General Assembly Grants Palestine Upgraded Status in U.N.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, center, was congratulated by Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. More Photos »

UNITED NATIONS — More than 130 countries voted on Thursday to upgrade Palestine to a nonmember observer state of the United Nations, a triumph for Palestinian diplomacy and a sharp rebuke to the United States and Israel.

But the vote, at least for now, did little to bring either the Palestinians or the Israelis closer to the goal they claim to seek: two states living side by side, or increased Palestinian unity. Israel and the militant group Hamas both responded critically to the day's events, though for different reasons.

The new status will give the Palestinians more tools to challenge Israel in international legal forums for its occupation activities in the West Bank, including settlement-building, and it helped bolster the Palestinian Authority, weakened after eight days of battle between its rival Hamas and Israel.

But even as a small but determined crowd of 2,000 celebrated in central Ramallah in the West Bank, waving flags and dancing, there was an underlying sense of concerned resignation.

"I hope this is good," said Munir Shafie, 36, an electrical engineer who was there. "But how are we going to benefit?"

Still, the General Assembly vote — 138 countries in favor, 9 opposed and 41 abstaining — showed impressive backing for the Palestinians at a difficult time. It was taken on the 65th anniversary of the vote to divide the former British mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, a vote Israel considers the international seal of approval for its birth.

The past two years of Arab uprisings have marginalized the Palestinian cause to some extent as nations that focused their political aspirations on the Palestinian struggle have turned inward. The vote on Thursday, coming so soon after the Gaza fighting, put the Palestinians again — if briefly, perhaps — at the center of international discussion.

"The question is, where do we go from here and what does it mean?" Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, who was in New York for the vote, said in an interview. "The sooner the tough rhetoric of this can subside and the more this is viewed as a logical consequence of many years of failure to move the process forward, the better." He said nothing would change without deep American involvement.

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, speaking to the assembly's member nations, said, "The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine," and he condemned what he called Israeli racism and colonialism. His remarks seemed aimed in part at Israel and in part at Hamas. But both quickly attacked him for the parts they found offensive.

"The world watched a defamatory and venomous speech that was full of mendacious propaganda against the Israel Defense Forces and the citizens of Israel," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responded. "Someone who wants peace does not talk in such a manner."

While Hamas had officially backed the United Nations bid of Mr. Abbas, it quickly criticized his speech because the group does not recognize Israel.

"There are controversial issues in the points that Abbas raised, and Hamas has the right to preserve its position over them," said Salah al-Bardaweel, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, on Thursday.

"We do not recognize Israel, nor the partition of Palestine, and Israel has no right in Palestine," he added. "Getting our membership in the U.N. bodies is our natural right, but without giving up any inch of Palestine's soil."

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, spoke after Mr. Abbas and said he was concerned that the Palestinian Authority failed to recognize Israel for what it is.

"Three months ago, Israel's prime minister stood in this very hall and extended his hand in peace to President Abbas," Mr. Prosor said. "He reiterated that his goal was to create a solution of two states for two peoples, where a demilitarized Palestinian state will recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

"That's right. Two states for two peoples. In fact, President Abbas, I did not hear you use the phrase 'two states for two peoples' this afternoon. In fact, I have never heard you say the phrase 'two states for two peoples' because the Palestinian leadership has never recognized that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people."

The Israelis also say that the fact that Mr. Abbas is not welcome in Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave run by Hamas, from which he was ejected five years ago, shows that there is no viable Palestinian leadership living up to its obligations now.

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting from Washington, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, and Khaled Abu Aker from Ramallah, West Bank.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

U.S. Moves Toward Recognizing Syria Opposition

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Rebels in Aleppo, Syria's largest city, in August. The opposition to the Syrian government is developing a political structure.

WASHINGTON — The United States is moving toward recognizing the Syrian opposition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people as soon as it fully develops its political structure, American officials said Thursday.

A decision to recognize the group could be announced at a so-called Friends of Syria meeting that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to attend in Morocco on Dec. 12. It is the most immediate decision facing the Obama administration as it considers how to end the government of Bashar al-Assad and stop the violence that has consumed Syria.

President Obama has not signed off on the move, and the meetings to decide the issue have yet to be held. Debates within the administration concern legal issues about the implications of diplomatic recognition, how such a move might affect efforts to enlist Russian support for a political transition in Syria and, most importantly, the state of the opposition.

Britain, France, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council have already recognized the opposition, which was enlarged and overhauled at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, last month at the insistence of the United States and other nations. It is formally known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.

"They are a legitimate representative of the Syrian people's aspirations," Robert Ford, the American ambassador to Syria, said Thursday at a conference on the Syrian humanitarian crisis. "They are making real progress and I expect that our position will evolve as they themselves develop," he added.

American officials who favor the move are hoping to use formal recognition as a reward to the opposition for uniting opponents of the Assad government inside and outside Syria and fleshing out its political structure so that it can play a credible role if Mr. Assad is ousted.

The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces is in the process of developing a series of committees on humanitarian assistance, education, health, judicial and security issues. If opposition leaders are able to present their group at the Morocco meeting as a functioning organization, one senior American official said, recognition by the United States might follow at the gathering, a conference of more than 70 nations that is to be held in Marrakesh.

"We've been looking for them to establish a leadership structure that's clear to everybody, but also discrete committees that can deal with the various issues that they are assuming responsibility for," Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, said Thursday. "We don't want to get ahead of the game here."

At an appearance here on Thursday, Mrs. Clinton expanded on Ms. Nuland's remarks. "We have been deeply involved in helping stand them up, and we're going to carefully consider what more we can do," she said at a conference co-hosted by the publisher of the magazine Foreign Policy. "It appears as though the opposition in Syria is now capable of holding ground, that they are able to bring the fight to the government forces."

Mr. Ford and other experts attending a conference organized by the Middle East Institute and International Relief and Development, two nongovernment organizations, described a deepening humanitarian crisis because of the Syrian conflict. The number of internally displaced people in Syria has soared to about 2.5 million, according to Kelly Clements, a deputy assistant secretary in the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

The number of refugees has also climbed. About 140,000 Syrians have registered for assistance as refugees in Jordan, some 25,000 of whom are in refugee camps. There are also believed to be more than 100,000 additional Syrian refugees who have not registered. In Turkey, there are 125,000 Syrian refugees in camps and another 75,000 who are not residing in camps, she said. In Lebanon, there are an estimated 135,000 Syrian refugees, none of whom live in refugee camps.

In Iraq, some 60,000 Syrians have registered as refugees, half of whom live in camps. More than 35,000 additional Iraqis who fled the conflict in Iraq for Syria have since returned to Iraq.

The Assad government, Mr. Ford said, has often interfered with the delivery of humanitarian assistance. He also said that Iran had helped the Assad government track down opposition figures who are voicing their view on the Internet.

Mr. Ford indicated that the subject of providing arms to opposition fighters was also being reviewed, but said that any discussion of arms needed to be part of a broader strategy for a political transition if Mr. Assad leaves power. "Arms are not a strategy; arms are a tactic," he said.

He suggested that the government was still able militarily. "There is no sign of any kind of political deal to be worked out between the opposition groups and the regime," he said. "The fighting is going to go on."

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

White House Plan on Fiscal Crisis Draws G.O.P. Ire

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal on Thursday to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, $50 billion in immediate stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits.

The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, met strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced the goal of finding $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other social programs to be worked out next year, with no guarantees.

He did propose some upfront cuts in programs like farm price supports, but did not specify an amount or any details. And senior Republican aides familiar with the offer said those initial spending cuts might be outweighed by spending increases, including at least $50 billion in infrastructure spending, mortgage relief, an extension of unemployment insurance and a deferral of automatic cuts to physician reimbursements under Medicare.

"The Democrats have yet to get serious about real spending cuts," Mr. Boehner said after the meeting. "No substantive progress has been made in the talks between the White House and the House over the last two weeks."

Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman, said: "Right now, the only thing preventing us from reaching a deal that averts the fiscal cliff and avoids a tax hike on 98 percent of Americans is the refusal of Congressional Republicans to ask the very wealthiest individuals to pay higher tax rates. The president has already signed into law over $1 trillion in spending cuts and we remain willing to do tough things to compromise, and it's time for Republicans in Washington to join the chorus of other voices — from the business community to middle-class Americans across the country — who support a balanced approach that asks more from the wealthiest Americans."

Beneath the outward shows of frustration and rancor, Democrats said a deal could still be reached before hundreds of billions of dollars in automatic tax increases and spending cuts go into effect, threatening the fragile economy. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, pointed to conservative Republicans who have suggested that the House quickly pass Democratic legislation in the Senate extending the expiring tax cuts for income below $250,000.

"All you have to do is just listen to what's happening out there and you realize there is progress," he said.

But publicly, the leaders of neither side were giving an inch. And Republican aides said the details of the White House proposal pointed to a re-elected president who believes he can bully Congress.

"They took a step backward, moving away from consensus and significantly closer to the cliff," said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.

The president's proposal does stick to the broad framework of the deal Mr. Boehner wants: an upfront deficit-reduction "down payment" that would serve to cancel the automatic tax increases and spending cuts while still signaling seriousness on the deficit, followed by a second stage in which Congress would work next year on overhauling the tax code and social programs to secure more deficit reduction.

But the details show how far the president is ready to push House Republicans. The upfront tax increases in the proposal go beyond what Senate Democrats were able to pass earlier this year. Tax rates would go up for higher-income earners, as in the Senate bill, but Mr. Obama wants their dividends to be taxed as ordinary income, something the Senate did not approve. He also wants the estate tax to be levied at 45 percent on inheritances over $3.5 million, a step several Democratic senators balked at. The Senate bill made no changes to the estate tax, which currently taxes inheritances over $5 million at 35 percent. On Jan. 1, the estate tax is scheduled to rise to 55 percent beginning with inheritances exceeding $1 million.

Administration negotiators also want the initial stage to include an extension of the payroll tax cut or an equivalent policy aimed at working-class families, an extension of a business tax credit for investments, and the extension of a number of other expiring business tax credits, like the one on research and development.

To ensure that there are no more crises like the debt ceiling impasse last year, Mr. Geithner proposed permanently ending Congressional purview over the federal borrowing limit, Republican aides said. He said that Congress could be allowed to pass a resolution blocking an increase in the debt limit, but that the president would be able to veto that resolution. Congress could block a higher borrowing limit only if two-thirds of lawmakers overrode the veto.

In total, Mr. Geithner presented the package as a $4 trillion reduction in future deficits, but that too was disputed. The figure includes cuts to domestic programs agreed to last year that the White House put at $1.2 trillion but that Republicans say is about $300 billion less. And it counts savings from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though no one has proposed maintaining war spending over the next decade at the current rate.

"Listen, this is not a game," Mr. Boehner said. "Jobs are on the line. The American economy is on the line. And this is a moment for adult leadership."

Senate Democratic leaders left their meeting with Mr. Geithner ecstatic. If the Republicans want additional spending cuts in that down payment, the onus is on them to put them on the table, said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

Egypt Rushes to Vote on New Constitution

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptians helped a protester who was overcome by tear gas fired by the police during protests in downtown Cairo on Thursday. More Photos »

CAIRO — Racing against the threat of dissolution by judges appointed by ousted President Hosni Mubarak, and ignoring howls of protest from secular opponents, the Islamists drafting Egypt's new constitution prepared for a final vote on Friday to approve a charter that human rights groups and international experts said was full of holes and ambiguities.

The expected result would fulfill some of the central demands of the revolution: the end of Egypt's all-powerful presidency, a stronger parliament and provisions against torture or detention without trial. But it would also give Egypt's generals much of the power and privilege they had during the Mubarak era and would reject the demands of ultraconservative Salafis to impose puritanical moral codes.

Yet the contents of the document were perhaps less contentious than the context in which it was being adopted. Adding to the divisive atmosphere in Egypt, its passage was expected after almost all the delegates from secular parties and Coptic Christians walked out and protesters took to the streets.

Dismissing the discord, President Mohamed Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, said in a televised interview on Thursday that he expected to call for an almost immediate referendum to bring Egypt's chaotic political transition to a close — "a difficult birth from the womb of an ancient nation."

"We are going to get out of this short bottleneck hugging each other," he added.

But Mohamed ElBaradei, an opposition leader and former United Nations diplomat, compared the proposed constitution to the charters that Egypt's former authoritarian rulers passed in rigged plebiscites. "It is will not survive," he said.

The Coptic Church, whose members are believed to make up about 10 percent of Egyptians, directed its representatives on the assembly to boycott the vote. One representative said the constitution represented only the Islamists who had drafted it. "Not the constitution of Egypt," the church negotiator, Kamel Saleh, told the state newspaper Al Ahram.

But several independent analysts said the hasty way in which it was prepared led to more problems than any ideological agenda. Instead of starting from scratch and drawing on the lessons of other countries, the deadline-conscious drafters tinkered with Egypt's existing Constitution, without attempting to radically remake Egyptian law in any particular direction, said Ziad Al-Ali, who has tracked the assembly for the International Institute for Democratic and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organization in Sweden.

On the question of Islamic law's place in Egyptian jurisprudence, the assembly left unchanged a longstanding article at the beginning of the text grounding Egyptian law in the "principles of Islamic law."

But in an attempted compromise between the ultraconservatives and their liberal opponents, the proposed constitution added a new article defining those principles in accordance with established schools of Sunni Muslim thought.

Some liberals expressed fear that conservatives Islamist judges and lawmakers could ultimately use the new clause to push Egypt to the right. But liberals who signed on to the compromise said the language was broad enough to give judges grounds to argue for individual rights, too.

Egypt's generals, who seized power at Mr. Mubarak's ouster and who relinquished it to Mr. Morsi only in August, retain many of their prerogatives. The defense minister would be chosen from the military's officers. Insulating the armed forces from parliamentary oversight, a special council that includes military officers would oversee military affairs and the defense budget. And the military would retain the ability to try civilians in military courts if they are accused of damaging the armed forces. On individual rights, the constitution is a muddle. Believers in any of the three Abrahamic religions — Islam, Christianity and Judaism — are guaranteed the freedom of worship, but only those three.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

Muslims Face Expulsion From Western Myanmar

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

A Muslim girl at a camp for displaced people in Sittwe, where Muslims face what some groups are calling ethnic cleansing. More Photos »

SITTWE, Myanmar — The Buddhist monastery on the edge of this seaside town is a picture of tranquillity, with novice monks in saffron robes finding shade under a towering tree and their teacher, U Nyarna, greeting a visitor in a sunlit prayer room.

But in these placid surroundings Mr. Nyarna's message is discordant, and a far cry from the Buddhist precept of avoiding harm to living creatures. Unprompted, Mr. Nyarna launches into a rant against Muslims, calling them invaders, unwanted guests and "vipers in our laps."

"According to Buddhist teachings we should not kill," Mr. Nyarna said. "But when we feel threatened we cannot be saints."

Violence here in Rakhine State — where clashes have left at least 167 people dead and 100,000 people homeless, most of them Muslims — has set off an exodus that some human rights groups condemn as ethnic cleansing. It is a measure of the deep intolerance that pervades the state, a strip of land along the Bay of Bengal in western Myanmar, that Buddhist religious leaders like Mr. Nyarna, who is the head of an association of young monks, are participating in the campaign to oust Muslims from the country, which only recently began a transition to democracy from authoritarian rule.

After a series of deadly rampages and arson attacks over the past five months, Buddhists are calling for Muslims who cannot prove three generations of legal residence — a large part of the nearly one million Muslims from the state — to be put into camps and sent to any country willing to take them. Hatred between Muslims and Buddhists that was kept in check during five decades of military rule has been virtually unrestrained in recent months.

Even the country's leading liberal voice and defender of the downtrodden, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has been circumspect in her comments about the violence. President Obama made the issue a priority during his visit to the country this month — the first by a sitting American president — and Muslim nations as diverse as Indonesia and Saudi Arabia have expressed alarm.

Buddhists and Muslims in western Myanmar have had an uneasy coexistence for decades, and in some areas for centuries, but the thin threads that held together the social fabric of Rakhine State have torn apart this year.

Muslims who fled their homes now live in slumlike encampments that are short on food and medical care, surrounded by a Buddhist population that does not want them as neighbors.

"This issue must be solved urgently," said U Shwe Maung, a Muslim member of Parliament. "When there is no food or shelter, people will die."

Conditions have become so treacherous for Muslims across the state that Mr. Shwe Maung travels with a security force provided by the government. "They give me a full truck of police," he said. "Two, three or four policemen is not enough."

Leaders of the Buddhist majority in the state say they feel threatened by what they say is the swelling Muslim population from high birthrates and by Islamic rituals they find offensive, like the slaughter of animals.

"We are very fearful of Islamicization," said U Oo Hla Saw, general secretary of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, the largest party in the state. "This is our native land; it's the land of our ancestors."

During outbreaks of sectarian violence in June and again in October, villagers armed themselves with swords, clubs and sharpened bicycle spokes that they launched from homemade catapults. In Muslim-majority areas, monasteries were burned. In Buddhist-majority areas, mosques were destroyed. The mayhem was set off by the rape and murder of a Buddhist girl for which Muslims were blamed.

The center of Sittwe, a former British colonial outpost, is now empty of the Muslims who once worked in large numbers as stevedores and at other manual jobs.

"I'm scared to go back," said Aye Tun Sein, who was a teacher at a government school before the upheaval. In his village, Teh Chaung East, a 20 minute drive from Sittwe, he said that no one has a job because no one can leave the village, a collection of shacks and tents.

Political leaders describe the near total segregation of Muslims as temporary, but it appears to be more and more permanent.

"I don't miss them," said U Win Maung, a bicycle rickshaw driver whose house was burned down in June by his Muslim neighbors. "The hatred we have for each other is growing day by day."

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

Florida Shooting Stirs Echoes of Trayvon Martin Case

Kelly Jordan for The New York Times

In Jacksonville, Fla., a Wolfson High School student wept after leaving a memorial for Jordan Davis, 17, a student fatally shot outside a convenience store on Friday. The suspect has said he fired in self-defense.

MIAMI — In what could become another test of Florida's broad self-defense law, a software developer charged with killing a Jacksonville teenager said he reached for his gun and fired eight rounds only after he was threatened with a shotgun.

The suspect, Michael Dunn, 45, of Satellite Beach, was charged Wednesday with second-degree murder and attempted murder.

Mr. Dunn told his lawyer that the victim, Jordan Davis, 17, who was parked at a convenience store in Jacksonville on Friday night with three other teenagers, pointed a shotgun at him through a partly rolled-down window, threatened to kill him and began to open the door. The shooting occurred after a dispute over loud music coming from the teenagers' sport utility vehicle.

Mr. Davis, a junior at a Jacksonville high school who had moved from Georgia two years ago to live with his father, died after being shot twice.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said officers had not found a shotgun in the car.

Mr. Dunn and his fiancée, Rhonda Rouer, fled the convenience store in his Volkswagen Jetta after the teenagers left because he was afraid they would return, his lawyer, Robin Lemonidis, said. He did not call the authorities; the police arrested him the following day, finding him because a witness noted his license plate number.

The case has drawn parallels to the Trayvon Martin shooting because of the age and race of the victim, the fact that no weapon associated with the victim has been found, and Mr. Dunn's self-defense claim. Ms. Lemonidis is considering using the state's Stand Your Ground law, which allows people who fear for their lives to retaliate with lethal force, as a defense.

But she said the shooting bore no resemblance to the case of George Zimmerman, accused of second-degree murder in the death of Mr. Martin.

"There is no racial motivation here whatsoever," Ms. Lemonidis said. "He would have never, ever, in a million years pulled a gun if his life was not threatened. He saw a shotgun, and four inches of the barrel, and the guy said to him, 'This is going down now' and popped the door open."

Ms. Lemonidis said it was possible the teenagers had thrown away the shotgun after the encounter. "How hard did they look?" she said of the police search for a gun.

Ron Davis, Mr. Davis's father, told CNN that his son, who recently got a job at McDonald's, did not own guns and that the teenagers in the car had tried to flee when they saw Mr. Dunn's gun. "He did something that there was no defense for," Mr. Davis said of Mr. Dunn.

The victim's mother, Lucia McBath, said Mr. Davis had hoped to join the military. She said she did not view the shooting as a racial crime, despite the fact that her son is black and the suspect is white.

"Something snapped in him," she said of the suspect in an interview with First Coast News in Jacksonville.

Mr. Dunn, a gun collector who has a pilot's license, was in Jacksonville for his son's wedding last weekend. He had one drink at the reception and a glass of Champagne before he left, his lawyer said. When he and Ms. Rouer stopped at the convenience store for wine to take to the hotel, the teenagers in the car next to him were blasting music. He asked them to turn it down. At first they did, Ms. Lemonidis said. But then they turned the volume back up and began cursing him.

When he saw the shotgun and heard the threat, Mr. Dunn reached into his glove compartment, unholstered his Taurus 9-millimeter gun and fired two rounds into the back seat, and then two more. As the car with the teenagers pulled out, he feared they would try to shoot back, so he fired four more shots, his lawyer said.

He returned to the hotel, believing no one had been hurt. But the next morning, after Ms. Rouer saw on the news that a teenager had been killed, Mr. Dunn decided to turn himself in, but in Satellite Beach, about 170 miles away, where his neighbor has ties to law enforcement, Ms. Lemonidis said. Soon after, he went to the neighbor's home, and the police, already on their way, arrived to arrest him.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

News Analysis: With Focus on Talking Points, Benghazi Attack’s Big Issues Fade

WASHINGTON — Three days after the lethal attack on the American Mission in Benghazi, Libya, Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, asked intelligence agencies to write up some unclassified talking points on the episode. Reporters were besieging him and other legislators for comment, and he did not want to misstate facts or disclose classified information.

More than 10 weeks later, the four pallid sentences that intelligence analysts cautiously delivered are the unlikely center of a quintessential Washington drama, in which a genuine tragedy has been fed into the meat grinder of election-year politics.

In the process, the most important questions about Benghazi, where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed on Sept. 11, have largely gotten lost: Were requests for greater security for diplomats in Libya ignored? Even if Al Qaeda's core in Pakistan has been decimated, what threat is posed by its affiliates and imitators in other countries where they have taken refuge? How can crucial diplomacy be conducted amid the dangerous chaos that has followed the toppling of dictators across the Arab world?

Instead, it is the parsing of the talking points — who wrote them, altered them, recited them on television or tried to explain them — that could decide the fate of a leading candidate for secretary of state, Susan E. Rice, currently the United Nations ambassador. On Wednesday, for the second time in two weeks, Ms. Rice received a hearty endorsement from President Obama in the face of a continuing battering on Capitol Hill.

"Susan Rice is extraordinary," he said in response to a reporter's question as he met at the White House with his cabinet for the first time since the election. "Couldn't be prouder of the job that she's done."

Now the talking points could also affect the chances of a top candidate for C.I.A. director, Michael Morell, the agency's acting director, who on Tuesday accompanied Ms. Rice to a briefing for some of her most vocal Senate critics and misspoke about changes in the original draft of the talking points.

Intelligence officials said Wednesday that Mr. Morell's flub, which prompted a sharply worded statement from three Republican senators, was an insignificant mix-up: He said the F.B.I. had taken out a specific reference to Al Qaeda, when in fact that change was made by the C.I.A. The F.B.I. had added another phrase to the same sentence.

"This was an honest mistake, and it was corrected as soon as it was realized," one official said. "There is nothing more to this."

But such earnest attempts to lower the political temperature have so far failed. As so often in Washington, the clashes over Benghazi have a semi-hidden personal element that adds to the emotion. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who led the initial lambasting of Ms. Rice, had been subjected to withering criticism by her in 2008 when he was running for president. And senators considering Ms. Rice's future are quite aware that her main rival for the job of secretary of state is their colleague Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts.

For now, the focus of Congress and the news media is mostly on language. For weeks after the Benghazi attack, Republicans accused Mr. Obama and his aides of avoiding labeling it "terrorism" for fear of tarnishing his national security record in the weeks before the Nov. 6 election. Since his re-election, that issue has faded, and the debate has shifted to the talking points.

The facts about the talking points, like those about the Benghazi attack itself, have dribbled out slowly and awkwardly from intelligence officials who generally do not relish airing their internal deliberations. But there is now a fairly clear account.

The C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies rarely prepare unclassified talking points; more often, policy makers submit proposed public comments, and intelligence analysts check them for classified information or errors of fact. But in the storm of news media coverage after the killings in Benghazi, C.I.A. officials responded quickly to Mr. Ruppersberger's request on Sept. 14.

C.I.A. analysts drafted four sentences describing "demonstrations" in Benghazi that were "spontaneously inspired" by protests in Cairo against a crude video lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. (Later assessments concluded there were no demonstrations.) The initial version of the talking points identified the suspected attackers — a local militant group called Ansar al-Shariah, with possible links to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an offshoot of the terrorist network in North Africa.

Jeremy W. Peters and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

U.S. Is Weighing Stronger Action in Syrian Conflict

Francisco Leong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Rebels in northern Syria celebrated on Wednesday next to what was reported to be a government fighter jet.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, hoping that the conflict in Syria has reached a turning point, is considering deeper intervention to help push President Bashar al-Assad from power, according to government officials involved in the discussions.

While no decisions have been made, the administration is considering several alternatives, including directly providing arms to some opposition fighters.

The most urgent decision, likely to come next week, is whether NATO should deploy surface-to-air missiles in Turkey, ostensibly to protect that country from Syrian missiles that could carry chemical weapons. The State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said Wednesday that the Patriot missile system would not be "for use beyond the Turkish border."

But some strategists and administration officials believe that Syrian Air Force pilots might fear how else the missile batteries could be used. If so, they could be intimidated from bombing the northern Syrian border towns where the rebels control considerable territory. A NATO survey team is in Turkey, examining possible sites for the batteries.

Other, more distant options include directly providing arms to opposition fighters rather than only continuing to use other countries, especially Qatar, to do so. A riskier course would be to insert C.I.A. officers or allied intelligence services on the ground in Syria, to work more closely with opposition fighters in areas that they now largely control.

Administration officials discussed all of these steps before the presidential election. But the combination of President Obama's re-election, which has made the White House more willing to take risks, and a series of recent tactical successes by rebel forces, one senior administration official said, "has given this debate a new urgency, and a new focus."

The outcome of the broader debate about how heavily America should intervene in another Middle Eastern conflict remains uncertain. Mr. Obama's record in intervening in the Arab Spring has been cautious: While he joined in what began as a humanitarian effort in Libya, he refused to put American military forces on the ground and, with the exception of a C.I.A. and diplomatic presence, ended the American role as soon as Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was toppled.

In the case of Syria, a far more complex conflict than Libya's, some officials continue to worry that the risks of intervention — both in American lives and in setting off a broader conflict, potentially involving Turkey — are too great to justify action. Others argue that more aggressive steps are justified in Syria by the loss in life there, the risks that its chemical weapons could get loose, and the opportunity to deal a blow to Iran's only ally in the region. The debate now coursing through the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A. resembles a similar one among America's main allies.

"Look, let's be frank, what we've done over the last 18 months hasn't been enough," Britain's prime minister, David Cameron, said three weeks ago after visiting a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. "The slaughter continues, the bloodshed is appalling, the bad effects it's having on the region, the radicalization, but also the humanitarian crisis that is engulfing Syria. So let's work together on really pushing what more we can do." Mr. Cameron has discussed those options directly with Mr. Obama, White House officials say.

France and Britain have recognized a newly formed coalition of opposition groups, which the United States helped piece together. So far, Washington has not done so.

American officials and independent specialists on Syria said that the administration was reviewing its Syria policy in part to gain credibility and sway with opposition fighters, who have seized key Syrian military bases in recent weeks.

"The administration has figured out that if they don't start doing something, the war will be over and they won't have any influence over the combat forces on the ground," said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer and specialist on the Syria military. "They may have some influence with various political groups and factions, but they won't have influence with the fighters, and the fighters will control the territory."

Jessica Brandt contributed reporting from Cambridge, Mass.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

President Obama Asks Congress to Keep Tax Cuts for Middle Class

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama, joined by taxpayers at the White House, spoke Wednesday on his plans for taxes, part of a high-profile effort.

WASHINGTON — President Obama surrounded himself with taxpayers on Wednesday to pitch his plan to preserve current rates for the middle class and raise them for the wealthy. A day before, he met with small-business owners for the same purpose. On Friday, he plans to fly to Pennsylvania to tour a factory to make the same point.

As the president and Congress hurtle toward a reckoning on the highest federal budget deficit in generations, Mr. Obama says he wants a "balanced" approach to restoring the nation's fiscal order. But the high-profile public campaign he has been waging in recent days has focused almost entirely on the tax side of the equation, with scant talk about his priorities when it comes to curbing spending.

Mr. Obama has embraced specific cuts to the federal budget in the past and has committed to an agreement with Congress that will include deep reductions in spending. But it would be easy for those who listen to his public pronouncements lately to miss it. In public statements since his re-election, he has barely discussed how he would pare back federal spending, focusing instead on the aspect of his plan that plays to his liberal base and involves all gain and no pain for 98 percent of taxpayers.

Republicans and even some Democrats have expressed frustration that Mr. Obama has avoided a serious public discussion on spending with barely a month until deep automatic budget cuts and tax increases are scheduled to take effect. While the president's aides said it was important to engage the public on taxes, others say he has not prepared the country for the sacrifice that would come with lower spending.

"The problem is real," said Erskine B. Bowles, who was co-chairman of Mr. Obama's deficit reduction commission. "The solutions are painful, and there's not going to be an easy way out of this."

After meeting with White House officials this week, Mr. Bowles said he believed "they were serious about reducing spending" but added that "we need to talk more about the spending side of the equation."

Republican leaders were more scathing, saying the president was more interested in campaigning than sitting down to resolve difficult issues. They said they were willing to raise tax revenue by closing loopholes and limiting deductions, but Mr. Obama has not reciprocated with more restraint of entitlement programs.

"We have not seen any good-faith effort on the part of this administration to talk about the real problem that we're trying to fix," said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader. "This has to be a part of this agreement or else we just continue to dig the hole deeper, asking folks to allow us to kick the can down the road further. And that we don't want to do."

Although Mr. Obama has not scheduled a new meeting with Congressional leaders, he will dispatch top advisers to Capitol Hill for talks on Thursday. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Rob Nabors, the White House legislative director, will pay separate visits to Senators Harry Reid of Nevada and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Democratic and Republican leaders, and Representatives John A. Boehner of Ohio and Nancy Pelosi of California, the Republican speaker and Democratic minority leader.

Mr. Obama met privately on Wednesday with the chief executives of 14 major corporations like Goldman Sachs, Home Depot, Marriott, Coca-Cola, Pfizer and Yahoo to discuss the fiscal situation.

"He seemed flexible, but he said taxes should go up on the top 2 percent," said one executive who did not want to be named. Most of the executives said they were not opposed to tax increases as part of a deal but stressed that a quick resolution could help the economy.

White House officials rejected Republican suggestions that Mr. Obama has not been serious enough about tackling the growth of entitlement spending. "He is committed, every time he talks about this, to a balanced approach that includes both, you know, revenues, spending cuts and savings through entitlement reforms," said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.

White House officials pointed to $340 billion in health care entitlement program savings and $272 billion in reductions to other mandatory programs over 10 years in a previous presidential budget proposal. "Even though that budget proposal's been out there for a long time, a lot of people aren't aware of that," Mr. Carney said. " He called it "another piece of evidence that the president has been willing to make tough choices."

One reason a lot of people may not be aware of the cuts Mr. Obama has proposed is that he does not talk about them often. In his first postelection news conference, he focused on tax increases on the wealthy and used the term "spending cuts" just once without elaborating.

By focusing on taxes, Mr. Obama has put Republicans on the defensive. At Wednesday's event, he challenged them to extend Bush-era tax cuts for family income under $250,000 since both sides agree those should continue. Doing so would effectively mean tax cuts on income over $250,000 would expire at the end of the year since Mr. Obama would not sign a separate bill extending them.

The president's public lobbying seemed to crack through the solid Republican opposition this week when a prominent conservative, Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, urged his party to seek such a quick deal with Mr. Obama extending middle-class tax cuts. Mr. Boehner pushed back against Mr. Cole on Wednesday, saying that would hurt small businesses and the economy.

At the same time, Mr. Obama evidently sees no percentage in talking in detail about spending cuts, acutely aware that his liberal base is unenthusiastic about paring back entitlement programs. Senator Richard J. Durbin, a longtime Illinois ally and the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said this week that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security should not be part of current budget talks.

As the two sides continued to shadowbox, Mr. Bowles was skeptical, putting the chances of a deal by the end of the year at one in three. "I believe the probability is that we are going over the cliff," he said, "and I think that will be horrible."

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting from Washington, and Nelson Schwartz from New York.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

Cost of Coastal Living to Climb Under New Flood Rules

New York and New Jersey residents, just coming to grips with the enormous costs of repairing homes damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, will soon face another financial blow: soaring flood insurance rates and heightened standards for rebuilding that threaten to make seaside living, once and for all, a luxury only the wealthy can afford.

Homeowners in storm-damaged coastal areas who had flood insurance — and many more who did not, but will now be required to — will face premium increases of as much as 20 percent or 25 percent per year beginning in January, under legislation enacted in July to shore up the debt-ridden National Flood Insurance Program. The yearly increases will add hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to homeowners' annual bills.

The higher premiums, coupled with expensive requirements for homes being rebuilt within newly mapped flood hazard zones, which will take into account the storm's vast reach, pose a serious threat to middle-class and lower-income enclaves. In Queens, on Staten Island, on Long Island and at the Jersey Shore, many families have clung fast to a modest coastal lifestyle, often passing bungalows or small Victorian homes down through generations, even as development turned other places into playgrounds for the well-to-do.

While many homeowners are beginning to rebuild without any thought to future costs, the changes could propel a demographic shift along the Northeast Coast, even in places spared by the storm, according to federal officials, insurance industry executives and regional development experts. Ronald Schiffman, a former member of the New York City Planning Commission, said that barring intervention by Congress or the states, there would be "a massive displacement of low-income families from their historic communities."

After weeks of tearing debris from her 87-year-old, two-story house on the bay side of Long Beach, N.Y., Barbara Carman, 59, said she understood the need to stabilize the flood insurance program, but she compared coming premium increases to "kicking people while they're down."

Ms. Carman and her husband, who had hoped to retire in a few years, were reconsidering whether they could afford to remain on the coast on fixed incomes. But she said she feared that even selling their home could be hard.

"Only wealthy people could afford it, I guess, not middle-class people," she said. "You're going to price us out of here."

The heightened financial pressure has emerged as an unintended consequence of efforts to stop the government subsidization of risk that has encouraged so many to build and rebuild along coasts increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather. Supporters of the effort acknowledged that it would squeeze lower-income residents but said it was vital for the insurance program to reflect the risk of living along the shore.

"The irony is, if we allowed market forces to dictate at the coast, a lot of the development in the wrong places would never have gotten built," said Jeffrey Tittel, director of the Sierra Club's chapter in New Jersey. "But we didn't. We subsidized that development with low insurance rates for decades. And we can't afford to keep doing that. Should a person who lives in an apartment in Newark pay for someone's beach house?"

Because private insurers rarely provide flood insurance, the program has been run by the federal government, which kept rates artificially low under pressure from the real estate industry and other groups. Flood insurance in higher-risk areas typically costs $1,100 to $3,000 a year, for coverage capped at $250,000; the contents of a home could be insured up to $100,000 for an additional $500 or so a year, said Steve Harty, president of National Flood Services, a large claims-processing company.

Premiums will double for new policyholders and many old ones within three or four years under the new law.

Across the board, rates will begin rising an average of 20 percent after Jan. 1, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency; rate increases had previously been capped at 10 percent. For properties older than the flood insurance program, where premiums cost half as much as for newer buildings, those discounts are being phased out, through yearly rate increases of 25 percent.

Second homes and businesses will see these increases next year without exception. Primary homes will lose their discounted rates if repairs cost more than half the value of the home, if the home has had recurring flood damage or if the owner refuses an offer of money to help elevate or relocate the building — the exact situations being confronted by many homeowners affected by Hurricane Sandy. The discounted rates disappear if owners sell, let their policies lapse or make major improvements.

The practice of grandfathering is also being discontinued: homes that were built in areas deemed safe at the time, but later added to flood hazard areas, will no longer be treated as though they are on high ground.

At the same time, avoiding the expense of flood insurance will become harder for middle-class homeowners, many of whom have historically dropped their policies after a few uneventful years even though it is required for homeowners with federally backed mortgages who live in flood-prone areas. Lenders who do not enforce the requirement will face higher penalties.

Charles V. Bagli and Sarah Maslin Nir contributed reporting.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

After Hurricane Sandy, Fighting to Save the Flavor of New York

Evan Sung for The New York Times

Gargiulo's is one of several Coney Island restaurants that are more than mere dining establishments. "They're community centers," the chef Michael Lomonaco said.

GO ahead. Ask Antoinette Balzano. Ask her why Totonno's, the pizzeria in Coney Island, matters.

"Here's what we mean to the city," she said the other day, her voice rising with emotion. Ms. Balzano, one of the heirs to the pizzeria, pointed at a black-and-white photograph, leaning on a tabletop, showing a blunt-faced, apron-clad man who looked like a retired boxer. It was a portrait of her grandfather Anthony (Totonno) Pero, who hatched the Brooklyn landmark in 1924 after years making pies at the legendary Lombardi's on Spring Street.

"He left Naples," she said. "He came here on a boat, left everybody behind. This man. This man. He brought pizza to this country, my grandfather did."

Ms. Balzano was cold, angry and fed up. It was an overcast Monday in November, a full three weeks after Hurricane Sandy had blasted into Brooklyn, and she was waiting for an engineer to show up to survey the damage.

As she paced, swaddled in a puffy coat inside the pizzeria, where particles in the air made her cough and chairs were stacked up after having been tossed around like toys from a Barbie tea party, she got on the phone with an insurance company to express her displeasure.

"Is this a joke?" she said. "You guys run some operation, let me tell you."

No matter whom she spoke with, it seemed as if each person failed to comprehend what Totonno's signified. To Brooklyn. To New York. To America.

"Nobody knows that this is insane," she said.

Hurricane Sandy shredded the Atlantic Seaboard, flattening entire neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey, and it will take a long time to tally the full measure of that devastation. In a symbolic way, though, the storm's assault on restaurants like Totonno's tore at the very heart of the New York experience.

Totonno's is just one of scores of beloved haunts, old and new, that have been struggling in and around the city, in areas like Brighton Beach and Howard Beach, Red Hook and Hoboken. These are the restaurants where toasts are raised to newlyweds, where candles are blown out on birthday cakes, where locals unload their troubles at the bar, and where street food is occasionally elevated to art — or at least a rowdy, pugnacious history lesson.

For many New Yorkers, they are the places that left the first emotional imprint of what dining ought to feel like. Ask someone from Nebraska — or France, Brazil or Japan — to free-associate a bunch of dishes that come to mind when hearing the phrase "New York food," and there is a high probability that pizza and hot dogs will top that list. And when one longs for pizza and hot dogs, yearnings naturally turn to Coney Island, where two places that helped popularize them, Totonno's and Nathan's, were so ravaged by the storm that they have temporarily shut down.

If you're a Brooklynite, your mental list of food memories probably encompasses the marinara sauce at Randazzo's Clam Bar and the freshly made sandwiches at Jimmy's Famous Heros, both fixtures in Sheepshead Bay, or the lobster fra diavolo served in the buzzing banquet halls of Gargiulo's, which has been the special-occasion Windsor Castle of Coney Island since 1907.

Long before Brooklyn became an internationally recognized gastronomic brand, such places taught the borough how to eat. "These are the stalwarts of Brooklyn dining, as far as I'm concerned," said Michael Lomonaco, the Bensonhurst-bred executive chef at Porter House New York, who knows about loss, having headed the team at Windows on the World, atop the World Trade Center, on Sept. 11, 2001. "These restaurants are very close to me."

All were savaged by Sandy.

If you want to know why these establishments matter, ask Darren Aronofsky, the director behind movies like "Requiem for a Dream," "The Wrestler" and "Black Swan." Mr. Aronofsky grew up in Manhattan Beach. He remembers dropping into Jimmy's to get supplies before heading off to Mets games. He remembers watching the folks behind the counter squirting on the oil and vinegar, laying on the sliced onions, wrapping each sandwich in wax paper.

"That place is a classic," he said. "Whenever you went on a trip anywhere, you'd always get Jimmy's heroes."

Mr. Aronofsky can't help but rhapsodize about Totonno's, too — how, even when there is a long line of drooling customers, the conjuring of dough always comes to a halt when the fresh ingredients run out. The pies always had "that burnt taste, which was just so remarkable," he said. "It changed my perception of what pizza could be."

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

Marvin Miller, Union Leader Who Changed Baseball, Dies at 95

Barton Silverman/The New York Times

Marvin Miller addressing members of the Phillies and Red Sox during spring training in 1977.

Marvin Miller, an economist and labor leader who became one of the most important figures in baseball history by building the major league players union into a force that revolutionized the game and ultimately transformed all of professional sports, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.

His death was announced by the Major League Baseball Players Association. He had liver cancer, his daughter, Susan Miller, said.

When Mr. Miller was named the executive director of the association in 1966, club owners ruled much as they had since the 19th century. The reserve clause bound players to their teams for as long as the owners wanted them, leaving them with little bargaining power. Come contract time, a player could expect an ultimatum but not much more. The minimum salary was $6,000 and had barely budged for two decades. The average salary was $19,000. The pension plan was feeble, and player grievances could be heard only by the commissioner, who worked for the owners.

By the time Mr. Miller retired at the end of 1982, he had secured his place on baseball's Mount Rushmore by forging one of the strongest unions in America, creating a model for those in basketball, football and hockey.

Never had the dugout been so business-minded. The average player salary had reached $241,000, the pension plan had become generous, and players had won free agency and were hiring agents to issue their own demands. If they had a grievance, they could turn to an arbitrator.Peter Seitz, the arbitrator who invalidated the reserve clause and created free agency in 1975, called Mr. Miller "the Moses who had led Baseball's children of Israel out of the land of bondage."

But not only them. If Mr. Miller had one overarching achievement, it was to persuade professional athletes to cast aside the paternalism of the owners and to emerge as economic forces in their own right, often armed with immense bargaining power. The changes he wrought in baseball rippled through all of pro sports, and it could be said that he, more than anyone else, was responsible for the professional athlete of today, a kind of pop culture star able to command astronomical salaries and move from one team to another.

Still, though his contributions to baseball were compared to those of Babe Ruth, who made the home run an essential part of the game, and Branch Rickey, who broke the major leagues' color barrier when he signed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mr. Miller has not been recognized by the Baseball Hall of Fame.

"There's been a concerted attempt to downplay the union," Mr. Miller told The New York Times, referring to the Hall, when he narrowly missed out on election in December 2010, the fifth time he had been on the ballot. "It's been about trying to rewrite history rather than record it. They decided a long time ago that they would downgrade any impact the union has had. And part of that plan was to keep me out of it."

A Series of Showdowns

Mr. Miller, an economist by training, had bargained on behalf of the steelworkers' union but lacked the charisma of fiery old-style labor leaders like the mineworkers' John L. Lewis or the New York City transport workers' Mike Quill. A silver-haired man with a mustache he had cultivated since he was 17, he was typically described as calm, patient, even-keeled. Nonetheless, he got results.

"Miller's goal was to get his ballplayers to think like steelworkers — to persuade members of the professional class to learn from members of the working class," Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker in 2010.

Everett M. Ehrlich, a business economist and an under secretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, said that Mr. Miller's victories owed much to the changing structure of the game, particularly baseball's expansion to the West Coast and the South, which led to greater television and attendance revenue. The new money allowed many ball clubs to spend heavily on players no longer tied to their teams.

"Luck is the residue of opportunity and design," Mr. Ehrlich wrote on his blog in 2010, quoting Rickey. "Free agency," he added, "was an important accomplishment, and it made baseball better, but it also happened at a propitious moment. It takes nothing away from Miller to note that."

Though Mr. Miller never convinced the owners that they could prosper from an upheaval of baseball's economic order — they would discover that eventually — he outmaneuvered them at every turn. "I loved baseball and I loved a good fight, and in my mind, ballplayers were among the most exploited workers in America," Mr. Miller wrote in his memoir, "A Whole Different Ball Game" (1991), recalling his decision to take charge of the players association when it was in effect a company union.

He had his share of fights. The players went on strike for 13 days in 1972 (part of the exhibition season and nine regular-season days); they were locked out of spring training for almost a month in 1976; they struck for the final eight days of the 1980 exhibition season; and staged a 50-day strike that began in the middle of the 1981 regular season.

Mr. Miller was portrayed by many on the management side as a harbinger of economic ruin.

"There was about Miller a wariness one would find in an abused animal," Bowie Kuhn, the baseball commissioner during most of Mr. Miller's tenure, wrote in his memoir, "Hardball" (1987). "It precluded trust or affection."

But Mr. Miller did win the trust of the ballplayers.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

California Shows Signs of Resurgence

Sam Hodgson/Bloomberg News

Prosperous coastal places like La Jolla, here, are better off than the state as a whole; many inland areas still have high jobless rates.

LOS ANGELES — After nearly five years of brutal economic decline, government retrenchment and a widespread loss of confidence in its future, California is showing the first signs of a rebound. There is evidence of job growth, economic stability, a resurgent housing market and rising spirits in a state that was among the worst hit by the recession.

California reported a 10.1 percent unemployment rate last month, down from 11.5 percent in October 2011 and the lowest since February 2009. In September, California had its biggest month-to-month drop in unemployment in the 36 years the state has collected statistics, from 10.6 percent to 10.2 percent, though the state still has the third-highest jobless rate in the nation.

The housing market, whose collapse in a storm of foreclosures helped worsen the economic decline, has snapped back in many, though not all, parts of the state. Houses are sitting on the market for a shorter time and selling at higher prices, and new home construction is rising. Home sales rose 25 percent in Southern California in October compared with a year earlier.

After years of spending cuts and annual state budget deficits larger than the entire budgets of some states, this month the independent California Legislative Analyst's Office projected a deficit for next year of $1.9 billion — down from $25 billion at one point — and said California might post a $1 billion surplus in 2014, even accounting for the tendency of these projections to vary markedly from year to year.

A reason for the change, in addition to a series of deep budget cuts in recent years, was voter approval of Proposition 30, promoted by Gov. Jerry Brown to raise taxes temporarily to avoid up to $6 billion in education cuts.

"The state's economic recovery, prior budget cuts and the additional, temporary taxes provided by Proposition 30 have combined to bring California to a promising moment: the possible end of a decade of acute state budget challenges," the report said. "Our economic and budgetary forecast indicates that California's leaders face a dramatically smaller budget problem in 2013-14."

And 38 percent of Californians say the state is heading in the right direction, according to a survey this month by U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times. For most places, that figure would seem dismal. But it is double what it was 13 months ago.

California's recovery echoes a rebound across much of the country; the state suffered not only one of the longest downturns but also one of the most severe. Economists say the turnaround, should it continue, is a positive harbinger for the nation, given the size and diversity of the state's economy.

Democrats here have been quick to argue that the improvements in fiscal conditions that the state is now projecting after voters approved the temporary tax increase may embolden other states, and Congress, to raise some taxes rather than turn to a new round of cuts.

Yet California still faces major problems. The economic recovery is hardly uniform. Central California and the Inland Empire — the suburban sprawl east of Los Angeles — continue to stagger under the collapse of the construction market, and some economists wonder if they will ever join the coastal cities on the prosperity train. Cities, most recently San Bernardino, are facing bankruptcy, and public employee pension costs loom as a major threat to the state budget and those of many municipalities, including Los Angeles.

A federal report this month said that by some measures, California has the worst poverty in the nation. The river of people coming west in search of the economic dream, traditionally an economic and creative driver, has slowed to a crawl.

Still, the fear among many Californians that the bottom had fallen out appears to be fading. Economists said they were spotting many signs of incipient growth, including a surge in rental costs in the Bay Area, which suggests an influx of people looking for jobs.

"I think the state is turning a corner," said Enrico Moretti, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He said that the recovery was creating regional lines of economic demarcation — "We are going to see a more and more polarized state," he said — but that over all, California was emerging from the recession.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

Ambassador Rice Concedes Error on Libya, but G.O.P. Senators Are Not Satisfied

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Senators Lindsey Graham, left, and John McCain arrive on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to meet with Susan Rice, the ambassador to the U.N.

WASHINGTON — Susan E. Rice may have hoped that paying a conciliatory call on three hostile Senate Republicans on Tuesday would smooth over a festering dispute about the deadly attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and clear a roadblock to her nomination as secretary of state.

But the senators seemed anything but mollified, signaling instead that they would still oppose Ms. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, if she is nominated by President Obama, even after she conceded errors in the account of the assault she gave on Sunday morning television programs shortly after it occurred in September.

Two of the Republicans, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said they would seek to block Ms. Rice, who according to administration officials remains Mr. Obama's preferred choice to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The third Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, said on Fox that he would be "very hard-pressed" to support Ms. Rice.

"Bottom line, I'm more disturbed than I was before," Mr. Graham said after the tense, closed-door meeting.

The continued criticism of Ms. Rice, 48, a diplomat with close ties to Mr. Obama, deepens an already bitter and unusually personal feud between the White House and Republicans over Libya. Responding to a question about criticism of Ms. Rice at a news conference two weeks ago, Mr. Obama said, "If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me."

It also raises the prospect of a confirmation battle if the president goes ahead with nominating Ms. Rice. To some extent, that battle is already under way, even before he has submitted her name. Ms. Rice's visits to senators, which will continue Wednesday, bear all the hallmarks of a presidential nominee seeking to win over reluctant lawmakers.

A senior administration official said the harsh reaction to Ms. Rice's appearance on Tuesday would have no effect on her chances for secretary of state. "They've been saying the same thing for months," he said.

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is the other leading candidate for the post. Several senators, including Mr. McCain, said they would prefer Mr. Kerry and predicted that he would sail through a confirmation hearing.

In a statement after the meeting, Ms. Rice said she incorrectly described the attack in Benghazi, which killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, as a spontaneous protest gone awry rather than a premeditated terrorist attack. But she said she based her remarks on the intelligence then available — intelligence that changed over time.

"Neither I nor anyone else in the administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in the process," said Ms. Rice, who was accompanied at the 10 a.m. meeting by the acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael J. Morell.

But Mr. Morell reinforced the perception of an administration that cannot get its story straight by asserting during the meeting that the F.B.I. had modified Ms. Rice's talking points by removing a specific reference to Al Qaeda. At 4 p.m., the senators said in a statement, the C.I.A. called to notify them that Mr. Morell had erred, and that the agency had made the change, not the bureau.

"We are disturbed by the administration's continued inability to answer even the most basic questions about the Benghazi attack and the administration's response," the senators said.

Ms. Rice had requested the meeting amid signs that Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham were softening their criticism. "She deserves the ability and the opportunity to explain herself," Mr. McCain said Sunday.

It is difficult to gauge whether the opposition of the three Republicans, however vociferous, would be enough to derail Ms. Rice's chances for the secretary of state post. Assuming the White House had the support of every Senate Democrat, it would have to win over only five Republicans to gain a filibuster-proof majority.

At a minimum, though, Ms. Rice would face harsh scrutiny. Other Republicans on Tuesday continued voicing suspicions that the White House shaded its initial accounts of the attack in Benghazi, during a hard-fought election, to preserve Mr. Obama's counterterrorism credentials.

Some Republicans condemned Ms. Rice not so much for her handling of the Benghazi affair but for what they said was her blind loyalty to the president. "While I think she'd be outstanding as head of the Democratic National Committee," said Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who will meet with her on Wednesday, "I've just never seen that sense of independence from her, and I think that's one of the reasons she got herself into so much trouble."

Jennifer Steinhauer and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

Mexico Seeks to Recast Relationship With U.S.

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Students in a class this month at the aeronautical university in Querétaro, Mexico, a city that has emerged as a hub for the industry in recent years.

QUERÉTARO, Mexico — They came looking for Andrés Cobos Marín, 22, with promises of financial security, a leg up over his peers, the life of his dreams.

But these were not the sort of recruiters who have made Mexico infamous, scouting hired guns and drug couriers for the criminal underworld. Quite the contrary, they were out hunting for talented young engineers with a knack for designing turbines and the like for this city's growing aerospace industry.

"The companies are looking for us; we don't have to go looking for them," said Mr. Cobos, who starts work in January at a Spanish company even before he graduates next year.

It is the flip side of the Mexico that the world is familiar with: the one in which drug barons hang bodies from bridges, evade the law in elaborate hideaways and funnel billions of dollars in narcotics across the border and around the world.

In this other Mexico, taking hold in several pockets of the country like this one, high-skilled jobs are plentiful, industrial plants churn out increasingly sophisticated products and families adopt shades of middle-class life, with flat-screen televisions, new cars and homes a cut or more above those of their parents.

This more prosperous, parallel universe is what Mexico's president-elect, Enrique Peña Nieto, highlighted when he met with President Obama on Tuesday as he seeks to shift relations with the United States toward improving the economy and loosening up trade.

Mr. Peña Nieto, who takes office on Saturday, discussed a range of issues with Mr. Obama, including negotiations on Mexico's role in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement being worked out among Asian and Western Hemisphere nations.

Mr. Peña Nieto's advisers are careful to say that they will continue to work closely with the United States on fighting drugs and organized crime, and he has promised Mexicans that he will reduce drug violence.

But Mr. Peña Nieto, who visits Canada on Wednesday, has made it clear that Mexico's poor image abroad has slowed its growth. His team plans a strong push to "modernize" trade deals, speed up or add new crossings at the border for commerce, court foreign investment to take advantage of vast, newly discovered shale gas fields near the United States border and generate more quality jobs like the ones here in Querétaro.

"In the next years, the great challenge is to succeed in making these kinds of examples multiply very quickly," Mr. Peña Nieto said this month.

Mexico fell into a deep recession in 2009 when American demand for Mexican-made imports collapsed. But the recovery under President Felipe Calderón has been notable, with growth expected to reach almost 4 percent this year, roughly twice that of the United States.

While Brazil is often thought of as Latin America's economic marvel, Mexico's economy outpaced Brazil's last year and is expected to do so again this year. Business that had fled Mexico in favor of China has started to return, as the wage gap narrows and transportation and other costs rise. Auto manufacturing, for instance, is surging, with several new plants.

The Obama administration is not expected to let up on its security concerns — almost all of the administration members greeting Mr. Peña Nieto were from the security and foreign policy teams — but economic changes have already altered the relationship between the two nations in some concrete ways. Better opportunities for Mexicans at home, not just the flagging United States economy and stricter enforcement at the border, contributed to a significant slowdown in illegal immigration north in recent years.

A senior Obama administration official said Mr. Peña Nieto's team made it clear from the start of talks after the July election that it would emphasize economic progress. But, the official said, "there will also clearly be things that we will want to see Mexico do, like accelerate judicial reforms, like being as open and as forward-leaning as possible on reducing human rights abuses when they occur, like ensuring that they do as much as they say they are going to do on corruption issues."

Still, analysts suggested that Mexico's president-elect was wise to play up a safer theme.

"The way to change the narrative is not to say, 'Security is not as bad as it seems,' " said Christopher Wilson, a scholar at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. "The way to change the narrative is to talk about other things that are going well, and the economy is a good story now."

Still, Mexico is far from realizing the middle-class society envisioned nearly two decades ago when it signed the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada.

A recent World Bank report on the expanding middle class in Latin America noted that although an additional 17 percent of the Mexican population had entered the middle class since 2000, class mobility was still low. Almost 30 percent of Mexican workers toil in the informal economy, without any benefits or protection, for employers who pay no taxes.

Elisabeth Malkin reported from Querétaro, and Randal C. Archibold from Mexico City. Ginger Thompson contributed reporting from New York.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More

Syrian Rebels, Gaining Savvy, Shift Their Tactics

BEIRUT, Lebanon — At a hydroelectric dam on the Euphrates River on Monday, Syrian rebels relaxed in the operations room, checking a computer screen, sipping tea and projecting confidence after driving off government forces and seizing crates of rocket-propelled grenades. All of this was proudly recorded and quickly uploaded for the world to see.

Swarming the heavily guarded dam was the latest in a monthlong string of tactical successes in which rebels have raided government installations, including numerous air bases, from northern Syria to the suburbs of Damascus. The raids allowed the rebels to boast of their growing effectiveness, undercut the morale of government forces and reinforce their arsenals.

But what they are not necessarily seeking is to hold the bases they hit. Instead, rebels have shifted tactics, fighters and analysts say, seizing outposts, then often abandoning them, to deny government air power a target for retaliation. Rebels say they have learned from recent mistakes, after seizing neighborhoods only to draw devastating airstrikes that killed civilians and alienated supporters. Now, they focus less on conquering territory than on turning a war of attrition to their advantage, forcing the state to bleed.

In the past month, fighters have overrun a half-dozen bases around Damascus, Syria's capital; two in the country's eastern oil-producing area; and the largest military installation near the country's largest city, Aleppo. They have focused on challenging air power, their deadliest foe, by harassing some air bases, ransacking others and seizing antiaircraft weapons.

They are continuing to fight even in areas crucial for the government, like the ring of suburbs around Damascus and the commercial hub of Aleppo and its supply routes.

"Rebels are learning," said Ahmad Kadour, an activist in Idlib, reached through Skype. When they capture a base, he said, "they take the machinery and the weapons and leave right away, because the regime is always shelling the places it used to control."

Yet the tactical gains appear unlikely to lead to a sudden shift that collapses the government, analysts say. Rather, they say, a de facto split of Syria is hardening with the government slowly shrinking the area it tries to fully control, a swath that runs from Damascus north along the more-populated western half of the country to Latakia, the ancestral province of President Bashar al-Assad.

The government is still strong in core areas, analysts say, and even when it cedes control of the ground to rebels, as in parts of northern Syria and growing areas of the thinly populated east, it retains, the power to strike from the air. And, analysts warn, even if the army abandons some areas, that could simply open the way to fighting among sectarian and political factions.

Yezid Sayigh, an analyst of Arab military affairs at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said that the loss of bases near Damascus, like the helicopter base that rebels seized on Sunday, is more significant than losses in the rebel-dominated north and isolated northeast, where the army has partly melted away, leaving the reduced forces vulnerable. The government's main focus is holding Damascus and a corridor northward through the cities of Homs and Hama to coastal Latakia, analysts said.

"By contracting the core areas they seek to defend, regime forces can extend their ability to fight," Mr. Sayigh said. "And regime forces have not yet lost their ability to escalate the level of violence."

Still, rebel actions are imperfectly coordinated, and it was unclear whether they planned to hold the Tishreen Dam near Aleppo. It is an important source of electric power and one of two major crossings between Aleppo and the eastern provinces.

Even as they celebrated its capture, there came a reminder of the risks of victory: warplanes bombed the Bab al-Hawa border crossing into Turkey, an area the rebels have controlled since July. The strikes scattered people who had taken shelter there after fleeing their homes elsewhere in Syria, said a fighter in the area who goes by the nickname Abu Zaki.

Tactics have often shifted throughout the conflict, which is approaching the two-year mark. It began as a peaceful protest movement. After security forces fired on demonstrators, sporadic insurgent attacks began. The government pursued pockets of rebels across the country, only to have them pop up again elsewhere. Last summer, the government withdrew to strong points, increasingly relying on air power and artillery to smash areas that rebels had seized.

The rebels have changed their tactics, too. Col. Qassem Saadeddine, the head of the military council of the loose-knit Free Syrian Army rebel umbrella group in Homs, said there was a concerted strategy to attack key bases and withdraw with weaponry. But, he said, where possible, rebels leave guards to prevent troops from using the bases again.

"They just control the areas the tanks stand on," he said in an interview from Turkey. "The regime is pulling out its forces from the provinces to the capital."

The rebel victories create opportunities, and dangers, as well.

After they took Base 46, a large base outside Aleppo, rebels won a political victory by restoring power that had been cut in pro-rebel areas. "The heater or the Internet or the TV? — I'm running around confused," said Najid, an activist in Binnish in Idlib Province. "I wish I could save electricity in boxes or containers, like water."

But when rebels took over oil fields in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, chaos ensued, with residents siphoning oil without safety precautions and selling it for far less than its value, said an activist there, reached by Skype.

Majed, an activist in Aleppo, was angry that rebels had captured the dam. He doubted they would be able to pay the foreign experts and technicians running it, and feared large regions would lose electricity. Worse, he said, the government might shell it, drowning villages.

"The regime destroyed half the country," he said. "They won't stop at a dam."

Hwaida Saad and Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut, and Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

12.07 | 0 komentar | Read More