Iraq fades as a hot political issue

"Until recently the conventional wisdom was that the 2008 election would be dominated by the Iraq war," says Philip Gordon, fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research and policy organisation, who is advising Barack Obama's 2008 bid. "But the situation in Iran is moving much more quickly and that is where President Bush's decisions could have consequences for whoever takes over in January 2009."

The fading of Iraq as a lightning rod is most evident on Capitol Hill, where Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, has all but abandoned Democratic attempts to force Mr Bush's hand by attaching conditions to White House war-funding requests.

Mr Bush on Monday asked Congress for another $54bn (€38bn, £26bn) in supplemental war funding - bringing the total for this financial year to $194bn, or roughly $400m a day. Instead of promising new conditions, the Democrats announced they would merely delay Mr Bush's request to authorise the money in coming weeks.

"Because casualties have fallen so far, it is futile to try to persuade moderate Republicans to vote with us to compel a withdrawal of US troops," said a Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill.

The reduction in casualties has also helped bring about a change in the debate among Democratic 2008 candidates who are no longer competing with each other to promise the quickest withdrawal of US troops.

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Clues to Why We Dream at All

Few of us suffer from nightmares crippling and persistent enough to demand treatment. Yet we all know how bad a nightmare feels, how it surrounds you and surges up to drown you and makes your teeth fall out in chunks and gives you leukemia and look, your 6-year-old daughter is running back and forth through traffic, and oh no, this train is headed the wrong way and it’s past midnight, and there you are a cowardly third-grader back on Creston Avenue in the Bronx, no, please, not the Bronx! And you scream and you thrash and you want to wake up.

By all evidence, outrageously bad dreams are a universal human experience. Sometimes the dreams are scary enough to jolt the slumberer awake, in which case they meet the formal definition of nightmares — bad dreams that wake you up. At other times, they are even worse. The sleeper thinks the nightmare is over, only to step into Your Nested Nightmare, Chapter II. Whatever the particulars of the plot, researchers say, nightmares and dreadful dreams offer potentially telling clues into the larger mystery of why we dream in the first place, how our dreaming and waking lives may intersect and cross-infect each other, and, most baffling of all, how we manage to construct a virtual reality in our skull, a seemingly life-size, multidimensional, sensorily rich nocturnal roundhouse staffed with characters so persuasive you want to ... strangle them, before they can strangle you.

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Keeping the faith

It may be daring to say it but America seems to be experiencing an atheist moment. Although "In God We Trust" was declared the national motto by an act of Congress more than 50 years ago and has been stamped on the currency for longer than that, some considerable doubt has developed of late.

If you look at the bestseller list over the last year, you'll find a number of books on atheism - to the surprise of the publishing industry.

God has always moved in not-so-mysterious ways when it comes to the literary world. He can sell books, especially ones that foretell an apocalyptic ending just around the corner.

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In Diabetes, a Complex of Causes

The fifth leading killer of Americans, with 73,000 deaths a year, diabetes is a disease in which the body’s failure to regulate glucose, or blood sugar, can lead to serious and even fatal complications. Until very recently, the regulation of glucose — how much sugar is present in a person’s blood, how much is taken up by cells for fuel, and how much is released from energy stores — was regarded as a conversation between a few key players: the pancreas, the liver, muscle and fat.

Now, however, the party is proving to be much louder and more complex than anyone had shown before.

New research suggests that a hormone from the skeleton, of all places, may influence how the body handles sugar. Mounting evidence also demonstrates that signals from the immune system, the brain and the gut play critical roles in controlling glucose and lipid metabolism. (The findings are mainly relevant to Type 2 diabetes, the more common kind, which comes on in adulthood.)

Focusing on the cross-talk between more different organs, cells and molecules represents a “very important change in our paradigm” for understanding how the body handles glucose, said Dr. C. Ronald Kahn, a diabetes researcher and professor at Harvard Medical School.

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Al-Qaeda In Iraq Reported Crippled

Things looking good in one aspect of the Occupation, but it may be too soon to judge.

There is widespread agreement that AQI has suffered major blows over the past three months. Among the indicators cited is a sharp drop in suicide bombings, the group's signature attack, from more than 60 in January to around 30 a month since July. Captures and interrogations of AQI leaders over the summer had what a senior military intelligence official called a "cascade effect," leading to other killings and captures. The flow of foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq has also diminished, although officials are unsure of the reason and are concerned that the broader al-Qaeda network may be diverting new recruits to Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The deployment of more U.S. and Iraqi forces into AQI strongholds in Anbar province and the Baghdad area, as well as the recruitment of Sunni tribal fighters to combat AQI operatives in those locations, has helped to deprive the militants of a secure base of operations, U.S. military officials said. "They are less and less coordinated, more and more fragmented," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said recently. Describing frayed support structures and supply lines, Odierno estimated that the group's capabilities have been "degraded" by 60 to 70 percent since the beginning of the year.

A reason to be pessimistic

For each assessment of progress against AQI, there is a cautionary note that comes from long and often painful experience. Despite the increased killings and captures of AQI members, Odierno said, "it only takes three people" to construct and detonate a suicide car bomb that can "kill thousands." The goal, he said, is to make each attack less effective and lengthen the periods between them.

Right now, said another U.S. official, who declined even to be identified by the agency he works for, the data are "insufficient and difficult to measure."

"AQI is definitely taking some hits," the official said. "There is definite progress, and that is undeniable good news. But what we don't know is how long it will last . . . and whether it's sustainable. . . . They have withstood withering pressure for a long period of time." Three months, he said, is not long enough to consider a trend sustainable.

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Ex-Commander Says Iraq Effort Is ‘a Nightmare’

“After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” General Sanchez said at a gathering of military reporters and editors in Arlington, Va.

He is the most senior war commander of a string of retired officers who have harshly criticized the administration’s conduct of the war. While much of the previous condemnation has been focused on the role of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, General Sanchez’s was an unusually broad attack on the overall course of the war.

But his own role as commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal leaves him vulnerable to criticism that he is shifting the blame from himself to the administration that ultimately replaced him and declined to nominate him for a fourth star, forcing his retirement.

Though he was cleared of wrongdoing in the abuses after an inquiry by the Army’s inspector general, General Sanchez became a symbol — with civilian officials like L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority — of ineffective American leadership early in the occupation.

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Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work

The prize is a vindication for Mr. Gore, whose frightening, cautionary film about the consequences of climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary, even as conservatives in the United States denounced it as alarmist and exaggerated.

“I will accept this award on behalf of all the people that have been working so long and so hard to try to get the message out about this planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in a brief appearance on Friday, Alto... standing with his wife, Tipper, and four members of the United Nations climate panel. “I’m going back to work right now,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”

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The Odyssey Years

There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood.

During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.

Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there’s bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don’t even detect a clear sense of direction in their children’s lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed.

They see that people in this age bracket are delaying marriage. They’re delaying having children. They’re delaying permanent employment. People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments — moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.

In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.

Yet with a little imagination it’s possible even for baby boomers to understand what it’s like to be in the middle of the odyssey years. It’s possible to see that this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions.

Great Op-Ed by David Brooks

Boom Times for Dentists, but Not for Teeth

For middle-class and wealthy Americans, straight white teeth are still a virtual birthright. And dentists say that a majority of people in this country receive high-quality care.

But many poor and lower-middle-class families do not receive adequate care, in part because most dentists want customers who can pay cash or have private insurance, and they do not accept Medicaid patients. As a result, publicly supported dental clinics have months-long waiting lists even for people who need major surgery for decayed teeth. At the pediatric clinic managed by the state-supported University of Florida dental school, for example, low-income children must wait six months for surgery.

In some cases, the results of poor dental care have been deadly. A child in Mississippi and another in Maryland died this year from infections caused by decayed teeth.

The dental profession’s critics — who include public health experts, some physicians and even some dental school professors — say that too many dentists are focused more on money than medicine.

“Most dentists consider themselves to be in the business of dentistry rather than the practice of dentistry,” said Dr. David A. Nash, a professor of pediatric dentistry at the University of Kentucky. “I’m a cynic about my profession, but the data are there. It’s embarrassing.”

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Tragedy in Wisconsin

The family of Tyler Peterson, the off-duty sheriff’s deputy who the police say shot and killed six people on Sunday and injured a seventh before dying, apparently of a gunshot wound, issued a statement of apology to the town yesterday afternoon.

“We also feel a tremendous amount of guilt and shame for the horrible acts Tyler committed,” the family said in a statement read aloud at a news briefing by Bill Farr, a local pastor. “We are struggling to respond, like most of you. We don’t know what we should do.”

The Petersons’ statement went on, “There is nothing that happened before or after yesterday’s events that has given us any insight into why.”

Before 3 a.m. Sunday, state authorities said, Mr. Peterson, 20, who also served as a part-time police officer in Crandon, arrived at the home of his former girlfriend, Jordanne Murray, 18. Ms. Murray and others — most of them graduates or students of the same close-knit high school in town — were watching movies, dozing and eating pizza.

Mr. Peterson, who many people said had a tumultuous relationship with Ms. Murray and had not been invited to the gathering, argued with the group, then left, state authorities said. But he quickly returned with a weapon — a rifle similar to the type and model carried by local sheriff’s deputies, though officials said they had not yet determined whether Mr. Peterson’s work rifle was used.

He sprayed the apartment with at least 30 rounds of gunfire. Ms. Murray died. So did five others, ranging in age from 14 to 20, including two young men whom schoolmates said Mr. Peterson considered close friends. A seventh person, Charlie Neitzel, 21, was wounded and remained hospitalized.

The state authorities, who took over investigation of the case given Mr. Peterson’s ties to both of the local law enforcement agencies, did not speculate on a motive for the shootings. But many residents and family members of the dead said Mr. Peterson had been angry about his separation from Ms. Murray, and seemed particularly jealous.

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Painkillers in Short Supply in Poor Countries

A survey of specialists in Africa, Asia and Latin America has produced a disturbing portrait of the difficulties in offering pain relief to the dying in poor countries. Many suffer routine shortages of painkillers, and the majority of specialists got no training in pain relief or opioid use during their medical education.

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Spreading Homework Out So Even Parents Have Some

Mr. Frye, an English teacher at Montclair High School, has asked the parents to read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, Section 1 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Their newest assignment is a poem by Saul Williams, a poet, musician and rapper who lives in Los Angeles. The ninth graders complete their assignments during class; the parents are supposed to write their responses on a blog Mr. Frye started online.

If the parents do not comply, Mr. Frye tells them, their child’s grade may suffer — a threat on which he has made good only once in the three years he has been making such assignments.

The point, he said, is to keep parents involved in their children’s ’ education well into high school. Studies have shown that parental involvement improves the quality of the education a student receives, but teenagers seldom invite that involvement. So, Mr. Frye said, he decided to help out.

“Parents complain about never getting to see their kids’ work,” he said. “Now they have to.”

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Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

No surprise here.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Ahmadinejad, at Columbia, Parries and Puzzles

The story of the day yesterday.

His speech at Columbia, in advance of his planned speech today at the United Nations, produced a day of intense protests and counterprotests around the campus. It was a performance at once both defiant — he said Iran could not recognize Israel “because it is based on ethnic discrimination, occupation and usurpation and it consistently threatens its neighbors” — and conciliatory — he said he wanted to visit ground zero to “show my respect” for what he called “a tragic event.”

And he said that even if the Holocaust did occur, the Palestinians should not pay the price for it.

He began the afternoon on the defensive.

Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia, under intense attack for the invitation — one protester outside the campus auditorium where Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke passed out fliers that said, “Bollinger, too bad bin Laden is not available” — opened the event with a 10-minute verbal assault.

He said, “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” adding, “You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

Sarkozy, a Frenchman in a Hurry, Maps His Path

“I can’t be criticized for wanting first place for France,” Mr. Sarkozy said in an interview with The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, his first with English-language news organizations since becoming president in May. He added, “If France doesn’t take the lead, who will?”

This projection of French power is like that of de Gaulle, in the 1950s and 60s, and every French leader since. But Mr. Sarkozy departs from classic Gaullist doctrine by suggesting that the path to that goal sometimes lies in aligning France — and Europe — alongside Washington rather than as a counterpoint to it.

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The Tiara Was Nice, Now Where’s the Scholarship?

Ashley Wood, Miss South Carolina 2004, attends the Wharton School. She has not been able to collect her pageant scholarships.

Interviews with contestants across the country describe a Miss America system in which local pageant directors do not return telephone calls and e-mail messages for months, local competitions close down before scholarships are distributed, and the fine print in contracts creates hurdles. Local winners across the country have threatened legal action, and some have taken it.

Pageant organizers at each level of the Miss America system say that such problems are the exception and that they occur because contestants miss deadlines or do not dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s to get paid.

In a statement, the Miss America Organization, based in Linwood, N.J., said: “While it is unimaginable that scholarships, which are the heart and soul of Miss America, could or would be wrongly withheld from pageant participants, we are looking into these allegations. We have definitive procedures in place to vet disputes and guarantee state organizations stand behind their scholarship agreements with the Miss America Organization and those to whom scholarships are promised.”

The statement added, “The Miss America Organization is absolutely unaware of any young lady that has ever been denied payment of scholarships after properly following the application process.”

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More Profit and Less Nursing at Many Homes

When health care goes private.

Habana Health Care Center, a 150-bed nursing home in Tampa, Fla., was struggling when a group of large private investment firms purchased it and 48 other nursing homes in 2002.

The facility’s managers quickly cut costs. Within months, the number of clinical registered nurses at the home was half what it had been a year earlier, records collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services indicate. Budgets for nursing supplies, resident activities and other services also fell, according to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration.

The investors and operators were soon earning millions of dollars a year from their 49 homes.

Residents fared less well. Over three years, 15 at Habana died from what their families contend was negligent care in lawsuits filed in state court. Regulators repeatedly warned the home that staff levels were below mandatory minimums. When regulators visited, they found malfunctioning fire doors, unhygienic kitchens and a resident using a leg brace that was broken.

“They’ve created a hellhole,” said Vivian Hewitt, who sued Habana in 2004 when her mother died after a large bedsore became infected by feces.

Habana is one of thousands of nursing homes across the nation that large Wall Street investment companies have bought or agreed to acquire in recent years.

Those investors include prominent private equity firms like Warburg Pincus and the Carlyle Group, better known for buying companies like Dunkin’ Donuts.

Happiness for $10 or Less

Finding wines for $10 or less.

Leave it to the Dining section’s wine panel to try to fill this vacuum. In a tasting of 25 red wines all $10 or under, we tried to pick out not only the best bottles but also the best regions to explore for good values.

Let’s face it, you can find hundreds if not thousands of bottles in this price range, down to the lowest of the low. We cannot try them all and say, “Here are the 10 best.” But we can give you some suggestions as to where to look, while offering up some good examples.

For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Jill Roberts, a portfolio manager for Valckenberg, an importer of German wines, and Chris Goodhart, the wine director of Balthazar in SoHo.

Frankly, the $10-and-under price range may represent the cheapest wines, but I feel the best values are in the $10-to-$20 range, where you can find sensational wines made by small producers using traditional techniques. These sorts of wines are much harder to find at $10 and under.

But this is September, that time of the year when the reality of summer vacation bills dims the hope of Christmas splurges, so right now every dollar helps. Here’s what we know:

In today’s winemaking world, there’s no excuse for bad wines. Technology and knowledge have reached the point where any wine ought to be purchased without fear of a spoiled or tainted bottle. Even Two-Buck Chuck is palatable, though I wouldn’t insult you by telling you it’s good. The exception is corked wines. Regardless of cost, bad corks can elude even the most meticulous examination.

While consumers can expect all wines to be palatable, finding interesting ones is another matter. Mass-producing inexpensive wine is a lot easier than creating wines with personality. In this price range, the great divide is between wines you can drink and wines you want to drink.

A Minister’s Public Lesson on Domestic Violence

The attack in a hotel parking lot here last month was remarkable not only because the victim, Juanita Bynum, is the most prominent black female television evangelist in the country, who is pals with Oprah, admired by Aretha, and who recently signed on to campaign for Obama.

It was shocking, especially to legions of women who had latched onto her message that only chastity and self-respect would bring true love, because the attacker who choked, stomped and kicked her, Ms. Bynum said, was her husband.

The episode has led to debate about domestic violence and how churches, particularly black churches, respond to it.

But it has also raised questions about the trajectory of Ms. Bynum’s career as a woman who called herself a prophetess, and while condemning promiscuity spoke openly about her lust and longing, in what has been called one of the most significant contemporary American sermons. Her struggle struck a chord in many black communities, where marriage rates are notoriously low, and it seemed to culminate in the form of an earthly reward: a televised, million-dollar 2003 wedding to a fellow Pentecostal preacher, Bishop Thomas W. Weeks III, followed by what seemed to be a model marriage.

Since the attack, Ms. Bynum, 48, has tried to reinvent herself once more, announcing that she is “the new face of domestic violence.” But Tom Joyner, the syndicated radio talk show host, did not let her off the hook so easily: “If you’re a prophet,” Mr. Joyner asked, “didn’t you see this coming?”

In a telephone interview, Ms. Bynum said the public had overly romanticized the union. “What happened to me was reality,” she said. “I made a right decision that went bad. If you choose a Cadillac, if two years later someone runs into you and tears it up, it wasn’t a bad decision to buy the car.”

Mr. Weeks, who according to the police report was pulled off his wife by a hotel bellhop, pleaded not guilty to charges of aggravated assault and making terroristic threats. Ms. Bynum has filed for divorce.

Conservative critics among the evangelical clergy have accused her of exploiting the attack for publicity, calling her “loud,” “angry,” “aggressive” and “out of control,” while a group of black and Hispanic churches has demanded Mr. Weeks’s resignation. Fans responded with shock.

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Migration Reshapes Iraq’s Sectarian Landscape

A vast internal migration is radically reshaping Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian landscape, according to new data collected by thousands of relief workers, but displacement in the most populous and mixed areas is surprisingly complex, suggesting that partitioning the country into semiautonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves would not be easy.

The migration data, which are expected to be released this week by the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization but were given in advance to The New York Times, indicate that in Baghdad alone there are now nearly 170,000 families, accounting for almost a million people, that have fled their homes in search of security, shelter, water, electricity, functioning schools or jobs to support their families.

The figures show that many families move twice, three times or more, first fleeing immediate danger and then making more considered calculations based on the availability of city services or schools for their children. Finding neighbors of their own sect is just one of those considerations.

Over all, the patterns suggest that despite the ethnic and sectarian animosity that has gripped the country, at least some Iraqis would rather continue to live in mixed communities.

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Support Grows for Teacher Bonuses

A movement gaining momentum in Congress and some school systems in the Washington region and beyond would boost pay for exceptional teachers in high-poverty schools, a departure from salary schedules based on seniority and professional degrees that have kept pay in lockstep for decades.

Lawmakers are debating this month whether to authorize federal grants through a revision of the No Child Left Behind law for bonuses of as much as $12,500 a year for outstanding teachers in schools that serve low-income areas.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said that the teaching workforce is leaking talent and that his proposal would help rejuvenate it. Young teachers watch their friends "go off and get paid for their time and ingenuity" in other fields, Miller said. "In teaching, you go as fast as the slowest person."

Miller's proposal, building on recent federal steps to encourage incentive pay, would provide grants to school systems that choose to pay bonuses to teachers who excel in high-poverty schools, worth up to $10,000 in most cases and $12,500 for specialists in math, science and other hard-to-staff subjects. Decisions on who gets extra pay would be based on student test gains and professional evaluations. Miller's aides said they had no cost estimate for the measure.

Advocates of performance pay have seen similar initiatives fail, and many take pains to avoid the term "merit pay" and its association with past mistakes. But with fresh support from foundations and new tools that enable student achievement data to be linked to individual teachers, many experts said the idea is gaining favor. Performance pay efforts are underway in school systems in Denver and Minnesota, and some local administrators are planning to establish fast tracks for financial rewards for top teachers.

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Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?

At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?

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University Fences In a Berkeley Protest, and a New One Arises

Life at Berkeley

On one side are the protesting tree lovers who have been living Tarzan-like since December in a stand of coastal oaks and other trees. On the other is the university, which wants to cut down the trees to build a $125 million athletic center, part of a larger plan to upgrade its aging, seismically challenged football stadium.

The two sides disagreed. They bickered. Lawyers were called. Then came The Fence.

Iraqis have mixed feelings on U.S. progress report

"The Americans are and will remain occupiers and hated," said Abu Jabir, a receptionist at a Baghdad hospital. Jabir, expressing a thought heard frequently among Iraqis from all backgrounds, said the U.S. invasion in March 2003 had done a good thing in overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein. But he said the occupation had planted the seeds of sectarianism and it was time U.S. troops became less visible so Iraqis could begin taking charge.

"A quick American pullout is not good, as civil war may flare," he said. "I think they should stay, but avoid the streets. Yes, we want them, but only as a backup and cover for our security."

"It didn't show the negative things on the ground, but it showed the positive things only. We are rejecting it completely," said Abdul Mehdi Muttari, a spokesman for the Sadr bloc in Najaf, a Shiite city south of Baghdad.

"There is nothing new that it was going to tell us," said Allawi, whose Iraq National Accord holds 22 seats in the parliament. "What's going on here is not that good: sectarianism, violence, no institutions, services almost totally halted."

A few minutes earlier, a loud bomb had gone off at a busy intersection about half a mile from his Baghdad office. Police said the blast killed one civilian and injured five.

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U.S. seeks pact with Shiite militia

U.S. diplomats and military officers have been in talks with members of the armed movement loyal to Muqtada Sadr, a sharp reversal of policy and a grudging recognition that the radical Shiite cleric holds a dominant position in much of Baghdad and other parts of Iraq.

The secret dialogue has been going on since at least early 2006, but appeared to yield a tangible result only in the last week -- with relative calm in an area of west Baghdad that has been among the capital's most dangerous sections.

The discussions have been complicated by divisions within Sadr's movement as well as the cleric's public vow never to meet with Iraq's occupiers. Underlying the issue's sensitivity, Sadrists publicly deny any contact with the Americans or British -- fully aware the price of acknowledging such meetings would be banishment from the movement or worse.

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High School Football Teams Reflect Changes in Rural Life

Rural America's Friday Night Lights

The northwestern Minnesota towns of Stephen and Argyle, populations 708 and 656 respectively, are separated by nine flat miles of soybean and wheat. The highest point between them is the mounded dirt that elevates the railroad tracks connecting their grain elevators. Since consolidating their schools in 1996, they have dominated nine-man football, never missing a state semifinal.

With a state-record winning streak and four consecutive nine-man state championships, the Stephen/Argyle Central Storm has the characteristics of a high school football powerhouse. Carrying the weight of two small, declining farming towns on its shoulders, the team also manifests much larger challenges confronting towns like these throughout the Midwest.

The impact of changing demographics and farming technology in this region is apparent in the student body and, on Friday nights, on the football field.

Consolidation has brought Stephen and Argyle football glory, but the towns are shrinking and growing older. The average age in Marshall County, home to Stephen and Argyle, is 40, 10 years older than the state average. Almost a fifth of the population exceeds the age of 65, a 50 percent jump above the state average.

“It’s young people moving off the prairie and into the city,” said Tom Gillaspy, the state’s demographer.

‘Feel Good’ vs. ‘Do Good’ on Climate

Article from the NYT's about a new book by Dr Lomborg and his economic evaluation of the global warming threat.

The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies.

But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.

“We could spend all that money to cut emissions and end up with more land flooded next century because people would be poorer,” Dr. Lomborg said as we surveyed Manhattan’s expanded shoreline. “Wealth is a more important factor than sea-level rise in protecting you from the sea. You can draw maps showing 100 million people flooded out of their homes from global warming, but look at what’s happened here in New York. It’s the same story in Denmark and Holland — we’ve been gaining land as the sea rises.”

Dr. Lomborg, who’s best known (and most reviled in some circles) for an earlier book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” runs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which gathers economists to set priorities in tackling global problems. In his new book, he dismisses the Kyoto emissions cuts as a “feel-good” strategy because it sounds virtuous and lets politicians make promises they don’t have to keep. He outlines an alternative “do-good” strategy that would cost less but accomplish more in dealing with climate change as well as more pressing threats like malaria, AIDS, polluted drinking water and malnutrition.

If you’re worried about stronger hurricanes flooding coasts, he says, concentrate on limiting coastal development and expanding wetlands right now rather than trying to slightly delay warming decades from now. To give urbanites a break from hotter summers, concentrate on reducing the urban-heat-island effect. If cities planted more greenery and painted roofs and streets white, he says, they could more than offset the impact of global warming.

The biggest limitation to his cost-benefit analyses is that no one knows exactly what global warming will produce. It may not be worth taking expensive steps to forestall a one-foot rise in the sea level, but what if the seas rise much higher? Dr. Lomborg’s critics argue that we owe it to future generations to prepare for the worst-case projections.

But preparing for the worst in future climate is expensive, which means less money for the most serious threats today — and later this century. You can imagine plenty of worst-case projections that have nothing to do with climate change, as Dr. Lomborg reminded me at the end of our expedition.

Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

The Legal Arguments

The lawsuit raises serious First Amendment concerns, said Douglas Laycock, professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, but he added that it was not a slam-dunk case.

“Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out things that tend to incite violence in prisons,” Mr. Laycock said. “But once they say, ‘We’re going to pick 150 good books for your religion, and that’s all you get,’ the criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They’re picking out what is accessible religious teaching for prisoners, and the government can’t do that without a compelling justification. Here the justification is, the government is too busy to look at all the books, so they’re going to make their own preferred list to save a little time, a little money.”

Link

Gaza Under Hamas: Quiet, Cut Off and Digging In

After 18 months in which gun battles between Hamas and Fatah forces defined street life, Hamas has made it illegal to carry weapons in public or to fire them, even at weddings or funerals.

Tamer al-Bagga, who manages a beachside cafe, said people now patronized his business until “all hours of the night.” In June, people were hiding at home, keeping their children on the floor to avoid bullets. “Now we have security,” he said. “But with the closure, we have no money.”

Because the Hamas charter calls for Israel’s destruction and Hamas is classified by Israel, the United States and the European Union as a terrorist group, Israel, along with much of the world, is squeezing Gaza, allowing only goods classified as humanitarian or essential to enter and no exports at all to leave. So an already faltering economy is collapsing.

According to the Palestinian Businessmen Association, 75 percent of private factories and workshops have closed for lack of essential materials or spare parts, throwing 70,000 more people out of work.

Stores are half stocked. Cigarettes and spare parts have become very expensive. There are electricity cuts of up to eight hours a day. Vegetables and fruit, with no possibility of export, are dirt cheap. “We have the best-fed donkeys in the world,” said Fahed Khalifa, 19, who owns one.

With United Nations food aid, no one is starving, but Gaza is more isolated now than ever, cut off not only from the West Bank but also from the rest of the world. With the crossing into Egypt also closed, Gazans are finding it almost impossible to get Israeli permission to leave the territory, even temporarily.

Hamas now has a near monopoly on weapons in Gaza, but its battle with Fatah, which largely controls the West Bank, continues. The fight is over personnel, the news media and even how to define the weekend, with Hamas sticking with the traditional Thursday and Friday, and the West Bank government insisting on Friday and Saturday.

While Hamas talks of restoring a unity government with Fatah, the rift appears to be deepening.

Link

Some Food Additives Raise Hyperactivity

In Study reports that certain food additives can cause hyperactivity. NYT Article.

“A mix of additives commonly found in children’s foods increases the mean level of hyperactivity,” wrote the researchers, led by Jim Stevenson, a professor of psychology at the University of Southampton. “The finding lends strong support for the case that food additives exacerbate hyperactive behaviors (inattention, impulsivity and overactivity) at least into middle childhood.”

In response to the study, the Food Standards Agency advised parents to monitor their children’s activity and, if they noted a marked change with food containing additives, to adjust their diets accordingly, eliminating artificial colors and preservatives.

But Professor Stevenson said it was premature to go further. “We’ve set up an issue that needs more exploration,” he said in a telephone interview.

In response to the study, some pediatricians cautioned that a diet without artificial colors and preservatives might cause other problems for children.

“Even if it shows some increase in hyperactivity, is it clinically significant and does it impact the child’s life?” said Dr. Thomas Spencer, a specialist in Pediatric Psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“Is it powerful enough that you want to ostracize your kid? It is very socially impacting if children can’t eat the things that their friends do.”

Brightly lit classrooms 'hamper ability of pupils to concentrate'

Don't blame the Teachers, the unions, or the parents. It looks like bright lights in schools may be to blame.

A paper to be presented today to the British Educational Research Association conference warns that classrooms that are too light can cause headaches for pupils, making it less easy to concentrate in class.

Mark Winterbottom, a researcher from the University of Cambridge, will tell the conference – held at the University of London's Institute of Education – that "misguided policy decisions" over the kind of lighting used in classrooms were hampering the drive to improve standards.

One offender is the "whiteboard" installed in most classrooms which, until now, has been considered the most innovative resource to stimulate pupils' interest installed for decades. Dr Winterbottom will argue that the whiteboards, which are usually mounted on a wall at the front of the class, help direct light in the classroom into pupils' eyes. "Wherever possible, such boards should be tilted so that such reflected glare is directed towards the ceiling," he will say.

Dr Winterbottom will argue that the main offender is the kind of fluorescent lighting installed in more than 80 per cent of classrooms (100Hz lights with 100 vibrations per second are most commonly used). These, his research indicates, create an imperceptible flicker that can cause visual discomfort and make it more difficult to read properly.

Dr Winterbottom and his co-researcher, Professor Arnold Wilkins from Essex University, studied the effect of lighting in 90 classrooms and concluded that, in addition to tilting the whiteboards, local education authorities should replace the 100Hz lights with high-frequency 32Hz fluorescent lights, which are used in 20 per cent of classrooms. These, the duo will argue, did not cause discomfort, used less energy and had lower long-term running costs.

Doctor Links a Man’s Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit

Beware of the Microwave Popcorn.

A fondness for microwave buttered popcorn may have led a 53-year-old Colorado man to develop a serious lung condition that until now has been found only in people working in popcorn plants.

Lung specialists and even a top industry official say the case, the first of its kind, raises serious concerns about the safety of microwave butter-flavored popcorn.

“We’ve all been working on the workplace safety side of this, but the potential for consumer exposure is very concerning,” said John B. Hallagan, general counsel for the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association of the United States, a trade association of companies that make butter flavorings for popcorn producers. “Are there other cases out there? There could be.”

Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq

Insight from the New York Times.

There is no assurance that the willingness of Sunnis in Anbar to join in common cause with the United States against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia can be replicated elsewhere in Iraq. And as reporters who have been embedded with units working to enlist the support of the Sunni sheiks have written, in vivid accounts from the scene, there are many reasons to question how sustained the Sunnis’ loyalty will be.

The sheiks and their followers have been barred from the Iraqi military, and it is unclear whether Mr. Maliki’s government will let large numbers of Sunnis sign up in the future. That creates the risk that the Sunni groups, once better trained and better armed, will ultimately turn on the central government or its patron, the American military.

Then there is the worry that, even if Mr. Bush is successful in working in promoting “moderate” Sunnis in Anbar and “moderate” Shiites in the south, the result will be exactly the kind of partitioned state — with all its potential for full-scale civil war — that the White House has long insisted must be avoided.

“Those are real risks, and they explain in part why the strategy was not pursued before late in 2006,” said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who, as a member of the National Security Council staff at the White House until he left this summer, was one of the architects of the “New Way Forward,” the plan Mr. Bush unveiled in January.

Bipolar Illness Soars as a Diagnosis for the Young

The number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, researchers report today in the most comprehensive study of the controversial diagnosis.

Experts say the number has almost certainly risen further since 2003.

Many experts theorize that the jump reflects that doctors are more aggressively applying the diagnosis to children, and not that the incidence of the disorder has increased.

But the magnitude of the increase surprises many psychiatrists. They say it is likely to intensify the debate over the validity of the diagnosis, which has shaken child psychiatry.

Bipolar disorder is characterized by extreme mood swings. Until relatively recently, it was thought to emerge almost exclusively in adulthood. But in the 1990s, psychiatrists began looking more closely for symptoms in younger patients.

Some experts say greater awareness, reflected in the increasing diagnoses, is letting youngsters with the disorder obtain the treatment they need.

Other experts say bipolar disorder is overdiagnosed. The term, the critics say, has become a catchall applied to almost any explosive, aggressive child.

Link

Panel Will Urge Broad Overhaul of Iraqi Police

The hits keep on coming.

An independent commission established by Congress to assess Iraq’s security forces will recommend remaking the 26,000-member national police force to purge it of corrupt officers and Shiite militants suspected of complicity in sectarian killings, administration and military officials said Thursday.

The commission, headed by Gen. James L. Jones, the former top United States commander in Europe, concludes that the rampant sectarianism that has existed since the formation of the police force requires that its current units “be scrapped” and reshaped into a smaller, more elite organization, according to one senior official familiar with the findings. The recommendation is that “we should start over,” the official said.

The report, which will be presented to Congress next week, is among a number of new Iraq assessments — including a national intelligence estimate and a Government Accountability Office report — that await lawmakers when they return from summer recess. But the Jones commission’s assessment is likely to receive particular attention as the work of a highly regarded team that was alone in focusing directly on the worthiness of Iraq’s army and police force.

GAO Draft at Odds With White House

More negative reports coming out of Iraq. This time the GAO weighs in.

The draft provides a stark assessment of the tactical effects of the current U.S.-led counteroffensive to secure Baghdad. "While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved."

"Overall," the report concludes, "key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds," as promised. While it makes no policy recommendations, the draft suggests that future administration assessments "would be more useful" if they backed up their judgments with more details and "provided data on broader measures of violence from all relevant U.S. agencies."

Moqtada al-Sadr announces ceasefire in Iraq

Sadr announced yesterday that an order to stand down had been distributed to his loyalists following the deaths of more than 50 Shia Muslim pilgrims during sectarian fighting in the holy city of Karbala on Tuesday.

The surprise statement regarding his notorious Mahdi army, which is responsible for much of Iraq's sectarian blood-letting, not only caught British and American commanders off-guard but appeared to have surprised Baghdad officials too. Mowaffak al-Rubbaie, Iraq's national security adviser, said Baghdad would only welcome the move if Sadr's lieutenants stop attacks and their attempts to "blow up" the Iraqi government.

"I will see on the ground what is going to happen," he said. "It is good news if it is true. If it happens it will reduce violence in the country a great deal."

The militia has waged factional battles with rival Shia groups across Iraq in recent weeks. The extent of Shia against Shia fighting has raised questions over the 34-year-old cleric's grip over his loyalists. Sadr acted to dispel tensions hours after Baghdad was forced to impose a curfew on Karbala and order hundreds of thousands of worshippers out of the city.

Link

Iraq Chaos

Violence at a Religious Festival.

A power struggle between rival Shiite groups erupted during a religious festival in Karbala today, as gunmen with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades fought street battles amid crowds of pilgrims, killing 50 people and wounding 200, Iraqi officials said.

The Iraqi refugee crisis continues.

This year, for the first time, administration officials began publicly discussing the special dangers faced by Iraqis working with Americans here and acknowledging the need to grant them safe haven in the United States. To that end, the administration has set up a special program for a small number of Iraqis, which gives preferential treatment to full-time employees of the American Embassy, currently about 125 in Baghdad, and to 500 interpreters by allowing them to skip the lengthy United Nations refugee process once they leave Iraq.

But thousands more Iraqis work for the United States through contractors like Titan, a subsidiary of L-3 Communications; DynCorp International; Parsons Corporation; and Triple Canopy, or the subcontractors working for them. In all, 69,000 Iraqis work on contracts with the Department of Defense through Iraqi and foreign companies, according to the American military. They are cleaners, construction workers, drivers and security guards, to name a few, and though they face the same reprisals as anyone working more directly with the American government they do not fall into the special category.

A spokesman for the United States Embassy here said all Iraqis who had worked for the United States would have their refugee applications sped up once they fled Iraq and reached neighboring countries like Jordan or Syria.

“The big question mark is for those who can’t reach us here,” said Rafiq A. Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration in Amman, Jordan.

“I am not gay, I never have been gay”

Mr. Craig, 62, apologized for “the cloud placed over Idaho” by his arrest and guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge. But his deepest regret, he said, is that he pleaded guilty when he had done nothing wrong.

The senator said he had chosen to plead guilty without consulting a lawyer, and before telling his family, in the hope that the incident would just “go away” somehow.

“That was a mistake, and I deeply regret it,” he said.

Link

Senator, Arrested at Airport, Pleads Guilty

Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, was arrested in June by an undercover police officer in a men’s bathroom at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in the case three weeks ago.

Mr. Craig, 62, was fined more than $500 and placed on unsupervised probation for a year. A 10-day jail sentence was suspended, according to a copy of a court document in the case. A second charge, interference with privacy, was dismissed.


Link

Iraq Orders Pilgrims to Leave After Violence

More than 1 million pilgrims were ordered to leave the Shiite holy city of Karbala on Tuesday and police imposed a curfew after two days of violence -- including raging gunbattles between rival militias -- claimed at least 35 lives during a religious festival.

Nearly 200 people were wounded, security officials said, and the government sent reinforcements from Baghdad to quell growing unrest and help clear the city.

gunbattle between rival militias -- claimed at least 35 lives during a religious festival.

Nearly 200 people were wounded, security officials said, and the government sent reinforcements from Baghdad to quell growing unrest and help clear the city.

Link

Schools Fight for Teachers Because of High Turnover

The battle to retain the best and brightest to teach America's youth continues.

The retirement of thousands of baby boomer teachers coupled with the departure of younger teachers frustrated by the stress of working in low-performing schools is fueling a crisis in teacher turnover that is costing school districts substantial amounts of money as they scramble to fill their ranks for the fall term.

Superintendents and recruiters across the nation say the challenge of putting a qualified teacher in every classroom is heightened in subjects like math and science and is a particular struggle in high-poverty schools, where the turnover is highest. Thousands of classes in such schools have opened with substitute teachers in recent years.

Here in Guilford County, N.C., turnover had become so severe in some high-poverty schools that principals were hiring new teachers for nearly every class, every term. To staff its neediest schools before classes start on Aug. 28, recruiters have been advertising nationwide, organizing teacher fairs and offering one of the nation’s largest recruitment bonuses, $10,000 to instructors who sign up to teach Algebra I.

“We had schools where we didn’t have a single certified math teacher,” said Terry Grier, the schools superintendent. “We needed an incentive, because we couldn’t convince teachers to go to these schools without one.”

Guilford County, which has 116 schools, is far from the only district to take this route as school systems compete to fill their ranks. Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit policy group that seeks to encourage better teaching, said hundreds of districts were offering recruitment incentives this summer.

Officials in New York, which has the nation’s largest school system, said they had recruited about 5,000 new teachers by mid-August, attracting those certified in math, science and special education with a housing incentive that can include $5,000 for a down payment.

New York also offers subsidies through its teaching fellows program, which recruits midcareer professionals from fields like health care, law and finance. The money helps defer the cost of study for a master’s degree. The city expects to hire at least 1,300 additional teachers before school begins on Sept. 4, said Vicki Bernstein, director of teacher recruitment.

Los Angeles has offered teachers signing with low-performing schools a $5,000 bonus. The district, the second-largest in the country, had hired only about 500 of the 2,500 teachers it needed by Aug. 15 but hoped to begin classes fully staffed, said Deborah Ignagni, chief of teacher recruitment.

In Kansas, Alexa Posny, the state’s education commissioner, said the schools had been working to fill “the largest number of vacancies” the state had ever faced. This is partly because of baby boomer retirements and partly because districts in Texas and elsewhere were offering recruitment bonuses and housing allowances, luring Kansas teachers away.

“This is an acute problem that is becoming a crisis,” Ms. Posny said.

As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes

New series of articles by the New York Times about the Chinese Economy.

BEIJING, Aug. 25 — No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo.

But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.

Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.

Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.

Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.

China is choking on its own success. The economy is on a historic run, posting a succession of double-digit growth rates. But the growth derives, now more than at any time in the recent past, from a staggering expansion of heavy industry and urbanization that requires colossal inputs of energy, almost all from coal, the most readily available, and dirtiest, source.

“It is a very awkward situation for the country because our greatest achievement is also our biggest burden,” says Wang Jinnan, one of China’s leading environmental researchers. “There is pressure for change, but many people refuse to accept that we need a new approach so soon.”

China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.

More pressing still, China has entered the most robust stage of its industrial revolution, even as much of the outside world has become preoccupied with global warming.

Experts once thought China might overtake the United States as the world’s leading producer of greenhouse gases by 2010, possibly later. Now, the International Energy Agency has said China could become the emissions leader by the end of this year, and the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency said China had already passed that level.

Iraqi Factions’ Self-Interest Blocks Political Progress

Another good piece by Damien Cave.

In part, of course, Iraq remains a place pocked by violence and fear, which makes compromise difficult. But more important, say Iraqi political commentators and officials, Iraq has become a cellular nation, dividing and redividing into competing constituencies that have a greater stake in continued chaos than in compromise.

In most areas, for most Iraqis, the central government today is either irrelevant or invisible. Provinces and even neighborhoods have become the stages where power struggles play out. As a result, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — or elements of each faction — have come to feel that they can do a better job on their own.

“No one can rely on the political participants who lack a common view of the public interest,” said Nabeel Mahmoud, an international relations professor at Baghdad University. “Such a concept is completely absent from the thinking of the political powers in Iraq’s government, so each side works to get their own quota of positions or resources.”

Generals Differ on the Timing of Troop Cuts

Different views of when and how many troops we should withdraw.

Among others, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, are said to be leaning toward a recommendation that steep reductions by the end of 2008, perhaps to half of the 20 combat brigades now in Iraq, should be the administration’s goal.

Such a drawdown would be deeper and faster than Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, is expected to recommend next month, administration officials said.

“If you’re out in Baghdad you might have a different priority for where you want the troops,” an administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the White House has not authorized public remarks on the options being considered.

It has been known since the spring that the White House was considering options for reducing combat forces in Iraq by almost half in 2008, which could bring overall troop levels below 100,000. But the shape of the debate is only beginning to emerge.

President Bush will have to weigh whether such steep reductions in 2008, even if cast only as a goal, would risk eroding what a new National Intelligence Estimate has described as measurable but fragile security gains achieved in Iraq in recent months.

Iraq's 'Alamo' simmers

Well-Written piece by the LA Times that goes inside the Surge.

Across the walls of a neighborhood that has seen better days, Sunni Arab insurgents splash slogans in black Arabic letters: "Death to America" and "Long Live the Resistance." U.S. and Iraqi forces black out the words and replace them with slogans of their own: "Long Live Iraq" and "No to Sectarianism."

The graffiti war, with its echo of U.S. ganglands, is a manifestation of a deadly confrontation that has played out for months in the vast southwestern section of Baghdad known as Dora. Sunni militants have chosen to make a concerted stand in Dora against U.S. troops -- their Alamo, as one American military official put it.

Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq?

Bush tries to make a comparison between the two.

In reminding Americans that the pullout in 1975 was followed by years of bloody upheaval in Southeast Asia, Mr. Bush argued in a speech on Wednesday that Vietnam’s lessons provide a reason for persevering in Iraq, rather than for leaving any time soon. Mr. Bush in essence accused his war critics of amnesia over the exodus of Vietnamese “boat people” refugees and the mass killings in Cambodia that upended the lives of millions of people.

President Bush is right on the factual record, according to historians. But many of them also quarreled with his drawing analogies from the causes of that turmoil to predict what might happen in Iraq should the United States withdraw.

“It is undoubtedly true that America’s failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia,” said David C. Hendrickson, a specialist on the history of American foreign policy at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

“But there are a couple of further points that need weighing,” he added. “One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam — this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred.”

Militias Seizing Control of Iraqi Electricity Grid

Armed groups increasingly control the antiquated switching stations that channel electricity around Iraq, the electricity minister said Wednesday.

That is dividing the national grid into fiefs that, he said, often refuse to share electricity generated locally with Baghdad and other power-starved areas in the center of Iraq.

The development adds to existing electricity problems in Baghdad, which has been struggling to provide power for more than a few hours a day because insurgents regularly blow up the towers that carry power lines into the city.

The government lost the ability to control the grid centrally after the American-led invasion in 2003, when looters destroyed electrical dispatch centers, the minister, Karim Wahid, said in a news briefing attended also by United States military officials.

Link

Middle Class Income Growth

While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, analysis of new tax statistics show.

The combined income of all Americans in 2005 was slightly larger than it was in 2000, but because more people were dividing up the national income pie, the average remained smaller. Total adjusted gross income in 2005 was $7.43 trillion, up 3.1 percent from 2000 and 5.8 percent from 2004.

Link

Tenet’s C.I.A. Unprepared for Qaeda Threat

So says a report conducted that was recently de-classified.

“They did not always work effectively and cooperatively, however,” the team concluded, in what amounted in part to sharp criticism of Mr. Tenet’s management skills and style.

“The team found neither ‘a single point of failure’ nor a ‘silver bullet’ that would have enabled the intelligence community to predict or prevent the 9/11 attacks,” the inspector general’s office said. “The team did find, however, failures to implement and manage important processes, to follow through with operations, and to properly share and analyze critical data.”

Levin Comments on Maliki

These comments further the reality that Iraq has no functioning government. We have replaced Prime Ministers there before without much success and now Levin hopes to do it again.

"I hope that the Iraqi assembly, when it reconvenes in a few weeks, will vote the Maliki government out of office and will have the wisdom to replace it with a less sectarian and a more unifying prime minister and government," said Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

I assume Levin is trying to win Brownie points with some group out there, but who does he honestly think we can replace Maliki with? At best we are years away from an actual unifying Prime Minister and Government.

Muqtada al-Sadr Interview in the Independent

On the Brits Leaving Basra...

"The British have realised this is not a war they should be fighting or one they can win," Mr Sadr said. "The Mehdi army has played an important role in that." He also warned that Britain's involvement in the invasion of Iraq had made the UK a less safe place to live. "The British put their soldiers in a dangerous position by sending them here but they also put the people in their own country in danger," he said. "They have made enemies among all Muslims and they now face attacks at home because of their war. That was their mistake."

On Iran and the UN

"We are at war and America is our enemy so we are entitled to take help from anyone," he said. "But we have not asked for Iran's help." The cleric also said he "welcomed" a recent decision by the UN to expand its role in Iraq. "I would support the UN here in Iraq if it comes and replaces the American and British occupiers," he said.

"If the UN comes here to truly help the Iraqi people, they will receive our help in their work. I would ask my followers to support the UN as long as it is here to help us rebuild our country. They must not just be another face of the American occupation."

Maliki

"Al-Maliki's government will not survive because he has proven that he will not work with important elements of the Iraqi people," the cleric said.

"The Prime Minister is a tool for the Americans and people see that clearly. It will probably be the Americans who decide to change him when they realise he has failed. We don't have a democracy here, we have a foreign occupation."

Link

As Democracy Push Falters, Bush Feels Like a 'Dissident'

The quest to end tyranny while noble, may not be realistic in the current political landscape.

The story of how a president's vision is translated into thorny policy is a classic Washington tale of politics, inertia, rivalries and funding battles -- and a case study in the frustrated ambition of a besieged presidency. Bush says his goal of "ending tyranny" will take many generations, and he aims to institutionalize it as U.S. policy no matter who follows him in the White House. And for all the difficulties of the moment, it may yet, as he hopes, see fruition down the road.

At this point, though, democracy promotion has become so identified with an unpopular president that candidates running to succeed him are running away from it. At a recent debate, they rushed to disavow it. "I'm not a carbon copy of President Bush," one said. Another ventured that "maybe going to elections so quickly is a mistake." A third, asked if he agreed with Bush's vision, replied, "Absolutely not, because I don't think we can force people to accept our way of life, our way of government."

And those were the Republicans.

Falluja’s Calm Is Seen as Fragile if U.S. Leaves

Despite progress things are shaky at best. NY Times Reporting.

Nearly three years after invading and seizing Falluja from insurgents, the Marines are engaged in another struggle here: trying to build up a city, and police force, that seem to get little help from the Shiite-dominated national government.

Fallujans complain that they are starved of generator fuel and medical care because of a citywide vehicle ban imposed by the mayor, a Sunni, in May. But in recent months violence has fallen sharply, a byproduct of the vehicle ban, the wider revolt by Sunni Arab tribes against militants and a new strategy by the Marines to divide Falluja into 10 tightly controlled precincts, each walled off by concrete barriers and guarded by a new armed Sunni force.

Security has improved enough that they are planning to largely withdraw from the city by next spring. But their plan hinges on the performance of the Iraqi government, which has failed to provide the Falluja police with even the most routine supplies, Marine officers say.

The gains in Falluja, neighboring Ramadi and other areas in Anbar Province, once the most violent area in Iraq and the heart of the Sunni Arab insurgency, are often cited as a success story, a possible model for the rest of Iraq. But interviews with marines and Iraqi officials in Falluja suggest that the recent relative calm here is fragile and that the same sectarian rivalries that have divided the Iraqi government could undermine security as soon as the Marines leave.

The War as We Saw It

New York Times Op-Ed on Iraq, by some of those who are serving.

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

Well-Written paper on Iraq from an economic perspective.

Our response to 9/11 may have done more to further the interests of our jihadist opponents than our own, in that we have weakened an international system they view as illegitimate and destabilized the Middle East in a manner they now seek to exploit. Afghanistan aside, by attacking Iraq with meager international support, we weakened the fabric of the global order based on a system of states and international consensus. Friends and allies have been uneasy for years regarding the imbalance inherent in America’s comparatively excessive military spending.48 With Iraq, we have shown we too are capable of what some see as foolish aggression. A radical adjustment will be required if we are to regain international confidence. Perception of the inability of the United States to deliver global security (and unwilling to be constrained by international opinion and cooperative arrangements) will erode global confidence, contribute to economic and political instability, and encourage non-state insurgents. Within the Middle East region, our natural allies in this fight are strong, moderate states, even if some of those states espouse views that run counter to our own. To restore vitality to the system we must begin to reconcile with proto-democratic Iran and secular Syria.

The End?

Our own history tells us states are most often forged in the crucible of violence. If we wish to see mature states in the Middle East, we must make way for violence there, reserving the exercise of force and subversion to those instances when vital U.S. interests are truly at stake, which, as U.S. tolerance for higher pump prices show, do not necessarily include oil. The U.S. and its allies apparently succeeded in tamping down one of Huntington’s fault-line wars51 in the Balkans, doing so in a manner that some hoped would appease Muslim discontent. Any such gains now lay in the ashes of an Iraq that, much like the Balkans before, appears to be coming apart. This clash of Islam is internal, reflecting a division within a religion. We have seen something like this in our own history. The bloody battle is on, but it is not ours. Our best hope is to contain and shape the conflict in ways that support the modern states system. Despite the fact states maturing in the Middle East diverge from our conceptual framework, we should avoid undermining upstart republics as the system develops. We have accepted a nuclear-armed religious state wrapped around democratic principles in Israel. We may have to accommodate one in Iran.

Insight into the Iraq bombing blast

Conflict between Arab and Kurd, Sunni and non-Sunni has been rising sharply this year in northern Iraq. Arab-Kurdish friction has increased in and around the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. In both places Arabs and Kurds are vying for control. In Mosul city, a total of 70,000 Kurds have fled persecution, according to Khasro Goran, the deputy governor.

Sectarian conflict between Yazidis and Muslims has escalated since a so-called "honour killing" earlier this year in which several thousand Yazidis stoned to death a Yazidi girl who had converted to Islam in order to marry her Muslim boyfriend. Her gruesome death was recorded on mobile phone cameras and later shown on websites. In revenge, 23 Yazidi textile workers were taken off a bus by gunmen and shot dead.

The attacks in Sinjar underline the inability of the government in Baghdad to control a series of very distinct battles for supremacy taking place in different parts of Iraq. This is not only between communities but also within them.

In the Shia city of Diwaniyah last Saturday, an expertly timed roadside bomb killed the governor, Khalil Jalil, and the provincial police chief, Maj-Gen Khalid Hassan. The assassinations may be part of a war for control of the province between the Mehdi Army militia of the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and Iraqi government forces who are loyal to the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, of which Mr Jalil was a senior member.

The intra-Shia conflict has little to do with the US and British occupation and is primarily over the control of jobs and local resources. In cities such as Basra, control of oil products and the port are particularly valuable.

The struggle for power in northern Iraq is likely to escalate sharply in coming months because a referendum is scheduled at the end of 2007 in which people in Kirkuk and Mosul will vote on whether or not to join the semi-independent Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

Although the timing of the referendum is written into the constitution, the government in Baghdad has been very slow in reversing Saddam Hussein's ethnic cleansing of Kurds and holding a census to determine who can vote.

The Kurds are growing impatient about holding the referendum but might agree to a short delay. They would expect the result of a vote to show Kirkuk city and the surrounding oilfields joining the KRG but Mosul city staying out. On the other hand, the Kurds would hope to take over areas around Mosul city such as Sinjar, the site of this week's bombing, because it is also their link to the large Kurdish minority in northern Syria. Militant Sunni areas such as Hawaijaqh in western Tameem province would probably secede.

The US military has suggested the bombers are operating more ruthlessly in northern Iraq because they can no longer operate in Baghdad because of the success of the American "surge". In reality, the number of car bombings in Baghdad in July was 5 per cent higher than last December and civilian casualties in explosions have increased by about the same percentage.

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Forced to Pick a Major in High School

Career planning begins at an even younger age.

Ninth graders often have trouble selecting what clothes to wear to school each morning or what to have for lunch. But starting this fall, freshmen at Dwight Morrow High School here in Bergen County must declare a major that will determine what electives they take for four years and be noted on their diplomas.

Driving to Work as a Tax Break

This week, the department announced $848 million in grants to help cities discourage people from driving, in many cases by imposing new tolls or fees.

But at the same time, another arm of the federal government seems to be sending a very different message. Congress provides a tax break to many of those same drivers to help them shoulder the costs of taking their cars to work.

Close to 400,000 commuters nationwide — about half of them in the New York City area — take advantage of a provision in the federal tax code that allows them to use up to $215 a month in pre-tax wages to pay for their parking at work, according to executives at corporate benefits firms that specialize in administering the tax break.

While some drivers use it to pay for parking at commuter rail stations or bus stops, most take advantage of it to pay for parking near their workplace, mostly in city centers, the executives said.

The tax savings can equal about $1,000 a year for some drivers. And the effect makes driving to work more desirable.

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Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

Could it be possible we live in a world similar to the Matrix? The New York Times discusses the possibility.

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.