Militants’ Airport Attack Misses Somali President - NYTimes.com

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By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM

MOGADISHU, Somalia — The nation’s most feared Islamist insurgent group, the Shabab, attacked the nation’s main airport with mortars here on Thursday as the president prepared to board a plane to Uganda, Somali officials said.

The president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, was unharmed, the officials said, but the attack was followed by an artillery strike on the nation’s biggest market that left at least 18 people dead, according to witnesses and ambulance workers.

Several members of Parliament called a news conference to denounce the artillery barrage, which they said had been fired by African Union peacekeepers, who are here to protect the weak transitional government but are finding themselves increasingly under fire from militants. The troops maintain a base at the airport.

Bootaan Isse Aalin, one of the Parliament members, said the shelling was “unlawful and inhuman.”

But Maj. Barigye Bahoko, a spokesman for the African Union troops in Somalia, denied that the peacekeepers had fired the artillery. “Anyone is free to comment on what is going on in Somalia and those parliamentarians never condemned the assassinations and shelling by Al Shabab,” he said. “I don’t know if they have something to do with Al Shabab.”

Anger at the peacekeepers has been rising, with civilians accusing them of indiscriminately shelling residential areas where insurgents live side-by-side with noncombatants — a charge the peacekeepers deny.

Many Somalis turned against the peacekeepers after an episode in February, when troops responded to a roadside bomb attack by firing wildly into a crowded street.

Somali officials say the peacekeepers killed 39 civilians; the troops say that the toll was much lower and that the victims were hit in cross-fire.

On Thursday, witnesses said that because there was no gun battle with militants at the time of the artillery attack, they suspected that most of the dead at the Bakara marketplace were civilians.

The mortar strike on the airport as Sheik Sharif’s plane was leaving, for a summit meeting on displaced people in Africa, raised renewed concerns about the Shabab’s intelligence capabilities. The government had tried to keep secret the timing of Sheik Sharif’s trip.

“Of course, as the government has sources within the Shabab, so do they,” said Abdulkadir Mohamed Osman, a presidential spokesman. “That does not mean that they are part of the government.”

Witnesses and the members of Parliament said the artillery attack on Thursday started soon after the mortar strike on the airport.

Aamina Hussein, 30, who was slightly wounded by shrapnel in the right leg in the Howlwadaag neighborhood, where the market is, said she saw five bodies lying on the ground as she was hit. “I am lucky I survived,” she said in an interview.

Sources from Lifeline Africa, an emergency volunteer ambulance organization, said that more than 20 bodies and 60 wounded people had been picked up in Howlwadaag and the nearby Hodan neighborhood.

Somalia’s transitional government is facing intense resistance from insurgent groups trying to overthrow it and impose Shariah, the strict Islamic legal code. Western leaders say that Sheik Sharif, a moderate Islamic cleric who came to power in January, has the best chance of any leader in years to bring stability to the war-torn nation.

Their Numbers Are Dropping - the Cellphone Refuseniks - NYTimes.com

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By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Not so long ago, we all lived in a world in which we decided where to meet friends before leaving the house and we hiked to the nearest payphone if we got a flat tire. Then we got cellphones.

Well, not everyone. For a hardy few that choose to ignore cellphones, life is a pocketful of quarters, missed connections and a smug satisfaction of marching to a different ring tone.

For Linda Mboya, 32, who lives in Brooklyn and works on arts and education programs at a nonprofit group, it also involves never letting sleeping dogs lie.

A friend who lives on the top floor of a house in Brooklyn has a perpetually broken apartment buzzer. So Ms. Mboya makes noise to disturb the dogs who live on the first floor, who then bark and announce her arrival to her friend.

“This system works pretty well,” Ms. Mboya said, though the dogs’ owners might disagree.

For many people, cellphones have become indispensable appendages that make calls, deliver e-mail messages, locate restaurants and identify the song on the radio. After 20 years, 85 percent of adult Americans have cellphones, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. According to the Federal Communications Commission, cellphones caught on faster than cable TV and personal computers although, by some accounts, broadband Internet service was adopted faster.

Those who still do not have them, according to Pew, tend to be older or less educated Americans or those unable to afford phones. “These are people who have a bunch of other struggles in their lives and the expense of maintaining technology and mastering it is also pretty significant for them,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew project.

But there is also a smaller subset of adults who resist cellphones simply because they do not want them. They resent the way that ring tones, tiny keyboards and screens disrupt face-to-face conversation. They savor their moments alone and prize the fact that no one knows how to reach them.

“It’s a luxury not to be reached when I’m out and about,” said Gregory Han, a 34-year-old writer and editor living in Los Angeles. Life for him is a lot more planned than most, the consequence of not having a cellphone — or even a landline — at home.

When his mother recently went to the hospital, the family’s communication plan went into action: his mother called his sister, who sent him an instant message on his computer, to which he replied with a call using Skype over the Web. When he travels for work, he prepares his boss with a list of ways to reach him and colleagues to call if he is unreachable, a modern-day version of Tony Roberts’s neurotic character giving minute-by-minute updates of where he would be reachable in the pre-BlackBerry era of Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam.”

Far from being technology-resistant, Mr. Han makes a living blogging about interior design and tech gadgets. He initially got rid of his cellphone to save money, but “I feel I benefit by living in the moment and not having a ring or a buzz or an inclination to always look at the screen.”

These cellphone “refuseniks” probably account for less than 5 percent of those who do not have cellphones, said John Horrigan, consumer research director at the National Broadband Task Force. Though many cellphone owners express growing displeasure about cellphones’ intrusions into their lives, according to Pew, a tiny and most likely shrinking number actually manage to resist them completely.

“Ambivalent networkers bristle at all their gadget-facilitated connectivity, but don’t give it up,” Mr. Horrigan said. “The cell refuseniks are making a statement that they control their availability.”

The painstaking plans that people without cellphones must make to navigate the world show just how dependent the rest of us have become on our phones.

Ms. Mboya always picks a time and a landmark to meet friends and carries quarters in case she has to use a payphone.

Still, her friends are not used to planning their social lives in advance. A recent brunch date required several three-way planning phone calls among Ms. Mboya and two friends. “I can only do that periodically,” said Sheila Shirazi, one of the friends. “I don’t have the time and energy to coordinate to the extent it takes with somebody who isn’t mobile. It’s just not something I’m used to.”

And even the best-laid plans falter. Jenna Catsos, 22, does not have a cellphone because she thinks the idea of always being reachable is “scary” and prefers to keep in touch with handwritten letters. While at college in rural Vermont, Ms. Catsos decided to drive to Massachusetts to surprise her father for his birthday. Halfway there, her car’s transmission broke down. She walked half a mile to the nearest gas station and called her parents from the payphone, but because they were not expecting her, they were not home. After leaving a message with the payphone number, she stood in the gas station parking lot for an hour waiting for them to call back.

“It’s situations like that when I would really love to have a phone,” she said. That might happen sooner than she would like, because she will start looking for a new job this winter and stay on friends’ couches for a few weeks, without her own landline. “It’s really getting impossible not to have one.”

Pakistani Brigadier Assassinated in the Capital - NYTimes.com

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By JANE PERLEZ and SALMAN MASOOD

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Two assailants on a motorbike fired on a Pakistani Army jeep in heavy rush-hour traffic on Thursday morning, killing a brigadier and his driver, a security official said.

The assassination of the brigadier, Moinudin Ahmed, was believed to be the first targeted attack on a senior military officer in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, and also suggested a new tactic in the continuing war between the government and Islamist militants. Until now, the military has been able to move with relative freedom through the capital.

The assailants fired with automatic weapons at the jeep, which was not bulletproof, and then disappeared into heavy traffic, according to witnesses. The attack took place around 9:30 a.m. in the G-11 neighborhood of the capital. Another soldier was wounded in the attack, according to a military spokesman.

The attack appeared to be a direct reprisal for the army’s current offensive against militants in the rugged tribal region of South Waziristan.

On Friday morning, a suicide bomber killed seven people in an attack on a checkpoint near a military complex about 30 miles from Islamabad, The Associated Press reported.

The brigadier returned to Islamabad a few days ago from Sudan, where he was leading the Pakistani contingent attached to the United Nations peacekeeping force, according to an Islamabad police official. He was on his way to Rawalpindi when he was attacked.

Pakistani officials said the brigadier assumed charge as head of the Pakistani contingent in Sudan almost nine months ago. Before that, he was serving in Rawalpindi as deputy director general of military operations. Earlier this year, he helped plan military operations in Swat and Bajaur. He was also involved in a government operation to end a militant siege at the Red Mosque in Islamabad in 2007.

“Investigators are looking into this angle,” an official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Late Thursday night, the Pakistani Interior Ministry issued a deadline of 72 hours for illegal Afghan immigrants to leave the capital. A door-to-door search was also ordered in three residential neighborhoods of the city.

The army continued to make slow progress in the mountainous terrain of South Waziristan, battling Taliban and Qaeda fighters in a Taliban stronghold, where the government says most of the recent terrorist attacks have been organized.

On Tuesday, Taliban militants killed six people when they struck a student cafeteria and an academic building at the International Islamic University in Islamabad. Schools in Islamabad and the province of Punjab remained closed Thursday.

Lone Cleric, Mehdi Karroubi, Emerges to Defy Iran’s Leaders - NYTimes.com

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By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A short midlevel cleric, with a neat white beard and a clergyman’s calm bearing, Mehdi Karroubi has watched from his home in Tehran in recent months as his aides have been arrested, his offices raided, his newspaper shut down. He himself has been threatened with arrest and, indirectly, the death penalty.

His response: bring it on.

Once a second-tier opposition figure operating in the shadow of Mir Hussein Moussavi, his fellow challenger in Iran’s discredited presidential election in June, Mr. Karroubi has emerged in recent months as the last and most defiant opponent of the country’s leadership.

The authorities have dismissed as fabrications his accusations of official corruption, voting fraud and the torture and rape of detained protesters. A former confidant of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a longtime conservative politician, he has lately been accused by the government of fomenting unrest and aiding Iran’s foreign enemies.

Four months after mass protests erupted in response to the dubious victory claims of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the opposition’s efforts have largely stalled in the face of unrelenting government pressure, arrests, long detentions, harsh sentences, censorship and a strategic refusal to compromise.

But for all its success at preserving authority, the government has been unable to silence or intimidate Mr. Karroubi, its most tenacious and, in many ways, most problematic critic. While other opposition figures, including Mr. Moussavi and two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, are seldom heard now, Mr. Karroubi has been unsparing and highly vocal in his criticism of the government, which he feels has lost all legitimacy.

Last week, a special court for the clergy began to consider whether Mr. Karroubi, 72, should face charges. His response, in a speech to a student group that was reported on a reformist Web site, was withering.

“I am not only unworried about this court,” he wrote. “I wholeheartedly welcome it since I will use it to express my concerns regarding the national and religious beliefs of the Iranian people and the ideas of Imam Khomeini, and clearly reveal those who are opposed to these concerns.”

Despite such provocations, Iran’s conservative leadership has so far not arrested him, apparently fearful of making a powerful symbol of a man so closely associated with the founding of the Islamic republic.

“His potential arrest is an acid test of the internal meltdown of the upper echelon of the regime and the final breakdown in its legitimacy facade,” said Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University. “We had heard that revolutions eat their own children, but his seems to be a case of revolutionary parricide.”

Mr. Karroubi works from a villa on a quiet street in Tehran that ends at a rundown palace once occupied by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. It is one of the many symbols of his standing among the revolutionary elite. He was jailed nine times by the shah and spent years in prison, where he grew close to inmates of widely different political persuasions: nationalist, socialist, Islamist, said Rasool Nafisi, an Iran expert based in Virginia.

“These forced companionships, Karroubi wrote in his autobiography, made him aware of the pain of the others, and relieved him from sectarian behavior,” Mr. Nafisi said.

After the overthrow of the shah, Ayatollah Khomeini put Mr. Karroubi in charge of the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee and the Martyrs Foundation, two of the nation’s most important and wealthiest institutions. He also served twice as speaker of Parliament, where he earned a reputation as a conciliator; served on the powerful Expediency Council; and was appointed adviser to the subsequent supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

So it was hard for the leadership to brand him an enemy of the state when he posted on his Web site last month an impassioned, unyielding and damning letter to the nation, written in response to the judicial finding that his allegations of the rape of imprisoned protesters were unfounded.

“The ugliness has reached the point that instead of the perpetrators and propagators and people behind this oppression, it is Mehdi Karroubi whom they want to put on trial,” he wrote. “I take refuge with you, oh God, from these catastrophes which some are causing and are not only a disgrace to the Islamic republic, but a disgrace to Iran.”

Mr. Karroubi’s disenchantment with the revolution he helped create began not with the elections in June, but with the balloting that brought Mr. Ahmadinejad to office four years ago. Mr. Karroubi was a candidate then, too, and late into the night after the polls closed, he was running second, behind Mr. Rafsanjani.

A few days later, he talked about election night during an interview in his villa, still angry and surprised at what had happened. He said he had gone to sleep and when he woke, he was in third place, behind Mr. Ahmadinejad and out of the race.

Mr. Ahmadinejad won a runoff, and Mr. Karroubi wrote an open letter of protest to the supreme leader charging vote fraud. There was no investigation, however, and Ayatollah Khamenei chastised Mr. Karroubi. He dropped his protest, but quit the Expediency Council and started his own political organization, the National Trust Party.

Of course, much the same thing happened again in June, when Mr. Ahmadinejad supposedly won with 63 percent of the votes cast — including 71 percent of the votes cast in Mr. Karroubi’s home province, Lorestan.

If Mr. Karroubi had restricted his complaints to the vote tally, he might have been ignored. But he has gone far beyond that with his accusations that state security officers raped, sodomized and tortured men and women who were arrested for taking part in the protests. The allegations have unnerved the leadership, threatening its legitimacy and religious standing far more than images of the police beating protesters in the streets.

After the government dismissed those allegations last month, Mr. Karroubi was summoned to appear before a three-judge panel investigating his actions. He welcomed the invitation. “It will be a good opportunity for me to talk again about crimes that would make the shah look good,” he said, according to the Green Freedom Wave Web site.

As calls for his arrest grow louder, he remains defiant.

“If only I were not alive and had not seen the day that in the Islamic republic, a citizen would come to me and complain that every variety of appalling and unnatural act would be done in unknown buildings and by less-known people: stripping people and making them face each other and subjecting them to vile insults and urinating in their faces,” he wrote in his letter to the nation. “I said to myself, ‘Where indeed have we arrived 30 years after the revolution?’ ”

Government widens control over paychecks - washingtonpost.com

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BAILED-OUT FIRMS ARE FIRST Measures aim to cut risk to companies, economy

By Frank Ahrens and David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 23, 2009

The Federal Reserve joined the Treasury Department on Thursday in imposing new limits on executive pay, extending the government's control over compensation at taxpayer-owned companies to institutions that are merely government regulated.

The restrictions were the latest in more than a year's worth of government intervention in matters once considered inviolable aspects of the country's free-market economy and represent a signal moment in the history of the American economic experiment. After years of setting minimum wages, the government is now telling some companies how they should structure pay for those who run them.

The actions Thursday put the United States more in line with European governments. France and Germany, in particular, have pressed for international standards to limit executive pay, a move that the United States and Britain have resisted.

At Treasury, President Obama's pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, announced sharp cuts in pay for 175 top executives at seven big banks and automakers that received hundreds of billions of dollars in federal bailout money during the financial crisis. The new structures reduced the cash salary paid to some executives by 90 percent and tied more compensation to long-term stock awards.

"There is entirely too much reliance on cash, and there's got to be a better way to tie corporate performance to long-term growth," Feinberg said at a media briefing. "I'm hoping that the methodology we developed to determine compensation for these individuals might be voluntarily adopted elsewhere."

At the Federal Reserve, Chairman Ben S. Bernanke proposed a broader but less proscribed plan to restrict pay at banks. The aim is to prevent them from rewarding employees for actions that could endanger the firms' long-term financial health. Unlike Feinberg's more limited plan, the Fed's guidance would cover all banks it regulates -- even those that never received a bailout -- as well as U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies.

However, the Fed's proposed rules have wiggle room: The guidelines would let banks set their own compensation but give the Fed veto power over pay practices that it determines could threaten the safety and soundness of a bank. They would extends the regulators' reach into pay practices affecting tens of thousands of bank employees, from senior executives to traders of complex securities.

"I've always believed that our system of free enterprise works best when it rewards hard work," Obama said at the White House on Thursday. "But it does offend our values when executives of big financial firms -- firms that are struggling -- pay themselves huge bonuses even as they continue to rely on taxpayer assistance to stay afloat."

Since the crisis began, the federal government has used taxpayer money to inject capital into financial firms in exchange for ownership stakes. Failing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by Washington. American International Group, the world's largest insurance company, is 80 percent owned by U.S. taxpayers. The government has picked winners (Bear Stearns) and losers (Lehman Brothers). And a sitting chief executive -- General Motors' Rick Wagoner -- was effectively fired by the White House.

Executive compensation has long been linked to company performance -- the higher profits and stock prices go, the bigger the payday for top executives. But Bernanke, other regulators and many on Capitol Hill say that compensation packages were so high that they led executives to put their companies and shareholders at risk solely for the benefit of multimillion-dollar bonuses.

"The Federal Reserve is working to ensure that compensation packages appropriately tie rewards to longer-term performance and do not create undue risk for the firm or the financial system," Bernanke said.

The banking industry viewed the Fed's guidelines with ambivalence. Many banks already are moving to revise compensation practices for top executives and other employees who could expose the bank to bet-the-company risks. But industry representatives are wary of the regulations, concerned that they could ensnare even relatively low-level employees of smaller banks.

"If it focuses on those who really put institutions at risk, that's fine," said Ed Yingling, chief executive of the American Bankers Association. "But if you get down to the point where you have regulators looking over the shoulders of branch managers, it really does not make sense."

Long-simmering resentment over executive compensation boiled over in March when it was revealed that AIG, the recipient of a taxpayer-fueled bailout package worth up to $180 billion, was paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to a trading division that nearly brought the company and the global financial system to their knees.

The seven companies included in the Feinberg's cash crackdown are AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, General Motors, Chrysler, GMAC and Chrysler Financial.

The new pay ceilings are low by Wall Street standards, and they are by no means watertight. They still allow for hefty compensation.

For instance: Feinberg reduced the cash salary of 13 top Bank of America executives by $89 million for 2009. But the total compensation for each of the 12 executives beneath outgoing chief executive Kenneth D. Lewis still averages $6.5 million this year. Feinberg's actions do nothing to stop Lewis's $70 million retirement compensation.

And the companies escape the pay curbs if they pay back all of the bailout money they have received.

Still, Feinberg managed to slash about $879 million in total 2009 compensation at the seven companies, compared with 2008 levels.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Feinberg did not go far enough. He urged Feinberg to push the government deeper into corporate boardrooms via a number of proposals, such as forcing companies to split the jobs of chief executive and chairman.

Daniel J. Mitchell, senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, says he worries about the slippery slope.

"I fear as politicians get a taste for interfering with executive pay for one little subset of companies where you actually could have sympathy for the approach, what's going to stop them from saying, 'Hey, this was popular. Let's do a little demagoguery before the next election and go after all the CEOs.' "

Correspondent Anthony Faiola in London contributed to this report.

Pushing for Energy Legislation, Obama Takes On Critics - NYTimes.com

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By HELENE COOPER and JOHN M. BRODER

BOSTON — President Obama, taking aim at business interests that have lobbied against an energy and climate bill moving through Congress, called on legislators Friday to rally around the push toward greater use of renewable energy.

In a wide-ranging speech on energy and the environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Obama called for passage of legislation that would make “the best use of resources we have in abundance, through clean coal technology, safe nuclear power, sustainably grown biofuels and energy we harness from wind, waves and sun.”

At the same time, Mr. Obama chided critics of the proposed legislation.

“There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy when it’s the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs,” Mr. Obama said, an apparent reference to the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Both organizations oppose the proposal moving through Congress to cap the emissions of greenhouse gases and allow companies to buy and sell permits to pollute. That approach, known as cap and trade, is meant to guarantee that emissions will decline, while providing market incentives for companies to invest in the most cost-effective technologies.

The legislation “provides the largest single boost in scientific research in history,” Mr. Obama said.

“The closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we’ll hear from those whose interest or ideology runs counter to action,” he added.

Mr. Obama made his remarks after touring a research laboratory at M.I.T. that has been developing what the White House described as “cutting edge clean energy technology.” He checked out a quantum dot lighting project involving a new kind of light-emitting diode, or LED, that gives off whiter light at lower energy cost and could replace existing light bulbs or fluorescent lights.

“There is also another myth we must dispel,” Mr. Obama said in his speech, “and it is one far more dangerous than any attack made by those who wish to stand in the way of progress — and that’s the idea that there is little or nothing we can do. That is the pessimistic notion that our politics are too broken and our people too unwilling to make hard choices. Implicit in this argument is the sense that we’ve lost something important — that fighting American spirit, that willingness to tackle hard challenges and the determination to see those challenges to their end.”

Legislation addressing energy and the related problem of climate change from fossil-fuel emissions faces significant challenges in Congress, where some Democrats remain worried about lost jobs and rising energy costs in the parts of the country most heavily dependent on coal and manufacturing. From the outset, the bill’s proponents have sought to make the case that it will create high-tech jobs and save money on energy costs in the long run.

The Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee will begin hearings next Tuesday on the climate change and energy bill introduced last month by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts — who hitched a ride home to Boston with Mr. Obama aboard Air Force One — and Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Mr. Obama’s speech appeared timed to give the legislation a strong lift-off.

But the timing on any committee action, let alone passage by the full Senate, is highly uncertain and depends not only on the environment committee but also on action by several other Senate committees, not all of them as friendly toward strict caps on emissions. The White House has said it does not expect final Senate action before next year, and certainly not before the big climate change summit in Copenhagen next month.

Mr. Obama’s trip to New England will also include campaign fund-raisers later Friday for Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, and a stop later in Stamford, Conn., to stump for Senator Christopher J. Dodd.

NATO Defense Ministers Endorse Wider Afghan Effort - NYTimes.com

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By THOM SHANKER

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — NATO defense ministers gave their broad endorsement Friday to the counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan laid out by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, increasing pressure on the Obama administration and on their own governments to commit more military and civilian resources to the mission.

General McChrystal, the senior American and allied commander in Afghanistan, landed here early Friday to brief NATO defense ministers on his strategic review of an eight-year war in which the American-led effort has lost momentum to a tenacious insurgency. The closed-door session — which had not been disclosed in advance — added a note of drama to the sort of NATO ministerial meeting that is often mundane.

“What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal’s overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counterinsurgency approach,” said NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Although the broad acceptance by NATO defense ministers of General McChrystal’s strategic review included no decision on new troops, it was another in a series of judgments that success there cannot be achieved by a narrower effort that calls for not increasing troop levels substantially and focuses more on capturing and killing terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. That counterterrorism strategy is identified with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In contrast, General McChrystal’s review calls for implementing a full-scale counterinsurgency strategy that focuses on protecting population centers and accelerating the training of Afghan army and police units, both requiring significant numbers of fresh troops. NATO diplomats noted that it was difficult to see how an acceptance of this broad strategy could be viewed as anything but an endorsement of the need to increase both military and civilian contributions.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, whose views carry great weight in Mr. Obama’s war council, declined to be drawn out on his assessment. “For this meeting, I am here mainly in listening mode,” Mr. Gates said, although he noted that “many allies spoke positively about General McChrystal’s assessment.”

Mr. Gates said the administration’s decision on Afghanistan was still two or three weeks away, and he cautioned that it was “vastly premature” to draw conclusions now about whether the president would deploy more troops. He emphasized that allied defense ministers had not voiced concerns about the administration’s decision-making process.

Although NATO will not meet until next month to decide whether to commit more resources to Afghanistan, Mr. Gates did reveal that he had received indications that some allies were prepared to increase their contributions of civilian experts or troops, or both.

Separate from his strategic review, General McChrystal has submitted a request for forces, which was not under discussion Friday, but is now working its way through both the American and NATO chains of command.

The various options submitted by General McChrystal range up to a maximum of 85,000 more troops, although his leading option calls for increasing forces by about 40,000, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

Pressure for adding troops mounted throughout the day, as other senior international representatives also told NATO defense ministers of the need to increase their commitments in order to succeed in Afghanistan.

Kai Eide, the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, flew to Slovakia to meet NATO defense chiefs, and he stressed that “additional international troops are required.” He also told the allies, “This cannot be a U.S.-only enterprise.”

Mr. Eide acknowledged that it may be difficult to rally public support for force contributions while accusations of election fraud continue to taint the government of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.

Senior American military officers have already endorsed General McChrystal’s overall strategy, including Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in the Middle East. Neither has publicly discussed what specific troop increases he might advocate.

Senior NATO officials made clear that additional commitments should go beyond combat forces to include trainers for the Afghan army and police force, as well as civilians to help rebuild the economy and restore confidence in the government.

“What we need is a much broader strategy, which stabilizes the whole of Afghan society, and this is the essence in the recommendations presented by General McChrystal,” said Mr. Rasmussen, the alliance secretary general. “This won’t happen just because of a good plan. It will also need resources — people and money.”

General McChrystal was not scheduled to make any public comments here. This reserve was not unexpected, as some administration officials have criticized his recent statements, including a speech in London, as an effort to pressure the White House.

The general and his aides have denied they were playing politics, and have expressed respect for the importance of the civilian-led policy review process now under way in Washington. General McChrystal said in a recent interview that his ability to succeed required a unified, government-wide strategy and that he welcomed a process that resulted in a consensus from his civilian bosses that would include clear instructions on the way ahead.

NATO officials assessing the potential for allied troop contributions said that delicate negotiations were under way and that NATO capitals were watching the Obama administration for signals even while they send signals of their own.

In what one NATO diplomat described as “a chicken-and-egg process,” the British government, for example, announced this month a plan still laced with conditions for sending 500 more troops to Afghanistan. Some NATO diplomats viewed that as a way to emphasize their support for a decision by the Obama administration to deploy more troops.

At the same time, though, some allies with forces in Afghanistan are cautiously discussing how and when to end their deployments there.

U.S. arrests 303 in raid targeting Mexico's La Familia drug cartel - washingtonpost.com

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By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 23, 2009

U.S. authorities arrested 303 people Wednesday and Thursday in a nationwide sweep targeting the distribution network of La Familia, a fast-rising Mexican drug cartel known for its violence, messianic culture and control over the methamphetamine trade, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday.

More than 3,000 federal, state and local agents participated in the U.S. law enforcement operation, the largest mounted against a Mexican cartel, Holder said.

The raids "dealt a significant blow to La Familia's supply chain," Holder said, netting cash, drugs, weapons and vehicles in 19 states. But U.S. officials did not say whether any cartel leaders were caught. "With the increases in cooperation between U.S. and Mexican authorities in recent years, we are taking the fight to our adversaries," Holder said.

Arrests took place in 38 cities, from Boston to Seattle, with 77 made in Dallas. The effort involved the Drug Enforcement Administration; the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Charges include drug and gun trafficking and money laundering.

Analysts said the operation appeared designed to allay skepticism among Mexico's political leaders about the U.S. government's commitment to Mexico's crackdown on cartels. The drug-related violence has taken about 15,000 lives since President Felipe Calderón entered office in 2006. Mexican authorities have arrested 80,000 drug suspects, and Washington has responded with $1.4 billion in aid under the Merida initiative, but some in Mexico have grown frustrated with the U.S. market's continuing demand for illegal drugs.

"Many Mexican leaders have viewed the Merida initiative as too little and too late," said George W. Grayson, a Mexico specialist at the College of William and Mary who has written about La Familia, "and so Washington is trying to make clear that we are good faith, genuine partners in the war against drugs."

La Familia, the newest of Mexico's five major cartels, has become entrenched in many U.S. cities after flourishing in Mexico through entrepreneurial zeal, brutality and promises to spin drug profits into "divine justice," or social benefits for its impoverished home state.

La Familia opposes the sale of methamphetamine to Mexicans, for example, but is responsible for the "vast majority" of the lucrative drug entering the United States from Mexico, said Michele M. Leonhart, acting DEA administrator.

The cartel, based in the southwestern Mexico state of Michoacan, has also benefited from a splintering of older cartels, and its effort to gain social legitimacy is combined with a savage program to kill, coerce and corrupt security and government personnel, Mexican analysts said.

In Washington, Holder said that U.S. authorities have targeted La Familia for 44 months. Under the effort, called Project Coronado, the federal government has arrested 1,186 people and seized $32.8 million, 2,710 pounds of methamphetamine, 1,999 kilograms of cocaine, 29 pounds of heroin, 16,390 pounds of marijuana, 389 weapons and 269 vehicles.

U.S. authorities indicted, but did not arrest, La Familia's operational chief, Servando Gomez-Martinez -- known as La Tuta.

How an amateur historian rescued D.C.'s Wikipedia page - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

By Michael S. Rosenwald
Friday, October 23, 2009

The historian largely responsible for summing up Washington, D.C., for millions of Wikipedia readers digs for facts from his tiny bedroom in Dupont Circle. He sits on a chair borrowed from his four-piece dinette set at a desk he bought from Target, footnoting away on an old Dell computer. He is 24 years old. Sometimes he makes his bed.

His name is Adam Lewis -- a fact sure to surprise his closest friends and even his parents, who are unaware that, for a year or so, Lewis has been staying up late to rescue the District's Wikipedia page from vandals and mediocrity. Having grown up in the area, Lewis felt an obligation to do the work but not to brag about it.

"I just really don't think anyone would care," Lewis said.

Lewis joined thousands of other amateurs toiling in obscurity on Wikipedia, where facts are more important than the star historians who tend to dominate the popular view of history. On Wikipedia, anyone can be a historian. It's easy: Most pages are edited just by clicking on a button that says "edit this page."

More than 150,000 users made changes in the past 30 days, according to the site. Some, like Lewis, have user names and Wikipedia profiles. He goes by EpicAdam. Others are anonymous. Almost everyone has a specialty. There are editors who just fix punctuation. Some defend content against vandals. Others, like Lewis, pull the content together. It is an assembly line of nobodies.

"One of the things Wikipedia does really well is allow people to do distributed work," said Fernanda Viégas, a former MIT Media Lab researcher who studies digital information. "You can just go in and fix small things. But then you can really get hooked and get into ever more complex work as well."

Getting sucked in

That's what happened to Lewis. In spring 2008, he checked to see how his home town was presented to the world. This is a common way Wikipedia editors get sucked in. They look for topics they know about to judge whether the information is dependable.

Lewis didn't like what he found. There was misinformation and missing information, and the page had been demoted from "good article" status, meaning a group of experienced Wikipedia editors thought the page was shoddy.

"The page had really fallen by the wayside," said Lewis, who was born in the District and grew up in Potomac. "But this is my home town. I felt like it should be presented well."

His first edit was tiny. He thought a Washington Post article shouldn't be the source of information about the District's population, so he changed the citation to the U.S. Census. (Every change can be viewed through a search feature.)

During the next few days, he made other seemingly trivial edits, which led to larger changes about, among other things, how much money the city gets from the federal government.

In May, Lewis left a note on the discussion portion of the D.C. page, telling other editors that he was overhauling the entry. "Hi all," he wrote. "I'm sure you've noticed many changes to the page over the last few days. Hopefully these changes are for the better and will help the article regain it's 'good' rating."

Lewis wanted the D.C. page to present the city as a city, not just the U.S. capital, a goal in line with the wishes of many Washingtonians.

To that end, Lewis has made sure the page includes a good deal of information about the city's demographics. The page notes: "Unique among cities with a high percentage of African Americans, Washington has had a significant black population since the city's creation. This is a result of the manumission of slaves in the Upper South after the American Revolutionary War."

Some information about the city is not pretty: "A report in the year 2007 found that about one-third of District residents are functionally illiterate, compared to a national rate of about one in five."

But on culture: "Washington is also an important center for indie culture and music in the United States. The label Dischord Records, formed by Ian MacKaye, was one of the most crucial independent labels in the genesis of 1980s punk and eventually indie rock in the 1990s."

To be included on the page, Lewis said, events and people must have a close relationship to life in the District. So, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln doesn't make the cut. But the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (in Memphis) does because of the ensuing riots in the city.

Praised and panned

Other editors on the D.C. page have been pleased with Lewis's leadership. Josh Howell, whose user name is (because, he says, it's true) AgnosticPreachersKid, said Lewis is "very, very courteous" when it comes to making changes.

But Lewis can also come down hard on what he considers silliness. Another editor recently wrote: "I think we should split this article into two pages: Washington (City) and District of Columbia, as they are not the same thing. The District of Columbia is a separate thing from the city, as Washington, D.C. is only a part of the federal district."

Lewis's reply: "The argument that the District of Columbia is a separate entity from Washington, D.C. is erroneous and perpetuates a misconception of the uninformed."

Lewis has been on the other side of such criticism. Zachary Schrag, a George Mason University historian who studies the District, reviewed the page and found a blunder: the assertion that building heights in the city were limited to the height of the Capitol. Wrong, Schrag said. (The information was attributed to a Washington Post article. Oops.)

Lewis, alerted to the error, quickly made a fix. "That's the problem/success with Wikipedia," he said in an e-mail. "You may have a reliable source that's still wrong. It's hard to weed that stuff out until you have an expert (like Dr. Schrag) take a look at it. But, unfortunately, there are many like him who don't bother with Wikipedia."

There are historians who embrace Wikipedia. Last year, after using the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., as a resource, Lewis began volunteering there. Now he is membership coordinator. One day, he asked special collections librarian Colleen McKnight where she sent callers for information on the District. She said the D.C. Wikipedia page. Lewis was tickled. He revealed his editor identity to her.

McKnight remembers telling him, "Well, you did a good job."

And his work has paid off. The D.C. article not only regained "good article" status, but it also became a "featured article," the Web site's highest ranking.

"Oh, I was really pleased at that," Lewis said. "It was like getting a first-place ribbon at the state fair."

What Women Want Now - The State of the American Woman - TIME

If you were a woman reading this magazine 40 years ago, the odds were good that your husband provided the money to buy it. That you voted the same way he did. That if you got breast cancer, he might be asked to sign the form authorizing a mastectomy. That your son was heading to college but not your daughter. That your boss, if you had a job, could explain that he was paying you less because, after all, you were probably working just for pocket money.

It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely. It's expected that by the end of the year, for the first time in history the majority of workers in the U.S. will be women — largely because the downturn has hit men so hard. This is an extraordinary change in a single generation, and it is gathering speed: the growth prospects, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are in typically female jobs like nursing, retail and customer service. More and more women are the primary breadwinner in their household (almost 40%) or are providing essential income for the family's bottom line. Their buying power has never been greater — and their choices have seldom been harder.

It is in this context that the Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with TIME, conducted a landmark survey of gender issues to assess how individual Americans are reacting. Is the battle of the sexes really over, and if so, did anyone win? How do men now view female power? How much resentment or confusion or gratitude is there for the forces that have rearranged family life, rewired the economy and reinvented gender roles? And what, if anything, does everyone agree needs to happen to make all this work? The study found that men and women were in broad agreement about what matters most to them; gone is the notion that women's rise comes at men's expense. As the Old Economy dissolves and pressures on working parents grow, they share their fears about what this means for their children and their frustration with institutions that refuse to admit how much has changed. In the new age, the battles we fight together are the ones that define us.

A Quiet Revolution
In the spring of 1972, TIME devoted a special issue of the magazine to assessing the status of women in the throes of "women's lib." At a time when American society was racing through change like a reckless teenager, feminism had sputtered and stalled. Women's average wages had actually fallen relative to men's; there were fewer women in the top ranks of civil service (under 2%) than there were four years before. No woman had served in the Cabinet since the Eisenhower Administration; there were no female FBI agents or network-news anchors or Supreme Court Justices. The nation's campuses were busy hosting a social revolt, yet Harvard's tenured faculty of 421 included only six women. Of the Museum of Modern Art's 1,000 one-man shows over the previous 40 years, five were by women. Headhunters lamented that it was easier to put a man on the moon than a woman in a corner office. "There is no movement," complained an activist who resigned her leadership position in the National Organization for Women two years after it was founded. "Movement means 'going someplace,' and the movement is not going anywhere. It hasn't accomplished anything." (Read TIME's 1972 cover story "Where She Is and Where She's Going.")

That was cranky exaggeration; many changes were felt more than seen, a shift in hopes and expectations that cracked the foundations of patriarchy. "In terms of real power — economic and political — we are still just beginning," Gloria Steinem admitted. "But the consciousness, the awareness — that will never be the same."

So it's worth stopping to look at what happened while we were busy ending the Cold War and building a multicultural society and enjoying the longest economic expansion in history. In the slow-motion fumblings of family life, it was easy just to keep going along, mark the milestones, measure the kids on the kitchen door and miss the movement. In 1972 only 7% of students playing high school sports were girls; now the number is six times as high. The female dropout rate has fallen in half. College campuses used to be almost 60-40 male; now the ratio has reversed, and close to half of law and medical degrees go to women, up from fewer than 10% in 1970. Half the Ivy League presidents are women, and two of the three network anchors soon will be; three of the four most recent Secretaries of State have been women. There are more than 145 foundations designed to empower women around the world, in the belief that this is the greatest possible weapon against poverty and disease; there was only one major foundation (the Ms. Foundation) for women in 1972. For the first time, five women have won Nobel Prizes in the same year (for Medicine, Chemistry, Economics and Literature). We just came through an election year in which Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Tina Fey and Katie Couric were lead players, not the supporting cast. And the President of the United States was raised by a single mother and married a lawyer who outranked and outearned him.

It is still true that boardrooms and faculty clubs and legislatures and whole swaths of professions like, say, hedge-fund management remain predominantly male; women are about 10% of civil engineers and a third of physicians and surgeons but 98% of kindergarten teachers and dental assistants, and they still earn 77 cents on the dollar compared with men. They are charged higher premiums for health insurance yet still have greater out-of-pocket expenses for things as basic as contraception and maternity care. At times it seems as if the only women effortlessly balancing their jobs, kids, husbands and homes are the ones on TV.

See TIME's covers on women.

See more about women.

Now the recession raises the stakes and shuffles the deck. Poll after poll finds women even more anxious than men about their family's financial security. While most workers have seen their wages stall or drop, women's earnings fell 2% in 2008, twice as much as men's. Women are 32% more likely than men to have subprime mortgages, leaving them more vulnerable in the housing crisis. The Guttmacher Institute found that the downturn has affected the most basic decisions in family life. Nearly half of women surveyed in households earning less than $75,000 want to delay pregnancy or limit the number of children they have. At the same time, women are poised to emerge from the downturn with even greater relative economic power as the wage gap narrows. A new survey by GfK Roper for NBC Universal gives a whole new meaning to the power of the purse: 65% of women reported being their family's chief financial planner, and 71% called themselves the family accountant. According to a Mediamark Research & Intelligence survey, they make 75% of the buying decisions in American homes. Together, women control more wealth than ever in history.

Progress is seldom simple; it comes with costs and casualties, even challenges about whether a change represents an advance or a retreat. The TIME survey provides evidence of both. At the most basic level, the argument over where women belong is over; the battle of the sexes becomes a costume drama, like Middlemarch or Mad Men. Large majorities, across ages and incomes and ideologies, view women's growing role in the workforce as good for both the economy and society in general. More than 8 in 10 say mothers are just as productive at work as fathers or childless workers are. Even more, some 84% affirm that husbands and wives negotiate the rules, relationships and responsibilities more than those of earlier generations did; roughly 7 in 10 men say they are more comfortable than their fathers were with women working outside the home, while women say they are less financially dependent on their spouse than their mother was.

This is not to say there's nothing left to argue about. More than two-thirds of women still think men resent powerful women, yet women are more likely than men to say female bosses are harder to work for than male ones. Men are much more likely to say there are no longer any barriers to female advancement, while a majority of women say men still have it better in life. People are evenly split over whether the "mommy wars" between working and nonworking mothers are finally over.

But just as striking is how much men and women agree on issues that divided them a generation ago. "It happened so fast," writes Gail Collins in her new book, When Everything Changed, "that the revolution seemed to be over before either side could really find its way to the barricades." It's as though sensible people are too busy to bother bickering about who takes out the garbage or who deserves the corner office; many of the deepest conflicts are now ones that men and women share. Especially in the absence of social supports, flexible work arrangements and affordable child care, it's hardly surprising that a majority of both men and women still say it is best for children to have a father working and a mother at home. Among the most dramatic changes in the past generation is the detachment of marriage and motherhood; more men than women identified marriage as "very important" to their happiness. Women no longer view matrimony as a necessary station on the road to financial security or parenthood. The percentage of children born to single women has leaped from 12% to 39%. Whereas a majority of children in the mid-1970s were raised by a stay-at-home parent, the portion is now less than a third, and nearly two-thirds of people say this has been a negative for American society.

Among the most confounding changes of all is the evidence, tracked by numerous surveys, that as women have gained more freedom, more education and more economic power, they have become less happy. No tidy theory explains the trend, notes University of Pennsylvania economist Justin Wolfers, a co-author of The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. "We looked across all sectors — young vs. old, kids or no kids, married or not married, education, no education, working or not working — and it stayed the same," he says of the data. "But there are a few ways to look at it," he adds. "As Susan Faludi said, the women's movement wasn't about happiness." It may be that women have become more honest about what ails them. Or that they are now free to wrestle with the same pressures and conflicts that once accounted for greater male unhappiness. Or that modern life in a global economy is simply more stressful for everyone but especially for women, who are working longer hours while playing quarterback at home. "Some of the other social changes that have happened over the last 35 years — changes in family, in the workplace — may have affected men differently than women," Wolfers says. "So maybe we're not learning about changes due to the women's movement but changes in society."

All the shapes in the puzzle are shifting. If there is anything like consensus on an issue as basic as how we live our lives as men and women, as lovers, parents, partners, it's that getting the pieces of modern life to fit together is hard enough; something has to bend. Equal numbers of men and women report frequent stress in daily life, and most agree that government and businesses have failed to adjust to the changes in the family. As the Old Economy dissolves before our eyes, men and women express remarkably similar life goals when asked about the importance of money, health, jobs and family. If male jobs keep vanishing, if physical strength loses its workplace value, if the premium shifts ever more to education, in which achievement is increasingly female, then we will soon be having parallel conversations: What needs to be done to free American men to realize their full potential? You can imagine the whole conversation flipping in a single generation.

It's no longer a man's world. Nor is it a woman's nation. It's a cooperative, with bylaws under constant negotiation and expectations that profits be equally shared.

— With reporting by Andréa Ford and Deirdre van Dyk

POLL

Men, Women and Society: Where Are We Now?

TIME collaborated with the Rockefeller Foundation to conduct a landmark study of gender attitudes in a changing economy. Here are the major findings

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The Unfinished Revolution

The numbers don't lie: it's no longer a man's world. Maria Shriver on why more change is needed

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Catching up with three of the women we profiled in TIME's 1972 issue

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The Welder Janie Cottrell

When Janie Cottrell was looking for a welding job in Georgia in the 1970s, no one would give her an interview. Now she works at NASA

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The Farmer's Wife

In 1972, Marcia Hueber worked fifteen hour days as a farmer's wife. When her kids were old enough, she packed it in and got a job. She's still working now

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Homemaker Lauretta Galligan

In 1972, Lauretta Galligan was a 51-year-old housewife who told TIME her role was to support her husband. She still makes him breakfast every day

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A look inside how happy we really are rushing to work in the morning and how much we socialize, play and spend