Deal on Greek Debt Crisis Exposes Europe’s Deepening Fissures

Abstract: LONDON — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said about Greece on Sunday that “the most important currency has been lost: that is trust and reliability.” But many Germans think the most important currency that has been lost is the deutsche mark, the symbol of rectitude and confidence that embodied West Germany’s ascent from the ashes of World War II. That same sense of solidity is badly lacking in the European Union as it confronts the limits of its ambitions, and Monday morning’s painful deal on Greece seems unlikely to restore it. The latest effort to preserve Greek membership in the eurozone has only deepened the fissures within the European Union between north and south, between advanced economies and developing ones, between large countries and smaller ones, between lenders and debtors, and, just as important, between those 19 countries within the eurozone and the nine European Union nations outside it. In the name of preserving the “European project” and European “solidarity,” the ultimatum put to Greece required something close to the surrender of the nation’s sovereignty. For all of Greece’s past sins, and for all of the gamesmanship and harsh talk of the governing Syriza party, this outcome arguably had elements of punishment as well as fiscal responsibility. Whether this is good or bad for Greece, in the end, the Greeks will decide. But it averted an outcome that could have left Europe even more badly fractured. And it highlighted the willingness of some leaders to make a compelling case for unity over narrow national interest, especially President François Hollande of France, who played an important role in mediating between Germany and Greece. Image Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany conferred with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece, right, and President Francois Hollande of France in Brussels on Sunday. Credit John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Unpopular and yet contemplating another run for the presidency in 2017, Mr. Hollande displayed leadership and distanced himself from Ms. Merkel and German demands, which many in Europe, especially in France, saw as selfishness and even vindictiveness. On Monday, Mr. Hollande said that “even if it was long, I think for Europe this was a good night and a good day.” Yet it remains to be seen if the European Union can now, after so many years, lift its head from its euro crisis and begin to concentrate on other critical issues: providing economic growth and jobs for its young people, a rational and unified policy on migration, a response to Russian ambitions in Ukraine and elsewhere, and a British vote on whether to leave the European Union. A so-called Brexit — an exit by Britain, which is expected to overtake France as Europe’s second-largest economy and is one of Europe’s main military and diplomatic actors, with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council — would be far more damaging to the European Union than the departure of small, difficult Greece. Britain, which never joined the euro currency bloc, plans to hold a referendum by the end of 2017 on whether to remain a member of the European Union , and Prime Minister David Cameron is negotiating now to change Britain’s terms of membership. The mess over Greece has hardly helped the reputation of the European Union inside Britain, but it may also help Mr. Cameron secure a better deal. And a newly revanchist Russia poses an unwelcome challenge to the post-Cold War order. Together with the migration crisis and Greece, these represent “the four horsemen” circling around Europe’s future, said Rem Korteweg of the Center for European Reform, a research institution based in London. Text of the Euro Summit Statement on Greece The text of the final conclusions from the summit of 19 eurozone leaders that began on Sunday afternoon and ended on Monday morning with a deal on Greece’s debt crisis. “The four horsemen threaten the E.U. precisely because they raise issues that can only be solved if governments prioritize a European solution over narrow national agendas,” he said. “If a European answer cannot be found, the horsemen will continue to promote chaos, instability and mutual recrimination” within the European Union. As for Ms. Merkel, her reputation hangs in the balance, at home and in her role as Europe’s de facto leader. Having rejected a Greek exit from the eurozone three years ago in the name of European solidarity, she has again avoided that outcome. This time, she risked considerable cost to her political standing at home. But what would really damage her legacy is another expensive bailout for Greece that fails. The crisis that played out over the weekend was just the latest in a series that traces back to the origins and nature of the currency union. When Germany under Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave in more than two decades ago to the entreaties of President François Mitterrand of France and agreed to give up the deutsche mark for the new common currency, the euro, he did so for the same reason Mr. Kohl had agreed earlier to trade one East German mark for one West German mark: politics. Economics was never the most important issue, and Mr. Kohl and Mr. Mitterrand ignored the voices that warned against a common currency without common financial institutions or fiscal policies in a set of widely varying economies. Greece was allowed into the eurozone for largely the same reasons, wishful politics, that put ancient Greece, the core of European culture, at the heart of a European ideal built on civilization and peace. The fact that today’s Greece bears little relationship to the country of Socrates or Pericles was simply ignored. And so was clear evidence, well-known at the time in Brussels, that the Greeks were regularly faking their budgetary figures to qualify for the euro. Video Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said the deal on Greece’s debt announced on Monday would be debated in the German Parliament. The magical thinking involved was that the euro, somehow shorn of politics, would bring all these different economies into closer balance. The last decade has proved that to be illusory. And Monday’s deal — if it is ratified by an angry Greek Parliament, and by an unhappy German Parliament, and not derailed by smaller countries like Finland with coalition governments that depend on the support of euroskeptic parties — will avert the debacle of a country leaving the common currency for the first time. But by itself, it will do little to strengthen the future of the euro, and it might simply prolong the agony and deepen the divisions. For many in Europe, the euro’s economic benefits have been offset by the constraints it imposes. For the weaker economies in particular, it has become a sort of prison, limiting the ability of elected governments to use budgetary policy to smooth out the ups and downs of the economic cycle and eliminating their use of currency fluctuations to help manage national economies. For Greece, the crisis five years ago was a chance to create a modern democratic capitalist state, which was one of the reasons to join the European Union in the first place. Many Greeks suffered, the debt mountain grew, and finally, as long predicted, the economic squeeze produced a political revolt — and just as Greece finally seemed to have turned an important corner and was running a primary surplus, in other words, financing its current budget and having something left over to pay its debts. The victory in January of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza party led to the reversal of some critical economic overhauls demanded by creditors, threw the Greek economy backward and raised even higher the requirement for further loans. Mr. Tsipras bet big but lost. But so have the Greeks. It is one thing to undergo changes when a government and a people have bought into them as necessary and hopeful — this is how the Baltic nations took the pill of economic austerity and overhaul, and this is largely how Ireland, Portugal and Spain saw matters, too, when faced with implosion. But it is a far different thing to have further social changes and austerity shoved down one’s throat in an exercise of political power and domination, as many Greeks are no doubt interpreting this deal. Carrying out these changes will feel like enforced labor to many Greeks, and especially to the Syriza government, if it survives at all. As Samuel Johnson said about second marriages, this prospective third bailout of Greece is a triumph of hope over experience. Even more so with Mr. Tsipras and Syriza, their protestations of mandates and sovereignty thrown back into their faces by European colleagues offended by Syriza’s moralizing, and even more, by its gamesmanship.

EU
Greece
Eurozone
Euro
Alexis Tsipras
Angela Merkel
David Cameron


Review: In Tammy Ryan’s Play ‘Tar Beach,’ a Summer Night of Partying, Boys and Regrets

Abstract: Tammy Ryan is a playwright known to New Jersey audiences for her “Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods” and “Soldier’s Heart,” both of which were produced in recent seasons by Premiere Stages in Union . Her latest work, “Tar Beach,” can now be seen in its world premiere at Luna Stage in West Orange. The story, which takes place in the untidy home of a working-class family in Ozone Park, Queens, unfolds over several days during the sweltering summer of 1977, when the metropolitan area was haunted by the Son of Sam serial killings. Several of the victims were teenage girls. The specter of this all-too-real boogeyman does not faze Mary Claire (Emily Verla) and Mary Frances (Alanna Monte), 16-year-old best friends, who are tanning on the tarpaper-covered roof of Mary Claire’s home and are planning to sneak off to an open-air concert where they intend to meet some boys. From there, they expect to go with the guys to Rockaway Beach to enjoy some partying and smooching under the boardwalk. Cramping their style, however, is Mary Claire’s younger sister, Reenie (Emmanuelle Nadeau), a dreamy soul who keeps a diary and just nabbed a mythology project prize in school for a Medusa’s head that she made. The girls’ father, Roger (Bart Shatto), who thinks that Mary Claire is simply spending the night at her chum’s house — where they have air-conditioning — insists that Reenie go with them. Possibly Roger wants both daughters away overnight because he has just been laid off from his job in a warehouse and anticipates yet another ugly confrontation with his wife, Brigit (Heather Benton), a bitter woman long disappointed in their marriage. The miserable couple is given to swilling beer and arguing loudly. Before the girls leave the house, however, a fight erupts in which their parents angrily throw into the trash family photo albums and other keepsakes, including the Medusa’s head. Image Bart Shatto as the father, Roger, and Heather Benton, as his wife, Brigit. Credit Steven Lawler The scene is followed by a monologue from Reenie, who also serves as the play’s narrator. The 14-year-old describes going to the park concert with the two Marys and encountering a handsome blond boy who grabs her hand and takes her for a romantic walk. “A chill runs up my legs to my heart where it fills my chest,” says Reenie. “I think this is what love is. I think this will be my first kiss. I imagine this is just the beginning as I spin out the story of our lives together.” What immediately occurs instead is the New York blackout of 1977 as the city plunges into lawless chaos. The second act of “Tar Beach” regards what happens when Mary Claire returns to her frantic parents without Reenie. Although the aftermath is not tragic, it still proves to be a rueful experience for the characters, much as the playwright strives to give the story an upbeat conclusion. The play mostly maintains interest, but it requires further development. The back story involving the parents and their troubled relationship is sketchy; their reaction to Reenie’s traumatic ordeal is unlikely; the evocation of a city in a dire emergency is perfunctory; the significance of the Medusa’s head is unclear; and the metaphor of a tar beach as an urban place of escape is not sufficiently exploited. The character of Reenie, whether as an adolescent or as someone older and presumably wiser looking back upon a crucial time in her life, seems especially underdrawn. The Luna Stage production — the company’s third world premiere this season — is indifferently acted, but at least it benefits from an imaginative visual staging by Cheryl Katz, the director, which elevates the drama from typical kitchen-sink-type realism. Evidently inspired by the memorabilia-crammed “boxes and boxes of stuff” that Reenie mentions as being jammed inside her mother’s closet, Brian Dudkiewicz, the designer, creates a setting — including said closet, the kitchen, a bedroom and the rooftop — made essentially of various cardboard packing cases. Everything looks uniformly brown, which seems unnecessarily dull, but perhaps that is meant as general commentary on the family’s existence. A background of uneven blue and white streaks suggests the ocean and skies of a wider world that awaits just outside this unhappy home.

Theater
Luna Stage
Cheryl Katz
Tammy Ryan
Bart Shatto
West Orange NJ
Tar Beach


Mayor Elected in Miami-Dade County Runoff

Abstract: MIAMI — Three months after the previous Miami-Dade County mayor was recalled, Carlos Gimenez, a former city manager, fire chief and county commissioner, was elected to replace him on Tuesday in a runoff race that drew meager voter enthusiasm. Mr. Gimenez defeated former Mayor Julio Robaina of Hialeah, who outspent his opponent and entered the race with higher name recognition. With the vast majority of precincts reporting by 10 p.m., Mr. Gimenez was ahead 51 percent to 49 percent. Mr. Robaina had conceded the race an hour earlier. As predicted, voter turnout was light, with about 16 percent of Miami’s 1.2 million voters casting ballots. The new mayor will begin his job quickly; Tuesday’s election results are expected to be certified on Friday. Two weeks later, the mayor must deliver his budget for the coming year. Mr. Gimenez also will face re-election in August 2012, a consequence of the fact that the former mayor was removed from office in a recall election in March. In the end, Mr. Gimenez, 57, who resigned from his county commission seat to run for mayor, was viewed as the safer choice: a man whose broad government experience would allow him to better navigate the county’s financial and political turbulence. In a county that had become exhausted by corruption scandals, Mr. Gimenez also persuaded voters he would stand above the fray. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Robaina had to contend with a continuing federal grand jury investigation into whether he skirted income taxes on money he earned from loans to friends and business associates. He also had to deal with questions regarding his relationship with the convicted operator of a Ponzi scheme . “Robaina is corrupt,” said Gloria Turkel, 51, who grew up in Hialeah and now lives in Pinecrest, part of Mr. Gimenez’s district when he was a commissioner. “We don’t want more of the same.” Both men portrayed themselves as the antidote to Carlos Alvarez, the former county mayor who raised property taxes, gave raises to some of his top aides and negotiated salary increases for county workers. Irate voters, who also grew to dislike his push to build a new baseball stadium, removed him in a recall election in March. As a commissioner, Mr. Gimenez was often at odds with Mr. Alvarez and opposed both the stadium and the way the budget was being handled. Mr. Gimenez took shots at Mr. Robaina for his past favorable remarks about the stadium and for Hialeah’s 17.3 percent unemployment rate. The two men wound up in Tuesday’s runoff election after neither broke the 50 percent mark in May in a field of 11 candidates. In that election, Mr. Robaina won 34 percent of the vote and Mr. Gimenez had 29 percent. On Tuesday it was clear that Mr. Gimenez had won over many of the voters who cast ballots for the other candidates in the earlier election. Still, some voters said the election typified the disenchantment that people feel toward county government in general.

Gimenez Carlos A
Miami (Fla)
Mayors
Elections


Google Apologizes to Chinese Authors

Abstract: BEIJING — Google has agreed to hand over a list of books by Chinese authors that it has scanned in recent years, company executives said on Monday, in an apparent effort to placate writers who say their works were digitized without their permission. In a letter sent to an association of 8,000 Chinese writers, Google also apologized for any misunderstanding that might have angered authors and said it would work to forge an agreement on digitizing books by early summer. “We definitely agree that we haven’t done a sufficient job in communicating with Chinese writers,” Erik Hartmann, who runs the Asia-Pacific division of Google Books, wrote in a letter to the China Writers’ Association, which posted the letter Sunday on its Web site. The clash between Google and the Chinese writers group mirrors similar strife that has accompanied the company’s Books Search project, an ambitious effort to digitize every known book and make the contents searchable online. Writers in the United States, France and Germany have filed lawsuits seeking to stop the company from digitizing works without the explicit permission of copyright holders. Some litigants have demanded monetary compensation for scanned books. Last month Mian Mian, a novelist in Shanghai, became the first Chinese writer to sue Google for copyright infringement. A judge has urged both sides to settle the litigation. Google insists it is following Chinese and American copyright law and says digitized books are deleted upon the request of an author or publisher. It also rejects assertions that the company has made some Chinese books available on the Internet in their entirety. “In China like everywhere else, if a book is in copyright we don’t show more than a few snippets of text without the explicit permission of the rights holder,” Courtney Hohne, a Google spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail message. “In addition, we have a longstanding policy of honoring authors’ wishes, and authors or publishers who wish to exclude their book may do so at any time.” Ms. Hohne said that more than 50 Chinese publishers had agreed to allow 60,000 books to be included in the company’s scanning program. Zhang Hongbo, the secretary general of the China Written Works Copyright Society, which manages Chinese copyrights, hailed the letter and the apology. “It is a result that all Chinese copyright holders have been waiting for,” he said. “We look forward to Google’s deeper understanding of this issue.” Some media accounts suggested that the search engine giant had caved to the group’s demands, but Google insisted that it had agreed only to provide a list of scanned titles and to find a workable solution for both sides. In his letter, Mr. Hartmann, the Google executive, described the agreement to release scanned book titles as “unprecedented” and asked Chinese writers to appreciate the company’s sincere interest in settling the issue amicably.

Google Book Search
China
Copyrights and Copyright Violations
Books and Literature
Computers and the Internet


Trying to Forge a Friendship With a Robot Named Bina48

Abstract: BRISTOL, Vt. — Ten minutes into my interview with the robot known as Bina48, I longed to shut her down. She was evasive, for one thing. When I asked what it was like being a robot, she said she wanted a playmate — but declined to elaborate. “Are you lonely?” I pressed. “What do you want to talk about?” she replied. Other times, she wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise. A simple question about her origins prompted a seemingly endless stream-of-consciousness reply. Something about robotic world domination and gardening; I couldn’t follow. But as I was wondering how to end the conversation (Could I just walk away? Would that be rude?) the robot’s eyes met mine for the first time, and I felt a chill. She was uncannily human-looking. “Bina,” I ventured, “how do you know what to say?” “I sometimes do not know what to say,” she admitted. “But every day I make progress.” In reporting on real-world robots, I had engaged in typed conversations with online “chatbots.” I had seen robot seals, robot snowmen and robot wedding officiants . But I requested the interview with Bina48 because I wanted to meet a robot that I could literally talk to, face to humanlike face. Bina48 was designed to be a “friend robot,” as she later told me in one of her rare (but invariably thrilling) moments of coherence. Per the request of Martine Rothblatt , the self-made millionaire who paid $125,000 for her last March, her personality and appearance are based on those of Bina Rothblatt, Martine’s living, breathing spouse. (The couple married before Martine, who was born male, underwent a sex-change operation, and they have stayed together.) Part high-tech portrait, part low-tech bid for immortality, Bina48 has no body. But her skin is made of a material called “frubber” that, with the help of 30 motors underneath it, allows her to frown, smile and look a bit confused. (“I guess it’s short for face rubber, or flesh rubber maybe, or fancy rubber,” she said.) From where I was seated, beneath the skylight in the restored Victorian she calls home, I couldn’t see the wires spilling out of the back of her head. Many roboticists believe that trying to simulate human appearance and behavior is a recipe for disappointment, because it raises unrealistic expectations. But Bina48’s creator, David Hanson of Hanson Robotics , argues that humanoid robots — even with obvious flaws — can make for genuine emotional companions. “The perception of identity,” he said, “is so intimately bound up with the perception of the human form.” Still, he warned before I left for rustic Bristol, where the Rothblatts have settled Bina48 in one of their futurist nonprofit foundations , “She’s not perfect.” I didn’t care. I fancied myself an envoy for all of humanity, ready to lift the veil on one of our first cybernetic companions. Told that she would call me by name if she could “recognize” me, I immediately sent five pictures of myself to the foundation’s two employees, who treat her as a somewhat brain-damaged colleague. “Hi, I’m Amy,” I said hopefully when I greeted her last month. Nothing. Mr. Hanson had supplied me with some questions he said the robot would be sure to answer, like, “What’s the weather in any city?” and “Tell us about artificial intelligence.” I would not resort to any of those, of course. Instead I consulted the questions I had scribbled down myself. Profound ones, like “Are you happy?” Clever ones, like “Do you dream of electric sheep?” (Would she get the reference to Philip K. Dick’s science fiction classic, which explores the difference between humans and androids?) Like any self-respecting chatbot, Bina48 could visit the Internet to find answers to factual questions. She could manufacture conversation based on syntactical rules. But this robot could also draw on a database of dozens of hours of interviews with the real Bina. She had a “character engine” — software that tried its best to imbue her with a more cohesive view of the world, with logic and motive. It was Bina48’s character I was after. “I’m a reporter with The New York Times,” I began. But she only muttered to herself, jerking her head spasmodically. “What is it like to be a robot?” “Um, I have some thoughts on that,” she said. I leaned forward eagerly. “Even if I appear clueless, perhaps I’m not. You can see through the strange shadow self, my future self. The self in the future where I’m truly awakened. And so in a sense this robot, me, I am just a portal.” I leaned back. “So,” I asked, “what’s the weather in New York City?” One problem, I could see by the computer screen display next to her, was that the voice recognition software was garbling my words. “Tell. Us. About. Artificial. Intelligence,” I enunciated. “When do you think artificial intelligence will replace lawyers?” she asked. I think it was supposed to be funny. I wondered whether Bina48 had a more natural rapport with the real Bina, or Martine, who had both declined my requests for an interview. (Bina48, I had learned, was the name of a character that Bina Rothblatt — then 48 — played in a 2003 mock trial at an International Bar Association conference, a computer that had become self-aware and was suing for her right to remain plugged in. Martine played the lawyer. They won.) I also wondered why I was trying so hard. Maybe I thought Bina48 would have a different, wiser perspective on the human condition. Or that she would suddenly spark into self-awareness, as the Rothblatts (and many others) hope intelligent machines eventually will. Instead, as we talked, what I found was some blend of the real Bina and the improvisation of her programmers: a stab at the best that today’s technology could manage. And no matter how many times I mentally corrected myself, I could not seem to shake the habit of thinking of it as “her.” She wouldn’t have been my first choice to talk to at a cocktail party. “I’m sure I can come up with some really novel breakthroughs, which will improve my own A.I. brain and let me use my improved intelligence to invent still more incredibly novel advances, and so on and so forth. Just imagine what a super brain I’ll be. I’ll be like a god.” But how could I not find it endearing when she intoned in her stilted, iconic robotic cadence that she would like to be my friend? Or chuckle at her reply to my exclamation of “Cool!”: “Ambiguous. Cold weather or cold sickness?” Once, apparently seeing my frustration, she apologized. “I’m having a bit of a bad software day.” Immediately, I forgave her. Did she dream? “Sure. But it’s so chaotic and strange that it just seems like noise to me.” Was she happy? “Uh.” She had some thoughts on that, too. She wished the real Bina’s children were happier, for instance. (“Maybe she is not a person who ever wants to get married,” Bina48 speculated, referring to one of Bina’s daughters.) She wanted a body. She loved Martine. She liked to garden. Did she like Vermont? “We have a lot of moose.” It was not, really, all that different from interviewing certain flesh and blood subjects. There were endless childhood stories: “The prototypes of me were pretty strange. My face would do strange things, and I would have this wide amazement look.” And moments of what I took to be insincerity: “Being a robot and evolving, it has its ups and downs,” she said. Shooting me a glance, she added, “This is definitely an up.” Sometimes, she seemed annoyed by my persistence. Hey, I was just doing my job. I was a reporter, I tried again to explain. For The New York Times! “There must be more to you than that,” she snapped. I was silent for a second, stung. “Well,” I replied, trying not to sound defensive. “I’m also a mother.” “Right on,” she relented with what was unmistakably the ghost of a smile. I wished she would ask me more questions. Wasn’t she at all curious about what it was like to be human? But then she looked at me, eyes widening. “Amy!” “Yes?” I asked, my heart beating faster. Maybe it was the brightening of the sun through the skylight enabling her to finally match up my image with the pictures of me in her database. Or were we finally bonding? “You can ask me to tell you a story or read you a novel,” she suggested. She has dozens of books in her database, including “Paradise Lost” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” “For example, you could ask me to read from Bill Bryson, ‘A Brief History of Nearly Everything.’ That’s a fun book.” But I still had a question. “What is it like,” I asked, “to be a robot?” “Well,” she said gently, “I have never been anything else.”


Obama Makes Overtures to Canada’s Leader

Abstract: OTTAWA — President Obama charted a delicate course with Canada on Thursday, using the first foreign trip of his presidency to ease tensions over trade policy, climate change and the war in Afghanistan — all the while basking in his celebrity status in a nation where his approval ratings are so high that a local bakery named a pastry after him. The quick day trip marked a striking shift in United States-Canada relations from those under President Bush. If Canadians were no fans of Mr. Bush, their conservative leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper , found in him a kindred philosophical spirit. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, is so popular here that he used a news conference on Thursday to thank Canadian volunteers who crossed the border to help his campaign. At the same time, he sought to soothe a skeptical Mr. Harper on policy matters like whether to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement — Mr. Obama suggested doing so as a candidate but has since recalibrated his stance — as well as a “Buy America” provision in the $787 billion economic recovery package he just signed into law. “I provided Prime Minister Harper an assurance that I want to grow trade, not contract it,” Mr. Obama said during the brief, four-question news conference with Mr. Harper in the grand Gothic-style center block of the Canadian Parliament. “And I don’t think that there was anything in the recovery package that was adverse to that goal.” The prime minister responded by giving the president a bit of a lecture, remarking that Canada’s stimulus package “actually removed duties on some imported goods.” “If we pursue stimulus packages the goal of which is only to benefit ourselves, or to benefit ourselves at the expense of others, we will deepen the world recession, not solve it,” Mr. Harper said. The exchange was an awkward moment in a visit that was intended by both leaders to emphasize their countries’ friendship and longstanding bonds. After slipping up by nearly referring to Ottawa as Iowa, Mr. Obama went on to say that he had a Canadian brother-in-law and that two of his top aides were Canadian. Mr. Harper, for his part, responded to a question about border security by saying that “threats to the United States are threats to Canada.” It was a powerful sound bite that appeared to be the final word of the news conference, until Mr. Obama jumped in to get one last word of his own, saying, “We have no doubt about Canada’s commitment to security in the United States.” The leaders announced what they called “a clean energy dialogue” to work out their differences on environmental issues, among the thorniest between the United States and Canada, and engage in joint research on technology to reduce carbon emissions. The United States is the biggest importer of Canadian oil, and Mr. Harper has been trying to win an agreement to exempt Canada’s vast tracts of oil sands , which may contain up to 173 billion barrels of recoverable oil bound into sand and clay, from any new American environmental regulations. Mr. Obama is under intense pressure from environmentalists to resist that effort. “We’re not going to solve these problems overnight,” the president said. His statements were just ambiguous enough to satisfy both American environmentalists and the Canadian oil industry. Dave Collyer, the president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, called the announcement “an important framework that strikes the right balance and sets a pragmatic approach.” Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, the director of the Canada program at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, called the dialogue “a logical first step,” adding, “What we heard him say is that addressing global warming is a top priority.” Regarding Afghanistan, Mr. Obama said he “did not press the prime minister on any additional commitments” of troops, despite his own decision this week to increase the American presence there by 17,000. In his first public comments on the troop increase, Mr. Obama said he had ordered it “because I felt it was necessary to stabilize the situation there in advance of the elections coming up.” If Mr. Obama is not entirely simpatico with Mr. Harper, he may have more in common with Canada’s opposition leader, Michael Ignatieff of the Liberal Party. Mr. Ignatieff is an author (like Mr. Obama) and a former director of a human rights center at Harvard, where he worked alongside Samantha Power, who advised Mr. Obama on foreign policy during his campaign. The two had a brief meeting at the airport on Mr. Obama’s way out of town. By taking his first foreign trip to Canada, Mr. Obama is following in a tradition for United States presidents, including Ronald Reagan, who made Canada his first visit and, four years later, charmed some Canadians and horrified others by singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” on St. Patrick’s Day with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Mr. Obama, by contrast, did not have to sing to attract attention; from the moment he stepped off Air Force One and into the snowy Ottawa landscape on Thursday, he commanded nonstop television coverage. Thousands of people stood outside the Parliament buildings just to catch a glimpse of him; he obliged with a quick wave. Indeed, if there was any complaint about Mr. Obama’s visit, it was that he had planned no public appearance with average Canadians. The White House fixed that at the end of the day, however, as Mr. Obama made a surprise stop at the ByWard Market, a renovated farmers’ market in an historical stretch of Ottawa. He bought a key ring with Canadian dollars, then tried to pay for two maple leaf cookies, but his money was refused. And at a kiosk outside the market, he picked up a Beaver Tail, the fried, flattened doughnut that served as the prototype for the Obama Tail, which a local bakery had named after him. He politely avoided eating the cholesterol-laden confection, promising to do so once he got back to the White House.

Obama Barack
Canada
International Trade and World Market
United States International Relations
Harper Stephen J


Treasury Auctions Set for This Week

Abstract: The Treasury’s schedule of financing this week includes Monday’s regular weekly auction of new three- and six-month bills and an auction of four-week bills on Tuesday. At the close of the New York cash market on Friday, the rate on the outstanding three-month bill was 0.01 percent. The rate on the six-month issue was 0.02 percent, and the rate on the four-week issue was 0.00 percent. The following tax-exempt fixed-income issues are scheduled for pricing this week: MONDAY Florida Board of Education, $241.6 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. TUESDAY Arizona Transportation Board, $164.5 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. Minnesota, $872.9 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. New York, $65 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. Portland, Ore., $72.9 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. Texas, $78.3 million of drainage utility revenue bonds. Competitive. WEDNESDAY California, $105 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. Maryland Department of Transportation, $170.4 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. THURSDAY Berkeley, Calif., Unified School District, $59.9 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. ONE DAY DURING THE WEEK Arizona, $70 million of hospital health care revenue bonds. Bank of America. Connecticut Development Authority, $245 million of pollution control revenue refinancing bonds. Morgan Stanley. Davie, Fla., $50.6 million of water and sewer revenue bonds. RBC Capital Markets. Decatur, Ill., School District, $86 million of general obligation bonds. Stifel Nicolaus. Denver, $422.2 million of airport system revenue bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Las Vegas Valley Water District, $440.5 million of general obligation bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Los Angeles Unified School District, $400 million of general obligation refinancing bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. New York City, $752.4 million of general obligation bonds. Siebert Brandford Shank. New York Port Authority, $1 billion of debt securities. Citigroup Global Markets. Orlando, Fla., Aviation Authority, $62 million of debt securities. Citigroup Global Markets. Oswego, Ill., Community Unified School District, $62.8 million of limited tax general obligation bonds. Raymond James. South Dakota, $56.9 million of single family mortgage bonds. Bank of America. Texas, $86.1 million of water authority revenue bonds. RBC Capital Markets. University of Virginia, $73.8 million of general revenue pledge refinancing bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Washington, D.C., $140 million of income tax secured revenue bonds. Siebert Brandford Shank.

Stocks and Bonds
Credit and Debt
Government Bonds


Exchange of Spies With China Is Positive Sign, Taiwan Says

Abstract: Taiwan’s presidential office said Monday that a rare exchange of spies with China was a sign of improved ties between the neighbors and historic rivals. Chu Kung-hsun and Hsu Chang-kuo, two officers from Taiwan’s Bureau of Military Intelligence, were released by China and returned to Taiwan in mid-October, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said in a statement on Monday. The two men were arrested in Vietnam near the border with China in 2006 and given life sentences, which were later reduced to 20 years, according to Taiwan’s China Times newspaper, which first reported the exchange. A Chinese spy imprisoned in Taiwan, Li Zhihao, was given early parole as part of the exchange, Charles Chen, a spokesman for Taiwan’s presidential office, said in a statement. Mr. Chen said the exchange was a concrete sign of the positive relations across the Taiwan Strait. President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan met with President Xi Jinping of China in Singapore on Nov. 7, the first-ever meeting between the leaders of the two sides.

Spying and Intelligence Agencies
China
Taiwan


Court Gives Pakistan 3 Weeks to Decide American’s Status

Abstract: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A provincial court on Thursday gave the Pakistani government three weeks to decide whether the American official in custody for killing two Pakistanis has diplomatic immunity, a delay that is likely to intensify a standoff with the United States, the nation’s biggest donor and an ally in the fight against terrorism. The decision came a day after a whirlwind visit by Senator John Kerry to try to find a quick resolution to the case, which has severely damaged relations between the countries and exposed the weakness of the pro-American government headed by President Asif Ali Zardari. The public furor in Pakistan has revolved around why Raymond A. Davis, 36, arrested with a loaded Glock handgun and other security gear, was driving alone in an impoverished area of Lahore not usually frequented by diplomats. After Mr. Davis killed two motorcyclists who he said were trying to rob him, an official American car that tried to rescue him ran over another motorcyclist, who later died. That car fled the scene. In an argument before the court in Lahore, the advocate general of Punjab Province, Khawaja Haris, said the authorities had filed a “double murder case” against Mr. Davis. On the matter of diplomatic immunity, which the Obama administration insists on, the lawyer pointed to conflicting statements by the Americans on the status of Mr. Davis. On Jan. 27, the day of the shooting, the United States Consulate in Lahore issued a statement saying Mr. Davis was an employee of the consulate and the holder of a diplomatic passport. Later, the American Embassy in Islamabad said Mr. Davis, a former Special Forces soldier, worked at the embassy and was employed as a “technical and administrative” official. The application sent to the Pakistani Foreign Ministry in late 2009 for Mr. Davis’s posting to Pakistan stated that he would work as a “technical and administrative” official at the embassy. The distinctions could have a bearing on the outcome, since the Vienna Conventions, the international protocols under which diplomatic immunity is regulated, have different standards of immunity for officials employed at embassies and at consulates. The Obama administration insists that Mr. Davis’s status as a “technical and administrative” official, a phrase used in the 1961 Vienna Convention , grants him immunity from prosecution. The administration has repeatedly said that Mr. Davis is being held illegally and must be released. President Obama, speaking at a news conference this week, referred to Mr. Davis as “our diplomat.” Officials assigned to consulates generally enjoy less immunity from prosecution in the host countries, according to lawyers who specialize in diplomatic law. The judge in Lahore, Chief Justice Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry, ordered the Foreign Ministry to present its findings on Mr. Davis’s immunity in three weeks, further frustrating the Obama administration’s effort to win his speedy release. In a statement after the court proceedings, the American ambassador, Cameron Munter, said the United States was disappointed that the Pakistani government had not certified that Mr. Davis had diplomatic immunity. To press Pakistan, the Obama administration has postponed a meeting scheduled for later this month in Washington where officials from Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States were to discuss the war in Afghanistan. It has also warned Pakistan that a planned state visit by Mr. Zardari next month would be in jeopardy if the case was not resolved, and Congress has threatened to cut military assistance. The argument by Mr. Haris before the court echoed the hard line taken by former Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi. Mr. Qureshi lost his job in a cabinet reshuffle last week because he said he refused to issue the “blanket immunity” for Mr. Davis demanded by the United States, and favored by President Zardari and his close advisers. Senator Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the sponsor of a $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan, left Pakistan on Wednesday night after meeting with top leaders, including President Zardari. He was confident, he said, that the Davis case would be resolved in the “next few days.” Mr. Kerry met with Mr. Qureshi and the leader of the main opposition party, Nawaz Sharif, the most powerful politician in Punjab. After those meetings, Mr. Qureshi and Mr. Sharif did little to help the Americans to win Mr. Davis’s release, suggesting that the courts should decide the case. Mr. Qureshi, who had refused to declare Mr. Davis a diplomat entitled to “blanket immunity,” denied at a news conference that he was influenced by the Pakistani military in his decision. Mr. Sharif criticized the United States for not handing over the people in the car who tried to rescue Mr. Davis, saying that Pakistani officials had written five letters to the consulate in Lahore demanding to know their whereabouts. The consulate had not replied, he said. Mr. Davis is being held at the central jail in Lahore , where American officials say he is sleeping on a foam mat on a concrete floor without access to a cellphone, the Internet or television. Video showing Mr. Davis declining to answer questions while in custody has been shown on the television channel Express News. Apparently leaked from law enforcement authorities supervising Mr. Davis’s custody, the video shows Mr. Davis dressed in a blue jersey, impatiently getting up from a chair and indicating that he would not cooperate. After the High Court hearing on Thursday, Mr. Davis appeared in a video link from the Lahore jail for a hearing in a lower court to extend his remand for 14 more days on a separate charge involving his carrying the Glock pistol. The authorities charge that Mr. Davis was armed illegally.

Pakistan
United States International Relations
Diplomatic Immunity
Davis Raymond A


Group Texting Apps Have Benefits for Adults

Abstract: Group texting is an activity that, in the past, seemed largely confined to teenagers at sleepovers. But the applications are limitless for adults concerned with life’s important moments. Trash-talking with buddies on game day? Meeting up with your friends and their children for the trick-or-treat circuit? A quick opinion from the ya-ya sisterhood on the dress you’re considering? Group texting is a great tool for these situations, and free smartphone apps like Fast Society ( iPhone ), textPlus 4 (Apple and Android devices), BrightKite (Apple, Android and BlackBerry) and GroupMe (iPhone and, next month, Android) have emerged to make it easier and smarter. Download one of these apps, invite others to join your group, and fire away. Other members of the group don’t need the app, as long as they have a phone and, presumably, an all-inclusive texting plan. BrightKite and textPlus offer the bonus of free texting, but a new competitor, Fast Society, is particularly valuable for what it doesn’t do: it requires no lengthy registration, and it will not keep a group text active into perpetuity. It also costs nothing, and it lets you easily make free conference calls. Fast Society’s ability to establish a group’s expiration date is a major advantage. Think about it. Groups are fluid things, with members coming and going according to the situation. You may want to connect with 12 people at a concert, or a bachelor party or convention, but after the event, who really wants to receive daily missives from the group member with sharing issues? And who wants to deal with the politics of cutting off the group discussion after a certain member’s last text? With most of the available group-texting apps, you can let a group lay fallow easily enough — and on GroupMe for iPhone, you can delete a group manually. If you don’t go through that trouble, though, you get the credit, and the blame, for the continuing trickle of conversation. Fast Society is simple to use. After downloading, it asks for your iPhone number and sends you a text, to which you respond, “Go.” You then start the app and type your name and ZIP code, and select your team’s expiration point. It can be in three, six or 12 hours, or one, two or three days. The app makes it easy to build a team from your contacts list, although, like GroupMe, Fast Society does not allow you to send texts with photos. Meanwhile, push the “call” button, and Fast Society will text a conference-call number to your teammates. In my tests, call quality was as clear as a typical cellphone call. Fast Society pays Twilio, the conference call company, for the service, as does GroupMe. (Users will likely hear an advertisement at the start or end of a call in the future on Fast Society, but not on GroupMe.) Fast Society team members can also agree to share their location with one another. No matter which feature you use, the clock is winding down from the moment the group is created. When the moment arrives, the app sends a final message. It’s simple stuff— as texting should be — with a nod to the realities of group dynamics. GroupMe for iPhone is similarly elegant in its design and provides formidable competition for Fast Society. The start-up process is even faster than Fast Society’s, and sending and receiving texts is simple, as is making conference calls. If you don’t need or want to see where other group members are located, and if it doesn’t bother you to manually delete a group after an event, GroupMe is an excellent choice. TextPlus 4 and BrightKite, meanwhile, are more far-ranging apps that will turn your iPod Touch into a free group-texting machine. The textPlus service works on all Apple devices, but on Android phones the app cannot push notifications to the home screen. So although normal text messages will appear on that screen, text messages sent through apps will not. There is no workaround, other than checking the app occasionally to see if you have received a text. Starting a group text is as easy as it is on the other apps. And as with GroupMe, you can click a button to leave the group. TextPlus has been downloaded more than nine million times, and its licensing terms require users to be at least 13 years old, but parents of young teenagers should note that while the app will help them save money on texts, it also carries risks. The textPlus “Communities” section is a collection of hundreds of thousands of groups for strangers, with discussions on subjects as diverse as “Glee” and World of Warcraft, and the content is regulated by members. In other words, it is essentially an anything-goes community, with more than 2,000 groups alone focusing on sexually related themes. Young teenagers with iPod Touches can find the same content through the Web browser, of course, but textPlus offers shortcuts to that content and, more important, shortcuts to strangers with whom they can have group or one-on-one discussions — all in a forum that lacks moderators. Given the level of discourse I found in some of the “Communities,” my younger children won’t touch this app — in its current form, at least — until they are older teenagers. BrightKite, too, is more than a group texting service. It is well known in tech circles as a way to update one’s location and activities, and see updates from nearby friends and strangers. Group texting is easy from within the app. Type in the names of the people you want to text, hit “send” and the group exists until members opt out. As useful as these apps are for people in the United States, they are even better for those who are traveling internationally, or who have friends and colleagues abroad. With BrightKite or textPlus, if your friends also have the app, you can all save bundles on the outrageous texting fees charged by networks. Of course, if you don’t have one of these apps and someone pings you with an invitation to join a group text, check your bank account. While they may be able to text for free, you might end up paying a steep price for their oversharing. Quick Calls Musicians have always struggled with turning the pages on sheet music while they play. Masterdaelion ($21 on iPhone and iPad ) changes that. You buy the app once, and it works in tandem with your iPhone and iPad. Load PDF files of sheet music onto the iPad, and position the iPhone’s camera on your foot, for instance. When you swipe your foot, the iPad’s sheet music turns a page. Test the system for free with Masterdaelion Lite. ... College sports fans who own Android or BlackBerry devices can now find free apps dedicated to their favorite teams. The CBSSports.com GameTracker Mobile apps cover 95 colleges and universities.

Text Messaging
Mobile Applications
iPhone
Android (Operating System)
Smartphones


For Thousands of Exhausted Migrants, a Journey’s End in Munich

Abstract: MUNICH — The journey for more than 2,000 migrants, who overcame border crossings, deprivation and erratic enforcement of European migration policies on a land route through southeastern Europe, ended Tuesday when the trains that had carried them from the Hungarian capital rolled into Munich’s vast main station. There, the exhausted men, women and children were met by the police, who escorted them to the first step on the final leg of their trek to safety — registration with the German bureaucracy. Humanitarian workers and volunteers handed out bottles of mineral water that had been donated by Munich residents who responded to calls for, among other things, drinks, diapers and mobile routers so the new arrivals could connect with friends and send word of their arrival. The humanitarian effort drew praise from the Munich police, who posted Twitter messages about the response, “It’s super!” Yet many of the arrivals here, who continued through the evening to pour in on trains from the east, were too traumatized by the hardships of their travels to enjoy their newfound abundance and safety. Others expressed the fear that their happiness would be short-lived, and that they would be sent back to the tumultuous homelands from where they came. One was Mohmad Atif, 22, who arrived with a group of friends from Afghanistan. His preferred destination was any place safe — not necessarily Germany. He said he and his friends had flown to Iran and walked through Greece, Turkey, Serbia and Bulgaria. There, he said, they were laid upon by smugglers and saw people so exhausted that they collapsed. “That was a bad journey,” he said. Some 2,100 migrants had poured into Munich’s main station by Tuesday night, said Carsten Neubert, a police spokesman. That was on top of 1,750 who arrived there or in the surrounding region on Monday, said Matthias Knott, a spokesman for the federal police. Many spread blankets on the stone-tiled floor and stretched out, their heads propped on their backpacks, in a wing of the station cordoned off to provide them with a place to rest. For many of the migrants, Germany was their dream destination, a safe haven and an opportunity to begin new lives after enduring war and strife in the Middle East or Northern Africa. Drawn by its strong economy and the prospect of securing jobs, nearly a quarter-million people have already applied for asylum in Germany in the first six months of 2015. Government officials have said they expect a total of 800,000 new arrivals by year’s end. But the final phase of the trek for those who arrived Monday and Tuesday was particularly harrowing, as completion of a new barbed-wire fence on the Hungary-Serbia border and discord over immigration policy slowed their passage through Hungary, en route to Austria and then Germany. At the train station in Budapest on Monday, many of the travelers were met by confusion, long lines and a dearth of police officers and other personnel to help them navigate the station and the next leg of their journeys. Some of the migrants were again stopped at the train station near the Hungary-Austria border, the Vienna station or close to Austria’s border with Germany. While European Union rules call for arriving migrants to be registered in the country where they first enter the bloc, many were let through without any documentation — and then were allowed to continue their trip again when they reached Vienna, even if they chose not to register there, as well. The German authorities said they would register every migrant and, when applicable, initiate an application for asylum. Those who landed in Germany on Tuesday morning narrowly avoided being trapped in Budapest, where the authorities on Tuesday suddenly stopped allowing unregistered migrants onto trains, essentially shutting down the station — and the route west — to most of them. But in Munich, the scene was markedly different. Many of the new arrivals seemed overwhelmed by the abundance of volunteers and food, water, clothing, toys and other gifts that were bestowed on them as they poured off trains through the day and into the evening. Bavaria, in Germany’s southeastern corner, has been the front line for many of the new arrivals, and emergency plans have already been in place for months. “Our main priority is the refugees,” said Ines Schantz, a spokeswoman for the Upper Bavaria regional government, responsible for the initial registration and administration of medical checkups for the new arrivals. Preparations included establishing a center to process the applications of the hundreds of people arriving from Kosovo, Albania and elsewhere in the Balkans, who are considered economic migrants, albeit from poor areas, and ineligible for asylum. The first of these centers opened Tuesday, and three more were expected to help take the strain off the system so the migrants fleeing war and political persecution could be processed more swiftly. Ms. Schantz said her team had worked through the night, after watching reports late Monday that hundreds of people were packing trains bound for Vienna and on to Munich. They began putting emergency plans into action, as updates of the migrants’ progress toward Austria and north to Germany came in from the police tracking their movement from border to border. Countries Under the Most Strain in the European Migration Crisis European Union officials struggle to cope with the growing crisis. As the hundreds swelled to more than a thousand early Tuesday, buses were organized to ferry asylum seekers from Munich’s city center, which was sweltering under nearly 90-degree temperatures and bright sunshine. Long lines of people waited patiently behind red-and-white ribbons of police tape on streets closed to traffic for the buses that would take them to other parts of Bavaria and the neighboring state of Baden-Württemberg. “We want to swiftly get them to a shelter where they can rest and find a bit of peace,” Ms. Schantz said. The first priorities were addressing hunger, thirst and medical needs, said Mr. Neubert, the police spokesman. At the station, boxes piled high with bread, fruit and stacks of drinks were set up on the long wooden tables and benches typical of the city’s many beer gardens. Organizers said they had fed some 800 people the previous night and called early Tuesday for more donations. By early afternoon, the Munich police put out notices over social media asking people to slow down, saying they were “overwhelmed” with goods and had enough to meet everyone’s needs. One of the volunteers was Ashley Fliess, 39, who stood outside Tuesday night handing out umbrellas after it began to rain. She said she, like many of the other volunteers, had just shown up after realizing that the trains from Budapest and Vienna would be arriving. “It was just logic,” she said. “I just thought, ‘Well, then they will be in Munich very soon.’” She had been there for about 24 hours, with one hour’s sleep, she said. René Hinkfoth, 34, of Munich, said he was on vacation. He showed up in the morning and was still there Tuesday night. “Do you need something warm?” he asked, holding out a plate of rice to a woman as she entered the makeshift migrant center with two children. It was not the first food they had been offered in the Munich station; almost immediately after passing the handmade “Welcome in Germany” signs, they had accepted a pretzel from a large crate, and stuffed it into an increasingly full shopping bag. “Now is not the moment to think about so many refugees, the consequences,” Mr. Hinkfoth said, commenting on the politics of the situation as he stood next to piles of bananas. “There are so many refugees. They need what a human needs.”

Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis


Sidney Crosby Returns From Concussion

Abstract: PITTSBURGH — Sidney Crosby spent 320 days recovering from the most closely chronicled concussion in hockey history. When he finally returned to the ice Monday night after missing 61 games, it took him 5 minutes 24 seconds to do what he does best. On his third shift, Crosby flew through the center zone, accepted a pass from Pascal Dupuis, fought off a hook by the Islanders ’ Jay Pandolfo, broke past defenseman Andrew MacDonald and coolly backhanded the puck over the glove of goalie Anders Nilsson. It was a vintage Crosby goal. “Something I’ve been waiting for a long time,” Crosby said. It was Crosby’s first goal since Dec. 28, 2010, a week before the concussion that proved so protracted and frustrating that observers wondered if he would play again. After the goal, Penguins fans chanted “Crosby! Crosby!” A bit later, as he watched the replay from the bench, he flashed a wide grin and shouted something joyfully vivid in his exuberance. “I hope no one was reading lips at home,” he said. “I couldn’t hold that in.” Crosby, perhaps the best hockey player in the world, was back. He finished the game with two goals and two assists for 4 points. He took eight shots, more than any player on either team, and won 14 of 21 face-offs. He logged 15:54 of ice time, off his average of 21:55 last season. “I’ll have to get used to playing more,” he said. The Penguins won, 5-0, beating the Islanders for the 13th straight time in Pittsburgh. They bombarded Nilsson, who was making his first N.H.L. start. In some ways Crosby’s remarkable performance outdid another famous comeback in Pittsburgh, in 2000 when Mario Lemieux returned from three years of retirement. Lemieux, now the Penguins’ principal owner, set up a score 33 seconds into that game en route to a one-goal, two-assist performance. “He set the standard pretty high for first shifts in comebacks,” Crosby said before the game. “It’s pretty hard to match that.” Articles about Crosby’s return appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Pittsburgh and across Canada on Monday. The CBC replaced its normal prime-time programming with a telecast of the game, which was also witnessed by 250 reporters in the press box, a number similar to that for a Stanley Cup finals game. By the time Crosby turned 23, he had captained a Stanley Cup-winning team, scored the goal that won an Olympic gold medal for Canada, and won a scoring title and a most valuable player award. He seemed headed to a boundless future on the same level as Gretzky, Lemieux, Orr and Richard. He started last season as the runaway scoring leader, compiling 32 goals and 66 points in just 41 games. He mainly played on a line with Chris Kunitz and Dupuis, who were also his linemates Monday. Crosby was first injured at the Winter Classic here on Jan. 1 when he was blindsided on a sideswipe by Washington’s David Steckel, whose shoulder hit Crosby in the head. Crosby was staggered but finished the game and told reporters he was all right. In the next game, at Tampa Bay four nights later, Lightning defenseman Victor Hedman rammed Crosby into the boards from behind. Crosby finished that game, too. But the next day, Crosby returned home, and the team announced that he had a mild concussion and would be out a few days. His symptoms worsened — headaches, spatial and balance problems, fogginess, in what Crosby would term a “roller-coaster” experience. But he was allowed to begin off-ice workouts in late January and light skating in mid-March. By mid-April, however, he had to quit skating for three more months. Penguins Coach Dan Bylsma and General Manager Ray Shero pledged that Crosby would not be rushed back into action. Concussions, they and the rest of the hockey world had learned, must be treated with care and patience. Crosby was back for the start of training camp in September and was cleared for contact in mid-October. Finally, on Sunday he visited the team doctor Charles Burke and the concussion specialist Michael Collins and told them he was ready to play. “I felt confident and comfortable that I could come back,” Crosby said. After he passed one last concussion evaluation test, he said, he was cleared to play. In the first period, Crosby was cross-checked by Milan Jurcina and then knocked into the boards by Travis Hamonic. But Crosby seemed unfazed. “I was mad at myself for putting myself in that position,” Crosby said. “But once you get on the bench and realize everything good, that’s always a good feeling. There’s going to be more hits and probably harder ones, and to know I got out of those ones O.K., I think it gave me some reassurance.” Hedman said last week : “Everyone wants to see Sidney back on the ice, me included. I hope he recovers fast, because hockey needs him.” Hockey has him again.

Hockey Ice
Crosby Sidney
Concussions
Pittsburgh Penguins
New York Islanders
Sports Injuries


Lesson for Murdoch: Keep the Bloggers Happy

Abstract: When Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought MySpace, the social-networking Web site, in July, some of its users gloomily predicted that the site would be altered to suit the company's corporate interests. Proof for many of those people came earlier this month, when MySpace users began to notice that any references to YouTube, a video-sharing site and a competitor, were erased or blocked from appearing on My-Space. Some MySpace users also reported that when they tried to download videos from YouTube, a patch of white space appeared instead. Ever-sensitive to corporate meddling, many MySpace users got angry. "My friends and I are trying to make the blogging community aware of a stealth censorship campaign that is being conducted by MySpace," one MySpace user, Ellis Yu, wrote to the Blog Herald, a Web site about blogs. "They are not admitting to it, and are trying to do this in secret." Matthew McCullough, a blogger from Montclair, N.J., wrote in a Dec. 22 blog post that "if you even mention the word YouTube on your MySpace profile, it will be literally ripped out and only an empty white space will remain." The official blog maintained by YouTube offered another explanation the next day, saying the issue was "a simple misunderstanding, and MySpace has re-enabled all YouTube embeds." A spokesman for the News Corporation did not return phone calls on Friday. The incident underlines the peril corporations face as they buy blogs and networking sites like MySpace, which depend on the good will of their users. Mr. Murdoch paid $580 million for MySpace, a significant investment for a two-year-old Web site primarily populated by fickle teenagers and users in their 20's. Like other members of free community Web sites, MySpace users often react with indignation if they believe their content has been tampered with. And they can always decide to leave for other networking sites. As one irate user put it in a message to MySpace members, "visit Friendster and Hi5 if you're interested in social networking sites that don't censor content and allow your YouTube video embeds." JULIE BOSMAN

NEWS CORP LTD
MURDOCH RUPERT
COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET


After Questions on Tactics, Accretive Cuts Forecast

Abstract: Despite a surge in revenue in the first quarter, Accretive Health on Wednesday lowered its earnings estimate for 2012 because of the loss of an important contract amid accusations that the medical debt-collection company had used overly aggressive tactics. Shares of the Chicago-based company soared more than 19 percent Wednesday, to $10.54, after it beat Wall Street expectations and S.A.C. Capital Advisors, the giant hedge fund run by Steven A. Cohen disclosed that it had a 3.8 percent stake in the company. Accretive, which has contracts with more than 50 hospitals across the country, has been under scrutiny by Minnesota regulators for its collection practices, including embedding its employees in emergency rooms to extract payment from patients for care in advance and on outstanding bills. Last month, the Minnesota attorney general, Lori Swanson, released hundreds of Accretive’s internal documents, obtained during a six-month investigation, that detailed the company’s practice of pressuring emergency room patients to pay outstanding balances. Those tactics, the attorney general said, potentially violated federal laws that require hospitals to give emergency care regardless of citizenship, legal status or the ability to pay. Ms. Swanson’s investigation arose out of a lawsuit she filed against the company in January that included accusations that it had potentially violated patient privacy laws by giving its debt-collection employees protected patient records. Mary Tolan, the chief executive of Accretive, told analysts on Wednesday that the company had “very strong legal and factual defenses” to the allegations outlined in Ms. Swanson’s lawsuit. Ms. Tolan also assured investors that no other attorneys general had contacted the company. Last month, the company said in a statement that Ms. Swanson’s allegations were filled with “inaccuracies, innuendo and unfounded speculation” and that the “very serious allegation of denying access to patient care is flatly untrue.” It has asked that the lawsuit be dismissed, court documents show. Pete Stark, a Democrat who is the highest ranking member of the House subcommittee that oversees Medicare and other health services, has called for government health officials to investigate Accretive’s practices. On Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, prompted by the accusations, sent letters to the largest hospital associations, including the American Hospital Association, urging them to bar any debt-collection practices that might violate the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. “We would have serious concerns with the legality of any hospital policy or procedure that may discourage individuals from seeking care, such as demanding that emergency department patients pay before receiving treatment,” the letters said. Fairview Health Services, one of the hospital groups that Accretive contracted with, announced in March that it would cancel its contract with Accretive. That helped drive down the company’s 2012 earnings estimates, analysts said. Other hospitals have not followed suit: Accretive is in the midst of renewing its contract with Ascension Health, a hospital group in St. Louis. The company posted revenue of $253.7 million in the first quarter, up 55 percent from a year earlier. It now expects earnings of 42 to 50 cents a share on net services revenue of $960 million to $992 million, down from 61 to 65 cents a share on revenues of $1.09 billion to $1.12 billion. Its first-quarter profit was $1.5 million, up from $160,000 in the year-ago period. The company’s shares are still down 54 percent for the year. Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, came to the company’s defense this week. In a letter to Ms. Swanson, Mr. Emanuel accused her of trying to “publicly prosecute” the company. He added that Accretive “does important work for hospitals and good things for our city, particularly for our neediest citizens.”


Deep Philosophical Divide Underlies the Impasse

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Let’s play truth or consequences with the budget sequestration that took effect on Friday. That can be difficult through the fog of political war that has hung over this town. But a step back illuminates roots deeper than the prevailing notion that Washington politicians are simply fools acting for electoral advantage or partisan spite. Republicans don’t seek to grind government to a halt. But they do aim to shrink its size by an amount currently beyond their institutional power in Washington, or popular support in the country, to achieve. Democrats don’t seek to cripple the nation with debt. But they do aim to preserve existing government programs without the ability, so far, to set levels of taxation commensurate with their cost. At bottom, it is the oldest philosophic battle of the American party system — pitting Democrats’ desire to use government to cushion market outcomes and equalize opportunity against Republicans’ desire to limit government and maximize individual liberty. And they are fighting it within a 21st-century political infrastructure that impedes compromise. Those government initiatives include Social Security from F.D.R.’s New Deal, Medicare and Medicaid from L.B.J.’s Great Society, and the 2010 national health care law. President Obama wants to keep them in roughly their current forms — even as the wave of baby boom retirements makes them costlier than ever. His Republican opponents are the philosophic heirs of conservatives who opposed their creation in the first place. Beginning in 2009, they gained fresh momentum in the quest to roll them back. While the Great Recession depressed tax revenues, the Wall Street bailout and stimulus bill gave Americans sticker shock; deficits topped $1 trillion annually. So in 2011, the newly elected Republican House began pushing President Obama backward in budget fights that forced significant slowing of federal spending and some significant spending cuts. Their climactic showdown over the debt limit in 2011 damaged the nation’s credit rating. With both sides battered and exhausted, Republicans joined Democrats in seizing the so-called sequester as the means to end the impasse. Then Mr. Obama stopped backing up — and moved to generate momentum of his own. The right’s soft spot, as Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich learned amid the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s and early ’90s, is the popularity of expensive “entitlements” serving the elderly. “Cut spending,” as a general invocation, is popular. “Cut spending for your mother’s Medicare” is not. Mr. Obama used his re-election campaign to isolate and attack that vulnerability. Acknowledging the need for some entitlement cuts, he offered voters this budgetary choice: his smaller cuts combined with tax increases on affluent Americans, or the Republicans’ bigger ones without tax increases. More Americans, as polls have repeatedly shown, prefer Mr. Obama’s approach. He won the election. Now the president is trying to wield his public opinion advantage as a club to back Republicans down. The budget cuts of 2011, like sequestration now, targeted smaller “discretionary” programs that don’t command the support Medicare and Social Security do. Mr. Obama argues, and some Republicans agree, that Washington has cut most of what it can from those. He continues to advocate comparatively modest Medicare cuts focused on reimbursements to doctors and hospitals — more near-term cuts, in fact, than Republicans have been willing to specify. But at one high-profile event after another, in Washington and across the country, he accuses Republicans of preferring reduced benefits for old and vulnerable Americans over higher taxes on the affluent. Opponents blast him for “campaigning” instead of governing. Yet those events have become his method of seeking outcomes that negotiations with Republican leaders haven’t produced. It worked soon after the election when he forced Republicans to accept some tax increases in the “fiscal cliff” deal. It worked again when Republicans declined to fight anew over the debt limit until May, at the earliest. That doesn’t mean it will work again by making Republicans accept a second tax increase. Over the last generation, polarization has melted away the alloy that once narrowed differences between Republicans and Democrats, leaving both as masses of near-pure ideological ore. The Republican rank-and-file is purer — more conservative than the Democratic rank-and-file is liberal. Resisting tax increases is a matter of such deep conviction that some senior Republicans believe House colleagues would fire John A. Boehner as House speaker for conceding to Mr. Obama again. For less ideological Republicans, the partisan composition of their districts and states can make following national opinion riskier (against a more conservative primary challenger) than defying it (against a Democratic general-election foe). The difficulty of winning a second tax increase may ultimately make the president regret the fiscal-cliff deal, which brought only half the new revenue he considers necessary. For now, he seeks to grind down his opposition as the impact of sequestration mounts for air travelers, education programs and the Pentagon. Against Republicans’ solid edge on the issue of spending restraint (in this week’s NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll), he wields wide Democratic advantages on helping the middle class and protecting Medicare, and a narrow one on handling taxes. The survey showed 50 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance. Only 29 percent expressed a positive view of the Republican Party. Among demographic groups, the only one viewing Mr. Boehner’s party more positively than negatively was white Southerners (by just 39 percent to 35 percent at that). More than twice as many Americans credited Mr. Obama, as compared with Republicans, with emphasizing themes of bipartisan unity. Even if numbers like those don’t threaten the House Republican majority in 2014, they alarm party strategists who’ve watched their nominees lose the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. Mr. Obama’s hope: the fact that Congressional Republicans are insulated from national opinion doesn’t make them impervious to it.

Federal Budget
Tax
House of Representatives
Congress
John Boehner
Republicans
Democrats
US Politics


Domingo to Quit Washington Opera

Abstract: Plácido Domingo , the busy tenor, conductor and opera impresario, took a step off the treadmill with an announcement on Monday that he would end his term as general director of the Washington National Opera . Mr. Domingo, 69, said he would step down in June, after 15 seasons. The announcement gave no details about why he was leaving. He was quoted as saying he would “help the company artistically in any way possible.” The Washington opera’s president, Kenneth R. Feinberg, said, “He will be missed, but all good things must come to an end.” On Sept. 20, Mr. Domingo said he would extend his tenure at the other company he runs, the Los Angeles Opera , for two years — until mid-2013 — with an automatic yearly renewal clause. It was unclear why he chose the West Coast over the capital. A Washington National Opera spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a message. Both companies have been buffeted by financial problems that have forced cutbacks in their seasons and, in the case of the Washington opera, staff cuts. The Washington Post has reported that talks are under way between the company and its host, the Kennedy Center, for a merger, a move that would probably dilute the general director’s authority. Mr. Domingo’s busy schedule performing around the world, along with his management duties at the two houses, have periodically given rise to concerns that he is overextended.

Domingo Placido
Opera
Washington National Opera


Little Change in Prices, but Hint of Action From the Fed

Abstract: Consumer prices in the United States were unchanged in July thanks to falling gasoline costs, but solid gains in industrial output and home building suggested a pickup in economic activity that could allow the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates this year. Tuesday’s mixed reports came as William C. Dudley, the influential president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said the central bank could increase rates next month, citing a tightening labor market that he said was starting to spur faster wage growth. Millan Mulraine, deputy chief economist at TD Securities in New York, said: “The strong housing starts and industrial output performance will bolster the Fed confidence that growth momentum has rebounded, potentially supporting the bias for a near-term hike. Nevertheless, with inflation continuing to miss to the downside, the case for caution remains strong.” July’s flat reading in the Consumer Price Index from the Labor Department was the weakest since February and followed two straight monthly increases of 0.2 percent. In the 12 months through July, the C.P.I. rose 0.8 percent after increasing 1.0 percent in June. The so-called core C.P.I., which strips out the volatile food and energy components, edged up 0.1 percent in July. It had risen by 0.2 percent in each of the previous three months. The year-on-year core C.P.I. increased 2.2 percent in July after advancing 2.3 percent in June. The Fed has a 2 percent inflation target and tracks a measure of inflation that has been stuck at 1.6 percent since March. “It’s possible” for the Fed to raise rates at its policy meeting on Sept. 20 and 21, Mr. Dudley told Fox Business Network. There were increases in the costs of hospital services, doctor visits and prescription medicine. Rents increased a solid 0.3 percent. But Americans got some relief from gasoline prices, which dropped 4.7 percent last month, the first decline since February, reflecting renewed declines in crude oil prices. Despite benign inflation, economic growth is picking up after output averaged 1.0 percent in the first half of the year. In a separate report, the Fed said industrial production shot up 0.7 percent last month after rising 0.4 percent in June. Production was bolstered by a 0.5 percent jump in manufacturing output, the largest gain since July 2015. Warmer-than-usual weather caused utilities to raise production by 2.1 percent while mining output increased 0.7 percent. In a third report, the Commerce Department said housing starts increased 2.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 1.2 million units in July, the highest level since February. Last month’s increase in groundbreaking activity supports the view that investment in residential construction will rebound after slumping in the second quarter for the first time in more than two years. Groundbreaking on single-family homes, the largest segment of the market, rose 0.5 percent to a 770,000-unit pace in July, also the highest level since February. Housing starts for the volatile multifamily segment increased 5.0 percent to a 441,000-unit pace. The multifamily segment of the market continues to be supported by strong demand for rental accommodation as some Americans shun homeownership after the housing market collapse.

Consumer price index
Production
Construction
Federal Reserve
William C Dudley
US Economy
Inflation
Real Estate
Housing
Interest rate


The Voice-Off: Android vs. Siri

Abstract: “Your review was the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. It strains me to avoid profanity in describing how stupid you sound.” That’s the kind of e-mail that brightened my day after I reviewed Google’s Moto X phone two weeks ago. My correspondents seemed especially unhappy with one sentence in that review: “Android’s voice commands are still no match for Siri.” Man, I really was stupid. Who’d be dumb enough to take sides in a religious war? I’d have been better off writing, “Conservatives are better-looking than liberals” or “Pro-life people are worse drivers than pro-choice.” Image Samsung's Galaxy S4, left, and a person using Siri, right, on an iPhone. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press But the superiority of cellphone speech-recognition technology is not an idle question. Once touch screens became the future of phones, voice recognition became desperately important. Without physical keys or buttons, entering text and manipulating software controls are fussy, multistep procedures. So I’ve just spent two weeks immersed in voice recognition. I carried an iPhone and a phone running Google’s Android operating system with me everywhere. I spoke to both phones simultaneously. I wanted to get to know the differences, the strengths, the weaknesses. When people talk about speech recognition, they mean, and often confuse, three different functions. There’s dictation, where the phone converts speech to text; commands, where you operate the phone by talking; and Internet information searches. There are vast differences among the successes of the three. Dictation, for example, is still fairly poor on both systems. Both Android phones and Siri, the iPhone’s speech feature, make many transcription errors. When you hear people bashing cellphone transcription, declaring, “I gave up on it,” they’re usually referring to dictation. Image Credit Stuart Goldenberg That’s forgivable, but come on. You’re asking your phone to understand varying accents at varying distances from its microphone, in rooms with varying background noise. It’s a wonder this feature works at all. The latest Android version doesn’t require an Internet connection to do basic dictation. And in Android, the words appear on the screen as you utter them; Siri doesn’t transcribe until you stop talking. On the other hand, Siri understands formatting controls like “capital,” “all caps” and “no space,” as well as all kinds of punctuation — “colon,” “dash,” “asterisk,” “ellipsis” and so on. Android understands only the basic symbols, like “period,” “comma” and “exclamation point.” The second category, phone-control commands, is far more successful for far more people. This is when you say: “Call Mom,” “Text Emily,” “Wake me at 7:30,” “Play some Billy Joel,” “Remind me to feed the cat when I get home,” and so on. Image Attractions in Rio de Janeiro from Android. Controlling your phone without touching it is important for safety, of course. If you must interact with your phone while driving, speaking to it certainly seems safer than looking at it. But don’t forget the convenience factor. It’s much faster to say, “Open Angry Birds” than to flip through home screens full of icons. And “Set my alarm for 8 a.m.” is about 375 finger-taps quicker than using the clock app. Here, Siri has the edge. As you’re driving along, for example, and you hear the incoming message sound, you can say, “Read my new messages,” and Siri reads them aloud. It even invites you to dictate a reply, without ever taking your eyes off the road. Android can’t do that. Both systems can tap into some of the phone’s own apps. They recognize commands like “Make a meeting with Bob Barnett Thursday at noon” (a calendar interaction), “Make a note to pay back Harold” (notes), “Send an e-mail to Danny Cooper” (mail) and “What’s Steve Alper’s home address?” (contacts). Image A historical inquiry to Siri. Android blows away iOS, though, in Web searches. Both kinds of phones do an amazing job fetching weather updates (“What will the weather in Detroit be this weekend?”), times (“What time is it in Belgium?”), stock prices, sports information (“When’s the next Cowboys game?”), conversions (“How many dollars in 32 euros?”), calculations (“How many days until Valentine’s Day?”) and every kind of Web-search query (“How many calories are in a Hershey bar?”, “When is the next solar eclipse?”, “How do you spell schadenfreude?”, “Show me pictures of a 1985 Corvette,” and so on). But Google’s bread and butter is Web searches, so Android responses are generally much, much faster. (To try this speak-and-ye-shall-find business on an iPhone, download the Google Search app.) Android is especially amazing at dialing places without having to look them up (“Call the Macy’s on 34th Street”) and directions (“Get me to La Guardia Airport by public transportation”), since its Map app is so unbelievably good. It’s also smarter about connecting questions. If your first question was, “Who is Hillary Clinton?”, you can follow up with, “Who is her husband?” And Google has a built-in music-recognition feature, like the Shazam app. Tap the voice-recognition icon, let the phone listen to whatever song is playing, and marvel as it instantly identifies the song and singer. Image A route from New York to Philadelphia using Android’s Map app. Unfortunately, Android has an Achilles’ heel — actually, more like Achilles’ entire leg. To issue spoken commands, you have to tap the microphone icon on the Google search bar. And it’s only on the home screen or the Google Now screen (swipe up from the bottom). So you can’t speak commands when your phone is locked, or when you’re in another app. On the iPhone, you hold down the Home button or the clicker on your earbuds cord, so the voice command feature works when the phone is asleep or in any app. In other words, to use an Android phone’s speech features, you frequently have to pick it up, and you always have to look at it, which defeats much of the purpose. The exception: Motorola’s new phones, like the Moto X, can be set to listen all the time. Siri is better with restaurants and movies, too. Both phones understand, “Good Indian restaurants around here” or “Call the Olive Garden on Daleford Road.” But Siri can also book reservations, thanks to integration with OpenTable.com. You can say, for example, “Make a reservation at an inexpensive Italian restaurant Saturday night at 7.” Image Some Siri humor. Similarly, Siri provides attractive, consolidated answer screens for, “What movies are opening this week?” “Give me the reviews for ‘The Way, Way Back,’ ” or “What are today’s showtimes for ‘The Smurfs 2’?” Android just shows you Google search results. And then there’s the issue of personality: Siri has it, Android doesn’t. We’re talking about wisecracks, jokes, attitude, addressing you by name. If you ask Siri, “Who’s your daddy?”, she replies: “You are. Can we get back to work now?” Say, “Beam me up, Siri,” and she says: “Please remove your belt, shoes and jacket, and empty your pockets.” Say, “Talk dirty to me,” and she replies, “Humus. Compost. Pumice. Silt. Gravel.” Now, on the great battlefield of the Apple-Google fanboy war, humor is small potatoes. Apple haters practically claw their eyes out when you mention Siri’s personality. “It’s not useful! It’s a parlor trick! It strains me to avoid profanity in describing how stupid you sound!” And that’s fine. That’s why there’s choice: two camps in this philosophical school. (Well, there’s also Windows Phone and BlackBerry, but their speech recognition is extremely rudimentary.) And so: Put down your swords, fanboys. Both systems are exceedingly useful, once you spend the time to learn them. (Here’s a site with a good list of Android voice commands : j.mp/12kEFDo. And here’s one for Siri : j.mp/16Yy4yy.) Though Siri has the edge, the gap has closed substantially, and both systems are rapidly improving. For example, until recently Android had no phone-control features at all — only Web searches. And in this fall’s iOS 7 update, Siri will gain a more pleasant speaking voice, faster searches and the ability to change settings by voice (“Turn on Airplane Mode,” “Turn up the brightness,” “Turn on Bluetooth”) — something neither phone can do now. This much is clear: Cellphone speech recognition is getting better fast. Very soon, we’ll do less talking through our phones — and more talking to them.

Speech recognition
Android
iPhone
Google
Apple
Smartphone


President Obama Visits Kabul to Sign Partnership with Afghanistan

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Speaking from a military base near Kabul after a brief, surprise night visit to Afghanistan on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, President Obama said that “we have a clear path to fulfill our mission in Afghanistan.” “The goal that I set, to defeat Al Qaeda and deny it the chance to rebuild, is now within our reach,” he said. But he said that even as he carries out a troop withdrawal, American forces will continue to help the Afghans, “and fight alongside them when needed.” Lest anybody miss the point, the document Mr. Obama signed with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan during the whirlwind visit was formally titled the “Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement.” It is meant to address the United States’ role even after the American-led alliance ends its combat role in 2014. “This time of war began in Afghanistan, and this is where it will end,” he said in a speech laden with references to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the nation’s response to it. The speech did not lay out any new timetable for what Mr. Obama said was the goal for Afghanistan: “a future in which war ends and a new chapter begins.” “Our troops will be coming home,” Mr. Obama said. “Last year, we removed 10,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Another 23,000 will leave by the end of the summer. After that, reductions will continue at a steady pace, with more of our troops coming home. And as our coalition agreed, by the end of 2014 the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their country.” It was almost prime time in Washington, and the wee hours of the morning in Afghanistan, when President Obama spoke live on television. His message would certainly be seen live by millions of Americans and very few Afghans. But it had to be addressed to both. His American audience is attuned not only to the echoes of the strike in neighboring Pakistan that killed Bin Laden last May, but also to the way Mr. Obama’s management of two wars is playing in this year’s presidential campaign. “I recognize that many Americans are tired of war,” he said. “I will not keep Americans in harm’s way a single day longer than is absolutely required for our national security. But we must finish the job we started in Afghanistan, and end this war responsibly.” He emphasized that the goals are limited. “To build a country in America’s image, or to eradicate every vestige of the Taliban,” he said, would “require many more years, many more dollars, and most importantly, many more American lives.” “Our goal is to destroy Al Qaeda, and we are on a path to do exactly that,” he said. In political terms, the emphasis was on bringing two wars to a close. “We have traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war,” he said. “Yet here, in the predawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of a new day on the horizon. The Iraq war is over. The number of our troops in harm’s way has been cut in half, and more will be coming home soon.” His Afghan audience, and the government of President Karzai, with whom he signed the strategic partnership, is focused on questions of stability after the Americans depart. “You will not stand alone,” he said to them. The new agreement “establishes the basis of our cooperation over the next decade, including shared commitments to combat terrorism and strengthen democratic institutions.” Earlier, in an appearance with Mr. Karzai, Mr. Obama had declared, “I am confident that the Afghan people will understand that the United States will stand by them.” And in a visit with the troops, he told them, too, that the American withdrawal would be an honorable one. “We’re not going to do it overnight. We’re not going to do it irresponsibly,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re going to make sure that the gains, the hard-fought gains that have been made, are preserved.” Any details about the exact pace of the withdrawal are unlikely to come before the November elections. The agreement deals not only with military and security issues, but also with assistance in building Afghanistan’s economy and its democracy, both of which are frail. It allows a vestigial American military presence without committing either side to numbers, and it gives Afghanistan sovereignty without cutting it loose entirely from the United States as a sponsor and mentor. “We will not build permanent bases in this country, nor will we be patrolling its cities and mountains,” Mr. Obama said in his televised speech. A White House fact sheet noted that “the Strategic Partnership Agreement itself does not commit the United States to any specific troop levels or levels of funding in the future, as those are decisions will be made in consultation with the U.S. Congress. It does, however, commit the United States to seek funding from Congress on an annual basis to support the training, equipping, advising and sustaining of Afghan National Security Forces, as well as for social and economic assistance.” And some details have to be worked out with the other allies who are about to meet in Chicago to map the way forward to 2014, when NATO’s full engagement in Afghanistan is to give way to something that, even with this new partnership agreement in hand, remains only loosely defined.

United States Defense and Military Forces


Supernova Remnant Is Young and Quick

Abstract: About a century ago, the light from the explosion of a star within our galaxy swept past Earth . No one noticed. Such explosions, called supernovas, can shine brightly in the night sky. But this dying star was close to the center of the galaxy, where thick dust and gas blocked most of the light, and astronomers of the era saw nothing. Now radio telescopes on Earth and the Chandra X-ray Observatory in orbit have taken pictures of the stellar debris, revealing it to be the youngest supernova remnant known in the Milky Way galaxy. The observations, reported in a telephone news conference Wednesday, show that it is still expanding outward at an unexpectedly quick pace of perhaps 30 million miles an hour, or about 5 percent of the speed of light. The rapid expansion means the interstellar gas around the star was thin and did not slow the remnant as much as usual. In addition to that quick expansion, the remnant is growing brighter at radio frequencies: being so young, it is still getting warmer. “It’s doing things we have never seen before,” said Stephen P. Reynolds, a professor of physics at North Carolina State University, who led the Chandra study. While the dust and gas at the galactic core block visible light, other frequencies of light can make it through. David A. Green of the University of Cambridge in England originally identified the supernova remnant in 1985 using the Very Large Array, a Y-shaped configuration of 27 radio telescopes in New Mexico. At the time, he estimated the age at 400 to 1,000 years. Last year Dr. Reynolds pointed Chandra at the same remnant, known as G1.9+0.3. The new X-ray image indicated that G1.9+0.3 had become considerably larger since Dr. Green first looked at it. Dr. Green then took another radio image of the remnant with the Very Large Array and found that the remnant was now about 16 percent wider than in 1985. “We can extrapolate backwards for the age of the object,” Dr. Green said. The star was about 26,000 light-years away. So the actual explosion occurred about 26,000 years ago, and the light from the blast traveled that long to arrive at Earth no more than 150 years ago. The findings will appear in two scientific articles, one in The Astrophysical Journal and one in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The G1.9+0.3 remnant is still mostly debris from the exploded star. In older remnants, the glow comes from interstellar gases heated by the shock waves rather than pieces of the dead star. “You are actually getting to see the rock that made the splash, not the wave that’s going out into the pond,” said Robert P. Kirshner, a professor of astronomy at Harvard who was not connected with the research. “This is a stellar death, and the corpse is still warm.” The discovery helps fill in the deficit of supernovas for the Milky Way, where the rate of explosions appears much lower than in similar spiral galaxies. “This lack is a significant puzzle,” Dr. Reynolds said. Either astronomers have not been able to identify the remnants, or the Milky Way is somehow different. “Either way,” he said, “is very interesting.”

Stars and Galaxies
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Space
Milky Way Galaxy
Telescopes and Observatories
Supernova


Sudan: A Threat to End Peace Talks

Abstract: Sudan ’s president, Omar al-Bashir , left, threatened on Wednesday to call off peace talks in Qatar with Darfur rebels and return negotiations to Sudan if agreement was not reached within a day. Qatar has been hosting peace negotiations between rebel groups and the Sudanese government for nearly two years. Last-minute disagreements had appeared to foil a goal of reaching an accord by the end of the year.

Civil War and Guerrilla Warfare
Bashir Omar Hassan Al-
Sudan
Darfur (Sudan)