Gabon’s government, blessed with billions of dollars of oil money and miles and miles of virgin rain forest, has made many of the right moves to protect its animals by setting aside chunks of land for national parks, actually paying wildlife rangers on time (a rarity in Africa) and recently destroying a towering mountain of ivory in a statement of its refusal to look the other way. But as the price of ivory keeps going up, hitting levels too high for many people to resist, Gabon’s elephants are getting slaughtered by poachers from across the borders and within the rain forests, proof that just about nowhere in Africa are elephants safe. In the past several years, 10,000 elephants in Gabon have been wiped out, some picked off by impoverished hunters creeping around the jungle with rusty shotguns and willing to be paid in sacks of salt, others mowed down en masse by criminal gangs that slice off the dead elephants’ faces with chain saws. Gabon’s jails are filling up with small-time poachers and ivory traffickers, destitute men and women like Therese Medza, a village hairdresser arrested a few months ago for selling 45 pounds of tusks. “I had no idea it was illegal,” Ms. Medza said, almost convincingly, from the central jail here in Oyem, in the north. “I was told the tusks were found in the forest.” She netted about $700, far more than she usually makes in a month, and the reason she did it was simple, she said. “I got seven kids.” It seems that Gabon’s elephants are getting squeezed in a deadly vise between a seemingly insatiable lust for ivory in Asia, where some people pay as much as $1,000 a pound, and desperate hunters and traffickers in central Africa. It is a story of temptation — and exploitation — and it shows that the problem is not just about demand, but about supply as well. Poverty, as well as greed, is killing Africa’s elephants. Across the continent, tens of thousands of elephants are being poached each year in what is emerging as one of the gravest wildlife crises in decades. Gabon’s elephants are among the last of the planet’s rare forest elephants, a subspecies or possibly a totally distinct species (scientists can’t agree), which makes the stakes particularly high here. Forest elephants are smaller than their savanna cousins and have an alluring, extra-hard pinkish ivory that is especially prized. A few decades ago, there were perhaps 700,000 forest elephants roaming through the jungles of central Africa. Now there may be fewer than 100,000, and about half of them live in Gabon. “We’re talking about the survival of the species,” said Lee White, the British-born head of Gabon’s national parks. In June, Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo, defiantly lighted a pyramid of 10,000 pounds of ivory on fire to make the point that the ivory trade was reprehensible, a public display of resolve that Kenya has put on in years past. It took three days for all the ivory to burn, and even after the last tusks were reduced to glowing embers, policemen vigilantly guarded the ashes. Ivory powder is valued in Asia for its purported medicinal powers, and the officers were worried someone might try to sweep up the ashes and sell them. Some African countries, like Zimbabwe and Tanzania, are sitting on million-dollar stockpiles of ivory (usually from law enforcement seizures or elephants that died naturally) that someday may be legal to sell. Gabon has the unusual luxury of kissing its ivory mountain goodbye because it has an even more lucrative resource: two billion barrels of crude oil. But it is not clear how long Gabon will continue as this relatively prosperous, politically stable corner of Africa. Protesters recently began chaffing against Mr. Bongo’s rule, saying he rigged an election to ensure that he would take over from his father, who died in 2009 after 41 years in office.
Thứ Ba, 1 tháng 1, 2013
Official Acquitted in Russian Jail Death Case
Sergei Magnitsky died in jail in 2009 after his pancreatitis went untreated, and an investigation by Russia's presidential council on human rights concluded he was severely beaten and denied medical treatment. Prison doctor Dmitry Kratov was the only person to face trial in the case. Judge Tatyana Neverova said she found no evidence that Kratov's negligence could have caused the lawyer's death. The acquittal was widely expected after prosecutors earlier this week dropped their accusations, saying they had decided there was no connection between Kratov's actions and Magnitsky's death. The case has angered both Russian activists and the West. The U.S. Congress passed legislation this month in Magnitsky's name, calling for sanctions against officials — including Kratov — deemed to be connected with human rights abuses. The bill provoked retaliation from Moscow, including a measure barring Americans from adopting Russian children that President Vladimir Putin signed on Friday. Magnitsky, a lawyer for the Hermitage Capital fund, was arrested in 2008 on suspicion of tax evasion by the same Interior Ministry officials he accused of using false tax documents to steal $230 million from the state. He died while in custody awaiting trial. Government officials have dismissed calls to investigate police officials and the only official charged in his death was Kratov, who was deputy chief physician at the Butyrskaya prison where Magnitsky was held. Hermitage's owner, Bill Browder, said the outcome of the trial shows the government's unwillingness to find and try the culprits. "Even though Kratov was only a minor player in the overall persecution of Sergei, the fact that the Russian authorities can't even scapegoat their one scapegoat says everything about this case," Browder said. Kratov pleaded not guilty to charges of negligence leading to death, saying he was unable to ensure medical care for Magnitsky because of a shortage of staff. The prison doctor thanked "everyone who believed in me and my innocence" after the verdict. The lawyer's family has described the trial as a sham, maintaining that Kratov played a minor role in the man's death and that officials responsible must face justice. The lawyer's mother and attorney did not attend the ruling in protest. "Participation in this court hearing would have been humiliating for me," Nataliya Magnitskaya said in a statement. "I understand that everything has been decided in advance and everything has been pre-determined." Browder said that he does not doubt that "people responsible for Magnitsky's death are being protected by the president of Russia. "In this case, there was overwhelming evidence of Kratov's involvement and his acquittal goes against any logic or concept of justice," he said Valery Borshchev, a human rights advocate who spearheaded the presidential commission's investigation into Magnitsky's death, was outraged with the court's decision. Borshchev insisted that authorities must investigate overwhelming evidence collected by his commission that points to the fact that Magnitsky was tortured. "Kratov and others are guilty because there were inadequate conditions to treat Magnitsky," he told the Interfax news agency. "The conditions in jail were torturous, and doctors didn't do anything to change that."
Critic’s Notebook: Amsterdam’s New Stedelijk Museum
On a crowded weekend the narrow, cluttered, glassed-in lobby, roughly where the tub’s drain would be, was badly clogged. The galleries beyond flowed seamlessly into the museum’s old building. The collection looked great. But entering an oversize plumbing fixture to commune with classic modern art is like hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit. Why a tub? That’s the $170 million (well over budget) question. Benthem Crouwel, the Amsterdam firm that designed it, hasn’t explained. At 130,000 square feet, the new Stedelijk (pronounced STEH-duh-lick) gloms onto the rear of the old one, a beloved red-and-white-striped, late-19th-century Neo-Renaissance brick pile by Adriaan Willem Weissman. The new building flips the museum entrance, so that it now faces Museum Plaza, a scruffy greensward around which the Concertgebouw, the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum are scattered. The ambition: update the old building and add exhibition space along with a restaurant and store on the ground floor facing the plaza. There the new Stedelijk, its jutting roof acting as an enormous canopy, is intended to activate the plaza’s northwest corner. All logical-sounding enough. But what transpired seems another case of civic icon-envy. The old Stedelijk pioneered the collecting of modern art and design in postwar Europe. Its white-box interior was widely imitated. The place became a people’s palace for contemporary culture. A wing was added during the 1950s to promote local and experimental art, and to be a host for happenings and cultural protests. It was a very Dutch sort of democratic gesture. I loved the old Stedelijk when I started visiting it 20-odd years ago. Its grand staircase, creaky herringbone floors, laid-back vibe and modish art mixed quaint and cool. But by then museums like the Pompidou in Paris were already overshadowing it. To get its mojo back the Stedelijk enlisted Robert Venturi, then Álvaro Siza; both of their plans proved unworkable. The project stalled. The Guggenheim opened in Bilbao, Spain, Tate Modern in London. Benthem Crouwel’s gonzo design suggests a kind of desperation in Amsterdam’s reaction to Bilbao. That said, this city has been suffering through a decade or more of disruptive and costly infrastructural and other construction, much of it unfinished and shortsighted. People here have been angry and frustrated. So the completion of the new Stedelijk, not long after the arrival of a spectacular new film institute, the Eye, designed by the Austrian architects Delugan Meissl, was greeted generously. The feeling was relief, a reaction notable for a capital previously unaccustomed to new architecture that declines to blend in. This is fine, even admirable, but it doesn’t mean the bathtub is too. Mel Crouwel, the lead architect for the Stedelijk, was government architect for years. His firm is normally reliable, with an industrial bent. He promoted the tub as a technological novelty, its aerodynamic exterior made of a reinforced synthetic fiber coated in white airplane paint to give the museum a shiny, enameled finish and to nod to the old Stedelijk’s white rooms, which still fails to explain the plumbing metaphor or other moves. The bathtub floats above the glassed-in ground floor. A few sealed porthole windows, stylish but stingy and soon to look dated, provide glimpses from inside the tub onto the lobby and street. A double-height escalator threads via an enclosed tube from tub to basement, a curious locale for galleries considering the cost and trouble of building below ground in the Netherlands, never mind the feng shui of bunkers for art.
Shinzo Abe Selected as Japan’s Prime Minister
The victory puts Mr. Abe, 58, a former prime minister and outspoken nationalist, at Japan’s helm as it faces the growing burden of its aging population, years of industrial decline and the challenge of an increasingly assertive China. The change in prime ministers is the seventh in six years, a high turnover that is itself a sign of this nation’s inability to escape its long economic funk. Mr. Abe won the support of 328 members of the 480-seat lower house, a total that included votes from the Liberal Democrats’ coalition partner, a small Buddhist party. Mr. Abe’s election resulted from his pro-business party’s landslide victory over the incumbent, left-leaning Democratic Party in lower-house elections Dec. 16. Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and his cabinet resigned to make way for the new leader. Despite Mr. Abe’s vows to strengthen control of a chain of islands in the East China Sea that both Japan and China claim, he has played down confrontation with Asian neighbors since the elections, instead focusing his agenda on lifting Japan’s economy out of recession before upper-house elections next summer. Mr. Abe has vowed to spur growth quickly by offering 10 trillion yen, or about $120 billion, in public works and other emergency stimulus spending. He has also promised to force the central bank to move more aggressively to combat deflation and to weaken the value of the yen, actions that would offer relief to beleaguered export industries by making Japanese products cheaper abroad. The measures are intended to revive the economy ahead of the elections in June, to give Mr. Abe’s party a better chance of winning the upper house and, with it, control of all of Parliament. Mr. Abe will have to hurry to retain the support of Japan’s weary voters, who have shown themselves quick to turn against leaders who fail to deliver on promised change. Immediately after Wednesday’s vote, Mr. Abe began appointing a new cabinet filled with relatively young and unknown faces. While many of these appointees are Mr. Abe’s friends, the fresh lineup is also apparently intended to emphasize that the party has changed since it was driven from power three years ago. Among the few veterans on the cabinet is Taro Aso, 72, another former prime minister, who was appointed finance minister. The key post of foreign minister went to Fumio Kishida, a 55-year-old former minister in charge of Okinawan affairs, who is expected to try to smooth ties with the United States frayed by a dispute over an American air base on Okinawa. Mr. Abe will also face some early challenges, like bridging a rift within his party over whether Japan should join a new regional free-trade pact led by the United States. Joining this Trans-Pacific Partnership is supported by business but opposed by farmers, two of the staunchest backers of the Liberal Democrats. Another challenge will be responding to China’s stepped-up efforts to assert its claims to the disputed islands, which Japan calls the Senkaku and China calls the Diaoyu. Chinese ships and, more recently, aircraft now make almost daily incursions into Japanese-controlled waters and airspace near the islands, with no signs of letting up. Mr. Abe has also left vague whether he will eventually shift his energies to his long-held desire to rewrite Japan’s antiwar Constitution to allow for a full-fledged military. Mr. Abe and other conservatives say such a step is needed for Japan to stand up for itself in light of China’s growing strength, and to share more of the regional security burden with the cash-strapped United States. However, the move could also be seen as provocative by China and South Korea, two victims of Japan’s World War II-era militarism.
Greek Bond Buyback May Have Been Cheaper Under Collective Action Clause
Greece, under pressure from its European creditors, wanted to retire some of its debt by buying back its bonds at a deep discount to their face value. A senior executive at Deutsche Bank proposed that Europe take a tough negotiating stance toward private hedge funds that had bought Greek bonds. He urged officials to use a legal mechanism that would force the funds to sell at a lower price than they might voluntarily accept. The move was “perfectly legal” and would not “upset the markets,” the executive, Hakan Wohlin, argued. And by forcing private investors to sell low — for 28 to 30 cents on the euro, instead of the 34 to 35 cents many hedge funds were aiming for — Greece could achieve significant debt reduction at a reasonable cost. But in this latest showdown with private investors over Greece’s debt, Europe blinked first. With litigious hedge funds and global finance’s most powerful lobbying group warning of a market crisis, European officials rejected the hard-line approach. When the results were tallied on Dec. 12, Greece had reached its target of buying back enough bonds at a discount to retire 21 billion euros, or about $27 billion, of its debt. The bigger winners, though, were hedge funds, which pocketed higher profits than many had expected, in yet another Greek bailout financed by European taxpayers. To some experts, this latest chapter in the long-running Greek drama is another reminder of how private investors have outmaneuvered European officials at various stages of the debt crisis. And they caution that each time it happens, future debt workouts in the euro zone will become even more costly. “I just don’t understand why they did this,” said Mitu Gulati, a sovereign debt specialist at Duke University School of Law, who argues that Europe could have saved up to 2 billion euros. “This would have been an easy transaction to do, and still the hedge funds would have come out with a hefty profit.” Opportunistic hedge funds have profited handsomely from the euro zone crisis, be it by speculating in Greek bonds or by buying up the senior debt of failed Spanish banks. They have successfully bet that Europe, ever fearful of Greek-style contagion, will prefer taxpayer-financed bailouts to forcing concessions from the private sector. In Greece this year, so-called vulture funds like Dart Management were paid back in full after refusing to take the losses that most other private bondholders grudgingly accepted as part of the 100 billion euro Greek bailout that Athens and Europe agreed to in March. The big winners this time, according to bankers and investors, were American and European hedge funds like Greylock Capital, Fir Tree, Brevan Howard and Third Point, all of which snapped up Greek debt last summer as warnings grew that Greece might leave the euro and default on its debt. Many have booked gains of 100 percent or higher. They largely have the financial lobby to thank — in particular the Institute of International Finance, which is based in Washington and represents the interests of more than 450 banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions around the world. The institute played on fears in Brussels, Rome and Madrid that a hard-line approach to the hedge funds would create another round of market chaos. The warning was blunt: If Athens set off legal mechanisms in the bond contracts known as collective action clauses, forcing bondholders to accept lower prices, investors would stop buying the bonds of struggling European countries. That would be bad news for Spain and Italy — to say nothing of Portugal and Ireland when they return to global bond markets in 2013. Countering this pro-hedge-fund argument was a small circle of bankers, lawyers and policy advocates, the most prominent of whom was Mr. Wohlin, the Deutsche Bank executive who sent the e-mail. Another was Adam Lerrick, a former investment banker now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute. They argued that collective action clauses have a legitimate function: to help near-bankrupt countries reach debt restructuring agreements with a majority of their bondholders, with a minimum of legal fuss from investors holding out for a better deal. All euro zone countries that issue debt next year will have such clauses in their bond contracts, and proponents say there is scant evidence that they cause market turmoil.
Chávez Faces New Complications After Surgery
CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is facing “new complications” arising from a respiratory infection following cancer surgery in Cuba, Vice President Nicolás Maduro said in a televised statement on Sunday night. “Nineteen days after the complex surgery, President Chávez’s condition continues to be delicate, presenting complications that are being treated, in a process that is not without risks,” Mr. Maduro said, speaking from Havana, where he had flown a day earlier to visit the president, who is being treated in a hospital there. Looking grim, Mr. Maduro said that, after arriving in Havana, “we were told about new complications arising as a consequence of the respiratory infection.” Officials previously had said the infection was detected on Dec. 17, almost a week after the surgery. Mr. Maduro said that he had just come from a visit with Mr. Chávez. He also said that he spoke about national affairs with the president and that Mr. Chávez sent an end-of-the-year greeting to the families of Venezuela. Mr. Maduro, who has been designated by Mr. Chávez as the one to continue leading his Socialist revolution if he is too ill to govern, said that he planned to remain in Havana for “the coming hours” to monitor the president’s condition. Venezuela has been in deep uncertainty for weeks as a result of Mr. Chávez’s sickness and his extended absence. Mr. Chávez, who has been president for nearly 14 years, was re-elected in October, but officials have said that he may not be able to return to Venezuela for the start of his new six-year term on Jan. 10.
Attackers in India Rape Case Charged With Murder
A police spokesman, Rajan Bhagat, said that if convicted of murder, the men could face the death penalty in the Dec. 16 attack, which shocked India because of its savagery, led to violent protests and prompted demands for improved protection for women as well as calls for the death penalty in rape cases. The country’s Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the death penalty should be used only in the “rarest of rare” cases, and fewer than 50 people have been executed since India’s independence in 1947. The woman, who has not been identified, has become a symbol for the treatment of women in India, where rape is common and conviction rates for the crime are low. She boarded a bus with a male friend after watching a movie at a mall, and was raped and attacked with an iron rod by the men, who the police later said had been drinking and were on a “joy ride.” She died Saturday morning in Singapore, where she had been flown for treatment for the severe internal injuries caused by the assault. She had an infection in her lungs and abdomen, liver damage and a brain injury, the Singapore hospital said, and died from organ failure. Her body was flown back to India on Saturday. As news of her death spread Saturday, India’s young, social-network-using population began to organize protests and candlelight vigils in places like the western city of Cochin in Kerala, the outsourcing hub of Bangalore and New Delhi, the capital. Just a tiny sliver of India’s population can afford a computer or has access to the Internet, but the young, educated subset of this group has become increasingly galvanized over the New Delhi rape case. Late Saturday afternoon, thousands of people, most of them men, filled Jantar Mantar, an observatory and popular protest ground in New Delhi, where they waved placards and shouted slogans. When Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of Delhi, arrived there in the early afternoon surrounded by a police escort, she was booed, heckled and jostled by the crowd. Ms. Dikshit, a diminutive 74-year-old, stayed only a few minutes, lighting a candle and holding her hands together in prayer. She did not speak to the crowd. As darkness fell here in New Delhi, the crowd at Jantar Mantar lighted hundreds of candles. Upamanyu Raju, 21, a student at Delhi University who attended the Jantar Mantar protest, said he had been protesting since a day after the rape victim was admitted to the hospital because of the “utter atrocity of what happened.” Mr. Raju said he had given his younger sister pepper spray and a Swiss Army knife, but he worried that those things would not protect her. “It’s wrong to stop girls from going out” of the house, he said, but there is little choice because the city is so unsafe for women. According to a 2010 survey, more than a third of the women questioned in New Delhi said they had been physically sexually harassed in the previous year, but less than 1 percent reported the assault to the police. The roads leading to India Gate, the site of earlier protests that had turned violent, were barricaded by the police early Saturday, and nearby subway stations were closed. More than 40 police units were deployed in the area, including 28 units of the Central Reserve Police Force, which are national anti-insurgency troops. In South Delhi, hundreds of students from Jawaharlal Nehru University organized a silent march on Saturday from their campus to Munirka, the bus stop where the rape victim was picked up. The crowd of protesters trudged along a busy road, a few holding hastily made placards with phrases like “You are an inspiration to us all.” On Saturday morning, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed his “deepest condolences” to the family of the victim, who was a physiotherapy student. “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.” And Sonia Gandhi, India’s most powerful female politician and the president of the governing Congress Party, made a rare televised statement that was broadcast Saturday. “As a woman, and mother, I understand how protesters feel,” she said. “Today we pledge that the victim will get justice,” she said. Even larger protests are planned for Sunday, protesters in Delhi said, including a so-called March for Freedom from the Delhi University subway station.
Anjani Trivedi contributed reporting.
Morsi Admits Mistakes in Drafting Egypt’s Constitution
Appealing for unity after the bitter debate over the charter, which was finalized by his Islamist allies over the objections of opposition parties and the Coptic Christian Church, Mr. Morsi pledged in a televised address to respect the one-third of voters who cast ballots against it. “This is their right, because Egypt of the revolution — Egypt’s people and its elected president — can never feel annoyed by the active patriotic opposition,” he said, bobbing his head between the camera and the lectern as he read from a prepared text. “We don’t want to go back to the era of the one opinion and fabricated fake majorities.” But Mr. Morsi offered no concrete concessions, and he did not acknowledge any specific errors, saying only, “There have been mistakes here and there, and I bear responsibility.” His most tangible outreach to the opposition was an invitation to join a so-called national dialogue that has already begun under his auspices. Hussein Abdel Ghani, a spokesman for the main opposition bloc, dismissed it as “a dialogue with himself” based on “political bribes.” Still, Mr. Morsi’s attempt at reconciliation, however vague or superficial, represented another notable step in Egypt’s political transition. Here was a recently elected politician seeking to move from the brutally partisan campaign back to the political middle. The speech echoed many American inaugural addresses. It was a stark contrast to Mr. Morsi’s previous speech, given just 20 days ago, when he sounded far more like his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak. Then, Mr. Morsi attributed a night of deadly violence between his Islamist supporters and their opponents to a conspiracy of foreign agents, old-regime insiders and his political rivals. “As we all welcome difference in opinion, we all reject violence and breaking the law,” Mr. Morsi said Wednesday, without blaming either side this time. In Egypt, where previous presidents more often jailed political opponents, even Mr. Morsi’s limited mea culpa appeared to be the first of its kind in decades. The last presidential apology was President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s speech offering his short-lived resignation after the humiliation of losing the 1967 war with Israel, said Khaled Fahmy, a liberal historian at the American University in Cairo. “It is the only thing comparable in its clarity,” Mr. Fahmy said. (Nasser’s theatrical resignation was rejected in a staged plebiscite.) But at a news conference on Wednesday that was billed as a response to Mr. Morsi, the opposition leaders said they had not even listened to the speech. Mr. Abdel Ghani said the opposition coalition leaders had been in a meeting to draft a statement calling for new protests against the Constitution on the anniversary of the uprising that overthrew Mr. Mubarak on Jan. 25. In its statement, the coalition complained of “scandalous violations that amounted to fraud” in the referendum that approved the Constitution. “Even if this Constitution is considered approved legally,” the coalition said, “it lacks moral legitimacy, political legitimacy and popular legitimacy because it lacks national consensus.” But with the results confirmed, the new order began to take shape. The Islamist-dominated upper house of Parliament met on Wednesday for the first time under provisions of the Constitution that empower it to act as the legislature until the election of a new lower house. The upper house had been almost powerless under the former Constitution, but a court order disbanded the more authoritative lower house last spring while Egypt was still under military rule. The upper house’s first move was to relocate to the lower house chambers until the new elections, which are expected to be held in two months. The Supreme Constitutional Court accepted its reconstitution under the new charter, which removed several of the most recently appointed judges. The reduction in its size effectively purged certain judges, including some who were Mubarak loyalists appointed in recent years and one who was an outspoken opponent who was often cast in the role of a villain by the Islamists. The court’s response to the Constitution had been a matter of some suspense. Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies had feared that the court would strike down the assembly that was created to draw up the charter, just as it had dissolved the lower house of Parliament, or would seek to review the Constitution. In a pre-emptive strike, Mr. Morsi sought last month to temporarily elevate his own powers over the court, setting off a month of sometimes violent battles between the Islamists and their opponents. Since then, Mr. Morsi has come under growing international pressure to compromise and resolve the tensions. After taking a notably evenhanded tone toward Mr. Morsi and his opponents through the stormy days after his power grab, the United States State Department said this week that the onus was on Mr. Morsi to pull Egypt back together. “Democracy requires much more than simple majority rule,” said a department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell. “It requires protecting the rights and building the institutions that make democracy meaningful and durable. “President Morsi, as the democratically elected leader of Egypt, has a special responsibility to move forward in a way that recognizes the urgent need to bridge divisions, build trust and broaden support for the political process,” he added. Mr. Morsi declared in his speech on Wednesday that Egypt was “moving steadfastly toward democracy and pluralism.” Under the new Constitution, he said, “everyone is equal without any discrimination.” “No matter what were the hardships of the past period, I see it as the pain of birthing the new Egypt,” Mr. Morsi said. “It is truly the dawn of the new Egypt, which has risen and is now shining.”
Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.
Vermont Resort Pulls in Big Foreign Investments
He is expanding the Jay Peak ski resort, which he co-owns, but he is also building a biomedical research firm and a window manufacturing plant, extending the runway at the local airport and rehabilitating much of the nearby town of Newport, where he lives. There, he is developing the waterfront, adding the town’s first hotel and a conference center and rebuilding an entire downtown block. He is also creating what he says is the largest indoor mountain bike park in the world and a state-of-the art tennis center. The price tag for the entire project, which Mr. Stenger says will create 10,000 direct and indirect jobs over several years, is $865 million. But even more unusual than the size of the undertaking is the method by which Mr. Stenger and his business partner, Ariel Quiros, are financing it. They have tapped into a federal program that gives green cards, or permanent residency, to foreigners who invest at least $500,000 in an American business — the reward for the investment is a chance at United States citizenship. Mr. Stenger has already attracted 550 foreign investors from 60 countries to put up $275 million for the first phase: a hotel here at the Jay Peak ski complex, an indoor water park the size of a football field, an ice hockey arena, condominiums, restaurants and stores. The second and third phases, now under way, require 1,000 additional foreign investors to put up $500 million to overhaul Newport and to develop the nearby Burke Mountain ski area. Mr. Stenger and Mr. Quiros are putting up $90 million themselves. But even at $785 million, this is one of the single biggest projects in the country financed under the investor program. Congress created the visa program in 1990 to help stimulate the economy. Because of a cumbersome process and complaints of fraud and corruption, it was long underused. But a confluence of events in recent years has led to its rather sudden revival: the program was improved; the financial crisis of 2008 made it hard for developers to get loans from commercial banks; and foreign nationals, especially in China, were accumulating vast wealth and were eager for their children to study and live in the United States. In 2006, the government issued just 802 of these EB-5 visas to investors and their families; this year, it granted 7,818. The program is now growing so rapidly that in the next year or two the number issued will probably reach the annual limit of 10,000. For the first time in the program’s history, applicants may be turned away. Mr. Stenger, 64, who began his career as a ski instructor, and Mr. Quiros, 56, who spent years in the import-export business and already owned thousands of acres here, began leveraging the visa program five years ago, in the early stages of its revival. Along with state officials, who monitor and audit their projects, and Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Democrat who has championed the program in Washington, the two men have sought to make Jay Peak a national showcase for the investor program. Mr. Quiros said these projects would have been impossible without it. “It’s too hard to get money of this magnitude,” he said, “especially with the economic situation that exists today.” The immigrant investors do not have to get involved in the business, though it must create or save at least 10 jobs, and they can live anywhere they want. One potential investor in Jay Peak is Steve Green, 49, an Englishman who has had a successful career in banking and reinsurance and has lived in Bermuda for 25 years. “The reason to explore this and potentially to do it — and I’m more than 50-50 inclined to do it — is that it would give me an opportunity to relocate in the United States, keep a small home in Bermuda, spend the majority of my retirement in the United States and confer those rights on my children,” he said in a telephone interview from Bermuda. Mr. Green said his hesitation about investing here stemmed from uncertainty over what kind of financial return he would get. “There is a substantial risk that you don’t get anything back,” he said. Investors must put up $1 million for a visa, but if they invest in a rural area or one with high unemployment, that is reduced to $500,000.
Senate Votes to Extend Electronic Surveillance Authority
The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 73 to 23, clearing it for approval by President Obama, who strongly supports it. Intelligence agencies said the bill was their highest legislative priority. Critics of the bill, including Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican, expressed concern that electronic surveillance, though directed at noncitizens, inevitably swept up communications of Americans as well. “The Fourth Amendment was written in a different time and a different age, but its necessity and its truth are timeless,” Mr. Paul said, referring to the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. “Over the past few decades, our right to privacy has been eroded. We have become lazy and haphazard in our vigilance. Digital records seem to get less protection than paper records.” The bill, which extends the government’s surveillance authority for five years, was approved in the House by a vote of 301 to 118 in September. Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill in the next few days. Congressional critics of the bill said that they suspected that intelligence agencies were picking up the communications of many Americans, but that they could not be sure because the agencies would not provide even rough estimates of how many people inside the United States had had communications collected under authority of the surveillance law, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The inspector general of the National Security Agency told Congress that preparing such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office. The chief Senate supporter of the bill, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the proposed amendments were unnecessary. Moreover, she said, any changes would be subject to approval by the House, and the resulting delay could hamper the government’s use of important intelligence-gathering tools, for which authority is set to expire next week. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was adopted in 1978 and amended in 2008, with the addition of new surveillance authority and procedures, which are continued by the bill approved on Friday. The 2008 law was passed after the disclosure that President George W. Bush had authorized eavesdropping inside the United States, to search for evidence of terrorist activity, without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying. Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, said that he and Mr. Wyden were concerned that “a loophole” in the 2008 law “could allow the government to effectively conduct warrantless searches for Americans’ communications.” James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Congress, “There is no loophole in the law.” By a vote of 52 to 43, the Senate on Friday rejected a proposal by Mr. Wyden to require the national intelligence director to tell Congress if the government had collected any domestic e-mail or telephone conversations under the surveillance law. The Senate also rejected, 54 to 37, an amendment that would have required disclosure of information about significant decisions by a special federal court that reviews applications for electronic surveillance in foreign intelligence cases. The amendment was proposed by one of the most liberal senators, Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and one of the most conservative, Mike Lee, Republican of Utah. The No. 2 Senate Democrat, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said the surveillance law “does not have adequate checks and balances to protect the constitutional rights of innocent American citizens.” “It is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence,” Mr. Durbin said, “but the reality is that this legislation permits targeting an innocent American in the United States as long as an additional purpose of the surveillance is targeting a person outside the United States.” However, 30 Democrats joined 42 Republicans and one independent in voting for the bill. Three Republicans — Mr. Lee, Mr. Paul and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted against the bill, as did 19 Democrats and one independent. Mr. Merkley said the administration should provide at least unclassified summaries of major decisions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “An open and democratic society such as ours should not be governed by secret laws,” Mr. Merkley said, “and judicial interpretations are as much a part of the law as the words that make up our statute.” Mrs. Feinstein said the law allowed intelligence agencies to go to the court and get warrants for surveillance of “a category of foreign persons,” without showing probable cause to believe that each person was working for a foreign power or a terrorist group. Mr. Wyden said these writs reminded him of the “general warrants that so upset the colonists” more than 200 years ago. “The founding fathers could never have envisioned tweeting and Twitter and the Internet,” Mr. Wyden said. “Advances in technology gave government officials the power to invade individual privacy in a host of new ways.”
New York Woman Charged in Connection With Ambush of Firefighters
William Spengler had picked out the semiautomatic rifle and shotgun used in the ambush and went to the sporting goods store with the neighbor when she bought them for him, U.S. Attorney William Hochul said. The neighbor, Dawn Nguyen of Rochester, was arrested Friday. She faces a federal charge of knowingly making a false statement for signing a form indicating she would be the legal owner of the guns, Hochul said. She also was charged with a state count of filing a falsified business record, State Police Senior Investigator James Newell said. Shortly before her arrest, Nguyen told The Associated Press that she didn't want to talk about Spengler. A number listed in the name of her lawyer, David Palmiere, was disconnected. The charges stem from the purchase of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun that Spengler had with him Monday when firefighters Michael Chiapperini and Tomasz Kaczowka were gunned down. Three other people were wounded before the 62-year-old Spengler killed himself. He also had a .38-caliber revolver, but Nguyen is not connected to that gun, Newell said. Police used the serial numbers on the rifle and shotgun, which were purchased on June 6, 2010, to trace them to Nguyen, Hochul said. "She told the seller of these guns, Gander Mountain in Henrietta, N.Y., that she was to be the true owner and buyer of the guns instead of William Spengler," he said. "It is absolutely against federal law to provide any materially false information related to the acquisition of firearms." "It is sometimes referred to acting as a straw purchaser and that is exactly what today's complaint alleges," he said. The federal charges carry a maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment, a fine of $250,000 or both. During an interview late on Christmas Eve, Nguyen told police she had bought the guns for personal protection and that they were stolen from her vehicle, though she never reported the guns stolen. The day after the shootings, Nguyen texted an off-duty Monroe County Sheriff's deputy with references to the killings. She later called the deputy and admitted she bought the guns for Spengler, police said. That information was consistent with a suicide note found near Spengler's body after he killed himself. Nguyen and her mother, Dawn Welsher, lived next door to Spengler in 2008. On Wednesday and again on Friday, she answered her cellphone and said she didn't want to discuss Spengler. Her brother, Steven Nguyen, told the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper of Rochester that Spengler stole the guns from Dawn Nguyen. Spengler set a car on fire and touched off an inferno in his Webster home on a strip of land along the Lake Ontario shore, took up a sniper's position and opened fire on the first firefighters to arrive at about 5:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve, authorities said. He wounded two other firefighters and an off-duty police officer who was on his way to work. A Webster police officer who had accompanied the firefighters shot back at Spengler with a rifle in a brief exchange of gunfire before the gunman killed himself. Spengler spent 17 years in prison for killing his grandmother in 1980. He had been released from parole in 2006 on the manslaughter conviction, and authorities said they had had no encounters with him since. Investigators still haven't released the identity of remains found in Spengler's burned house. They have said they believe the remains are those of his 67-year-old sister, Cheryl Spengler, who also lived in the house near Rochester and has been unaccounted for since the killings. The Spengler siblings had lived in the home with their mother, Arline Spengler, who died in October. In all, seven houses were destroyed by the flames. Investigators found a rambling, typed letter laying out Spengler's intention to destroy his neighborhood and "do what I like doing best, killing people."
Chinese Firm Is Cleared to Buy American DNA Sequencing Company
The Chinese firm, BGI-Shenzhen, said in a statement this weekend that its acquisition of Complete Genomics, based in Mountain View, Calif., had been cleared by the federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews the national security implications of foreign takeovers of American companies. The deal still requires antitrust clearance by the Federal Trade Commission. Some scientists, politicians and industry executives had said the takeover represented a threat to American competitiveness in DNA sequencing, a technology that is becoming crucial for the development of drugs, diagnostics and improved crops. The fact that the $117.6 million deal was controversial at all reflects a change in the genomics community. A decade ago, the Human Genome Project, in which scientists from many nations helped unravel the genetic blueprint of mankind, was celebrated for its spirit of international cooperation. One of the participants in the project was BGI, which was then known as the Beijing Genomics Institute. But with DNA sequencing now becoming a big business and linchpin of the biotechnology industry, international rivalries and nationalism are starting to move front and center in any acquisition. Much of the alarm about the deal has been raised by Illumina, a San Diego company that is the market leader in sequencing machines. It has potentially the most to lose from the deal because BGI might buy fewer Illumina products and even become a competitor. Weeks after the BGI deal was announced, Illumina made its own belated bid for Complete Genomics, offering 15 cents a share more than BGI’s bid of $3.15. But Complete Genomics rebuffed Illumina, saying such a merger would never clear antitrust review. Illumina also hired a Washington lobbyist, the Glover Park Group, to stir up opposition to the deal in Congress. Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia, was the only member of Congress known to have publicly expressed concern. BGI and Complete Genomics point out that Illumina has long sold its sequencing machines — including a record-setting order of 128 high-end machines — to BGI without raising any security concerns. Sequencing machines have not been subject to export controls like aerospace equipment, lasers, sensors and other gear that can have clear military uses. “Illumina has never previously considered its business with BGI as ‘sensitive’ in the least,” Ye Yin, the chief operating officer of BGI, said in a November letter to Complete Genomics that was made public in a regulatory filing. In the letter, Illumina was accused of “obvious hypocrisy.” BGI and Complete said that Illumina was trying to derail the agreement and acquire Complete Genomics itself in order to “eliminate its closest competitor, Complete.” BGI is already one of the most prolific DNA sequencers in the world, but it buys the sequencing machines it uses from others, mainly Illumina. Illumina, joined by some American scientists, said it worried that if BGI gained access to Complete’s sequencing technology, the Chinese company might use low prices to undercut the American sequencing companies that now dominate the industry. Some also said that with Complete Genomics providing an American base, BGI would have access to more DNA samples from Americans, helping it compile a huge database of genetic information that could be used to develop drugs and diagnostic tests. Some also worried about protection of the privacy of genetic information. “What’s to stop them from mining genomic data of American samples to some unknown nefarious end?” Elaine R. Mardis, co-director of the genome sequencing center at Washington University in St. Louis, said in an e-mail. Dr. Mardis could not specify what kind of nefarious end she imagined. But opponents of the deal cited a November article in The Atlantic saying that in the future, pathogens could be genetically engineered to attack particular individuals, including the president, based on their DNA sequences. BGI and Complete Genomics dismissed such concerns as preposterous.
Explosions in Iraq Kill at Least 10
Tensions between Shi'ite, Kurdish and Sunni factions in Iraq's power-sharing government have been on the rise this year. Militants strike almost daily and have staged at least one big attack a month. The latest violence followed more than a week of protests against Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki by thousands of people from the minority Sunni community. No group claimed responsibility for any of Monday's attacks, which targeted government officials, police patrols and members of both the Sunni and Shi'ite communities. Seven people from the same Sunni family were killed by a bomb planted near their home in the town of Mussayab, south of Baghdad. In the Shi'ite majority city of Hilla, also in the south, a parked car bomb went off near the convoy of the governor of Babil province, missing him but killing two other people, police said. "We heard the sound of a big explosion and the windows of our office shattered. We immediately lay on the ground," said 28-year-old Mohammed Ahmed, who works at a hospital near the site of the explosion. "After a few minutes I stood up and went to the windows to see what happened. I saw flames and people lying on the ground." In the capital Baghdad, five people were killed by a parked car bomb targeting pilgrims before a Shi'ite religious rite this week, police and hospital sources said. Although violence is far lower than during the sectarian slaughter of 2006-2007, about 2,000 people have been killed in Iraq this year following the withdrawal last December of U.S. troops, who led an invasion in 2003 to overthrow Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein. SUNNIS PROTEST Violence also hit Iraq's disputed territories, over which both the central government and the autonomous Kurdish region claim jurisdiction. Three militants and one Kurdish guard were killed in the oil-producing, ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, where militants driving a car packed with explosives tried to break into a Kurdish security office. Earlier on Monday, two policemen were killed in Kirkuk when a bomb they were trying to detonate exploded prematurely. An army official and his bodyguard were also killed in a drive-by shooting in the south of the city. Kirkuk lies at the heart of a feud between Baghdad and Kurdistan over land and oil rights, which escalated last month when both sides deployed their respective armies to the swath of territory along their contested internal boundary. Efforts to ease the standoff stalled when President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd seen as a steadying influence, suffered a stroke and was flown abroad for medical care in December. Maliki then detained the bodyguards of his Sunni finance minister, which ignited anti-government protests in the western province of Anbar, a Sunni stronghold on the border with Syria. A lecturer in law at Baghdad University said the protests could help create the conditions for militant Islamist groups like al Qaeda to thrive. "Raising tension in Anbar and other provinces with mainly Sunni populations is definitely playing into the hands of al Qaeda and other insurgent groups," Ahmed Younis said. More than 1,000 people protested in the city of Samarra on Monday and rallies continued in Ramadi, center of the protests, and in Mosul, where about 500 people took to the streets. In the city of Falluja, where protesters have also staged large rallies and blocked a major highway over the past week, gunmen attacked an army checkpoint, killing one soldier. Protesters are demanding an end to what they see as the marginalization of Sunnis, who dominated the country until the U.S.-led invasion. They want Maliki to abolish anti-terrorism laws they say are used to persecute them. On Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, himself a Sunni, was forced to flee a protest in Ramadi when demonstrators pelted him with stones and bottles. The civil war in neighboring Syria, where majority Sunnis are fighting to topple a ruler backed by Shi'ite Iran, is also whipping up sectarian sentiment in Iraq. "The toppling of President Bashar al-Assad and empowerment of Sunnis (in Syria) will definitely encourage al Qaeda to regain ground," Younis said. (Reporting by Ali al-Rubaie in Hilla, Mustafa Mahmoud and Omar Mohammed in Kirkuk, Ali Mohammed in Baquba and Ahmed Rasheed and Aseel Kami in Baghdad; Writing by Isabel Coles; Editing by Alison Williams)
Fired, but Firing Back Over Dealings in Washington
But this is not a typical hard-luck story of setback amid a recession. Since he was fired almost four years ago, Mr. Payne, 41, has been locked in a bitter dispute with the city’s chief financial officer, Natwar M. Gandhi, his former boss and one of the most powerful unelected officials in Washington. Mr. Payne asserted in a lawsuit filed in 2010 that he was fired for drawing attention to misconduct in city contracting; Mr. Gandhi has countered by calling him a disgruntled employee. At least one federal criminal investigation has sprung directly from concerns that Mr. Payne says he raised when he was a contracting officer and included in a lawsuit over his dismissal. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Mr. Gandhi’s office as well. The legal feud has taken an unusually personal tone. In a second lawsuit, Mr. Payne accused Mr. Gandhi of defaming him in public statements and in private e-mail circulated to business leaders, preventing him from finding new work. “The uncomfortable questions I’ve raised have made it difficult for district officials to continue those practices,” Mr. Payne said. “This feels like a measure of retribution.” Mr. Payne was fired, he has said, for resisting efforts by city officials, including Mayor Vincent C. Gray and at least one City Council member, to scrap a $38 million lottery contract with the winning bidder. The fight has played out in the footlights of another scandal: an inquiry into Mr. Gray’s 2010 election, which has been tainted by revelations that a wealthy supporter bankrolled an off-the-books “shadow campaign.” In unrelated scandals, two City Council members resigned this year after one pleaded guilty to bank fraud and the other to theft. Mr. Payne has been something of a voice in the wilderness as intrigue has swirled around the mayor and the Council. But his accusations about misconduct in the lottery contracting process have gained attention recently as new controversies have emerged over Mr. Gandhi’s stewardship of his office. In October, his internal affairs chief, William J. DiVello, abruptly stepped down over what he said was pressure to shield internal audits from public view. The S.E.C. is investigating. Mr. Gandhi’s office denies that such a policy exists. In early December, Mr. Gandhi faced blunt questions at a tense City Council committee hearing that touched on his dispute with Mr. Payne. A former council member, William P. Lightfoot, called Mr. Payne’s account “a story about villains and a hero.” “I think Mr. Payne spoke truth to power, and power decided they were going to crush him,” he said. “It’s just that simple.” Council members who sought a public airing of the circumstances around Mr. Payne’s firing left disappointed. Mr. Gandhi sat silently as his lawyer told frustrated council members he could not discuss the case because of the litigation. Jack Evans, a council member and chairman of the finance committee, said: “Someone is going to explain to this committee what happened. We can do it today, we can do it next week, we can do it next month, but at some point, someone is going to explain.” A spokesman for Mr. Gandhi declined an interview request. Mr. Gandhi is considered the guardian of Washington’s treasury, a position created during the city’s near-insolvency in the 1990s. But his credibility was damaged several years ago after Harriette M. Walters, a manager in the city tax office, pleaded guilty to stealing $48 million, raising questions about oversight in his office.
Doctors Expect Clinton to Recover Fully From Blood Clot Near Brain
Mrs. Clinton was hospitalized Sunday at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for the blood clot — in a vein between the brain and the skull and behind her right ear — and doctors said on Monday that it had not resulted in a stroke or neurological damage. They said they were treating her with blood thinners to try to dissolve the clot. “She will be released once the medication dose has been established,” according to the statement from Dr. Lisa Bardack and Dr. Gigi El-Bayoumi. Clots like the one Mrs. Clinton has can be serious, said doctors not involved in her care. Dr. David Langer, a brain surgeon and an associate professor at the North Shore-Hofstra-Long Island Jewish School of Medicine, said that if this type of clot was untreated, it could cause blood to back up, and could lead to a hemorrhage inside the brain. Mrs. Clinton’s doctors struck an upbeat tone in their statement. “In all other aspects of her recovery, the secretary is making excellent progress, and we are confident she will make a full recovery,” the statement said. “She is in good spirits, engaging with her doctors, her family and her staff." The sudden turn in Mrs. Clinton’s condition appeared to take members of her staff by surprise. As recently as Sunday afternoon, they thought she was on the mend and ready to return to work this week. “Yep, she’s looking forward to getting back to the office this week and resuming her schedule (plan is Wednesday),” Mrs. Clinton’s close aide, Philippe Reines, replied to an e-mail inquiry. But by 7:30 p.m. Sunday, all that had changed. Mrs. Clinton, who had been home for more than two weeks nursing injuries sustained after she fainted and hit her head, suffering a concussion, had been admitted at NewYork-Presbyterian with an ominous diagnosis: a blood clot stemming from the concussion, Mr. Reines said. Instantly, the woman who, before even announcing, has been widely viewed as a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, someone who has spent the past four years keeping up a grueling schedule in which she racked up miles as the most-traveled secretary of state and visited 112 countries, was seeming uncharacteristically fragile. Instead of talking about who might be her running mate, or how she had, even on Monday, again been named the most admired woman in America in a Gallup poll, the chatter on the Potomac shifted to talk about how, at the end of the day, she is a 65-year-old woman trying to recover after falling and hitting her head. This being Washington, there was plenty of political finger-pointing. On Twitter, those sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton lashed out at Republican critics who had accused her of faking her illness. BuzzFeed helpfully chronicled the top “eight people who thought Hillary Clinton was faking her concussion” because she did not want to testify before Congress on the Benghazi attacks. They included The New York Post, which called her concussion a “head fake,” and the Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, who called her illness “acute Benghazi allergy.” David Rothkopf, an acting Commerce Department under secretary in the Bill Clinton administration, strongly criticized the quick politicizing of Mrs. Clinton’s health, both by allies and foes. “It’s a sign of the level of politicization that this woman could be lying in a hospital bed dealing with a serious issue and the first reaction of all these people is politics,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “There’s no politics in a blood clot.” “The point is,” he added, “people should just stop and be human beings.” Mrs. Clinton’s friends say they have become increasingly concerned about her since she fell ill in mid-December from a stomach virus that left her severely dehydrated. She was vomiting constantly, friends said, and fell forward, hitting her head and blacking out. The result, one friend said, was a contusion on her eye and on her brain. She was forced to cancel a trip to the Middle East and Africa that had been planned for the next week. On Dec. 13, doctors diagnosed a concussion, and she had been kept since then to limited activity, according to a friend of Mrs. Clinton’s who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to discuss her illness publicly. Mr. Reines said that on Sunday, during a follow-up exam, doctors found a blood clot and hospitalized her. “Her doctors will continue to assess her condition, including other issues associated with her concussion,” he said in a statement Sunday night. Dr. Geoff Manley, vice chairman of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, said patients with this condition generally needed to be treated in an intensive care unit, by specialists with expertise in this kind of clot. The treatment usually begins with intravenous blood thinning drugs, and scans to monitor the clot. After a few days, patients can usually be moved to a regular hospital floor and be gradually switched from intravenous drugs to pills. Barring complications, after a few more days they can usually go home. But the clot may take weeks or months to dissolve, and treatment will continue for even longer to prevent a recurrence. This type of venous clot is more common in women than in men, Dr. Langer said, particularly with dehydration. But it is impossible to say exactly what caused it in Mrs. Clinton’s case — her head injury, the illness, some other factor or a combination. Given that she has had a blood clot in the past — in her leg in 1998 — she may be prone to form clots, and may need lifelong treatment to prevent them, possibly with low doses of aspirin or other blood-thinning drugs.
Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Denise Grady from New York. Lawrence K. Altman contributed research.
2 Firefighters Are Killed in Shooting Rampage Near Rochester
“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,” Mr. Spengler, 62, wrote, in a note the police recovered. It had been 32 years since he beat his grandmother to death with a hammer in the Lake Road house next to his. As Christmas Eve dawned in this suburb of Rochester, local authorities say, Mr. Spengler set fire to a car, as a trap. When an engine company came roaring down the street, he started shooting at the first responders, most likely from his Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle. It was the same type of semiautomatic weapon used in the school shooting 10 days earlier in Newtown, Conn. “He was equipped to go to war to kill innocent people,” the Webster police chief, Gerald L. Pickering, said of Mr. Spengler. The authorities say Mr. Spengler fired shots that killed two volunteer firefighters from long range and seriously wounded two others, and set a “raging inferno.” The police found him dead on a berm about five hours after the siege started, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. On Tuesday, the authorities added another likely victim: Cheryl Spengler, 67, the gunman’s sister. Chief Pickering said “human remains” were found at the shooter’s house, 191 Lake Road, that they believed were of Ms. Spengler. The Monroe County medical examiner’s office did not return requests for comment on the identification of the remains or the cause of death. Mr. Spengler’s note, Chief Pickering said, contained no motive, just ramblings, and spoke only to a murderous intent. He said he was not at liberty to disclose it in full because of the investigation. As investigators tried on Tuesday to determine reasons for the brutal acts that shattered the holiday peace of a close-knit town, details emerged about Mr. Spengler and his bitter relationship with his sister. A relative said it was possible the two were in a dispute over who would inherit the family home after their mother’s death in October. The siblings had such antipathy for each other that they lived on separate sides of the house, a former neighbor, Roger D. Vercruysse, said Monday. “He hated his sister, but he loved his mama,” Mr. Vercruysse said. Mr. Spengler was 30 in the summer of 1980 when he killed his 92-year-old grandmother, Rose. According to newspaper accounts from the time, he lied to his mother, saying he had found her at the bottom of the stairs. He accepted a plea bargain for manslaughter and went to state prison for 17 years. A 1997 transcript said Mr. Spengler abruptly cut a parole hearing short when he discovered that he did not need to be there, displaying an irascible, unrepentant attitude. He was released in 1998 and moved back home. “If you kill a family member, I don’t know why you would ever be out of jail,” Shirley Ashwood, 63, a first cousin of Mr. Spengler, said in a telephone interview from Rochester. “It frightened me, and that’s why I and my family stayed away from him.” She added: “If you’re going to kill your grandmother, you’re going to kill anybody.” Mr. Spengler adored his mother, however. When Arline Spengler was in a nearby nursing home, Mr. Spengler would visit her each day, Mr. Vercruysse said. Arline Spengler died on Oct. 7, at age 91. In the weeks to follow, Cheryl Spengler apparently told a relative that she had hired a lawyer because there could be issues about inheriting the house. “I could see a fight brewing, right after her mom passed,” the relative said. An account from an unintentional first responder bolstered officials’ descriptions of the harrowing siege. John Ritter, a police officer from the nearby town of Greece, said in an interview in his home on Tuesday that he was driving to work around 5:35 a.m. on Monday when he suddenly came upon the scene. He had no scanner in his car, nor did he have a weapon. “I came around the corner, and the fire truck is in the road backing up on the left,” said Officer Ritter, showing a deep bruise on his left breast area and cuts on his left arm. “I hear popping. Several pops. Suddenly my windshield explodes and there’s a hole right in front of my head. I was in shock. I leaned over into the passenger seat and slammed it in reverse around the corner, out of the line of sight.” Chief Pickering said another officer from his department had returned fire from his own rifle. The chief did not reveal that officer’s name. Funeral arrangements were being made for the volunteer firefighters who were killed: Michael Chiapperini, 43, and Tomasz Kaczowka, 19. The two firefighters who were severely wounded, Theodore Scardino and Joseph Hofstetter, remained in stable condition, in the intensive care unit at Strong Memorial Hospital. In the chaos, seven houses burned and 33 residents were displaced. Chief Pickering said all people were accounted for. Displaced residents were waiting Tuesday night to return to their homes along Lake Road. John Kohut, 68, whose house burned down in Mr. Spengler’s attack, described him as quiet, socially awkward and “kind of rough” from his years spent in prison. Last summer, Mr. Kohut had asked him if he wanted a beer because it was a hot day. “He said, ‘No, because I’m on meds,’ ” Mr. Kohut recalled Tuesday, while waiting to be let back onto Lake Road.
Liz Robbins reported from Webster, and Joseph Goldstein from New York. Reporting was contributed by Alain Delaquérière, Patrick McGeehan and Michael D. Regan.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 25, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of Mr. Spengler’s sister. She is Cheryl Spengler, not Cherly.
China Toughens Restrictions on Internet Use
The decision came as government censors have sharply stepped up restrictions on China’s international Internet traffic in recent weeks. The restrictions are making it harder for businesses to protect commercial secrets and for individuals to view overseas Web sites that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive. The new regulations, issued by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, allow Internet users to continue to adopt pseudonyms for their online postings, but only if they first provide their real names to service providers, a measure that could chill some of the vibrant discourse on the country’s Twitter-like microblogs. The authorities periodically detain and even jail Internet users for politically sensitive comments, such as calls for a multiparty democracy or accusations of impropriety by local officials. Any entity providing Internet access, including over fixed-line or mobile phones, “should when signing agreements with users or confirming provision of services, demand that users provide true information about their identities,” the committee ordered. In recent weeks, Internet users in China have exposed a series of sexual and financial scandals that have led to the resignations or dismissals of at least 10 local officials. International news media have also published a series of reports in recent months on the accumulation of wealth by the family members of China’s leaders, and some Web sites carrying such reports, including Bloomberg’s and the English- and Chinese-language sites of The New York Times, have been assiduously blocked, while Internet comments about them have been swiftly deleted. The regulations issued Friday build on a series of similar administrative guidelines and municipal rules issued over the past year. China’s mostly private Internet service providers have been slow to comply with them, fearing the reactions of their customers. The committee’s decision has much greater legal force, and puts far more pressure on Chinese Internet providers to comply more quickly and more comprehensively, Internet specialists said. In what appeared to be an effort to make the decision more palatable to the Chinese public, the committee also included a mandate for businesses in China to be more cautious in gathering and protecting electronic data. “Nowadays on the Internet there are very serious problems with citizens’ personal electronic information being recklessly collected, used without approval, illegally disclosed, and even traded and sold,” Li Fei, a deputy director of the committee’s legislative affairs panel, said on Friday at a news conference in Beijing. “There are also a large number of cases of invasive attacks on information systems to steal personal electronic information, as well as lawbreaking on the Internet through swindles and through defaming and slandering others.” Mr. Li denied that the government was seeking to prevent the exposure of corruption. “When citizens exercise these rights according to the law, no organization or individual can use any reason or excuse to interfere, and cannot suppress them or exact revenge,” he said. “At the same time, when citizens exercise their rights, including through use of the Internet, they should stay within the bounds of the Constitution and the laws, and must not harm the legitimate rights and interests of the state, society, the collective or of other citizens.” A spokesman for the National People’s Congress said that 145 members of the committee voted in favor of the new rules, with 5 abstaining and 1 voting against them. The requirement for real names appeared to be aimed particularly at cellphone companies and other providers of mobile Internet access. At the news conference, an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Zhao Zhiguo, said that nearly all fixed-line services now had real-name registration, but that only about 70 percent of mobile phones were registered under real names.
Gaps in F.B.I. Data Undercut Background Checks for Guns
The database is incomplete because many states have not provided federal authorities with comprehensive records of people involuntarily committed or otherwise ruled mentally ill. Records are also spotty for several other categories of prohibited buyers, including those who have tested positive for illegal drugs or have a history of domestic violence. While some states, including New York, have submitted more than 100,000 names of mentally ill people to the F.B.I. database, 19 — including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Maryland and Maine — have submitted fewer than 100 records and Rhode Island has submitted none, according to federal data compiled by Mayors Against Illegal Guns. That suggests that millions of names are missing from the federal database, gun control advocates and law enforcement officials say. “Until it has all the records of people out there in the country who have been deemed too dangerous to own a firearm, the background check system still looks like Swiss cheese,” said Mark Glaze, director of the group. The gaps exist because the system is voluntary; the Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that the federal government cannot force state officials to participate in the federal background check system. As a result, when a gun dealer asks the F.B.I. to check a buyer’s history, the bureau sometimes allows the sale to proceed, even though the purchaser should have been prohibited from acquiring a weapon, because its database is missing the relevant records. While the database flaws do not appear to have been a factor in the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, they have been linked to other attacks, including the Virginia Tech mass murder in 2007. In that case, a Virginia state judge had declared the gunman mentally ill, but the record of that proceeding was not submitted to the F.B.I. He was able to pass a background check and buy the weapons he used to kill 32 people and wound 17 others. Since then, Virginia has increased its submissions to the F.B.I. But other states have not taken similar steps because of lack of political will, technical obstacles and state privacy laws, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which conducted a survey of states last year about their compliance. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York is a co-chairman of the group. A July report by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan Congressional watchdog, found that the total number of mental health records submitted by states to the background check system increased to 1.2 million from about 126,000 between 2004 and 2011, but that the increase largely reflected the efforts of just 12 states. And, it found, 30 states were not making noncriminal records — like positive drug test results for people on probation — available to the system. Charles H. Ramsey, the police commissioner in Philadelphia, said the system needed to be strengthened immediately. “There is a lot of data sitting in different places, and we need to be able to access it in a timely fashion,” he said. “It ought to be a top priority now.” The gaps in the database have exacerbated the effect of a loophole that results in violent felons, fugitives and the mentally ill being able to buy firearms when the F.B.I. cannot determine the person’s history during a three-day waiting period. Roughly 97 percent of the time, specialists said, the F.B.I. can provide an instant answer, but sometimes an ambiguity — an arrest record that does not say whether someone was convicted, or a common name — requires calling local courthouses to track down the information. That can cause delays as local officials search through records, some of which are not yet digitized, law enforcement officials said. If the F.B.I. investigation is not completed within the waiting period, would-be gun buyers are permitted to go ahead. Since 2005, 22,162 firearms — including nearly 3,000 this year — have been bought after the waiting period by people later determined to have been disqualified because of their criminal and mental histories, according to an examination of F.B.I. data. Some of the weapons were used in violent crimes, including a fatal drive-by shooting, but it is not clear how many were linked to criminal acts, because authorities are barred by Congress from tracking such information.
G.O.P. Yields on Fiscal Point, Clearing Way for More Talks
In seesaw negotiations, the two sides got closer on the central issue of how to define the wealthy taxpayers who would be required to pay more once the Bush-era tax cuts expire. But that progress was overshadowed by gamesmanship. After Republicans demanded that any deal must include a new way of calculating inflation that would mean smaller increases in payments to beneficiaries of programs like Social Security, Democrats halted the negotiations for much of the day. The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, made an emergency call to Mr. Biden in hopes of restarting negotiations, and the White House sent the president’s chief legislative negotiator to the Capitol to meet with Senate Democrats. Soon after, Republicans withdrew their demand and discussions resumed, but little progress was made. Lawmakers will be back on Monday. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said the Senate would return at 11 a.m. Monday and then left the Capitol just after 6 p.m. “Talk to Joe Biden and McConnell,” Mr. Reid told reporters when asked if negotiations were continuing. In the balance are more than a half-trillion dollars in tax increases on virtually every working American and across-the-board spending cuts that are scheduled to begin Tuesday. Taken together, they threaten to push the economy back into recession. “It looks awful,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat. “I’m sure the American people are saying, with so much at stake why are they waiting so late to get this done?” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who had said early Sunday that he thought a deal was within reach, said later on his Twitter feed, “I think we’re going over the cliff.” Weeks of negotiations between President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner inched toward a deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff, while locking in trillions of dollars in deficit reduction over 10 years and starting an effort to overhaul the tax code and entitlement programs like Medicare. But earlier this month, Mr. Boehner walked away from those talks. Instead he tried to reach a much more modest deal to avoid a fiscal crisis by extending the expiring tax cuts for incomes under $1 million. When Mr. Boehner’s own Republican members revolted, he ceded negotiations to the Senate. But compromise has proved equally elusive in that chamber. Absent a last-minute deal, Mr. Reid is expected to move on Monday to bring to a vote a stopgap measure pushed by Mr. Obama, which would retain lower tax rates for incomes below $250,000 and extend unemployment benefits. But it was not clear that would even get a vote. The objection of a single senator on Monday would run out the clock on the 112th Congress before a final tally could be taken. Mr. Obama appeared on the NBC program “Meet the Press” on Sunday and implored Congress to act. “We have been talking to the Republicans ever since the election was over,” Mr. Obama said in the interview. “They have had trouble saying yes to a number of repeated offers.” He added, “Now the pressure’s on Congress to produce.” After the talks broke down over the inflation demand, Senate Republicans emerged from a closed-door meeting on Sunday afternoon to declare the issue off the table for now. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said that holding the line against raising taxes on high-income households while fighting for cuts to Social Security was “not a winning hand.” Then they mustered a new talking point, saying Democrats want to raise taxes only to spend more money. Their new objection: Democrats are seeking a one- to two-year “pause” for across-the-board spending cuts and an extension of expired unemployment benefits for two million people. “We raise taxes, and we spend more?” asked Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas. “It’s business as usual.” For their part, Democrats beat back the inflation proposal, and then promptly proclaimed themselves incensed that Republicans would not soften their position on a generous level of taxation on inherited estates and an insistence that a final deal permanently prevent the alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax system meant to ensure that wealthy people pay more, from expanding to affect more of the middle class. Democrats were also demanding that across-the-board cuts to military and domestic programs — known as the “sequester” — at least be delayed.
Robert Pear and John M. Broder contributed reporting.
Bolivia Reduces Coca Plantings by Licensing Growers
President Evo Morales, who first came to prominence as a leader of coca growers, kicked out the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2009. That ouster, together with events like the arrest last year of the former head of the Bolivian anti-narcotics police on trafficking charges, led Washington to conclude that Bolivia was not meeting its global obligations to fight narcotics. But despite the rift with the United States, Bolivia, the world’s third-largest cocaine producer, has advanced its own unorthodox approach toward controlling the growing of coca, which veers markedly from the wider war on drugs and includes high-tech monitoring of thousands of legal coca patches intended to produce coca leaf for traditional uses. To the surprise of many, this experiment has now led to a significant drop in coca plantings in Mr. Morales’s Bolivia, an accomplishment that has largely occurred without the murders and other violence that have become the bloody byproduct of American-led measures to control trafficking in Colombia, Mexico and other parts of the region. Yet there are also worrisome signs that such gains are being undercut as traffickers use more efficient methods to produce cocaine and outmaneuver Bolivian law enforcement to keep drugs flowing out of the country. In one key sign of progress in Bolivia’s approach toward coca, the total acres planted with coca dropped 12 to 13 percent last year, according to separate reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. At the same time, the Bolivian government stepped up efforts to rip out unauthorized coca plantings and reported an increase in seizures of cocaine and cocaine base. “It’s fascinating to look at a country that kicked out the United States ambassador and the D.E.A., and the expectation on the part of the United States is that drug war efforts would fall apart,” said Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network, a Bolivian research group. Instead, she said, Bolivia’s approach is “showing results.” Still, there is skepticism. “Our perspective is they’ve made real advances, and they’re a long way from where we’d like to see them,” said Larry Memmott, chargé d’affaires of the American Embassy in La Paz. “In terms of law enforcement, a lot remains to be done.” Although Bolivia outlaws cocaine, it permits the growing of coca for traditional uses. Bolivians chew coca leaf as a mild stimulant and use it as a medicine, as a tea and, particularly among the majority indigenous population, in religious rituals. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Rojas placed a few dried leaves into his mouth and watched the sun set over his coca field, slightly less than two-fifths of an acre, the maximum allowed per farmer here in this region, known as the Chapare. “This is a way to keep it under control,” he said, spitting a stream of green juice. “Everyone should have the same amount.” Mr. Rojas is a face of a changing region. He makes far more money growing bananas for export on about 74 acres than he does growing coca. But he has no intention of giving up his tiny coca plot. “What happens if a disease attacks the bananas?” he asked. “Then we still have the coca to save us.” The Bolivian government has persuaded growers that by limiting the amount of plantings, coca prices will remain high. And it has largely focused eradication efforts, of the kind that once spurred strong popular resistance, outside the areas controlled by growers’ unions, like in national parks. The registration of thousands of Chapare growers, completed this year, is part of an enforcement system that relies on growers to police one another. If registered growers are found to have plantings above the maximum allowed, soldiers are called in to remove the excess. If growers violate the limit a second time, their entire crop is cut down and they lose the right to grow coca. Growers’ unions can also be punished if there are multiple violations among their members. “We have to be constantly vigilant,” said Nelson Sejas, a Chapare grower who was part of a team that checked coca plots to make sure they did not exceed the limit. But there is still plenty of cheating. Officials say they are going over the registry of about 43,000 Chapare growers to find those who may have multiple plots or who may violate other rules.
Jean Friedman-Rudovsky contributed reporting from Ivirgarzama, Bolivia.
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