Drought Threatens Shipping on Mississippi River

A Midwestern drought has brought the river, one of the world’s largest navigable inland waterways, to water levels so low that they threaten to shut down shipping. The Mississippi, which handles some $7 billion in trade in a typical December and January, is expected to be closed to navigation between St. Louis and Cairo, Ill., when water levels dip toward the nine feet of depth that is necessary for most tugboats to clear the river bottom.

Those who ship goods up and down the river have asked the federal government to do two things: destroy rock formations known as pinnacles in Southern Illinois that hinder navigation when the water is shallow, and release more water from reservoirs along the upper Missouri River.

The Army Corps of Engineers has begun meeting the first request, using excavating equipment to break down the formations. Officials said the work should take 30 to 45 days.

Getting the corps to release the water has been more difficult. The corps has rejected requests for large-scale water releases from the upper Missouri, saying it does not have the authority to use that water to aid navigation on the Mississippi.

Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, applauded that decision and called it “unlawful” to release water that states like South Dakota need and use. He said that his region, too, has suffered “significant negative impact” because of the drought.

The Waterways Council, a group that lobbies on behalf of inland carriers, operators and ports, had initially warned that traffic would come to a halt by Monday. But so far, the water levels have dropped more slowly than expected, in part because of small water releases by the corps. A coalition of businesses involved in trade along the Mississippi and sympathetic lawmakers have asked President Obama to order the water released.

“It would cripple our national economy to shut down the Mississippi River,” said R. D. James, a Missouri farmer and a member of the Mississippi River Commission, which manages uses of the river with the corps.

But without action from the president, Congress or the courts, the water will stay behind the reservoirs of the upper Missouri.

“When they get a little water in those reservoirs,” Mr. James said, “they don’t want to give it up.”

It could soon be too late to prevent a partial closing. Water takes two weeks to make its way from the upper Missouri River reservoirs, and predictions released by the corps over the weekend suggest that without substantial rainfall, the water levels could dip below nine feet by Jan. 11.

With the threat of a shutdown ahead, farmers might decide to hold their grain instead of shipping it in a more expensive manner, said Gregory L. Guenther, a farmer and corporate consultant. Since farmers tend to pay for the coming year’s supplies like fertilizer with those sales, they will have to borrow instead, and “that means paying interest on it.”

Transporting goods by rail is a less attractive option, Mr. Guenther said, because shipping and storage facilities that use the river are not necessarily near rail lines, and rail capacity is limited. Altogether, shifting transportation modes would drive up prices, he said, adding, “Rail is not the answer.”

Rick Calhoun, the president of Cargo Carriers, a part of Cargill, noted that carriers were already loading barges to a lighter weight to deal with the water depth, which also ends up raising costs.

“We put less product in the barge, it takes longer to get there, and we use more fuel per barge,” Mr. Calhoun said, adding, “We’re going to be running into very difficult issues.”

Col. Christopher G. Hall, the commander of the St. Louis district of the corps, said, “We’re doing everything that we possibly can to keep that channel at the authorized depth so that they can continue to operate.”

Intense dredging, tweaks and luck have helped push the crisis “to the right” on the calendar, Colonel Hall said, but it is unclear how long that will last.

The low water conditions could persist into the spring, when it generally rains more.

Steven L. Stockton, the director of civil works for the corps, said, “The only long-term solution is more rain.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 23, 2012

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misidentified a piece of equipment removing chunks of limestone from a navigation channel on the Mississippi River. It is an excavator, not a backhoe. The error was repeated in a Web summary.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 23, 2012

View the original article here

In Wake of Newtown Shootings, N.R.A. Leader Faces Big Challenge

“Today,” Mr. Keene told a roomful of conservatives in Hawaii, “guns are cool.”

That, of course, was before the massacre at a Connecticut elementary school dramatically revived the once-moribund debate over gun control.

With the N.R.A. set to hold its first news conference on the shootings Friday after a weeklong silence, Mr. Keene is facing perhaps the biggest threat in decades to his organization’s gun rights stance.

He finds himself in the difficult position of persuading Americans outside the N.R.A. that guns are, if not “cool,” at least not the stark danger that President Obama made them out to be this week. “His instinct is to fight back and make his case as strongly as he can — that’s been his modus operandi for as long as I’ve known him,” said Craig Shirley, a conservative author and former business partner and occasional hunting buddy of Mr. Keene.

Indeed, Mr. Keene, 67, a combative and sometimes bombastic political operative who has advised Republican leaders from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney, has rarely shied from a fight.

In a videotaped confrontation that quickly made the Republican rounds in 2009, he threatened to punch a conservative filmmaker who challenged his leadership of the American Conservative Union and his criticism of “whining” by the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

And when Mr. Keene was a senior adviser to Senator Bob Dole’s losing presidential bid in 1988, his clashes with others in the Dole campaign became so heated that he and another top aide were fired midtrip, with the campaign manager yelling during a stopover at the Jacksonville airport to “Get their baggage off the plane!”

That fighter’s instinct puts him squarely in the tradition of past leaders of the N.R.A., a four-million-member group that has one of Washington’s most powerful, well-financed lobbying arms.

In the most iconic scene of defiance in the N.R.A.’s 141-year history, its most famous president — the actor Charlton Heston — lifted a colonial musket over his head in 2000 and dared opponents to take it “from my cold, dead hands!”

A year earlier, the N.R.A. spurned calls to cancel its convention in Denver less than two weeks after shootings at nearby Columbine High School killed 13 people. As 7,000 people protested, Mr. Heston declared that the N.R.A. “cannot let tragedy lay waste” to gun rights.

Even after the Columbine shootings, the N.R.A. was able to block a measure in 2000 to close the so-called gun-show loophole, allowing private gun sales at shows without background checks. The aftermath of the Columbine shootings provides one possible road map for how the N.R.A. may respond now.

The group has been uncharacteristically quiet in the week since the Connecticut shootings, and Mr. Keene and other N.R.A. officials did not respond to messages and e-mails seeking comment for this article.

The N.R.A. did offer a short statement of condolence four days after the shootings and said, without elaboration, that it “is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.”

What it was billing as a “major news conference” Friday will be its first response to growing calls for greater gun restrictions. Mr. Keene, elected president last year, was also scheduled to appear Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS.

After past shootings, N.R.A. officials have stressed the need for greater safety training and enforcement of existing gun laws, without offering significant concessions to gun control advocates.

Josh Sugarman, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, which supports increased gun control, says he expects a similar approach this time.

“I don’t see him as any type of change-agent inside the organization,” Mr. Sugarman said. “What will guide the N.R.A. is to try to delay any action on guns for as long as they possibly can.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the position once held by former Representative Tom DeLay. He was majority leader in the House of Representatives, not the speaker.

View the original article here

On Pro Basketball: P.J. Carlesimo, Nets Interim Coach, Puts Choke in Past

When Carlesimo was a marquee name, the assailant just went for the jugular. The results could be fatal. Those who had longstanding relationships with him worried that his coaching career, N.B.A. or college, would be forever entombed after he was infamously choked and punched by Latrell Sprewell when with the Golden State Warriors early in the 1997-98 season.

His mother, Lucy, wept on the doorstep of her Montclair, N.J., home after a reporter knocked the following day. His close-knit cluster of nine brothers and sisters — two of them lawyers — rallied around him and advised him on how to defend his reputation. Industry friends and colleagues wondered how Carlesimo could survive a spectacle that, however indefensible on Sprewell’s part, saw a player-coach relationship deteriorate to the point of assault.

Yet here is Carlesimo, still living the itinerant pro basketball life, around long enough to be taking control of his fourth N.B.A. team. Even if it is with an interim tag attached to his big toe, while the Nets owner Mikhail D. Prokhorov considers chasing Phil Jackson or some other hot name.

Jackson to the long downtrodden franchise he once sneered at when it tried to recruit him to New Jersey? We agree it sounds far-fetched, but the Nets do finally have an appealing setting, an owner with billions of rubles and international riches, and an upgraded roster, though one with flaws that have become increasingly and painfully apparent during a miserable December.

It is conceivable, if not likely, that Carlesimo, Johnson’s top assistant, gets the same opportunity Mike Woodson made the most of after replacing Mike D’Antoni last season with the Knicks. Could Deron Williams, the franchise player who publicly complained about Johnson’s offense and Wednesday night took a suspiciously timed seat on the bench in Milwaukee with an injured wrist, suddenly grow a healthier attitude now that Johnson and his personality, long known to grate on point guards, are gone?

A sobering disclaimer: Carlesimo’s undoing in Portland, Golden State and to a certain degree in Oklahoma City was almost universally attributed to a high-volume style that invariably worked better with college players on scholarship than professionals earning seven-figure salaries.

It is hard to imagine that Carlesimo, at 63 and after three N.B.A. dismissals, would be as headstrong as he once was. From 2002 through 2007, as an assistant coach in San Antonio, he was well positioned to marvel at one of the best player-coach relationships — Tim Duncan and Gregg Popovich — in the history of the sport.

Having been blamed for Jerry Sloan’s coaching exit in Utah and sure to be implicated in Johnson’s descent from decorated (he was N.B.A. coach of the month in November) to departed, Williams is obviously no Duncan. He was also clearly not playing at 100 percent. But will he respond to Carlesimo the way Carmelo Anthony did to Woodson? Who knows?

At the Nets’ practice facility in East Rutherford, N.J., on Thursday, General Manager Billy King said he told Carlesimo, “You coach it like you’re going to be here for the next 10 years.” Be it 4 games or the 54 that remain on the Nets’ regular-season schedule, Carlesimo at least has come full circle in his career as a head coach.

The son of Peter Carlesimo, a longtime power broker with the then-prestigious National Invitation Tournament, Carlesimo played college ball at Fordham, made a coaching name for himself at Wagner on Staten Island and came within the cheapest of nudge fouls in 1989 of winning a national title at Seton Hall.

He spent 12 years at the South Orange, N.J., university and probably could have stayed for 25, given his success, and a gregarious and raspy-voiced style that seemed perfectly suited to his trademark Smith Brothers beard.

When bigger programs recruited Carlesimo, he invariably would say, “No thanks,” and then question himself a few days later for not listening harder. But when the Portland Trail Blazers called in 1994, offering more than $7 million of the computer giant Paul Allen’s money, Carlesimo took the leap into the N.B.A. life. His timing for the pros wasn’t good and never really was.

In Portland, he inherited a veteran team that had made the finals in 1990 and 1992, but was in decline. At Golden State, a bad team was made worse by the ever-obdurate Sprewell. Carlesimo’s short tenure with the Seattle/Oklahoma City franchise occurred when Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook were still playing on training wheels.

And then there was always the question of whether Carlesimo was best suited for the college game and should have stayed there.

That said, there has also been a Zelig-like quality to Carlesimo. People tended to like and respect him, especially other coaches. Mike Krzyzewski chose him as an assistant for the 1990 world championships. Ditto Chuck Daly for the Dream Team at the Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992. Carlesimo was Popovich’s top lieutenant on three championship teams, and Johnson hired him with the Nets.

In making the change, King said it was Carlesimo’s experience that kept him from going outside the franchise, for now.

“If you bring in someone from the outside right now, it’s going to take them a while just to figure out the personnel,” he said. “And that takes time.”

How much time Carlesimo gets may depend on how quickly the Nets regain their footing, or maybe not. Either way, it is more time than many thought he would get when Sprewell made the figurative act of coach-killing seem worse than it already was.

View the original article here

Books of The Times: ‘The Insurgents,’ About David Petraeus, by Fred Kaplan

But as Mr. Petraeus would learn in 2012, when he made front-page news with an embarrassing personal transgression, not even the best-made rules cover all conceivable challenges. That point is central to “The Insurgents,” a very readable, thoroughly reported account of how, in American military circles, “counterinsurgency” became a policy instead of a dirty word.

In 2004 during the Iraq war, counterinsurgency “was still a frowned-upon term inside the Bush administration.” That kind of warfare — what were once called “irregular wars,” “asymmetric wars” or “low-intensity conflicts” — was also overlooked at West Point, Mr. Petraeus’s alma mater.

But Mr. Petraeus, who would develop a reputation “as a schemer, a self-promoter and, worst of all, an intellectual,” took an autodidact’s approach to a subject that fascinated him. He learned from “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” by the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), and “Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice,” by David Galula, both dated texts that had uncanny relevance to the Vietnam War and the post-Vietnam era.

The title of “The Insurgents” is a clever reference to the rebellious, Petraeus-led faction within the American military, not to the guerrilla fighters American soldiers fought abroad. And it is a painstaking, step-by-step account of how these insurgents’ ideas bubbled up into the mainstream. Among the 100-plus interviewees from whom Mr. Kaplan drew information, each became aware of the inadequacy of then-current combat tactics in different ways.

The book begins with an epiphany for John A. Nagl, a West Point-educated Army officer turned counterinsurgency theorist who, while driving a tank across southern Iraq during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, discovered that the tank-on-tank fighting for which he had trained was all but irrelevant. And yet he had not been trained for less hidebound forms of combat; he cites with approval one cadet’s idea of a new motto for West Point, “Two Hundred Years of Tradition, Unhindered by Progress.” While this book is by no means a valentine to Mr. Petraeus and his fellow innovators, it does acknowledge that innovative military thinking was badly needed after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Nagl went on to write a book, “Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife,” which took its title and many precepts from Lawrence of Arabia’s lessons about desert fighting. This book became influential to Mr. Petraeus, as he came to realize that American soldiers were being taught no exit strategy, no peacetime plan.

By the time he was a major general in 2003, leading the 101st Airborne to Mosul in Iraq, Mr. Petraeus was ready to implement some of his thinking about how to conduct a counterinsurgency, which the military referred to as COIN. His plans relied on rebuilding, not on breaking down doors in the middle of the night, and it seemed to be succeeding. But Mr. Petraeus was rotated out of Mosul before his effort could achieve results.

Some of Mr. Kaplan’s book is about significant events, like the handling of Mosul. But most of it concentrates on the theoretical arguments behind even the most minute-sounding differences in military dictums. Even after counterinsurgency began to be codified and taught, it was a source of confusion for junior officers unfamiliar with its ways of utilizing Iraqis and later Afghans, not fighting them at every turn. “I get what we’re supposed to achieve,” one said succinctly, “but what are we supposed to do?”

Even as the counterinsurgency thinkers fine-tuned their phrases — “clear and hold” evolved into “clear, hold and build,” and later into “shape/clear/hold/build,” each with a slightly but significantly different meaning — their approach was viewed by some as a provocation. The book describes how blasts from The New York Post led to the insertion of words like “sometimes,” “some” and “most” into Mr. Petraeus’s field manual, “FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency,” and how the manual’s way of answering old questions only prompted new ones.

What if the local people didn’t want what America wanted for them? What if the local governments were receptive and trustworthy but the national leadership was not? What if terrorists could not be isolated from the larger population because, as with Hamas and Hezbollah, they were a significant part of it? How could we think about the culture of Muslim countries without accounting for religion too?

Mr. Kaplan takes a resourceful, undogmatic approach to such questions. And he presents a full array of influential figures from the military and from government, often reconstructing conversations from multiple participants’ perspectives.

Mr. Petraeus was the author’s single most important interviewee, but Mr. Kaplan also conveys the thinking of Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who brought a solid grasp of conditions in Iraq to the Pentagon, as senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates; Huba Wass de Czege, known for the innovative AirLand Battle field manual, who in 2002 was astonished to see that American training exercises tended “to devote more attention to successful campaign-beginnings than to successful conclusions”; and Gen. Raymond Odierno, a convert to counterinsurgency after years of taking a door-bashing approach to strategy.

The book also mentions the three young women known as “Odierno’s Chicks,” conspicuous members of the general’s intelligence staff. A few other women, younger than the generals they accompanied, are described as invaluable aides and companions.

Then there is Paula Broadwell, the Petraeus biographer about whom Mr. Kaplan has tacked on a one-page coda. In “The Insurgents” Ms. Broadwell is only one of the miscalculations that an admirable but dangerously unrealistic Mr. Petraeus has made.

View the original article here

Tour Bus Crash Kills 9 in Oregon

The charter bus carrying about 40 people lost control around 10:30 a.m. on snow- and ice-covered lanes of Interstate 84 in a rural area of eastern Oregon, according to the Oregon State Police. The bus crashed near the start of a 7-mile section of road that winds down a hill.

The bus came to rest at the bottom of a snowy slope and landed upright, with little or no debris visible around the crash site.

More than a dozen rescue workers descended the hill and used ropes to help retrieve people from the wreckage in freezing weather. The bus driver was among the survivors, but had not yet spoken to police because of the severity of the injuries the driver had suffered.

Lt. Greg Hastings said the bus crashed along the west end of the Blue Mountains, and west of an area called Deadman Pass. The area is so dangerous the state transportation department published specific warnings for truck drivers, advising it had "some of the most changeable and severe weather conditions in the Northwest" and can lead to slick conditions and poor visibility.

St. Anthony Hospital in Pendleton treated 26 people from the accident, said hospital spokesman Larry Blanc. Five of those treated at St. Anthony were transported to other facilities.

I-84 is a major east-west highway through Oregon that follows the Columbia River Gorge.

Umatilla County Emergency Manager Jack Remillard said the bus was owned by Mi Joo travel in Vancouver, B.C., and state police said the bus was en route from Las Vegas to Vancouver.

A woman who answered the phone at a listing for the company confirmed with The Associated Press that it owned the bus and said it was on a tour of the Western U.S. She declined to give her name.

A bus safety website run by the U.S. Department of Transportation said Mi Joo Tour & Travel has six buses, none of which have been involved in any accidents in at least the past two years.

The bus crash was the second fatal accident on the same highway in Oregon on Sunday. A 69-year-old man died in a rollover accident about 30 miles west of the area where the bus crashed.

A spokesman for the American Bus Association said buses carry more than 700 million passengers a year in the United States.

"The industry as a whole is a very safe industry," said Dan Ronan of the Washington, D.C.,-based group. "There are only a handful of accidents every year. Comparatively speaking, we're the safest form of surface transportation."

The bus crash comes more than two months after another chartered tour bus in October veered off a highway in northern Arizona, killing the driver and injuring dozens of passengers who were mostly tourists from Asia and Europe. Authorities say the driver likely had a medical episode.

View the original article here

U.N. Envoy Calls for a Transitional Government in Syria

Mr. Brahimi’s remarks to journalists, reported by news agencies, follow intensive talks this week with Mr. Assad and a range of opposition figures.

Over the past month, Mr. Brahimi, as special representative from the United Nations and Arab League, has consulted extensively with both the United States and Russia in hopes of fulfilling of an accord reached in Geneva this summer calling for dialogue between Syria’s government and the opposition.

“The Syrian people seek genuine change,” he said. He emphasized the importance of preserving state institutions and warned that military intervention would “lead to the destruction of the Syrian state” according to Russia’s ITAR-TASS news service.

“There will be no victor in this war,” he said.

As a Syrian government delegation met with Russia’s top diplomats in Moscow, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Aleksandr K. Lukashevich, said there was no specific plan under discussion that would envisage a transitional government. Opposition figures have suggested that Mr. Brahimi presented Mr. Assad with offers either to cede some of his authority or to leave the country, but Mr. Lukashevich denied that. “There was and is no plan, it is not being discussed with Mr. Brahimi or with American colleagues,” he said.

Russia, a key ally of the government in Damascus, has long pointed to the Geneva agreement, which calls for negotiation between the government and the opposition, as the only acceptable basis for resolving the conflict.

But the agreement requires both Mr. Assad’s allies and Syrian opposition forces to agree to negotiate — a long shot, said Dmitri V. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Earlier this year, he said, influential policy makers in Moscow favored a process like the one that led to the Dayton accords to end the Bosnian war of the 1990s: “Bring them together, close the door and don’t let them out until they reach an agreement.” He said he had serious doubts that either Moscow or Washington could induce the two sides to sit down at the table.

“Frankly, I see very little leverage that Russia has over Assad,” Mr. Trenin said. “Even if the United States were prepared to lean hard on the opposition, or push them toward some kind of negotiation, I do not see the Gulf states or the Turks backing that move.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Lukashevich said Thursday, Moscow has ratcheted up its diplomacy in an effort to “intensify dialogue, not only with the government but also with the opposition groups.” Top Russian officials met Thursday with Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Faisal al-Meqdad. Mr. Brahimi will have his own meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in Moscow on Saturday.

Mr. Lukashevich said Russia was open to talks with Syria’s national opposition coalition, which has been recognized by many Western governments as representing the Syrian people.

“We are not rejecting this dialogue,” he said. “On the contrary, we are holding it very vigorously with all opposition groups who are also interested in getting better insight into the Russian approach.”

“It is obviously another question when and at what level they will take place,” he said.

Among the widely discussed sticking points for a possible transition plan is what role, if any, Mr. Assad and his allies would play in the process. Among the options being floated this week are an arrangement that would allow him to remain in office for most or all of the rest of his presidential term, which ends in 2014, but transferring much of his authority to a transitional body. A separate question is whether the agreement would allow him to run for re-election in 2014.

Mr. Lukashevich said Russia had no role in determining this.

“We are not lawyers for this regime,” he said. “We would prefer that the Syrians themselves should determine the prospects for their state’s further development.”

Ellen Barry reported from Moscow, and Kareem Fahim from Beirut, Lebanon.

View the original article here

Tribal Fighting Kills Dozens in Kenya

According to the police, the fighting broke out when armed attackers from the Pokomo community raided a village belonging to the neighboring Orma ethnic group on Friday morning.

“So far, 39 people are dead, including 13 children and 6 women,” said Robert Kitur, the deputy police chief for the region.

He said 11 Orma men and 9 of the attackers were among those killed.

No arrests have been made, the police official said, adding that security was being reinforced in the area.

Kenya Red Cross officials, whose response team was at the scene, gave a lower toll, saying they had counted 30 bodies, among them children and women. The officials said more than 30 people sustained serious wounds while more than 45 houses were set on fire.

Most of those killed were either shot or hacked to death after the dawn attack.

More than 100 people from the same region have died in recent months as rivalry between the two communities flared up.

Locals say the fighting was triggered by a confrontation over pasture for livestock. Kenyans are still grappling with the memory of the 2007 postelection mayhem that racked the East African nation and left more than 1,000 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

The attack came as the country prepares braces for another general election in March.

View the original article here

U.N. Panel Votes to Help Mali’s Army Oust Extremists

But the resolution also makes it clear that such a military intervention will not happen until Mali’s own dysfunctional army is adequately trained and a framework for political stability and elections is restored in the country, which has been in turmoil since a military coup in March.

The resolution, which was sponsored by France, the former colonial power in Mali, does not specify a time frame for the first deployment of foreign troops, to be supplied by a group of West African nations that are eager to see calm restored in Mali. United Nations officials and diplomats who worked on the resolution said that a 3,300-soldier force would be sent, and that any attempt to drive the Islamists from northern Mali would not happen before September or October at the earliest.

The resolution does not explain precisely how the military expedition, which is to last for an initial period of one year, will be financed, although diplomats said they expected the cost to exceed $200 million. The resolution calls for voluntary contributions from member states into a trust fund to be created by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Despite the caveats, the Security Council’s vote authorizing military force, which it is empowered to do by the United Nations Charter, represented a rare moment of decisive unanimity among its 15 member states and in particular its 5 permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — in a year punctuated by bitter disagreements, mostly over the Syrian conflict.

“Everyone knows the complexity of the task facing the international community to restore the territorial integrity of Mali and to put an end to terrorist activities in the north of the country,” Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador, told reporters after the vote. The resolution, he said, “provides a reasonable answer.”

Ideally, Mr. Araud said, the mere threat of military intervention would persuade Islamist militia leaders to negotiate a peaceful restoration of control by Mali’s central government. “It is premature to indicate when the military operation will take place,” he said. “In fact, the question is even whether the military operation will take place. Our goal would be to have a real political process which will allow the Malian Army to go back to its barracks in the northern part of the country without fighting.”

The final version of the resolution reflected what diplomats called some compromises between France and the United States, which had been skeptical that the Malian Army could be made capable of participating in a potentially long and violent struggle to retake the country’s northern area, roughly twice the size of Germany.

The resolution specifies that the European Union will be responsible for training the Malian forces, described as “vital to ensure Mali’s long-term security and stability.” It also specifies that the secretary general must regularly inform the Council on political and military-training progress, and “confirm in advance the Council’s satisfaction with the planned military offensive operation.”

Language was also included specifically intended to guard against human rights abuses by the Malian military in any operation in the north, where ethnic tensions linked to the occupation by Islamist militants are known to be on the rise. A report released Thursday by Human Rights Watch enumerated instances of abuses in Mali committed by security forces and others since the military coup.

Tens of thousands of Malians have fled the north since Islamist militias seized control there after the coup, which left a power vacuum that has yet to be resolved. Just last week, military generals forced the resignation of Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra, in office since April.

The principal Islamist militia, known as Ansar Dine, or Defenders of the Faith, has imposed harsh Shariah law based on strict Islamic tenets and enforced it with public killings, stonings and amputations. The group has also welcomed Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the affiliate of Al Qaeda in northern Africa, which has recruited child soldiers, established training camps and reached out to other militant Islamist organizations, including Boko Haram, a particularly violent group in northern Nigeria.

Rights activists monitoring the Mali crisis had a mixed reaction to the Security Council resolution. While they welcomed action against abuses by the Islamists, some expressed concern that the Malian Army, humiliated by the loss of half the country, would be bent on revenge.

Michael Quinn, country director of the aid group Oxfam in Mali, said the Security Council “must make sure that any military planning includes humanitarian consideration to minimize harm to civilians at all stages.”

View the original article here

U.S. Civilian Is Killed at Police Headquarters in Kabul

The American victim was identified as Joseph Griffin, 49, of Mansfield, Ga., who had worked for DynCorp International as a police trainer since July 2011, according to a DynCorp spokeswoman, Ashley Burke.

Afghan officials identified the suspect as a woman named Nargis, a 33-year-old sergeant in the national police force who worked in the Interior Ministry’s legal and gender equality department, and whose husband is also a member of the police force.

A person at Kabul police headquarters, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release information, said the attacker had shot the American adviser in the head at close range with a pistol and then was immediately arrested by other Afghan police officers. The person added that both American and Afghan officials were questioning her, and he said she was distraught. The police said they did not believe the attack was related to terrorism and that the suspect had no known connections with insurgents.

The Afghan news station TOLO cited Afghan officials as saying that the woman, who had crossed multiple police checkpoints before she fired her gun, had graduated from the national police academy in 2008, in one of its first female classes.

The effort to recruit and train female police officers has been fraught with difficulty. Eupol, the European police organization active in police training here, says there are only 380 female police officers in Kabul, and even fewer in the provinces, despite a goal by the Interior Ministry of recruiting 5,000 by the end of 2014.

Insider attacks, in which members of the Afghan security services have turned against their foreign allies, have greatly increased in the past year, with 61 American and other coalition members killed, not including the episode on Monday, compared with 35 deaths the previous year, according to NATO figures.

Monday’s attack — the first insider attack known to be committed by a woman — came after a lull in insider shootings after the military instituted a series of precautions meant to reduce them. The most recent episode was on Nov. 11, when a British soldier was killed in Helmand Province.

American and Afghan officials have been struggling to figure out how large a factor Taliban infiltration or coercion has been in such attacks. Although insurgent contact has been clear in some cases, many of the attacks have seemed to come out of personal animosity or outrage, attributed to culture clash or growing Afghan anger at what they see as an unwelcome occupation by the United States and its allies.

“The loss of any team member is tragic, but to have this happen over the holidays makes it seem all the more unfair,” Steven F. Gaffney, the chairman of DynCorp, said in a statement.

The company also released a statement attributed to the victim’s wife, Rennae Griffin. “My husband was a thoughtful, kind, generous and loving man who was selfless in all his actions and deeds,” it said.

In other violence on Monday, a coalition member was killed in an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan, and an Afghan Local Police commander killed five fellow officers at a checkpoint in Jowzjan Province in the north. Dur Mohammad, the commander at the checkpoint, shot and killed five officers under his command, according to Gen. Abdul Aziz Ghairat, the provincial police chief. He said the commander fled after the shooting. General Ghairat did not offer a motive, but said that Mr. Mohammad had connections with the Taliban in the area.

The Afghan Local Police program, which seeks to bring armed elements — including some former insurgents — into government service, has drawn criticism because of a series of episodes in which the armed elements have switched allegiances, sometimes repeatedly.

View the original article here

Unboxed: Big Data Is Great, but Don’t Forget Intuition

Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, led off the conference by saying that Big Data would be “the next big chapter of our business history.” Next on stage was Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor and director of the M.I.T. center and a co-author of the article with Dr. McAfee. Big Data, said Professor Brynjolfsson, will “replace ideas, paradigms, organizations and ways of thinking about the world.”

These drumroll claims rest on the premise that data like Web-browsing trails, sensor signals, GPS tracking, and social network messages will open the door to measuring and monitoring people and machines as never before. And by setting clever computer algorithms loose on the data troves, you can predict behavior of all kinds: shopping, dating and voting, for example.

The results, according to technologists and business executives, will be a smarter world, with more efficient companies, better-served consumers and superior decisions guided by data and analysis.

I’ve written about what is now being called Big Data a fair bit over the years, and I think it’s a powerful tool and an unstoppable trend. But a year-end column, I thought, might be a time for reflection, questions and qualms about this technology.

The quest to draw useful insights from business measurements is nothing new. Big Data is a descendant of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” of more than a century ago. Taylor’s instrument of measurement was the stopwatch, timing and monitoring a worker’s every movement. Taylor and his acolytes used these time-and-motion studies to redesign work for maximum efficiency. The excesses of this approach would become satirical grist for Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” The enthusiasm for quantitative methods has waxed and waned ever since.

Big Data proponents point to the Internet for examples of triumphant data businesses, notably Google. But many of the Big Data techniques of math modeling, predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence software were first widely applied on Wall Street.

At the M.I.T. conference, a panel was asked to cite examples of big failures in Big Data. No one could really think of any. Soon after, though, Roberto Rigobon could barely contain himself as he took to the stage. Mr. Rigobon, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, said that the financial crisis certainly humbled the data hounds. “Hedge funds failed all over the world,” he said.

THE problem is that a math model, like a metaphor, is a simplification. This type of modeling came out of the sciences, where the behavior of particles in a fluid, for example, is predictable according to the laws of physics.

In so many Big Data applications, a math model attaches a crisp number to human behavior, interests and preferences. The peril of that approach, as in finance, was the subject of a recent book by Emanuel Derman, a former quant at Goldman Sachs and now a professor at Columbia University. Its title is “Models. Behaving. Badly.”

Claudia Perlich, chief scientist at Media6Degrees, an online ad-targeting start-up in New York, puts the problem this way: “You can fool yourself with data like you can’t with anything else. I fear a Big Data bubble.”

The bubble that concerns Ms. Perlich is not so much a surge of investment, with new companies forming and then failing in large numbers. That’s capitalism, she says. She is worried about a rush of people calling themselves “data scientists,” doing poor work and giving the field a bad name.

Indeed, Big Data does seem to be facing a work-force bottleneck.

“We can’t grow the skills fast enough,” says Ms. Perlich, who formerly worked for I.B.M. Watson Labs and is an adjunct professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needed 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.

Thomas H. Davenport, a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School, is writing a book called “Keeping Up With the Quants” to help managers cope with the Big Data challenge. A major part of managing Big Data projects, he says, is asking the right questions: How do you define the problem? What data do you need? Where does it come from? What are the assumptions behind the model that the data is fed into? How is the model different from reality?

Society might be well served if the model makers pondered the ethical dimensions of their work as well as studying the math, according to Rachel Schutt, a senior statistician at Google Research.

“Models do not just predict, but they can make things happen,” says Ms. Schutt, who taught a data science course this year at Columbia. “That’s not discussed generally in our field.”

Models can create what data scientists call a behavioral loop. A person feeds in data, which is collected by an algorithm that then presents the user with choices, thus steering behavior.

Consider Facebook. You put personal data on your Facebook page, and Facebook’s software tracks your clicks and your searches on the site. Then, algorithms sift through that data to present you with “friend” suggestions.

Understandably, the increasing use of software that microscopically tracks and monitors online behavior has raised privacy worries. Will Big Data usher in a digital surveillance state, mainly serving corporate interests?

Personally, my bigger concern is that the algorithms that are shaping my digital world are too simple-minded, rather than too smart. That was a theme of a book by Eli Pariser, titled “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You.”

It’s encouraging that thoughtful data scientists like Ms. Perlich and Ms. Schutt recognize the limits and shortcomings of the Big Data technology that they are building. Listening to the data is important, they say, but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model?

At the M.I.T. conference, Ms. Schutt was asked what makes a good data scientist. Obviously, she replied, the requirements include computer science and math skills, but you also want someone who has a deep, wide-ranging curiosity, is innovative and is guided by experience as well as data.

“I don’t worship the machine,” she said.

View the original article here

Universities Chase Big-Time Glory in F.B.S.

“You’ve got to get to Gillette,” they read in beseechingly bold lettering.

This year, UMass took the mighty step up to big-time college football, shedding its lower-level pedigree to enter the sport’s highest tier, the Football Bowl Subdivision. To make the leap more concrete, UMass decided to play its home games at Gillette Stadium, the domain of the N.F.L.’s New England Patriots.

When UMass completed its Gillette home schedule last month, the campus banners — part of nearly $3 million in new football expenditures — had apparently gone unheeded. There were only 6,385 fans in a stadium that seats 68,756 as UMass lost, 42-21, to Central Michigan to finish the season 0-5 at home. UMass finished the season 1-11 over all and was outscored by opponents, 482-152.

Such is the big time, where the newcomers take a beating and a vast majority of established football programs lose money just like their lesser-level brethren.

But UMass and a flock of other institutions with far-reaching football dreams — from Texas State to Old Dominion — are undeterred.

In an unforeseen convergence, nearly a dozen institutions of limited football renown are trying to force their way into the cutthroat, unrestrained arena dominated by college football monoliths like Alabama, Notre Dame and Oregon — universities that will be on display as the sport’s most prestigious bowl games are held over the next eight days. As many as 15 other institutions across the country are publicly or privately discussing such a move.

Big-time college football programs may have been linked recently to scandals involving illicit payments to players (Ohio State), academic improprieties (North Carolina) and child sexual abuse (Penn State), but that has not slowed a rush to join the fraternity. The institutions chasing a new football status do so with baby steps and varied circumstances, but the common journey has a visionary end — some would call it illusionary — and it is a wonderland of television riches, national exposure and ecstatic alumni donating money by the bushel.

“The reality is that football schools who move up a division almost always lose even more money,” said Daniel Fulks, an accounting professor at Transylvania University who has spent the last 15 years as a research consultant for the N.C.A.A. “There’s not much defense of the economics in the short term or the long term. There are arguments for countervailing, intangible benefits — more national exposure, more admission applications, better quality students and increased alumni donations.

“That has definitely happened in some places, but it’s not a proven outcome. Some studies say it does work that way, some studies say it does not. There’s the risk.”

As the president of Tulane, Scott Cowen might seem one of the winners in the pursuit of big-time football status. Cowen’s institution was recently invited to join the Big East, one of the six elite college conferences that divide up the most lucrative postseason game revenues. But Cowen cautioned those universities eager to join the chase for the brass ring of college athletics.

“What any school moving up in football should ask itself is this: what are the real costs of the benefits?” Cowen said. “You will get more visibility and exposure, and at first, that seems like a very good investment. The problem is that once you wade in for keeps at the F.B.S. level, you face facility improvements, escalating coaching salaries, added staff and more athletic scholarships.

“The cost curve is extremely steep, and unless you’re in a power conference, the revenue is flat.”

This year, Texas State and Texas-San Antonio (as a transitional member) joined UMass as first-timers in the top tier of college football. Georgia State and the University of South Alabama will make the move next year.

Old Dominion, which reinstated football in 2009, and North Carolina-Charlotte, which will play its first football game next year, will be full-time F.B.S. members in 2015. Liberty, Appalachian State and Georgia Southern would like to make the move and are awaiting an invitation from a F.B.S. conference, which is required to join the top tier. But such invitations are not hard to come by in a climate in which conferences restructure almost weekly. Other universities that have discussed taking a leap of faith upward include, among others, James Madison, Delaware, Northern Iowa, Cal-Poly, Villanova, Jacksonville State, Northern Arizona and Sam Houston State. There are already about 125 F.B.S.-level football teams.

Making the Move

View the original article here

Use of Death Sentences Continues to Fall, Numbers Show

“We have done polling on this, and the biggest reason is lingering doubt about guilt,” said Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks executions around the country and released the numbers this week. “Between 90 and 95 percent of the people are aware that there have been exonerations based on DNA evidence.”

While a majority of states — 33 — still have the death penalty on the books, that number has also been on the decline. Connecticut banned capital punishment this year, the fifth state in five years to do so, following Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York. Twenty-nine states either do not have the death penalty or have not carried out an execution in five years.

In addition, four states with histories of executing convicted murderers — Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia — sentenced no one to death this year. Three-quarters of the 43 people put to death in 2012 were in four states: Arizona, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.

Another major reason for the decline is that the death penalty involves enormous expense and numerous appeals; some prosecutors say they prefer life imprisonment.

Stan Garnett, the district attorney in Boulder County, Colo., wrote recently that as his state considered repealing the death penalty, he would like his fellow citizens to know that he was “not morally or philosophically opposed” to it. But he considers the death penalty impractical because it is expensive, time-consuming and often unfairly applied.

“A 1994 Colorado death verdict currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court has cost the state of Colorado nearly $18 million to fund through all the appeals,” Mr. Garnett wrote. He said his office’s operating budget is $4.6 million and prosecutes 1,900 felonies a year.

In California, a referendum last month seeking to end the death penalty because of its cost narrowly failed to achieve a majority. But the 47 percent of voters who supported the referendum represents a much larger number of Californians opposing capital punishment than ever before. The state has not carried out an execution in nearly seven years.

A year ago, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, Tani Cantil-Sakauye, called for a re-evaluation of the death penalty system, saying it was ineffective. Asked if she supported the death penalty, she replied: “I don’t know if the question is whether you believe in it anymore. I think the greater question is its effectiveness and, given the choices we face in California, should we have a merit-based discussion on its effectiveness and costs?”

Texas executed 15 people this year, by far the most in the country. But for the eighth consecutive year it executed more people than it sentenced to death, signaling that fewer executions will be carried out in the future, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, in Washington. The total number of people on death row in the country is 3,170, down from 3,670 in 2000.

James S. Liebman, a law professor at Columbia University, said he had studied the death penalty’s use by county, rather than by state, because punishment is sought at the county level, and he found that 60 percent of the nation’s counties no longer seek it. In addition, he said, some counties that in the past had led the country in its use, like Houston, did not hand down a single death penalty this year.

“A lot of officials have come to the conclusion that if they are concerned about deterrence and protection of their citizens and the diminishing of crime, the death penalty is not a very good strategy,” Professor Liebman said. “The counties that use it are ones that tend to spend a lot less money on law enforcement, criminal justice and the courts. They are using it instead of modern law enforcement.”

Professor Liebman, like Mr. Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, noted that murders account for a small percentage of crimes, yet seeking the death penalty can take up most of a prosecutor’s budget. Death penalty cases usually involve two trials — one to determine guilt, and the other to decide on the death penalty — and better lawyers for the defense. In addition, prosecutors do not like to lose death penalty cases, so they tend to put in far greater effort and resources.

“If you get someone into jail, the likelihood of his committing murder will at least be lower,” Professor Liebman said. “In addition, most people on death row are never going to get executed. Death row incarceration is more expensive. It requires single cells because the inmates are considered more dangerous and more desperate.”

Mr. Dieter added: “Juries know that mistakes have been made and have lingering doubts about absolute guilt. Life without parole gives them an alternative.”

View the original article here

Webster Residents Survey Ruins After Homes Are Burned in Plot to Kill Firefighters

The man shot and killed two firefighters and injured two others before killing himself on Monday, the authorities said.

For those whose homes were destroyed, it was a day to take stock and grieve over what was lost on Lake Road.

John Kohut stared at the spot where his house once stood and saw only embers. “I just wanted to see if there was anything left,” Mr. Kohut, 68, said as he stepped over burned floorboards and charred concrete. “There is nothing.”

“You can’t even tell where the refrigerator or stove or anything was,” he added. “It is hard to make any sense of it.”

As people in town prepared for a winter storm and those left without a home sought shelter elsewhere, the police said they were still searching for clues about what had motivated the gunman, William Spengler Jr., to go on his deadly rampage and deliberately target firefighters.

But Mr. Spengler, 62, seemed to make his intentions clear in a typewritten note recovered by investigators.

“I still have to get ready to see how much of the neighborhood I can burn down and do what I like doing best — killing people,” he wrote in the note.

Human remains found inside the Spengler home were believed to be those of Mr. Spengler’s sister, Cheryl Spengler, 67, the authorities said. The two shared the home, and those who knew them said they did not get along.

Gerald L. Pickering, the chief of police in Webster, said Mr. Spengler set fire to a car early on Monday in a trap for emergency responders. As the firefighters arrived, he said, Mr. Spengler shot at them with a semiautomatic assault rifle; firing from a nearby berm where he was hiding, he killed the firefighters Michael Chiapperini, 43, and Tomasz Kaczowka, 19. They were members of the West Webster Fire Department, a volunteer force.

Outside their fire station, a memorial of candles, cards and flowers continued to grow, and firefighters from across the region arrived to offer their condolences.

“We are all brothers,” Gene Preston, 71, a member of the nearby North Greece Fire Department, said at the crime scene. “When one bleeds, we all bleed.”

“It is unbelievable and unspeakable,” he added. “In all my days of fighting fires, not once did I pull up to the scene and think I would be shot at. You think water supply and human life — in that order. Being shot at is not part of our training.”

Separate funeral services for the two firefighters have been scheduled for Sunday and Monday.

Two other firefighters, Theodore Scardino and Joseph Hofstetter, were seriously wounded in the attack but were recovering, officials said.

In a statement issued through the University of Rochester Medical Center, the two firefighters said they were “humbled and overwhelmed” by the outpouring of support.

As residents surveyed the wreckage of their homes and the town mourned those killed, many offered recollections of their dealings with Mr. Spengler, who moved back to Webster in 1998 after serving a 17-year sentence for killing his grandmother with a hammer.

Despite what he had done, Mr. Spengler did not hide himself away, neighbors and relatives said. He was frequently seen tinkering on one project or another in his yard, quick to chat with neighbors and let them know his mind.

Nick Marino, 25, whose home near the Spengler house was damaged in the fire, said he had spoken to Mr. Spengler several times.

About a month ago, he recalled Mr. Spengler’s complaining to him about his tax bill. But what Mr. Marino remembered most about that conversation was Mr. Spengler’s outfit. Despite it being bitterly cold, he wore only cutoff jean shorts, T-shirt and sandals.

He seemed like “an old hippie,” Mr. Marino said, but not someone dangerous.

Like many others interviewed in Webster this week, Mr. Marino was unaware of Mr. Spengler’s violent history.

Marc Fiore, 45, said he thought of Mr. Spengler as “kind of a busybody.”

“I did not know his past, but I talked to him,” he said. He described him as awkward but not outwardly threatening.

Before his mother, Arline, died in October, Mr. Spengler visited her nearly every day at St. Ann’s Home, in northeast Rochester, according to people who worked there. He was often seen joking with the attendants.

A relative said it was possible that Mr. Spengler and his sister were feuding over who would inherit the family home after her death.

Now that home is part of the ruins on Lake Road.

Michael D. Regan reported from Webster, and Marc Santora from New York.

View the original article here

Victim of Gang Rape in India Dies at Hospital in Singapore

The woman, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student whose rape on Dec. 16 had served as a reminder of the dangerous conditions women face in India, died “peacefully,” according to a statement by Dr. Kelvin Loh, the chief executive of Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.

The woman, whose intestines were removed because of injuries caused by a metal rod used during the rape, has not been identified. She was flown to Singapore on Wednesday night after undergoing three abdominal operations at a local hospital. She had also suffered a major brain injury, cardiac arrest and infections of the lungs and abdomen. “She was courageous in fighting for her life for so long against the odds, but the trauma to her body was too severe for her to overcome,” Dr. Loh’s statement said.

After word of her death spread, protesters gathered in New Delhi at Jantar Mantar, a popular site for demonstrations. By noon, the crowd had swelled to several hundred, most of them young men.

Upamanyu Raju, 21, a student at Delhi University, said he has been attending protests since a day after the rape victim was admitted to the hospital because of the "utter atrocity of what happened." Mr. Raju said he has given his younger sister pepper spray and a Swiss Army knife, but he worries that won’t protect her. "It’s wrong to stop girls from going out" of the house, he said, but there’s little choice because the city is so unsafe for women.

The roads leading to India Gate, the site of earlier protests that had turned violent, had been barricaded by the police, and nearby subway stations were closed. More than 40 police units have been deployed in the area, including 28 units of the Central Reserve Police Force, which are national anti-insurgency troops.

The police have arrested six people in connection with the attack, Indian officials said.

Revulsion and anger over the rape have galvanized India, where women regularly face sexual harassment and assault, and where neither the police nor the judicial system is seen as adequately protecting them. Top officials now say that further change is needed, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed his “deepest condolences.”

“We have already seen the emotions and energies this incident has generated,” he said in a statement. “It would be a true homage to her memory if we are able to channelize these emotions and energies into a constructive course of action.” The government, he said, is examining “the penal provisions that exist for such crimes and measures to enhance the safety and security of women.”

The six men arrested in the case will be charged with murder, the Delhi police said Saturday morning, as they, too, asked citizens to remain calm.

"We appeal to the people that they maintain peace," Satyendra Garg, a joint commissioner of the police, said in a televised interview. "We want the situation in Delhi to normalize as soon as possible," he said. Until then, he added, Delhi commuters will have to plan their travel carefully and be aware of the restrictions.

Activists and lawyers in India have long said that the police are insensitive when dealing with crimes against women, and that therefore many women do not report cases of sexual violence.

India, which has more than 1.3 billion people, recorded 24,000 cases of rape last year, a figure that has increased by 25 percent in the past six years. On Thursday, Delhi government officials said they would register the names and photographs of convicted rapists on the Delhi police Web site, the beginning of a national registry for rapists.

The family of an 18-year-old woman in the northern Indian state of Punjab who was raped last month by two men and committed suicide on Wednesday blamed the police on Friday for her death.

Relatives of the woman say she killed herself because the police delayed registering the case or arresting the rapists.

If the police “had done their job, she would be alive today,” the woman’s sister, Charanjit Kaur, 28, said in a phone interview. “They didn’t listen to us; they didn’t act.”

On Friday, the Punjab high court intervened, asking the police to explain their delay. Three police officers have been suspended in the case, according to news media reports. Punjab police officials did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.

Ms. Kaur said the men abducted her sister from a place of worship near the small town of Badshahpur on Nov. 13, then drugged and raped her repeatedly.

When her sister reported the attack at the local police station a few days later, she was asked to describe it in graphic detail and was “humiliated,” Ms. Kaur said. Over the next few days, she said, her mother and sister were repeatedly called to the police station and forced to sit all day.

But the case was not registered for two weeks, as police officials and village elders tried to broker a deal between the men accused of the rape and the victim. In some parts of India, women are commonly married to men who have raped them.

Ms. Kaur said the police told her family that, because they were poor, they would not be able to fight the matter in court. “They kept putting pressure on my family to take money or marry the accused or just somehow settle the matter,” she said.

After no agreement was reached, the police registered the case, but made no arrests.

The victim was stalked by the men accused of the rape, who threatened to kill her and her family if she refused to drop the complaint, her suicide note said.

“They have ruined my life,” the note read, Ms. Kaur said. It named two men and a woman who allegedly helped them in the kidnapping. Those men have been arrested, the police said.

Niharika Mandhana contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Keith Bradsher contributed from Hong Kong..

View the original article here

West Antarctic Warming Faster Than Thought, Study Finds

A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth.

“The surprises keep coming,” said Andrew J. Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who took part in the study. “When you see this type of warming, I think it’s alarming.”

Of course, warming in Antarctica is a relative concept. West Antarctica remains an exceedingly cold place, with average annual temperatures in the center of the ice sheet that are nearly 50 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing.

But the temperature there does sometimes rise above freezing in the summer, and the new research raises the possibility that it might begin to happen more often, potentially weakening the ice sheet through surface melting. The ice sheet is already under attack at the edges by warmer ocean water, and scientists are on alert for any new threat.

A potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the long-term hazards that have led experts to worry about global warming. The base of the ice sheet sits below sea level, in a configuration that makes it especially vulnerable. Scientists say a breakup of the ice sheet, over a period that would presumably last at least several hundred years, could raise global sea levels by 10 feet, possibly more.

The new research is an attempt to resolve a scientific controversy that erupted several years ago about exactly how fast West Antarctica is warming. With few automated weather stations and even fewer human observers in the region, scientists have had to use statistical techniques to infer long-term climate trends from sparse data.

A nearby area called the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts north from West Antarctica and for which fairly good records are available, was already known to be warming rapidly. A 2009 paper found extensive warming in the main part of West Antarctica, but those results were challenged by a group that included climate change contrarians.

To try to get to the bottom of the question, David H. Bromwich of Ohio State University pulled together a team that focused on a single temperature record. At a lonely outpost called Byrd Station, in central West Antarctica, people and automated equipment have been keeping track of temperature and other weather variables since the late 1950s.

It is by far the longest weather record in that region, but it had intermittent gaps and other problems that had made many researchers wary of it. The Bromwich group decided to try to salvage the Byrd record.

They retrieved one of the sensors and recalibrated at the University of Wisconsin. They discovered a software error that had introduced mistakes into the record and then used computerized analyses of the atmosphere to fill the gaps.

The reconstruction will most likely undergo intensive scientific scrutiny, which Dr. Bromwich said he would welcome. “We’ve tested everything we could think of,” he said.

Assuming the research holds up, it suggests that the 2009 paper, far from overestimating warming in West Antarctica, had probably underestimated it, especially in summer.

Eric J. Steig, a University of Washington researcher who led the 2009 work, said in an interview that he considered his paper to have been supplanted by the new research. “I think their results are better than ours, and should be adopted as the best estimate,” he said. He noted that the new Byrd record matches a recent temperature reconstruction from a nearby borehole in the ice sheet, adding confidence in the findings.

Much of the warming discovered in the new paper happened in the 1980s, around the same time the planet was beginning to warm briskly. More recently, Dr. Bromwich said, the weather in West Antarctica seems to have become somewhat erratic. In the summer of 2005, the interior of West Antarctica warmed enough for the ice to undergo several days of surface melting.

Dr. Bromwich is worried that this could eventually become routine, perhaps accelerating the decay of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but the warming is not fast enough for that to happen right away. “We’re talking decades into the future, I think,” Dr. Bromwich said.

View the original article here

Wind Farm Developers Race Against End of Tax Credit

All over the country, developers are in a sprint to get new wind farms up and running before Tuesday, when the federal wind production tax credit will disappear like Cinderella’s ball gown. After that, the nation’s wind-farm building will be at a virtual standstill.

The stakes of meeting the deadline are enormous. Wind turbines that are connected to the grid and in commercial service before midnight on New Year’s Eve are entitled to a 2.2 cent tax credit for each kilowatt-hour they generate in their first 10 years, which comes out to about $1 million for a big turbine. As it stands now, those that enter service on Jan. 1 or later are out of luck.

The deadline is a bit like the April 15 one for filing income taxes, but “there are no extensions here,” said Paul Copleman, a spokesman for Iberdrola. To reduce the risk of missing it — a risk that increases when managing construction projects on mountaintops in New England in the winter — the company allowed more than a year for what are normally nine-month construction projects.

More than just individual projects are at risk; the wind industry says it expects installations to decline by 90 percent next year, with the loss of thousands of jobs. The erratic pattern of wind subsidies has spawned a boom-and-bust cycle, with supplier companies building factories that run at full production for months and then shut down when demand collapses.

The industry has long experience with drop-dead deadlines: since the tax credit began in the early 1990s, it has expired three times, said Elizabeth A. Salerno, director of industry data and analysis at the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group based in Washington. Each time, new installations fell from 73 percent to 93 percent, according to the association.

Congress, which last renewed the credit as part of the 2009 fiscal stimulus package, balked at an extension this year. Opponents argue that the money spent so far, about $14.7 billion, is enough, and that a renewal could cost about $12.2 billion were it to last for 10 years. They also complain that the credit allows wind machines to be profitable even when there is a surplus of electricity and the market price for it falls to zero.

The tax credit could be equal to one-sixth to one-half of the revenue from the wind turbine, depending on electricity prices in the area of the generator.

Wind advocates say that the wind production tax credit did not cost the taxpayers any money, because it stimulated economic activity, in the form of manufacturing and construction, that was taxed at the federal, state and local levels.

Iberdrola’s wind farm near Rosamond, Calif., with 126 turbines, opened last week. The company said it was “extremely optimistic” that its 19-turbine farm in Monroe and Florida, Mass., and a 24-turbine farm in Groton, N.H., would be up and running by Monday night, but declined to say precisely when.

 According to the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Energy Department, wind developers were planning to install 12,000 megawatts of wind capacity this year, but as of Nov. 30, only about 6,000 megawatts had been completed.

The remaining 6,000 megawatts works out to more than 3,000 turbines: if they are all operating by late Monday night, the wind industry will have added 12 percent to its capacity in a single month. (A megawatt is the power required by, say, everything in a full-size Walmart with an included supermarket. Over the course of a year, however, a turbine produces only about one-third of its theoretical maximum capacity.)  

Iberdrola did not disclose the price of each wind farm, but the industry average is about $2 million per megawatt, meaning that the three projects may have cost a total of more than $500 million.

Wind advocates say they will seek to revive the tax credit when a new Congress convenes next month, but it will not be at the top of Congress’s agenda.

With the tax credit due to expire, few developers are now taking the early steps required to establish a wind farm, like negotiating deals to sell the power and ordering the equipment. Mr. Copleman, the Iberdrola spokesman, said his company had a variety of projects “at various stages” but was “unlikely to be pouring any concrete next year.”

For projects being wrapped up now, Ms. Salerno said, developers lined up power purchase agreements with utilities and then arranged financing a year and a half to two years ago, with the economics predicated on the tax credit.

The start-and-stop pattern of recent years has repeatedly affected companies up and down the chain, especially the highly specialized ones that make towers, blades and generators. Robert Thresher, a wind expert at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, Colo., said manufacturers were “trying to run down their inventory so they wouldn’t be caught holding turbines” after the market collapsed in January.

A study commissioned by the wind industry predicts the loss of 37,000 jobs as a result of the credit’s expiration. For example, the Spanish company Gamesa, which built the giant blades for the New Hampshire project at its factory in Ebensburg, Pa., has announced the layoffs of more than 150 workers.

Some members of Congress have proposed that the credit be renewed, perhaps with a phaseout over a few years. A one-year extension would be of little use: Ms. Salerno said it would not give developers enough time to get new projects financed, built and put on the grid before the expiration date, even if they had already completed environmental studies and obtained the various permits required.

A one-year extension would work for developers, she said, but only “if you knew 24 months ahead of time that this was going to happen.”

View the original article here

Woman Is Held in Death of Man Pushed Onto Subway Tracks in Queens

The woman, Erika Menendez, selected her victim because she believed him to be a Muslim or a Hindu, Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said.

“The defendant is accused of committing what is every subway commuter’s nightmare: Being suddenly and senselessly pushed into the path of an oncoming train,” Mr. Brown said in an interview.

In a statement, Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,” as having told the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu faiths in her comments to the police and in her target for attack, officials said.

The victim, Sunando Sen, was born in India and, according to a roommate, was raised Hindu.

Mr. Sen “was allegedly shoved from behind and had no chance to defend himself,” Mr. Brown said. “Beyond that, the hateful remarks allegedly made by the defendant and which precipitated the defendant’s actions should never be tolerated by a civilized society.”

Mr. Brown said he had no information on the defendant’s criminal or mental history.

“It will be up to the court to determine if she is fit to stand trial,” he said.

Ms. Menendez is expected to be arraigned by Sunday morning. If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of life in prison. By charging her with murder as a hate crime, the possible minimum sentence she faced would be extended to 20 years from 15 years, according to prosecutors.

On Saturday night, Ms. Menendez, wearing a dark blue hooded sweatshirt, was escorted from the 112th Precinct to a waiting car by three detectives. Greeted by camera flashes and dozens of reporters, she let out a loud, unintelligible moan. She did not respond to reporters’ questions.

The attack occurred around 8 p.m. on Thursday at the 40th Street-Lowery Street station in Sunnyside.

Mr. Sen, 46, was looking out over the tracks when a woman approached him from behind and shoved him onto the tracks, according to the police. Mr. Sen never saw her, the police said.

 The woman fled the station, running down two flights of stairs and down the street.

 By the next morning, a brief and grainy black-and-white video of the woman who the police said was behind the attack was being broadcast on news programs.

Patrol officers picked up Ms. Menendez early Saturday after someone who had seen the video on television spotted her on a Brooklyn street and called 911, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department. She was taken to Queens and later placed in lineups, according to detectives. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Friday that, according to witnesses’ accounts, there had been no contact on the subway platform between the attacker and the victim before the shove.

The case was the second this month involving someone being pushed to death in a train station. In the first case, Ki-Suck Han, 58, of Elmhurst, Queens, died under the Q train at the 49th Street and Seventh Avenue station on Dec. 3. Naeem Davis, 30, was charged with second-degree murder in that case.

Mr. Sen, after years of saving money, had opened a small copying business on the Upper West Side this year.

Ar Suman, a Muslim, and one of three roommates who shared a small first-floor apartment with Mr. Sen in Elmhurst, said he and Mr. Sen often discussed religion.

Though they were of different faiths, Mr. Suman said, he admired the respect that Mr. Sen showed for those who saw the world differently than he did. Mr. Suman said he once asked Mr. Sen why he was not more active in his faith and it resulted in a long philosophical discussion.

“He was so gentle,” Mr. Suman said. “He said in this world a lot of people are dying, killing over religious things.”

Reporting was contributed by William K. Rashbaum, Wendy Ruderman, Jeffrey E. Singer and Julie Turkewitz. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

View the original article here

Woman Helped Firefighters’ Killer Get Ambush Gun, Police Say

According to the police, the woman, Dawn Nguyen, 24, bought a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle and a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun from a gun shop more than two years ago on behalf of William Spengler Jr., who as a felon was not permitted to buy or own a gun.

Mr. Spengler apparently used the rifle on Monday to kill the firefighters, whom he lured to his home in Webster, N.Y., near Lake Ontario, by starting a fire, the authorities said. After shooting at other emergency responders, Mr. Spengler shot himself in the head with another weapon, a handgun, an autopsy revealed. The fire destroyed seven homes.

Ms. Nguyen went with Mr. Spengler to buy the weapons at a shop in June 2010, according to a criminal complaint filed by the United States attorney in the Western District of New York.

When the police asked her about the purchase after the shooting, she claimed the guns were for her own protection. She also said they had been stolen from her car, although the police said no report had been filed to support that claim.

The complaint said Ms. Nguyen had told a friend that she bought the weapons for Mr. Spengler. The police said that assertion was corroborated by what Mr. Spengler wrote in a suicide note, in which he said a neighbor’s daughter helped him acquire the guns.

Since the guns were not intended for her, the complaint said, she made a false statement when she bought them, a felony that is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Ms. Nguyen is “the person who purchased that rifle and that shotgun found next to William Spengler,” William J. Hochul Jr., the United States attorney for the Western District of New York, said at a news conference in Rochester on Friday.

Ms. Nguyen’s lawyer could not be immediately reached for comment.

The Webster police chief, Gerald L. Pickering, said that based on the distance between Mr. Spengler’s hiding place and where his victims were found, he most likely used the Bushmaster.

A similar gun was used in the Newtown, Conn., school shootings, which prompted a renewed debate about the nation’s gun laws. Much of the discussion has been focused on whether military-style assault weapons like the Bushmaster should be banned.

On Thursday, the State Police released the autopsy results of the two firefighters who were killed and their attacker.

Michael Chiapperini, 43, died as a result of a gunshot wound and Tomasz Kaczowka, 19, died as a result of two gunshot wounds, the police said. Mr. Spengler, 62, was killed by a self-inflicted gunshot to his head.

Funeral and memorial services are planned for Mr. Chiapperini and Mr. Kaczowka during the weekend. Hundreds of firefighters and police officers from around the region were pouring into Webster on Friday.

The police have also recovered human remains in Mr. Spengler’s home, which was among the buildings that burned, but the remains have yet to be positively identified. Earlier this week, Chief Pickering said the police believed that the remains belong to Cheryl Spengler, 67, Mr. Spengler’s sister.

The two had fought bitterly in the past, friends and neighbors said, and they may have been involved in a dispute over who would take ownership of the family home following the death of their mother, Arline, in October. Mr. Spengler served 17 years in prison for the 1980 murder of his grandmother, whom he killed with a hammer.

It remained unclear what motivated him to target emergency responders, but he made his intentions clear in the note he left behind: he wanted to kill as many people as he could.

When the police arrived at the scene of the fire just before dawn on Monday, they were met by a fusillade of bullets. A SWAT team was called in to help thwart the gunman. As the gun battle raged, the fire spread.

The autopsy report showed that Mr. Spengler was not struck by any bullets fired by law enforcement officers.

Michael D. Regan contributed reporting.

View the original article here

With a Parent at War, a Holiday of Pain and Pride

It is nothing unusual for Alexandra Alfield, a 17-year-old senior whose father, a Special Forces soldier, has been gone since August and for six of the last nine years. “I do miss him,” she said, “but I’m just so accustomed to it.”

As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 66,000 American troops from Afghanistan, the parents of Fort Campbell students are still going off to war.

Nearly 10,000 men and women from the 101st Airborne, a third of the active-duty troops based here, are either in Afghanistan or getting ready to go. Still more parents here have been deployed with units like the Fifth Special Forces Group and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, whose members piloted the helicopters in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

That has made the high school, which is run by the Defense Department and is one of only four secondary schools on military bases in the United States, something of a window into the pain, pride and resentment felt by the families of the all-volunteer military force, which has borne the burdens of 11 years of war.

The high school, which has about 700 students and is open to any 9th to 12th grader who lives on the 100,000-acre post along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, is by definition physically and psychologically cut off from the world outside the gates. But at no time is that sense of isolation more acute than now, when many of the students’ parents are deployed while the rest of the country’s interest in Afghanistan has moved on.

“No one really cares,” Tyisha Smith, a 19-year-old senior, said of the outside world. “Your father goes, gets deployed. War — it’s normal. It’s not like a big deal that we’re still at war.”

But Ms. Smith said she was struggling to manage the pressures of her final year in high school while her father was away and she was living with her stepmother. The reality of his deployment with the 101st Airborne is never far away. “It’s starting to hit me that there’s a possibility that he could die,” she said. “I just hope he comes home.”

School administrators point to a bright spot: not as many parents are gone this year as there were at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when nearly everyone in the school had a parent deployed and the post was a virtual ghost town. But that hardly makes the modest one-story school typical.

A strict dress code bans jeans and T-shirts, so students wear tucked-in collared shirts with khakis or dark pants. Presidents turn up a lot: Mr. Obama spoke at the post in May 2011, and George W. Bush visited three times while he was president. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met earlier in 2011 with the Fort Campbell High School football team. And the death of a parent is something to be mourned but overcome.

Only months after his father was killed in Afghanistan in June 2008, Josh Carter, a starting linebacker, helped lead the Falcons to their second of three straight state championships.

“My dad would want me to keep going,” Mr. Carter, now a student at Western Kentucky University, said in an interview over the summer. Administrators say that perhaps five other students have lost parents in the wars in recent years. Many other parents have been wounded or have received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The students readily call their school a “bubble,” both comforting and claustrophobic, because of the dangers their parents face. “If you went to off-post schools, you couldn’t exactly talk to a teenager because they wouldn’t understand what you’re going through,” said Larissa Massie, a 17-year-old senior whose father is home but has had two deployments to Iraq.

View the original article here

Woman Posed as Newtown Victim’s Aunt in Fraud Scheme, F.B.I. Says

The woman, Nouel Alba, 37, claimed to be an aunt of a 6-year-old victim and used her Facebook account, telephone calls and text messages to solicit money for a “funeral fund,” according to a criminal complaint filed in Federal District Court in Connecticut.

When contacted by federal agents investigating fraud schemes related to the shootings in Newtown, Conn., law enforcement officials said Ms. Alba denied that she had posted any messages on Facebook soliciting donations.

“It is unconscionable to think that the families of the victims in Newtown, and a sympathetic community looking to provide them some sort of financial support and comfort, have become the targets of criminals,” said Kimberly K. Mertz, the special agent in charge of the New Haven division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Today’s arrest is a stern message that the F.B.I. will investigate and bring to justice those who perpetrate Internet fund-raising scams, especially those scams that exploit the most vulnerable in their time of shared sorrow.”

If convicted, Ms. Alba faces a maximum of five years in prison and $250,000 fine.

Ms. Alba, who was released on $50,000 bond at her arraignment on Thursday in Hartford, was represented by a federal public defender, Deirdre Murray, who did not immediately return a call.

Allegations against Ms. Alba were first reported by several news organizations.

The complaint cites a report that aired on Dec. 19 on the CNN program “Anderson Cooper 360,” in which Ms. Alba denied taking “any funds from anybody.”

Jeff Rossen on the “Today” show on NBC also reported on the case on Dec. 21. In his report, Mr. Rossen said that within hours of the shooting, someone started posing as the aunt of Noah Pozner, a 6-year-old boy killed at Newtown.

“All we know is 18 kids have been killed,” the person wrote. “Still no word on my nephew.”

According to the criminal complaint, the person posted on Facebook under the name Victorian Glam Fairys and used an account controlled by Ms. Alba.

A few days later, Victorian Glam Fairys posted a message asking for donations and included a PayPal account and bank information.

Noah’s uncle, Alexis Haller, told Mr. Rossen that the family was disgusted when they learned people might be trying to make money off the shootings.

“It’s trying to turn a profit on a horrible tragedy, on the death of kids, 6-year-old kids, 7-year-old kids,” Mr. Haller said. “And to me, that’s just a horrible thing to be doing.”

According to the complaint, Ms. Alba kept up her ruse even when she was contacted by potential donors, claiming via text message that she hugged President Obama when he visited Newtown and that she was an emotional wreck.

“Ima mess,” she wrote to one person. “Not looking forward to see that casket cause that is what will kill us all today. 11 gun shot in his little body.”

“The guilt we have,” she continued, “just keeps building up.”

View the original article here