Florida Sinkhole Growing as Engineers Investigate

Chris O'Meara/Associated Press

An engineer wore a safety line Saturday outside the house in Seffner, Fla., where a bedroom and its occupant fell into a sinkhole.

SEFFNER, Fla. (AP) — Engineers worked gingerly on Saturday to find out more about a slowly growing sinkhole that had swallowed a Florida man in his bedroom, believing the entire house could succumb to the unstable ground.

Brian Blanco/Reuters

Police tape kept onlookers safely across the street on Friday.

Jeremy Bush/Jeremy Bush, via Associated Press

Jeff Bush

Jeff Bush, 37, was in his bedroom on Thursday night when the earth opened and took him and everything else in his room. Five other people were in the house but escaped unharmed. Mr. Bush’s brother jumped into the hole to try to help, but he had to be rescued by a sheriff’s deputy.

Engineers returned to the property on Saturday morning to do more tests after taking soil samples and running tests there all day Friday. They said the entire lot was dangerous, and no one was allowed in the house.

“I cannot tell you why it has not collapsed yet,” said Bill Bracken, the owner of an engineering company called to assess the sinkhole. He described the earth below as a “very large, very fluid mass.”

“This is not your typical sinkhole,” said Michael Merrill, the Hillsborough County administrator. “This is a chasm. For that reason, we’re being very deliberate.”

The hole had grown to 20 feet deep and 30 feet wide by Friday night, and officials said it was still expanding and “seriously unstable.”

Officials delicately addressed another sad reality: Mr. Bush was likely dead, and the family wanted his body.

“They would like us to go in quickly and locate Mr. Bush,” Mr. Merrill said.

Two neighboring houses were evacuated, and officials were considering further evacuations. Members of the media were moved from a lawn across the street to a safer area a few hundred feet away.

“This is a very complex situation,” said the Hillsborough County fire chief, Ron Rogers. “It’s continuing to evolve, and the ground is continuing to collapse.”

Sinkholes are so common in Florida that the state requires home insurers to provide coverage against the danger. While some cars, homes and other buildings have been devoured, it is extremely rare for a sinkhole to swallow a person.

Florida is highly prone to sinkholes because of the underground prevalence of limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water, creating caverns.

“You can almost envision a piece of Swiss cheese,” Taylor Yarkosky, a sinkhole expert from Brooksville, Fla., said while gesturing to the ground and the sky-blue house where the earth opened in Seffner. “Any house in Florida could be in that same situation.”

A sinkhole near Orlando grew to 400 feet across in 1981 and devoured five cars, most of two businesses, a three-bedroom house and the deep end of an Olympic-size swimming pool.

More than 500 sinkholes have been reported in Hillsborough County alone since the government started keeping track in 1954, according to the state’s environmental agency.

The sinkhole that swallowed Mr. Bush caused the home’s concrete floor to cave in around 11 p.m. Thursday as everyone in the Tampa-area house was turning in for the night. It gave way with a loud crash that sounded like a car hitting the house and brought Mr. Bush’s brother, Jeremy, running.

Jeremy Bush said he had jumped into the hole but could not see his brother before the ground crumbled around him. A sheriff’s deputy reached out and pulled him to safety.

“The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn’t care — I wanted to save my brother,” Jeremy Bush said through tears Friday in a neighbor’s yard. “But I just couldn’t do nothing.”

Read More..

U.S. Finds Erdogan Comments on Zionism ‘Offensive,’ Official Says

ANKARA (Reuters) - Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday the United States found a comment by Turkey's prime minister, likening Zionism to crimes against humanity, "objectionable", overshadowing their talks on the crisis in neighboring Syria.

Kerry, on his first trip to a Muslim nation since taking office, met Turkish leaders for talks meant to focus on Syria's civil war and bilateral interests from energy security to counter-terrorism.

But the comment by Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan at a U.N. meeting in Vienna this week, condemned by his Israeli counterpart, the White House and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, has clouded his trip.

"We not only disagree with it, we found it objectionable," Kerry told a news conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, saying he raised the issue directly with Davutoglu and would do so with Erdogan.

Kerry said Turkey and Israel were both key U.S. allies and urged them to restore closer ties.

"Given the many challenges that the neighborhood faces, it is essential that both Turkey and Israel find a way to take steps in order to bring about or to rekindle their historic cooperation," Kerry said.

"I think that's possible but obviously we have to get beyond the kind of rhetoric that we've just seen recently."

Washington needs all the allies it can get as it navigates the political currents of the Middle East, and sees Turkey as the key player in supporting Syria's opposition and planning for the era after President Bashar al-Assad.

But the collapse of Ankara's ties with Israel have undermined U.S. hopes that Turkey could play a role as a broker in the broader region.

Erdogan told the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations meeting in Vienna on Wednesday: "Just as with Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it has become necessary to view Islamophobia as a crime against humanity."

Erdogan's caustic rhetoric on Israel has in the past won applause from conservative supporters at home but raised increasing concern among Western allies.

Ties between Israel and mostly Muslim Turkey have been frosty since 2010, when Israeli marines killed nine Turks in fighting aboard a Palestinian aid ship that tried to breach Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.

"If we must talk about hostile acts, then Israel's attitude and its brutal killing of nine of our civilian citizens in international waters may be called hostile," Davutoglu said, adding Turkey had always stood against anti-Semitism.

"No single statement carries a price higher than the blood of a person ... If Israel wants to hear positive statements from Turkey it needs to reconsider its attitude both towards us and towards the West Bank," he told the news conference.

Turkey has demanded a formal apology for the 2010 incident, compensation for victims and their families and for the Gaza blockade to be lifted. Israel has voiced "regret" and has offered to pay into what it called a "humanitarian fund" through which casualties and relatives could be compensated.

SUPPORT FOR SYRIAN OPPOSITION

Turkey's relations with the United States have always been prickly, driven more by a mutual need for intelligence than any deep cultural affinity. And Erdogan's populist rhetoric, sometimes at apparent odds with U.S. interests, is aimed partly at a domestic audience wary of Washington's influence.

But the two have strong common interests. Officials said Syria would top the agenda in Kerry's meetings with Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, building on the discussions in Rome between 11 mostly European and Arab nations within the "Friends of Syria" group.

After the Rome meeting, Kerry said on Thursday the United States would for the first time give non-lethal aid to the rebels and more than double support to the civilian opposition, although Western powers stopped short of pledging arms.

"We need to continue the discussion which took place in Rome ... in terms of the main goals there is no daylight between us and the Americans," a senior Turkish official said.

"A broad agreement was reached on supporting the opposition. Now our sides need to sit down and really flesh out what we can do to support them in order to change the balance on the ground," he said.

Turkey has been one of Assad's fiercest critics, hosting a NATO Patriot missile defense system, including two U.S. batteries, to protect against a spillover of violence and leading calls for international intervention.

It has spent more than $600 million sheltering refugees from the conflict that began almost two years ago, housing some 180,000 in camps near the border and tens of thousands more who are staying with relatives or in private accommodation.

Washington has given $385 million in humanitarian aid for Syria but U.S. President Barack Obama has so far refused to give arms, arguing it is difficult to prevent them from falling into the hands of militants who could use them on Western targets.

Turkey, too, has been reluctant to provide weapons, fearing direct intervention could cause the conflict to spill across its borders.

(Additional reporting by Gulsen Solaker; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Michael Roddy)

Read More..

After Pledging Loyalty to Successor, Pope Leaves Vatican

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI left the Vatican by helicopter on Thursday afternoon to spend the final hours of his nearly eight-year, scandal-dogged papacy at the papal summer residence. Onlookers in St. Peter’s Square cheered, church bells rang and Romans stood on rooftops to wave flags as he flew from Rome to Castel Gandolfo, a hilltop town southeast of the city where popes have summered for centuries.

More carillons heralded his arrival, and he was greeted by a vivid contingent of silver-suited firemen, gendarmes in red capes, and bishops in black and pink.

Addressing cheering well-wishers from a window at the residence, he said: “Dear friends, I am happy to be with you! Thanks for your friendship and affection! You know this is a different day than others.”

His retirement formally takes effect at 8 p.m. local time (2 p.m. Eastern). “I am just a pilgrim who has reached the last stage in his pilgrimage on this earth,” he said.

Earlier in the day, in one of his concluding acts, Benedict addressed a gathering of more than 100 cardinals who will elect his successor, urging them to be “like an orchestra” that harmonizes for the good of the Roman Catholic Church. From a gilded throne in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace, the pope thanked the cardinals collectively, and then rose to greet each of them individually.

Draped in a red and gold mantle lined with snow-white ermine, Benedict clasped each cardinal’s hands as he removed his red skullcap and kissed ther pope’s ring. Benedict told them, “I will be close to you in prayer” as the next leader of the church is chosen. Many of them were appointed to their powerful positions as so-called princes of the church by Benedict or by his predecessor, John Paul II, and are thus seen as doctrinal conservatives in their mold.

“Among you is also the future pope, whom I promise my unconditional reverence and obedience,” Benedict told the cardinals, reflecting the concern among Vatican watchers about what it will mean to have two popes residing in the Vatican.

As pope emeritus, Benedict intends to reside in Castel Gandolfo for several months and then return to the Vatican to live in an apartment being prepared for him in a convent whose gardens offer a perfect view of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.

He surprised many on Feb. 11 when he announced that, feeling his age and diminishing strength, he would retire, a dramatic step that sent the Vatican hierarchy spinning. He reassured the faithful on Sunday that he was not “abandoning” the church, but would continue to serve, even in retirement. In an emotional and unusually personal message on Wednesday, his final public audience in St. Peter’s Square, Benedict said that he sometimes felt that “the waters were agitated and the winds were blowing against” the church.

His retirement will bring changes in style and substance. Rather than the heavy ornate robes he wore to greet the cardinals, Benedict will wear a simple white cassock, with brown shoes from Mexico replacing the red slippers that he and other popes have traditionally worn, the color symbolizing the blood of the martyrs.

The conclave to elect the next pope, expected in mid-March, will begin amid a swirl of scandal. On Monday, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Britain’s senior Roman Catholic cleric, said he would not participate in the conclave, after having been accused of “inappropriate acts” with several priests, charges that he denies. Other cardinals have also come under fire in sexual abuse scandals, but only Cardinal O’Brien has recused himself.

On Monday, Benedict met with three cardinals he had asked to conduct an investigation into a Vatican scandal in which hundreds of confidential documents were leaked to the press and published in a tell-all book last May, the worst security breach in the church’s modern history. The three cardinals compiled a hefty dossier on the scandal, which Benedict has entrusted only to his successor, not to the cardinals entering the conclave, the Vatican spokesman said earlier this week.

On Thursday, Panorama, a weekly magazine, reported that the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, had been conducting his own investigation into the leaks scandal, including requesting wiretaps on the phones of some members of the Vatican hierarchy. That would be taking a page from the playbook of magistrates in Italy, where wiretaps are extensive.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said on Thursday that in the context of an investigation into the leaks, magistrates of the Vatican, not the secretary of state, “might have authorized some wiretaps or some checks,” but nothing on a significant scale. The idea of “an investigation that creates an atmosphere of fear of mistrust that will now affect the conclave has no foundation in reality.” A shy theologian who appeared to have little interest in the internal politics of the Vatican, Benedict has said that he is retiring “freely, and for the good of the church,” entrusting it to a successor who has more strength than he does. But shadows linger. The next pope will inherit a hierarchy buffeted by crises of governance as well as power struggles over the Vatican Bank, which has struggled to conform to international transparency norms.

Many faithful have welcomed Benedict’s gesture as a sign of humility and humanity, a rational decision taken by a man who no longer feels up to the job.

As he stood near St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday after attending the pope’s last public audience, Vincenzo Petrucci, 26, said he had come to express “not so much solidarity, but more like closeness” to the pope. “At first we felt astonished, shocked and disoriented,” he said. “But then we saw what a weighty decision it must have been. He seemed almost lonely.”

Many in the Vatican hierarchy, known as the Roman Curia, are still reeling from the news. Many are bereaved and others seem almost angry. “We are terribly, terribly, terribly shocked,” one senior Vatican official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 28, 2013

A photo credit with an image on earlier version of this article misstated the photographer. He is Alberto Pizzoli, not Alberto Pizzolialberto.

Read More..

Conservative Justices Voice Skepticism on Voting Law

WASHINGTON — A central provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 may be in peril, judging from tough questioning on Wednesday from the Supreme Court’s more conservative members.

Justice Antonin Scalia called the provision, which requires nine states, mostly in the South, to get federal permission before changing voting procedures, a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked a skeptical question about whether people in the South are more racist than those in the North. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked how much longer Alabama must live “under the trusteeship of the United States government.”

The court’s more liberal members, citing data and history, said Congress remained entitled to make the judgment that the provision was still needed in the covered jurisdictions.

“It’s an old disease,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer said of efforts to thwart minority voting. “It’s gotten a lot better. A lot better. But it’s still there.”

Four of the nine-member court’s five more conservative members asked largely skeptical questions about the law. The fifth, Justice Clarence Thomas, did not ask a question, as is typical.

The law, a landmark achievement of the civil rights era was challenged by Shelby County, Ala., which said that the requirement had outlived its usefulness and that it imposed an unwarranted badge of shame on the affected jurisdictions.

The county’s lawyer, Bert W. Rein, said that the “problem to which the Voting Rights Act was addressed is solved.”

In reauthorizing the provision for 25 years in 2006, Congress did nothing to change the criteria for inclusion under the provision, relying instead on a formula based on historic practices and voting data from elections held decades ago. Much of the argument concerned that coverage formula.

Should the court strike down the coverage formula, Congress would be free to take a fresh look at what jurisdictions should be covered. But making distinctions among the states based on new criteria may not be politically feasible.

Four years ago, the court signaled that the law may need revision to withstand constitutional scrutiny, hinting that Congress might want to take a fresh look at the places subject to the preclearance provision, called Section 5. Congress failed to act.

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. said Congress had made a considered and cautious decision in extending the act.

Debo P. Adegbile, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that “our right to vote is what the United States Constitution is about.”

Section 5, originally set to expire five years after the law was enacted, was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1966 as a rational response to the often flagrantly lawless conduct of some Southern officials then.

Congress repeatedly extended the requirement: for 5 years in 1970, 7 years in 1975, and 25 years in 1982. Congress renewed the act in 2006 after holding extensive hearings on the persistence of racial discrimination at the polls, again extending the preclearance requirement for 25 years.

But it made no changes to the list of jurisdictions covered by Section 5, relying instead on a formula based on historical practices and voting data from elections held decades ago. It applies to nine states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — and to scores of counties and municipalities in other states.

Last May, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the law. Judge David S. Tatel, writing for the majority, acknowledged that “the extraordinary federalism costs imposed by Section 5 raise substantial constitutional concerns,” and he added that the record compiled by Congress to justify the law’s renewal was “by no means unambiguous.”

Read More..

Scientist at Work Blog: Getting to the Bottom of It All

Michael Becker, a doctoral student at McGill University, was a scientific diver on an expedition to Lake Untersee in Antarctica.

If you’re going where there’s no air to breathe, you better be organized.

Any kind of underwater diving involves process for that very reason. There’s the early-morning wake-up, the weather check, the gear check (masks, fins, regulators … check). And then there’s the dive site approach – whether you’re walking in from the shore or taking a boat to some far forgotten reef.

Diving Lake Untersee is just like that – except in Antarctica we get to our dive site by snowmobile.  And Untersee ratchets up the workload because it’s remote, technical and cold.

To even get into the lake is a feat of accomplishment and a trick of clever engineering. Just the thought of trying to chip a dive hole through 10-foot thick lake ice could give you tendinitis long before you get your feet wet.

During the early days of Antarctic diving in the late-1970s, the expedition leader Dale Andersen and a few clever people working in the Dry Valley region of Antarctica came up with an ingenious way of getting through the ice. They modified an industrial-strength steam cleaner to circulate boiling hot liquid through a closed-circuit piece of copper tubing. All a would-be diver had to do was place the tubing inside a small hole drilled in the ice and wait for magic to happen as the hole slowly formed over two days.

But even when the hole is melted there’s still a lot to do before getting into the water.

Dive Days

We start with a hearty breakfast of dehydrated granola — a meal that I hope to never see again. After breakfast, the diver gets ready by sorting the gear and putting on the dry suit while the first tender drives out by snowmobile to chip out any refrozen ice from the dive hole.

The second snowmobile carries the other dive tender and the diver (already in their dry suit) to the hole. The diver sits on the ice platform and is dressed with weights, tank, gloves, and is tied in to the all-important safety line.

This line is the life tether. It is fed out and taken in as needed. That way the surface assistants have a sense of how far away the diver is, and the diver knows where to return. In the early days, sequences of line pulls would be used to communicate simple commands like an early Morse code for dive messages. Nowadays, the dive line connects a surface communication box to the diver’s facemask. Diver and tender are easily able to grumble back and forth to each other with all the benefits of modern technology.

Once the diver’s mask is on they slide in, do the dive, come back to the hole and are yanked out. If the diver still has a pulse there is applause all around and we go back to celebrate with a dinner of dehydrated food.

Safety is paramount here and there is no margin of error. The nearest recompression chamber for a dive injury is 2,000 miles away in Cape Town. There are no helicopters for rescue and any serious injury or accident could mean death.

We follow all this protocol and process in pursuit of one thing – studying microbial communities locked away from human history.

The Science Down There

Dale and I have done a number of dives to collect data and samples on the conical stromatolites found at the bottom of Lake Untersee.  Dale has surfaced several times with sediment cores of the lake’s bottom. These cores tell us about the history of the lake and its resident organisms. By looking at cross-sections of the cores, we can see that the microbial communities grow over the years in layers known as laminations. These laminae show us a chronosequence of events, alternating between mineral deposition and organic layer growth. These mineral deposits must come from somewhere as the lake surface is covered in ice. It’s thought that the occasional influx of silt from nearby glaciers provides the sediment that the cyanobacteria then recolonize.

But there’s more than just grabbing a sample and returning to the surface – the lake environment needs to be described in precise detail.

These cyanobacteria are photosynthetic and dependent on light to create their energy. One of my dives was spent swimming transects back and forth directly underneath the 10-foot ice ceiling holding a light meter. This gives us an idea of the amount of energy that is available for photosynthesis beneath the lake. The ice cover isn’t completely uniform; there are dark areas intermingled with sections of bright windows. Also, since light drops off with depth, not all life within the lake is receiving the same amount of energy.

It’s not just these cyanobacterial mats that thrive in Lake Untersee.

There is a diverse world of bacteria and viruses that inhabit their own unique sections of the water column all the way from the lake surface to over 500 feet below. These areas are far beyond our range capacity as scientific divers, and so we must rely on a different technique to sample these distant creatures.

Our two Russian scientists, Vladimir Akimov and Valery Galchenko from the Winogradsky Institute of Microbiology, are microbiologists that specialize in microbial life in extreme environments. Their work has taken them from remote regions of Yakutia, Russia, studying heat-loving extremophiles, to the even more remote Lake Untersee to study the isolated bacteria inhabiting this lake.

Different communities of bacteria thrive according to the changing abiotic conditions, as you get deeper in the lake’s water column.  These environments are mapped out by lowering sensors to measure conductivity, temperature, and depth, or CTD, from the lake’s surface down to around 330 feet – our maximum sample depth.

Vladimir and Valery then lower their sampler to different points within the water column and capture about a gallon of water. These samples are brought back to camp, and the two spend hour after waking hour filtering the water to concentrate samples of both bacteria and viruses. There’s no human health concern with these viruses – they are specific to the bacteria in the lake, and must exist in some sort of equilibrium with the lake life.

One of the areas that Vladimir and Valery are particularly interested is a section of the lake at 256 feet. At this depth, the lake chemistry changes quite a bit – it becomes anoxic, meaning without oxygen. The organisms that thrive in this section have no need for oxygen in their metabolic processes. They use sulfur instead.

From a practical perspective, that means the samples reek. Rich in hydrogen sulfide, they smell like sour, rotten eggs. But by studying this transition from the clear, oxygen-rich water above to the dark, oxygen-poor water below we can get a sense of the two different worlds experienced by bacteria within the same lake.

What we bring up from the depths of Lake Untersee is only the beginning of a long scientific process. All these samples must be carried back to the civilized world, processed and analyzed over the next several months. Only then we will be able to more fully understand the ecosystem of Lake Untersee, and only then will we fully understand the significance of what we’re seeing.

And that’s what makes all this time, effort, and risk worth it. Diving Untersee has been an incredible experience, but without the questions driving us forward, it would be a lot to gamble for a good view.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @Michael__Becker or on his blog, “The Dry Valleys.”

Read More..

Syria Willing to Talk With Armed Opponents, Foreign Minister Says

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria’s government is willing to hold talks with members of the armed opposition on ending the country’s nearly two-year-old civil war, the Syrian foreign minister said on Monday.

It was the first time that a high-ranking Syrian official signaled that the government was open to talking with Syrian rebels who have taken up weapons against the armed forces. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, called in January for talks to resolve the conflict, but appeared to rule out dialogue with Syrians who were armed.

The new statement came as two opposition figures said that the main Syrian opposition leader, Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, had already met quietly on at least one recent occasion with a prominent Syrian businessman with close ties to Mr. Assad, apparently in an effort to explore channels for discussion.

Both sides are under pressure from their international backers to explore ways to end the fighting that threatens to destroy Syria and spread conflict beyond its borders.

But Syrian opposition leaders gave conflicting signals on Monday on the future of any talks with members of Mr. Assad’s government.

The rebels’ top military leader, Gen. Selim Idriss, seemed to harden the opposition’s position, ruling out any negotiations until after Mr. Assad steps down — a precondition the Syrian government and its main international backer, Russia, reject. But Sheik Khatib said his offer to talk with members of the government without “blood on their hands” remained on the table, although he criticized what he called the Syrian government’s slowness to respond.

Russia declared last week that it would work with the Arab League to bring about direct talks between the government and the rebels, and Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, was meeting in Moscow on Monday with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov.

“We are ready for a dialogue with anyone who’s willing,” Mr. Moallem said ahead of the meetings, Russian news agencies reported. “Even with those who carry arms.”

It was unclear whether the Syrian government would ask rebels to lay down arms before such talks. The rebels have said before that they will reject such a precondition.

General Idriss, the leader of the Free Syrian Army, the main rebel fighter group, said that to the contrary, a cessation of violence by the government was “the bottom line” for rebels ahead of any talks. In remarks to Al-Arabyia, a Saudi-backed news Web site, General Idriss also said, “There needs to be a clear decision on the resignation of the head of the criminal gang Bashar Assad, and for those who participated in the killing of the Syrian people to be put on trial.”

The main opposition group, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, led by Sheik Khatib, had long insisted on Mr. Assad’s departure as a precondition for talks, but on Jan. 30, Sheik Khatib floated the idea of negotiations with members of the government not directly involved in the bloody crackdown.

On Friday after meetings in Cairo, the coalition adopted a written framework for talks that stopped short of calling for Mr. Assad to step down. It called for Mr. Assad and others involved in the killing to be “held accountable for their crimes” and declaring that they “will not be a part of this political solution.”

But many in the coalition remain skeptical of talks with the government and see them as a way for Mr. Assad to buy time, and are frustrated that the rebels are under pressure to compromise amid what they see as insufficient international support.

On Monday, Samir Nachar, a member of the coalition, said that Sheik Khatib had met in the past week with Muhammad Hamsho, a prominent Syrian businessman who is close to Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother who leads the army’s feared Fourth Division, and a frontman for many Assad family enterprises.

News of the meeting, which surfaced in the London-based pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, prompted a new round of criticism in some opposition quarters of Sheik Khatib. The newspaper quoted Faiek al-Meer, a member of the banned opposition Democratic People’s Party, as saying that Sheik Khatib had met with Mr. Hamsho without telling other coalition members.

Mr. Nachar said that Sheik Khatib had briefed him and other coalition members on the recent meeting, which he said had been initiated by Mr. Hamsho.

“Hamsho asked to meet Moaz al-Khatib and the latter agreed,” Mr. Nachar said in an interview. “The meeting did take place, yes. Al-Khatib was straightforward about it place but he refrained from going into details.”

Mr. Hamsho is one of several Syrian figures on whom the United States Treasury Department has imposed sanctions since Mr. Assad’s harsh crackdown on a peaceful protest movement that began in March 2011 and has since evolved into a civil war.

“Muhammad Hamsho earned his fortune through his connections to regime insiders, and during the current unrest, he has cast his lot with Bashar al-Asad, Mahir al-Asad and others responsible for the Syrian government’s violence and intimidation against the Syrian people,” David S. Cohen, under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement in August 2011.

Sheik Khatib did not directly address the issue, but posted a message on his personal Facebook page cautioning against rumors.

Sheik Khatib told reporters in Cairo that he had not had any contacts with the Syrian government about potential meetings, and did not immediately respond to the offer from the Syrian foreign minister. He said that he would postpone a planned visit to Moscow “until we see how things develop,” The Associated Press reported.

He added, “We are always open to initiatives that stop the killing and destruction but the regime rejected the simplest of humanitarian conditions. We have asked that the regime start by releasing women prisoners and there was no response,” he said. “This regime must understand that the Syrian people do not want it anymore.”

Hania Mourtada contributed reporting.

Read More..

African Nations and U.N. Offer Plan to Stabilize Congo

NAIROBI, Kenya — Leaders of several African countries and United Nations officials on Sunday announced a new “framework” to tackle instability in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a war-torn country that has become synonymous with suffering and has eluded countless attempts to build a lasting peace over the years.

The new effort calls for greater cooperation between Congo’s neighbors — several of which are suspected of sponsoring violence inside Congo — and political changes by the Congolese government. United Nations and African officials are also proposing a new beefed-up “peace enforcement” brigade of about 2,000 soldiers to go after rebel groups in Congo.

“We can only put an end to recurring cycles of violence through an innovative approach,” said Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, who witnessed the signing of the peace framework in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Sunday.

But many Congo analysts doubt that this agreement, by itself, is going to make much of a difference in a place where myriad rebel groups haunt the hills, massacring civilians and raping women with impunity.

“If not accompanied by the swift appointment of a U.N. envoy and the initiation of a focused peace process between Congo, Rwanda and Uganda led by that U.N. envoy, this framework agreement will end up having no impact on ending the violence in eastern Congo,” said John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, a nonprofit anti-genocide group.

Parts of Congo, especially in the east, along the borders with Uganda and Rwanda, have been mired in various degrees of rebellion and mayhem since the mid-1990s, when rebel groups overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko, a Western-backed dictator who set new standards for wanton corruption. Congo is home to vast mineral riches, and many rebel groups who now control territory sustain their brutality by seizing minerals or taxing the mineral trade.

This fall, a relatively new rebel outfit, called the March 23 Movement, or M23, captured the provincial capital of Goma, though under intense international pressure it soon pulled out. United Nations investigators have accused Rwanda and Uganda of providing covert support to the M23.

The United Nations has more than 17,000 military personnel in Congo, but the peacekeepers have been roundly criticized for being too passive. Several African countries, including Tanzania and Mozambique, have discussed contributing troops to a new intervention brigade to confront and disarm rebel groups in Congo. The plan is for the new brigade to work with the other peacekeepers but engage in combat more often.

But analysts warn that this new brigade, which still needs to be approved by the United Nations Security Council, will be effective only if it is willing to go toe-to-toe with rebel fighters and take heavy casualties — as peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi have been doing in Somalia, with some success. Many observers say the United Nations has so far been unwilling to do this in Congo.

Jason Stearns, the author of a recent, well-regarded book on Congo and a blog that is considered required reading by Congophiles, said there had not been a genuine peace process in Congo since 2006.

“So are we back in a peace process?” Mr. Stearns asks on his blog. “Not really. Or more precisely: We don’t know yet. The agreement is more a statement of principles than a concrete action plan.”

Read More..

Emory University President Revives Racial Concerns

ATLANTA — A reception Friday at Emory University to celebrate the work of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the years after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could have been more poorly timed, but not by much.

All week long, the president of Emory, James W. Wagner, had been trying to rewind a column that he had written for the university magazine. In it, he praised the 1787 three-fifths compromise, which allowed slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person as a way to determine how much Congressional power Southern states would have, as an example of how polarized people can find common ground.

It was, he has since said, a clumsy and regrettable mistake.

A faculty group censured him last week for the remarks. And in a speech at Friday’s reception for the campus exhibition, “And the Struggle Continues: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Fight for Social Change,” Dr. Wagner acknowledged both the nation’s ongoing education in race relations and his own.

“I know that I personally have a long way to go,” he said.

His article has been seized upon by students and faculty who say it was yet one more example of insensitivity from the Emory administration, which in September announced sweeping cuts that some say unfairly targeted some programs popular with minorities.

About 45 protesting students showed up at the reception, silently holding signs that read “This is 5/5 outrageous” and “Shame on James” as Dr. Wagner; Representative John Lewis of Georgia, a veteran of the civil rights movement; and leaders of the S.C.L.C. spoke about the fight for racial equality.

Whether the cuts, which include the elimination of physical education, visual arts, journalism, and graduate programs in economics and Spanish, disproportionately affect racial minorities is in dispute at the university, whose student body is 31 percent minority.

Certain programs that focused on or made recruiting minorities a priority have been shifted to other departments or eliminated, but university officials say the numbers are not as drastic as protesters believe.

Savings from the reorganization will be reinvested in other departments, including neurosciences, studies of contemporary China, and new media studies.

Such academic realignment is starting to happen at liberal arts colleges around the country, said Phil Kleweno, a consultant at Bain & Company who specializes in higher education.

“Not every school can excel in every subject,” he said. “Given where we are financially, these are wise decisions for many universities to make.”

In an interview Friday, Dr. Wagner said neither the cuts nor his self-described gaffe in Emory Magazine was intended to hurt what he described as a vibrant multicultural environment at the college.

The president’s misstep was only the latest incident in what one Emory administrator called “quite a challenging year” for the private university, which some call the Harvard of the South. (Emory boosters prefer to call Harvard University the Emory of the North.)

Although still the 20th best university in the nation in U.S. News and World Report’s latest ranking, Emory admitted in August that it had intentionally sent incorrect test scores to the magazine and the Department of Education for more than a decade.

The university has also grappled over whether to allow Chick-fil-A, whose conservative Christian owners have donated large sums of money to organizations opposed to gay marriage, to serve food on campus.

And in October, Dr. Wagner officially apologized to Jewish dental students who had either been failed, harassed or both under John E. Buhler’s reign as dean of the dental school from 1948 to 1961.

Many had seen the apology for that chapter in Emory’s history, when as many as 65 percent of Jewish students had to redo coursework or were failed, as a forward-thinking and healing move in keeping with the culture of the university, which has devoted years to studying its own racial history, both the good and the bad.

The school, which is 177 years old, was named for John Emory, a slave owner. Although many of its leaders favored segregated education, the school decided in 1962to sue the state for the right to enroll students regardless of race.

More recently, the school has dealt with a fraternity that flew a Confederate flag and an anthropology professor who used a racial epithet in class, but it also houses significant collections of African-American history and literature, including what is arguably the nation’s most complete database documenting American slave trade routes.

“Emory is a community that airs its laundry,” Dr. Wagner said, calling that a strength and a demonstration of its ability to evolve with its student body.

“We’ve had several wounds this year,” he said. “This one is a particularly painful wound for me because it was self-inflicted.”

Jovonna Jones, 19, the president of the Black Student Alliance at Emory, said she forgave Dr. Wagner for his transgression.

“As an African-American woman who has gone to predominately white institutions since middle school, I’ve had lots of incidents like this,” she said. “It’s hard to be shocked any more.”

People keep asking her if she thinks the university president is a racist, Ms. Jones said.

“I don’t think that’s the real question,” she said. “The important question is: What does it mean to embrace and value a diverse student body? What are the values of the school?”

Leslie Harris, an Emory history professor and the director of a series of campus events that for five years examined issues of race at Emory, said she was more troubled by the intellectual holes in Dr. Wagner’s argument.

In his column, Dr. Wagner used the Congressional fight over the national debt to muse on the importance of compromise, which he called a tool for noble achievement.

“The constitutional compromise about slavery, for instance, facilitated the achievement of what both sides of the debate really aspired to — a new nation,” he wrote.

That is a deep misunderstanding of history, said Dr. Harris.

“The three-fifths compromise is one of the greatest failed compromises in U.S. history,” she said. “Its goal was to keep the union together, but the Civil War broke out anyway.”

To members of the S.C.L.C., whose records are housed in Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, the protesters at the reception were a welcome sign.

“I love it,” said Brenda Davenport, once the national volunteer and youth organizer for the S.C.L.C. “Where else would you want protesters to show up but at something that is about the value of protesting?”

Read More..

In Drought-Stricken Heartland, Snow is No Savior

Matthew Staver for The New York Times

Thin mountain snow in Colorado and across the West could signal another summer of drought and wildfire.

DENVER — After enduring last summer’s destructive drought, farmers, ranchers and officials across the country’s parched heartland had hoped that plentiful winter snows would replenish the ground and refill their rivers, breaking the grip of one of the worst dry spells in American history. No such luck.

Across the West, lakes are half full and mountain snows are thin, omens of another summer of drought and wildfire. Complicating matters, many of the worst-hit states now have even less water on hand than a year ago, raising the specter of shortages and rationing that could inflict another year of losses on struggling farms.

Reservoir levels have fallen sharply in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. The soil is drier than normal. And while a few recent snowstorms have cheered skiers, the snowpack is so thin in parts of Colorado that the government has declared an “extreme drought” around the ski havens of Vail and Aspen.

“We’re worse off than we were a year ago,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center.

This week’s blizzard brought a measure of relief to the Plains when it dumped more than a foot of snow. But it did not change the basic calculus for forecasters and officials in the drought-scarred West. Ranchers are straining to find hay — it is scarce and expensive — to feed cattle. And farmers are fretting about whether they will have enough water to irrigate their fields.

“It’s approaching a critical situation,” said Mike Hungenberg, who grows carrots and cabbage on a 3,000-acre farm in northern Colorado. There is so little water available this year, he said, that he may scale back his planting by a third, and sow less thirsty crops, like beans.

“A year ago we went into the spring season with most of the reservoirs full,” Mr. Hungenberg said. “This year, you’re going in with basically everything empty.”

National and state forecasters — some of whom now end phone calls by saying, “Pray for snow” — do have some hope. An especially wet springtime could still spare the western plains and mountains and prime the soil for planting. But forecasts are murky: They predict warmer temperatures and less precipitation across the West over the next three months but say the Midwest could see more rain than usual.

Water experts get more nervous with each passing day.

“We’re running out of time,” said Andy Pineda of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District. “We only have a month or two, and we are so far behind it’s going to take storms of epic amounts just to get us back to what we would think of as normal.”

Parts of Montana, the Pacific Northwest and Utah have benefited from a snowy winter. But across Colorado, the snowpack is just 72 percent of average as of Feb. 1, which means less water to dampen hillsides and mountains vulnerable to fire, less water for farms to use on early season crops and less to fill lakes and reservoirs that ultimately trickle down into millions of toilets, taps and swimming pools across the state.

Heavy rains and snow have recently brought some hope to the parched states of Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, where the drought is easing. But 55.8 percent of the United States remains locked in drought, according to the government’s latest assessments. And states like Nebraska and Oklahoma are facing precipitation deficits of as much as 16 inches. Without damp soil, many wheat crops will have trouble growing come March and April when they should be in full bloom, and corn and soybeans could be stunted after they are planted this spring. In a year when farmers are planning another record planting, some might be forced to sow fewer seeds because there is not enough soil moisture to go around.

In southwestern Kansas, Gary Millershaski said the wheat on his 3,000 acres was as dry as it had ever been after two years of drought. But as snow fell around him, he was smiling, a guarded optimist for this year’s planting. “If we get above average rainfall from here on, we’re going to raise a wheat crop,” he said. “But what are the odds of that?”

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, put it this way: “Mother Nature is testing us.”

But Washington is also posing a challenge.

Mr. Udall, Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, and other members of Colorado’s Congressional delegation are seeking $20 million in emergency funds to help restore watersheds in Colorado ravaged by last year’s wildfires. So far, there has been little action on the measure. Western politicians are also urging the Forest Service to move more quickly to modernize the shrinking and aging fleet of tanker planes it uses to douse wildfires.

John Eligon contributed reporting from Kansas City, Mo.

Read More..

India Ink: Two Explosions Kill at Least Eleven in India

Two blasts near a bus stop killed at least 11 people and injured dozens in the south Indian city of Hyderabad on Thursday night, in what officials said may be a coordinated terrorist attack.

“Two blasts took place in Diksukh Nagar in old Hyderabad,” Sushil Kumar Shinde, India’s home affairs minister, told journalists in New Delhi. The blasts came from two bicycles at two sites 150 meters away from each other, he said, and killed eight at one site and three at the other. About fifty people have been injured.

The central government had warned state governments earlier that an attack was planned, he said. “We have had some information for the last two days of such an incident,” Mr. Shinde said, and states had been alerted of the possibility of blasts. “At this stage it is difficult to say more,” he said, except that the death toll may go up.

Teams from the National Investigation Agency, the National Security Guard and the Intelligence Bureau are headed to the site, he said.

“This is a dastardly attack, the guilty will not go unpunished,” prime minister Manmohan Singh said on Twitter.

Hyderabad has been the site of frequent terrorist activities in recent years, particularly those using homemade bombs.

In May 2007, 13 people died after a bomb went off at the Mecca Masjid, killing 11, and then the police and Muslims clashed after the explosion. In August 2007, a pair of synchronized explosions tore through two popular gathering spots in Hyderabad, killing at least 42 and wounding dozens more. Police found and defused 19 more bombs in the hours after the blasts, left at bus stops, movie theaters, pedestrian bridges and road intersections.

Read More..

In Cyprus Trial, Man Says Hezbollah Scouted Israeli Targets in Europe

LIMASSOL, Cyprus — A man on trial here admitted Wednesday to being a member of the militant group Hezbollah, staking out locations Israelis would frequent and acting as a courier for the group inside the European Union.

In a little-watched proceeding in a small courtroom here, the defendant, Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, 24, described how he would be picked up in a van to meet with his handler, whom he knew only as Ayman, and used code words to confirm his identity. “I never saw the face of Ayman because he was always wearing a mask,” Mr. Yaacoub said.

In written testimony read out loud in Greek by his interpreter, the man said that he had not taken part in a plot to target Israeli tourists visiting Cyprus, as prosecutors charge. “Even if they asked me to participate in a terrorist action I would refuse. I could never do that,” Mr. Yaacoub said. “I’m only trained to defend Lebanon.”

But he was arrested in July with the license plates of buses ferrying Israelis written in a small red notebook. He said that he wrote them down because one of the license numbers, LAA-505, reminded him of a Lamborghini sports car, while the other, KWK-663, reminded him of a Kawasaki motorcycle.

The Cypriot police arrested Mr. Yaacoub on July 7. Less than two weeks later, a busload of Israelis was blown up in Burgas on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, killing five Israelis and a Bulgarian bus driver. This month, Bulgarian officials announced that evidence pointed to Hezbollah as being behind the attack.

While the trial here on this little Mediterranean island has received little public attention, the stakes are high both for Hezbollah and the European Union, which has thus far resisted following Washington’s lead and declaring the militant group a terrorist organization. Experts say that a conviction here in Cyprus could put even more pressure on the bloc for a designation.

Officials in Cyprus have tried to keep the case as low-key as possible, declining in most instances to comment on it or to release documents. “It’s a very serious and delicate case,” the justice minister, Loucas Louca, said shortly after Mr. Yaacoub was arrested. “I don’t want to make a statement because any publicity could harm the case.”

The prosecution and the defense have both declined to comment before a verdict is reached, sometime in March. But a preliminary ruling by the three-judge panel last week found that the prosecutor had provided enough evidence to proceed on all eight counts, including four charges of conspiracy to commit a felony, two charges for participating in a criminal organization, one for participating in the preparation of a crime and a charge for covering it up.

Mr. Yaacoub, who has both Swedish and Lebanese passports, said that he had been a member of Hezbollah since 2007, and worked for the group for four years. He also owned a trading company in Lebanon. He had visited Cyprus in 2008 but first came for business in December 2011. Though he traded in shoes, clothing and wedding goods, he was interested in branching out into importing juice.

It was unclear from his testimony exactly how he got involved with the man he called Ayman. He said that he had been on “previous missions with Hezbollah,” in Antalya, on Turkey’s southwest coast; Lyon, France; and Amsterdam.

In France he said he “picked up some bags,” while in Amsterdam he “picked up a cellphone, two SIM cards and something that was rolled in a newspaper but I don’t know what it was,” Mr. Yaacoub said. He said that he delivered the items to Lebanon.

On June 26, 2012, he traveled to Sweden to renew his passport there. He returned to Cyprus via Heathrow Airport. Ayman asked him to observe two locations, a parking lot behind a Limassol hospital and a hotel called the Golden Arches. He was also supposed to acquire two SIM cards for cellphones and locate Internet cafes in Limassol and the Cypriot capital, Nicosia. Ayman also asked him to locate restaurants that served kosher food, but Mr. Yaacoub said he could not find any.

Mr. Yaacoub said that on his visit to Cyprus last summer he bought several thousand dollars worth of juice from a Cypriot company but could not find a way to transport it.

He explained multiple trips to the airport at Larnaca, which authorities said were for surveillance, as a result of a rental car with faulty air-conditioning that had to be returned. “I have no accomplices and I am not hiding weapons,” he said.

Read More..

Syrian Army Rocket Kills 19 and Levels Buildings in Aleppo, Rebels Say

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian antigovernment activists said Tuesday that an army rocket had leveled several buildings in a rebel-held neighborhood of Aleppo, killing at least 19 people and possibly leaving dozens more buried under rubble. The attack appeared to cause one of the worst civilian tolls in the embattled city since its university was hit in a multiple bombing a month ago.

News of the Aleppo rocket attack came as activists also reported that at least two mortar rounds had exploded near President Bashar al-Assad’s Tishreen Palace in Damascus. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage, and it was not known if Mr. Assad had been there at the time. The palace, surrounded by a park, is in an upscale area that has largely been insulated from the insurgency and is situated less than a mile from the main presidential palace, on a plateau overlooking the city.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based anti-Assad group with a network of sources inside Syria, described the Aleppo rocket as a “surface-to-surface missile” that slammed into the Jabal Badro neighborhood late on Monday, and said at least six children and three women were among the victims. A witness in Aleppo was quoted by Reuters as saying that the attack felled three buildings and that survivors were digging up bodies.

Syria’s state-run news media did not immediately report the rocket attack, and it was impossible to independently corroborate the details provided by the anti-Assad activists. But the attack appeared to be one of the deadliest in the city since more than 80 people were killed and hundreds were wounded on Jan. 15 in a multiple bombing of Aleppo University as students were taking exams. Although rebels and the government accused each other of responsibility for the university attack, video footage of the immediate aftermath suggested that it had involved a missile or missiles fired by the Syrian military.

The United Nations has estimated that nearly 70,000 people have died in the Syrian conflict, which began as a peaceful uprising against Mr. Assad in March 2011. The alliance of rebel groups fighting to oust Mr. Assad has claimed a series of strategic advances in recent weeks, but Mr. Assad contends that his side is winning.

On Monday, United Nations human rights investigators reported that violence in the country had worsened in the six-month period ending in mid-January. Carla del Ponte, a former war crimes prosecutor and a member of the panel responsible for chronicling rights violations in Syria, called on the Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court so that those responsible for atrocities in the conflict, from the government and from the insurgent side, could be held to account.

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Hwaida Saad and Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut.

Read More..

Drug Makers Increasingly Join Fight Against Doping

Now, a growing number of pharmaceutical companies are trying to prevent their drugs from the same fate by joining with antidoping officials to develop tests to detect the illegal use of their drugs among athletes.

Two major drug makers, Roche and GlaxoSmithKline, have begun evaluating every new drug candidate for its potential to be abused by athletes and have agreed to share information about those products with the World Anti-Doping Agency, known as WADA, which polices drug use in international sports. Several other smaller companies have provided proprietary information about specific drugs. A conference in Paris in November dedicated to the topic drew 250 participants.

The development reflects a significant shift from the days when drug makers paid little attention to how their products could be abused by athletes, said David Howman, the director general of the antidoping agency. In the past, drug makers “felt that any publicity in relation to antidoping control would be negative,” he said. “But what they discovered is the opposite happened.”

Instead of shying away from such stories, Roche and Glaxo have promoted their involvement as an example of good corporate citizenship. Last year, Glaxo went so far as to sponsor the testing laboratories for the London Games, the first time in Olympic history that an antidoping laboratory had a named corporate sponsor.

Pauline Williams, who leads the team at Glaxo that runs the antidoping initiative, said the cooperation with WADA grew out of that sponsorship. “What the London 2012 involvement led to was a real pride and willingness, and a positive attitude toward this continued engagement,” she said. Since the start of the program, the company said it has shared information about four of its projects, and development of a test for one drug is under way.

Antidoping officials have long sought information from drug companies. For instance, Amgen, which developed EPO, helped develop a test for Aranesp, another of its drugs that has been used in doping, in advance of the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics. But such arrangements were ad hoc and fairly simple, said Olivier Rabin, the antidoping agency’s science director. “It was almost more by chance when it was happening,” he said.

Relationships between antidoping officials and pharmaceutical companies have sometimes been tense. In 2006, Amgen was criticized for sponsoring the Tour of California at a time when EPO abuse was rampant among cyclists. Although the company said it had sponsored the race to raise awareness about doping, it was later revealed that the organizers had failed to test for EPO, short for erythropoietin, a synthetic hormone that, like Aranesp, stimulates the production of red blood cells.

“They were associated with some things in the past which we felt were probably inappropriate,” Mr. Howman said. “What we had to do was start the conversation from scratch, and say let’s see how we can work together.”

Steven Elliott, the Amgen scientist who invented Aranesp, said the misperceptions went both ways. He said some believed, wrongly, that biotechnology companies were developing drugs that could be misused by athletes as a way to increase sales. “There was this uneasiness about that,” said Mr. Elliott, who recently retired but continues to work as a liaison between biotechnology companies and the antidoping agency. “There had to be this realization that it was a win-win for both sides.”

Antidoping officials began to work more closely with drug makers after 2004, when Dr. Rabin heard that athletes were talking about a new version of EPO, called CERA, that was being developed by Roche, and asked the company for help.

“We were shocked when they first contacted us,” recalled Barbara Leishman, who oversees the antidoping program there. She said company scientists had not realized that athletes were following the drug’s development so closely. “This is not the sort of thing we like to hear about our compounds.”

Roche then worked with the antidoping agency to develop a blood test for the new drug, turning over proprietary compounds, called reagents, that would help officials test for their drug. Because of the complex nature of the drug, which mimics the body’s own hormones, and the development of the test, the project took years.

In 2009, blood samples from six athletes taken during the Beijing Olympics tested positive for CERA. Other drug makers took note of the media attention Roche received for the collaboration, Mr. Howman said. “Once there’s a foot in the water, then you can follow and walk right in,” he said.

Roche broadened its agreement with WADA, expanding the project to screen all of its drugs in development. Glaxo followed suit and around the same time, two major industry groups representing biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies adopted policies encouraging their members to cooperate.

Halting the abuse of new prescription drugs is only part of the antidoping picture. Athletes today are believed to use a variety of methods to gain an advantage, from transfusing their own blood to taking tiny quantities of tried-and-true doping agents. And some performance-enhancing drugs gain life in illicit laboratories, as was the case with “the clear,” the designer steroid developed in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative that toppled star athletes like Marion Jones.

Still, pharmaceutical companies have an important role to play given how complex new drugs have become, and how athletes are increasingly using substances that closely mimic the body’s natural processes, officials said.

“Developing detection methods to show that the substance taken in a synthetic form is different than your natural substance is more challenging,” said Matthew Fedoruk, the science director for the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

Many pharmaceutical companies already have the tools to create a doping test for their products because the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory bodies require them to show how the drug passes through the body. During the development process, the companies design reagents to help identify the drug. Amgen and other companies, like the biotechnology company Affymax — which makes a competing anemia drug called Omontys — have given WADA some of these reagents for use in developing tests.

Still, Dr. Rabin and others said some companies needed persuading and did not return his calls. In those cases, he said, he uses peer pressure, reminding them that other companies are also participating.

“We know the progress of their drugs, and we know that at some point collaboration will naturally come,” he said. “We are a bit stubborn.”

Read More..

Crowds at St. Peter’s Cry ‘Viva il Papa’ to Benedict

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday asked the tens of thousands of people who had flocked to St. Peter’s Square to see one of his last public appearances to pray for him and his successor.

Riccardo De Luca/Associated Press

An emotional crowd of well-wishers greeted Pope Benedict XVI as he gave his weekly blessing in St. Peter's Square on Sunday.

Franco Origlia/Getty Images

The pope delivered a blessing from the window of his private apartment.

Speaking from his window in the Apostolic Palace, the pope did not make any direct references to his startling decision to resign, effective Feb. 28. But in his greetings to pilgrims in various languages, he called on them in Spanish to “continue praying for me and for the next pope.”

Thousands — some 50,000 according to Italian news media — filled the square this mild, hazy Sunday morning. They cheered for the pope, calling out “Viva il Papa!” — long live the Pope — and clapping out his name rhythmically: “Be-Ne-De-To!”

Dozens of homemade banners — mostly sheets stapled to wooden planks — swayed throughout the square, each an expression of affection for a pope who stunned the world earlier this week with his unexpected decision to retire, which will make him the first pope to do so in 600 years. “With the pope forever” and “We love you very much,” some banners read.

One seminarian at the front of the crowd held up a simple board that said: “We’ll miss you.”

“He’s meant a lot to me and to other Roman Catholics, it’s important to pay our respects to him before we begin to speak too much about the next pope,” said Mark Baumgarten, a seminarian from Perth Australia, studying in Rome.

In his address, which centered on the beginning of the season of Lent, for Christians a 40-day period of reflection before Easter, the pope called on the church and its members to refocus on God, “repudiating pride and egotism.”

“In the decisive moments of life — indeed, if we look closely, in every moment — we are at a crossroads. Do we want to follow the self, or God? Individual interest or the real good?” he said.

“I was moved, he touched my heart,” said Francesca Della Penna, a Roman who had come to hear the pope with her parish, wanting to be close after his decision to retire, which she called “a courageous decision dictated by prayer, a true message of faith.”

On Sunday evening, the pope retired for a weeklong Lenten spiritual retreat with the members of his household and cardinals and bishop.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, is scheduled to preach during the retreat. The pope will not have any public engagements until next Saturday, when he will meet with the President of Italy.

In the meantime, cardinals will gather in Rome in preparation for the conclave to elect his successor. Church law states that a conclave must start between 15 and 20 days after the papacy becomes vacant. But on Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi said that discussions were ongoing at the Vatican to determine whether the resignation left room to interpret the rules to see if the conclave could begin earlier.

Though support for the pope was widely expressed in St. Peter’s Square, not everyone was happy with his decision.

“We want the pope to remain with us. We think he’s good for the church today, which needs to defend values like life and the family and fight relativism,” said GiovanBattista Varricchio, a political science student at the University of Rome and a member of the Catholic movement “Militia Christi.” “We came because we hope that we can convince him to change his mind.”

Read More..

Explosion in Crowded Market Kills Dozens in Pakistan

Banaras Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Pakistani paramedics on Saturday examined the bodies of bombing victims at a hospital in the western city of Quetta.

KARACHI, Pakistan — A devastating explosion ripped through a crowded market in the western city of Quetta on Saturday, killing at least 47 people and wounding more than 200, the police said.

The attack occurred in a neighborhood dominated by Hazaras, a Shiite ethnic minority that has suffered numerous attacks at the hands of Sunni militant death squads in recent years.

A previous attack on Jan. 10, when a Sunni group bombed a billiards hall, killed almost 100 Hazaras, prompting domestic and international outrage.

The police said that Saturday’s bomb was apparently set off by a remote-controlled device, possibly hidden in a rickshaw. The explosion caused a building to collapse and the death toll to rise sharply.

By late evening, Wazir Khan Nasir, a senior police officer, said that at least 47 people had been killed and 200 wounded, the French news agency Agence France-Presse reported. “It was a remote-controlled bomb,” he told the news agency, whose photographer counted 30 bodies in one hospital alone.

Local hospitals declared an emergency as rescue efforts were hampered by angry crowds at the bomb site, where distraught Hazaras prevented the police, reporters and rescuers from reaching the scene.

Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf quickly condemned the attack, emphasizing the government’s resolve to fight “such dastardly acts” and vowing to bring the perpetrators to justice.

After the January attack, Mr. Ashraf flew to Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province, to meet with Hazara families who protested in the streets for four days, sleeping beside the coffins of the bombing victims to protest the government’s inaction.

That protest captured the sympathies of Pakistanis across the country, and helped galvanize political opinion against a growing problem of sectarian attacks on minority Shiites in Quetta, Karachi and northwestern Pakistan.

Standing at the protest site, Mr. Ashraf announced that the government was dissolving the provincial government and handing control to the provincial governor — a move Hazaras had hoped would stop the sectarian bloodshed.

But Saturday’s attack shows that extremists can still operate with impunity in Baluchistan, Pakistan’s largest but most sparsely populated province.

Baluchistan is plagued by several conflicts, including sectarian attacks on Shiites, a nationalist insurgency and ethnically motivated killings. It is also home to Afghan Taliban insurgents who use the province to carry out attacks inside Afghanistan.

The largest sectarian group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, is widely believed to be based in the town of Mastung, south of Quetta. Few of its members have been captured or arrested.

Human rights groups accuse the powerful Pakistani military of tacit collusion with the sectarian groups, who have reportedly helped the military quell the nationalist insurgency.

The military vehemently denies those accusations and says its forces are overstretched in the region. After the January bombing, responsibility for security in Quetta was handed to the paramilitary Frontier Corps, which vowed to dismantle the sectarian groups.

Read More..

Venezuela Releases First Pictures of Chávez

CARACAS, Venezuela — The Venezuelan government on Friday released photographs of President Hugo Chávez for the first time since he had surgery in Cuba more than nine weeks ago.

Venezuelan Ministry of Information, via Reuters.

President Hugo Chávez smiles with his daughters, Rosa Virginia, right, and María Gabriela, while recovering from cancer surgery in Havana, in this photograph released by Venezuela's government on Friday.

The four photos showed Mr. Chávez lying in bed and smiling, with two of his daughters, Rosa Virginia and María Gabriela, on either side of him.

Jorge Arreaza, the minister of science and technology who is married to María Gabriela, said the photos were taken on Thursday. In three of the photos Mr. Chávez is holding a copy of what Mr. Arreaza said was Thursday’s edition of Granma, the Cuban newspaper.

“There he is with his family, always attentive to the people of Venezuela, always attentive and in charge of his functions, working tirelessly,” Mr. Arreaza said.

Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said that doctors had controlled a severe lung infection that Mr. Chávez contracted in the hospital. But he added that the president was breathing with a “tracheal tube,” making it difficult for him to speak.

In the photos Mr. Chávez wore what appeared to be a white and blue jacket, which covered his throat. The tube was not visible.

Mr. Chávez has had four cancer-related operations in Cuba since June 2011. The latest was on Dec. 11. But in contrast to his previous absences from the country, Mr. Chávez has remained out of sight and has not even posted on Twitter or telephoned a government television program, which he often did before. That has led to widespread speculation about the severity of his illness.

Government officials have repeatedly insisted that he is continuing to run the government from his hospital bed in Havana, but the political opposition has long challenged that assertion, questioning how he could manage the country and be too sick to communicate with the public directly.

As Mr. Chávez’s absence has dragged on, the opposition has consistently demanded that the government provide proof that he is well enough to lead the nation. Some have even questioned whether he is still alive.

On Friday, opposition leader Henrique Capriles, responded to the release of the pictures, posting on Twitter: “How the spokesmen of the government keep lying to the people.”

In another tweet he said: “A few days ago, the liars said they talked with the Pdt., now they say he can’t talk! They make fun of their own people.” 

Read More..

City Room: Live Video: Mayor Bloomberg's Final State of the City Address

Watch Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg deliver his final State of the City address from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

Also, New Yorkers, we are interested in the State of Your Block. Please tell us how your block has been doing, or tweet at us using the hashtag #NYCblock.

Below: Twitter highlights from the mayor’s speech:

“The strike is a lost cause” @MikeBloomberg on bus driver strike

— Michael Paulson (@MichaelPaulson) 14 Feb 13

No mention of buying-out homeowners in flood zones, like @NYGovCuomo has suggested. #SOTC2013

— Andrew J. Hawkins (@andyjayhawk) 14 Feb 13

MT @samrob12: Pot possession in NYC? From now on: No overnight jail, just desk appearance ticket from precinct, Bloomberg to say.

— NYT Metro Desk (@NYTMetro) 14 Feb 13

Mayor: We’ll open all of our beaches on Memorial Day weekend this year, just as we always do! #Sandy #SOTC2013

— NYC Mayor’s Office (@NYCMayorsOffice) 14 Feb 13

Bloomberg on Sandy rebuilding: “We’re a coastal city, so we cannot – and will not – abandon the waterfront.” #sotc2012

— Anna Sale (@annasale) 14 Feb 13

Bloomberg throws a hard elbow at Robert Moses, saying — correctly — that Moses cut off the city from its waterfront.

— Clyde Haberman (@ClydeHaberman) 14 Feb 13

“The special interests and campaign donors have never had less power than they’ve had over the past 11 years” – @MikeBloomberg

— Michael Paulson (@MichaelPaulson) 14 Feb 13

Our goal is not to spend the year cutting ribbons. Our goal is to keep NYC on the right course for decades http://t.co/iIJ1sfih #SOTC2013

— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) 14 Feb 13

Read More..

Tech Companies and Immigrant Advocates Press for Broad Changes in Law

SAN FRANCISCO — What do computer programmers and illegal immigrants have to do with each other?

When it comes to the sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that Congress is considering this year, the answer is everything.

Silicon Valley executives, who have long pressed the government to provide more visas for foreign-born math and science brains, are joining forces with an array of immigration groups seeking comprehensive changes in the law. And as momentum builds in Washington for a broad revamping, the tech industry has more hope than ever that it will finally achieve its goal: the expanded access to visas that it says is critical to its own continued growth and that of the economy as a whole.

Signs of the industry’s stepped-up engagement on the issue are visible everywhere. Prominent executives met with President Obama last week. Start-up founders who rarely abandon their computers have flown across the country to meet with lawmakers.

This Tuesday, the Technology CEO Council, an advocacy organization representing companies like Dell, Intel and Motorola, had meetings on Capitol Hill. On Wednesday, Steve Case, a founder of AOL, is scheduled to testify at the first Senate hearing this year on immigration legislation, alongside the head of the deportation agents’ union and the leader of a Latino civil rights group.

“The odds of high-skilled passing without comprehensive is close to zero, and the odds of comprehensive passing without high-skilled passing is close to zero,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research group based in Washington.

The push comes as a clutch of powerful Senate Republicans and Democrats have reached a long-elusive agreement on some basic principles of a “comprehensive” revamping of immigration law. Separately, a bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate in late January focuses directly on the visa issue.

The industry’s argument for more so-called high-skilled visas has already persuaded the president.

“Real reform means fixing the legal immigration system to cut waiting periods, reduce bureaucracy, and attract the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers that will help create jobs and grow our economy,” Mr. Obama said in Tuesday’s State of the Union speech.

In a speech in Las Vegas in January in which he introduced his own blueprint for overhauling immigration law, Mr. Obama embraced the idea that granting more visas was essential to maintaining innovation and job growth. He talked about foreigners studying at American universities, figuring out how to turn their ideas into businesses.

In part, the new alliance between the tech industry and immigration groups was born out of the 2012 elections and the rising influence of Hispanic voters.

“The world has changed since the election,” said Peter J. Muller, director of government relations at Intel, pointing out that the defeat of many Republican candidates had led to a softening of the party’s position on broad changes to immigration law. “There is a focus on comprehensive. We’re thrilled by it.”

“At this point,” he added, “our best hope for immigration reform lies with comprehensive reform.”

Mr. Case, the AOL co-founder, who now runs an investment fund, echoed that sentiment after meeting with the president last Tuesday.

“I look forward to doing whatever I can to help pass comprehensive immigration reform in the months ahead,” he said, “and ensure it includes strong provisions regarding high-skilled immigration, so we are positioned to win the global battle for talent.”

That sort of sentiment delights immigrants’ rights advocates who have banged their heads against the wall for years to rally a majority of Congress around their agenda.

“The stars are aligning here,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “You’ve got the politics of immigration reform changing. You’ve got tech leaders leaning in not just for high-skilled but for broader immigration reform.”

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who is co-sponsoring the bill to increase the number of visas available for highly skilled immigrants, said the cooperation went both ways.

“All the talk about the STEM field — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — has awakened even those who aren’t all that interested in the high-tech world,” he said.

While the growing momentum has surprised many in Washington, comprehensive change is still not a sure thing, especially in the Republican-controlled House.

Mr. Hatch said he would push forward with his measure even if the broader efforts foundered. But his Democratic co-sponsor, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, said she would press for the bill to be part of the comprehensive package.

Last year, technology executives had a taste of what could happen with stand-alone legislation.

Julia Preston contributed reporting from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 13, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the current basic annual cap for H-1B visas. It is 65,000 a year, not 60,000.

Read More..