Bits: Wall Street Journal Leak Site Works on Fixes

May 7, 12:29 a.m. | Updated Updating Qualys’s rating of SafeHouse’s encryption.

The Wall Street Journal on Thursday introduced SafeHouse, a Web site that takes a page from WikiLeaks by inviting whistleblowers to submit tips and documents. But within hours, security researchers were challenging the notion that the site was safe for leakers. And on Friday, The Journal said it was rushing through technical changes to address the problems.

According to the researchers, the way SafeHouse uses Web encryption technology known as HTTPS opens the site up for attacks, and is not rigorous enough for a site that handles highly sensitive communications. They also said they were troubled that SafeHouse used Adobe Flash for uploading documents, a technology that can help strip leakers of anonymity.

The problems were the subject of a barrage of messages on Twitter on Thursday afternoon by Jacob Appelbaum, a developer for the Tor Project, which provides tools for anonymous online communication used by dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists and others. Mr. Appelbaum was formerly associated with Wikileaks. “Pro-tip: if you’re going to create a document leaking website – have a clue!” he wrote.

The Journal said in an e-mailed statement that it was taking the issues raised “very seriously” and that it would end its use of Flash within 48 hours. “In addition, our system has been updated to limit the types of less secure connections it will accept,” it said.

SafeHouse’s terms of service encourage whistleblowers to improve their security by using tools like Tor that provide anonymity. However, both Mr. Appelbaum and Peter Eckersley, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said Adobe Flash defeated? those tools.

Mr. Eckersley said the problem was with a Flash feature called Flash Socket Class, which would allow SafeHouse to discover a user’s real IP address, regardless of any anonymizing technologies that might be in use. As such, The Journal could identify people who upload documents, or be forced by the government to do so. News organizations like The Journal are accustomed to protecting sources, including from the government, but having the information could open it up to legal difficulties.

The E.F.F. said that it raised its concerns about Flash Socket Class in March 2010 with Adobe’s chief privacy officer, MeMe Rasmussen, and that the company said the issue would be hard to fix but that it would work on it. An Adobe spokeswoman was not immediately able to provide comment.

The way HTTPS is used by SafeHouse would not be problematic for an average Web site, said Ivan Ristic, director of engineering at Qualys and founder of a research effort called SSL Labs. However, it did not cover all the bases necessary to ensure that a user couldn’t be fooled into engaging in unencrypted communication.

Dan Kaminsky, chief scientist at the security firm DKH, said even major banks did not use the advanced technologies in question. Those technologies are “nice to have,” but can cause other problems, he said, and their absence does not make a site unsafe.

Mr. Ristic said it was also troubling that SafeHouse was using algorithms known as cipher suites that are not strong enough to ensure that recorded communications cannot be deciphered later if the key to them is somehow obtained.

On Friday afternoon, Qualys was giving SafeHouse a grade of B on its use of encryption, in large measure due to poor cipher strength. But by Friday evening, its use of cipher technology was getting higher marks, and Qualys raised its grade to an A.

“Hopefully we’ll see this WSJ site moving toward a truly secure deployment,” Mr. Eckersley of the E.F.F. said. “That kind of i-dotting and t-crossing is necessary to be safe against some of the attacks we’ve seen used against HTTPS Web sites in recent years.”

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Labadie Journal: In Haiti, Class Comes With a Peek at Lush Life

For years, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., the cruise line corporation based in Miami, has run a private resort on a sandy promontory nearby — a playground of lounge chairs, bars and even an alpine coaster that shoots guests though the forest.

The company has leased the 260 beachfront acres, about 90 miles north of the nation’s capital, from the government since 1986. Several times a week, up to 7,000 people descend for the day when mega ships make berth here on a newly completed $34 million pier, offering a dizzying contrast to the poverty beyond the gates.

But in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the capital, the cruise line evoked harsh criticism when it resumed docking pleasure ships at the resort for frolicking vacationers — just six days after the quake killed as many as 300,000 people, according to Haitian officials, and rendered more than a million homeless.

Then the company opened the cheery citrus-colored school complex just outside the resort’s heavily guarded chain-link fences in October, a move Royal Caribbean representatives said it was considering before the disaster and the scathing press it received afterward.

“We’ve been there for a long time and of course the problems in Haiti are enormous, and it’s hard for anyone to really make a significant dent in them,” said Richard D. Fain, the company’s chairman and chief executive. “We thought one of the places to start was with education.”

Still, the assistance was “modest,” he added. “We are a business. We’re not a charitable organization.”

Other projects include a water distribution system in the village of Labadie, said John Weis, an associate vice president. After the quake, the company donated around $2 million in aid and helped import relief supplies.

“I’m not saying we do this because it’s a completely altruistic motivation,” Mr. Weis said, “but I think that our management feels that we have a responsibility to make a difference down here.”

While residents seem to agree that the school is a boon to the community, the praise is tempered by doubts. Its mountainous location is far from the towns it serves, and its failure to provide any meals — leaving many children hungry throughout the day — has critics wondering why the company has not done more.

The World Food Program provided some food, but the company discontinued lunch a few months ago, citing sanitary concerns in preparation. A kitchen is being planned, but for now only a handful of parents can afford to provide lunch for their children, several teachers said.

The vast majority of the 200 or so students do not eat anything from early morning until they get home after school, teachers said. Some students fall asleep at their desks from fatigue.

“The school was built for underprivileged kids, but the way the school is functioning, it is for the bourgeois,” said Paul Herns, 29, who teaches fifth grade. He echoed a common sentiment: gratitude mixed with the feeling that the company, which had revenues of $6.8 billion last year, could do a lot better.

“Royal promised a school that was to be different from other ones in Haiti, similar to schools abroad,” Mr. Herns said. “Where children are fed and have access to sporting activities and taught some English skills to speak to foreigners; where they can surf the Web. These services have not yet been provided.”

Mr. Weis said meals were not promised.

The school itself is stunning and serene, a clean-swept haven from the several surrounding towns from which the students hail, where streets are choked with trash and the smoke of plastic bottles burning. It houses kindergarten through fifth grade and is run by a nonprofit group founded and led by Maryse Pénette-Kedar, a former minister of tourism and president of Royal Caribbean’s operations in Haiti.

Students are chosen by lottery, and around 20 percent are children of the company’s local employees.

 

Titusville Journal: In Shuttle’s Waning Days, One of the Last Reasons to Cheer

 

Drivers will abandon their cars, and customers will pour out of the Village Inn, where Mr. Galorneau is the general manager, as they will at businesses up and down Route 1, which serves as a main street for this city of 45,000.

Shortly before 4 p.m., all eyes will turn toward the Kennedy Space Center, 12 miles east across the wide expanse of the Indian River Lagoon. There, at Launch Pad 39A, if the weather allows, the shuttle Endeavour will thunder into the sky on a pedestal of flame, carrying six astronauts on a two-week mission to the International Space Station.

“The place will clear out,” Mr. Galorneau said Wednesday while waitresses bustled around him, and every diner got a free piece of pie for Pie Rush Wednesday. “Everybody crowds down to the river. And then, as soon it goes up, 10 minutes later I have a packed restaurant and I have a waiting list for hours.”

The brief but jaw-dropping spectacle that is a shuttle launching has occurred 133 times before, and Mr. Galorneau has seen his share (except for the time he was stuck inside making pancake batter — “You can’t run a pancake house without pancake batter,” he said — and got to feel the building shake). This launching is expected to be one of the biggest ever, with perhaps three-quarters of a million people jamming Titusville, Cape Canaveral and other nearby towns.

Some of the interest in the Endeavour mission is no doubt because of the drama involving its commander, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, whose wife, Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, was gravely wounded in a shooting in January. She is here to watch the launching. And some of it is no doubt because of an anticipated visit by President Obama.

But the main draw is the fact that after this liftoff, and the launching of the Atlantis in two months, there will be no more space shuttle voyages. After three decades, the program has just about reached the end of the line.

“You’re not going to see another one — this is going to be it,” said Truman Scarborough, who was Titusville’s mayor in the 1980s and served as a Brevard County commissioner for 20 years.

Mr. Scarborough and others said that for the past three or four launchings, the crowds have been getting larger as the program nears its end. Officials were forecasting perhaps a million or more for the Atlantis launch, a crowd that would rival the glory days of the space program, when a mammoth Saturn V rocket propelled the Apollo 11 astronauts toward the moon.

At the space center, the shuttle program’s demise is apparent in the physical changes taking place. At Launch Pad 39B, a twin to the pad where the Endeavour sits, workers were dismantling, bit by bit, the giant steel structures that coddled many shuttles before liftoff — including the Challenger, which rocketed off in 1986, never to return.

Several miles away, at a huge bay where workers would normally be swarming over the shuttle Discovery to ready it for its next mission, they were instead preparing it to be shipped next year to the Smithsonian Institution.

But in Titusville and other towns nearby, the changes are being measured in terms of humans, not hardware. While the shuttle program never really achieved its lofty goal of making spaceflight routine, it did provide a routine for thousands of aerospace workers here.

Some of them — mostly employees of contractors, not NASA — have already received pink slips. Many more layoffs and buyouts are to come this summer — in all, about 8,000.

“It’s been our livelihood forever,” said the Rev. Tom Porter, pastor of Temple Baptist Church here, who said some laid-off members of his congregation had already left for new jobs elsewhere.

Titusville and other communities saw this coming; discussions about the end of the shuttle program began as early as seven years ago. And old-timers have seen this kind of thing before, especially when the Apollo moon program ended in 1973. “In the early ’70s, I used to come over here from St. Petersburg, and it was a ghost town,” Pastor Porter said.

Indeed, it was the shuttle program that shook the area out of its post-Apollo doldrums. And while NASA plans eventually to replace the shuttles with commercial manned rockets that would use the space center, no one knows how soon that would happen.

Local officials say that the region is much more diverse economically now and that the effect of the space industry, for better or worse, is not as great as it used to be. With its many shuttered businesses — the Miracle City Mall, just down the block from Mr. Galorneau’s restaurant, is a shell of its former self, with only a few stores open — Titusville is not that different from other Florida cities, far from the Space Coast, which overbuilt in the boom years only to fall hard in the economic downturn.

Aside from the economic diversity, Mr. Scarborough said, there is something else that is different: life is more complicated. Apollo employed a lot of young engineers who quickly pulled up stakes when the program closed. These days the engineers and other workers are older, and many of their spouses work. Leaving for a new job may not be so easy; it may not even be desired.

“Breaking and running, when you’re within 10 or 15 years of retirement, doesn’t seem to be making sense to them,” Mr. Scarborough said. “Which is not what happened after Apollo.”

Pastor Porter said that this week his congregation prayed that President Obama, who has continued to nudge the manned spaceflight program away from NASA and toward private companies, “would see the launch and be so moved to keep the program going.” Did he think that would happen? “No,” he said. “Humanly speaking, no way.”

Pastor Porter said that some workers have already taken steps to be ready for layoffs. But others have not.

“The Bible says consider the ants,” he said. “The ants — you know, they toil, they save up, they prepare. Yeah, in a perfect world that would be great.”

 

Titusville Journal: In Shuttle’s Waning Days, One of the Last Reasons to Cheer

 

Drivers will abandon their cars, and customers will pour out of the Village Inn, where Mr. Galorneau is the general manager, as they will at businesses up and down Route 1, which serves as a main street for this city of 45,000.

Shortly before 4 p.m., all eyes will turn toward the Kennedy Space Center, 12 miles east across the wide expanse of the Indian River Lagoon. There, at Launch Pad 39A, if the weather allows, the shuttle Endeavour will thunder into the sky on a pedestal of flame, carrying six astronauts on a two-week mission to the International Space Station.

“The place will clear out,” Mr. Galorneau said Wednesday while waitresses bustled around him, and every diner got a free piece of pie for Pie Rush Wednesday. “Everybody crowds down to the river. And then, as soon it goes up, 10 minutes later I have a packed restaurant and I have a waiting list for hours.”

The brief but jaw-dropping spectacle that is a shuttle launching has occurred 133 times before, and Mr. Galorneau has seen his share (except for the time he was stuck inside making pancake batter — “You can’t run a pancake house without pancake batter,” he said — and got to feel the building shake). This launching is expected to be one of the biggest ever, with perhaps three-quarters of a million people jamming Titusville, Cape Canaveral and other nearby towns.

Some of the interest in the Endeavour mission is no doubt because of the drama involving its commander, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, whose wife, Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, was gravely wounded in a shooting in January. She is here to watch the launching. And some of it is no doubt because of an anticipated visit by President Obama.

But the main draw is the fact that after this liftoff, and the launching of the Atlantis in two months, there will be no more space shuttle voyages. After three decades, the program has just about reached the end of the line.

“You’re not going to see another one — this is going to be it,” said Truman Scarborough, who was Titusville’s mayor in the 1980s and served as a Brevard County commissioner for 20 years.

Mr. Scarborough and others said that for the past three or four launchings, the crowds have been getting larger as the program nears its end. Officials were forecasting perhaps a million or more for the Atlantis launch, a crowd that would rival the glory days of the space program, when a mammoth Saturn V rocket propelled the Apollo 11 astronauts toward the moon.

At the space center, the program’s demise is apparent in the physical changes taking place. At Launch Pad 39B, a twin to the pad where the Endeavour sits, workers were dismantling, bit by bit, the giant steel structures that coddled many shuttles before liftoff — including the Challenger, which rocketed off in 1986, never to return.

Several miles away, at a huge bay where workers would normally be swarming over the shuttle Discovery to ready it for its next mission, they were instead preparing it to be shipped next year to the Smithsonian Institution.

But in Titusville and other towns nearby, the changes are being measured in terms of humans, not hardware. While the shuttle program never really achieved its lofty goal of making spaceflight routine, it did provide a routine for thousands of aerospace workers here.

Some of them — mostly employees of contractors, not NASA — have already received pink slips. Many more layoffs and buyouts are to come this summer — in all, about 8,000.

“It’s been our livelihood forever,” said the Rev. Tom Porter, pastor of Temple Baptist Church here, who said some laid-off members of his congregation had already left for new jobs elsewhere.

Titusville and other communities saw this coming; discussions about the end of the shuttle program began as early as seven years ago. And old-timers have seen this kind of thing before, especially when the Apollo moon program ended in 1973. “In the early ’70s, I used to come over here from St. Petersburg, and it was a ghost town,” Pastor Porter said.

Indeed, it was the shuttle program that shook the area out of its post-Apollo doldrums. And while NASA plans eventually to replace the shuttles with commercial manned rockets that would use the space center, no one knows how soon that would happen.

Local officials say that the region is much more diverse economically now and that the effect of the space industry, for better or worse, is not as great as it used to be. With its many shuttered businesses — the Miracle City Mall, just down the block from Mr. Galorneau’s restaurant, is a shell of its former self, with only a few stores open — Titusville is not that different from other Florida cities, far from the Space Coast, which overbuilt in the boom years only to fall hard in the economic downturn.

Aside from the economic diversity, the pastor said, there is something else that is different this time: life is more complicated. Apollo employed a lot of young engineers who quickly pulled up stakes when the program closed. These days the engineers and other workers are older, and many of their spouses work. Leaving for a new job may not be so easy; it may not even be desired.

“Breaking and running, when you’re within 10 or 15 years of retirement, doesn’t seem to be making sense to them,” Mr. Scarborough said. “Which is not what happened after Apollo.”

Pastor Porter said that this week his congregation prayed that President Obama, who has continued to nudge the manned spaceflight program away from NASA and toward private companies, “would see the launch and be so moved to keep the program going.” Did he think that would happen? “No,” he said. “Humanly speaking, no way.”

Pastor Porter said that some workers have already taken steps to be ready for layoffs. But others have not.

“The Bible says consider the ants,” he said. “The ants — you know, they toil, they save up, they prepare. Yeah, in a perfect world that would be great.”

 

Florence Journal: Britain to Close a Consulate With a View

Once a haven for traveling aristocrats and dreamy Britons escaping the strictures of home for the looser ways of Italy, in recent years the consulate has dealt more with lost passports than lost morals. But it holds a central place in the history of British-Italian relations, and news of its closing has been taken as an affront here.

The mayor of Florence has expressed regrets, one Florentine aristocrat says she hopes to raise the issue at the royal wedding, and a leading British historian here has questioned Britain’s diplomatic priorities.

As the sun streamed through the windows of his office overlooking the Arno River on a recent morning, David Broomfield, the man who will most likely be the last British consul of Florence, treated the news wistfully. “It’s not like I’m the last governor leaving the old colony with a feather in his hat,” Mr. Broomfield said. “But it’s the end of an important tradition here for 500 years.” There was an English diplomatic presence in Florence as far back as the 1450s.

Across the room, lists of his predecessors hung framed on the wall in neat calligraphy. They begin in 1698 with Sir Lambert Blackwell, “consul at Leghorn,” as the port city of Livorno was then known, and continue through Sir Horace Mann, who as consul in Florence from 1760 to 1786 turned the consulate into a salon, receiving all Britons of rank who passed through the city.

On one panel, a line of devastating understatement reads, “No British representation in Florence 11 June 1940 to 1 Feb. 1945.” Every year, the city holds a memorial service for the first British soldier killed in the Allied liberation of Florence.

In his autobiographical 1999 film “Tea With Mussolini,” Franco Zeffirelli captured the world of well-heeled, slightly batty English women who had come to Florence seeking beauty and who took their tea in the Uffizi — until Mussolini declared them and all Britons enemy aliens.

When the Arno flooded in 1966, sending all of Florence scrambling to save both its citizens and its priceless art, the consulate opened its doors as a temporary clinic.

With so much intertwined history, it is not surprising that the city is upset that the consulate will close at the end of the year.

“Obviously, I’m very sorry and sad, because the British Consulate in Florence has a very unique and beautiful history,” said the mayor, Matteo Renzi. But, he added, “The world changes, and it’s clear that in the era of EasyJet and Ryanair there’s no more Grand Tour.”

Mr. Renzi said he understood the budget cuts, part of Britain’s austerity plan, but would like to invite Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and his wife to visit Florence before the consulate closes: to show, he said, “that relations between our city and that nation remain strong.”

The Marchesa Bona Frescobaldi, from the Tuscan wine-producing dynasty, was quoted widely in the Italian press as saying that she would try to raise the issue with Prince Charles at the wedding this week of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Miss Middleton lived in Florence for several months in 2000 and studied at the private British Institute, which has offered Italian- and English-language courses — and an extensive lending library — since it was founded in 1917 to foster better British-Italian relations during the First World War.

Paul Ginsborg, a professor of European history at the University of Florence who has written extensively on Italy, questioned the timing of the closing. “How come we could afford the consulate for five centuries, and we no longer can now? How come they didn’t need to close it in 1820, in 1910 or even in the 1930s, during the Great Depression?” he asked.

“It’s a political decision that will affect the British image abroad precisely in a moment when culture and communications count so much,” Mr. Ginsborg said. “I believe that they should reconsider it.”

For its part, the British Foreign Office “keeps the future shape of its network under constant review,” a spokeswoman said in an e-mail. “We are looking both to broaden and deepen our overseas network, particularly to increase our presence in emerging powers.”

Indeed, since 2007, the Foreign Office has opened consulates in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo; Antananarivo, Madagascar; and Juba, Sudan; and closed them in Durban, South Africa; Geneva; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Nagoya, Japan; and Aleppo, Syria; among other places.

Britain is also closing its consulate in Venice, meaning that Britons who need help or lose passports will have to travel to Rome, Milan or Naples for assistance.

“From a symbolic point of view, I’m very, very sad,” Mr. Broomfield said. “From a practical point of view, I understand putting consular resources in three posts, not five.”

In a dark chapter, Mr. Broomfield assisted the family of Meredith Kercher, a British student who was killed in Perugia in 2007. Her American roommate, Amanda Knox, and Ms. Knox’s boyfriend and another man were convicted of the murder in 2009.

In the mid-19th century, Florence was one of the first destinations for Thomas Cook package tours. Today, visitors to Florence include scores of college students who often seem as interested in pub crawls as in the church of Santa Croce.

But Florence has long been a haven for those seeking to shake off the confines of England. They include the fictional Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s 1908 novel “A Room With a View,” who breaks off her engagement to a stuffy man she does not love after finding aesthetic and emotional freedom in Florence. The novelist D. H. Lawrence first published “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” privately in Florence in 1928 after British censors banned the vivid account of adulterous love.

The poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning eloped to Florence and lived at Casa Guidi, where Elizabeth died in 1861, “worn out by illness, addiction and arguments with Robert,” according to the Penguin Classics edition of her poetry, co-edited by Julia Bolton Holloway.

On a recent sunny afternoon here, Ms. Bolton Holloway showed Elizabeth Browning’s elaborate tomb at the Protestant Cemetery. Ms. Bolton Holloway, who has labored to bring the cemetery back from disrepair, said she was sorry the consulate would be closing.

“It’s sad,” she said. “The English community isn’t as strong as it has been in the past.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

 

Baltimore Journal: For Late ‘Mr. Mayor,’ a Last Tour of Town

?A motorcade led by a shiny black hearse cruised through closed streets, making stops at some of his most famous achievements, including the National Aquarium, the stadium at Camden Yards and the Inner Harbor, the glittering heart of downtown that is considered one of the country’s greatest urban renewal success stories.

?It ended at City Hall, where a small crowd watched as his coffin was unloaded near a giant American flag hung between two fire engine ladders.

“This is history,” said Bernard Smith, 43, who had come with his 13-year-old daughter. “We’re never going to have another mayor like him.”

It was a fitting finale for a man who loved public spectacles, and it gave the residents of this city a chance to pay their respects to Mr. Schaefer, a ferociously energetic politician whom many locals referred to as “Mr. Mayor” or ?“Willie Don,” and who served in elected office for most of his 89 years. A public funeral will be held on Wednesday.

?But the applause and tributes seemed to be as much about this city’s yearning to return to the Schaefer era, to a time when anything seemed possible, and before the city’s vast social problems settled too deeply into its bones.

“Sometimes you just want to go back to the old days and the old ways, when there were morals and grace and respect,” said Melody Sayre, 54, a bus driver who lived near Mr. Schaefer. “He was the last of the Mohicans. He was an original man.”

By all accounts, Mr. Schaefer made this gritty port city feel good about itself at a time — after the race riots and a long-term decline in manufacturing and transport jobs — when its spirits were touching new lows.

“He put Baltimore on the map,” Ms. Sayre said.

But while his downtown development gave the economy a boost, those gains ultimately were swept away by the storm of social and economic woes — like the crack epidemic and the dwindling numbers of working-class jobs — that continued unabated, and have made it one of the country’s most troubled cities and a natural backdrop for police-themed television series like “The Wire” and “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

?“What Schaefer did was mostly psychological,” said Matthew Crenson, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. “He turned around the city’s morale, but not so much its economy.”

?Marc Levine, a professor of history and economic development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said Mr. Schaefer might have stopped Baltimore from becoming an abandoned city like Detroit, but he nevertheless was unable to stem its economic decline.

Today, less than half of the city’s working-age, black male population is employed, down from 68 percent in 1970. And despite the downtown renaissance, it has relentlessly lost ground as a regional employment center, with just 25 percent of the Baltimore region’s jobs, down from 62 percent in 1970. Fifty years later, the city continues to lose residents, and it is now home to just 23 percent of the population of the larger metro area, down from 44 percent in 1970.

?“He had an important impact, but that doesn’t mean he turned the city around,” said Professor Levine, who has studied Baltimore. “All the indicators suggest that the larger economic trajectory remained unchanged.”

But that mattered little to people who were celebrating him on Monday, who praised him as a down-to-earth man who helped them feel a sense of pride about their city.

 

Miharu Journal: Japan’s Cherry Blossoms Bloom, but Nuclear Fears Keep Tourists Away

 

The town, however, may not be as resilient. The hundreds of thousands of people who come here each cherry blossom season to view the prized tree, one of the three oldest in the country and a designated national monument, are largely staying away this year, scared off by the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, just 30 miles away.

“This tree has lived through many disasters,” said Masayoshi Hashimoto, 85, a local vegetable farmer whose produce has also been rendered largely unsalable by the radioactive plume. “It may survive the nuclear accident,” he said, “but the town may not.”

Sakura, or cherry blossom season, reaches its peak this week along the Tohoku coast, a region still reeling from the March 11 quake, tsunami and accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Tohoku’s famous sakura trees usually draw hundreds of thousands of visitors, many from greater Tokyo, bringing precious tourist income to villages and towns that have little industry to speak of.

Even though many cherry trees in the disaster zone have survived, it will very likely take years to rebuild the tourism industry, officials warn. The troubles are many: severe damage to the tourism infrastructure, fears of heightened radiation levels in areas around Fukushima and an overall plunge in travelers in a country still shell-shocked by its worst disaster since World War II. JTB Corporation, Japan’s largest travel agency, said last week that it expected travel to fall 28 percent during a holiday period known as Golden Week, which starts this month.

Damage to tourism in the area adds to the woes of a local economy that has suffered severe blows: many fishing and farming communities were decimated in the tsunami, and many of the factories in the region are struggling to rebuild or restart production lines.

In Miharu, the weeping sakura has been an important source of income for an aging farming community. About 300,000 people descended on the town to view the 40-foot tree last year, spending generously at local inns and eateries, as well as on produce.

This year, the town expected the number of visitors to fall by about 80 percent. Though the town is not affected by the evacuation zone, which is now a 12-to-18-mile radius around the Fukushima plant, visitors “are playing it safe and staying away,” said Susumu Yamaguchi, a tourism official at Miharu’s town hall. “It’s a big blow for us,” he said.

In a bid to attract visitors, the town abolished its usual $3.60 viewing fee and went on a media offensive. “There won’t be any crowds this year, no traffic jam,” Miharu’s mayor, Yoshinori Suzuki, told a local paper last week.

Helped by sunny weather on Sunday, the tree attracted a larger-than-expected throng of visitors, though still far fewer than usual, according to officials.

Asuka Kimura, 29, a homemaker and mother of four from nearby Iwaki City, said that the thrill of an outing to see the cherry tree at Miharu had outweighed concerns over radiation. “I’ve had the kids play indoors for so long,” she said. “Today we’re spending the day outside, just for the day.”

The town has been desperate to protect its prized tree. Visitors were scarce during World War II, elders recall, but villagers still tended to the tree, preparing for the return to more peaceful times. Five years ago, when a blizzard threatened to overwhelm the tree, local farmers lovingly brushed off the snow and erected wooden supports to keep its branches from breaking.

They again raced to the tree after the devastating March 11 quake, which damaged some homes in the area. The tree remained intact and was far enough inland to escape the tsunami, but the bad news came the next day as the plant spewed radioactive steam toward the town. Local inns, which had been booked solid with reservations ahead of the sakura season, were inundated with cancellations.

Still, as the trees bloom, sometimes amid mountains of rubble, they have become symbols of resilience.

“These cherry trees blossom each year despite any catastrophe,” said Noriyuki Kasai, the mayor of Hirosaki, a city on the edge of the disaster zone, some 400 miles north of Tokyo. Though the city and its 2,600 cherry trees escaped the brunt of the damage, far fewer visitors are expected this season. “Like the trees, we will also recover,” he said.

 

Ventimiglia Journal: On Journey, Young Tunisians Need Only a Final Destination

Luca Zennaro/European Pressphoto AgencyTunisians traveling from Ventimiglia, Italy, to Nice, France, on Tuesday. Some 25,700 Tunisian refugees have in arrived in Italy so far this year, many of whom want to settle in France.

VENTIMIGLIA, Italy — In the American Bar, across the square from the train station here, they have had enough. “The Tunisians are everywhere,” the waitress said. “It’s been like this for a month. They sleep in the station and on the streets, and we’ve lost a lot of customers.”

The route from Ventimiglia to Nice is closely monitored.

Mara Scasso, an emergency room nurse, said she had never seen so many police officers in this western edge of Italy, on the French border. “Helping the refugees is a moral duty,” she said. “But here we have one of the highest unemployment rates in Italy; it’s a dead zone. I don’t see how we can help them.”

Thirty yards away, about 70 young Tunisian men sat around the lip of a dry fountain in Piazza Battisti, drinking coffee, asking for money and giving interviews. Some of them have been sent between Italy and France several times, and the police and immigration officers carefully monitor the trains and stations on the Riviera tourist route between Nice, Menton and Ventimiglia, stopping every young man who looks Tunisian.These young men — there are no women — are a kind of Ping-Pong ball in a French-Italian political soap opera: economic migrants from a newly free but chaotic Tunisia who have dared the seas to find opportunity in a European Union that does not want them.

Italy has started issuing temporary six-month residence permits to Tunisians who arrived before April 5, saying that European Union rules under the Schengen treaty, which allows passport-free travel, would let them travel into France and elsewhere. The French are turning many of them back if they lack other documentation or sufficient money, or if they simply cannot satisfactorily explain, at least to officials, the nature and duration of their visit. As a French policeman in the Nice train station said of the permits, “The Italians have created a beautiful stupidity.”

But the Italians feel put upon, given their proximity to Tunisia and the arrival of some 25,700 Tunisian refugees this year, and they are worried about an even larger influx from Libya. They are asking for “European solidarity” from a European Union that has no uniform policy on economic migrants, refugees or even political asylum, and some Italian politicians have even threatened, idly, to quit the European Union if it does not help Italy with the influx. But the Italians are most angry with France, which is where most of the Tunisians say they want to go.

As Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told the daily La Repubblica: “The problem of immigration is becoming a bit like the nuclear issue. Everyone wants to say something about it, but no one wants it in their backyard.”

Mohamed Haddaji is a good example. In January, he paid about $2,100 to travel to Lampedusa, an Italian island near Tunisia, on a small boat. Single and 25, he worked in a Tunis bakery, but with the collapse of state authority he took his chance to go to France, where he has family, he said, to have a better life.

The Italian authorities are pleasant, he said; the French are not. “We sleep in the streets in France,” he said. He came with $1,400; he is decently dressed and has various phone cards in his wallet for Tunisia, Italy and France. Like his friend Jalel, 23, he says he wants to earn money and return to Tunisia.

But he has no papers, except for a card with his name and photograph from an Italian charity, and the French police told him to go back to Italy to get some. Even if he gets a six-month residency card and can show the French a valid train ticket from Italy, he may still get sent back, said Francis Lamy, the prefect of France’s Alpes-Maritimes department.

The French police have the right and duty, Mr. Lamy said in an interview in Nice, to ask a foreigner “to justify the reason for his visit and the duration, and to demonstrate the means to pay for this stay,” he said — usually $88 a day. “If the person acts suspicious or the answers are not satisfactory, the state can, under Schengen, send the person back, in this case to Italy, and Italy has an obligation to retake him.”

Mr. Lamy has told police officers under his command — as well as the 240 in three mobile units sent from Paris to help him deal with the Tunisians — “to follow the rules strictly.” Those rules, he said, along with a new French security law passed last month, allow officers within 12 miles of the border to stop people for identity and security checks if they are suspected of violating the law, crossing illegally or smuggling.

The police have arrested 100 human traffickers, Mr. Lamy said. In March alone, he said, French authorities arrested 2,800 foreigners, nearly all Tunisian, of whom 1,700 were expelled from France. Of those, 1,450 were returned to Italy, and some 250 were returned directly to Tunisia. There was not a single woman or application for political asylum, he said, insisting that each case is treated separately and with judicial oversight.

Ma?a de la Baume contributed reporting from Ventimiglia, Italy, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.