Iraq War Logs Detail Iran’s Aid to Militias – Iraq War Logs - Wikileaks Documents

Abstract: On Dec. 22, 2006, American military officials in Baghdad issued a secret warning: The Shiite militia commander who had orchestrated the kidnapping of officials from Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education was now hatching plans to take American soldiers hostage. What made the warning especially worrying were intelligence reports saying that the Iraqi militant, Azhar al-Dulaimi, had been trained by the Middle East’s masters of the dark arts of paramilitary operations: the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran and Hezbollah , its Lebanese ally. “Dulaymi reportedly obtained his training from Hizballah operatives near Qum, Iran, who were under the supervision of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC-QF) officers in July 2006,” the report noted, using alternative spellings of the principals involved. Read the Document » Five months later, Mr. Dulaimi was tracked down and killed in an American raid in the sprawling Shiite enclave of Sadr City in Baghdad — but not before four American soldiers had been abducted from an Iraqi headquarters in Karbala and executed in an operation that American military officials say literally bore Mr. Dulaimi’s fingerprints. Scores of documents made public by WikiLeaks, which has disclosed classified information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, provide a ground-level look — at least as seen by American units in the field and the United States’ military intelligence — at the shadow war between the United States and Iraqi militias backed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. During the administration of President George W. Bush, critics charged that the White House had exaggerated Iran’s role to deflect criticism of its handling of the war and build support for a tough policy toward Iran, including the possibility of military action. But the field reports disclosed by WikiLeaks, which were never intended to be made public, underscore the seriousness with which Iran’s role has been seen by the American military. The political struggle between the United States and Iran to influence events in Iraq still continues as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has sought to assemble a coalition — that would include the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr — that will allow him to remain in power. But much of the American’s military concern has revolved around Iran’s role in arming and assisting Shiite militias. Citing the testimony of detainees, a captured militant’s diary and numerous uncovered weapons caches, among other intelligence, the field reports recount Iran’s role in providing Iraqi militia fighters with rockets, magnetic bombs that can be attached to the underside of cars, “explosively formed penetrators,” or E.F.P.’s, which are the most lethal type of roadside bomb in Iraq, and other weapons. Those include powerful .50-caliber rifles and the Misagh-1, an Iranian replica of a portable Chinese surface-to-air missile, which, according to the reports, was fired at American helicopters and downed one in east Baghdad in July 2007. Iraqi militants went to Iran to be trained as snipers and in the use of explosives, the field reports assert, and Iran’s Quds Force collaborated with Iraqi extremists to encourage the assassination of Iraqi officials. The reports make it clear that the lethal contest between Iranian-backed militias and American forces continued after President Obama sought to open a diplomatic dialogue with Iran’s leaders and reaffirmed the agreement between the United States and Iraq to withdraw American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. A Revolutionary Force Established by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has expanded its influence at home under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former member of the corps, and it plays an important role in Iran’s economy, politics and internal security. The corps’s Quds Force, under the command of Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, has responsibility for foreign operations and has often sought to work though surrogates, like Hezbollah. While the American government has long believed that the Quds Force has been providing lethal assistance and training to Shiite militants in Iraq, the field reports provide new details about Iran’s support for Iraqi militias and the American military’s operations to counter them. The reports are written entirely from the perspective of the American-led coalition. No similar Iraqi or Iranian reports have been made available. Nor do the American reports include the more comprehensive assessments that are typically prepared by American intelligence agencies after incidents in the field. While some of the raw information cannot be verified, it is nonetheless broadly consistent with other classified American intelligence and public accounts by American military officials. As seen by current and former American officials, the Quds Force has two main objectives: to weaken and shape Iraq’s nascent government and to diminish the United States’ role and influence in Iraq. For people like General Soleimani, “who went through all eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, this is certainly about poking a stick at us, but it is also about achieving strategic advantage in Iraq,” Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador in Iraq from 2007 until early 2009, said in an interview. “I think the Iranians understand that they are not going to dominate Iraq,” Mr. Crocker added, “ but I think they are going to do their level best to weaken it — to have a weak central government that is constantly off balance, that is going to have to be beseeching Iran to stop doing bad things without having the capability to compel them to stop doing bad things. And that is an Iraq that will never again threaten Iran.” Politics and Militias According to the reports, Iran’s role has been political as well as military. A Nov. 27, 2005, report, issued before Iraq’s December 2005 parliamentary elections, cautioned that Iranian-backed militia members in the Iraqi government were gaining power and giving Iran influence over Iraqi politics. “Iran is gaining control of Iraq at many levels of the Iraqi government,” the report warned. The reports also recount an array of border incidents, including a Sept. 7, 2006, episode in which an Iranian soldier who aimed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at an American platoon trying to leave the border area was shot and killed by an American soldier with a .50-caliber machine gun. The members of the American platoon, who had gone to the border area with Iraqi troops to look for “infiltration routes” used to smuggle bombs and other weapons into Iraq, were concerned that Iranian border forces were trying to surround and detain them. After this incident, the platoon returned to its base in Iraq under fire from the Iranians even when the American soldiers were “well inside Iraqi territory,” a report noted. Read the Document » But the reports assert that Iran’s Quds Force and intelligence service has turned to many violent and shadowy tactics as well. The reports contain numerous references to Iranian agents, but the documents generally describe a pattern in which the Quds Force has sought to maintain a low profile in Iraq by arranging for fighters from Hezbollah in Lebanon to train Iraqi militants in Iran or by giving guidance to Iraqi militias who do the fighting with Iranian financing and weapons. The reports suggest that Iranian-sponsored assassinations of Iraqi officials became a serious worry. A case in point is a report that was issued on March 27, 2007. Iranian intelligence agents within the Badr Corps and Jaish al-Mahdi, two Shiite militias, “have recently been influencing attacks on ministry officials in Iraq,” the report said. According to the March report, officials at the Ministry of Industry were high on the target list. “The desired effect of these attacks is not to simply kill the Ministry of Industry Officials,” the report noted, but also “to show the world, and especially the Arab world, that the Baghdad Security Plan has failed to bring stability,” referring to the troop increase that Gen. David H. Petraeus was overseeing to reduce violence in Iraq. Read the Document » News reports in early 2007 indicated that a consultant to the ministry and his daughter were shot and killed on the way to his office. The March report does not mention the attack, but it asserts that one gunman was carrying out a systematic assassination campaign, which included killing three bodyguards and plotting to attack ministry officials while wearing a stolen Iraqi Army uniform. The provision of Iranian rockets, mortars and bombs to Shiite militants has also been a major concern. A Nov. 22, 2005, report recounted an effort by the Iraqi border police to stop the smuggling of weapons from Iran, which “recovered a quantity of bomb-making equipment, including explosively formed projectiles,” which are capable of blasting a metal projectile through the door of an armored Humvee. Read the Document » A Shiite militant from the Jaish al-Mahdi militia, also known as the Mahdi Army, was planning to carry out a mortar attack on the Green Zone in Baghdad, using rockets and mortar shells shipped by the Quds Force, according to a report on Dec. 1, 2006. On Nov. 28, the report noted, the Mahdi Army commander, Ali al-Sa’idi, “met Iranian officials reported to be IRGC officers at the border to pick up three shipments of rockets.” A Dec. 27, 2008, report noted one instance when American soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division captured several suspected members of the Jaish al-Mahdi militia and seized a weapons cache, which also included several diaries, including one that explained “why detainee joined JAM and how they traffic materials from Iran.” Read the Document » The attacks continued during Mr. Obama’s first year in office, with no indication in the reports that the new administration’s policies led the Quds Force to end its support for Iraqi militants. The pending American troop withdrawals, the reports asserted, may even have encouraged some militant attacks. A June 25, 2009, report about an especially bloody E.F.P. attack that wounded 10 American soldiers noted that the militants used tactics “being employed by trained violent extremist members that have returned from Iran.” The purpose of the attack, the report speculated, was to increase American casualties so militants could claim that they had “fought the occupiers and forced them to withdraw.” An intelligence analysis of a Dec. 31, 2009, attack on the Green Zone using 107-millimeter rockets concluded that it was carried out by the Baghdad branch of Kataib Hezbollah, a militant Shiite group that American intelligence has long believed is supported by Iran. According to the December report, a technical expert from Kataib Hezbollah met before the attack with a “weapons facilitator” who “reportedly traveled to Iran, possibility to facilitate the attacks on 31 Dec.” Read the Document » That same month, American Special Operations forces and a specially trained Iraqi police unit mounted a raid that snared an Iraqi militant near Basra who had been trained in Iran. A Dec. 19, 2009, report stated that the detainee was involved in smuggling “sticky bombs”— explosives that are attached magnetically to the underside of vehicles — into Iraq and was “suspected of collecting information on CF [coalition forces] and passing them to Iranian intelligence agents.” Read the Document » A Bold Operation One of the most striking episodes detailed in the trove of documents made public by WikiLeaks describes a plot to kidnap American soldiers from their Humvees. According to the Dec. 22, 2006, report, a militia commander, Hasan Salim, devised a plan to capture American soldiers in Baghdad and hold them hostage in Sadr City to deter American raids there. To carry out the plan, Mr. Salim turned to Mr. Dulaimi, a Sunni who converted to the Shiite branch of the faith while studying in the holy Shiite city of Najaf in 1995. Mr. Dulaimi, the report noted, was picked for the operation because he “allegedly trained in Iran on how to conduct precision, military style kidnappings.” Read the Document » Those kidnappings were never carried out. But the next month, militants conducted a raid to kidnap American soldiers working at the Iraqi security headquarters in Karbala, known as the Provincial Joint Coordination Center. The documents made public by WikiLeaks do not include an intelligence assessment as to who carried out the Karbala operation. But American military officials said after the attack that Mr. Dulaimi was the tactical commander of the operation and that his fingerprints were found on the getaway car. American officials have said he collaborated with Qais and Laith Khazali, two Shiite militant leaders who were captured after the raid along with a Hezbollah operative. The Khazali brothers were released after the raid as part of an effort at political reconciliation and are now believed to be in Iran. The documents, however, do provide a vivid account of the Karbala attack as it unfolded. At 7:10 p.m., several sport utility vehicles of the type typically used by the American-led coalition blocked the entrance to the headquarters compound. Twenty minutes later, an “unknown number of personnel, wearing American uniforms and carrying American weapons attacked the PJCC,” the report said. The attackers managed to kidnap four American soldiers, dragging them into an S.U.V., which was pursued by police officers from an Iraqi SWAT unit. Calculating that they were trapped, the militants shot the handcuffed hostages and fled. Three of the American soldiers who had been abducted died at the scene. The fourth later died of his wounds, the report said, and a fifth American soldier was killed in the initial attack on the compound. Summing up the episode, the American commander of a police training team noted in the report that that the adversary appeared to be particularly well trained. “PTT leader on ground stated insurgents were professionals and appeared to have a well planned operation,” the report said.

Classified Information and State Secrets


The Kama Sutra as a Work of Philosophy

Abstract: NEW DELHI — Yoga is hard for most Indians, too, and they certainly don’t practice it while having sex. They probably never attempted such a combination in their whole history. The global view that ancient Indians performed extreme gymnastics while making love was seeded by a late-19th-century English translation of a Sanskrit text called the Kama Sutra, which contained, among other things, details of sexual positions, practical advice on seduction and a note on types of erotic women, who were named after mammals even though, as a book released this month observes, they made noises like birds. “The Mare’s Trap: Nature and Culture in the Kamasutra” by Wendy Doniger, an American academic, argues, as some discerning couples may have suspected, that the sex in the Kama Sutra is more prank than instructional manual. But the grand ambition of her book is to elevate the Kama Sutra to the status of two great philosophical works that have influenced Indian society: Manu’s Dharmashastra, which invented castes and defined women as subordinate to men, embarrassing some fine people who share the author’s name, and Kautilya’s Arthashastra, a ruthless book on statecraft. Very little is known about the origins of the Kama Sutra. No portion of the original text has survived. It was probably written in Sanskrit by one Vatsyayana. He seems to have been a compiler of sexual habits, and he blamed another scholar for inventing some of the very difficult sexual positions. Ms. Doniger believes that the Kama Sutra is about 2,000 years old, but she told me that this is based solely on circumstantial evidence. The reason she takes the Kama Sutra so seriously is that even though she feels that the sexual positions were fantasies, she sees in the rest of the work nothing short of anthropology, a rare portrait of an affluent ancient society. Also, there are stylistic similarities between the Kama Sutra and the works of Manu and Kautilya. All three include psychological analyses and instructions and divide people into types. The Kama Sutra is for and about the rich. It has very little to say about the poor except as sexual prey. Ms. Doniger suspects it was originally a seven-act play about the art of love. The unnamed protagonist is referred to as nagaraka, a “man-about-town.” He is urban and rich. He has “a foam bath every third day,” the Kama Sutra says, “his body hair removed every fifth or tenth day … and he continually cleans the sweat from his armpits.” As with men today, his penis is egalitarian. This is a significant revelation of the Kama Sutra, according to Ms. Doniger, because it seems to defy the laws of Manu that divide society into castes and condemns their mingling. The Kama Sutra does not prohibit women, either, from having flings with those in the lower castes, but it does ask them to be prudent. It appears to portray a society that was far less rigid than what Manu ordained, and that was friendlier to women. Manu says, “Good looks do not matter to them [women], nor do they care about youth. ‘A man!’ they say and enjoy sex with him.” But Vatsyayana says a woman desires “any attractive man” just as “a man desires a woman. But, after some consideration [by the woman], the matter goes no further.” While Manu wants to restrain women, Vatsyayana takes female promiscuity for granted. He says that men who want to pick up married women would have a good chance in temples, at weddings and, for some reason, in the vicinity of a house that is on fire. If the India portrayed in the Kama Sutra was real, how did it become such a deeply conservative place? Ms. Doniger dismisses as “jaded” V.S. Naipaul’s view that the Mughal invasion destroyed this liberal India. She does not blame Christian missionaries either. She says that the conservative stream was always powerful in Hindu society and that over the centuries it came to dominate — which would explain the decision by the country’s film censor board to ban “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Follow Manu Joseph, author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People,” on Twitter at @manujosephsan.


In Moscow Mayoral Race, an Important Nonfavorite

Abstract: MOSCOW — The campaigning in Moscow’s strange mayoral race concluded Friday evening on a fittingly strange note, with the main contenders holding dueling concerts in a last bid to draw large crowds of supporters before entering a 24-hour silent period before Sunday’s vote. Outside the Olympic Stadium, a behemoth Soviet-era structure, supporters of the incumbent mayor, Sergei S. Sobyanin, arrived in a chilling wind and rain to see Russian pop stars like Grigory Leps and Turetsky Choir, an a cappella group. Many attending the invitation-only event were city employees or their guests. Dmitri Sergeyev, 59, who was given a ticket by a friend who works in the city’s education department, took shelter from the rain under an overhang to smoke a cigarette and said he would vote for Mr. Sobyanin on Sunday. “There just isn’t another exit,” Mr. Sergeyev said. “He’s a leader; you can look at his life and see that. The streets are being repaired. They’ve fixed the playground by my house.” As for other candidates, Mr. Sergeyev was dismissive. “What other candidates? Who knows anything about them?” Less than two miles away, however, supporters of Mr. Sobyanin’s main challenger, the anticorruption candidate Aleksei A. Navalny, gathered in the raw chill for their own concert, an outdoor event headlined by a Belarussian rock band called Lyapis Trubetskoi. But the main draw was clearly Mr. Navalny himself. Image Sergei S. Sobyanin, the acting mayor, also spoke to voters on Friday. Credit Denis Tyrin/Associated Press “I look out at this crowd, and I see a sea of smiles,” said Darya Droviannikova, 24, an art teacher, who said she would vote for Mr. Navalny on Sunday. “He has become the incarnation of all of our hopes for change.” A strong sense of stagecraft has pervaded the race since June when Mr. Sobyanin abruptly announced he would step down from the mayor’s post — two years before the official end of his term — not because he wanted to leave the job but to force a snap election, sharply increasing his advantage over potential opponents. In July, Mr. Navalny, who has emerged as the most prominent leader of the political opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin, was convicted on embezzlement charges, ordered jailed on a five-year sentence and led from the courtroom in handcuffs. The next day, however, he was unexpectedly released after the same prosecutors who had wanted him in prison said his participation was needed in the Moscow race to ensure a fair election. With the conviction hanging over him, it has been clear all along that Mr. Navalny will never be mayor. The main question in Sunday’s election is whether he and the Communist Party candidate, Ivan Melnikov, will attract enough votes to prevent Mr. Sobyanin from clearing the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. For Mr. Sobyanin, who refused to debate his opponents, the main purpose of the campaign has seemed to be to convince the public that his inevitable victory would be the result of a truly competitive election and not an inevitable victory orchestrated by the Kremlin. Indeed, the competitiveness of the race — rather than his own attributes as a public servant — was the main theme of Mr. Sobyanin’s remarks to the crowd at the Olympic Stadium on Friday evening. Video In 2013, as Moscow prepared for its first mayoral elections in a decade, the anti-corruption candidate Aleksei A. Navalny energized the youth vote, irritating the Kremlin. “There’s an excellent slogan: Let’s return Moscow to the Muscovites,” he said in recorded remarks posted later on the Internet. “We’ve done that. Muscovites themselves are choosing their city’s government!” To applause and cheers, he continued: “Muscovites themselves are choosing their city’s mayor. Muscovites are worthy of this. Together we are holding open, honest, fair and competitive elections in Moscow.” An even bigger drama, beyond the question of a runoff, is what will happen to Mr. Navalny, who could be told at any moment that his appeal has been denied and he is being returned to prison. Mr. Navalny’s wife, Yulia, who has said little publicly during the campaign, drove that point home during a speech on Friday evening, saying her family was prepared. “Our family is seen by the authorities as the place where they can hit us hardest,” Ms. Navalny said. “But if somebody in government sees the family as a vulnerable point, then he is mistaken. Family is the strength of every normal person, and moreover of a true politician. In 20 years, and every year, we are learning to be good parents and good spouses. But if we have to resist pressure, we will also learn that science.” Mr. Navalny himself offered up his classic fiery remarks. Dressed in black jeans, a turtleneck and a raincoat, he asked voters to support him. “These elections decide who will be the next mayor,” he said. “But to a larger extent, these elections are about what place we give ourselves, what place we want to take for ourselves in this country.” In his speech, he also joked about officials refusing to say his name. “It’s very funny when all these guys in the Kremlin are afraid to call me by name and call me ‘the politician’ or ‘that gentleman,’ ” he said. “My name is Aleksei Navalny. I’m running for mayor along with you.”

Mayoral races
Moscow
Aleksei Navalny
Vladimir Putin
Sergei S Sobyanin
Russia


A Rare Scotch, Back on the Rocks

Abstract: SCOTT BASE, Antarctica (AP) — Three bottles of rare, 19th-century Scotch found beneath the floorboards of Ernest Shackleton’s abandoned expedition base were returned to Antarctica on Saturday after a distiller flew them to Scotland to recreate the long-lost recipe. But not even Prime Minister John Key of New Zealand, who personally returned the stash, got a taste of the contents of the bottles of Mackinlay’s whiskey, which were rediscovered 102 years after Shackleton was forced to leave them behind. “I think we’re all tempted to crack it open and have a little drink ourselves now,” Mr. Key said at a ceremony where he handed over the bottles to officials of the Antarctic Heritage Trust at Scott Base, New Zealand’s Antarctic outpost on Ross Island. The whisky will be transferred by March from Ross Island to Shackleton’s desolate hut at Cape Royds and replaced beneath the restored hut as part of a program to protect the legacy of the so-called heroic era of Antarctic exploration from 1898 to 1915. Bottled in 1898 after the blend was aged for 15 years, the Mackinlay’s whiskey was among three crates of Scotch and two of brandy buried beneath a basic hut that Shackleton had used during his adventurous 1907 Nimrod excursion to the Antarctic. The expedition failed to reach the South Pole but set a record at the time for reaching the farthest southern latitude. Shackleton’s stash was discovered frozen in ice by conservationists in 2010. The crates were frozen solid after more than a century beneath the Antarctic surface. But the bottles were found intact, and researchers could hear the whiskey sloshing inside. Antarctica’s minus 22 temperature was not enough to freeze the liquor.

Scotch whisky
Exploration
Ernest Shackleton
Antarctica
New Zealand
Scotland
South Pole


U.N. Warns Somalia’s Leaders to Stop Bickering

Abstract: NAIROBI, Kenya — Members of the United Nations Security Council sent an unusually blunt message to Somalia ’s leaders on Wednesday to stop fighting among themselves or risk losing millions of dollars a year from Western donors. Somalia’s leaders survive solely on international support, but instead of using that money to fight the Islamist militants who rule much of the country, or the innumerable pirates who cruise Somalia’s seas, they have recently paralyzed the government with bitter infighting, disappointing Western donors and most Somalis with their passivity and lack of progress. Representatives of the Security Council met with Somali officials here in the Kenyan capital, after visiting Sudan earlier this week. They held a news conference here Wednesday, during which they offered stark warnings, as they tried to push Somalia’s leaders to work together. “The bickering has to stop,” said Mark Lyall Grant, Britain’s representative on the Security Council. Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was on the trip and was even more direct in a Twitter post. “Get your act together, resolve your differences or lose intl support,” she wrote. The current political crisis pits the speaker of Somalia’s Parliament, Sharif Hassan Sheik Aden, a wily, illiterate livestock trader, against the president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed , a religious teacher who came into office two years ago amid great expectations. The two used to be close, but the speaker is now trying to persuade fellow members of Parliament to oust the president and elect him as the new president. Many Somali officials said the speaker was more popular than the president and that he had tapped into his vast wealth to buy allegiance from the Parliament. The president seems to know this, which is why he has been opposing elections anytime soon. Somalia’s military forces are embarrassingly weak, analysts say, and if not for the 8,000 African Union peacekeepers in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, the government would fall in hours. The European Union pays the salaries of Parliament members. “And that money could be spent elsewhere,” Mr. Grant warned. The United States has shipped in weapons. Still, the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia controls only a small patch of the capital. Much of the rest of country, which is nearly the size of Texas, is ruled by militants. In August, the mandate for the transitional government expires. The United Nations officials said they were calling on Somalia’s politicians to agree on a plan and to focus more on stemming extremism and piracy. Earlier this week, six foreigners, including one American, were arrested at the airport in Mogadishu with around $4 million in cash. Somali government officials said the money was ransom for a pirate gang — paying ransoms is the most common way of resolving pirate hijackings. The Somali government has yet to say what it is going to do with the foreigners or the money.

Somalia
Security Council (UN)
International Relations
Ahmed Sharif


Iran Security Officials Arrest Four at Newspaper

Abstract: TEHRAN — Security officials have raided one of Iran ’s few remaining independent newspapers, arresting three journalists and a managing director, web sites associated with the political opposition reported Wednesday. The arrests, made Tuesday, coincided with the publication of a special supplement by the newspaper, Shargh, that paid homage to Student Day, the annual commemoration of the deaths of student protesters in 1953. The section, titled “The Student Movement is Alive,” included interviews with government critics and amounted to a daring compliment to the student protesters and others who demonstrated after the disputed June 2009 presidential elections. Iran’s official news outlets on Wednesday reported the arrest of four members of Shargh but made no connection between the arrests and the Student Day supplement. Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi, the top prosecutor in Tehran, said in an interview with the ISNA news agency that the four were under investigation for “security-related offenses” but did not identify them or elaborate on the accusations against them. Iranian judicial authorities have arrested or intimidated dozens of journalists and closed at least 10 publications as part of a broad crackdown on the political opposition since the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by a suspiciously lopsided margin that his challengers called a fraud. Opposition web sites reported that security officers raided the Shargh newspaper offices twice on Tuesday, first arresting a senior editor, Ahmad Gholami, as well as two other senior editorial staff members while roughing up other staff members. Later in the day, the web sites said, officials returned to arrest Ali Khodabakhsh, a managing director, who has financed and run a number of newspapers and magazines now banned by the Iranian government because of views that are deemed politically unacceptable. Shargh has been closed by Iran’s press censors on three occasions since it was started in 2003. The latest ban was in 2007 when the newspaper was accused of “violating public chastity.” Shargh was again given permission to publish this past March. Students at universities all over Iran commemorated Student Day on Tuesday with modest protests within the confines of their campuses and on a scale far smaller than those in the months immediately following Mr. Ahmadinejad’s re-election. None of the protests were reported in the state-run press. But opposition web site videos posted on Youtube showed gatherings of several hundred students at universities in Tehran, Ghazvin, Rasht and Hamedan chanting anti-government slogans and singing songs associated with the reform movement. At least one video showed skirmishes with pro-government militia men whom opposition web sites reported had been brought in to suppress the protests. According to the reports, police made around a dozen arrests nationwide. Hundreds of students have been arrested in the post-election crackdown, including a number of prominent student leaders who have received long prison sentences for charges such as “acting against national security” and “propaganda against the regime.”. Many more have been disciplined or expelled.

Iran
Newspapers
Politics and Government
Censorship


Estonian News Site Can Be Held Liable for Defamatory Comments, Court Rules

Abstract: LONDON — One of Europe’s top courts has ruled that an Estonian news organization can be held liable for defamatory comments posted on its website. The decision signals the first time that the European Court of Human Rights has intervened in a case related to the role that publishers have over user-generated content disseminated through their online news websites. The decision, which was announced in Strasbourg, France, on Tuesday, has raised concerns for free-speech advocates who fear that newspapers’ ability to publish information may be hampered if they are held responsible for all comments made on their sites. “Holding organizations liable for user comments hampers freedom of speech,” said Peter Noorlander, chief executive of the Media Legal Defense Initiative, a media rights group in London. “Comment sections are important. They allow for debate on issues of public interest and have become an integral part of online media.” The case relates to a 2006 article published by Delfi, one of Estonia’s largest news websites, about SLK, a local ferry company. The article led to thousands of angry comments against the company, including many anonymous posts that were both defamatory and threatening toward SLK and its owner. In response, the ferry operator asked Delfi to remove the harmful comments. While the news organization had used filtering technology to block some of the posts, the remaining comments were taken down six weeks after the initial request. Delfi’s employees did not edit or moderate a majority of the comments. A local Estonian court initially found that Delfi was responsible for the defamatory comments and fined the company 320 euros, or $360. The news organization, however, appealed the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights, emphasizing that it had the right to publish content under European rules on freedom of expression. Yet in its legal decision, the European Court of Human Rights said that Delfi’s rights to freedom of expression had not been harmed by the Estonian court’s decision, and that Delfi could be held liable for the user-generated content published on its website. The judges emphasized that the extreme nature of the comments and the fact that they had been published on Delfi’s professionally managed — and commercially run — website made the company liable for the posts. “The steps taken by Delfi to remove the offensive comments without delay after their publication had been insufficient,” the European court said in a statement . While the ruling may have significant implications for Europe’s largest media companies like Axel Springer and Bertelsmann in Germany, the European court emphasized that its decision related only to publishers, and not to social networks and other Internet giants like Facebook and Google, which rely heavily on user-generated content. Urmo Soonvald, Delfi’s editor in chief, said the news organization continued to develop and improve how it handled user-generated content on its website. “I believe those who passed the verdict comprehend its historical dimension,” he said in a statement .

Freedom of the press
Computers and the Internet
Tech Industry
Freedom of speech
News media,journalism
Social Media
European Court of Human Rights
Facebook
Google


Sympathy for the Working Mother

Abstract: One morning recently I received a call from a friend who told me she had decided to leave her job after many years, one in which she commanded a lot of authority and was very well paid, to begin a new and as yet undetermined phase; she was taking advantage of a lucrative buyout her company had offered. I pointed out the fortuitous timing — it was May, which meant she would have the summer off, which meant she could leave the city, which meant she would be envied by a great number of people (arguably this year more than others because The Farmers’ Almanac is predicting a summer so hot, wet and muggy that New York will essentially feel like Biloxi, Miss.). In the past, my friend and I had lamented the singular indignity suffered by the affluent working mother in New York — a social type to whom we can never extend enough sympathy — when she is asked, usually outside school, generally by other parents, what she is doing for the summer, when what she is doing is pretty much what she has done nearly every other day of the year. Just as it is considered a breach of prison etiquette for visitors to ask the incarcerated what brought them, say, to Cayuga Correctional Facility, the rules for casual social exchange in the weeks from mid-May to late June ought to require that no one ever ask anyone with a day job what she is doing “for the summer.” In 99 cases out of 100, the person on the receiving end of that question is not going to say, “In July we’ll just be doing a family tennis clinic in the country, and for August we’ve rented a beach house in Croatia.” These observations are not meant to initiate a diatribe about the injustices endured by the 1 percent in a city dominated by the habits and tastes of the 0.01 percent (though anyone wishing to go in that direction has my blessing). Instead, they point to the tension, heightened during the summer months, that those with very little control over their schedules feel around those who have a lot. Time, especially among women in a certain demographic, is as much a source of friction as money can be. A few years ago a friend recounted the rage she felt when, as she left a party held sometime in early June, the hostess, on her way to Martha’s Vineyard, ostentatiously waved everyone off loudly declaring, “See you in September.” It is not simply, as the cliché goes, that women earning a paycheck hate the stay-at-home private-equity wives who don’t. It is that summer supplies energy to whole new channels of resentment: toward the painter who has secured the three-week fellowship at Yaddo; toward the academic who is teaching a course at the University of Edinburgh; toward the psychotherapist who is decamping to Wellfleet; toward the inveterate bohemian who has sublet her Chelsea apartment to a group of professional clowns so that she can travel with her daughter through Patagonia. Summer is the season of ambivalence, regret and even more frequent and significant tremors of maternal self-loathing. Even women who fiercely love their work and devote themselves to it entirely will quietly confess their alternative fantasies to one another from Memorial Day to Labor Day. They wonder, with greater intensity, what it would be like not to work at all, or to have made different choices. Or to have arranged their lives so that any professional downshifting would look, not as if they had given anything up, but as if they had simply turned themselves into Anne-Marie Slaughter, migrating from the State Department to celebrity feminist punditry. The Thrive movement, an iteration of seemingly bogus new-age feminism inaugurated by Arianna Huffington with her best-selling book, “ Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom and Wonder,” is a great inducement to the mind-set of scaling back. What constitutes well-being and wonder if not spending two and a half uninterrupted months with your children creating sculptures out of the starfish you’ve collected? (In one of the book’s many anecdotes about the thrills of quitting, an executive goes so far as to move to Cape Cod because she finds herself “inspired by the natural surroundings.”) When you stay in the city, because it is not the era of Edith Wharton and because you must, you remain vulnerable to the feeling that all those who have left are giving their children experiences that are both more enriching and more fun. In all likelihood you have made 68 phone calls, beginning in February, to get your child into a camp that markets itself as marginally educational, only to have your child spend no more than 11 minutes a day outdoors. Of course you wish only pestilence for the neighbor who has gone to Maine.


Harvard Case Against Marc Hauser Is Hard to Define

Abstract: The still unresolved case of Marc Hauser, the researcher accused by Harvard of scientific misconduct, points to the painful slowness of the government-university procedure for resolving such charges. It also underscores the difficulty of defining error in a field like animal cognition where inconsistent results are common. The case is unusual because Dr. Hauser is such a prominent researcher in his field, and is known to a wider audience through his writings on morality. There seemed little doubt of the seriousness of the case when Harvard announced on Aug. 20 that he had been found solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct. But last month two former colleagues, Bert Vaux and Jeffrey Watumull, both now at the University of Cambridge in England, wrote in the Harvard Crimson of Dr. Hauser’s “unimpeachable scientific integrity” and charged that his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program.” Also last month his principal accuser outside of Harvard, Gerry Altmann, allowed that he may have spoken too hastily. Dr. Altmann is the editor of Cognition, a psychology journal in which Dr. Hauser published an article said by Harvard to show scientific misconduct. When first shown evidence by Harvard for this conclusion, Dr. Altmann publicly accused Dr. Hauser of fabricating data. But he now says an innocent explanation, based on laboratory error, not fraud, is possible. People should step back, he writes, and “allow due process to conclude.” Due process, in this case, includes an independent inquiry by the Office of Research Integrity, a government agency that investigates scientific misconduct. Its inquiries take seven months on average, ranging up to eight years, says John Dahlberg, director of the agency’s investigations unit. Under Harvard’s faculty policy, the university cannot make known its evidence against Dr. Hauser, nor can he defend himself, until the government’s report is ready. That leaves both in difficult positions. Harvard has accused a prominent professor of serious failings yet has merely put him on book leave. Dr. Hauser, for his part, cannot act publicly to prevent the derailment, at least for the moment, of his rising scientific career. Harvard’s investigation has been “lawyer-driven,” says a faculty member who spoke on condition of anonymity, and has stuck so closely to the letter of government-approved rules for investigating misconduct that the process has become unduly protracted — it lasted three years — and procedurally unfair to the accused. “I think it legitimate to ask why the Harvard brass did not push back against their lawyers,” this member said. “At Harvard we now have the Un-Larry administration — no risk-taking, no thinking outside the box, no commitment to principles that challenge standard university practice,” he said, referring to Harvard’s previous president, the economist Larry Summers. Dr. Hauser’s difficulties began in 2007 when university officials went into his lab one afternoon when he was out of the country and publicly confiscated his records, an action based on accusations by some of his students. For the next 18 months he had no idea what he was accused of. A troika of Harvard department heads then delivered a secret report. Dr. Hauser has amassed substantial legal debts in defending himself, his friends say. Harvard presumably has substantial evidence against Dr. Hauser. He was investigated by a committee of fellow professors, and their findings were endorsed by the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Dr. Michael D. Smith. But from what is on the record so far, at least, Harvard’s charges may or may not meet the government’s definition of scientific misconduct, which is reserved for ethical offenses, like fabrication, falsification or plagiary, that directly undermine the research process. Two of Harvard’s eight charges of scientific misconduct involve published papers for which some of the original raw data is missing. But Dr. Dahlberg, of the Office of Research Integrity, said: “Missing data is not scientific misconduct. The whole purpose of O.R.I. is to go after serious fraud and not the peccadilloes one might find in many labs.” Dr. Hauser and a colleague have redone the experiments and notified the two journals involved that they got the same results as reported. A third charge, apparently the most serious, concerns the article in Cognition. The article, published in 2002, reported that rhesus monkeys can distinguish a novel string of sounds from a control sequence, an issue which has important bearing on their capacity for language. The novel and control sound sequences must be alternated so as to keep background conditions as similar as possible. But the video of the experiment contains only novel sequences. Critics like Dr. Altmann at first charged that the controls had never been done, and that since control conditions are reported in the paper, they must have been concocted. But Dr. Altmann, a psychologist at the University of York in England, now says his earlier accusation was “heavily dependent on the knowledge that Harvard found Professor Hauser guilty of misconduct.” When he gave the issue further thought, he saw an alternative explanation. In the experimental setup, the monkey is in a soundproof box. The researchers can see the computer is playing a sound but cannot hear it. What could have happened is that the computer, through a programming error, substituted a second test sound for the control sounds, and the researchers, unaware of the problem, wrote up their report assuming the control sounds had been played as planned. Even so, it is far from clear how the data on the video led to the reported results. This would be a devastating error, but not fraud. “It is conceivable that the data were not fabricated, but rather that the experiment was set up wrong, and that nobody realized this until after it was published,” Dr. Altmann wrote. Mr. Watumull, a linguistics student, said that when he worked in Dr. Hauser’s lab in 2007 he performed a similar experiment. It is “perfectly possible” that such an error could occur, he said, because the experimenters are blinded to the conditions of the experiment. Harvard’s five other charges of scientific misconduct involve disagreements between Dr. Hauser and his students, all of which were corrected before any articles were published. E-mails in one of these cases, leaked to The Chronicle of Higher Education, concerned the same kind of experiment as the Cognition paper: researchers scored how often a monkey turned its head to the loudspeaker, meaning it heard the sound as novel. In analyzing the experiment, Dr. Hauser scored the head turnings as significant, but a graduate student and a research assistant both found the monkey did nothing. The e-mails show Dr. Hauser telling his students that “we need to resolve this because I’m not sure why we are going in circles.” The research assistant later wrote to the Harvard authorities, “The most disconcerting part of the whole experience to me was the feeling that Marc was using his position of authority to force us to accept sloppy (at best) science.” It was this complaint that prompted the inquiry. In at least one previous disagreement with students, Dr. Hauser backed off when challenged. A former student who worked in Dr. Hauser’s lab before 2007 said Dr. Hauser had required the use of a statistical test that provided a publishable result. The student, who spoke on condition of anonymity, felt the test was inappropriate and objected. After discussion, Dr. Hauser agreed and the result was not published. “I worked with Marc for years on dozens of experiments, and I never saw any problems with the handling of data that were this serious,” this student said, referring to the Harvard committee’s charges. A more recent student, Mr. Watumull, said he never saw Dr. Hauser putting improper pressure on people to reach a conclusion. “He’s truly one of the greatest teachers I had as an undergraduate,” Mr. Watumull said. “He’s very well known in the department for being solicitous of students and inviting them to offer their own opinions.” One of the few people to have seen any documents from the Harvard inquiry is Bennett Galef, an expert on animal behavior at McMaster University in Ontario. Because of his interest in research ethics, he was asked by Dr. Hauser to review the charges relating to the three published papers. Dr. Galef said he concluded, based on what he was shown, that there was no clear evidence that Dr. Hauser had acted unethically. Dr. Galef referred to the tensions that can arise in a large laboratory where some students are more successful than others. “Marc should have supervised more closely,” he said. Dr. Galef also questioned whether those conducting the inquiry fully understood the culture of an animal behavior laboratory. “As I understand it, the investigating committee were all physical scientists, and they have a very different approach to research and data-keeping than behavioral researchers do,” he said. In an interview, Dr. Hauser declined to discuss the eight charges against him. But he did talk about another of his experiments cited by critics, a mirror recognition test, which is not part of Harvard’s investigation. In 1995 he published a finding, which he later wrote that he could not repeat, that cotton-top tamarin monkeys could recognize themselves in a mirror. This contradicted a well-known finding by the psychologist Gordon G. Gallup that only humans, chimps and orangutans can recognize themselves. Dr. Gallup asked for a tape of the experiment, which Dr. Hauser provided. But Dr. Gallup could see no evidence, he has said, that the monkeys were reacting as Dr. Hauser had reported. To critics, this seemed an example of Dr. Hauser rushing to unsustainable conclusions. In Dr. Hauser’s view, his article correctly reported the cotton-tops’ reactions. One of the difficulties of the animal cognition field is that experimenters have to recognize often subtle changes in an animal’s head movements, and judge whether this is a response to the test sound. Scoring an animal’s responses is quite subjective. It can take months to train someone to score rhesus monkeys, and a person skilled at scoring rhesus may fail with tamarins. Dr. Hauser’s 1995 article was written with two colleagues trained in scoring cotton-top tamarins reliably. Dr. Gallup may not have spotted the reactions because he is not trained in scoring cotton-tops, Dr. Hauser said. Why, then, could Dr. Hauser not repeat the experiment? The reason, he believes, has to do with another unresolved problem in the animal cognition field, that of how to deal with the variability in individuals. Just as with people, some animals are gifted, others less so. Alex was the wonderfully intelligent gray parrot studied by Irene Pepperberg; no other parrots have equaled his abilities to distinguish colors and numbers. A collie dog called Rico was reported in Science in 2004 to possess a 200-word vocabulary, but has never been heard of since, suggesting that for whatever reason the experiment cannot be repeated. The prodigy problem can interfere with less spectacular experiments. Dr. Hauser says that the first group of tamarins he tested for self-recognition may have included a few very adept individuals but that later groups were more average. He was unable to get the same result, and published his failure to do so. Disagreements over the appropriate method are quite common in the animal cognition field, as is evident in the fact that some of the most spectacular experiments cannot be repeated. Disagreements over method also seem to have been involved in at least some of the five cases involving differences between Dr. Hauser and his students. The e-mails leaked to The Chronicle of Higher Education were portrayed as an instance of Dr. Hauser pressuring his students to reach conclusions they thought unjustified. But they could also have involved a technical difference of opinion about how to score rhesus monkey behavior, a matter in which Dr. Hauser is trained and the two students were not. Dr. Hauser has already acknowledged making “significant mistakes,” but has admitted to nothing worse. It remains to be seen whether or not the Office of Research Integrity will see these mistakes as serious enough to count as scientific misconduct. “Maybe down the line there’ll be some forgiveness and a way to re-enter,” Dr. Hauser said. “I feel I have a lot more to contribute. But it’s been brutal.”

Hauser Marc D
Harvard University
Psychology and Psychologists
Monkeys and Apes
Science and Technology


Americans and Space (2 Letters)

Abstract: To the Editor: Re “ At 90, John Glenn Looks Back ” (Feb. 14): I think it is appropriate to praise John Glenn. He took chances in going into space. As a onetime engineer myself, however, I protest lauding astronauts before the engineers who got them into space and back home again. Someday I hope to see The New York Times acknowledge that huge groups of supporting workers — managers, accountants, engineers, physicists, chemists and others — assembled and managed to complete the tasks of supporting our astronauts on their journey. They would never have made it alone. James Dietz Durham, N.C. To the Editor: John Glenn’s epic flight united the world and raised the stature of the United States. When we see a Chinese taikonaut or an Indian vyomanaut standing on the moon in 2020 or so, people will be asking, “Who lost space?” As an astronomer, I am firmly in support of the scientific advances of NASA’s unmanned space program, but I think it would be a serious error not to put serious funds toward launching Americans to the moon and, eventually, beyond. Jay M. Pasachoff Williamstown, Mass.

Moon
Space
Science and Technology
Glenn John Herschel Jr


Hofstra Hires Mo Cassara as Basketball Coach

Abstract: A tumultuous off-season for college basketball in the New York metropolitan area has yielded its share of bizarre coaches’ stories, from the implosion of Fred Hill at Rutgers to the arrest of Hofstra’s newly hired Tim Welsh to the rebirth of Steve Lavin at St. John’s. But perhaps the final stop on the carousel may be the most unexpected. Hofstra announced on Wednesday that it was hiring the assistant Mo Cassara to replace Welsh, who resigned on Monday after being arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated. Cassara found himself unemployed when Boston College surprisingly fired Coach Al Skinner in late March. After he landed at Hofstra to be an assistant for Welsh, Cassara appeared destined to be looking for work again. “I never expected to be here,” he said. Instead, the 36-year-old Cassara signed a multiyear deal Wednesday to become the Pride’s coach. Since being hired as an assistant five weeks ago, he has lived in a dorm on campus. His future was so uncertain that he said he had spent the past few nights making lists of people to call about jobs. “I’m devastated about the way that this job presented itself,” said Cassara, who has known Welsh for years. The hiring of Cassara was surprising considering that he was the third assistant at Boston College. He does have college head-coaching experience, however, with two years at Division III Clark University in Worcester, Mass., from 2004-6. He also served as the head coach at Worcester Academy, where he mentored the future N.B.A. players Jarrett Jack and Craig Smith. Cassara said he would retain Hofstra’s new staff, which includes the former longtime Providence assistant Steve DeMeo and the former Syracuse point guard Allen Griffin. Hofstra returns a strong nucleus and will be among the favorites to win the Colonial Athletic Association next season. “We want to build on what Jay Wright and Tom Pecora have done here,” Cassara said.

Coaches and Managers
Basketball
Hofstra University
Hiring and Promotion


Flatiron Building, Admired but Rarely Copied, Inspires Developers

Abstract: New York is awash with architectural imitators: the rows of identical 19th-century brownstones, the spires and setbacks of the Art Deco era, the Seagram Building knockoffs strewn around Midtown Manhattan in the 1960s and ’70s, the luxury fishbowls rising now. Yet one of the city’s favorite landmarks, the Flatiron Building, with its prow looming over Broadway and Madison Square Park, has been rarely copied. At least, not until now. New York developers prefer to stick to the grid. This results in buildings that are square — in ambition as much as aesthetics — but as the cost of land, particularly in Manhattan, has increased, builders have begun to look to odder-shaped plots. Image The corner living room of a new building at 10 Sullivan. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times “The lots that determine the Flatiron shape have previously been avoided since the resultant interiors are unusual and not easy to market,” Patrice Derrington, director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University, wrote last week in an email. “However, ‘as needs be’ developers are attending to these less favorable sites, as they eke out every last possibility.” Standing at a corner in SoHo, where Avenue of the Americas and Sullivan Street meet, the possibilities of such a profile are apparent. When, starting in 1925, the path for the avenue was blasted through the areas now known as Greenwich Village, SoHo and TriBeCa, it left more than a few half-standing buildings in its wake. Some were walled off, others torn down and some replaced. A few become parking spots and carwashes. At 10 Sullivan Street, a stalk of flowing bricks and curved glass now shoots 16 stories into the air. While the building resembles one of the industrial lofts in neighboring Hudson Square that has been wrapped into a 204-foot-tall wedge, the building’s architect, Cary Tamarkin , said the shape was not intended as a homage. “Obviously we’re well aware of the Flatiron Building,” Mr. Tamarkin said. “It’s three blocks from our office, but I wouldn’t call it an inspiration. The whole shape, it was always just a question of making the site work.” The lot gave him 92 feet at the back and just a few at the front, with 360 feet in between. About 100 of that went to creating four townhouses, while the rest of the site contains the tower. A set of balconies at the rear even shares the curved shape of the tip, which helps make the jutting spaces more functional. “The curve at the front, it’s 20 feet across,” Mr. Tamarkin said. “It may look tight from the street, but inside, it’s a lot of space to play with.” Image A “double Flatiron,” made from two triangular lots at 100 Franklin Street. Credit DDG And what might be lost in room is gained in wraparound views. The developers tried a dozen different designs with the tower set back from the corner before settling on moving it to the front. “We definitely have buyers who like it and buyers who don’t,” said Kevin P. Maloney , the founder of Property Markets Group, which is developing the site with Madison Equities. “We’re O.K. with that. It’s a big city.” Just a few blocks south, near the beginning of Avenue of the Americas, the development firm DDG is tackling two triangular lots. Both between Franklin and White Streets, they were bought for $9.5 million. That is what some lofts cost in TriBeCa these days, not an entire building site, and it is easy to see why. The parcels, one 35 feet wide, the other 25 feet at its widest point, will soon be home to 10 new apartments and a pair of shops, called 100 Franklin. If 10 Sullivan celebrates its wedge-shaped site, 100 Franklin masks it and embraces it in equal measure. Looking north, it almost appears to be a typical loft building, with big windows recessed into a patterned brick facade ( a DDG specialty ). But move to the other end of the building and it is apparent that the facade tapers down to a fine point, before vanishing into the building next door. An arched buttress at the street, which creates a doorway for a retail space, appears to be holding the entire end aloft. Image A corner building in downtown Manhattan. Much of Manhattan adheres to the street grid and the square lots it creates. Sometimes, though, the lots are oddly shaped, leading to triangular buildings. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times The two lots meet at opposing corners in a way that made it unfeasible to connect the interiors. So DDG has essentially created two buildings that look like one, joined by a wall of patterned bricks. As with almost any project in the city, the highly prescriptive zoning code is responsible as much as the architects for a building’s look. As in this case, the code requires an uninterrupted facade along most wide avenues. This was one of the reasons that Joe McMillan, the chief executive of DDG , wanted the properties in the first place. “Where else can you get 200 feet of uninterrupted frontage on a major avenue these days?” Mr. McMillan said. “And with all these streets converging, it gives us more light and more visibility. “This is really about turning constraints to your advantage. If this was an easy project, it would have been built years ago.” Image The property at 285 West 110th Street, at the roundabout of Central Park, comes to a curvaceous point. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times Even with their complexity, there is a considerable competition for many of these unusual sites, some of it spurred by the city. At an old parking lot by the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Flatbush Avenue, Two Trees Management is building a 32-story tower , and the controversial redevelopment of the library on Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn Heights has been called the Flatiron of that borough. In Harlem, a project on Frederick Douglass Circle, at the northwestern terminus of Central Park, was similarly sold off by the city after many suitors placed bids on yet another old gas station . The site comes to a point, but a curvaceous one. Appropriately called Circa, the complex of 48 condominiums has a more conventional layout than appears from the street. The middle of the property is left open to create more of a cursive V than a triangle, which makes for longer units, with more views of the park. Where the building, developed by Artimus Construction, comes to its point along 110th Street, balconies were added so as not to create complicated interior spaces. “Very rarely do you get a curve or an arc in a building in New York, so we wanted to embrace that and create a real presence on the circle and the park,” Dan Kaplan, a senior partner at FXFowle Architects, said. Even the swooping buildings in the city by Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid tend to be glorified squares. Unlike the crooked geographies of San Francisco or Paris, where Flatirons abound, New York is perhaps a little too frenetic for obtuse living. Then again, that may be why the city could use fewer square spaces. Robert Stilin , a designer tackling a full-floor apartment at 10 Sullivan, said, “I don’t really love angles or arches,” though they have their advantages. “You can really float the living space around you,” he said. “You have to create your own symmetries.”

Real Estate
Housing
Architecture
Flatiron Building
Buildings
Commercial Real Estate
DDG
FXFowle Architects
NYC


Alaska Air’s Premium Deal for Virgin America

Abstract: Alaska Air is paying through the nose cone for Virgin America. The airline secures some coveted airport slots with its $2.6 billion deal for Richard Branson’s American carrier. Cost cuts fall way short of the deal’s premium to Virgin’s share price, however. It’s a risky bet that the airline industry has changed its destructive ways. There may be some validity to the thesis from Alaska Air, a company with an investment-grade rating and net cash on its balance sheet. Domestic airlines have benefited from a decent economy in recent years and a series of mergers — most of them struck when one or both partners were struggling — that slashed costs. The precipitous fall in the price of oil also saved $18 billion in fuel expenses for the sector last year, two-fifths of which landed right on the bottom line, according to Barclays. Pretax margins are 20 percent or higher for the best among them: Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and Alaska. Laggards like United Continental and American Airlines generate about 12 percent. A few years ago, such results would have been just a pipe dream. Video David Cush, Virgin America’s chief, and Brad Tilden, Alaska Air Group’s chief, discuss the latest airline merger in an consolidating industry. Credit Credit CNBC Bradley Tilden, Alaska Air’s chairman and chief executive, is only going a short way with this acquisition. Virgin America accounted for 1.7 percent of air traffic in the United States last year. That won’t make up much ground against the big four, which control more than four-fifths of the market. Adding West Coast hubs and bulking up in New York and Dallas could, however, lay the groundwork for later expansion. The two airlines, though, have little overlap in either routes or planes. Alaska Air flies mostly Boeing, and Virgin flies predominantly Airbus. Expected cost cuts are $50 million after tax. They’re worth $150 million to shareholders, once capitalized and adjusted for the $350 million of merger costs. To help cover the rest of the nearly $1.2 billion premium, Mr. Tilden is relying on a top-line turbo boost from changing which aircraft fly which routes, persuading more passengers to fly Alaska Air and generating more income from the company-branded credit card. These sorts of revenue benefits tend to be harder to realize. There also may be other headwinds. Oil prices are back on the rise. Margins are expected to slide again by 2019, according to analyst forecasts culled by Thomson Reuters. That means Alaska Air’s journey could be a bumpy one.

Virgin America
Airlines,airplanes
Mergers and Acquisitions
Alaska Air Group


‘It Had to Be Stopped’: Heroes Rise Amid France Terror Attacks

Abstract: NICE, France — Terrorist attacks in France come often enough that they can seem to be variations on a painful pattern: carnage followed by disbelief, then condemnations, condolences, and shrines of flowers, candles and letters for the dead. Yet to see the attacks only that way is to miss the one element that might buoy the national spirit: In nearly every terrorist episode here, ordinary individuals risked their own safety to try to halt the attack or to lend a hand to the wounded rather than running away. Some of these local heroes are recognized right away, though others never receive recognition and some receive it only belatedly. “What I saw was horrible, people crushed — it had to be stopped,” said a 48-year-old man named Franck who would not give his surname even after he was decorated by the City of Nice for his effort to stop the driver of a cargo truck that ran over scores of people at a Bastille Day celebration on July 14. A worker at the Nice airport, Franck, who was on a motor scooter, decided in a split second to chase the truck and when he caught up, rammed it — to no avail — and was knocked off. He got up and ran after the truck, managed to climb onto the running boards and began hitting the driver through the open window. As the driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel , tried to shoot Franck his gun failed and at the same time, Franck tried to open the door of the truck, then tried climbing through the window, but the driver struck him on the head with the gun and he fell, breaking a rib and badly bruising his back. Franck said he was satisfied that when the driver was fighting with him, he was not running over more people. “He was concentrating on me; in that moment he could not kill people,” he said. At least two other men made similar, if less prolonged, efforts and also received medals from the City of Nice: Alexander Migues pursued the truck on a bicycle, and Gwenaël Leriche, a 26-year-old deliveryman, ran after the truck armed with nothing but a penknife and tried to jump onto the running boards as the truck came to a halt. Image Sister Danielle Delafosse, left, saw terrorists enter the small church at St.-Etienne-de-Rouvray, ran out and found someone with a phone to call the police. Credit Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images They were not unique. Almost every attack or attempted attack in France since the assault on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7, 2015, produced local heroes. There was Lassana Bathily , a Muslim immigrant from Mali, who hid shoppers in the basement of a kosher grocery store in Paris two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack, then smuggled them out as the terrorist Amedy Coulibaly held people hostage upstairs. In Villejuif in April last year, a fitness instructor and mother, Aurélie Châtelain , 32, refused to hand over her car to Sid Ahmed Ghlam, who the authorities say planned to gun down a crowd at a suburban church. Her refusal ended with both of them being shot in a tussle, and she died. When Mr. Ghlam called the police for help, he was arrested. He remains in prison and contends he did not shoot her. Ms. Châtelain received the Légion d’Honneur posthumously after her family and friends pointed out that if those who stopped a gunman presumed to be on the verge of an attack on the high-speed Thalys train running from Amsterdam to Paris deserved France’s highest award , so did she. The attempted attack on the train occurred almost exactly a year ago, when a shirtless man emerged from a train bathroom with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a Luger pistol. Three Americans who stopped him have been decorated by France’s president, along with a Briton and a French-American man, Mark Moogalian, who was the first to grab the gunman, Ayoub El Khazzani . Mr. Moogalian was shot in the process but survived. The intervention of the men stopped what could have become a slaughter. On Nov. 13, 2015, when extremists tied to the Islamic State attacked a theater, a stadium and restaurants in and near Paris , a number of people made extraordinary efforts to help each other. One was Ludovic Boumbas, a 40-year-old of Congolese descent, who lived in Lille and was celebrating the birthday of a waitress at the bar-cafe La Belle Équipe when armed men began firing on them. He jumped in front of a young woman who was at the party and was fatally shot; she was wounded but survived. Most recently, in July, Sister Danielle Delafosse overcame her fear after terrorists entered a small church at St.-Étienne-Du-Rouvray in Rouen, France, with the intent to kill people. She ran out of the church, found someone with a phone and had the person call the police, who arrived too late to save the Rev. Jacques Hamel , 85, who was killed, but perhaps in time to prevent more bloodshed. Image Pictures of Aurélie Châtelain, 32, who refused to hand over her car to Sid Ahmed Ghlam, who investigators said had planned to attack a crowd at a church in Villejuif, a Paris suburb. She was killed in a fight with him. Credit Kenzo Tribouillard/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images While the heroism that gains attention is often the sort that risks the hero’s own life or limb, many who acted in less visible ways nonetheless transcended the moment. They responded with an extraordinary commitment to assist the wounded in circumstances that many would find overwhelming. In Nice, they include doctors, X-ray technicians, nurses and firefighters who worked hours upon hours treating the injured or trying to match lost children with their families. There was also Gilles Thévenet, the owner of the High Club, a popular discothèque in Nice that faces the Promenade des Anglais, who swiftly turned his nightclub into a triage center for emergency workers. Mr. Thévenet was sitting in his office in the back of the building, oblivious to the bloody chaos as the cargo truck careened by, until his security guards rushed in and he ran to the front door. “We heard the weeping, the cries, we saw the crowds,” he said. “I understood I had to choose. I could not open the door to the crowds of people and to those giving first aid, I decided the first priority was the wounded, to do as much as we could for the emergency responders who were trying to save whomever they could,” he said. In minutes, the firefighters and first-aid workers began carrying the injured — and the dead — into the club to get them off the promenade, which was thick with running, stumbling, screaming people . Soon, two medical helicopters landed just in front of the disco, where the aid workers performed triage, with the most badly hurt airlifted to hospitals nearby. Some of Mr. Thévenet’s security staff, who were trained in first aid, worked alongside the firefighters and emergency responders; a room in the club was set aside for the dead. Mr. Thévenet is not sure when — or even if — business will return, especially because many in Nice know that the dead and wounded lay in rows on the same floor where they would be dancing. But he believes it will. Image Lassana Bathily, a Muslim immigrant from Mali, hid shoppers in the basement of a kosher grocery store in Paris, then smuggled them out as a terrorist held others hostage upstairs. He was granted French citizenship in recognition of his courage. Credit Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images “We will have to find again the party atmosphere, that has been our protein for 11 years,” he said. “It is out of the question to cede it to the terrorists.” A few blocks farther west on the promenade, in sight of the sea, stands the ultramodern Lenval Foundation Hospital, one of only two major pediatric centers in southern France. and the place where Dr. Virginie Rampal, a pediatric orthopedist, who was born and raised in Nice, works day in and day out to mend the bones of children. She was on-call the night of the attack, but at home after a relatively quiet day. She had considered going with her daughters to the promenade to see the fireworks, but her plans changed when a friend stopped by. When Dr. Rampal’s pager went off, like everyone else, she did not know of the attack, but rushed to the emergency room. The wounded were already filling the chairs, lying on the floor, some with open fractures — most of them children. More were coming in, some carried in their parents’ arms. She helped with triage, went into surgery, back to triage, working without stopping as 30 young patients, many under the age of 10, were stabilized and sent into surgery. Of the 30 children, 28 survived — two died from head injuries and crushed pelvises, she said. At 7 a.m. she went home to shower. “I came in and took my daughter in my arms and held her close to me” — she has two girls, one 2½ and another 9 months old. She was back at the hospital 90 minutes later.

Terrorism
Nice Attack
Sid Ahmed Ghlam
France
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel
Good Samaritans


Showing Character After a Shaky Start

Abstract: Chicago The moment will be but a blip on the radar of N.F.L. history: 9 plays, 77 yards, 1 touchdown. But for Eli Manning , the game-winning drive against the Chicago Bears yesterday may have been a career maker. Or at the least, it was redemption at a time when critics were wondering if he would ever improve beyond O.K. Yesterday, his supporters discovered that he had a pulse. On a gloomy, rain-swept afternoon, when the N.F.L. commemorated the shooting death of Redskins safety Sean Taylor, Manning showed character, something that his growing legion of critics were beginning to doubt he had. • And, yes, his doubters had to wait awhile to see it unfold. For three quarters, Manning looked awful. He appeared to have regressed, going from simply managing games to costing the Giants another game. After throwing four interceptions last week in a dreadful loss to the Minnesota Vikings, Mannings continued to struggle yesterday. On his second pass attempt, Manning was intercepted by linebacker Brian Urlacher. Manning later threw another interception; he also lost a fumble in the second quarter. After the fumble — the ball actually slipped out of his hand as he attempted a pass — I wrote myself a note. Question: When do the Giants pull the plug on Eli? Answer: What’s the alternative? Jared Lorenzen? The Giants’ fate is tied to Manning. Then, with just under five minutes to play and the Giants trailing, 16-14, Manning led his team on the winning drive. In the process, he displayed flashes of the skills that made him a No. 1 overall draft choice. He stayed in the pocket, and, when he had to, scrambled to buy himself time: an 8-yard completion here, a 15-yard bullet there, then a 24-yard strike. And before you knew it, Manning was handing off to Reuben Droughns for the 2-yard game-winning touchdown. Is this the same quarterback who was so terrible in the first half? “We wanted to get that bad taste out of our mouth,” Manning said afterward. “The way it happened wasn’t the prettiest; at times it was flat-out ugly, but it was sweet.” I must confess, I like Eli Manning, though I’m not always sure why. Maybe it’s the way he carries himself — low-key, never seeming to take himself too seriously. I feel a little sorry for him playing in the ever-widening shadow of his older brother Peyton. Beyond that, regardless of how erratically the Giants play, Eli’s glass always seems half full. Last week, in one intense interview session when the news media horde was projecting gloom and doom for the Giants after the loss to Minnesota, Manning said that a lot of contending teams were in the same boat. “You look around and you see that we are not the only team that lost yesterday,” he said. Manning effectively used the lopsided loss as proof that the Giants had a high upside. “That is exciting,” he said. “We can improve.” When we were trying to get him to remember the details of a horrible performance, Manning spoke about the importance of having the power to forget. He was asked why he didn’t show more emotion — even if he didn’t mean it. Doesn’t he become weary of critics suggesting that he throw his helmet or kick water coolers? “You are trying to keep a straight face,” Manning said, “and don’t let my players and people see that I am down or that I am out. I figure if I start going crazy and getting wild, it is just going to make everybody else go into a tantrum. And I’m trying to keep everybody calm.” Finally, when someone asked about his confidence, specifically whether it had been shattered, Manning said with authority, although with no particular passion, “My confidence is fine.” After last week’s loss, Jerry Reese, the Giants’ first-year general manager, ever so gently called Manning out. Reese said Manning looked skittish. He meant the way he was being sacked and pounded was enough to make any quarterback skittish. • Manning said he didn’t know what that meant. It means easily startled; restless; fickle or uncertain. The point is that Reese seemed to be serving notice to young Manning that in this, his third full season as a starter, the clock is beginning to tick. December is the most important month of the N.F.L. season. Is Manning improving or declining? Will he be Vince Young? Drew Brees? Will he even be Kellen Clemens? Yesterday — when it counted — he was a good version of himself. Who will he be next week in Philadelphia and the week after that against Washington? Yesterday, Eli Manning was asked to pick this team off the mat, and he did. He showed a pulse. That’s all Giants fans have been looking for. A pulse.


Cambodia: Charity Closes After Scandal

Abstract: The Somaly Mam Foundation, which worked against human trafficking and sexual exploitation, has closed five months after its founder resigned amid allegations of broad deception . In a statement on its website, the organization said it believed strongly in “transparency, integrity and service,” and announced that as of Sept. 30 it had shut down. The foundation operated primarily in Cambodia. Somaly Mam, its founder, resigned after investigations called into question her tale of enduring years as a child sex slave. She has taken over management of a Cambodian nongovernmental organization called Afesip — Agir Pour les Femmes en Situation Précaire, or Acting for Women in Distressing Situations — that also fights trafficking, Rigmor Schneider, a former Somaly Mam Foundation official, said in a telephone interview.

Somaly Mam
Somaly Mam Foundation
Closings
Human trafficking
Cambodia


Bank Failures Bring Total to 68

Abstract: Regulators on Friday shut down banks in Florida, Minnesota, Arizona and California, bringing the number of bank failures to 68 this year. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took over The Bank of Bonifay, based in Bonifay, Fla., which had $242.9 million in assets and $230.2 million in deposits; and Access Bank, in Champlin, Minn., with $32 million in assets and $32 million in deposits. The agency also seized Towne Bank of Arizona, in Mesa, with $120.2 million in assets and $113.2 million in deposits; and 1st Pacific Bank of California in San Diego, with $335.8 million in assets and $291.2 million in deposits. First Federal Bank of Florida, in Lake City, agreed to acquire Bonifay’s deposits and about $78.1 million of its assets. The F.D.I.C. will keep the remainder for eventual sale. PrinsBank of Prinsburg, Minn., will assume Access’s deposits and assets. Commerce Bank of Arizona, based in Tucson, agreed to assume all of the deposits and assets of Towne Bank, and City National Bank of Los Angeles will assume all of 1st Pacific Bank’s deposits and assets. With the 68 closures so far this year, the pace of bank failures is double that of 2009.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp
Shutdowns (Institutional)
Banks and Banking
Deposit Insurance
Subprime Mortgage Crisis


Baseball Suspends Umpire in Dispute

Abstract: The umpire who was involved in the argument that left Padres outfielder Milton Bradley with a season-ending knee injury was suspended yesterday for the rest of the regular season by Major League Baseball. The details of why the umpire, Mike Winters, was suspended were not announced, but according to two people within baseball briefed on the specifics, Winters did not attempt to defuse the confrontation with Bradley. And after the argument escalated, the officials said, Winters referred to Bradley using profane language. In baseball, the unwritten rule about arguments between players and umpires is that players can curse when describing the nature of calls they disagree with but cannot use curse words to characterize an umpire. Winters appears to have turned that rule around on Bradley. “He was substantially responsible for creating the situation,” one of the officials said in a telephone interview. “The umpire’s role is to defuse on-the-field incidents when they happen, and in this case he escalated it.” In Sunday’s game against the Colorado Rockies, Bradley was called out on strikes in the bottom of the fifth inning. Before hitting a single in the bottom of the eighth, Bradley was asked by the plate umpire Brian Runge if he had flung his bat at him after he was called out. Runge told Bradley that he had been informed by the other umpires that such an action had taken place. After reaching first base, Bradley asked Winters if he had told Runge that he had thrown his bat. An ugly argument ensued, and while Bud Black, the Padres’ manager, tried to pull Bradley away, Bradley’s knee buckled and he fell to the ground. On Monday, the Padres, who entered yesterday with a one-game lead in the National League wild-card race, announced that Bradley is expected to be sidelined well into next season because of a torn ligament in his right knee. Over the past three days, baseball investigated the incident, interviewing the Padres’ first-base coach, Bobby Meacham; Rockies first baseman Todd Helton, who was near the incident; Winters; and Bradley. A telephone message to Lamell McMorris, a representative of the umpires union, was not immediately returned. A spokesman for the players union declined comment. Winters, 48, has been a major league umpire for the past 17 seasons and worked the World Series last season and in 2002. Winters will most likely be left off the list for this year’s postseason, but he is expected to return to the field next April. A decision on whether to suspend Bradley is pending. But because of Winters’s actions, and the fact that Bradley will probably miss the next six months recovering from an injury, it is unlikely he will be suspended. The incident was not the first in which Winters was accused of inciting a player. In 1998, Charlie Hayes, then with the San Francisco Giants, said Winters cursed at him after he argued a call. Suspensions of umpires are rare and often do not pertain to on-the-field situations. In 2003, the veteran umpires Bruce Froemming and John Hirschbeck were suspended for 10 days. Froemming was accused of making an anti-Semitic remark about an umpiring administrator, and baseball said Hirschbeck threatened a senior official in the commissioner’s office. Last April, the N.B.A. suspended the referee Joey Crawford after Tim Duncan, the San Antonio Spurs star, said Crawford challenged him to a fight during a game. On Sept. 18, the league reinstated Crawford. Shortly after the game Sunday, Bradley seized on a comparison to the incident involving Crawford, saying: “Mind you, Tim Duncan has a way different reputation than I got — but I have never hurt anybody. You don’t ride people, he kept talking to me, he just wouldn’t stop.”


Japan Radiation Risk Seen as Low so Far

Abstract: Although several plant workers are ill from radioactive exposure in Japan , the radiation risk to the public appears low so far, experts said. “At least as of now, what we’re looking at is rather more like Three Mile Island than Chernobyl,” said Dr. David J. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University. The radiation release from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, where the entire reactor blew up and vaporized its radioactive fuel, was about a million times the amount released from the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, he said. The Chernobyl accident led to an epidemic of thyroid cancer and increases in leukemia, he said. But from Three Mile Island, Dr. Brenner said, “There is no evidence that anybody at all got sick, even decades later.” At the exposure rate now being reported at the boundary of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, it would take many weeks before people exposed would notice any symptoms. “The sorts of numbers I’m seeing are not the sort that could be linked with radiological symptoms,” Dr. Brenner said. Inside the plant, however, the three workers with radiation sickness were presumably exposed to much more radiation. “The medical consequences depend entirely on how much radioactive material is released,” Dr. Brenner said. The duration of exposure also matters. High levels of exposure can cause severe radiation sickness and death. Symptoms can include nausea, fatigue, vomiting, hair loss, diarrhea and hemorrhaging. Even high doses generally take several weeks to cause death. “It’s normally due to what we call ‘gut death,’ ” Dr. Brenner said. “The lining of the gut gets depleted.” Radiation interferes with the cells’ ability to divide and reproduce, and cells in the intestine are usually replaced frequently. For the same reason, the blood-forming cells in bone marrow are also sensitive to radiation. “What you really die of in the end is infection,” Dr. Brenner said. The more likely risk for the public is that of low-level exposures, which can increase the risk of cancer many years later. Again, the danger depends on the length of exposure and what types of radioactive materials to which one is exposed. Some radioactive materials are readily absorbed by the body and linger there. Iodine, for example, goes to the thyroid gland, and strontium to bone, and they emit radiation inside the body that over time can lead to cancer or leukemia. Other radioactive materials, like tritium, pass quickly through the body. The Japanese government is handing out iodine pills to flood the thyroid gland with ordinary iodine in hopes of preventing it from taking up the radioactive form. Dr. Brenner said the iodine pills were protective, but were “a bit of a myth” because their use is based on the belief that the risk is from inhaling radioactive iodine. Actually, he said, 98 percent of people’s exposure comes from milk and other dairy products. “The way radioactive iodine gets into human beings is an indirect route,” he said. “It falls to the ground, cows eat it and make milk with radioactive iodine, and you get it from drinking the milk. You get very little from inhaling it. The way to prevent it is just to stop people from drinking the milk.” He said that the epidemic of thyroid cancer around Chernobyl could have been prevented if the government had immediately stopped people from drinking milk. Crops can also be contaminated. “I wouldn’t be eating an apple from a tree close to the plant,” Dr. Brenner said. Children, and fetuses, are more vulnerable to radiation than are adults. Scientists estimate that about 5 percent of the population is genetically more susceptible to radiation than the rest. The radioactive elements released from the reactor form clouds that are carried off by the prevailing winds. Again, the risk depends on how much is released. “As it’s being blown away, to some extent it’s being dispersed,” Dr. Brenner said. “And some of it falls on the ground.” One way of measuring radiation exposure is in a unit called the rem. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, most people in the United States receive 0.3 rem per year just from normal, background radiation. Flying for 12 hours at 39,000 feet exposes a person to 0.006 rem. At 5 to 10 rem, lab tests can pick up changes in blood chemistry. Nausea starts after 50 rem, hemorrhaging at 100 rem. At 500 rem, half of people exposed will die within 30 days. At 2,000 rem, a person can die within hours or days. So far, one employee at a nuclear plant in Japan has been reported to have had an exposure of 10 rem, not enough to produce obvious symptoms. The annual dose limit for workers at nuclear plants in the United States is 5 rem. People are so afraid of radiation that any threat of exposure can cause what Dr. Brenner called psychophysical consequences. He cited an incident in 1987 in Goiania, Brazil, in which people were exposed to radioactive material stolen from a hospital. Fearing contamination, about 125,000 sought medical exams. Thousands reported symptoms of radiation sickness, like vomiting and rashes. Ultimately, only 249 turned out to have any signs of contamination.

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan)


Antigovernment Protesters Vow to Block Elections in Thailand

Abstract: BANGKOK — In one of the more provocative moves of Thailand’s monthlong political crisis, antigovernment protesters marching through Bangkok on Sunday vowed to disrupt the coming elections in their campaign to rid the country of its most influential political family. As tens of thousands of protesters rallied at several points in Bangkok, the capital, the main protest leader, Suthep Thaugsuban, instructed his followers to gather outside the building where the governing party of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and other smaller parties had planned to register for the Feb. 2 national elections. “If you want to register, you will have to walk past our feet,” said Mr. Suthep, who vowed to organize more protests if necessary. “We will shut down the country; we will block everyone casting ballots,” he said. The dueling realities of Thailand’s grinding political turmoil were vividly on display on Sunday. As protesters massed in Bangkok and blocked major intersections, Ms. Yingluck was hundreds of miles away in friendly territory among adoring crowds in northeastern Thailand, the power base of her party, a vast region with a population that rivals Bangkok’s. As with the divisions of the red and blue states of the United States, Thailand’s geographical divides have become even sharper as the crisis has continued. The country is split over whether elections are the answer to the impasse or whether the country should suspend democracy while it overhauls its political system, the plan supported by protesters. The Democrat Party, which leads the country’s opposition but has struggled over the past two decades to attract voters in the provinces, said Saturday that its members would boycott the elections , tightening the party’s alliance with protesters and further polarizing the country. Opposition leaders and the protesters accuse Ms. Yingluck and her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire tycoon and former prime minister, of subverting democracy. Mr. Thaksin, who fled the country in 2008 before being convicted of abuse of power, wields his influence over the party from exile. Mr. Thaksin’s allies counter that elections, which were called by Ms. Yingluck two weeks ago, are the only way forward for the country. “Even if they do not accept this government, they must accept the system,” Ms. Yingluck told the Thai news media on Sunday. “The government has already returned power to the people and let them decide the future of the country.” Charupong Ruangsuwan, the leader of the governing party, Pheu Thai, said he was confident that candidates would be able to register for the elections. Image Antigovernment protesters marched through Bangkok on Sunday. Credit Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters “I will go to the registration venue every day until we can get inside or until the election commission changes the venue,” he said Sunday on Thai television. But the volatility of the crisis was underlined by statements made Sunday by members of the pro-government United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, a group also known as the Red Shirts. The group is watching whether “rebels stir up violence or intimidate the candidates,” said Tida Thawornseth, the chairwoman of the group, which says it has tens of thousands of followers. “We will rise to fight only if there is a coup,” Ms. Tida said. Mr. Thaksin was removed as prime minister by the military in 2006, an event that helped set off the continuing cycle of political unrest. The coup makers also initiated a number of legal proceedings against him, including one case that led to the 2008 conviction. On Sunday, protesters in Bangkok, who rallied beside shopping malls decorated for Christmas and New Year, said they were sure that if elections were held the governing party would return to power. The party, they said, does not respect the country’s king and passes populist policies that benefit farmers and other government supporters but that harm the country as a whole. “Our country is an agricultural society — we are not ready for democracy,” said Saran Seedum, a 24-year-old university student from southern Thailand. “I think we need to restore the absolute monarchy,” he said, echoing a surprisingly common sentiment among protesters. “Let the king appoint good people to run the country.” Darunee Kerdkhao, 48, a teacher who lives in Bangkok, said she had joined the protest because the governing party had a lot of money and she feared that the votes of “simple minded” citizens in northern parts of the country could be bought. “The protesters here are all educated people,” she said. But watching the protests with disdain was Som Srisuwan, 48, a motorcycle-taxi driver who said he was grateful that Mr. Thaksin had introduced universal health care and that the governing party was forging ahead with plans for high-speed trains in the country. Everyone in his village in northeastern Thailand planned to vote in the elections, he said. “It’s impossible to stop the election,” he said. “How can we live without any rules, without any leaders?” He dismissed the protests as a “ridiculous movement.”

Bangkok
Election
Yingluck Shinawatra
Thaksin Shinawatra
Thailand