Central China Hit by Drought, as Reservoirs Become ‘Dead Water’

BEIJING — A severe drought along the Yangtze River region in central China has rendered nearly 1,400 reservoirs in Hubei Province temporarily unusable, devastated farm fields and made drinking water scarce, according to a report on Monday by Xinhua, the state news agency.

The drought, which has lasted for five months, has brought water levels in the middle part of the Yangtze to a near-record low. For the second time since the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, began operating, officials have had to make emergency water discharges from it to help ease the drought.

As of Sunday, 4 medium-size reservoirs and 1,388 small reservoirs in Hubei had dropped below the allowable discharge levels for irrigation, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the director of the reservoir management office for the Hubei Provincial Water Resources Department. One-fourth of all small reservoirs had what officials called “dead water” remaining, which could be pumped for use only in an emergency.

The drought adds to concerns over the effect that a gargantuan water-diversion project will have on the central provinces of China. The project, called the South-North Water Diversion, is supposed to move water from the Yangtze and its tributaries north to Beijing along a canal, and to Tianjin along an eastern route.

Both routes are supposed to be fully operational within the next couple of years. Criticism of the project has become widespread, and many people along the Yangtze and in the south say precious water resources should not be sent north, where there has been a chronic water shortage.

The water on the middle route is supposed to flow from the Danjiangkou Reservoir in Hubei. The water level at the reservoir was measured at 443 feet on Saturday, about 13 feet below the level at which the water is considered dead, Xinhua reported.

Du Yun, a geography scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, said in an earlier interview that the central government had not done enough studies to assess the impact of the diversion project, especially when compared with all the research that was done before the building of the Three Gorges Dam.

“For that project, the preliminary discussion and studies phase was decades long,” he said. “There was the participation of institutions and experts from across China. Compared to that, this water diversion project did not do as comprehensive a preliminary study as the Three Gorges project did.”

As of Saturday, the drought had left 315,000 people and 97,300 head of livestock in Hubei short of drinking water, and more than two million acres of farmland had been affected, Xinhua reported. In neighboring Henan Province, the drought had affected at least 320,000 people.

Officials discharged 400 million cubic meters of water from the Three Gorges Dam from May 7 to May 11, according to Wang Hai, a spokesman for the dam’s construction and operation management bureau, Xinhua reported on Thursday.

This discharge is aimed at fighting the current drought and raising levels of the Yangtze to aid shipping. People in the city of Yichang, where the dam stands, have been hit especially hard. They say they have had to buy water rather than relying on water from their land.

The water levels in the section of the Yangtze between Yichang and Jiujiang in Jiangxi Province were about 8 to 18 feet lower than average, Xinhua reported, citing a statement by the Hubei provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters.

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Fundamentally: Tech Stocks May Become an Unlikely Haven

THE stock market has been fighting an army of economic worries — including slowing economic growth and corporate earnings, a weakening dollar and what until last week were surging oil prices.

For the most part, investors have been so focused on the excellent performance of individual companies that they’ve been willing to overlook these threats. But with first-quarter earnings season nearing an end, “the market will refocus from the micro- to the macroeconomic picture,” says Jeffrey N. Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial. And once that happens, he contends, the view won’t be as rosy.

If economic head winds strengthen — a distinct possibility — some strategists say the market could shift in meaningful ways. For starters, stocks could suffer their first major pullback or correction since last spring, when fears over Europe’s fiscal crisis dominated the news. At the same time, technology stocks, which have been laggards this year, could become a favored sector if they benefit from some of the same forces that trouble other parts of the market.

Right now, the broad market’s performance is “approaching too-good-to-be-true status,” said Brian G. Belski, chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer. Historically, equity prices tend to move in anticipation of corporate earnings growth, which tends to recover before the broad economy does, Mr. Belski said. “Well, in the last two years, we’ve seen the market double and a huge rebound in profits,” he said. “Yet it remains to be seen if the economy will follow through and deliver on its part.”

Last month, the Commerce Department reported that gross domestic product grew at a slower-than-anticipated annual rate of 1.8 percent in the first quarter, down from 3.1 percent at the end of 2010.

David C. Wright, managing director of Sierra Investment Management, said he was particularly worried that high food and fuel costs were making it hard for consumers to spend much on anything else. He said he was also concerned that despite economic worries, stocks are more expensive than they’ve been in years, leaving little room for error. Based on 10-year average earnings, the stock market’s price-to-earnings ratio is currently more than 23, versus the long-term average of 16. The last time the ratio was this high was in late 2007, at the start of the last bear market.

By contrast, tech stocks are significantly less frothy than they’ve been in years. Historically, shares of technology companies have traded at about a 30 percent premium to the broad market, based on their P/E ratios. That’s because tech companies have traditionally enjoyed faster earnings growth than other types of businesses. Today, however, technology’s P/E is on par with that of the overall Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

Yet tech is still exhibiting solid earnings growth. I.B.M., Apple and Intel were among several tech giants that have recently reported better-than-expected first-quarter profits. Intel’s results — which included a 25 percent jump in revenue — were particularly embraced by Wall Street, as they were viewed as a sign that demand for hardware like PCs may be stronger than anticipated.

Over all, tech sector earnings are on track to climb 25 percent in the first quarter, while revenue is expected to jump 15 percent, according to Thomson Reuters. By comparison, profits for the S.& P. 500 are expected to grow 18 percent, while sales predicted to climb 9 percent.

Earnings aren’t the only area where some tech businesses are financially healthier than the typical S.& P. 500 company, said Robert E. Turner, chief investment officer at Turner Investment Partners, a money management firm in Berwyn, Pa. For one thing, big tech companies are sitting on billions of dollars in cash, which they are starting to use to raise dividends and make acquisitions. Recently, Texas Instruments announced plans to buy a rival, National Semiconductor, for $6.5 billion — representing more than a 70 percent premium to what the stock had been trading for.

Despite a surprising uptick in operating expenses recently reported by Google, tech companies in general are doing a better job of keeping their costs under control. In fact, according to Deutsche Bank, tech is one of only three market categories where expenses as a percentage of sales have been falling over the past five years. (The others are health care and consumer staples.)

Even if energy prices resume their rise, analysts note that technology companies aren’t likely to be hurt as much as other parts of the market because oil isn’t as large a component of expenses as it is in sectors like the industrials or transportation.

At the same time, tech spending could actually benefit if oil prices rise, because other companies and consumers are likely to look for ways to improve productivity and lower expenses. That may mean a jump in investment in technology.

Mr. Turner noted that the two biggest drivers of tech growth these days are mobile computing and — despite the recent outage at Amazon’s data centers — so-called cloud computing, where companies offload costly computer applications and data storage to servers run by third parties like Amazon and Microsoft.

Both mobile technology and cloud computing “are all about improving efficiency and cost savings,” Mr. Turner said.

Yet some of the companies that stand to benefit from this trend, like Microsoft, Intel and Cisco Systems, are trading at P/E ratios of 10 or less, based on projected earnings.

“I have a bit of trouble understanding why they’re so cheap,” he said.

Paul J. Lim is a senior editor at Money magazine. E-mail: fund@nytimes.com.

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British Law Used to Shush Scandal Has Become One

They were not listening for the announcers, or even the score. Instead, as one of the journalists recounted, they were listening to the chanting crowd, hoping it would sing en masse about the extramarital affair of one of the players on the field.

The reporters knew that the player, married and among Britain’s most famous, had had an affair with a television personality. But the player has taken out a so-called super injunction — a stringent British legal measure that prevents newspapers from publishing a story on the topic, or even from making any mention that a court order has been granted.

The injunctions, intended to protect privacy, have become a scandal here in Britain. The BBC political editor Andrew Marr, who often grills Britain’s most prominent politicians on the Sunday show that bears his name, publicly admitted Tuesday that he, too, had used one to hide an affair.

And in recent weeks, the issue of the soccer player’s identity has become a matter of national debate, splashed across front pages and featured on television shows. Super injunctions have also been raised in the Houses of Parliament as an example of a curb on the freedom of the press by activist judges.

But in a world where millions converse on Facebook, Twitter and the like, the law cannot feasibly be enforced online. So the reporters listening to the soccer game were hoping that the boisterous fans of the rival team would have read about the affair on the Internet and then shout or sing the details to ridicule their opponents, providing a circuitous way of covering the story. But they were disappointed.

Britain’s press laws are widely seen as particularly restrictive, so much so that international celebrities and public figures often choose to pursue their libel suits here, in what is frequently referred to as “libel tourism.”

But the super injunctions offer a way of stopping stories before they come out and are frequently served on multiple newspapers to pre-empt any possible publication, said Charlotte Harris, a media lawyer who has represented public figures seeking injunctions and others arguing against them.

The injunctions are so protective of their subjects that only a few cases have been made public: another soccer player, John Terry, the captain of the English team, who was reported to have had an affair with the ex-girlfriend of a teammate; Fred Goodwin, the former chairman of the $40 billion banking group Royal Bank of Scotland, who faced criticism for his lavish payouts; and Trafigura, a multinational commodities company accused of dumping toxic waste in Africa.

Details of other cases may become well known within the media community, and rumors from other sources may even spread online, but once a super injunction is served news organizations must keep their readers in the dark. The injunctions take “a matter of hours” in private meetings between judges and lawyers, said Ms. Harris, the media lawyer. And though their secretive nature makes it hard to verify a precise number, reports in the British press suggest that as many as 30 super injunctions may have been granted to other prominent figures.

“The rich and powerful,” said Ian Hislop, the editor of the magazine Private Eye, a satirical weekly that often reports on the hypocrisies of Britain’s elite, “are increasingly turning to these orders.”

“They used at least to have to argue that something you’d printed was not true,” Mr. Hislop said referring to Britain’s strong libel laws, widely held to favor those bringing claims. “Now it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. They can suppress it with a super injunction and call it privacy.”

Private Eye had mounted a legal challenge to Mr. Marr’s super injunction last week, days before he admitted to the court order. Through a BBC spokesman, Mr. Marr declined to comment.

But speaking of his injunction, granted in 2008, he told the Daily Mail that he “did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists. Am I embarrassed by it? Yes. Am I uneasy about it? Yes. But at the time there was a crisis in my marriage,” he said, adding that he was also concerned about protecting the young child of the woman with whom he had had the affair.

“I know these injunctions are controversial,” he said, “and the situation seems to be running out of control.”

The controversy first surfaced in 2009, when Trafigura obtained a super injunction against journalists who had obtained internal documents discussing the dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast. The documents, the company’s lawyers Carter-Ruck argued and the judge agreed, were private material.

The order was eventually overturned when a British member of Parliament tabled a question on the issue, using a centuries-old precedent known as privilege, which holds reporting on Parliament above the law. Later, WikiLeaks also published the document.

And last month another member of Parliament, John Hemming, also used Parliamentary privilege to reveal that Mr. Goodwin, the former chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, “has obtained a super injunction preventing him being identified as a banker.”

“Will the government,” Mr. Hemming asked, “have a debate or a statement on the issue of freedom of speech and whether there is one law for the rich, such as Fred Goodwin, and another law for the poor?”

Ms. Harris, the media lawyer, argued that “this is so much wider and more important than the rich and powerful protecting themselves.” Tabloid newspapers, she said, were using freedom of speech as a pretext to publish stories that were sometimes spurious.

Behind many of the injunctions she has worked on, she said, lies a seamy world of betrayals and tabloid bidding wars for kiss-and-tell tales, “not to mention blackmail and harassment of some of these people.”

“If you’re a public figure and a fan you’ve exchanged a few e-mails with suddenly tells you that she is going to ruin your career, that she’ll turn up at your kids’ school, or go to the press and make accusations, what can you do?” Ms. Harris continued.

“Instead of hysteria we need a proper debate on this,” she said. “What exactly is private and what exactly is not private?”

Mr. Hislop agrees that a debate is essential, and added that to ban publication in the age of the Internet, when many of the recipients of super injunctions can be revealed with a little careful searching online, is “bizarre; it’s ludicrous.”

“I suppose those of us in print should be flattered,” Mr. Hislop said, “that only dead-wood publications count for these judges.”

 

Libya Could Become Stalemate, Top U.S. Military Officer Says

The officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that a month of airstrikes had destroyed 30 percent to 40 percent of the capabilities of the military forces loyal to Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, but had not yet drastically tilted the conflict with opposition militias one way or another. He cited shifts in tactics by Libyan forces that made it difficult for NATO warplanes to distinguish them from the rebel fighters and civilians.

“So it’s become a much more difficult fight, much more difficult targets,” Admiral Mullen said in Baghdad, where he visited American troops involved in another American war. “As I have observed in recent days, essentially it’s very much stalemate-like in the vicinity of Ajdabiya and Brega,” two contested cities east of the capital, Tripoli.

His remarks were echoed by those of the most prominent American yet to visit the rebel strongholds in Libya: Senator John McCain. Appearing on Friday in Benghazi, he, too, used the word stalemate as he called on the United States to intensify its attacks on pro-Qaddafi forces, using aircraft like A-10 jets and AC-130 gunships that the White House and Pentagon have pulled from the fight, citing the threat from portable missiles on the ground and saying allied warplanes should take the lead.

Mr. McCain, a strong advocate of intervention in Libya, called for the United States to recognize the rebels’ governing council as the country’s legitimate government, as France, Italy and Qatar have done, and provide it with money and arms on a scale similar to what the United States did in support of those who fought the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

“I have met these brave fighters, and they are not Al Qaeda,” said Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona. “They are Libyan patriots who want to liberate their nation.” His comments came after a brief visit that included meetings with the members of the Transitional National Council, led by a former justice minister, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, and a former interior minister, Abdul Fateh Younes, who both defected when the uprising began in February.

Mr. McCain’s visit, though coordinated with the White House and the State Department, nonetheless underscored a mounting sense of frustration among critics and even some supporters of the Obama administration that it was not acting aggressively enough to help the rebels overthrow Colonel Qaddafi.

Although this week President Obama authorized the use of armed drones in Libya and a $25 million contribution of nonlethal military surplus for the rebel forces, the administration resists deepening the American military involvement. Asked on Thursday whether American soldiers or advisers should be sent to help improve the effectiveness of the rebel forces, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Mr. Obama had explicitly ruled that out. “And there is no wiggle room in that,” he said.

Instead, administration officials have pleaded for patience. They said that while it could take weeks or months for the rebels to mature as fighters, they asserted that the operation continued to weaken Colonel Qaddafi’s military and that sanctions and an arms embargo allowed the United States “quite aggressively, both unilaterally and multilaterally, to put the squeeze on Qaddafi,” as the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, put it on Friday.

“I think it’s important to remember that Qaddafi’s resources are limited,” Mr. Carney told reporters returning with the president to Washington from California. “And the arms embargo and the sanctions that have been put in place will, as each day goes by, make it harder and harder for him to function and for his regime to function.”

Military officials said the greatest shortcoming among the ragtag rebel militias was not weapons but training, communications systems and a sensible command structure. The supplies the United States is sending — including uniforms, body armor and nonclassified communications gear — are suited to building a more effective fighting force. With the anticipated arrival in Libya of liaison officers from France, Italy and Britain, officials expressed hope that the rebels would become better organized and coordinate their battlefield movements more effectively.

Even so, Admiral Mullen and other NATO officials acknowledged that an evolving tactic adopted by pro-Qaddafi forces — hiding among the population and moving about the battlefield in civilian vehicles — had vastly complicated NATO’s attempts to locate, identify and attack government troops, armor and artillery.

The use of armed Predator drones is intended to counter that. Those drones, though, will operate only on the frontlines separating the rebels and the government forces, with the justification of protecting civilians in besieged cities like Misurata. As of late Friday, no Predators had yet attacked Libyan government forces, officials said.

A senior administration official acknowledged that the fierce fighting in Misurata in particular called into question whether the NATO campaign was succeeding in protecting civilians. “There are constraints on doing that because of the stated desire to avoid civilian casualties, the technical limits of air power and even the weather,” the official said.

Overall, though, the NATO campaign was never intended, by itself, to overthrow Colonel Qaddafi. The measure of success, the official added, is “not whether the rebels are marching on Tripoli.”

The fighting in Misurata seesawed Friday.

The rebels there said they had driven Colonel Qaddafi’s men from buildings along Tripoli Avenue, a central artery, where snipers had been shooting at anyone who dared venture out. Shooting resumed later, though, near the main hospital, not far from Tripoli Avenue, according to a foreign journalist at the hospital, suggesting that whatever success the rebels had enjoyed was probably short-lived. The Libyan flag, which had been taken down the day before, was once again flying over the city’s tallest building.

Libya’s deputy foreign minister, Khaled Kaim, said the army might stop fighting in Misurata because of NATO airstrikes, Reuters reported. Instead, he said, local tribes will try to negotiate with the rebels, and if that fails, the tribes will fight the rebels, the news agency reported.

In Benghazi, the rebels seemed buoyed by the news from the front and from Mr. McCain’s visit. He stopped briefly at the courthouse that has been the headquarters of the uprising’s leaders. Only a few dozen Libyans were there, and they chanted pro-American and anti-Qaddafi slogans.

“This,” Mr. McCain said, “was one of the most exciting and inspiring days of my life.”

Rod Nordland reported from Benghazi, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington. Reporting was contributed by C. J. Chivers from Benghazi, Michael S. Schmidt from Baghdad, Thom Shanker from Washington, Alan Cowell from London and J. David Goodman from New York.