GULF SPILL IS THE LARGEST OF ITS KIND, SCIENTISTS SAY

Originally published in The Mikiverse, August 2, 2010, republished in Mikiverse Politics,
July 16, 2012 By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
NEW ORLEANS — The BP spill is by far the world’s largest accidental release of oil into marine waters, according to the most precise estimates yet of the well’s flow rate, announced by federal scientists on Monday.
Nearly five million barrels of oil have gushed from BP’s well since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, according to the latest data. That amount outstrips the estimated 3.3 million barrels spilled into the Bay of Campeche by the Mexican rig Ixtoc I in 1979, previously believed to be the world’s largest accidental release.
The BP spill was already thought to be the largest spill in American waters, but it was unclear whether it had eclipsed Ixtoc.
“We’ve never had a spill of this magnitude in the deep ocean,” said Ian R. MacDonald, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University.
“These things reverberate through the ecosystem,” he said. “It is an ecological echo chamber, and I think we’ll be hearing the echoes of this, ecologically, for the rest of my life.”
Federal science and engineering teams, citing data that are “the most accurate to date,” estimated that 53,000 barrels of oil a day were pouring from the well just before BP was able to cap it on July 15. They also estimated that the daily flow rate had diminished over time, starting at about 62,000 barrels a day and decreasing as the reservoir of hydrocarbons feeding the gusher was gradually depleted. Before Monday’s announcement, federal scientific teams had estimated the spill in a range from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day.
The teams believe that the current estimates are accurate to within 10 percent. They also reported that of the roughly 4.9 million barrels that had been released from the well, about 800,000 had been captured by BP’s containment efforts. That leaves over four million barrels that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico from April 20 to July 15.
As the estimates of the number of barrels spilled increases, so, too, do the penalties under the Clean Water Act, which calls for fines of $1,100 per barrel, or $4,300 per barrel if the government finds that gross negligence led to the spill.
At 4.9 million barrels, that means that the total fine could be $5.4 billion — and, if gross negligence led to the spill, $21 billion. If BP successfully argues that the 800,000 barrels it has recovered should mitigate the penalty, then the figure drops to $4.5 billion and $17.6 billion, respectively.
The amount of oil estimated to be pouring from the well has been a matter of dispute from the earliest days of the spill. Federal and BP officials initially announced that no oil appeared to be leaking, then 1,000 barrels a day, then 5,000 a day, frequently repeating that spill estimates are rough at best and that the main goal was to stop the well. But criticism mounted that no effort was being made to measure the leak with more certainty.
The Obama administration announced the creation of a scientific group dedicated to analyzing the flow rate, which came up with a new estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day in late May, a figure that was met with skepticism. That, too, was later revised upward several times before Monday’s announcement. Previous estimates came from analysis of videos from remote-controlled vehicles at the wellhead, modeling of the reservoir and measurements of the oil that was collected by surface ships in the response effort.
After BP capped the well, these measurements could be reinforced by pressure readings within the well. Those pressure readings were compared with pressure estimates when the well was first drilled to determine whether the rate had changed over time, which it apparently had.
The government is continuing to study the data and may refine the estimate.
Meanwhile, BP continued efforts Monday to permanently seal the well. It said it was preparing to conduct final testing on Tuesday to determine whether to go ahead with a plan to pump heavy drilling mud into the runaway Macondo well, in hopes of permanently sealing it by the end of the week.
During the tests, a surface ship will slowly inject small amounts of mud into the well to make sure the mud will reach the oil reservoir from the column of pipes and valves that sit atop it. If that is accomplished, BP will pump higher volumes of mud, and possibly cement, into the well, in an operation known as a static kill or bullheading.
BP executives said Monday that they expected positive results from the tests, which will also check the pressure of the well to ensure that it is safe to pump the mud.
The efforts come 18 days after BP placed a tight-fitting cap on the well that put a temporary end to months of leaking. Engineers had planned to begin the tests on Monday but had to delay when they found a small hydraulic leak in the capping control system above the well.
Kent Wells, senior vice president for exploration and production at BP, said on Monday that a day or two after the pumping of mud began, engineers would consider pumping cement into the well, which could permanently plug it. Engineers might also decide to wait for a relief well to be completed before pumping cement in. There is also a chance that they will pump cement during the static kill and later through the relief well, to make sure the runaway well is sealed.
“We want to end up with cement in the bottom of the hole, completely filling the entire Macondo well,” Mr. Wells said Monday. “Whether that comes from the top or whether it comes from the relief well, those will be decisions made along the way.”
An estimated 2,000 pounds of mud is to be flooded into the well this week.
Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who is leading the federal response to the spill, cautioned against rushing to declare the static kill a final victory over the well. “I don’t think we can see this as the end-all, be-all, until we actually get the relief wells done,” he said.
Mr. Wells said the last 100 feet of the first of two relief wells should be completed by Aug. 15. A final killing of the well by pouring mud and cement just above the reservoir could take a few days or as much as a few weeks. If the first relief well somehow misses its target, a second one is being drilled for insurance.

Campbell Robertson reported from New Orleans, and Clifford Krauss from Houston. Catrin Einhorn and John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03spill.html?_r=1

BIG NAME, BIG BUCKS, BIG QUESTIONS

Steven Davidoff & Michael, Member of the House Of Byers, Editor-In-Chief, October 6, 2011

CHELSEA Clinton as a corporate director? Really?

Clinton was appointed last week to the board of IAC/InterActiveCorp, the internet media conglomerate controlled by Barry Diller.

For her efforts, Clinton will be paid about $US300,000 a year in cash and incentive stock awards. Not bad for a 31-year-old in graduate school.

Is IAC also getting a good deal, or is this another eye-rolling celebrity appointment?

In her favour, Clinton appears to be a smart, capable individual. She worked in her 20s at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co and at a hedge fund run by a loyal Clinton donor. She is now working at New York University and pursuing a doctorate at Oxford.

Clinton appears to be level-headed, despite growing up in the limelight. She is also popular - her wedding last year was one of the social events of the year.

But let's be real. Clinton only has this position because she is the daughter of former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the current Secretary of State. This is clearly an appointment made because of who she is, not what she has done, one that defies American conceptions of meritocracy. Even most celebrity directors earn their way to such celebrity - sort of.

In fairness, while the reasons for the appointment are suspect, that does not mean Clinton cannot be a good, even great, board member. But questions raised by her selection speak to the larger issue of what types of directors should be on boards.

In the past, boards were too often passive instruments of the chief executive officer, and often included celebrities. Some examples: Sidney Poitier (the Walt Disney Co), Evander Holyfield (the Coca-Cola Bottling Co), Tommy Lasorda (Lone Star Steakhouse and Saloon), Lance Armstrong (the Morgans Hotel Group); and O. J. Simpson (Infinity Broadcasting). Simpson actually served on Infinity's audit committee, the body responsible for supervising a company's auditors.

In recent years, the Securities and Exchange Commission and corporate governance advocates have tried to bring more professionalism to corporate boards. Public companies are now required to have a majority of independent directors on their boards. Directors on audit committees must have demonstrable financial knowledge, and companies are required to publicly disclose the skills of each director and state why that person was chosen.

In Clinton's case, IAC said her ''skills and background complement the existing areas of expertise of other board members''. In the absence of experience in the internet industry or substantial business or other life experience, presumably IAC is going to assert that she was selected because she is smart. If so, other graduate students should dust off their resumes. There are plenty of struggling students out there who could use the extra $300,000 a year.

Another argument IAC could advance is that Clinton has an extensive network of contacts that can help the business, and there is evidence that celebrity directors do create value this way.

In the wake of the financial crisis, board members need to devote time and resources to their duties, and be willing to question the actions of the CEO and fellow directors. Too many boards, including those of Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard, have got into hot water for failing to act forcefully and exercise their duties to run the company. Will a celebrity - even a smart, well-regarded one like Clinton - ask the hard questions?

Age is not a problem, after all, Mark Zuckerberg, a Facebook founder and its chief executive, is about four years younger. And while it would be nice if Clinton had more experience, too often today directors are clones, having all sprung from the same business background and having been shaped by similar experiences. Journalist is trying to sell us on the idea that Chelsea represent's change from the norm, I say that a poor black or hispanic woman that was educated outside of the elitist, ultra-rich ivy league culture. This is Barack Obama/Kevin Gillard change, a cosmetic, ephemeral change designed to make you feel that change is occurring/has occurred while everything actually remains the same.

The real question is whether Clinton can act independently and provide value to the IAC board. While there are many doubts on that score - and while Clinton clearly did not earn this position - she can still demonstrate that she is up to the task. Go for it, Chelsea. Nice to see that this article is being independent & not taking sides. Is the New York Times sucking up to Chelsea, Hilary? or the current mobsters that are running the American corporation/country-The Democrats?

NEW YORK TIMES

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/business/big-name-big-bucks-big-questions-20111005-1l9k4.html

CHENEY SAYS HE URGED BUSH TO BOMB SYRIA IN ’07

August 24, 2011 By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney says in a new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr. Bush opted for a diplomatic approach after other advisers — still stinging over “the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” — expressed misgivings.
“I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”
Mr. Bush chose to try diplomatic pressure to force the Syrians to abandon the secret program, but the Israelis bombed the site in September 2007. Mr. Cheney’s account of the discussion appears in his autobiography, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” which is to be published by Simon & Schuster next week. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Cheney’s book — which is often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues. While he praises Mr. Bush as “an outstanding leader,” Mr. Cheney, who made guarding the secrecy of internal deliberations a hallmark of his time in office, divulges a number of conflicts with others in the inner circle.
He wrote that George J. Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, resigned in 2004 just “when the going got tough,” a decision he calls “unfair to the president.” He wrote that he believes that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tried to undermine President Bush by privately expressing doubts about the Iraq war, and he confirms that he pushed to have Mr. Powell removed from the cabinet after the 2004 election. “It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government,” Mr. Cheney writes. His resignation “was for the best.”
He faults former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for naïveté in the efforts to forge a nuclear weapons agreement with North Korea, and Mr. Cheney reports that he fought with White House advisers over softening the president’s speeches on Iraq.
Mr. Cheney acknowledged that the administration underestimated the challenges in Iraq, but he said the real blame for the violence was with the terrorists.
He also defends the Bush administration’s decision to inflict what he called “tough interrogations” — like the suffocation technique known as waterboarding — on captured terrorism suspects, saying it extracted information that saved lives. He rejects portrayals of such techniques as “torture.”
In discussing the much-disputed “16 words” about Iraq’s supposed hunt for uranium in Niger that were included in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address to help justify the eventual invasion, Mr. Cheney said that unlike other aides, he saw no need to apologize for making that claim. He writes that Ms. Rice eventually came around to his view.
“She came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk and tearfully admitted I had been right,” he wrote.
The book opens with an account of Mr. Cheney’s experiences during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he essentially commanded the government’s response from a bunker beneath the White House while Mr. Bush — who was away from Washington and hampered by communications breakdowns — played a peripheral role. But Mr. Cheney wrote that he did not want to make any formal statement to the nation that day.
“My past government experience,” he wrote, “had prepared me to manage the crisis during those first few hours on 9/11, but I knew that if I went out and spoke to the press, it would undermine the president, and that would be bad for him and for the country.
“We were at war. Our commander in chief needed to be seen as in charge, strong, and resolute — as George W. Bush was.”
Mr. Cheney appears to relish much of the criticism heaped on him by liberals, but reveals that he had offered to resign several times as President Bush prepared for his re-election in 2004 because he was afraid of becoming a burden on the Republican ticket. After a few days, however, Mr. Cheney said that Mr. Bush said he wanted him to stay.
But in the Bush administration’s second term, Mr. Cheney’s influence waned. When Mr. Bush decided to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense after the 2006 midterm elections, Mr. Cheney said he was not given a chance to object.
Mr. Cheney praised Barack Obama’s support, as a senator from Illinois, for passing a bank bailout bill at the height of the financial crisis, shortly before the 2008 election. But he criticizes Mr. Obama’s decision to withdraw the 33,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan in 2009 by September 2012, and writes that he has been “happy to note” that Mr. Obama has failed to close the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as he had pledged.
Mr. Cheney’s long struggle with heart disease is a recurring theme in the book. He discloses that he wrote a letter of resignation, dated March 28, 2001, and told an aide to give it to Mr. Bush if he ever had a heart attack or stroke that left him incapacitated.
And in the epilogue, Mr. Cheney writes that after undergoing heart surgery in 2010, he was unconscious for weeks. During that period, he wrote, he had a prolonged, vivid dream that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.

Reporting was contributed by Julie Bosman from New York, and Helene Cooper, Mark Landler, Mark Mazzetti and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/us/politics/25cheney.html?_r=0

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PLEDGE FOR EURO UNITY MAY NOT BE ENOUGH TO SATISFY MARKETS

August 16, 2011 By STEVEN ERLANGER and JACK EWING

PARIS — The leaders of France and Germany on Tuesday promised to take concrete steps toward a closer political and economic union of the 17 countries that use the euro, but it was unclear whether their proposals would be sufficient, or come quickly enough, to satisfy markets anxious over Europe’s debts and listless economies.

Markets across Asia reflected the uncertainty following the announcement, as indices registered modest mixed gains and losses on Wednesday. The Hang Seng gained 0.9 percent, but analysts said the rise was due to Beijing's pledge to expand Hong Kong as an offshore trading center for the yuan. Exchanges in South Korea and Australia also showed a slight rise, but markets in Japan, mainland China and Taiwan had fallen.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called for each nation in the euro zone to enshrine a “golden rule” into their national constitutions to work toward balanced budgets and debt reduction, a level of discipline well beyond the current, oft-broken commitment.

They also pledged to push for a new tax on financial transactions, and for regular summit meetings of the zone’s members under the leadership of Herman Van Rompuy, who heads the council of all 27 European nations.

“We are certainly heading for greater economic integration of the euro zone,” Mr. Sarkozy said.

The much-anticipated meeting at the Élysée Palace here produced little that would seem to quell the nerves of bond traders, who are becoming increasingly worried that the economic slowdown in both Germany and France will make it harder to overcome Europe’s debt crisis.

Both leaders ruled out issuing collective bonds, known as eurobonds, to share responsibility for government debt across member states, and they opposed a further increase in a bailout fund that will not be put into place until late September at the earliest.

Mrs. Merkel repeated that there was “no magic wand” to solve all the problems of the euro, arguing that they must be met over time with improved fiscal discipline, competitiveness and economic growth among weaker states.

Even the stronger members of the euro zone have stalled. Official figures released on Tuesday showed that growth in the zone fell to its lowest rate in two years during the second quarter, and that Germany — considered the Continent’s locomotive — came almost to a standstill, growing 0.1 percent.

The German figures followed data showing that the French economy was flat in the second quarter, leaving Europe’s two largest economies stagnant. That means the two pillars of the European economy may be less willing and able to prop up their weaker counterparts, analysts warned.

Across the euro zone, gross domestic product rose only 0.2 percent in the second quarter from the first, when growth had advanced by 0.8 percent, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency.

The joint French-German proposals were as modest as German officials had forecast. And the most ambitious idea — that all euro zone states legally bind themselves to working toward balanced budgets and reduced sovereign debt — is unlikely to be accepted by all member states. It may not even get through the French constitutional process, since Mr. Sarkozy does not have a constitutional majority in Parliament.

The proposal calling for twice-yearly meetings and increased integration could formalize the “two-speed Europe” — of those in the euro zone and those outside it — that many warned of when the European Union expanded so rapidly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Both leaders said that France and Germany must set an example, citing their agreement to propose jointly a financial-transaction tax by 2013 as “an example of convergence” needed in the entire euro zone. But such a tax is unlikely in the larger European Union, especially if Britain, which is outside the euro zone and contains Europe’s biggest financial center, continues to resist the idea.

They also said they would work to harmonize French and German economic assessments and, in the future, corporate tax rates.

“France and Germany are committed to strengthen the euro,” Mrs. Merkel said. “To that end we need to better integrate our economies” and “to see that the stability pact will be acted on.”

The stability pact, a central element of the treaty that established the euro zone, commits members to keep fiscal deficits to 3 percent of gross domestic product a year and total sovereign debt under 60 percent of G.D.P. Both benchmarks are regularly missed.

The Sarkozy-Merkel meeting came after a dizzying week in the markets and a general gloom about the lack of European leadership on the euro. Economists said the weak data could simply reflect a pause after two years of brisk expansion. But the numbers could also signal that the sovereign debt crisis is undercutting growth outside the countries like Spain that are most directly affected.

“The longer the sovereign debt market remains stressed, the greater will be the damage to the wider economy,” Lloyd Barton, an economist, said in a note Tuesday.

If there was any silver lining, it was the hope that slower growth would lead to less inflation, giving the European Central Bank more leeway to keep interest rates low and intervene in bond markets. Since last week, the bank has been buying Italian and Spanish debt on the open market to hold down yields so the two countries do not face ruinous borrowing costs.

What impetus remains in the European economy came from countries like Austria and Finland. Even Italy, with growth of 0.3 percent compared with the previous quarter, outperformed Germany. A whiff of hope came from Portugal, one of the countries at the heart of thedebt crisis, as the economy stopped shrinking for the first time since October 2010.

Given the problems in the euro zone — sovereign debt, undercapitalized banks, aging populations, imbalances in trade, growth and competitiveness between northern and southern countries — many analysts and some officials have been pushing for the introduction of eurobonds, which would combine the credibility and collateral of all the members of the currency union.

But that could lead to a rise in borrowing costs for Germany and France, and a considerable rise in risk, too, something that neither country is currently prepared to accept, beyond a July 21 agreement to expand a bailout fund to 440 billion euros.

Mrs. Merkel in particular, cautious by nature, rules in a coalition with a weakened partner, the liberal Free Democrats. Her own Christian Democrats are largely against writing blank checks for Europe, and the German constitutional court may not find eurobonds legal. Mrs. Merkel could probably find support among the opposition Social Democrats and Greens, but that would divide her party and undermine her government.

Mrs. Merkel is going to have enough trouble getting the July 21 agreement through Parliament.

As the chancellor’s European-minded finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, told the newsmagazine Der Spiegel over the weekend, “I rule out eurobonds as long as member states conduct their own financial policies.”

Steven Erlanger reported from Paris, and Jack Ewing from Frankfurt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/world/europe/17europe.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fsports%2Fbasketball%2Findex.jsonp

CHINA GIVES PAKISTAN FIFTY FIGHTER JETS

By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — China has agreed to immediately provide 50 JF-17 fighter jets to Pakistan, a major outcome of a visit by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to Beijing this week, Pakistani officials said Thursday.

China and Pakistan have jointly produced the JF-17 aircraft, but the new planes would be equipped with more sophisticated avionics, the officials said. The latest jet fighters would be paid for by China, they said.

The announcement came as Pakistan’s already tense relations with the United States soured further after the killing of Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan on May 2.

Last week, Pakistan’s spy chief denounced the United States in a rare briefing before Parliament in which he condemned the American raid for breaching Pakistan’s sovereignty. Parliament, in turn, called for the government to revisit relations with the United States.

Mr. Gilani’s visit to Beijing served as a pointed reminder of Pakistani suggestions that the government might seek to recalibrate relations with the United States, using China to offset what many here view as an overdependence on Washington.

The United States has provided Pakistan with some $20 billion in aid, mostly military, for its cooperation in fighting terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Much of that aid has come in the form of reimbursements for Pakistani counterterrorism operations.

Both the aid and the effectiveness of Pakistan’s cooperation have been called into question by the discovery that Bin Laden had lived for years in a large compound adjacent to a top military academy in the city of Abbottabad, a two-hour drive from the capital, Islamabad.

While the Obama administration would still like Pakistan’s cooperation to wind down the war in Afghanistan and to root out terrorist groups, some American lawmakers are now calling for aid to Pakistan to be cut or suspended.

For their part, Pakistani officials were incensed that the Obama administration gave them no notice of the raid until helicopters bearing a Navy Seal team had already left the country.

Mr. Gilani’s four-day visit to China may help Pakistan as it tries to regain leverage with the United States. During his visit, Mr. Gilani met with Premier Wen Jiabao of China, who bolstered Pakistan by saying the United States should respect Pakistan’s sovereignty.

The news about the JF-17 aircraft is clearly a signal that Pakistan is shopping for alternatives to Washington, though the value of the deal may be more symbolic than decisive in terms of Pakistan’s military capacity.

Pakistani military officials have consistently complained that American aid, which they would nonetheless like to keep flowing, falls short on many essential military items that the Americans have been reluctant to offer.

The United States provides Pakistan with F-16 fighter jets to help the country match the air power of its archrival India, but Pakistani military officials have complained that their F-16 fleet is aging.

The deal is another sign that Pakistan’s relations with China are frequently far less encumbered than those with the United States, and that in many ways the interests of Pakistan and China coincide more easily.

The United States may be Pakistan’s largest benefactor, but China is Pakistan’s largest trading partner, and for years the Chinese have heavily invested in building a deep-water port in the Pakistani city of Gwadar.

China is often referred to as Pakistan’s “all-weather friend,” a contrast to the common depiction of its up-and-down relationship with the United States, which is deeply unpopular here.

The United States has invested in a special relationship with India. Both China and Pakistan, on the other hand, view India as a rival. They share an interest in containing India’s regional influence, particularly as the United States draws down its forces in Afghanistan, a process the Obama administration says it will start this summer.

At a landmark meeting on April 16 in the Afghan capital, Kabul, top Pakistani officials suggested to Afghan leaders that they, too, needed to look to China, an ascendant power, rather than align themselves closely with the United States, according to Afghan officials.

“You couldn’t tell exactly what they meant, whether China could possibly be an alternative to the United States, but they were saying it could help both countries,” an Afghan official said afterward.

FORMER PEDIATRICIAN ARRESTED ON NEW PEDOPHILIA CHARGES

By SUSAN SAULNY Published: May 08, 2003
A former Brooklyn pediatrician who lost his medical license after a pedophilia conviction 20 years ago faced new charges yesterday for participating in what prosecutors called an international sex ring involving young boys.

The former doctor, Stefan Irving, 56, of Sunset Park, was arrested on Monday morning after a lengthy nationwide investigation led federal investigators to a guesthouse in Acapulco, Mexico, that they said catered to American men who wanted to have sex with boys. According to a complaint that was unsealed yesterday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. Irving promoted, visited and gave financial support to the guesthouse, where boys, often homeless orphans ranging from 6 to 17, were recruited off the streets and given shelter and food in exchange for sex.

James B. Comey, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference in Lower Manhattan earlier in the day that the guesthouse allowed ''a disturbing pedophiles' holiday in Acapulco.''

Mr. Irving is charged with traveling internationally to engage in sex with a minor, and he faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted. His lawyer, Andy Citron, did not return a call for comment. But at a bail hearing yesterday, Mr. Citron told Magistrate Judge Michael H. Dolinger that Mr. Irving ''is capable of controlling himself'' and that ''there's no reason to believe he's a danger to anyone or a flight risk.''

Nonetheless, Judge Dolinger ordered Mr. Irving held without bail, adding, ''The defendant seems to suffer from a compulsion that is not at all clear to me controlled.''

According to court papers, Mr. Irving was convicted of attempted sexual abuse of a child in 1983. During the hearing, Michael Scudder Jr., a federal prosecutor, presented Judge Dolinger with personal letters from Mr. Irving to friends that he said highlighted Mr. Irving's continued fascination with young boys and showed ''ample evidence of predatory conduct.''

In other letters found by investigators or obtained by customs officials when Mr. Irving was stopped at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport upon returning from Mexico, he described young boys as ''body warmers'' and gave details about boys with whom he liked to play ''hanky-panky.''

In a poem Mr. Scudder obtained and partially reproduced in the complaint, Mr. Irving likens boys to ''small mangoes piled at the door.''

''Unique. Unripe. So pretty, each one,'' the poem says.

The manager of the guesthouse is cooperating with the authorities, as are three Mexican children who identified Mr. Irving, according to the complaint. The manager, whose name was not released, told investigators that Mr. Irving visited the guesthouse at least once in 1998 and perhaps twice, officials said. On more than one occasion, officials said the manager told them, he observed a boy accompanying Mr. Irving into his bedroom at night.

According to the complaint, the manager told investigators that Mr. Irving would question him about which boys were staying at the guesthouse. ''The manager stated that Irving asked for such information because, perhaps among other reasons, he wanted to be certain that his favorite boys would be at the house when he visited from the United States,'' the complaint stated.

Mr. Comey said the investigation was continuing. One other person has been arrested, he said, and more arrests are expected.

''People need to know that this goes on all over the world,'' Mr. Comey said.

FAKE TWITTER ACCOUNTS GET REAL LAUGHS

February 9, 2011 By ASHLEY PARKER
WASHINGTON — When a blizzard blanketed Chicago last week, “Rahm Emanuel” took to Twitter to chronicle his day — making a snow angel on Lake Michigan, shoveling out David Axelrod’s Civic, drinking whiskey in an igloo made by a tireless campaign intern named Carl.

Except, of course, these urgent updates were not from the actual Mr. Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff who is running for mayor of Chicago and who has his own — far more professional and less profanity-laden — Twitter feed. They were from a fake account in his name, an online alter ego created anonymously.

Fake Twitter personalities mock actors like Chuck Norris and world leaders like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose faux feed suggested that “Muslim Brotherhood of the Traveling Pants!” would be a great “political movie mash-up.”

But figures from the worlds of Washington and politics are particularly attractive targets for the mock Twitter treatment.

There are several phony accounts for Sarah Palin, including one in which she confuses North and South Korea and another where she boasts, “I can check in to Russia on FourSquare from my house!”

There is the Twitter doppelganger of the executive editor of the Politico Web site, @FakeJimVandeHei, a wisecracking, tyrannical presence in the newsroom, threatening to fire reporters who link to rival news organizations in their articles and waking dozing colleagues with a bullhorn.

There is @DCJourno, a self-described “important political reporter in Washington” who recently advised cable television bookers that he would be happy to appear on their shows to talk about Egypt — he has, after all, “been following this stuff pretty closely for almost a week.” And there was a short-lived Twitter feed in the guise of Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary.

“I love that we have no idea who is behind them, and that’s part of the fun,” said Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist. “The fact that people are facilitating those conversations anonymously is in many ways completely anti-Washington, where you have such a name-obsessed culture, and now some of the most pointed observations are coming from people who don’t have real names. In that regard, it’s even more perfect.”

But that has not stopped people from guessing. The Washington parlor game of the moment is trying to puzzle out just who is behind each new parody account. Casual conversations in newsrooms, at bars and even over Twitter are peppered with allusions to “fake Rahm Emanuel” and “DCJourno” as the city’s insiders laugh about the accounts and lament that they did not think of them first.

The real Jim VandeHei jokingly says that he thinks John F. Harris, who co-founded Politico with him, might be behind @FakeJimVandeHei, “though he’s much funnier than the posts suggested.”

“I have suspected he wanted a way to unload on me, but didn’t have the heart to do it in person,” Mr. VandeHei said in an e-mail.

Twitter allows parody accounts as long as they are labeled as such, and many of the site’s most popular tweets are comedic — in 2010, the most re-tweeted message was a 10-word missive about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill from the comedian Stephen Colbert: “In honor of oil-soaked birds, ‘tweets’ are now ‘gurgles.’ ”

The person behind the handle @DCJourno, who would not reveal his identity and agreed to be interviewed only via e-mail, said that he started the account in the hope that it might make its targets a bit more self-aware. His tweets totter between fact and fiction so closely that he said: “Several of my followers still don’t understand that I’m a parody. They think I’m just a cool D.C. journalist, which really says it all.”

Betsy Rothstein, the editor of Fishbowl DC, a media and gossip blog, offers her own take on Washington by mining the real Twitter feeds of the chattering class for embarrassing fodder. And not every fake account carries a household name. Someone, for example, has created a fake account for Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant.

“Whoever does this does it to mock me. And while on the one hand it’s flattering that someone would take the time to follow my life so closely, on the other hand, it makes you realize how ridiculous you are,” Mr. Mackowiak said. “The one thing everyone in Washington can use is a check on their own ego.”

A few minutes later, he e-mailed with an even more optimistic perspective: “Finally, I can say Brad Pitt and I have something in common.”

ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS TO RESUME TALKS, OFFICIALS SAY

August 20, 2010 By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to announce Friday that Israel and the Palestinians will return to direct negotiations for the first time in 20 months, delivering the Obama administration a small victory in its protracted effort to revive the Middle East peace process, two officials briefed on the situation said Thursday evening.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, have agreed to place a one-year time limit on the talks, these officials said.
President Obama is expected to invite both leaders to Washington in early September to start the negotiations, which will cover thorny issues like the borders of a new Palestinian state, the political status of Jerusalem, security guarantees for Israel and right of return for Palestinian refugees.
The Obama administration declined to confirm the announcement, which was first reported by Reuters, with an official cautioning that final details were still being worked out and that the timing could slip by a day or so.
But after months of grueling diplomacy by the administration’s special envoy to the region, George J. Mitchell, officials sounded a more optimistic note on Thursday.
“We think we are very, very close to a decision by the parties to enter into direct negotiations,” Philip J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, said to reporters. “We think we’re well positioned to get there.”
Mrs. Clinton has been working the phone in recent days to clear the final hurdles, speaking Thursday with Jordan’s foreign minister, Nasser Judeh, and with Tony Blair, the special representative of the Quartet, the group of Middle East peacemakers comprising the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.
Late on Wednesday, she spoke with the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad. The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that on Thursday night President Abbas called a meeting of the Fatah Central Committee, the party’s main decision-making body, at which "developments in the peace process" were discussed.
While the details of the talks are not yet public, the one-year time limit is viewed as crucial because the Palestinians are leery of being drawn into an open-ended negotiation with Israel. Mr. Netanyahu has long said he is open to talks, but the Palestinians have been resistant, seeking assurances from the United States about the terms and conditions.
Israel has eschewed any pre-conditions to negotiations, officials said, including an extension of the government’s 10-month, partial moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank, set to expire on Sept. 26. The Obama administration has pushed to restart direct talks so that the two sides would be at the negotiating table when that date arrives.
Mr. Obama held separate meetings with Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas in recent weeks, which officials said helped reassure the Palestinians and began to heal a rift between Israel and the United States over American demands that Israel halt settlement construction.
The broad outlines of a peace agreement are well known and likely to be based on the borders of Israel before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, with certain agreed-upon land swaps. But many analysts are skeptical that Israel and the Palestinians will be able to reach a deal, given the hardened political realities on each side.
Mr. Netanyahu is trying to hold together a right-wing coalition that will view concessions, like an extension of the settlement moratorium, with extreme suspicion. The Palestinians are deeply divided between Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority from its base in the West Bank, and Hamas, a militant Islamic group that rules Gaza and is shunned by the West for its terrorist attacks.
Some analysts believe the two sides will quickly turn to the United States to provide “bridging proposals” to help close the gap on delicate issues. Mr. Crowley stressed that the negotiation was between Israel and the Palestinians, but acknowledged the American role.
“We, the United States, have always played a special role within this effort, and we will be prepared to assist the parties going forward in moving towards a successful negotiation,” he said.
www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/world/middleeast/21mideast.html?hp

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U.S. IS SAID TO ASSURE ISRAEL A NUCLEAR IRAN ISN'T IMMINENT

August 19, 2010

By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, citing evidence of continued troubles inside Iran’s nuclear program, has persuaded Israel that it would take roughly a year — and perhaps longer — for Iran to complete what one senior official called a “dash” for a nuclear weapon, according to American officials.

White House officials said they believe the assessment has dimmed the prospect that Israel would pre-emptively strike against the country’s nuclear facilities within the next year, as Israeli officials have suggested in thinly veiled threats.

For years, Israeli and American officials have debated whether Iran is on an inexorable drive toward a nuclear bomb and, if so, how long it would take to produce one. A critical question has been the time it would take Tehran to convert existing stocks of low-enriched uranium into weapons-grade material, a process commonly known as “breakout.”

Israeli intelligence officials had argued that Iran could complete such a race for the bomb in months, while American intelligence agencies have come to believe in the past year that the timeline is longer.

“We think that they have roughly a year dash time,” said Gary Samore, President Obama’s top adviser on nuclear issues, referring to how long it would take the Iranians to convert nuclear material into a working weapon. “A year is a very long period of time.”

Mr. Samore said the United States believed international inspectors would detect an Iranian move toward breakout within weeks, leaving a considerable amount of time for the United States and Israel to consider military strikes.

The American assessments are based on intelligence collected over the past year, as well as reports from international inspectors. It is unclear whether the problems that Iran has had enriching uranium are the result of poor centrifuge design, difficulty obtaining components or accelerated Western efforts to sabotage the nuclear program.

American officials said new intelligence information was being fed into a long-delayed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program.

Now, American and Israeli officials believe breakout is unlikely anytime soon, according to administration officials. For one thing, Iran, which claims it is interested in enriching uranium only for peaceful purposes, would be forced to build nuclear bombs from a limited supply of nuclear material, currently enough for two weapons. Second, such a decision would require kicking out international weapons inspectors, eliminating any ambiguity about Iran’s nuclear plans.

Even if Iran were to choose this path, American officials said it would probably take Iran some time to reconfigure its nuclear facilities to produce weapons-grade uranium and ramp up work on designing a nuclear warhead.

Israeli officials have indicated that if they saw a race for the bomb under way, they would probably take military action and encourage the United States to join the effort.

American officials said, in contrast to a year ago, that Iran’s nuclear program was not currently the central focus of discussions between top leaders in Washington and Jerusalem. During the last visit to Washington by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in early July, the Iranian program was relatively low on the agenda, according to one senior administration official.

To block Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the United States and the European Union recently imposed harsh economic sanctions aimed at choking off Iran’s energy supplies and prohibiting foreign banks from doing business with financial institutions inside the country.

Several officials said they believed the mounting cost of the economic sanctions, especially those affecting Iran’s ability to import gasoline and develop its oil fields, has created fissures among Iran’s political elite and forced a debate about the costs of developing nuclear weapons.

“The argument is over how far to push the program, how close to a weapon they can get without paying an even higher price,” said the senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because American assessments on these debates are classified. “And we’re beginning to see a lot of divisions inside the leadership on that question.”

Nuclear experts agree that the hardest element of producing a weapon is obtaining weapons-grade material. And for Iran that quest, which stretches back more than 20 years, has not been going well, by most accounts.

For most of this year, Iran has added relatively few centrifuges — the machines that spin uranium at supersonic speed, enriching it — to its main plant at Natanz. Only about half of those installed are operating, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. That would be enough, with considerable additional enrichment, to produce roughly two weapons.

The public explanation by American officials is that the centrifuges are inefficient and subject to regular breakdowns. And while Iranian officials have talked about installing more advanced models that would be more efficient and reliable, only a few have been installed.

“Either they don’t have the machines, or they have real questions about their technical competence,” Mr. Samore said.

Some of Iran’s enrichment problems appear to have external origins. Sanctions have made it more difficult for Iran to obtain precision parts and specialty metals. Moreover, the United States, Israel and Europe have for years engaged in covert attempts to disrupt the enrichment process by sabotaging the centrifuges. Those efforts accelerated in the last years of the Bush administration and, according to several officials, have continued under Mr. Obama.

Officials concede there are potential vulnerabilities in their assessments. Chief among them is whether Iran has hidden another enrichment center somewhere in the tunnels it has dug throughout the country, including some near Natanz.

Last September, Iran acknowledged to inspectors that it had spent years building such a hidden facility near the holy city of Qum, buried in a mountain near a major military base. The admission came just days before Mr. Obama, along with Britain’s prime minister at the time, Gordon Brown, and France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, revealed the existence of the facility. But after detailed surveys, and interviews with defectors, officials say they have no evidence a second such facility is under construction.

The current draft of the intelligence report also describes considerable division in Iran about whether the goal of the nuclear program should be to walk right up to the threshold of building an actual bomb — which would mean having highly enriched uranium on hand, along with a workable weapons design — or simply to keep enough low-enriched uranium on hand to preserve Tehran’s options for building a weapon later.

Even as American and Israeli officials agree that the date that Iran is likely to have a nuclear weapon has been pushed into the future, that does not mean that Israel has abandoned the idea of a possible military strike.

American officials said that Israel was particularly concerned that, over time, Iran’s supreme leader could order that nuclear materials be dispersed to secret locations around the country, making it less likely that an Israeli military strike would significantly cripple the program.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/world/middleeast/20policy.html?hp

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