Where do all the missing letters go?

Rico says he fails to understand why, in an era of all-electronic media, journalists refuse to type out all the letters in a word. The most common contractions, of course, are state names, but there are plenty of others, equally stupid.
He don't get it...

Turning a bad thing good

Lawrence Downes has an editorial in The New York Times about an experiment that worked:

The seaside town of Jupiter, Florida has lots of immigrant day laborers, which makes it scarcely different from hundreds of towns across the country. Men started showing up on street corners there a few years ago, taking manual jobs in construction, landscaping and carpentry. It was— in the boom years, anyway— a good match of labor demand and supply.
The changes brought consternation, too, as groups of men turned quiet sidewalks into traffic-snarling hiring bazaars. Residents complained and anti-immigrant anger grew. It’s an old script, but here is where Jupiter gets extraordinary. In 2006, workers and residents banded together, with the town’s help, to create a hiring site. It brought both order to the streets and immigrant families into the community.
The site, run by nonprofit groups in a building leased from the town, offers job referrals. But it also offers job training, counseling, language and sewing classes, health services and a food pantry. Eighteen workers recently volunteered to build a playground outside the police department in West Palm Beach. They call the center El Sol, not just for the sun, but for the man who helped create it, Sol Silverman.
Jupiter has now also set up a sister-city relationship with Jacaltenango, Guatemala, the little Mayan village where so many of its newest residents were born.
Hiring sites like Jupiter’s are not going to fix America’s ramshackle immigration system. A recent documentary about Jupiter and Jacaltenango, Brother Towns, shows the pain and damage of a labor market fueled by desperation: the perils of the desert crossing, the women whose husbands return home in coffins, the children who grow up recognizing their fathers only as a photo and a voice over the phone.
But it would be foolish to think immigrant labor can be wished or persecuted away. It is the wise community that resolves to do what it can to help day laborers— and itself— instead of waiting for the great solution that hasn’t arrived.
Nobody has the one big immigration answer. But Jupiter has an answer, one that supplies more order, lawfulness and compassion than all the screaming in so many other cities across the country.

History for the day

On 26 February 1993, a bomb exploded in the garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others.

Rico says we all thought that was terrible and tragic at the time; only eight short years later, however, they'd be back...

Okdies but goodies

Rico says that would be The Longest Day, which he's rewatching. Fortunately, he didn't miss his favorite line: Gummi puppen?
That's German for 'rubber dummies', referring to the fake paratroopers they dropped behind the German lines as a distraction (which worked, amazingly).
Two Oscars, plus Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, and a cast of thousands.
Perfect, or what? (See the trailer here, if you haven't seen it.)

A swath of trouble

(This map, in the original, is interactive, and you can click each country for an update.)

Thamer Brahmi and Jabeen Bhatti have an article at USA Today about Libya:

Hoping to snuff out the uprising against his rule, Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi sent foreign mercenaries and Libyan militiamen to strike back against anti-government forces in cities where an unknown number of people were killed. The attacks came as Western nations, including the United States, talked about how to react to the onslaught. A ferry boat packed with fleeing Americans remained in port in Tripoli, Gadhafi's stronghold, because of rough seas.
"I cannot believe what is happening in Tripoli," said Bechir Ghorbali, a Tunisian who lived in Libya's capital for years and had reached the Tunisian border. "Oh my God! It is a genocide!" he cried. "They need help, but who will help them?"
Gadhafi is turning Tripoli into his bunker and will do whatever it takes to retain control of the country, even if that means thousands dead, said people crossing the border into Tunisia.
An oil industry worker who had fled the country and was boarding a plane at the airport in Tunis said that death toll estimate was far less than what he had seen. The man, a North American who asked that his name be withheld because of the danger of speaking out against the regime, saw corpses everywhere and figured the toll was in the thousands.
Those who made it out of Libya on boats to Malta or flights to Crete described a grisly scene: bodies hanging from electric poles in the port of Benghazi and militia trucks full of dead bodies. One video showed a tank apparently crushing a car with people inside.
Americans aboard the Maria Dolores ferry at Tripoli's port were told high waves in the Mediterranean Sea would delay departure to Malta until today or later. "The ferry will depart when the weather improves," said Elijah Waterman of the U.S. Embassy in Malta.
Gadhafi, who took power in a 1969 coup, went on television to call on his loyalists to hunt down opponents in their homes. He blamed the revolt on al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and teenagers on drugs given to them "in their coffee with milk, like Nescafé".
"Shame on you, people of Zawiya! Control your children!" he said, addressing residents of a city outside Tripoli that was attacked by pro-government forces.
An army unit opened fire with automatic weapons on a mosque in Zawiya where people— some armed with hunting rifles— have been holding a sit-in to support protesters in Tripoli, a witness told the Associated Press. The troops blasted the mosque's minaret with an anti-aircraft gun.
A doctor told the AP he saw the bodies of ten people shot in the head and chest and about 150 wounded people. Thousands massed in Zawiya's main Martyrs Square by the Souq mosque after the attack, shouting for Gadhafi to leave, he said.
Libyan militiamen and foreign mercenaries attacked an airport outside Libya's third-largest city, Misrata. Militiamen with rocket-propelled grenades and mortars barraged a line of government opponents who were guarding the airport, some armed with rifles, one of the rebels told the AP.
Some nations took actions against Gadhafi, but nothing that was aimed at stopping the violence. The Swiss government ordered a freeze of any assets in Switzerland belonging to Gadhafi. The European Union pushed for Libya to be suspended from the United Nation's top human rights body.
Witnesses have reported seeing roving bands of hired soldiers in Tripoli hunting down civilians. The atmosphere in the city is one of fear, and most residents refuse to leave their homes. Businesses were closed. Internet and phone communication is intermittent.
"Gadhafi and his hired guns are doing everything they can to scare the population," said Khaleed Kadoussi, a Tunisian man arriving at Tunis' airport Thursday. "We all know that many Libyans, as well as foreigners, are missing." Kadoussi said that Gadhafi's loyalists are a small minority of the country of six million, but that doesn't mean the slaughter can be stopped by Libyans, he said. "Even the so-called loyalists in Tripoli support Gadhafi out of fear," Kadoussi said. He said Gadhafi's loyalists are targeting Tunisians and Egyptians because of their revolutions. "There are many Tunisian and Egyptian girls that have been raped and beaten in Tripoli," he said.
Salah Jemali, who was returning from Tripoli, agreed: "We were humiliated, insulted, and threatened by Gadhafi loyalists," said Jemali, 40.
Kacem Youssfi said, "Only Sabha, in the south, Syrt, and Tripoli are still under the control of the dictator, and he is looking now to get the rest back into the fold."
Tunisian and other Arab media reported that the leader's son, Khemaiss Gadhafi, ordered his mercenaries to slaughter at least two hundred soldiers because they refused to shoot unarmed civilians. The report could not be independently confirmed.
Jemali said Gadhafi is getting more "insane" as the revolt goes on, referring to his latest speech in which he described protesters as "rats" and vowed to exterminate them. "Gadhafi's regime is horrible," he said.

That's Charlie, shooting himself in the neck

TMZ has the story of the decline and rapid fall of Charlie Sheen:

Charlie Sheen tells TMZ he wants to fight Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre in an octagon and, according to Charlie: "If he wins, then he can leave my show!" Charlie is still ensconced in the Bahamas, having what he calls "a grand old time." Charlie said, "I violently hate Chuck Lorre. He's a stupid, stupid little man and a pussy punk that I'd never want to be like." Charlie adds: "That's me being polite." Charlie is scoffing at all the people around him, saying: "All these guys told me to 'clean it up.' Well this is me cleaning it the fuck up."
Charlie, who insists he's sober, says: "All I want is to bring my family together, and I have to deal with all this bullshit politics." And, as if that's not enough, Charlie says :"That piece of shit took money out of my pocket, my family's pocket, and, most importantly, my crew's pocket." Charlie adds, "You can tell him one thing: I own him."

But, wait, there's more:

Charlie Sheen just launched a nuclear attack on live radio, slamming Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre, calling him a turd, and went on to call Thomas Jefferson a 'pussy'. Sheen unloaded while calling The Alex Jones Show and claimed he is 100% clean, saying: "Here's your first pee test, next one goes in your mouth. No, you won't get high." During his rant, Sheen compared himself to the Marlon Brando character in Apocalypse Now, and hit just about everything and everyone:
• He calls Lorre a turd and a clown, and says his real name is "Haim Levine".
• Referring to his rehab stint, Sheen claims to have embarrassed Lorre "in front of his children and the world by healing at a pace that his unevolved mind cannot process."
• On Alcoholics Anonymous, Sheen says it's a "bootleg cult" with a success rate of only 5%, while his is 100% and added: "Newsflash: I am special and I will never be one of you."
• After one rant the host, Alex Jones, told Charlie he sounded like Thomas Jefferson. Charlie's response: "I'm not Thomas Jefferson. He was a pussy! But I dare anyone to debate me on things."
• On his drug and alcohol issues: "I have a disease? Bullshit! I cured it with my mind."
Yesterday Charlie flew to an island near the Bahamas with ex-wife Brooke Mueller, Bree Olson, and Natalie Kenly. In the the interview, Charlie says Brooke bailed out, saying, "Where there were four, there are now three. Goodbye Brooke. Good luck in your travels, you're going to need it. Badly."
There's more, much more, including sometimes incomprehensible riffs about trolls, tattoos, F-18 fighter pilots, and Vatican assassins. For what it's worth, Charlie also said he's ready to get back to work.

Rico says Thomas Jefferson was a lot of things, but a pussy wasn't one of them. It would be better if Charlie was stoned (or drunk); then he'd have an excuse for sounding like an idiot... (Too bad; he was doing well on Two and a Half Men, but this'll be the end of that.)

More on Libya

Kareem Fahim and David Kirkpatrick have an article in The New York Times about the latest in Benghazi:

Rebels seeking to overturn the forty-year rule of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi repelled a concerted assault by his forces on cities close to the capital, removing any doubt that Libya’s patchwork of protests had evolved into an increasingly well-armed revolutionary movement.
The series of determined stands by rebel forces— especially in the strategic city of Zawiyah, near important oil resources and thirty miles from the capital, Tripoli— presented the gravest threat yet to the Libyan leader. In Zawiyah, more than one hundred people were killed as Colonel Qaddafi’s forces turned automatic weapons on a mosque filled with protesters, a witness said. Still, residents rallied afterward.
Colonel Qaddafi’s evident frustration at the resistance in Zawiyah spilled out in a rant by telephone over the state television network, charging that Osama bin Laden had drugged the town’s youth into a rebellious frenzy: “al=Qaeda is the one who has recruited our sons,” he said in a thirty-minute tirade broadcast by the network. “It is bin Laden.” Colonel Qaddafi said, “Those people who took your sons away from you and gave them drugs and said ‘Let them die’ are launching a campaign over cellphones against your sons, telling them not to obey their fathers and mothers.”
The violence underscored the contrast between the character of Libya’s revolution and the uprising that toppled autocrats in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia. Unlike those Facebook-enabled youth rebellions, the insurrection here has been led by people who are more mature and who have been actively opposing the government for some time. It started with lawyers’ syndicates that have campaigned peacefully for two years for a written constitution and some semblance of a rule of law.
Fueled by popular anger, the help of breakaway leaders of the armed forces and some of their troops, and weapons from looted military stockpiles or smuggled across the border, the uprising here has escalated toward more violence in the face of increasingly brutal government crackdowns.
At the revolt’s starting point, in the eastern city of Benghazi, Fathi Terbil, 39, the human rights lawyer whose detention first ignited the protests, drew a map of rebel-held territory in striking distance of Tripoli. “It is only a matter of days,” he said.
A turning point in the uprising’s evolution was arguably the defection of the interior minister, Abdel Fattah Younes al-Abidi, an army general who had been a close ally of Colonel Qaddafi. The break by General Abidi, who has family roots near the revolt’s eastern origins, encouraged other disaffected police, military, and state security personnel to change sides as well. “We are hoping to use his experience,” said Mr. Terbil, who some called the linchpin of the revolt.
Opposition figures in rebel-held cities like Benghazi have been appearing on cable news channels promising that opponents of Colonel Qaddafi are heading toward Tripoli to bolster the resistance there. Their ability to carry out those assertions remains to be seen.
In parts of the country, the revolutionaries, as they call themselves, appear to have access to potentially large stores of weapons, including small arms and heavy artillery, automatic weapons smuggled from the Egyptian border, and rocket-propelled grenades taken from army bases, like the Kabila in Benghazi.
Tawfik al-Shohiby, one of the rebels, said that in the early days of the revolt one of his relatives bought $75,000 in automatic weapons from arms dealers on the Egyptian border and distributed them to citizens’ groups in towns like Bayda.
So far, at least in the east, many of the weapons appear to be held in storage to defend against a future attempt by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces to retake the territory. At a former security services building in Benghazi on Thursday, men in fatigues prepared to transport anti-aircraft and antitank weapons to what one said was a storage depot.
Like their counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt, the rebels in Libya have shown tech-savvy guile in circumventing government efforts to block their communication. To sidestep the government’s blocking of the Internet and curbing of cellphone access, for example, some of the more active antigovernment protesters distribute flash drives and CDs with videos of the fighting to friends in other towns and to journalists.
Mr. Shohiby began helping lead an effort this week to shuttle foreign journalists from the Egyptian border to towns across eastern Libya. His network of contacts was built on the Internet: not on Facebook, but on a popular soccer website. “I have friends from east to west, north to south,” he said. “There are two guys in Sabha, one in Zawiyah, three friends in Misurata, for example,” he said, speaking of towns that were the scenes of some of the recent clashes.
Still, Mohammed Ali Abdallah, deputy secretary general of an opposition group in exile, The National Front for the Salvation of Libya, said the government’s fierce crackdown made organizing the spontaneous uprising a continuing challenge, especially in heavily guarded Tripoli. “It is almost like hit and run,” he said. “There are almost no ways that those young guys can organize themselves. You can’t talk on a mobile phone, and if five people get together in the street they get shot.”
Nonetheless, protesters in Tripoli were calling for a massive demonstration on Friday after noon prayers, residents of the city and those fleeing the country said. In recent days, witnesses said, Colonel Qaddafi appears to have pulled many of his militiamen and mercenaries back toward the capital to prepare for its defense. But, despite the encroaching insurrection, Colonel Qaddafi appeared determined to put on a show of strength and national unity, a stark turnabout from his approach so far. Since the start of the uprising, his government had shut out all foreign journalists, cut off communications, and even confiscated mobile phone chips and other devices that might contain pictures at the border from people fleeing the country. Libya had warned that reporters who entered the country illegally risked arrest and could be deemed collaborators of al-Qaeda.
But Colonel Qaddafi’s son and heir apparent Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi announced on television that the government would allow teams of journalists to visit Tripoli. Witnesses said preparations for the visit were already under way.
The soldiers and mercenaries who had previously roamed the streets had largely disappeared by the late afternoon, leaving only traffic police officers, and the capital’s central Green Square— the scene of violent clashes earlier in the week— had been cleaned up. Two banners, in English, now adorned the square: “al-Jazeera, BBC, don’t spread lies that reflect other’s wishful thinking,” one read. The other: “Family members talk but never fight between each other.”
But the rebels’ unexpected strength was undeniable, as they appeared to hold or contest several towns close to Colonel Qaddafi’s stronghold in Tripoli in the face of a coordinated push by his mercenaries and security forces.
In Misurata, 130 miles the east of the capital, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces struck at rebels guarding the airport with rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells, The Associated Press reported. But the rebels seized an anti-aircraft gun used by the militias and turned it against them.
In Zuwarah, 75 miles west of the capital, the police and security forces had pulled out and a “people’s committee” was controlling the city, several people who had fled across the border reported. “The people are taking care of their own business,” said Basem Shams, 26, a fisherman.
In Sabratha, fifty miles west of the capital, witnesses reported that the police headquarters and offices of Colonel Qaddafi’s revolutionary committees were all in smoldering ruins. “We are not afraid; we are watching,” said a doctor by telephone from Sabratha. “What I am sure about, is that change is coming.”
In Zawiyah, an envoy from Colonel Qaddafi had reportedly arrived to warn rebels on Wednesday: “Either leave or you will see a massacre,” one resident said.
About 5 a.m. on Thursday, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces fulfilled their threat. Witnesses said a force that included about sixty foreign mercenaries assaulted a central mosque where some of the roughly 2,000 protesters had sought refuge. One witness said the protesters were armed mainly with rifles, sticks, and knives, but after four hours of fighting they managed to hold the square. About a hundred people were killed and two hundred were wounded, this witness said. During a telephone interview with him, a voice could be heard over a loudspeaker in the background telling the crowd, in an area known as Martyrs Square, not to be afraid.
“People came to send a clear message: We are not afraid of death or your bullets,” one resident told the Associated Press. “This regime will regret it. History will not forgive them.”
Meanwhile, the violence sowed concern across the region and beyond. President Obama spoke, in separate calls, with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and the prime ministers of Britain and Italy, David Cameron and Silvio Berlusconi. The White House said the leaders expressed “deep concern” over the Libyan government’s use of force and discussed possible responses, without specifying what steps they were prepared to take.

Self-government is harder than it looks

Libyans in Benghazi, under rebel control, celebrated on a surrendered tank.

Kareem Fahim has an article in The New York Times about the latest out of Libya:

The rebels here said they caught a spy in the court building, the nerve center of the uprising, recording insurgent plans on a cellphone camera. The response was swift. Prosecutors interrogated the man, and the rebels said they planned to detain him, for now.
“We want to know if he’s alone,” said Fathi Terbil, the lawyer whose detention set off Libya’s rebellion and who is now one if its leaders.
In the city where the Libyan uprising began, lawyers, prosecutors, judges, and average citizens who oppose the rule of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi are adjusting to unfamiliar roles: they are keepers both of an evolving rebellion, as well as law and order, in Libya’s second largest city. And they fret that their gains will be reversed, by people and groups sympathetic to Colonel Qaddafi, who still maintain a presence.
Since Sunday, when government forces withdrew and Benghazi became the first major city to fall under rebel control, residents and rebels here have been left to hammer out a new way of life and governance. On Thursday, the fruits of that effort were beginning to take a rough shape. A judge, still wearing his robes, wandered through traffic, ordering drivers to put on their seat belts. At another intersection, three young men helped an elderly police officer direct a traffic jam. Dozens of banks opened for business, and, by late afternoon, stores shuttered for days had started to open as well.
In Benghazi’s new order, the court building overlooking the Mediterranean has become both a seat of rebel power and the town hall. A battery of newly formed committees meet there to discuss security, negotiate with the army, and sort out how to get people back to work. “We needed something temporary, to manage the day-to-day life,” said Imam Bugaighis, an orthodontist who has become a spokeswoman for the caretaker administration. She said her sister, a lawyer, is also an organizer of the effort, whose leadership remains very loose. Lawyers and judges were at the vanguard of the uprising. “They are in charge,” Dr. Bugaighis said. Then she added, “Nobody is in charge.”
After Libya’s revolt began here on 15 February, there was intense fighting for several days. The local hospital is still coping with the influx of those who survived. At the height of the uprising, about a hundred people a day were admitted with bullet wounds and other injuries, according to the chief surgeon, who gave his name only as Dr. Abdullah because the government’s agents were still lurking. “We’ve been under threats for forty years,” he said. Badly wounded men lay in the hospital’s intensive care unit, and doctors confided privately that they did not expect them to live. They included a thirty-year-old man whose chest was filled with bullet fragments. “He’s deeply comatose,” Dr. Abdullah said. Dr. Abdullah said that 140 people died during the unrest here, while local rebel leaders said the number could be as high as 300. The doctors said many patients arrived with bullet wounds to the chest and the head. Many of them are paralyzed. In the morgue, nine green bags contained charred remains. Dr. Abdullah said that they had been recovered from the local military base, and that he was told they were soldiers who were executed and then burned by their commanders after they refused to fire on civilians. But he could not be sure. “It was chaos,” he said.
The chaos had started with the detention of Mr. Terbil, a lawyer who represents families of those killed in a massacre of more than a thousand inmates in abu-Slim prison in Tripoli in 1996. The families planned to be part of a protest on 17 February, and Mr. Terbil said that the authorities detained him on 15 February, hoping to head off the demonstrations. During an interview in a second-floor office in the court building, Mr. Terbil said his interrogation stretched out over two days, as his supporters protested outside the security building where he was detained. Using carrots and sticks, the authorities told him to find a way to end the demonstrations. “I told them, it’s already on Facebook and Twitter,” he said he told the officer interrogating him. “We can’t stop it. We can make it peaceful.” The interrogator’s response, Mr. Terbil said, was: “We cannot allow protests like that to take place. Blood will be shed.”

Big Bird

Christopher Drew has an article in The New York Times about Boeing's latest:

In a surprise twist to a long-running saga, the Air Force said that it would award a $35 billion contract for aerial fueling tankers to Boeing rather than to a European company that builds Airbus planes. William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary, said Boeing was “the clear winner” under a formula that considered the bid prices, how well each of the planes met war-fighting needs, and what it would cost to operate them over forty years.
After weighing all the factors, the Pentagon determined that Boeing’s bid was more than one percent below that of its rival, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, Mr. Lynn said. If the bids had been within one percent, the Air Force would have considered 92 additional requirements for the plane as a tiebreaker, and some of those were widely thought to favor the larger EADS plane.
The Air Force said the first phase of the contract would be worth $3.5 billion, and it would cover the construction of the first eighteen tankers by 2017. Boeing would build 179 tankers in all for about $35 billion.
Boeing, its supporters in Congress, and independent analysts were all surprised by the outcome, because in recent days, the Chicago-based company seemed to have given up hope of winning.
Lawmakers from Washington State, where Boeing assembles a substantial portion of its planes, had complained that the Pentagon had given EADS extra time to bid and had put in place several evaluation rules that seemed to favor the European company, which had submitted its bid through a North American subsidiary.
And the choice could still face opposition from lawmakers on the Gulf Coast, who were counting on EADS’s promise to build an assembly plant in Mobile, Alabama, that would have created thousands of jobs. “I’m disappointed but not surprised,” Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, said. “Only Chicago politics could tip the scales in favor of Boeing’s inferior plane. EADS clearly offers the more capable aircraft. If this decision stands, our warfighters will not get the superior equipment they deserve.”
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, called the decision “a major victory for the American workers, the American aerospace industry and America’s military.” In a phone interview, she said: “Everybody here is ecstatic. Our economy has been struggling, and this is a good news announcement that we really needed.”
EADS had contended that its plane was bigger and better. EADS had also lined up companies from other politically important states, like Ohio, to supply parts. The company has ten days to decide whether to protest the decision. But it gave no indication of its plans in a statement; EADS said only that it was concerned that the Air Force had selected a “high-risk, concept aircraft” over its “proven, more capable” refueling tanker.
Under the contract, Boeing will eventually build fourteen planes a year at plants in Washington and Kansas. The victory will also enable the company to keep open the 767 production line at its assembly plant in Everett, Washington.
EADS’s confidence that it could win the competition stemmed partly from the success that its A330 series had in commercial sales over Boeing’s 767 jetliners. And Boeing had planned to phase out the 767 when its new 787 Dreamliner is ready for delivery.
The contract, which could be the largest awarded for many years as military budgets tighten, could eventually reach $100 billion. The tankers are like flying gas stations; they transfer fuel in mid-flight to fighters, bombers, and cargo planes.
Richard L. Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia, said the victory could also help Boeing in its battle with Airbus in their much larger fight over sales of passenger jets and freighters. If EADS had won the tanker contract, it planned to eventually assemble commercial freighter planes at the plant in Mobile, giving it a manufacturing foothold that could help expand other sales in the United States. And with sharp budget cuts in Europe, “EADS also faces a home defense market that is imploding like a black hole,” Mr. Aboulafia said. “So it was imperative that they get this contract.”
The award could signal the end of a long and often embarrassing effort by the Air Force to replace its aging tankers, which date to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. The bidding represented the service’s third attempt to obtain new tankers since 2001. The first effort collapsed after Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, blew the whistle on corruption involving an airplane-leasing proposal with Boeing.
Northrop Grumman and EADS then won in 2008, only to have government auditors block the award after Boeing protested that the evaluation had been too subjective.
Northrop dropped out last year, prompting the Pentagon to extend the bid deadline to give EADS more time out of concern that Boeing could charge a higher price if it were the only bidder.
Boeing had complained that EADS could rely on subsidies from European governments to undercut Boeing’s price, or to absorb losses if it won the contract with a low bid. Boeing’s concerns were heightened after a World Trade Organization panel concluded last year that Airbus could not have fielded all its models, including the A330 series, when it did without the subsidies.
Boeing’s chief executive, W. James McNerney Jr., had said it would be hard for Boeing to match EADS’s price while still meeting shareholder expectations for a reasonable profit. At an investment conference this month, Mr. McNerney described Boeing’s final offer as “an aggressive but responsible bid”. He also told the investors: “I think the people in this room would be glad if we won at the bid level we put in and would be happy if we lost at a lower level.”
Under the proposed leasing deal in 2001, the Air Force would have paid Boeing over $20 billion for one hundred tankers, or more than $200 million per plane. Northrop Grumman has said that the bids fell to around $184 million in 2008. Most analysts thought they could come in five to ten percent below that this time, and that Boeing would have to accept low profit margins to win the contract.
But Boeing’s triumph could also irritate European leaders. And it could set back Pentagon efforts to encourage bids from foreign companies to create more competition and bring down the cost of weapons systems.
The mayor of Mobile, Samuel L. Jones, said city officials had been confident that EADS would win. “It’s very, very disappointing,” he said, “especially since we had won this competition in 2008.”

Drooling may commence

Sam Grobart has an article in The New York Times about hot new MacBooks:

Apple announced a refresh of its MacBook Pro line of laptops. The highlights? New, faster processors, more powerful graphics processors, an HD camera, and a new port for a technology that Apple is calling Thunderbolt.
Cosmetically, the new Pros look very similar to their predecessors. There are still 13-, 15-, and 17-inch models (starting at $1,199, $1,799 and $2,499, respectively), and they still have the same aluminum unibody construction and full-width glass across the display. To look at them, you wouldn’t notice a whole lot that’s different.
It’s under the hood where things change. The new Intel processors, the Core i5 and Core i7, are dual- and quad-core chips that promise up to twice the performance of the chips in the earlier models.
One of the new features of the Intel chips is an integrated graphics processor. But in the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros, Apple doubled down on graphics by adding a discrete AMD Radeon graphics chip. Models with both chips seamlessly and automatically switch between the two processors, depending on performance needs.
There is also a new FaceTime camera, which can stream video in 720p resolution and display it in a new widescreen format.
It’s the last addition to the MacBook Pro line that is perhaps the most intriguing: the Thunderbolt port. Apple collaborated with Intel on its Light Peak project to create a new high-speed data and display port that would be adaptable to existing connection standards. The MacBook Pros are the first computers to feature the technology, but it will roll out across manufacturers next year.
The performance specs of Thunderbolt are striking: At 10 Gbps, it’s twice as fast as USB 3.0, twelve times as fast as FireWire 800 and twenty times faster than USB 2.0. As Intel calculated in their press release, a Thunderbolt connection can transfer a full-length high-definition movie in thirty seconds.
Thunderbolt is also a native Mini DisplayPort, so any display with that connection can hook up easily. HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, and VGA displays can use adapters. Thunderbolt also provides up to ten watts of power to peripherals and can be daisy-chained to up to six peripherals.
The new MacBook Pros are available now.

Rico says he would, if he had the money...

Manny Fernandez has an article in The New York Times about home-grown (no, not that) in Brooklyn:

The cigarettes Audrey Silk used to smoke, Parliament Lights, are made in a factory in Richmond, Virginia. The cigarettes she smokes these days are made and grown in Brooklyn, at her house.
Ms. Silk’s backyard is home to raspberry and rose bushes, geraniums, impatiens, and a hundred tobacco plants in gardening buckets near her wooden deck. Inside her house, around the corner from Flatbush Avenue in Marine Park, she has to be careful stepping into her basement; one wrong move could ruin her cigarettes. Dozens of tobacco leaves hang there, drying on wires she has strung across the room, where they turn a crisp light brown as they age above a stack of her old Springsteen records.
She talks about cartons and packs in relation to crops and seeds. Planted in 2009, her first crop— two dozen plants of Golden Seal Special Burley tobacco— produced nine cartons of cigarettes. Ms. Silk would have spent more than $1,000 had she bought nine cartons in parts of New York City. Instead, she spent $240, mostly for the trays, the buckets, and plant food.
But for Ms. Silk, 46, a retired police officer and the founder of New York City CLASH (Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment), a smokers’ rights group, it is not just about the money. It is about the message. In the state with the highest cigarette taxes in the country, in a city that has become one of the hardest places in America to find a place to smoke, Ms. Silk has gone off the grid, growing, processing, and smoking her own tax-free cigarettes from packets of seeds she buys online for about $2. She expects to produce a total of 45 cartons after planting two crops— the first in the summer of 2009, the second last summer— and estimates that she will have saved more than $5,000. “It’ll make the anti-smokers apoplectic,” said Ms. Silk. “They’re using the power of taxation to coerce behavior. That’s not what taxation is supposed to be for.”
There are no federal, state, or city laws prohibiting New Yorkers from growing tobacco at home for personal consumption. Still, Ms. Silk has kept her homegrown tobacco a secret for the most part since she planted the first crop, though she has offered cigarettes to her boyfriend and a few neighbors. This month, however, she changed her position on keeping quiet, after the City Council approved a bill banning smoking at parks, beaches, and pedestrian plazas.
“The only way we’re going to win now, since you can’t reason with the irrational, which is the City Council or any lawmakers,” Ms. Silk said, “is you have to take the position of giving them the finger.”
Though she has become more vocal about her tobacco, she remains apprehensive. She said that she worried that anti-smoking advocates and the Bloomberg administration, which pushed to ban smoking in restaurants and bars, would make homegrown tobacco their next target. “We fear that the anti-smokers are so hysterical that if they start finding that people are doing this, they would craft a law to make it illegal,” Ms. Silk said. “I’m waiting for the black helicopters to start flying over my yard.”
Jim Johnson, the president of Seedman.com, the company based in Mississippi that supplied Ms. Silk with her seeds, was not surprised to learn that the Golden Seal tobacco had done well in the Brooklyn sunshine. He said that tobacco would grow anywhere there were about a hundred frost-free nights, and that he even had customers in Alaska. Mr. Johnson said tobacco was “a very tough, resilient plant”.
If there are other New York City smokers growing tobacco at home, they appear to be keeping it to themselves. Ms. Silk does not know anyone else in the city who does so. But they are out there: Mr. Johnson estimated that last year, he had more than a thousand tobacco-seed customers in the New York City region.
Ms. Silk sat in the house she shared with Bingo, her dog, and Albert, her parrot, and pulled a cigarette from a Parliament Lights pack. “Don’t let this fool you,” she said. “I put my roll-your-owns in here. I just saved all my old Parliament boxes.”
Ms. Silk was smoking loose tobacco she had bought. She is in a lull in production: she finished smoking her first crop and has been too busy to prepare her second. The delay works to her advantage. “If I want a better flavor,” she said, “the longer I can leave it, the better it is.”
Growing tobacco saves Ms. Silk money, but costs her time. She has to plant the virtually microscopic seeds in trays indoors and then, weeks later, transplant them to buckets outside. She waters the plants daily until they grow to be about five feet tall, with big leaves that droop from the stem. “Like elephant ears,” Ms. Silk said of the leaves. “That’s why, when people joke around and say, ‘They’re going to think you’re growing pot,’ I’m like: ‘I’m sorry. There’s no one mistaking this for pot.’”
Then there is the processing: washing leaves in her kitchen sink, drying them over the downstairs tub, hanging them in the basement, storing some in boxes she keeps in a walk-in closet, removing the middle vein from each leaf, forming bricks out of about 25 leaves and feeding those bricks into a hand-crank machine for shredding. After planting her 2009 crop, Ms. Silk had to wait several months before smoking her first cigarette from it. The authorities, she added, should not be concerned that she might be illegally selling her cigarettes.
“I make meatballs,” Ms. Silk said, by way of explanation. “My recipe is a four-hour ordeal. My biggest loved ones do not get any. When I have to put a lot of work into something, I don’t share.”
The hundred plants from her second crop are not much to look at now: mostly bare stems standing upright in the cold. Still, her Brooklyn tobacco is a source of pride, as both a green-thumb accomplishment and a political statement. She has even named her garden in honor, or dishonor, of someone important in her life: not her boyfriend, her dog or her parrot, but her mayor.

Rico asks why, if tobacco is so bad for you, can you grow that at home (and smoke it, which'll eventually kill you), but you can't grow marijuana at home? Rico says he wouldn't smoke either with a gub to his head, but gummint is so capricious...

History for the day

On 25 February 1870, Hiram R. Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, became the first black member of the United States Senate, sworn in to serve out the unexpired term of Jefferson Davis.

Glass; it's not just windows

Rico says his father sends along this great Corning video, just in case you forgot about glass:

You can always tell a Marine...

...but you can't tell 'em much.
Rico says his friend Tex (a former Marine himself) sends along this splendid poster, which says it all:

Going down, if slowly

Paul Schemm and Maggie Michael of the AP have an article about the latest from the Middle East, especially Libya:

The scope of Moammar Gadhafi's control was whittled away as major Libyan cities and towns closer to the capital fell to the rebellion against his rule. In the east, now all but broken away, the opposition vowed to "liberate" Tripoli, where the Libyan leader is holed up with a force of militiamen roaming the streets and tanks guarding the outskirts.
In a further sign of Gadhafi's faltering hold, two air force pilots, one from the leader's own tribe, parachuted out of their Russian-made warplane and let it crash into the eastern Libyan desert rather than follow orders to bomb an opposition-held city.
International momentum was building for action to punish Gadhafi's regime for the bloody crackdown it has unleashed against the uprising that began on 15 February. President Obama said the suffering and bloodshed in Libya "is outrageous and it is unacceptable", and he directed his administration to prepare a full range of options, including possible sanctions that could freeze the assets and ban travel to the United States by Libyan officials.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy raised the possibility of the European Union cutting off economic ties.
Another proposal gaining some traction was for the United Nations to declare a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent it from using warplanes to attack protesters. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said that if reports of such strikes are confirmed, "there's an immediate need for that level of protection".
Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said estimates of 1,000 people killed in the violence in Libya were "credible", although he stressed that information about casualties was incomplete.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch has put the death toll at nearly 300, according to a partial count.
In Tripoli, Gadhafi's stronghold, protest organizers called for new rallies on Thursday and Friday, raising the potential for a more bloody confrontation.
Militiamen and Gadhafi supporters (a mix of Libyans and foreign African fighters brought in) roamed the capital's main streets, called up by the Libyan leader in a fist-pounding speech in which he vowed to fight to the death. The gunmen fired weapons in the air, chanting Long live Gadhafi, and waved green flags. With a steady rain, streets were largely empty, residents said.
In many neighborhoods, residents set up watch groups to keep militiamen out, barricading streets with concrete blocks, metal, and rocks, and searching those trying to enter, a Tripoli activist said. Gadhafi's residence at Tripoli's Aziziya Gates was guarded by loyalists, along with a line of armed militiamen in vehicles, some masked, he said. The radio station building downtown was also heavily fortified. In one western neighborhood, security forces stormed several homes and arrested three or four people, a witness said, while tanks were deployed on the eastern outskirts, witnesses in at least one neighborhood said.
"Mercenaries are everywhere with weapons. You can't open a window or door. Snipers hunt people," said another resident, who said she had spent the night in her home awake hearing gunfire outside. "We are under siege, at the mercy of a man who is not a Muslim."
But below the surface, protesters were organizing, said the activist. At night, they fan out and spray-paint anti-Gadhafi graffiti or set fires near police stations, chanting The people want the ouster of the regime before running at the approach of militiamen, he said. The Tripoli residents, like other witnesses around the country, spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation.
In opposition-controlled Benghazi, the eastern city where the uprising began, residents held a mass rally outside the city's main courthouse, vowing to support protests in the capital, said Farag al-Warfali, a banker. They also called a one-day fast in solidarity with them. Afterward, young men went into the courthouse to register to obtain weapons, which had been looted from police stations and military bases and then turned over to the city's new rulers, he said. The idea is to "take their weapons and march toward Tripoli," Warfali said, although Benghazi lies 580 miles east of the capital, and territory still loyal to Gadhafi lies between them.
There were similar calls in Misrata, several hours' drive from Tripoli, the closest major city to the capital to fall to antigovernment forces. A mosque called residents to come to jihad, or holy war, in support of the anti-Gadhafi camp, said one resident, Iman. "We are going to join forces with our brothers in Tripoli," she said.
The extent of Gadhafi's control over the country he has ruled for 41 years had been reduced to the western coastal region around Tripoli, the deserts to the south, and parts of the center.
After Gadhafi's speech Tuesday night, militiamen flooded into Sabratha, a town west of Tripoli famed for nearby ancient Roman ruins, and battled government opponents who had taken over, said one resident. About 5,000 militiamen from neighboring towns, backed by army and police units, clashed with the rival group and drove it from the streets, he said. But his territory was being eroded.
The opposition said Wednesday that it had taken over Misrata, Libya's third-largest city. Residents honked horns in celebration and raised the pre-Gadhafi flags of the Libyan monarchy after several days of fighting that drove militiamen from the city, about 120 miles east of Tripoli, said Faraj al-Misrati, a local doctor. He said six people had been killed and 200 wounded in clashes that began on 18 February.
Residents had formed committees to clean the streets, protect the city, and treat the wounded, he said. "The solidarity among the people here is amazing, even the disabled are helping out." An audio statement posted on the Internet, reportedly from armed forces officers in Misrata, proclaimed "our total support" for the anti-Gadhafi movement.
Government opponents were also in control in Zwara, a town about thirty miles from the Tunisian border in the west, after local army units sided with them and police fled, said one resident, a 25-year-old unemployed university graduate. "Gadhafi has reached the point that he's saying he will bring armies from Africa. That means he is isolated," he said.
At the Egyptian border, guards had fled, and local tribal elders have formed local committees to take their place. "Welcome to the new Libya," proclaimed graffiti spray-painted at the crossing.

In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh said he had ordered his security services to protect protesters, stop all clashes, and prevent direct confrontation between government supporters and opponents. The directive came at the end of a day when security forces in the port of Aden used tear gas and fired bullets in the air to disperse hundreds of protesters, and government supporters wielding clubs attacked demonstrators in the capital, Sana'a.
In Bahrain, thousands of anti-government protesters flooded Manama's Pearl Square after the release of at least 100 political prisoners, including 25 Shi'ite activists on trial since last year for allegedly plotting against the state.
In Egypt, an angry crowd of hundreds taunted three former high-ranking members of ousted President Hosni Mubarak's regime as they arrived in court for a corruption hearing, screaming Thieves and You robbed our money. The three were ex-Housing minister Ahmed Maghrabi, ex-Tourism minister Zuheir Garana, and steel tycoon & ruling party leader Ahmed Ezz.
In Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah nearly doubled a development fund that helps citizens buy homes, marry, and start businesses, and he set up unemployment aid. The steps appear aimed at shoring up popular support and fending off unrest that has spread to Bahrain.
In Jordan, the cabinet approved laws making it easier to organize protests and will revive a body that works to ensure that basic commodities remain affordable to the poor.

Rico says they may chant Long live Gadhafi, but not for long...

If religion is a drug, are these guys pushers?

Reid Kanaley has a column at Philly.com about the latest app:

I was brought up Baptist. So, is it okay for me to try out Confession: A Roman Catholic App?
"Sure, if you're interested in it," says Patrick Leinen, the web developer who, with his brother and a pal, came up with the smartphone and tablet app that came out this month and struck nerves from Leinen's home in South Bend, Indiana to the Vatican in Rome. "Actually, it's got a lot of people who are just curious about it," Leinen says.
Confession, a $1.99 app from Leinen's Little iApp, has sold tens of thousands of copies from the Apple App Store. Leinen's group is working on an Android version after getting deluged with requests from non-Apple users.
Leinen, 31, notes that Apple prohibits app sellers from divulging exactly how many copies of apps get sold, but he, brother Chip Leinen, 34, and their friend Ryan Kreager, 26, are also working on Spanish, French, German, and Italian versions. "We're floored" by the attention, says Patrick Leinen. "We thought there might be some churches interested, maybe some youth groups."
Using the app is easy. You give it your name, age, gender, and marital status, and it does a lot of the rest. Your other job is to tell it everything.
On a menu of the Ten Commandments, tap on each one that you've broken since your last confession, then be prepared to become more specific. If your peccadillos seem to defy the categories of the Decalogue, a separate space is available for enumerating "custom sin". There, I entered, "Running with scissors", which I'm sure I have done at some point. Once listed, the Catholic user is ready to enter the church confessional, smartphone in hand, to review these wrongs with a live confessor, seek forgiveness, and be assigned penance.
Peddling digital forgiveness to avoid traditional confession is not what the app is about, Leinen insists.
But it still led to a stir two weeks ago when a Vatican spokesman stepped out to say: "One cannot speak of a 'confession via iPhone'." The spokesman did add, though, that the app could be useful in helping people make what the Catholic News Service called an "examination of conscience".
"Some of the press got this mixed up by saying 'The Pope blessed the app,' or 'The Pope condemned the app,'" says Leinen. What about computer privacy and that list of sins? Leinen says what's typed by the sinner never gets uploaded anywhere and stays on the handheld device only until the user closes the app. "Catholics are taught that your sins are forgiven and washed away; the database does the same thing," he says.

Paying the piper

Ravi Somaiya has an article in The New York Times about the latest legal travails for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks:

A British court ordered Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, to be extradited to Sweden to face accusations of sexual abuse. His lawyers have seven days to appeal the ruling and immediately indicated that they would. Mr. Assange, dressed in the blue suit he has worn to previous hearings, sat impassively as the decision was read. He is currently free on bail and the court continued that, subject to conditions which were being discussed. Judge Howard Riddle, in his ruling, said that allegations brought by two women qualified as extraditable offenses and that the warrant seeking Mr. Assange’s return to Sweden for questioning was valid.
The verdict marks a turning point in the three-month battle in the British courts and the media against what Mr. Assange, his legal team, and his celebrity supporters say is a conspiracy to stop WikiLeaks and its campaign to expose government and corporate secrets.
The case has been fought against the backdrop of the group’s highest-profile operation yet: the release of a quarter of a million confidential American diplomatic cables that became the basis of articles by news organizations worldwide, including The New York Times.
WikiLeaks supporters, many of whom contend that the case against Mr. Assange is retribution for the cables’ release, have mobbed courthouses over the course of six acrimonious hearings, chanting We love you, Julian. Mr. Assange was initially denied bail and briefly jailed after defying a judge’s request to provide an address.
Swedish prosecutors argued that Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, must return to Stockholm to face accusations by two women who say that he sexually abused them last August. Under Sweden’s strict sexual-crimes laws, he is accused of two counts of sexual molestation, one count of unlawful coercion, and one count of rape. His accusers, both WikiLeaks volunteers, have said that their sexual encounters with Mr. Assange started out as consensual but turned non-consensual.
Mr. Assange has said the accusations are “incredible lies,” and he has referred to Sweden as “the Saudi Arabia of feminism”.
Judge Little said that, if there have been abuses in Sweden, “the right place for these to be examined and remedied is in the Swedish trial system.”
Mr. Assange has also denied accusations by the Swedish authorities that he fled the country in September rather than surrender to the police; he says he left Sweden with permission. And he has denounced the leaks of two Swedish police documents that provided graphic details of the accusations.
Mr. Assange and his lawyers have signaled their intent to take their fight to Britain’s highest courts, and even to the European Court of Human Rights. In adjourning a hearing earlier this month to make his decision, Judge Riddle said with a note of resignation that whatever he decided would “perhaps inevitably be appealed”.
The long and costly legal battle has left Mr. Assange isolated in the country house of a wealthy friend, and he is electronically monitored as a condition of his bail.
During the legal fight, many of his closest colleagues have defected from WikiLeaks, and a dozen of them formed a rival website, OpenLeaks. The United States Justice Department, meanwhile, has subpoenaed his Twitter account as part of an investigation that could lead to espionage charges.
In one of his frequent interviews from his friend’s house, Mr. Assange compared himself to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In a recorded speech played this month at a rally in Melbourne, Australia, his adopted hometown, he went further, comparing the struggles of WikiLeaks to those of African-Americans who fought for equal rights in the 1950s, of protesters who sought an end to the Vietnam War in the ‘60s, and of the feminist and environmental movements. “For the Internet generation,” he said, “this is our challenge, and this is our time.”
Mr. Assange is also working on his autobiography, which he has said will be worth $1.7 million in publishing deals. “I don’t want to write this book, but I have to,” he said in a December interview with The Sunday Times of London, explaining that his legal costs had reached more than $300,000. “I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.”
The book, he said, will detail his “global struggle to force a new relationship between the people and their governments”. He said he hoped the book, due out in April, “will become one of the unifying documents of our generation”.
This month, in another fund-raising effort, he organized what he called a “dinner for free speech”, encouraging online supporters to donate to his defense and dine with friends while watching a video message he had recorded. On a website to promote the idea, where he was pictured holding a wine glass aloft, he was quoted as declaring: “There are four things that cannot be concealed for long: the sun, the moon, the truth— and dessert!”
WikiLeaks, though unable to process and release new material, has continued to post classified United States diplomatic cables from the cache of the more than 250,000 it has obtained. Recent examples have included documents concerning the opulent lifestyle of the family of former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia. The documents were widely disseminated during the revolution that ousted Mr. Ben Ali and started a wave of protests in the Arab world.
In recent weeks, some of Mr. Assange’s supporters, eager to see WikiLeaks operating with its founder’s full attention, have been echoing a question asked by a judge at one of the initial hearings in the case: “If he is so keen to clear his name,” the judge, Justice Duncan Ouseley, asked in December, “what stops a voluntary return to Sweden?”
Mr. Assange told friends in Britain he feared that if he returned to Sweden he would be extradited to the United States and perhaps be detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or executed. But one of his former WikiLeaks colleagues said in an interview that he thought Mr. Assange’s reason was more mundane. The colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who is one of the OpenLeaks founders, told reporters last week that when Mr. Assange first heard about the sexual abuse allegations in late August, “he was not concerned about the United States, but he is very scared of going to prison in Sweden,” Mr. Domscheit-Berg said, “which he thinks might happen.” Such charges carry a maximum sentence of four years and no minimum sentence.

Rico says the US government might dislike what the guy's done, but be "extradited to the United States and perhaps detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or executed"? The guy thinks a little highly of himself (Dr. Martin Luther King, indeed); if we wanted him dead, it would have already happened...

Seventy thousand and counting

Rahm's in

Monica Davey and Emma Fitzsimmons have an article in The New York Times about Emanuel's rapid victory in Chicago:

Rahm Emanuel, a former congressman who worked for two presidents, was elected mayor of Chicago on Tuesday, marking a new path for a city that has, for 22 years, been led by a singular, powerful force, Richard M. Daley.
Mr. Emanuel, who will take office in May, won 55 percent of the vote against five other candidates. That allowed him to avoid a one-on-one runoff election in April that had been seen by some opponents as their best chance to defeat Mr. Emanuel. With 95 percent of precincts reporting, his closest competitor, Gery J. Chico, a former chief of staff to Mr. Daley, got 24 percent of the vote.
“Tonight we are moving forward the only way we truly can; together as one city with one future,” Mr. Emanuel told a crowd at a union hall west of downtown.
Mr. Emanuel, 51, is known to nearly everyone here; less, perhaps, for his years as a congressman from the North Side than for his ties to President Obama, a fellow Chicagoan whom he served as White House chief of staff. Mr. Obama congratulated Mr. Emanuel evening, saying, “As a Chicagoan and a friend, I couldn’t be prouder.”
Some voters here have viewed the connection as both an affirmation to support Mr. Emanuel and as a potential advantage for Chicago in its future dealings with Washington.
As the next mayor of this city, the nation’s third largest, Mr. Emanuel faces significant obstacles. He must cope with staggering unfunded pension liabilities, as well as a budget deficit around $600 million, by some estimates. Easy fixes, like the proceeds of privatization deals of the city’s parking meters, have already been used. Meanwhile, the city’s population of 2.69 million is smaller than it was a decade ago, unhappy news for a new mayor who would wish to see a growing tax base.
“There are no more rabbits to pull out of the hat,” said Joe Moore, an alderman from the North Side for the last twenty years, referring to the city’s budget of about $6 billion. “What is left for the next mayor and the next City Council is a series of bad choices: cutting services, perhaps raising taxes and fees.”
A Daley, either the current mayor or his father, Richard J., who operated with a similarly tight control, has run this city for 42 of the past 55 years, and Mr. Emanuel, the city’s first Jewish mayor, is likely to be compared with that family’s legacy at every turn.
Among the questions certain to arise: How does he now handle the city’s fifty aldermen, some of whose political careers were owed to the current mayor and others who pressed for Mr. Emanuel’s opponents? How may he push to change city workers’ pensions, a system he has described as unsustainable? And how does he soothe differences that arose during a tense campaign; differences with public-sector unions that endorsed Mr. Chico, and with African-American leaders who backed Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman in the United States Senate?
City voting officials said the election had drawn a smaller turnout than they had anticipated. Along with Mr. Chico and Ms. Braun, who was winning 8.8 percent of the vote, Mr. Emanuel defeated Miguel del Valle, the city clerk, who got 9.4 percent; Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins, 1.6 percent; and William Walls, 0.9 percent.
Mr. Emanuel, who has spent plenty of time working behind the scenes for other politicians, including Mayor Daley and President Bill Clinton, has long been known for his tough-guy methods of negotiating, his harsh, blunt retorts, and his use of four-letter words. But over the last five months, in his own campaign, Mr. Emanuel showed a far more reserved side. That left some here wondering which Mr. Emanuel— fierce or muted— may next appear, with the campaign over and the governing ahead.
Mr. Emanuel had long suggested that he would love to be the mayor of Chicago, his birthplace. But his immediate road to City Hall began last September, when Mayor Daley stunned this city by announcing he would not seek a seventh term. That meant the first mayoral election in 64 years without a sitting mayor on the ballot, and a huge crop of would-be candidates emerged from every political rank.
In October, Mr. Emanuel left his post as White House chief of staff to return to Chicago for a run, and the number of candidates quickly began shrinking. In the months that followed, he would raise some $13 million and campaign at more than 100 neighborhood L stations, 229 neighborhood stops, and 20 schools.
In the end, the effort, far more elaborate and expensive than his five opponents’, spared him from a runoff in April. Some opponents had viewed that second race, a head-to-head race with only one other candidate, as the only chance of defeating Mr. Emanuel.
After Mr. Chico spoke on the telephone to Mr. Emanuel on Tuesday evening, Mr. Chico told his supporters that he had pledged his support, from here on out, to Mr. Emanuel’s efforts for Chicago. “Let’s all work together to get behind the new mayor,” Mr. Chico told a subdued group during his brief concession speech, “and make this the best city on the face of the earth.”
At points in the campaign, Mr. Emanuel’s inevitability faltered over a seemingly simple question: was he really a resident of Chicago? Critics challenged him, saying his time at the White House meant he failed to meet a requirement that candidates live in Chicago for the year immediately before Election Day. The Illinois Supreme Court found that he was allowed to run — he had never lost legal residency at his North Side home, the justices found — but not before the issue became a major drama here, with election workers, at one point, urgently halting the printing of ballots.
If the residency battle ultimately drew sympathy to Mr. Emanuel, it also raised a question that his opponents had quietly pressed on all along: Was he a true, die-hard Chicagoan the way Mr. Daley, an avid White Sox fan and a constant, if gruff cheerleader for his city, was a Chicagoan? Mr. Emanuel spent part of his youth in the northern suburbs, in addition to his working time in Washington, details regularly noted by his critics.
But voters who chose him seemed to dismiss the question. “Who cares if he lived on the North Shore?” said Ben Fogel, a social worker who said he was voting for Mr. Emanuel. “I have family there, and it is close enough.” The distinction was silly now, his supporters said, a non-issue in a post-Daley world.

Kareem Fahim and David Kirkpatrick have an article in The New York Times about the current state of Libya:

Vowing to track down and kill protesters “house by house,” Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya tightened his grip on the capital, Tripoli, but the eastern half of the country was slipping beyond his control. A bloody crackdown drove protesters from the streets of Tripoli, where residents described a state of terror. After a televised speech by Colonel Qaddafi, thousands of his supporters converged in the city’s central Green Square, wearing green bandannas and brandishing large machetes. Many loaded into trucks headed for the outlying areas of the city, where they occupied traffic intersections and appeared to be massing for neighborhood-to-neighborhood searches. “It looks like they have been given a green light to kill these people,” one witness said.
Human Rights Watch said it had confirmed 62 deaths in two hospitals after a rampage Monday night, when witnesses said groups of heavily armed militiamen and mercenaries from other African countries cruised the streets in pickup trucks, spraying crowds with machine-gun fire. The death toll was probably higher; one witness said militia forces appeared to be using vans to cart away bodies.
But as they clamped down on the capital, Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces did not appear to make any attempt to take back the growing number of towns in the east that had in effect declared their independence and set up informal opposition governments. For now, there is little indication of what will replace the vacuum left by Colonel Qaddafi’s authority in broad parts of the country other than simmering anarchy.
Only around the town of Ajdabiya, south of the revolt’s center in Benghazi, were Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces and militia still clashing with protesters along the road to the colonel’s hometown, Surt. The widening gap between the capital and the eastern countryside underscored the radically different trajectory of the Libyan revolt from the others that recently toppled Arab autocrats on Libya’s western and eastern borders, in Tunisia and Egypt.
Though the Libyan revolt began with a relatively organized core of longtime government critics in Benghazi, its spread to the capital was swift and spontaneous, outracing any efforts to coordinate the protests. Colonel Qaddafi has lashed out with a level of violence unseen in either of the other uprisings, partly by importing foreigners without ties to the Libyan people. His four decades of idiosyncratic one-man rule have left the country without any national institutions, not even a unified or disciplined military, that could tame his retribution or provide the framework for a transitional government.
Condemnations of his brutal crackdown mounted, from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the United Nations Security Council to the Arab League, which suspended Libya as a member. High-profile aides and diplomats continued to defect, among them Libya’s interior minister and the country’s ambassadors to the United States, India and Bangladesh.
In his second television appearance in two days, Colonel Qaddafi vowed on Tuesday to die as a martyr for his country. “I will fight on to the last drop of my blood,” he said. Wearing a beige robe and turban and reading at times from his manifesto, the Green Book, Colonel Qaddafi called the protesters “cockroaches” and attributed the unrest shaking Libya to foreigners, a small group of people distributing pills, brainwashing, and young people’s naïve desire to imitate the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. He urged citizens to take to the streets and beat back the protesters, and he described himself in sweeping, megalomaniacal terms. “Muammar Qaddafi is history, resistance, liberty, glory, revolution,” he declared.
In Tobruk, an eastern city that joined the uprising almost as soon as it began, a resident watching the speech in the main square reacted by throwing a rock at Colonel Qaddafi’s face as it was broadcast on a large television. And in a cafe not far from Tobruk, Fawzi Labada, a bus driver, looked incredulously at the screen. “He is weak now,” he said. “He’s a liar, a big liar. He will hang.”
In Tripoli, however, the reaction was more chastened. One resident reported the sound of gunfire during the speech; presumably in celebration, he said, but also in warning. “He is saying, ‘If you go to protest, all the shots will be in your chest,’ ” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “We are unarmed and his warning is very clear,” he added. “The people are terrified now.”
The gap between Colonel Qaddafi’s stronghold in Tripoli and the insurrection in the east recalled Libya’s pre-1931 past as three different countries— Tripolitania, Fezzan, and Cyrenaica— and underscored the challenge facing its insurrection. Many analysts have suggested that Colonel Qaddafi seemed to fear the development of any national institutions or networks that might check his power, and he has kept even his military divided into battalions, each loyal mainly to its own officers. That has set the stage for heavy defections during the revolt; rebels in the east said some government forces had simply abandoned their uniforms to join the cause. But it also means that Libya’s military is unlikely to play the stabilizing role its Tunisian or Egyptian counterparts did.
Foreign companies and Libyan factions focused intensely on the fate of the country’s substantial oil reserves. The Italian oil company Eni confirmed that it had suspended use of a pipeline from Libya to Sicily that provides ten percent of Italy’s natural gas.
Opponents of Colonel Qaddafi tightened their control of their area around Ajdabiya, an important site in the oil fields of central Libya, said Tawfiq al-Shahbi, a protest organizer in Tobruk.
Tripoli remained under an information blackout, with no Internet access and limited and intermittent phone service. Colonel Qaddafi’s government has sought to block all foreign journalists from entering the country or reporting on the revolt.
But the uprising in the east cracked open the country as the Libyan military retreated from the eastern border with Egypt and foreign journalists poured through. The road from the border to Tobruk appeared to be completely under the control of Colonel Qaddafi’s opponents, and small, ragtag bands of men in worn fatigues ran easygoing checkpoints and flashed victory signs at visitors. Except for those guards, there was little to suggest an uprising was under way. Shops were open along the road, which was full of traffic, mostly heading out of Libya.
Tobruk residents said neighboring cities, including Dernah, Al Qubaa, Bayda and El Marij, were also quiet, and effectively ruled by the opposition.
The government lost control of Tobruk almost immediately, according to Gamal Shallouf, a marine biologist who has become an informal press officer in the city. Soldiers took off their uniforms, taking the side of protesters, who burned the police station and another government building, smashing a large stone monument of Colonel Qaddafi’s Green Book. Four people were killed during clashes here, residents said.
Salah Algheriani, who works for the state-owned Gulf Oil company, talked about the sea change in Tobruk, where everyone was suddenly full of loud opinions and hope, including the hope that young people might stop leaving the country for Europe. “The taste of freedom is very delicious,” he said.
The protests began with a relatively organized network of families in Benghazi who had all lost relatives in a 1996 prison riot. Many were represented by the same lawyer, a prominent Qaddafi critic in the region, and his arrest last week set off their uprising. But the revolt in Tripoli appears far more genuinely spontaneous and unorganized than the Benghazi uprising or, for that matter, the revolutions that toppled the leaders of Tunisia or Egypt. The lack of organization now raises questions about the ability of the mostly young rebels in the capital to regroup after the Qaddafi government’s retaliation.
Protesters in other parts of the country have vowed in recent days to send reinforcements to their fellow citizens in Tripoli, but Qaddafi supporters have set up roadblocks to prevent entry into the city. Still, even in Tripoli, some protesters who had retreated into their homes vowed that they would return to the street. “It is too late,” one said. “I don’t think anyone is prepared to listen to Qaddafi anymore, and it is not one town or one area. It is the whole country in an uprising.”

Civil War for the day

Harold Holzer continues The New York Times series on the history of the Civil War:

Just two years ago, President-elect Barack Obama staged the final leg of his pre-inaugural journey by boarding a train in Baltimore for a very public rally at the Amtrak station, followed by a leisurely rail journey to Washington, where the media and a large and exuberant crowd welcomed the future president and his wife. Preceding as it did Mr. Obama’s “new birth of freedom” inauguration, billed as a tribute to his hero, Abraham Lincoln, there was little doubt that the carefully crafted trip from Baltimore was meant as a symbolic prelude. Lincoln, too, had traveled from Baltimore to Washington on the final sprint of his own so-called journey to greatness.
But most Americans overlooked a critical historical irony: whereas Obama was greeted by a cheering crowd, Lincoln was met by a single friend; no one else in the capital even knew he was arriving. Following eleven days and more than 2,000 miles of travel on twenty different railroad lines, after making one hundred speeches and appearing at dozens of parades, receptions, dinners, and church services, Lincoln made the final leg of his journey in total secrecy, in the dead of night, disguised to avoid detection and, at one point, sleeping near a woman who was not his wife.
The bizarre episode began in Philadelphia, toward the end of what Lincoln called his “meandering” journey from Illinois. There he received a chilling report from detective Allan Pinkerton that assassins planned to kill him in Baltimore when he changed trains to continue his journey south. (at the time track lines didn’t connect, even in large cities, so he would have to go from one depot to another to reach southbound tracks).
The story sounded credible to Lincoln. Baltimore was the first southern, slaveholding city on Lincoln’s itinerary, and as such inherently dangerous territory. Walking from his train platform out into the street, no doubt wearing his signature stovepipe hat, the looming president-elect would have made a plum target. When warned that even Baltimore’s local police force might betray him in a pinch, Lincoln chose to abort his published schedule. Living to take office was more important than appearing in public in a city where only one or two percent of voters had supported him.
Bravely, Lincoln did insist on continuing his itinerary in Pennsylvania. He was feted in Philadelphia, then his train headed west to Harrisburg, where he had promised to appear with the state’s recently elected Republican governor, Andrew Curtin. But that night, in the midst of a supper in his honor, Lincoln slipped outside, donned a soft, wide-brimmed hat and long overcoat (“I was not the same man,” he later crowed) and raced off in a waiting carriage, accompanied only by Pinkerton and the president-elect’s physically imposing friend and bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon. Pinkerton ordered telegraph wires severed to prevent leaks. (Oddly, Lincoln left behind the largest security retinue ever assigned to protect an incoming or sitting president.)
Arriving in Philadelphia around 10 p.m., Lincoln rode a carriage to the next depot and there boarded a sleeping car under an assumed name, with Pinkerton agent Kate Warne, posing as his sister, occupying a nearby bunk. After its arrival in Baltimore at 3:30 a.m., horses drew the sleeper from the Calvert Street to the Camden Street station and coupled it to a southbound locomotive. Pinkerton later insisted, as if to emphasize the danger, that he heard strains of the incendiary new pro-South song Maryland My Maryland wafting through the darkened streets.
Lincoln finally arrived in Washington at 6 a.m. on 23 February. Following a week and a half of loud and boisterous welcomes, the silence there must have seemed eerily portentous. No music played. Not a soul shouted his name. One old friend who spotted him on the lonely platform, Representative Elihu Washburne of Illinois, did try to approach. But so tense was the situation (the capital abounded with hostile slaveholders, several of whom had vowed Lincoln would not live to be sworn in) that when Washburne neared, Pinkerton tried to strike him.
News of Lincoln’s premature and clandestine arrival quickly found its way into the newspapers, and it shocked the country. Yet the incident might have been quickly forgotten had it not been for The New York Times. Its embedded inaugural journey reporter, Joseph Howard, no doubt incensed that he had been left behind in Harrisburg, reported that Lincoln had passed through Baltimore disguised in a “Scotch cap and military cloak”. Though Lincoln had worn no such garb, the calumny spread rapidly. (He likely intended his slur to hold meaning only for the president’s closest friends, for his claims could be read as coded messages. A scotch cap sounded just like a “scotch cop”, and the Glasgow-born Pinkerton was certainly that. Lamon had only recently been named an honorary colonel to validate his credentials as Lincoln’s protector, engendering much teasing, and he may have been Howard’s idea of a “military cloak”.)
Within days, editorials assailed him. Cartoons showing The Flight of Abraham poured off the presses, depicting him in the Howard-invented masquerade, running for his life and cowering in fear. Frederick Douglass compared Lincoln to a “poor, hunted fugitive slave” reaching his designation “in concealment, evading pursuers by the underground railroad, crawling and dodging under the sable wing of night.” Other observers were even less charitable. To the pro-secession Charleston Mercury, the country was “disgusted at his cowardly and undignified entry.” Even the New York Herald conceded that Lincoln had “crept into Washington” like “a thief in the night”.
Lincoln supposedly later confided that his Baltimore escapade was a mistake. For years, artists who wanted to cast him in a negative light would draw him in a beribboned Scottish tam. But in hindsight, was his decision unwise? Was the plot authentic? Was the most bizarre presidential journey in American history justified? It’s hard to know. Lincoln did not object to having his official traveling party, including his wife and sons, enter Baltimore later, as scheduled. Reportedly they were harassed but never really threatened.
What about Pinkerton’s report? Today he is best remembered not as a lifesaver but a chronic worry wart and exaggerator; his wildly inflated estimates of Confederate troop strength in 1862 scared Union General George B. McClellan into virtual paralysis. And he certainly did not hear Maryland My Maryland in Baltimore, because it had yet to be written. So there is reason to doubt the solidity of his evidence concerning an assassination plot.
On the other hand, just weeks after Lincoln evaded Baltimore, rioters there attacked a train bearing Massachusetts soldiers en route to Washington. Blood was spilled in the streets, inspiring a frightened mayor to rush to the White House and demand that the new president order future regiments to bypass his city.
If a Baltimore Plot existed at all, it was at most ad hoc, poorly organized, and probably destined to fail. But, as Lincoln’s private secretaries later insisted, “the fate of the government” required him to “shun all possible and unnecessary peril”. Lincoln had to reach Washington to rule there.

Until the end of his days, Lincoln’s bodyguard defended the evasion. Lamon (photo) insisted that “there never was a moment from the day he crossed the Maryland line, right up to the time of his assassination, that he was not in danger of death by violence.” And when Lincoln did die at the hands of an assassin in 1865, the killer hailed from Maryland.

WikiLeaks cuts both ways, it seems

Scott Shane has an article in The New York Times about Libyan secrets, outed by WikiLeaks:

After New Year’s Day of 2009, Western media reported that Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, a son of the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, had paid Mariah Carey $1 million to sing just four songs at a bash on the Caribbean island of St. Barts. In the newspaper he controlled, the younger el-Qaddafi indignantly denied the report; the big spender, he said, was his brother, Muatassim, Libya’s national security adviser, according to an American diplomatic cable from the capital, Tripoli.
It was Muatassim, too, the cable said, who had demanded $1.2 billion in 2008 from the chairman of Libya’s national oil corporation, reportedly to establish his own militia. That would let him keep up with yet another brother, Khamis, commander of a special-forces group that “effectively serves as a regime protection unit”.
As the Qaddafi clan conducts a bloody struggle to hold onto power in Libya, cables obtained by WikiLeaks offer a vivid account of the lavish spending, rampant nepotism, and bitter rivalries that have defined what a 2006 cable called “Qadhafi Incorporated”, using the State Department’s preference from the multiple spellings for Libya’s troubled first family.
The glimpses of the clan’s antics in recent years that have reached Libyans despite Colonel Qaddafi’s tight control of the media have added to the public anger now boiling over. And the tensions between siblings could emerge as a factor in the chaos in the oil-rich African country.
Though the Qaddafi children are described as jockeying for position as their father ages— three sons fought to profit from a new Coca-Cola franchise— they have been well taken care of, cables say. “All of the Qaddafi children and favorites are supposed to have income streams from the National Oil Company and oil service subsidiaries,” one cable from 2006 says.
A year ago, a cable reported that proliferating scandals had sent the clan into a “tailspin” and “provided local observers with enough dirt for a Libyan soap opera”. Muatassim had repeated his St. Barts New Year’s fest, this time hiring the pop singers Beyoncé and Usher. An unnamed “local political observer” in Tripoli told American diplomats that Muatassim’s “carousing and extravagance angered some locals, who viewed his activities as impious and embarrassing to the nation”.
Another brother, Hannibal, meanwhile, had fled London after being accused of physically abusing his wife, Aline, and after the intervention of a Qaddafi daughter, Ayesha, who traveled to London despite being “many months pregnant”, the cable reported. Ayesha, along with Colonel Qaddafi’s second wife, Safiya, the mother of six of his eight children, “advised Aline to report to the police that she had been hurt in an ‘accident’, and not to mention anything about abuse,” the cable said.
Amid his siblings’ shenanigans, Seif, the president’s second-eldest son, had been “opportunely disengaged from local affairs”, spending the holidays hunting in New Zealand. His philanthropy, the Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, had sent hundreds of tons of aid to earthquake-ravaged Haiti, and he was seen as a reasonable prospect to succeed his father.
The same 2010 cable said young Libyan contacts had reported that Seif al-Islam is the ‘hope’ of ‘Libya al-Ghad’ (Libya of tomorrow), with men in their twenties saying that they aspire to be like Seif, and think he is the right person to run the country. They describe him as educated, cultured, and someone who wants a better future for Libya, by contrast with his brothers, the cable said.
That was then. Today the young protesters on the streets are demanding the ouster of the entire family, and it was Seif el-Qaddafi who declared on television that Libya faced civil war and “rivers of blood” if the people did not rally around his father.
As for the 68-year-old Colonel Qaddafi, the cables provide an arresting portrait, describing him as a hypochondriac who fears flying over water and often fasts on Mondays and Thursdays. The cables said he was an avid fan of horse racing and flamenco dancing who once added King of Culture to the long list of titles he had awarded himself. The memos also said he was accompanied everywhere by a “voluptuous blonde”, the senior member of his posse of Ukrainian nurses.
After Colonel Qaddafi abandoned his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, many American officials praised his cooperation. Visiting with a congressional delegation in 2009, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut told the leader and his party-loving national security adviser, Muatassim, that Libya was “an important ally in the war on terrorism, noting that common enemies sometimes make better friends.”
Before Condoleezza Rice visited Libya in 2008, the first secretary of state to do so since 1953, the embassy in Tripoli sought to accentuate the positive. True, Colonel Qaddafi was “notoriously mercurial” and “avoids making eye contact”, the cable warned Ms. Rice, and “there may be long, uncomfortable periods of silence”. But he was “a voracious consumer of news”, the cable added, who had such distinctive ideas as resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a single new state called “Isratine”. He was “a self-styled intellectual and philosopher,” the cable told Ms. Rice, “and has been eagerly anticipating for several years the opportunity to share with you his views on global affairs.”

Rico says the best "long, uncomfortable period of silence" will be when el-Qaddafi croaks...