French Strikes Disrupt Air and Rail Travel

Abstract: PARIS — In the latest expression of discontent over government austerity moves across Europe , French transport and energy workers, teachers and civil servants took to the streets on Tuesday to protest plans to reform the country’s pension system — the third such strike here in just over a month. The strikes in France follow waves of social unrest across the region in recent months, with protesters in Spain , Belgium , Greece and Ireland voicing their anger as governments seek to rein in exploding deficits that threaten to undermine their sovereign credit ratings, exacerbating national budget woes. Union officials claimed a nationwide turnout of more than 3.5 million people, an increase of 20 percent from the previous strike on Sept. 23, while the French interior ministry put the figure closer to 1.23 million, up from just under a million in the last strike. In Paris , the police counted 89,000 protesters, up from 75,000 previously. “The protest is not weakening, but we can’t be sure it will grow,” Éric Woerth, the labor minister who has spearheaded the new measures, told France 3 television. “The government’s determination is total.” Several labor groups — including those representing the national rail and Paris public transport workers — voted Tuesday to extend their walkouts through Wednesday, and unions have also called for another day of demonstrations on Saturday, so the ultimate effects of the strikes remain unclear. But analysts remained skeptical that rolling strikes would secure anything more than superficial changes to the proposed changes, which President Nicolas Sarkozy has made a cornerstone of his fiscal policy. “Everyone admits that things can’t continue like this,” said François Vergne, a labor lawyer in the Paris office of the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. “Other countries have adapted their laws and there is a resigned consensus that retirement at 60 is no longer sustainable.” Late Monday, the upper house of the legislature voted to raise the age of retirement with a full pension to 67 from 65, having already agreed to increase the minimum legal retirement age to 62 from 60. Senators from the opposition Socialist Party still hope to slow full adoption of the package through amendments. Last month the lower house voted to raise the minimum pension age to 62. Tourists visiting Paris on Tuesday found many of the city’s monuments and museums shuttered for at least part of the day, including the Eiffel Tower, the Cathedral of Nôtre-Dame and the Musée d’Orsay. Several sites were not expected to re-open until Wednesday. According to the national train operator S.N.C.F., intercity trains to Paris were running at only one-third of normal frequency, while rural services were more seriously disrupted. Just over 40 percent of rail workers took part, up marginally from the 37 percent who walked off the job during the last strike, on Sept. 23, the S.N.C.F. said. The service was normal on the Eurostar trains to London , and trains to Belgium and Germany were running at two-thirds of normal schedules. The R.E.R. commuter trains into Paris were running at under 50 percent, while there were also disruptions on the Paris subway and bus system. Airports also reported significant disruption to flights as air traffic controllers and Air France staff joined the walkout. At Roissy Charles de Gaulle and Beauvais airports, 30 percent of flights were canceled, and about 50 percent at Orly. A vast majority of intercontinental flights were maintained as scheduled, however. Unions at ports, refineries, the chemical industry and those representing civil servants, postal and communication workers and education also took part. The marches across the country were largely peaceful. However, in the northern city of Caen, news reports said riot police officers had fired tear gas at protesters who had gathered to lob eggs, tomatoes and firecrackers at the local headquarters of the national business lobby, Medef. Garbage cans were also set ablaze. While some of the more radical unions have urged unlimited general strikes, leaders of the main trades councils have sought to avoid the kind of prolonged action that has backfired with the public in the past. François Chérèque, secretary general of the Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens, has stressed that he has not called for general strikes, leaving it instead to workers to vote day-to-day at the union chapter level. The go-softly approach appears to have bolstered public sympathy for the strikers. According to a poll conducted Monday by the IFOP polling institute and published Tuesday in France Soir, 53 percent of French surveyed said they “trusted the unions,” up sharply from 43 percent in a similar survey conducted in June. Forty-seven percent polled said they “did not trust trade unions,” down from 57 percent in June. The survey was conducted on Oct. 8 and 9, with 955 people aged 18 and over contacted by telephone. “People have internalized the idea that pension reforms are necessary,” said Frédéric Dabi, director of opinion research at IFOP. “But there is clearly still the idea that the unions can help sway the balance.” Faced with widespread anger, Mr. Sarkozy has offered some concessions — for example, last week he proposed softening the rules for women in their 50s who had earlier halted work to bring up at least three children, allowing them to receive full pensions at 65. The government said this would cost about $4.8 billion and would be financed by higher capital gains tax on property sales. Unions have described the offer as insufficient and had hoped that the fresh action this week would force the government back to the bargaining table. The French media have portrayed the current showdown over pension reform as a defining moment for Mr. Sarkozy that could decide his fate in presidential elections in 2012. Le Monde this week described it as a turning point. “Failure will sink him,” the newspaper wrote. But some observers said that could be said of the country’s labor movement. While France’s trade union leaders did manage to extract some “face-saving alterations” to the reform, the core aspect — pushing back the retirement age by two years — will probably not be affected by the protests, said Paul Vallet, a professor of history and political science at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris. “In the end, even if people are marching, there is a broad resignation that this is going to happen anyway,” Mr. Vallet said. The same could be seen in recent protests elsewhere on the Continent: When Spanish union leaders called for coordinated demonstrations throughout Europe at the end of last month, the result was little more than scattered unrest and protest. Mr. Vallet argued that the French unions and the main opposition parties had erred strategically in seeking to turning the debate over pension reform into a mandate on Mr. Sarkozy’s presidency. “Everyone’s sense of priorities in this confrontation have gotten dangerously mixed up and short-sighted,” Mr. Vallet said. “The risk for the unions after this is that they will be viewed as even more ineffective.” In five years’ time, he said, France will still be faced with a significant budget deficit that will require further reforms to pensions and other social programs. By then, “the unions are probably going to be even less influential in shaping those new reforms, and people are going to be less convinced that the unions have any relevance on this issue.” At 7.7 percent, the rate of trade union membership in France is second-lowest in the 30-member O.E.C.D., just above Turkey at 5.8 percent and well below the United States at 11.9 percent. But among public-sector employees — including transport workers and civil servants like teachers — the unions hold greater sway, with a membership more than twice as high. “It is a paradoxical situation,” said Mr. Vergne, the labor lawyer. “It is a very small number, but this has been the case for a long time.” Yet he was hesitant to say that France’s labor movement was in permanent decline. “The power relationship is being modified,” Mr. Vergne said. “We are in a period of transition.” The pension reform debate, he noted, has managed to stir France’s youth — even some who are too young to vote. On Tuesday, organizers said several thousand high-school and university students formed a procession on the Rue de Rennes in Paris, one of the largest youth turnouts so far. A national union of high school students said there were protests at roughly 400 campuses across the country, about 10 percent of the total. “The entry of young people into the debate is interesting and significant,” Mr. Vergne said, though he conceded that it was too early to say whether high school students would remain politically engaged over the longer term. “It is hard to know,” he said. “Protesting is kind of a national sport in France.”

France
Strikes Labor
Public Transit
Retirement


Return of Islamic College Raises New Questions

Abstract: The American Islamic College, closed since 2004 when the state revoked its operating authority, is expected early next month to win approval to reopen. Supporters see the opening of the Chicago college, founded in 1981 in the Lakeview neighborhood, as an important step for Islamic instruction in the United States. But its detractors point to the college’s ties to a secretive and far-reaching international movement that has been accused of Islamism in some countries and of an overuse of non-immigrant work visas to hire foreign teachers in its schools in the United States. The movement, led by Fetullah Gulen, a Turkish religious leader living in self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania, supports scores of charter schools that have gained a reputation for academic achievement and a commitment to spreading Turkish language and culture. Yet the Gulen schools have caused widespread concern about possible manipulation of immigration laws and misallocation of taxpayer dollars. Mr. Gulen, an extremely wealthy and well-connected Turkish spiritual and political leader, fled Turkey amid charges of plotting to overthrow the secular government. He was acquitted of all charges in 2006. The college would become the second Islamic educational institution in the country to offer college-level credit. For Muslims in the area, it would be a rejoinder to those who depict followers of Islam as prone to extremism. “It looks like a resurrection of the college, which is great,” said Zaher Sahloul, head of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. “It’s very important to have an institution of higher learning run by the Muslim community.” Top officials at American Islamic College have been linked to Mr. Gulen’s movement. In a cable obtained by Wikileaks, the United States’ former ambassador to Turkey characterized the Gulen movement as a potentially destabilizing influence in Turkey that more secular Turks see as an effort to bring about an Islamic state. The Gulen movement, called Hizmet (a Turkish word meaning “service”), promotes public service and education and oversees research institutes, universities, media outlets and one of Turkey’s largest banks. The movement seeks to spread Gulen’s influence internationally through an informal network of 1,000 schools in 130 countries. Hizmet operates more than 120 publicly financed charter schools in 25 states, in addition to a handful of private schools, like the Science Academy of Chicago, run by Niagara Educational Services, a Mount Prospect firm associated with the Gulen movement. Like many of the movement’s American schools, the Science Academy focuses on math and science. Administrators of the schools often deny any official connection to the movement, which has no formal organization or official membership but operates through a network of followers, according to Hakan Yavuz, a political science professor at the University of Utah and co-editor of a 2003 book on the organization. “It’s safe to assume that A.I.C. will be influenced by the Gulen movement,” mainly through the selection of the college’s instructors and administrative staff, Mr. Yavuz said. “It makes sense for them to hire people from the Gulen community,” he said, “as they have much more knowledge and experience in the American education system.” According to recent news reports , the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Departments of Labor and Education are investigating accusations that as many as 100 of the movement’s American schools have used taxpayer money to pay for the immigration of teachers’ families from Turkey and provide other financial support for the Gulen movement. Federal officials declined to comment. Ali Yurtsever, head of the executive committee setting up the American Islamic College, denied any connection with Gulen. The school will have to generate its own income, unlike Gulen schools in the United States that are supported by the movement, he said. Mr. Yurtsever has long been a follower of Mr. Gulen and serves as administrator of Niagara Educational Services. He previously was president of the Gulen-backed Rumi Forum, a Washington research institute whose honorary president is Mr. Gulen. Attempts to contact Mr. Gulen through his Web site and through Mr. Yurtsever were unsuccessful. School officials say the college will present what Mr. Gulen has long stood for: a more moderate form of Islam than the extremist version that has often dominated public debate in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. The school plans to offer more than a dozen courses in the fall and hopes to attract up to 400 local and international students in the next few years. The college was established 30 years ago by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a Saudi Arabia-based association of more than 50 predominantly Muslim countries. In 2004, the Illinois Board of Higher Education revoked its operating authority, citing a failure to comply with state regulations. Now, after spending $500,000 from the Islamic Conference to renovate its library, dorms, mosque, and 1,000-seat auditorium, the college is reopening under new management. It is led by Mr. Yurtsever, a mathematician with a Ph.D. from Ege University in Turkey who taught at Georgetown University. College officials expect to receive authority to offer for-credit courses from the Illinois Board of Higher Education on June 7. The college has applied for full accreditation, which would allow it to confer four-year degrees. Mr. Gulen, 70, has lived in the United States since 1999, when he left Turkey. In a widely circulated video from that time, he advised his followers to “move within the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers.” In the United States, Gulen schools often import Turkish teachers using H-1B visas, which allow American employers to temporarily hire foreign workers in specialty jobs. The federal government places a strict limit on the number of H1-B visas it issues, and corporations often complain the cap restrains their ability to transfer highly qualified workers from foreign countries. Yet Gulen-backed schools received 839 H-1B visas in 2010, a 65 percent increase from 2007, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Teachers unions and education reform groups in several states have spoken out against the spike in foreign-born teachers at Gulen schools. “There is no reason to bring teachers in from other countries under the guise of lack of staffing,” said Jenni White, president of Restore Oklahoma Public Education. Mr. Yavuz, the political scientist, said he did not see the movement as a danger, “but I don’t see it as productive. “ “I think their main goal is to improve the image of Islam in the U.S.,” he said, “but even there, I don’t know if they can be successful.”

Gulen Fetullah
Muslims and Islam
Colleges and Universities
Education
Chicago (Ill)
American Islamic College


Sheldon Silver Trial Can Include Clinic Move, Federal Judge Says

Abstract: A federal judge ruled on Friday that prosecutors may introduce evidence at the trial of Sheldon Silver, the former speaker of the New York State Assembly, showing he took official action on behalf of a real estate developer to block a methadone clinic from relocating near one of its buildings in Lower Manhattan. The government has charged that Mr. Silver, whose corruption trial is scheduled to begin on Nov. 2, had an undisclosed interest in helping the developer, Glenwood Management. Prosecutors say Mr. Silver was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal payments disguised as referral fees from a law firm to which he had directed some of Glenwood’s legal business. Mr. Silver, 71, a Democrat from the Lower East Side, has pleaded not guilty to charges that include honest services fraud and extortion under color of official right. Image Sheldon Silver Credit Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times The government has accused him of collecting nearly $4 million in illegal payments through two law firms, including the one that received Glenwood’s business. The episode involving the clinic, which ultimately did not relocate near Glenwood’s building, was one of several pieces of evidence not included in the indictment against Mr. Silver that prosecutors had asked Judge Valerie E. Caproni of Federal District Court to allow them to present at trial. Lawyers for Mr. Silver, who remains an assemblyman but was forced to step down as speaker after his arrest in January, have argued that his actions against the clinic’s move were traditional constituent service — local business owners and residents strongly opposed the move. But prosecutors said Mr. Silver wanted to help Glenwood, intervening with the relevant state agency and later taking credit for doing so. “The charge is that he invoked his official position as the opportunities arose,” James McDonald, a prosecutor, told the judge, adding that this was an opportunity to help Glenwood. Judge Caproni, in ruling the evidence admissible, said the defense could argue Mr. Silver was engaged in constituent service. But ultimately, she added, “it’s up to the jury.”

Sheldon Silver
Glenwood Management
Bribery and Kickbacks
New York


WORLD BUSINESS BRIEFING: Japan: Business Sentiment Index Falls

Abstract: Sentiment among Japan’s small and midsize companies, especially in housing, fell to its lowest level in nearly three years in December, a government-affiliated lender said. An index that measures the percentage of companies predicting sales improvement in three months minus those predicting decline fell to 6.4 in December from 8.9 in November, the lender, the Japan Finance Corporation for Small and Medium Enterprise, said.


Mayor’s Aide Pushes Hard for Kennedy

Abstract: When a powerful labor leader picked up the phone this week, he was surprised to hear the voice of a top aide to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. The aide, Kevin Sheekey, a deputy mayor, made it clear: Caroline Kennedy is going to be the next senator from New York, “so get on board now,” according to a person with direct knowledge of the call. As Ms. Kennedy’s unusual campaign for the seat takes shape, the mayor’s top political strategist is pushing hard behind the scenes for her, with Mr. Bloomberg’s blessing. The involvement has helped immediately elevate and coordinate the debut of Ms. Kennedy, who lacked an experienced political staff of her own. But now, it is setting off a backlash among some Democrats who see in her well-orchestrated emergence the same message of inevitability and entitlement that surrounded Mr. Bloomberg’s successful bid for a third term — a campaign overseen by Mr. Sheekey. They worry that the Bloomberg administration’s advocacy for Ms. Kennedy will only reinforce her image as a privileged Upper East Sider whose biggest base of support is from Manhattan’s exclusive social set. “It appears to be another case of central casting by the city’s cognoscenti,” said a Democratic city councilman, John C. Liu. “It’s amazing how much it’s all about the upper crust.” Rory I. Lancman, a state assemblyman, said that there was “a growing concern that high public office is being reserved for a better class of people — people who can buy into it like Michael Bloomberg or people who can come into it through their celebrity like Caroline Kennedy.” Ms. Kennedy embarked on a tour of upstate and western New York on Wednesday in an effort to overcome skepticism about her inexperience. She was scheduled to meet with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Thursday morning in Harlem. Questions about Mr. Sheekey’s role prompted Mr. Bloomberg to declare on Wednesday that the mastermind of his two political campaigns was acting on behalf of Ms. Kennedy as a private citizen, not as a public employee. “If Kevin in his private time wants to make calls for that, that’s his choice,” Mr. Bloomberg said. When asked whether he was supporting Ms. Kennedy’s bid for the Senate, the mayor said: “I am not out there campaigning for anyone.” Mr. Sheekey declined to be interviewed. But even as he says he is not taking sides and praises other contenders, Mr. Bloomberg and his aides have given Ms. Kennedy glowing reviews. “I have great admiration for her,” Mr. Bloomberg said Wednesday. (Last week, the mayor said that Ms. Kennedy “can do anything.”) Ms. Kennedy’s ties to the Bloomberg administration run deep. As chief fund-raiser for the city’s public schools — like Mr. Bloomberg, she is personally wealthy and accepts a $1 salary — she worked closely with the chancellor, Joel I. Klein, whose wife is a close friend of Ms. Kennedy’s from Harvard. Since Ms. Kennedy disclosed her interest in the Senate seat, Mr. Klein has become a prominent cheerleader, praising her ability to build coalitions and declaring that she “has a broad spectrum of support.” Ms. Kennedy, who lives on Park Avenue, around the corner from Mr. Bloomberg, has also grown close to the mayor through the city’s charity and dinner party circuits. However, her biggest ally in the administration appears to be Mr. Sheekey, the mayor’s political maestro. Mr. Sheekey has become a trusted friend and adviser to Ms. Kennedy. Mr. Sheekey, a 42-year-old native of Washington who worked for Mr. Bloomberg’s private company, has earned the trust of the Kennedy family through his work on behalf of California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose wife, Maria Shriver, is Ms. Kennedy’s cousin. After Mr. Bloomberg won re-election in 2005, Ms. Shriver called Mr. Sheekey to praise his work, and asked him to run her husband’s next campaign. Mr. Sheekey declined to leave Mr. Bloomberg’s side, but served as an informal political adviser to the governor. As Ms. Kennedy considered whether to seek Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s seat in recent weeks, she and Mr. Sheekey discussed the possibility. Mr. Sheekey had a hand in bringing together Ms. Kennedy and Josh Isay, a well-connected consultant who will have a central role in Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election campaign. Mr. Bloomberg is one of Mr. Isay’s biggest clients, and Mr. Sheekey gave Mr. Isay “the green light” to take Ms. Kennedy on as a client, according to a Democrat who has spoken to Mr. Sheekey. Mr. Isay said he would not discuss how Ms. Kennedy became a client, and said he did not seek permission from Mr. Sheekey to work with her. Separately, at a meeting this week, Mr. Sheekey described his role in helping organize the campaign-style swing Ms. Kennedy made on Wednesday through upstate New York, according to a person who attended the meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the Bloomberg administration. “Sheekey’s up to his eyeballs in this,” said the person. Lawrence O’Donnell, who worked with Mr. Sheekey in the office of the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan in the early 1990s, said that in telephone conversations, he and Mr. Sheekey discussed which party strategists were best positioned to help arrange Ms. Kennedy’s debut political tour. “Kevin said to me, ‘What do you think she needs to do?’ ” he said. Mr. O’Donnell added: “I was just throwing out ideas about what she needed to do in order to pursue the seat. I had the sense that Kevin would let Caroline know that.” Mr. Sheekey’s enthusiasm for Ms. Kennedy was apparent when he bumped into Jack Kittle, political director of the painters’ union. “He said I should support a fellow Irishman,” Mr. Kittle said. The decision of Mr. Sheekey, who has also been engaging in give-and-take with reporters about Ms. Kennedy’s bid, to devote time to her effort has raised eyebrows among city lawmakers, who are confronting a budget shortfall. As deputy mayor for intergovernmental relations, Mr. Sheekey is responsible for working with legislators in Washington and Albany to protect the city’s interests. Gov. David A. Paterson, in his spending plan this week, proposed cuts of $1 billion to the city, potentially forcing layoffs. “With everything that is going on, with the budget, the M.T.A. mess, I can’t imagine there is a lot of free time on anyone schedule,” said Mr. Liu, the Council member. Still, some city lawmakers see a potential alliance between the Bloomberg administration and Ms. Kennedy as smart strategy. “It’s important that the next senator is someone who has a close relationship with the city government,” said David Yassky, a city councilman.

Schlossberg Caroline Kennedy
Senate
Sheekey Kevin
Politics and Government


Bloomberg’s Soda Plan and His Company’s Policy Differ

Abstract: Bloomberg L.P. , the media and financial information company founded by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg , has one perk its employees almost universally love: free snacks. At the sixth-floor pantry in its glossy Upper East Side headquarters, employees can pick from a health-conscious menu of celery sticks, bananas, freshly made peanut butter and 100-calorie snack packs. There is also free Coke, Pepsi, orange Fanta, ginger ale and Mountain Dew — exactly the types of drinks Mr. Bloomberg this week said he wanted to prohibit poor New Yorkers from buying with their food stamps. “We have all the junk in the world up there,” a Bloomberg employee, who declined to be named for fear of upsetting the company, said during an interview outside the offices at 731 Lexington Avenue. “I mean, you can gain 15 pounds in a hurry.” It is hardly the first time that Mr. Bloomberg’s policies as New York City’s health mayor have come into conflict with his personal eating habits, or, in this case, nutritional options at a place he is closely associated with. He is known for negotiating voluntary reductions in salt by food companies, and putting salt on his own saltine crackers; for fighting rising obesity among his constituents, and for serving comfort food like grilled hot dogs and ice cream sundaes at his town house. At a news conference on Thursday where he announced that he was requesting federal permission for a two-year ban on the use of food stamps for sugared drinks, Mr. Bloomberg talked about the “enormous correlation” between those drinks and obesity and diabetes, and asserted that taxpayers did not want to subsidize bad nutrition. Then the mayor answered “Yes” when asked if he allowed soft drinks to be served at Gracie Mansion, where he holds events but does not live. But wait, Mr. Bloomberg and his aides said, this was not a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” His gustatory practices have evolved. At Gracie Mansion, sugary soda is now kept behind the bar. “We have it available if somebody asks,” Mr. Bloomberg said Thursday. Since last summer, moved by a city advertising campaign that showed soda turning into gobs of fat, Mr. Bloomberg ordered that sugar-sweetened beverages be removed from the refrigerator in the City Hall bullpen, where the mayor and his top aides sit. “Of course, people can bring in whatever beverage they want,” Stu Loeser, the mayor’s spokesman, said Friday in an e-mail. Is serving free Coke at Bloomberg L.P. a trifle hypocritical on the mayor’s part? “He isn’t involved in the day-to-day operations of the company he started 29 years ago, and that includes picking out the food in the pantries,” Mr. Loeser said Friday. A spokesman for the company, whose majority owner is still Mr. Bloomberg, declined to comment. To commemorate the bullpen refrigerator ban, Mr. Loeser saved the last (unopened) Snapple. R.I.P., Mango Madness .

Bloomberg Michael R
Soft Drinks
Food Stamps
Bloomberg LP
New York City
Diet and Nutrition


Lawrenceville: Alcohol Ban at Frat Parties

Abstract: In response to the death in March of a freshman who was binge drinking, Rider University said yesterday that it would take steps to curb campus drinking, including banning alcohol at fraternity parties. The freshman, Gary DeVercelly, 18, of Long Beach, Calif., had a blood alcohol content of .426 when he died after a night of drinking at the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity house. In April, the university appointed a task force of faculty and staff members and students to come up with ways to address drinking on campus. The group’s recommendations, issued yesterday, include prohibiting alcohol at all social events in residence halls or fraternity houses. Sororities did not allow alcohol at parties even before Mr. DeVercelly’s death. The recommendations will go into full effect this fall. Students over 21 would still be allowed to drink alcohol in their rooms.

Fraternities and Sororities
Alcoholic Beverages
New Jersey


In Standoff Over Assange, Ecuadoreans Close Ranks

Abstract: GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador — Juan José Illingworth has English bona fides that are hard to beat. He is the sixth-generation namesake of an Englishman who became one of Ecuador’s national heroes, fighting for independence from Spain, helping to lead the young nation, founding its naval academy and drafting the law that freed the country’s slaves. But for all of Mr. Illingworth’s keen appreciation of his family’s ties to the old sod, when the British authorities threatened last month to enter Ecuador’s embassy in London to seize the asylum-seeking founder of WikiLeaks , Julian Assange , his sentiments went decidedly against Mother England. “I’ve always believed that an embassy is a bulwark of protection,” said Mr. Illingworth, a software executive and a former legislator. “England cannot violate that.” Bear in mind, Mr. Illingworth is no fan of Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa , who made the decision to grant asylum to Mr. Assange. And like others here, he sees political motives behind the move. Mr. Correa certainly has a predilection for grand public stances that portray him as fearless and defiant, whether he is daring rebellious police officers to kill him if they are “brave enough,” kicking out the World Bank’s representative, expelling the American ambassador or refusing to let the American military use a prominent base on Ecuadorean soil. But when the tussle over Mr. Assange turned into a fight pitting tiny Ecuador against a powerful and imperious Britain , many in this politically divided country rallied around him. Miriam Vilela, 40, a seamstress, who sat on a recent afternoon in Navy Park here near a statue of Mr. Illingworth’s famous relative, had only a vague notion of who Mr. Assange was, recalling merely that he had “something to do with the Internet.” But what she was clear about was that Britain had tried to bully Ecuador, and she was glad that Mr. Correa had stood his ground. It reminded her of a phrase used by a former president of Ecuador, Sixto Durán Ballén, to rally the country during its 1995 war with Peru. “Not one step backward,” said Ms. Vilela, who supports Mr. Correa because of his policies that help the poor. “Never retreat. What’s ours is ours.” Britain ultimately backed off its threat to invade the embassy, and Ecuador said this week that it would resume talks aimed at resolving the standoff. There seemed to be little hope for a quick fix, however. Mr. Assange, who has taken refuge in the embassy since June 19 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning on allegations that he sexually assaulted two women, told Telesur, a channel based in Venezuela, that he expected to remain in the building for 6 to 12 months. Still, London is far away, and large numbers of Ecuadoreans are busy worrying about making ends meet. On the streets of Guayaquil, the country’s biggest city, and Quito, the capital, more than half of the people questioned said they had not heard of Mr. Assange or of the embassy standoff. Nonetheless, a few walls in Quito have been spray-painted with an end-of-days-like slogan: “Assange is coming. Get ready.” There have been a handful of small rallies in support of Mr. Assange’s asylum and against Britain’s bullying. Last Sunday, a half-dozen activists showed up at the main square in Quito, Independence Plaza, taking turns holding up a large banner that said “Welcome Assange” and another one calling for a ban on bullfighting. Felipe Ogaz, 34, one of the activists, said that he would gladly offer Mr. Assange the use of the couch in his two-room apartment, if he ever made it to Ecuador. “He is an icon who has made Ecuador be seen not just as a small country but as something important,” said Patricio Melo, 26, a student who passed by and took a couple of posters of Mr. Assange. Mr. Correa has made many broadly popular changes, improving health care, education, roads and social services. But he is a lightning rod and delights in picking fights and taunting his opponents. He has been criticized by human rights groups for cracking down on popular protests and by dissident groups for seeking to intimidate and restrict the press. In granting asylum to Mr. Assange and butting heads with Britain, Mr. Correa both stirred a sense of national pride and confirmed some skeptics’ views of him. Carlos Soria, 45, the owner of a tiny hardware store near the Quito airport, said he cherished Ecuador’s tradition of offering refuge to those who need it and approved of giving asylum to Mr. Assange. “We had to do it for humanitarian reasons,” he said. But Mr. Soria, who said he had never voted for Mr. Correa and did not plan to in the future, questioned the president’s motives. “I think he did it to get a political advantage, to increase his popularity,” he said. “This president is always trying to draw attention to himself.” Enrique Ayala, the president of Simón Bolívar Andean University in Quito, said he believed that Mr. Assange had been politically persecuted and ran the risk of being accused of a crime by the United States for the release of secret documents and diplomatic cables. But he said that granting asylum was a mistake. “It isn’t in the best interests of Ecuador to have taken this step, which creates conflict with various countries,” Mr. Ayala said. “The country doesn’t gain anything. I think it loses.” Meanwhile, Mr. Illingworth and his relatives have a privileged perspective on Ecuadorean-British relations. Their famous ancestor, Juan Illingworth, born John in 1786 in Heaton Norris, near Manchester, was one of many Englishmen who came in the early 19th century to fight against the Spanish for South American independence, encouraged by a government back home that was in constant conflict with imperial Spain. Illingworth fought in many battles on sea and land; befriended Simón Bolívar, the independence leader; and was named a general and an admiral. He settled in Guayaquil, married into a prominent family and had an illustrious political career. His descendants have continued to play a major role in the country. An Illingworth has served as vice president, and there have been many cabinet ministers and legislators. That includes Juan José, who served in the National Assembly from 1996 to 1998. During and after his term in the legislature, he championed greater autonomy for Guayaquil — a position that earned him his own WikiLeaks moment. Mr. Illingworth is mentioned in a 2005 State Department cable on the autonomy movement, which was among tens of thousands of diplomatic cables made public in 2010 by WikiLeaks. The family has a strong sense of history and its place in it. Its members walk through a city that has an Illingworth Street and an Illingworth Passage. There are at least two statues and a bust of the Admiral, as their famous forebear is usually called. (The base of the statue in Navy Park contains a coffer with the Admiral’s remains. Mr. Illingworth was present a few years ago at the exhumation and was happy to see that, more than 150 years later, “his skull was in perfect condition,” he said.) And what would the Admiral have thought about the conflict over Mr. Assange? “He would have felt uncomfortable,” Mr. Illingworth said. “Part of his heart was with England and part with Ecuador.”

Asylum Right of
Wikileaks
Assange Julian P
Ecuador
International Relations
Correa Rafael
Great Britain


Being Skeptical of Green

Abstract: EVERY retail trend has its excesses. In the late 90s, the natural supplement fad reached a zenith (or nadir) with the introduction of potato chips laced with St. John’s wort, said to be a natural cure for depression. The newest trend is “green.” But consumers who think they can help improve the environment should be as careful as a snack-craving depressive when it comes to their purchasing decisions and avoid relying on labels. Not everything called “green” is going to do much for the environment, according to a report issued this week by a marketing firm, TerraChoice Environmental Marketing ( terrachoice.com ). Titled “The Six Sins of Greenwashing,” the report is based on a study of 1,018 consumer products that make environmental claims. Of those, according to the report, “all but one made claims that are demonstrably false or that risk misleading intended audiences.” The firm said, for example, that the “sin of vagueness” is committed when insecticides are sold as “chemical free.” In fact, the report points out, “nothing is chemical-free.” Also watch out for “nontoxic,” “all natural” and “earth friendly.” The “Sin of Irrelevance” shows up, the report said, when a claim essentially means nothing. Many products, like oven cleaners, are sold as being free of chlorofluorocarbons, but CFCs have been banned for three decades. And the report said the “Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils” applied to products like “organic tobacco” and “green” herbicides. These and the other “sins” mean “both that the individual consumer has been misled and that the potential environmental benefit of his or her purchase has been squandered,” the report concludes. Martin LaMonica of CNET News.com ’s Green Tech blog ( news.com ) said some of the sins “may sound like nitpicking,” adding, “If manufacturers use more recycled material or make an effort to use benign chemicals, they should be able to label their products as such.” Still, he said, more information is usually better. GOOGLE ’S FUTURE Paul La Monica, who writes the Media Biz blog for CNNMoney.com , predicted that Google’s stock could be worth more than Microsoft ’s by 2010 and that the search company’s market capitalization could surpass $500 billion. (It’s less than half that now.) He extrapolated from long-term estimates of earnings growth for both Google and Microsoft. “One would think that Google, eventually, would see its growth slow due to nothing more than the law of large numbers,” he wrote. But some stock researchers agreed with his projections. BRIGHTSPOT GOES DARK Brightspot.tv, one of a number of companies that pay viewers to watch advertisements, has suspended operations. “Brightspot was one of a clutch of companies looking to turn consumer ad avoidance into a business opportunity by letting users choose when to watch ads,” wrote Brian Morrissey of AdWeek. Aaron Martens, Brightspot’s chief executive, confirmed the situation in an e-mail message to AdWeek. “Advertisers have been relatively slow to adopt new models when it’s so clear they absolutely need to change their thinking,” he wrote. “The question remains whether the lure of compensation, which in many cases works out to minimum wage for consumers’ time, is enough to ensure their participation,” Mr. Morrissey wrote. WHAT IT ISN’T “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” is a well-known brand of butter substitute. Robyn Lee of the Serious Eats blog said she had “assumed that this was the only product that used the word butter to market its superiority over other butter substitutes through its fascinating ability to be mistaken for real butter.” But she found several others ( seriouseats.com ). They range from the economically named “Butter It’s Not” to the Zen koanlike “Could It Be Butter?” to the mystical “What, Not Butter!” DAN MITCHELL

Advertising and Marketing
Environment
Cnet
Google Inc
Microsoft Corp


The Giants Were Winners Vs. the Rangers, and Now in Verse

Abstract: It has just been confirmed for me that the Giants actually won the World Series, while some of us were sleeping round midnight on the East Coast. It was not a mirage, that glorious season, those kaleidoscopic characters, catching fire in autumn. In fact, it was better than Easterners knew, as seen through the eyes of a poet and real estate agent (Is there really such a thing?) named Steve Hermanos, in a booklet (with appropriate orange cover), “O, Gigantic Victory! Baseball Poems: The 2010 Championship Season.” Hermanos is from New York and is a Yankees fan. Despite that, he has poetry in his soul. He has written fiction and made films and once owned a bar on Third Avenue in Manhattan named Polo Grounds. He moved to San Francisco in 2002, just in time for Big Barry Bonds to nearly win the World Series. Last year began with Hermanos struggling with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and realizing he could not write fiction at the moment. (“It’s called chemo brain,” he said Monday. “A combination tequila-red-wine-beer hangover.”) So he watched the Giants become a contending team. Only at Thanksgiving, with the illness in remission and the chemotherapy fading and the turkey high taking over, did he start writing, at warp speed, about the season he seemed to recall. The book begins with a rumination on Manager Bruce Bochy, who once wore the largest batting helmet in the majors: Boche, With a head the size of a thirty-dollar pumpkin, The brain mass should be as impressive, Shouldn’t it? Then it is March 2010 and Hermanos is in Momo’s, a restaurant near the ballpark, harboring morbid apprehension that the Giants will salt the hotshot rookie catcher Buster Posey in the minors, to keep him an extra season. He spots Larry Baer, that most approachable club president , who politely explains, If he starts well, He’ll be up. Hermanos thanks Baer, but worries that the Giants could lose the division by a game or two, out of cheapness. Next, Hermanos hallucinates about Barry Zito’s lost fastball measured against Zito’s Canvas bag of money, By canvas bag of money, Stacked onto hand trucks, and Zito’s imaginary lavish departure from the ballpark in a stretch limo While you lounge in back, White silk scarf fluttering, Top hat warming you against the fog. Hermanos likes Zito, but still. Observing the svelte players of 2011, Hermanos comments on the twilight of the steroid generation: Jason Giambi is a lithe bench player, His tattoos saggy, unreadable abstractions. The Giants demonstrate sanity and bring up Posey. Hermanos envisions the ghost of Christy Mathewson’s catcher, materializing at Posey’s bedside in the middle of the night. Your name, dude Roger Bresnahan. If you’re Tough enough to handle the pain, You’ll wind up with me. The kid asks, Where would that be? The spirit says, The Hall of Fame. Along comes a new Giant; Are you serious, Huff? A red thong in your duff? (Once in the mind, It’s nasty. Porno gone way, way wrong.) The poet calls the new man Captain Thong. In a “Field of Dreams” reverie, Hermanos imagines the chubby third baseman , Pablo Sandoval, a k a Panda, taking practice grounders from ancient infielders like Alvin Dark, Jose Pagan, Jim Davenport, Dickie Schofield, Tito Fuentes, Will Clark, So that when pitchers and catchers show up in February, You’ll be wearing 8, Because 48, Would be unreadable. Skip to the chase. The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! (With homage to the 1951 broadcaster Russ Hodges. ) Hermanos twits the Fox network for not focusing on the beauty of the sport but instead zeroing in on Homemade signs of varying hokitude, Sleeping infants, Quaint city views, In a poem subtitled “Chernobyl, Texas,” he second-guesses Manager Ron Washington for resting his best reliever while a game gets away. The Series moves to the city by the bay, and Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton comments on a purple haze, medicinal no doubt, which he can smell in center field. Hermanos notes that Hamilton scorns weed while appearing in public, His mouth crammed, Cheeks chipmunk-stretched, Overflowing to his sinuses, With tobacco, Spitting a Mannequin Pis, Of brown effluvium. Twin visitors arrive named Bush and Bonds — sounds like an intersection near Union Square. Hermanos does not care for either of them, put it that way. John McGraw tries to light a stogie in the stands, is told to put it out. The pitching staff takes over the Series. Hermanos tells Madison Bumgarner, You might be, The most unflappable ballplayer, I’ve ever seen. Have your agent, Look it up. The poet labels Tim Lincecum a sea monster: Huge limb lashing up and out, Whipping down, Near 100 MPH, On the overmatched fisherman, Cracking him, Through the bottom of the boat, Leaving the corpse to sharks. Edgar Renteria wins it on the road. Why take chances. Hermanos writes: I am banging cooking pots, On the porch, With my four-year-old son; Smooching my wife; Sharing throat-clearing hoots along the street; High-fiving everyone. “O, Gigantic Victory!” can be found on the Web through Smashwords.com . It’s cheaper than a brew at the ballpark, for goodness’ sakes. Hermanos makes me hunger for this season, when something else will happen, some new appealing bunch, maybe not the Yanks or Red Sox or Phillies and surely not the sad-sack Mets, will have a red-thong season. The 2010 season is now official. It was not all purple haze, after all.

O Gigantic Victory! Baseball Poems: The 2010 Championship Season (Book)


James Green, Author and Human Rights Activist, Dies at 71

Abstract: James Green, a self-described “activist scholar” whose view of organized labor’s violent birth challenged conventional visions of America as a classless society, died on June 23 in Boston. He was 71. The cause was complications of leukemia, his son, Nicholas, said. Professor Green taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and wrote six books and countless articles, but taking his cue from a Yale mentor, C. Vann Woodward — to pursue history “with a purpose” — he did not confine his interests to the academy. For decades, he participated in protest politics, including the civil rights movement, and organized community history projects and training programs for labor unions. “My purpose was to study the past to understand injustice in our society and then to explain how men and women who suffered from injustice gained the will to struggle against it and to strive for a better society,” he wrote in an online autobiographical sketch . “My goal,” he continued, “was to tell powerful stories of people in struggle, to create narratives that cut against the grain of scholarship that characterized protesters as paranoid fanatics.” His best-known book, published in 2006, was “Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America,” chronicling what he called the biggest news event since Lincoln’s assassination. The May 4, 1886, rally at Chicago’s Haymarket Square had been organized to protest the killing of several workers by police the day before during a strike at the McCormick Reaper Works to support an eight-hour day and other demands. As the police advanced to disperse the peaceful Haymarket rally, somebody tossed a bomb — what Professor Green called a graphic demonstration of how the invention of dynamite had altered the calculus of power. Over the next few decades, other bombings of targets that embodied the establishment were linked to anarchists, labor agitators and leftists. The bomb and the gunfire that ensued killed seven police officers and several civilians. “It is impossible to say exactly what might have been different if the police hadn’t killed four strikers at McCormick’s, if the police chief hadn’t decided to break up the Haymarket meeting, if someone hadn’t thrown the bomb,” Professor Green wrote, “but it is clear that, in some sense, we are today living with the legacy of those long-ago events.” The eight anarchists who were charged in the crime were reviled as murderers and revered as martyrs. The bombing impeded gains for organized labor, besmirched the image of immigrants and radicals, and raised enduring questions about free speech and fair trials. Professor Green shifted his focus to Appalachia in his 2015 book, “The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom.” Here he explored what he called “the largest working-class uprising in the nation’s history.” The book was the basis for “The Mine Wars,” an episode of the PBS series “American Experience.” He singled out Mary Harris Jones , better known as Mother Jones, for her role in the struggle. “Acting largely on her own,” he wrote, “one woman had done more than the nation’s top union leaders to alert reformers to the suppression of civil liberties in industrial America.” James Robert Green was born in Oak Park, Ill., on Nov. 4, 1944. His father, Gerald, was a math teacher and school administrator. His mother, the former Mary Katherine DiVall, was a secretary. She survives him, as does his daughter, Amanda Green, from his marriage to Carol McLaughlin, which ended in divorce; his wife, Janet Lee Grogan; a brother, Mark; and two sisters, Mary Beth Kress and Nancy Herbert. He lived in Somerville, Mass. During summer breaks from college, he worked as an intern for Senator Paul H. Douglas, an Illinois Democrat and leading liberal, and considered a career in government himself. He graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1966 and received a doctorate in history from Yale. Deciding to teach, he joined the faculty at Brandeis University. He began teaching at the University of Massachusetts in 1977, eventually becoming a professor of history and labor studies. He had been an emeritus professor there since 2014. “Many of us came of professional age in the 1960s, with the hope that we could affect public policy or build movements for social justice,” Professor Green said in an article adapted from his book “Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements” (2000). He wrote that he had learned “that historical narratives can do more than just redeem the memory of past struggles; they can help people think of themselves as historical figures who, like those who came before them, have crucial moral and political choices to make. “Sometimes stories of the past provide hope,” Professor Green added, “sometimes guidance.”

Obituary
Labor Unions
Civil Rights
Mining
Death in the Haymarket
James Green


Angst Amid the Artichokes

Abstract: NOT everyone who works in the Steve’s C-Town supermarket, on Ninth Street near Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, is a teenager. It can, however, seem that way to a customer, waiting in the long express line that curves toward the seltzer display and the frozen foods while the stock boys flirt with the cash register girls, the delivery guys lounge out front with their stereos on blast, and over in the corner somebody is mouthing off to a manager. Teenagers are everywhere at C-Town, which, in addition to being one of the neighborhood’s larger and better-stocked grocery stores, is a teen-centered ecosystem of raised voices, boredom and text messages. This is the kind of place you end up when you’re 17 and need spending money: under fluorescent lights in a big rectangular box with produce at one end, frozen foods at the other, an elevated managers’ perch looking down at a row of registers along the front, and a metal pen outside the front door to keep people from walking off with shopping carts. Maybe you quit the McDonald’s down the block and saw that the supermarket was hiring. Maybe your sister worked at the Dominican restaurant next door, got friendly with a C-Town manager and helped you out. Maybe, like 17-year-old Krystaline Velez, who has big round eyes, crimped hair and a taste for multicolored high-tops, you used to work with children in a day care program, taking them on trips and keeping them out of trouble. Krystaline, who lives in Sunset Park and goes to Midwood High School, liked that job. “But I guess this prepares me for the real world,” she said with a shrug. “So it’s better.” Taking care of the kids was a lot easier than memorizing register codes, which is what Krystaline was doing one recent sunny afternoon in her first week at the supermarket, hovering over a display of leafy greens with a typed list in hand. Every produce item in the store has a four-digit code for the cashiers to punch into the register, and the master list has all of them, but it falls to the cashiers to distinguish between Vidalia, Spanish and yellow onions, or kale, chicory, collard greens and escarole. “All these different mangoes,” Krystaline fretted. “Mexican mangoes, Haitian mangoes. I don’t know!” At the other end of the store, studying shelves of his own, was Oscar Perez, a 17-year-old who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and goes to John Adams High School in Ozone Park, Queens. Oscar is there five days a week, wearing a red C-Town T-shirt, the store’s stock-boy uniform, stocking shelves for five hours a day on school days and seven hours a day on weekends. After just a few months on the job, he knew every item in his aisle from refilling stock and making everything sit straight on the shelves. “I don’t feel stressed out,” he said, stopping to find a jug of purified water for a young mother. “If you take it easy, time goes faster, smoother.” WITH so many young people in a confined space, however, some days run less smoothly than others. “I think every supermarket has its own story,” mused 17-year-old Geraldine Arvelo, a cashier with a giant smile and a rapid-fire speaking voice. “I think this one is like a high school story, because everywhere you go you see a young person, and everybody always has something to say about each other.” Geraldine speaks from experience: She began working at the C-Town more than a year ago, though she was not sure what would happen when she started classes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the fall. She is one of the faster cashiers, and persistently upbeat, though there are occasional teenage dramas, like the time a few months back when she got drawn into an argument between her best friend and his girlfriend — both of whom were also co-workers — and got sent home for using bad language in front of the customers. “Everybody knows a little story of who went out with who, who dated, why’d they break up,” Geraldine lamented. “Even the managers, they know a little about you.” Rita Barsoum is now a manager, but she has seen the drama of supermarket life from both sides. She got her first supermarket job when she was 15, stocking shelves, and has worked in sections of many supermarkets, even in a meat department learning the different cuts. “I’d go home smelling horrible every day,” she said. “God, to take the smell of meat out of your hair, it’s like 34 washes.” Ms. Barsoum is 21 and is studying at John Jay to be a corrections officer. The teenage cashiers make her feel a little old. “Sometimes it’s hard,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like a baby sitter. You’ve got to tell them not to do this ——” She stopped in midsentence to glare at Krystal Leon, a 17-year-old in a yellow headband, yellow shirt, yellow and black sneakers, glossy lipstick and giant hoop earrings. “Krystal!” she shouted. “Yeah, I saw that. You have a customer! “She’s on her phone,” Ms. Barsoum said, turning back. “She thought I wouldn’t see her.”

Supermarkets
Children and Youth
Park Slope (NYC)


‘Stability’ Mission In Iraq Won’t Mean End of Fighting

Abstract: NEAR TULUL AL-BAQ, Iraq — President Obama has set an August deadline for the end of the combat mission in Iraq . Here at this makeshift desert camp in the insurgent badlands of northern Iraq, a mission is under way that is not going to stop then: American soldiers hunting terrorists and covertly watching an Iraqi checkpoint staffed by police officers whom the soldiers say they do not trust. “They’re not checking anybody, and they’re wondering why I.E.D.’s are getting in to town,” said Staff Sgt. Kelly E. Young, 39, from Albertville, Ala., as he watched the major roadway that connects Baghdad with Mosul, regarded as the country’s most dangerous city . He referred to improvised explosive devices , the military term for homemade bombs. The August deadline might be seen back home as a milestone in the fulfillment of President Obama’s promise to end the war in Iraq, but here it is more complex. American soldiers still find and kill enemy fighters, on their own and in partnership with Iraqi security forces, and will continue to do so after the official end of combat operations. More Americans are certain to die, if significantly fewer than in the height of fighting here. The withdrawal, which will reduce the number of American troops to 50,000 — from 112,000 earlier this year and close to 165,000 at the height of the surge — is a feat of logistics that has been called the biggest movement of matériel since World War II. It is also an exercise in semantics. What soldiers today would call combat operations — hunting insurgents, joint raids between Iraqi security forces and United States Special Forces to kill or arrest militants — will be called “stability operations.” Post-reduction, the United States military says the focus will be on advising and training Iraqi soldiers, providing security for civilian reconstruction teams and joint counterterrorism missions. “In practical terms, nothing will change,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen R. Lanza, the top American military spokesman in Iraq. “We are already doing stability operations.” Americans ceased major combat in Iraq long ago, and that has been reflected in the number of casualties. So far this year, 14 soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, and 27 more from accidents, suicides and other noncombat causes, according to icasualties.org. As fighting involving Americans tapered off, thousands of items of Iraq war matériel were packed and shipped to Afghanistan. The complex and flexible mission of cutting down forces while simultaneously keeping up the fight with a festering insurgency could prove a model for Afghanistan, where withdrawal is scheduled to begin next year. Next summer, the Americans will begin to leave Afghanistan, too, and they probably won’t be able to halt fighting completely as they do so. Beyond August the next Iraq deadline is the end of 2011, when all American troops are supposed to be gone. But few believe that America’s military involvement in Iraq will end then. The conventional wisdom among military officers, diplomats and Iraqi officials is that after a new government is formed, talks will begin about a longer-term American troop presence. “I like to say that in Iraq, the only thing Americans know for certain, is that we know nothing for certain,” said Brett H. McGurk, a former National Security Council official in Iraq and current fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations . “The exception is what’s coming once there’s a new government: they will ask to amend the Security Agreement and extend the 2011 date. We should take that request seriously. ” The mission here in the desert, a temporary base of armored vehicles and one tent for two platoons, provided a vivid example of what American forces still do on the ground and, military officers said, would be able to do after the reduction. “They needed someone killed, so they sent us,” said Maj. Bryan L. Logan, squadron operations officer for the Third Squadron, Seventh Cavalry Regiment, referring to an insurgent cell that had been planting bombs near the highway. Iraqi security forces were not present or informed of the mission, a seeming contravention of the emphasis from commanders that operations be conducted jointly, and at the request of the Iraqis. Lt. Col. Michael Jason, the brigade operations officer for the Third Infantry Division’s Second Brigade, said that the operation was unusual because it didn’t “have an Iraqi face.” The operation was justified by a liberal interpretation of the security agreement that allows unilateral operations to protect American forces, or, in Colonel Jason’s words, to address “unique American problem sets.” “That’s what they are doing,” he said, referring to his soldiers. For the troops living in the desert, it was a return to the soldiering life many hadn’t experienced since earlier in the war or during training back home: eating Meals Ready to Eat, or M.R.E.’s; sleeping on top of vehicles or on the ground; firing artillery, albeit nonlethal, illuminated rounds to remind insurgents that Americans are still here. The legacy of the United States’ seven-year war here will partly pivot on how well the Iraqi police and army secure the country after the Americans are gone. American military officers praise the rising capability of the Iraqi security forces — especially in securing the country for the parliamentary elections in March. But questions of loyalty that arose during the sectarian warfare of 2006 and 2007 remain. So as some soldiers in the desert hunted for insurgents, others felt they needed make sure that Iraqis at the checkpoint to Mosul were actually doing their jobs and stopping and searching vehicles. In Mosul, suicide attacks still regularly inflict damage. The unit did not find the insurgents. But another unit close by found three of them laying a bomb. Days later, officers watched a video taken from the gunsight of an attack helicopter that killed the insurgents with a Hellfire missile. In the closing window of the American war here, commanders are still trying to kill as many militants as possible, because they say it keeps American forces and Iraqis safer. But in doing so, the United States military command sometimes plays down the American role in the killing. Almost daily, press releases are issued that announce the killing or capture of terrorists by the Iraqi security forces, usually noting the involvement of “U.S. advisers.” Sometimes credit is not given when American soldiers kill militants. In April, the third-ranking member of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia was killed by Iraqi forces, according to a press release. But officers on the ground said he was killed by fire from an American Bradley Fighting Vehicle. And no press release has been issued about the three insurgents who were recently killed by the American Hellfire missile. As the soldiers were packing up the desert camp, Major Logan, who saw combat in Iraq in 2003, stood watching and quoted Robert Duvall from a movie about another American war, Vietnam, one that ended badly: “Someday this war is going to end.”

United States Defense and Military Forces


New Rules Threaten Sport’s Tryout Process

Abstract: Perhaps no college sport has better exemplified the undefined nature of athletic scholarship distribution than baseball, where some players traditionally received as little as $400 a year while stars were awarded full scholarships. For years, some coaches have signed a handful of high school athletes to what were viewed as tryout scholarships. For $1,000 or less apiece, four or five players would be enrolled and then evaluated during the college’s fall practices. Those who were deemed good players were asked to remain on campus for the spring baseball season and might have their scholarships upgraded in the future. Players not considered likely to be valuable contributors would be cut from the team and encouraged to transfer elsewhere by the spring, which an athlete could do without interrupting his eligibility. Baseball coaches and college administrators said such maneuvering evolved in part as an answer to scholarship limits. The N.C.A.A. limits Division I baseball teams to 11.7 full scholarships, but a college roster customarily has about 35 players. Since coaches are forced to split scholarships into small amounts, it is not unusual for players to be lured to a campus for as little $500 or $1,000. “If some coach brings in four guys at $400 and gets one keeper, that has been viewed as a good deal,” said Joe Godri, the coach at Villanova University. “He got a good player for $1,600.” But Godri prefers the new frontier that college baseball is facing. Baseball-specific N.C.A.A. restrictions going into effect this fall will eliminate the tryout scholarship. All scholarships in the sport will have to be worth at least 25 percent of an institution’s tuition and room and board. Also starting this fall, any baseball player transferring between institutions will lose his eligibility for a year, something already in place for football, basketball, ice hockey and volleyball. And because the N.C.A.A. has said that graduation rates for baseball players were among the lowest in college athletics, the organization will soon require that players be academically eligible in the fall to play during the spring. “This will be a lot more fair for all of us,” Godri said. “Now everybody has to look at a prospect as someone you’ll probably have for four years. You won’t have people running off kids after four months just because they don’t like them.” The new rules will also limit the number of players who can receive athletic aid on a team to 30 by 2008-9 and 27 by 2009-10. For the dozens of coaches like Godri who are not overseeing fully funded baseball programs, this last guideline may not be a major problem. He has the equivalent of six full scholarships. But for the major college baseball powers handing out the limit of 11.7 scholarships, the new rule is highly controversial. Some coaches say they feel that baseball is being unfairly persecuted. “We’re the only partial scholarship sport with these kind of sanctions,” said Mississippi State’s longtime baseball coach, Ron Polk, who wrote a host of N.C.A.A. officials and college presidents an 18-page letter delineating his objections. “We’re the only partial scholarship sport that has to have its athletes eligible two consecutive semesters and that has restrictions on how to distribute our scholarships. “The new rules are flawed because baseball is not football, where they get 85 full scholarships for a team. In football, they can afford to have their kids all go to summer school to help their eligibility and their grades. Give baseball some of that money and we’ll be happy to send our kids to summer school, too.” Myles Brand, the N.C.A.A. president, said the driving factor in the new rules was the realization that while baseball players tended to enter college with higher academic qualifications than most other college athletes, their grades in college were poor when compared with their athletic peers. Brand cited the fall semester tryout scholarship as a contributing factor. “There were just too many athletes changing schools every year and never staying long enough to achieve academically,” he said. Polk countered that the N.C.A.A.’s Academic Progress Rate, a measuring stick that assesses the graduation rates of college teams with penalties built in, would have ultimately penalized those baseball teams handing out tryout scholarships. “Instead I’m going to have to dump five to eight guys from my team to satisfy the N.C.A.A.,” Polk said. “They’ll probably transfer. How is that going to help graduation rates?”

Scholarships and Fellowships
College Athletics
Baseball
National Collegiate Athletic Assn


Top Apps for Whiling Away the Minutes

Abstract: If idle hands are the devil’s plaything, Satan must hate smartphones. Androids, BlackBerrys and iPhones have so many good apps that their owners can fill the tiniest gap of free time with a productive, whimsical or useless activity. Neuroscientists are debating whether this always-on approach is healthy for one’s brain, but as that argument unfolds, you might as well have a little fun. Here are my top picks for best time-wasting apps. Games are a clear favorite for the stranded legions at subway stops and grocery store checkout lines, but this category has a staggering number of choices. Apple’s iTunes Store helps narrow those choices with the Game Center, a selection of around 1,700 highly rated, high-selling apps, including 30 featured titles. You’ll find the usual suspects, like Angry Birds, Flight Control and Doodle Jump, which are perfect for situations when you have three free minutes. If you already have these games, try Let’s Golf 2 ($5 on iPhone ), Blokus ($5 on iPhone) and Tetris ($1), or newer games like Trucks and Skulls ($1), Astronut (free) and Zoo Rescue ($1). Android users have fewer choices here and elsewhere, because many game developers have only just begun working on this platform. Among other things, developers were losing money on Android users who, until recently, could “test” a game for nearly 23 hours and 59 minutes and then request a refund. That said, Android has Angry Birds, Let’s Golf 2 and Tetris, which are all solid choices. Glu Mobile, the maker of many popular and free iPhone games, like Gun Bros and Deer Hunter, will introduce some of those games to Android in the coming weeks. Gun Bros is expected to appear this week. BlackBerry users who are accustomed to second-rate apps have it slightly better when it comes to games. The genre’s most famous mobile games are missing, but thanks chiefly to Electronic Arts, great ones still await, like Need for Speed Shift 3D, Yahtzee, Tetris and Risk. All sold for $1 apiece for iPhone devices last week. Heavy I.M. users who can’t bear to be away from their instant messaging accounts can continue their conversations on the smartphone with BeejiveIM ($10 on iPhone and BlackBerry devices, $5 on Android). The app offers a seamless experience with all the major desktop or Web-based I.M. systems. Few things kill time more effectively than Twitter and Facebook, of course. The Twitter app, from the company, is now better than all the other apps that purport to help you follow your feed. It’s free on the iPhone and Android phones. Research In Motion has built a good free version for BlackBerry. Facebook’s official iPhone and Android apps are also free and highly rated. No official Facebook app yet exists for BlackBerry, however, and the R.I.M. version has earned poor reviews. For those who believe that Twitter, Facebook and smartphone games will rot your brain — or who simply can’t get past Level 1 of Angry Birds — I.Q. boosters are a good option for killing a few minutes. Brain Fitness Pro ($4 on iPhone) can be tough — like boot camp for the brain, as one iTunes reviewer characterized it. Through a variety of timed quizzes, it promises to improve your short-term memory and problem-solving ability. Brain Tuner ($3) is featured in Apple’s Game Center; skeptics can try Brain Tuner Lite, which is free. Brain Genius Deluxe (free on iPhone and Android), from Glu Mobile, is highly rated. Same goes for the BlackBerry app, Brain Up. For a different sort of brain-building activity, crosswords do nicely. Try the Crosswords app ($10 on iPhone and iPad ), or the NYTimes Crosswords (free for first week, then $2 a month or $17 a year). On Android, go with Shortyz Crosswords (free). Many people have abandoned crosswords for Sudoku. For them, the Sudoku app ($1 on iPhone) from Electronic Arts offers thousands of grids and five difficulty levels. Android users have an even better alternative in Platinum Sudoku ($3) from Gameloft. It includes 640,000 grids, five difficulty levels and automatic error checking. Because we’re talking about processing bite-size pieces of information, poetry deserves a mention. And while a grocery store checkout line may not seem an obvious place to consume poetry, the Poetry app (free on iPhone), from the Poetry Foundation, makes it easy to quickly discover new poems and writers. You can mark your favorite works for future exploration, too. Sometimes I like to be productive in those odd minutes, rather than waste time. In those instances, I’ll sometimes open my SoundHound and Shazam apps — but not to identify music. Rather, I’ll buy some of the songs I’ve identified with the apps in recent weeks, and which these apps keep in neat lists. If I have the children along for errands, however, I can forget both productivity and mobile gaming. Few sights are as sad as a child watching a parent who is lost in a video game. Storykit is a free iPhone app parents can use to quickly build picture books with children, using on-the-spot photos or old-school tales that are ripe for rewriting. For parents of middle-school children, BrainPOP is a worthy app, featuring a new brief educational cartoon every day. The cartoon is followed by a quick quiz that will at times challenge even a grown-up. Finally, one of the best things you can do as you wait in line is go to the App Store and peruse all the updates to the apps you already own. Some of the updates are important, others merely incremental. (Hint: if the version number is 1.5 or 2.0, it’s more important than 1.2.7.5.) With big updates, it’s almost as if someone has given you a new app. Take a few minutes, download the important ones and take them for a test spin. Angry Birds can wait until your next set of errands. Quick Calls Grown-ups love popup books, and children love to tear them apart to see how they work. With the Three Little Pigs and the Secrets of a Popup Book app for the iPad ($7 ), when you touch a button you see the book’s mechanical guts. One caveat for parents of younger children: it’s a slightly harsh version of the tale. A sweeter, but less visually enthralling, alternative is the new Thomas the Train interactive iPad book, Thomas & Friends: Misty Island Rescue ($5).

Computer and Video Games
Mobile Applications
Smartphones


Dozens Killed in School Bus Crash in Egypt

Abstract: CAIRO (Reuters) — Fifty people, mostly children, were killed on Saturday when a train slammed into a school bus as it crossed tracks south of Cairo, state news media and officials said. All but two of the dead were children, ranging in ages from 4 to 8, said a senior security official in Assiut, near the site, about 190 miles south of Cairo. A man and a woman were also killed. The destruction made it difficult to count and identify the bodies, officials said. Photos posted on the Web site of an Egyptian newspaper showed that the bus had been broken in half by the force of the crash. Blood was spattered on the front of the engine and school bags and textbooks, some bloodstained, were scattered. Witnesses said barriers at the rail crossing were open when the train hit the bus. The transport minister and the head of the railways authority have resigned, and President Mohamed Morsi said those responsible would be held accountable. Egypt ’s roads and railways have a poor safety record, and Egyptians have long complained that successive governments have failed to enforce even basic safeguards, leading to a string of deadly crashes. The state news media reported that in addition to the 50 dead, at least 15 people were injured. “They told us the barriers were open when the bus crossed the tracks and the train collided with it,” said Mohamed Samir, a doctor at the Assiut hospital where the injured were taken, citing witness accounts. The governor of Assiut, Yahya Keshk, also said the crossing was open. “The crossing worker was asleep,” Mr. Keshk told state television. “He has been detained.” The doctor said the bodies of many of those killed had sustained severe injuries, illustrating the force of the crash, which occurred in the city of Manfalut. A witness to the crash, Ahmed Youssef, said the bus was pushed about a half-mile down the track. The families of victims protested at the crash site, the state news agency reported. Officials sought to reassure them that the case would be investigated and that they would receive help, it said.

Egypt
Traffic Accidents and Safety
Railroad Accidents and Safety


For a Filipino Boxer, Money Opens Door to Politics

Abstract: ALABEL, the Philippines MANNY PACQUIAO ’S black Hummer was nowhere in sight. The parade that he was supposed to lead had already wound down in front of the town hall here. His seat, the seat of honor, stood vacant on a stage on which singers, three beauty queens and the province’s ruling political class sat waiting. Mr. Pacquiao, possibly the best boxer in the world and a new congressman in the Philippines , had awakened at home a little earlier, still jet-lagged from a trip to the United States, where he had been promoting his next fight . He was the main financial sponsor of the annual “foundation day” festival here in Alabel, the capital of Sarangani , the southern province that was carved out of another in 1992 and that he now represents in the House of Representatives . Perhaps more than anywhere else in the Philippines, feudal-like dynasties dominate here on the impoverished, violence-ridden island of Mindanao. But by brandishing his vast wealth, Mr. Pacquiao — who came out of one of this area’s poorest slums, finished only elementary school and often appears uncomfortable speaking English — defeated a member of the clan that founded Sarangani and that had held the congressional seat for three decades. Outwardly, the establishment has welcomed Mr. Pacquiao, 31, since he was sworn in as Sarangani’s only congressman less than three months ago. “It was the public’s choice,” Steve Solon, 39, the vice governor and nephew of the man Mr. Pacquiao beat in a landslide, said at the festival here. “We need to support each other.” A FEW DAYS earlier, Mr. Pacquiao was getting ready to attend a plenary session in Congress in Manila, the capital, having flown back from the United States the night before. Since taking office, he has given a couple of well-received speeches, including one on human trafficking, and has become a visible presence on the committee to carry out the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which is led by Imelda Marcos , the former first lady and a newly minted congresswoman. “So far, so good,” Mr. Pacquiao said in an interview in his office in Congress. With “time management,” he said he would be able to train for his next fight, in November, and fulfill his legislative duties. Boxing and politics, he said, had been his twin dreams growing up. “I want to help people, especially in my province,” he said. “There are a lot of poor people. When I’m old, I want my name, Manny Pacquiao, to be known not only as a good boxer but a good public servant.” He may have become one of the world’s wealthiest athletes — Forbes magazine said he earned $40 million in 2009 — and he may now socialize with Hollywood celebrities, but in the Philippines, his pledge to help the poor resonates because of his now familiar personal history. He grew up in General Santos City, in a neighborhood that even today is a warren of narrow, dirt roads and ramshackle houses — though now adorned, incongruously, by two mansions belonging to Mr. Pacquiao’s mother and brother. Amateur boxing rings are fixtures of festivals in the countryside, a legacy of the United States’ colonial history in the Philippines. So, like many American boxers, Mr. Pacquiao sought his way out of his old neighborhood through boxing. At 14 years old, he ran away from home, stowing away aboard a ship bound for Manila, where he turned pro a couple of years later. In the assembly hall, most congressmen sat waiting for the plenary to start. But Mr. Pacquiao moved relentlessly, bantering with colleagues, posing for photos, scanning, in the split seconds he found himself alone, the entire room. “He can easily become a senator,” said Antonio Tinio, 40, another new congressman, explaining that Senate seats were nationwide offices favoring popular candidates like Mr. Pacquiao. But becoming president or even provincial governor requires the kind of political machine established by dynasties, he added. Mr. Pacquiao, though, has proven himself a fast learner. He ran for the first time in 2007, naïvely believing that his popularity alone would win him a congressional seat in General Santos City. “This time, I started forming my machinery two years before the election,” Mr. Pacquiao said. Choosing to run in Sarangani, his wife’s home province, Mr. Pacquiao wooed local power brokers, showering them and their districts with money. Reynaldo Constantino, 51, the mayor of one of Sarangani’s seven municipalities, said that since 2007 he has received more than $1.6 million from Mr. Pacquiao to deploy on projects in his district. Whenever the mayor himself needed money for his “image-building,” he turned to Mr. Pacquiao. “Money in the Philippines is the No. 1 factor in winning elections,” Mr. Constantino, who is known as Bong, said. “Even though he is very popular, he would not have won without his money.” Like many of Mr. Pacquiao’s constituents, Mr. Constantino said he hoped that the new congressman would now use his personal wealth to develop all of Sarangani, a province dominated by fishing and agriculture. “All of Sarangani will develop now because of Manny and because of Manny’s money,” he said. MR. PACQUIAO’S black Hummer was finally spotted barreling down the one road from General Santos City, west of here. If there was any doubt that the Hummer was his, the absence of any license plates — a privilege often granted to the powerful here in Mindanao — confirmed it. Dark clouds had been moving toward Alabel from the other direction and, as if on cue, rain began falling as Mr. Pacquiao took the microphone, nearly two hours late. Speaking in Visayan, the region’s main language, he said he had been working hard to attract investors to Sarangani. He pledged to build a new hospital here and start other projects to improve people’s lives. “I will not be an embarrassment to you,” he said. Later, inside the mayor’s office, Mr. Pacquiao sat at a large desk behind a lechon , a roast suckling pig. People drifted in and out of the office to pick from a buffet. The governor, Miguel Rene Dominguez — the 33-year-old scion of two of the southern Philippines’ oldest and richest families — sat to his left. The congressman and the governor spoke easily with each other. A conversation about Mr. Pacquiao’s knockout of Ricky Hatton, a British boxer, led to an exchange on the histories of England and Scotland. They talked of the importance of promoting a provincial tourist spot. The governor asked him what he was doing in Manila. Mr. Pacquiao talked about serving on the Millennium Development Goals committee. Mr. Pacquiao said that he would dedicate all his discretionary pork-barrel budget to Sarangani. Each congressman receives almost $1.6 million a year for pet projects at home, but much of the amount is typically funneled into private accounts. “I don’t need it anyway,” he said. Mr. Pacquiao, who was picking at the lechon and chewing on lanzones, a tropical fruit, abruptly stopped eating when the governor stood up and Mr. Pacquiao spotted a switchblade knife in the governor’s right pants pocket. Plucking it out before the governor had noticed, Mr. Pacquiao repeatedly folded and unfolded the switchblade, testing its sharpness with his index finger. “This is dangerous for children,” he said. Taking back the knife, the governor showed him how to whip it out of his pocket so that the blade unfolded in a single motion. “Even if my opponent has this,” Mr. Pacquiao said, “I can beat him as long as he’s physically close to me.” The governor gave him the switchblade to keep. “You can thrust it into somebody,” the governor told the new congressman, “and just leave it in there.”

Philippines
Pacquiao Manny
Politics and Government
Boxing
Elections


Studios in a Tentative Deal With TV Actors in One Union, but Uncertainty Remains

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — Hollywood took another step toward labor peace on Wednesday morning, as a union representing television actors reached a tentative three-year deal with production companies after talks had stalled over the re-use of performers’ images on the Internet. The agreement between the producers and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists builds pressure on another, bigger actors union, the Screen Actors Guild, to devise a similar solution. Alan Rosenberg, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, said in a statement Wednesday that the union would carefully analyze the deal’s provisions. But the guild has said it would not simply accept the same terms as other unions, which were the basis of the agreement with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. And that means this city will continue to be preoccupied with the threat of Hollywood shutting down. The guild’s talks over a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — which is set to expire at the end of June — stalled this month, but resumed on Wednesday. The most difficult issue in the talks with the federation surprisingly did not hinge on compensation of artists for work in new media, as during the recent three-month writers’ strike. Instead, it centered on the granting of permission. Actors have traditionally had the right to approve the use of clips from their work on television. But producers had asked for the ability to use clips on the Web without permission from each actor, arguing that flexibility was needed to counter the widespread piracy of shows on the Internet. “We did not see it coming. It was a huge issue to tackle,” said Roberta Reardon, president of the federation. Ms. Reardon said the union had agreed that within 90 days of the contract’s final approval, it would work out a system under which performers might give advance or blanket permissions covering an entire series, for which the actors would be compensated. The federation’s contract covers performers on nearly a dozen series, including “Cashmere Mafia” on ABC and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on HBO. The settlement followed three weeks of talks, and back-to-back sessions that ran through the holiday weekend, and continued until the early hours on Wednesday. The federation’s national board is expected to review the tentative agreement next week, and, if it approves terms, to submit the deal to a vote of the membership of approximately 70,000. In the last half-year, Hollywood’s movie and television producers weathered a three-month strike by writers, and set new contracts with unions representing writers, directors and, now, some television actors. In each case, negotiators have fought over difficult questions related to new media. Ms. Reardon said her union’s tentative deal closely followed those struck earlier by writers and directors. It established union jurisdiction over new-media compensation and set pay schedules for digital media. An earlier round of talks between producers and the Screen Actors Guild, which represents about 120,000 actors, ran aground over a number of issues, which included the companies’ demand for freedom to use clips. In a statement on its Web site, the producers alliance called the deal with the federation “an agreement that makes the new-media framework work for all actors.” Hollywood has been bracing for the possibility of another strike, should no agreement be reached with the actors guild by June 30, when its contract expires. Unlike what happened during the writers’ strike, a walkout by the actors would bring virtually all filming covered by the guild to an immediate halt. Companies have been rushing to complete their movie productions before that deadline, and little work has been scheduled for the weeks beyond, promising what some have called a de facto strike — a period with little production because of uncertainty over labor talks. Last month, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents about 25,000 movie and television workers on the West Coast, recessed talks focused on a contract that would take effect when its current pact expires in August 2009.


Iraqis Want Lead Role in Driving ISIS From Mosul

Abstract: BAGHDAD — Underscoring the Iraqi government’s determination to control the timetable and tactics in the battle against the Islamic State, the country’s defense minister declared on Wednesday that the most challenging operation, driving the militants from Mosul, Iraq ’s second-largest city, would be “planned, timed and executed by Iraqis.” The comments from the minister, Khaled al-Obeidi, came a day after tensions surfaced in the Iraqi-American alliance against the group, and as Islamic State militants used guerrilla tactics to hold off a major government effort to retake the city of Tikrit for a third day. Thousands of people have fled their homes in and around Tikrit, United Nations officials said. Amid hopes that the Tikrit offensive could become the first step in a broader effort to seize back territory from Islamic State fighters, Iraqi officials have bridled at estimates by some American officials that the Iraqi forces would not be ready to move against Mosul for months. American officials had also expressed concerns about the leading role of Iranian military officials and Iranian-aligned Shiite militias in the new offensive. Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi Efforts to stem the rise of the Islamic State. But as the battle continued in Tikrit, American officials, as well as some of their Iraqi counterparts, insisted that the countries’ relationship was healthy and that close military collaboration would continue against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS , ISIL or by the Arabic acronym Daesh. Even though United States warplanes are not participating in the Tikrit battle, as they have in others, the Iraqi government still welcomes continued international assistance, said Ali al-Alaaq, a close aide to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. “Today in Salahuddin, we were hoping that the Americans could participate in the battle against ISIS, but we have launched against ISIS alone,” he said. “We are expecting that the support will be continued, especially since we are facing a very important task in Mosul and other cities in Iraq.” American officials, too, tried to play down signs of strain between the United States and Iraq. “The United States is proud of its partnership with Iraqi forces, which has made huge impacts in weakening Daesh, and we are looking forward to more coordination with the Iraqi forces,” the United States ambassador to Iraq, Stuart E. Jones, said after meeting with Adnan al-Zurufi, the governor of Najaf, in southern Iraq. He appeared to be reassuring Iraqi officials that the United States did not oppose the use of Shiite militias known as popular mobilization forces. They have played a crucial role in the ground fight since many regular army units disintegrated as ISIS seized much of northern and western Iraq in June. “Our direct coordination is with the Iraqi security forces, and we count on the security forces to coordinate with the popular mobilization forces and other forces that are cooperating in the fight against Daesh,” Mr. Jones said. Video ISIS massacred hundreds of Iraqi military recruits in June 2014. Ali Hussein Kadhim survived. This is his improbable story. [Includes graphic images.] Credit Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times On Wednesday, new militia reinforcements — augmenting a force that began with about 20,000 militia fighters and 10,000 regular soldiers — arrived on the outskirts of towns near Tikrit, Al Dour, Al Alam and Albu Aji. But snipers, roadside bombs and other guerrilla tactics prevented them from advancing, said military officials in Samarra, another city in Salahuddin Province. A major bridge crossing to Tikrit from the town of Tuz Khurmato had been wired with bombs by the Islamic State, they said. United Nations officials said about 24,000 people had been driven from their homes in the province during a week of fighting. A Sunni lawmaker, Maysoon al-Damluji, said she supported an offensive in Tikrit, and noted that Sunnis there and in the surrounding province of Salahuddin had suffered under the Islamic State. Her only concern, she said, was the Iranian leadership. “We have enough Iraqis with military expertise,” Ms. Damluji said. Separately, Islamic State supporters have been circulating a report online that an American member of the militant group took part in a suicide truck bombing Monday near Samarra. According to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks militants’ online activity, the message referred to the bomber only as Abu Dawoud al-Amriki and said his suicide attack had killed dozens of Shiites. Iraqi military officials confirmed there had been a truck bombing in Samarra on Monday, and said it had killed three militia volunteers and wounded 12, with no information about the bomber’s identity.

Iraq
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Baghdad
Mosul
US Foreign Policy
Tikrit