MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS

 About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden

Alternatives to Schools

 This was another hard and gut-wrenching report related to the COVID-19 crisis.

As schools are being closed in some regions of the developing world, child are being sent to the street, exploited as sources for cheap labor. 

While hunger is stalking children from Afghanistan to South Sudan, young girls in sex works and pregnancies shooting up in Uganda.

This happens while other sectors of society (bars, gyms, subway, etc.) have been allowed to reopen, begging the question: what is the root of all this discordance.  

Haneke Presents: "Amour"

 By Sunday morning the 65th Cannes Film Festival had its first masterwork and an overwhelming critical favorite in Michael Haneke’s “Amour.” A tender, wrenching, impeccably directed story of love and death, the French-language film stars Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant as a Parisian couple in their 80s — named Georges and Anne, as are most of Mr. Haneke’s middle-class couples — struggling with an increasingly debilitating illness and the specter of what comes next. One day over breakfast she suffers a frightening episode that leaves her briefly locked in a mute, seemingly unaware blankness. She’s there, but not, and then just as suddenly she returns.

A hospital stay follows along with an operation, a grim prognosis, a slide into helplessness, the expected accumulation of humiliations, natural and not, and swells of emotion. Half-frozen by a stroke, Anne’s body has begun to betray her, but Georges holds her so very close: he brushes her hair, bathes and dresses her. Somewhat stooped, with a shaky, hitchy walk, he trembles when he lifts her from the bed or a chair, but he keeps holding on. The first time he has to help her move from her wheelchair, she tells him how to grasp her properly, as if in a hug, a gesture that’s poignant in its literalness — they press into each other — and reverberant of an erotic life shared and still remembered.

Mr. Haneke has often turned his cool gaze toward power and violence, and in some respects he has done so again in “Amour,” one difference being that he’s also made room here for tenderness. Part of the film’s emotional force is due to the actors, both superb, and to the poignancy of watching these two familiar, now frail bodies of cinema, as it were, performing in a pantomime of sickness and death. This very real fragility makes a sharp contrast with the bodies cinema immortalizes — eternally young — and it seems telling that Mr. Haneke, who likes to pick at screen illusion, cast actors who starred in two of the most famous French films of all time: Mr. Trintignant was the titular man from “A Man and a Woman” and Ms. Riva played the nameless woman in “Hiroshima Mon Amour.”

“Amour” sent a charge through the packed, rapt 2,300-seat theater, and immediately suggested that there was more to the official lineup than the first few days had suggested. The competition had gotten off toa terrific start with Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom,” even if not everyone was equally convinced. A similar critical ambivalence greeted another strong competition entry, “Beyond the Hills,” from the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who won the Palme in 2007 for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” His new film centers on two young women who, after a reunion, are slowly and forcibly separated by different faiths: Alina (Cristina Flutur) believes in their friendship while Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) has turned to God and become a nun in a tiny Christian Orthodox sect.

Set largely in Voichita’s monastery, a windswept outcropping of buildings in the deep countryside, the story unfolds in atmospheric bits and narrative pieces. Alina and Voichita are lifelong friends, having grown up in the same orphanage. Alina, the stronger, more stubbornly independent of the two, has returned home after a stint working in Germany and thinking that she and Voichita will go off together. Mr. Mungiu, who prefers that viewers come to their own conclusions, never makes it clear if the women are lovers — “You will think whatever you will think,” he said during the party for his film Saturday — though a scene in which Voichita massages Alina’s back, then looks away when Alina turns over, baring her breasts, suggests private worlds of complication.

Shot on film and running two-and-a-half engrossing hours, “Beyond the Hills” explores the push and pull between the collective and the individual, between faith and free will. Voichita insists that she wants to stay at the monastery, where she and some dozen other nuns — along with chickens, boxes of bees and a kind of Greek chorus of incessantly barking dogs — live without electricity under the strict religious supervision of a priest. With mounting desperation and increasingly violent outbursts, Alina tries to change Voichita’s mind. Believing in a world of absolute good and evil, and confused by Alina’s passion, the nuns and priest respond by trying to ritualistically drive out the Devil, an ordeal that effectively pits one woman against a millennium of religious orthodoxy.

At his party, a typical Cannes beach affair with pounding beats and revelers swarming the open bar, Mr. Mungiu talked about his film, the difficulties of shooting in winter and working with a young, untested cast. He based the screenplay (originally 245 pages!) on a pair of fact-based books by Tatiana Niculescu Bran about a real nun who died after being gagged and tied to a cross for days in a Romanian monastery during an exorcism. (Ms. Bran turned her first book into a play, “Deadly Confession,” which was staged at La MaMa in 2008.) It’s a shocker of a story, yet while Mr. Mungiu’s sympathies are transparently with Alina he neither sentimentalizes her — he keeps her at both an emotional and visual distance — nor does he demonize the priest or, especially, the nuns.

“The film should be watched and judged from each character’s perspective,” he explained, giving the larger, suggestively political view. “This is how you will discover that it is difficult to say who is guilty, because the people who are really guilty are not in the film. They are the people who created this kind of society, the people who created education that completely lacks the very important moral values that people should have.”


@NYTIMES

A Warning Shot For Putin

Russia's parliamentary election last Sunday saw Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's party, United Russia, receive slightly less than 50 percent of the popular vote. In most countries, this would be viewed as a stunning victory. Instead, it is being interpreted by the Russian and Western press as a rebuke by a restive Russian public to Putin and his policies.
Although the electoral results are undoubtedly a signal to Putin and his political protégé, President Dmitry Medvedev, that Russian voters will not blindly follow wherever the Kremlin leads, in reality they do not portend seismographic shifts in the Russian political landscape.
Some reports, including that of The New York Times earlier this week, have argued that with only 238 seats in the 450-seat Duma, as opposed to the 315 parliamentary seats it previously held, United Russia will now be unable to change the Russian constitution unilaterally. True enough -- but what they fail to mention is that the Kremlin has little need to make any significant constitutional changes in the foreseeable future. The constitution is already stacked in favor of the presidency, and even with a reduced number of seats in parliament for United Russia, the Duma will still be compliant, since no new parties have gained seats.
The Duma is already relatively powerless compared to what Russia watchers call the "super" presidency enshrined in the 1993 constitution that was hastily written by Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first elected president. Between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and 1993, Yeltsin faced a recalcitrant parliament (then called the Congress of People's Deputies), whose members resisted his attempts to reform the country's troubled economy. The standoff reached its climax in the fall of 1993, when Yeltsin disbanded parliament. When Russian deputies trapped inside the parliament building broke out and attempted to take control of a national television station, Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the building, putting an end to the showdown.
The constitution that Yeltsin then forced through by popular referendum in December 1993 resolved the issue of legislative executive power in no uncertain terms. It allows the president to rule by decree in almost every area but the budget. At the same time, the president has the authority to disband the Duma and call new elections should parliament refuse three times to accept the president's choice of prime minister, and the executive branch has full control of the country's security and defense ministries.
The ruling tandem of Putin and Medvedev has made further constitutional changes to strengthen the executive's hand. In the constitution's original version, the president could serve a maximum of two consecutive four-year terms. In his first year as president, Medvedev changed the constitution, then approved by the United Russia-dominated Duma and the compliant Federation Council (Russia's appointed upper house of parliament), to allow for two consecutive six-year terms, paving the way for Putin to serve for a total of 12 years when he retakes the presidency (as he intends to do in the upcoming March 2012 presidential elections).
What is more, even if Putin and his allies decided they needed to change the constitution (and this is doubtful), they would still have little difficulty doing so. Sunday's election results, however dispiriting for United Russia, will not bring about any significant change to the composition of the Duma. The Communist Party (which finished second with just under 20 percent of the vote, translating into 92 seats in the Duma), the Just Russia party (13 percent and 62 seats), and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (11.7 percent and about 56 seats), are exactly the same parties that have sat in the pliant Russian Duma of the past four years.
Of the three, the Communist Party has taken the most oppositional positions toward United Russia -- at least relatively speaking -- but it has seldom voted against United Russia on legislation that actually mattered. It provided modest opposition on cuts to subsidized transportation fares for pensioners, for example, but strongly supported the invasion of Georgia in 2008.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democratic Party, which was created by the Kremlin in the 1990s, has not provided any true opposition in the last ten years. Its outspoken and flamboyant leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is more concerned with attracting attention and outrage for his appearances on television than in having any substantive debate with Putin and those close to him.
Finally, although Just Russia did manage to increase its representation in the Duma over its 2007 standing, it, too, is a Kremlin construct. (The party was originally conceived as a social democratic alternative to United Russia, but one that would still vote with the ruling party on big issues.) Historically, it provided little opposition to United Russia and is unlikely to do so now.
In effect, the opposition parties that gained seats are no real opposition at all. Any true opposition forces were weeded out far in advance of Sunday's elections. Only seven political parties met the state's strict registration requirements; the courts simply did not permit other parties that represent more independent liberal alternatives to register. The leadership of some of these groups -- in particular, Boris Nemtsov of Solidarity -- are now leading street protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They have little nationwide support, however, and given the degree of state control over the media, their brave efforts this week will not bring about a popular revolution.
In the end, the biggest loser on Sunday was neither United Russia nor Putin, but rather his fall guy, Medvedev. At United Russia's party congress on September 24, Medvedev nominated Putin to take over again as president. Accepting the nomination in a well-choreographed exchange, Putin then nominated Medvedev to become his prime minister should he win the presidency next March. This "castling" of positions is evidently the straw that broke the back of many Russians' tolerance for Putin's growing autocracy. Medvedev, now the party's nominee for prime minister, was the only name that appeared on the United Russia electoral list in the Duma elections. The Kremlin's apparent logic was that Medvedev's personal popularity would carry the party to easy victory.
Given the effects within Russia of the global economic downturn, a decline in the fortunes of the ruling party was inevitable, at least relative to United Russia's high in 2007, when it captured 62 percent of the vote. But few predicted that the party would receive less than 50 percent of the vote; as of late last week, reputable Russian polling agencies were predicting that it would receive at least 53 to 55 percent. The fact that United Russia supporters resorted to ballot stuffing and other falsifications to boost their votes and still fell below 50 percent will likely affect Medvedev's political prospects the most, given that he headed the party's ticket. In a foreshadowing of exactly such a scenario, Putin late last week amended his offer of the office of prime minister to Medvedev, suggesting the post might be contingent on United Russia's performance in the Duma elections. Medvedev is now particularly vulnerable.
Despite the clear falsification of electoral results, international expressions of displeasure with the electoral process, public demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg calling for "Russia without Putin," the new Duma will most likely be seated by the end of the month. Putin's largely successful efforts to control the country's media and curb freedom of expression and assembly eviscerated any meaningful opposition years ago. Further, Putin remains personally popular, still polling at slightly below 70 percent approval. And if the need for muscle arises, Putin has already shown willingness to use the security forces to put down any opposition activity; he is also adept at mobilizing the country's state-controlled media and government-created youth groups to counter protests.
Still, although there will be no immediate seismic shift in the balance of power in Russia today, the masses have fired a warning shot at Putin's presidential bid. Protests against the election may be relatively small and are unlikely to lead to a Ukrainian-style popular revolt, but should Putin and Medvedev not appear to listen to voters and be ready to make a few concessions, they may have to resort to the sporadic use of force to keep the regime afloat.

by: Kathryn Stoner-Weiss

US Braced For Fights With Pakistanis

President Obama insisted that the assault force hunting down Osama bin Laden last week be large enough to fight its way out of Pakistan if confronted by hostile local police officers and troops, senior administration and military officials said Monday.

In revealing additional details about planning for the mission, senior officials also said that two teams of specialists were on standby: One to bury Bin Laden if he was killed, and a second composed of lawyers, interrogators and translators in case he was captured alive. That team was set to meet aboard a Navy ship, most likely the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea.
Mr. Obama’s decision to increase the size of the force sent into Pakistan shows that he was willing to risk a military confrontation with a close ally in order to capture or kill the leader of Al Qaeda.
Such a fight would have set off an even larger breach with the Pakistanis than has taken place since officials in Islamabad learned that helicopters filled with members of a Navy Seals team had flown undetected into one of their cities, and burst into a compound where Bin Laden was hiding.
One senior Obama administration official, pressed on the rules of engagement for one of the riskiest clandestine operations attempted by the C.I.A. and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command in many years, said: “Their instructions were to avoid any confrontation if at all possible. But if they had to return fire to get out, they were authorized to do it.”
The planning also illustrates how little the administration trusted the Pakistanis as they set up their operation. They also rejected a proposal to bring the Pakistanis in on the mission.

Under the original plan, two assault helicopters were going to stay on the Afghanistan side of the border waiting for a call if they were needed. But the aircraft would have been about 90 minutes away from the Bin Laden compound.
About 10 days before the raid, Mr. Obama reviewed the plans and pressed his commanders as to whether they were taking along enough forces to fight their way out if the Pakistanis arrived on the scene and tried to interfere with the operation.
That resulted in the decision to send two more helicopters carrying additional troops. These followed the two lead Black Hawk helicopters that carried the actual assault team. While there was no confrontation with the Pakistanis, one of those backup helicopters was ultimately brought in to the scene of the raid when a Black Hawk was damaged while making a hard landing.
“Some people may have assumed we could talk our way out of a jam, but given our difficult relationship with Pakistan right now, the president did not want to leave anything to chance,” said one senior administration official, who like others would not be quoted by name describing details of the secret mission. “He wanted extra forces if they were necessary.”
With tensions between the United States and Pakistan escalating since the raid, American officials on Monday sought to tamp down the divisions and pointed to some encouraging developments.
A United States official said that American investigators would soon be allowed to interview Bin Laden’s three widows, now being held by Pakistani authorities, a demand that Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, made on television talk shows on Sunday.
American officials say the widows, as well as a review of the trove of documents and other data the Seals team collected from the raid, could reveal important details, not only about Bin Laden’s life and activities since he fled into Pakistan from Afghanistan in 2001, but also information about Qaeda plots, personnel and planning.
“We believe that it is very important to maintain the cooperative relationship with Pakistan precisely because it’s in our national security interest to do so,” said the White House spokesman, Jay Carney.
In an effort to help mend the latest rupture in relations, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, will talk soon with his counterpart, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, “to discuss the way forward in the common fight against Al Qaeda,” an American official said.
On Sunday, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. “Mullen just wanted to check in with him,” said an American military official. “The conversation was civil, but sober, given the pressure that the general is under right now.”
In describing the mission, the officials said that American surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft were watching and listening to how Pakistan’s police forces and military responded to the raid. That determined how long the commandos could safely remain on the ground going through the compound collecting computer hard drives, thumb drives and documents.
American forces were under strict orders to avoid engaging with any Pakistani forces that responded to the commotion at the Bin Laden compound, senior administration officials said.
If a confrontation appeared imminent, there were contingency plans for senior American officials, including Admiral Mullen, to call their Pakistani counterparts to avert an armed clash.
But when he reviewed the plans, Mr. Obama voiced concern that this was not enough to protect the troops on the mission, administration officials said.
In planning for the possible capture of Bin Laden, officials decided they would take him aboard a Navy ship to preclude battles over jurisdiction.
The plan, officials said, was to do an initial interrogation for any information that might prevent a pending attack or identify the location of other Qaeda leaders.
“There was a heck of a lot of planning that went into this for almost any and all contingencies, including capture,” one senior administration official said.
In the end, the team organized to handle his death was called into duty. They did a quick forensics study of the body, washed it, and buried it at sea.
But the officials acknowledged that the mission always was weighted toward killing, given the possibility that Bin Laden would be armed or wearing an explosive vest.

By ERIC SCHMITT, THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER

@ NYTimes

Beyond Revenge

it's an interesting article ,psychological analysis of ecstatic joy after Bin Laden's death/Pedram

Some Americans celebrated the killing of Osama bin Laden loudly, with chanting and frat-party revelry in the streets. Others were appalled — not by the killing, but by the celebrations.
“It was appropriate to go after Bin Laden, just to try to cut the head off that serpent, but I don’t think it’s decent to celebrate a killing like that,” said George Horwitz, a retired meat cutter and Army veteran in Bynum, N.C.
Others were much more critical. “The worst kind of jingoistic hubris,” a University of Virginia student wrote in the college newspaper, The Cavalier Daily. In blogs and online forums, some people asked: Doesn’t taking revenge and glorying in it make us look just like the terrorists?
The answer is no, social scientists say: it makes us look like human beings. In an array of research, both inside laboratories and out in the world, psychologists have shown that the appetite for revenge is a sensitive measure of how a society perceives both the seriousness of a crime and any larger threat that its perpetrator may pose.
Revenge is most satisfying when there are strong reasons for exacting it, both practical and emotional.
“Revenge evolved as a deterrent, to impose a cost on people who threaten a community and to reach into the heads of others who may be contemplating similar behavior,” said Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami and author of “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct” (Jossey-Bass, 2008). “In that sense it is a very natural response.”
Many of the sources of the joyous outburst were obvious: A clear victory after so many drawn-out conflicts. A demonstration of American competence, and of consequences delivered. The public relations value of delivering a public blow to a worldwide terror network. And, it needs to be said, the timing: The news hit just as many bars were starting to clear out for the night.
But this was much more than a simple excuse to party.
“Pure existential release,” said Tom Pyszczynski, a social psychologist at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who has studied reactions to 9/11. “Whether or not the killing makes any difference in the effectiveness of Al Qaeda hardly matters; defeating an enemy who threatens your worldview, the very values you believe are most protective, is the quickest way to calm existential anxiety.”
After almost 10 years, the end was nothing if not final. “The emotions were so strong, I think, because the event was compacted: Bin Laden was found and killed, and it was done — done and over, just like that,” said Kevin Carlsmith, a social psychologist at Colgate University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. “We’re so used to people being brought in, held at Guantánamo, the trials, the appeals; it feels like justice is never done.”
As a rule, people are far more forgiving than they might guess, studies find. After most betrayals, like being dumped by a love interest or insulted, the urge for revenge erodes around the same rate that certain memories do: sharply in the first few weeks, and much more slowly afterward. The same kind of pattern can follow even physical assaults, depending on the circumstances and the personality of the victim.
“The intensity of the emotion falls off precipitously, simply because the body can’t carry such a giant load of outrage and function very well,” Dr. McCullough said.
But the urge for payback — especially for a crime like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which killed almost 3,000 civilians — never goes to zero. “There is a stubborn part of the memory that hangs on to the urge, to a little piece of it,” and the pain is refreshed every time the memory is recalled, Dr. McCullough said.
It is easy to forget how much fear was in the air after the 9/11 attacks: the anthrax    mailings, the airport lines, the color-coded terror alerts. Many of those celebrating late on Sunday and early Monday were teenagers during those years, young people who have lived much of their lives under the threat of terrorism — and this terrorist in particular — and who had the time and energy to hit the streets and share the moment.
“For them this was a chance to be a part of history,” Dr. Pyszczynski said.
In a long series of studies, psychologists have shown that when people are reminded that they will one day die, they fixate on attributes they consider central to their self worth. Those who are religious become more so; those who value strength or physical attractiveness intensify their focus on these qualities; and people generally become more patriotic, more supportive of aggressive military action.
“Even subtle reminders of 9/11 have the same effect,” Dr. Pyszczynski said.
The sight of Bin Laden’s face on television or a smartphone news feed might have been enough to move people from the sidelines into the streets, to cheer for the home team.
Finally, people everywhere have a strong belief in “just desserts” punishment. In a 2002 study, psychologists at Princeton University had more than 1,000 participants evaluate specific crimes and give sentencing recommendations for each. The subjects carefully tailored each recommended sentence to the details of the infraction, its brutality and the record of the perpetrator.
The drive to enforce those sentences varies widely from person to person. But in a crowd of like-minded people, the most intense drives for justice become the norm: People who may have felt a mix of emotions in response to the news can be swept up in the general revelry.
Thus the natural urge for revenge — satisfied so suddenly, releasing a decade of background anxiety, stoked by peers — feeds on itself. Delight turns to chanting turns to climbing on lamp posts.

by : Benedict Carey

The Royals Need To Earn Their Keep

Amid the flag-waving and the street parties to celebrate the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton today, bigger questions about the relevance of the monarchy to modern Britain lurk like uninvited guests. Extravagant living in a time of austerity abrades public sensibilities; unearned privilege is resented, while snobbery and elitism are seen as dangerously outmoded. The usual arguments in support of the monarchy — continuity, tradition and dignity — are no longer enough. The royals need to earn their keep.
While only a small minority here favor a republican government, many Britons hope the wedding might signal the dawning of a more populist monarchy. This is the marriage of a senior royal prince and a commoner — the first in 350 years — that spans the class divide and is, it seems, a marriage for love. These two met in college, have lived in a shared house with friends, and plan to spend at least the first few years of their married life in northern Wales, with William continuing his service as a search-and-rescue pilot for the Royal Air Force. They have caught the public’s imagination not because of outdated deference to royalty but because of their appearance of normality and togetherness even amid the strictures of royal protocol and the frenzy of press coverage.
Comparisons have of course been drawn to the wedding of William’s parents, Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Diana was young, aristocratic, naïve and intimidated, whereas Kate is older, middle-class, educated, respected by her groom and undoubtedly wiser to the pressures that will surround her. But the circumstances are similar: in 1981, as now, Britain was mired in economic difficulty and the public was expected to welcome the opulence of the ceremony as a respite from hardship.
To understand how a wedding could accomplish that, it is instructive to look much further back than 1981 — to a time before royal weddings meant much at all to ordinary Britons.
Consider Mary Tudor’s 1554 marriage to Philip of Spain. Officials feared that the public might object to the queen, herself half-Spanish, marrying a Spanish prince. And so the nuptials were performed some 50 miles from London, at Winchester Cathedral. It was an alliance born of the mutual strategic interest forged by the marriage of Mary’s parents, Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon.
Royal marriages had long been arranged for diplomatic and political reasons. In 1420, Henry V married Catherine of Valois in an attempt at peace with France during the Hundred Years’ War; in 1589, James I married Anne of Denmark to establish a strong Protestant alliance in Europe; in 1625, Charles I married Henrietta Maria of France during a brief period when England’s pro-Spanish policy was replaced by a pro-French one.
Under the Stuarts, royal brides were mainly Catholic, which jarred a Protestant nation. The monarchs of the German House of Hanover, which acceded in 1714, invariably wed Germans of similar rank.
What finally changed all this was a remaking — indeed a rebranding — of the monarchy in 1917. England and Germany were at war, so another marriage to a German was out of the question. Instead, what was then the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was renamed the House of Windsor, and George V decreed that his children could now “marry English men and English women.” In that moment the all-British monarchy was born. And royal weddings became big events to be celebrated publicly and patriotically.
When the future George VI married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923, wedding fever engulfed the country. Newspapers and magazines scrutinized every detail: the dress, the guests, the venue. A million people lined the route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey. There were fireworks and parties in the streets.
The wedding of Charles and Diana followed this tradition. The ceremony was moved from the abbey to the larger St. Paul’s Cathedral, and much of the country watched on television. Celebratory merchandise, from mugs and plates to plastic trays and tea towels, were sold worldwide. The royal family had become the ultimate British brand.
As the wedding unfolds today, many people here will be keenly aware that this is a spectacle to which they, the taxpayers, have contributed. Britons want to see their royals demonstrating “value for money,” to be seen to be in touch, to have a greater ethos of service and to be more than vacuous figureheads propped up by pomp and pageantry. In a democratic age of mass media, maintaining public favor has never been more critical.
Queen Elizabeth II’s longevity — next year will be her 60th on the throne — has in many ways suspended public discussion of the reform and modernization of the monarchy.
This might prove to be the biggest threat to the royal future: more than half of Britons now believe William should succeed the queen. With Charles first in line, there is a real prospect that William and Kate will not become king and queen until they are middle-aged. By then, the honeymoon will be over, their public appeal will surely have waned and the new “classless” monarchy that their marriage symbolized may well have arrived too late.
@NYTIMES

Turkey Figure

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey seems on a path to win his third election in a row, having effectively neutered a once-all-powerful military.
Arriving at a template that effectively integrates Islam, democracy and vibrant economics has been a near-impossible dream for Middle East reformers stretching back decades. To a large extent, Egypt’s inability to accommodate these three themes lies at the root of its current plight.
But no country in the region has come closer to accomplishing this trick, warts and all, than Turkey. As a result, diplomats and analysts have begun to present the still-incomplete Turkish experiment as a possible road map for Egypt.
“Turkey is the envy of the Arab world,” said Hugh Pope, project director for the Turkish office of the International Crisis Group. “It has moved to a robust democracy, has a genuinely elected leader who seems to speak for the popular mood, has products that are popular from Afghanistan to Morocco — including dozens of sitcoms dubbed into Arabic that are on TV sets everywhere — and an economy that is worth about half of the whole Arab world put together.”
The idea is not new. President Obama’s first trip as president to a Muslim country was to Turkey in April 2009, and he hailed its progress as a Middle East model. (His visit there preceded his better-remembered speech in Cairo by two months.)
Since then, the already wide distance separating these countries has grown. Turkey’s economy and its internationally competitive companies are expanding at a relentless pace. Meanwhile, its mildly Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems on a path to win his third election in a row, having effectively neutered a once-all-powerful military apparatus long seen as the guardian of secularism in the country.
It has not always been this way.
Indeed, when Hosni Mubarak came to power in Egypt in October 1981, after the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat, Turkey was still being governed by its army, which one year earlier intervened to impose a sense of order on the country’s fractious political scene.
But while Mr. Mubarak, a military man himself, banked upon authoritarian rule, paying only lip service to democratic institutions and running rigged elections, the general behind the Turkish coup, Kenan Evren, moved to withdraw from politics. The constitution he imposed left the military considerable scope to meddle in political affairs, but it allowed civilian institutions to bloom.
On the economic front Egypt maintained state control, with many restrictions on foreign trade and domestic competition. By contrast, Turkey, which hopes to join the European Union, has opened up its economy and unleashed a dynamic private sector.
Today, with similarly sized populations of about 80 million, Turkey has an economy that is nearly four times the size of Egypt’s.
Its recent growth spurt has been driven by Mr. Erdogan, who came to power in 2003 and focused first on reducing deficits and bringing down inflation. Only after he demonstrated success in raising living standards did he feel confident enough to overcome opposition from the determinedly secular army and the cosmopolitan elite in Istanbul by introducing elements of Islam into Turkish public life.
He has been rewarded with broad popular support at home — demonstrated in September when Mr. Erdogan easily won a referendum that further diluted the military’s powers — and growing influence abroad.
In responding to the Egypt crisis, President Obama telephoned Prime Minister Erdogan twice in six days to discuss the unfolding events, and administration officials say they have been keeping in close contact with their Turkish counterparts at all levels.
“There’s no question that Turkey can play a role,” one administration official said. The official, speaking on grounds of anonymity, noted that Mr. Erdogan and Turkish leaders had publicly called for Mr. Mubarak to listen to what the protesters on the streets of Cairo had been saying — words that might have heartened democracy advocates in the Muslim world.
Turkey’s ability to thrive as a predominantly Muslim country that maintains diplomatic relations — though chilly — with Israel is one that American officials would like to see other Muslim nations develop.
But it is also true that actions taken by the Erdogan government against the Turkish news media have been a cause for some concern, a point made recently by the new American ambassador to Turkey, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who was ambassador to Egypt from 2005 to 2008.
With the Egyptian military likely to play the role of political guarantor in any transition from Mr. Mubarak’s rule, analysts suggest that Turkey might serve as a model for introducing new political parties, writing a constitution from scratch and ultimately stepping aside and letting the democratic process play out (as uncomfortable as that might be) — all of which the Turkish military has done since the 1980 coup.
“The military did not overplay its hand in Turkey,” said Soner Cagaptay, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Mr. Cagaptay also said that even though Mr. Erdogan had made gains in pushing his Islamist agenda, the military served as an effective restraint.
“The relative moderation of Islamic parties in Turkey is due to the military,” he said.
There are still substantial differences between the countries. For the Turkish military, its organizing philosophy has always been preserving the secularist traditions that Turkey’s post-World War I founder, Kemal Ataturk, set in place. In Egypt, while the Muslim Brotherhood has been officially banned, the army has been seen more as the defender of the authoritarian status quo rather than secularism itself.
How the military in Egypt deals with the Muslim Brotherhood — by far the most powerful civic force in the country — will be crucial in determining the country’s political future.
Can it, as was the case in Turkey, encourage the formation of competing political parties? And can it encourage the moderate elements of the Muslim Brotherhood to come to the fore rather than its more militant factions?
Turkey may have a more direct role to play on that front. Mr. Erdogan’s party has already established ties to the Muslim Brotherhood — a result of Mr. Erdogan’s long and successful campaign to present himself as a dominant and increasingly anti-Israeli voice in the Middle East.
According to research by Dore Gold at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, three members of the Muslim Brotherhood — two of whom serve in the Egyptian Parliament — were on the Turkish-sponsored ship that was attacked by Israeli forces on its way to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip in May.
“There is a great deal of ideological compatibility between the A.K.P. and the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Mr. Gold, a former top adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, referring to Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party. “This is something to watch carefully.”
Perhaps, but in the end that could be a plus rather than a minus.
For all his Islamist sympathies, Mr. Erdogan is at root a pragmatist. As a young firebrand he was jailed for his antisecular rhetoric but now, after working within Turkey’s democratic framework rather than outside it, he is recognized as perhaps the Middle East’s most influential figure.

by : Landon Thomas Jr.

Facebook raises new funding at $50B valuation

Facebook is now worth $50 billion,according to a report in The New York Times that says the company has raised $500 million in new funding from Goldman Sachs and Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies.

Goldman invested $450 million, while DST (which has already invested about $500 million into Facebook) provided the remaining $50 million. Goldman also plans to create a “special purpose vehicle” to pool its clients and invest another $1.5 billion in Facebook without triggering the Securities and Exchange Commission’s 500-shareholder threshold, The Times says. (Companies that break the threshold are required to disclose more information publicly.)

Facebook’s valuation has been climbing steadily on the secondary markets where shares are sold. (The SEC is now investigating those markets.) Early Facebook investor Accel Partners recently sold off some of its shares at a $34 billion valuation.

Facebook is expected to have its initial public offering as soon as 2012, although the company hasn’t said anything specific on the matter. It reportedly brought in $2 billion in revenue in 2010, and chief Mark Zuckerberg has said that the company is barely profitable, because it’s not focused on profits yet.

Last month, the second-hottest social networking company, Twitter, raised $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation.

by : Anthony Ha

@VentureBeat

Oil Tycoon Convicted of Embezzlement Again !

A judge in Moscow on Monday handed down a new conviction against Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon, in a case that has been widely seen as an indicator of the Kremlin’s tolerance for political dissent. Mr. Khodorkovsky, who has already been imprisoned for seven years after feuding with Vladimir V. Putin, was found guilty on embezzlement charges that could keep him behind bars for several more years. Formerly Russia’s richest man, Mr. Khodorkovsky, 47, is the country’s most well-known prisoner, and his treatment has been held up by opponents of the Kremlin as evidence that the justice system here is readily manipulated by those in power.
The judge did not immediately pass sentence, and it was unclear when he might do so. While a guilty verdict was expected, the length of the sentence will be scrutinized as a sign of whether the Kremlin wants to loosen or tighten control over the political system.
Mr. Putin, the former president and current prime minister, has often assailed Mr. Khodorkovsky as a criminal who ordered his associates to kill people so that he could amass wealth. Just this month, Mr. Putin referred to Mr. Khodorkovsky as a thief who should “sit in jail” — criticism that Mr. Khodorkovsky’s lawyers described as a blatant attempt to pressure the court.
A short prison sentence might be considered a victory for Mr. Putin’s protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, a former law professor who is thought of as less of a hard-liner. Mr. Medvedev has been promoting policies to modernize Russia, and analysts say the Khodorkovsky case is an obstacle toward convincing foreign investors that the country’s legal system is fair.
Mr. Khodorkovsky’s co-defendant and business associate, Platon L. Lebedev, was also found guilty on Monday by the judge, Viktor Danilkin.Mr. Khodorkovsky earned his fortune in the rough-and-tumble 1990’s after the fall of Communism, snapping up state-owned oil fields at a fraction of their worth and then creating one of the world’s largest oil companies. Like many Russian businessmen at the time, he had a reputation for engaging in practices that would be illegal or unsavory in the West.
He later decided to reform both his image and his business, and became a champion, at least publicly, of good corporate governance. He also delved into politics, which is where he seems to have run into trouble.
After Mr. Putin became president in 2000, he made clear to the class of tycoons who earned their fortunes in the 1990’s that they could keep their holdings if they did not interfere with the Kremlin.
Mr. Khodorkovsky apparently did not heed the message. He financed political parties and ignored increasingly pointed warnings from Mr. Putin’s associates. In 2003, Mr. Khodorkovsky was arrested on the tarmac of an airport in Siberia. He has been in prison since then.
He was convicted of tax fraud in 2005, and his companies were essentially confiscated by the government.
His current sentence ends in 2011, which is just before Russia’s next presidential election. Analysts suggested that Mr. Putin did not want Mr. Khodorkovsky out of prison before then, which is why prosecutors brought fresh charges against him.
In the current case, he was accused of stealing $27 billion in oil from subsidiaries of his own oil conglomerate through pricing schemes. Mr. Khodorkovsky’s lawyers call the charges absurd, and politically motivated.

@nytimes.com

WikiLeaks : 5 Basic Questions

The WikiLeaks controversy pits one hallowed purpose of US government – preventing security threats from abroad – against another, that of protecting constitutional rights of expression by the media and individuals. Striking that balance has become difficult in an age of the Internet hackers, bloggers, self-appointed public policy watchdogs, and thousands of online “publications” marked by ideology and attitude.

So far, WikiLeaks has released more than 700,000 sensitive or classified documents about US military and diplomatic activity – 92,000 on the war in Afghanistan, 392,000 on the Iraq war, and now nearly 250,000 diplomatic cables that US officials say are damaging to foreign relations and intelligence operations. Within weeks, WikiLeaks says, it’ll release inside information on business interests – starting with a major American bank.
Here are answers to five key questions by Brad Knickerbocker, Staff writer  ThFire.com

1. Who is responsible for the leaks?
WikiLeaks describes itself as a “not-for-profit media organization” whose goal is to “bring important news and information to the public.” Launched in 2006, it is a loose network of individual leakers and advisers with a post office box at the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. A shadowy, mostly volunteer organization, WikiLeaks operates on many servers and under domain names around the world. Much of its work is conducted from a rented house in Iceland.
Australian Julian Paul Assange is WikiLeaks' editor in chief and only spokesman. He is in his late 30s, studied physics, math, and computer programming, all of which made him an expert computer hacker. Mr. Assange seems to travel constantly, although not to the United States, sometimes altering his appearance to avoid being recognized or possibly arrested.
The other prominent name connected to WikiLeaks is US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. Manning was a military analyst in Iraq, where, despite his low rank, he had wide access to sensitive and classified information. Among other things, he allegedly downloaded and leaked video footage of an attack by a US Apache helicopter gunship that killed Iraqi civilians, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.
Manning was arrested in May and later charged with violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in conjunction with “transferring classified data onto his personal computer and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system,” as well as “communicating, transmitting and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source.



2. How could so much classified information be stolen?
During the months Manning worked with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division in Iraq, it was apparently easy for him to find, download, and copy sensitive military information. Writing in an online chat, he claims to have had “unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months.”
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing … I listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.”
“Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis,” Manning wrote. “A perfect storm.”
“No one suspected a thing,” he wrote to a former computer hacker who eventually tipped off the FBI and Army officials. “I didn’t even have to hide anything.”
Officials have told the Associated Press that Manning is the prime suspect in the most recent leak of diplomatic cables. He is now awaiting court martial at the US Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. He faces up to 52 years in prison.


3. How did the information become public?
WikiLeaks provided the latest cache of 251,287 diplomatic cables to Der Spiegel, El País, Le Monde, and The Guardian newspapers. The New York Times, which had published earlier reports critical of Assange and Manning, was snubbed by WikiLeaks for this round of leaked documents. But the Guardian quickly passed along the leaked material to the Times.
In justifying the decision to publish reports on the leaked cables, New York Times editor Bill Keller offered this explanation:
“We have edited out any information that could identify confidential sources – including informants, dissidents, academics and human rights activists – or otherwise compromise national security,” he wrote in response to questions on the Times website. “We did this in consultation with the State Department, and while they strongly disapprove of the publication of classified material at any time, and while we did not agree with all of their requests for omission, we took their views very seriously indeed.” He also noted that the Times chose "a small selection of the cables – about 100 in all, out of a quarter of a million documents – that we think provide useful source material for the articles we have written.”


4. What information got released?
In July, WikiLeaks released some 92,000 documents on the war in Afghanistan, including information on civilian casualties, the strength of the Taliban, friendly fire episodes, and links between Pakistan’s intelligence services and the Taliban.
Three months later, WikiLeaks disclosed nearly 392,000 US Army field reports – the largest military leak in US history – dubbed the “Iraq War Logs.” Among other things, the information included details of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners, secret civilian death counts, Iran’s involvement with Shiite militias operating in Iraq, tensions between Kurds and Arabs in northern Iraq, and new information about three American hikers arrested along the Iraq-Iran border and taken to Iran.
Of the 250,000 confidential and secret diplomatic cables released Nov. 28, 15,652 are classified as “secret.” Of those, 4,330 also are labeled “NOFORN,” meaning they should not be seen by foreign nationals. The frankly worded cables revealed US spying on United Nations officials, included disparaging remarks about national leaders such as Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and recounted Saudi Arabia’s urging the US to attack Iran over that nation’s nuclear program.


5. Could this kind of leak happen again?
Unless the US changes how it distributes and tracks sensitive information, the short answer is “yes.”
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, agencies began sharing information that previously had been “stove-piped.” At the same time, the number of individuals with access to classified information via the secure Secret Internet Protocol Router Network grew to nearly 2.5 million people (most of them at the Defense Department). Manning was one such person
“Obviously that aperture went too wide,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Pentagon reporters recently. The Pentagon is now tightening controls on classified information. For example, classified computers will be “read-only,” preventing the use of thumb drives and other removable media to copy and walk away with sensitive data.
The State Department and other agencies, too, are tightening information-sharing. Moreover, the White House has directed government entities that handle classified information to review their "implementation of procedures for safeguarding classified information against improper disclosures.”

Muslim ‘Radicalization’ Is Focus of Planned Inquiry

Representative Peter T. King of New York, who will become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he was responding to what he has described as frequent concerns raised by law enforcement officials that Muslim leaders have been uncooperative in terror investigations.
He cited the case of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan man and a legal resident of the United States, who was arrested last year for plotting to bomb the New York subway system. Mr. King said that Ahmad Wais Afzali, an imam in Queens who had been a police informant, had warned Mr. Zazi before his arrest that he was the target of a terror investigation.
“When I meet with law enforcement, they are constantly telling me how little cooperation they get from Muslim leaders,” Mr. King said.
The move by Mr. King, who said he was planning to open a hearing on the matter beginning early next year, is the latest example of the new direction that the House will take under the incoming Republican majority.
Indeed, Mr. King, a nine-term incumbent from Long Island, said that he had sought to raise the issue when Democrats had control of Congress, but was “denounced for it.” He added: “It is controversial. But to me, it is something that has to be discussed.”
Mr. King’s proposal comes amid signs that deep anxieties about Muslims persist in the United States nine years after the 9/11 terror attacks and an outcry this year over a proposed Islamic center near ground zero in New York City.
Told of Mr. King’s plan, Muslim leaders expressed strong opposition, describing the move as a prejudiced act that was akin to racial profiling and that would unfairly cast suspicion on an entire group.
Abed A. Ayoub, the legal director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said Mr. King’s effort ignored that Muslim leaders around the country had been working closely with law enforcement officials since the 2001 terror attacks.
“We are disturbed that this representative who is in a leadership position does not have the understanding and knowledge of what the realities are on the ground,” Mr. Ayoub said, adding that Mr. King’s proposal “has bigoted intentions.”
Salam al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, also expressed deep concern and noted that his group would be holding a convention this weekend at which members would discuss the impact that the Republican takeover of Congress could have on Muslims.
“He basically wants to treat the Muslim-American community as a suspect community,” Mr. Marayati said of Mr. King. He added that Mr. King was potentially undermining the relationship that Muslim leaders had sought to build with law enforcement officials around the country. Tensions have occasionally erupted in recent years over counterterrorism measures that civil rights groups and others said had gone too far.
In 2007, for example, the Los Angeles Police Department was forced to abandon a plan to create a map detailing the city’s Muslim communities after civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders denounced the effort as a form of racial profiling.
Mr. King has used his position on the House Homeland Security Committee to elevate similar issues. In 2006, when his party controlled the House and he was chairman of the committee, Mr. King was the first Republican in Congress to break ranks publicly with President Bush over the president’s plan to give a company in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, control of six American ports. Mr. King joined Democrats in calling the port deal a potential threat to national security, and the deal eventually collapsed.
Mr. King also opposed the plan to build an Islamic center near ground zero, urging the developers of the project to meet with 9/11 families to identify a more appropriate location for the center.
“This is such a raw wound, and they are just pouring salt into it,” he said, referring to the developers of the proposed Islamic center.
Mr. King, who has conveyed his intentions to Republican leaders in the House, said he would seek comment from mainstream Muslim leaders so that the hearings he was planning to hold were not one-sided, with only people critical of Muslims.
But Mr. King suggested that Muslim leaders had minimized the extent of the problem he said he had identified. “They try to tell me that it is not as bad as it seems,” he said.


by : Raymond Hernandez
@nytimes
Pic : Peter T. King

Hacker Threatens More Attacks On WikiLeaks Foes

On Thursday, a man identifying himself as one of the activists from a group called Anonymous, who used the pseudonym Coldblood in an interview with BBC radio, said: “This campaign is not over from what I’ve seen. It’s still going strong.” The speaker had an English accent and said he was a 22-year-old software engineer with no specific political loyalty.
Within 12 hours of a British judge’s decision on Tuesday to deny Mr. Assange bail in a Swedish extradition case, attacks on the Web sites of WikiLeaks’s “enemies,” as defined by the organization’s impassioned supporters around the world, caused several corporate Web sites to become inaccessible or slow down markedly.
Targets of the attacks, in which activists overwhelmed the sites with traffic, included the Web site of MasterCard, which had stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which revoked the use of its computer servers; and PayPal, which stopped accepting donations for Mr. Assange’s group. Visa.com was also affected by the attacks, as were the Web sites of the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the lawyer representing the two women whose allegations of sexual misconduct are the basis of Sweden’s extradition bid.
The Internet assaults underlined the growing reach of self-described “cyberanarchists,” antigovernment and anticorporate activists who have made an icon of Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian.
Though Reuters said that no major Web sites appeared to be under attack early Thursday, a Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, reported that the Swedish government’s Web site had gone down briefly during the night.
The speed and range of the attacks appeared to show the resilience of the backing among computer activists for Mr. Assange, who has appeared increasingly isolated in recent months amid the furor stoked by WikiLeaks’s posting of hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mr. Assange has come under renewed attack in the past two weeks for posting the first tranche of a trove of 250,000 secret State Department cables that have exposed American diplomats’ frank assessments of relations with many countries, forcing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to express regret to world leaders and raising fears that they and other sources would become more reticent.
The New York Times and four other news organizations last week began publishing articles based on the archive of cables made available to them.
In recent months, some of Mr. Assange’s closest associates in WikiLeaks abandoned him, calling him autocratic and capricious and accusing him of reneging on WikiLeaks’s original pledge of impartiality to launch a concerted attack on the United States. He has been simultaneously fighting a remote battle with the Swedish prosecutors, who have sought his extradition for questioning on accusations of “rape, sexual molestation and forceful coercion” made by the Swedish women. Mr. Assange has denied any wrongdoing in the cases.
American officials have repeatedly said that they are reviewing possible criminal charges against Mr. Assange, a step that could lead to a bid to extradite him to the United States and confront him with having to fight for his freedom on two fronts.
The cyberattacks in Mr. Assange’s defense appear to have been coordinated by Anonymous, a loosely affiliated group of activist computer hackers who have singled out other groups before, including theChurch of Scientology. Last weekend, members of Anonymous vowed in two online manifestos to take revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks.
Anonymous claimed responsibility for the MasterCard attack in Web messages and, according to one activist associated with the group, conducted waves of attacks on other companies during the day. The group said the actions were part of an effort called Operation Payback, which began as a way of punishing companies that tried to stop Internet file-sharing and movie downloads.
The activist, Gregg Housh, who disavows a personal role in any illegal online activity, said that 1,500 supporters had been in online forums and chat rooms organizing the mass “denial of service” attacks. His account was confirmed by Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, Mass., firm that tracks malicious activity on computer networks.
Most of the corporations whose sites were targeted did not explain why they severed ties with WikiLeaks. But PayPal issued statements saying its decision was based on “a violation” of its policy on promoting illegal activities.
Almost all the corporate Web sites that were attacked appeared to be operating normally later on Wednesday, suggesting that any economic impact was limited. But the sense of an Internet war was reinforced when Netcraft, a British Internet monitoring firm, reported that the Web site being used by the hackers to distribute denial-of-service software had been suspended by a Dutch hosting firm, Leaseweb.
A sense of the belligerent mood among activists was given when one contributor to a forum the group uses, WhyWeProtest.net, wrote of the attacks: “The war is on. And everyone ought to spend some time thinking about it, discussing it with others, preparing yourselves so you know how to act if something compels you to make a decision. Be very careful not to err on the side of inaction.”
Mr. Housh acknowledged that there had been online talk among the hackers of a possible Internet campaign against the two women who have been Mr. Assange’s accusers in the Swedish case, but he said that “a lot of people don’t want to be involved.”
A Web search showed new blog posts in recent days in which the two women, identified by the Swedish prosecutors only as Ms. A. and Ms. W., were named, but it was not clear whether there was any link to Anonymous. The women have said that consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange became nonconsensual when he stopped using condoms.
The cyberattacks on corporations Wednesday were seen by many supporters as a counterstrike against the United States. Mr. Assange’s online supporters have widely condemned the Obama administration as the unseen hand coordinating efforts to choke off WikiLeaks by denying it financing and suppressing its network of computer servers.
Mr. Housh described Mr. Assange in an interview as “a political prisoner,” a common view among WikiLeaks supporters who have joined Mr. Assange in condemning the sexual abuse accusations as part of an American-inspired “smear campaign.”
Another activist used the analogy of the civil rights struggle for the cyberattacks.
“Are they disrupting business?” a contributor using the name Moryath wrote in a comment on the slashdot.org technology Web site. “Perhaps, but no worse than the lunch counter sit-ins did.”

John Markoff and Ashlee Vance contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
NYTIMES

Cables Disclosed

Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks posted 220 cables, some redacted to protect diplomatic sources, in the first installment of the archive on its Web site on Sunday.
The disclosure of the cables is sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures. A statement from the White House on Sunday said: “We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information.”
The White House said the release of what it called “stolen cables” to several publications was a “reckless and dangerous action” and warned that some cables, if released in full, could disrupt American operations abroad and put the work and even lives of confidential sources of American diplomats at risk. The statement noted that reports often include “candid and often incomplete information” whose disclosure could “deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.”
The cables, a huge sampling of the daily traffic between the State Department and some 270 embassies and consulates, amount to a secret chronicle of the United States’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism. Among their revelations, to be detailed in The Times in coming days:

A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.”

Thinking about an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the United States.

 

Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”

 

Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan’s vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money “a significant amount” that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination.” (Mr. Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.)

 

A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.

Mixed records against terrorism: Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the “worst in the region” in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December. Qatar’s security service was “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals,” the cable said.








 intriguing alliance: American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and business magnate, including “lavish gifts,” lucrative energy contracts and a “shadowy” Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Mr. Berlusconi “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe. The diplomats also noted that while Mr. Putin enjoyed supremacy over all other public figures in Russia, he was undermined by an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignored his edicts.

Arms deliveries to militants: Cables describe the United States’ failing struggle to prevent Syria from supplying arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has amassed a huge stockpile since its 2006 war with Israel. One week after President Bashar al-Assad promised a top State Department official that he would not send “new” arms to Hezbollah, the United States complained that it had information that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the group.

Clashes with Europe over human rights: American officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan. A senior American diplomat told a German official “that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S.”
The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to The Times by an intermediary on the condition of anonymity. Many are unclassified, and none are marked “top secret,” the government’s most secure communications status. But some 11,000 are classified “secret,” 9,000 are labeled “noforn,” shorthand for material considered too delicate to be shared with any foreign government, and 4,000 are designated both secret and noforn.
Many more cables name diplomats’ confidential sources, from foreign legislators and military officers to human rights activists and journalists, often with a warning to Washington: “Please protect” or “Strictly protect.”
The Times, after consultations with the State Department, has withheld from articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire cables whose disclosure could compromise American intelligence efforts. While the White House said it anticipated WikiLeaks would make public “several hundred thousand” cables Sunday night, the organization posted only 220 released and redacted by The Times and several European publications.
The cables show that nearly a decade after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the dark shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States’ relations with the world. They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al Qaeda, adding Australians who have disappeared in the Middle East to terrorist watch lists, and assessing whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, Pakistan, was awaiting fares or conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate.
They show officials managing relations with a China on the rise and a Russia retreating from democracy. They document years of effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon — and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran with the same goal.
Even when they recount events that are already known, the cables offer remarkable details.
For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the American role in missile strikes against the local branch of Al Qaeda. But a cable’s fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, is breathtaking.
“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemen had carried out the strikes.
Mr. Saleh, who at other times resisted American counterterrorism requests, was in a lighthearted mood. The authoritarian ruler of a conservative Muslim country, Mr. Saleh complains of smuggling from nearby Djibouti, but tells General Petraeus that his concerns are drugs and weapons, not whiskey, “provided it’s good whiskey.”
Likewise, press reports detailed the unhappiness of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, when he was not permitted to set up his tent in Manhattan or to visit ground zero during a United Nations session last year.
The cables also disclose frank comments behind closed doors. Dispatches from early this year, for instance, quote the aging monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, as speaking scathingly about the leaders of Iraq and Pakistan.
Speaking to another Iraqi official about Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah said, “You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not.” The king called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan the greatest obstacle to that country’s progress. “When the head is rotten,” he said, “it affects the whole body.”
The American ambassador to Eritrea reported last year that “Eritrean officials are ignorant or lying” in denying that they were supporting the Shabab, a militant Islamist group in Somalia. The cable then mused about which seemed more likely.
As he left Zimbabwe in 2007 after three years as ambassador, Christopher W. Dell wrote a sardonic account of Robert Mugabe, that country’s aging and erratic leader. The cable called him “a brilliant tactician” but mocked “his deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics).”
The possibility that a large number of diplomatic cables might become public has been discussed in government and media circles since May. That was when, in an online chat, an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, described having downloaded from a military computer system many classified documents, including “260,000 State Department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world.” In an online discussion with Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, Private Manning said he had delivered the cables and other documents to WikiLeaks.
Mr. Lamo reported Private Manning’s disclosures to federal authorities, and Private Manning was arrested. He has been charged with illegally leaking classified information and faces a possible court-martial and, if convicted, a lengthy prison term.
In July and October, The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel published articles based on documents about Afghanistan and Iraq. Those collections were placed online by WikiLeaks, with selective redactions of the Afghan documents and much heavier redactions of the Iraq reports.



Fodder for Historians



Traditionally, most diplomatic cables remain secret for decades, providing fodder for historians only when the participants are long retired or dead. The State Department’s unclassified history series, titled “Foreign Relations of the United States,” has reached only 1972.
While an overwhelming majority of the quarter-million cables provided to The Times are from the post-9/11 era, several hundred date from 1966 to the 1990s. Some show diplomats struggling to make sense of major events whose future course they could not guess.
In 1989, an American diplomat in Panama City mulled over the options open to Gen. Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader, who was facing narcotics charges in the United States and intense domestic and international political pressure to step down. The cable called General Noriega “a master of survival”; its author appeared to have no inkling that one week later, the United States would invade Panama to unseat General Noriega and arrest him.
In 1990, an American diplomat sent an excited dispatch from Cape Town: he had just learned from a lawyer for Nelson Mandela that Mr. Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment was to end. The cable conveys the momentous changes about to begin for South Africa, even as it discusses preparations for an impending visit from the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
The voluminous traffic of more recent years — well over half of the quarter-million cables date from 2007 or later — show American officials struggling with events whose outcomes are far from sure. To read through them is to become a global voyeur, immersed in the jawboning, inducements and penalties the United States wields in trying to have its way with a recalcitrant world.
The cables have their own lexicon: “codel,” for a Congressional delegation; “visas viper,” for a report on a person considered dangerous; “démarche,” an official message to a foreign government, often a protest or warning.
But the drama in the cables often comes from diplomats’ narratives of meetings with foreign figures, games of diplomatic poker in which each side is sizing up the other and neither is showing all its cards.
Among the most fascinating examples recount American officials’ meetings in September 2009 and February 2010 with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of the Afghan president and a power broker in the Taliban’s home turf of Kandahar.
They describe Mr. Karzai, “dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez,” the traditional dress of loose tunic and trousers, appearing “nervous, though eager to express his views on the international presence in Kandahar,” and trying to win over the Americans with nostalgic tales about his years running a Chicago restaurant near Wrigley Field.
But in midnarrative there is a stark alert for anyone reading the cable in Washington: “Note: While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker.” (Mr. Karzai has denied such charges.) And the cables note statements by Mr. Karzai that the Americans, informed by a steady flow of eavesdropping and agents’ reports, believe to be false.
A cable written after the February meeting coolly took note of the deceit on both sides.
Mr. Karzai “demonstrated that he will dissemble when it suits his needs,” the cable said. “He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities. We will need to monitor his activity closely, and deliver a recurring, transparent message to him” about the limits of American tolerance.



Not All Business



Even in places far from war zones and international crises, where the stakes for the United States are not as high, curious diplomats can turn out to be accomplished reporters, sending vivid dispatches to deepen the government’s understanding of exotic places.
In a 2006 account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of a well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia’s Caucasus, where one guest is the strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
The diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.
“The dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones,” the diplomat wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov “had brought the happy couple ‘a five-kilo lump of gold’ as his wedding present.”
“After the dancing and a quick tour of the premises, Ramzan and his army drove off back to Chechnya,” the diplomat reported to Washington. “We asked why Ramzan did not spend the night in Makhachkala, and were told, ‘Ramzan never spends the night anywhere.’ ”