Afghan Minority Savors Its Pivotal Role in Runoff - WSJ.com

The Hazaras, After Centuries of Discrimination and Religious Persecution, May Be Decisive Bloc in Determining Next President

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

KABUL -- Afghanistan's Hazara minority is enjoying a historic turnabout after centuries of oppression: It has become the kingmaker in the country's Nov. 7 presidential runoff.

The maverick Hazara candidate, Ramazan Bashardost, garnered 10.5% of the votes in August's first round, placing third after President Hamid Karzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. The runoff between Mr. Karzai and Dr. Abdullah that will decide the next president now hinges, to a great extent, on Bashardost's largely Hazara supporters. Mr. Bashardost has endorsed neither contender.

"The Hazara vote is crucial: Whoever they support will become the winner," says Ali Akbar Kazemi, head of Eqtedar-e-Melli, a predominantly Hazara party backing Dr. Abdullah.

In the World of the Hazara

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Adam Ferguson/VII Mentor Program for The Wall Street Journal

A Hazara woman and her child left Kabul's Jafaria Mosque Friday.

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While the Hazaras account for only one-tenth of Afghanistan's population, their voting power is much greater because central Afghanistan's Hazara heartland is almost untouched by the Taliban insurgency that kept voters at home in many other parts of the country. In August, the Hazaras accounted for an estimated one-quarter of ballots cast.

Espousing the Shiite sect of Islam in a predominantly Sunni country, the Hazaras -- who appear strikingly different from other Afghans because of their Mongol features -- have long been subjected to discrimination and worse. Thousands of Hazaras were massacred by Afghan kings in the late 19th century. In the late 1990s, the Taliban -- who consider the Shiites to be heretics -- carried out another round of slaughter.

"The Hazaras are the most deprived people in the whole country," Dr. Abdullah said in an interview, pledging to develop the impoverished Hazara districts if he wins the planned runoff.

(Earlier this week, Dr. Abdullah threatened to boycott the Nov. 7 vote unless Mr. Karzai dismissed election officials who Dr. Abdullah says were involved in fraud in the first round. Mr. Karzai declined to do so. Dr. Abdullah is expected to clarify his intentions over the weekend.)

Recent interviews with dozens of Hazaras of different ages and from all walks of life indicate that winning the Hazaras' support will be a challenge for Dr. Abdullah. Many of those who voted for Mr. Bashardost in the first round say they will either back Mr. Karzai in the runoff or stay home. Such behavior is likely to translate into a victory for Mr. Karzai -- who gained a significant part of the Hazara vote in the first round.

Mr. Karzai, a member of Afghanistan's biggest ethnic community, the Pashtuns, has long courted the Hazaras. He appointed a Hazara as one of his two vice presidents and named Hazaras to key government jobs. He also fulfilled a series of Hazara demands, giving official state recognition to Shiite Islamic jurisprudence and carving out a separate Hazara-majority province, Daykundi, from the Pashtun-dominated Uruzgan. Hazara leaders expect Mr. Karzai to create additional Hazara-majority provinces from parts of the provinces of Ghazni and Wardak, which adjoin the Hazara heartland.

"The vast majority of the Hazaras will vote for Karzai in the runoff. I wouldn't call his presidency a golden age, but he has certainly done a lot of good things for the Hazaras," says parliamentarian Mohammed Mohaqeq, a Hazara and a former warlord who placed third in the 2004 presidential elections, with 11.4% of the vote. Mr. Mohaqeq endorsed Mr. Karzai in the current race, saying "our community's leaders have told their people to vote for Karzai, and the people will follow their leaders."

After the fall of the Soviet-installed regime in 1992, Mr. Mohaqeq's Hazara militia vied for control of Kabul with the mainly ethnic Tajik forces of Ahmad Shah Masood, reducing much of the city to rubble. Dr. Abdullah was Mr. Masood's key aide at the time -- a fact still remembered in Kabul's Hazara neighborhoods, where ruins of once-stately buildings provide a daily reminder of the ethnic clashes.

"We had a really hard time during the civil war. Our homes were shelled every day and walking even 100 meters was impossible," says Amin Mohammed, a 60-year-old Hazara baker in Kabul's Chendawal neighborhood who voted for Mr. Bashardost in the first round and plans to vote for Mr. Karzai in the runoff.

In a nearby tea parlor, one among two dozen Hazara men expressed support for Dr. Abdullah; the rest praised Mr. Karzai. "Karzai treats all ethnicities -- Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara -- the same. When he came to power, he brought an end to discrimination," said the parlor's owner, 70-year-old Ali Ehsan Agha Jan.

Even Dr. Abdullah's backers among the Hazaras recognize the improvements in their community's status under Mr. Karzai. "It's true that Karzai has done many things for the Hazaras. But it doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to his mistakes," said Mr. Kazemi, the Eqtedar-e-Melli party chief who is backing Dr. Abdullah. The Hazaras, he said, should cast their ballots "putting the national interest ahead of the ethnic one."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Secret Mission Rescues Yemen's Jews - WSJ.com

By MIRIAM JORDAN

AFP/Getty Images

UNDER SIEGE: The State Department has resettled about 60 Yemeni Jews in the U.S. since July amid rising violence; more are expected to arrive. Here, the father of Moshe Nahari, who was killed in December, with his daughters outside a court in Yemen following a hearing in the murder case.

MONSEY, N.Y. -- In his new suburban American home, Shaker Yakub, a Yemeni Jew, folded a large scarf in half, wrapped it around his head and tucked in his spiraling side curls. "This is how I passed for a Muslim," said the 59-year-old father of seven, improvising a turban that hid his black skullcap.

The ploy enabled Mr. Yakub and half a dozen members of his family to slip undetected out of their native town of Raida, Yemen, and travel to the capital 50 miles to the south. There, they met U.S. State Department officials conducting a clandestine operation to bring some of Yemen's last remaining Jews to America to escape rising anti-Semitic violence in his country.

In all, about 60 Yemeni Jews have resettled in the U.S. since July; officials say another 100 could still come. There were an estimated 350 in Yemen before the operation began. Some of the remainder may go to Israel and some will stay behind, most in a government enclave.

Clandestine Resettlement

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Reuven Schwartz

Moshe Nahari, who was murdered in December 2008 (left), and Said Ben Yisrael, whose house was firebombed (second from left), danced at a wedding celebration in Raida, Yemen in 2007.

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The secret evacuation of the Yemeni Jews -- considered by historians to be one of the oldest of the Jewish diaspora communities -- is a sign of America's growing concern about this Arabian Peninsula land of 23 million.

The operation followed a year of mounting harassment, and was plotted with Jewish relief groups while Washington was signaling alarm about Yemen. In July, Gen. David Petraeus was dispatched to Yemen to encourage President Ali Abdullah Saleh to be more aggressive against al-Qaeda terrorists in the country. Last month, President Barack Obama wrote in a letter to President Saleh that Yemen's security is vital to the region and the U.S.

Yemen was overshadowed in recent years by bigger trouble spots such as Afghanistan. But it has re-emerged on Washington's radar as a potential source of regional instability and a haven for terrorists.

The impoverished nation is struggling with a Shiite revolt in the north, a secessionist movement in the south, and growing militancy among al-Qaeda sympathizers, raising concern about the government's ability to control its territory. Analysts believe al-Qaeda operatives are making alliances with local tribes that could enable it to establish a stronghold in Yemen, as it did in Afghanistan prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The State Department took something of a risk in removing the Yemenis to the U.S., as it might be criticized for favoritism at a time when refugees elsewhere are clamoring for haven. The U.S. calculated the operation would serve both a humanitarian and a geopolitical purpose. In addition to rescuing a group threatened because of its religion, Washington was seeking to prevent an international embarrassment for an embattled Arab ally.

President Saleh has been trying to protect the Jews, but his inability to quell the rebellion in the country's north made it less likely he could do so, prompting the U.S. to step in. The alternative -- risking broader attacks on the Jews -- could well have undermined the Obama administration's efforts to rally support for President Saleh in the U.S. and abroad.

"If we had not done anything, we feared there would be bloodshed," says Gregg Rickman, former State Department Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.

Mr. Yakub says the operation saved his family from intimidation that had made life in Yemen unbearable. Violence toward the country's small remaining Jewish community began to intensify last year, when one of its most prominent members was gunned down outside his house. But the mission also hastens the demise of one of the oldest remaining Jewish communities in the Arab world.

Jews are believed to have reached what is now Yemen more than 2,500 years ago as traders for King Solomon. They survived -- and at times thrived -- over centuries of change, including the spread of Islam across the Arabian Peninsula.

"They were one of the oldest exiled groups out of Israel," says Hayim Tawil, a Yeshiva University professor who is an expert on Yemeni Jewry. "This is the end of the Jewish Diaspora of Yemen. That's it."

Centuries of near total isolation make Yemeni Jews a living link with the ancient world.

Many can recite passages of the Torah by heart and read Hebrew, but can't read their native tongue of Arabic. They live in stone houses, often without running water or electricity. One Yemeni woman showed up at the airport expecting to board her flight with a live chicken.

Through the centuries, the Jews earned a living as merchants, craftsmen and silversmiths known for designing djanbias, traditional daggers that only Muslims are allowed to carry. Jewish musical compositions became part of Yemeni culture, played at Muslim weddings and festivals.

"Yemeni Jews have always been a part of Yemeni society and have lived side by side in peace with their Muslim brothers and sisters," said a spokeswoman for the Embassy of Yemen in Washington.

In 1947, on the eve of the birth of the state of Israel, protests in the port city of Aden resulted in the death of dozens of Jews and the destruction of their homes and shops. In 1949 and 1950 about 49,000 people -- the majority of Yemen's Jewish community -- were airlifted to Israel in "Operation Magic Carpet."

About 2,000 Jews stayed in Yemen. Some trickled out until 1962, when civil war erupted. After that, they were stuck there. "For three decades, there were no telephone calls, no letters, no traveling overseas. The fact there were Jews in Yemen was barely known outside Israel," says Prof. Tawil.

After alienating the West by backing Iraq during the first Gulf War, Yemen sought a rapprochement with Washington. In 1991, it declared freedom of travel for Jews. An effort led by Prof. Tawil and brokered by the U.S. government culminated in the departure of about 1,200 Jews, mainly to Israel, in the early 1990s. Arthur Hughes, American ambassador to Yemen at the time, recalls that those who chose to remain insisted: "This is where we have been for centuries, we are okay; we're not going anywhere."

The few hundred Jews who stayed behind were concentrated in two enclaves: Saada, a remote area in Yemen's northern highlands, and Raida to the south.

In 2004, unrest erupted in Saada. The government says at least 50,000 people have been displaced by fighting between its troops and the Houthis, a Shiite rebel group.

Animosity against Jews intensified. Notes nailed to the homes of Jews accused them of working for Israel and corrupting Muslim morals. "Jews were specifically targeted by Houthi rebels," says a spokeswoman for the Yemeni embassy in Washington.

In January 2007, Houthi leaders threatened Jewish families in Saada. "We warn you to leave the area immediately... [W]e give you a period of 10 days, or you will regret it," read a letter signed by a Houthi representative cited in a Reuters article.

Virtually the entire Jewish community in the area, about 60 people, fled to the capital. Since then, they have been receiving food stipends and cash assistance from the government while living in state-owned apartments in a guarded enclave, says the Yemeni embassy in Washington.

President Saleh, a Shiite, has been eager to demonstrate goodwill toward the Jews. On the Passover holiday, he invited TV crews to videotape families in the government complex as they feasted on lamb he had ordered.

Raida became the last redoubt of Yemeni Jews, who continued to lead a simple life there alongside Muslims.

Ancient stone homes dot the town. Electricity is erratic; oil lamps are common. Water arrives via truck. Most homes lack a TV or a refrigerator. The cell phone is the only common modern device. Some families receive financial aid from Hasidic Jewish groups in Brooklyn and London, which has enabled them to buy cars.

Typically, the Jewish men are blacksmiths, shoe repairmen or carpenters. They sometimes barter, trading milk and cow dung for grass to feed their livestock. In public, the men stand out for their long side curls, customarily worn by observant Jewish men. Jewish women, who often marry by 16, rarely leave home. When they do, like Muslim women, only their eyes are exposed.

For fun, children play with pebbles and chase family chickens around the house. At Jewish religious schools, they sit at wooden tables to study Torah and Hebrew. They aren't taught subjects like science, or to read and write in Arabic, Yemen's official language.

"I showed them a multiplication table and I don't think they had ever seen one," says Stefan Kirschner, a New York University graduate student who visited Raida in August 2008 and says he sat in a few classes.

In September 2008, militants detonated a car bomb outside the U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital of Sanaa, killing 16 people. The attack raised fresh concern about Muslim extremism and the government's stability.

Then, on Dec. 11, a lone gunman shot dead Moshe Nahari, a father of nine and well-known figure in Raida's Jewish community. Abdul-Aziz al-Abdi, a retired Air Force pilot, pumped several bullets into Mr. Nahari after the Hebrew teacher dismissed his demands that he convert to Islam. In June, the shooter was sentenced to death.

Israel's offensive against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip later in December sparked protests in Yemen. Jewish men and children in Raida were heckled, beaten and pelted with rocks. A grenade was hurled at the house of Said Ben Yisrael, who led one of three makeshift synagogues in Raida, and landed in the courtyard of his two-story home.

From the safety of his new home in suburban New York, Mr. Yakub recounted his last months in Yemen. Rocks shattered the windows of his house and car. Except for emergencies and provisions, Jews began to avoid leaving home. When they did, Mr. Yakub and other Jews took to disguising themselves as Muslims.

"This was no way to live," he said, seated at the head of a long table surrounded by his wife and children.

Salem Suleiman, who also arrived recently in New York, bears scars from rocks that hit his head. "They throw stones at us. They curse us. They want to kill us," he said. "I didn't leave my house for two months."

New York had a community of about 2,000 Yemeni Jews. Yair Yaish, who heads the Yemenite Jewish Federation of America, says he was barraged with "desperate calls from the community here saying we have to do something to get our families out."

The U.S. Ambassador to Yemen urged Yemeni ministers to facilitate the departure. After initial reluctance -- the government preferred to give the Jews safe haven in the capital city -- Yemen agreed to issue exit permits and passports.

"It was the embassy's view, and the Department concurred, that because of their vulnerability, we should consider them for resettlement," says a spokeswoman for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

Jewish Federations of North America raised $750,000 to help the effort. Orthodox groups also pledged to pitch in. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was tasked with their resettlement.

Word reached Jews in Raida that there was an American plan afoot to rescue them.

The first applicants signed up at the U.S. Embassy in January. To avoid attracting attention, families convoyed to Sanaa in taxis at dawn.

Later they traveled to a hotel for interviews with U.S. officials. To establish a case for refugee status, they had to demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution. For many of the women, it was the first time speaking with anyone outside the home.

As news spread of their imminent departure, many families reported trouble selling property. Potential buyers offered low prices or refused to bid, thinking they could get the property free after it was deserted.

"All they have is this little house worth $15,000," says Yochi Sabari, a Jew from Raida who lives in New York and has relatives in Yemen. "They can't leave until they sell it."

About three weeks before their travel date, the U.S. embassy contacted the first four families cleared for travel. On July 7, their 17 members traveled to the airport in Sanaa and boarded a Frankfurt-bound flight.

When the Yemenis landed in New York the next day, Jewish organization officials there to greet them spotted several women cloaked in black robes, only their eyes exposed.

"The Jewish women were the ones in burqas," says Gideon Aronoff, president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. He says he was "initially shocked."

Several families missed the two flights offered to them by the U.S. and, therefore, forfeited their chance to move here. Family members say they are having trouble disposing of assets. An undisclosed number of people have reached Israel, including the family of Mr. Ben Yisrael, whose home was the target of a grenade, and the family of Mr. Nahari, who was slain in December 2008. In the U.S., the Yemeni refugees are being settled in Monsey, a suburban enclave of ultraorthodox Jews, lined with strip malls that sell black coats and wide-rimmed hats worn by Hasidic men.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society's network established a Monsey office, where case managers arrange housing and disburse food stamps, cash and other refugee benefits to the Yemeni arrivals. Many of the adults, caseworkers say, aren't yet capable of budgeting, following a schedule or sitting still in a structured classroom to learn English.

On a recent morning, Mr. Suleiman, a 36-year-old father of three, retrieved an alarm clock that he received with his furnished apartment.

"I still don't know how to use this," he said. "The children have been playing with it."

Write to Miriam Jordan at miriam.jordan@wsj.com

White House Visitor Log Lists Stars and C.E.O.’s - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday released a partial roster of visitors in the first six months of President Obama’s term, a disclosure that shows business executives, labor leaders, lobbyists and a sprinkling of celebrities were cleared into the White House for meetings, events or tours.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, visited the Oval Office on March 25. Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, dined in the White House Mess Hall on Feb. 19. Oprah Winfrey arrived two days earlier for an appointment in the residence of the executive mansion.

Among the White House guests was a boldface-names list of chief executives, including Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup Inc., Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Rex W. Tillerson of the Exxon Mobil Corporation, David J. O’Reilly of the Chevron Corporation and Jeffrey R. Immelt of the General Electric Company The men, who met with Mr. Obama, his advisers or both, were among nearly 500 entries in logs from Jan. 20 to July 31.

The White House released the names late Friday in a disclosure that officials said was without precedent by previous administrations. The names on the White House Web site were in response to requests about specific people by watchdog groups or news organizations. By December, the White House intends to regularly release names of visitors in three-month increments.

The most frequent visitor included in the narrow sample was Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union and Mr. Obama’s top ally in the labor movement. Mr. Stern visited the White House 22 times, sometimes for health care or other public events in the East Room, other times for meetings with the president or aides like Rahm Emanuel, Peter R. Orszag or Ronald A. Klain.

The visit tally underscores the clout that S.E.I.U. and Mr. Stern enjoy in this White House, something that has generated consternation at times among business groups and envy among rival unions. By contrast, Richard L. Trumka, the new president of the AFL-CIO, visited seven times in the same period.

Maurice R. Greenberg, a former chief executive of American International Group Inc., which received a $182.3 billion federal bailout, visited three times.

John D. Podesta, who oversaw the transition operation for Mr. Obama, visited the president and his top advisers 17 times in the six months after Inauguration Day. His brother and sister-in-law, Tony and Heather Podesta, both high-profile Washington lobbyists, made a total of eight visits to the White House complex.

Other visitors included Gary D. Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, who was a major contributor to Mr. Obama’s campaign. Several lobbyists from financial industry trade groups also came to the White House, including Edward L. Yingling of the American Bankers Association, Timothy Ryan of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, and Scott Talbott of the Financial Services Roundtable.

While the list can be searched on the White House Web site, the visits can raise as many questions as they answer. On many of the entries, the purpose of the visit is unclear. Still, it offers a glimpse into the workings of the administration that has not been previously available.

In addition to Ms. Winfrey, a small sampling of Hollywood visitors included Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt and George Clooney, who met with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Feb. 23. The White House offered no commentary about the list, except to clarify that visitors by the names of William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright were not the same two men who stirred controversy for Mr. Obama in his campaign.

“The well-known individuals with those names never actually came to the White House,” said Norm Eisen, special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform. “Nevertheless, we were asked for those names and so we have included records for those individuals who were here and share the same names.”

Peter Baker and David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting.

China Is Trying the Tibetan Filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen for Subversion - NYTimes.com

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By ANDREW JACOBS

CHONGQING, China — A self-taught filmmaker who spent five months interviewing Tibetans about their hopes and frustrations living under Chinese rule is facing charges of state subversion after the footage was smuggled abroad and distributed on the Internet and at film festivals around the world.

The filmmaker, Dhondup Wangchen, who has been detained since March 2008, just weeks after deadly rioting broke out in Tibet, managed to sneak a letter out of jail last month saying that his trial had begun.

“There is no good news I can share with you,” he wrote in the letter, which was provided by a cousin in Switzerland. “It is unclear what the sentence will be.”

As President Obama prepares for his first trip to China next month, rights advocates are clamoring for his attention in hopes that he will raise the plight of individuals like Mr. Wangchen or broach such thorny topics as free speech, democracy and greater religious freedom.

With hundreds of lawyers, dissidents and journalists serving time in Chinese prisons, human rights organizations are busy lobbying the White House, members of Congress and the news media. In some ways, the pressure has only intensified since Mr. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, raising expectations for him to carry the torch of human rights.

Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, said Mr. Obama had an obligation to press Mr. Wangchen’s case and the cause of Tibetan autonomy in general, given his decision not to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington this month.

That move, which some viewed as a concession to China, angered critics already displeased with what they say was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failure to press human rights during a visit to China in February.

“Beijing is emboldened by such moves,” Ms. Tethong said. “They see a weakness in the U.S. government, and they’re going to exploit it. This idea that you’ll gain more through some backroom secret strategy does not work.”

Until now, the case of Mr. Wangchen, 35, has received little attention abroad. Uneducated and plainspoken, he was an itinerant businessman until October 2007, when he bought a small video camera and began traveling the Tibetan plateau interviewing monks, yak herders and students about their lives.

Tsetring Gyaljong, a cousin who helped him make the documentary, said that Mr. Wangchen’s political awareness was sharpened nearly a decade ago, when he witnessed a demonstration in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, that was quickly broken up by public security officers.

“He saw how it was dissolved in two or three minutes and how everyone was taken away,” said Mr. Gyaljong, speaking from Switzerland, where he has lived in exile since escaping from Tibet. “There were no pictures, no testimonies, and he felt like the world should know that Tibetans, despite the Chinese portrayals, are not a happy people.”

Out of 40 hours of footage and 108 interviews came “Leaving Fear Behind,” a 25-minute documentary that is an unadorned indictment of the Chinese government. Although given the choice to conceal their identities, most of his subjects spoke uncloaked and freely expressed their disdain for the Han Chinese migrants who are flooding the region and their love for the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since 1959.

In his own comments at the start of the film, Mr. Wangchen said the approach of the 2008 Olympics had compelled him to record the feelings of Tibetans, many of whom were less than enthusiastic about the decision to hold the Games in Beijing.

“We have no independence or freedom, so Tibetans have no reason to celebrate,” said one young woman standing by a road. “The Chinese have independence and freedom, so this is something they can celebrate.”

On March 10, 2008, Mr. Wangchen traveled to Xi’an in central China to hand over the tapes to Dechen Pemba, a British citizen who ferried them out of the country. That same day, a protest in Lhasa turned into a rampage that left at least 18 people dead, most of them Han Chinese.

On March 26, Mr. Wangchen and Golog Jigme, a Buddhist monk who helped him make the film, were arrested. Mr. Jigme was subsequently released.

“It really is a remarkable coincidence,” Ms. Pemba said.

Mr. Wangchen’s family hired a lawyer, but the authorities barred him from court last July, leaving Mr. Wangchen with a public defender.

Before he was forced to drop the case, the lawyer, Li Dunyong, said Mr. Wangchen had told him that he was tortured and that he had contracted hepatitis B while in custody. Since then, he has been held incommunicado. Officials at the Xining Intermediate Court in Qinghai Province, where Mr. Wangchen is being held, would not comment on his case.

Mr. Wangchen seemed acutely aware that his project could get him in trouble. Just before he began filming, he sent his wife and their four children to India, where they live along with his elderly parents.

In an interview from Dharamsala, where she works as a baker, Mr. Wangchen’s wife, Lhamo Tso, said she feared she might not see him again for many, many years.

“As a wife, I’m very sad to be without the person I love so much,” she said. “But if I can separate out that sadness, I feel proud because he made a courageous decision to give a voice to people who don’t have one.”

Mozambique Is Reporting Big Victory for President - NYTimes.com

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By BARRY BEARAK

JOHANNESBURG — A partial count in Mozambique’s elections on Friday shows President Armando E. Guebuza of the Frelimo Party far ahead of his two opponents and likely to finish with around 75 percent of the votes.

If the pattern holds up, and political analysts predict it will, it will be the most decisive victory in the nation’s four presidential elections.

Frelimo, with much superior financing and a tightly run organization, is also expected to win overwhelmingly in the race for seats in Parliament and provincial legislatures.

Frelimo insiders had predicted a landslide. “We are really just competing with ourselves; our aim is to win by a margin greater than in the past,” a party spokesman, Edson Macuácua, said recently.

Mr. Guebuza, 66, is one of the nation’s wealthiest businessmen. Among his main campaign slogans was “With Guebuza we will win the battle against poverty.” The fight has quite a way to go. The country, with 21 million people, has per capita income of only $454, according to the World Bank.

Mozambique was once a Portuguese colony, and after independence in 1975 it became the battleground for one of Africa’s most devastating civil wars. Peace finally came in 1992, and the two warring armies — Frelimo and Renamo — were transformed into competing political parties.

Frelimo, a one-time Marxist organization that now eagerly shakes the marketplace’s guiding hand, has managed to stay on top. Renamo has fallen ever further behind, and Wednesday’s election could prove a backbreaker.

The official results may not be announced by the nation’s election commission until Nov. 12. But for now, Afonso Dhlakama, Renamo’s longtime leader, finds himself in a tight race for second place with Daviz Simango, a relative newcomer who started his party, the Mozambique Democratic Movement, only last March.

Experts say the Renamo candidate is likely to pull ahead for the runner-up spot when more returns come in from the northern parts of the nation. Yet Mr. Dhlakama, who has headed Renamo for 25 years, is unlikely to make another try. In 1999, he narrowly lost the presidential election. In 2004, he was defeated by 32 percentage points. This time, the margin will be much larger.

Under Frelimo, Mozambique has managed to attract foreign investors eager to exploit the nation’s mineral wealth. It also has become a darling of foreign donors, whose annual contributions come to an estimated $2 billion.

Many of those donors, however, have expressed their disapproval with the way the election has been run.

The election commission, widely believed to be dominated by Frelimo, refused to allow the Mozambique Democratic Movement to compete for parliamentary seats in 9 of the 13 voting constituencies. It cited procedural grounds.

Mr. Simango, the mayor of the country’s second-largest city, Beira, may not even manage 10 percent of the presidential vote. “But even if he gets 9 percent, it’s a good start for someone who first appeared on the national stage less than a year ago,” said Miguel de Brito, the country director for EISA, a group that works for democratic reforms in Africa. “It may be less of a start than Simango wanted, but it shows he has some base.”

On Friday, in a meeting with reporters, election observers from the European Union praised the voting as “well-managed” and “calm.” But they too criticized the election commission for excluding so many candidates on technicalities, calling it a “restriction of voter choice at the local level.”

French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality - NYTimes.com

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By STEVEN ERLANGER and MAÏA DE LA BAUME

PARIS — Just as Le Corbusier’s white cruciform towers once excited visions of the industrial-age city of the future, so Vélib’, Paris’s bicycle rental system, inspired a new urban ethos for the era of climate change.

Residents here can rent a sturdy bicycle from hundreds of public stations and pedal to their destinations, an inexpensive, healthy and low-carbon alternative to hopping in a car or bus.

But this latest French utopia has met a prosaic reality: Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.

With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.

“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”

The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.

Bruno Marzloff, a sociologist who specializes in transportation, said, “One must relate this to other incivilities, and especially the burning of cars,” referring to gangs of immigrant youths burning cars during riots in the suburbs in 2005.

He said he believed there was social revolt behind Vélib’ vandalism, especially for suburban residents, many of them poor immigrants who feel excluded from the glamorous side of Paris.

“It is an outcry, a form of rebellion; this violence is not gratuitous,” Mr. Marzloff said. “There is an element of negligence that means, ‘We don’t have the right to mobility like other people, to get to Paris it’s a huge pain, we don’t have cars, and when we do, it’s too expensive and too far.’ ”

Used mainly for commuting in the urban core of the city, the Vélib’ program is by many measures a success. After swiping a credit card for a deposit at an electronic docking station, a rider pays one euro per day, or 29 euros (about $43) for an annual pass, for unlimited access to the bikes for 30-minute periods that can be extended for a small fee.

Daily use averages 50,000 to 150,000 trips, depending on the season, and the bicycles have proved to be a hit with tourists, who help power the economy.

But the extra-solid construction and electronic docks mean the bikes, made in Hungary, are expensive, and not everyone shares the spirit of joint public property promoted by Paris’s Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë.

“We miscalculated the damage and the theft,” said Albert Asséraf, director of strategy, research and marketing at JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company that is a major financer and organizer of the project. “But we had no reference point in the world for this kind of initiative.”

At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so badly that they had to be replaced — nearly 80 percent of the initial stock, Mr. Asséraf said.

JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day. The company maintains 10 repair shops and a workshop on a boat that moves up and down the Seine.

JCDecaux reinforced the bicycles’ chains and baskets and added better theft protection, strengthening the mechanisms that attach them to the electronic parking docks, since an incompletely secured bike is much easier to steal. But the damage and theft continued.

“We made the bike stronger, ran ad campaigns against vandalism and tried to better inform people on the Web,” Mr. Asséraf said. But “the real solution is just individual respect.”

In 2008 , the number of infractions related to Vélib’ vandalism rose 54 percent, according to the Paris police.

“We found many stolen Vélib’s in Paris’s troubled neighborhoods,” said Marie Lajus, a spokeswoman for the police. “It’s not profit-making delinquency, but rather young boys, especially from the suburbs, consider the Vélib’ an object that has no value.”

Sometimes the bikes are also victims of good old adolescent anarchic fun. These attitudes are expressed by the “freeriders,” and a bicycle forum, where a mock poll asks riders whether the Vélib’ can do wheelies, go down stairs and make decent skid marks.

It is commonplace now to see the bikes at docking stations in Paris with flat tires, punctured wheels or missing baskets. Some Vélib’s have been found hanging from lampposts, dumped in the Seine, used on the streets of Bucharest or resting in shipping containers on their way to North Africa. Some are simply appropriated and repainted.

Finding a decent one is now something of an urban treasure hunt. Géraldine Bernard, 31, of Paris rides a Vélib’ to work every day but admits having difficulties lately finding functioning bikes.

“It’s a very clever initiative to improve people’s lives, but it’s not a complete success,” she said.

“For a regular user like me, it generates a lot of frustration,” she said. “It’s a reflection of the violence of our society and it’s outrageous: the Vélib’ is a public good but there is no civic feeling related to it.”

Still, with more than 63 million rentals since the program was begun in mid-2007, the Vélib’ is an established part of Parisian life, and the program has been extended to provide 4,000 Vélib’s in 29 towns on the city’s edges.

So despite the increasing costs, Paris and JCDecaux are pressing on. The company invested about $140 million to set up the system and provides a yearly fee of about $5.5 million to Paris, which also gets rental fees for the bikes. In return, the company’s 10-year contract allows it to put up 1,628 billboards that it can rent.

Although JCDecaux will not discuss money figures, the expected date for profitability has been set back. But the City of Paris has agreed to pay JCDecaux about $600 for each stolen or irreparably damaged bike if the number exceeds 4 percent of the fleet, which it clearly does.

In an unsuccessful effort to stop vandalism, Paris began an advertising campaign this summer. Posters showed a cartoon Vélib’ being roughed up by a thug. The caption read: “It’s easy to beat up a Vélib’, it can’t defend itself. Vélib’ belongs to you, protect it!”

Maoist Rebels Widen Deadly Reach Across India - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By JIM YARDLEY

BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government.

“That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh.

Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

For India, the widening Maoist insurgency is a moment of reckoning for the country’s democracy and has ignited a sharp debate about where it has failed. In the past, India has tamed some secessionist movements by coaxing rebel groups into the country’s big-tent political process. The Maoists, however, do not want to secede or be absorbed. Their goal is to topple the system.

Once considered Robin Hood figures, the Maoists claim to represent the dispossessed of Indian society, particularly the indigenous tribal groups, who suffer some of the country’s highest rates of poverty, illiteracy and infant mortality. Many intellectuals and even some politicians once sympathized with their cause, but the growing Maoist violence has forced a wrenching reconsideration of whether they can still be tolerated.

“The root of this is dispossession and deprivation,” said Ramachandra Guha, a prominent historian based in Bangalore. “The Maoists are an ugly manifestation of this. This is a serious problem that is not going to disappear.”

India’s rapid economic growth has made it an emerging global power but also deepened stark inequalities in society. Maoists accuse the government of trying to push tribal groups off their land to gain access to raw materials and have sabotaged roads, bridges and even an energy pipeline.

If the Maoists’ political goals seem unattainable, analysts warn they will not be easy to uproot, either.

Here in the state of Chattisgarh, Maoists dominate thousands of square miles of territory and have pushed into neighboring states of Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, part of a so-called Red Corridor stretching across central and eastern India.

Violence erupts almost daily. In the past five years, Maoists have detonated more than 1,000 improvised explosive devices in Chattisgarh. Within the past two weeks, Maoists have burned two schools in Jharkhand, hijacked and later released a passenger train in West Bengal while also carrying out a raid against a West Bengal police station.

Efforts are under way to open peace negotiations, but as yet remain stalemated. With the government offensive drawing closer, the people who feel most at risk are the tribal villagers who live in the forests of Chattisgarh, where the police and Maoists, sometimes called Naxalites, are already skirmishing.

“Earlier,” said one villager, “we used to fear the tigers and wild boars. Now we fear the guns of the Naxalites and the police.”

The counterinsurgency campaign, called Operation Green Hunt, calls for sending police and paramilitary forces into the jungles to confront the Maoists and drive them out of newer footholds toward remote forest areas where they can be contained.

“It may take one year, two years, three years or four,” predicted Vishwa Ranjan, chief of the state police in Chattisgarh, adding that casualties would be inevitable. “There is no zero casualty doctrine,” he said.

Once an area is cleared, the plan also calls for introducing development projects such as roads, bridges and schools in hopes of winning support of the tribal people. Also known as adivasis, they have faced decades of exploitation from local officials, moneylenders and private contractors, numerous government reports have found.

“The adivasis are the group least incorporated into India’s political economy,” said Ashutosh Varshney, an India specialist at Brown University, calling their plight one of the “unfinished quests of Indian democracy.”

The Maoist movement first coalesced after a violent 1967 uprising by local Communists over a land dispute in a West Bengal village known as Naxalbari, hence the name Naxalites.

Some Communists would enter the political system; today, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is an influential political force that holds power in West Bengal. But others went underground, and by the 1980s, many found sanctuary in Chattisgarh, especially in the region across from the Indravati River known as Abhujmad. From here, the Maoists recruited and trained disgruntled tribal villagers and slowly spread out. For years, the central government regarded them as mostly a nuisance. But in 2004, the movement radicalized, authorities say, when its two dominant wings merged with the more violent Communist Party of India (Maoist).

Authorities in Chattisgarh then deputized and armed civilian posses, which have been accused by human rights groups of terrorizing innocent villagers and committing atrocities of their own in the name of hunting Maoists. Now, violence is frequent, if unpredictable, like the ambush near the village of Laheri, in Maharashtra State, carried out by the Maoists on Oct. 8.

That morning, following a tip, a police patrol chased two Maoist fighters and stumbled into a trap. Two hundred Maoists with rifles and machine guns lay waiting and opened fire when the officers came into an exposed area of rice paddies. Seventeen officers died, fighting for hours until they ran out of ammunition.

“They surrounded us from every side,” said Ajay Bhushari, 31, who survived the ambush and is now the commanding officer in Laheri. “They were just stronger. They had more people.”

The Maoists felled trees across the only road leading to the village. The police, already wary of using roads because of improvised explosive devices, marched their reinforcements 10 miles through the jungle, arriving too late at the scene.

Officer Bhushari said violence in the area had risen so sharply that the police now left the fortified defenses of their outpost only in large groups, even for social outings. The Maoists also killed 31 police officers from other nearby outposts in attacks in February and May.

“It’s an open jail for us,” he said. “Either we are sitting here, or we are on patrol. There is nothing else.”

About 40 miles from Laheri, a processing plant owned by Essar Steel has been closed for five months. Maoists sabotaged Essar’s 166-mile underground pipeline, which transfers slurry from one of India’s most coveted iron ore deposits to the Bay of Bengal. “I’ve told my management that I’ll take a team and do the repairs,” said S. Ramesh, the project manager for Essar. “But I can’t promise how long it will last.”

The Essar plant is part of broader undertaking by the government and several private mining companies to extract the resources beneath land teeming with guerrillas. Mr. Ramesh said 70 percent of India’s iron ore lay in states infiltrated by Maoists; production in this area is stalled at 16 million tons a year even though the area has the potential to produce 100 million tons.

Mr. Ramesh fretted that India’s growth would be stunted if the country could not exploit its own natural resources. Yet he also cautioned that the counterinsurgency operation was no cure-all. “That alone is not going to help,” he said. “We are not fighting an enemy here. We are fighting citizens.”

With police officers dying in large numbers and Maoists carrying out bolder attacks, the debate around the insurgency has sharpened in India’s intellectual salons and on the opinion pages and talk shows.

The writer Arundhati Roy recently called for unconditional talks and told CNN-IBN that the Maoists were justified in taking up arms because of government oppression. Others who are sympathetic to the plight of the adivasis say the Maoist violence has become intolerable.

“You can’t defend the tactics,” said Mr. Varshney, the Brown University professor. “No modern state can accept attacks on state institutions, even when the state is wrong.”

Local people are caught in the middle. On a recent market day in the village of Palnar, women balancing urns of water on their heads and bare-footed, emaciated men came out of the forests to shop for vegetables, nuts or a rotting fruit fermented to produce local liquor. As peddlers spread their wares over blankets, the nearby government office was locked behind a closed gate.

“It’s a bad situation,” said one villager who asked not to be identified, fearing retribution from both sides. “The Naxalite activities have increased. They have their meetings in the village. They tell the people they have to fight. The people here do not vote out of fear.”

Another man arrived on a motorcycle from a more distant village. Several months ago, the police raided his village and arrested more than a dozen people after accusing them of being collaborators. A few were Maoist sympathizers, the man on the motorcycle said, but most were wrongly swept up in the raid. Now, Operation Green Hunt portends more confrontation.

“Life is very difficult,” the man said. “The Naxalites think we are helping the police. The police think we are helping the Naxalites. We are living in fear over who will kill us first.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

Abdullah widely expected to boycott Afghan run-off election - washingtonpost.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 31, 2009 11:51 AM

KABUL -- A presidential run-off election planned for Nov. 7 was thrown into turmoil Saturday, with the main challenger to President Hamid Karzai, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, widely expected to pull out of the race.

Campaign spokesmen for Abdullah said he had not made a final decision but would announce it here Sunday at a gathering of his top supporters from around the country. Some analysts suggested the boycott threat was an eleventh-hour ploy to win a power-sharing agreement with Karzai.

However, several sources close to Abdullah said he had no option but to boycott the contest. They said Karzai had refused to meet Abdullah's demands to fire the nation's top election official and take other measures to prevent the fraud that marred the original presidential election in August.

"We don't want to boycott, but Mr. Karzai has not accepted any conditions, so he left us with no other choice," said one member of Abdullah's political team, speaking on the condition of anonymity because Abdullah has not yet announced his plans. "There is no guarantee that a second round would be free and fair. It would only create more problems than it solves."

The prospect of Abdullah's withdrawal could plunge Afghanistan into an even deeper political crisis after weeks of mounting tension and uncertainty over how to form a new government. Karzai's victory in the Aug. 20 presidential election was found invalid because of widespread fraud, leading to plans for the runoff.

A canceled or marred election would further complicate matters for the Obama administration, which is nearing a decision on whether to significantly expand its military commitment to the war against Afghan and al-Qaeda insurgents. Washington has been counting on the election to produce a credible administration and partner in the war effort.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who arrived in Abu Dhabi early Saturday for a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, played down the importance of a possible Abdullah withdrawal, however, saying that his decision was a "personal choice which may or may not be made."

Asked whether a run-off would be legitimate with only one candidate running, Clinton said that "other countries" had faced similar situations. "We see that happen in our own country where, for whatever combination of reasons, one of the candidates decides no to go forward. I don't think it has anything to do with the legitimacy of the election," Clinton said.

U.S. officials had pressed Karzai hard to accept the run-off and he reluctantly agreed, although there was widespread concern among Afghans that the second round would not only be marred by fraud but would be even more vulnerable to insurgent attacks than the first poll. This week, the Taliban killed six U.N. workers and threatened to violently sabotage the Nov. 7 vote.

Aides to Karzai said Saturday that Abdullah has no right to boycott the election and that if he does, it will be up to the Afghan election commission to decide what to do. However, they also said he is legally allowed to simply resign from the race, in which case Karzai would automatically win.

"He can resign, but he cannot boycott, because he already accepted the election the first time," Moinuddin Manastial, a legislator and campaign aide to Karzai, said late Saturday. "He is making excuses to do something that is not in the constitution, while we are ready to go for the elections 100 percent."

Election officials said that they are still preparing to hold the vote, that Afghan security forces are ready to protect the voters at more than 6,000 polling stations across the country, and that neither candidate has the right to withdraw at this late date. Whether Abdullah boycotts the vote or not, his name will remain on the ballot.

Some analysts said they thought the door might still be open to a last-minute compromise between Karzai and Abdullah. They said Abdullah's threats to quit were aimed at undermining Karzai's electoral legitimacy and at pressing him for a power-sharing deal. But there was no hint from either camp that an agreement is still being explored.

Independent election experts said it is not clear what will happen if Abdullah does quit the race. They said most of the possible options -- canceling the vote and having Karzai declared president; having him run alone; or postponing the race until spring and replacing Abdullah with the third-highest vote-getter -- would either leave the country in political limbo or Karzai as head of a weak and illegitimate new administration.

"The situation is both depressing and complicated," said Ahmad Nader Nadery, chairman of the private Free and Fair Elections Foundation. "The law is silent on what to do in this situation, and whatever happens is likely to bring us more deeply into trouble, because we will probably end up with a president who did not get the minimum number of votes in a fair election."

Local analysts and Kabul residents glued to TV news stations Saturday expressed concern that violence could erupt in the capital and other cities if Abdullah quits the race amid angry recriminations and Karzai remains in office. Some of Abdullah's powerful supporters who command regional or private militias have vowed not to recognize or obey a new Karzai administration.

Abdullah, who abruptly canceled a scheduled trip to India on Saturday, has delayed announcing his decision for the past several days amid a flurry of private negotiations and meetings involving Karzai, Abdullah and their political aides and allies, as well as several foreign diplomats.

But sources close to the discussions told various media outlets late Friday and Saturday that talks between the two rival leaders collapsed Friday after Karzai had already announced he would not meet Abdullah's demands to fire the election commission chairman and other officials.

Since then, several sources said, Abdullah has leaned toward boycotting the contest, which Karzai has been widely expected to win. In the first round, even after hundreds of thousands of votes for Karzai were found invalid and discounted, the president won more than 49 percent of the vote, while Abdullah won less than 30 per cent.

Although Abdullah's public manner has been polite and his demands have sounded reasonable, there is widespread public skepticism about his sincerity. Some analysts say he wants to remain in the race but is surrounded by ambitious allies who have been pressing him to make a deal with Karzai.

Diplomatic sources said earlier this week that Karzai was open to forming a "government of unity" after the elections that would include Abdullah and his allies, but that he would not make any deal in advance.

Some experts and diplomats have suggested that if the country's political crisis deepens or there is an eruption of violence, the wisest solution would be to establish an interim or caretaker government and hold a new election in the spring, when the winter snows have melted and voters can go to the polls again.

But U.S. officials already appear to be preparing to accept Karzai's extended presidency as a fait accompli. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who personally persuaded Karzai to accept the run-off during a visit to Kabul, told a TV interviewer in Washington on Friday that he has confidence in Karzai's political resilience and that the Afghan president is "prepared to embrace reforms" in a new term.

Staff writer Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.

Rob Pegoraro - New Google Maps GPS for smartphones spooks competitors - washingtonpost.com

Image via CrunchBase

By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, November 1, 2009

Wednesday morning, Google notified manufacturers of GPS navigation units that their services would no longer be needed. It didn't say so explicitly -- the news came in a corporate blog post about an improved Google Maps smartphone program offering turn-by-turn directions -- but the company didn't have to.

The imminent arrival of a no-charge navigation service, complete with real-time traffic data and satellite and street-level views of a route, on phones running Google's latest Android software, made standalone GPS devices look suddenly redundant. GPS manufacturers' share prices promptly fell off a cliff; Garmin's dropped about 16 percent and TomTom's plunged by 21 percent Wednesday.

Wednesday was a not-atypical day for the Mountain View, Calif., Internet giant. Perhaps more so than any other company since Microsoft at its peak, Google can spook competitors and enthrall users just by introducing a product.

You could see the same dynamic in late September, when Google introduced a Web-based fusion of e-mail, instant messaging and collaborative editing called Google Wave-- and hype-intoxicated Web users who weren't necessarily sure what Wave did began groveling for invitations to try it out.

Somewhat like the late '90s incarnation of Microsoft, Google also now provides an extraordinarily wide range of services. Many are subisidized by the torrent of cash thrown off by its Web advertising business -- but if these new offerings keep you online longer and, therefore, within sight of Google's ads, the company still comes out ahead.

You can easily spend a full day on the Web without leaving its sites or applications: checking email at Gmail, uploading pictures at Picasa, updating your schedule at Google Calendar, looking up an address on Google Maps, watching goofy video clips at YouTube, skimming the headlines at Google News, writing in Google Docs -- and that doesn't count all the Google-hosted ads at many other sites. You could do all this in Google's Chrome browser, then get up to make a call on a phone running Google's Android software.

That is not to say that Google is some reincarnation of the dot-com-era Microsoft. It has yet to engage in such hubristic excesses as co-founding a TV news network, and it hasn't trampled over the antitrust laws. Google avoids locking in users with proprietary data formats or protocols; last month, it set up a site (http://dataliberation.org) to document and promote ways for users to take their data out of (and into) Google services.

As the second person to mention Google in The Post, I can attest that this company has achieved its success honestly--with help from the errors and apathy of competitors.

Gmail, for example, wouldn't have had such a fast start if Microsoft and Yahoo hadn't spent years steadily cutting the features of their free e-mail services. The same goes for Google Maps: Had MapQuest not degenerated into mediocrity under AOL's inept stewardship, users might have not jumped so quickly to a new source of online cartography.

It's also important to remember that Google's ventures don't succeed as much as people think. Google Maps may now be the number-one mapping source, according to ComScore's latest figures, but Gmail still trails Microsoft and Yahoo's Web-mail sites.

Google's Picasa may be a fine photo-editing application, but its corresponding photo-sharing site is dwared by rivals in ComScore's data. The Google Checkout payment service has drawn less support from Web retailers than PayPal or BillMeLater.

Some Google ventures rank as outright failures. Google Base, an ambitious attempt to set up a marketplace where individual users could buy and sell goods and services, didn't lure the masses away from Craiglist, despite that site's relative technological backwardness. Its Orkut social-networking site's audience isn't even a rounding error in the United States.

In other words, the wizards of Mountain View can't flick other companies off the map with their fingertips. What they can do is leap far enough ahead of competitors in a single product launch to shock them into attention. When those firms draw the appropriate "get better or get lost" conclusion and redouble their efforts, customers should benefit.

This effect may break down when Google steps into markets dominated by firms selling devices instead of software. In the time it takes a manufacturer to usher an improved gadget from whiteboard to circuit board, Google can push out three or four rounds of updates to a Web application.

You shouldn't feel obliged to avoid Google altogether because of this power to upend markets. But you should remind yourself not to discount worthy alternatives just because they're Not Google. There's also much to be said for keeping a part of your online identity -- maybe your photos, maybe your e-mail -- outside of Google. Spread your business around, and one company can't get too comfortable with it.

Living with technology, or trying to? Read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.

Iran counters U.N. on uranium plan - washingtonpost.com

Image by Hamed Saber via Flickr

Russia, France and U.S. likely to find offer unacceptable

By Glenn Kessler and Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 30, 2009

Iran on Thursday appeared to reject a key element of a U.N.-backed proposal aimed at quickly reducing its stockpile of enriched uranium, offering an informal oral counteroffer that diplomats said fell far short of a tentative deal reached earlier this month.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the Iranian ambassador to the U.N. agency that the counteroffer, as structured, would not be acceptable to Russia, France and the United States -- the other parties to the arrangement -- and urged him to get more clarification from his government. Diplomats said they hope a formal, written answer from Iran will be delivered as early as Friday.

The long-awaited Iranian answer appeared to dash hopes that Tehran would be willing to quickly embrace engagement with the West on its nuclear program. Not only did Iran appear to reject a central element of the proposed agreement but it also has refused to commit to another high-level diplomatic meeting to discuss the program.

Obama administration officials will now need to assess whether the engagement gambit has begun to run its course -- and whether to shift toward pressing for tougher sanctions against the Islamic republic.

In a statement, the IAEA said that ElBaradei "has received an initial response from the Iranian authorities" and that he "is engaged in consultations with the government of Iran as well as all relevant parties, with the hope that agreement on his proposal can be reached soon." The agency provided no other details.

Stockpile would remain steady

In talks in Geneva on Oct. 1, Iran tentatively agreed to the arrangement, under which nearly 80 percent of its stockpile would go to Russia and France to be fashioned into fuel for a research reactor that produces isotopes that detect and treat diseases. As part of the deal, the United States would support the IAEA in an effort to help Iran ensure the safe operation of the reactor, built by the United States in the 1960s.

Iran has enough low-enriched uranium, in theory, to produce one nuclear weapon. If it agreed to the deal, most analysts estimate, it would be nine to 12 months before Iran would again have enough uranium to be able to enrich it to weapons grade.

Further talks were held last week in Vienna, with ElBaradei presenting a draft agreement that was embraced by the other countries, but Iran missed a Friday deadline to respond.

A central element of the plan, conceived by the Obama administration, is that Iran must ship the enriched uranium out of the country in one batch by the end of the year. Instead, the presentation by Iranian Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh suggested that Iran would ship out its uranium in batches, swapping it for new material on a continuous basis, diplomats said. That would negate the main attraction of the proposal for the major powers dealing with Iran, because it would mean its stockpile of enriched uranium would not be significantly reduced.

The United States, France and Russia had no official response to the counteroffer, but they were consulting behind the scenes about how to respond if the formal offer differed little from the ambassador's apparent trial balloon. One U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described Iran's answers as "a response of sorts" but said the three other countries remain united in support of the plan.

"We need further clarification," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters. "And I think it's also fair to say that we need to have a formal response from Iran at this point. We've been given some details of it, but we're still talking to the Iranians about it."

Internal disagreement

The proposal appears to have generated fierce debate within the Iranian government.

In a speech in the northeastern city of Mashhad on Thursday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defied harsh criticism from domestic opponents who accused him of giving away too much in the negotiations. He said the West has been forced to alter its confrontational stance toward Iran, state television reported.

"Nuclear fuel supply for the Tehran reactor is an opportunity to evaluate the honesty of the powers and the [IAEA]," Ahmadinejad said.

"We shake any hand that is honestly stretched toward us," he said. "However, if someone pursues plots and wants to be dishonest, the Iranian nation's response to him will be similar to the response we gave to Mr. Bush and his predecessors," a reference to former president George W. Bush.

Domestic opponents, including the parliament speaker, lawmakers and the leader of the political opposition, have spoken out against the proposed deal, arguing that the other partners in the arrangement might not return Iran's uranium after it has been sent abroad.

The strongest criticism has come from Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading opposition presidential candidate in Iran's June 12 election. Even though the two-term government of his political partner, former president Mohammad Khatami, tried several times to reach a compromise with the West over Iran's nuclear program, Mousavi charged that the current proposal would lead to disaster.

"The discussions in Geneva were really surprising, and if the promises given [to the West] are realized, then the hard work of thousands of scientists would be ruined," the Kaleme Web site quoted Mousavi as saying in reference to the nuclear fuel plan.