With WiMax, Walking on the Wireless Side in Baltimore

By PETER WAYNER

Baltimore, the home of the hapless Orioles and a favorite backdrop for so-called realistic TV crime dramas, just happens to be one of the most wired cities in the country. It ascended to the throne after Clearwire introduced WiMax service last winter, giving the city a preview of what the company is slowly building throughout the country.

Calling the city “wired” is not quite accurate because, HBO series aside, WiMax has little to do with copper; it delivers the Internet through radio signals broadcast from cellphone towers. The service is much faster, though, than what many cellphone networks currently provide with their 3G networks. Indeed, WiMax delivers speeds much faster than many DSL circuits, rivaling many cable modems. I often clock downloads at 6 megabits per second (equivalent to basic cable service in many areas) and uploads at faster than 1 megabit per second.

Sprint, one of the owners of Clearwire, calls WiMax a “4G network” to distinguish it from the 3G networks that connect smartphones and offer speeds from 0.4 to 1 megabit per second. To make matters a bit more confusing, Clearwire sells “pre-WiMax” service in 47 cities at speeds that top out at 2 megabits per second. In an effort to clarify the matter, Clearwire is using the brand name “Clear” to apply to full WiMax service.

For the last six months, I’ve used a full WiMax/4G equipped netbook to test the service around Baltimore. The Acer Aspire One with a Sprint U300 WiMax card I used is an ideal companion for sending and receiving e-mail messages. It’s small enough to take almost everywhere but it’s large enough to act like a PC — a PC that’s always connected to a very big Wi-Fi hotspot.

Adding WiMax to a laptop may make it easier to read e-mail messages often, but the real value of the bandwidth becomes apparent when the PC does something more than just send text. VoIP software like Skype turns it into a video phone, a browser pointed at Hulu acts like a television that can fetch shows on command and there’s also GPS service for finding directions. It’s a smartphone with a normal keyboard and a very open software marketplace. All of the PC software built for the desktop also works with the small package.

The U300 attaches to any laptop, but Netbook manufacturers are offering more and more machines with built-in cards. Lenovo, for instance, will add the WiMax/Wi-Fi Link 5150 card to some of their laptops for an additional $30. Prices vary depending on the model.

WiMax is also one of the first wireless services that’s being actively marketed to people sitting on their couches at home. Xohm, the brand name originally given to Baltimore’s WiMax service (it’s now being merged into Clearwire and the Xohm brand will disappear), sells a home base station meant to compete directly with DSL or cable for $35 a month, and sometimes there is a short-term discount. A base station and a laptop card together cost $50 a month. The service options are getting complicated and the prices vary in different communities. Comcast, another investor in Clearwire, is starting a wireless service in Portland, Ore., under its own brand name. It will charge $50 a month for service within Portland that is promised to deliver downloads at a rate of 4 megabits per second.

Sprint also sells a card that offers both 4G service where WiMax is available and 3G service where Sprint’s cellphone network is all that’s there. It’s a better choice for anyone who travels outside of the cities where WiMax is appearing. Sprint charges $80 for the modem and $80 a month for the service.

The WiMax coverage in Baltimore is good but far from comprehensive. The signal blankets downtown and many of the neighborhoods, but it stops just a few blocks from my house. The cellphone tower is on one side of the hill and my house is on the other. Clearwire says that it is slowly expanding coverage but I’ve seen little change in the map over the last few months.

WiMax can also suffer from the same problems that affect all wireless services. Rain and snow absorb the signal, reducing the quality of the service during storms, an effect the industry calls “rain fade.” Trees and other plants are filled with water and can cause the same problems even when the sun is shining. Thick walls are also a challenge. Being closer to the tower is always better for service. All of these effects work together, so it’s no surprise that the maps of WiMax service show that early deployment is concentrated in the densest part of the city where trees are rare. That’s where the most people will find the best reception.

But wireless also comes with advantages. I’ve averaged about one visit from the phone or cable company every year or so because the copper wires coming to my house need their care. Both services require internal wiring that must either be fished through the walls or the baseboard. Wireless service to the home avoids these problems.

The Xohm/Clearwire base station can sit anywhere in the house and it can even be moved, but putting it on a higher floor near a window improves service. If the house isn’t near the tower, it may even help to put it on the closest side of the house where there’s no dense foliage in the path. Using the WiMax laptop card alone also works under the same conditions.

The more I used the laptop while traveling around the city, the more aware I became of the time it took Windows to start. While the Internet service may be available everywhere, it took several painful minutes for Windows to boot up. To make matters worse, the U300 card needs its own minute or so to look for a signal.

Some netbook manufacturers are experimenting with adding a simpler operating system that can start much faster than Microsoft Windows. These machines can boot up in less than 10 seconds but only by loading a lightweight operating system that offers a few basic services like a Web browser or Skype. The full version of Windows is still available if you need it. Needless to say, offering such a start-up time will change the utility of these microlaptops considerably.

Speeding the start-up time will be crucial if the netbooks want to compete with smartphones for casual use by people on the go. The bandwidth is ready to supply full-size applications that augment reality with an endless heavy stream of data. Scott Richardson, chief strategy officer of Clearwire, told me: “I did a demonstration in Portland with some computer industry guys. I was driving down a road going 60 miles per hour and I got a 14 megabits-per-second download.”

Portland came online in January of this year and Clearwire just announced that it was selling service in Atlanta and Las Vegas a few weeks ago. This isn’t the end. Clearwire says it’s on to Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Honolulu, Seattle and Charlotte, N.C. They’re all fine cities, even if they don’t all have the same level of baseball and the same fertile source of inspiration for narrative crime dramas.

Organ Trafficking Fueled by Worldwide Market

By DOMINICK TAO

They won’t look the doctor in the eye, and their stories have holes — after all, how often does someone offer a spare kidney to a third cousin he just met?

Eventually, many would-be live-organ donors simply disappear; at one hospital, Hackensack University Medical Center, more than half drop out of the transplant process after initial meetings with doctors.

Dr. Michael Shapiro, the chief surgeon of the hospital’s transplant unit, said he suspects that many of those people are looking to be paid for their body parts, but fear getting caught.

“Sometimes, you have to sit down with the donor and say: ‘It’s illegal to buy or sell organs. You know that, right?’ ” Dr. Shapiro said.

Among the 44 people arrested last week in one of the most sweeping bribery and money-laundering investigations in New Jersey history, one stood out: Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn businessman who was accused of trying to broker the purchase of a kidney for $160,000.

Though most developed countries, including the United States, ban organ sales, there is an international market for transplantable organs: a shady world of unscrupulous doctors, concocted relationships and hotels used as recovery rooms.

The World Health Organization estimates that about 10 percent of the 63,000 kidneys transplanted worldwide each year from living donors have been bought illegally. Lungs, pieces of livers and corneas also command a price.

Last year, the authorities in India said they had broken up a ring involving doctors, nurses, paramedics and hospitals that had performed 500 illegal transplants of organs to rich Indians and foreigners. Most of the donors were poor laborers who were paid up to $2,500 for a kidney. Some were forced to give up organs at gunpoint.

Federal authorities say Mr. Rosenbaum told an undercover investigator that he had been brokering the sale of organs for 10 years and had been involved with “quite a lot” of transplants. According to the criminal complaint, Mr. Rosenbaum was approached by the same government witness who persuaded a number of New Jersey officials, including the mayor of Hoboken, to accept bribes, and who snared several rabbis in a money-laundering operation.

In Mr. Rosenbaum’s case, the witness, believed to be Solomon Dwek, a New Jersey developer arrested on bank fraud charges in 2006, pretended to a businessman whose secretary was looking for a kidney for her uncle. An undercover agent posed as the secretary.

“Let me explain to you one thing,” Mr. Rosenbaum told her, according to the complaint. “It’s illegal to buy or sell organs.”

Mr. Rosenbaum later received $10,000 as a down payment for delivery of a willing organ donor, the authorities said. The total cost, as agreed upon, would eventually have been $160,000.

Mr. Rosenbaum spoke of the strengths and weaknesses of hospitals’ screening procedures. He told the agent that the donor would come from Israel, that he would be young and healthy, and that once he was in the United States, the donor and the recipient would need to make up a story to tell hospital officials.

The donor could not pretend to be a relative, not even a third cousin — the relationship Dr. Shapiro said he sometimes hears — as that would be too easily disproved, Mr. Rosenbaum said. Instead, he said, they should choose a different story, saying, perhaps, that they were neighbors, friends from synagogue or business acquaintances. “Could be friends from the community, could be friends of, of, of his children,” Mr. Rosenbaum said, according to the complaint.

Ronald Kleinberg, Mr. Rosenbaum’s lawyer, said he would not comment because he had not yet obtained all the facts in the case.

Doctors have become more aware of organ-selling schemes, but many still feel powerless.

“When you have the suspicion the donor is doing this for the wrong reasons, the question is — what do we do?” Dr. Shapiro said. “I don’t have a detective on retainer. I don’t have a polygraph. We’re pretty good at surgery, but part of the medical school curriculum is not interrogation techniques.”

Some doctors may feel that the Hippocratic oath prevents them from turning away a sick patient with an organ ready to be transplanted. Others may simply be tempted by the money involved.

“There’s this perverse motivation for me to say yes. It takes a really honest person to say, ‘I’m not going to do this, even if it will reduce my numbers,’ ” Dr. Shapiro said.

To those needing a kidney who are dependent on dialysis machines, the wait for a new organ can seem daunting.

The length of time generally depends on the patient’s condition and blood type; most organ transplants in the United States are based on a waiting-list system formed by Congress in 1984 and run by the United Network for Organ Sharing.

In New York, the average wait for a new kidney is nine years.

For those who cannot or no longer want to wait for a kidney, the only other legal option is to find someone willing to donate an organ of their own free will, and free of charge, usually a relative or friend.

While many doctors and academics sympathize with those who in effect want to buy a longer life, the general concept behind the ban on paying for organs is that society’s poorest people should not be enticed to sell their own bodies and that its richest should not be able to buy their way out of the existing system.

Dr. Luc Noel, the coordinator of clinical procedures in the Department of Essential Health Technologies at the World Health Organization, said the organization has been wrestling for years with whether or how to legalize organ sales.

“The truth is, it’s people in poor countries who choose between selling a kidney or a child,” Dr. Noel said. “It’s not caricature. It’s reality.”

Sheila M. Rothman, a professor of public health at Columbia University who studies living organ transplantation, said it has opened a Pandora’s box of questions no government has been able to answer fairly.

“In principle there’s nothing wrong with selling an organ, but if you try to get someone to articulate it and what it means, nobody can explain an equitable way to do it,” Dr. Rothman said.

Some doctors, however, say that since demand is so high, and waiting times for organs from cadavers so long, organ sales should be legalized, but tightly regulated.

“It has to have a built-in system for checking the individuals’ motivations to be sure they’re not being coerced. There should be a fair and established price,” said Dr. Eli A. Friedman, a distinguished teaching professor and the chief of the Division of Nephrology at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

Dr. Friedman said brokers wanting to find people seeking kidneys had tried turning to him.

“I’ve had kidney agents come into my office and offer to give me $5,000 for every person who I referred to them,” he said.

Arrests of Sunni Leaders Rise in Baghdad

By ROD NORDLAND

BAGHDAD — The Baghdad police still do not enter the hard-line Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya, which continues to suffer an insurgent attack every couple of days.

The Iraqi Army mans checkpoints here, but usually jointly with neighborhood volunteers from the Awakening movement, which is made up mostly of former Sunni insurgents who changed sides and helped reduce violence; it now fields as many as 900 paid fighters in Adhamiya.

But in little more than a week, the Iraqi Army’s 42nd Brigade has arrested seven Awakening leaders in Adhamiya, a neighborhood in north Baghdad. The second in command, Riyadh Abdul Hadi, was arrested on July 21, along with four of his followers, and last Sunday, the group’s security chief, Ghassan Muttar, and a local neighborhood leader, Abdul Khadir, were also arrested, three Awakening leaders in Adhamiya said.

The Iraqi government, which has been deeply suspicious of the Awakening movement for arming former insurgents, made no announcement of the Adhamiya arrests. They may well be another telltale sign of the dwindling influence the United States has over the Iraqi government now that American troops no longer dominate Baghdad.

In March and April, at least two dozen Awakening leaders were arrested, along with many more of their followers. The arrests apparently subsided in May, after strong expressions of concern from American officials. The recent arrests are the first known ones since American troops withdrew from cities and towns on June 30.

American military commanders at the highest levels have promised to track the arrests of Awakening leaders, and in some cases have intervened to win their release. American military officials declined to comment on the arrests. In the past, officials have stressed that arrests represented only a small portion of the 90,000 Awakening members throughout Iraq.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, has called Awakening members patriots and said that only those who have committed new crimes will be arrested. The Awakening leaders in Adhamiya are deeply skeptical. “We thought what we did for this area would win some place in the hearts of Iraqi officials, but it hasn’t,” one of the leaders said. “This place was a jungle before us.”

Many Adhamiya Awakening leaders have been attacked by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi organization with some foreign leadership. Last year a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest approached one of the local founders of the Awakening, then hugged him while detonating his vest. When other Awakening members arrived at the scene, another suicide bomber, this time in a car, drove into their midst and set off explosives, killing 13 more. Twenty-five of the Adhamiya fighters have been killed so far in insurgent attacks.

Two Awakening leaders were interviewed recently in a storefront that one of them used as a base; both spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying they feared provoking the Iraqi Army into arresting them.

Their fighters stood guard outside and along the road; outsiders to Adhamiya still draw attention from residents.

“A month ago I was ready to quit,” one of the leaders said, complaining that since the Iraqi Army took over from the Americans, their pay has often been delayed, and Iraqi soldiers have often treated them contemptuously. He was persuaded by a community leader to be patient and remain in the group.

“We have sacrificed our blood here, so how can we quit?” the second leader said. He said he had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt just four months ago when a roadside bomb was detonated as he passed by.

The other leader said: “The Americans created the Awakening movement here. Before June 30th, when we had a problem, we could go to them and they would fix it. Now we don’t have anyone to talk to, we’re just hanging out in the streets.”

The leaders said that local Iraqi Army commanders held a meeting with Awakening members in Adhamiya early this week, attended by an American officer, to assure them they were not singling out the organization. The army commanders said they were just arresting individuals charged with new offenses, rather than crimes committed when Adhamiya was an insurgent stronghold. In those days, the local American base was called Fort Apache.

The commanders did not, however, reveal what those offenses were. “When the Americans were here, they would have told us the reasons and then everyone would calm down,” the second leader said. “Now they tell us nothing.”

Sheik Sabah al-Mashadani, the overall leader of the Adhamiya Awakening, said in an interview at his home that he was unconcerned, even at the arrest of his deputy. The judicial investigation will determine whether he is guilty, he said.

Under the Iraqi legal system, suspects are arrested and then a judge supervises an investigation before determining whether the charges were justified. That process often takes many months.

“We don’t want these arrests to make any unrest in the neighborhood,” the sheik said. “Since the Iraqi Army took over authority for us, we became part of the Iraqi security system, and like any other Iraqi employee, we are subject to our employer’s discipline.”

Riyadh Mohammed contributed reporting.

West Bank Settlers Send Obama Defiant Message

By ETHAN BRONNER

NERIA, West Bank — In this land of endless history and ethereal beauty, several thousand Jewish settlers gathered on a dozen West Bank hills with makeshift huts and Israeli flags over several days this week to mark an invented anniversary and defy the American president, conveying to his aides visiting Jerusalem what they thought of his demand for a settlement freeze.

Eleven tiny settler outposts were inaugurated, including one next to this settlement in the rugged Samarian hills. A clearing encompassing a generator and a hut with a corrugated metal roof and a ritual mezuza on its doorpost now bears the name Givat Egoz. This is how nearby Neria, with 180 families, got its start 18 years ago.

“We are rebuilding the land of Israel,” Rabbi Yigael Shandorfi, leader of a religious academy at the neighboring settlement outpost of Nahliel, said during the ceremony. “Our hope is that there will be roads, electricity and water.” The message to President Obama, he said, is that this is Jewish land. He did not use the president’s name, but an insulting Hebrew slang for a black man and the phrase “that Arab they call a president.”

None of the hundreds gathered — mostly couples with large families, but also armed young men and teenagers from other outposts — objected. Yitzhak Shadmi, leader of the regional council of settlements, said Mr. Obama was a racist and anti-Semite for his assertion that Jews should not build here, but Arabs could.

Mr. Shadmi said the ceremonies across the West Bank this week honored a moment in 1946 when Zionists established 11 settlements in the northern Negev of Palestine in defiance of the British rulers before Israel was created. It was important for the new outposts to be established while Washington’s emissaries were visiting, he said. George J. Mitchell, the special envoy for the Middle East, who is pressing the settlement freeze, was in the West Bank at the start of the week.

The national security adviser, James L. Jones, and a White House adviser on the region, Dennis B. Ross, held meetings in Jerusalem on Wednesday as part of the negotiations, which also include attempts to get Arab governments and Palestinians to reciprocate if the Israelis agree to the freeze.

“We wanted to do this while they were here,” Mr. Shadmi said. “We’re saying, ‘Mitchell, go home.’ ”

When the settlement of Neria was created in 1991, it had a similar purpose. Yossi Dermer, spokesman for the settlement, said it was known slyly to intimates as “the James Baker settlement” because it was set up to convey a message of defiance before a visit by James A. Baker III, secretary of state for the first President George Bush.

Because West Bank settlements officially require Israeli government approval and the new outposts did not obtain it, the Israeli police have dismantled several of the new ones already. But just as quickly, they are being rebuilt, sometimes a bit bigger. At nearly every outpost, the ruins left by past police actions lie next to newly built huts.

“We’ll build and build, and every time they destroy it we will build bigger and better and prettier,” asserted Tirael Cohen, a 16-year-old girl who lives at Ramat Migron, an extension of the unauthorized Migron outpost, not far from Ramallah, a large Palestinian city in the West Bank. Ruined corrugated metal and pieces of wood were strewn on the ground nearby.

Tirael has lived at Ramat Migron for a year and a half with 10 other girls, and, at a religiously modest distance away, 10 boys live in a separate structure. The girls cook, the boys build and maintain, and all study at nearby religious academies.

About 40 religious girls from within Israel and West Bank settlements spent three days at Ramat Migron last week in what they called “spiritual preparation” for coming battles over the land.

On the outside wall of the kitchen is a rabbinical quotation about the need to redeem the land of Israel. It says “bare mountains and deserted fields cry out for life and creation,” and adds: “An internal revolution is taking place here, a revolution in man and the earth. These are the true pains of salvation.”

The Migron outpost itself is expected to be taken down because it is built on land that, according to a court case, belongs to private Palestinian families. Centuries-old olive trees dot the landscape.

The Obama administration is hoping to help establish a Palestinian state in nearly all of the West Bank next to Israel. One major challenge is what to do with the 300,000 Israeli Jews who have settled here over four decades, often at their government’s urging.

Many could be incorporated into Israel through a border adjustment; others say they would move if compensated. But some, like these outpost settlers, say they will never move because they believe they are fulfilling God’s plan with every hut they put up. They are likely to be a major stumbling block to any attempt to find a two-state solution.

At the Neria outpost celebration, Noam Rein, a father of 10, looked out across the hills at Ramallah and called its presence “temporary.”

He added: “The Torah says the land of Israel is for the Jewish people. This is just the beginning. We will build 1,000 homes here. The Arabs cannot stay here, not because we hate them, but because this is not their place.”

Among the religious leaders who spoke at the ceremony, Rabbi Yair Remer of Harasha, a nearby outpost, noted that Thursday was the Ninth of Av, a Jewish day of mourning commemorating the destruction of the ancient temples. He suggested that the best way to cope with the tragedy of Jewish history was to do what the young builders of this outpost were doing.

“The land rejoices because its children are returning to her,” he said, referring to Jewish settlers, making no mention of the 2.5 million Palestinians here.

Tirael, the teenager from Ramat Migron, put it another way: “I believe that every inch of this land is us, our blood. If we lose one inch, it is like losing a person.”

Pakistan Injects Precision Into Air War on Taliban

By ERIC SCHMITT

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s Air Force is improving its ability to pinpoint and attack militant targets with precision weapons, adding a new dimension to the country’s fight against violent extremism, according to Pakistani military officials and independent analysts.

The Pakistani military has moved away from the scorched-earth artillery and air tactics used last year against insurgents in the Bajaur tribal agency. In recent months, the air force has shifted from using Google Earth to sophisticated images from spy planes and other surveillance aircraft, and has increased its use of laser-guided bombs.

The changes reflect an effort by the Pakistani military to conduct its operations in a way that will not further alienate the population by increasing civilian casualties and destroying property. But they are also dictated by necessity as the military takes its campaign into areas where it is reluctant to commit ground troops, particularly in the rugged terrain of Waziristan, where it had suffered heavy losses.

Military analysts say the airstrikes alone cannot ultimately substitute for ground forces or for better counterinsurgency training. But they say the airstrikes have become a valuable tool for Pakistan in fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in sometimes inaccessible terrain.

Since May, F-16 multirole fighter jets have flown more than 300 combat missions against militants in the Swat Valley and more than 100 missions in South Waziristan, attacking mountain hide-outs, training centers and ammunition depots, Pakistani military officials said.

In conjunction with infantry fire, artillery barrages and helicopter gunship attacks, military officials say, the air combat missions reinvigorated the military campaign in Swat and have put increasing pressure on the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, in South Waziristan.

Interviews with Pakistani fighter pilots and senior commanders offered a rare window into this other air war — a much larger but less heralded campaign that runs parallel to the three dozen secret missile strikes carried out this year by Central Intelligence Agency drones in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas.

The air force’s new tools and tactics have several sources. The air force has without fanfare accepted some American assistance, like sophisticated surveillance equipment and high-grade images.

But sensitive to anti-American fervor in the country, Pakistani officials have refused most outside aid, developing a small corps of ground spotters largely on their own, and occasionally tapping the Internet for online assistance.

Pakistani officials are urging the Obama administration to lease Pakistan upgraded F-16s, until its own new fighters are delivered in the next year or two. This would allow Pakistani pilots to fly night missions, impossible with their current aircraft.

Pakistan has argued that it needs the more advanced versions of the F-16 to more effectively battle the Taliban insurgency. In the past, American officials raised concerns that Pakistan’s arms purchases and troop deployments were geared mainly to bolstering its ability to fight its traditional enemy to the east, India. “Of course, there is a real threat from India,” Air Chief Marshal Rao Qamar Suleman, Pakistan’s air force chief of staff, said in an interview at his headquarters here. “But right now we have to tackle the threat from the militants.”

Nearly every day in the past few months, Pakistani warplanes have pummeled militant targets in the contested Swat Valley and South Waziristan. The campaigns are a big change from operations in Bajaur last fall.

“The biggest handicap we had in Bajaur was that we didn’t have good imagery,” Air Chief Marshal Qamar said. “We didn’t have good target descriptions. We did not know the area. We were forced to use Google Earth.

“I didn’t want to face a similar situation in Swat,” he said.

In advance of the Swat campaign, the air force equipped about 10 F-16s with high-resolution, infrared sensors, provided by the United States, to conduct detailed reconnaissance of the entire valley.

The United States has also resumed secret drone flights performing military surveillance in the tribal areas, to provide Pakistani commanders with a wide array of videos and other information on militants, according to American officials.

In most cases, officials said, the Pakistani Army provides target information to the air force, which confirms the locations on newly detailed maps. Identifying high-value targets through the use of army spotters or, in some cases, a new, small group of specially trained air force spotters, the air force was able to increase its use of laser-guided bombs to 80 percent of munitions used in Swat, from about 40 percent in Bajaur, Air Chief Marshal Qamar said.

Another change was the mass evacuation of civilians. About two million people were displaced, sometimes with only a few hours’ notice, as part of an effort to get civilians out of conflict areas to reduce their casualties.

Some American officials voice skepticism about Pakistani claims of success. “We don’t have access to battle-damage assessment or the information on the actual strike execution, so we cannot make a qualitative comparison of what the intended effect was versus the actual effect,” said an American adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity, to avoid jeopardizing his job.

Officials of human rights organizations say the military has not been able to eliminate all civilian casualties from airstrikes and ground fire, but they agree that the numbers are down.

“Certainly, the level of civilian casualties in this phase of the conflict has been lower than in previous operations in the tribal areas,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, senior South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, based in Lahore, Pakistan.

The air force still operates under limitations. Because the F-16s are equipped to fly only by day, the militants move and conduct operations at night. Indeed, not one of the 21 main militant leaders in Swat has been killed or captured, Pakistani officials acknowledge. In addition, the Pakistani jets cannot be refueled in midair, as American fighters can, limiting how long they can remain over a target area.

In South Waziristan, as the army mulls a ground war, the air force continues to attack militants’ hide-outs and training camps as well as storage caves and tunnels with 500-pound and 2,000-pound bombs.

“We’re still developing our plans for South Waziristan,” Air Chief Marshal Qamar said. “We are preparing to ramp up. I think Baitullah Mehsud is getting the message, and the message is, if he keeps doing these things, we’ll hit him.”

Fast Forward: Yahoo to the Recycle Bin

By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, July 30, 2009

Adieu, Yahoo.

Not the Web site or the company, but the search engine. Yahoo announced Wednesday morning that it signed a 10-year agreement with Microsoft to combine search and advertising efforts, each ceding much of one field to the other.

"In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers," a press release declared.

Few Web users are likely to miss Microsoft's contribution to Web searching, but most people have fed a query to Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo at some point. Replacing Yahoo's search engine with Microsoft's Bing would delete one of the oldest landmarks in the Web landscape.

It would also take away a choice for users and a source of innovation for Web search, contrary to the claims at the "Choice. Value. Innovation." site that the companies set up to herald the news.

Yet their separate attempts have not slowed Google's steady growth. Yahoo may have no other choice but to make its search engine yet another casualty of outsourcing.

If so, it will mark the end of an long run.

Yahoo began life in February 1994 as a simple catalogue of Web sites put together by Stanford University students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It acquired its name -- short for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" -- not long after and then expanded into a true search engine.

That head start, combined with Yahoo's early proficiency and the missteps of other Web sites (anybody remember Lycos, Excite or HotBot?), allowed the firm to become the Microsoft of search engines for quite a few years.

And then yet another Stanford research project took off. Google found things on the Web faster and more accurately than Yahoo and didn't try to sell you 20 unrelated things as it did. Then Google began adding other Web services -- e-mail, maps, calendars -- that made Yahoo's fare look clumsy by comparison.

In the process, Google ran away with much of the Web advertising business -- a machine that generates most of its profits.

Inertia has helped Yahoo hold on to a respectable chunk of the market even as its search site grew stagnant and new ventures including a music store and a social network flopped. Almost 20 percent of U.S. Web searches ran through its site last month, according to ComScore's data. Yahoo has also kept a spot in many browser toolbars; for example, it remains the only search-shortcut alternative to Google on the iPhone.

Microsoft, for its part, spent years fumbling around with quasi-proprietary online services such as MSN or Windows Live. Two winters ago, it tried to solve its Internet issues by proposing to buy Yahoo for around $47.5 billion.

The Microsoft folks in Redmond, Wash., should thank their counterparts in Sunnyvale for spurning that offer, against the advice of nearly everybody in the technology business. Yahoo's rejection stopped Microsoft from burning through billions of dollars just in time for the economy to plunge off a cliff, then spending years cleaning up after an AOL/Time Warner-esque collision of corporate cultures.

Left on its own, Microsoft had to build a better search site, and with Bing it may have done just that. The site, unlike some of Microsoft's older forays and Yahoo's just-redesigned home page, delivers much of the accuracy and simplicity of Google.

Should the Yahoo-Microsoft deal survive antitrust scrutiny, Yahoo's search technology won't vanish down the bit bucket; Microsoft would be able to add its features to Bing. Likewise, Microsoft will continue to handle automatically placed search ads. And other Web services, such as e-mail and instant messaging, will remain separate -- your Yahoo Mail won't get forwarded to Hotmail or vice versa.

Filo and Yang surely didn't mean for their invention to land in Microsoft's parts bin. But if the alternative is the continued surrender of Web search and advertising to Google -- a competition in which Yahoo has done little to distinguish itself lately -- the company they founded hasn't left itself many other options.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at robp@washpost.com. Read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.

In Fighting Radical Islam, Tricky Course for U.S. Aid

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 30, 2009

Three years ago, while working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Kyrgyzstan, Clifford H. Brown came across an idea that he thought could help stem the spread of radical Islam in the Central Asian nation.

The University of Montana had proposed translating Islamic writings from Persian and Arabic into the local Uzbek and Kyrgyz languages. Brown hoped the translations could have a moderating influence at a time when a conservative Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, was expanding its influence in the region.

"Islam has a large body of moderate literature saying, for example, that suicide is a sin against Allah," he later wrote in a paper describing his efforts to fund the initiative. "Not a bad idea, I thought at the time."

But USAID lawyers rejected the proposal, saying that using taxpayer funds would violate a provision in the First Amendment barring the government's promotion of religion. The agency also prohibited Brown from publishing the opinion piece, which laid out his case for the proposal, according to Brown and a senior USAID official. A USAID lawyer said publication of the paper would have violated government restrictions on disclosure of privileged information.

The role of religion in overseas assistance has long been highly sensitive for a country founded on the principle that state and religion should be separate. But as U.S. policymakers seek to curtail the influence of radical Islam, they are being increasingly hamstrung by legal barriers, some experts say.

USAID does provide funds for faith-based organizations -- mostly Christian groups -- in instances in which it says the aid is strictly for secular purposes. But the line between secular and religious is often blurry.

Last week, the USAID inspector general's office raised concerns about the agency spending more than $325,000 to repair four mosques and adjoining buildings in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was once an insurgent hub. USAID argued that most of the money went to repair facilities that provided jobs, social services, food and other basics for the needy. The agency noted that it had withheld payment of more than $45,000 for mosque repairs because the contractor could not demonstrate that the work served a secular purpose.

Still, some scholars say that restrictions on USAID and other American civilian agencies have undercut the United States' ability to win the hearts and minds of Muslims in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, where Islam plays a central role in public and private life.

Karin von Hippel, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said military commanders have been given much more freedom to fund Islamic causes -- such as rehabilitation of mosques and assistance for religious schools. She argued that U.S. civilian agencies need to be given the same flexibility.

Von Hippel said many officials have simply steered clear of Islamic charities because they do not understand how they function and fear that their careers could be harmed if they inadvertently support an entity that later turns out to be linked to militants. "We can't just sit on our hands, which is what we have been doing for the past eight years," von Hippel said.

At the heart of the debate is a dispute about the intent of the First Amendment's establishment clause, which bars Congress from establishing a state religion or prohibiting the free expression of religious thought. Brown, who served as a USAID lawyer for more than a decade, said he thinks that the First Amendment does not apply to overseas assistance.

"Our legal position is too conservative. We've got a war on terror," Brown said. "The lawyers are concerned about excessive entanglement with religion. Well, we're already entangled."

Brown maintains that U.S. efforts to promote democracy and build schools, roads and clinics in the Islamic world will not succeed unless American officials help foster the spread of moderate Islam and its a message of peace.

Gary Winter, USAID's legal counsel, said the agency would never fund any program with a religious purpose. He added, though, that "the legal test goes beyond that to [include] endorsement of religion, indoctrination of religions, excessive entanglement with religion. We have to try to accomplish our secular purpose while still not violating these legal principles."

Winter said there are ways that USAID can provide assistance to Islamic institutions without breaking the law. For instance, he said, the USAID could finance mathematics textbooks or English classes for students in Islamic schools in Afghanistan, while leaving it to others to pay for Koranic studies programs. Or if the agency selected a local religious leader to support an AIDS-prevention program, it could try to minimize the religious content of the charitable work. "If you're talking about sexual behavior, you don't necessarily have to get into the scriptures," he said.

Little USAID funding has gone to Islamic groups in recent years. From 2001 to 2005, more than 98 percent of agency funds for faith-based organizations went to Christian groups, according to figures obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Boston Globe newspaper in 2006. Winter said most of the faith-based groups applying for aid have been Christian. He added that the agency is eager to reach out to Islamic moderates.

Some experts, meanwhile, have urged caution on that front. Jonathan Benthall, an anthropologist at University College London, said there are serious risks of outsiders interfering in the theology of Islam.

He noted that when the U.S. government extended support to guerrillas who opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, money in one case supported a journal promoting militant jihad.

Brown recalled that the agency once learned that a program it had supported in Afghanistan in the 1980s used primary textbooks that dealt with the life and views of the prophet Muhammad.

To highlight the sensitivity of the issue, a senior USAID lawyer pulled an Afghan prayer rug from his safe and showed it to his colleagues, Brown said. A USAID emblem was sewn onto the back.

Opening Their Wallets, Emptying Their Savings

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 30, 2009

SEOUL -- In pursuit of middle-class prosperity, South Koreans have looted their household savings like no other people on Earth.

They have collectively binged on private schools and fancy cars, language camps and new apartments, foreign travel and designer shoes.

Americans, the longtime avatars of consumerism gone mad, will save next year at double the rate of South Koreans, according to a report this month from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group that supports sustainable economic growth in developed countries.

When it comes to buying high-priced, brand-name stuff as if there were no tomorrow, Sabina Vaughan concludes that Americans are relative wimps. "Koreans spend more, way more," said Vaughan, 35, who travels to Seoul every summer with her Korean-born mother and spies on her cousins as they shop. "It is a kind of competition for them. It doesn't matter what their income is."

Her conclusion is supported by a mountain of data and a chorus of concerned economists. The household savings rate in South Korea will have plummeted from a world-beating 25.2 percent in 1988 to a projected world low of 3.2 percent in 2010, according to the OECD. Government policies have encouraged borrowing, while Korea's aggressive culture has supercharged spending on signifiers of success, whether they be Ivy League degrees or Louis Vuitton handbags.

"It is not recognized as a virtue to save, not anymore," said Lee Sun-uk, an investment adviser for an office of Samsung Securities that is located in a wealthy neighborhood of Seoul. "To maintain a certain status, people are willing to spend, even if their incomes have declined."

In the past decade, average savings per household have plunged from about $3,300 to $525. On a percentage basis, it is the steepest savings decline in the developed world. Meanwhile, household debt as a percentage of individual disposable income has risen to 140 percent, higher than in the United States (136 percent), according to the Bank of Korea.

The consequences of South Korea's collapsed savings rate are beginning to register in the country's slowing rate of growth, economists said. For nearly 40 years, growth galloped along at between 6 and 8 percent, as banks were flush with household savings that fueled business investment and research. But growth slowed to about 4.5 percent after 2000, when the savings rate dipped below 10 percent.

"The low savings rate is sapping our capacity to grow, and it is going to get worse," said Park Deog-bae, a research fellow who specializes in household finance at the Hyundai Research Institute. "It will lead to credit delinquency. It will cause greater income disparity. It means less resources for our aging population."

As South Korea changed from a war-battered farming society to Asia's fourth-largest economy, its savings rate was almost certain to decline. Economists consider a fall in savings and a rise in consumer spending to be part of the normal development process, as government-backed social services increase, property values rise, and stock markets grow.

But the fall-off-a-cliff character of what has happened with household savings in South Korea strikes many experts as abnormal and worrisome. It is one of several trends suggesting that South Korea, as it wrestles with post-industrial affluence, is a society under extraordinary stress.

South Koreans work more, sleep less and kill themselves at a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country, according to the OECD. They rank first in time spent online and second to last in spending on recreation, and the per capita birthrate scrapes the bottom of world rankings. By 2050, South Korea will be the most aged society in the world, narrowly edging out Japan, according to the OECD.

At the same time, South Korea ranks first in per capita spending on private education, which includes home tutors, cram sessions and English-language courses at home and abroad.

An obsessive pursuit of educational achievement, it seems, is one of the driving forces behind the low savings rate. About 80 percent of all students from elementary age to high school attend after-school cram courses. About 6 percent of the country's gross domestic product is spent on education, more than double the percentage of spending in the United States, Japan or Britain.

"Education is a fixed expenditure for Korean parents, even when household income shrinks," said Oh Moon-suk, executive director at LG Economic Research Institute. "Parents often overspend. It even appears to be leading to a slowdown in the birthrate."

As she plans her family's monthly spending, Lim Ji-young says she makes sure that at least a third of the money is reserved for the education of her 5-year-old son, Roah.

Besides day-care fees, he requires money for books, alphabet tutoring and sports training.

"We want to give our son the opportunity not to be left behind in this society," said Lim, 34, an office administrator in Seoul. "We want to provide him with what other people are providing. To avoid condescension from other people, you want to have the best."

Competitive spending -- on tutors, apartments, imported whiskey and designer handbags -- is a significant factor in the decline of saving in South Korean, according to Park at Hyundai Research.

"Koreans are so much concerned about saving face," Park said. "This is encouraging overspending and it is sometimes irrational."

There are other reasons for the fall in savings that are eminently rational -- and sponsored by the government.

When the economy nearly collapsed a decade ago during the Asian financial crisis, the government made low-cost loans available for the purchase of apartments.

Borrowing exploded, as did housing values, while savings began to evaporate.

"Young households without proper discipline borrowed heavily from banks and on credit cards," said Lee Doo-won, a professor of economics at Yonsei University in Seoul. "They ended up with a huge amount of debt, and the debt trap is still there."

Stagnant incomes and job losses in the current recession have further reduced capacity for savings and have slowed debt repayment.

As important, the spending patterns of aging parents, many of whom have been tapped for loans by children in pursuit of real estate, mean that cash is steadily disappearing from savings accounts.

"Old people do not save," Lee said. "This is a long-term structural phenomenon. It will not change with the business cycle."

Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.

Serbian Officials Say War Crimes Fugitive Mladic Is 'Within Reach'

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 30, 2009

BELGRADE, Serbia -- Europe's most-wanted war crimes suspect has been on the run longer than Osama bin Laden. But after more than a decade of looking the other way, Serbian authorities say they are finally closing in on Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander charged with genocide and other crimes in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

"He's somewhere within reach," said Vladimir Vukcevic, Serbia's prosecutor in charge of investigating war crimes committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Vukcevic said that he could not yet pinpoint the fugitive general's location but that it was clear Mladic was in Serbia, adding: "Absolutely, I'm optimistic we're nearing the end. It must be done by the end of the year."

For years, Serbian officials have said they were doing their best to catch Mladic and extradite him to the Netherlands, where he has been indicted by a U.N. tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity and other offenses. And skepticism remains deep here that the man many nationalist Serbs still consider a hero will be arrested anytime soon, despite a $5 million reward offered by the U.S. government.

But Serbian and European Union officials said that political conditions have shifted decisively against Mladic and that investigators, for the first time, have reconstructed his movements from the end of the Bosnian war in 1995 until 2006, when he was last confirmed to be in Serbia.

Also working against Mladic: the July 2008 arrest in Belgrade of fellow fugitive Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader who prosecutors say worked hand-in-hand with the general to carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims and Croats. Their goal was to create a Greater Serbia out of the remains of the former Yugoslavia by expelling or exterminating other ethnic groups. About a quarter-million people died during the conflict.

Both men are charged in the executions of about 8,000 Muslims in the town of Srebrenica in 1995, the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, as well as a three-year bombing siege of Sarajevo that flattened the city and killed about 10,000 people.

Serbian investigators said they have concluded that Mladic had no recent contact with Karadzic, a psychologist by training who avoided capture for years by masquerading as a New Age healer. The lack of a sustained public backlash to Karadzic's arrest, officials and analysts said, has made it easier for the government to redouble its efforts to find Mladic.

The biggest boost to the manhunt, however, was the election last year of a new Serbian government that has pledged to end the country's chilly relations with the West and join the European Union.

"You have a very different Serbia now," said Vuk Jeremic, Serbia's foreign minister. "This is probably the most pro-European government in the history of Serbia. It represents a coming out of the decades of crisis and war."

Serbia had hoped to begin the lengthy application process to join the European Union early this year. But the Dutch government has blocked Serbia's candidacy, insisting that it catch Mladic first. Mladic's freedom is a sore point in the Netherlands, whose peacekeeping troops were overrun by his forces in Srebrenica.

Rasim Ljajic, the Serbian official in charge of relations with the U.N. war crimes tribunal based in The Hague, said his government remains surprised that the Dutch did not drop their objections after Karadzic's capture. Ljajic said that nearly all other members of the European Union, as well as the United States, have expressed satisfaction with Serbia's record in tracking down war criminals and cooperating with the U.N. tribunal.

"Everybody but the Netherlands believes in our efforts," he said. "They are being very tough in their position, and it's hard to expect that they'll change."

At the same time, Ljajic echoed prosecutors' predictions that the rogue general would be caught by the end of the year. The minister said he would resign if Mladic is not arrested by then. "It's a moral obligation for us," he said.

Ljajic and other Serbian officials were vague when asked why they were so confident. But they acknowledged that previous governments in Belgrade had either overtly protected Mladic or not tried very hard to find him.

The extent of that protection was underscored last month when a Sarajevo television station broadcast several homemade videos of Mladic enjoying life while on the run, including an undated clip of him playing table tennis at a Serbian military barracks. Other videos showed him singing at weddings and playing in the snow.

Serbian investigators said they discovered the videos in December during a search of the Mladic family home in Belgrade, Serbia's capital, and turned them over to the U.N. tribunal. The Sarajevo TV station said some of the videos appeared to have been recorded as recently as last year. Serbian officials denied that, saying all the videos were at least eight years old.

While searching the house, police also found 360 pages of wartime diaries belonging to Mladic. Ljajic described the diaries, in which Mladic talks about his turbulent relations with Karadzic and former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, as a much more significant recovery.

When asked why investigators waited until December to search the Mladic family home, Ljajic shrugged. "It was so obvious that he was not there," he said.

Prosecutors said that the last time Mladic was confirmed as being in Belgrade was December 2005.

In June 2006, investigators thought they were on the verge of a breakthrough as they followed a suspect who was "a direct connection to Mladic," said Vukcevic, the prosecutor.

"But there was a mistake made by the security services, and they missed the person who was closest to Mladic," he said.

Vukcevic described Mladic as "very old and very sick" and said investigators have kept former Serbian military physicians under close surveillance. He declined to comment on local media reports that Mladic, now 67, suffered a mild stroke years ago.

Goran Petrovic, a former chief of Serbia's civilian intelligence service, said Mladic was probably receiving help from retired military officers or other nationalist supporters. "There are a lot of people who would report Mladic to the police, but even more who wouldn't," he said.

He said the Serbian government was not eager to turn over Mladic to The Hague for a show trial but was feeling the pressure to act.

"They're waiting for Mladic to die before they have to choose between him and the European Union," Petrovic said. "They would be happy if Mladic would go to The Hague and die there, without a trial."

The Muslim Matchmakers of Birmingham

by Irfan Husain

The Birmingham Central Mosque —File photo

For the vast majority of young men and women in Pakistan, arranged marriages are still the only way for couples to tie the knot. In a largely segregated society, there are few occasions and venues for boys and girls to meet and get to know each other. But the system works well enough as most families have a vast network of relatives, friends and acquaintances, and clan and biradari connections are called upon when needed.

However, these links break down in the diaspora of Pakistani communities abroad. This is especially true when the young have grown up in a society where almost every educational and workplace is shared by men and women, and segregation is limited to a few old-fashioned men’s clubs. But for Muslims, this easy mingling of the sexes does not make it any easier to meet a life partner.

The younger generation of Pakistanis in Britain, for example, have imbibed values that belong neither to their parents, nor to the host community. Caught in between the two, they seek partners who are both ‘modern’, and yet hold fast to their traditional culture. And since their parents’ network in Britain is limited, young people often have to fend for themselves in a tricky marriage market. Also, as not many of them go to clubs, pubs or singles bars, they do not have the same opportunity to meet people that other Brits take for granted.

Compounding the problem for educated, professional Muslim women is the fact that their male counterparts often marry young, so when the women are successful and hitting 30, they find it increasingly tough to find the kind of partners they seek.

Many websites address this problem, and carry profiles and photos of Muslim women seeking husbands. Here in cyberspace, the essentials of lonely lives are laid bare. Meet ‘Kashmiri Kuri’: 29, a qualified accountant, working in London for a large firm, she is 5’ 3’ tall, likes going to the movies and listening to music, and does not smoke. She is looking for a man who is good-looking and has a sense of humour. He should not wear a beard, but should not drink alcohol. Will she find this paragon, or will she succumb to family pressure and marry somebody from Mirpur through a match arranged by the family?

Far too many lives have been ruined by a mismatch of expectations. Young men from rural Pakistan, unfamiliar with the liberal values of the West and concepts like gender equality, expect their educated British wives to conform to the submissive role wives play in their home village. The young brides, having been born and brought up in an environment where women are equal, often cannot adjust to the demands made by their husbands. Such matches end up in divorce or a lifetime of miserable coexistence in the name of duty.

For many in the West, the only idea they have of Muslim marriages is in the form of headlines announcing yet another honour-killing. This is a common phenomenon where a Muslim girl is made the victim of her father’s or brother’s outrage at her refusal to accept their dictation about who she should marry. But these incidents are rare exceptions: the majority community is largely ignorant of the problems young Muslims face in meeting Mr or Miss Right.

To address this issue, Channel 4 recently aired ‘Muslim and Looking for Love’, a documentary that examines the dilemma so many young Muslims face in Britain today. Directed and produced by the well-known London-based Pakistani director Faris Kermani, this is an occasionally painful scrutiny of lonely lives seeking love and companionship.

The film takes us to the Birmingham Central Mosque, where Mr Razzaq and Mr Haq are two of the more implausible matchmakers you are likely to encounter. Middle-aged and traditional, they maintain profiles of a thousand young men and women. Those seeking partners, often accompanied by their parents, are told about prospective spouses who, in the judgment of Mr Haq or Mr Razzaq, might fit the requirements.

A woman of Egyptian descent wants to meet somebody from her country who is educated and would make a good match. Highly qualified, she works for a re-insurance company in London and feels she is very eligible. After a long search, the matchmakers find Mo, somebody they feel who meets her requirements, and an introduction is arranged at the mosque. Here, the two young people talk, but sadly, Mo is too Westernised for her liking. He enjoys going to clubs, and admits to having a drink now and then; she prays five times a day, and feels she could not live with somebody who is not similarly observant of religious edicts.

Another successful young man comes to the marriage bureau with his mother, and is introduced to a possible match. Very attractive, she is educated and has a good job. Initially, the vibes between the two seem good, and they agree to meet again. At this meeting, she begins to have doubts, especially when he bombards her with emails, wanting to know more about her. They then meet for the third and last time with her cousins on a day in the country. Although they seem to enjoy each other’s company, she is put off by the pressure he exerts to push things along. He appears to be in too much of a hurry to get married, while she wants to be sure that he is the right man for her. Finally, he confesses to the camera that he will have to go to Pakistan with his parents, and let them find a girl for him.

Tellingly, all the young Muslim women who appear in the film make it clear that they will only consider men who are British nationals. Clearly, they are all too aware of the pitfalls of marrying somebody who is unfamiliar with the values and attitudes they have grown up with. But although they expect to be treated as equals in a marriage, they have not yet got to the point where they can bring themselves to venture into the world of clubs and singles bars where other young men and women gather to meet prospective partners. Perhaps their children will, but this generation will still be going to Mr Haq and Mr Razzaq for help in meeting Mr Right.

Supreme Court Won't Try Musharraf for Treason

ISLAMABAD: Chief justice turned down a request on Thursday to launch a treason case against former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, saying the Supreme Court lacked the authority. Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry's remarks could reassure both the fragile civilian government and military establishment, as they can ill-afford any fresh crisis at a time when the country is fighting a Taliban insurgency. ‘This is not the proper forum to initiate such case. We are not authorised to do so,’ Chaudhry told the court. Musharraf was forced to quit as president almost a year ago to avoid impeachment and has been living in London for the past two months. Hamid Khan, a lawyer who was at the forefront of a movement to oust Musharraf, asked a panel of 14 judges led by Chaudhry to begin treason proceedings on grounds that the general had seized power in a coup in 1999 and violated the constitution to extend his rule in 2007. Musharraf declared emergency rule in November 2007 and purged the Supreme Court of judges, including chief justice Chaudhry, who might have ruled illegal his re-election while still army chief. The court last week ordered Musharraf to explain allegations that he appointed new judges under emergency rule in violation of the constitution, but Musharraf and his lawyers have stayed away from the hearings.—Reuters

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/12-supreme+court+wont+try+musharraf+for+treason--bi-04

India-Pak Statement Rocks Parliament, BJP Walks Out

New Delhi (IANS): A two-day debate in parliament on a controversial India-Pakistan joint statement that sought to delink terrorism from dialogue ended on Thursday with the government reiterating that there was no dilution in its stand on countering cross-border terror and a hostile Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) staging a walk-out over the Balochistan issue.

The intense and bitterly partisan Lok Sabha debate that lasted for nearly seven hours spread over two days concluded with a formal reply by External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna asserting that there was no deviation from the basic principles of foreign policy except for a shift in nuances and emphases here and there.

But an aggressive BJP remained unconvinced and sought to pin down the government on the inclusion of a reference to Balochistan - shorthand for India's alleged meddling in Pakistan's southwestern province - in the July 16 India-Pakistan joint statement agreed between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani at Sharm el-Sheikh.

In the end, a belligerent BJP decided to walk out when Mr. Krishna reiterated the government's position on Balochistan, saying "we have nothing to hide". BJP leader L.K. Advani said the prime minister's intervention Wednesday and the external affairs minister's reply had failed to address the party's chief objections to the Sharm el-Sheikh joint statement.

"There was no satisfactory response. There is no point in this discussion," an exasperated Advani said while leading the walk-out by his party MPs from the Lok Sabha.

Mr. Krishna focused his reply on India's continuing pursuit of an independent foreign policy, but chose to brush off the opposition's objections to the terror-dialogue delink and a reference to Balochistan in the India-Pakistan joint statement.

"Certain doubts have been expressed," Mr. Krishna admitted, adding that much of them had been "cleared by the effective intervention" of Dr. Manmohan Singh and of former foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee Thursday.

Mr. Krishna's reply was interrupted by vociferous accusations from BJP members questioning the Balochistan reference.

In his spirited 45-minute intervention in the debate Wednesday, Dr. Manmohan Singh asserted that while there was no dilution or rupture of national consensus on countering terrorism emanating from Pakistan, there was no alternative except to continue the engagement with Islamabad.

Seeking to allay apprehensions over the India-Pakistan joint statement, the prime minister, however, stressed that bilateral engagement or dialogue process can't move forward if terrorist attacks continue from across the border. The prime minister also responded to concerns on India's end-user defence pact with the US and New Delhi's position on climate change, saying that there was no compromise of national interests.

With the prime minister's reply as a backdrop, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who held the external affairs portfolio in the previous Dr. Manmohan Singh dispensation, Thursday eloquently defended the government's latest Pakistan diplomacy and reiterated that there was no surrender on the issue of countering cross-border terrorism.

"Neither have we succumbed to terrorism nor will we stop talking," Mr. Mukherjee maintained.

"The NDA did it. The UPA did it. This is the way the world of diplomacy moves," Mr. Mukherjee said while reminding parliament that over the last 10 years governments across the political spectrum in India kept talking to Pakistan despite brief disruptions after terrorist attacks.

"We can't erase Pakistan. It's going to exist. War is no solution," Mr. Mukherjee said while underlining the importance of keeping talks going with Pakistan.

Mr. Mukherjee, during whose tenure as external affairs minister the 26/11 Mumbai attacks had taken place, clarified that talking did not mean the resumption of a full-fledged dialogue.

"Keeping channels open does not mean surrendering our position on terrorism," Mr. Mukherjee stressed, adding that action against terrorism was independent of the composite dialogue.

"Pakistan must act credibly and verifiably to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure operating from its soil," Mr. Mukherjee maintained.

Mr. Mukherjee also vehemently defended the Balochistan reference, echoing what the prime minister had said. "It's a unilateral reference. The perception of Pakistan is not shared by us," he pointed out.

Mr. Mukherjee also repudiated any suggestion of India's involvement in fomenting insurgency in Balochistan. "We are victims of terrorism. We have no intention of exporting terrorism to any other country," he maintained.

This defence, however, did not cut ice with the BJP, with member after member asking why Balochistan was included for the first time in a bilateral document between India and Pakistan.

The two-day debate had started with BJP leader Yashwant Sinha Wednesday shredding apart the joint statement, saying it showed the government had broken the national consensus on Pakistan. "All the waters of the seven seas will not be able to wash the shame at Sharm el-Sheikh," Sinha had said.

Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and Janata Dal-United chief Sharad Yadav also questioned the government's Pakistan diplomacy. But the treasury benches rallied around the prime minister with MPs thumping their desks in appreciation when he intervened in the debate, indicating that the much-speculated rift between the government and the party over the joint statement was a thing of the past.

Some 50,000 N.Koreans Use Mobile Phones

About 48,000 North Koreans had by the end of June subscribed to the mobile phone service that started in the North last December, VOA reported Wednesday quoting data released by the service operator.

Orascom, the Egyptian telecom firm that runs it, plans to expand the service area from Pyongyang to the whole of North Korea by the end of this year, VOA said. The operator is poised to start HSPA service at the request of foreigners in North Korea who need to use wireless high-speed internet there, the report said.

Currently, officials of the North Korean Workers' Party or the government are reportedly banned from using mobile phones for security reasons. Ordinary North Korean residents, whose monthly pay is about 4,000 North Korean won (around US$30), cannot afford the service due to the high price of handsets, which cost at US$300-500, and the subscription fee.

"We understand that mobile phones are used chiefly by foreigners, wealthy people, and trade functionaries," a South Korean government official said.

North Korean phone users buy prepaid phone cards and can send text messages. The North started the European-style GSM service in Pyongyang and the Rajin-Sonbong special economic zone in November 2002 but suspended it after an explosion at Ryongchon Railway Station in April 2004.

englishnews@chosun.com / Jul. 30, 2009 08:56 KST

Iran Police Clash with Mourners

Baton-wielding Iranian police have clashed with mourners holding memorials for those killed in post-election violence, reports say.

State TV said police used teargas to disperse crowds from the grave of Neda Agha Soltan, whose death became a symbol of post-election unrest.

Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi tried to join the mourners but police forced him to leave, witnesses said.

Further confrontations were reported at a second gathering in central Tehran.

Several hundred people defied a heavy police presence to gather at the Grand Mossala prayer area, witnesses said.

Opposition supporters allege the 12 June election results were rigged in favour of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Anger at the outcome led to the largest mass protests seen in Iran since the 1979 revolution which brought the current Islamic regime to power.

'Surrounded'

Neda Agha Soltan, 27, was shot dead on 20 June as she watched protests against the poll result. Her death - one of 10 that day - was filmed on a mobile phone and broadcast around the world.

Mother's tribute to Neda Profile: Neda Agha Soltan

Shia Muslims traditionally mark 40 days after a death with a ceremony called the "arbayeen".

Mr Mousavi and another opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, had asked the interior ministry for permission to hold a memorial service in the Grand Mossala, according to an aide to Mr Mousavi, but permission was denied.

So the opposition leaders said they would join Neda's family at her graveside at the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery.

"Hundreds have gathered around Neda Agha Soltan's grave to mourn her death and other victims' deaths... police arrested some of them ... dozens of riot police also arrived and are trying to disperse the crowd," a witness told Reuters.

Mr Mousavi was surrounded by police shortly after he arrived, witnesses said.

ANALYSIS Jon Leyne BBC Tehran correspondent It's an ominous moment for the government. Those who run the Islamic Republic know only too well the cycle of protests, killings, then Arbayeen ceremonies from 1979, a cycle that helped bring them to power. They must fear history repeating itself, as similar anniversaries approach 40 days after protesters killed in the recent protests. For the opposition, it's an opportunity to take to the streets despite the ban on protests. They could argue that there is no ban on religious ceremonies, though the police and government militia members attacking them with clubs and teargas obviously disagree. The protests now are not remotely on the scale of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of demonstrators who came onto the streets immediately after the election. But they are happening despite repeated threats and intimidation, and they are keeping up the pressure on the government.

"Mousavi was not allowed to recite the Koran verses said on such occasions and he was immediately surrounded by anti-riot police who led him to his car," one person told AFP.

Some people in the crowd threw stones and chanted anti-Ahmadinejad slogans, reports said, as security personnel with batons charged at them.

One man told the BBC there were about 3,000 people there. Seven or eight men used professional cameras to film the protesters, he said.

Shortly afterwards hundreds more demonstrators were said to have gathered at the Grand Mossala.

Police again used tear gas and batons to break up the crowds, some of whom set rubbish bins on fire, witnesses said.

Iranian authorities banned all opposition protests following post-election violence.

And, reports the BBC's Jon Leyne, the authorities are particularly sensitive about these "arbayeen'' turning into political demonstrations.

That is exactly what happened during the Islamic Revolution 30 years ago in a cycle that helped lead to the downfall of the Shah, our correspondent says.

The US criticised the use of violence against the protesters.

"I think it's particularly disturbing to see security forces use force to break up a graveside demonstration," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said.

Prisoner trials

In a separate development, a lawmaker said prominent opposition campaigner Saeed Hajjarian had been moved from jail to a government-owned residential complex.

Mr Hajjarian, an advisor to former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, was detained shortly after the polls.

The judiciary had said he would be released on Wednesday, but lawmaker Kazem Jalali told Mehr news agency that he would instead be kept at a government site.

Campaigners had called for his release, arguing his health had deteriorated badly because of harsh treatment in prison.

On Tuesday, officials said about 140 people detained during the protests had been released from Evin prison.

But about 200 others, accused of more serious crimes, remain in jail.

Tehran's public prosecutor's office has announced that the first trials of "rioters" will begin on Saturday, the official Iranian news agency Irna reported.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she deplored the way the Iranian government was treating those it had imprisoned after the violence and urged authorities to release political detainees.

Mr Ahmadinejad is to be officially approved as Iranian president on 3 August.

Nigeria Forces Storm Sect Mosque

Nigerian security forces have stormed a mosque where militants from an Islamic sect blamed for days of deadly violence have been hiding out.

Reports say scores of fighters were killed in the assault, which came after a third night of gun battles in the northern city of Maiduguri.

Many of the militants have now fled, attacking police stations on their way.

The group, known as Boko Haram, wants to overthrow the government and impose a strict version of Islamic law.

Reports from the city on Thursday said the fighting had stopped and the streets were quiet.

In a short while we believe that everyone will be able to go about his normal duties Chris Olukolade Army spokesman

The assault by the security forces came after 1,000 extra soldiers were drafted into the city.

Army commander Major General Saleh Maina told the Associated Press that the deputy leader of the sect was killed in the bombardment.

But he said Mohammed Yusuf, leader of the group also known as "Taliban", escaped along with about 300 followers.

An AP reporter who watched the storming of the mosque on Wednesday night and counted about 50 bodies inside the building and another 50 in the courtyard.

Civilian casualties?

Army spokesman Chris Olukolade told the BBC's Network Africa programme that law and order had now been restored in Maiduguri.

"The enclave of the people causing the problem has been brought under better control and in a short while we believe that everyone will be able to go about his normal duties in that area," he said.

Nigeria's 'Taliban' enigma Eyewitness: Nigeria attacks Fear and tension after attack Nigerian attacks: Your reaction

The government eased curfew restrictions overnight, allowing people in the city more time on the streets in the evening.

The BBC's Caroline Duffield, in Nigeria, says the state governor has warned that anyone harbouring members of Boko Haram will be dealt with harshly.

But allegations are emerging that the security forces have killed innocent civilians and opened fire indiscriminately as they tackled the militants.

One eyewitness told the BBC he had seen three young men shot dead at close range while they were kneeling on the floor with their arms in the air.

The military strenuously denies claims it has caused civilian casualties.

'All necessary action'

The latest deaths would mean about 300 people have been killed in four days of clashes since an estimated 1,000 militants began attacking police stations and government buildings in several cities in northern Nigeria.

President Umaru Yar'Adua has ordered Nigeria's national security agencies to take all necessary action to contain and repel attacks by the extremists.

Security forces flooded into Maiduguri and began shelling Mr Yusuf's compound on Tuesday, after militants had attacked the city's police headquarters.

The violence broke out in Bauchi State on Sunday, before spreading to the states of Borno, particularly the state capital Maiduguri, Kano and Yobe.

Sharia law is in place across northern Nigeria, but there is no history of al-Qaeda-linked violence in the country.

The country's 150 million people are split almost equally between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south.

Family Tree Magazine - 101 Best Web Sites 2009

By David A. Fryxell

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Count on us to point you to genealogy's top digital destinations: 10 standouts in 10 areas (plus one!) add up to the 10th edition of our 101 Best Web Sites.

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If our ancestors had swung down from the trees with six fingers on each hand, we'd probably be counting by dozens. But thanks to humanity's development of 10 fingers and 10 toes, we count things in 10s, group the years in decades and celebrate anniversaries ending in 0—such as this 10th annual installment of Family Tree Magazine's 101 Best Web Sites.

We're marking the occasion by honoring 10 categories of 10 noteworthy sites each (plus one to make 101, of course). With this 10th roundup of meritorious sites, we've also sought to break the mold a bit and encompass more of the "Web 2.0" sites that are paving the way for changes in online genealogy over the next 10 years. Something had to give, however, to keep our count at a manageable 101, so we've omitted some old favorites—still worth bookmarking, nonetheless—and several excellent foreign research sites of interest to genealogists with that particular ancestry.

Sites that are mostly free but where you might still wind up pulling out your credit card for some purchase or other are marked with a $. Subscription-only sites and those where you have to pay for any meaningful results are indicated with $$.

What's the one Web resource in a class by itself? Ancestry.com $$, of course. What can we say? With its ever-expanding collection of databases and globe-spanning country-specific sites, Ancestry.com comes the closest to realizing the dream of doing real genealogy online—not just finding a few clues, but tracing your ancestors in primary sources. The complete US census, indexed, searchable and linked to images, is only the beginning here. An annual membership is $155.40 for US collections only, or $299.40 for the World Deluxe membership.

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10 Best Web Sites to See Dead People

Use these sites to find obituaries, cemeteries and other traces of your departed ancestors.

10 Best Web Sites for Vital Records

These are the best searchable databases of vital records from health departments, historical societies and state archives.

10 Best Web Sites for Storing and Sharing

Sharing your family history just got easier with these Web sites that let you create a family tree, store pictures and more.

10 Best Big Web Sites

You're sure to find information about your family in these stellar genealogy Web sites.

10 Best Web Sites for Maps

Trace your family's paths, find your ancestors' homes and explore the old country.

10 Best Web Sites for Local Searches

You can thank your lucky stars if your ancestors resided in the areas these Web sites cover.

10 Best Web Sites for International Searches

Tracking down immigrant ancestors has never been easier.

10 Best Cutting-edge Web Sites

Stay informed about the latest technology for genealogists with these sites.

10 Best Web Sites for Military Research

Find ancestors who served their country in these databases.

10 Best Virtual Library Web Sites

Powerful search tools let you explore great library collections in the comfort of your own home.

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Click here to download a printable PDF of the 101 Best Web Sites for 2009.

Click here to see the 2008 list of 101 Best Web Sites.

Getting the Edge on Global Data

by Gary Price

Let’s face it: Conducting international business research can be a stressful undertaking. Often the most challenging part is getting your bearings and getting started.

This is why I like the globalEDGE portal from Michigan State University. It’s a great place to get basic info and quickly identify resources that might be useful in your quest to answer the query. It’s also a great development tool to find resources worthy of a place in your local collection or bookmarks. Best of all, access to globalEDGE is completely free.

The site is organized into six sections each filled with content. Here are just a few highlights.

First up is the Resource Desk. This section is home to a massive and continuously updated directory of sites that have been hand chosen by the staff of globalEDGE. The directory can be keyword searched or browsed.

Other useful features are the RSS feed or web page containing new additions/updated sites. The Resource Desk section is also home to the Market Potential Index and the wonderful Database of International Business Statistics (registration required, free).

The second section is Country Insights. It contains statistical data for 199 countries around the globe. You’ll also find links to Country Comparator, which allows you to quickly compare statistics from one country with another.

Another section is titled State Insights and contains statistics, trade info and more for each of the 50 United States.

The fourth section of globalEDGE is Industry Profiles. Here you’ll find background, news, events, and stats organized by industry.

The next section contains the globalEDGE blog, with news and commentary of interest to those involved in international business. News of new blog postings is also available via Twitter.

The final section is the Global Academy. Here, you’ll be able to access academic info including course syllabi, info on publishers, conference announcements, and the globalEDGE Job Bank.

What we’ve listed above only scratches the surface of what globalEDGE has to offer. Spend some time here and you’ll come to find this site a useful companion when conducting international business research. I also recommend subscribing to the globalEdge monthly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay current with the content and features this wonderful portal offers.