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.

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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.

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The Saturday Profile: Maria Bashir, Afghan Prosecutor, Faces New Line of Attack Over Her Pursuit of ‘Moral Crimes’

MARIA BASHIR, the only woman serving as chief prosecutor in any of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, does more than just walk the line between the progressive and the conservative — she has, uncomfortably, come to personify it.

Ms. Bashir, 42, is used to personal and even physical attacks from traditionalists because of her role as one of the country’s most senior female public officials and her work promoting women’s rights.

The outside world recognizes the ideal she represents as well as the dangers. Last year, in Washington, Michelle Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lauded her with a State Department International Women of Courage award.

“For uneducated men, but also even educated men, it is still very difficult to accept that a woman should be in a position of making decisions,” Ms. Bashir said, talking in her office tucked behind a gantlet of metal detectors and glowering security guards at the government compound in the western province of Herat.

But recently, Ms. Bashir has had to endure criticism of a less-familiar kind — that she has hurt women with her own conservatism.

Ms. Bashir’s office is jailing women for so-called moral crimes — like adultery, or even attempted adultery, an accusation that opens the door to being jailed merely for being alone with a man who is not in the family — at nearly the highest pace in Afghanistan, according to government records.

The country’s laws, though they have been changing over the past decade, are still criticized by human rights groups as being particularly harsh for women. And many women are languishing in jail on adultery convictions even though they were the victims of rape, forced into prostitution, or simply ran away from abusive homes.

Ms. Bashir insists that she must uphold the law of the land, even as she works to improve opportunities for Afghan women. But concern over her prosecution statistics this fall sent ripples through the human rights community in Afghanistan.

Most rights advocates express respect for her. Still, she has become the focus of a whole body of disquieting questions for international officials working here: How far should you support a woman who personally represents change but also consistently enforces customs that the West sees as discriminatory? How far and how long can you push another society to change, and when do you accept it and compromise?

In its way, too, her case restates the questions dogging the entire American involvement in Afghanistan: Is the United States here merely to fight the Taliban or rebuild the country along Western lines? And now that the United States has said it is leaving, what progress has really been won, and what will endure when it is gone?

Ms. Bashir knows how discrimination feels personally. She was a prosecutor in Herat, her husband’s home province, but had to give up her job when the Taliban came to power in the 1990s.

She went underground, furtively teaching women and girls from her neighborhood in her home.

AFTER the Taliban fell, she got her job back and has been the chief prosecutor in Herat for the past five years, and a focus of attention for the international community.

She has worked with the United Nations, giving lectures at high schools and universities titled, “If I Did It, You Can Do It, Too.” In those speeches, and in other settings both public and private, she urges Afghan girls and young women to expand their ambitions and strive for jobs outside the home as lawyers or doctors.

For many in this country, hers is an unwelcome message.

During a recent interview in her office, Ms. Bashir was methodical, even understated, as she discussed much of her work. But when the talk turned to the patriarchal society that dominates here, her eyes showed the fire that distinguishes her — and has helped her survive — in a place where women in powerful posts are rare.

“We have the mullahs, we have the former jihadis,” she said. “They don’t spare any effort to weaken or defame you. They talk about your clothes; they talk about the fact you have been talking to foreigners and talking to men.”

Habib Zahori and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

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