Political Memo: After Snips to Budget, a Thicket Looms

With time growing short before an Aug. 2 deadline to raise the federal debt limit, Republican and Democratic lawmakers meeting with Mr. Biden behind closed doors are just beginning to weigh the big fiscal trade-offs necessary for a compromise that could clear the way for a Congressional vote.

An accelerated schedule of meetings for next week will test whether the six members of the House and Senate talking with the White House are willing to entertain the serious political concessions and to make the hard choices needed to cut a deal in time.

In the colorful phrasing of Mr. Biden, the moment has arrived to find out who is willing to trade their side’s bicycle for the other side’s golf clubs.

“The really tough stuff that is left are the big-ticket items,” Mr. Biden said Thursday at the conclusion of the week’s third bargaining session, meetings that took lawmakers and administration officials to every corner of the federal budget in a search for consensus on ways to save federal dollars.

Lawmakers and aides say the negotiators quickly gobbled up low-hanging fruit like trimming agriculture subsidies and selling more of the telecommunications spectrum to generate revenue. There is a general consensus that federal workers are going to have to contribute more to their pensions, though the details are still to be determined. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation will collect higher fees from stable companies, and some idle federal property could be up for sale.

But those actions are not going to produce anywhere near the $2 trillion or more in savings that both sides agree is the level required to win a debt limit increase while putting the government on course to save $4 trillion over the next decade — a goal set by Mr. Biden.

To get there, negotiators are going to have to make some excruciating choices about federal health care and safety-net programs, as well as the tax structure. At the same time, they need to reach a deal that not only can be sold to a bipartisan majority in the House and Senate, but also is credible enough to assure investors worldwide that Washington is getting serious about taking care of its financial health.

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee and a participant in the talks, said one reason for setting three-hour meetings four times next week is to gauge whether he and his fellow budget bargainers can ever come to terms.

“We are picking up the pace in a big way, recognizing that we’ve got to determine whether we can reach agreement in principle or recognize that we are not able to bridge our differences,” he said.

Watching the clock, Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, on Friday called on the negotiators to keep working through the Fourth of July recess if necessary.

To Democrats, a major impediment is the Republican position against relying on any significant new revenues as part of the deal, insisting that most of the $2 trillion or more come from cuts in federal spending — although not from Pentagon spending, a major potential source of savings.

Democrats say they will never be able to sell a compromise without some new revenue to their colleagues in the House and Senate. They say the most affluent Americans should contribute to the debt limit deal through new taxes on hedge fund operators or by phasing out tax deductions for those at the highest levels of earnings.

But Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader who is representing House Republicans in the talks, on Thursday reiterated the deep Republican opposition to higher taxes.

“Our side will not support any attempt to raise the debt ceiling that is not accompanied by the kinds of cuts necessary or reforms necessary,” he said. “Nor will we support an attempt to raise the debt limit that raises people’s taxes. That, we don’t want to do.”

Republicans want to see Democrats embrace more changes in Medicare and Medicaid, the federal health programs for older Americans and the poor.

Democrats have so far pushed for modest changes like allowing the government to negotiate prescription prices with drug companies and to require drug industry rebates for people eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid — a proposal that could potentially generate tens of billions of dollars. But Democrats will not support any major Medicare overhaul, saying they believe that they have the political high ground on the issue at the moment.

To get a deal, lawmakers on both sides are going to have to bend considerably and back unpopular positions. They are then going to have to sell the plan to their rank and file on the grounds that they need to avert the economic disarray that could result from a failure to raise the debt ceiling.

Both sides say that all those in the talks want to reach a compromise. “There is no principal in that room that doesn’t want to get agreement,” Mr. Biden said.

Yet that is no guarantee that the deal will be done.

“I’m confident,” said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, another top Democrat in the talks. “But I’ve been confident before and come up short.”

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After Raid, Indian Guru’s Protest Stirs a Firestorm

 

“The government wanted to kill me,” he said on national television hours after the hunger strikers in New Delhi were scattered by police officers spraying tear gas. “My hunger strike is not broken. I will continue. My agitation will continue.”

Swami Ramdev, a yoga guru with a large following in India, had organized the mass hunger strike that began Saturday in New Delhi. But less than 14 hours later, amid the tumult of the raid, he was detained by officers and flown to the state of Uttaranchal, where he was taken to his ashram near the city of Haridwar.

Appearing on national television, he described how he had tried in vain to escape the police raid by dressing as a woman and covering his flowing black beard with white cloth.

The police raid quickly transformed what had been a quirky mixture of yoga sit-in and political protest into a political firestorm. Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., the country’s main opposition party, assailed the Congress Party as having mishandled the hunger strike and described the police action as “a shameful chapter in the democracy of this country.”

But Congress Party leaders were hardly apologetic and instead accused Swami Ramdev of trying to deliberately stir up trouble as a proxy for the Bharatiya Janata Party and right-wing Hindu groups. “You cannot allow people like Ramdev to run riot in the capital,” said Digvijay Singh, a powerful Congress Party leader who has been outspoken in his criticism of the swami. “He was trying to incite people. Therefore, the action of the police is justified.”

Other Congress Party leaders said Swami Ramdev had deliberately violated a secret agreement to cancel his hunger strike on Saturday afternoon. The swami had focused his protest on the issue of “black money,” the untold billions of misappropriated dollars stashed in foreign banks.

Last week, ministers met with him several times to explain government initiatives on the issue as part of their effort to head off the hunger strike, and on Saturday he announced that the government had met his demands. But after the government announced publicly that there had been an agreement and that Swami Ramdev had promised to end the strike, he angrily vowed that the strike would go on.

On Sunday morning, the police moved in to break up the protest.

Kapil Sibal, the Congress Party’s point man on the issue, said the government delegation actually struck a deal with the swami on Friday. In it the government pledged to take certain actions on black money, he said, while Swami Ramdev agreed that he would strike on Saturday morning but call it off by the afternoon.

But when Swami Ramdev continued with his fast into Saturday evening, Mr. Sibal appeared before reporters with a written copy of the secret agreement and accused the yoga guru of breaking their deal.

The Delhi police said Sunday that they had broken up the demonstration because Swami Ramdev had a permit to conduct a yoga meditation session with 5,000 people but that the crowd had surpassed 50,000 and he was imploring more people to come to New Delhi to join the strike.

Rajan Bhagat, a police spokesman, denied that the police had instigated the confrontation. He said some protesters began pelting officers with bricks after the police ordered everyone to go home. Officers then used tear gas to disperse the crowd.

Mr. Bhagat said that 23 police officers and 39 civilians were slightly injured in the ensuing scuffle.

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Iceland Shuts Main Airport After Volcano Eruption

?PARIS — Iceland’s most active volcano began erupting over the weekend, sending billows of ash up to 11 miles into the air on Sunday, and prompting the island nation to close its main international airport to commercial air traffic as a precaution, aviation officials said.

The Icelandic authorities said that as of 8:30 a.m. local time, Reykjavík-Keflavik International Airport was closed to all inbound and outbound air traffic.

"The ash is covering up all of Iceland,” said Hjordís Gudmundsdottir, a spokeswoman for Isavia, Iceland’s air navigation services provider. "We are trying to identify some holes in it and to use them to allow some flights, but it’s not looking very good right now.”

Overnight, Iceland’s civil protection agency said it had imposed a no-fly zone of 120 nautical miles around the Grimsv?tn volcano in southeast Iceland.

Meteorologists said the prevailing winds were expected to blow the volcanic ash in a generally westward direction through the rest of this week — most likely avoiding a repeat of the widespread shutdowns of European airports that grounded more than 100,000 flights in April and May 2010.

Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based agency that coordinates air traffic management across the region, said it was monitoring the situation but it appeared there would be no wider threat to trans-Atlantic or European air travel at least for the next 24 hours.

Ms. Gudmundsdottir of Isavia said Iceland’s aviation authorities planned an update on the situation at around noon. For the time being, Iceland’s three other international airports remained open, she said.Iceland officials said roughly 30 flight arrivals and departures had originally been scheduled at Keflavik airport on Sunday.Iceland’s Met Office weather agency reported heavy ash fall near the volcano itself.

Grimsv?tn, a volcano of 1,725 meters, is located beneath an uninhabited icecap, Vatnajokull, in southeast Iceland.

Iceland’s civil protection agency said the volcano began erupting Saturday. The authorities have closed the main road to the eruption site and advised people living near the volcano to stay indoors or, if they must go outside, to wear protective masks and goggles.

Grimsv?tn is one of the most active volcanoes in Iceland, with at least 60 eruptions over the past 800 years. Past eruptions, most recently in 1983 and 1998, have been relatively small, however, and?have not posed a direct threat to the population.

Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, one of the island’s largest, erupted violently in April 2010 and sent numerous bursts of ash into the high into the atmosphere for several weeks, disrupting air traffic in Northern Europe, with ripple effects far beyond. The aviation authorities in dozens of European countries moved quickly to close their airspace and ground airplanes in order to prevent possible damage to jet engines.

But due to limited information about what levels of ash density were considered to be safe, the authorities were slow to re-open their airspace — resulting in the worst peacetime air travel disruption in history that cost airlines hundreds of millions of dollars.

European aviation regulators have since taken a series of steps to better coordinate their response to volcanic eruptions.

In April, Eurocontrol, the European Aviation Safety Agency and the International Civil Aviation Organization staged a two-day joint exercise with more than 70 airlines and more than a dozen air traffic control bodies to test their updated procedures.

The exercise, which in fact simulated a significant ash cloud event from the Grimsv?tn volcano, determined that more than 70 percent of scheduled European flights would have been able to take off as scheduled under the new procedures — three times more than during the Eyjafjallaj?kull eruption.

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Australian dies after 'planking'

 15 May 2011 Last updated at 11:33 ET  The craze has thousands of followers on social media websites Australian police say a man who plunged to his death from a seventh-floor balcony on Sunday was participating in the internet craze of "planking".

Planking involves someone lying flat on their stomach in unusual and sometimes dangerous situations, and posting photographs on social media websites.

Police said the dead man, in his 20s, fell from a balcony railing in Brisbane while a friend photographed him.

The man's name has not been released pending notification of his family.

Planking arrest

The craze has gone viral in recent weeks, with one Facebook page boasting 90,000 fans and hundreds of photos of people lying on chimneys, escalators, camels, and other objects.

"This morning we have seen a young man take this activity a step further and attempt to plank on a balcony," said Queensland Police Deputy Commissioner Ross Barnett.

"Unfortunately he has tragically fallen to his death."

Queensland police last week warned "plankers" of the dangers of the activity, after a man was caught allegedly planking on a police car.

The 20-year-old was charged with being on police equipment without lawful excuse.

Sergeant Matthew Russell, of Gladstone police, told the Brisbane Courier-Mail newspaper that planking could be dangerous, and practitioners may find themselves charged with "unauthorised high risk activity".

"While we appreciate the activity is light-hearted fun, putting yourself and others at risk and breaking the law will not be tolerated," he said.

Mr Barnett said the death on Sunday is "what we've been fearing".

"As planking gains popularity, there may be more injuries and potentially further deaths," he said.

Parliament sits after SNP victory

。 10 May 2011 Last updated at 19:44 ET By Andrew Black Political reporter, BBC Scotland  The Scottish Parliament is re-convening for the first time since the Holyrood The Scottish Parliament is sitting for the first time since the SNP's landslide victory in last week's election.

All 129 MSPs will be sworn in, before electing one of their number to become Holyrood's presiding officer for the five-year-term.

Meanwhile, SNP ministers have been continuing to press Westminster to give increased financial powers to Scotland.

The Nationalists won 69 seats, giving them an overall majority.

Labour emerged with 37 seats, while the Conservatives were on 15, the Liberal Democrats won five seats and the Greens have two MSPs.

Independent MSP Margo Macdonald was also returned to parliament.

The Scottish Labour and Tory leaders, Iain Gray and Annabel Goldie, have both announced they are standing down from their jobs in the autumn, while the Lib Dems' Tavish Scott quit his party's leadership at the weekend with immediate effect.

Scottish Secretary Michael Moore is due to meet Alex Salmond in Edinburgh on Thursday, following the SNP's demands for more economic powers in light of the election result.

Continue reading the main story

The Scottish Parliament presiding officer is an MSP elected in a ballot of Holyrood members.

MSPs submit nominations between 1230 BST and 1415 BST.

If a candidate wins more votes than the total number received by all other candidates and the total number of votes cast is more than a quarter of the total number of seats in parliament, that candidate will be elected.

If there is no outright winner for presiding officer, successive rounds of voting will be held, with the candidate receiving the fewest votes in each round being eliminated until one is left.

If there is only one candidate, MSPs are asked to vote for or against that contender or abstain.

A sole nominee is elected if they win a simple majority in their favour and the total number of votes cast is more than a quarter of the total number of seats in the parliament.

The successful candidate is required to resign from their party, in keeping with the requirement of impartiality.

Holyrood must also elect two deputy presiding officers.

Mr Salmond has said Holyrood must be given more ''economic teeth'' in the Scotland Bill, currently going through Westminster.

The SNP wants greater borrowing powers, control over corporation tax and devolution of the Crown Estates.

Meanwhile, candidates for presiding officer of the parliament include Labour MSP and former minister Hugh Henry, along with SNP backbenchers Christine Grahame and Tricia Marwick.

In his pitch for presiding officer, Mr Henry, once education and justice minister, said he would not stand in the way of an independence referendum.

Mr Salmond has indicated he would not attempt to influence his MSPs to elect an SNP presiding officer.

His position came amid speculation that SNP MSPs may wield their majority to elect one of their own members because of fears that an opposition member could rule the referendum beyond the parliament's powers.

Labour MSP Patricia Ferguson will stand to become one of Holyrood's two deputy presiding officers, a post she has previously held.

It is thought Tory MSP John Scott will also stand for the post.

Continue reading the main story

I (name) do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.”

End Quote MSP oath of allegiance Holyrood's out-going presiding officer, Tory, Alex Fergusson, will be the first former holder of the post to return to parliament as an MSP.

The election for the parliament's first minister - with SNP leader Alex Salmond the only realistic candidate - is taking place at a later date.

During the morning swearing-in session, 46 MSPs are taking up seats in parliament for the first time, while 36 members are returning, having served continuously since the first election in 1999.

MSPs will be reflecting their cultural backgrounds by taking oaths or affirmations in Urdu, Gaelic, Scots, Italian and Doric, as well as in English.

Holyrood was also being re-convened after the Earl of Wessex attended the Kirking of parliament on Tuesday night.

The traditional ecumenical service at Edinburgh's St Giles' Cathedral was also attended by MSPs, faith representatives and other guests.

It was led by The Very Rev Gilleasbuig Macmillan, who led the Kirking ceremonies after the 1999, 2003 and 2007 elections.

After a Tornado, Solace on the Ball Field

 

“I love you to death,” Robert Dale told his children. “If something happens, I’ll see you in heaven.”

Within minutes, the Dales had a clear view of the heavens — from the bathroom, which was spared. The roof was peeled off and the house damaged beyond repair.

No sooner had their heart rates returned to normal than Slade began fielding messages from baseball teammates concerned about his safety. Word was spreading that their school, a deep fly ball’s distance from the Dales’, was wrecked.

Few places were pummeled harder by a gang of tornadoes — at least 178 in 14 states, according to the National Weather Service — than Ringgold, a northwest Georgia town of 2,800.

Eight lives were lost. Two students were storm casualties, one a former football player who had such a big heart, according to Robert Akins, the athletic director and football coach, that he would apologize to an opponent after knocking him down. It was estimated that half of the community’s businesses sustained damage, and at least 75 houses were not salvageable.

After Mother Nature unleashes fury, human nature inspires the targets to resume their routine. For the Ringgold Tigers, that meant jump-starting the pursuit of a state title they were denied in the final a year ago.

Players and parents flocked to the school the next day, eager to rescue the season. Akins could not wait; he drove there in the darkness not long after the storm passed.

“I saw things that broke my heart,” Akins said. When the sun rose, illuminating the scene, “it was worse.”

The high school and the middle school next door were ravaged, the outdoor athletic facilities unplayable. Much of the baseball equipment was a lost cause.

Brent Tucker’s first thought: a season of such promise is over. He coached the team, 21-2 and ranked fifth in Class AAA, that was minus only one senior from last year.

The team began picking up the pieces. Scattered gear and soaked uniforms — the slugger Caleb Jones found his pants hanging in brush — were retrieved amid broken glass, loaded into a truck and distributed to players.

“Looked like a rummage sale,” Tucker said.

His cellphone rang incessantly with offers of bricks, lumber, earth movers, shovels, rakes and helping hands.

“I’m not so sure we wouldn’t have had our stadium already rebuilt,” he said. “People were ready to go to work. It’s almost been overwhelming.”

Fellow coaches cut Ringgold a break by approving the cancellation of its last two regular-season games and waving it through to the tournament. Akins said he and superiors never hesitated accepting: “We want our kids to feel the love the community has. In order to do that, you’ve got to start playing.”

The reward was a “home” game. Akins, inundated by 15 invitations from schools to use their ballparks, chose crosstown Heritage High, which left some still-gracious players asking if a less intense rival were preferable.

On Friday, under a sky so magnificent that it seemed Photoshopped, the Tigers opened a three-game playoff series against Riverwood High with Ringgold banners draped — by the hosts — along the outfield fence. Ringgold’s old English R replaced Heritage’s H in chalk behind home plate.

“It gave you goose bumps,” Tucker said.

Near the baselines, in foul territory, the number 42 was twice inscribed in tribute to the Ringgold supporter and retired baseball coach Bill Womack, who died of cancer in February.

Hanging in the Tigers’ dugout was a tattered and torn American flag that had been ripped by wind off the flagpole at their stadium.

The few hundred fans, nearly all wearing blue “United We Stand” T-shirts, observed a moment of silence.

Friday’s games marked the first event for the school, which is unusable at least until the fall term because the tornadoes struck nine days earlier.

“Who knows? This may be the last chance for these players” while associated with the existing school, said David Kafka, the father of Corey. Both had been at the school, returning bats, 15 minutes before it was hit. “They are fighting in case we can’t rebuild.”

The parents’ appreciation for the season’s resumption was evident in their words and smiles.

 

Abroad: 50 Years After Trial, Eichmann Secrets Live On

The 50th anniversary of Eichmann’s trial this spring has cast the early days of the postwar Federal Republic in a fresh historical light. Those were the years when the new West Germany held itself up as the cure for what ailed a humiliated and broken nation, and as an alternative to the Communist East.

That era was also the populist heyday of the organization man. And the classic portrait of Eichmann as a soulless cog in the machinery of totalitarianism, a petty bureaucrat acting out of “blind obedience,” in the incredulous description by Moshe Landau, the presiding judge at the trial — who, as it happens, died just the other day, at 99 — has also come to seem a sacred but dubious shibboleth of the time.

A different picture of the man, and the period, has begun to circulate. Bild, the German tabloid, having recently forced the BND through the courts to release a few files, uncovered an index card from 1952 that made clear that West German intelligence officials already knew Eichmann was living in Argentina. The card listed his alias there, or something close to it, and a contact who edited a well-known Nazi magazine in Buenos Aires, Der Weg.

West German authorities had claimed they had no clue where Eichmann went until the Israelis found him. Then in 2006 declassified C.I.A. documents showed they knew as early as 1956. Now it turns out they knew even earlier. Considering that Eichmann’s wife and children settled in Argentina in 1952 — living openly with Eichmann under their own names, in a house that was under his name — it seems remarkable today that authorities got away with claiming ignorance for so long.

Germans reacted to the Bild article with a familiar shake of the head that, here, implies not a lack of concern but stoic resignation. The bigger kerfuffle, though, has been around the more than 4,000 pages of undisclosed intelligence about Eichmann.

“The postwar period remains sensitive,” explained Bettina Stangneth, the author of a new German book on Eichmann, “because many Germans want to preserve the positive image they have of that time.”

She meant the postwar years of Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship and the so-called economic miracle. Few West German officials, or for that matter American ones, had any interest in hunting for Eichmann during the 1950s, Ms. Stangneth noted. Both countries employed ex-Nazis in government jobs. Eichmann had beans to spill. Better to leave him in obscurity, they figured.

That Adenauer’s close adviser, Hans Globke, helped strip Jews of their rights under the Nazis was a widely publicized scandal, but it only distracted from the larger shame that countless lesser-known Nazis lived and worked under the radar throughout West German society, including in the ranks of the BND.

A new exhibition about the trial at the Topography of Terror Museum here devotes a section to reappraising the work of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, pointing out that she failed to attend much of the trial, never saw Eichmann cross-examined and thus didn’t witness his “just following orders” defense crumble.

“Neither perverted nor sadistic,” is how Arendt described Eichmann, but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” In Argentina Eichmann had been interviewed by an ex-Nazi, Willem Sassen, who, along with some other ex-Nazis there, dreamed about exonerating Hitler and inaugurating a Fourth Reich. Confronted with some of the Sassen material at the trial, Eichmann was exposed. He had told Sassen that he only regretted not having murdered more Jews. “I could have done more and should have done more,” he said.

The German historian Ulrich Herbert, during a recent interview with a German newspaper, described Eichmann as typical of many high-ranking Nazis, priding himself on being “an anti-Semite without anti-Semitic emotions.” Historians like Mr. Herbert have increasingly been questioning Arendt’s iconic concept of the “banality of evil.” As an underling to ultimate Nazi policy makers like Himmler and Heydrich, Eichmann was following orders, but was also “convinced of his actions,” Mr. Herbert insisted.

 

After Houston Officers Are Shot, Suspect Is Found Dead

HOUSTON (AP) — A man opened fire on two police officers Saturday, injuring them as part of a two-hour episode that began at a downtown Houston bus station and ended with the suspect found dead in a parking garage three blocks away, officials said.

The incident began about 5:15 p.m. Saturday when a Greyhound ticket agent checked the baggage of an unidentified man, saw an exposed handgun butt and alerted an off-duty police officer working security at the station, Houston Police spokesman John Cannon said.

Officer Fernando Meza, a two-year veteran of the force, followed the man outside, demanded his bag, then used a Taser in a failed effort to subdue the man, Cannon said. Instead, the man opened fire with a semiautomatic handgun, wounding Meza in the hand.

The gunman darted across the street to a McDonald's restaurant where he encountered Officer Timothy Moore, who was responding to a report of an officer in distress. There, his first gun empty, the man pulled another gun from his bag and fired at the 12-year police force veteran, wounding him in the leg, Cannon said.

Witnesses say they saw the man apparently bleeding from a wound to his side as he fled two blocks to the Amegy Bank parking garage, beside Interstate 45, and exchanged gunfire with arriving tactical unit officers as he darted inside, Cannon said.

Police closed the interstate and tactical officers searched and cleared each level of the multilevel garage. Officers found the unidentified man dead with a gunshot wound to the head at 7:05 p.m., Cannon said.

The freeway was reopened and the man's body taken to the Harris County medical examiner's office for autopsy and identification, he said.

"There were 80 to 100 patrons in the bus station waiting room or waiting to board their buses just outside," Cannon said, adding that it was nearly miraculous that no one else was injured and that neither police officer's wound appeared to be life-threatening. "That's why Officer Meza waited until the man was outside."

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After Disaster Hit Japan, Electric Cars Stepped Up

WITH deep-tread tires and ample ground clearance, a rugged 4-wheel-drive Hummer or Jeep might seem the best choice for navigating through the wrecked cities of northeastern Japan. The areas pummeled by the earthquake and tsunami in March would surely be inhospitable for an electric vehicle.

Yet in the days and weeks after the horrific one-two punch of natural disasters, wispy battery-electric cars — engineered for lightness and equipped with tires designed for minimal rolling resistance — proved their mettle.

These welterweight sedans, including models from Mitsubishi and Nissan, turned out to be the vehicles that got through — not because of any special ability to claw their way over mountains of debris, but because they were able to “refuel” at common electrical outlets.

With oil refineries out of commission and clogged roadways slowing deliveries, finding gasoline had become a challenge. Shortages were so acute that Japan’s Self-Defense Forces had to truck in gasoline; donations of diesel fuel were accepted from China.

Yet in Sendai, about 250 miles northeast of Tokyo, and other cities ravaged by the earthquake, electricity returned within days. Taking stock of the situation, the president of Mitsubishi Motors, Osamu Masuko, offered dozens of his company’s egg-shaped i-MiEV (pronounced “eye-meeve”) electric cars to affected cities.

Despite their image as light-duty runabouts best suited for trips to a nearby shopping mall, the electric vehicles were immediately put to use. They were pressed into service ferrying supplies to refugee centers, schools and hospitals, and taking doctors, city workers and volunteers on their rounds.

While the i-MiEVs could not help out with tasks like hauling building materials or towing stranded vehicles, the assistance from Mitsubishi was much appreciated. In all, 89 i-MiEVs went to the recovery effort, including 34 to Miyagi Prefecture, 33 to Fukushima Prefecture and 18 to Iwate Prefecture.

“There was almost no gas at the time, so I was extremely thankful when I heard about the offer,” said Tetsuo Ishii, a division chief in the environmental department in Sendai, which also got four Nissan Leaf electric cars. “If we hadn’t received the cars, it would have been very difficult to do what we needed to.”

Mr. Ishii and other officials in Sendai assigned the cars strategically. Two were used to bring food and supplies to the 23 remaining refugee centers in the city, while two others served doctors. Education officials have been using another two vehicles to inspect schools for structural damage. Others helped deliver supplies to kindergartens around the city or were loaned to volunteer groups.

Once the most pressing needs are met, the city may use the cars to help in the cleanup of damaged homes, as fuel shortages still limit the availability of trucks. For now, though, the cars are driven an average of 30 to 45 miles each day, about half the distance that they can be driven on a full charge.

“One charge is perfect for us, because it allows us to drive around during the day with no trouble,” Mr. Ishii said. “We’re not that big of a city.”

Most of the cars, he said, returned each night to city hall, where they were recharged at 200-volt outlets. Fast-charging stations, which replenish batteries to 80 percent of capacity within 30 minutes, are used where available. Standard 100-volt outlets can also be used, but the recharge then takes more than 12 hours.

Slightly over five feet high and less than five feet wide, the i-MiEV is cozy, to say the least, and at just 2,400 pounds it is relatively light. Its battery, the size of a tatami mat and weighing about 400 pounds, is under the floor, which helps give the car a lower center of gravity.

The cars’ unexpected sturdiness and utility has pleased Mr. Masuko, who, like other automobile executives, has been battling skeptics who see electric vehicles as expensive and impractical.

“I am most impressed when I hear the words, ‘I felt electric vehicles were unreliable at first, but now, the vehicles are being integrated into daily life,’?” he wrote in an e-mail. “I am so glad I heard that our electric vehicles are contributing to the recovery of the affected areas.”

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After Bust in Ireland, Ordinary People Make Do With Less

“We were on the up and up,” Mr. Condra said.

The Condras are among hundreds of thousands of Irish who, over the last few years, finally started to catch up with and even surpass many of their European neighbors. But now, after a stunning plunge fueled by a disastrous banking collapse, the economy has fallen back to where it was in 2005, before a housing bubble stoked a growth frenzy.

“The last several years of growth in Ireland have effectively been wiped out,” said Constantin Gurdgiev, an economist and lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin.

For many people in Ireland, it is as if the boom never happened. And some of those who floated up during the good times now see themselves slipping even further behind.

“It’s like we drew the lottery ticket made in hell,” said Mr. Condra, who says he gets by with only two pairs of shoes, one for work, so that he can afford to meet the needs of his growing children. “Suddenly we see that the Europe we’ve bought into isn’t a golden utopia.”

Benefiting from years of low interest rates that followed the creation of the euro zone in 1999, Ireland enjoyed one of the biggest growth spurts of any country in Europe, and spent lavishly as its wealth increased. The economy expanded an average of 7 percent in the decade leading up to 2007 before plunging into a deep recession. Per person, inflation-adjusted economic activity has fallen approximately 18 percent from the peak, when the average gross domestic product per person was a shade over 43,000 euros ($62,000). Now it is less than 35,000 euros ($50, 767).

As the country tries to recover from the bust, many of its people are paying a tremendous cost for the folly of the country’s banks and to bring its government finances back in order.

As part of Ireland’s effort to pay down its immense debts and bail out the banks, the Condras’ salaries from their state jobs as hospital workers have been cut 20 percent in two years. Higher taxes and further spending cuts are on the horizon.

Moreover, the European Central Bank, for the first time in three years, is raising interest rates, which will increase borrowing costs on existing home loans. That frightens the Condras even more.

“Now we’re terrified that we won’t be able to pay our mortgage, and could move into social housing,” Mr. Condra said.

Even people with good incomes who have not been hit as hard as the Condras are convinced that Ireland is facing years, perhaps a full generation, of economic struggle.

With unemployment at 14.7 percent, thousands of young Irish people continue to leave the country to find work. Those who have good, secure jobs here are thankful, but even they worry about the future and are rationing spending. Household savings surged to 11 billion euros in 2009 from 3.5 billion euros in 2008, and net disposable income fell.

There are glimpses of renewal. Exports from multinational companies like Intel, Pfizer and smaller manufacturers are surging as wages become more competitive and help to lower production costs, giving hope for future growth.

Signs of a real estate recovery have even emerged, with buyers flocking to recent auctions to snap up distressed properties.

Patsy Carney’s generic pharmaceuticals export business, EirGen Pharma, has been thriving. He has hung on to the 40 employees at his plant in Waterford and hopes to hire 60 more people.

Nevertheless, he recognizes what the collapse has meant for the Irish as a whole. “You see it all around you, all the people out of work, and there’s nothing turning up,” he said. “It’s frightening.”

In Ireland, treatments at suicide prevention centers increased by a third last year, with sudden financial troubles cited most often as the cause of despair. “It’s the psychological impact of austerity that bites the hardest and lasts the longest,” Mr. Condra said.

View the original article here

DealBook: Buffett Eager to Move On After Sokol Controversy

“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可 Daniel Acker/Bloomberg NewsWarren E. Buffett, second from right, sits with his children, from left, Howard, Susie and Peter at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in Omaha, Neb.

OMAHA — At the annual gathering of Berkshire Hathaway’s investors here this weekend, Warren E. Buffett made it clear that, as far as he is concerned, it’s back to business as usual. But a former top manager for him, David L. Sokol, may make that a difficult goal to accomplish.

Mr. Buffett said at a news conference on Sunday that while he viewed the controversy caused by Mr. Sokol’s abrupt departure a month ago as sad, he saw little reason to dwell on the matter for very long.

“I’ve got no strong feelings about it, except that it’s a very sad situation,” he said.

He said he planned no major changes to Berkshire’s management practices, which largely leave the executives of the company’s subsidiaries to operate as they please. With more than 260,000 employees working for him around the world, something can and will inevitably go wrong, Mr. Buffett said.

His longtime investing partner, Berkshire’s vice chairman, Charles Munger, addressed the issue more bluntly. “We’ve had a close brush with scandal two times in 50 years,” he said Sunday. “We’re not going to devote a lot of time to this.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Sokol appears ready to keep the issue alive and wage a fight against Berkshire and his onetime boss. In a statement issued after Berkshire’s annual meeting, Mr. Sokol’s lawyer insisted that Mr. Buffett was “transparently scapegoating” his client, and that Mr. Sokol had not violated company policy with those trades.

Mr. Buffett already used the annual meeting on Saturday, attended by tens of thousands of ardent investors from around the world, to speak at length about what he knew of Mr. Sokol’s stock purchases in a chemical maker that he later recommended to Mr. Buffett as a potential acquisition.

Berkshire announced in March that it would buy the chemical producer, Lubrizol, for $9 billion. The deal produced a $3 million paper profit for Mr. Sokol.

Mr. Buffett said Saturday that Mr. Sokol’s actions were “inexplicable and inexcusable,” though he declined to personally attack him. Mr. Buffett said that Mr. Sokol had violated company trading policy. In his statement, Mr. Sokol’s lawyer defiantly denied that claim, saying, “At no time did Mr. Sokol violate the law or any Berkshire policy.”

Mr. Buffett sought to parry those assertions on Sunday, arguing that he has been forthright in disclosing the relevant details of the matter. He said that he did not know of any other details relevant to an investigation, and that he was cooperating with regulators in their inquiries.

“The facts are the facts,” he said. “His lawyer wasn’t there. I know what happened.”

Since Berkshire disclosed Mr. Sokol’s resignation and its circumstances, the controversy has threatened to mar Mr. Buffett’s lustrous reputation among investors. But Mr. Buffett said he did not expect the affair to cause permanent damage.

The pressure on Mr. Sokol is likely to grow. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into his trades, according to people briefed on the matter, using in part information submitted by Berkshire. Mr. Buffett said on Saturday that the data his company had turned over was “pretty damning.”

Mr. Buffett spoke at greater length Sunday about more traditional topics of discussion for Berkshire meetings.

Asked by reporters from various countries — including Germany, Brazil and South Korea — about whether he would be interested in acquiring companies in those areas, he responded yes to all of them.

Asked again about a potential successor to him, Mr. Buffett said only that even the worst of the unnamed candidates would be “very, very good.”

Shareholders appeared to side largely with Mr. Buffett. At Berkshire’s meeting on Saturday, most seemed more concerned with potential investments and successors than with the Sokol matter.

“I trust Buffett and the board,” Mary Murphy, from Omaha, said on Sunday. “He seemed like he was being honest and saying what he knew.”

 

Many Japanese Factories Recover After Quake

The ceiling is still not fixed. But employees are back at their posts, working under temporary lighting and wearing hard hats to protect themselves in case debris falls.

The factory may be a case study for the can-do recovery of Japan’s manufacturing industry. Only seven weeks after the huge earthquake in northeastern Japan collapsed the ceiling, toppled a huge water tank and upended assembly line equipment, the Ricoh factory here is nearly back to full production. And so, for the most part, is all of Ricoh, a nearly $25 billion company that makes copiers and other office equipment.

“The influence of this disaster is not as large as the world thinks,” Shiro Kondo, Ricoh’s president, said in an interview at the company headquarters in Tokyo.

At varying speeds, Ricoh’s story is being played out all over the quake-affected parts of Japan. The pattern suggests that whatever the long-term effect of the natural and nuclear disasters on this country, manufacturing — the most important cog in Japan’s export-oriented economy — might largely rebound within a few months.

Without doubt, things are not back to normal yet. And some sectors, particularly automobile manufacturing, are suffering more than others. Still, almost every day companies are reporting progress on some of the hundreds of factories knocked out of commission by the quake or ensuing tsunami. The government estimates that 7 percent of Japanese factories were in the region heavily affected by the earthquake.

A survey of 70 damaged factories released last week by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry found that nearly two-thirds of them had recovered while most of the rest in the survey group expected to do so by summer.

Shin-Etsu Chemical, a leading producer of silicon wafers used to make computer chips, said last week that it expected to return to pre-earthquake production levels by July. Sony has resumed operations at nine of its 10 halted factories, with the 10th expected to come online in phases from May to July.

Masatomo Onishi of Kansai University, who studied the recovery after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, said that when a disaster strikes, Japanese companies tend to cooperate with one another and workers rally to the cause.

That seems to be the case at the Ricoh factory here. Even many of the Ricoh workers who lost family members to the tsunami came to work. Some whose homes were destroyed or flooded slept on blankets on the floor of a factory conference room. With gasoline scarce, many rode bicycles. And with bathrooms not working because of blocked sewer lines, employees improvised with plastic bags.

Still, the disaster exposed vulnerabilities that simply restoring any one factory’s assembly line cannot fully resolve.

The biggest susceptibility for Ricoh and many other companies has proven to be parts shortages. Although Japanese manufacturers have spread their factories around the world — Ricoh makes 70 percent of its products outside of Japan — many of those overseas plants often still depend on parts made in Japan.

For example, Tohoku Ricoh, as this plant is known, is the company’s only factory making a particular motor used in copiers. When the factory here went down, a giant Ricoh plant in Shenzhen, China — which supplies most of the Ricoh copiers sold in the United States — had to stop production for a full week. (Mr. Kondo said he did not think Ricoh’s sales in the United States would be affected much.)

Ricoh is also dependent on parts from various suppliers in Japan, some of which suffered their own damage from the earthquake.

That is forcing Ricoh to live off its inventory of certain computer chips and connectors. If production of those parts does not resume in the next couple of months, Ricoh might have to slow or halt production.

Another weakness was in emergency planning.

David Jolly contributed reporting from Tokyo.

 

Eyeing the White House After Service in China

Blindsided, Pentagon officials considered whether the best response would be to pack up and leave before the mission had even begun. The American ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., advised forcefully against it. Too much was at stake, he said. Better to make clear Mr. Gates’s displeasure, then move on to more serious business.

Which is what Mr. Gates did, raising the issue with President Hu Jintao and relaying Mr. Hu’s embarrassed response to reporters shortly afterward.

“Jon came in and gave sensible advice,” said a person who was privy to the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the debate had been both private and official. “It was classic and proper handling of a difficult situation with the Chinese.”

It was also classic Huntsman. The ambassador, who was to leave his post on Saturday, has proved deft with the carrot and stick, mixing measured criticism of China’s government with a relentless effort to cement its fractious relations with the United States. It has not always worked: in recent months, as China’s growing crackdown on domestic dissidents drew Mr. Huntsman’s pointed objections, the efforts of the ambassador and other American diplomats have been angrily rejected by Beijing.

When President Obama selected Mr. Huntsman, then the popular Republican governor of Utah, as ambassador in 2009, pundits speculated that the president was working to edge him out of the race for the 2012 Republican nomination. Mr. Huntsman has implied otherwise in speeches, expressing respect for Mr. Obama’s skills and saying that they share a common cause in improving relations.

Now that Mr. Huntsman is publicly pondering a run for the nomination anyway — an unstated but clear reason behind his departure — the question may not be whether his China stint hurt his chances, but whether it improved them. Clearly, he did not achieve the goals he set. In a valedictory speech last month in Shanghai, he put his frustrations with China’s prickly and suspicious diplomacy on full display.

“Turning the relationship on and off in reaction to unwelcome events is inconsistent with the objective of a positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship that our leaders have set out to achieve,” Mr. Huntsman said. “Canceling meetings as a sign of displeasure will not encourage greater respect for each other’s views.”

“We cannot move forward if, when differences emerge, only one of us is fully committed and fully engaged,” he said.

Getting China fully engaged — and persuading it to temper the suspicion and resentment that has marked even warm periods in its relationship with the United States — is the Obama administration’s strategic goal and, by all accounts, Mr. Huntsman’s passion. If that goal is, by many assessments, only slightly less distant than it was two years ago by, his pursuit of it wins wide praise.

“The course of a major relationship such as that between the United States and China is not going to be guided solely by the skill or lack thereof of an ambassador, but what an ambassador can do is make a meaningful difference,” J. Stapleton Roy, a China-born diplomat who served President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and was President Bill Clinton’s first ambassador to China, said. “If Washington has confidence in the ambassador and the ambassador has access, then a lot of business will get done.” Mr. Huntsman, he said, “has what it takes. He’s done a superb job.”

Current and former diplomats and White House officials said he skillfully managed preparations for the two signal occasions of his tenure, the state visits of both nations’ leaders to the other’s capital. Workers at the United States Embassy in Beijing give him high marks for his management of the United States’ second-largest diplomatic outpost.

Officially, the Chinese government bade him a fond farewell. Vice President Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to President Hu, called him “an old friend of China” in a meeting last month, adding, “We will never forget what you have done.”

Polished by years in American politics and fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Huntsman was nothing if not charming in his courtship of the Chinese. He regularly reminded Chinese audiences of his adopted Chinese daughter and his years in Asia as a youth. He flummoxed Chinese security guards — but perhaps left a distinctively American impression on Chinese diplomats — by forgoing the requisite limousine and suit and instead bicycling in casual clothes to several meetings at the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

He nevertheless spent much of his two years in the diplomatic doghouse. Mr. Huntsman did win the rare permission to visit Tibet, but he was denied an official visit to the restive western region of Xinjiang. (He went anyway, as a private citizen.) The cold shoulder included efforts to limit his official dealings to lower-level Chinese diplomats, as is standard for ambassadors who are out of favor. Most of those moves were a consequence of the deep chill that settled over relations in 2010, when the Chinese crimped Google’s Chinese search-engine business and the White House entertained the Dalai Lama and approved the sale of weapons to Taiwan. That was dispelled only after the successful visit to Washington by Mr. Hu last winter.

Perhaps Mr. Huntsman’s greatest misstep, which he has insisted was just a coincidence, was to wander into the tense scene of a pro-democracy protest in February while on a stroll through central Beijing with his family. The protest, the first of several Internet-based calls for a “Jasmine Revolution,” drew a horde of security agents who regarded Mr. Huntsman as a potential provocateur.

Mr. Huntsman later publicly condemned the beating and detention of foreign journalists at the scene. The Chinese, who appear to believe he deliberately attended the event, placed him back in the doghouse. But last week, at a farewell reception at the United States Embassy, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi shared a toast with Mr. Huntsman and his wife. He appears to leave China in good standing — much as a future president, Mr. Bush, did when he left the chief diplomatic post in 1975.

 

Portland, Ore., Votes to Rejoin Task Force After Terrorism Scare

No, it told Attorney General John Ashcroft in the fall of 2001, its police officers would not join federal efforts to interview thousands of Middle Eastern men. No, it said again in 2005, when it became the first city to stop participating in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which the Department of Justice operates in cities across the country to unite federal, state and local law enforcement authorities.

And then, on Thanksgiving weekend last year, federal authorities arrested Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali-born teenager they accused of trying to detonate a bomb at a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony attended by thousands of people. The investigation had been under way for many months, but the Portland police were consulted only near the end, largely to help with logistics of a sting operation. Mayor Sam Adams was unaware until after the arrest.

“It showed the challenges we face and the fact that the 2005 resolution, while well intentioned, wasn’t meeting the needs of collaboration between local and federal law enforcement,” Chief Michael Reese of the Portland police said in an interview. “You’re going to be an afterthought, like we were in that investigation.”

Now, after five months of public debate and rewritten drafts — and as Mr. Mohamud’s case moves slowly along — city leaders last week approved what one City Council member called a “very Portland” compromise to rejoin the task force.

“Be it resolved, that it is the policy of the city simultaneously to help prevent and investigate acts of terrorism, protect civil rights and civil liberties under United States and Oregon Law, and promote Portland as an open and inclusive community,” reads part of the preamble to the agreement.

The agreement goes on to emphasize that local officers will be guided by state law “in situations where the statutory or common law of Oregon is more restrictive of law enforcement than comparable federal law.” It also advises individual officers working with the task force to consult with the city attorney “whenever the officer has any question about the application of Oregon law.”

Under Oregon law, law enforcement agencies cannot collect information about a person’s political, religious or social views or group involvement “unless such information directly relates to an investigation of criminal activities, and there are reasonable grounds to suspect the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct.”

The upshot, Chief Reese said, is that his department will soon be able to participate in longstanding regular briefings that already include the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Police, county sheriff’s deputies, port authority officials and others. He will be allowed to apply for top-secret government clearance, and Mayor Adams, who is also the police commissioner, will be able to have secret clearance.

“A month from now, if we’re able to be there at the table and assign officers where it’s appropriate, I would be very happy,” Chief Reese said.

The agreement passed unanimously among the city’s five commissioners, though many residents spoke against it. Some said it would stir more fear among Muslims already wary of federal agents. Some said officers would abuse the agreement.

“How do you spell oppression? J.T.T.F!” a small group of opponents chanted on the sidewalk outside City Hall during the debate, in easy earshot of Council members. “How do you spell police state? J.T.T.F!”

Some critics said the agreement was so nuanced that it was hard to understand. “I don’t know if we are or if we’re not” joining the task force, Brandon Mayfield told Council members.

Mr. Mayfield, a lawyer, has experience in terrorism investigations that go wrong. In 2004, he was arrested after the F.B.I. mistakenly said his fingerprints matched one found on a plastic bag containing detonator caps found at the scene of terrorist bombings in Madrid the same year. He eventually received a $2 million settlement and an apology from the federal government.

Mr. Mayfield said in an interview that he opposed the agreement but that he was pleased that “at least they are thinking of civil rights.”

“They don’t want to be deemed as being soft on security, but at the same time they are putting in all these precautions,” he said. “It shows they are listening to the citizens of this city.”

Much has happened in the decade since Portland first resisted. The mayor and the police chief are new. The lead F.B.I. agent in Portland is new, as is the United States attorney here, Dwight C. Holton. The administration in Washington is also new.

“They were uncomfortable with some of the tactics in the war on terror,” said Mr. Holton. “They were uncomfortable with some of the politics of it, the national politics. Those folks are all gone now.”

Jeffrey L. Rogers, who was the city attorney in 2001 when Portland pushed back against Mr. Ashcroft, was among several people struck by the fact that the American Civil Liberties Union has given cautious support to the new agreement.

“It was harder to look for this kind of middle ground because the positions were so hardened,” Mr. Rogers said, recalling earlier debates. “Just on its face, that’s pretty impressive, to have all of those people agreeing.”

 

Eyeing the White House After Service in China

Blindsided, Pentagon officials considered whether the best response would be to pack up and leave before the mission had even begun. The American ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., advised forcefully against it. Too much was at stake, he said. Better to make clear Mr. Gates’s displeasure, then move on to more serious business.

Which is what Mr. Gates did, raising the issue with President Hu Jintao and relaying Mr. Hu’s embarrassed response to reporters shortly afterward.

“Jon came in and gave sensible advice,” said a person who was privy to the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the debate had been both private and official. “It was classic and proper handling of a difficult situation with the Chinese.”

It was also classic Huntsman. The ambassador, who was to leave his post on Saturday, has proved deft with the carrot and stick, mixing measured criticism of China’s government with a relentless effort to cement its fractious relations with the United States. It has not always worked: in recent months, as China’s growing crackdown on domestic dissidents drew Mr. Huntsman’s pointed objections, the efforts of the ambassador and other American diplomats have been angrily rejected by Beijing.

When President Obama selected Mr. Huntsman, then the popular Republican governor of Utah, as ambassador in 2009, pundits speculated that the president was working to edge him out of the race for the 2012 Republican nomination. Mr. Huntsman has implied otherwise in speeches, expressing respect for Mr. Obama’s skills and saying that they share a common cause in improving relations.

Now that Mr. Huntsman is publicly pondering a run for the nomination anyway — an unstated but clear reason behind his departure — the question may not be whether his China stint hurt his chances, but whether it improved them. Clearly, he did not achieve the goals he set. In a valedictory speech last month in Shanghai, he put his frustrations with China’s prickly and suspicious diplomacy on full display.

“Turning the relationship on and off in reaction to unwelcome events is inconsistent with the objective of a positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship that our leaders have set out to achieve,” Mr. Huntsman said. “Canceling meetings as a sign of displeasure will not encourage greater respect for each other’s views.”

“We cannot move forward if, when differences emerge, only one of us is fully committed and fully engaged,” he said.

Getting China fully engaged — and persuading it to temper the suspicion and resentment that has marked even warm periods in its relationship with the United States — is the Obama administration’s strategic goal and, by all accounts, Mr. Huntsman’s passion. If that goal is, by many assessments, only slightly less distant than it was two years ago by, his pursuit of it wins wide praise.

“The course of a major relationship such as that between the United States and China is not going to be guided solely by the skill or lack thereof of an ambassador, but what an ambassador can do is make a meaningful difference,” J. Stapleton Roy, a China-born diplomat who served President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and was President Bill Clinton’s first ambassador to China, said. “If Washington has confidence in the ambassador and the ambassador has access, then a lot of business will get done.” Mr. Huntsman, he said, “has what it takes. He’s done a superb job.”

Current and former diplomats and White House officials said he skillfully managed preparations for the two signal occasions of his tenure, the state visits of both nations’ leaders to the other’s capital. Workers at the United States Embassy in Beijing give him high marks for his management of the United States’ second-largest diplomatic outpost.

Officially, the Chinese government bade him a fond farewell. Vice President Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to President Hu, called him “an old friend of China” in a meeting last month, adding, “We will never forget what you have done.”

Polished by years in American politics and fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Huntsman was nothing if not charming in his courtship of the Chinese. He regularly reminded Chinese audiences of his adopted Chinese daughter and his years in Asia as a youth. He flummoxed Chinese security guards — but perhaps left a distinctively American impression on Chinese diplomats — by forgoing the requisite limousine and suit and instead bicycling in casual clothes to several meetings at the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

He nevertheless spent much of his two years in the diplomatic doghouse. Mr. Huntsman did win the rare permission to visit Tibet, but he was denied an official visit to the restive western region of Xinjiang. (He went anyway, as a private citizen.) The cold shoulder included efforts to limit his official dealings to lower-level Chinese diplomats, as is standard for ambassadors who are out of favor. Most of those moves were a consequence of the deep chill that settled over relations in 2010, when the Chinese crimped Google’s Chinese search-engine business and the White House entertained the Dalai Lama and approved the sale of weapons to Taiwan. That was dispelled only after the successful visit to Washington by Mr. Hu last winter.

Perhaps Mr. Huntsman’s greatest misstep, which he has insisted was just a coincidence, was to wander into the tense scene of a pro-democracy protest in February while on a stroll through central Beijing with his family. The protest, the first of several Internet-based calls for a “Jasmine Revolution,” drew a horde of security agents who regarded Mr. Huntsman as a potential provocateur.

Mr. Huntsman later publicly condemned the beating and detention of foreign journalists at the scene. The Chinese, who appear to believe he deliberately attended the event, placed him back in the doghouse. But last week, at a farewell reception at the United States Embassy, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi shared a toast with Mr. Huntsman and his wife. He appears to leave China in good standing — much as a future president, Mr. Bush, did when he left the chief diplomatic post in 1975.

 

Off the Charts: A Reversal for Real Estate After Some Mild Gains

Indexes of the two markets showed this week that the latest declines had almost wiped out the mild gains the two markets had shown after prices appeared to have hit bottom.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of home prices ended February 3.3 percent below where it was a year earlier, and just 0.5 percent above the low reached in May 2009. The Moody’s/REAL Commercial Property Price Index was reported to be down 4.9 percent over the last 12 months, but still 0.8 percent above its low, reached last August.

In both cases, sales volumes are far below what they were when the markets were booming, and a large proportion of the properties that are being sold were in trouble before the sale. The National Association of Realtors estimates that about 40 percent of existing homes that changed hands in March were either in foreclosure or were so-called short sales in which the house was sold for less than was owed on the existing mortgage.

The commercial property index, which is based on data collected by Real Capital Analytics, shows that 29 percent of transactions in February involved distressed properties — including those already in foreclosure or default, as well as those whose owners had filed for bankruptcy.

“Only when the share of distressed sales meaningfully drops off will we be able to enter the recovery phase,” said Tad Philipp, Moody’s director of commercial real estate research.

As can be seen from the accompanying charts, home prices nationally peaked in 2006 but did not begin to plunge until 2007.

At first, that was widely viewed as a result of problems in the subprime mortgage market. Commercial real estate prices rose until early 2008, but then declined rapidly. The latest values for the indexes show national home prices down 31 percent from peak levels, while the commercial real estate index shows a fall of 45 percent.

The charts show the trend of prices since December 2000. Home prices are about 27 percent higher than they were then, but commercial real estate is up just 6 percent. Meanwhile, in a tortoise-versus-hare tale, home rental rates are higher than they ever were even though they failed to boom when real estate prices soared.

Both indexes are based on repeat sales of the same property, and the relative lack of commercial property transactions — the index counted only 107 in February for more than $2.5 million each — means that the figures are far from exact. But they do show trends.

According to data from Moody’s, hotels and apartments are in the most distress, with about 16 percent of loans in each category classified as delinquent. About 10 percent of loans on industrial property are in trouble, while the figures for offices and retail properties are lower, at around 7 percent.

Over all, the proportion of commercial loans in distress climbed from under 1 percent at the end of 2008 to over 9 percent now. But it has been stable in recent months, providing some hope that the market is no longer deteriorating.

On a regional basis, the same markets tend to have problems in both commercial and residential real estate. The three states with the highest proportion of commercial loans in distress, according to Moody’s, are Nevada, Arizona and Michigan. In Nevada, more than 30 percent of loans are classified as being in trouble, nearly double Arizona’s 16 percent figure.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy on his blog at nytimes.com/norris.

 

South Assesses the Toll After a Deadly Barrage of Tornadoes

At least 285 people across six states died in the storms, with more than half — 195 people — in Alabama. This good-time college town, the home of the University of Alabama, has in some places has been shorn to the slab, and accounts for at least 36 of those deaths.

Thousands have been injured, and untold more have been left homeless, hauling their belongings in garbage bags or rooting through disgorged piles of wood and siding to find anything salvageable.

While Alabama was hit the hardest, the storm spared few states across the South. Thirty-four people were reported dead in Tennessee, 33 in Mississippi, 15 in Georgia, 7 in Virginia and one in Kentucky. With search and rescue crews still climbing through debris and making their way down tree-strewn country roads, the toll is expected to rise.

“History tells me estimating deaths is a bad business,” said W. Craig Fugate, the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, in a conference call with reporters.

Cries could be heard into the night here on Wednesday, but on Thursday hope was dwindling. Mayor Walt Maddox said that the search and rescue operation would go for 24 to 48 more hours, before the response pivoted its focus to recovery.

“They’re looking for five kids in this rubble here,” said Lathesia Jackson-Gibson, 33, a nurse, pointing to the incoherent heap of planks and household appliances sitting next to the muddled guts of her own house. “They’re mostly small kids.”

President Obama announced that he was coming to Alabama on Friday afternoon, saying in a statement that the federal government had pledged its assistance.

Gov. Robert Bentley toured the state by helicopter along with federal officials, tracking a vast scar that stretched from Birmingham to his hometown, Tuscaloosa. He declared Alabama “a major, major disaster.”

“As we flew down from Birmingham, the track is all the way down, and then when you get in Tuscaloosa here it’s devastating,” Mr. Bentley said at an afternoon news conference, with an obliterated commercial strip as a backdrop.

An enormous response operation was under way across the South, with emergency officials working alongside churches, sororities and other volunteer groups. In Alabama, more than 2,000 National Guard troops have been deployed.

Across nine states, more than 1,680 people spent Wednesday in Red Cross shelters, said Attie Poirier, a spokeswoman with the organization. The last time the Red Cross had set up such an elaborate system of shelters was after Hurricane Katrina, a comparison made by even some of those who had known the experience firsthand.

“It reminds me of home so much,” said Eric Hamilton, 40, a former Louisianan, who was sitting on the sidewalk outside the Belk Activity Center, which was being used as a Red Cross shelter in south Tuscaloosa.

Mr. Hamilton lived in a poor area of Tuscaloosa called Alberta City, which residents now describe merely as “gone.” He wiped tears off his cheeks.

“I’ve never seen so many bodies,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Babies, women. So many bodies.”

Officials at the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center said they had received 137 tornado reports on Wednesday, with 104 of them coming from Alabama and Mississippi. Over all, there have been 297 confirmed tornadoes this month, breaking a 36-year-old record.

Southerners, who have had to learn the drill all too well this month, watched with dread on Wednesday night as the shape-shifting storm system crept eastward across the weather map. Upon hearing the rumble of a tornado, or even the hysterical barking of a family dog, people crammed into closets, bathtubs and restaurant coolers, clutching their children and family photos.

Many of the lucky survivors found a completely different world when they opened their closet doors.

“We heard crashing,” said Steve Sikes, 48, who lives in a middle-class Tuscaloosa neighborhood called the Downs. “Then dirt and pine needles came under the door. We smelled pine.

“When you smell pine,” he said, gesturing, by way of a conclusion, toward a wooden wreck behind him, so mangled that it was hard to tell where tree ended and house began.

Some opened the closet to the open sky, where their roof had been, some yelled until other family members pulled the shelves and walls off them. Others never got out.

Campbell Robertson reported from Tuscaloosa, and Kim Severson from Atlanta. Kevin Sack contributed reporting from Tuscaloosa, and Robbie Brown from Birmingham, Ala.

 

After School in Brooklyn, West African Girls Share Memories of a Painful Ritual

 

The small group — all the students had roots in West Africa — was there not to discuss quadratic equations, but something much more personal.

The 15-year-old was sharing the memory of the day back in her homeland when a neighbor duped her into going to a hospital. There, she was tied down, and restrained, and subjected to genital cutting.

She was 8 at the time, and had to be hospitalized for the bleeding. “I got sick,” the girl said. “I was about to die.”

After she had healed, a celebration was held in her honor.

Now a high school sophomore, the girl belongs to a group of young West Africans who all share the experience of having been subjected to genital cutting, a procedure that is sometimes called circumcision and that opponents refer to as female genital mutilation.

The issue has largely been considered a foreign human rights concern but is starting to pose a bigger challenge here with an increase in the number of immigrants from countries in Africa and elsewhere where the practice is most common.

A conference on Wednesday at Harlem Hospital, hosted by the hospital and by the Sauti Yetu Center for African Women and Families, a group based in the Bronx that works to end female genital cutting, will focus on the physical and emotional needs of women in the United States who have experienced it.

Female genital cutting was banned in the United States in 1996. Some parents send daughters overseas to have it done; other girls are cut by relatives without their parents’ knowledge while on vacation abroad.

A 19-year-old woman from Guinea whose genitals were cut before she moved to the United States said her 13-year-old sister was 6 when their parents arranged for her to undergo the procedure while visiting their homeland. “Since she was there, they did it for her,” said the 19-year-old, who lives in Brooklyn.

Like all of the young women interviewed for this article, she asked not to be identified, saying that she did not want to be publicly associated with an intimate and controversial procedure.

In some families, parents oppose female genital cutting, but the decision about whether or not to have it done is not always theirs to make. Many elders in West African communities hold great social authority and do not seek parental permission to have it done to a girl.

The 15-year-old from Guinea was cut without the consent of her mother, who was living in the United States while her daughter was being raised in Africa by the girl’s paternal grandmother — who also was not consulted.

Female genital cutting is controversial even in countries where it is performed, and opponents have lobbied their governments for decades to outlaw the practice. Campaigns to end the practice have made strides in countries like Senegal and Burkina Faso.

The practice can cause a variety of medical problems, including extensive bleeding, infection, painful menstruation and complications during childbirth. Some women are leery of seeking medical care because they fear their doctors’ reaction.

“It bothers me a lot when I go to doctor visits, how they don’t understand,” said an 18-year-old woman from Guinea whose genitals were cut and who lives in the Bronx. “The look in their face tells you that they are shocked or confused.”

Female genital cutting is practiced in more than two dozen African countries and parts of Asia and the Middle East, and the World Health Organization estimates that up to 140 million women have undergone it.

Female genital cutting refers to a range of procedures performed without a medical purpose. They range from clitoridectomy, the removal of part or all of the clitoris, to infibulation, in which all the outer genitalia are removed and the vagina is sealed, often with stitches, except for a small opening. ?Despite the risks and the controversy, the cutting is, in many places, grounded in strongly held beliefs about cleanliness, chastity and coming of age.

“This is not done with ill intent,” said Zeinab Eyega, the executive director of Sauti Yetu. “This is actually done to embrace the child, to bring the child into the fold of the community.” Nonetheless, Ms. Eyega said the practice was dangerous and needed to be stopped.

Whatever the arguments over the practice, the experience often leaves indelible memories.

“That day was the worst day of my life,” said a 16-year-old high school sophomore in the Bronx. She said she was cut at her grandmother’s house in Guinea when she was 4.

One 17-year-old from the Bronx who was cut at an aunt’s house in Ivory Coast learned of the medical risks by watching a television report about a girl who had been cut and could not have children.

“It made me feel angry, because maybe that can happen to me,” said the 17-year-old, who has been in the United States for eight months. “And it make me feel like my aunt lied to me, but I feel like she doesn’t know, too. She just taught me the way they taught her, too.”

Sauti Yetu and other organizations run peer support groups for African high school students and provide counseling for women who have been cut.

Some opponents of the practice are also pressing for federal legislation to make it a crime to deliberately take or send a girl overseas to be cut.

“It’s not preventing people from going for vacation,” said Mariama Diallo, a social worker with Sanctuary for Families, a Manhattan nonprofit group that opposes genital cutting. “But the girls will feel protected.”

But Ms. Eyega said such a law would discourage women from reporting the procedure or seeking help, out of fear of causing legal trouble for their families.

The bill is sponsored by Representatives Joseph Crowley, Democrat of Queens, and Mary Bono Mack, Republican of California. Nevada and Georgia, as well as several European countries, have adopted similar laws.

More than anything else, girls and young women who have been cut seem to want to be accepted in their new homeland. The 19-year-old from Brooklyn, who was cut in Guinea, said, “They shouldn’t think Africans are weird just because of that.”

 

After School in Brooklyn, West African Girls Share Memories of a Painful Ritual

The small group — all the students had roots in West Africa — was there not to discuss quadratic equations, but something much more personal.

The 15-year-old was sharing the memory of the day back in her homeland when a neighbor duped her into going to a hospital. There, she was tied down, and restrained, and subjected to genital cutting.

She was 8 at the time, and had to be hospitalized for the bleeding. “I got sick,” the girl said. “I was about to die.”

After she had healed, a celebration was held in her honor.

Now a high school sophomore, the girl belongs to a group of young West Africans who all share the experience of having been subjected to genital cutting, a procedure that is sometimes called circumcision and that opponents refer to as female genital mutilation.

The issue has largely been considered a foreign human rights concern but is starting to pose a bigger challenge here with an increase in the number of immigrants from countries in Africa and elsewhere where the practice is most common.

A conference on Wednesday at Harlem Hospital, hosted by the hospital and by the Sauti Yetu Center for African Women and Families, a group based in the Bronx that works to end female genital cutting, will focus on the physical and emotional needs of women in the United States who have experienced it.

Female genital cutting was banned in the United States in 1996. Some parents send daughters overseas to have it done; other girls are cut by relatives without their parents’ knowledge while on vacation abroad.

A 19-year-old woman from Guinea whose genitals were cut before she moved to the United States said her 13-year-old sister was 6 when their parents arranged for her to undergo the procedure while visiting their homeland. “Since she was there, they did it for her,” said the 19-year-old, who lives in Brooklyn.

Like all of the young women interviewed for this article, she asked not to be identified, saying that she did not want to be publicly associated with an intimate and controversial procedure.

In some families, parents oppose female genital cutting, but the decision about whether or not to have it done is not always theirs to make. Many elders in West African communities hold great social authority and do not seek parental permission to have it done to a girl.

The 15-year-old from Guinea was cut without the consent of her mother, who was living in the United States while her daughter was being raised in Africa by the girl’s paternal grandmother — who also was not consulted.

Female genital cutting is controversial even in countries where it is performed, and opponents have lobbied their governments for decades to outlaw the practice. Campaigns to end the practice have made strides in countries like Senegal and Burkina Faso.

The practice can cause a variety of medical problems, including extensive bleeding, infection, painful menstruation and complications during childbirth. Some women are leery of seeking medical care because they fear their doctors’ reaction.

“It bothers me a lot when I go to doctor visits, how they don’t understand,” said an 18-year-old woman from Guinea whose genitals were cut and who lives in the Bronx. “The look in their face tells you that they are shocked or confused.”

Female genital cutting is practiced in more than two dozen African countries and parts of Asia and the Middle East, and the World Health Organization estimates that up to 140 million women have undergone it.

Female genital cutting refers to a range of procedures performed without a medical purpose. They range from clitoridectomy, the removal of part or all of the clitoris, to infibulation, in which all the outer genitalia are removed and the vagina is sealed, often with stitches, except for a small opening. ?Despite the risks and the controversy, the cutting is, in many places, grounded in strongly held beliefs about cleanliness, chastity and coming of age.

“This is not done with ill intent,” said Zeinab Eyega, the executive director of Sauti Yetu. “This is actually done to embrace the child, to bring the child into the fold of the community.” Nonetheless, Ms. Eyega said the practice was dangerous and needed to be stopped.

Whatever the arguments over the practice, the experience often leaves indelible memories.

“That day was the worst day of my life,” said a 16-year-old high school sophomore in the Bronx. She said she was cut at her grandmother’s house in Guinea when she was 4.

One 17-year-old from the Bronx who was cut at an aunt’s house in Ivory Coast learned of the medical risks by watching a television report about a girl who had been cut and could not have children.

“It made me feel angry, because maybe that can happen to me,” said the 17-year-old, who has been in the United States for eight months. “And it make me feel like my aunt lied to me, but I feel like she doesn’t know, too. She just taught me the way they taught her, too.”

Sauti Yetu and other organizations run peer support groups for African high school students and provide counseling for women who have been cut.

Some opponents of the practice are also pressing for federal legislation to make it a crime to deliberately take or send a girl overseas to be cut.

“It’s not preventing people from going for vacation,” said Mariama Diallo, a social worker with Sanctuary for Families, a Manhattan nonprofit group that opposes genital cutting. “But the girls will feel protected.”

But Ms. Eyega said such a law would discourage women from reporting the procedure or seeking help, out of fear of causing legal trouble for their families.

The bill is sponsored by Representatives Joseph Crowley, Democrat of Queens, and Mary Bono Mack, Republican of California. Nevada and Georgia, as well as several European countries, have adopted similar laws.

More than anything else, girls and young women who have been cut seem to want to be accepted in their new homeland. The 19-year-old from Brooklyn, who was cut in Guinea, said, “They shouldn’t think Africans are weird just because of that.”

 

Protests Continue in Yemen After Saleh Accepts Exit Plan

 VOA News ?April 24, 2011

Yemeni army officers lifted by anti-government protestors gesture as they join a demonstration demanding the resignation of of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in Sanaa, Yemen, April 24, 2011

Anti-government protesters in Yemen's capital continue to demand the president's immediate departure, a day after President Ali Abdullah Saleh agreed to a Gulf Arab initiative for him to transfer power and resign within 30 days of signing a formal agreement with the opposition.

A coalition of seven opposition parties has said it accepts the deal but refuses to join a proposed unity government while Saleh is still in office. Protesters in Sana'a on Sunday remained skeptical of the agreement, with some saying they do not feel represented by the opposition coalition.

Protesters also demanded that Saleh and his family face trial, while the deal brokered by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council would grant the president and his family immunity from prosecution.

Yemen has been shaken by more than two months of widespread protests seeking the ouster of Saleh, who has been in power 32 years.

The United States on Saturday welcomed the announcements that Yemen's government and opposition had accepted the GCC-brokered deal.? A White House spokesman urged both sides to move swiftly to implement the terms of the agreement.

The GCC plan calls for President Saleh to transfer power to a deputy, who would then call presidential elections. It requires the opposition to stop demonstrations and would set up a power-sharing government in which ruling party members would control half the seats. The opposition coalition would hold 40 percent and unaffiliated parties would make up the rest.

GCC Secretary-General Abdullatif al-Zayani presented the plan to Saleh on Thursday.

In other unrest Sunday, police say fresh clashes between soldiers and tribesmen in the country's south killed five people, including four soldiers.

information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.