Presidential candidate and ultra-conservative congresswoman Michele Bachmann prays every day for guidance. "The American people are looking for someone who will say, 'No'," she said last week. "I will be that person… I won't raise taxes. I will reduce spending. I won't vote to raise the debt ceiling. And I have the titanium spine to see it through."
Developing her theme, she added that the little people of America, factory workers and housewives, tell her: "'Michele, stand strong. Michele, don't cave.' The American people are scared to death they have lived through the pinnacle of American greatness, that we may be in decline."
The struggle to secure a deal between the Republicans and Democrats to lift the $14.3 trillion cap on the country's national debt is seen by disinterested onlookers as a foolish squabble between self-serving politicians, whose silliness risks potential default on the US's national debt and a first-order financial crisis within the next 48 hours.
If only it were just an ordinary political squabble. The reason the US is so close to economic calamity is that its politicians have existentially different views of the world. As the US faces stagnation and retreat from "the pinnacle of American greatness", these differences have become crucially important. This goes to the heart of how the US can recover its greatness.
Bachmann, with her "titanium spine" and communion with God, is no normal Washington politician. Nor is she alone. There is the chair of the house budget committee, Paul Ryan. There is first-time congressman Jim Jordan, head of the Republican study committee that represents two-thirds of the Republicans in the house. For all of them, representatives of the Tea Party movement, the cause of the US's problems is the federal government, federal spending and federal debt.
Taxation is not merely coercive, it takes money from efficient taxpayers and transfers it to inefficient government. To raise taxes in any circumstances is immoral and undermines the US economy.
These are not politicians given to compromise. Their predecessors in the Republican party did so, securing tax cuts but only at the price of rising national debt because spending has not been cut. The new generation is going to pursue this matter to the end – and the only deal they are prepared to sanction is a short-term fix that will bring the whole issue back to congress in the new year – presidential election year.
While the Democrats now control the Senate and the presidency, they were routed last year in the elections for the house by the Tea Party movement.
The Democrats know that being the defenders of debt, deficits and taxes does not play well with the US electorate, and that to allow another wrangle over the national debt limit in six or nine months is tantamount to signing a political suicide note. Better secure a deal with the Republicans now than allow this fight to go into 2012.
This goes to the heart of the stand-off. Although the ultra-conservatives are not in control of the White House and the Senate, they feel they have the political wind at their back. Why compromise when they can get all they want – no increase to the debt limit and the entire pain being taken by swingeing cuts to federal spending? Which is why President Obama and Democrat Senate leader, Harry Reid, have given so much ground. The Democrats' latest plan for deficit reduction contains virtually no tax increases, despite Obama's insistence it is a balanced package with the rich and corporate America taking some of the burden. But it does require that the issue be taken off the table until after next year's elections.
Within Republican ranks, there is virtually no incentive to bargain; until the US is confronted with the need to maintain debt within the $14.3 trillion cap, no one knows what the consequences will be.
Some Republicans may be concerned about slashing much-loved social programmes, while others worry that they will get the blame if there is a calamity. But there are many who refuse to see why Bachmann and co should get credit for their intransigence, while others bargain responsibly and risk the wrath of voters.
Economically, the Tea Party argument is feeble. Countries' debts are not like individual households; they can be serviced over generations. In the aftermath of a credit crunch, a country that tries simultaneously to cut public and private debt will suffer prolonged economic stagnation or depression. The cost in lost opportunity, broken lives and bust businesses is too high to slash public debt; indeed, the right action may be to increase it.
Nor is tax in essence different from any other fee: it is the cost of services rendered, and some services such as defence, security, healthcare and investment in innovative technology are best rendered by society as a whole. Hence taxation.
All the US's great advances – in the internet, computers, aerospace, space, the internal combustion engine, drugs, optics – have had the federal government as their sponsor. A well-designed social security system offers people security while not removing their incentive to work; well-judged federal spending on innovation boosts the economy; a banking system needs federal deposit insurance and a central bank as a lender of last resort when banks are distressed.
But in the land inhabited by Michele Bachmann, these propositions are false; they undermine US self-reliance and individualism and obstruct America's road back to greatness.
In vain do conservative supporters in Wall Street and business urge the Tea Party Republicans to moderate their opposition – they are dismissed as Democrat stooges.
Nor do the Democrats help their case. In democracies, you argue, argue and argue, but even Obama's eloquence has been silenced in the search for a deal. The Democrats seem to have stopped believing.
Maybe there will be a bargain at one minute to midnight, but until the Tea Party Republicans are exposed as dangerous charlatans and their support recedes, the threat to the US is ever-present.
Sunday 31 July 2011
9/11 Ground Zero: why has its rebirth turned sour?
This 11 September, exactly 10 years after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre fell, politicians and relatives of the victims will gather in a grove of 415 trees planted on the event's charged ground. Two huge cascades of water, each occupying the square footprint of one of towers, will start churning, ceaselessly, forever. Inscribed in a bronze strip surrounding the cascades will be the names of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, including those at the Pentagon and on United flight 93, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, as this is the national 9/11 memorial, not just New York's.
The memorial will be ready, just, although it will be accessible only by advance booking for another two years. It could not miss this deadline. Despite billions of public dollars, thousands of ideas for memorials and rebuilding, a shared public desire to honour the event and speeches by governors and mayors about the urgent need to get things done, perhaps a third of all the reconstruction that will happen here has so far taken place.
Work on 7 World Trade Centre, a relatively plain tower at the edge of the site, was completed in 2006. Otherwise, the grove and the fountains stand among pits, canyons, cranes and rising frames, a Bosch landscape of machines and mud, of digging down and piling up, as skyscrapers, a train station, a museum and 550,000 sq ft of retail space take shape.
"It is very New York," is what everyone connected with the project says, by which they mean that everyone has an opinion and an interest, which must face down the opinions and interests of others. Much of the past decade has been spent in arguing, in law courts, in the media, at public and private meetings. Relatives of victims had different views from one another, and from people living near the Ground Zero site, who did not want their neighbourhood to become a shrine to catastrophe. One of the residents' leaders was told she would "burn in hell". Construction became political: protestors against slow progress carried placards saying: "Don't forget 9/11. Delay means defeat." There was rage and defiance, a desire to stick it back to the terrorists, which made it very likely that large towers would be put back on the site.
In the years following 9/11, the event was honoured by a carnival of pretention and viciousness, as architects felt compelled – as there can be narcissism in healing – to put themselves at the centre of the stage cleared by the attacks. "We're going to crush his nuts," said one of another, while others preened and posed and drivelled about the fusion "of military and urban space" or new towers that would "kiss and touch and become one". They employed black propaganda, old boys' networks, emotional posturing and shameless spinning. At stake was the greatest commission in the world, the chance to shape 16 acres of Manhattan property that were also the site of the most momentous event of the 21st century thus far. It was not just about the memorial but about the towers, station and museum that would go on the site as well.
The way they were: the World Trade Centre’s twin towers dominate the New York skyline in the 1990s. Photograph: Peter J. Eckel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty
After a false start or two, several architects were asked to take part in an "innovative design study", a process that was not supposed to have any winners. Then a winner was chosen, a group called Think, a decision overturned the next day by George Pataki, the governor of New York State, who chose Daniel Libeskind instead.
Libeskind's design studies were then called a masterplan, even though there had not been the time or money to work them out as fully as a masterplan would normally be. They then acquired the status, at least for some politicians, of designs for individual buildings, which they were not either. What were essentially sketches were treated as blueprints for multibillion-dollar structures.
Libeskind is the Polish-born son of Holocaust survivors, and designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, who, as a teenager, had arrived in New York, in the time-honoured way of immigrants, by boat. He was well placed to speak of freedom, hope, conflict and tragedy. His proposals, in which fractured geometric forms rose into a triumphant spiral said to echo the Statue of Liberty's torch, soaked the site in symbols. Its pinnacle would be the tallest building in the world – 1,776ft high in honour of the date of the American Declaration of Independence – which Pataki would name the Freedom Tower.
Nor was Libeskind afraid, though no Republican, to borrow the Bushite warping of language that followed 9/11: "Freedom" to mean "America", "heroes" to mean "victims". He called his project "Memory Foundations" and said it represented "life victorious". Libeskind is intelligent – when he received news of his win he was reading God, Death, and Time by the talmudist Emmanuel Levinas – but he can sound remarkably simplistic when he wants to.
There was a snag. "That idiot," as one of his rivals puts it, uncharitably, "he forgot that most American of things – the contract." There were in fact other architects engaged to work on the site, the giant, business-friendly practice Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM had been hired by Larry Silverstein, the developer who bought a long lease on the towers in the summer of 2001, a few weeks before they fell, and they were still his architects. His lease required him to put back all 10 million sq ft of the office space destroyed, so his views mattered. According to Janno Lieber of the Silverstein Corporation: "Larry said to Libeskind, 'Congratulations, this is a phenomenal plan. You've managed to accommodate everyone. But – no disrespect – I'd like my architects to design the individual buildings.'"
The main man at SOM was David Childs, now aged 70, prominent for decades in American architecture but never adulated like its more glamorous stars. His style is courteous but ruthless, that of one used to getting his own way. The project was also personal for him, as it was for many. A member of SOM's staff was killed in the attacks and Childs and his team had all too good a view from their Wall Street offices, a few blocks away. "There was a young man with tears streaming down his face," recalls Childs. "He said, 'Will they fall?' I said, 'No.'"
Pataki pushed Libeskind for a while but, according to Childs, Silverstein needed architects with experience of large buildings, such as SOM. Libeskind wanted to design the Freedom Tower, the most conspicuous element of his plan, but found himself put in a junior partnership with SOM ("We're a team organisation but we needed 51% of the vote," is how Childs describes it). Then he became an increasingly marginal figure as Childs redesigned the tower as he wanted it.
The outcome of the Childs/Libeskind showdown is now the most prominent object in the place that in the 1960s was named the World Trade Centre, became Ground Zero in 2001 and now – to lighten its load of significance – is called the World Trade Centre again. The rising tower, its slick skin chasing its steel-and-concrete frame up to the sky, is already taller than anything in Britain but still far from its final height. Libeskind wanted a dynamic, asymmetrical shape but the tower will now be a symmetrical obelisk, in emulation of the Washington Monument in Washington DC. Childs calls it "iconic and simple".
The Freedom Tower, now renamed 1 World Trade Centre, looks assertive and confident, like the towers of corporate America anywhere, but it has contradictions. It is unsure if it is a symbol or a piece of commercial real estate. Childs refers to the Washington Monument but also cites the importance of "market realities", among other things, as a reason for discarding Libeskind. Yet its size is grandiose and its security measures elaborate, for obvious reasons, which make it expensive in a location that is not New York's hottest commercial spot. It does not obviously respect market realities. At least, it did not convince Silverstein, who refused to build it, meaning that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the public body that owns the freehold, decided to put its own funds into putting up the tower, with uncertain prospects of an early, sufficient return on its investment.
Freedom Tower nears completion. Photograph: Rowan Moore for the Observer
The tower is the pinnacle of Childs's career, as it would be of any architect's, yet he is openly contemptuous of what might seem an important design feature, its height. This, achieved with the help of a large steel stick, retains the magic number specified by Libeskind: "1,776 feet, whatever that's worth," says Childs. "Nobody's going to count the feet."
The rebuilding of Ground Zero is an immense public building project, consuming billions of public dollars, pushed by mayors and governors, of a scale that would impress an old-fashioned socialist despot. Yet it is also a commercial development by the Silverstein Corporation. Its most important guiding document is Silverstein's lease agreement of summer 2001 and its requirement, blind to the imminent attacks and the emotional charge they would bring, that any destroyed accommodation should be put back. It meant that, whatever else happened, there would be very large office blocks on the site.None of the powerful people involved with the site since then has been able or willing to change this requirement.
At the same time, it was impossible for anything built there not to be a symbol, given what had happened and given the geometric potency of the Twin Towers. Their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, dreamed, with hopelessly misplaced optimism, that they would become "a representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the co-operation of men, and through co-operation, his ability to find greatness". The fearful symmetries of their downfall, and the contrast between the perfection of their forms and the chaos of their collapse, ensured that architecture and construction were enmeshed in the event.
Hence the contradictions. Is it a symbol? Is it an office block? It is both.
What are most clearly symbols are the two square cascades of the memorial, which lie in front of the tower in an eight-acre plaza containing the grove of 415 trees. The memorial is by Michael Arad, the architect who won a design competition held in 2003-4, beating 5,200 entrants. He was 34 at the time, unknown and inexperienced, and has realised the work in partnership with the well-established landscape architect Peter Walker.
Arad was living in Lower Manhattan at the time of the attacks and, like many, "was very affected by what I saw and felt compelled to do something about it". He recalls the place as a "ghost town" after 9/11, but with people instinctively gathering at night in public places such as Washington Square. From this, he learned that "public spaces are the glue that binds society together".
Almost immediately, Arad started imagining a memorial, spending "a lot of time and effort drawing and sketching and modelling". He came up with two squares set in the Hudson River, "with the surface of water torn open, by voids that will never fill". Then the competition was announced and he adapted his idea to the location at Ground Zero. At the same time, inspired by his discovery of the power of public space, he wanted them set in a large, flat, open plaza. He called his plan "Reflecting Absence" and won.
For Walker, the main problem was maintaining the flatness and openness of the plaza, which was essential to Arad's design, without making it bare and arid. The most important part of the answer is the trees, selected and nurtured, with great difficulty, so that they are all the same size.
Both Walker and Arad had to fight the many pressures to put unwanted stuff in the empty space, such as skylights for the train station or 17 air vents 20ft high. "How can you make something flat with 17 vents in it?" says Walker, who needed Pataki's help to sort out that one. They had to find the right kind of seating: park benches seemed inappropriate but so did oblong slabs that "looked as if they might have a dead person underneath"; so the slabs had to be given dimensions that made them look less tomb-like.
They had to make the cascades work, with the help of a mock-up in Toronto, and Walker still sounds a caution. "We've made them as well as we know how, but they're mechanical and usually mechanical things only last 30-40 years." Somehow, the money will have to be found to pump the water round for ever and ever. You get the impression Walker would not have gone for fountains if it had been up to him.
Arad wanted the names of the victims to be inscribed near the bottom of the cascades, with visitors descending to them behind the screen of falling water. Cost and security issues made this prohibitive and the names will now be around the cascades' upper rim, at the level of the plaza.
Even this simpler presentation took years to resolve, not least because of the question of the order in which the names, which include the six people who died in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre, would be arranged. Should they be alphabetical? Should they be random? Eventually it was agreed that names should be arranged by groupings of place – who was in which tower, on the ground, in which plane or in the Pentagon. However, relatives were invited to make "meaningful adjacency requests", of which 1,200 were received, whereby they could ask for particular names to be together.
Arad's and Walker's other concern was, as it was for most who have touched this site since 2001, the balance of remembrance and renewal. "A lot of people," says Arad, "thought it had to be either a living park or a cemetery and a forever dismal place." The combination of the fountains and the canopy of trees is intended to house both death and life, both acts of pilgrimage and lunchtime sandwich eating by office workers. "You walk through trees," says Walker, "and suddenly these waterfalls open up underneath you. Then you turn around and you're in a forest, which is a symbol of life."
Newspaper critics are being kept at a distance from the memorial for now, but it is possible to see from surrounding buildings that each fountain is vast. As each of each square's four sides is more than 200ft, and there are two squares, the total length of falling water is nearly a third of a mile. Each cascade drops 30ft, before dropping another 30ft down a smaller square hole in the centre, down to the level of the bedrock under the site.
But they are not the end of the remembering. Beneath the plaza, a museum is being built, with 100,000 sq ft of exhibition space. Exhibits will include crushed cars and fire trucks, twisted metal from the old towers and photographs and remembrances of victims. Within the museum's vast spaces it will be possible to see the slurry wall, the rough concrete that kept out the waters of the Hudson river, allowing the Twin Towers to be built. Never intended to be seen, it was revealed after they fell.
The cross discovered upright in the ruins of Ground Zero will be included in the museum beneath the plaza. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP
Above the pavement of the plaza can be seen the entrance pavilion to the museum, a tilting shard by the Norwegian practice Snøhetta. To one side is rising Tower Four, designed by the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. Work is also proceeding on Tower Three, by the British practice Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners. Next to it will be a transport interchange, linking the subways and trains, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Tower Two, by Foster and Partners and taller than the Empire State Building, is on hold for now. A proposed performing arts centre by Frank Gehry remains a distant prospect. On the other hand, Ground Zero's great unknown monument, 550,000 sq ft of retail, is on track.
These buildings are the constructional response of New York to 9/11, primed with some of the $20bn of federal money that the New York senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer won from Congress in the wake of the attacks. Most are far from complete. Tower One, the former Freedom Tower, is due to be finished in 2014. Calatrava's station is scheduled for 2014, the museum for 2012. Most are prodigiously expensive: the Freedom Tower costs more than $3bn, and the museum and memorial combined $700m. The station, originally budgeted at $2.2bn, is reputed to be heading towards $4bn.
All the buildings have what the Silverstein Corporation calls "significant" architects. It is an interesting adjective, as significance has always been the big issue at the World Trade Centre. Yamasaki wanted significance for his towers, that of world peace. Al-Qaida saw them differently. Since 9/11, all the argument and anguish has been about the ways in which construction can express and honour the significance of the event. Yet the way in which Foster or Calatrava are "significant" is different. Here, the word means "well known, successful and highly regarded". Its meaning is hollowed out; its relation to the significance of the site is approximate.
Libeskind's promise was significance. It can be debated how successfully his ideas would have achieved it but what is clear is that the Pritzker-winning architects – Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Maki – hired by Silverstein for the other towers, have not been inclined to defer to Libeskind's vision. The towers will ascend in a vague, stiff, spiral, roughly in accordance with Libeskind's wishes, but each is a singular assertive object rather than a figure in a great unified gesture. Until such time as the Foster tower is completed, which could yet be a decade from now, it remains to be seen how plain is the resemblance of the group to Lady Liberty's torch or how many people will care if it is.
Others of Libeskind's ideas have fallen away. He had wanted the memorial plaza to be sunk but Arad and Walker raised it back to street level. He envisaged a "wedge of light" where sunshine would fall, each 11 September, between the times when the first plane hit the North Tower and the second tower to fall – also the North Tower – collapsed. The extravagant roof of Calatrava's station compromises this idea, whose effectiveness had already been questioned. Calatrava, using the greeting card triteness that has infected many in this project, said his roof would be like a dove released from the hands of a child. In reality, like much of his work, it is mostly about Santiago Calatrava. He has designed similar-looking roofs elsewhere, without a dove pretext in sight.
Libeskind is nothing if not optimistic and despite past rages at Childs is now serene. "The fundamental ideas are exactly there," he says. He may sound almost like Saddam Hussein's PR man, Comical Ali, proclaiming victory as the US army could be seen entering Baghdad behind him, but he can at least list ideas of his that are still there, such as the 1,776ft of the tower, the open space containing the memorial, the exposure of the slurry wall and the idea that retail should be spread about the site rather than placed in a single underground zone.
Libeskind says his experience at Ground Zero "reaffirms [his] belief in democracy, which is as difficult as it can be worthwhile". The place is indeed a product of New York's version of democracy, in which no one has the ability to assume complete control, not even the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the man widely credited for ensuring that the project has got as far as it has. The site becomes a jostle of competing interests, in which a combination of money, power and loud voices, tempered to a degree by public opinion, tends to win.
The jostle of buildings reflects this jostle of power. They do not connect or cohere, except in a very general way. There is a reluctance to engage with the specific or the small-scale. The memorial is one thing, the museum another, the station and former Freedom Tower others again.
At the same time, all are driven by a pervading fear that whatever is built to honour 9/11 will not be enough. So everything – waterfall, towers, museum, plaza, station – is huge. Was it really necessary to try to build the tallest building in the world, creating immense security issues in the process, especially now that New York has been thrust out of the tallest-building game by Dubai?
Subtlety, intimacy and complexity are blunted and in a sense the development is untypical New York. In the past decade, the city has acquired a certain lightness and playfulness, represented by the High Line, the phenomenally successful conversion of a railway viaduct into a public park. Or by the never-ending ingenuity with which restaurant menus and cocktails are constructed; or by the glittering, joyful residential skyscraper that Frank Gehry has put up downtown. For better and worse, the city resembles a giant habitable iPad, a delectable grid where gratification can be had at a touch. The World Trade Centre feels ponderous, corporate and old-fashioned by comparison. For a Londoner, it feels like Canary Wharf.
But it will be effective. The magnificent waterfalls and the exhibits in the museum will do their job of assuaging the event. The generalness and abundance will mean that most of the many, many parties who care about the site, from property developers to victims' families and residents, will be satisfied. It will achieve closure but with a looseness that avoids the need to reconcile conflicts that may be irreconcilable. The train station will pump people into the skyscrapers, who will lunch under the trees and shop in the mall.
It will have been a long time coming, and cost an extraordinary amount, but it will be there. And, possibly, given the ways New York does and does not work, no other route was possible but the one by which it got there.
The memorial will be ready, just, although it will be accessible only by advance booking for another two years. It could not miss this deadline. Despite billions of public dollars, thousands of ideas for memorials and rebuilding, a shared public desire to honour the event and speeches by governors and mayors about the urgent need to get things done, perhaps a third of all the reconstruction that will happen here has so far taken place.
Work on 7 World Trade Centre, a relatively plain tower at the edge of the site, was completed in 2006. Otherwise, the grove and the fountains stand among pits, canyons, cranes and rising frames, a Bosch landscape of machines and mud, of digging down and piling up, as skyscrapers, a train station, a museum and 550,000 sq ft of retail space take shape.
"It is very New York," is what everyone connected with the project says, by which they mean that everyone has an opinion and an interest, which must face down the opinions and interests of others. Much of the past decade has been spent in arguing, in law courts, in the media, at public and private meetings. Relatives of victims had different views from one another, and from people living near the Ground Zero site, who did not want their neighbourhood to become a shrine to catastrophe. One of the residents' leaders was told she would "burn in hell". Construction became political: protestors against slow progress carried placards saying: "Don't forget 9/11. Delay means defeat." There was rage and defiance, a desire to stick it back to the terrorists, which made it very likely that large towers would be put back on the site.
In the years following 9/11, the event was honoured by a carnival of pretention and viciousness, as architects felt compelled – as there can be narcissism in healing – to put themselves at the centre of the stage cleared by the attacks. "We're going to crush his nuts," said one of another, while others preened and posed and drivelled about the fusion "of military and urban space" or new towers that would "kiss and touch and become one". They employed black propaganda, old boys' networks, emotional posturing and shameless spinning. At stake was the greatest commission in the world, the chance to shape 16 acres of Manhattan property that were also the site of the most momentous event of the 21st century thus far. It was not just about the memorial but about the towers, station and museum that would go on the site as well.
The way they were: the World Trade Centre’s twin towers dominate the New York skyline in the 1990s. Photograph: Peter J. Eckel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty
After a false start or two, several architects were asked to take part in an "innovative design study", a process that was not supposed to have any winners. Then a winner was chosen, a group called Think, a decision overturned the next day by George Pataki, the governor of New York State, who chose Daniel Libeskind instead.
Libeskind's design studies were then called a masterplan, even though there had not been the time or money to work them out as fully as a masterplan would normally be. They then acquired the status, at least for some politicians, of designs for individual buildings, which they were not either. What were essentially sketches were treated as blueprints for multibillion-dollar structures.
Libeskind is the Polish-born son of Holocaust survivors, and designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, who, as a teenager, had arrived in New York, in the time-honoured way of immigrants, by boat. He was well placed to speak of freedom, hope, conflict and tragedy. His proposals, in which fractured geometric forms rose into a triumphant spiral said to echo the Statue of Liberty's torch, soaked the site in symbols. Its pinnacle would be the tallest building in the world – 1,776ft high in honour of the date of the American Declaration of Independence – which Pataki would name the Freedom Tower.
Nor was Libeskind afraid, though no Republican, to borrow the Bushite warping of language that followed 9/11: "Freedom" to mean "America", "heroes" to mean "victims". He called his project "Memory Foundations" and said it represented "life victorious". Libeskind is intelligent – when he received news of his win he was reading God, Death, and Time by the talmudist Emmanuel Levinas – but he can sound remarkably simplistic when he wants to.
There was a snag. "That idiot," as one of his rivals puts it, uncharitably, "he forgot that most American of things – the contract." There were in fact other architects engaged to work on the site, the giant, business-friendly practice Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM had been hired by Larry Silverstein, the developer who bought a long lease on the towers in the summer of 2001, a few weeks before they fell, and they were still his architects. His lease required him to put back all 10 million sq ft of the office space destroyed, so his views mattered. According to Janno Lieber of the Silverstein Corporation: "Larry said to Libeskind, 'Congratulations, this is a phenomenal plan. You've managed to accommodate everyone. But – no disrespect – I'd like my architects to design the individual buildings.'"
The main man at SOM was David Childs, now aged 70, prominent for decades in American architecture but never adulated like its more glamorous stars. His style is courteous but ruthless, that of one used to getting his own way. The project was also personal for him, as it was for many. A member of SOM's staff was killed in the attacks and Childs and his team had all too good a view from their Wall Street offices, a few blocks away. "There was a young man with tears streaming down his face," recalls Childs. "He said, 'Will they fall?' I said, 'No.'"
Pataki pushed Libeskind for a while but, according to Childs, Silverstein needed architects with experience of large buildings, such as SOM. Libeskind wanted to design the Freedom Tower, the most conspicuous element of his plan, but found himself put in a junior partnership with SOM ("We're a team organisation but we needed 51% of the vote," is how Childs describes it). Then he became an increasingly marginal figure as Childs redesigned the tower as he wanted it.
The outcome of the Childs/Libeskind showdown is now the most prominent object in the place that in the 1960s was named the World Trade Centre, became Ground Zero in 2001 and now – to lighten its load of significance – is called the World Trade Centre again. The rising tower, its slick skin chasing its steel-and-concrete frame up to the sky, is already taller than anything in Britain but still far from its final height. Libeskind wanted a dynamic, asymmetrical shape but the tower will now be a symmetrical obelisk, in emulation of the Washington Monument in Washington DC. Childs calls it "iconic and simple".
The Freedom Tower, now renamed 1 World Trade Centre, looks assertive and confident, like the towers of corporate America anywhere, but it has contradictions. It is unsure if it is a symbol or a piece of commercial real estate. Childs refers to the Washington Monument but also cites the importance of "market realities", among other things, as a reason for discarding Libeskind. Yet its size is grandiose and its security measures elaborate, for obvious reasons, which make it expensive in a location that is not New York's hottest commercial spot. It does not obviously respect market realities. At least, it did not convince Silverstein, who refused to build it, meaning that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the public body that owns the freehold, decided to put its own funds into putting up the tower, with uncertain prospects of an early, sufficient return on its investment.
Freedom Tower nears completion. Photograph: Rowan Moore for the Observer
The tower is the pinnacle of Childs's career, as it would be of any architect's, yet he is openly contemptuous of what might seem an important design feature, its height. This, achieved with the help of a large steel stick, retains the magic number specified by Libeskind: "1,776 feet, whatever that's worth," says Childs. "Nobody's going to count the feet."
The rebuilding of Ground Zero is an immense public building project, consuming billions of public dollars, pushed by mayors and governors, of a scale that would impress an old-fashioned socialist despot. Yet it is also a commercial development by the Silverstein Corporation. Its most important guiding document is Silverstein's lease agreement of summer 2001 and its requirement, blind to the imminent attacks and the emotional charge they would bring, that any destroyed accommodation should be put back. It meant that, whatever else happened, there would be very large office blocks on the site.None of the powerful people involved with the site since then has been able or willing to change this requirement.
At the same time, it was impossible for anything built there not to be a symbol, given what had happened and given the geometric potency of the Twin Towers. Their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, dreamed, with hopelessly misplaced optimism, that they would become "a representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the co-operation of men, and through co-operation, his ability to find greatness". The fearful symmetries of their downfall, and the contrast between the perfection of their forms and the chaos of their collapse, ensured that architecture and construction were enmeshed in the event.
Hence the contradictions. Is it a symbol? Is it an office block? It is both.
What are most clearly symbols are the two square cascades of the memorial, which lie in front of the tower in an eight-acre plaza containing the grove of 415 trees. The memorial is by Michael Arad, the architect who won a design competition held in 2003-4, beating 5,200 entrants. He was 34 at the time, unknown and inexperienced, and has realised the work in partnership with the well-established landscape architect Peter Walker.
Arad was living in Lower Manhattan at the time of the attacks and, like many, "was very affected by what I saw and felt compelled to do something about it". He recalls the place as a "ghost town" after 9/11, but with people instinctively gathering at night in public places such as Washington Square. From this, he learned that "public spaces are the glue that binds society together".
Almost immediately, Arad started imagining a memorial, spending "a lot of time and effort drawing and sketching and modelling". He came up with two squares set in the Hudson River, "with the surface of water torn open, by voids that will never fill". Then the competition was announced and he adapted his idea to the location at Ground Zero. At the same time, inspired by his discovery of the power of public space, he wanted them set in a large, flat, open plaza. He called his plan "Reflecting Absence" and won.
For Walker, the main problem was maintaining the flatness and openness of the plaza, which was essential to Arad's design, without making it bare and arid. The most important part of the answer is the trees, selected and nurtured, with great difficulty, so that they are all the same size.
Both Walker and Arad had to fight the many pressures to put unwanted stuff in the empty space, such as skylights for the train station or 17 air vents 20ft high. "How can you make something flat with 17 vents in it?" says Walker, who needed Pataki's help to sort out that one. They had to find the right kind of seating: park benches seemed inappropriate but so did oblong slabs that "looked as if they might have a dead person underneath"; so the slabs had to be given dimensions that made them look less tomb-like.
They had to make the cascades work, with the help of a mock-up in Toronto, and Walker still sounds a caution. "We've made them as well as we know how, but they're mechanical and usually mechanical things only last 30-40 years." Somehow, the money will have to be found to pump the water round for ever and ever. You get the impression Walker would not have gone for fountains if it had been up to him.
Arad wanted the names of the victims to be inscribed near the bottom of the cascades, with visitors descending to them behind the screen of falling water. Cost and security issues made this prohibitive and the names will now be around the cascades' upper rim, at the level of the plaza.
Even this simpler presentation took years to resolve, not least because of the question of the order in which the names, which include the six people who died in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre, would be arranged. Should they be alphabetical? Should they be random? Eventually it was agreed that names should be arranged by groupings of place – who was in which tower, on the ground, in which plane or in the Pentagon. However, relatives were invited to make "meaningful adjacency requests", of which 1,200 were received, whereby they could ask for particular names to be together.
Arad's and Walker's other concern was, as it was for most who have touched this site since 2001, the balance of remembrance and renewal. "A lot of people," says Arad, "thought it had to be either a living park or a cemetery and a forever dismal place." The combination of the fountains and the canopy of trees is intended to house both death and life, both acts of pilgrimage and lunchtime sandwich eating by office workers. "You walk through trees," says Walker, "and suddenly these waterfalls open up underneath you. Then you turn around and you're in a forest, which is a symbol of life."
Newspaper critics are being kept at a distance from the memorial for now, but it is possible to see from surrounding buildings that each fountain is vast. As each of each square's four sides is more than 200ft, and there are two squares, the total length of falling water is nearly a third of a mile. Each cascade drops 30ft, before dropping another 30ft down a smaller square hole in the centre, down to the level of the bedrock under the site.
But they are not the end of the remembering. Beneath the plaza, a museum is being built, with 100,000 sq ft of exhibition space. Exhibits will include crushed cars and fire trucks, twisted metal from the old towers and photographs and remembrances of victims. Within the museum's vast spaces it will be possible to see the slurry wall, the rough concrete that kept out the waters of the Hudson river, allowing the Twin Towers to be built. Never intended to be seen, it was revealed after they fell.
The cross discovered upright in the ruins of Ground Zero will be included in the museum beneath the plaza. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP
Above the pavement of the plaza can be seen the entrance pavilion to the museum, a tilting shard by the Norwegian practice Snøhetta. To one side is rising Tower Four, designed by the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. Work is also proceeding on Tower Three, by the British practice Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners. Next to it will be a transport interchange, linking the subways and trains, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Tower Two, by Foster and Partners and taller than the Empire State Building, is on hold for now. A proposed performing arts centre by Frank Gehry remains a distant prospect. On the other hand, Ground Zero's great unknown monument, 550,000 sq ft of retail, is on track.
These buildings are the constructional response of New York to 9/11, primed with some of the $20bn of federal money that the New York senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer won from Congress in the wake of the attacks. Most are far from complete. Tower One, the former Freedom Tower, is due to be finished in 2014. Calatrava's station is scheduled for 2014, the museum for 2012. Most are prodigiously expensive: the Freedom Tower costs more than $3bn, and the museum and memorial combined $700m. The station, originally budgeted at $2.2bn, is reputed to be heading towards $4bn.
All the buildings have what the Silverstein Corporation calls "significant" architects. It is an interesting adjective, as significance has always been the big issue at the World Trade Centre. Yamasaki wanted significance for his towers, that of world peace. Al-Qaida saw them differently. Since 9/11, all the argument and anguish has been about the ways in which construction can express and honour the significance of the event. Yet the way in which Foster or Calatrava are "significant" is different. Here, the word means "well known, successful and highly regarded". Its meaning is hollowed out; its relation to the significance of the site is approximate.
Libeskind's promise was significance. It can be debated how successfully his ideas would have achieved it but what is clear is that the Pritzker-winning architects – Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Maki – hired by Silverstein for the other towers, have not been inclined to defer to Libeskind's vision. The towers will ascend in a vague, stiff, spiral, roughly in accordance with Libeskind's wishes, but each is a singular assertive object rather than a figure in a great unified gesture. Until such time as the Foster tower is completed, which could yet be a decade from now, it remains to be seen how plain is the resemblance of the group to Lady Liberty's torch or how many people will care if it is.
Others of Libeskind's ideas have fallen away. He had wanted the memorial plaza to be sunk but Arad and Walker raised it back to street level. He envisaged a "wedge of light" where sunshine would fall, each 11 September, between the times when the first plane hit the North Tower and the second tower to fall – also the North Tower – collapsed. The extravagant roof of Calatrava's station compromises this idea, whose effectiveness had already been questioned. Calatrava, using the greeting card triteness that has infected many in this project, said his roof would be like a dove released from the hands of a child. In reality, like much of his work, it is mostly about Santiago Calatrava. He has designed similar-looking roofs elsewhere, without a dove pretext in sight.
Libeskind is nothing if not optimistic and despite past rages at Childs is now serene. "The fundamental ideas are exactly there," he says. He may sound almost like Saddam Hussein's PR man, Comical Ali, proclaiming victory as the US army could be seen entering Baghdad behind him, but he can at least list ideas of his that are still there, such as the 1,776ft of the tower, the open space containing the memorial, the exposure of the slurry wall and the idea that retail should be spread about the site rather than placed in a single underground zone.
Libeskind says his experience at Ground Zero "reaffirms [his] belief in democracy, which is as difficult as it can be worthwhile". The place is indeed a product of New York's version of democracy, in which no one has the ability to assume complete control, not even the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the man widely credited for ensuring that the project has got as far as it has. The site becomes a jostle of competing interests, in which a combination of money, power and loud voices, tempered to a degree by public opinion, tends to win.
The jostle of buildings reflects this jostle of power. They do not connect or cohere, except in a very general way. There is a reluctance to engage with the specific or the small-scale. The memorial is one thing, the museum another, the station and former Freedom Tower others again.
At the same time, all are driven by a pervading fear that whatever is built to honour 9/11 will not be enough. So everything – waterfall, towers, museum, plaza, station – is huge. Was it really necessary to try to build the tallest building in the world, creating immense security issues in the process, especially now that New York has been thrust out of the tallest-building game by Dubai?
Subtlety, intimacy and complexity are blunted and in a sense the development is untypical New York. In the past decade, the city has acquired a certain lightness and playfulness, represented by the High Line, the phenomenally successful conversion of a railway viaduct into a public park. Or by the never-ending ingenuity with which restaurant menus and cocktails are constructed; or by the glittering, joyful residential skyscraper that Frank Gehry has put up downtown. For better and worse, the city resembles a giant habitable iPad, a delectable grid where gratification can be had at a touch. The World Trade Centre feels ponderous, corporate and old-fashioned by comparison. For a Londoner, it feels like Canary Wharf.
But it will be effective. The magnificent waterfalls and the exhibits in the museum will do their job of assuaging the event. The generalness and abundance will mean that most of the many, many parties who care about the site, from property developers to victims' families and residents, will be satisfied. It will achieve closure but with a looseness that avoids the need to reconcile conflicts that may be irreconcilable. The train station will pump people into the skyscrapers, who will lunch under the trees and shop in the mall.
It will have been a long time coming, and cost an extraordinary amount, but it will be there. And, possibly, given the ways New York does and does not work, no other route was possible but the one by which it got there.
Al-Qaeda Claims U.S. Mass Transportation Infrastructure Must Drastically Improve Before Any Terrorist Attacks
WASHINGTON—In a 30-minute video released Thursday, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri criticized the mass transportation infrastructure of the United States, claiming significant repairs and upgrades would need to be implemented before the militant group would consider destroying any roads, bridges, or railways with terrorist attacks.
Reading from a prepared statement, al-Zawahiri blasted the U.S. government for its lack of foresight and admonished its leaders for failing to provide Americans with efficient and reliable modes of public transport to reduce traffic congestion, lower carbon emissions, improve air quality, and supply suitable targets for terrorists.
"The al-Qaeda network is fully prepared to continue the jihad against the American infidels by launching deadly attacks, but your outdated and rusting transportation infrastructure needs to be completely overhauled for those strikes even to be noticed," al-Zawahiri said. "We want to turn your bridges into rubble, but if we claimed credit for making them collapse, nobody would ever believe us."
"We'd really just be doing you a favor because then you'd actually have to rebuild them," al-Zawahiri added.
The al-Qaeda commander confirmed his organization initially hoped to cripple travel in the United States by destroying its nationwide high-speed rail system, but had been shocked to discover no such thing exists. Calling it a cost-efficient, modern way of travel that would serve as a boon to small businesses and the national economy, al-Zawahiri implored U.S. officials to invest in not just one high-speed passenger train network, but many of them, so they could all be blown up simultaneously in a signature al-Qaeda attack upon the nation's major population centers.
Throughout the threatening video, the terrorist leader questioned the priorities of American politicians, asking why they would refuse to fund engineering projects that would create jobs, bombing opportunities, and new ways for the U.S. compete globally.
"It's ridiculous that the Netherlands, the world's 16th-ranked economy, is continuously investing in its infrastructure, while the No. 1 economy simply refuses to enter the 21st century," said al-Zawahiri, adding that Americans should be ashamed of having only one operational high-speed rail line, considering the Dutch have 120. "And of course, we don't want to bring the Netherlands to its knees and make its people question the unholy excesses of their way of life. No one would care if we did that."
"Also, to the Great Satan American leader Barack Obama: Investing in mass transit infrastructure would have positive, long-term effects for the environment," he added. "Stop being so shortsighted."
Al-Qaeda sources confirmed that members of terror cells living in America regularly complain about the extreme difficulty of traveling around the country and say it has prevented them from doing their jobs effectively. A plot to destroy O'Hare International Airport was reportedly abandoned after constant flight delays made coordinating an attack nearly impossible.
In addition, al-Zawahiri said a terrorist attack on O'Hare couldn't make the commercial aviation center any worse.
He also revealed the terrorist organization had wasted six months planning to take down Amtrak's regional operations before realizing that with its constant delays and malfunctions, the government-owned passenger train service "basically terrorizes itself."
"We spent countless hours on training, surveillance, and intelligence-gathering for absolutely nothing," al-Zawahiri said. "We falsely assumed that disrupting key Amtrak lines would instill fear and cause chaos throughout the nation. Unfortunately, the overall impact and limited number of casualties wouldn't even make it worth the effort."
While al-Zawahiri mainly focused on reprimanding the U.S. for not updating its mass transportation system, the al-Qaeda leader also recommended the government repair sewage treatment plants, dams, waterlines, and the power grid.
"Frankly, America is a complete mess," al-Zawahiri said. "How could we even think about cutting electricity across multiple states, leaving millions of Americans terrified in darkness, when there are brownouts all the time? And of course, we would like nothing better than to poison your lakes and rivers, but it looks like you already beat us to it.
Reading from a prepared statement, al-Zawahiri blasted the U.S. government for its lack of foresight and admonished its leaders for failing to provide Americans with efficient and reliable modes of public transport to reduce traffic congestion, lower carbon emissions, improve air quality, and supply suitable targets for terrorists.
"The al-Qaeda network is fully prepared to continue the jihad against the American infidels by launching deadly attacks, but your outdated and rusting transportation infrastructure needs to be completely overhauled for those strikes even to be noticed," al-Zawahiri said. "We want to turn your bridges into rubble, but if we claimed credit for making them collapse, nobody would ever believe us."
"We'd really just be doing you a favor because then you'd actually have to rebuild them," al-Zawahiri added.
The al-Qaeda commander confirmed his organization initially hoped to cripple travel in the United States by destroying its nationwide high-speed rail system, but had been shocked to discover no such thing exists. Calling it a cost-efficient, modern way of travel that would serve as a boon to small businesses and the national economy, al-Zawahiri implored U.S. officials to invest in not just one high-speed passenger train network, but many of them, so they could all be blown up simultaneously in a signature al-Qaeda attack upon the nation's major population centers.
Throughout the threatening video, the terrorist leader questioned the priorities of American politicians, asking why they would refuse to fund engineering projects that would create jobs, bombing opportunities, and new ways for the U.S. compete globally.
"It's ridiculous that the Netherlands, the world's 16th-ranked economy, is continuously investing in its infrastructure, while the No. 1 economy simply refuses to enter the 21st century," said al-Zawahiri, adding that Americans should be ashamed of having only one operational high-speed rail line, considering the Dutch have 120. "And of course, we don't want to bring the Netherlands to its knees and make its people question the unholy excesses of their way of life. No one would care if we did that."
"Also, to the Great Satan American leader Barack Obama: Investing in mass transit infrastructure would have positive, long-term effects for the environment," he added. "Stop being so shortsighted."
Al-Qaeda sources confirmed that members of terror cells living in America regularly complain about the extreme difficulty of traveling around the country and say it has prevented them from doing their jobs effectively. A plot to destroy O'Hare International Airport was reportedly abandoned after constant flight delays made coordinating an attack nearly impossible.
In addition, al-Zawahiri said a terrorist attack on O'Hare couldn't make the commercial aviation center any worse.
He also revealed the terrorist organization had wasted six months planning to take down Amtrak's regional operations before realizing that with its constant delays and malfunctions, the government-owned passenger train service "basically terrorizes itself."
"We spent countless hours on training, surveillance, and intelligence-gathering for absolutely nothing," al-Zawahiri said. "We falsely assumed that disrupting key Amtrak lines would instill fear and cause chaos throughout the nation. Unfortunately, the overall impact and limited number of casualties wouldn't even make it worth the effort."
While al-Zawahiri mainly focused on reprimanding the U.S. for not updating its mass transportation system, the al-Qaeda leader also recommended the government repair sewage treatment plants, dams, waterlines, and the power grid.
"Frankly, America is a complete mess," al-Zawahiri said. "How could we even think about cutting electricity across multiple states, leaving millions of Americans terrified in darkness, when there are brownouts all the time? And of course, we would like nothing better than to poison your lakes and rivers, but it looks like you already beat us to it.
2014 FIFA WC qualification draw set
RIO DE JANEIRO: The 2014 World Cup has officially kicked off, with the United States being drawn with Jamaica in qualifying for the North, Central America and Caribbean region for the tournament in Brazil in three years' time.
The other two teams in Group A will come from preliminary qualifying matches that include Haiti, Guatemala, the U.S. Virgin Islands and five other nations.
Mexico is in Group B with Costa Rica, while Cuba and Honduras are in Group C. All three group winners and runners-up will advance to a final qualifying round, beginning February 2013.
African and Asian countries also found out their opponents in Saturday's qualifying draw in Rio de Janeiro, the first major World Cup event in Brazil since the South American nation was awarded the competition in 2007.
In Asia, Japan will face Uzbekistan, Syria and North Korea in Group C, while Australia will play Saudi Arabia, Oman and Thailand in Group D.
Iran, Bahrain and Qatar were drawn in the same Group E, along with Indonesia, while China is in Group A with Iraq, Jordan and Singapore.
The African teams were divided into 10 groups for qualifiers beginning in November. South Africa, last year's World Cup host, was drawn in Group A along with Botswana. Ghana, the best African team last year, is in Group D with Zambia and Sudan.
As host, Brazil is the only nation that doesn't have to qualify. But 166 other teams are having their fate decided in the draw.
South America was not included in the draw because the continent's nine teams will be placed in a single group. They will play each other twice, home and away, with the top four finishers securing a World Cup spot. The fifth-place team will advance to an intercontinental playoff against a team from Asia. The other playoff will pit teams from CONCACAF and Oceania.
The qualifiers began June 15 and will end Nov. 19, 2013, after 824 matches. Twenty-eight teams were eliminated in preliminary rounds before Saturday's draw.
The World Cup will be played from June 12 to July 13, and the complete match schedule will be announced in October.
"We love football,'' Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said at the draw. "Today, Brazil is admired for more than just football, music and its popular festivities. I invite you to come visit us. You will find a country very well prepared for the World Cup.''
The other two teams in Group A will come from preliminary qualifying matches that include Haiti, Guatemala, the U.S. Virgin Islands and five other nations.
Mexico is in Group B with Costa Rica, while Cuba and Honduras are in Group C. All three group winners and runners-up will advance to a final qualifying round, beginning February 2013.
African and Asian countries also found out their opponents in Saturday's qualifying draw in Rio de Janeiro, the first major World Cup event in Brazil since the South American nation was awarded the competition in 2007.
In Asia, Japan will face Uzbekistan, Syria and North Korea in Group C, while Australia will play Saudi Arabia, Oman and Thailand in Group D.
Iran, Bahrain and Qatar were drawn in the same Group E, along with Indonesia, while China is in Group A with Iraq, Jordan and Singapore.
The African teams were divided into 10 groups for qualifiers beginning in November. South Africa, last year's World Cup host, was drawn in Group A along with Botswana. Ghana, the best African team last year, is in Group D with Zambia and Sudan.
As host, Brazil is the only nation that doesn't have to qualify. But 166 other teams are having their fate decided in the draw.
South America was not included in the draw because the continent's nine teams will be placed in a single group. They will play each other twice, home and away, with the top four finishers securing a World Cup spot. The fifth-place team will advance to an intercontinental playoff against a team from Asia. The other playoff will pit teams from CONCACAF and Oceania.
The qualifiers began June 15 and will end Nov. 19, 2013, after 824 matches. Twenty-eight teams were eliminated in preliminary rounds before Saturday's draw.
The World Cup will be played from June 12 to July 13, and the complete match schedule will be announced in October.
"We love football,'' Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said at the draw. "Today, Brazil is admired for more than just football, music and its popular festivities. I invite you to come visit us. You will find a country very well prepared for the World Cup.''
US town for sale
SCENIC: In the market for a town? Well if you have $799,000 who can be the proud owner of Scenic, South Dakota in the US. The town comes with 46 acres of land including a post office, gas station, a grocery store, two empty jails and a saloon. Interested buyers don’t have to worry about congestion because the town only has nine residents.
The town has been on the market for three years and owner Twila Merril was originally asking $3 million for the property but lowered the price when she could not attract any buyers.
The town has been on the market for three years and owner Twila Merril was originally asking $3 million for the property but lowered the price when she could not attract any buyers.
Tearful Jolie gets Sarajevo film festival award
SARAJEVO: Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie was close to tears as she received a special award during an unannounced visit to Sarajevo's film festival Saturday with partner Brad Pitt.
"I will start crying if you don't stop," Oscar-awarded Jolie told the audience who gave her a standing ovation at the city's National Theater.
Jolie chose Bosnia's 1992-95 war as the setting for her first film as a director. "In the Land of Blood and Honey" is due to be released in December.
She has also visited Bosnia as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N.'s refugee agency UNHCR and funded the construction of several houses for returnees in eastern Bosnia.
Festival director Mirsad Purivatra presented Jolie with a heart-shaped award when she appeared at the closing ceremony.
"Tonight we are giving the honorary Heart of Sarajevo to a great artist, not only for the great impact she has in the world of cinema but also for persisting and her active engagement in the complexities of the real world we live in," Purivatra said.
Jolie, dressed in a long peach dress, stood on stage with eyes full of tears waiting for the clapping to die down.
"I told Brad in the car I was afraid I was going to cry," she said, her voice breaking.
Jolie's film tells the story of a love affair between a Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) woman and a Serb, who were on opposite warring sides during the conflict.
She planned to shoot parts of the film in Sarajevo and engaged a local crew. But she had to move to Budapest after some female victims of sexual violence objected to details in the plot and Bosnian authorities canceled a filming permit.
"I am so honored to be here at this festival," Jolie said after receiving the award. "There is no greater example of the strengths of the artists and the festival that began during the war and grew stronger every year."
The Sarajevo film festival was launched toward the end of the Bosnian capital's 43-month siege by Bosnian Serb forces.
Jolie presented Austrian actor Thomas Schubert with the award for the best actor for his role in the film "Atmen," directed by Karl Markovics.
Atmen, about a young offender searching for his mother, was also named best film in the festival.
Romanian actress Ada Condeascu won the prize for best actress for her role in the film "Loverboy." (Reuters)
"I will start crying if you don't stop," Oscar-awarded Jolie told the audience who gave her a standing ovation at the city's National Theater.
Jolie chose Bosnia's 1992-95 war as the setting for her first film as a director. "In the Land of Blood and Honey" is due to be released in December.
She has also visited Bosnia as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N.'s refugee agency UNHCR and funded the construction of several houses for returnees in eastern Bosnia.
Festival director Mirsad Purivatra presented Jolie with a heart-shaped award when she appeared at the closing ceremony.
"Tonight we are giving the honorary Heart of Sarajevo to a great artist, not only for the great impact she has in the world of cinema but also for persisting and her active engagement in the complexities of the real world we live in," Purivatra said.
Jolie, dressed in a long peach dress, stood on stage with eyes full of tears waiting for the clapping to die down.
"I told Brad in the car I was afraid I was going to cry," she said, her voice breaking.
Jolie's film tells the story of a love affair between a Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) woman and a Serb, who were on opposite warring sides during the conflict.
She planned to shoot parts of the film in Sarajevo and engaged a local crew. But she had to move to Budapest after some female victims of sexual violence objected to details in the plot and Bosnian authorities canceled a filming permit.
"I am so honored to be here at this festival," Jolie said after receiving the award. "There is no greater example of the strengths of the artists and the festival that began during the war and grew stronger every year."
The Sarajevo film festival was launched toward the end of the Bosnian capital's 43-month siege by Bosnian Serb forces.
Jolie presented Austrian actor Thomas Schubert with the award for the best actor for his role in the film "Atmen," directed by Karl Markovics.
Atmen, about a young offender searching for his mother, was also named best film in the festival.
Romanian actress Ada Condeascu won the prize for best actress for her role in the film "Loverboy." (Reuters)
Third of the world infected with hepatitis: WHO
GENEVA: Around one third of the global population, or 2 billion people, have been infected with one of the viruses that causes the liver disease hepatitis, which kills about a million victims annually, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.
And although most of those carrying hepatitis do not know they have it, they can unknowingly transmit it to others and at any time in their lives it can develop to kill or disable them, the United Nations agency warned.
"This is a chronic disease across the whole world, but unfortunately there is very little awareness, even among health policy-makers, of its extent," WHO hepatitis specialist Steven Wiersma told a news conference.
The conference marked the first U.N. World Hepatitis Day, called by the world body to raise awareness of the viral disease, largely spread by contaminated water and food, blood, semen and other body fluids.
Wiersma said the disease - which has five main viruses - produced a "staggering toll" on health care systems around the globe and had the potential to spark epidemics, as well as being the main cause ofliver cirrhosis and cancer.
Of the five viruses dubbed A, B, C, D and E, a new WHO document says, B was the most common and could be transmitted by mothers to infants at birth or in early childhood as well as through contaminated injections or injected drug use.
The E virus, transmitted through infected water or food, is a common cause of outbreaks of the disease in developing countries and is increasingly observed in developed economies, according to the WHO.
The WHO says effective vaccines had been developed to combat the A and B viruses and could also be used against D. A vaccine for hepatitis E had been developed but was not widely available, while there was none for the C virus.
Vaccination campaigns had scored considerable success in many countries, with about 180 of the WHO's 193 member states now including the B vaccine in infant immunization programs, the agency said.
But more needed to be done to prevent or control the disease. It was vital to ensure that people already infected could be tested and given quality care and treatment without delay, the WHO document declared. (Reuters)
And although most of those carrying hepatitis do not know they have it, they can unknowingly transmit it to others and at any time in their lives it can develop to kill or disable them, the United Nations agency warned.
"This is a chronic disease across the whole world, but unfortunately there is very little awareness, even among health policy-makers, of its extent," WHO hepatitis specialist Steven Wiersma told a news conference.
The conference marked the first U.N. World Hepatitis Day, called by the world body to raise awareness of the viral disease, largely spread by contaminated water and food, blood, semen and other body fluids.
Wiersma said the disease - which has five main viruses - produced a "staggering toll" on health care systems around the globe and had the potential to spark epidemics, as well as being the main cause ofliver cirrhosis and cancer.
Of the five viruses dubbed A, B, C, D and E, a new WHO document says, B was the most common and could be transmitted by mothers to infants at birth or in early childhood as well as through contaminated injections or injected drug use.
The E virus, transmitted through infected water or food, is a common cause of outbreaks of the disease in developing countries and is increasingly observed in developed economies, according to the WHO.
The WHO says effective vaccines had been developed to combat the A and B viruses and could also be used against D. A vaccine for hepatitis E had been developed but was not widely available, while there was none for the C virus.
Vaccination campaigns had scored considerable success in many countries, with about 180 of the WHO's 193 member states now including the B vaccine in infant immunization programs, the agency said.
But more needed to be done to prevent or control the disease. It was vital to ensure that people already infected could be tested and given quality care and treatment without delay, the WHO document declared. (Reuters)
South Africa’s Parnell converts to Islam
JOHANNESBURG: Wayne Parnell, the South Africa left-arm seamer, has announced that he has converted to Islam.
Parnell confirmed in a statement on Thursday that he converted to Islamic faith in January this year and is considering to change his name to Waleed, which means 'Newborn Son'.
Parnell confirmed that he will "continue to respect the team's endorsement of alcoholic beverages." South Africa's Test team is sponsored by Castle Lager, a local beer. Hashim Amla, also of Muslim faith, does not wear the beer logo on his playing kit after making a special arrangement with CSA because of his religious beliefs.
Proteas team manager Mohamed Moosajee, himself a Muslim, said Parnell's Muslim teammates Hashim Amla and Imran Tahir had not influenced his decision to convert from Christianity.
Supporting Moosajee's denial of influence by Amla, the players said he had never attempted to convert them to his religion, although they had all been very impressed by the discipline and strict adherence that Amla showed to his religion, by refusing to participate in celebrations with them that involved liquor, staying steadfast in his daily prayers even while on tour, and refusing to wear the kit sponsored by South African beer brand Castle Lager.
Parnell confirmed in a statement on Thursday that he converted to Islamic faith in January this year and is considering to change his name to Waleed, which means 'Newborn Son'.
Parnell confirmed that he will "continue to respect the team's endorsement of alcoholic beverages." South Africa's Test team is sponsored by Castle Lager, a local beer. Hashim Amla, also of Muslim faith, does not wear the beer logo on his playing kit after making a special arrangement with CSA because of his religious beliefs.
Proteas team manager Mohamed Moosajee, himself a Muslim, said Parnell's Muslim teammates Hashim Amla and Imran Tahir had not influenced his decision to convert from Christianity.
Supporting Moosajee's denial of influence by Amla, the players said he had never attempted to convert them to his religion, although they had all been very impressed by the discipline and strict adherence that Amla showed to his religion, by refusing to participate in celebrations with them that involved liquor, staying steadfast in his daily prayers even while on tour, and refusing to wear the kit sponsored by South African beer brand Castle Lager.
Fat is more dangerous for South Asians: study
Updated at: 0931 PST, Friday, July 29, 2011
WASHINGTON: Weight gain can be more dangerous for South Asians than for Caucasians because the fat clings to organs like the liver instead of the skin, said a study published Thursday.
The main difference between Caucasians and South Asians comes down to how much space there is to store fat in the body and where it holes up, said Sonia Anand, lead author of the study in the public access journal PLoS One.
"South Asians have less space to store fat below the skin than white Caucasians," said Anand, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at McMaster University.
"Their excess fat, therefore, overflows to ectopic compartments, in the abdomen and liver where it may affect function."
When extra fats clings to the organs, it can cause high glucose and lipid levels, which are risk factors for heart disease.
That means South Asians with a weight and height ratio, or body mass index (BMI), that would be considered in the healthy range for Caucasians may merit screening for conditions like diabetes and coronary artery disease.
The Canada-based study recruited 108 people in all, some first- or second-generation immigrants from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh and the rest Caucasian subjects whose ancestry could be traced to Europe.
They underwent a series of measurements and tests to assess body fat, cholesterol and sugar levels.
"Young, apparently healthy South Asians have greater metabolic impairment
compared to white Caucasians who tend to develop metabolic changes at higher levels of obesity and at a more advanced age," said the study.
South Asians tended to have lower HDL (or good) cholesterol, higher total body fat but lower levels of abdominal fat, fattier livers and less lean muscle mass than Caucasians of similar age, height and weight.
"This study helps explain why South Asians experience weight-related health problems at lower BMI levels than Caucasians," said Arya Sharma, director of the Canadian Obesity Network and a co-author of the study.
"For the clinician, this also means that individuals of South Asian heritage need to be screened for the presence of heart disease and diabetes at lower BMIs." (AFP)
WASHINGTON: Weight gain can be more dangerous for South Asians than for Caucasians because the fat clings to organs like the liver instead of the skin, said a study published Thursday.
The main difference between Caucasians and South Asians comes down to how much space there is to store fat in the body and where it holes up, said Sonia Anand, lead author of the study in the public access journal PLoS One.
"South Asians have less space to store fat below the skin than white Caucasians," said Anand, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at McMaster University.
"Their excess fat, therefore, overflows to ectopic compartments, in the abdomen and liver where it may affect function."
When extra fats clings to the organs, it can cause high glucose and lipid levels, which are risk factors for heart disease.
That means South Asians with a weight and height ratio, or body mass index (BMI), that would be considered in the healthy range for Caucasians may merit screening for conditions like diabetes and coronary artery disease.
The Canada-based study recruited 108 people in all, some first- or second-generation immigrants from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh and the rest Caucasian subjects whose ancestry could be traced to Europe.
They underwent a series of measurements and tests to assess body fat, cholesterol and sugar levels.
"Young, apparently healthy South Asians have greater metabolic impairment
compared to white Caucasians who tend to develop metabolic changes at higher levels of obesity and at a more advanced age," said the study.
South Asians tended to have lower HDL (or good) cholesterol, higher total body fat but lower levels of abdominal fat, fattier livers and less lean muscle mass than Caucasians of similar age, height and weight.
"This study helps explain why South Asians experience weight-related health problems at lower BMI levels than Caucasians," said Arya Sharma, director of the Canadian Obesity Network and a co-author of the study.
"For the clinician, this also means that individuals of South Asian heritage need to be screened for the presence of heart disease and diabetes at lower BMIs." (AFP)
A Mobilization in Washington by Wall Street
After a year of clashing with Washington over new financial reforms, the country’s most powerful bankers have found common ground with regulators in the hard-fought effort to lift the debt ceiling and avoid a default.
Enlarge This Image
Susan Walsh/Associated Press
In December of 2009, President Obama met with chiefs of the financial industry. Lately, they have reached out on the debt ceiling.
Multimedia
Graphic
Charting the American Debt Crisis
Interactive Feature
The Debt Crisis — What Should Congress Do?
Related
Amid New Talks, Some Optimism on Debt Crisis (July 31, 2011)
Nation Calls Capital Mad, and It Agrees (July 31, 2011)
Debt Problem’s Sure Cure: Economic Growth (July 31, 2011)
Essay: Coming Soon: ‘Invasion of the Walking Debt’ (July 31, 2011)
Taking a Closer Look at the Result of a Credit Downgrade (July 31, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Ceiling
Wall Street is no longer watching from the sidelines as the most polarizing political fight in years plays out on Capitol Hill. In the last few days, top executives have been in close contact with Washington in a last-ditch attempt to prod lawmakers toward a compromise by Tuesday, the administration’s deadline to reach a deal.
On Friday, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, raised concerns with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner about the standoff over the debt ceiling and its potential to disrupt the system through which JP Morgan and other big banks disburse federal payments. Mr. Geithner assured him that the Treasury and Federal Reserve had taken steps to keep the payment system functioning smoothly, according to individuals briefed on the call.
In addition, more than a dozen chief executives from the nation’s biggest financial services firms wrote a joint letter to President Obama and members of Congress on Thursday warning of “very grave” consequences for the economy and the job market if an agreement wasn’t reached.
It’s not just chief executives who are now doing the talking, either.
Bankers have deluged Congressional staff members with research reports outlining the bleak consequences of a default, or even a downgrade of United States government debt by the major rating agencies. And in corporate America’s version of grassroots mobilization, Allstate e-mailed 45,000 employees urging them to call their local members of Congress and demand a deal.
Hedge fund managers, normally among Wall Street’s most secretive tribes, have been stepping out of the shadows, too.
Marc Lasry, a major Democratic fundraiser who manages the $14 billion Avenue Capital hedge fund, said he spoke to half a dozen members of Congress from both parties on Thursday and Friday with blunt warnings that failure to compromise on the debt ceiling risked permanently damaging the nation’s financial standing.
“Over the last couple of weeks, everybody assumed it would get done,” said Mr. Lasry. “It’s only in the last couple of days that I’ve gotten worried it might not.”
Not since 2008 have federal officials and bankers been so clearly aligned in their push for the same policies. Back then, the industry and regulators pressed Congress to pass legislation allowing the federal bank bailout at the height of the financial crisis.
“They both have the same interests at the end of the day,” said Tom Block, a consultant and formerly the global head of government relations at JPMorgan Chase. “They both want the banking system to be safe and sound.”
To be sure, with market turbulence almost certain to follow a default, Wall Streeters also want to safeguard bank profits and their own bonuses. Nevertheless, for much of the spring and early summer, while battle lines were being drawn by Republican and Democratic lawmakers, financial executives mostly stayed out of the fray.
According to lobbyists and executives, banks believed the two sides in Washington would ultimately find a way to make a deal. Plus, there were worries that being too outspoken might spook the financial markets. Most important, with the industry’s image in tatters in the wake of the financial crisis and subsequent bailout, some bankers feared their involvement might actually be detrimental.
“Every time Wall Street raises its head, there are a lot of people ready to chop it off,” said one senior banking industry official.
But as the deadline approached, anxiety began to take hold. A turning point came on July 11, when top officials from some of Wall Street’s most powerful lobbying groups filed into an ornate conference room opposite Mr. Geithner’s office on the third floor of the Treasury Building to make their case about the danger of inaction.
Several of the representatives, like Frank Keating of the American Bankers Association and John Engler of the Business Roundtable, were former governors with deep political connections. Others, including Robert S. Nichols of the Financial Services Forum and Leigh Ann Pusey of the American Insurance Association, are among the most powerful lobbyists in Washington.
“Everyone was on the same page,” said Mr. Nichols. “We all said this had to get done and it was urgent.”
Mr. Geithner told the group that anything they could do to get the debt ceiling lifted would be helpful, according to Mr. Nichols.
Administration officials reached out to the business community this spring, anticipating a bruising political fight. Over a lunch buffet in April in the Manhattan boardroom of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Mr. Geithner warned Wall Street executives of the dire consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling.
Multimedia
Graphic
Charting the American Debt Crisis
Interactive Feature
The Debt Crisis — What Should Congress Do?
Related
Amid New Talks, Some Optimism on Debt Crisis (July 31, 2011)
Nation Calls Capital Mad, and It Agrees (July 31, 2011)
Debt Problem’s Sure Cure: Economic Growth (July 31, 2011)
Essay: Coming Soon: ‘Invasion of the Walking Debt’ (July 31, 2011)
Taking a Closer Look at the Result of a Credit Downgrade (July 31, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Ceiling
Among the attendees were Henry Kravis, the private equity titan, Gary Cohn of Goldman Sachs, Robert Wolf of UBS, and the hedge fund managers John Paulson and Paul Singer.
But Wall Street’s ensuing steps were mostly below the radar — a very different tack than the much more dramatic efforts of recent days, and a sharp contrast to the tenacious and more public fight bankers have waged with the administration as it implements the financial regulatory reforms signed into law last summer.
Mr. Dimon’s call to Mr. Geithner Friday was prompted by a growing concern in the last week that even a brief disruption in federal payments might force JPMorgan and other big banks to lay out billions of dollars to food-stamp recipients, military service members, and other beneficiaries of the government, unnerving both banks officials and customers.
In a statement, a Treasury spokeswoman, Colleen Murray, said “in the event Congress does not act to raise the debt ceiling, Treasury had assured the Federal Reserve that we will only authorize them to make government payments when there are sufficient funds to cover such payments.”
A day before Mr. Dimon’s phone call to Mr. Geithner, Allstate urged its employees to “add your voice as an individual by encouraging your elected officials to redouble their efforts immediately to find a reasonable compromise.”
Earlier in the week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which donated heavily to Republican candidates last year, threw its weight behind a proposal to raise the debt ceiling backed by the House Speaker, John A. Boehner.
Mr. Boehner retooled his proposal to win House passage, but it was rejected by the Senate Friday night. Still, the Financial Services Roundtable, another major trade association, prepared a lobbying blitz this weekend to secure passage of whatever budget blueprint finally emerges.
But some lobbyists say it’s the market, not political maneuvering, that will ultimately force Congress’s hand.
“At the end of the day, people won’t do this because they want to do this,” said Jimmy Ryan, a lobbyist whose clients include the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and Citigroup. “They will do this because they are scared of what will happen if they don’t do it.”
Enlarge This Image
Susan Walsh/Associated Press
In December of 2009, President Obama met with chiefs of the financial industry. Lately, they have reached out on the debt ceiling.
Multimedia
Graphic
Charting the American Debt Crisis
Interactive Feature
The Debt Crisis — What Should Congress Do?
Related
Amid New Talks, Some Optimism on Debt Crisis (July 31, 2011)
Nation Calls Capital Mad, and It Agrees (July 31, 2011)
Debt Problem’s Sure Cure: Economic Growth (July 31, 2011)
Essay: Coming Soon: ‘Invasion of the Walking Debt’ (July 31, 2011)
Taking a Closer Look at the Result of a Credit Downgrade (July 31, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Ceiling
Wall Street is no longer watching from the sidelines as the most polarizing political fight in years plays out on Capitol Hill. In the last few days, top executives have been in close contact with Washington in a last-ditch attempt to prod lawmakers toward a compromise by Tuesday, the administration’s deadline to reach a deal.
On Friday, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, raised concerns with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner about the standoff over the debt ceiling and its potential to disrupt the system through which JP Morgan and other big banks disburse federal payments. Mr. Geithner assured him that the Treasury and Federal Reserve had taken steps to keep the payment system functioning smoothly, according to individuals briefed on the call.
In addition, more than a dozen chief executives from the nation’s biggest financial services firms wrote a joint letter to President Obama and members of Congress on Thursday warning of “very grave” consequences for the economy and the job market if an agreement wasn’t reached.
It’s not just chief executives who are now doing the talking, either.
Bankers have deluged Congressional staff members with research reports outlining the bleak consequences of a default, or even a downgrade of United States government debt by the major rating agencies. And in corporate America’s version of grassroots mobilization, Allstate e-mailed 45,000 employees urging them to call their local members of Congress and demand a deal.
Hedge fund managers, normally among Wall Street’s most secretive tribes, have been stepping out of the shadows, too.
Marc Lasry, a major Democratic fundraiser who manages the $14 billion Avenue Capital hedge fund, said he spoke to half a dozen members of Congress from both parties on Thursday and Friday with blunt warnings that failure to compromise on the debt ceiling risked permanently damaging the nation’s financial standing.
“Over the last couple of weeks, everybody assumed it would get done,” said Mr. Lasry. “It’s only in the last couple of days that I’ve gotten worried it might not.”
Not since 2008 have federal officials and bankers been so clearly aligned in their push for the same policies. Back then, the industry and regulators pressed Congress to pass legislation allowing the federal bank bailout at the height of the financial crisis.
“They both have the same interests at the end of the day,” said Tom Block, a consultant and formerly the global head of government relations at JPMorgan Chase. “They both want the banking system to be safe and sound.”
To be sure, with market turbulence almost certain to follow a default, Wall Streeters also want to safeguard bank profits and their own bonuses. Nevertheless, for much of the spring and early summer, while battle lines were being drawn by Republican and Democratic lawmakers, financial executives mostly stayed out of the fray.
According to lobbyists and executives, banks believed the two sides in Washington would ultimately find a way to make a deal. Plus, there were worries that being too outspoken might spook the financial markets. Most important, with the industry’s image in tatters in the wake of the financial crisis and subsequent bailout, some bankers feared their involvement might actually be detrimental.
“Every time Wall Street raises its head, there are a lot of people ready to chop it off,” said one senior banking industry official.
But as the deadline approached, anxiety began to take hold. A turning point came on July 11, when top officials from some of Wall Street’s most powerful lobbying groups filed into an ornate conference room opposite Mr. Geithner’s office on the third floor of the Treasury Building to make their case about the danger of inaction.
Several of the representatives, like Frank Keating of the American Bankers Association and John Engler of the Business Roundtable, were former governors with deep political connections. Others, including Robert S. Nichols of the Financial Services Forum and Leigh Ann Pusey of the American Insurance Association, are among the most powerful lobbyists in Washington.
“Everyone was on the same page,” said Mr. Nichols. “We all said this had to get done and it was urgent.”
Mr. Geithner told the group that anything they could do to get the debt ceiling lifted would be helpful, according to Mr. Nichols.
Administration officials reached out to the business community this spring, anticipating a bruising political fight. Over a lunch buffet in April in the Manhattan boardroom of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Mr. Geithner warned Wall Street executives of the dire consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling.
Multimedia
Graphic
Charting the American Debt Crisis
Interactive Feature
The Debt Crisis — What Should Congress Do?
Related
Amid New Talks, Some Optimism on Debt Crisis (July 31, 2011)
Nation Calls Capital Mad, and It Agrees (July 31, 2011)
Debt Problem’s Sure Cure: Economic Growth (July 31, 2011)
Essay: Coming Soon: ‘Invasion of the Walking Debt’ (July 31, 2011)
Taking a Closer Look at the Result of a Credit Downgrade (July 31, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Ceiling
Among the attendees were Henry Kravis, the private equity titan, Gary Cohn of Goldman Sachs, Robert Wolf of UBS, and the hedge fund managers John Paulson and Paul Singer.
But Wall Street’s ensuing steps were mostly below the radar — a very different tack than the much more dramatic efforts of recent days, and a sharp contrast to the tenacious and more public fight bankers have waged with the administration as it implements the financial regulatory reforms signed into law last summer.
Mr. Dimon’s call to Mr. Geithner Friday was prompted by a growing concern in the last week that even a brief disruption in federal payments might force JPMorgan and other big banks to lay out billions of dollars to food-stamp recipients, military service members, and other beneficiaries of the government, unnerving both banks officials and customers.
In a statement, a Treasury spokeswoman, Colleen Murray, said “in the event Congress does not act to raise the debt ceiling, Treasury had assured the Federal Reserve that we will only authorize them to make government payments when there are sufficient funds to cover such payments.”
A day before Mr. Dimon’s phone call to Mr. Geithner, Allstate urged its employees to “add your voice as an individual by encouraging your elected officials to redouble their efforts immediately to find a reasonable compromise.”
Earlier in the week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which donated heavily to Republican candidates last year, threw its weight behind a proposal to raise the debt ceiling backed by the House Speaker, John A. Boehner.
Mr. Boehner retooled his proposal to win House passage, but it was rejected by the Senate Friday night. Still, the Financial Services Roundtable, another major trade association, prepared a lobbying blitz this weekend to secure passage of whatever budget blueprint finally emerges.
But some lobbyists say it’s the market, not political maneuvering, that will ultimately force Congress’s hand.
“At the end of the day, people won’t do this because they want to do this,” said Jimmy Ryan, a lobbyist whose clients include the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and Citigroup. “They will do this because they are scared of what will happen if they don’t do it.”
A Paper Calendar? It’s 2011
LAST month, I did something that not once in my 20 years as an overscheduled, neurotically punctual, paper-bound calendar keeper had I done before: I left my personal organizer (as Filofaxes, Day Runners and such are known to the trade) at the office.
Enlarge This Image
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Dany Levy of the Web site Daily Candy has used a Filofax since high school.
Enlarge This Image
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Dany Levy with her computer and Filofax.
Not only that, I forgot it there on a Friday, leaving me clueless and unmoored for an entire weekend. What was I supposed to do on Saturday? What were my children supposed to do? Were birthday parties left unattended, errands unrun? On Sunday night, deprived of my ritual week-ahead review, I had nothing to worry about except what I didn’t know I should be worrying about.
This sorry situation had, of course, a solution, one embraced by many: convert to iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook or any number of other electronic personal-information management systems (as they are known to the trade). You can instantly update. You can sync. You can seamlessly integrate personal and professional into a harmoniously unified oneness.
I would rather live a life of 1,000 missed appointments.
So much of our social and professional lives are determined by the systems we use to keep track of them. With more people converting to electronic calendars or hovering between paper and PDA, how we construct and coordinate our schedules is in flux. And no matter how synchronized our intertwined lives have become, a certain amount of calendar clashing is inevitable.
Electronic calendar users (“normal people,” my husband calls them) can be dismissive of their paper forebears. “You lose a paper calendar and it’s gone,” said Ayelet Waldman, a novelist who syncs her iCal among her husband and five children with the zeal of the converted. The night of her wedding she lost her Filofax, and “It was so traumatizing that as soon as there was an electronic option, I switched over.” Paper, she said, “is horse and buggy.
“I have a friend who’s still on paper. I think it’s silly.”
“There’s absolutely nothing anyone could say to get me to switch,” said Dany Levy, founder of Daily Candy and a faithful Filofax keeper since high school. “People are shocked. Here I am a dot.com entrepreneur, I should be on the bleeding edge of hip technology, yet I use a form of scheduling that dates to the dinosaurs.”
But according to “An Exploratory Study of Personal Calendar Use,” a 2008 paper from Virginia Tech, the march of electronic calendaring is swift and inevitable: “With the increased use of mobile devices, more and more calendaring tasks are performed off the desktop computer.”
Three years later, the study is already a relic, according to one of its authors, Manuel A. Perez-Quinones, an associate professor of computer science. “That was before smartphones, before Google calendar, back when you still had to plug in your PDA to sync,” Dr. Perez-Quinones said. “It was a whole different monster.” Paper hasn’t totally disappeared, he said, “but the desk and office calendar is on its way out.”
This kind of prediction strikes terror in paper people. Yet there isn’t necessarily a correlation between a commitment to technology and a choice of calendar. “I’ve got an iPad, an iPod, I’m on Twitter and Facebook and I’m talking on my BlackBerry now,” said Nelson George, a cultural critic, filmmaker and producer, in a phone interview. “But that’s enough. I’m an old-school paper calendar person.”
Mr. George uses a datebook that fits in his back pocket. “People make comments about it,” he said. “They show me their little technology. But then they sit there tapping on their device, and by the time they’ve gone through all the log-ins and downloading, I’ve already flipped the page.”
Though it may be counterintuitive (electronic calendar keepers insist their method is more reliable than the ephemera of paper), those who use a paper calendar see it as the more durable option. Mr. George has dropped his BlackBerry in water three times — something he believes wouldn’t or couldn’t threaten his notebook.
The fear of submerging an electronic calendar has a peculiar hold on the paper-ites. “Even if I dropped my agenda in the bath, I could still fish it out,” Simon Doonan, creative ambassador at large for Barneys, said in defense of his yellow Goyard, monogrammed in orange, gold, burgundy and blue. There’s something inherently appealing about its physicality, he said. “I am always doodling and sketching and making insane little micro notes to myself.”
Elizabeth Beier, executive editor at St. Martin’s Press, has kept the same agenda since the mid-’80s, when she bought it in London at the Filofax boutique. “I have the standard size with a cover that used to be green and a handsome little snap that has since rotted off,” she said. “I feel like it’s lived with me so long that it’s earned its decrepitude.”
For many would-be diarists, the annual inserts serve as a substitute journal, often filed on a bookshelf like a set of 19th-century memoirs. A similar diary stored in the recesses of a computer hard drive or afloat somewhere on the cloud feels decidedly less real.
Enlarge This Image
Trent Bell for The New York Times
Ayelet Waldman, who relies on iCal.
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Robert Wright for The New York Times
Elizabeth Beier with her vintage Filofax.
Enlarge This Image
Robert Wright for The New York Times
Nelson George using his datebook.
Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, is on his 10th New Yorker desk calendar. “I can look up exactly what I did in the last 10 years,” he said with pride. At night, Mr. Stein leaves his calendar at work (“back in the world of obligation,” he said).
The yawning gap between work and home can be welcome. Even electronic aficionados concede that the lines blur on a networked system. When Christena Nippert-Eng, a sociologist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, conducted a study of how people balanced their lives, two objects had significance: keys and a calendar. “People who merged their home and work keep all their keys on one chain and all their home and work commitments on one calendar.”
The study led Ms. Nippert-Eng to examine how calendar use affects privacy. “Electronically managing everything — friends, communications, information — is a good way to break down the boundaries between the different parts of your life,” she said. “Some people are O.K. with blurred boundaries. They’ll ‘friend’ anyone. But it makes it harder to keep aspects of your life separate.”
Part of what raises the paper team’s hackles about electronic systems is that others may become privy to an afternoon’s haircut or a therapy appointment. But electronic calendar users often thrive on the convenience that comes from synchronicity. Gina Neff, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Washington, shares an electronic calendar with her husband. “He’s always inviting me to meetings that I don’t need to be at but need to know about in order to schedule myself around them,” she said. “It’s totally distracting, but it works.”
Some might say it’s T.M.I. Ms. Neff’s husband even “invites” her, in the terminology of electronic calendaring, to his guys’ night out. “I know when he’s playing Xbox with one of his oldest friends and so have the night free.”
Of course, not all couples are on the same system. “That’s all my wife and I do: argue about her paper calendar and my electronic one,” David Shenk, a Brooklyn-based author, said partly in jest. Mr. Shenk is in the process of converting his wife, at least in part, to his system. “But if she doesn’t input information in the right account or the Internet is down, it may not sync,” he said. “I get mad at her for not doing it right, but of course it’s not her fault: it’s a very complicated process.”
The divide between paper- and digital-calendar people is in some cases unbreachable. Mr. Doonan’s husband, he said, calls him “a geriatric lunatic with relentless regularity.”
But things get lost even between couples synced on the cloud. When a husband pastes an invitation to the Smiths’ barbecue into his wife’s calendar, it is no longer accompanied by a sigh and the “We didn’t go last year, but I think we really need to go this year because they got us such a lovely baby gift and we haven’t reciprocated, but if we go I promise we’ll leave by 8 and we can just ignore the Joneses who will inevitably be there.”
Ms. Neff, who studies how technology and communication affect people’s lives, calls this “messy talk.” Sometimes, she said, “digital technologies can short-circuit necessary discussions.”
The slow creep of clean and efficient technology and the managed life into the domestic sphere has multiple consequences. “We’re not compelled to go to a social event just because someone set it up for X o’clock in our calendar,” Ms. Neff said. “Just because we’ve figured out these time strategies in the office, doesn’t mean we should always adopt them in our social lives.”
Then there are those who float between two systems or develop their own alternatives. Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel.com, uses a collage of paper and electronic stickies on her Mac desktop. “I just do not want to have to open another computer application,” she said by way of explanation. Stickies don’t need to be saved. There’s never a spinning color wheel.
Makers of old-fashioned calendars are trying to keep up with the electronic march. Letts, a diary company based in Britain, sells personalized inserts for Filofaxes and other diaries that incorporate birthday and anniversaries so users don’t have to laboriously write them in each year. In 2009, Day-Timer introduced calendar apps for the iPhone.
It may be an uphill battle. According to Matt Tatham, a spokesman for Experian Simmons, a unit of Experian Marketing Services, a market research firm, the use of electronic calendars is growing. “Among online Americans, 22 percent of online adults maintain a calendar on their cellphone or their tablet, and 34 percent of tablet owners maintain an electronic calendar on their tablet,” Mr. Tatham said, citing his company’s data. “I would imagine those numbers will go up as the adoption of smartphones and tablets continues to increase in the U.S.”
Even committed paper calendar keepers, like Muffie Potter Aston, a socialite and philanthropist, concede there are drawbacks to their approach. “It would no doubt be wonderful to just be at a meeting and be able to agree to a date on the spot,” said Ms. Aston, who keeps a desk calendar at home. But like other paper keepers, she’s reluctant to cross over electronically, partly out of fear. “I’ve suffered too many computer meltdowns that have almost melted me down. Maybe if I had a little computer genie that handled the glitches, I could make the switch.”
As for me, it would take cold hard cash to make me cross over. Of course, I said that about the cellphone and Facebook, too. Now, how to explain all this in 140 characters or less. ...
Enlarge This Image
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Dany Levy of the Web site Daily Candy has used a Filofax since high school.
Enlarge This Image
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Dany Levy with her computer and Filofax.
Not only that, I forgot it there on a Friday, leaving me clueless and unmoored for an entire weekend. What was I supposed to do on Saturday? What were my children supposed to do? Were birthday parties left unattended, errands unrun? On Sunday night, deprived of my ritual week-ahead review, I had nothing to worry about except what I didn’t know I should be worrying about.
This sorry situation had, of course, a solution, one embraced by many: convert to iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook or any number of other electronic personal-information management systems (as they are known to the trade). You can instantly update. You can sync. You can seamlessly integrate personal and professional into a harmoniously unified oneness.
I would rather live a life of 1,000 missed appointments.
So much of our social and professional lives are determined by the systems we use to keep track of them. With more people converting to electronic calendars or hovering between paper and PDA, how we construct and coordinate our schedules is in flux. And no matter how synchronized our intertwined lives have become, a certain amount of calendar clashing is inevitable.
Electronic calendar users (“normal people,” my husband calls them) can be dismissive of their paper forebears. “You lose a paper calendar and it’s gone,” said Ayelet Waldman, a novelist who syncs her iCal among her husband and five children with the zeal of the converted. The night of her wedding she lost her Filofax, and “It was so traumatizing that as soon as there was an electronic option, I switched over.” Paper, she said, “is horse and buggy.
“I have a friend who’s still on paper. I think it’s silly.”
“There’s absolutely nothing anyone could say to get me to switch,” said Dany Levy, founder of Daily Candy and a faithful Filofax keeper since high school. “People are shocked. Here I am a dot.com entrepreneur, I should be on the bleeding edge of hip technology, yet I use a form of scheduling that dates to the dinosaurs.”
But according to “An Exploratory Study of Personal Calendar Use,” a 2008 paper from Virginia Tech, the march of electronic calendaring is swift and inevitable: “With the increased use of mobile devices, more and more calendaring tasks are performed off the desktop computer.”
Three years later, the study is already a relic, according to one of its authors, Manuel A. Perez-Quinones, an associate professor of computer science. “That was before smartphones, before Google calendar, back when you still had to plug in your PDA to sync,” Dr. Perez-Quinones said. “It was a whole different monster.” Paper hasn’t totally disappeared, he said, “but the desk and office calendar is on its way out.”
This kind of prediction strikes terror in paper people. Yet there isn’t necessarily a correlation between a commitment to technology and a choice of calendar. “I’ve got an iPad, an iPod, I’m on Twitter and Facebook and I’m talking on my BlackBerry now,” said Nelson George, a cultural critic, filmmaker and producer, in a phone interview. “But that’s enough. I’m an old-school paper calendar person.”
Mr. George uses a datebook that fits in his back pocket. “People make comments about it,” he said. “They show me their little technology. But then they sit there tapping on their device, and by the time they’ve gone through all the log-ins and downloading, I’ve already flipped the page.”
Though it may be counterintuitive (electronic calendar keepers insist their method is more reliable than the ephemera of paper), those who use a paper calendar see it as the more durable option. Mr. George has dropped his BlackBerry in water three times — something he believes wouldn’t or couldn’t threaten his notebook.
The fear of submerging an electronic calendar has a peculiar hold on the paper-ites. “Even if I dropped my agenda in the bath, I could still fish it out,” Simon Doonan, creative ambassador at large for Barneys, said in defense of his yellow Goyard, monogrammed in orange, gold, burgundy and blue. There’s something inherently appealing about its physicality, he said. “I am always doodling and sketching and making insane little micro notes to myself.”
Elizabeth Beier, executive editor at St. Martin’s Press, has kept the same agenda since the mid-’80s, when she bought it in London at the Filofax boutique. “I have the standard size with a cover that used to be green and a handsome little snap that has since rotted off,” she said. “I feel like it’s lived with me so long that it’s earned its decrepitude.”
For many would-be diarists, the annual inserts serve as a substitute journal, often filed on a bookshelf like a set of 19th-century memoirs. A similar diary stored in the recesses of a computer hard drive or afloat somewhere on the cloud feels decidedly less real.
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Ayelet Waldman, who relies on iCal.
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Robert Wright for The New York Times
Elizabeth Beier with her vintage Filofax.
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Robert Wright for The New York Times
Nelson George using his datebook.
Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, is on his 10th New Yorker desk calendar. “I can look up exactly what I did in the last 10 years,” he said with pride. At night, Mr. Stein leaves his calendar at work (“back in the world of obligation,” he said).
The yawning gap between work and home can be welcome. Even electronic aficionados concede that the lines blur on a networked system. When Christena Nippert-Eng, a sociologist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, conducted a study of how people balanced their lives, two objects had significance: keys and a calendar. “People who merged their home and work keep all their keys on one chain and all their home and work commitments on one calendar.”
The study led Ms. Nippert-Eng to examine how calendar use affects privacy. “Electronically managing everything — friends, communications, information — is a good way to break down the boundaries between the different parts of your life,” she said. “Some people are O.K. with blurred boundaries. They’ll ‘friend’ anyone. But it makes it harder to keep aspects of your life separate.”
Part of what raises the paper team’s hackles about electronic systems is that others may become privy to an afternoon’s haircut or a therapy appointment. But electronic calendar users often thrive on the convenience that comes from synchronicity. Gina Neff, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Washington, shares an electronic calendar with her husband. “He’s always inviting me to meetings that I don’t need to be at but need to know about in order to schedule myself around them,” she said. “It’s totally distracting, but it works.”
Some might say it’s T.M.I. Ms. Neff’s husband even “invites” her, in the terminology of electronic calendaring, to his guys’ night out. “I know when he’s playing Xbox with one of his oldest friends and so have the night free.”
Of course, not all couples are on the same system. “That’s all my wife and I do: argue about her paper calendar and my electronic one,” David Shenk, a Brooklyn-based author, said partly in jest. Mr. Shenk is in the process of converting his wife, at least in part, to his system. “But if she doesn’t input information in the right account or the Internet is down, it may not sync,” he said. “I get mad at her for not doing it right, but of course it’s not her fault: it’s a very complicated process.”
The divide between paper- and digital-calendar people is in some cases unbreachable. Mr. Doonan’s husband, he said, calls him “a geriatric lunatic with relentless regularity.”
But things get lost even between couples synced on the cloud. When a husband pastes an invitation to the Smiths’ barbecue into his wife’s calendar, it is no longer accompanied by a sigh and the “We didn’t go last year, but I think we really need to go this year because they got us such a lovely baby gift and we haven’t reciprocated, but if we go I promise we’ll leave by 8 and we can just ignore the Joneses who will inevitably be there.”
Ms. Neff, who studies how technology and communication affect people’s lives, calls this “messy talk.” Sometimes, she said, “digital technologies can short-circuit necessary discussions.”
The slow creep of clean and efficient technology and the managed life into the domestic sphere has multiple consequences. “We’re not compelled to go to a social event just because someone set it up for X o’clock in our calendar,” Ms. Neff said. “Just because we’ve figured out these time strategies in the office, doesn’t mean we should always adopt them in our social lives.”
Then there are those who float between two systems or develop their own alternatives. Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel.com, uses a collage of paper and electronic stickies on her Mac desktop. “I just do not want to have to open another computer application,” she said by way of explanation. Stickies don’t need to be saved. There’s never a spinning color wheel.
Makers of old-fashioned calendars are trying to keep up with the electronic march. Letts, a diary company based in Britain, sells personalized inserts for Filofaxes and other diaries that incorporate birthday and anniversaries so users don’t have to laboriously write them in each year. In 2009, Day-Timer introduced calendar apps for the iPhone.
It may be an uphill battle. According to Matt Tatham, a spokesman for Experian Simmons, a unit of Experian Marketing Services, a market research firm, the use of electronic calendars is growing. “Among online Americans, 22 percent of online adults maintain a calendar on their cellphone or their tablet, and 34 percent of tablet owners maintain an electronic calendar on their tablet,” Mr. Tatham said, citing his company’s data. “I would imagine those numbers will go up as the adoption of smartphones and tablets continues to increase in the U.S.”
Even committed paper calendar keepers, like Muffie Potter Aston, a socialite and philanthropist, concede there are drawbacks to their approach. “It would no doubt be wonderful to just be at a meeting and be able to agree to a date on the spot,” said Ms. Aston, who keeps a desk calendar at home. But like other paper keepers, she’s reluctant to cross over electronically, partly out of fear. “I’ve suffered too many computer meltdowns that have almost melted me down. Maybe if I had a little computer genie that handled the glitches, I could make the switch.”
As for me, it would take cold hard cash to make me cross over. Of course, I said that about the cellphone and Facebook, too. Now, how to explain all this in 140 characters or less. ...
The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement
NASHVILLE — Tennessee’s latest woes include high unemployment, continuing foreclosures and a battle over collective-bargaining rights for teachers. But when a Republican representative took the Statehouse floor during a recent hearing, he warned of a new threat to his constituents’ way of life: Islamic law.
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David Yerushalmi has quietly led a national movement.
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Residents watched in downtown Nashville as state lawmakers discussed an antiterrorism measure.
The representative, a former fighter pilot named Rick Womick, said he had been studying the Koran. He declared that Shariah, the Islamic code that guides Muslim beliefs and actions, is not just an expression of faith but a political and legal system that seeks world domination. “Folks,” Mr. Womick, 53, said with a sudden pause, “this is not what I call ‘Do unto others what you’d have them do unto you.’ ”
Similar warnings are being issued across the country as Republican presidential candidates, elected officials and activists mobilize against what they describe as the menace of Islamic law in the United States.
Since last year, more than two dozen states have considered measures to restrict judges from consulting Shariah, or foreign and religious laws more generally. The statutes have been enacted in three states so far.
Voters in Oklahoma overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment last November that bans the use of Islamic law in court. And in June, Tennessee passed an antiterrorism law that, in its original iteration, would have empowered the attorney general to designate Islamic groups suspected of terror activity as “Shariah organizations.”
A confluence of factors has fueled the anti-Shariah movement, most notably the controversy over the proposed Islamic center near ground zero in New York, concerns about homegrown terrorism and the rise of the Tea Party. But the campaign’s air of grass-roots spontaneity, which has been carefully promoted by advocates, shrouds its more deliberate origins.
In fact, it is the product of an orchestrated drive that began five years ago in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the office of a little-known lawyer, David Yerushalmi, a 56-year-old Hasidic Jew with a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam. Despite his lack of formal training in Islamic law, Mr. Yerushalmi has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Shariah.
Working with a cadre of conservative public-policy institutes and former military and intelligence officials, Mr. Yerushalmi has written privately financed reports, filed lawsuits against the government and drafted the model legislation that recently swept through the country — all with the effect of casting Shariah as one of the greatest threats to American freedom since the cold war.
The message has caught on. Among those now echoing Mr. Yerushalmi’s views are prominent Washington figures like R. James Woolsey, a former director of the C.I.A., and the Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, who this month signed a pledge to reject Islamic law, likening it to “totalitarian control.”
Yet, for all its fervor, the movement is arguably directed at a problem more imagined than real. Even its leaders concede that American Muslims are not coalescing en masse to advance Islamic law. Instead, they say, Muslims could eventually gain the kind of foothold seen in Europe, where multicultural policies have allowed for what critics contend is an overaccommodation of Islamic law.
“Before the train gets too far down the tracks, it’s time to put up the block,” said Guy Rodgers, the executive director of ACT for America, one of the leading organizations promoting the legislation drafted by Mr. Yerushalmi.
The more tangible effect of the movement, opponents say, is the spread of an alarmist message about Islam — the same kind of rhetoric that appears to have influenced Anders Behring Breivik, the suspect in the deadly dual attacks in Norway on July 22. The anti-Shariah campaign, they say, appears to be an end in itself, aimed at keeping Muslims on the margins of American life.
“The fact is there is no Shariah takeover in America,” said Salam Al-Marayati, the president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, one of several Muslim organizations that have begun a counteroffensive. “It’s purely a political wedge to create fear and hysteria.”
Anti-Shariah organizers are pressing ahead with plans to introduce versions of Mr. Yerushalmi’s legislation in half a dozen new states, while reviving measures that were tabled in others.
The legal impact of the movement is unclear. A federal judge blocked the Oklahoma amendment after a representative of the Council on American- Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, sued the state, claiming the law was an unconstitutional infringement on religious freedom.
The establishment clause of the Constitution forbids the government from favoring one religion over another or improperly entangling itself in religious matters. But many of the statutes are worded neutrally enough that they might withstand constitutional scrutiny while still limiting the way courts handle cases involving Muslims, other religious communities or foreign and international laws.
For Mr. Yerushalmi, the statutes themselves are a secondary concern. “If this thing passed in every state without any friction, it would have not served its purpose,” he said in one of several extensive interviews. “The purpose was heuristic — to get people asking this question, ‘What is Shariah?’ ”
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The Road Map
Shariah means “the way to the watering hole.” It is Islam’s road map for living morally and achieving salvation. Drawing on the Koran and the sunnah — the sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad — Islamic law reflects what scholars describe as the attempt, over centuries, to translate God’s will into a system of required beliefs and actions.
In the United States, Shariah, like Jewish law, most commonly surfaces in court through divorce and custody proceedings or in commercial litigation. Often these cases involve contracts that failed to be resolved in a religious setting. Shariah can also figure in cases involving foreign laws, for example in tort claims against businesses in Muslim countries. It then falls to the American judge to examine the religious issues at hand before making a ruling based on federal or state law.
The frequency of such cases is unknown. A recent report by the Center for Security Policy, a research institute based in Washington for which Mr. Yerushalmi is general counsel, identified 50 state appellate cases, mostly over the last three decades. The report offers these cases as proof that the United States is vulnerable to the encroachment of Islamic law. But, as many of the cases demonstrate, judges tend to follow guidelines that give primacy to constitutional rights over foreign or religious laws.
The exceptions stand out. Critics most typically cite a New Jersey case last year in which a Moroccan woman sought a restraining order against her husband after he repeatedly assaulted and raped her. The judge denied the request, finding that the defendant lacked criminal intent because he believed that his wife must comply, under Islamic law, with his demand for sex.
The decision was reversed on appeal.
“It’s wrong to just accept that the courts generally get it right, but sometimes get it wrong,” said Stephen M. Gelé, a Louisiana lawyer who represents a nonprofit organization that has promoted Mr. Yerushalmi’s legislation. “There is no reason to make a woman play a legal game of Russian roulette.”
While proponents of the legislation have seized on aspects of Shariah that are unfavorable to women, Mr. Yerushalmi’s focus is broader. His interest in Islamic law began with the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, when he was living in Ma’ale Adumim, a large Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
At the time, Mr. Yerushalmi, a native of South Florida, divided his energies between a commercial litigation practice in the United States and a conservative research institute based in Jerusalem, where he worked to promote free-market reform in Israel.
After moving to Brooklyn the following year, Mr. Yerushalmi said he began studying Arabic and Shariah under two Islamic scholars, whom he declined to name. He said his research made clear that militants had not “perverted” Islamic law, but were following an authoritative doctrine that sought global hegemony — a mission, he says, that is shared by Muslims around the world. To illustrate that point, Mr. Yerushalmi cites studies in which large percentages of Muslims overseas say they support Islamic rule.
In interviews, Islamic scholars disputed Mr. Yerushalmi’s claims. Although Islam, like some other faiths, aspires to be the world’s reigning religion, they said, the method for carrying out that goal, or even its relevance in everyday life, remains a far more complex subject than Mr. Yerushalmi suggests.
“Even in Muslim-majority countries, there is a huge debate about what it means to apply Islamic law in the modern world,” said Andrew F. March, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at Yale University. The deeper flaw in Mr. Yerushalmi’s argument, Mr. March said, is that he characterizes the majority of Muslims who practice some version of Shariah — whether through prayer, charitable giving or other common rituals — as automatic adherents to Islam’s medieval rules of war and political domination.
It is not the first time Mr. Yerushalmi has engaged in polemics. In a 2006 essay, he wrote that “most of the fundamental differences between the races are genetic,” and asked why “people find it so difficult to confront the facts that some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem-solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones?” He has also railed against what he sees as a politically correct culture that avoids open discussion of why “the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”
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On its Web site, the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish civil rights organization, describes Mr. Yerushalmi as having a record of “anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.” His legal clients have also drawn notoriety, among them Pamela Geller, an incendiary blogger who helped drive the fight against the Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero.
A stout man who wears antique wire-rimmed glasses and a thick, white-streaked beard, Mr. Yerushalmi has a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for the arguments his work provokes. “It’s an absurdity to claim that I have ever uttered or taken a position on the side of racism or bigotry or misogyny,” he said.
When pressed for evidence that American Muslims endorse the fundamentalist view of Shariah he warns against, Mr. Yerushalmi argues that the problem lies with America’s Muslim institutions and their link to Islamist groups overseas. As a primary example, he and others cite a memorandum that surfaced in the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Muslim charity based in Texas whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of sending funds to Hamas.
The 1991 document outlined a strategy for the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States that involved “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Critics emphasize a page listing 29 Muslim American groups as “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” Skeptics point out that on the same page, the author wrote, imagine if “they all march according to one plan,” which suggests they were not working in tandem.
Nevertheless, a study by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center to be released next week found that only a minority of American Muslims say that domestic Islamic groups represent them. It also concludes that American Muslims have as much confidence in the judicial system as members of other faiths and are more likely than the other groups to say that elections in the United States are “honest.”
“There’s a conflation between the idea of Islam being a universalist, proselytizing religion and reducing it to a totalitarian movement,” said Mohammad Fadel, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at the University of Toronto. “All good propaganda is based on half-truths.”
Reaching Out
The movement took root in January 2006 when Mr. Yerushalmi started the Society of Americans for National Existence, a nonprofit organization that became his vehicle for opposing Shariah. On the group’s Web site, he proposed a law that would make observing Islamic law, which he likened to sedition, a felony punishable by 20 years in prison. He also began raising money to study whether there is a link between “Shariah-adherent behavior” in American mosques and support for violent jihad.
The project, Mapping Shariah, led Mr. Yerushalmi to Frank Gaffney, a hawkish policy analyst and commentator who is the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington. Well connected in neoconservative circles, Mr. Gaffney has been known to take polarizing positions (he once argued that President Obama might secretly be Muslim). Mr. Gaffney would emerge as Mr. Yerushalmi’s primary link to a network of former and current government officials, security analysts and grass-roots political organizations.
Together, they set out to “engender a national debate about the nature of Shariah and the need to protect our Constitution and country from it,” Mr. Gaffney wrote in an e-mail to The New York Times. The center contributed an unspecified amount to Mr. Yerushalmi’s study, which cost roughly $400,000 and involved surreptitiously sending researchers into 100 mosques. The study, which said that 82 percent of the mosques’ imams recommended texts that promote violence, has drawn sharp rebuke from Muslim leaders, who question its premise and findings.
Mr. Yerushalmi also took aim at the industry of Islamic finance — specifically American banks offering funds that invest only in companies deemed permissible under Shariah, which would exclude, for example, those that deal in alcohol, pork or gambling
In the spring of 2008, Mr. Gaffney arranged meetings with officials at the Treasury Department, including Robert M. Kimmitt, then the deputy secretary, and Stuart A. Levey, then the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. Mr. Yerushalmi warned them about what he characterized as the lack of transparency and other dangers of Shariah-compliant finance.
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In an interview, Mr. Levey said he found Mr. Yerushalmi’s presentation of Shariah “sweeping and, ultimately, unconvincing.”
For Mr. Yerushalmi, the meetings led to a shift in strategy. “If you can’t move policy at the federal level, well, where do you go?” he said. “You go to the states.”
With the advent of the Tea Party, Mr. Yerushalmi saw an opening. In 2009, he and Mr. Gaffney laid the groundwork for a project aimed at state legislatures — the same year that Mr. Yerushalmi received more than $153,000 in consulting fees from Mr. Gaffney’s center, according to a tax form filed by the group.
That summer, Mr. Yerushalmi began writing “American Laws for American Courts,” a model statute that would prevent state judges from considering foreign laws or rulings that violate constitutional rights in the United States. The law was intended to appeal not just to the growing anti-Shariah movement, but also to a broader constituency that had long opposed the influence of foreign laws in the United States.
Mr. Gaffney swiftly drummed up interest in the law, holding conference calls with activists and tapping a network of Tea Party and Christian groups as well as ACT for America, which has 170,000 members and describes itself as “opposed to the authoritarian values of radical Islam.” The group emerged as a “force multiplier,” Mr. Gaffney said, fanning out across the country to promote the law. The American Public Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization formed that year by a political consultant based in Michigan, began recruiting dozens of lawyers to act as legislative sponsors.
Early versions of the law, which passed in Tennessee and then Louisiana, made no mention of Shariah, which was necessary to pass constitutional muster, Mr. Yerushalmi said. But as the movement spread, state lawmakers began tweaking the legislation to refer to Shariah and other religious laws or systems — including, in one ill-fated proposal in Arizona, “karma.”
By last fall, the anti-Shariah movement had gained new prominence. ACT for America spent $60,000 promoting the Oklahoma initiative, a campaign that included 600,000 robocalls featuring Mr. Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director. Mr. Gingrich called for a federal law banning courts from using Shariah in place of American law, and Sarah Palin warned that if Shariah law “were to be adopted, allowed to govern in our country, it will be the downfall of America.”
Also last fall, Mr. Gaffney’s organization released “Shariah: The Threat to America,” a 172-page report whose lead author was Mr. Yerushalmi and whose signatories included Mr. Woolsey and other former intelligence officials.
Mr. Yerushalmi’s legislation has drawn opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union as well as from Catholic bishops and Jewish groups. Mr. Yerushalmi said he did not believe that court cases involving Jewish or canon law would be affected by the statutes because they are unlikely to involve violations of constitutional rights.
Business lobbyists have also expressed concern about the possible effect of the statutes, as corporations often favor foreign laws in contracts or tort disputes. This is perhaps the only constituency that has had an influence. The three state statutes that have passed — most recently in Arizona — make corporations exempt.
“It is not preferable,” Mr. Yerushalmi said. “Is it an acceptable political compromise? Of course it is.”
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David Yerushalmi has quietly led a national movement.
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Residents watched in downtown Nashville as state lawmakers discussed an antiterrorism measure.
The representative, a former fighter pilot named Rick Womick, said he had been studying the Koran. He declared that Shariah, the Islamic code that guides Muslim beliefs and actions, is not just an expression of faith but a political and legal system that seeks world domination. “Folks,” Mr. Womick, 53, said with a sudden pause, “this is not what I call ‘Do unto others what you’d have them do unto you.’ ”
Similar warnings are being issued across the country as Republican presidential candidates, elected officials and activists mobilize against what they describe as the menace of Islamic law in the United States.
Since last year, more than two dozen states have considered measures to restrict judges from consulting Shariah, or foreign and religious laws more generally. The statutes have been enacted in three states so far.
Voters in Oklahoma overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment last November that bans the use of Islamic law in court. And in June, Tennessee passed an antiterrorism law that, in its original iteration, would have empowered the attorney general to designate Islamic groups suspected of terror activity as “Shariah organizations.”
A confluence of factors has fueled the anti-Shariah movement, most notably the controversy over the proposed Islamic center near ground zero in New York, concerns about homegrown terrorism and the rise of the Tea Party. But the campaign’s air of grass-roots spontaneity, which has been carefully promoted by advocates, shrouds its more deliberate origins.
In fact, it is the product of an orchestrated drive that began five years ago in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the office of a little-known lawyer, David Yerushalmi, a 56-year-old Hasidic Jew with a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam. Despite his lack of formal training in Islamic law, Mr. Yerushalmi has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Shariah.
Working with a cadre of conservative public-policy institutes and former military and intelligence officials, Mr. Yerushalmi has written privately financed reports, filed lawsuits against the government and drafted the model legislation that recently swept through the country — all with the effect of casting Shariah as one of the greatest threats to American freedom since the cold war.
The message has caught on. Among those now echoing Mr. Yerushalmi’s views are prominent Washington figures like R. James Woolsey, a former director of the C.I.A., and the Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, who this month signed a pledge to reject Islamic law, likening it to “totalitarian control.”
Yet, for all its fervor, the movement is arguably directed at a problem more imagined than real. Even its leaders concede that American Muslims are not coalescing en masse to advance Islamic law. Instead, they say, Muslims could eventually gain the kind of foothold seen in Europe, where multicultural policies have allowed for what critics contend is an overaccommodation of Islamic law.
“Before the train gets too far down the tracks, it’s time to put up the block,” said Guy Rodgers, the executive director of ACT for America, one of the leading organizations promoting the legislation drafted by Mr. Yerushalmi.
The more tangible effect of the movement, opponents say, is the spread of an alarmist message about Islam — the same kind of rhetoric that appears to have influenced Anders Behring Breivik, the suspect in the deadly dual attacks in Norway on July 22. The anti-Shariah campaign, they say, appears to be an end in itself, aimed at keeping Muslims on the margins of American life.
“The fact is there is no Shariah takeover in America,” said Salam Al-Marayati, the president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, one of several Muslim organizations that have begun a counteroffensive. “It’s purely a political wedge to create fear and hysteria.”
Anti-Shariah organizers are pressing ahead with plans to introduce versions of Mr. Yerushalmi’s legislation in half a dozen new states, while reviving measures that were tabled in others.
The legal impact of the movement is unclear. A federal judge blocked the Oklahoma amendment after a representative of the Council on American- Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, sued the state, claiming the law was an unconstitutional infringement on religious freedom.
The establishment clause of the Constitution forbids the government from favoring one religion over another or improperly entangling itself in religious matters. But many of the statutes are worded neutrally enough that they might withstand constitutional scrutiny while still limiting the way courts handle cases involving Muslims, other religious communities or foreign and international laws.
For Mr. Yerushalmi, the statutes themselves are a secondary concern. “If this thing passed in every state without any friction, it would have not served its purpose,” he said in one of several extensive interviews. “The purpose was heuristic — to get people asking this question, ‘What is Shariah?’ ”
Multimedia
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Islamic Law and American Courts
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Times Topic: Islam
The Road Map
Shariah means “the way to the watering hole.” It is Islam’s road map for living morally and achieving salvation. Drawing on the Koran and the sunnah — the sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad — Islamic law reflects what scholars describe as the attempt, over centuries, to translate God’s will into a system of required beliefs and actions.
In the United States, Shariah, like Jewish law, most commonly surfaces in court through divorce and custody proceedings or in commercial litigation. Often these cases involve contracts that failed to be resolved in a religious setting. Shariah can also figure in cases involving foreign laws, for example in tort claims against businesses in Muslim countries. It then falls to the American judge to examine the religious issues at hand before making a ruling based on federal or state law.
The frequency of such cases is unknown. A recent report by the Center for Security Policy, a research institute based in Washington for which Mr. Yerushalmi is general counsel, identified 50 state appellate cases, mostly over the last three decades. The report offers these cases as proof that the United States is vulnerable to the encroachment of Islamic law. But, as many of the cases demonstrate, judges tend to follow guidelines that give primacy to constitutional rights over foreign or religious laws.
The exceptions stand out. Critics most typically cite a New Jersey case last year in which a Moroccan woman sought a restraining order against her husband after he repeatedly assaulted and raped her. The judge denied the request, finding that the defendant lacked criminal intent because he believed that his wife must comply, under Islamic law, with his demand for sex.
The decision was reversed on appeal.
“It’s wrong to just accept that the courts generally get it right, but sometimes get it wrong,” said Stephen M. Gelé, a Louisiana lawyer who represents a nonprofit organization that has promoted Mr. Yerushalmi’s legislation. “There is no reason to make a woman play a legal game of Russian roulette.”
While proponents of the legislation have seized on aspects of Shariah that are unfavorable to women, Mr. Yerushalmi’s focus is broader. His interest in Islamic law began with the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, when he was living in Ma’ale Adumim, a large Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
At the time, Mr. Yerushalmi, a native of South Florida, divided his energies between a commercial litigation practice in the United States and a conservative research institute based in Jerusalem, where he worked to promote free-market reform in Israel.
After moving to Brooklyn the following year, Mr. Yerushalmi said he began studying Arabic and Shariah under two Islamic scholars, whom he declined to name. He said his research made clear that militants had not “perverted” Islamic law, but were following an authoritative doctrine that sought global hegemony — a mission, he says, that is shared by Muslims around the world. To illustrate that point, Mr. Yerushalmi cites studies in which large percentages of Muslims overseas say they support Islamic rule.
In interviews, Islamic scholars disputed Mr. Yerushalmi’s claims. Although Islam, like some other faiths, aspires to be the world’s reigning religion, they said, the method for carrying out that goal, or even its relevance in everyday life, remains a far more complex subject than Mr. Yerushalmi suggests.
“Even in Muslim-majority countries, there is a huge debate about what it means to apply Islamic law in the modern world,” said Andrew F. March, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at Yale University. The deeper flaw in Mr. Yerushalmi’s argument, Mr. March said, is that he characterizes the majority of Muslims who practice some version of Shariah — whether through prayer, charitable giving or other common rituals — as automatic adherents to Islam’s medieval rules of war and political domination.
It is not the first time Mr. Yerushalmi has engaged in polemics. In a 2006 essay, he wrote that “most of the fundamental differences between the races are genetic,” and asked why “people find it so difficult to confront the facts that some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem-solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones?” He has also railed against what he sees as a politically correct culture that avoids open discussion of why “the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”
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On its Web site, the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish civil rights organization, describes Mr. Yerushalmi as having a record of “anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.” His legal clients have also drawn notoriety, among them Pamela Geller, an incendiary blogger who helped drive the fight against the Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero.
A stout man who wears antique wire-rimmed glasses and a thick, white-streaked beard, Mr. Yerushalmi has a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for the arguments his work provokes. “It’s an absurdity to claim that I have ever uttered or taken a position on the side of racism or bigotry or misogyny,” he said.
When pressed for evidence that American Muslims endorse the fundamentalist view of Shariah he warns against, Mr. Yerushalmi argues that the problem lies with America’s Muslim institutions and their link to Islamist groups overseas. As a primary example, he and others cite a memorandum that surfaced in the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Muslim charity based in Texas whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of sending funds to Hamas.
The 1991 document outlined a strategy for the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States that involved “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Critics emphasize a page listing 29 Muslim American groups as “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” Skeptics point out that on the same page, the author wrote, imagine if “they all march according to one plan,” which suggests they were not working in tandem.
Nevertheless, a study by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center to be released next week found that only a minority of American Muslims say that domestic Islamic groups represent them. It also concludes that American Muslims have as much confidence in the judicial system as members of other faiths and are more likely than the other groups to say that elections in the United States are “honest.”
“There’s a conflation between the idea of Islam being a universalist, proselytizing religion and reducing it to a totalitarian movement,” said Mohammad Fadel, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at the University of Toronto. “All good propaganda is based on half-truths.”
Reaching Out
The movement took root in January 2006 when Mr. Yerushalmi started the Society of Americans for National Existence, a nonprofit organization that became his vehicle for opposing Shariah. On the group’s Web site, he proposed a law that would make observing Islamic law, which he likened to sedition, a felony punishable by 20 years in prison. He also began raising money to study whether there is a link between “Shariah-adherent behavior” in American mosques and support for violent jihad.
The project, Mapping Shariah, led Mr. Yerushalmi to Frank Gaffney, a hawkish policy analyst and commentator who is the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington. Well connected in neoconservative circles, Mr. Gaffney has been known to take polarizing positions (he once argued that President Obama might secretly be Muslim). Mr. Gaffney would emerge as Mr. Yerushalmi’s primary link to a network of former and current government officials, security analysts and grass-roots political organizations.
Together, they set out to “engender a national debate about the nature of Shariah and the need to protect our Constitution and country from it,” Mr. Gaffney wrote in an e-mail to The New York Times. The center contributed an unspecified amount to Mr. Yerushalmi’s study, which cost roughly $400,000 and involved surreptitiously sending researchers into 100 mosques. The study, which said that 82 percent of the mosques’ imams recommended texts that promote violence, has drawn sharp rebuke from Muslim leaders, who question its premise and findings.
Mr. Yerushalmi also took aim at the industry of Islamic finance — specifically American banks offering funds that invest only in companies deemed permissible under Shariah, which would exclude, for example, those that deal in alcohol, pork or gambling
In the spring of 2008, Mr. Gaffney arranged meetings with officials at the Treasury Department, including Robert M. Kimmitt, then the deputy secretary, and Stuart A. Levey, then the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. Mr. Yerushalmi warned them about what he characterized as the lack of transparency and other dangers of Shariah-compliant finance.
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In an interview, Mr. Levey said he found Mr. Yerushalmi’s presentation of Shariah “sweeping and, ultimately, unconvincing.”
For Mr. Yerushalmi, the meetings led to a shift in strategy. “If you can’t move policy at the federal level, well, where do you go?” he said. “You go to the states.”
With the advent of the Tea Party, Mr. Yerushalmi saw an opening. In 2009, he and Mr. Gaffney laid the groundwork for a project aimed at state legislatures — the same year that Mr. Yerushalmi received more than $153,000 in consulting fees from Mr. Gaffney’s center, according to a tax form filed by the group.
That summer, Mr. Yerushalmi began writing “American Laws for American Courts,” a model statute that would prevent state judges from considering foreign laws or rulings that violate constitutional rights in the United States. The law was intended to appeal not just to the growing anti-Shariah movement, but also to a broader constituency that had long opposed the influence of foreign laws in the United States.
Mr. Gaffney swiftly drummed up interest in the law, holding conference calls with activists and tapping a network of Tea Party and Christian groups as well as ACT for America, which has 170,000 members and describes itself as “opposed to the authoritarian values of radical Islam.” The group emerged as a “force multiplier,” Mr. Gaffney said, fanning out across the country to promote the law. The American Public Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization formed that year by a political consultant based in Michigan, began recruiting dozens of lawyers to act as legislative sponsors.
Early versions of the law, which passed in Tennessee and then Louisiana, made no mention of Shariah, which was necessary to pass constitutional muster, Mr. Yerushalmi said. But as the movement spread, state lawmakers began tweaking the legislation to refer to Shariah and other religious laws or systems — including, in one ill-fated proposal in Arizona, “karma.”
By last fall, the anti-Shariah movement had gained new prominence. ACT for America spent $60,000 promoting the Oklahoma initiative, a campaign that included 600,000 robocalls featuring Mr. Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director. Mr. Gingrich called for a federal law banning courts from using Shariah in place of American law, and Sarah Palin warned that if Shariah law “were to be adopted, allowed to govern in our country, it will be the downfall of America.”
Also last fall, Mr. Gaffney’s organization released “Shariah: The Threat to America,” a 172-page report whose lead author was Mr. Yerushalmi and whose signatories included Mr. Woolsey and other former intelligence officials.
Mr. Yerushalmi’s legislation has drawn opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union as well as from Catholic bishops and Jewish groups. Mr. Yerushalmi said he did not believe that court cases involving Jewish or canon law would be affected by the statutes because they are unlikely to involve violations of constitutional rights.
Business lobbyists have also expressed concern about the possible effect of the statutes, as corporations often favor foreign laws in contracts or tort disputes. This is perhaps the only constituency that has had an influence. The three state statutes that have passed — most recently in Arizona — make corporations exempt.
“It is not preferable,” Mr. Yerushalmi said. “Is it an acceptable political compromise? Of course it is.”
Kate sparks off nude shoe copycats
Prince William's wife Kate Middleton has reportedly become Britain's latest icon for understated footwear. The 29-year-old Duchess of Cambridge sparked a copycat trend among the female guests for flattering,
nude-coloured shoes as she arrived at Saturday's royal wedding in a pair of
classic, high-heeled beige
court shoes to complete her elegant outfit, the 'Sunday Express' reported.
Zara Phillips, the Queen's grand daughter, and Mike Tindall, the England rugby captain, got married yesterday.
The normally conservative Princess Anne invested in a pair of her own, along with a nude handbag and gloves, and even the British Queen wore a pair of crocodile print shoes.
Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie kept in step as they, too, opted for cream shoes.
However, Maid of Honour Dolly Maude optedinstead for pale blue heels to match her elegant dove-grey satin cocktail dress which had a bell-shaped skirt.
Zara wore them at her party on Friday night and on the day bridesmaids Stephanie Phillips, Maude's daughter Nell, Jaz Jocelyn, the daughter of a family friend, and Hope Balshaw, daughter of best man Iain, also all wore the uniform pale cream flat shoes.
The Duchess of Cambridge was pictured in a pair of nude-coloured shoes last week when she viewed her wedding gown before a public showing at Buckingham Palace.
nude-coloured shoes as she arrived at Saturday's royal wedding in a pair of
classic, high-heeled beige
court shoes to complete her elegant outfit, the 'Sunday Express' reported.
Zara Phillips, the Queen's grand daughter, and Mike Tindall, the England rugby captain, got married yesterday.
The normally conservative Princess Anne invested in a pair of her own, along with a nude handbag and gloves, and even the British Queen wore a pair of crocodile print shoes.
Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie kept in step as they, too, opted for cream shoes.
However, Maid of Honour Dolly Maude optedinstead for pale blue heels to match her elegant dove-grey satin cocktail dress which had a bell-shaped skirt.
Zara wore them at her party on Friday night and on the day bridesmaids Stephanie Phillips, Maude's daughter Nell, Jaz Jocelyn, the daughter of a family friend, and Hope Balshaw, daughter of best man Iain, also all wore the uniform pale cream flat shoes.
The Duchess of Cambridge was pictured in a pair of nude-coloured shoes last week when she viewed her wedding gown before a public showing at Buckingham Palace.
Strong quake shakes Fukushima
A strong 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck off northeast Japan's Fukushima region, home to a crippled nuclear power plant, early on Sunday, but there was no risk of a tsunami, seismologists said. The tremor
at 3:54 am (1854 GMT Saturday) injured seven people but caused no damage to the
Fukushima Daiichi
plant, which was ravaged by a 9.0 quake and ensuing tsunami in March, the national Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.
In the city of Hitachinaka, a 60-year-old man broke his wrist when he was jolted off his bed by the tremor, media reports said. Two elderly women, aged 69 and 90, were hurt when they fell over at their homes in Koriyama.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said the tremor was presumed to be an aftershock of the March 11 quake.
"Aftershocks of the massive earthquake are still continuing actively," Akira Nagai, director of earthquake and tsunami monitoring at the agency, told a news conference.
The quake was centred in the Pacific around 100 kilometres (60 miles) south-southeast of Fukushima city, the agency and the US Geological Survey said, at a depth of about 40 kilometres.
The March disaster left more than 20,000 people dead or missing on the country's northeast coast, and the damaged nuclear plant leaking radioactive substances from its reactors.
Japan, located at the junction of four tectonic plates, experiences 20 percent of the strongest quakes recorded on Earth each year.
at 3:54 am (1854 GMT Saturday) injured seven people but caused no damage to the
Fukushima Daiichi
plant, which was ravaged by a 9.0 quake and ensuing tsunami in March, the national Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.
In the city of Hitachinaka, a 60-year-old man broke his wrist when he was jolted off his bed by the tremor, media reports said. Two elderly women, aged 69 and 90, were hurt when they fell over at their homes in Koriyama.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said the tremor was presumed to be an aftershock of the March 11 quake.
"Aftershocks of the massive earthquake are still continuing actively," Akira Nagai, director of earthquake and tsunami monitoring at the agency, told a news conference.
The quake was centred in the Pacific around 100 kilometres (60 miles) south-southeast of Fukushima city, the agency and the US Geological Survey said, at a depth of about 40 kilometres.
The March disaster left more than 20,000 people dead or missing on the country's northeast coast, and the damaged nuclear plant leaking radioactive substances from its reactors.
Japan, located at the junction of four tectonic plates, experiences 20 percent of the strongest quakes recorded on Earth each year.
China to give squadron of J10-B fighters to Pakistan
Taking bilateral defence relations to a new high, China will give Pakistan a squadron of the advanced J-10B fighter aircraft, a media report said. The offer was made by senior Chinese military leaders to
visiting Pakistan Army's Chief of General Staff, Lt Gen Waheed Arshad, the Urdu
daily Jang reported on
Saturday, quoting defence sources.
The J-10B fighters are equipped with the latest weapons and Pakistan will be the first country, after China, to have these advanced aircraft, it said.
During his visit, Lt Gen Arshad was assured that the defence relationship between the two countries will reach new heights and China's efforts for the safety and security of Pakistan will be never-ending.
During his visit, Waheed called on General Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of general staff of People's Liberation Army and other officials including Lt General Ren Haiquan, the vice president of the National Defence University.
visiting Pakistan Army's Chief of General Staff, Lt Gen Waheed Arshad, the Urdu
daily Jang reported on
Saturday, quoting defence sources.
The J-10B fighters are equipped with the latest weapons and Pakistan will be the first country, after China, to have these advanced aircraft, it said.
During his visit, Lt Gen Arshad was assured that the defence relationship between the two countries will reach new heights and China's efforts for the safety and security of Pakistan will be never-ending.
During his visit, Waheed called on General Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of general staff of People's Liberation Army and other officials including Lt General Ren Haiquan, the vice president of the National Defence University.
Masti 2 puts Total Dhamaal on hold
The third movie in the Dhamaal series will have to wait longer in the wings. Reason: producers plan to kick start the sequel to Masti (2004) over the next six months. Total Dhamaal with Riteish Deshmukh, Sanjay Dutt, Ashish Chowdhry, Arshad Warsi and Javed Jaffery is expected to
Producer Ashok Thakeria confirms and says, “The audience has just watched the second movie from the Dhamaal series. So, we feel it’s better to bring on the Masti sequel before Total Dhamaal. It will give everyone a breather.” As of now, scripts are being worked out for both the films. The Masti sequel will feature most stars from the first movie including Riteish, Genelia D’Souza and Aftab Shivdasani.
The news on Total Dhamaal is that it’s likely to feature two more names: Aftab Shivdasani and a cameo by Jacqueline Fernandez. Thakeria contends that the key cast will be the same as Double Dhamaal but it’s early right now to discuss the rest of the line-up including Mallika Sherawat, who, during Double Dhamaal’s premiere at IIFA, Toronto, walked the green carpet but didn’t promote the movie.
It’s also believed that director Indra Kumar is looking for replacements for Mallika and Kangna Ranaut for Total Dhamaal.
Producer Ashok Thakeria confirms and says, “The audience has just watched the second movie from the Dhamaal series. So, we feel it’s better to bring on the Masti sequel before Total Dhamaal. It will give everyone a breather.” As of now, scripts are being worked out for both the films. The Masti sequel will feature most stars from the first movie including Riteish, Genelia D’Souza and Aftab Shivdasani.
The news on Total Dhamaal is that it’s likely to feature two more names: Aftab Shivdasani and a cameo by Jacqueline Fernandez. Thakeria contends that the key cast will be the same as Double Dhamaal but it’s early right now to discuss the rest of the line-up including Mallika Sherawat, who, during Double Dhamaal’s premiere at IIFA, Toronto, walked the green carpet but didn’t promote the movie.
It’s also believed that director Indra Kumar is looking for replacements for Mallika and Kangna Ranaut for Total Dhamaal.
CIA's station chief in Pak exits
CIA's station chief in Islamabad, who oversaw the intelligence team that found Osama bin Laden and shared "extremely tense" ties with the ISI chief, has left Pakistan, the second top officer of the US agency
to have exited the country in the last seven months, a media report has said. The
Islamabad station chief,
one of the agency's most-important positions in the world, arrived only late last year after his predecessor was essentially run out of town when a Pakistani official admitted his name had been leaked, ABC News reported.
The top CIA officer in Islamabad, who was supervising the team that tracked down bin Laden, left Pakistan due to medical reasons and is not returning, it said.
The departure of two station chiefs in such a short span of time threatens to upset a vital intelligence office, it said.
US officials, however, insisted that the quick turnover would not harm US intelligence efforts in Pakistan, it said.
That is because, according to three US and Pakistani officials, the departing chief of station had an "extremely tense" relationship with his ISI counterparts, including Director General Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha. One US official said the CIA chief was dying to depart in a few months as a result of his poor relations with the Pakistanis, it said.
to have exited the country in the last seven months, a media report has said. The
Islamabad station chief,
one of the agency's most-important positions in the world, arrived only late last year after his predecessor was essentially run out of town when a Pakistani official admitted his name had been leaked, ABC News reported.
The top CIA officer in Islamabad, who was supervising the team that tracked down bin Laden, left Pakistan due to medical reasons and is not returning, it said.
The departure of two station chiefs in such a short span of time threatens to upset a vital intelligence office, it said.
US officials, however, insisted that the quick turnover would not harm US intelligence efforts in Pakistan, it said.
That is because, according to three US and Pakistani officials, the departing chief of station had an "extremely tense" relationship with his ISI counterparts, including Director General Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha. One US official said the CIA chief was dying to depart in a few months as a result of his poor relations with the Pakistanis, it said.
Plane from NY crashes at Guyana
The Boeing 737-800 overshot the runway after arriving at Georgetown's Cheddi Jagan airport just past midnight from New York. It had stopped over in Trinidad. Passengers screamed when the plane lost control and many fled through emergency exits when it finally came to a stop, a local
newspaper reported.
"It was terror," a woman passenger whose husband opened the exit door told Kaieteur News.
"I was praying to Jesus."
One passenger suffered a broken leg, an airline spokeswoman said, and others reported neck and back injuries.
"We are very, very thankful and grateful that there are no deaths," Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo said at the airport.
A photo published by local newspaper Stabroek News showed a Caribbean Airlines plane with the half its fuselage broken off and resting in thick undergrowth.
Flight BW-523 was carrying 157 passengers and six crew.
newspaper reported.
"It was terror," a woman passenger whose husband opened the exit door told Kaieteur News.
"I was praying to Jesus."
One passenger suffered a broken leg, an airline spokeswoman said, and others reported neck and back injuries.
"We are very, very thankful and grateful that there are no deaths," Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo said at the airport.
A photo published by local newspaper Stabroek News showed a Caribbean Airlines plane with the half its fuselage broken off and resting in thick undergrowth.
Flight BW-523 was carrying 157 passengers and six crew.
Obama reviews Afghan conflict, Pakistan visit
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama reviewed the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan Thursday with senior American officials serving in the region as he gears up for a landmark visit later this year.
The meeting in the White House’s ultra-secure “situation room” kicked off at 11:00 am (1600 GMT) with the president’s national security team and military, intelligence and diplomatic officials working in the region.
About 100,000 US troops are deployed in Afghanistan but they are due to gradually begin withdrawing in July as Afghan forces assume greater security responsibilities.
Obama “got an update on the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, both from a counterterrorism perspective as well as the security situation in Afghanistan,” spokesman Robert Gibbs said after the meeting.
“The bulk of the meeting was spent discussing our goals” for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2011, he added.
“The assessment of where we are security-wise is not a lot different than what you heard the president (say) during the AfPak review — while we’ve seen progress, we understand that that progress can be reversed,” – Gibbs.
“The assessment of where we are security-wise is not a lot different than what you heard the president (say) during the AfPak review — while we’ve seen progress, we understand that that progress can be reversed,” Gibbs cautioned.
In the mid-December review, Obama reaffirmed his target of starting to pull US troops out of Afghanistan in July 2011 while emphasizing 2014 as the year when Nato hopes to fully hand over security to Afghan forces.
Top officials have suggested that only a small number of forces will be pulled out by the July target date.
Thursday’s White House meeting, the first of the year, comes as Obama plans an official visit to Pakistan, a key US ally but one with which Washington has had rocky relations marked by mutual distrust.
The visit will be wrapped in high security and secrecy due to a fierce internal conflict and anti-US sentiment, notably over US drone strikes on insurgents in the country’s wild northwest tribal areas.
The United States, meanwhile, this week welcomed the opening of the Afghan parliament as a “significant milestone,” after President Hamid Karzai tried to keep members of parliament from taking their seats only to back down.
Last year was the deadliest one for Western troops in Afghanistan since the US-led overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, with 711 foreign soldiers killed.
General David Petraeus, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, said this week that the Taliban insurgency was in retreat.
In a letter to troops released Tuesday, he said the international coalition had seized the initiative on the battlefield over the past year, pushed back the Taliban in the south and inflicted “enormous losses” on mid-level insurgent leaders.
The meeting in the White House’s ultra-secure “situation room” kicked off at 11:00 am (1600 GMT) with the president’s national security team and military, intelligence and diplomatic officials working in the region.
About 100,000 US troops are deployed in Afghanistan but they are due to gradually begin withdrawing in July as Afghan forces assume greater security responsibilities.
Obama “got an update on the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, both from a counterterrorism perspective as well as the security situation in Afghanistan,” spokesman Robert Gibbs said after the meeting.
“The bulk of the meeting was spent discussing our goals” for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2011, he added.
“The assessment of where we are security-wise is not a lot different than what you heard the president (say) during the AfPak review — while we’ve seen progress, we understand that that progress can be reversed,” – Gibbs.
“The assessment of where we are security-wise is not a lot different than what you heard the president (say) during the AfPak review — while we’ve seen progress, we understand that that progress can be reversed,” Gibbs cautioned.
In the mid-December review, Obama reaffirmed his target of starting to pull US troops out of Afghanistan in July 2011 while emphasizing 2014 as the year when Nato hopes to fully hand over security to Afghan forces.
Top officials have suggested that only a small number of forces will be pulled out by the July target date.
Thursday’s White House meeting, the first of the year, comes as Obama plans an official visit to Pakistan, a key US ally but one with which Washington has had rocky relations marked by mutual distrust.
The visit will be wrapped in high security and secrecy due to a fierce internal conflict and anti-US sentiment, notably over US drone strikes on insurgents in the country’s wild northwest tribal areas.
The United States, meanwhile, this week welcomed the opening of the Afghan parliament as a “significant milestone,” after President Hamid Karzai tried to keep members of parliament from taking their seats only to back down.
Last year was the deadliest one for Western troops in Afghanistan since the US-led overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, with 711 foreign soldiers killed.
General David Petraeus, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, said this week that the Taliban insurgency was in retreat.
In a letter to troops released Tuesday, he said the international coalition had seized the initiative on the battlefield over the past year, pushed back the Taliban in the south and inflicted “enormous losses” on mid-level insurgent leaders.
US commanders concerned about attacks in Ramazan
KABUL: The top US commander in Afghanistan has until mid-October to submit a plan for the initial withdrawal of American troops, decisions that may hinge in part on whether the latest surge in attacks continues through the holy month of Ramazan.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says commanders are hearing that Taliban leaders may leave their fighters in the country to try to regain lost ground during the Islamic holy period which begins Monday.
Speaking to reporters traveling with him in Afghanistan, Mullen said Marine Gen. John Allen, who has just taken over as top US commander here, needs time to evaluate the combat, training and other requirements before presenting a detailed withdrawal plan.
Mullen’s comments for the first time laid out a deadline for Allen to structure the planned withdrawal of 10,000 US troops by the end of the year, as announced by President Barack Obama.
“The next month will be very telling,” said Mullen, noting that often the Taliban leaders will travel back to Pakistan for Ramazan.
It’s unclear at this point what they will do, or if there will be any decline in the fighting.
Mullen, who arrived Friday in Afghanistan, met Saturday with commanders in southern Afghanistan. He was traveling in the east Sunday.
He said that so far commanders are saying they are seeing some signs of improved security, but his comments came amid a series of spectacular deadly attacks across the south, including a bombing Sunday outside the main gate of the police headquarters in the southern Afghan city of Lashkar Gah.
There are nearly 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Under Obama’s troop withdrawal plan, 10,000 US troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of the year, and another 23,000 by the end of next summer.
A key to the withdrawal is the ongoing effort to train Afghan forces so they can take control of their own security.
Mullen said that while training remains a top priority, and commanders would like to accelerate it, it’s not clear how possible that will be over the coming months.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says commanders are hearing that Taliban leaders may leave their fighters in the country to try to regain lost ground during the Islamic holy period which begins Monday.
Speaking to reporters traveling with him in Afghanistan, Mullen said Marine Gen. John Allen, who has just taken over as top US commander here, needs time to evaluate the combat, training and other requirements before presenting a detailed withdrawal plan.
Mullen’s comments for the first time laid out a deadline for Allen to structure the planned withdrawal of 10,000 US troops by the end of the year, as announced by President Barack Obama.
“The next month will be very telling,” said Mullen, noting that often the Taliban leaders will travel back to Pakistan for Ramazan.
It’s unclear at this point what they will do, or if there will be any decline in the fighting.
Mullen, who arrived Friday in Afghanistan, met Saturday with commanders in southern Afghanistan. He was traveling in the east Sunday.
He said that so far commanders are saying they are seeing some signs of improved security, but his comments came amid a series of spectacular deadly attacks across the south, including a bombing Sunday outside the main gate of the police headquarters in the southern Afghan city of Lashkar Gah.
There are nearly 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Under Obama’s troop withdrawal plan, 10,000 US troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of the year, and another 23,000 by the end of next summer.
A key to the withdrawal is the ongoing effort to train Afghan forces so they can take control of their own security.
Mullen said that while training remains a top priority, and commanders would like to accelerate it, it’s not clear how possible that will be over the coming months.
Pak mlitary brass wanted drone support: WikiLeak
ISLAMABAD: The American government secret cables leaked by the WikiLeaks have revealed that Pakistan's military brass had requested the US for greater drone back-up for its own military operations in the country's restive tribal regions, according to a report published in the Dawn newspaper.
Earlier, WikiLeaks had exposed that Pakistan's civilian leadership had tacitly agreed to the US drone strikes in the tribal areas but told the American officials that they will publicly condemn such attacks. The latest findings about the military leadership that they wanted the US drones support for their offensives in the tribal belt will add to public displeasure against the generals. Pakistan's military had been reeling under pressure in the wake of Osama bin Laden's killing in a unilateral US raid on May 2.
"In a meeting on January 22, 2008 with US CENTCOM commander Admiral William J Fallon, Army Chief General Ashfaq Kiyani requested the Americans to provide "continuous Predator coverage of the conflict area" in South Waziristan where the army was conducting operations against militants," stated a secret cable sent by then US Ambassador Anne Patterson on February 11, 2008.
"During talks with General Kiyani, the US chairman joint chiefs of staff Admiral Mike Mullen asked him for help "in approving a third restricted operating zone for US unmanned aircrafts over the tribal areas," a cable sent from the US embassy in Islamabad on March 24 stated. It meant that Pakistan had earlier agreed for US drone operations in two restricted zones. However, the military has consistently denied any involvement in the CIA-driven covert programme.
In a cable dated February 19, 2009, ambassador Patterson sent agenda points to the US, a week before Kiyani's visit to Washington. She wrote: "Kiyani knows well that the strikes have been precise (creating few civilian casualties) and targeted primarily at foreign fighters in the North and South Waziristan tribal regions."
In yet another previously unpublished cable dated May 26, 2009 details President Zardari's meeting on May 25 with an American delegation led by senator Patrick Leahy. "Referring to a recent drone strike in the tribal area that killed 60 militants," wrote ambassador Patterson in her report, "Zardari reported that his military aide believed a Pakistani operation to take out this site would have resulted in the deaths of over 60 Pakistani soldiers."
Drone attacks are extremely unpopular in Pakistan. Pakistan's Parliament has recently passed a unanimous resolution asking for end to drone strikes. It said that if the US continued with their covert operations, Pakistan would block the transit route for US lead Nato and ISAF troops in Afghanistan. However, several drone strikes occurred after the parliament adopted a non-binding resolution.
Earlier, WikiLeaks had exposed that Pakistan's civilian leadership had tacitly agreed to the US drone strikes in the tribal areas but told the American officials that they will publicly condemn such attacks. The latest findings about the military leadership that they wanted the US drones support for their offensives in the tribal belt will add to public displeasure against the generals. Pakistan's military had been reeling under pressure in the wake of Osama bin Laden's killing in a unilateral US raid on May 2.
"In a meeting on January 22, 2008 with US CENTCOM commander Admiral William J Fallon, Army Chief General Ashfaq Kiyani requested the Americans to provide "continuous Predator coverage of the conflict area" in South Waziristan where the army was conducting operations against militants," stated a secret cable sent by then US Ambassador Anne Patterson on February 11, 2008.
"During talks with General Kiyani, the US chairman joint chiefs of staff Admiral Mike Mullen asked him for help "in approving a third restricted operating zone for US unmanned aircrafts over the tribal areas," a cable sent from the US embassy in Islamabad on March 24 stated. It meant that Pakistan had earlier agreed for US drone operations in two restricted zones. However, the military has consistently denied any involvement in the CIA-driven covert programme.
In a cable dated February 19, 2009, ambassador Patterson sent agenda points to the US, a week before Kiyani's visit to Washington. She wrote: "Kiyani knows well that the strikes have been precise (creating few civilian casualties) and targeted primarily at foreign fighters in the North and South Waziristan tribal regions."
In yet another previously unpublished cable dated May 26, 2009 details President Zardari's meeting on May 25 with an American delegation led by senator Patrick Leahy. "Referring to a recent drone strike in the tribal area that killed 60 militants," wrote ambassador Patterson in her report, "Zardari reported that his military aide believed a Pakistani operation to take out this site would have resulted in the deaths of over 60 Pakistani soldiers."
Drone attacks are extremely unpopular in Pakistan. Pakistan's Parliament has recently passed a unanimous resolution asking for end to drone strikes. It said that if the US continued with their covert operations, Pakistan would block the transit route for US lead Nato and ISAF troops in Afghanistan. However, several drone strikes occurred after the parliament adopted a non-binding resolution.
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