Moment in Convention Glare Shakes Up Khans’ American Life

Abstract: Six minutes and one second. That was all it took for the 66 years of Khizr Khan’s life to become an American moment. It was not something that he could have anticipated. For years, he and his wife, Ghazala, had lived a rather quiet existence of common obscurity in Charlottesville, Va. He was known in circles that dealt with electronic discovery in legal proceedings. Another overlapping sphere was the rotating cast of cadets that passed through the Army R.O.T.C. program at the University of Virginia. His wife was a welcoming face to the customers of a local fabric store. And the last dozen years for the Khans were darkened by their heartbreak over the death of a military son, Humayun , whose body lies in Arlington National Cemetery, his tombstone adorned with an Islamic crescent. Their grief brought them closer to a university and to a young woman in Germany whom their son loved. It also gave them a conviction and expanded the borders of their lives. Some of their neighbors knew Mr. Khan liked to carry a $1 pocket Constitution around with him. In the Khan home, a stack of them always lay at the ready. Guests showed up and they were handed one, in the way other hosts might distribute a party favor. Mr. Khan wanted it to stimulate a conversation about liberty, a cherished topic of his. He liked to point out that he lives nearly in the shadow of Monticello, home of one of his heroes, Thomas Jefferson. Mrs. Khan liked to say, “We need Thomas Jefferson.” And then the Khans stepped into a sports arena in Philadelphia and left as household names. In a passionate speech at the Democratic National Convention, the bespectacled Mr. Khan stingingly criticized Donald J. Trump and his stance on Muslim immigration, scolding him, “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.” Quickly enough, both Khans felt the verbal lashings of Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate. And just like that, they found themselves a pivot point in the twisting drama that is American politics. Goals Set Forth This is another moment in the lives of Khizr and Ghazala Khan. In 1972, he was studying law at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, the largest public university in his native Pakistan. He was intrigued by Persian literature. Learning of a Persian book reading, he went. Ghazala was the host. Image The University of Punjab’s old campus in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2011. Ghazala and Khizr Khan met at a book reading she hosted when he was studying law at the university. Credit Warrick Page for The New York Times He was raised in Gujranwala in Punjab Province, the oldest of 10 children. His parents had a poultry farm. “My life was very ordinary,” he said in an interview this week. “There was nothing special. I grew up as every other Pakistani. No extra earth-shattering events took place during my lifetime, and we were modest people.” But, he said, he had the ambition “to keep moving forward.” The university reading was one thing, but what enchanted him was the host. She was from Faisalabad and was studying the Persian language. He engaged in some decorous maneuvering and decided that she was the woman he wanted to marry. He enlisted the help of his parents, who reached out to her parents. Then the real courtship began. In 1973, he graduated from law school and he was licensed with the Punjab bar in 1974. Already, his goal was to move to the United States. “Everybody’s dreams come true if you are able to study and complete higher education abroad,” he said. “That’s the plan we grew up with: that it makes your future better if you have a postgraduate degree from overseas, England or United States.” But he did not have enough money. And so after the Khans were married, they moved to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. For three years, Mr. Khan worked for an American oil field company as the lawyer who handled the affairs of the expatriate workers. Their first two sons were born, Shaharyar and Humayun. In 1980, the Khans came to the United States. First, they went to Houston to save up more money. The four of them squeezed into a $200-a-month one-bedroom apartment. Once he had the savings, he enrolled at Harvard Law School. He graduated in 1986 with a master of laws degree and became a citizen, as did his wife. They moved to Silver Spring, Md., and he found work reviewing mortgage documents. It was not his dream job, but a third son, Omer, had been born. Mouths had to be fed. Image At the funeral for Capt. Humayun Khan, Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Peterson presented the Purple Heart to his father, Khizr Khan, on June 16, 2004. Credit Peter Cihelka/Potomac News, via Associated Press In time, he moved on to several large law firms, where he specialized in the emerging area of electronic discovery. It involved finding information that was stored electronically to answer discovery requests from opposing sides in lawsuits. Robert Eisenberg, a consultant who is a pioneer of the field, came to know Mr. Khan well and found him highly proficient at his work and immensely likable. “There is an old-world gentility about him,” he said. “He has this veneer of formality. But under it is kindness.” And so the Khans settled in, and they became an American life. A Protector Against Bullies There are different vantages from which to understand the Khans’ middle son, Humayun, and one of them is through Amir Ali Guerami. He was born in Iran and he happened to come to the Maryland middle school that Humayun attended. There were few Muslims, and that made Mr. Guerami different. And he was very overweight. He was taunted and beaten up. His middle name was Patrick. As he walked down the school hallways, bullies would bellow, “Fat Rick.” And Humayun would hear this and step in. He would walk alongside him, a sentry staring the bullies down, deflecting them. And he intervened when Mr. Guerami was being roughed up outside the library. When he was punched in the throat in gym class and could not breathe. This cemented a friendship that continued throughout high school. Humayun was Mr. Guerami’s defender and his motivator. He urged him to exercise and to diet. And after his sophomore year, Mr. Guerami was 60 pounds lighter. As a high school student, Humayun swam and played basketball, and he taught swimming to children with disabilities. In his middle son, Mr. Khan saw the traits of his mother — farsighted and “much more balanced in her thinking and gestures.” “I’m a little more emotional and shortsighted,” Mr. Khan said. Mr. Guerami saw this, too. “You always knew he had a plan,” Mr. Guerami said. “He wasn’t just stumbling through life like the rest of us. He was planning college from Day 1.” Image The Khan Room at the R.O.T.C. center at the University of Virginia serves as a space for meeting and studying. Credit Chet Strange for The New York Times They lost contact after high school. Mr. Guerami now lives in California and owns a mortgage company. He was watching the Democratic convention when the video came on about Captain Khan. And that was when Mr. Guerami learned that he had been an R.O.T.C. cadet at the University of Virginia and had joined the Army and had gone to Iraq and become a hero. That his life was frozen at age 27. The memories returned. “He had an impact on my life,” he said. “You read about kids being bullied in school and then their hurting themselves. He owed me nothing, a complete stranger. Yet he stood up for me. He was a savior.” Love in Germany A German woman named Irene Auer sat down in a cafe in the Bavarian town of Amberg, and a man approached her. This was another moment in the life of Humayun Khan. He was stationed in the barracks at nearby Vilseck. This was 2002. She liked his manner, and she especially liked his English. ”There were many who spoke English very badly, or with a lot of slang, but not him,” she said. “He spoke beautiful English and had a very beautiful voice.” They started dating. In time, she began studying international management but stayed with him in his apartment off base on weekends. His mother went to Germany in 2003, and the two became acquainted. In September 2003, Ms. Auer flew with Captain Khan to the United States to meet his father. This was serious stuff. Captain Khan loved to have a good debate with Ms. Auer, her family and her friends. One of his favorite topics was the meaning of life. As it happens, she opposed the war in Iraq. But he accepted his duty and was proud to be a soldier. “Once he even said to me, ‘You know that I am married,’ ” she said. “I asked him, ‘What do you mean you’re married?’ and he told me, ‘Yes, I am married to the U.S. Army.’ ” Image A photo of Captain Khan that is on display in the room bearing his name at the university. Credit Chet Strange for The New York Times On Feb. 9, 2004, he left for Iraq. They planned to get married the following year and eventually settle in the United States. His intention was to go to law school. In one of the last emails she received from him, he told her to go pick out an engagement ring. A Captain’s Kindness It was his day off but he was not much for days off. He was the commander of the Force Protection Team of the 201st Forward Support Battalion, First Infantry Division, at Camp Warhorse in Diyala Province, Iraq. Sgt. Crystal Selby, one of the team’s drivers, went to pick him up that morning. June 8, 2004. He said he wanted to check the compound’s gate. On a day off? She told him to stay in his room. He was her boss. She could not order him to, and he got in. It was funny how she had known Captain Khan only a couple of months and yet it seemed like she had known him so much longer. It was the way he treated her and all of the soldiers. “He didn’t talk to you like he was in charge of you, but like a friend,” she said. “He taught you how to be better. Not better tanker or better fueler. Better human being.” He made sandwiches for his soldiers when there was no time to get to lunch. He had such an easy sense of humor. “I read where someone called him a soldier’s officer,” she said. “To me, he was a human’s human.” The drive took three or four minutes. She dropped him off outside the gate and headed to the office. An orange-and-white taxi carrying two suicide bombers was creeping toward the gate. Captain Khan shouted for his men to hit the dirt. That may well have saved their lives. He moved toward the taxi, trying to halt it. Sergeant Selby was still in the truck, not even to the office, when she heard the explosion. When she arrived, the news of his death was already on the radio. Image Camp Warhorse in Diyala Province, Iraq, in 2007. Captain Khan was stationed at the camp, and he died trying to protect his unit when suicide bombers approached. Credit Olivier Laban-Mattei/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images R.O.T.C. ‘Mom and Pop’ The Army R.O.T.C. center at the University of Virginia is on the first floor of the Astronomy Building. The program is not large — a typical Army cadet class commissions 10 to 20 people. When you walk into the offices, it is the first room on the left. The Khan Room. There are several pictures of Captain Khan. Clippings about him. One of his uniforms. A letter of condolence from the Seven Society, one of the university’s secret societies. Memorial plaques. The piece he wrote for his commissioning. It is where who he was endures. It is a functional space, serving as a conference room, a place where prospective cadets might get interviewed or meetings held. When it is empty, cadets use it to study for exams. A few months after their son’s death, the Khans moved to Charlottesville, where their other two sons were living, so they could try to recover as a family. Shaharyar, their oldest son, co-founded a biotech firm that Omer, their youngest son, works at. The Army R.O.T.C. program became a part of their restoration. Tim Leroux, who was the commander from 2009 to 2012 and retired a lieutenant colonel, saw them as the “mom and pop of the department.” It became one of their rocks. They attended all its formal events. At the annual commissioning ceremony, Mr. Khan always spoke. When the cadets took the oath, he told them, they needed to think hard about their pledge to defend the Constitution, to reflect on what they were pledging to defend, because his son died for that document. And he would give each graduate one of his pocket Constitutions. Then there would be an award presented, the Khan award, that went to that year’s outstanding scholar-soldier. Image Tim Leroux, a former commander of the Army R.O.T.C. program at the University of Virginia, with a pocket-size Constitution like the ones Mr. Khan gave to graduating cadets. Credit Chet Strange for The New York Times “For years, I’ve been telling people he’s the most patriotic person I’ve ever met, and I’ve met quite a few,” Mr. Leroux said of Mr. Khan. “There are people who will put on cutoffs of the American flag and say they’re patriotic. Or they’ll put on bumper stickers — America, Love It or Leave It — and say they’re patriotic. He has a much more profound idea of being patriotic. It’s a complete understanding of what liberty and democracy mean.” Mrs. Khan came to these commissioning ceremonies, too. They were hard for her. Her grief over her son’s death reached deep. One day not long after moving to Charlottesville, she stopped at a local fabric store, Les Fabriques. She makes her own clothing and needed fabric. Carla Quenneville, the store’s owner, waited on her. Mrs. Khan told her the story of her son’s death. “She said she came in because she was so depressed and she said, ‘I have to get off my couch and stop crying,’ ” Ms. Quenneville said. “She had cried for a solid year. And we cried together that day.” Ms. Quenneville wanted to bring sun back into her life. She told her, if she wished, she could spend time in the store, help out if she wanted. And so she did. Pretty much every Monday, she began showing up and assisting customers, giving them tips on the sewing machines that the store sold. Since she prayed five times a day, she sometimes used a back room to pray. The fabric store helped her mend her own life. The sorrow, though, persists. “A new staff person comes on, she tells the story of her son,” Ms. Quenneville said. “And she cries. She can’t get through this.” There was other healing to be done in the circle of their son’s life. When Ms. Auer, the woman Captain Khan planned to marry, came to his funeral, Mrs. Khan presented her with his favorite quilt. She asked her to return it when she got married, so they would know she was happy again. Two years later, Ms. Auer was still adrift. The Khans invited her to stay with them, and she did, from May until August 2006. “They said to me, come, we need you here by us,” she said. Image Captain Khan’s funeral at Arlington Cemetery in 2004. Credit Gerald Martineau/The Washington Post, via Getty Images After returning to Germany, she met a man who became her husband. They have two daughters. She realizes she should return that quilt. Honoring a Legacy It was important to the Khans to know the R.O.T.C. cadets, really know them, and so they began the ritual of the dinners at their house. There would be one dinner each year for the freshmen cadets and one for the seniors. A front room was filled with mementos and objects no parent ever wants — the letter of condolence from President George W. Bush, the American flag that had covered the coffin. Often, the Khans would show the cadets the room for them to understand the magnitude of the step they were taking. “The Khans didn’t become bitter when they lost their son or become angry with the military,” said Joe Riley, a cadet who graduated in 2013. “The exact opposite. They showed tremendous pride in us.” He remembered how Mr. Khan pulled him aside and told him how he felt blessed to be in this country and how much he admired the American military. The focus at these dinners would swivel to the cadets — who they were, why they wanted to join the Army, what future they envisioned. As they shared, Mrs. Khan, always the R.O.T.C. mom, would remind them to eat their vegetables. At one dinner, he told of how he had pictures of himself as a boy wearing an Army uniform and digging tiny foxholes on the farm he lived on in Tennessee. As he got older, he just felt it was the correct thing to do, the only thing to do. He said he felt that if you live in your country and enjoy its wonders, you should give back. For him, the Army was the way to fulfill that obligation. Image Mr. and Mrs. Khan at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times His parents had a different view. When they learned of his plans, they did not speak to him for eight weeks. And, oh, how the Khans loved hearing this conviction in a young man, this resolute belief in guarding American democracy. In 2011, Joe Riley won the Khan Award. He went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and is now stationed in Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Wash., an Army lieutenant. A Crush of Attention Everything had happened in the space of a week, and it was so much. The Khans were on “Meet the Press” and “State of the Union” and “PBS NewsHour,” some dozen news shows in all, fresh arrivals in the political process. All from the dominoes of chance. Months ago, Mr. Khan was quoted in an article in Vocativ , an online publication, criticizing Mr. Trump’s position on Muslims. When asked about Muslim extremism in the United States, he recounted a conversation with his older son about the need to root out “traitors” among them. Seeing the article, campaign officials for Hillary Clinton wanted to put his son in a video to be shown at the convention, and then asked the Khans if they wished to say a few words. And now all this. Mr. Khan was on “Anderson Cooper 360” this week, and he seemed spent. He said they would not become silent but they were withdrawing. “I will continue to remind you what your behavior for the whole year had been,” he said addressing Mr. Trump. “I am not going to continue to appear on television. It is really disturbing because it is emotionally disturbing. It is family-wise disturbing.” He told The Times this week that he was exhausted from talking to reporters and that it was harming his health. In recent years, he had gone out on his own as a legal consultant. A few days ago, he took down the website promoting his law work. He said that he was getting hateful messages and that he was worried about it being hacked. Insinuations were being made, that he was involved in shady immigration cases. He said he has had no clients come to him for that sort of work. He said he did commercial law, especially electronic discovery work. The Khans had been one sort of family and now they are another. In the fast-forward way that it can happen in modern society, they have become public figures. They were put up in Washington hotels for their TV appearances. People floated up to them on the street. Took selfies with them. They wanted to be themselves again, mingle with cadets and talk about sewing at the fabric store. A few days ago, done with a round of interviews in Washington, they stopped at Arlington National Cemetery to visit the grave of their son. Then they went home.

Khizr Khan
Ghazala Khan
Humayun Khan
2016 Presidential Election
Democratic National Convention,DNC
Muslim Americans
Donald Trump


Drafting a Fantasy Football Team, With Help From Advanced Statistics

Abstract: Last year, I developed a statistical model for fantasy football that determines how to rank and tier players for every position based on consensus expert rankings. The algorithm found natural tiers and clusters within the rankings data. To help visualize this, I created charts for each week of the season, which could be used to help you decide your starting fantasy lineup. For those who haven’t seen the model before, it works like this: I take aggregated ranking data, provided by FantasyPros.com, and enter it into a machine learning clustering algorithm called a Gaussian mixture model . The algorithm finds similarly ranked players and identifies the tiers. Fantasy Football: Tiered Player Ranking Charts Charts resulting from a statistical algorithm find natural tiers and clusters within fantasy football player ranking data. The tiering model is well suited for the high variance nature of football. Last season, the best and worst out of 124 fantasy experts were separated by only 10 percent on in-season accuracy . For example, if 124 experts are split 50-50 on whether Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees is the better fantasy quarterback that week, this model will show that there no statistical difference between them, and identify them as equals. The tiers represent the consensus of all the experts, each of whom, it is assumed, does thorough research with their own sources and methods of ranking players. These may include matchup comparisons, strength of schedule, injuries, strength of offense, defense and even stadium conditions. Included here are preseason charts for each position, which can be used to help guide you through your next fantasy football draft. The charts will be updated throughout the preseason and will change each week during the season. When using this model for draft assistance, always favor players in the higher tiers. When you’re choosing among players from the same tier, diversify your picks across positions and real teams. Lastly, do not commit to picking up certain positions early. Let the mistakes of others dictate what positions you fill by sticking with higher-tier players.


Giant Eucalyptus Trees E arn Rain Forest Stripes

Abstract: Australia’s giant eucalyptus trees, the tallest flowering plants on earth, should be classified as a species of rain forest tree, a new study reports. This was the conclusion drawn by David Bowman , a forest ecologist at the University of Tasmania in Australia and one the study’s authors. He and his colleagues propose their idea in the current issue of the journal New Phytologist. They did a comparative analysis with other rain forest trees and report that Eucalyptus regnans grows within the boundaries of Australia’s rain forests, and shares traits with rain forest trees. In the past, the tree has been classified as unique vegetation in Australia because it has an unusual dependency on fire that allows it to outcompete other trees. Its seeds are protected from wildfires in aerial capsules, and after a fire they fall to the scorched ground and proliferate. “These pathetic little seeds, the size of a pinhead, grow like Jack’s beanstalk,” Dr. Bowman said. “It’s some of the fastest growth on earth, and then they can sit back and rule the forest until they die.” Rain forest pioneer trees — those that grow first as a rain forest is established — generally are intolerant to shade and require open ground that is free of an overhead canopy for their seeds to germinate, Dr. Bowman said. Although the eucalyptus depends on wildfires to create these circumstances, it too has these traits. Classifying the species as a rain forest pioneer tree may help preserve the giant eucalyptus, which in recent years has been overharvested. “It requires a shift in thinking,” Dr. Bowman said. “Calling them rain forest trees might put people on better behavior.”

Eucalyptus
Forests and Forestry
Australia
Endangered and Extinct Species
Environment
New Phytologist (Journal)
Trees and Shrubs


Some Doubt That North Korea Executed a Top General

Abstract: SEOUL, South Korea — Even to longtime analysts familiar with the unpredictability of the North Korean government, the news was shocking: a top general, the country’s equivalent of a defense minister, who had delivered a speech at an international symposium in Moscow last month, was executed by an antiaircraft gun while hundreds of fellow generals and senior party officials watched. At least, that is what South Korea’s National Intelligence Service said happened to the general, Hyon Yong-chol on April 30, according to South Korean lawmakers emerging from a closed-door parliamentary briefing by the spy agency on Wednesday. There were analysts in South Korea who questioned the authenticity of the report and the spy agency’s motive in releasing it. Among other things, they said, General Hyon, the North Korean People’s Armed Forces minister, was still shown alongside North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in old propaganda films broadcast this week. In the past, one of the first things the government did about people who had been purged was to remove their images or names from official records. Still, National Intelligence Service officials said that although they could not reveal their sources, they felt confident enough about their information to share it with Parliament. One of the South Korean spy agency’s biggest triumphs in recent years was to predict, correctly, the purge of Mr. Kim’s uncle Jang Song-thaek in late 2013, days before the North acknowledged executing him on treason charges. If General Hyon, 66, was executed, that would make him the most prominent official purged since Mr. Jang. Even though they were not completely sure that it actually happened, South Korean analysts began a tea-leaf reading on what was going on inside the opaque government in Pyongyang. As in many things concerning the inner workings of the dictatorship, they differed widely over the political dynamics going on. Yet they agreed on one thing: the general’s demise, if confirmed, would be another high-profile blow to the once-proud North Korean People’s Army leadership, which the analysts said had been humiliated repeatedly under Mr. Kim. What they did not agree on was whether a series of demotions, purges and executions was a sign of weakness or strength for the young North Korean leader. “It could mean cracks developing in the solidarity of the Pyongyang regime or another proof that Kim Jong-un is consolidating power,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a longtime North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. Purges have been part of the political life in Pyongyang going back to the days of Kim Il-sung, Mr. Kim’s grandfather and the founding president of North Korea, whose consolidation of power after the 1950-53 Korean War was accompanied by bloody crackdowns on rival factions. After he died, however, his son Kim Jong-il did not engineer major purges, partly because he had been consolidating power for two decades. He deftly mixed the old and new generations of elites, often retaining octogenarian loyalists from his father’s days in top posts, Mr. Koh said. Kim Jong-un never had the gradual and extended grooming his father enjoyed under his grandfather. Rather, Mr. Kim, while still in his 20s, was catapulted onto the fast track to leadership after Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke in 2008. After his father died in 2011, Mr. Kim began a series of purges that has so far left at least 72 senior military and party officials dead, according to the South Korean spy agency. The North Korean People’s Army, which enjoyed the biggest trust and perks under Kim Jong-il’s “songun,” or “military-first,” policy, bore the brunt of his son’s often bloodthirsty quest to consolidate his authority, analysts said. The relationship between Mr. Kim and his generals has been epitomized by reams of photographs coming out of North Korea that showed Mr. Kim swaggering while generals twice his age meekly pretended to write down everything he said in their notebooks. General Hyon’s fate was sealed after he was seen dozing off during a military meeting in mid-April, South Korean intelligence officials said. Kim Dong-yup, an analyst at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, saw method in Mr. Kim’s apparent madness: the North Korean leader, who considered his government’s survival dependent on whether he could revive his country’s moribund economy, has campaigned to wrest the vast trade and other economic rights the military accumulated under his father and restore them to the cabinet. He also tried to help the ruling Workers’ Party reclaim control of the military by making a civilian party technocrat, Hwang Pyong-so, a vice marshal and installing him at the top of the military hierarchy. “Kim Jong-un may have felt a need to suppress discontent and skepticism rising within the military elites about his rule by making an example out of their minister, General Hyon,” said Mr. Kim, the analyst. “This may be the beginning of a new round of disciplining the military.” Cho Han-beom, a senior analyst at the government-financing Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, said that Mr. Kim was taming the generals with the help of the Ministry of State Security, the North’s secret police, and the Workers’ Party’s Department of Organization and Guidance, which was widely believed to have engineered the purge of his uncle, Mr. Jang, once the North’s second-most powerful official. The top ranks of the two agencies have so far survived Mr. Kim’s rule with few casualties. “Unlike Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un is only wielding sticks without a firm grip on the military,” Mr. Cho said in an analysis posted on the website of his institute on Wednesday. That, Mr. Cho added, could leave Mr. Kim vulnerable to popular uprisings amid continuing economic hardships because he might not be able to rely on the kind of support the military provided for his father when he led his country through the great famine of the 1990s. During the parliamentary hearing on Wednesday, National Intelligence Service officials cautioned that they did not think that Mr. Kim faced any immediate trouble, because no one dared challenge him. Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea watcher at the Sejong Institute in South Korea, was one of those who doubted the spy agency’s parliamentary report. After scouring the North Korean media, Mr. Cheong found that General Hyon’s name appeared in the main party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, on April 30, the day South Korean intelligence officials said he was executed. “This means he was not arrested until April 29,” he said. “It means that he was arrested on April 30 and executed in the same day. This is hard to believe, unless he tried something unlikely, such as the assassination of Kim Jong-un.”

National Intelligence Service South Korea


Dubai World Reaches Deal to Restructure Debt

Abstract: LONDON — Dubai World, the debt-plagued conglomerate and proxy for the free-spending emirate of Dubai , said Thursday that it had reached an agreement with a group of banks to restructure $23.5 billion in debt. The deal came after months of discussions involving Dubai World and a committee representing more than 90 lenders, including HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. The agreement effectively extends the length of the conglomerate’s loans, giving it time to cut costs and sell assets and put itself in a better position to pay. The accord signified a willingness among Western banks to take a short-term hit to maintain relationships in a part of the world that, despite Dubai’s debt hiccup, is likely to remain a fruitful place to do business. It is also true that without the support of Dubai’s richer neighbor, Abu Dhabi, such a deal would not have occurred. Fears that Abu Dhabi would not back up its more profligate neighbor have, for the time being, been assuaged. The $14.4 billion in debt is to be split into two portions. The first part, $4.4 billion, is scheduled to be repaid in five years, while the second, of $10 billion, is to be repaid over eight years. As announced earlier, the government of Dubai will convert $8.9 billion of debt into Dubai World equity. The banks will be given a number of interest rate options that vary according to maturity and currency. Dubai World’s surprise decision late last year to stop paying interest on its mountainous debt shocked world markets and was in some ways an early warning signal for the subsequent financing problems that now face indebted euro zone economies. Contagion was contained, however, when Abu Dhabi and regional banks stepped in to subscribe to a $20 billion bond issued by Dubai earlier this year. “The proposal puts the company on a sound financial footing and reflects the continued support of the government of Dubai and its lenders,” said Aidan Birkett, the head of Dubai World’s restructuring effort. “It offers the company the ability to maximize the value of its assets over the medium to long term.” The Dubai stock market, which had been falling along with global markets recently, rose about 1 percent on the news. The accord came after an announcement in March in which the government of Dubai agreed to convert debt into equity, pay $500 million in expenses and extend a $1 billion debt facility. The government paid out no additional sums as part of that agreement. Dubai World emphasized that the agreement was in principle only and required the support of the rest of the company’s creditors. The bank coordination committee represents about 60 percent of Dubai World’s total bank loans, according to the statement.

Dubai (United Arab Emirates)
Credit and Debt
Banks and Banking


Live From New York, It’s a Beat Michael Phelps

Abstract: The traders at the New York Stock Exchange went berserk on Tuesday over the hottest commodity at the Beijing Olympics, circling Michael Phelps like sharks. There was barely room to breathe on the floor as people pushed to get close to Phelps, who won a record eight gold medals and set seven world records. Phelps rang the opening bell, or at least that was the original plan. On the platform alongside his fellow United States Olympic swimming champions Ryan Lochte and Natalie Coughlin, Phelps was so tired that he was tottering, so Coughlin discreetly did the honors. “Michael was just kind of jet-lagged,” Coughlin said. On the floor, he was besieged by autograph seekers. One trader held up a magazine with Phelps on the cover for him to sign and said, “My wife wants to marry you.” When told that Phelps, who was in the middle of a television interview, would not be signing anything more, the trader said, indignantly, “Is his hand broken?” No, but his circadian rhythm was seriously messed up. Phelps wore an expensive watch on his left wrist, a superfluous accessory, like sunglasses on a rainy day. Time has become blurred beyond recognition since the Olympics when, of course, every hundredth of a second mattered immensely. In the 23 days since he collected his eighth gold medal, Phelps has lived up to the nickname bestowed upon him by the Chinese. He has been a flying fish, traveling everywhere, it seems, but Baltimore, the place he calls home. The hours have blended into days and the days into weeks, so that he might as well be telling time by one of those melting clocks in the Salvador Dali painting. From Beijing, Phelps traveled to London, site of the 2012 Olympics, to be the guest of honor at festivities coinciding with the closing ceremony in Beijing. After a two-day recreational side trip to Portugal, Phelps plunged into an itinerary only a pilot could love, traveling over the past 12 days from New York to Orlando to Chicago to San Francisco to Las Vegas to Los Angeles to New York. Phelps, who recently received a reported $1.6 million advance to write a book and will have his face on 10 million boxes of Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes starting later this month, landed in White Plains on Tuesday morning at 6 after an all-night flight. He was whisked to Manhattan, arriving a little before 8 at the stock exchange, where he was easy to pick out in the crowd. In a sea of designer suits, chromatic ties and polished wingtip shoes, Phelps was the one bobbing around wearing blue jeans, flip-flops, a button-down white cotton shirt, a wrinkled black jacket and a weary smile. Slipping out of an ornate boardroom toward the end of a breakfast, at which he and Coughlin and Lochte were being honored, Phelps sank into a leather couch and yawned. The day before, he had appeared on the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” in Los Angeles. The day before that, he attended the Video Music Awards at the Paramount Studios in Hollywood, hobnobbing with a crowd that included Britney Spears, who won an award for her video, “Piece of Me.” Everybody wanted a piece of Phelps at the V.M.A. after-party. His Octagon agent, Drew Johnson, said a receiving line quickly formed of entertainers wanting to shake Phelps’s hand. Phelps said: “I walked into the party, and I see Baron Davis and Demi Moore and we started up a conversation like it’s the most natural thing to do. It was actually pretty cool.” When does his schedule have him turning for home? “ “Ask him,” Phelps said, nodding toward Johnson, who has been Phelps’s shadow during this publicity tour. “Beats me. I’m ready to go home.” Home is where Phelps’s English bulldog, Herman, awaits. It also is where his favorite N.F.L. team, the Ravens, opened their season with a victory against the Cincinnati Bengals behind the strong play of a rookie quarterback, Joe Flacco, who is the same age as the 23-year-old Phelps. “I was getting game updates from one of my friends,” Phelps said, perking up a little. “He was telling me how good Flacco looked.” His schedule remains fluid, but he is due back in Baltimore on Sunday, after hosting this week’s season premiere of “ Saturday Night Live .” “I’m more excited than nervous,” said Phelps, who was hoping to squeeze in a three-hour nap before attending his first S.N.L. production meeting Tuesday afternoon. Sure, he killed in eight live appearances in Beijing, but Phelps’s friends seem unsure about whether he can deliver a winning performance in front of a live studio audience. They knew his earnestness played better in front of small audiences even before his wooden introduction of Lil Wayne at the Video Music Awards. “All my friends are like, ‘Yeah, you’re either going to kill it or you’re going to whiff it,’ ” Phelps told The Chicago Sun-Times last week. He was in Chicago to appear on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” with other United States Olympians. On Monday, between shaking hands, posing for photographs and signing autographs, Coughlin asked Phelps if he was nervous about his “Saturday Night Live” appearance. It is probably the second-most common question he has fielded this week, after “Where are your eight medals?” (The answer: in a secure location.) He told her he thought it would be fun, but Coughlin sounded unconvinced. “Are you sure you’re not nervous?” she said to him. “I’d be terrified.” Lochte, who is as silly in public as he swears Phelps is when around his inner circle, is one of Phelps’s biggest rivals and also one of his best friends on the United States swimming team. After the show is broadcast, he said, “I’m definitely going to call him and make fun of him.” Lochte, who won bronze medals in both individual medleys and was on the 4x200 freestyle relay with him, has heard one of the S.N.L. cast members will play him in a skit. “I bet it’s Andy Samberg,” Coughlin said. “I could see that. That would be good.” Coughlin came away from Beijing with six medals, including her second consecutive gold in the 100-meter backstroke, to become the most successful American female at a single Olympics. Everywhere Coughlin goes, people want to know more. They bombard her with the same questions: “What’s Michael like?” and “Does he really eat 12,000 calories a day?” It does not bother Coughlin one bit that people are not hungry to know more about her feat. “He deserves it,” she said. “He won eight gold medals.” She laughed and said, “I get it.”

Olympic Games (2008)
Phelps Michael
Swimming


As Vote Looms, Some in Guatemala Foresee More Frustration

Abstract: GUATEMALA CITY — Guatemalans united to force their powerful president to step down. But now, many who joined the demonstration movement worry that creating lasting change, and rewriting the rules of their fragile democracy, may prove even harder. As former President Otto Pérez Molina faced his second day in court with the prospect of a corruption trial, some protesters worried that the country’s compromised judiciary might not follow through. And they expressed concern that Guatemala’s entrenched political class, including the new interim president, will hold onto power as it has so many times before. Most immediately, many of the young and middle-class Guatemalans who flooded the central square here every weekend for months simmered with frustration that a presidential and congressional vote they see as inherently flawed would go ahead as scheduled on Sunday. Their demands for postponement were rejected by the national election tribunal, and that decision was supported by both the United States Embassy and the Organization of American States. And so, the candidates whom Guatemalans will have to choose from Sunday mostly emerged from the same political mire that produced a series of dysfunctional governments that failed in the basic tasks of providing services and security. Polls suggest that as many as 30 percent of the 7.5 million eligible voters will abstain or annul their votes. The argument is that protesting the election itself is the only way to force accountability from politicians. “There is a true and widespread desire for more changes,” said Eduardo Stein, a former vice president and political analyst here, who argues instead that only voting will tell politicians that citizens will be watching their actions. “People feel that the traditional political parties have kidnapped representation.” Image Mr. Pérez Molina, right, with Cesar Calderon, his lawyer, in court on Friday, the second day of a hearing examining Mr. Pérez Molina’s role in a multimillion-dollar customs fraud case. Credit Luis Soto/Associated Press Even in the moment of triumph, many of the activists say their fear is that the political classes would again find a way to hold on to their privilege. In that light, they see the call for a national discussion issued by the interim president, Alejandro Maldonado, a 79-year-old conservative politician, as a way to try to play for time even as the election moves ahead. “It’s clear that Otto Pérez Molina’s resignation and Alejandro Maldonado assuming the presidency were an escape valve for the 6 of September elections,” said Helen Mack, a respected human rights activist and security expert in Guatemala. Each of the leading candidates for the presidency have campaigned under one cloud or another. The front-runner for much of the campaign, Manuel Baldizón, a businessman and political boss from the northern jungle region of Petén, has a seemingly bottomless campaign chest. And there have long been questions about his links to the drug gangs that have operated freely near the Mexican border. His vice-presidential candidate, Edgar Barquín, a former central bank president, is charged in a money laundering case involving a financial operator for drug gangs. Mr. Baldizón, who pulled his party’s support for Mr. Pérez Molina only at the very last minute last week, has been running for the presidency since he lost four years ago, apparently immune to campaign spending limits. The same protesters who demanded Mr. Pérez Molina’s resignation reserved some of their disgust for Mr. Baldizón. “It’s not your turn,” they chanted, a reference to the fact that the past five presidents came in second place in the preceding election — a sign of how consistently the political class has recycled itself here. That disgust has left a television comedian with no political experience as the most viable challenger to Mr. Baldizón. Running on the slogan “Not Corrupt, Not a Thief,” Jimmy Morales bills himself as an independent. But his backing by a group of military veterans has raised concerns in a country still deeply scarred by a 36-year civil war marked by human rights atrocities by the security forces. And Mr. Morales has been ridiculed for having performed skits in blackface in the past. Video In a Guatemala City courtroom on Thursday, former President Otto Pérez Molina said he intends to “face up” to allegations. Meanwhile, his vice president, Alejandro Maldonado, was sworn in. Credit Credit Luis Soto/Associated Press Another candidate, Sandra Torres, is a former first lady who divorced her husband in 2011 in a failed attempt to skirt electoral rules that prevented relatives of presidents from running. She, too, has associations that offer little hope she would align herself with the anticorruption citizens’ movement, given that some of her close family members have been accused of embezzling public funds. None of the candidates is expected to win the needed 50 percent on Sunday and the election is expected to go to a second round on Oct. 25. For the next four months, then, the government is in the hands of Mr. Maldonado, who was vice president under Mr. Pérez Molina. He proclaimed that he would run a clean government. But as a judge on the constitutional court, he helped overturn the genocide conviction of the former dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt in the massacres of Mayan Indians in the worst periods of the civil war. It is that sort of reaction — the possible reversal of prosecutors’ efforts to bring Mr. Pérez Molina to account — that many Guatemalans fear could come next if popular pressure dissipates. The influence of powerful groups, from political party leaders who control vast unregulated donations to shady business owners who have been the counterparts to much of the government corruption, still weighs over many institutions here. In the past, they have used their influence to rig the selection of judges and harass prosecutors. With that in mind, many of the protesters say their movement must continue in order to give real reform a chance to take hold. Juan Luis Castro, 61, a carpenter who attended a small rally outside the electoral tribunal on Friday, said the events of the past few days were just the beginning, and that protests should continue to put pressure on politicians. “Hopefully we will choose a Congress with a conscience,” he said.

Guatemala
Otto Perez Molina
Alejandro Maldonado
Civil Unrest
Embezzlement
Guatemala
Corruption


At Augusta, Danny Lee Tries to Keep His Cool

Abstract: AUGUSTA, Ga. — The United States Amateur champion Danny Lee is the lone amateur among the three teenagers in the Masters field, but he said that would change right after the tournament when he turns pro next week. Rory McIlroy, 19, of Northern Ireland and Ryo Ishikawa, 17, of Japan already have turned professional. Golf equipment manufacturers who want Lee to endorse their golf clubs and/or golf balls have swarmed the engaging 19-year-old player with almost, but not quite, equal the ardor shown by legions of his teenage fans. For his part, Lee, who won the Johnnie Walker Classic earlier this year against a decent field in Thailand, has been enjoying his last fling as an amateur — sleeping in the Crow’s Nest above the Augusta National clubhouse reserved for amateur contestants and playing as much golf as he wants in the seven days since his arrival at the golf course he saw on television as a boy growing up in New Zealand. Lee has had his moments on the course. Playing with an Augusta member on Sunday, he eagled the par-five 15th hole, whipping a 245-yard second shot with a 3-wood within 18 feet of the hole. He has dealt nicely with the professionals and has been listening closely to the advice of his local caddie. But for all his on-course cool, Lee is intimidated by the large news media contingent on hand for the Masters. “I’m trying to think this is friends,” he told reporters Tuesday. “When I get nervous, I can’t really talk properly, because my nerves are breaking down and I’m having a stomachache, too. I’m serious. “I’m trying to relax and trying to calm myself every time, but I know as soon as I go outside the clubhouse and watch all of those crowds out there, I cannot get relaxed or like nice and calm like that. But I’m still working on it.” LOST IN TRANSLATION Padraig Harrington, attempting to win his third straight major championship, has been getting a lot of e-mail messages from fans rooting him on, and was most amused by one delivered in person by the British golfer Lee Westwood. Harrington said: “Yeah, I’ve been getting the text messages and the e-mails and the encouragement. I think the best one, I do have to bring it up, Lee Westwood said to me yesterday, ‘What’s all this about the Paddy Slam? Are you starting up wrestling?’ ” BIRDIES FLYING SOUTH The weather conditions at Augusta National were blustery with temperatures in the 40s. Several players, including Jim Furyk, wore ski caps during their practice rounds. Many spectators on the grounds donned gloves and ski parkas. Tiger Woods said he did not bother practicing. “I’m not going to go out there and play today because I’m really not going to learn a whole lot in conditions that we won’t see all week,” he said. The forecast is for warmer and less windy weather the rest of the week. “Today’s weather is pretty unusual for this area,” Woods said. Surveying a group of bundled reporters in sweaters and windbreakers, Woods said, “This looks like something from the British Open not something from the Masters.” BILL PENNINGTON RIGHTY, NOT LEFTY, TAKES TIGER Tiger Woods was asked how his recent friendly golf game with pitcher John Smoltz turned out, especially because Woods is recovering from knee surgery and Smoltz from shoulder surgery. Woods said Smoltz shot 72 or 73 at Woods’s home course, Isleworth, in Florida. Woods said the two had had some memorable games over the years, with a little wagering on the side. “I remember the time that I shot 63 and lost money,” Woods said. “He shot 66 that day. The guy can play.” BILL PENNINGTON SHARK NIGHTMARE No Australian has won the Masters. Geoff Ogilvy, a winner of the United States Open and a contender this week, recalled watching Greg Norman’s collapse at the 1996 Masters. Norman will play in his first Masters since 2002. “I was home in Melbourne and got up early to watch as I think most people did in Australia because we were excited,” Ogilvy said. “Obviously, it was pretty hard to watch once the coverage started. I don’t think anybody was comfortable that day, and it doesn’t matter whose side you were on. It was hard to watch.” Ogilvy, who was 18, said he went to his golf club afterward. “It was quiet,” he said. “It was a pretty down day in Australia. ” BILL PENNINGTON


Backers Stayed With Donald Trump as He Regained His Bearings

Abstract: MANCHESTER, N.H. — After losing the Iowa caucuses, Donald J. Trump acted like a heavyweight champion who had just been knocked down. He lurched from one event to another, sounding defiant one moment and humbled the next. He went uncharacteristically silent for most of a day on Twitter, and barely mentioned his polling numbers after months of bragging about them. But Mr. Trump’s convincing victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday finally validated those numbers and gave the irrepressible celebrity candidate the status his opponents long feared, as a bona fide leader in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Despite a stream of provocative and even offensive remarks by Mr. Trump right up to the night before the primary, comments that might have destroyed any other candidate, his supporters mostly appeared to have made up their minds months ago, and never wavered. “Wow, wow, wow,” he said as he took the stage at his victory party Tuesday night, his family alongside him. As supporters waved foam fingers reading “You’re hired!” and “Make America Great Again!,” Mr. Trump seemed to have recaptured his pre-Iowa bravado, virtually guaranteeing great trade deals and a military “so big, so strong and so powerful, nobody is going to mess with us.” After beating some of the Republican Party’s brightest stars in New Hampshire following a second-place finish in Iowa, Mr. Trump heads into a string of primaries in conservative Southern states in a position of strength. For a man used to setting the terms of whatever debate he is having, Mr. Trump’s win on Tuesday keeps him in the race for the foreseeable future and means he will go to the party’s convention in Cleveland in July armed with delegates. His win signals not just a potential shift in the way campaigns spread their message — social media over mainstream media; television shows rather than news conferences; big rallies instead of meet-and-greets — but also confirms the growing chasm between the Republican Party’s leaders and its voters. Mr. Trump has run hard on anxiety over terrorism and especially illegal immigration, and his calls for mass deportations and a “big, beautiful wall” at the Mexican border have shredded the party’s longstanding efforts to attract the growing Latino electorate. At Mr. Trump’s primary night party here, the mood was far more buoyant than it had been in Iowa the night of the caucuses. Video A selection of remarks from the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates on Tuesday after Donald J. Trump and Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary. Credit Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times “I like his view on three items — borders, language and culture,” said Andrew Horvit, 69, a retired businessman from Londonderry, who said he had supported Mr. Trump since he began his candidacy. “As time goes by it’s like a grandfather clock. When the pendulum swings too far to the left, and it’s way over to the left, it has to swing back to the center.” Mr. Trump’s win answered two key questions — whether he could actually win after projecting he would for months, and whether his supporters, who are not reliable voters, would turn out on Primary Day. His victory also came after the Republican establishment essentially averted its gaze for months, and after most of his rivals, with the exception of Jeb Bush, made little effort to take him on. If Mr. Trump has had a disorienting effect on the Republican primary campaign, his second-place finish in Iowa had a similar effect on him. He was frustrated by the loss, according to people who spoke with him, and could not fathom why things had not gone better. Suddenly, the core message of his campaign — I win at everything I do — was in doubt. For the next four days, he was largely absent from the campaign trail. On Twitter and in person he appeared uncertain at first about what to say. He sounded notes of humility that were supplanted quickly by firm insistence that he, not Senator Ted Cruz, had actually won the Iowa caucuses because of improprieties by Mr. Cruz’s staff. Mr. Trump canceled a town hall-style meeting in New Hampshire last week, claiming the airports were closed due to snow and that had kept him from traveling. They were not closed, but the additional day gave Mr. Trump more time to prepare for a crucial debate on Saturday night. He fared well, but it appeared to take something out of him and he conceded he had been under “a lot of pressure.” Image Donald J. Trump recorded a lopsided victory in the Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday. 1 / 13 The next day, he bypassed one of his campaign stops and sounded exhausted at a rally in Holderness, conflating his thoughts about improving the military with his vow to build a border wall. At one point he sounded annoyed by the length of the drive to Manchester. He did not attend a Super Bowl party, holing up in his hotel, tweeting. Mr. Trump, a man who has long relied on his feel for the room, seemed to realize after Iowa that his instincts were not a firm compass for the unfamiliar terrain of a presidential race. He even behaved more like the typical politicians he is so fond of berating. He hosted a few smaller events, replete with “I feel your pain” connections with voters who told him personal stories of heartbreak. The extra effort may have paid off. “Here he is, a multimillionaire,” said Ray Breslin, a retiree who went to Mr. Trump’s event in Londonderry on Monday. “He doesn’t have to take the time to be signing autographs and shaking hands, either. He could just zoom out of here. It’s only a little venue.” Mr. Trump, who has never thought much of the political profession, praised his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Tuesday night, saying, “We learned a lot about ground games in one week, I have to tell you that.” 2016 Delegate Count and Primary Results According to the Associated Press, Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton have each won enough delegates to claim their party’s nomination for president. It remains to be seen which version of Mr. Trump will emerge in the Southern states, where deeply conservative voters could decide the winners. Mr. Trump prefers the rally format visually and because it is easier for him to perform in. He has resisted calls from his advisers to invest more heavily in the race, boasting about his campaign being under budget based on figures he appears to pluck from the air. Mr. Trump barely invested resources in New Hampshire, spending only on advertising in January. And Mr. Trump will potentially face a thinned-out field of Republicans, in states that will once again test the strength of his campaign organization. “His lack of running a serious, professional campaign cost him even more potential voters than he lost in Iowa a week earlier,” said David Carney, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire who ran the 2012 presidential campaign of Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas. “With the crowd of candidates about to dramatically shrink his lack of investing in a campaign structure will cost him even more potential delegates down the road.” Mr. Trump will head to South Carolina on Wednesday, but he is not expected to linger, with stops expected in later-voting states like Florida. On Tuesday, he started airing a blistering ad against Mr. Cruz, whom he sees as his closest competitor in South Carolina, which votes on Feb. 20. In March, the race becomes a hodgepodge of primaries held in a short period, so Mr. Trump’s drive-by style of campaigning could compensate for any weaknesses on the ground. And his victory in New Hampshire could ease doubts about the strength of his candidacy, including those he himself was having. Mr. Trump had shown signs of reverting to form by Monday. Speaking in front of 5,000 people at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester, he goaded a woman who called out a vulgarism in reference to Mr. Cruz, and then he repeated the word from the stage. He also appeared at three smaller gatherings, including one where he stood in the center of the room in his overcoat, fielding mostly laudatory questions but some uncomfortable ones. One woman asked him if he would refund a contribution from a white nationalist. He said he would. When she pressed him, he replied, “Don’t be so angry.”

2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
New Hampshire
Primaries
Republicans


Russia Pins Comeback Hopes on Superjet 100

Abstract: LE BOURGET, France — Decades after being left in the contrails of its Western competitors, Russia is seeking to stage a comeback in the civil aircraft market with a new passenger plane. Sukhoi, a company far better known for its military fighters, introduced its first regional jet, the Superjet 100, at the Paris Air Show this week, making the most of the fact that none of the world’s leading commercial plane manufacturers had any new products flying before the crowds. If Sukhoi was disappointed that the Superjet’s coming-out party had been spoiled by the enduring global economic crisis, the company’s chief executive, Mikhail A. Pogosyan, was not showing it. As a sleek prototype of the 100-seat plane soared above the stands at Le Bourget airport, Mr. Pogosyan insisted that the clouds hanging over the aviation industry had a silver lining. “I like crisis,” a smiling Mr. Pogosyan told journalists this week. “I like working in a crisis time because those who are strong get stronger and those who are weak get weaker.” “By the end of the crisis, the Superjet 100 will be in operation and it will be a proven product,” he said. Sukhoi says it expects to deliver its first four Superjets to two customers, Aeroflot and an Armenian airline, Armavia, this year. Those planes are expected to enter commercial service in the first quarter of 2010. Sukhoi has ambitions far larger than its slim product line would suggest. The Superjet is its only commercial product. The company intends to sell about 1,000 of the planes, which list for about $30 million, in 15 to 20 years. Moreover, it expects to sell 70 percent of them outside Russia. “This is a worldwide aircraft,” Mr. Pogosyan said. “With the progress of the program, we can start to go west. Superjet is a product of global cooperation, so we expect that it has good potential.” Within 15 years, he said, Sukhoi hoped to claim 20 percent of the world market for jets in the 100-seat category. For the moment, orders for Superjets look decidedly less international. Of the 122 firm orders for the plane, 85 are from Russian customers, including one for 24 planes announced Tuesday by the jet leasing company AviaLeasing. With the Superjet, Sukhoi is trying to break into a market that is already dominated by Embraer of Brazil and Bombardier of Canada. Mitsubishi of Japan is also developing a 100-seater, as is the Chinese state-owned plane maker, AVIC. “I think they are overly ambitious to expect anything in the double digits in terms of market share,” said Doug McVitie, managing director of Arran Aerospace in Dinan, France. Bombardier and Embraer, he said, already have 60 percent of the market. Mitsubishi might eventually claim 20 percent, while “the Chinese and the Russians will fight over the rest,” Mr. McVitie said. Sukhoi will also be fighting for business in a shrinking market. In its latest long-term forecast, Boeing predicted that the world market for regional jets would slowly contract over the next 20 years, in part because economic and environmental concerns are pushing airlines into buying larger planes. In its annual outlook, Boeing also predicted that the regional jet market share would drop to 6 percent in 2028 from 16 percent in 2008. “They are entering into the worst market in aviation,” said Richard L. Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., referring to Sukhoi. “Regional jets are the only segment that went nowhere in the boom years of 2002-2008,” Mr. Aboulafia said. To win customers abroad, analysts said, Sukhoi must also overcome an image problem that plagues many Russian companies: that they often lack fast and reliable after-sale support for their products. “I don’t think there are words in Russian for ‘customer support,’ ” Mr. McVitie said. Mr. Pogosyan acknowledged the issue. “This is a problem that remains,” he said. But he pointed out that Alenia Aeronautica, a subsidiary of Finmeccanica of Italy, was an industrial partner in the Superjet project. Alenia has a strong international reputation and a long track record. For the Superjet, Sukhoi said it had designed a customer support network from scratch, relying extensively on third-party maintenance and service companies.

Paris Air Show
Airlines and Airplanes
Sukhoi
Russia


Senior Commander in South Yemen Is Assassinated

Abstract: LONDON — An important military commander in Yemen was assassinated on Monday in the southern port city of Aden just days after the Yemeni government announced a major military victory over Qaeda militants in the region. The commander, Maj. Gen. Salim Ali Qatn, was killed on his way to work Monday morning when a suicide bomber blew himself up in front of General Qatn’s vehicle, according to a statement by Yemen’s Defense Ministry. An earlier message by the ministry identified the suicide bomber as a Somali national. General Qatn’s driver and another man traveling with him were also killed. Al Qaeda and a local group it is linked to, Ansar al-Shariah, have a strong presence in Yemen’s south, where the population has for years felt marginalized by the national government in the north. Militants from Ansar al-Shariah took over large sections of territory in the southern provinces of Abyan and Shabwa over the past year, where they became the de facto government, at times ruling according to strict interpretations of Islamic law. In the past week, more than a year after Ansar al-Shariah took over the cities, the Yemeni government announced that government forces had liberated them after a successful military campaign. Details of the campaign and its effects remain murky, however. Though there have been many confirming reports that the militants were gone, some local residents say they left without a fight rather than being driven out or killed. The Yemeni military has also relied on help from so-called popular committees — armed residents deputized to fight militants. General Qatn was one of the first military appointments made by President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi in March, just after he took over the presidency. The general was named head of the southern command, replacing a divisive commander, Maj. Gen. Mahdi al-Magwala. General Qatn then initiated a crackdown on Qaeda militants in the south, though troop casualties have been heavy. In the worst attack, shortly after he was appointed, Qaeda militants struck at a military post just east of Aden, killing about 100 soldiers. In Aden, once a bustling port city, security has collapsed over the past year. There are neighborhoods where soldiers or police officers cannot enter without being attacked. In recent months, the black flag of Al Qaeda has been spotted in neighborhoods like Mansoura, where, according to local news media reports, General Qatn was killed.

Defense and Military Forces
Ansar al-Sharia
Al Qaeda
Yemen
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
Ansar al-Shariah


Around the World in Crates and Boxes

Abstract: Formula One is entering the final stretch of the longest season in its 62-year history, having run the last race of the European season on Sept. 9 at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza and arriving in Asia this weekend for the fifth annual Singapore Grand Prix. There remain seven of 20 races in what will not only be the longest but also the most gruelling season ever. For the first time in Formula One history, seven races will be staged in nine weeks, with a series of three so-called flyaways and races taking place one week apart instead of the usual two weeks. The final Grands Prix will be run in Asia, the Middle East and in North and South America. But while the first thing that comes to most fans’ mind might be the tiring job the drivers face during that period, the heroes behind the wheel laugh it off. “For a driver it’s not that difficult — only in the sense that you are more days outside your home and if you have a family it is tougher — but the real heroes here are the teams,” said Pedro de la Rosa, a driver at the HRT team. “Because a back-to- back for us means two weeks; but for the team — the mechanics, engineers — it means maybe one month. Or for some people even two months, because they stay in between and do two back-to-backs.” Indeed, for many of the team personnel there will be a period of almost continuous travel over two months, away from their families in Europe, living in hotels. “It will be very challenging physically for the mechanics,” said Monisha Kaltenborn, the chief executive and part owner of the Sauber team, which is based in Switzerland. “If you look at the current season, I think 20 races are, under the current structure that we have, the limit,” she added. “If you were to bring in more races, you would have to change a lot in how the team is set up.” The Sauber team’s logistics are typical of how the teams move from race to race and from continent to continent. While in Europe, where the teams are based, the teams handle their own transport in team trucks that crisscross the Continent. But for the other races, the 24 cars and all of the material from the 12 teams’ motor homes and garages are sent around the world in six jumbo jets, and in hundreds of sea crates. Beat Zehnder, the Sauber team manager, has been in charge of the team’s logistics for 20 years. He explained that there are five different shipments moving over the seas to cover all the races. In other words, for much of the less-important material such as the cooking utensils, chairs and tables and appliances and things that the team uses in the hospitality areas at a race, there are five different replicas that go around the world. After the race in Monza, the cars and computers and all the garage materials were packed up in crates by the mechanics, truck drivers and hospitality staff and sent back to the team’s base in Hinwil, Switzerland. Once there, the cars were worked on and disassembled and sent to Milan for transport on Sept. 13 to Singapore. In Singapore, the advance crew then began setting up the temporary paddock and the team garages on Monday Sept. 17, while another group arrived in Singapore on Wednesday. After Singapore, the materials will be flown to Japan for the race there on Oct. 7 and then on to South Korea for the Grand Prix there a week later. “It’s tougher this year because there are so many races,” Zehnder said. “The majority of our team after Singapore is staying in Asia. We go to Thailand, 75 percent of the team; we are going to a nice hotel there for a week of relaxation. It would not make sense for especially the first group of mechanics to go back to Switzerland, they would arrive Tuesday after Singapore and have to go out again on Saturday, spending just four days at home and traveling twice through the time zones.” The team goes from Thailand to Japan and then to South Korea and then back to Switzerland. For some drivers, nothing will have prepared them for so much travel and racing in their careers. “Never in my dreams,” said Jean-Éric Vergne, a rookie driver at the Toro Rosso team. “I trained a lot in the summer and I have a good group of people working behind me with my physio, basically like how you would speak to a kid: ‘Go to sleep, go to eat, eat this, don’t eat this, don’t do this, do this.’ And in the end it will make a big difference, I think, during such a period. So I’m pretty relaxed about it.” Speaking on the day before the Italian Grand Prix in Monza two weeks ago, Zehnder, the Sauber team manager, outlined his team’s logistical system: “On Sunday after the race, we pack up here and drive it home from Monza. The car is disassembled Monday and all the spare parts go into the sub-assembly shops and on Tuesday evening we start putting the car back together, and at the same time the truck drivers take care of the infrastructure that we have to unload and load again to the air freight containers — while the mechanics prepare the car for Singapore — and then unload all the equipment spare parts, tools from the trucks and put it in air freight containers that are specially designed. You have lower wing containers, main deck containers, main freight containers, that have special shape to fit perfectly into a 747. We travel with eight air freight containers; we have only one sea freight container per event, and we have five different sets of those, so the first is going to Singapore and then from there to Japan, so they have a special schedule. “Thursday afternoon at 12:00 our freight goes to Milan, Malpensa airport, where a jumbo airplane is waiting for us. There is roughly 30 tons of air freight material just for our team, and just the two cars. The freight is sent by a transportation company. And after Milan, the next time we see it, it is in Singapore in the pit lane. It goes via Formula One Cargo, a company of Bernie Ecclestone. It is vital for Formula One that we do not have problems at customs, because there are 30 tons for each team, and you have 12 teams, plus the F.I.A., F.O.M., they carry their communications center, which you see at the entrance, and it is vital that it all be perfectly organized. So once the six jumbos arrive in Singapore, you have a lot of trucks bringing it to the circuit and the next time you see it is in Singapore. “We have five equal sets of sea freight. One has already left in August to Singapore, the second to Japan, the third to Korea, the fourth to Delhi; then the one from Singapore goes straight to Abu Dhabi. So on top of the air freight you have five equal sets and you have to shuffle them around. Every time you arrive on the circuit you have sea freight ready. Sea freight is mainly catering equipment, office installations. So you always have the same kind of tables, the same fridges, the same ovens, the same television screens “We travel in staggered formation, so the first group of team members leaves Switzerland on Sunday and arrives in Singapore on Monday and they take care of the setting up of the garages, unloading the containers and setting up. And the next group leaves Switzerland on Tuesday and arrives on Wednesday morning, and since it is a night race, we only start working in the afternoon, unlike usually at 7 a.m. In Singapore, we start working at 3 p.m. “Setting up the garages takes about two days, you lay down many kilometers of cables because all the computers are linked to each other, the pit wall stand is linked to the office, to the garage office, then we have a link back home to the headquarters. “Then it carries on in that same way, after the race you pack up — it takes about six to eight hours after the race to pack up everything. And then it depends on how long it takes for the cars to return from Parc Ferme, and sometimes if there is a protest you have to wait a long time for the cars to be given back. “Then as a matter of routine you change parts, suspensions, gearboxes, whatever, and you have a planned exchange of freight containers. So we have freight boxes, which are smaller, and you send used parts or broken parts back after the race. And then in exchange a box with exactly the same amount of parts will be sent after Singapore to Japan; so there is a consistent exchange of parts. We normally pre-book freight space in commercial planes just in case you have to exchange a chassis, which is quite a big box, and sending big boxes without notice is not very welcome by commercial airplane companies. “Obviously, since we have seven races it is a little bit tougher than normal and a little bit more expensive, because you are sending boxes back and forwards. But once the main freight leaves Switzerland it is not going back until after São Paulo. Everything that is being sent on Thursday after Monza is going from Singapore to Japan to Korea to Delhi to Abu Dhabi — staying there for the young driver test — and then to Austin, then São Paulo. Finally, the expected return date in Switzerland is about 3 December. “The more difficult bit is what comes next: Delhi back-to-back with Abu Dhabi, we are there for the young drivers’ test, and then Austin and then São Paulo. For those who do the driver’s test, they are back in Switzerland on Friday afternoon and off on Sunday afternoon for Austin again. So this group of people, within 35 days from going to Delhi and returning from São Paulo, they have one day off. This is pretty tough. It’s going to be very tough, and I am pretty sure that at the time we arrive in Austin we will be pretty knackered. “And so it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of people involved, basically our whole race team, all the mechanics, the truck drivers, which is about 28 people involved in setting up, in packing and unpacking, plus the eight people in catering. There are 47 operational people traveling to the races, but that excludes marketing, press, catering, so in total here we are 67 people going to the races. Helping with preparation loading the freight it is about 30 people, about half the team at the race. And those are long working days, they are not turning up at 9 a.m. and leaving at 5 p.m. You are regularly turning up at 8 a.m. and leaving at 10 p.m. So it is going to be a very intense second half of the season. “The main thing is always: ‘Don’t forget anything at home.’ If you forget an essential part… On top of the normal freight, if you have development parts for the car, from time to time you have to send an extra person with hand luggage to the races because they are bringing new parts which makes the car a bit quicker or a bit better to drive, and so at the last minute sometimes you have more than one person coming with hand luggage with parts.


Mets Win in Ninth to Stay Undefeated

Abstract: The giddiness of unforeseen perfection will continue in Queens for at least another day. The Mets , who began subverting expectations with their season-opening sweep of the Atlanta Braves, stretched their undefeated streak to four games Monday night in bewitching fashion. After the Mets fought back from a three-run deficit, Daniel Murphy broke the tie with a run-scoring single in the bottom of the ninth to give them a 4-3 win over the Washington Nationals at Citi Field. The Mets’ flawless four-game start is their best opening run since 2007 and has affirmed for now what the team has been saying for months: we can play. “We know it’s a long year, and we know it’s four games,” Manager Terry Collins said. “But I think we want to show our fans, what we say, maybe there’s some truth to it, and that is we’re a better team than people give us credit for.” With the score tied at three in the ninth, tense murmurs among the crowd of 23,970 began slowly turning into thrilled cheers. Pinch-hitter Mike Baxter led off with a walk against Henry Rodriguez. Ruben Tejada then laid down a two-strike bunt that dribbled back to the mound. Rodriguez fielded the ball cleanly, but flung it into foul territory behind first base, initiating a wild sequence for Baxter on the basepath. Baxter first slid feet-first into second. Then, realizing the ball was loose, he got up and powered around third and charged toward home. But Tim Teufel, the third-base coach, saw Danny Espinosa with the ball and yelled for Baxter to stop. Baxter tried to stop, lost his footing, then got up, wheeled back and slid headfirst into third. “I tried it all out,” Baxter said, “all the different ways of stopping.” Collins, with a mischievous smile, said: “I’m not really sure I can tell you what I said in the dugout. When I saw him fall down, and I saw Espinosa pick the ball up, I said, ‘Oh, goodness.’ ” Then came Murphy, who had made a diving stop at second base to stanch a potential rally in the top of the ninth. He took one pitch from Rodriguez, then lined the next one smoothly into right field . Moments later, his teammates were on the field, jubilantly walloping his head and back. “Dan Murphy, what can I say?” Collins said. “It’s all out. Every minute of every game, it’s all out.” Amid the Mets’ joy, the reckoning of starter Mike Pelfrey, the strapping sinkerballer returning from a season of stark regression, will continue. The performance he produced against the Nationals was hopeful at times and uneven at others and, in the end, altogether inconclusive. He gave up three runs in five and two-thirds innings. He allowed 10 hits, many of them solidly struck. But he also struck out eight batters, matching a career high, and walked only one. After hearing boos as early as the third inning, Pelfrey walked off the mound in the sixth to a polite round of applause. In the first inning, Pelfrey gave up a run on three consecutive singles, earning himself an early chat with Dan Warthen, the Mets’ pitching coach. He gave up two more runs during a third inning in which he allowed two singles, a double, and a triple. “Definitely, early, I missed a lot of pitches over the plate, and we can’t do that,” Pelfrey said. “Stuff-wise, I thought it was good, and if I can take it out there every night, it’s going to be a good year.” Pelfrey settled down when he started to use his curveball. But he first turned the tide of opinion in his favor in the third with his bat and legs. He doubled to start the inning, tagged up to take third, and scored when David Wright lined a single to left off starter Edwin Jackson. The Mets evened the score in the next inning. Josh Thole walked on four pitches with two outs. Then Kirk Nieuwenhuis, playing in his third major league game, clanged a hanging slider off the Modell’s sign in right field — which was in play last year — and dropped it into the new seating area for a two-run homer. “This kid’s at the start of possibly a great major league career,” Collins said of Nieuwenhuis. “He’s got all the tools.” For now, the same could be said of the Mets, who once again received a comprehensive performance from all corners of their team. The Mets’ bullpen, as it has been throughout the team’s perfect start, was stellar, pitching three and a third shutout innings. The door was thus left open for late-game heroics, and the Mets rushed through. INSIDE PITCH Ike Davis, who went 0 for 4 and is 0 for 15 to start the season, is scheduled to have Tuesday night off against the left-hander Ross Detwiler because the Mets continue to be cautious about overexerting him. Davis was believed to have contracted valley fever, a fungal infection of the lungs, during the off-season, and though he had showed no obvious symptoms, Manager Terry Collins said he would rather play it safe and give Davis some days off now to have him fresh for the summer. ... In 121/3 innings this season, Mets relievers have allowed one run. ... The only reliever who had not made an appearance entering Monday was the right-hander Miguel Batista. But Batista pitched a third of an inning Monday and walked two.

New York Mets
Washington Nationals
Pelfrey Mike
Baseball


Research Ties Human Acts to Harmful Rates of Species Evolution

Abstract: Human actions are increasing the rate of evolutionary change in plants and animals in ways that may hurt their long-term prospects for survival, scientists are reporting. Hunting, commercial fishing and some conservation regulations, like minimum size limits on fish, may all work against species health. The idea that target species evolve in response to predation is not new. For example, researchers reported several years ago that after decades of heavy fishing, Atlantic cod had evolved to reproduce at younger ages and smaller sizes. The new findings are more sweeping. Based on an analysis of earlier studies of 29 species — mostly fish, but also a few animals and plants like bighorn sheep and ginseng — researchers from several Canadian and American universities found that rates of evolutionary change were three times higher in species subject to “harvest selection” than in other species. Writing in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say the data they analyzed suggested that size at reproductive maturity in the species under pressure had shrunk in 30 years or so by 20 percent, and that organisms were reaching reproductive age about 25 percent sooner. In Alberta, Canada, for example, where regulations limit hunters of bighorn sheep to large animals, average horn length and body mass have dropped, said Paul Paquet, a biologist at the University of Calgary who participated in the research. And as people collect ginseng in the wild, “the robustness and size of the plant is declining,” he said. The researchers said that reproducing at a younger age and smaller size allowed organisms to leave offspring before they were caught or killed. But some evidence suggests that they may not reproduce as well, said Chris Darimont, a postdoctoral fellow in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the work. The fish they studied that are reproducing earlier “on average have far, far, far fewer eggs than those who wait an additional year and grow a few more centimeters,” he said in an interview. Dr. Darimont said it was unknown whether traits would change back if harvesting were reduced, or how long that might take. The researchers also noted that the pattern of loss to human predation like hunting or harvesting is opposite to what occurs in nature or even in agriculture. Predators typically take “the newly born or the nearly dead,” Dr. Darimont said. For predators, targeting healthy adults can be dangerous, and some predator fish cannot even open their mouths wide enough to eat adult prey. Animals raised as livestock are typically slaughtered relatively young, he said, and farmers and breeders retain the most robust and fertile adults to grow their herds or flocks. But commercial fishing nets and other gear that comply with conservation regulations typically trap large fish while letting smaller ones escape. Trophy hunters typically seek out the largest animals. And for some fish in some areas, as much as 50, 60 or even 80 percent of the stock may be caught every year. “Targeting large, reproducing adults and taking so many of them in a population in a given year — that creates this ideal recipe for rapid trait change,” Dr. Darimont said. Some fisheries scientists have said their studies of fish stock had not shown a correlation between fishing intensity and growth rates. And some wildlife conservationists question the idea that hunting can have harmful effects on species. Dr. Paquet said that although he had confidence in the new findings, he knew there would be questions about the analytical methods he and his fellow researchers used. “That’s expected,” he said. “That’s how science proceeds.” He said he had anticipated that the work would be “contentious” among trophy hunters. “Essentially, we are saying, ‘You should not do this because it is having effects even you might not like,’ ” he said. Daniel Pauly, who directs the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia, said the new findings “make sense.” Though Dr. Pauly said he had not seen the new work, he recalled similar changes in black chin tilapia, fish that live in brackish water. He said in an interview that he had studied the fish more than 30 years ago, when he was a young graduate student doing field work in Ghana. After decades of heavy fishing, the size of the typical adult fish had shrunk to about 10 centimeters from about 15 centimeters. But at the time, he said, “I did not realize what was happening.” Some fisheries managers are already suggesting that conservation regulations should be changed to safeguard larger fish in protected species. “Lots of people argue for that because the big ones are so fecund,” Dr. Pauly said. But he said customers in fish markets typically prefer larger fish. And if fishers are not permitted to keep the big ones, they “must catch enormous quantities of fish to have a good tonnage.”


Ivory Coast: Rebels Claim Major City

Abstract: Forces loyal to the internationally recognized president claimed Monday to have seized a major city, Duekoue, near the Liberian border. There has been fighting in the area for several weeks, but the latest push could open the way for troops loyal to Alassane Ouattara to march south to the strategic port of San Pedro, or east to Yamoussoukro, the capital. Mr. Ouattara won the presidential election last year but the incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo , has refused to cede power.

Politics and Government
Ouattara Alassane D
Gbagbo Laurent
Ivory Coast


Italy: Guilty Verdicts in Rendition Case

Abstract: The country’s highest court upheld guilty verdicts on Tuesday against the three United States defendants in the 2003 extraordinary rendition kidnapping of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, who was taken from a Milan street to Egypt, where, he said, he was tortured. The decision ended the only prosecution to date against the Bush administration’s practice of abducting terror suspects and taking them to other countries. The three, among 26 Americans, mostly C.I.A. agents, who have been found guilty in absentia, had been acquitted in the original trial because of diplomatic immunity. The court last month acquitted Italy’s former heads of military intelligence and counterintelligence, as well as three Italian agents, after key testimony was ruled to be a state secret.

Italy
Kidnapping
CIA
Torture
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr
George W Bush


Rapes of Women Show Clash Between Old and New India

Abstract: GHAZIABAD, India — The young lovers met at a secluded spot next to a field of wheat at the edge of this sprawling suburb of New Delhi , where the timeless India of mustard fields and bullock carts abuts the frantically rising apartment towers of the budding middle class. They went seeking solitude, but instead found themselves at the violent cusp of old India and new. There, according to the police, five drunken young men from a nearby farming village accosted the couple last month, beating the young man and gang-raping the woman. It was the latest in a series of brutal sexual assaults and gang rapes of women in India’s booming capital and its sprawling suburbs. In each case there has been an explosive clash between the rapidly modernizing city and the embattled, conservative village culture upon which the capital increasingly encroaches. The victims are almost invariably young, educated working women who are enjoying freedom unknown even a decade ago. The accused are almost always young high school dropouts from surrounding villages, where women who work outside the home are often seen as lacking in virtue and therefore deserving of harassment and even rape . “If these girls roam around openly like this, then the boys will make mistakes,” the mother of two of those accused in the rape said in an interview, refusing to give her name. It is a deeply ingrained attitude that has made New Delhi, by almost any measure, the most dangerous large city in India for women. The rate of reported rape is nearly triple that of Mumbai , and 10 times as high as Kolkata, formerly Calcutta , according to government records. A survey completed last year by the government and several women’s rights groups found that 80 percent of women had faced verbal harassment in Delhi and that almost a third had been physically harassed by men. Nearly half the women surveyed reported being stalked, a statistic grimly illustrated earlier this month when a student at Delhi University was shot in broad daylight by a man the police suspect was stalking her. The attackers often do not see their actions as crimes, the police said, and do not expect the women they attack to report them. “They have no doubt that they will get away with it,” said H. G. S. Dhaliwal, a deputy police commissioner in New Delhi who has investigated several such cases. India’s economy is expected to grow 9 percent this year, and its extended boom has brought sweeping social change. The number of women in the workforce has roughly doubled in the past 15 years. Law enforcement officials say that the rate of violent crime against women has actually dropped in Delhi in the past four years, owing to more aggressive policing efforts, measures like women-only train cars and laws that require companies that employ women on late shifts to chauffeur them home. But a vast majority of crimes against women go unreported, the police and women’s activists say. The clash between the increasingly cosmopolitan city and its traditional surroundings is worsening, they say. “There is a lot of tension between the people who are traditional in their mind-set and the city that is changing so quickly,” said Ranjana Kumari, a leading women’s rights advocate. “Men are not used to seeing so many women in the country occupying public spaces.” In few places is that conflict as evident as here in Ghaziabad, which sits at the eastern edge of New Delhi, a metastasizing megacity. The farmland where the young couple met represents an invisible but indelible dividing line. There is no question to which side the young couple belonged. The man was an engineer at a high-tech company with a salary good enough to afford him a motorbike and a laptop computer. Their attackers lived in the village of Raispur, less than a mile from the tidy complex where the young man shared an apartment with his parents, but they belong to an altogether different India. None of them managed to graduate from high school. The narrow lanes of their sleepy village are redolent of cow dung; every home, it seems, has a few cattle or buffaloes, many of them living in pens within residents’ houses. Unlike the growing ranks of professional women in the city on their doorstep, the women of Raispur live hemmed-in lives, covering their faces with shawls in front of strangers and seldom roaming beyond the village. Seema Chowdhury, 20, the sister of one of the accused men, graduated from high school. But when she tried to enroll in college to become a teacher, her brothers refused to allow it. Young women who wander too far face many dangers, they argued. “I wanted to do something in my life,” she said. “But they thought it was not a good idea.” In comparison, the young woman who was raped here had unimaginable freedom. She had a job as an accountant at a garment factory and her own cellphone and e-mail account. Using those, she carried on a secret romance with a young man she met online despite the fact that her parents had arranged for her to be married to someone else, according to the police. Vijay Kumar Singh, a senior police official here who investigated the rape, said that on Feb. 5 a young man came into his police station to report that his cellphone and laptop had been stolen. When the young man claimed they had been snatched near some isolated farmland at the edge of the city, Mr. Singh became suspicious: it was an unlikely place for a robbery. He pressed for details, and eventually the young man admitted taking his girlfriend to the secluded area so they could be alone, and that five men had beaten him and raped her. Based on the description, the police quickly identified one attacker as a village tough named Tony from Raispur with whom the police had tangled before. When they picked up Tony, who goes by one name, he was still drunk, Mr. Singh said. “He was so shameless he narrated the whole thing without any sense of remorse,” he said. Tony later denied that he had raped the woman, according to the police report. Tony had apparently assumed that the rape victim would not come forward because the shame would be too great. Mr. Singh feared that he was right. “I realized from the beginning that the girl would not help us,” he said. The police arrested the five young men and charged them with rape and robbery. They tried repeatedly to get the young woman to come forward. The city’s police chief sent her an e-mail asking her to cooperate and offering to protect her identity. She sent a curt e-mail reply, the police said: “The police will not be able to restore my honor.” The police approached her father, and he urged her to cooperate, said Raghubir Lal, Ghaziabad’s police chief. But the next morning her brother found her trying to hang herself, Mr. Lal said. The police decided to stop pressing her to cooperate. Mr. Singh, the officer who first investigated the rape, said that with no physical evidence or victim’s testimony, the rape charge would not stand. The police and women’s advocates say that successful convictions are central to changing attitudes that tolerate sexual assault. A similar episode in Delhi in November had a very different ending. Men in a pickup abducted and gang-raped a woman who worked at an outsourcing center after a taxi dropped her and a roommate near their apartment. The roommate called the police, who found the young woman and took her to the hospital. She was eager to press charges, the police said. Investigators tracked down and arrested five men. DNA evidence was matched to them, the police said, all but ensuring convictions. Mr. Dhaliwal, the senior Delhi police official who investigated that rape case, estimated that only one in 10 rapes in the Delhi region were reported. “But this girl was very brave,” Mr. Dhaliwal said. “It is a very difficult thing in the Indian context, but you have to report it.”

Women and Girls
Rape
Sexual harassment
India


Swiss Ski Jumper Simon Ammann Wins Vancouver’s First Gold

Abstract: WHISTLER, British Columbia — The Harry Potter connection, like the series of books itself, is firmly part of the past for Simon Ammann . The parallels were irresistible in 2002 at the Salt Lake Olympics, with his round-rimmed glasses, his boyish features and his agility in midair (no broomstick required). He won, in seemingly magical fashion, two gold medals in ski jumping as a 20-year-old who had never finished first in so much as a World Cup competition. But there was nothing sorcerous about the gold medal that Ammann won on Saturday. It was also the first gold medal of these Games. Ammann struggled in the years after his Salt Lake breakthrough, but he has been in a fine place for most of the last three years. He arrived in Vancouver as the leader of the World Cup and the winner of five events this season. In the first of two rounds Saturday, he recorded the longest jump and highest score with a leap of 105 meters. He then waited in a light rain with mist overhead and his well-established rivals — Gregor Schlierenzauer of Austria and Adam Malysz of Poland — applying pressure. “Any gold medal is so important, and the task is not getting easier,” Ammann said. “Because you get a big backpack with memories you have to carry with you along the way and, in the right moments, focus so clearly just on the technique and make it so smooth and powerful. “The spectators have just the idea that he just stood up, came on the hill and came, saw and conquered the hill,” he continued with a laugh. “It’s not like that. You have a lot of thoughts ahead of the jump, but the experience from eight years ago of course helped me to have a clear mind.” After everyone but Ammann had finished jumping and the sometimes-confused crowd of Canadians had finally begun to figure out some of the intricacies and applause points of ski jumping, he launched himself down the runway and once more into the air. When one watches a ski jumper on television, it looks as if he is far above the snow, but he is, in fact, never more than a few meters away from terra firma. The wonder comes not from sensing the danger but from seeing these athletes extend their flight beyond reasonable expectation. And when Amman stopped floating, he had the longest jump of the final round — a hill record of 108 meters and a combined score of 276.5 points, with Malysz in second with 269.5 and Schlierenzauer in third with 268. Ammann was soon embracing his coach, Martin Künzle, in the finish area, and there was much to celebrate. With three individual gold medals, Ammann has more than any ski jumper except Matti Nykanen, the hard-living Finn who swept the normal hill and large hill in 1984 and 1988 before injuries and self-destructive habits brought him back to earth for good. Ammann said his pre-jump thoughts turned to the Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, who died during a training run on Friday in Whistler. “The tragedy of yesterday, this gave me some other sorts of ideas to contemplate,” Ammann said. “Life often times turns out to be different than what you hope for. So this is why I wanted to cherish the moment.”

Olympic Games (2010)
Ski Jumping
Ammann Simon
Schlierenzauer Gregor
Nykanen Matti
Whistler (British Columbia)