Uncertainty Reigns in Burundi After Attempted Coup

Abstract: NAIROBI, Kenya — President Pierre Nkurunziza was back in Burundi on Thursday, news agencies reported, a day after an attempted coup against his government. The precise whereabouts of Mr. Nkurunziza, who had been at a summit meeting in Tanzania when the uprising began, was unclear. His communications adviser, Willy Nyamitwe, after confirming to Agence France-Presse that Mr. Nkurunziza had returned to the country, added, “That’s all we can say for now because of security reasons.” In a statement on Twitter earlier Thursday, Mr. Nkurunziza called on citizens to remain calm, saying that the situation was under control and that constitutional order was being maintained. Gunfire and explosions were heard on Thursday morning in Bujumbura, the capital, after an army general announced on Wednesday that Mr. Nkurunziza had been ousted, but it remained unclear Thursday who was in control of the country. The government’s hold on the capital was in dispute, with the military appearing to be divided in its support for the beleaguered president and the general seeking to unseat him. “We control virtually the entire city,” Venon Ndabaneze, a spokesman for the mutiny’s leaders, told Agence France-Presse. Clashes at and around RTNB, the state radio and television stations, were intense and lasted for two hours, with forces loyal to the president managing to maintain control, though radio broadcasts ceased for nearly an hour. “I would like to tell you that the state radio and television are still under the control of the loyal army,” the general manager of RTNB, Jerome Nzopfabarushe, announced on the radio. Supporters of Mr. Nkurunziza shut down independent broadcasters in Bujumbura. One of them, Radio Bonesha, said on Facebook that its studios had been stormed by a group of military officers and heavily armed police officers. Another station, Radio Publique Africaine, which was closed during recent protests and reopened after the attempted takeover, was also attacked. Image An opponent of President Pierre Nkurunziza’s decision to run again, in Bujumbura, the capital. Credit Goran Tomasevic/Reuters Protests erupted last month after Mr. Nkurunziza, a former rebel leader who took office in 2005, indicated that he planned to run in next month’s elections for a third term. Critics said that amounted to a breach of the Constitution, which limits presidents to two five-year terms. His supporters contend that the first term did not count because he was not directly elected by voters in 2005. When Mr. Nkurunziza was in Tanzania for a meeting of East African leaders to discuss the crisis in his country, he denounced the plot against him in a radio broadcast but said he was willing to forgive mutinous soldiers who surrendered. On Wednesday, Maj. Gen. Godefroid Niyombare, the country’s former security chief, said in a broadcast from a radio station in the capital that Mr. Nkurunziza had been dismissed. “The latest developments have increased the risk to civilians in a country already facing escalating violence,” Muthoni Wanyeki, Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Those in power in Burundi have the ultimate duty to ensure that no more lives are lost as the situation unfolds.” In New York on Thursday, members of the United Nations Security Council were briefed by Said Djinnit, the secretary general’s special envoy for the Great Lakes Region, about the developments in Burundi. The Council, in a statement, later said that it “condemned the violent unrest in Burundi and specifically condemned both those who facilitate violence of any kind against civilians and those who seek to seize power by unlawful means.” The African Union’s Peace and Security Council met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and warned against “any attempts at seizing power through violence and attempts against peace.” The East African Community, which was hosting the meeting of East African leaders in Tanzania, issued a statement on Wednesday denouncing “the coup in Burundi” and calling for the postponement of next month’s vote because “conditions are not conducive for elections.” The protests have left at least 20 dead, and more than 50,000 people have fled to neighboring countries. The roots of the conflict can be traced to a ruinous civil war that began in 1993, when the first president to be elected from the country’s Hutu majority, Mechior Ndadaye , was killed by troops from the Tutsi minority. After years of conflict, which claimed an estimated 300,000 lives, a power-sharing government took over in 2001. The country adopted a new Constitution in 2005 that guaranteed the rights of Hutus and Tutsis to be represented in government and prescribed term limits.

Burundi
Pierre Nkurunziza
Coups D'Etat
East African Community


The Chatter for Sunday, Nov. 10

Abstract: “We take responsibility for the handful of men who pleaded guilty and whose conduct gave rise to SAC’s liability.” From a statement by SAC Capital Advisors, which pleaded guilty to insider trading allegations and agreed to pay a penalty of $1.2 billion, becoming the first large Wall Street firm in a generation to confess to criminal conduct. Image Benjamin M. Lawsky Credit Mike Groll/Associated Press “I want a job for which I was trained, or else my education will be wasted. I don’t want to work in a factory.” Zheng Yilong, of Wuhan, China, who graduated from a university three months ago. As more educated Chinese seek desk jobs, factory owners are having trouble filling positions. “The recent financial difficulties in Detroit serve as a stern wake-up call.” Benjamin M. Lawsky, the New York financial services superintendent, in letters sent last month to the trustees of the top state and city public plans. State financial regulators have subpoenaed about 20 companies that help New York’s pension trustees decide how to invest the billions of dollars under their control to determine whether any outside advice is clouded by undisclosed financial incentives or other conflicts of interest.

SAC Capital Advisors
Insider trading
Education
Jobs
China
Detroit
Bankruptcy
Economy


Romania: Court Raises Bar for Impeachment Vote

Abstract: The Constitutional Court said Tuesday that a majority of the electorate must vote in order for a referendum on ousting the president to be valid, a ruling that may make it harder for President Traian Basescu’s opponents to push him out. Parliament voted Friday to impeach Mr. Basescu, accusing him of meddling in affairs that are the province of the prime minister, trying to influence judicial affairs and making bigoted remarks about Gypsies and disabled people. The impeachment was upheld by the Constitutional Court on Monday, setting the stage for a July 29 referendum on whether Mr. Basescu should be removed from office. The court’s ruling on Tuesday is likely to help Mr. Basescu, because a 50 percent turnout of the electorate is by no means a certainty. Mr. Basescu has denied any wrongdoing, saying that he may be outspoken but that he has not committed “grave violations” of the Constitution. The impeachment vote and other actions by Parliament, led by Prime Minister Victor Ponta, have drawn international criticism that Mr. Ponta was trying to usurp power.

Decisions and Verdicts
Impeachment
Romania
Basescu Traian
Ponta Victor
Politics and Government


Galaxy Has Rights to Angel

Abstract: The Los Angeles Galaxy selected the rights to Juan Pablo Angel in Major League Soccer ’s re-entry draft. The Red Bulls had declined their option on Angel, a Colombian forward, who is their career scoring leader. He has not said whether he intends to stay in M.L.S. Some other players whose rights were selected were Josh Wolf (D.C. United), Jimmy Conrad (Chivas USA) and Ryan Cochrane (New England).

Angel Juan Pablo
Soccer
Los Angeles Galaxy
Major League Soccer


Keselowski Wins at Talladega After a Wild Final Lap

Abstract: TALLADEGA, Ala. — Carl Edwards was going approximately 190 miles per hour when his 3,400-pound racecar went airborne Sunday . He was flying toward grandstand fencing and spectators. “That made me a little bit nervous,” Edwards said. Seven people in the stands at Talladega Superspeedway were injured by flying debris, none seriously, when Edwards’s car bounced off the reinforced catch fence above a wall separating fans from the track. The most serious injury, according to track officials, was a woman who had a cut lip and a broken jaw. Edwards was leading the Aaron’s 499 when he tried to block Brad Keselowski, who was in second place. Keselowski got the nose of his car inside the left rear panel of Edwards’s car and clipped Edwards, sending the car into the air. As Edwards wrecked, Keselowski kept racing to capture his first victory. “The rule is you can’t go below the yellow line and he blocked and I wasn’t going below it,” Keselowski said, referring to the yellow line on the bottom of the track that drivers are penalized for crossing. Keselowski, 25, racing in just his fifth Sprint Cup event, held off Dale Earnhardt Jr., in second, who owns the car Keselowski drives in the Nationwide Series. Keselowski was driving a car that was owned by Hendrick Motorsports and driven by Mark Martin earlier this season. Ryan Newman, who saw the tires of Edwards’ airborne car flying across the face of his windshield, managed to avoid the accident and finished third.


Damon, Feeling Comfortable in Detroit, Hurts Yanks

Abstract: DETROIT — All those spring training games desensitized them. The Yankees played the Detroit Tigers so often that by Monday night, when the game actually meant something, the sight of Johnny Damon wearing the Old English D no longer jarred them. It looked normal. He looked normal, his new Mohawk notwithstanding. And then came the fifth inning of the Tigers’ 5-4 victory , when Damon turned on a first-pitch fastball from Sergio Mitre and crushed it into the right-field stands . Comerica Park erupted, and so did his new teammates, but not his old ones, who for the first time this season glimpsed the player they remember — and, perhaps, could still use. “Johnny, he likes playing in games like this,” Derek Jeter said. “I’m sure he’s probably feeling pretty good on the other side. We’ve seen him do it against us before, we’ve seen him do it for us. It’s really not surprising.” The Yankees (21-10), sluggish early, scored twice in the eighth but had a rally snuffed by a superb sliding catch by Magglio Ordonez . Jose Valverde overpowered them in the ninth, striking out Nick Swisher, Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez for the save. In the off-season, the Yankees moved on from Damon, swiftly and decisively, by acquiring two players, Curtis Granderson and Nick Johnson, to help replace him. Neither made the trip here. They are on the disabled list, and they were not hitting well when they got hurt. Damon’s .412 on-base percentage might have fit snugly into the No. 2 slot in the Yankees’ lineup, but he has no regrets. “No, that’s not what I’m about,” Damon said. “I think my career shows people who I am and what I’m about, what I do on and off the field. I don’t need a single game for that to be dictated. It’s one game, but I think my career speaks for itself.” At the same time, the Yankees’ struggles with runners in scoring position — 1 for 10 — were not going to taint the résumés of Monday’s offenders. Through seven innings, they had scored but two runs, which came on a two-run homer by Teixeira, off the emergency starter Brad Thomas and relievers Eddie Bonine and Joel Zumaya. In the sixth, Bonine and Zumaya combined to walk the bases loaded, but Zumaya stranded all three runners. In the eighth, though, Zumaya loaded the bases with no outs, and they stayed full after an infield single by the former Tiger Marcus Thames. A run-scoring groundout by Brett Gardner cut the Tigers’ lead to 5-4, and after Randy Winn popped out, the right-hander Ryan Perry came in. With the Tigers’ outfield shading him the other way, Jeter lined a 3-2 pitch to right. Off the bat, Manager Joe Girardi thought it was a double — a two-run go-ahead double at that. But Ordonez has worked himself into terrific shape, and he raced over to make the catch while sliding feet first. “He was positioned perfectly,” Jeter said. The Yankees’ expectations for Mitre, pressed into a spot start when Andy Pettitte’s turn was skipped, were tempered by reality. At most, he would throw 75 pitches, and if that would usher him through five complete innings, Girardi said “you might see me do a cartwheel.” Alas, no gymnastic exhibitions Monday. Hurt by a Rodriguez throwing error, Mitre allowed two runs in the first, and another in the second on a groundout by Austin Jackson, the former Yankees prospect, who laughed when reminded that he would probably be toiling in the minors had the Yankees not traded him. “That’s the good thing about it,” Jackson said. “We’ll never know.” On his 69th pitch, after he had retired 10 of 11 batters, Mitre grooved that fastball to Damon and, “he didn’t miss it,” Mitre said. Tigers Manager Jim Leyland said of Damon: “He’s got some pretty nice jewelry on his hand for a reason. That’s pretty impressive. He’s sporting some pretty nice rings.” It was Damon’s first home run against the Yankees since Game 7 of the 2004 American League Championship Series, when he played for Boston. This is the first season since 2001 that the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry has unfolded without Damon, and he promised he did not miss it. With some of his former teammates in town, Damon said, he was going to invite them to lunch. But then he remembered. “I knew they got in around lunchtime this morning,” Damon said. “Those are some things you definitely don’t miss — those late Sunday night games up in Boston.” INSIDE PITCH The Yankees rewarded Ivan Nova, their best pitching prospect at Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, by recalling him to bolster their depleted bullpen. Nova, a 23-year-old right-hander who throws a low-90s fastball with good sink, was 2-0 with a 2.43 earned run average in six Class AAA starts. “I liked his command, I liked his poise, I liked his fastball, his changeup,” Joe Girardi said of Nova, who threw four Grapefruit League innings for the Yankees. “He had good stuff.” To make room for Nova, the Yankees sent down Romulo Sanchez.

Baseball
New York Yankees
Detroit Tigers


The Size of the Brook Trout Is in the Eye of the Fishing-Rod Holder

Abstract: DOAKTOWN, New Brunswick — “It’s another small one,” Bill Hooper said, as a remarkably strong brook trout fought to get to the alders and break off. It didn’t feel small, but neither had the others. And with six-pound-test leader, it did not break off. But when he slipped the hook of a bushy dry fly from its mouth, Bill gave me an I-told-you-so look. The stream had some of the look of the Adirondacks, where I learned to fish for trout nearly 60 years ago, reading about the hand-twist retrieve and other tips each night in Ray Bergman’s book “Trout.” The alders were familiar, and so were the deep woods. Even the fish looked like the brook trout Peter Friedman and I had caught at his parents’ summer place near Tupper Lake. Except for one thing. The brookie Bill dismissed as “another small one” was 16 inches long, thick and weighed about two pounds. The biggest brook trout I had ever caught in the Adirondacks was 14 inches long and thinner. Peter and I thought fish that size were monsters. Bill Hooper, a retired fisheries biologist for the province of New Brunswick, had taken me to a remote stream in the headwaters of the Miramichi. We drove for about an hour from Doaktown on a paved road, and then about another hour on a logging road. Finally he poled a canoe upstream past rapids to a plateau where the stream flattened out. This is where the trout came to spawn. As he pitched a tent and made supper, Bill explained that the stream’s sandy bottom was almost an aquatic desert. There is very little insect life, and there isn’t much to eat. So after spawning in late September, the trout head downstream, about 60 miles to the Miramichi estuary, where they pig out all winter on shrimp. A brook trout can grow to 16 or 17 inches from 5 inches that first winter. Subsequent winters (most brookies here live until they are 4) won’t add many inches, but the trout fill out, gaining about a pound each trip. About 7 p.m. we started seeing some rises upstream. For the next two and a quarter hours— until dark — it was the most action I have ever had on a stream. The brook trout is never a hard fish to fool (Bill insisted fisheries science had shown they were even dumber than cutthroats), but the shortage of real food made easy marks of this bunch. I fished all evening with barbless-hooked Bombers, a dry fly used for salmon, tied with what looked like bunches of stiff pompoms at head and tail. More of the time was spent playing fish. They seemed to hit on every second or third cast, usually near the alders but sometimes in midstream. Bill finally allowed that one or two fish were “good-sized.” The best was 20 inches, and probably three and a half pounds. The smallest was 12 inches, the rare fish that had not gone out to salt water. We kept that one for my wife, Ann, whose taste for trout makes her restive about the catch-and-release ethic. We had driven up after some disappointing salmon fishing. The Ledges Inn has several superior salmon pools on the Miramichi, but the water was about 70 degrees and I rarely saw a fish, much less hooked one. I kept focus by remembering the saying that the salmon is the fish of a thousand casts. That was pretty much it. After 903 casts on my first two days, I did hook and land a grilse on my 118th cast of the third day. On the trout stream, though, I landed 28 fish that first evening. It’s more fun to count fish than casts. Not long after we got into the tent, it started pouring. But it was sunny the next morning, and the stream was not discolored. Fish were rising by 7, and we went out again for a couple of hours. By local standards, the fishing was slow. Only six trout, up to 18 inches. We tried switching flies, and had two fish on a Bomber, another on a Chernobyl ant, one on a Marabou streamer and two on a Woolly Bugger. But the rises stopped and so did we for a while. They started up again around 11 a.m. It was hard to tell what they were after, but Bill spotted a couple of green mayflies, so we tried a Parachute Green Drake. It was dynamite for 90 minutes, with a 19-incher the best, until we stopped to have lunch and strike camp. We had seen some clouds, and hoped to beat the storm downstream. We failed. Sometimes we had to stop in midstream and midstorm because the sheets of rain made the passages between rocks invisible. Oh, yes, there were 24 brookies the second day.

Fish and Other Marine Life
Fishing Sport
Adirondack Mountains (NY)
Lakes


Bringing the British Countryside to Life

Abstract: As Elisabeth Fairman, of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, puts it, the exhibition “Of Green Leaf, Bird and Flower’: Artists’ Books and the Natural World” is something of “a walk through the countryside.” The British countryside, of course. The exhibition, whose title is derived from a description of “the woodland’s power” in an 1846 book on British mosses, contains more than 300 objects ranging from centuries-old manuscripts to contemporary artists’ books, many of them from the museum’s collections. It also features posters, prints, and recordings of bird songs and sounds of the countryside. Ms. Fairman, the museum’s senior curator of rare books and manuscripts and the exhibition’s curator, came up with the concept for the exhibition when she found a colored aquatint of a blackberry by Rosaleen Wain in a 1996 anthology of British wildflowers, which brought to mind a similar drawing of blackberries from the “Helmingham Herbal and Bestiary,” a 16th-century manuscript on parchment. “Despite being created some 500 years apart, these two images seemed to illustrate a similar impulse to observe and record,” she said. “The level of detail is remarkably alike. I find that almost miraculous.” The subjects covered in the exhibition are wide-ranging. An introductory section features early field guides and microscopes beside works by contemporary artists. The exhibition also focuses on the flora of the British countryside, its birds, butterflies, moths, caterpillars, beetles, bees and spiders, and ponds and streams, and the creatures that inhabit them. One of the show’s highlights is an 1861 collection of botanical specimens housed in a mahogany box that is believed to have belonged to Elizabeth Rowe, who was a 19-year-old member of a group called the Liverpool Naturalists’ Field Club. The collection consists of 500 botanical specimens, each mounted on a sheet of writing paper and placed in a blue envelope decorated with Miss Rowe’s watercolor illustration of the specimen. Ms. Fairman said the teenager probably created the collection as an entry in a contest staged by the club. “She’s done an incredible project, she spent so much time on this work of art. You couldn’t ask for a more beautiful concept,” Ms. Fairman said. Image A 2009 screen print of weeds and pests by John Dilnot. Credit Yale Center for British Art Among the contemporary pieces are works by Tracey Bush, including a 2006 herbarium sheet of the common poppy whose leaves, stalks and petals are collages of discarded paper covered with brand names and logos “picked up like a bunch of wild blooms from the streets of London.” “These ‘wild plants’ highlight our diminishing knowledge of indigenous flora and fauna, while encouraging us to consider our growing excess of consumerism,” Ms. Bush wrote in a label that accompanies the work. The first work to greet visitors is Julie Cockburn’s 2002 “Beetles Book,” an illustrated children’s field guide that has been altered by cutting out insects from the book and turning them into three-dimensional, larger-than-life beetles. Pieces by Dizzy Pragnell transform fruit, cabbage, asparagus, mushroom, eggplant and beetroot into papyrus; she adds printed or hand-drawn text to them. Works by Ron King were made by cutting and drilling sections of tree logs and binding them with linen to create “log books.” A 2009 screen print, “Weeds and Pests,” by John Dilnot, is one of his creations included in the exhibition that were inspired by the hours he spent as a child playing in his grandparents’ garden in southeast England. His grandparents, he said, “treated nature as a battleground, attempting to eradicate the advancing weeds and pests. If sides had to be taken, I think even then I was on the side of those unwelcome plants and creatures.” The sounds in the exhibition include a recording from the 1960s of a hedgehog in the Scottish highlands and a 1943 recording of a nightingale’s song as British Royal Air Force bombers embarked on a nighttime raid. The artist Eileen Hogan — whose paintings of a Scottish garden designed by the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay are on display — offered a commentary on the exhibition in a lecture she delivered in New Haven in May. “I’m very struck by the fact that although there is an enormous difference in the way artists interpret the natural world, there is continuity in the intensity of the dialogue that artists have with nature and their observation of it, and this exhibition captures that intensity brilliantly,” Ms. Hogan said.

Yale Center for British Art
New Haven CT
Connecticut
Art


In Effort to Avoid Conflicts, McCain Issues New Rules for Staff

Abstract: WASHINGTON — After expelling four advisers in the last week over concerns about their outside entanglements, Senator John McCain said Friday that his presidential campaign was beginning a new “vetting process” intended to end the embarrassments over staff ties to private interests, foreign governments or independent political groups. A campaign spokeswoman said it was too soon to say how many campaign officials might be removed under the new rules, which were distributed to campaign staff members Thursday night with a questionnaire to ferret out potential conflicts. “We’re going through the vetting process to make sure that everybody understands,” Mr. McCain said Friday, “and we’ll get those rules into play as quickly as possible.” The midcampaign staff review underscores the difficulties Mr. McCain is having in trying to build his Republican presidential campaign around his crusades for tighter ethics rules and pledges to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest. It is hard for any campaign to find experienced operatives who do not also sell their political connections, expertise or influence to private interests. And Mr. McCain’s emphasis on strict ethics has drawn special attention to the number of potential conflicts within his own staff. On Friday, the campaign severed its ties to Craig Shirley, a veteran public relations consultant who had helped handle outreach to conservatives. The campaign said it would no longer employ Mr. Shirley because he was also working for StopHerNow.com , an independent political group initially dedicated to attacking Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton that is now refocusing on Senator Barack Obama (and changing its name). Mr. McCain has criticized such groups — called 527 political organizations — because they operate outside the limits on campaign contributions and any coordination with a campaign can draw legal penalties. Diana Banister, Mr. Shirley’s partner, said their firm stopped working for the McCain campaign by mutual agreement in light of its new policy. On Thursday, the campaign removed one of its energy policy advisers, Eric Burgeson, because he was also a paid lobbyist for energy companies. Last weekend, the McCain campaign accepted the resignations of two other lobbyists, Doug Goodyear, previously charged with planning for the Republican convention, and Doug Davenport, a regional campaign director. Both had previously worked for the military junta governing Myanmar, which is now under fire for blocking humanitarian relief to cyclone victims. “Obviously, I didn’t like it,” Mr. McCain told reporters Friday when asked about the two aides’ ties to Myanmar. “Saw a problem, fixed it.” Still, eliminating potential conflicts may be complicated. Highlighting the issue, the new policy was disseminated by a former lobbyist: Mr. McCain’s top campaign adviser, Rick Davis, a longtime aide who is on leave from a lobbying firm whose clients included major telecommunications companies with business before a Senate committee that Mr. McCain led. Mr. Davis’s clients included a Russian aluminum magnate and a Ukrainian political party; United States officials suspect both of corruption and ties to antidemocratic groups. Another top strategist, Charlie Black, was one of Washington’s best-known Republican lobbyists until he joined the campaign. Mr. Black is on leave from his firm, which has ties to a host of business clients and several foreign governments. About a sixth of the campaign’s 106 top fund-raisers — dubbed innovators and trailblazers — are lobbyists. Mr. McCain’s fund-raising chairman, Tom Loeffler, founded a lobbying firm that bears his name, and the campaign’s deputy finance chairman, Wayne Berman, is a major Republican lobbyist as well. A McCain campaign official said Friday that Mr. Loeffler was expected to give up his position to comply with the new rules. It was unclear if Mr. Berman would relinquish his role, the official said. Mr. McCain’s most likely Democratic opponent, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, is another outspoken advocate of tighter ethics rules who has tried to walk a fine line on the subject of lobbyists and influence-seekers. He has pledged to reject contributions from federally registered lobbyists but has accepted money from former lobbyists, partners of lobbyists and business executives who hire lobbyists. His campaign includes lobbyists among its unpaid policy advisers as well as staff members who represent private clients before the government in less direct ways. Mr. Obama’s top campaign adviser, David Axelrod, is a partner in ASK Public Strategies, a firm that helps companies influence government policy by trying to shape public opinion. Its clients have included AT&T, Cablevision and a unit of the energy company Exelon. Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, drew a distinction between trying to sway public opinion and directly lobbying federal officials. “Senator McCain has some of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington running his campaign,” Mr. Burton said, “and if given a chance, they would run his White House.” Jill Hazelbaker, a McCain spokeswoman, called Mr. Obama’s position laughable. “In his world, a lobbyist can’t contribute financially to his campaign,” Ms. Hazelbaker said, “but they can advise him on matters of national security.” The policy Mr. Davis distributed late Thursday spells out the McCain campaign’s new rules. It bars active federal lobbyists or foreign agents from working full time for the campaign. It requires part-time volunteers to disclose any potential conflicts and excludes any lobbyists from discussions of policies they lobby about. It also forbids lobbyists who may volunteer for the campaign from lobbying Mr. McCain’s Senate office or committee staff. And it excludes anyone who works for independent political groups from working for the campaign. But it does not bar lobbyists from donating or raising money. In addition, Mr. Davis reminded the staff, Mr. McCain has pledged that if elected he will end the usual revolving door between serving in the White House and lobbying it from outside. “Anyone serving in a McCain administration must commit not to lobby the administration during his presidency,” Mr. Davis wrote.

Presidential Election of 2008
Lobbying and Lobbyists
McCain John
Washington (DC)


Islanders Settle for the Top Wild-Card Spot

Abstract: Even though the Philadelphia Flyers had virtually nothing to play for on Sunday, they still wore T-shirts under their white sweaters with “Every Day” printed across the back for their regular-season finale against the Islanders. The Flyers then won by 5-2. “It was actually nice to come to the rink for the first time in about five months knowing we didn’t have to win the game,” Philadelphia forward Jakub Voracek said. The Flyers had completed their mission Saturday, beating the Pittsburgh Penguins to earn the second wild-card berth in the Eastern Conference for the Stanley Cup playoffs. They will play the Washington Capitals, who finished with the N.H.L.’s best record, in the first round. “I’m not making any predictions, and I haven’t all year, but we feel very good about the group in this room,” said Dave Hakstol, the Flyers’ first-year head coach. By losing to the Flyers, the Islanders (45-27-10) finished with the first wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference and will visit the Florida Panthers (47-26-9), the Atlantic Division champions, on Thursday. The Islanders lost two of three regular-season games against Florida. The Rangers (46-27-9) finished third in the Metropolitan Division and will take on the Penguins (48-26-8) in the first round. The Rangers won one of four regular-season games against the Penguins, losing three times to them in March. The other two Eastern Conference matchups were set Saturday. The Detroit Red Wings (41-30-11) finished third in the Atlantic Division and will play the Tampa Bay Lightning (46-31-5), the second-place team in the division. They split four regular-season games. And the Flyers (41-27-14) will open the playoffs later this week with two games at Washington (56-18-8), against whom they split four regular-season games. “I’m sure people have us as a big underdog,” Philadelphia forward Brayden Schenn said. “For us, we go in there believing in the locker room, believing in our guys, and we were just as good in the second half as any other team.” Game No. 716 of the 1,230-game N.H.L. regular season, originally scheduled to be played Jan. 23 in Brooklyn but postponed because of a blizzard, was completed Sunday without any apparent serious injuries or incidents. The Flyers have come quite a way since January. On the day the game was supposed to have been played, Philadelphia had a 20-17-8 record and had lost three of its last four games. The Flyers were in seventh place in the eight-team Metropolitan Division, 5 points from a playoff spot. The Flyers passed the Devils and the Carolina Hurricanes in the next 11 weeks to finish fifth in the division, but they nosed out faltering Boston for a playoff spot by assembling an 11-4-3 record between March 5 and Saturday. “We were a little bit inconsistent through the first half of the year,” Hakstol said before Sunday’s game. “That put us into a position where we had to push hard, and our guys have done that.” As a result of clinching a playoff berth, Philadelphia goaltender Steve Mason, who had played 12 straight games before Saturday, had Sunday night off. Michal Neuvirth started in place of Mason. Neuvirth had shared the job with Mason before he sustained a knee injury last month. “They have a great team, but you know what?” said Neuvirth, who finished with 15 saves. “There’s going to be a lot of pressure on them.” Many Flyers who did dress were playing their fourth game in five days, but they pushed an Islanders team that did not include John Tavares, Johnny Boychuk, Kyle Okposo and Frans Nielsen, among many others. The Flyers’ Shayne Gostisbehere and Evgeny Medvedev scored power-play goals, and Michael Raffl, Scott Laughton and R. J. Umberger later beat Islanders goaltender Christopher Gibson, who had replaced the starter Thomas Greiss after the first period — as the Islanders had planned. Nikolay Kulemin and Matt Martin scored for the Islanders. “I thought it would come down to the final day, to be honest with you,” Hakstol said Sunday. “So it was nice that we were able to get it done last night. But I’m happy for the players, I’m happy for our fans. I’m really happy for the opportunity to get into the playoffs.” The Islanders were already there. They needed 3 points in their last two games to pass the Rangers and earn a matchup against Pittsburgh, but Coach Jack Capuano did not seem too interested in making a push for the Penguins — or the Panthers, for that matter. Capuano said the Islanders would have to go through four opponents to win the Cup anyway. The Flyers already knew they were starting with Alex Ovechkin and the Capitals, and now they can start tuning up. Mason said, “It’s not going to be easy, but we have to make sure we come out and make it hard on them.” DUCKS CLINCH PACIFIC DIVISION Corey Perry and Nick Ritchie scored, Frederik Andersen stopped all 24 shots he faced, and the visiting Anaheim Ducks clinched the Pacific Division on the final day of the regular season by beating the Capitals, 2-0, on Sunday night. The Ducks will face the Nashville Predators in the first round of the playoffs, leaving the second-place Los Angeles Kings to play the San Jose Sharks. Andersen looked sharp in his return from a five-game absence because of a concussion. He faced little resistance from a Capitals team that rested the star forwards Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom and defensemen John Carlson and Brooks Orpik. The Capitals also sat goaltender Braden Holtby after he tied Martin Brodeur’s single-season wins record. (AP)


Toyota’s Troubles Slam Japan’s Motor City

Abstract: TOYOTA CITY, Japan — For years, Toyota City prospered along with the giant carmaker that shares its name, growing into a global automotive manufacturing center as its official sister city, Detroit, slid into decline. Now, the current economic crisis has halted the good times in Japan’s Motor City. Toyota Motor, the city’s largest employer and dominating presence, has idled factories and slashed production amid its first annual net loss in 59 years. This has pushed Toyota City into its worst slump in memory, as jobs have vanished, tax revenues have dried up and tidy downtown shopping streets have grown eerily empty. The reversal of fortune has turned both Toyotas, the city and the car company, into grim symbols of a global downturn that has spared few, including the once seemingly unstoppable Japanese auto industry. “In the beginning, we used to aspire to be a second Detroit,” said Tatsuya Yoshimura, who owns a camera shop in downtown Toyota City. “Now, that is what we are afraid of becoming.” Many in this proud company town of 423,000 are questioning their extreme economic dependence on a single corporation, even if it is the world’s largest automaker. “When Toyota sneezed, we caught pneumonia,” said Shoji Sawahira, head of the finance section at Toyota City’s city hall. “We never imagined this would happen to the world’s No. 1 company.” Fear of the future is palpable at the local unemployment office, the optimistically named Hello Work Toyota, which has suddenly found itself overrun by the newly jobless. Until last summer, the office sat largely empty as the local auto industry faced a chronic labor shortage, drawing workers from across Japan and as far away as Brazil and Peru. Now, Hello Work is crowded with more than 1,000 job seekers a day who line up for hours to claim unemployment insurance or sit anxiously at computer terminals scouring a job database. One of those who came to find work was Masahiro Tanaka, 30, who lost his job at an auto glass factory in February. He said it was the first time he or anyone he knew had been cut in 12 years of working at auto parts factories in Toyota City. “The only places that are still busy are those producing for the Prius,” Mr. Tanaka said, referring to Toyota’s fuel-efficient hybrid sedan, which has remained popular despite the slump. “Everywhere else, jobs are just gone. Completely gone.” Hello Work’s vice director, Masami Kawajiri, said 8,042 job seekers visited the office between January and March, up 133 percent from the same period a year ago. The sudden surge in job seekers has kept Hello Work’s staff working six-day weeks without breaks, Mr. Kawajiri said. “We’ve never seen it this busy,” said Mr. Kawajiri, who explained that overwork had turned one of his eyes blood-red. “I don’t even want to think of what will happen if the economy gets even worse.” He and others said jobs began disappearing after last summer, as collapsing global auto sales led Toyota Motor to cut its work force by 6,000 and slow production at its seven factories in Toyota City, where most of the company’s 72,000 Japan-based employees are. Toyota said it expected a $3.5 billion net loss in the last fiscal year, its first loss since 1950. Many residents worry what could happen if the recession drags on. But they seem confident that Toyota City can weather the downturn in the long run. They point to a traditional ethic of thrifty self-reliance that led the city government to shun extravagant projects during the boom years, and instead set aside $719 million in emergency savings, exactly for such a rainy day. The city retains its spotless streets, immaculate shops and nonexistent crime rate. Since the slowdown, only one manufacturing company has gone bankrupt, says the city’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, because Toyota spread out orders among many of the more than 400 auto parts factories in the city, to keep them afloat through hard times. Nonetheless, Toyota’s downturn has rippled through the city’s economy, idling many smaller auto-related suppliers, which also cut payrolls, mainly by refusing to renew the contracts of short-term workers. After losing their jobs, many of the city’s 16,400 foreign residents, mostly ethnic Japanese from Brazil and Latin America, packed up and left, residents and city officials said. These have been wrenching setbacks for a city that has long flourished as the best known of Japan’s “corporate castle towns,” as company towns are known here. The city, about an hour east of the central city of Nagoya, changed its name to Toyota City in 1959 when the auto company relocated here. Despite Toyota’s dominating presence, residents say they do not expect the company to come to their rescue. A spokesman for Toyota, Paul Nolasco, said the company was not extending direct aid to the city. “We are a major member of the community,” Mr. Nolasco said, “but we are not city planners.” City finances have taken a huge hit from the crisis. According to Mr. Sawahira, the finance section chief at city hall, losses by Toyota and other companies drove down the city’s corporate income tax revenues to $16 million in the fiscal year ended March 31, from $442 million the year before. Personal income taxes, the city’s other main source of tax revenues, did not drop as sharply, though they are likely to fall again this year as unemployment spreads, Mr. Sawahira said. To help offset the lower revenues, the city has cut spending on several projects, including construction of a $100 million wing in city hall and purchases of artwork for the city’s art museum. Mr. Sawahira said the drop in tax revenues, while severe, did not catch the city completely by surprise. Toyota accounts for such a huge portion of corporate income taxes — some three-quarters — that city planners had gotten in the habit of monitoring the company’s regular earnings forecasts in order to predict the size of city budgets. “Our finances closely track the company’s,” Mr. Sawahira said. Local merchants have also joined to try to reverse both the city’s and the car company’s slouching fortunes. They introduced a “We Love Toyota” campaign in which shop owners will chip in $200 when one of their customers buys a new Toyota car at a local dealership. “Can’t let Toyota Motor fail,” said Mr. Yoshimura, the camera shop owner. “We don’t want to have to change the city’s name again.”

Toyota City (Japan)
Automobiles
Economic Conditions and Trends
Layoffs and Job Reductions
Toyota Motor Corp


Progress Seen After Obama and Karzai Discuss Detainees

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — President Obama and the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai , had what an American official called a “serious and positive” discussion on Wednesday night that the Afghans confirmed had made progress toward resolving an increasingly acrimonious dispute over detaining terrorism suspects, which had their two governments and their militaries at loggerheads for weeks. In a video teleconference, Mr. Karzai and Mr. Obama had a wide-ranging conversation touching almost every hot-button issue that has complicated the plans of the United States to draw down its forces here, senior American and Afghan officials said. Most important, they began to resolve the two countries’ differences on rules for indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trial, known as administrative detention, officials from the two countries said. American military commanders insist on assurances that terrorism suspects they detain in the field will not be summarily released. The Afghan Constitution and laws do not provide explicitly for indefinite detention, but Mr. Karzai has ordered his judiciary “to come up with a legal framework that allows us to keep those people who pose a serious security threat,” said Aimal Faizi, the president’s spokesman. While other problems are also urgent, the conflict over the Americans’ insistence that some detainees should continue to be held without charge had begun to spill out in public and undermine diplomatic relations, said people involved in the discussions. Until the issue is resolved, the Americans have refused to turn over the last prisoners that they are holding at Parwan, the American-built detention center adjacent to the Bagram Air Base. “President Karzai had a good conversation with President Obama last night,” Mr. Faizi said. “There were clear and frank talks — they started in general terms, then got very specific on the details regarding the 650-plus Afghan prisoners. “After last night’s conference, this should be solved,” Mr. Faizi said. “We’re working to frame this legal issue. The judiciary will look at our laws and soon come up with a legal framework that allows us to keep those people who pose a serious security threat.” A senior American official who characterized the conversation as “serious and positive” said that the call went on longer than planned. “It was very matter-of-fact,” the official said. “They talked about resolving it, they didn’t talk about setting a legal framework to do it,” he said. But he added that if the Afghan spokesman had alluded to such a framework, then “that’s good.” While there was no timetable set either for the Afghans to introduce a new law or regulation or for the Americans to hand over the prisoners, the friendly tone was a turnaround. Over the last three weeks, the Afghans have been increasingly confrontational in press statements and have suggested that the Americans are flouting the country’s sovereignty. The Americans, while keeping much of the argument behind the scenes, “were dug in,” a Western diplomat said. There have been many ups and downs in the countries’ relationship, but the dispute over detainees has come at a particularly delicate time between Afghanistan and the United States because of deepening worries over killings of American and other coalition troops by infiltrators and disgruntled Afghan security force members and because of the provocative anti-Muslim video produced in the United States that last week set off protests across the Muslim world. (American officials announced Thursday that the last of the 33,000 “surge” troops had left Afghanistan, leaving a force of 68,000 Americans in the country.) The debate between the governments over administrative detention touches on a larger disagreement between international human rights advocates and security experts. That is whether countries with weak justice systems should have laws allowing detention without trial — and if they do, what limits should be put on the length of detention without legal review. “The Afghan government’s justice system, as it is, is very shaky,” said Heather Barr, the Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch. “So we are very concerned about setting up a parallel system in which even the protections which are supposed to exist, but are rarely followed, are completely absent.” She noted that many countries put administrative detention regimes in place for a short-term emergency, but never repeal them. The dispute over detention has centered on the terms of a memorandum of understanding signed in March in which the Americans agreed to hand over all the Afghan detainees held in Parwan, as part of the transfer of security to the Afghans. The memorandum states that “Afghanistan has established an administrative detention regime.” But there were disagreements among senior Afghan officials about whether the Constitution allowed for indefinitely holding dangerous prisoners who could not be tried because of a lack of admissible evidence. On Tuesday, Mr. Karzai’s legal advisers told him that Afghan law had no provision for detention without trial. On Thursday, Mr. Faizi said that Mr. Karzai had resolved to have his judiciary draft such a provision. The NATO commander, Gen. John R. Allen, has privately expressed concerns that in the absence of an administrative detention process, dangerous insurgents captured on the basis of intelligence that could not be shared in court might be released and return to the battlefield, as has happened in the past. The Afghans are signatories to the Second Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions , which recognizes the right to detain people as inherent in any armed conflict and provides for it to be done in a humane way. The Americans had assumed that their accession to that convention would allow them to put such a system in place, but some senior Afghan legal experts disagreed. As the Afghans began to air doubts about continued detention, the Americans halted the transfer of the remaining 650 detainees they had captured since the memorandum was signed. That infuriated the Afghans, who viewed it as a violation of the memorandum and an infringement of their sovereignty. The Afghan government would like to end the practice of having foreign troops detain Afghans, Mr. Faizi said. When they have to, they should not hold them for more than 72 hours, he said. That could prove far too restrictive to the American military, which wants to hold suspected terrorists for weeks, if not months, for detailed interrogations. People close to the discussions over the detentions say they hope to come to a compromise between 72 hours and the weeks, or even months, requested by military interrogators.

Afghanistan
Karzai Hamid
Obama Barack
Afghanistan War (2001- )
Detainees
United States International Relations
Bagram Air Base (Afghanistan)
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Parwan Province (Afghanistan)


Surprise Representative Plans Surprises of His Own in Washington

Abstract: Joe Walsh’s anonymity is dissipating and, by the time it’s gone, we may have an answer to an intriguing political question. If you win in anger, can you govern in anger? Mr. Walsh was not just a little-noticed congressional candidate in Chicago’s northwest suburban 8th District. He was radioactive to most establishment Republicans, who were miffed over his surprise primary victory and gave him scant help and money during the general campaign. Deemed extreme by Republican honchos, Mr. Walsh — an unabashed Tea Party member, a business consultant and graduate of the University of Chicago’s public policy school — stunned Melissa Bean, the incumbent moderate Democrat, even though he had been dramatically outspent. John Shimkus, a Downstate Republican congressman, jokes that the Republicans won five of their four targeted congressional districts in Illinois. Few imagined a Walsh victory. “Generally, establishment Republicans have now embraced me, some sheepish, some guilty. I’m now their best friend,” Mr. Walsh said with a wry smile at a Barrington law firm that is giving him space until he takes office Jan. 5. He’s been to Washington for orientation, and he hired a chief of staff — a Capitol Hill veteran who has lately been a financial services lobbyist. He has received his three committee assignments: Oversight and Reform, Small Business and Homeland Security. Mr. Walsh, 48, will get about $1.4 million annually to run his operation and plans as many as three district branches. He’ll sleep in his office in Washington, while his family stays here in McHenry. And get this: he’s turned down the usual congressional health care, pension and retirement packages. “I don’t think congressmen should get pensions or cushy health care plans,” he said. His wife is not exhilarated with the latter decision; she has a pre-existing medical condition and is now forced to hunt for a plan. Mr. Walsh had an initial campaign debt of about $90,000. That soared several fold because of legal bills related to a lengthy recount battle. A New Year’s Eve party at the Lakemoor Banquet Hall will raise money for a congressman-elect happy to take checks from lobbyists and political action committees. “If JPMorgan Chase wants to give me money, fine,” he said. It’s no surprise that he’s unhappy with the tax deal congressional Republicans cut with President Obama. “We cut taxes, raised spending and contributed to the deficit,” he said. “Republicans should have held out for something better.” His legislative goals are repealing Mr. Obama’s health care legislation and seeking major changes in Social Security and Medicare . I asked if reducing the size, scope and power of government is a means to an end or an end in itself. “An end in itself,” he said, without pausing. “I think we were sent to D.C. to cut spending and grow the economy. We have to talk about cutting real programs” — and agencies — “like the Department of Energy and Department of Education.” One of the first votes he’ll confront is on raising the federal debt ceiling. Many economists warn that voting down an increase would be a mistake, and the House Republican leadership agrees. Mr. Walsh will vote against it. “On principle and policy, the leadership is wrong,” he said. “This is a teachable moment on my part.” What is government’s role? “Protect my borders, protect Americans on their streets, keep our highways paved and our environment clean, defend us overseas and help those who can’t help themselves,” he said. So he does support federal aid to those too sick or destitute to find work. He added, “But we’ve asked government to take care of too many in the middle class, not those who need it the most.” When I broached reaching across the political aisle and compromising to get things done, he replied, “Now is not the time.” But doesn’t history suggest you can win in anger but not govern that way? “No!” he said immediately. “If you put that anger away, you lose that standing. If you believe Obamacare will destroy health care, that’s a battle to join.” And when it comes to dogmatism potentially imperiling self-preservation, the state’s biggest Election Day surprise said, and perhaps believably so, “I’m going to D.C. absolutely prepared to lose in two years.”

Walsh Joe
United States Politics and Government
House of Representatives
Tea Party Movement
Illinois


Gujarat Riot Trials May Alter India’s Cycle of Violence

Abstract: AHMEDABAD, India — The police stood by as Hindu mobs slaughtered nearly 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, in massacres that evidence suggests were an election-year ploy by state officials to garner votes. Mothers were skewered, children set afire and fathers hacked to pieces. That was 10 years ago. A decade later, the riots in Gujarat State may be remembered less for the horrors they unleashed, however, than that such sectarian carnage, which once struck India as often as a heavy monsoon, has not been repeated since. There are many reasons for this astonishing quiescence, but technology has played a crucial role. The killers made cellphone calls, and records of those calls became evidence. After years of dithering, India’s creaky justice system lurched into action. Hundreds of rioters have been convicted, and more cases are pending. On Saturday, a judge trying 61 defendants — including a former state education minister — delayed issuing verdicts until Aug. 29 in a case that involves about 94 deaths. A total of 327 people testified, but the crucial evidence, again, was the phone records contradicting claims by some of the accused that they were nowhere near the scene of the crimes. Indeed, those same records continue to be examined for any role played in the riots by the office of the state’s top official, Narendra Modi , who is among India’s most prominent politicians. But even if Mr. Modi is never charged, the political calculus behind stoking sectarian clashes — long a staple for winning elections here — has fundamentally changed, political analysts say. “We reached a tipping point,” said M. J. Akbar, author of “Riot After Riot” and editorial director of India Today, one of India’s leading news organizations. “This is the first time that India’s judicial system has actually worked to hold people accountable for rioting. In the past, the guilty never got punished.” India was once the world’s wellspring of religiously inspired massacres. As such violence rages across the Middle East, the bougainvillea sprouting from Gujarat’s charred buildings offers hope that even societies steeped in blood can curb the self-perpetuating logic behind such clashes. Shakeel Ahmad, chairman of the Islamic Relief Committee in Gujarat, said he was optimistic. About 150,000 people were displaced by the rioting in 2002. Witnesses and other evidence suggest that the violence was encouraged by state officials, who deny the charge. Dr. Ahmad’s son was imprisoned for nearly seven years, accused of plotting against the life of a state official who is now on trial himself. During a lengthy interview in his office at the edge of a Muslim neighborhood, Dr. Ahmad could not suppress a triumphant smile. “There is a ray of hope,” he said in his office here, his white hair and beard swirled in cigarette smoke. “For the first time in Gujarat, we have seen demands for justice.” To be sure, India’s politics are still vicious and violent, its society riven by religious, cultural and caste divisions that feed continuing discrimination and sporadically erupt in fury. Assassinations are frequent, corruption endemic and the courts largely feckless. Gujarat’s Muslims have never entirely recovered from the riots, and the state’s population is more religiously segregated than ever. No one can promise that large-scale riots will never return, but there are signs of hope. The riots began on Feb. 27, 2002, when a train filled with Hindu pilgrims who had just visited a disputed shrine rolled into Godhra, a small city in eastern Gujarat, and was attacked by a Muslim mob. A fire started, and at least 58 Hindu pilgrims burned to death. Their charred bodies were brought to Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, and laid out in public, an act that all but guaranteed more violence. Huge mobs gathered to view the bodies. At the time of the riots, Gujarat’s chief minister was Mr. Modi, a newly appointed functionary from the Bharatiya Janata Party, which advocates Hindu supremacy but faced sinking popularity in the state. Mr. Modi and his party endorsed a widespread strike. Massacres began immediately. About 20,000 Muslim homes and businesses and 360 places of worship were burned. Later that year, Mr. Modi’s party was overwhelmingly re-elected. Mayors in the United States are thrown out when too much snow clogs streets; Mr. Modi let his streets be choked with blood and won election overwhelmingly. Mr. Modi was following a familiar script. In 1984, Sikh bodyguards assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and Hindu mobs in Delhi killed thousands of Sikhs in retaliation. The Congress Party, whose members encouraged the rioting, was rewarded later that year with a huge majority in Parliament. Commissions were formed to investigate, but there were few arrests and fewer convictions. After the 1992 Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai, in which 900 people were killed, commission recommendations were again ignored. Commissions were impaneled after the Gujarat riots as well. A top state official told one panel that Mr. Modi ordered officials to take no action against rioters. That official was murdered. Thousands of cases against rioters were dismissed by the police for lack of evidence despite eyewitness accounts. But in 2004, the Supreme Court intervened, acting on petitions from human rights groups. The court ordered that more than 2,000 dismissed cases be reopened, a special police team be created and some trials be transferred out of Gujarat. The wheels of justice began to turn, leading more victims to press claims. That year, a lawyer representing victims was cross-examining a top police official when the official laid a CD on the table in front of him. “What’s that?” asked the lawyer, Dr. Mukul Sinha. “Evidence,” answered the officer, Rahul Sharma. The CD contained records of every cellphone call made in Ahmedabad during the worst of the rioting. The records allowed advocates to construct precise timelines of the movements of many rioters, timelines that often dovetailed with the accounts of riot victims but contradicted those of the accused. Dr. Sinha is still mining the records for evidence, but Mr. Modi’s government is vigorously trying to suppress the investigation, charging the officer who provided the records with violating the Official Secrets Act. The cellphone records have proved invaluable to prosecutors. While no government agency or court seems to have a scorecard of how many people have been convicted, state and court records show that they number in the hundreds, with scores more due for judgments. Gujarat state officials and representatives for Mr. Modi did not respond to multiple interview requests or to a list of e-mailed questions. Mr. Modi’s role in the rioting continues to plague him and his party. Two years after the riots, his alliance lost its hold over the national government. Important members of the group have warned against Mr. Modi’s selection as the alliance’s candidate for prime minister in the 2014 elections. Yet Mr. Modi remains popular in Gujarat, where he has recast himself as an economic problem-solver. Steven I. Wilkinson, a professor of political science at Yale University who has studied India’s riots, said that India’s national elections had become so competitive that no political party could afford to alienate Muslims, who represent 13 percent of the electorate, about the same share that blacks represent in the United States. “Riots are now a stain on your reputation forever in a way they never were before,” he said. On a recent morning, Shareefa Bibi sat outside her reconstructed house in the Muslim neighborhood of Naroda Patiya. She recalled fleeing a mob with her husband and five children to a nearby police camp, where officers refused to protect them. “They said, ‘No, you have to die today,’ ” she recalled bitterly. The family ran to another neighborhood and hid, but in the confusion her 18-year-old son, Sharif, was caught by rioters, gutted and set on fire. Cowering just a few feet away with her other children, Ms. Bibi watched him die. She testified against her son’s killers, whose judgments have been delayed until Aug. 29. “I will never get my son back,” Ms. Bibi said. “But our hope is that we will get justice.”

Demonstrations Protests and Riots
Decisions and Verdicts
Modi Narendra
Gujarat State (India)
India
Muslims and Islam
Hinduism


Helmeted Volunteers Monitor Student Protests in Chile

Abstract: SANTIAGO, Chile — They appear at the student demonstrations that are once again filling the streets and occupying the schools of Santiago, and at the hospitals and police stations where the fallout lands afterward: small troops of observers in blue or white helmets, armed with notebooks, cameras, voice recorders and gas masks. They are not there to join the protests or interfere, only to monitor and record what happens when the police crack down on the protests — as they have done with increased violence this year — and to help anyone who is injured or abused. This month, they are busier than ever. The volunteer observers, known as “helmets,” are ordinary citizens of all ages and walks of life, professionals and blue-collar workers, university students and retirees, some well into their 70s, who see their work as crucial. “We have to register the evidence of what we’re seeing,” said Marta Cisterna, 45, the spokeswoman for one of the helmet groups, Human Rights Observers. “No one else is monitoring police actions.” When students mobilized last year to demand an overhaul of the country’s higher education system and a commitment to free, equal and high-quality public education, the official response was more restrained. This year the government has declared zero tolerance for school occupations, and has called in special police forces to clear the buildings. Hours or days later, the same schools are taken over again, and the police return, a cat-and-mouse pattern that often leads to violent clashes and hundreds of arrests. Meanwhile, small groups of radicalized students set up barricades, throw rocks and damage public and private property. Protest marches usually erupt in street battles with the police, who use tear gas and chemical-laced water cannons to disperse the crowds and wield their batons to arrest demonstrators. Some students have suffered head injuries, broken noses, convulsions and breathing problems; some have been trampled by police officers on horseback. Increasingly, the observer groups say , detainees are reporting acts of sexual humiliation by the police. That is why the helmets are there. Before each protest, they call one another to distribute tasks and locations. On the streets, they wear hard hats marked DDHH — short for derechos humanos, human rights in Spanish — as well as large credential cards around their necks to make their role as clear as possible. They get training in the legal basics, and have strict rules to follow: no interfering in events, no cursing at the police, always work in pairs. “The first thing we do is approach the officer in charge,” said Ms. Cisterna, a speech therapist. “We tell him we are there to observe police procedures. We don’t intervene, we don’t try to take detainees away from them, but we do let them know when they’re doing something illegal or irregular, that they can’t beat people up, and that we are watching and have their names and ranks. They pay attention.” Her group was among the first to field observers in white helmets. Members of Sutra, a labor union, also wear them and monitor the police at labor strikes and community protests as well as student actions. A third group created last year, Observers and Defenders of Human Rights, wears blue helmets similar to those of United Nations peacekeepers . A fourth observer group founded last month by law students also provides legal assistance to detainees. August has kept them all busy. Students occupied more than 25 high schools in Santiago and other cities, and took over the University of Chile’s main building and are on strike in at least eight other universities. Last week a group of high school students went on a hunger strike , and others chained themselves to government buildings and occupied Unesco’s offices in Santiago. Last Thursday 10,000 students marched from 14 different points in the capital, and nearly 140 were arrested. Police officials declined to comment on the work of the observer groups. The groups coordinate loosely with one another to cover more ground and alert one another to unwatched hot spots. Combined, the groups’ observers number a few dozen. Protest organizers now have the habit of calling the helmets beforehand. “They feel more protected if we are there, although they understand that there are limits to what we can do,” said Germán Chau, 66, an adult education monitor with Human Rights Observers. Despite those limits, the helmets are sometimes detained themselves. Matías Sotelo, a 23-year-old former nursing student and Red Cross volunteer, was arrested on June 20 while assisting a student suffering respiratory arrest at a march. Mr. Sotelo says he was beaten and shoved into a police bus with a dozen demonstrators, then held in isolation for eight hours. His arrest and the distinctive red cross on his blue helmet, meant to signal first aid, led to his expulsion from the Chilean Red Cross, he said. The helmets photograph what they see, and record oral accounts from protesters and witnesses. They jot down the license plates of police vehicles and the names of commanding officers, and keep track of everyone who is detained. Much of that information is immediately posted online in Twitter messages. They continue their work until the last detainee is released by the police. “Sometimes we stay up all night — we don’t sleep or eat much, and we spend our own money, but we have to be there,” said Luis Parra, 56, a volunteer lawyer with Human Rights Observers. The groups draft reports after each protest and send them to a congressional human rights commission. Human Rights Observers compiles them for submission to the National Institute for Human Rights, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Chile and international human rights organizations. Perhaps more important, Ms. Cisterna said, their material may be used in court. A lawyer for a student who said he and several others were tortured in a police station in February submitted the observers’ records last month as evidence in the case. “We were able to enter the police station and see the conditions they were in, and take their testimony,” Ms. Cisterna said of the students. “We’re talking about torture: they reported having their heads forced into the toilet, guns pointed against their heads, being beaten unconscious, and a police officer pulling down his pants to show them his genitals. These students were practically kidnapped, detained in a police bus for up to eight hours, and the police did not acknowledge their arrest. That’s when we had to learn to use Twitter, to keep evidence of the exact time of the arrests.” It all began a year ago, when a network of human rights organizations, concerned about police tactics, sent two members to observe a pot-banging protest in a plaza, wearing credentials with the logos of each organization. “Something happened that day,” Ms. Cisterna said. “People were curious and came up to us, looked at our credentials, asked what we were doing. We distributed fliers about the rights of detainees.” Encouraged, the groups then sent a dozen observers to a national strike march, this time in white safety helmets from a hardware store, and the idea gained visibility and attracted more volunteers. “It’s rewarding,” Mr. Parra said. “The kids appreciate our work because no one else is doing it.”

Human Rights and Human Rights Violations


Fearing Glass Contamination, Nestlé Issues a Limited Recall

Abstract: Nestlé USA is voluntarily recalling a limited number of DiGiorno, Lean Cuisine and Stouffer’s products because of the possibility they might contain small pieces of glass. Nestlé said on Thursday that the source of the glass was spinach, a common ingredient in all three brands. The company did not elaborate. No injuries have been reported.


Investors Can’t Shake Mortgage Worries

Abstract: Stocks fell sharply on an otherwise quiet Monday as jitters about the mortgage industry prevailed in low-volume trading, sending shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to 17-year lows. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 180 points and the broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index lost 1.5 percent, as shares of banks and financial services firms took a sharp hit. The biggest losers were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the beleaguered mortgage giants, which have suffered from widespread concern over their ability to raise capital and continue to guarantee most of the nation’s mortgages. Analysts said a report over the weekend in Barron’s, the financial weekly, reignited investors’ worries about the companies. Freddie’s stock lost 25 percent, falling to $4.39 a share, and Fannie shares fell 22 percent, to $6.15. The companies have lost more than 90 percent of their market value in the last year. Their shares plunged in July, when the Treasury Department was forced to devise a contingency plan to bail out the companies in the event of a crisis. Until this summer, Fannie and Freddie had been backed by only an implicit government guarantee. But the sharp declines came amid very light trading on the major exchanges. With many investors on vacation, big swings on light trading days are rarely harbingers of larger trends in the market. “It’s a very quiet day,” said Richard Sparks, an equities analyst at Schaeffer’s Investment Research. “No economic reports, very few earnings reports and almost none of any consequence. We’ve had oil trading to break even. The market’s really focusing its attention on the worries about Fannie and Freddie.” Oil prices dipped 90 cents to settle at $112.87 a barrel in New York trading. The dollar declined slightly against the euro, which settled at $1.4697, down from $1.4680. Interest rates were lower, with the benchmark 10-year Treasury note up 7/32, at 101 18/32, and the yield, which moves in the opposite direction from the price, at 3.81 percent, down from 3.84 percent. The Dow finished at 11,479.39, down 1.6 percent. The S.& P. ended the session at 1,278.60, down 19.60 points. The Nasdaq composite index fell 35.54 points, or 1.5 percent, to 2,416.98, as technology stocks declined. Shares also fell among businesses that depend on consumer spending. General Motors shares lost 7.3 percent, to $10.36. “You see wilder swings and more volatility when the volume is so light,” said Anthony Conroy, the head equity trader at the BNY ConvergEx Group. “One big order can certainly make a big move in the stock market.” On Tuesday, the government will release figures on producer prices, a measure of inflation, and a report on groundbreakings for new residential projects. Producer inflation is expected to have slowed in July, and housing starts are expected to have declined, according to estimates from economists. The drop in the Dow was the biggest decline in seven trading sessions. At least one analyst predicted that the volatility in the stock market would likely linger for the time being. “It’s a quiet time for substantive news, but it doesn’t mean on any given day that you’re going to have quiet days,” said the analyst, Robert Weissenstein, the chief investment officer of Credit Suisse’s American private banking division. “We have emotion and psychology driving the market in both directions.” Following are the results of Monday’s Treasury auction of three- and six-month bills:

Dow Jones Stock Average
Stocks and Bonds
Fannie Mae
Freddie Mac


New Afghan Attorney General Seeks Justice in System Rife With Graft

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — In a corner office at one of the most corrupt institutions of the Afghan government, the country’s new attorney general has been tasked with actually delivering justice. It is an uphill battle if there ever was one. The attorney general, Mohammad Farid Hamidi, must contend with a powerful political elite that over the past 15 years has seen law enforcement as its private net to entangle rivals and make money. The culture of graft and impunity has been entrenched for so long that the Afghan public hardly raises a fuss about it anymore. “When you say anticorruption, people laugh and say good luck with that,” said Naseem Akbar, the executive director of the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee, which evaluates anticorruption efforts across the country. “The most corrupt speak of fighting corruption. The offices of control and monitoring at ministries have largely become known for their corruption. People lost complete faith.” More than anything, Mr. Hamidi is up against his own institution. The attorney general’s office, which is supposed to be the highest enforcement agency of the law, is seen as breaking it at every turn. “You see a fancy two-story or three-story house, and you ask, ‘Whose is it?’ They name a prosecutor working in some corner of the attorney general’s office here,” Masroor Lutfi, a law student in Parwan Province, told Mr. Hamidi during a recent official visit to the province. “Everyone who finds out that I am studying law questions my real intentions, because the law has come under question.” Mr. Hamidi nodded in pained agreement. When it was his turn to speak, he acknowledged that the failure of the justice system had alienated people from the government, sometimes driving them to take their grievances to the Taliban even in areas under government control. “What is the point of controlling districts when we don’t have people’s hearts?” he said. Mr. Hamidi, a 48-year-old father of three who has been in office for seven months, is a police academy graduate who later took to civilian life and studied law. For a decade, he served as a well-respected human rights commissioner, investigating some of the earliest injustices of the political elite that set the tone after the United States invasion. He had been working on a master’s degree at Harvard for eight months, his only time living outside Afghanistan, when he was called home after the confirmation of his appointment by the coalition government to be attorney general. Bluntly, he says he has inherited an institution that he feels is in the same shape it was the morning after the Taliban government was overrun in 2001. Despite millions of dollars spent, there has been no attention to its most basic infrastructure, or to building the capacity of the staff; only one-third of its members have higher education. Mr. Hamidi said the attorney general’s office had been a “systematic” clearing house for graft by the elite, putting the stamp of legality on shady deals and corrupt syndicates while it pressed politically favorable prosecutions. “It was extremely political — it was a political tool at the hands of those who wanted to hit their rivals, to dishonor them,” he said. “It was a place for character assassination.” By all accounts, Mr. Hamidi has had a hard-charging first few months in office. He has targeted 30 of his office’s staff members for investigation, and has pushed others with tainted reputations to positions of less influence and authority. He has shuffled the leadership at the top and promoted a young cadre to new posts. All of that is an implicit accusation against his predecessor, Mohammad Ishaq Aloko, who served as attorney general for around eight years and was seen as a strong ally of former President Hamid Karzai. Reached by phone, Mr. Aloko defended his record before hanging up abruptly. “It was a clean office. This is propaganda — do not accept it,” Mr. Aloko said about the accusations against him. “Look, corruption is in the customs. Corruption is in contracts. These are all lies.” Image Visitors lining up outside the office of Mr. Hamidi, who became attorney general seven months ago. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times Interviews with officials in the justice system, lawyers and business leaders, however, portray an attorney general’s office that profited greatly from predation. Thousands of investigations have remained open for years, with prosecutors sending warrants every few months to call someone for questioning — another opportunity for a bribe — while the case goes nowhere. Individuals with ties to the powerful were usually exonerated easily. Later, though, if their patrons had become a political headache for the government, their cases might suddenly resurface. Senior officials linked to some of the most blatant cases of graft, including those accused in the near-meltdown of the Kabul Bank after $900 million in fraudulent “buddy” loans, were treated with leniency, or their convictions have been effectively forgotten . Meanwhile, names were being added left and right to the national travel ban — the list is standing at about 3,000 people, mostly business owners and contractors, Mr. Hamidi said. One of the most problematic, but lucrative, practices that the attorney general’s office engaged in was jumping into civil disputes that it had no jurisdiction over. A subcontractor disagreeing with a contractor? Drag him to the attorney general’s office, despite contract terms calling for arbitration, and quickly put him on the no-exit list. To save his reputation, the businessman would pay a bribe, or seek the help of a strongman. Kawun Kakar, who leads the Kabul-based law firm Kakar Advocates, said a large percentage of the prosecutors in the past spent their time on arbitration cases over which they had no jurisdiction. “We see that the new attorney general is curbing that,” Mr. Kakar said. “But my fear is that unless the loophole is closed through legislation and regulation, it will be same old business when another leadership comes.” Mr. Hamidi said he had ordered all cases that have remained open for years to be concluded in a period of two months so that his prosecutors could focus on current problems. “No one can put anyone on the no-exit list, no one can shut down the economic activities of a business because of a claim,” he said. “We will not interfere in civil matters at all. People’s debts have no relation to us.” Even in the most difficult political environment, with President Ashraf Ghani’s administration facing intense challenges and missed deadlines, Mr. Hamidi insists that so far, he has the firm support of the government’s coalition partners in his attempt to depoliticize his office. He recounted how he had recently suspended a powerful official in western Afghanistan who had a history of breaking his friends out of police custody with impunity. The man had also served as one of Mr. Ghani’s top campaign leaders in his region during the 2014 presidential election. But when Mr. Hamidi demanded that the official appear before prosecutors for questioning, and faced pressure for doing so, Mr. Ghani fully backed him. Mr. Hamidi fully understands that he is making enemies. But he said he was counting on a widening base of support among the public as he started making changes. “If you carry out the smallest action in a country where people no longer expect anything, it will bring you major support — and that support helps in lowering the political price one has to pay,” Mr. Hamidi said.

Afghanistan
Mohammad Farid Hamidi
Ashraf Ghani
Afghan National Police
Corruption
Kabul Bank
Taliban


H.P. Names Ethics Officer

Abstract: PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 12 (AP) — Hewlett-Packard said Thursday that it had named Jon Hoak, former general counsel for the NCR Corporation, as its vice president and chief ethics and compliance officer. Mr. Hoak, 57, replaces Kevin T. Hunsaker, who was ousted after his involvement in a boardroom spying inquiry was disclosed last month. Mr. Hunsaker was charged with several felonies in the case, as were the company’s former chairwoman, Patricia C. Dunn, and three outside investigators. Mr. Hoak’s duties will include working with an outside lawyer hired by Hewlett-Packard to assess the company’s investigative practices and develop future business-practice guidelines, the company said. He previously served as senior vice president and general counsel for NCR, a computer services company, from 1993 to May 2006. Mr. Hoak will report to the chief executive, Mark V. Hurd, another NCR veteran, until a general counsel is hired, the company said. In a statement, Mr. Hurd praised Mr. Hoak’s experience and said his leadership would help right the company’s course after an embarrassing scandal.

Hewlett-Packard Co
Appointments and Executive Changes
Ethics
Hunsaker Kevin T


Kentucky Shaken by Light Earthquake

Abstract: A magnitude 4.3 earthquake struck about eight miles west of Whitesburg, Ky., just after noon on Saturday, the United States Geological Survey said. The epicenter of the relatively light earthquake, which struck at a depth of 0.7 miles, was in Blackey, Ky., the agency said. The town, which is in the Appalachian Mountains, is near the border with Virginia and about 110 miles southwest of Charleston, W. Va. Tremors were felt as far north as Columbus, Ohio, and as far south as Atlanta, said Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the agency. He called the temblor “moderate” and said that aftershocks were a possibility. Mr. Caruso said the agency received reports that the earthquake was felt widely throughout the Appalachian region, including in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. He added that Blackey is near a fault line, “and where there are faults, there are earthquakes,” even if they are relatively mild. Chris Perry, a dispatcher at the Letcher County sheriff’s office in Whitesburg, said that he was based about 10 to 12 miles from the epicenter. “It was a good shake,” he said, adding that the home of a colleague, Deputy Wade Adams, who lives about 16 miles from the epicenter, was damaged. Deputy Adams said that his basement and garage walls cracked enough to show daylight, “from the top to the bottom all the way, about a half an inch wide,” and that the concrete floor of his garage was also damaged. He was outside when the earthquake hit and his wife and 8-year-old daughter were in the house, he said, but none of them were hurt. On Saturday afternoon, Deputy Adams was awaiting a call from his insurance agent. “I’m not sure I have earthquake insurance because we’ve never had an earthquake,” he said. Lt. Ken Sexton, of the Whitesburg Fire Department, also said that reports of damage so far had been minimal, but that just after 12:08 p.m., “the phones just flooded.” He said the fire chief and other officials were out assessing some of the calls. Mr. Caruso said this earthquake was considerably lighter than the magnitude 5.8 earthquake , centered in Louisa County, Va., that rattled the East Coast in August 2011. That quake was felt across more than a dozen states and in several Canadian provinces, and it cracked the top of the Washington Monument. The United States Geological Survey says that a magnitude 4.0 earthquake in the country’s East can be felt as far as 60 miles from where it occurred, even if it does not cause much damage near its source. But an earthquake like the one last year in Virginia — of magnitude 5.5. or more — can be felt as far as 300 miles away, the agency said, and sometimes can cause damage as far as 25 miles away.

Earthquakes
Kentucky
Appalachian Region
United States Geological Survey


Giants Arrive in Indianapolis, Without Their Injured

Abstract: INDIANAPOLIS — The Giants’ charter landed at Indianapolis International Airport at 2:49 p.m. Monday, according to flight records, and the requisite team flag was hung out the window as the plane taxied in from the runway. When the door opened, numerous coaches, assorted staff members and players stepped out, and the Giants had officially arrived at Super Bowl XLVI. Most of them, at least. While the 53 players on the active roster (and eight more on the practice squad) traveled on the team flight, a group of other players who had varying degrees of involvement with the Giants’ reaching the ultimate game of the season will not arrive until later in the week. “Maybe we don’t have the same obligations as the rest of the players, but we’re still part of the team,” left tackle Will Beatty said in a telephone interview. “It’s not like I’m going to Indianapolis to hang out by myself. It’s a team-sanctioned thing; we’re going to be with the guys. We’re just coming later.” Beatty, who played 10 games before undergoing surgery to repair a detached retina, is one of 10 players currently on injured reserve for the Giants, a list that includes the star cornerback Terrell Thomas and the highly regarded rookie defensive tackle Marvin Austin, neither of whom played a regular-season snap for the Giants. Most of those players will not travel here until Thursday, when the Giants will charter another flight for injured players and other guests of the team. It is not an ideal situation, cornerback Michael Coe admitted recently, gesturing to his injured shoulder. “In my dreams, I was usually playing in the game, you know?” he said. But the sentiment for injured players is similar to their healthy brethren’s: We are part of the Giants, several said. The Giants are in the Super Bowl. So we are happy. “I love this group,” said receiver Michael Clayton, who tore his meniscus . “I want to win as much as anyone.” Linebacker Mathias Kiwanuka, who grew up in Indianapolis, said he felt for the players who could not play Sunday against the New England Patriots . In 2008, Kiwanuka watched as his teammates upset the undefeated Patriots to win Super Bowl XLII, a bittersweet experience. “It’s tough; I have a lot of sympathy for them because I understand exactly what they are going through,” Kiwanuka said. “You don’t realize how important it is until it is taken away.” Kiwanuka was one of six Giants players who met the news media Monday afternoon, and the common theme among them and Coach Tom Coughlin was focus. The Giants did their best to stick to routine, boarding buses for the airport at the same time they have all year and keeping to their typical meetings schedule in hopes of furthering the notion that despite the pomp of the Super Bowl, this is a business trip. Their staid departure stood in contrast to that of the Patriots, who held a pep rally on Sunday before heading to the airport. Tom Brady may or may not have guaranteed a victory when he spoke of wanting to see even more fans present next week. While the Patriots appeared to enjoy the send-off, Giants lineman Chris Snee said he was not envious; all the Patriots gained by coming in a day earlier was “a more expensive hotel bill,” he said wryly. He added that the Giants preferred going through a “normal departure, a normal road game itinerary.” “A pep rally isn’t a part of that,” Snee said. Still, some of the Giants’ enthusiasm could not be contained. Coughlin said several players used video cameras to document the otherwise unremarkable plane flight, and the Giants were greeted at their downtown hotel by a throng of onlookers, some of whom, perhaps, noticed the rookie lineman James Brewer carrying a teddy bear. Punter Steve Weatherford sent a photo of the view from his hotel room via Twitter . He included a message, with three exclamation points, about how he had finally arrived at a Super Bowl. “It’s just been an incredible ride,” said receiver Victor Cruz, who had not recorded an N.F.L. reception before this season. “I can’t even put it into words. Sometimes I kind of think back to where I was a year ago and where I am now, it’s just a complete 180. It’s just amazing.” Coughlin said he expected the jolt of arriving at the Super Bowl to wear off the players by Wednesday, when they will begin practice. Tuesday will be primarily consumed with the annual Media Day responsibilities, as well as the official Super Bowl team photo. A year ago the Green Bay Packers endured some grumbling after their injured players were not going to be included in the photo (the team ultimately changed the date of the shoot to accommodate them), but the Giants do not appear to have a similar conflict. Beatty, for one, said he did not mind missing out. Players on injured reserve were also not able to acquire the same number of game tickets as active players (8 instead of 15, cornerback Coe said), and they may not sit in on all the team meetings, according to Beatty. Still, they remain invested in the outcome. Coe attended many of the extra film sessions that members of the secondary held after practice this season, and the inspirational Clayton continued to go in on Fridays to address members of the team before games. Beatty, who worked out at the Giants’ training center while his eye healed, said watching his teammates play was physically draining. “I stress out more when I’m watching the game then when I’m actually playing in the game,” he said. “My eye is still real sensitive, so if my blood pressure rises too much, my eye starts to get red.” He laughed. “In overtime against San Francisco , I had to get up and take a break from watching,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happens on Sunday.”

Patriots
Sports injury
Super Bowl
Football


21 Girls Kidnapped From Chibok School Released by Boko Haram, Nigeria Says

Abstract: LAGOS, Nigeria — Two and a half years after nearly 300 girls were kidnapped from a school in northeastern Nigeria, the government said on Thursday that 21 of them had been freed, the biggest breakthrough in an ordeal that has shocked the world and laid bare the deadly instability gripping large parts of the country. Boko Haram, the radical Islamist group that has killed thousands of civilians, overrun villages and terrorized the region, seized the girls from a school in the town of Chibok on April 14, 2014. For many around the globe, the mass abduction provided a stunning introduction to a militant group that had been waging war against Nigerians for years . Soon after the girls were kidnapped, an international campaign began urging the Nigerian government to do more to secure their release, using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls and drawing support from Michelle Obama and others. For more than a year, the Nigerian government has negotiated with Boko Haram to get the girls back. But the talks fell apart multiple times , in one case at the last minute, after the president had agreed to free imprisoned Boko Haram fighters. Another time, the talks failed because central members of Boko Haram’s negotiating team were killed. Finally, the government said Thursday, the negotiations bore fruit. Still, most of the girls remain in captivity, their whereabouts, health and circumstances unknown. “The release of the girls, in a limited number, is the outcome of negotiations between the administration and the Boko Haram, brokered by the International Red Cross and the Swiss government,” Garba Shehu , a spokesman for President Muhammadu Buhari, said in a series of messages posted on Twitter. “The negotiations will continue.” The girls were released around 5:30 a.m. on Thursday, the government said. In addition to the 21 girls, a 20-month-old boy born to one of them in captivity was released, it said. At a news conference in the capital, Abuja, the girls sat in rows in a room packed with government ministers, officials and journalists. Wearing colorful dresses, the girls listened to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo speak from behind a table, flanked by his ministers. “We can imagine what they’ve gone through,” he said. “So much needs to be done to get them back to living a normal life after so much trauma in captivity.” Mr. Osinbajo described the girls as being in “reasonably good health considering the circumstances they’ve been held in.” He added that they would stay in a medical facility “for some time, until we’re reasonably satisfied of their health condition.” As for the other girls held by Boko Haram, Mr. Osinbajo suggested that “in the next few days, the next few months, we should be able to bring in more of these girls, along the same lines, using exactly the same negotiations.” But he warned that the government, which is waging an aggressive campaign to fight Boko Haram and regain territory seized by the group, had the fate of the nation to consider as well. “We want to ensure that we bring these girls back alive,” Mr. Osinbajo said. “At the same time we, of course, balance this against the overall safety and security of the country.” Relatives of the girls rejoiced, even before they knew whether their kin were among those freed. Lawan Zanna, the father of Aisha Zanna, one of the abducted girls, said by telephone that he hoped his daughter had been freed. All of the parents are “very happy hearing that they have released our daughters,” he said. “All are our daughters.” Another parent, Esther Yakubu, said by telephone that she was praying that her daughter Dorcas was among those released. “They say it’s only 21,” she said. “Most of them are still out there, and we want them to come back.’’ Manasseh Allen, a native of Chibok whose cousin was abducted, said in a phone interview that he hoped more girls could be rescued. “Once we have 21 parents now linked up with daughters, at least we have solved a good part of the problem,” he said. “So many will be hopeful that their daughters have been brought back.” Asked if he thought a ransom was involved, he said: “Whether it’s a ransom, whether it’s a prisoner swap, the government knows how best to get these girls back. All we are after is to get the girls back.” Earlier in the day, Lai Mohammed, the minister of information and culture, denied preliminary reports that Boko Haram fighters might have been released in exchange for the girls. “Please note that this is not a swap,” he said. “It is a release, the product of painstaking negotiations and trust on both sides. We see this as a credible first step in the eventual release of all the Chibok girls in captivity.” The Bring Back Our Girls campaign thanked the Nigerian security services on Facebook and added: “We trust that our government will continue to work to keep the safety, security and well-being of the other girls a high priority.” The abductions, during exam time at a boarding school, increased pressure on the government to fight Boko Haram , which has raged through parts of northern Nigeria for years, burning entire villages and carrying out rape, beheadings, looting and other acts of violence. Some girls managed to escape shortly after the fighters stormed their school and hauled away their classmates, and in May, the authorities announced that one girl, Amina Ali, had been found ; she was wandering in the forest when members of a vigilante group came across her as they prepared to ambush a Boko Haram camp. But a majority of the girls are still missing, and it is feared that many may never return. In August, Boko Haram released a video purporting to show the bodies of several kidnapped schoolgirls who fighters said were killed by Nigerian airstrikes. The girls still in captivity are thought to be held by a faction controlled by the Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau , rather than a newer faction that has been endorsed by the Islamic State. The latter faction split from Mr. Shekau’s group after an ideological dispute over killings that targeted Muslims. Western intelligence officials have said they believe the girls are scattered in small groups, another hurdle to rescuing them. The Nigerian military, with help from troops from neighboring nations and from the United States, Britain and France, has made big advances against Boko Haram in recent months. But it has had trouble holding towns once liberated from Boko Haram control, and Boko Haram fighters have also taken the fight to neighboring countries like Niger.

Nigeria
Boko Haram
Kidnapping and Hostages
Women and Girls


Longtime Horse Racing Announcer to Retire

Abstract: Tom Durkin will retire from calling horse races in August at Saratoga after a 43-year career that included announcing Triple Crown and Breeders’ Cup races. Durkin, a 63-year-old Chicago native, has handled announcing duties at Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga since 1990. He began his career calling races at county fairs in Wisconsin in 1971.

Horse racing
Triple Crown Horse Racing
Tom Durkin