” Castanon said. “I just tried to keep him away from other horses and all the noise.”
John Velazquez, Animal Kingdom’s rider, said he broke so far back that he was bothered by the dirt. Velazquez, who went through five pairs of goggles during the race, said he thought Animal Kingdom still had a shot at the quarter pole.
“We worked our way through, but it was a little too much to make up,” he said.
Graham Motion, Animal Kingdom’s trainer, said “he ran a huge race” but it hurt them that they “slowed the pace down in the middle of the race.”
Record Snowpacks Could Threaten Western States
Thanks to a blizzard-filled winter and an unusually cold and wet spring, more than 90 measuring sites from Montana to New Mexico and California to Colorado have record snowpack totals on the ground for late May, according to a federal report released last week.
Those giant and spectacularly beautiful snowpacks will now melt under the hotter, sunnier skies of June — mildly if weather conditions are just right, wildly and perhaps catastrophically if they are not.
Fear of a sudden thaw, releasing millions of gallons of water through river channels and narrow canyons, has disaster experts on edge.
“All we can do is watch and wait,” said Bob Struble, the director of emergency management for Routt County in north-central Colorado. The county’s largest community, Steamboat Springs, sits about 30 miles from the headwaters of the Yampa River, a major tributary of the Colorado River that has 17 feet of snow or more in parts of its watershed.
“This could be a year to remember,” Mr. Struble added in a recent interview in his office as snow fell again on the high country.
No matter what happens, the snows of 2011, especially their persistence into late spring, have already made the record books.
But the West has also changed significantly since 1983, when super-snows last produced widespread flooding. From the foothills west of Denver to the scenic, narrow canyons of northern Utah, flood plains that were once wide-open spaces have been built up.
Many communities have improved their defenses, for example, by fortifying riverbanks to keep streams in place, but those antiflood bulwarks have for the most part not been tested by nature’s worst hits.
And in sharp contrast to the floods on the Mississippi River — one mighty waterway, going where it will — the Western story is fragmented, with anxiety dispersed across dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of large and small waterways that could surge individually, collectively or not at all.
¶ In California, officials staged three days of flood training last week, running disaster scenarios and practicing the grunt work of filling sandbags and draping and tying down tarp. The state’s aging levee system has long been a source of concern, with fears of large-scale failures that could leave Sacramento, the state capital, vulnerable to a Hurricane Katrina-scale flood. The anxieties are amplified this year by the deep snows in the Sierra Nevada, where some ski spots around Lake Tahoe saw more than 60 feet this season.
¶ At Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Utah, federal managers have begun spilling water downstream in preparation for the rising waters; the reservoir has 700,000 acre-feet of available space, but will have an expected inflow of 1.4 million acre-feet more through July, federal officials said.
¶ In the Wasatch Mountains outside Salt Lake City, where Alta Ski Resort still has about 200 inches of snow, cool temperatures have kept snowpacks from crossing what hydrologists call the isothermal barrier — 32 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the snowmass — which allows gradual melting from the bottom. Three more feet of snow piled on just last week.
¶ In sparsely populated Wyoming, emergency officials are worried about tiny communities that in many cases are far from help if rivers surge; almost every county is in a potential snow-melt flood zone, and relatively few residents have flood insurance.
¶ Here in Routt County, the terrain itself has changed, with thousands of acres of dead lodgepole pine trees on high mountain slopes. The trees were killed by an infestation of beetles in recent years and no longer hold the soil as they once did, raising erosion concerns.
Hydrologists, meanwhile, are cheering what they say will be a huge increase in water reservoir storage for tens of millions of people across the West. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, two huge dammed reservoirs on the Colorado River battered in recent years by drought, are projected to get 1.5 trillion gallons of new water between them from the mammoth melt.
But from Sacramento to Baggs, Wyo., a town of about 600 people on the Little Snake River, 150 miles west of Cheyenne, looking upslope in May and seeing lots of white is scary.
Kirk Johnson reported from Steamboat Springs, Colo., and Jesse McKinley from Twitchell Island, Calif.
The Caucus: Former Pizza Executive Joins Presidential Race
David Goldman/Associated PressHerman Cain announces his run for Republican candidate for president at a rally on Saturday in Atlanta.Herman Cain, who made his fortune pitching soda, burgers and pizza before turning to politics, declared himself a candidate on Saturday for something that few others seem to want these days: the Republican nomination for president in 2012.
At a noontime rally at a park in Atlanta, his hometown, Mr. Cain, 65, whose conservative fiscal credentials have made him a favorite among some Tea Party backers, promised “a real vision” to confront the nation’s growing economic and foreign policy problems.
And he vowed to prove wrong the “doubting Thomases” who regard him as a long shot. “I’m not running for second!” he shouted to cheers from several thousand supporters, as he laid out “the Cain doctrine” for promoting economic growth and protecting national security.
In a stylish video that accompanied his announcement, Mr. Cain offered few specific proposals but instead relied on sweeping, Reaganesque themes and allusions to God’s role in America as he promised what he called “a new American dream.”
“We can turn this country around,” he said. “We will make this country great again.”
Mr. Cain, who has never held public office, hopes to leap headlong into a Republican race that is as notable for who is not running as who is.
Big names like Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor; Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi; and Donald J. Trump, the businessman and reality TV star, recently announced that they would not seek the Republican nomination to run in the general election next year against President Obama.
Sarah Palin, a former governor of Alaska, has yet to declare her intentions. But the rest of the field is slowly coming together. Tim Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota, is scheduled to declare his candidacy on Monday in Iowa. Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has opened an exploratory campaign and is aggressively raising money. Jon M. Huntsman, a former Utah governor and United States ambassador to China, is considering entering the race and Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana has said he will announce his plans soon.
While other possible contenders have skipped many of the early events this year, Mr. Cain has been aggressively crisscrossing the country and trying to build name recognition among a public more familiar with the company he once ran, Godfather’s Pizza, than with the candidate himself.
A graceful public speaker with a deep baritone voice, Mr. Cain has spoken at dozens of Tea Party rallies. In March, he attended a forum in Iowa that marked his informal kickoff to win the state’s delegates, and he was one of just five second-tier hopefuls who took part in a Republican presidential debate in South Carolina this month.
Mr. Cain’s early supporters are hoping that his plainspoken speaking style, his up-from-the-bootstraps life story, and his success in business will appeal to conservative voters.
The son of a chauffeur and a domestic worker in Georgia, he graduated from Morehouse College, a historic black college, with a degree in mathematics, and he earned a master’s degree at Purdue before joining the Navy. He then began his rise in the corporate world, first at Coca-Cola and then at the Pillsbury Company, where he was an executive overseeing Burger King and chief executive at Godfather’s Pizza.
His first venture into national politics was almost accidental. At a nationally televised town hall meeting in 1994, he challenged President Bill Clinton’s health care plans and their potential effect on businesses. When Mr. Clinton assured him that the proposal would not harm businesses, Mr. Cain answered that “in the competitive marketplace, it simply doesn’t work that way.”
He used his newfound prominence among conservative groups to become more outspoken in politics, hosting a radio show in Atlanta, writing books on political themes and losing a 1994 Republican primary for the United States Senate in Georgia.
Nearly two decades after his televised run-in with Mr. Clinton, Mr. Cain will probably use his opposition to President Obama’s health care plan as one focal point of his campaign in railing against what he called “an out-of-control federal government that spends recklessly, taxes too much and oversteps its constitutional limits far too often.”
At Saturday’s rally, he also pledged to cut corporate tax rates and make permanent the tax breaks enacted under President George W. Bush. He also said he would push for new energy policies to make the United States less dependent on foreign oil, protect Israel’s interest in the Middle East and pursue tougher immigration policies to secure American borders.
He drew perhaps his loudest cheers when he praised Arizona’s controversial immigration law, which gives state officials more power to move against suspected illegal immigrants, and condemned the Obama administration’s decision to sue the state over the law.
New Mexico Judge Charged in Bribery Case, but Former Governor Draws a Mention
Prosecutors accuse Judge Murphy of advising a judicial candidate several years ago that if she wanted to increase her chances of getting a judgeship, she should deliver cash in an envelope to a Democratic Party operative, who would pass it along to Mr. Richardson, who was in his second term as governor. Judge Murphy is quoted in court papers as saying that the practice was commonplace and that he paid $4,000 to win an appointment from Mr. Richardson in 2006.
Mr. Richardson said in a statement that suggestions that he handed out judicial appointments based on campaign contributions were “outrageous and defamatory.”
His supporters call the case politically motivated, pointing to the involvement of two prominent Republicans, including Gov. Susana Martinez, who succeeded Mr. Richardson in January. “That speaks volumes about this prosecution,” said Gilbert Gallegos, who was Mr. Richardson’s deputy chief of staff.
In 2009, Ms. Martinez, who was then a district attorney, received a complaint from one of Judge Murphy’s colleagues. Because her office appeared before the judge, she referred the matter to another prosecutor, Matt Chandler, who was the Republican candidate for state attorney general.
“This is not about one party or another,” Mr. Chandler said in a telephone interview, pointing out that five of the witnesses are Democrats and the sixth is an independent. “It’s about a judge who put a price tag on a judgeship.”
A grand jury recently indicted Judge Murphy on felony charges of bribery and witness intimidation. On Friday, Judge Murphy pleaded not guilty at his own courthouse in Las Cruces and was released after posting $10,000 bail, handing over his passport and agreeing to stay away from witnesses in the case, avoid the courthouse and turn over any firearms.
In an interview, Mr. Chandler indicated that Mr. Richardson might be questioned as part of the investigation.
“At this time, the investigation is directed at Mr. Murphy, but I can assure you that law enforcement are following leads involving other suspects,” he said. “No one is off limits to get the truth.”
Ms. Martinez released a statement earlier in the week saying the charges were serious and needed to be pursued. “The indictment of a sitting judge on charges that he paid bribes for his judicial appointment and solicited bribes from another judicial candidate is deeply troubling,” Ms. Martinez said. “No one is above the law, and this criminal defendant should not be given any special treatment.”
Judge Murphy has been suspended without pay by the State Supreme Court. A retired magistrate, Leslie Smith, was appointed to handle the case.
The matter dates to 2007 when Beverly Singleman, a former state appeals judge, contacted Judge Jim T. Martin of State District Court to discuss a vacancy on his court. She said that Judge Martin, a Richardson appointee, invited Judge Murphy along to a lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Las Cruces and that he stayed largely silent during the meal as Judge Murphy laid out how political contributions were an essential part of the process. Judge Martin has not been charged, but was removed from hearing criminal cases last week.
After the meal, Ms. Singleman, a onetime Democrat who changed her registration to independent, was concerned enough that she took the matter to Judge Lisa C. Schultz of State District Court. Judge Schultz, a Richardson appointee, later confronted Judge Murphy about the accusations, once while taping the conversation.
Judge Schultz said she was hesitant to take the matter to the Judicial Standards Commission, which investigates ethical complaints, because most of its members were appointed by Mr. Richardson.
Eventually, she took the complaint to Ms. Martinez, who was criticizing Mr. Richardson’s tenure as ethically challenged in her campaign against Diane Denish, a Democrat who was Mr. Richardson’s lieutenant governor.
New Mexico has a hybrid system of elected and appointed judges that is designed to reduce the role of politics. The governor picks judges from a list submitted by a nominating commission run by the University of New Mexico School of Law. Appointed judges then must face nonpartisan elections to keep their posts.
“I appointed judges through an extensive process, including a thorough vetting first by the judicial nominating commission and then by my legal staff of the candidates that were nominated to me,” Mr. Richardson said in his statement.
He said he personally interviewed every candidate and made his appointments based on merit. “I appointed 113 judges, including several Republicans, and the general consensus in the legal community is that we selected excellent judges who had to prove themselves to voters in elections,” he said.
In the Golan Heights, Anxious Eyes Look East
From the vantage point of Majdal Shams, a Syrian village peeps out from behind a hillside across the valley. Damascus is 40 minutes away by car.
It was at this point a week ago that about 100 Palestinians living in Syria breached the border fence and crowded into Majdal Shams in a protest to mark the anniversary of Israel’s creation and the plight of the Palestinian refugees who demand a right to return. Four people were killed here when Israeli troops opened fire in the border area, shattering a calm of more than three decades and putting an international spotlight on this usually sleepy village near Mount Hermon.
But for the roughly 20,000 Arabs of the Druze religious sect who live in Majdal Shams and in nearby villages, this is Syrian territory — even though Israel has occupied this strategic plateau since the 1967 war and has extended Israeli law here. In the two months since the outbreak of the uprising in Syria, the Druze of the Golan have been preoccupied with, and divided by, events on the other side of the fence.
Modern communications have made contact with relatives much easier, yet have done little to make an already convoluted reality any less complicated.
Here, fierce loyalty to Syria is mixed with fear of the government led by Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, and residents have conflicted feelings about the relative freedoms they enjoy under the Israeli occupier.
“We cannot talk politics with our relatives on Skype, by phone or on the Net,” said Salman Fakherldeen , 56, a human-rights advocate at Al-Marsad, the Arab Center for Human Rights in the Golan, in Majdal Shams. “You do not need to be too clever to understand why.”
One of a few residents here who is willing to speak openly in support of the uprising in Syria, Shefa Abu Jabal, 25, has been helping disseminate news of the protests and their brutal suppression, working through social networking sites where none of the commenters uses their real names.
A graduate of Haifa University in northern Israel, where she studied law and communications, Ms. Abu Jabal said that no more than 15 people in the Golan Heights were involved in the effort. Because Israel is an open society, she said, “We have access to all Web sites.” But she added that pro-Assad “stalkers” on Twitter have accused the activists of being Israeli spies.
Residents say that the majority of the Golan Heights’ Druze are split between those who support the government of President Assad and those who do not want to get involved.
The reasons for supporting Mr. Assad include the knowledge that everything that happens in the Golan quickly finds its way to the authorities in Damascus, fear for the hundreds of thousands of Druze inside Syria and worries about what may happen to them if the current leadership is replaced by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.
The Druze, who practice a largely secret religion that is often described as an offshoot of Ismaili Islam, have not fared badly under the Assads, who belong to another minority sect, the Alawites. Another incentive for not opposing the regime is that up to 800 students from the Golan Heights are studying in Syrian universities free of charge. About 20 students returned home recently under a special arrangement because of the troubles in Syria.
In many cases, people’s true political positions remain as inscrutable as some of their religious beliefs.
At most, people here say, 10 percent of the Golan Druze openly identify with the protesters in Syria. In this conservative society, they risk being ostracized.
Many here say they are against the violence and bloodshed, but some, echoing the official line in Damascus, say that Islamic extremists from other countries are to blame.
In mid-April, residents held a small, silent gathering in the Majdal Shams square in solidarity with the protesters. “We did not say anything,” Ms. Abu Jabal said, “but we held signs.”
Supporters of the Assad government held a larger demonstration in Buqata, a village nearby. After a Druze soldier in the Syrian Army was killed in Homs, his relatives in Masada, another Golan village, held a memorial.
Less than 10 percent of the Golan Druze have chosen to take Israeli citizenship. Many say that their sense of belonging to Syria, even after more than 40 years of Israeli rule, is not a question of choice. They say they are Syrian, whichever side they are on.
“Politics do not concern us,” said Nayef al-Din, a shopkeeper in Masada. “We are Syrians, whoever is in charge.”
“We are in Syria now,” said Ata Farahat, 39, who works for a local television production company in Majdal Shams and is a strong supporter of Mr. Assad’s. “We have lived our whole life in Syria.”
The production company provides stories and footage from the Golan mostly for Syrian television stations, but also for some Israeli channels.
Mr. Farahat studied in Damascus from 1995 to 2002. He said he was arrested by the Israeli authorities on his return because of his political activities as a student and was jailed for a year. After working for Syrian television, he said, he spent another three years in an Israeli prison, charged with contact with enemy agents, and was released a few months ago.
His colleague, the journalist Hamad Awidat, 28, another supporter of Mr. Assad’s, studied information technology in Syria, then went to Tel Aviv University to study software engineering. Mr. Awidat has an Israeli travel document that states his place of birth as Israel and his nationality as “undefined.”
Saturday, May 21, 2011
A Doctor’s Push for Single-Payer Health Care for All Finds Traction in Vermont
MONTPELIER, Vt. — Many people move to Vermont in search of a slower pace; Dr. Deb Richter came in 1999 to work obsessively toward a far-fetched goal.
She wanted Vermont to become the first state to adopt a single-payer health care system, run and paid for by the government, with every resident eligible for a uniform benefit package. So Dr. Richter, a buoyant primary care doctor from Buffalo who had given up on New York’s embracing such a system, started lining up speaking engagements and meeting with lawmakers, whom she found more accessible than their New York counterparts.
“I wrote a letter to the editor, and the speaker of the House called me up to talk about it,” Dr. Richter, 56, recalled recently. “It was astounding. In New York, I couldn’t even get an appointment with my legislator.”
Twelve years later, Dr. Richter will watch Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, sign a bill on Thursday that sets Vermont on a path toward a single-payer system — the nation’s first such experiment — thanks in no small part to her persistence. Though scores of people pushed for the bill, she was the most actively involved doctor — “the backbone,” Mr. Shumlin has said, of a grass-roots effort that helped sway the Democratic Legislature to pass it this spring even as other states were suing to block the less ambitious federal health care law.
“We wouldn’t be where we are without Deb,” Mr. Shumlin said in an interview. “She’s made this her passion. And like anyone that’s making significant social change, she has qualities of persuasiveness and leadership and good judgment that are hard to find.”
As in all states, the cost of health care has increased sharply in Vermont in recent years. It has doubled here over the last decade to roughly $5 billion a year, taking a particular toll on small businesses and the middle class. All 620,000 of the state’s residents would be eligible for coverage under the new system, which proponents say would be cheaper over all than the current patchwork of insurers. A five-member board appointed by the governor is to determine payment rates for doctors, what benefits to cover and other details.
But much remains to be worked out — so much that even under the most optimistic projections the plan might not take effect until 2017. Most significantly, Mr. Shumlin still has to figure out how much it will cost and how to pay for it, possibly through a new payroll tax. Whether he will still be in charge by 2017 is among the complicating factors.
“If we had the exact same Legislature and the same governor we could get it done,” Dr. Richter said. “It’s a big if, because the opposition has a ton more money to convince people that the governor is evil and this is socialized medicine and all kinds of other scary stuff.”
The opposition will probably include insurance companies, drug makers and some employers who say there are too many unknowns. Many doctors, too, are wary of the change and what it might mean for their income. Dr. Richter said she believed a “slim majority” of the state’s 1,700 licensed physicians were supportive.
“One of the bigger worries I have is we’ve had all this hoopla and nothing’s going to happen,” she said at a coffee shop here recently on a rare quiet afternoon. “But it might also be helpful to us, because it’s going to be hard for any opposition to be steadily pushing for seven years.”
The federal health care law has complicated Vermont’s plans, requiring the state to first create a health insurance exchange to help residents shop for coverage by 2014. The state would then need a federal waiver to trade its exchange for a government-run system.
Dr. Richter said she embraced the idea of a single-payer system as a young doctor in Buffalo, where many of her patients put off crucial treatments because they were uninsured. As a medical student, she saw a patient with a life-threatening heart infection caused by an infected tooth that had gone untreated because he lacked dental insurance.
“He was in the hospital for six weeks, and I was like, ‘This makes no sense,’ ” she said.
Scientists: Iceland's Grimsvotn Volcano Erupting
REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) — Iceland's most active volcano has started erupting, scientists said Saturday — just over a year after another eruption on the North Atlantic island shut down European air traffic for days.
Iceland's Meteorological Office confirmed that an eruption had begun at the Grimsvotn volcano, accompanied by a series of small earthquakes. Smoke could be seen rising from the volcano, which lies under the uninhabited Vatnajokull glacier in southeast Iceland.
A no fly zone has been designated for 120 nautical miles (220 kilometers) in all directions from the eruption. Isavia, the company that operates and develops all airport facilities and air navigation services in Iceland, described this as standard procedure around eruptions.
"The plume of smoke has reached jet flying altitude and plans have been made for planes flying through Icelandic air control space to fly southwardly tonight," said Hjordis Gudmundsdottir, the spokeswoman for Isavia.
Grimsvotn last erupted in 2004. Scientists have been expecting a new eruption and have said previously that this volcano's eruption will likely be small and should not lead to the air travel chaos caused in April 2010 by ash from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano.
History shows that previous eruptions in Grimsvotn have not had much influence on flight traffic — unlike the massive disruption caused last year.
Pall Einarsson, geophysicist at the University of Iceland, said last year's eruption was a rare event.
"The ash in Eyjafjallajokull was persistent or unremitting and fine-grained," Einarsson said. "The ash in Grimsvotn is more coarse and not as likely to cause danger as it falls to the ground faster and doesn't stay as long in the air as in the Eyjafjallajokull eruption."
A plane from the Icelandic Coast Guard carrying experts from the University of Iceland will fly over the volcano and evaluate the situation.
One eyewitness, Bolli Valgardsson, said the plume rose quickly several thousand feet (meters) into the air.
Sparsely populated Iceland is one of the world's most volcanically active countries and eruptions are frequent.
Eruptions often cause local flooding from melting glacier ice, but rarely cause deaths.
Last year's Eyjafjallajokul eruption left some 10 million air travelers stranded worldwide after winds pushed the ash cloud toward some of the world's busiest airspace and led most northern European countries to ground all planes for five days.
Whether widespread disruption occurs again will depend on how long the eruption lasts, how high the ash plume rises and which way the wind blows.
In November, melted glacial ice began pouring from Grimsvotn, signaling a possible eruption. That was a false alarm but scientists have been monitoring the volcano closely ever since.
The volcano also erupted in 1998, 1996 and 1993. The eruptions have lasted between a day and several weeks.
___
Jill Lawless and Danica Kirka in London contributed to this report.
Promise of Arab Uprisings Is Threatened by Divisions
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The revolutions and revolts in the Arab world, playing out over just a few months across two continents, have proved so inspirational to so many because they offer a new sense of national identity built on the idea of citizenship.
Video interviews with more than two dozen people under 30, from Libya to the West Bank, talking about their generation’s moment in history and prospects for the future. Riot police clashed with protesters in Tunis on May 6.
But in the past weeks, the specter of divisions — religion in Egypt, fundamentalism in Tunisia, sect in Syria and Bahrain, clan in Libya — has threatened uprisings that once seemed to promise to resolve questions that have vexed the Arab world since the colonialism era.
From the fetid alleys of Imbaba, the Cairo neighborhood where Muslims and Christians have fought street battles, to the Syrian countryside, where a particularly deadly crackdown has raised fears of sectarian score-settling, the question of identity may help determine whether the Arab Spring flowers or withers. Can the revolts forge alternative ways to cope with the Arab world’s variety of clans, sects, ethnicities and religions?
The old examples have been largely of failure: the rule of strongmen in Egypt, Syria, Libya and Yemen; a fragile equilibrium of fractious communities in Lebanon and Iraq; the repressive paternalism of the Persian Gulf, where oil revenues are used to buy loyalty.
“I think the revolutions in a way, in a distant way, are hoping to retrieve” this sense of national identity, said Sadiq al-Azm, a prominent Syrian intellectual living in Beirut.
“The costs otherwise would be disintegration, strife and civil war,” Mr. Azm said. “And this was very clear in Iraq.”
In an arc of revolts and revolution, that idea of a broader citizenship is being tested as the enforced silence of repression gives way to the cacophony of diversity. Security and stability were the justification that strongmen in the Arab world offered for repression, often with the sanction of the United States; the essence of the protests in the Arab Spring is that people can imagine an alternative.
But even activists admit that the region so far has no model that enshrines diversity and tolerance without breaking down along more divisive identities.
In Tunisia, a relatively homogenous country with a well-educated population, fault lines have emerged between the secular-minded coasts and the more religious and traditional inland.
The tensions shook the nascent revolution there this month when a former interim interior minister, Farhat Rajhi, suggested in an online interview that the coastal elite, long dominant in the government, would never accept an electoral victory by Tunisia’s Islamist party, Ennahda, which draws most of its support inland.
“Politics was in the hands of the people of the coast since the start of Tunisia,” Mr. Rajhi said. “If the situation is reversed now, they are not ready to give up ruling.” He warned that Tunisian officials from the old government were preparing a military coup if the Islamists won elections in July. “If Ennahda rules, there will be a military regime.”
In response, protesters poured back out into the streets of Tunis for four days of demonstrations calling for a new revolution. The police beat them back with batons and tear gas, arrested more than 200 protesters and imposed a curfew on the city.
In Cairo, the sense of national identity that surged at the moment of revolution — when hundreds of thousands of people of all faiths celebrated in Tahrir Square with chants of “Hold your head high, you are an Egyptian”— has given way to a week of religious violence pitting the Coptic Christian minority against their Muslim neighbors, reflecting long-smoldering tensions that an authoritarian state may have muted, or let fester.
At a rally this month in Tahrir Square to call for unity, Coptic Christians were conspicuously absent, thousands of them gathering nearby for a rally of their own. And even among some Muslims at the unity rally, suspicions were pronounced.
Anthony Shadid reported from Beirut, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Heba Afify contributed reporting from Cairo, and an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria.
View the original article here
Video interviews with more than two dozen people under 30, from Libya to the West Bank, talking about their generation’s moment in history and prospects for the future. Riot police clashed with protesters in Tunis on May 6.
But in the past weeks, the specter of divisions — religion in Egypt, fundamentalism in Tunisia, sect in Syria and Bahrain, clan in Libya — has threatened uprisings that once seemed to promise to resolve questions that have vexed the Arab world since the colonialism era.
From the fetid alleys of Imbaba, the Cairo neighborhood where Muslims and Christians have fought street battles, to the Syrian countryside, where a particularly deadly crackdown has raised fears of sectarian score-settling, the question of identity may help determine whether the Arab Spring flowers or withers. Can the revolts forge alternative ways to cope with the Arab world’s variety of clans, sects, ethnicities and religions?
The old examples have been largely of failure: the rule of strongmen in Egypt, Syria, Libya and Yemen; a fragile equilibrium of fractious communities in Lebanon and Iraq; the repressive paternalism of the Persian Gulf, where oil revenues are used to buy loyalty.
“I think the revolutions in a way, in a distant way, are hoping to retrieve” this sense of national identity, said Sadiq al-Azm, a prominent Syrian intellectual living in Beirut.
“The costs otherwise would be disintegration, strife and civil war,” Mr. Azm said. “And this was very clear in Iraq.”
In an arc of revolts and revolution, that idea of a broader citizenship is being tested as the enforced silence of repression gives way to the cacophony of diversity. Security and stability were the justification that strongmen in the Arab world offered for repression, often with the sanction of the United States; the essence of the protests in the Arab Spring is that people can imagine an alternative.
But even activists admit that the region so far has no model that enshrines diversity and tolerance without breaking down along more divisive identities.
In Tunisia, a relatively homogenous country with a well-educated population, fault lines have emerged between the secular-minded coasts and the more religious and traditional inland.
The tensions shook the nascent revolution there this month when a former interim interior minister, Farhat Rajhi, suggested in an online interview that the coastal elite, long dominant in the government, would never accept an electoral victory by Tunisia’s Islamist party, Ennahda, which draws most of its support inland.
“Politics was in the hands of the people of the coast since the start of Tunisia,” Mr. Rajhi said. “If the situation is reversed now, they are not ready to give up ruling.” He warned that Tunisian officials from the old government were preparing a military coup if the Islamists won elections in July. “If Ennahda rules, there will be a military regime.”
In response, protesters poured back out into the streets of Tunis for four days of demonstrations calling for a new revolution. The police beat them back with batons and tear gas, arrested more than 200 protesters and imposed a curfew on the city.
In Cairo, the sense of national identity that surged at the moment of revolution — when hundreds of thousands of people of all faiths celebrated in Tahrir Square with chants of “Hold your head high, you are an Egyptian”— has given way to a week of religious violence pitting the Coptic Christian minority against their Muslim neighbors, reflecting long-smoldering tensions that an authoritarian state may have muted, or let fester.
At a rally this month in Tahrir Square to call for unity, Coptic Christians were conspicuously absent, thousands of them gathering nearby for a rally of their own. And even among some Muslims at the unity rally, suspicions were pronounced.
Anthony Shadid reported from Beirut, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Heba Afify contributed reporting from Cairo, and an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria.
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