On Eve of Vote, Fragile Valley in Kenya Faces New Divisions

KIAMBAA, Kenya — After another long day, Joseph Kairuri Mwangi walked back to his farmhouse shack, the late afternoon sun slanting behind him, his strides slow, his shoes muddy with rich, freshly turned earth.

It has been five years since his right hand was nearly cut off, but it still hurts.

“Right here,” he said, gingerly touching the scars. “I still feel pain right here.”

This whole area is a land of scars. On the shanties made from burned-up sheet metal, salvaged from homes set afire by mobs. On people’s limbs and faces. And in their hearts.

Five years ago, the Rift Valley of Kenya, a spectacularly verdant landscape of rolling hills, emerald green tea plantations and quilted farmland, suddenly exploded. A disputed election set off ethnic clashes that killed more than 1,000 people nationwide — more than 30 were burned alive in a church here in Kiambaa — and thousands are still living in shacks and tents, driven off their land with nowhere to go.

This was the seething center of Kenya’s upheaval, and now that the country is about to hold another major election on Monday, the first since the tumult of 2007 and 2008, the Rift Valley is still polarized, though some of the prejudices and poisonous feelings have shifted along with changes in political alliances.

“Those Luos,” said David Wanjohi Chege, a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group, speaking derisively about another one of Kenya’s major ethnic groups. “Those Luos won’t stop at nothing.”

Most people agree that preparations for this election are a vast improvement from the last time around. The creaky manual voting systems that promptly broke down have been replaced with state of the art digital technology, and nonprofit groups have devised social media tools to detect and parry hate speech. PeaceTXT, for example, is a text messaging service that sends out blasts of pro-peace messages to specific areas when trouble is brewing.

Donor nations have been holding Kenya’s hand much tighter this time around, advising election officials and contributing more than $100 million in election preparation. Investors big and small have shown their confidence that the vote will be all right, with Kenyan stocks edging up in the past week.

“I don’t think this time will be as bad,” said Bidan Thuku Mwangi, who runs a small bridal shop in the Rift Valley town of Londiani. On the floor are seven charred sewing machines, destroyed in the mayhem of 2008, but next to them is a sheaf of papers — an application for a new loan. “I’m waiting till after the election,” he said with a cautious smile. “Just in case.”

According to Human Rights Watch, Rift Valley politicians have been holding secretive night meetings, and more guns may have seeped in. Machete sales are sharply rising, other human rights observers in Kenya said recently, though it is not clear how much of this is fact and how much is fiction.

Some people are beginning to move out of ethnically mixed areas, frightened that there could be postelection reprisals, along ethnic lines, like what happened in 2008.

“All this is the mischief of politicians,” said Dominico Owiti, who lives in a new trouble spot, Sondu, a bushy borderland between the Luos and the Kalenjins. The two ethnic groups were allies during the last election, but because of opportunistic political alliances struck between Kenya’s leading politicians, they now find themselves on opposite sides of a very combustible political divide.

Similarly, two groups that fought so bitterly here the last time, the Kalenjins and the Kikuyus, are now political allies because their leaders have teamed up to run for president and deputy president on the same ticket.

“I don’t like it,” said Mary Macharia, a Kikuyu woman whose daughter was killed in the church fire in 2008, which was set by a Kalenjin mob. “But who am I to refuse?”

Kenya is considered one of the most modern countries in Africa, but ethnically charged politics is an Achilles’ heel. Colonial policies typecast certain ethnic groups — the Masai were the guards, the Kikuyus the farmhands, the Luos the teachers — and ethnicity has continued to serve as a stubbornly important basis of identity.

During elections, politicians use ethnic differences to stir up voters, and already 200 people have been killed in the Tana River Delta area of Kenya in clashes that both sides say have been inflamed by electoral politics.

In neighboring Tanzania, also a mosaic of dozens of ethnic groups, the government has instituted specific policies — like pushing the use of a common language, Swahili, and outlawing ethnically based political parties — to build a common Tanzanian identity. But here in Kenya, many people still speak their “mother tongue,” and interethnic marriage remains relatively rare.

“Everything has always been tribe-based,” said Christine Ololo Atieno, a Luo, who sells secondhand shoes in Kisumu, a big city in western Kenya.

Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from San Francisco.

Read More..

World Briefing | The Americas: Argentina: U.S. Court Orders Debt Repayment Plan

A United States court of appeals gave Argentina until March 29 to submit a plan for the repayment of $1.33 billion in debt that the country defaulted on 11 years ago. N.M.L. Capital, a subsidiary of the New York-based hedge fund Elliott Management, is leading a lawsuit among bondholders who refused Argentina’s 2005 and 2010 debt swaps. Ninety-three percent of creditors agreed to the restructuring in which debt stemming from Argentina’s $100 billion default was exchanged for new issues at 35 cents on the dollar. A judge ruled last fall in favor of creditors, saying that Argentina could not service only some of its debt, and that it had the “financial wherewithal” to pay in full. Speaking to Congress on Friday, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said Argentina would pay “these vulture funds” but only according to the same terms and conditions agreed upon for the other creditors. A spokesman for Elliott Management declined to comment.

Read More..

World Briefing | Europe: Ireland: Suspect in Terrorism Case Faces Extradition to U.S.

The United States government has petitioned the Irish High Court to extradite an Algerian man living in Ireland on terrorism charges relating to a plot to assassinate a Swedish artist, officials said Thursday. The United States alleges that the man, Ali Charaf Damache, planned to set up terrorist training camps and kill several Europeans, including a Swedish artist, Lars Vilks, whose sketch of the Prophet Muhammad’s head on a dog, published in 2007, had enraged the Islamic world. On Wednesday, Mr. Damache pleaded guilty in the Waterford Circuit Court to making a menacing phone call to an American peace activist, a charge for which he was arrested and detained in 2010. The judge sentenced him to time served and released him, but Mr. Damache was immediately rearrested on the American extradition warrant. Mr. Damache arrived in Ireland in 2000 and married an Irish woman in 2002. The relationship ended in 2008 and he then married an American citizen, Jamie Paulin Ramirez. Ms. Ramirez has pleaded guilty in the United States to charges of conspiring with Colleen LaRose, also known as Jihad Jane, to support and train terrorists.

Read More..

London Journal: Oxford and Cambridge Battle It Out in Wine-Tasting Contest

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

At the Oxford and Cambridge Varsity Blind Wine-Tasting Competition, participants must identify 12 unmarked wines by grape, country of origin, region, subregion, vintage and taste characteristics.

LONDON — Both teams had filled their rosters with only the most devoted competitors, training for months for this contest, doubtless the most prestigious of its kind in England and perhaps the world. They arrived early on the morning of the match, tense and unsmiling and prepared to compete.

The first round was hard-fought, a grueling 40 minutes from which both sides emerged a bit dazed; the second round proved more trying still. In the end, despite a valiant push from the younger, upstart squad, the match perhaps came down to experience, a turning point that came 20 minutes before the final bell for which no amount of training can prepare a competitor.

“Tannin buildup,” said a knowing David Soud, who last week helped Oxford narrowly defeat its archrival, Cambridge, in the 60th edition of what was in all likelihood the world’s first wine-tasting contest.

The Oxford and Cambridge Varsity Blind Wine-Tasting Competition, wherein participants must identify 12 unmarked wines by grape, country of origin, region, subregion, vintage and taste characteristics, seems a testament to man’s will to compete over just about anything. Or perhaps it is a measure of the attraction to the esoteric and bizarre that seems to reside somewhere deep within the English spirit. Or perhaps, some competitors suggested, wine-tasting ability is simply one more realm in which Oxford and Cambridge can play out their long and much mythologized rivalry.

Whatever the case, the gustatory capacities of the competitors are remarkable, to say nothing of their knowledge of winemaking practices and trends.

“It’s very serious, there’s no doubt about that,” said Jancis Robinson, the wine journalist and critic who served as one of two judges at this year’s contest. “You train like an athlete.”

Certainly, the competitors seemed all business when they gathered last Thursday at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, a grand edifice just a few steps from Buckingham Palace.

They were eight men and six women, among them a handful of Britons but also Chinese, Americans, a Pole, a Dutchman and a citizen of Brunei, among others. There was a physicist, a biochemist and an archaeologist, but also a creative writer and an expert on modernist poetry.

They sat around a table in a basement room, unspeaking, beneath a dour portrait of King Edward VII. On the table were 84 fine-stem crystal glasses — six for each competitor in each 40-minute round, with one round for whites and a second for reds — 14 water glasses, nine black spittoons and four plates of water crackers, to neutralize the palate.

The competitors twirled and sniffed and inspected, some holding their noses while sipping, others warming their glasses between their thighs, all of them scratching notes on their tasting sheets.

Tasting cannot fairly be called a spectator sport, but there were plenty of curious sounds, a dissonant chorus of slurping and sluicing and spitting, marked by the occasional chime of crystal on crystal and the creaking of wooden floorboards beneath a plush carpet. One Cambridge competitor, aerating her wines in her mouth, produced a sound akin to the pressurized rush of an airplane vacuum toilet.

“I’ve been mocked a couple of times,” said the woman, Vaiva Imbrasaite, 23, a Lithuanian doctoral student in computer science. (It can, however, be a useful party trick, Ms. Imbrasaite said.)

Most competitors concluded that the reds, which were on average significantly older than the whites, were more difficult. As they age, even very different reds tend to converge in flavor, said Mr. Soud of Oxford, the poetry expert. The senior competitor at 46, he said it was the taste or smell of American — not French — oak that allowed him to identify, with near exactitude, a 1953 Vega Sicilia.

According to the 15-page crib sheet that Oxford competitors are meant to memorize, an accurate description of that wine might have noted aromas of “coconut” — from the oak — and “tobacco leaf,” as well as a “horse manure character.” It also would have indicated that the wine was made largely from tempranillo grapes, in the Ribero del Duero region of Spain, and was a “gran reserva,” the top classification.

Read More..

News Analysis: Now Gathering in Rome, a Conclave of Fallible Cardinals

Dmitry Lovetsky/Associated Press

St. Peter’s Basilica on Tuesday. Roman Catholic cardinals were gathering at the Vatican amid scandal to choose a new pope.

The sudden resignation of the most senior Roman Catholic cardinal in Britain, who stepped aside on Monday in the face of accusations that he made unwanted sexual advances toward priests years ago, showed that the taint of scandal could force a cardinal from participating in the selection of a new pope.

His exit came as at least a dozen other cardinals tarnished with accusations that they failed to remove priests accused of sexually abusing minors were among those gathering in Rome to prepare for the conclave to select a successor to Pope Benedict XVI. There was no sign that the church’s promise to confront the sexual abuse scandal had led to direct pressure on those cardinals to exempt themselves from the conclave.

Advocates for abuse victims who were in Rome on Tuesday focused particular ire on Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles, and called for him to be excluded from the conclave. But Cardinal Mahony, who has vigorously defended his record, was already in Rome, posting on Twitter about the weather.

Even stalwart defenders of the church point out that to disqualify Cardinal Mahony would leave many more cardinals similarly vulnerable. Many of the men who will go into the Sistine Chapel to elect a pope they hope will help the church recover from the bruising scandal of sexual abuse have themselves been blemished by it.

“Among bishops and cardinals, certainly the old guys who have been involved for so long, sure they’re going to have blood on their hands,” said Thomas G. Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, who has served on the American bishops’ national abuse advisory board and has written three books on sexual abuse. “So when Cardinal Mahony says he’s being scapegoated, in some respects I think he’s right. All the focus is on him, but what about the other guys?”

Among the many challenges facing the church, addressing the wounds caused by sexual abuse is among the top priorities, church analysts say. When Pope Benedict was elected in 2005, many Catholics hoped that his previous experience at the helm of the Vatican office that dealt with abuse cases would result in substantive changes.

Benedict has repeatedly apologized to victims, and listened personally to their testimonies of pain. After the abuse scandal paralyzed the church in Europe in 2010, and began to emerge on other continents, Benedict issued new policies for bishops to follow on handling sexual abuse accusations, and he held a conference at the Vatican on the issue. But despite calls from many Catholics, he never removed prelates who, court cases and documents revealed, put children at risk by failing to report pedophiles or remove them from the priesthood.

It is not that these cardinals behaved so differently from the others, or that they do not have achievements to their names. It is just that they happened to come from pinpoints on the Catholic world map where long-hidden secrets became public because victims organized, government officials investigated, lawyers sued or the news media paid attention.

They include cardinals from Belgium, Chile and Italy. They include the dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, who is accused of taking large monetary gifts from a religious order, the Legion of Christ, and halting an investigation into its founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel — who was later exposed as a pathological abuser and liar.

They also include cardinals reviled by many in their own countries, like Cardinal Sean Brady, the primate of All Ireland, who survived an uproar after government investigations uncovered endemic cover-ups of the sexual and physical abuse of minors.

“There’s so many of them,” said Justice Anne Burke, a judge in Illinois who served on the American bishops’ first advisory board 10 years ago. “They all have participated in one way or another in having actual information about criminal conduct, and not doing anything about it. What are you going to do? They’re all not going to participate in the conclave?”

Even one cardinal frequently mentioned as a leading candidate for pope has been accused of turning a blind eye toward abuse victims. The Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet issued apologies to the many victims of abuse in church boarding schools in Quebec Province, but left behind widespread resentment when he reportedly refused to meet with them.

Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago, Chile; Ian Austen from Ottawa; and Gaia Pianigiani from Rome.

Read More..

Video Shows French Family’s Kidnappers Are Nigerian Extremists

LAGOS, Nigeria — A French family kidnapped last week on the Cameroon-Nigeria border appeared on a video posted Monday on YouTube, with one of the hostages and a gunman saying that the family is being held by the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram.

The family members — three adults and four children — are shown sitting on the ground inside a sort of tent made from prayer mats, in front of a black Qaeda-style banner, grim-faced but apparently in good health. The children, boys ages 5 to 12, fidget and glance at the camera. The family is flanked by two masked, fatigues-wearing men holding rifles, and in front of them s another masked hostage taker, who reads out a statement in Arabic demanding the release of “brothers” and “sisters” and threatening twice to “slaughter those we took” unless the group’s demands are met.

The French military campaign against Islamist militants in Mali is obliquely referred to by the masked gunman, who says “the president of France” has “waged war against Islam.”

Before that, a man identified by the French media as Tanguy Moulin-Fournier, the children’s father, reads a statement in French saying the family was “arrested” by Boko Haram. He uses the group’s Arabic name — it means “those engaged in the propagation and teaching of the prophet and of jihad” — which is responsible for hundreds of killings in a three-year insurgency in Nigeria’s north.

Next to him are a woman, apparently his wife, and a man, his brother; his wife is wearing a black head covering.

On Monday evening, French officials, including Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, identified the kidnappers as members of Boko Haram, with Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius calling the video “terribly shocking.”

But the link to Boko Haram remained unproven Monday night. The video differs from others released by the group in that Hausa, the language of Nigeria’s north, is not spoken on it, and Boko Haram had not previously been associated with kidnapping Westerners or showing them on videos. In addition, purported members of Boko Haram denied, in a statement to Nigerian journalists over the weekend, involvement in the kidnapping.

Mr. Moulin-Fournier, an expatriate employee of the French gas group GDF Suez, was vacationing with his family at a national park in northern Cameroon near the border with Nigeria when they were seized early last Tuesday by motorcycle-riding gunmen. Cameroon officials said the hostages were then taken across the border to Nigeria to the area that gave birth to Boko Haram nearly four years ago and where it is strongest, Borno State.

The group has waged a relentless guerrilla campaign of bombings and ambushes there and across northern Nigeria, which killed some 800 people last year alone. Its goals, beyond spreading mayhem and undermining the Nigerian state, remain vague, though it has demanded the establishment of Shariah law in Nigeria.

While Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the deadly 2011 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, the group has focused mostly on Nigerian targets, which would make the kidnapping of the French family something of a departure. In the video, apart from the admonishment to “the president of France,” the masked gunman warns President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria that “we will establish the Islamic state of Nigeria.”

The gunman tells Mr. Jonathan in Arabic, according to the SITE Monitoring Service: “We say to you: If you want us to leave those French people, leave all of our women whom you imprisoned by your hands quickly, because we know that all ways of disbelief are the same, and all of you are equally in war with us.”

The gunman also warns the president of Cameroon to release Boko Haram members — the gunman uses that informal name for the group — though none is known to be held by that country.

Though kidnapping has not so far been part of Boko Haram’s campaign, it has figured in that of a splinter group, Ansaru, known to be holding a number of Western hostages.

Nigerian officials declined to comment on the video Monday night and have said almost nothing about the kidnapping. The French, however, reiterated their belief that the family is being held in Nigeria, not Cameroon.

Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris.

Read More..

Nazaré Journal: On Portugal Beach, Riding a Wave That Hits Like a Quake

Rafael Marchante/Reuters

Garett McNamara preparing to surf at Praia do Norte beach. “Praia do Norte is the best secret in the world,” Mr. McNamara said by telephone from Hawaii.

NAZARÉ, Portugal — The big ones typically come only once a year, in the winter. Whipped up by powerful storms in the North Atlantic, they roll for days toward Europe, rising to seemingly impossible heights before crashing on the shores of Praia do Norte, a beach along the Portuguese coast just north of this picturesque fishing town.

“It is like an earthquake,” said Pedro Pisco, a city hall administrator from this old fishing port, a few miles away from Praia do Norte. “When it breaks, you can feel the earth shaking under your feet.”

The area has a reputation as a dangerous spot for its turbulent gales, crushing surf and frequent accidents, though on a recent day the sea was flat as a reflecting pool. Normally, though, the waves crash on shore with a special power, and for years residents were not even sure they were safe to surf.

Despite its charm and a stunning 14th-century church, Nazaré has seen some bad times, with the decline of its once-prosperous fishing industry and an exodus of local youth. And that was before the euro crisis and the deep slump in the Portuguese economy.

But thanks to a photo that electrified the world last month — showing a big-wave surfer named Garett McNamara setting a world record by streaking down the face of an estimated 100-foot breaker — the city is now busily trying to cash in on its moment of fame to promote itself and its now famous beach, Praia do Norte, as a pre-eminent big wave surfing spot.

The waves here have long been compared to invincible enemies, killing fishermen, vacationers and frequently inundating streets and shops. There is even a spot called “the reef of widows,” where by legend the wives of fishermen would watch their husbands drowning after waves had destroyed their boats.

The town is still filled with widows wearing black dresses or the traditional seven layers of multicolored petticoats and long socks. A local legend says that women wore seven skirts because while waiting for their husbands to sail home, they would count seven waves until the sea would calm down.

Dino Casimiro, a 35-year-old body-boarder from Nazaré, is an ardent admirer of the waves and one of the major initiators of the city’s image makeover.

“For many years, we didn’t know if the waves were surfable or not,” said Mr. Casimiro, a physical education teacher in several local schools. “They were too big.”

In 2010, with the town’s big-wave fame spreading, several of the biggest names in surfing — including Mr. McNamara, who lives in Hawaii, and Kelly Slater, Shane Dorian and Tiago Pires, the Portuguese surf champion — came to Praia do Norte. “Praia do Norte is the best secret in the world,” Mr. McNamara said by telephone from Hawaii. “There is nowhere in the world where you can be so close to the giant waves.”

The project, called the “Zon North Canyon show” and developed with Mr. McNamara, was aimed at promoting him as well as the town. It was sponsored by Zon, Portugal’s main media holding company, after Mr. McNamara broke his first world record here by surfing a 78-foot wave.

Then last month Mr. McNamara spent about 30 seconds on the face of a giant wave still spoken of with awe by other surfers. “It was like riding a mountain, like snowboarding down a giant mountain,” he said.

There are big wave spots far from land, like Cortes Bank 100 miles west of San Diego, Calif. But there are very few in coastal areas, because the gently sloping continental shelf normally flattens out the giants, gradually sapping their strength before they can reach land. But this small part of the Portuguese coast sits at the end of a giant funnel called the “canyon of Nazaré,” 130 miles long and 16,000 feet deep (at its deepest), that points like an arrow toward the town.

The canyon, said Luis Quaresma, an oceanographer at the Lisbon-based Instituto Hidrografico, creates “a highway for the swell,” which arrives with a lot of energy, very close to the beach. “While the waves here are almost always imposing, local people say, occasionally — on average, once a year — a few swells of almost unimaginable height will roll in,” he said.

Read More..

2 Palestinians Shot in Clashes With Israeli Settlers

JERUSALEM (AP) — Clashes erupted Saturday in the West Bank, with Jewish settlers shooting two Palestinian demonstrators in the northern village of Kusra, an Israeli military official and Palestinian residents said.

The unrest reflected mounting friction in the West Bank, where Palestinians have faced off against Israeli troops in recent weeks in a series of large demonstrations protesting Israel’s control of the territory in general and in solidarity with four prisoners on hunger strikes in Israeli jails.

Also on Saturday, a Palestinian prisoner died in an Israeli jail, an event that is likely to intensify tensions in the area.

In the West Bank skirmish, Helmi Abdul-Aziz, 24, was shot in the stomach by Jewish settlers, Palestinian demonstrators said. They said settlers also shot Mustafa Hilal, 14, in the foot.

An Israeli military official confirmed that two Palestinians had been shot, apparently by settlers, since the Israeli military forces there were not using live ammunition.

Villagers said the clashes began when a group of Jewish settlers encroached on their village lands and fired guns. They said settlers chased a Palestinian farmer and his family off land, prompting the farmer to call on other villagers to confront the settlers, and men on both sides hurled rocks at one another.

In an Israeli jail on Saturday, Arafat Shalish Shahin Jaradat, a Palestinian prisoner, died apparently of a heart attack, according to an Israeli prison services spokeswoman, Sivan Weizman. She said that Mr. Jaradat had not been on a hunger strike.

Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, said that Mr. Jaradat, 30, was arrested last week after he was involved in a rock-throwing attack that injured an Israeli citizen. Mr. Jaradat admitted to the charge, as well to another West Bank rock-throwing episode last year, the Shin Bet said.

A Shin Bet spokesman said that Mr. Jaradat had not been beaten during an interrogation.

Read More..

Russians Demand Return of Brother of Dead Adopted Boy in Texas

MOSCOW — Russian lawmakers on Friday demanded the return of a 2-year-old boy whose 3-year-old brother, adopted by the same family in Texas, died under murky circumstances in January, prompting allegations of abuse and an investigation.

The younger boy, Kristopher Shatto, who was born Kirill Kuzmin in Russia, remains in the custody of his adoptive parents, Alan and Laura Shatto, in Gardendale, Tex. His biological mother, Yulia V. Kuzmina, who lost custody of the boys because of alcohol addiction, has also demanded Kirill’s return.

But even as the State Duma, the lower house of Parliament, adopted a resolution calling for Kirill to be brought back to Russia, news outlets here reported that Ms. Kuzmina and her boyfriend had gotten into a drunken brawl and were removed from a train by the police while returning to Gdov, a town near the border with Estonia. They had been in Moscow for a television appearance.

Yevgeny Usovich, the owner of a resort on Lake Peipus where Ms. Kuzmina’s boyfriend, Vladimir Antipenko, worked as a bathhouse attendant, said he had seen the couple after their return but was unable to get details of their travel. “It was useless; they were drunk,” Mr. Usovich said in a telephone interview. “What could I find from them?”

In an interview with the Interfax news agency, Mr. Usovich said employees at the Ustye Beach Resort, where Mr. Antipenko worked, were shocked by the television appearance. “The staff here at the club were outraged as they were watching yesterday’s television program,” Mr. Usovich said. “And all of them said the child must not be handed back over to this couple.”

The older boy, Max Shatto, who was born Maksim Kuzmin, died on Jan. 21, and news of his death set off a huge outcry this week in Russia, which late last year banned adoptions by American citizens. Texas child welfare officials said they had received a report of abuse on the same day that Max died.

On Thursday, Shirley Standefer, chief investigator for the Ector County Medical Examiner’s Office in Texas, said bruises were found on Max’s lower abdomen. An autopsy was conducted on Jan. 23, and it normally takes 8 to 12 weeks to get results, she said. The chief medical examiner will then rule on the cause of death, she added, possibly early next week.

Russia’s child rights commissioner, Pavel A. Astakhov, who had said he would help Ms. Kuzmina regain custody of Kirill, posted a statement on his Web site on Friday seeming to backtrack after the reports of her drunkenness. He said that a decision on restoring parental rights could be made only by a court and that the bigger issue was the way American courts had mishandled abuse cases involving adopted Russian children.

“I repeat once again — the final decision is made by the court only,” Mr. Astakhov said in his statement. “Unfortunately, the debate around the death of little Maksim Kuzmin does not solve the main problem — to restore justice.”

Some Russian officials quickly accused the adoptive mother, Ms. Shatto, of beating the boy to death, but they have since pulled back and said she was guilty of negligence at a minimum.

President Valdimir V. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, on Friday urged the public to wait for the forensic results. “To qualify it is a murder or as an accident is not allowed while there is still no evidence,” Mr. Peskov said on Dozhd, a television station. “In this case, I would consider it necessary to temper emotions a bit.”

Earlier in the day, the American ambassador to Russia, Michael A. McFaul, posted a statement on his blog in English and Russian calling Max’s death a “tragedy” but urging that it not be exploited. In the post, Mr. McFaul said he was “troubled” by how some Russian news outlets were portraying the United States and Americans in the context of the Shatto case.

Ms. Shatto has told investigators that she had left the boys playing outside unattended and returned to find Max lying on the ground, unresponsive. He died later that day at a hospital.

In the resolution adopted on Friday, Russian lawmakers urged American officials to regard the issue of adopted Russian children in the United States as an “emergency situation requiring immediate reaction on the part of all government branches of our states.”

Such adoption cases are now covered by a bilateral agreement between the two countries — ratified last year — that sets forth a number of requirements for oversight and cooperation. Along with the adoption ban, which took effect on Jan. 1, the Russian government announced that it would terminate the existing agreement on adoptions on Jan. 1, 2014, following a required one-year notification period.

Mr. Putin called the adoption ban an appropriate retaliation for an American law that seeks to punish Russians accused of violating human rights.

The Russian law was named for Dima Yakovlev, a 21-month-old boy who was adopted from Russia and died of heatstroke in Virginia in July 2008, after being left in a parked car for nine hours by his father, Miles Harrison. Mr. Harrison was acquitted of manslaughter charges by a judge who called the death a tragic accident.

Dozens of American families are still hoping to complete adoptions that were in process when the ban took effect. The issue has become a major source of tension in an increasingly troubled diplomatic relationship. Officials have said that Secretary of State John Kerry and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, will discuss the Shatto case among other issues at a meeting next week in Berlin.

Staci Semrad contributed reporting from Lubbock, Tex.

Read More..

Montevideo Journal: Uruguay’s Video Game Start-Ups Garner Attention

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — For a start-up that has a hit video game for the iPhone, the new loft-style offices of Ironhide Game Studio are exactly what one would expect — a newly hired staff labors feverishly on software updates not far from a pinball machine and custom-built monster arcade cabinet intended for letting off steam.

But the company, a success in the fiercely competitive field of video game development, stands out from other high-tech ventures in one respect: its unconventional location, which frequently confuses people abroad. “They politely ask, ‘Where is Uruguay?’ ” said Álvaro Azofra, one of the three founders of Ironhide, the company behind Kingdom Rush, a lucratively popular game in the United States that involves a cartoonish kingdom under attack by marauding yetis and ogres.

Squeezed between Brazil and Argentina and long dependent on commodities exports, Uruguay may be better known for its flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. But attention is now shifting to the country’s growing constellation of start-ups that are engineering video games for computers and hand-held devices.

Developers point to a variety of reasons that Uruguay has been able to compete with South America’s larger economies, whether the creativity of its engineers and commercial artists or its relatively relaxed immigration rules and extensive use of computers in schools.

“It’s ironic, because historically, this is a country that hates entrepreneurship, but not the culture of entrepreneurship,” said Gonzalo Frasca, a video game theorist whose company, Powerful Robot, has developed numerous games for clients in the United States, including Legends of Ooo, based on the Cartoon Network animated television series “Adventure Time.”

Mr. Frasca, 40, contrasted the skepticism that persists in relation to private enterprise in Uruguay’s cradle-to-grave welfare state, in which companies in sectors like telecommunications, casinos and even whiskey production remain under state control, with the country’s robust tradition of creativity in the arts and sciences.

“We still have strong schools for computer science,” said Mr. Frasca, who has a doctorate in video game studies from IT University of Copenhagen and is a pioneer in Uruguay’s game industry. “When people graduate, they realize they’re in a small country where they have no choice but to engage with the rest of the world.”

While ORT, Uruguay’s largest private university, offers one of the region’s first degrees in video game design, the relaxed atmosphere of seaside Montevideo — the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once remarked that his countrymen resembled “Argentines on Valium” — can still make it seem as if it would be an unlikely place for technology start-ups to thrive.

Other parts of Latin America are nurturing their own video game development scenes. Chile, for instance, recently drew attention when Atakama Labs, a game developer based in Santiago, was acquired by the Japanese gaming company DeNA.

Gaming studios have also emerged in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two largest cities, but developers there complain of byzantine tax regulations and labor rules that make hiring employees costlier than in some rich industrialized countries. In Argentina, dozens of game-developing start-ups have been founded in Buenos Aires.

But while Argentina has traditionally had more companies in the industry, some of the momentum is seen shifting across the border to Uruguay as Argentine ventures struggle with abrupt changes in economic policy, including the tightening of currency controls that have complicated operations for exporters.

In Latin America and beyond, developers are seeking to mimic the success of Kingdom Rush, ranked in 2012 among the top-selling paid applications for the iPhone in the United States. In addition to Ironhide and Powerful Robot, an array of other game developers operates quietly.

Some, like Trojan Chicken, a developer of educational games in Spanish for schoolchildren, benefit from the heavy presence of the state across Uruguay’s economy, which avoided the privatization wave of neighboring Latin American countries in the 1990s.

Ingenio, a state-controlled incubator for start-ups, helped finance Trojan Chicken, which has created educational games including 1811, an adventure game set in colonial Uruguay, and D.E.D., a detective game in which players solve thefts of national heritage. The games are designed to be played on the inexpensive laptops distributed to schoolchildren across Uruguay.

Nearly all of the 300,000 children in Uruguay’s public schools now have their own computers, after the authorities here began embracing One Laptop per Child, the ambitious project aimed at bringing computing to children in the developing world, in 2006. Called the Plan Ceibal here, it is financed by public money.

Miguel Brechner, the director of the Plan Ceibal, said the initiative was already serving as a catalyst for Uruguayan content developers, notably gaming and animation studios. Describing Ceibal as a “digital equality plan,” he said that “reality has shown that kids get excited about games.”

Encompassing the video game companies, software development in Uruguay has evolved into a $600 million industry, making the country Latin America’s leader in per-capita software exports. But some here say that the industry may also be falling victim to its success, as salaries for developers rapidly climb and make it more expensive for start-ups to compete internationally.

Still, Uruguay’s immigration laws offer certain advantages in the competition for talented employees. Building on a history of attracting immigrants from Europe, engineers, animators and other foreign hires at start-ups can legally reside and work in Uruguay while their applications for work visas are being processed.

“Uruguay is a remarkably open place when it comes to attracting talent,” said Evan Henshaw-Plath, an American among the founders of the company that became Twitter. After moving to Uruguay in 2007, Mr. Henshaw-Plath founded a software development company that now has employees from countries like Poland and Ecuador.

Drawing a contrast between Uruguay and Brazil, he delights in telling a story about an American technology investor based in Japan who was about to embark on a business trip to South America aimed at finding start-ups in which to invest or to acquire outright.

Upon discovering that Brazil required Americans to go through a bureaucratic ordeal to obtain a visa, the investor canceled his trip there. Instead, he visited Uruguay, which has no such visa requirements, and eventually acquired Mr. Henshaw-Plath’s 20-person company, Cubox.

Mauricio Rabuffetti contributed reporting.

Read More..

World Briefing | Africa: Nigeria: Security Service Says It Halted Group Watching Israeli and U.S. Targets

Nigeria’s State Security Service said Wednesday that it broke up what it characterized as a terrorist group, backed by “Iranian handlers,” that wanted to gather intelligence about locations frequented by Americans and Israelis. The service said it arrested three suspects, but one remained at large. A spokeswoman, Marilyn Ogar, who was reading from a statement, identified the head of the group as Abdullahi Mustaphah Berende, a leader of a local Shiite sect. “He personally took photographs of the Israeli culture center in Ikoyi, Lagos,” she said. The group also conducted surveillance on USAID and the United States Peace Corps, she said. Ms. Ogar did not take questions.

Read More..

Pistorius Denies Murdering Girlfriend

Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

Oscar Pistorius wept at a hearing on Tuesday seeking bail.

PRETORIA, South Africa — Early on Feb. 14, Oscar Pistorius says, he heard a strange noise coming from inside his bathroom, climbed out of bed, grabbed his 9-millimeter pistol, hobbled on his stumps to the door and fired four shots.

“I fail to understand how I could be charged with murder, let alone premeditated,” Mr. Pistorius said in an affidavit read Tuesday to a packed courtroom by his defense lawyer, Barry Roux. “I had no intention to kill my girlfriend.”

Prosecutors painted a far different picture, one of a calculated killer, a world-renowned athlete who had the presence of mind and calm to strap on his prosthetic legs, walk 20 feet to the bathroom door and open fire as his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, cowered inside, behind a locked door.

“The applicant shot and killed an unarmed, innocent women,” Gerrie Nel, the chief prosecutor, said in court on Tuesday. That, Mr. Nel argued, amounted to premeditated murder, a charge that could send Mr. Pistorius to prison for life.

In court, Mr. Pistorius, a Paralympic track star who competed against able-bodied athletes at the London Olympics despite having lost both his lower legs as an infant, wept uncontrollably as Mr. Roux gave the runner’s account of the fateful early morning. At one point, Magistrate Desmond Nair called a recess to allow Mr. Pistorius, who was sobbing loudly, his face contorted, to regain his composure.

“My compassion as a human being does not allow me to just sit here,” Magistrate Nair said.

As the defense and prosecution laid out their competing versions of the shooting, some details were beyond dispute.

Mr. Pistorius and Ms. Steenkamp were alone in the house, having spent the evening there. Around 3 a.m., Mr. Pistorius shot Ms. Steenkamp through the bathroom door, fatally wounding her. He broke down the door and carried her down the stairs, where she died in the foyer of his upscale home in a highly secured compound.

The young woman, a model, was cremated Tuesday on the other side of the country in her hometown, Port Elizabeth. Her family and friends mourned her and called for the authorities to deal harshly with Mr. Pistorius.

“There’s a space missing inside all the people that she knew that can’t be filled again,” her brother, Adam Steenkamp, told reporters after the memorial service.

In court, Mr. Pistorius is seeking bail on the charge of premeditated murder, but he faces an uphill battle. Magistrate Nair ruled Tuesday that the case would be treated as the most serious kind of offense, which means bail will be granted only if the defense can prove extraordinary circumstances requiring it.

The court proceedings, though they concerned only whether Mr. Pistorius would receive bail, offered the first real glimpse into what unfolded at his home on the day of the shooting.

In his affidavit, Mr. Pistorius said that he and Ms. Steenkamp had decided to stay in for the night. He canceled plans with his friends for a night on the town in Johannesburg, while she opted against movies with one of her friends. They had a quiet evening, he said. She did yoga. He watched television. About 10 p.m., they went to sleep.

In the early morning hours, he said, he woke up to move a fan from the balcony and to close the sliding doors in the bedroom.

“I heard a noise in the bathroom and realized that someone was in the bathroom,” he said. “I felt a sense of terror rushing over me.”

He had already said in the affidavit that he feared South Africa’s rampant violent crime, and later added that he was worried because there were no bars on the window to the bathroom. Construction workers had left ladders in his garden, he said.

“I believed someone had entered my house,” he said in the affidavit. “I grabbed my 9-millimeter pistol from underneath my bed. On my way to the bathroom I screamed words to the effect for him/them to get out of my house and for Reeva to phone the police. It was pitch dark in the bedroom, and I thought Reeva was in bed.”

Walking on his stumps, he heard the sound of movement inside the toilet, a small room within the bathroom.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.

Read More..

China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

This 12-story building on the outskirts of Shanghai is the headquarters of Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army. China’s defense ministry has denied that it is responsible for initiating digital attacks.

On the outskirts of Shanghai, in a run-down neighborhood dominated by a 12-story white office tower, sits a People’s Liberation Army base for China’s growing corps of cyberwarriors.

The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around the white tower.

An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area.

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”

Other security firms that have tracked “Comment Crew” say they also believe the group is state-sponsored, and a recent classified National Intelligence Estimate, issued as a consensus document for all 16 of the United States intelligence agencies, makes a strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for commands like Unit 61398, according to officials with knowledge of its classified content.

Mandiant provided an advance copy of its report to The New York Times, saying it hoped to “bring visibility to the issues addressed in the report.” Times reporters then tested the conclusions with other experts, both inside and outside government, who have examined links between the hacking groups and the army (Mandiant was hired by The New York Times Company to investigate a sophisticated Chinese-origin attack on its news operations, but concluded it was not the work of Comment Crew, but another Chinese group. The firm is not currently working for the Times Company but it is in discussions about a business relationship.)

While Comment Crew has drained terabytes of data from companies like Coca-Cola, increasingly its focus is on companies involved in the critical infrastructure of the United States — its electrical power grid, gas lines and waterworks. According to the security researchers, one target was a company with remote access to more than 60 percent of oil and gas pipelines in North America. The unit was also among those that attacked the computer security firm RSA, whose computer codes protect confidential corporate and government databases.

Contacted Monday, officials at the Chinese embassy in Washington again insisted that their government does not engage in computer hacking, and that such activity is illegal. They describe China itself as a victim of computer hacking, and point out, accurately, that there are many hacking groups inside the United States. But in recent years the Chinese attacks have grown significantly, security researchers say. Mandiant has detected more than 140 Comment Crew intrusions since 2006. American intelligence agencies and private security firms that track many of the 20 or so other Chinese groups every day say those groups appear to be contractors with links to the unit.

While the unit’s existence and operations are considered a Chinese state secret, Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that the Mandiant report was “completely consistent with the type of activity the Intelligence Committee has been seeing for some time.”

Read More..

Graham and McCain Say They Will End Bid to Block Hagel

Two of the most outspoken Republican critics of Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense indicated Sunday that they would no longer hold up his Senate confirmation.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on Fox News Sunday that he would stand aside because Mr. Hagel had disavowed comments that he was said to have made during a talk at Rutgers University in 2007 that the State Department was an adjunct of the Israeli Foreign Minister’s office.

“I got a letter back from Senator Hagel in response to my question, ‘Did you say that, and do you believe that?’ And the letter said he did not recall saying that,” Mr. Graham said. “He disavows that statement.”

Mr. Graham, one of the most vociferous and persistent critics of Mr. Hagel’s nomination, added, “I’ll just take him at his word unless something new comes along.”

Although Mr. Graham said he would no longer try to block the nomination, he was far from giving it an emphatic endorsement, calling Mr. Hagel “one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of defense in a very long time.”

Those comments were echoed, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, a close friend of Mr. Graham and a public opponent of Mr. Hagel’s nomination.

“I don’t believe he is qualified,” Mr. McCain said. “But I don’t believe that we should hold up his nomination any further because I think it’s a reasonable amount of time to have questions answered.”

Mr. Graham and Mr. McCain were among a majority of Republicans in the Senate who backed a filibuster on Thursday when Mr. Hagel’s nomination came to a vote. Despite four Republicans’ crossing over to vote with the majority Democrats, the nomination fell one vote short of passing an up-or-down floor vote.

That unprecedented move forced the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, to set up another vote on Feb. 26. With Democratic control of the Senate, Mr. Hagel is expected to win confirmation whenever his nomination comes up for a vote.

Mr. Hagel, a Republican former senator from Nebraska, has been broadly criticized by his former colleagues over his positions on Iran, Iraq and Israel, and faced a nomination process rocky even by recent fractious standards.

President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, appearing Sunday on the ABC News program “This Week,” said that the White House had “grave concern” that national security was at stake, given the Senate Republicans’ delaying tactics in confirming both a new Pentagon chief and a director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“If you look at Chuck Hagel — decorated war veteran himself, war hero, Republican senator, somebody who over the course of the last many years, either as a Republican senator or as a chairman of the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, I’ve worked with very closely,” he said. “This guy has one thing in mind — how to protect the country.”

Mr. McDonough, who was formerly Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, working under John O. Brennan, the president’s choice for C.I.A. director, added that “between John Brennan as the C.I.A. director and Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, we want to make sure that we have those guys sitting in the chairs working. Because I don’t want there to have been something missed because of this hangup here in Washington.”

The White House and Senate Democrats have continued to express confidence that both men will be confirmed. Democrats have enough votes to approve both nominees, but they do not have the 60 votes necessary to overcome any filibuster.

After Thursday’s vote, outside groups campaigning against Mr. Hagel’s nomination said they would step up efforts to find damaging information and to pressure senators to vote against him.

Read More..

Dismissed as Doomsayers, Advocates for Meteor Detection Feel Vindicated

For decades, scientists have been on the lookout for killer objects from outer space that could devastate the planet. But warnings that they lacked the tools to detect the most serious threats were largely ignored, even as skeptics mocked the worriers as Chicken Littles.

Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Dr. Edward Lu, a former NASA astronaut and Google executive, has warned about space threats.

No more. The meteor that rattled Siberia on Friday, injuring hundreds of people and traumatizing thousands, has suddenly brought new life to efforts to deploy adequate detection tools, in particular a space telescope that would scan the solar system for dangers.

A group of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who helped build thriving companies like eBay, Google and Facebook has already put millions of dollars into the effort and saw Friday’s shock wave as a turning point in raising hundreds of millions more.

“Wouldn’t it be silly if we got wiped out because we weren’t looking?” said Edward Lu, a former NASA astronaut and Google executive who leads the detection effort. “This is a wake-up call from space. We’ve got to pay attention to what’s out there.”

Astronomers know of no asteroids or comets that pose a major threat to the planet. But NASA estimates that fewer than 10 percent of the big dangers have been discovered.

Dr. Lu’s group, called the B612 Foundation after the imaginary asteroid on which the Little Prince lived, is one team of several pursuing ways to ward off extraterrestrial threats. NASA is another, and other private groups are emerging, like Planetary Resources, which wants not only to identify asteroids near Earth but also to mine them.

“Our job is to be the first line of defense, and we take that very seriously,” James Green, the director of planetary science at NASA headquarters, said in an interview Friday after the Russian strike. “No one living on this planet has ever before been hurt. That’s historic.”

Dr. Green added that the Russian episode was sure to energize the field and that an even analysis of the meteor’s remains could help reveal clues about future threats.

“Our scientists are excited,” he said. “Russian planetary scientists are already collecting meteorites from this event.”

The slow awakening to the danger began long ago, as scientists found hundreds of rocky scars indicating that cosmic intruders had periodically reshaped the planet.

The discoveries included not just obvious features like Meteor Crater in Arizona, but wide zones of upheaval. A crater more than a hundred miles wide beneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico suggested that, 65 million years ago, a speeding rock from outer space had raised enough planetary mayhem to end the reign of the dinosaurs.

Some people remain skeptical of the cosmic threat and are glad for taxpayer money to go toward urgent problems on Earth rather than outer space. But many scientists who have examined the issues have become convinced that better precautions are warranted in much the same way that homeowners buy insurance for unlikely events that can result in severe damage to life and property.

Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, astronomers turned their telescopes on the sky with increasing vigor to look for killer rocks. The rationale was statistical. They knew about a number of near misses and calculated that many other rocky threats whirling about the solar system had gone undetected.

In 1996, with little fanfare, the Air Force also began scanning the skies for speeding rocks, giving credibility to an activity once seen as reserved for doomsday enthusiasts. It was the world’s first known government search.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration took a lead role with what it called the Spaceguard Survey. In 2007, it issued a report estimating that 20,000 asteroids and comets orbited close enough to the planet to deliver blows that could destroy cities or even end all life. Today, with limited financing, NASA supports modest telescopes in the southwestern United States and in Hawaii that make more than 95 percent of the discoveries of the objects coming near the Earth.

Scientists lobbied hard for a space telescope that would get high above the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. It would orbit the Sun, peering across the solar system, and would have a much better chance of finding large space rocks.

But with the nation immersed in two wars and other earthly priorities, the government financing never materialized. Last year, Dr. Lu, who left the NASA astronaut corps in 2007 to work for Google, joined with veterans of the space program and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to accelerate the asteroid hunt.

Read More..

Ecuadoreans Are Apprehensive Over Likely Re-Election of President Correa

Guillermo Granja/Reuters

A supporter of President Rafael Correa held a poster, “We already have a president, we have Rafael,” in Ambato, Ecuador.

CARACAS, Venezuela — In the final analysis, Edwin Tatés supports President Rafael Correa of Ecuador and wants him to be re-elected. He just does not want it to be too easy.

So for the election on Sunday, Mr. Tatés, a 39-year-old father of two, plans to vote against the president, in the hope that the contest will go to a runoff — and possibly curb the president’s rampant ego.

“The bad thing about him is his arrogance and that he insults all his opponents, and if he wins in the first round he will think he’s better than everyone else, and he will be even worse,” said Mr. Tatés, who lives in the capital, Quito.

Mr. Correa holds a hefty lead in polls and, with or without Mr. Tatés’s help, seems likely to cruise to re-election. That alone is remarkable in a country that had seven presidents in the decade before Mr. Correa took office in January 2007, including, at one point, three in one month.

A new four-year term, the last allowed under the new Constitution he pushed for in 2008, would be pivotal for Mr. Correa, who has pledged to deepen and consolidate what he calls a Citizen Revolution. That means continuing policies that favor the country’s poor, including expanded health care, improved schools, better roads in rural areas and monthly grants to poor families.

It may also give Mr. Correa a chance to raise his international profile. With the ailing president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, sidelined by cancer, Mr. Correa is arguably the most vocal leftist leader in the region. He made international headlines last year when he defied Britain by granting asylum to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

Mr. Correa seems so confident that he will win re-election that he has focused his campaign on winning a majority for his party, Alianza País, in the National Assembly.

“We need a convincing majority in the Assembly to pass the laws that have been blocked by these irresponsible people who want to harm the government and who don’t care if they harm the country,” Mr. Correa, 49, said at a rally last month.

At the top of Mr. Correa’s agenda is a long-stalled law regulating the news media that critics say would crimp press freedom. Opponents fear a legislative majority would feed what they see as Mr. Correa’s authoritarian tendencies.

“There is a lot of apprehension that if he wins the Assembly, there will be a greater concentration of power,” said José Hernández, an editor of Hoy, a Quito daily newspaper. “He will try to flatten everyone who is in his way. He will try to dominate more because that’s his personality, and that’s what he wants to do.”

Since he first took office in 2007, Mr. Correa has expanded presidential power and vigorously pursued opponents. A judicial overhaul extended his influence to the courts. Laws meant for terrorists have been used to jail antigovernment protesters. While he has worked in the past with other parties to create a coalition to pass laws in the legislature, his own party has never had a majority on its own.

“We have suffered four years of constant opposition to laws that are required by the Constitution,” said Rosana Alvarado, an Alianza País member of the Assembly who is running for re-election. “If the president has opponents in the Assembly instead of collaborators, this government cannot continue to the degree required by a process of transformation.”

An economist who studied at the University of Illinois, Mr. Correa has an irascible governing style, and perhaps no group has come in for more of his vituperation than the news media. He has run a crusade against the press, suing newspapers and journalists and accusing them of being out to destroy his government.

He has repeatedly tried to pass a communications law that would impose strict penalties on reporters and news media outlets in cases of libel or errors; it would also create a commission to regulate journalists’ activities.

He has governed during a period of relative prosperity. Ecuador is the smallest oil producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, yet oil sales account for about half of the country’s income from exports and about a third of all tax revenues, according to the United States Energy Information Administration.

William Neuman reported from Caracas, Venezuela, and Maggy Ayala from Quito, Ecuador.

Read More..

Loi Journal: In Vietnam, Some Chose to Be Single Mothers

Justin Mott for the International Herald Tribune

Nguyen Thi Nhan at home with her grandson, Thao, 2. Abandoned by her husband after the war, she asked another man to impregnate her.

LOI, Vietnam — They had no plan to break barriers or cause trouble. But 30 years ago in this bucolic village in northern Vietnam, the fierce determination of one group of women to become mothers upended centuries-old gender rules and may have helped open the door for a nation to redefine parenthood.

One recent morning in Loi, as farmers in conical straw hats waded quietly through rice paddies, a small group of women played with their grandchildren near a stream. Their husbands were nowhere to be found, not because they perished in the war, but because the women decided to have children without husbands.

The women’s story began during the American War, as it is called here, when many put the revolution before their families. As peace settled more than a decade later, it became clear that they — like so many of their generation — had sacrificed their marriageable years to the war.

At that time Vietnamese women traditionally married around 16, and those still single at 20 would often be considered “qua lua,” or “past the marriageable age.” When single men who survived the war returned home, they often preferred younger brides, exacerbating the effects of a sex ratio already skewed by male mortality in the war. According to the Vietnam Population and Housing Census of 2009, after reunification in 1979 there were on average only about 88 men for every 100 women between 20 and 44.

Unlike previous generations of unwanted Vietnamese women who dutifully accepted the “so,” or “destiny,” of living a solitary life, a group of women in Loi decided to take motherhood into their own hands. They had endured the war, developed a new strength and were determined not to die alone.

One by one they asked men — whom they would never interact with afterward — to help them conceive a child. The practice became known as “xin con,” or “asking for a child,” and it meant breaking with tradition, facing discrimination and enduring the hardships of raising a child alone.

“It was unusual, and quite remarkable,” said Harriet Phinney, an assistant professor of anthropology at Seattle University who is writing a book on the practice of xin con in Vietnam. Purposely conceiving a child out of wedlock, she said, “was unheard-of” before the revolutionary era.

It was a product of the mothers’ bravery, said Ms. Phinney, but also of a postwar society that acknowledged the unique situation of women across Vietnam, including thousands of widows, who were raising children alone.

Some of the women in Loi were willing to share their stories, though they always kept the names of the fathers a tightly held secret. One of the first women in Loi to ask for a child was Nguyen Thi Nhan, now 58.

Ms. Nhan had led a platoon of women during the war, and though she never saw battle, was awarded a medal for her exemplary leadership. Her husband, with whom she had a daughter, abandoned her after the war. Ms. Nhan moved to the cheapest land she could find, a field near the stream on the outskirts of Loi, where a few refugees from bombing nearby still lived. She then asked for a second child, ending up with the son she wished for.

Her first several years were hard. Despite her best efforts, food and money were scarce. The villagers eventually set aside prejudices and accepted her choice, offering to share the little food they could spare. Eventually, Ms. Nhan was joined by more than a dozen other women. Among them was Nguyen Thi Luu, 63. She had fallen in love with a soldier who was killed in battle in 1972.

“I was 26 when the war ended,” Ms. Luu said. “That was considered too old for marriage, in those times. I did not want to marry a bad, older man, and no single men came to me.”

But Ms. Luu wanted to become a mother, not least so she would have support in her old age. In Vietnam, nursing homes are scarce, and care for the elderly is considered a filial duty.

“I was afraid to die alone,” Ms. Luu said. “I wanted someone to lean on in my old age. I wanted a child of my own.”

Read More..

Russian Ethics Official Steps Aside Over Property Disclosures

MOSCOW — The chairman of the ethics committee in Russia’s lower house of Parliament temporarily relinquished his authority on Wednesday after bloggers posted a raft of documents on the Internet showing him as the owner of expensive real estate, including a luxury oceanfront apartment in South Beach, part of Miami Beach, as well as valuable property in Russia that he did not list on required disclosure forms.

The chairman, Vladimir A. Pekhtin, insisted in a televised statement that he had done nothing wrong, and that his voluntary surrender of authority over the ethics panel would last only for the duration of an investigation that he said would clear him.

But the documents, some of them easily available public property records, showed Mr. Pekhtin’s name on the deeds of at least three properties in Florida, including the South Beach apartment bought last year for nearly $1.3 million in a building where Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, also owns a unit.

Mr. Pekhtin’s official income and property declaration form, posted on Parliament’s Web site, lists no property outside of Russia.

The disclosure of his real estate holdings and the allegations that he failed to properly disclose his assets came just a day after President Vladimir V. Putin proposed legislation that would bar senior Russian officials from holding bank accounts or owning stocks outside the country.

While neither Mr. Putin’s proposal nor any existing law prohibits officials from owning real estate overseas, the disclosure of Mr. Pekhtin’s holdings provided powerful ammunition for critics of Mr. Putin and of United Russia, the party that controls Parliament.

The anticorruption blogger and political opposition leader Aleksei Navalny posted copies of property records and photographs, along with a narrative dripping with sarcasm.

United Russia could entrust Parliament’s ethics committee “only to the most honest, decent and ethical member of the State Duma,” he wrote. “Otherwise, if it turns out this person is not tactful and ethical, it would be embarrassing.”

He noted that another lawmaker, Sergei Zheleznyak, had voiced strong nationalist views and demanded an end to foreign influences in Russia, only to have pictures emerge recently of his children who live and study abroad. Russian bloggers and news organizations were apparently tipped off about the property by someone calling himself Doctor Z, whom the business newspaper Vedmosti described as a researcher living in Spain.

In appearances on Russian television, Mr. Pekhtin said that the property abroad belonged to his son, Aleksei, who lived and worked in the United States.

“I do not have any property abroad,” he said. “There is property belonging to my son.”

In October, Vedmosti reported that Mr. Pekhtin and his wife owned a huge mansion outside St. Petersburg and several other properties near the Bay of Finland, but had disclosed owning only the land and not any buildings on it.

Other records showed that the Pekhtins had bought a number of properties in an area where the government planned to build a new roadway, essentially guaranteeing them cash compensation.

In his statement on television, Mr. Pekhtin said he reserved the right to defend himself in court if necessary.  

Read More..

Despite Claims of Third Blast, North Korean Nuclear Program Remains a Mystery

As scientists and world leaders scrambled Tuesday to judge the importance of North Korea’s claim that it had detonated a third nuclear bomb, the main thing that quickly became evident is how little is known about the country’s increasingly advanced atomic and missile programs.

Even the best news about the test — that it was small by world standards — could have a dangerous downside if the North’s statement that it is learning to miniaturize bombs is true. That technology, which is extremely difficult to master, is crucial to being able to load a weapon atop a long-range missile that might one day reach as far as the United States mainland.

“We don’t know enough to nail it, but we can’t rule out that they’ve done something dangerous” Ray E. Kidder, a scientist who pioneered early nuclear warhead designs at the Livermore weapons lab in California, said of the underground test.

As is usual with tests by the secretive North, it was not even clear if the underground test was nuclear, rather than conventional bomb blasts meant to mimic an underground nuclear test. Experts assume it was nuclear partly from the shape of its seismic signal and because the blast was at the same mountainous site as two earlier nuclear tests.

It also remains unclear whether the North used plutonium or enriched uranium to fuel the bomb. American officials believed that the country’s last two nuclear tests, in 2006 and 2009, used plutonium, and they fear a switch to uranium will allow the country a faster and harder-to-detect path to a bigger arsenal. While scientists are actively hunting for the airborne markers of a uranium test, it is not certain that gases needed to make that judgment escaped the test site.

Scientists said the relatively small size of Tuesday’s blast calmed, at least temporarily, their worst fears: that the North’s recent references to more powerful hydrogen bombs indicated the possibility that it might have at least enough technology to try to test one. Those bombs, nicknamed city-busters, are roughly 1,000 times stronger than atom bombs, and if the North were to get them it would represent an enormous leap in its known abilities. The first American hydrogen bomb to be tested caused the Pacific island of Elugelab to vanish.

What emerged most clearly Tuesday from sensitive global networks that measure faint rumbles in the earth was that the underground blast was most likely larger than North Korea’s past explosions. In Vienna, the preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which runs a global seismic network, said the blast measured 5.0 in seismic magnitude. The United States Geological Survey put its own estimate at 5.1 in magnitude.

Nuclear experts said the magnitude of the blast equaled an atomic blast of about 6,000 tons of high explosive, or six kilotons. The first test by Pyongyang is thought to have packed less than a kiloton of power and was considered a partial failure by the West. The state’s 2009 blast was judged by American intelligence officials to have a power of two kilotons, though some experts outside the government say it might have been as large as this week’s test.

In any case, said Paul Richards, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., it was “a serious explosion.”

Still, even the largest estimates are small by world standards. The first three nuclear tests of China, for instance, were measured at 22 kilotons, 35 kilotons and 250 kilotons.

North Korea’s tests “are limited in explosive power compared with most previous ones,” said Robert S. Norris, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, and the author of “Racing for the Bomb,” a biography of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s military leader. Determining whether the test was fueled by plutonium or uranium is critical because North Korea in 2007 shut down its reactor that made plutonium, prompting analysts to conclude that its supplies of the rare element are now running low. Intelligence officials estimated it had enough fuel for 6 to 10 bombs.

But in 2010, the state revealed what appears to be a fairly advanced program to enrich uranium, which in theory could fuel many bombs since experts believe that North Korea has rich uranium deposits.

Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico who has repeatedly visited North Korea and learned details of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, has suggested that North Korea may be ready to switch to a pure uranium approach, in part because it might have a blueprint for a miniaturized uranium warhead.

He said the North’s leadership might have obtained the blueprint from A. Q. Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear expert, a blueprint of the type he gave Libya for a uranium bomb. It is well known that North Korea obtained its centrifuge design for uranium enrichment from Dr. Khan, and many experts say the Pakistani expert may have thrown in the warhead blueprint as a sweetener.

Analysts say the uranium approach may also offer North Korea the allure of a new secrecy. Centrifuge plants are much easier to hide than reactors.

Finding out whether the bomb was fueled by plutonium, uranium or a mix of the two materials could take some time or might never happen, analysts say.

Not all underground tests leak their explosive residues into the atmosphere or surrounding waters, and some say tests of the size of Tuesday’s blast are probably strong enough to seal any cracks in the rocks.

“If we get samples, I’m sure we’ll learn a lot about it,” Jay C. Davis, a nuclear scientist who helped found a federal effort to improve such analyses, said in an interview.

But if no bomb residue leaks, he added, the nature of the fuel that North Korean used for its third blast may remain a mystery.

Read More..