Obama’s missile defense chat with Russia’s Medvedev stirs critics
SEOUL — President Obama has said he plans to continue negotiations with Russia this year involving a U.S. missile defense system to protect Europe and is not trying to “hide the ball” in dealing with the matter.
Obama said Tuesday that he wants to spend time this year working through technical issues with the Russians.
In a private conversation made public by a live microphone, President Obama on Monday appeared to be putting off diplomatic talks with Russian leaders about the controversial missile defense system until after the November election, prompting quick attacks from the president’s Republican rivals.
Obama was seen on video in a casual chat with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at a nuclear security summit in Seoul. On the tape, Obama leans toward Medvedev and can be heard giving him a message for the once and future Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved,” Obama said. “But it’s important for him to give me space.
“This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”
“I understand,” Medvedev responded. “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”
The exchange, its air of secrecy enhanced by the muffled audio, raised alarm among Obama’s critics about his long-term commitment to the missile defense system. The U.S. has promoted it as a shield to protect Europe from missile attacks by Iran. The Russians fear it’s aimed at them, and opposition to the missile shield was a major theme of Putin’s recent presidential campaign.
Putin, who previously served two four-year terms as president, won a new six-year term March 4 in an election that critics charge was flawed. He will succeed Medvedev, who replaced him in 2008 when term limits prevented Putin from seeking a third successive term.
Mitt Romney, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, accused Obama of “pulling his punches with the American people” and obscuring his plans for the missile defense system.
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said “we look forward” to hearing what the president meant by “more flexibility” when he returns from South Korea.
John Bolton, ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration, called Obama’s comments a “fire bell in the night,” which signaled not only that Obama would scale back the missile defense program, but also that he might be planning to give ground on a range of national security priorities.
“There’s huge cause for concern here,” Bolton said.
Obama is too much of “a politician to entirely show his hand in the first term, but it would be open season” if he is reelected, Bolton said.
By afternoon, the Republican National Committee had created a video ad with the subtitle, “What Obama tells world leaders when he thinks you aren’t listening.”
White House aides said the president was still “deeply invested” in the missile defense system.
Deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes said after the recording became public that the two leaders had been talking about Russia’s objections to the missile defense system and agreed to talk later because of political concerns on both sides. The two sides have been trying in vain for years to reach a breakthrough on missile defense, and no one was expecting a dramatic change at this week’s nuclear summit.
What Obama meant by “flexibility” was unclear. Some analysts speculate the U.S. might try to win over the Russians by showing them classified data to prove that the system could take down Iranian launches but not Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles. Few experts think that would convince the Russians.
Public broadcast of the private exchange provided a rare glimpse at the candor world leaders sometimes exhibit at such high-level meetings. Last year, journalists overheard Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy talking about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sarkozy said he “can’t stand” Netanyahu.
kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com
paul.richter@latimes.com
Hennessey reported from Seoul and Richter from Washington. Times staff writers Christi Parsons and Lisa Mascaro in Washington and Maeve Reston in San Diego contributed to this report.
Ex-school police officer to pay $309,000 in shooting hoax
Jeffrey Stenroos, the former Los Angeles school police officer who staged his own shooting last year in a bizarre hoax that caused three schools to be locked down and forced the closure of streets across the western San Fernando Valley, will pay the city a lump sum of $309,000 in restitution, authorities said Monday.
In exchange for the restitution, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Richard Kirschner agreed to let Stenroos post bail from Los Angeles County jail pending the outcome of an appeal.
The lion’s share of the payment was to compensate the city of Los Angeles for deploying more than 500 officers, plus traffic management workers. The restitution also will be discussed at a court hearing next month.
“It’s highly unusual to receive such a large amount in a lump sum, but we welcome receiving the money,” said William Carter, chief deputy to City Atty. Carmen Trutanich. He said the money, raised by Stenroos’ friends and family, is expected to be received by the city Wednesday.
Stenroos, 31, was convicted in September of planting false evidence, insurance fraud and other crimes. The sentence came after Stenroos underwent a 90-day psychological evaluation to assess whether he should go to prison or receive probation.
In December, Stenroos was sentenced to five years in county jail, but Kirschner said he would have to serve only two years if he met the terms of his probation, which included completing 400 hours of community service.
The Jan. 19, 2011, hoax triggered a massive and costly hunt for a fictitious assailant, and it brought a swath of the Valley to a standstill for hours.
Stenroos, a seven-year veteran of the school police, was found by a passerby in apparent pain on the sidewalk near El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills. Stenroos told authorities that he had been following up on a report of a car burglar in the area when a man with a ponytail and bomber-style jacket shot him in the chest and fled. Stenroos’ bulletproof vest had apparently saved him from serious injury or death.
Believing that there was a gunman in the area, more than 550 police officers combed the quiet neighborhoods near the school, conducting door-to-door searches and keeping an eight-square-mile area locked down for 10 hours.
Police were suspicious of Stenroos’ account almost from the outset. A spent shell casing found at the scene and bruising on Stenroos’ chest seemed to support his story. But the officer gave investigators conflicting accounts of how the shooting had unfolded.
Authorities said Stenroos told them that only one shot had been fired, then changed his story to say that there had been several. In the days after the shooting, he dodged investigators who wanted to question him further.
During the trial, an LAPD detective testified that Stenroos admitted faking the attack, confessing that he had accidentally shot himself while trying to clean his weapon — an explanation that remains doubtful. Prosecutors and police officials have alleged that Stenroos may have shot himself intentionally to gain attention.
Stenroos’ attorney, Tim Murphy, said at the trial that the officer had been sitting in his office at the school when he accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun. After realizing he was not seriously injured, Stenroos went about his patrol duties, was overcome by delayed pain from the impact of the bullet and fell to the sidewalk.
andrew.blankstein@latimes.com
Ever in Need of Money, Private Schools Intensify Fund-Raising Efforts
Instead, the head of school explained that he was laying the groundwork for a new capital campaign, and that he had already received commitments from various families — some up to $1 million. Would Ms. Combe and her husband consider a gift of “even $25,000 to $50,000?”
Relentless fund-raising, be it for the annual fund, the spring benefit or the latest capital campaign, is as much a feature of private schools as small classes and diverse offerings. But with schools hitting the upper limits of what they can charge for tuition, consultants, parents and school heads say the race for donations has become notably more intense and aggressive.
Schools are mining online data for details about parents’ homes, luxury cars, private planes, stock holdings and donations to other charities. So-called development offices, once the domain of part-time administrators and school volunteers, have been elevated along with the titles of those running them, who are now known as chief advancement officers, directors of philanthropy and heads of strategic initiatives. Heads of school report spending much of their time in search of money, according to surveys.
The biggest change is the sophistication of the data available, and how schools can use it. Before a campaign begins, consultants interview 40 to 50 of the school’s top prospects to determine their level of interest in a campaign and how much they might give (a “feasibility study”). The consultants also try to measure a school’s philanthropic capacity (a “capacity analysis”).
“It’s not just that we know how to ask for money, but we can figure out more precisely what you can reasonably expect to raise,” said Daniel Boyer, director of client relations and a senior consultant at Marts Lundy, a consulting firm with a large private school practice.
Donors are then wooed with personal touches based on schools’ research. Say, for example, a parent sits on the board of the Museum of Modern Art. “Let the person tell you about their interest in the arts and what they like to support and whether they would like to support a high school student who has an interest in art,” Mr. Boyer said.
These efforts are paying off. In New York City, the median amount of annual giving raised per school increased 268 percent over the last decade, to $1.7 million from $462,341, according to data provided by the National Association of Independent Schools. The national median, by comparison, has increased 63 percent, to $895,614 from $548,651 (the New York sample included 20 schools; the national one, 246).
School heads say that raising money is an increasingly important part of the job. Tuition, more than $40,000 at some schools, typically covers only 80 percent of the cost of educating a student. So schools need additional fund-raising to cover financial aid, maintain and expand facilities and broaden program offerings.
“It’s a competitive business in New York City, and if you are missing one of the stool legs you won’t thrive very long,” said Steve Nelson, head of the Calhoun School on the Upper West Side. “If you don’t have the additional revenue that comes from fund-raising, you’re out of luck.”
Driving the effort is an increasing stratification of wealth, even in the private school population. In recent years, fund-raisers and school heads say, more revenue is coming from a smaller group of parents and what used to be the “80/20 rule” — 20 percent of the parents give 80 percent of the money — has become the 90/10 rule, or even the 95/5 rule.
If the Occupy Wall Street movement focused attention on the perceived excesses of the 1 percent, private schools are leaning on the wealth of their own 5 percent to try to win a bigger piece of their philanthropic pie (the back-of-the-envelope assumption is that families with more than $5 million in assets often give away up to $500,000 annually).
Special Report: Net Worth: Social Media Wallflowers
A survey on the social media activities of 50 leading private banks found that most had developed “amateurish” social media strategies, were “hibernating” on Facebook and displaying “tokenism attitudes” to Twitter and YouTube, according to assetinum.com, an independent financial information portal for investors.
One in three banks surveyed did not have an active Facebook profile, and of those that did, only half reacted to test “friend” requests by assetinum.com — a clear sign of low interaction with users, said Benjamin Manz, an assetinum.com managing partner.
And even though 42 out of 50 banks surveyed had Twitter accounts, only 26 banks reacted actively to user Twitter posts and only 13 posted about wealth management topics. Barely half of the banks had up-to-date YouTube channels, with only 15 banks using it to deal with topics related to wealth management.
The Web sites of the banks were also found to be behind the curve on social media: Almost half integrate social media “insufficiently in their Internet presence,” Mr. Manz said, with only 19 banks having blogs and only six of those actively interacting with users.
The results are surprising, when placed against the preferences of the banks’ clients. According to recent research conducted by Scorpio Partnership, a consulting firm, and sponsored by Standard Chartered Private Bank and SEI Global Wealth Service, more than 40 percent of high-net-worth individuals younger than 50 viewed social media as an important channel for communicating with their banks.
“The high-net-worth individuals who bank with us are no different from any other customers in that they are increasingly active on social media,” said Marged Lloyd, the head of online communications in London at Standard Chartered. “What’s more, high-net-worth-individuals are often characterized by their international mobility. Social media, by its very nature, is largely unrestricted by national boundaries.”
“It is clear,” she added, “that social media can be an extremely effective communications tool for us.”
While Standard Chartered Private Bank has not reached out directly to its high-net-worth clients via social media, a spokeswoman for the bank, Ally Lim, senior manager of corporate affairs, said the private bank was enjoying the spillover effect of the group’s overall social media efforts.
Private banks have several concerns about pursuing social media presence more aggressively, said Mr. Manz of assetinum.com. Those concerns include regulatory issues, “reputational risks” and the belief that social media require “too much time and effort for a ‘playground’ allegedly not to be taken seriously,” he said.
He added that he believed it posed considerably less risk to a bank’s reputation to be present on social media channels than to be absent from them.
“Reputational risks can best be avoided if banks are prominently present on social media channels and can react to accusations,” he noted.
Ms. Lloyd of Standard Chartered agreed. “It’s inevitable that people will talk about us online, so we have made a conscious decision to participate in these conversations in a meaningful way,” she said.
The assetinum.com survey listed some positive examples of banks’ use of social media. The Facebook pages of Royal Bank of Canada and ABN Amro reacted quickly to queries and give clients opportunities to participate in surveys and events, Mr. Manz said.
“Also, they are asking their users beforehand how to implement certain new services — as in the case of a new mobile app for ABN Amro, for example,” Mr. Manz said. “This makes users feel that they are taken seriously.”
Discussing financial topics is not the only reason for private banks to have a social media presence, Mr. Manz said, as the platforms can be used to draw attention to other activities, like sports sponsorships and patronage of the arts.
Standard Chartered uses social media to exchange information about the bank’s sponsorship of the Liverpool soccer club in the Premier League. The bank also maintains a “Food Explorer” Facebook page for India, with restaurant information and deals.
“One thing that has become clear since we began to use social media: Customers now take it for granted that they can communicate with their bank through social channels,” Ms. Lloyd said. “This is how it should be and we will continue to speak to customers through the channels that they are active on.”
Symantec Dissolves Alliance with Huawei of China
According to two people briefed on the deal, Symantec’s decision was a pre-emptive political maneuver timed to coincide with the United States government’s efforts to share more classified cyberthreat information with the private sector. People with knowledge of the venture, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak, said Huawei had already laid off several workers in Huawei Symantec’s Silicon Valley offices this month and planned to move its entire operation out of the United States, largely because of increased American government oversight.
In the next two weeks, Symantec, the Mountain View, Calif., computer security software firm, is expected to sell its 49 percent stake in the venture to Huawei for $530 million. The companies first announced the sale last November. In a news release, Enrique Salem, Symantec’s chief executive, said the project had “achieved the objectives we set four years ago” and would “exit the joint venture with a good return on our investment.”
As online espionage proliferates, the United States government has grappled with how best to share its classified cyberthreat intelligence with the private sector. In January, the Pentagon transferred an information-sharing pilot program, called the Joint Cybersecurity Services Pilot, to the Department of Homeland Security. The program was originally intended to share classified National Security Agency intelligence with military contractors. Homeland Security is expected to extend the program beyond those companies to antivirus companies, like Symantec, and network providers.
Symantec worried that its ties to Huawei would be a disadvantage when it came to being the recipient of classified threat information, according to the two people briefed on the matter. Cris Paden, a Symantec spokesman, declined to comment.
William Plummer, a Huawei spokesman, said that from Huawei’s perspective “both companies had a positive experience with the joint venture.” He added, “We are going to streamline the organization market by market including in the U.S.”
National security concerns have long dogged Huawei. Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s founder and chief executive, is a former officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army, and American government officials and regulators have repeatedly raised concerns about Huawei’s close ties to the Chinese government.
In 2008, Huawei was forced to abandon a bid for 3Com, which makes antihacking computer software for the United States military, among other products, after an American government panel raised questions about the national security risks. In 2010, Huawei lost a bid to supply mobile telecom equipment to Sprint Nextel after lawmakers expressed similar concerns.
Raúl Castro Greets Pope Benedict XVI in Cuba
“I am convinced that Cuba, at this moment of particular importance in its history, is already looking to the future, and thus is striving to renew and broaden its horizons,” the pope said.
But although Cuba’s president, Raúl Castro, greeted Benedict at the airport here, where he said Cuba’s Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, that broadening may take some time.
Many worshipers at a festive Mass here on Monday had been pressured to attend by their employer or a local chapter of the Communist Party, and dissidents had been pressured not to attend, according to a Cuban priest who is among the clerics most critical of the government. A man who started shouting criticism of the government was quickly removed by security.
Benedict’s visit comes 14 years after the historic first papal trip to Cuba by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, a visit that yielded an era of greater religious expression. In his speech at the airport, Benedict called John Paul’s visit “a gentle breath of fresh air which gave new strength to the church in Cuba.”
It is a delicate time for the Roman Catholic Church in Cuba, where it has staked out a mediating role between the Cuban people and the Castro government. In a key moment in 2010, the archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, helped negotiate the release of dozens of political prisoners. But others have criticized the church for being too close to the government.
At the airport, the pope told Cubans to “strive to build a renewed and open society, a better society, one more worthy of humanity, and which better reflects the goodness of God.” He added, “It is touching to see how God not only respects human freedom: he almost seems to require it.”
Human rights groups have been pushing for the pope to meet with Cuban dissidents. The Vatican has said no such meetings are scheduled. But at the airport, Benedict said that he carried in his heart “the just aspirations and legitimate desires of all Cubans,” singling out “prisoners and their families.”
In greeting Benedict, Mr. Castro saved his most pointed remarks for the United States. “The strongest power history has ever known has tried to strip us, fruitlessly, of the right to freedom, peace and justice,” he said, adding that the five-decade American embargo of Cuba was intended “to cause hunger and desperation and to overthrow the government.” The Vatican has long opposed the trade embargo, saying it harms the people more than the government.
Asked about Cuba on his plane on the way to Mexico, where he spent three days before traveling here, Benedict said, “Today it is evident that Marxist ideology, in the way it was conceived, no longer corresponds to reality.”
Cuban officials brushed off the pope’s words — while Cubans on the streets knew nothing about them because they were not reported in the Cuban news media.
As an estimated 200,000 people gathered for Mass in Santiago de Cuba, including several groups of pilgrims from Miami, bands playing music and stands selling pizza and soft drinks evoked the atmosphere of a pop concert — one whose audience has been well orchestrated by the authorities. Placards indicated that groups had been shepherded by their place of work, their school or their local chapter of the Communist Party, much in the same way the government mobilizes crowds for the huge May Day parade each year.
Before the Mass, the Rev. José Conrado of Santiago de Cuba, a critic of the government, said the opposition had reported government pressure on people to attend the Mass, and on opposition members to stay away.
“The worst thing that the government could do was to oblige people who don’t want to come to Mass to do so and prevent people who do want to come from coming,” Father Conrado said.
Randal C. Archibold contributed reporting from Havana.
Tibetan Exile Sets Self Afire in Protest Act
On Monday, however, a 26-year-old Tibetan exile in New Delhi offered the world a visceral view of a self-immolation, setting himself on fire at a demonstration to protest the impending visit to India by China’s president, Hu Jintao. Photographs of the man, a literal human torch in flames who sprinted for 50 yards with contorted screams before he collapsed by a tree, raced around the world by way of India’s unfettered press and the Internet.
“From head to toe, he was full of fire,” said a witness, Tenzin Dorjee, the national director of Students for a Free Tibet. “He was shouting. I was in shock. There were women crying.”
The exile, identified by the police as Jampa Yeshi, who left Tibet in 2006 and has lived in India for at least two years, apparently had soaked himself in flammable liquid unbeknownst to fellow activists at the demonstration. They scrambled to extinguish the flames by smothering them with Tibetan flags and sloshing Mr. Yeshi with water. Vast sections of his skin were blackened, and he was in critical condition late Monday at a local hospital, Tibetan exile news sites reported.
At least 600 Tibetan protesters from India’s Tibetan community-in-exile had been demonstrating, some carrying signs that read “Tibet Is Burning” and “Tibet Is Not Part of China,” when the self-immolation occurred.
News and images of the self-immolation were conspicuously absent from the Web site of China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, which has characterized such acts as terrorist incitement fomented by the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader-in-exile, who lives in India and is considered a subversive advocate of Tibetan independence.
The Dalai Lama and his subordinates have expressed shock and sadness at the immolations but have called them a reflection of desperation by Tibetans living under a system that represses their religion and culture.
The self-immolation on Monday was the second in the last few months in India, home to about 120,000 Tibetans.
The demonstrators had been making their way back from Ramlila Maidan, a frequently used rallying point, where hundreds of Tibetans had been protesting Mr. Hu’s scheduled visit this week for an economic meeting of leaders from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They regrouped at Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century celestial observatory that is often used as a political stage.
Shortly before 12:30 p.m. local time, as a minister in the lower house of India’s Parliament was speaking about the self-immolations in Tibet, Mr. Yeshi ran out from behind a gate in flames.
Afterward, the marchers tried to proceed to the Chinese Embassy but were stopped by the police. “What do we want? We want freedom!” the protesters chanted as they wound their way through the streets waving Tibetan flags. “Who’s the killer? Hu Jintao.”
The police prevented the marchers from getting close to the Indian Parliament, which was still in session. Demonstrators settled on the pavement at the mouth of Parliament Street as Tenzin Norsang, the joint secretary of the Tibetan Youth Congress, who was leading the protest, negotiated with the police.
Some held placards with the words “Hu Jintao is unwelcome” and a picture of a bloody hand smacking the Chinese president’s face. As the afternoon heat built, they blocked the sun with the placards.
Leaders of Tibetan groups said Mr. Yeshi, whose first name has also been rendered as Jamphel and Jamyang, had acted alone. “It’s not planned by any organization,” Mr. Norsang said. But he added, “We appreciate his courage.”
Sruthi Gottipati reported from New Delhi, and Rick Gladstone from New York.
Bo Xilai’s China Crime Crackdown Adds to Scandal
Since Mr. Bo was fired last month after a scandal involving his police chief, a starkly different picture of his sweeping campaign to break up organized gangs — called da hei, or smash black — is coming into focus. Once hailed as a pioneering effort to wipe out corruption, critics now say it depicts a security apparatus run amok: framing victims, extracting confessions through torture, extorting business empires and visiting retribution on the political rivals of Mr. Bo and his friends while protecting those with better connections.
“Even by Chinese Communist Party standards, this is unacceptable,” said Cheng Li, an analyst of the Chinese leadership at the Brookings Institution. “This is red terror.”
Intent on maintaining a facade of unity during a leadership transition, many of China’s rulers until recently heaped praise on Mr. Bo’s initiatives. Of the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, China’s ruling body, six have made the pilgrimage to Chongqing since 2009.
President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao pointedly did not go. And at a news conference this month, Mr. Wen issued what many called a veiled condemnation of Mr. Bo’s policies, warning that “the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution” have yet to be “fully eliminated.”
Fighting corruption was part of a muscular effort by Mr. Bo to thrust himself into the national limelight, and onto the Politburo’s Standing Committee, with splashy initiatives and political grandstanding that were alien to the rest of China’s mostly monochrome leaders. He aggressively promoted a retro-Maoist culture, summoning citizens to sing old nationalist songs and don red garments, strengthening his hand among influential left-wing nationalists.
Da hei, begun in June 2009, was Mr. Bo’s crown jewel, a strike against the corruption and law-flouting in China’s governing and business classes that ordinary Chinese deeply resent. It helped win Mr. Bo a national reputation as “a guy who gets things done,” Mr. Li of the Brookings Institution said.
In 10 months, 4,781 people were arrested, including business executives, police officers, judges, legislators and others accused of running or protecting criminal syndicates. In one celebrated case, Chongqing’s top justice official, found to have buried $3 million beneath a fish pond, was shot in July 2010, one of 13 da hei defendants who were executed.
Mr. Bo dismissed criticism of his hardball tactics. “There are still some small waves out there,” he said in August 2010. “The crackdown involves so many dark forces, has hurt so many people and affected the interests of so many groups. How can there be no conflicts?”
The campaign’s overlord was Wang Lijun, Mr. Bo’s police chief and, now, the force behind Mr. Bo’s downfall. Mr. Wang caused an international incident last month when he sought refuge in a United States consulate, apparently fearing for his safety. Details that have surfaced in the past week indicate that, in part, he feared retaliation after telling Mr. Bo that his family was linked to an inquiry into the death of a British citizen, Neil Heywood, who was an acquaintance of Mr. Bo’s family.
Some caught up in the da hei crackdown say they find it ironic that the party is just now investigating whether Mr. Bo flouted the law. They argue that his da hei crusade ignored legal restraints with impunity for two years.
Examples are not hard to find. Gong Gangmo, 48, a motorbike mogul, and Fan Qihang, 40, a construction entrepreneur, were charged with a string of felonies that included ordering the murder of a man after a nightclub fight. Both claimed innocence.
Bomb plot foiled: Cache of suicide vests found in Afghan defense ministry
KABUL, Afghanistan — A number of Afghan national army soldiers have been arrested inside the country’s defense ministry over a foiled suicide bomb plot, officials told NBC News.
The soldiers were held on Monday afternoon along with 11 suicide bomb vests in a guard box in the building in the capital, Kabul, army officials said on Tuesday.
Afghan news web site Khaama also reported the arrests, saying the incident raises fresh concerns over infiltration of militants among the country’s Afghan security forces.
There were no further details immediately available.
Tim Marshall, foreign editor of UK channel Sky News, said that the incident was serious, and showed that the Taliban are determined to chase NATO out of the country.
“The fact that these arrests took place within the walls of the defense ministry illustrates the level of insurgent penetration within the Afghanistan establishment and just tells you — gives a signal of — what is likely to happen when NATO leaves,” he said.
Afghan massacre suspect’s wife: ‘He did not do this’
The arrests came on the same day that at least three NATO service members were shot dead by Afghan security forces in two separate attacks.
A gunman wearing an Afghan army uniform killed two NATO troops in southern Afghanistan, while another was shot in eastern Afghanistan by an alleged member of the Afghan Local Police.
The attacks brought to 16 the number of NATO-led forces killed so far this year in what appeared to be attacks by members of Afghan forces.
Meanwhile, support for the war in Afghanistan has dropped sharply among both Republicans and Democrats, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll published Tuesday.
The survey found that more than two-thirds of those polled — 69 percent — thought that the United States should not be at war in Afghanistan, the New York Times reported.
PhotoBlog: 12 die in Quran-burning protests in Afghanistan
Just four months ago, 53 percent said that Americans should no longer be fighting in the conflict, it said.
It added that the increased disillusionment was even more pronounced when respondents were asked their impressions of how the war was going. The poll found that 68 percent thought the fighting was going “somewhat badly” or “very badly,” compared with 42 percent who had those impressions in November.
The poll was conducted by telephone from March 21 to 25 with 986 adults nationwide.
Akbar Shinwari, NBC News in Kabul, and msnbc.com staff also contributed to this report.
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Thousands march in protest to Florida hearing on Trayvon Martin slaying
As thousands of people gathered in Sanford, Fla., demanding justice for Trayvon Martin, his parents maintained he was trying to get away from George Zimmerman, despite claims that Zimmerman was acting in self-defense. NBC’s Ron Allen reports.
Updated at 9:47 p.m. ET: Thousands of people streamed through the streets of Sanford, Fla., on Monday to demand that authorities prosecute the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin one month ago.
The protesters were on their way to a special meeting of the City Commission at the town’s Civic Center that began at 5 p.m. ET, where members were to hold a hearing on the killing of Martin, who was unarmed, by George Zimmerman, 28, a self-described neighborhood watch volunteer.
The shooting of Martin, who was black, by Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, has led to similar rallies across the country. Martin’s family has made multiple media appearances pushing for Zimmerman’s arrest.
Tracy Martin, the young man’s father, addressed the hearing Monday, accusing police of trying to “sweep another dead black male under the rug.”
To loud cheers and applause, Tracy Martin said Zimmerman “needs to be arrested. He needs to be put on trial. He needs to be given a sentence by a jury of his peers.”
Sybrina Fulton, Martin’s mother, said her heart was broken.
“I’m not asking for anything,” she said. “I know I cannot bring my baby back. But I’m sure going to make changes so that does not happen to another family.”
The speakers included Rev. Al Sharpton, host of MSNBC-TV’s “PoliticsNation,” Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rep. Corrine Brown, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.
Rep. Jackson Lee gave a legal case for the city or for the state of Florida to arrest George Zimmerman. Rev. Sharpton fierily demanded an arrest, while Rev. Jackson drew parallels between Martin’s death and that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teen who was beaten and murdered in Mississippi in 1955.
Ben Crump, the attorney for Martin’s parents asked, “Who made the decision for whatever reason to not do a background check on George Zimmerman who had just shot and killed Trayvon Benjamin Martin? But yet saw fit to do a background check on this dead child on the ground.
Crump continued: “Number two, who was the officer who made the determination not to do a drug and alcohol analysis on George Zimmerman who had just shot an unarmed teenager with a bag of Skittles but yet found it appropriate to order drug alcohol analysis of Sabryna and Tracy’s son?”
Tracy Martin said he was anguished at “the slander of my son,” referring to leaked details of Zimmerman’s account of the shooting to police, which suggested that Trayvon Martin initiated the incident, and news reports revealing that the younger Martin had been suspended from his high school for possessing an empty marijuana bag.
“We consider ourselves strong black parents and we take pride in our kids,” Tracy Martin said, pounding his fist in the air for emphasis. ”We’re not asking for an eye for an eye. We’re asking for justice, justice, justice!”
Although toxicology tests on Martin’s body are pending, a spokesman for his family confirmed to NBC News that Martin was suspended for 10 days from Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in Miami for possession of an empty marijuana baggie.
Trayvon Martin was suspended three times from school
Shooter’s account
Zimmerman’s account emerged for the first time Monday in a report by The Orlando Sentinel. Quoting unidentified “law enforcement authorities,” the Sentinel reported that Zimmerman told police that Trayvon Martin knocked him down with a single punch and slammed his head into the sidewalk several times before the shooting — an account that police said witnesses have corroborated.
EPA/Brian Blanco
Accompanied by their attorney, Ben Crump, right, Trayvon Martin’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, passionately addressed the Sanford, Fla., City Commission on Monday.
Zimmerman said he was walking back to his SUV when Martin approached him from behind, according to the Sentinel’s report, which Sanford police confirmed Monday afternoon.
The two exchanged words before Martin decked him with a punch to the nose and began beating him, Zimmerman told police. He said he then shot Martin in self-defense.
Witnesses said they heard someone cry out in distress, some of them telling NBC News and other news organizations that it was Martin. But police sources told the Sentinel their evidence indicated it was Zimmerman.
Dateline NBC interviews woman who saw aftermath
One witness told police he saw Martin pounding Zimmerman on the ground. This witness was certain it was Zimmerman who was crying for help, the Sentinel reported.
When police arrived less than two minutes later, Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose and had a swollen lip and bloody lacerations to the back of his head, the newspaper reported. Police said Zimmerman wasn’t badly injured and didn’t seek treatment until the next day.
ABC News reported separately that Zimmerman told police that Martin also tried to take his gun.
In a statement, Sanford police said the Sentinel’s report was “consistent with the information provided to the State Attorney’s office by the police department.” It did not address the ABC report.
Zimmerman’s attorney, Craig Sonner, has said he could invoke Florida’s “stand-your-ground” law, which provides significant leeway for people to use deadly force if they feel their lives are in danger.
Meanwhile, Angela Corey, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, told ABC News that means “the state must go forward and be able to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. … So it makes the case in general more difficult than a normal criminal case.”
The information about Martin’s three suspensions from high school also appeared to complicate the case.
Crump, the family lawyer, called the disclosures an attempt to assassinate Martin’s character.
“Very clearly, whatever Trayvon Martin was suspended for had absolutely no bearing on what happened on the night of February 26,” he said, adding that Martin “wasn’t suspended for anything violent or criminal.”
“If he and his friends experimented with marijuana, it’s still completely irrelevant,” Crump said.
As the City Commission hearing approached, there were these other developments:
- The Smoking Gun, a website that tracks criminal cases and document filings, reported Monday afternoon that Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, filed two applications last week for trademarks on her late son’s name.
Fulton is seeking marks for the phrases “I Am Trayvon” and “Justice for Trayvon,” according to filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In both instances, Fulton is seeking the trademarks for use on “digital materials,” namely, CDs and DVDs featuring Trayvon Martin,” and other products.
- Sanford City Manager Norton Bonaparte announced that Capt. Darren Scott would serve as interim police chief during the investigation, NBC station WESH of Orlando, Fla., reported. Police Chief Bill Lee stepped aside last week as criticism over the lack of an arrest mounted across the country.
Following is the full text of the statement Monday confirming The Orlando Sentinel’s report by the Sanford, Fla., Police Department:
The information in the article is consistent with the information provided to the State Attorney’s office by the police department.
“We do not condone these unauthorized leaks of information,” said City Manager, Norton Bonaparte, Jr. “Acting Chief Scott will be doing an internal investigation within the Sanford Police Department as this type of action compromises the integrity of the law enforcement agency which has pledged to uphold the law”.
Mr. Bonaparte stated that disciplinary action including possible termination will be taken against anyone found to have leaked the information.
Roxanne Garcia, Lauren Selsky,Tom Winter and Edgar Zuniga Jr. of NBC News contributed to this report by M. Alex Johnson of msnbc.com. Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.
More content from msnbc.com and NBC News:
- Court signals it will decide constitutionality of health care mandate
- Afghan massacre suspect’s wife: ‘He did not do this’
- Younger veterans want to work, but face roadblocks
- For female veterans, job opportunities limited
Follow US News on msnbc.com on Twitter and Facebook
Poll: 1 in 4 want Supreme Court to uphold health care law
(Credit:
CBS)
CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto.
As the Supreme Court begins to hear arguments about the 2010 health care overhaul, just one in four say the high court should keep President Obama’s signature legislative achievement intact, according to a new CBS News/ New York Times poll.
Thirty-eight percent say the entire law should be abolished, according the poll, conducted March 21-25. Another 29 percent would like the high court to strike down only the requirement that nearly all Americans obtain health insurance if they do not have it.
The court on Tuesday will hear arguments on whether the so-called individual mandate – which will require nearly all Americans to acquire insurance or pay a penalty — is unconstitutional. The case tackles not only a hotly-debated legal matter, but also the most controversial aspect of Mr. Obama’s health care law.
When asked directly about the mandate, which goes into effect in 2014, 51 percent of Americans said they disapprove of it, while 45 percent said they approve. Most Republicans and independents oppose the mandate, while Democrats support it.
Poll: Support for war in Afghanistan hits all-time low
Poll: 47% disapprove of Obama health care law
Read the complete poll (PDF)
When the Supreme Court issues a ruling this summer, it could choose to uphold the law, strike down just the individual mandate, strike the mandate along with certain other provisions or strike down the entire law.
Views on the law and what Americans would like to see the Supreme Court do about it break down along party lines. Most Republicans, 65 percent, disapprove of the law and would like to see all of it overturned. Democrats support the law, and 39 percent want the Supreme Court to keep it in place, but 35 percent want to see the health insurance mandate outlawed. Nearly half of independents disapprove of the health care law, and 36 percent would like the whole law overturned.
(Credit:
CBS)
Advantages
At the same time, large percentages of Americans – even majorities of Republicans — support specific elements of the health care law. For instance, a full 85 percent of Americans support the requirement for insurance companies to cover those with pre-existing conditions.
Most health policy experts say that the individual mandate in order for insurers to able to accommodate these customers. As the Obama administration has argued to the court, without an individual mandate, the provision barring insurers from discriminating against those with pre-existing conditions can “create a spiral of higher costs and reduced coverage because individuals can wait to enroll until they are sick.” Should the Supreme Court decide to strike down the individual mandate, the administration has asked the court to strike down the pre-existing conditions provision as well.
Other popular provisions include the reduction of the Medicare “donut hole” for prescription drug coverage (77 percent approve) and the provision allowing children up to 26 years old to stay on their parents’ health care plans (68 percent approve).
Will Supreme Court case boost the GOP, or Democrats?
Health care case seems likely to go on in court
Poll: 47% disapprove of Obama health care law
Most of those who disapprove of the health care law overall approve of these specific changes too, although in smaller numbers. For instance, among those who disapprove of the whole law, 76 percent approve of the requirement for insurance companies to cover those with pre-existing conditions.
Among those with children age 18 to 26 who have health insurance, 31 percent say they have already benefitted from the provision that allows them to add their children to their own coverage. Seventy percent of parents of children 18 to 26 approve of this change.
Two-thirds of seniors approve of the provision that offers assistance with the prescription drug donut hole, and 15 percent have already benefitted.
But even among those who have benefitted from at least one of these three provisions (36 percent), there are mixed views of the health care law overall. Forty-eight percent approve of it — including just 21 percent who strongly approve — and 35 percent disapprove. Another 7 percent don’t have an opinion.
Concerns
Americans’ concerns about the reforms are due in part to their concerns about government involvement in health care. Fifty-four percent of Americans think the reforms will lead to too much government involvement in the health care system. As many as 83 percent of Republicans think this is the case, as do 52 percent of independents. Views on this have changed little since the reforms were passed into law in March 2010.
There are concerns about the impact on the economy as well. Three in four think it is likely that businesses will have to cut jobs as a result of the health care law.
The personal impact of the law is also a concern; few Americans are convinced that it will benefit them personally. Only 19 percent think the law will mostly help them; most either think it will hurt them (31 percent) or not have much of an effect (43 percent).
Audio: Listen to day 1 of oral arguments
Supreme Court transcripts
CBSNews.com special coverage: Health care
Half of Republicans think it will hurt them, while most Democrats believe it will have no effect on them personally.
Americans’ concerns extend to the law’s effect on their own medical care. As was the case in March 2010, half of Americans expect the cost of their health care to eventually rise as a result of the law. Just 15 percent expect their costs to decrease, and 27 percent expect the health care law will have no impact on their health care costs.
One third expect the quality of the care they receive to also get worse. Just 17 percent expect that will improve as a result of the 2010 law.
Expectations are highly partisan – 76 percent of Republicans expect their costs to rise, and 59 percent expect the quality of their care to drop. Only 35 percent of Democrats expect a cost increase, and just 12 percent think the quality of their care will get worse. Among independents, 50 percent expect their costs to go up, and 34 percent expect the quality of their care will decline.
Most Americans are at least somewhat concerned that their access to tests and treatment will be limited, and that they may be required to change doctors.
Two years after the health care bill was signed into law, nearly half of Americans (48 percent) still say the effect it will have on themselves and their family is confusing to them. Another 47 percent now say they have a good understanding of the law – up just six points since it was passed.
While much of the focus may be on the issue of health care this week, the economy is the public’s top issue when it comes to the presidential election. Forty-eight percent of Americans pick the economy as the most important issue, more than twice as many as choose health care (22 percent).
This poll was conducted by telephone from March 21-25, 2012 among 986 adults nationwide. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups may be higher. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.
Smiths News Plc
Smiths News PLC
Notification of Interim Results
Smiths News PLC, the UK‘s leading wholesaler of newspapers and magazines and a leading UK book wholesaler, will be announcing its interim results for the six months ended 29 February 2012 on Tuesday 24 April 2012.
A meeting for analysts will be held at 9.30am at the offices of Buchanan, 107 Cheapside, London EC2V 6DN on Tuesday 24 April 2012, with an audio webcast of the results presentation available thereafter.
To access the facility please visit the following link:
http://mediaserve.buchanan.uk.com/2012/smithsnews240412/registration.asp
Enquiries:
About Smiths News PLC:
Smiths News PLC comprises Smiths News (LSE: NWS.L – news) , the UK’s leading wholesaler of newspapers and magazines, and Bertrams, a leading UK book wholesaler.
Smiths News distributes newspapers and magazines on behalf of all the major national publishers as well as a large number of regional publishers. The business serves approximately 30,000 customers across England and Wales, supplying large general retailers as well as smaller independent newsagents. Smiths News has an approximate 55% share of the newspaper and magazine wholesaling market in the UK. In addition to its distribution activities, Smiths News collects and processes returns, supplies sales information to publishers and provides a range of services for its retail customers.
Bertrams, which was acquired on 20 March 2009, supplies books to a mix of independent booksellers, on-line and multiple retailers, and libraries. Bertrams has an approximate 45% share of the wholesale book market.
In August 2011 the company acquired Dawson Holdings plc and is currently integrating its businesses into the Smiths News Group. The principal asset, Dawson Books is a leading supplier of academic books in the UK and internationally.
News Corp subsidiary 'hired hacker to attack rival'
A subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has been accused of enlisting the help of a computer hacker to bring down a rival company.
The BBC’s Panorama program says News Corp‘s security arm NDS recruited a hacker to acquire the smart card codes of ITV‘s ONdigital, the biggest UK pay TV rival to News Corp’s Sky TV.
The BBC says the codes were then posted online, allowing pirates to access ITV’s digital services for free.
ONdigital went bust in 2002, just four years after it had been set up as a rival to Sky.
The allegations centre on pay TV smart cards – cards with a microchip which pay TV subscribers insert into a set top box to unscramble pay TV signals.
When a smart card is pirated, it can cost the pay TV operator hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Panorama alleged that two former senior Scotland Yard officers, Ray Adams and Len Withall, who worked for NDS, recruited a hacker.
Hacker Lee Gibling told the program he was encouraged to expand his piracy website, The House of Ill Compute (THOIC).
“It was NDS, it was their baby and it started to become more their baby as they fashioned it to their own design,” he said.
With that NDS controlled the biggest pirate website in the world, and Panorama alleges it used it to recruit one of the best hackers in the world.
A young German, Oliver Kömmerling, had hacked into Sky’s latest smart card.
He said Mr Adams from NDS paid him a visit.
“Adams made me a proposition and he looked at me and said could you imagine working for us? This was really after half an hour,” he said.
“And I said to him, in principle ‘yes’, but what do you really want, I mean, what does that mean, what I have to do?”
The program goes onto to detail how Mr Kömmerling unlocked the secrets of ITV’s smart cards.
‘Flogged until it broke’
But the codes were then allegedly published on THOIC’s website, unlocking programming for ONdigital.
“We sent them out update codes, we wanted people to be able to update these cards themselves, we didn’t want them buying a single card and then finding they couldn’t get the channels,” Mr Gibling said.
“We wanted them to stay and keep with ONdigital, flogging it until it broke.”
The company’s former chief technical officer, Simon Dore, says this spelt ONdigital’s downfall in 2002.
“The real killer, the hole beneath the waterline was the piracy – we couldn’t recover from that,” he said.
The downfall cost the operator’s shareholders more than a billion pounds and 1,500 employees lost their jobs.
Panorama secretly filmed Mr Adams denying any knowledge of these codes.
“I never ever had the ONdigital codes, I never touched an ONdigital card, ever once.
I’ve never seen an ONdigital pirate card.
I’ve never had any codes,” he said.
But Panorama says internal emails suggest otherwise.
NDS denies that it used the THOIC website to sabotage the commercial interests of ONdigital, or any other rival.
It says it recruited hackers to track and catch hackers and pirates.
But similar allegations of corporate espionage are being levelled against News Corporation in other parts of the world, including Italy.
In a statement, News Corporation said it was proud to have supported NDS in its “aggressive fight against piracy and copyright infringement”.Â
“The BBC did not pose questions to News Corporation ahead of broadcast and was unwilling to engage in any conversation on this issue, which is disappointing,” the statement added.
News Corp accused of hacking rival company
A subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has been accused of enlisting the help of a computer hacker to bring down a rival company.
The BBC’s Panorama program says News Corp’s security arm NDS recruited a hacker to acquire the smart card codes of ITV’s ONdigital, the biggest UK pay TV rival to News Corp’s Sky TV.
The BBC says the codes were then posted online, allowing pirates to access ITV’s digital services for free.
ONdigital went bust in 2002, just four years after it had been set up as a rival to Sky.
The allegations centre on pay TV smart cards – cards with a microchip which pay TV subscribers insert into a set top box to unscramble pay TV signals.
When a smart card is pirated, it can cost the pay TV operator hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Panorama alleged that two former senior Scotland Yard officers, Ray Adams and Len Withall, who worked for NDS, recruited a hacker.
Hacker Lee Gibling told the program he was encouraged to expand his piracy website, The House of Ill Compute (THOIC).
“It was NDS, it was their baby and it started to become more their baby as they fashioned it to their own design,” he said.
With that NDS controlled the biggest pirate website in the world, and Panorama alleges it used it to recruit one of the best hackers in the world.
A young German, Oliver Kömmerling, had hacked into Sky’s latest smart card.
He said Mr Adams from NDS paid him a visit.
“Adams made me a proposition and he looked at me and said could you imagine working for us? This was really after half an hour,” he said.
“And I said to him, in principle ‘yes’, but what do you really want, I mean, what does that mean, what I have to do?”
The program goes onto to detail how Mr Kömmerling unlocked the secrets of ITV’s smart cards.
‘Flogged until it broke’
But the codes were then allegedly published on THOIC’s website, unlocking programming for ONdigital.
“We sent them out update codes, we wanted people to be able to update these cards themselves, we didn’t want them buying a single card and then finding they couldn’t get the channels,” Mr Gibling said.
“We wanted them to stay and keep with ONdigital, flogging it until it broke.”
The company’s former chief technical officer, Simon Dore, says this spelt ONdigital’s downfall in 2002.
“The real killer, the hole beneath the waterline was the piracy – we couldn’t recover from that,” he said.
The downfall cost the operator’s shareholders more than a billion pounds and 1,500 employees lost their jobs.
Panorama secretly filmed Mr Adams denying any knowledge of these codes.
“I never ever had the ONdigital codes, I never touched an ONdigital card, ever once. I’ve never seen an ONdigital pirate card. I’ve never had any codes,” he said.
But Panorama says internal emails suggest otherwise.
NDS denies that it used the THOIC website to sabotage the commercial interests of ONdigital, or any other rival.
It says it recruited hackers to track and catch hackers and pirates.
But similar allegations of corporate espionage are being levelled against News Corporation in other parts of the world, including Italy.
In a statement, News Corporation said it was proud to have supported NDS in its “aggressive fight against piracy and copyright infringement”.
“The BBC did not pose questions to News Corporation ahead of broadcast and was unwilling to engage in any conversation on this issue, which is disappointing,” the statement added.
Bid to appease bullet train critics may violate law
A series of concessions over the last year to quiet opposition to the California bullet train has created a potentially lethal problem: the revised blueprint for the system may violate requirements locked into state law when voters approved funding for the project in 2008.
The Legislature packed the law with an unusual number of conditions intended to reassure voters, protect the project from later political compromises and ensure that it would not end up a bankrupted white elephant.
But many of those requirements may be at odds with the plan to integrate bullet trains with existing commuter rail lines in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They may also conflict with the Obama administration’s insistence to start construction in the Central Valley without any near-term prospect that high-speed trains would operate there.
Outside critics, state oversight boards, some legislators and former officials of the California High-Speed Rail Authority say the compromises violate those requirements, not to mention that voters were told the system would cost far less than the currently projected $98.5 billion.
The project is entering a crucial phase, adding urgency to the legal questions. A final business plan is expected this week. Gov. Jerry Brown said he will request $2.7 billion from the Legislature next month. And the authority wants to start building a 130-mile section of track later this year. A legal dispute could snarl the tight schedule.
Quentin Kopp, an architect of the project when he was a state senator and chairman of the rail authority, believes the design changes do not meet the law and is not what was envisioned by the Legislature.
“These guys at the rail authority have been pretty clever,” said Kopp, who is also a former state judge. “I saw it coming.”
The mandates in the law are considerable. They require that any initial segment has to use high-speed trains. Money for each operating segment needs to be in hand before construction starts. Passengers must be able to board in Los Angeles and arrive in San Francisco without changing trains. As many as 12 trains per hour are supposed to run in each direction and the system has to operate without taxpayer subsidies.
Instead, the rail authority has agreed to run fewer trains at slower speeds on tracks shared with commuter rail systems, Amtrak and freight trains. In the early years, passengers will probably have to transfer trains to get from one end of the system to the other. The concept, known as the blended approach, was pushed last year by Bay Area politicians, who fought the original plan to run high-speed trains through the region on 60-foot high viaducts over local neighborhoods. The idea has attracted support in Southern California as well.
Brown has thrown his weight behind the blended plan, but also recognizes the potential legal problem.
“We are aware of the issue,” Brown said. But he dismissed the suggestion that any judge would block the nation’s largest infrastructure project over disputed ballot language. “People want to micromanage everything,” Brown said, adding that the matter will be tested legally before any bonds are sold to pay for the work.
The rail authority is on guard too. The former chief executive, Roelof van Ark, requested a legal analysis by the attorney general. In the confidential letter dated Sept. 9, Van Ark asked whether the blended system would “comply with the criteria prescribed by Proposition 1A” and whether “there is a time limit to achieving full compliance” with the law.
A spokesman for the attorney general, citing attorney-client privilege, declined to say whether the office has issued an opinion.
The blended approach was intended to save the project. State Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) said the earlier plan for exclusive high-speed rail tracks was unaffordable and faced overwhelming opposition in the Bay Area. But he acknowledges the alternative system, which will be detailed in its final form when the business plan is made public this week, may have defects also.
The two biggest legal issues, Simitian says, are the requirement for no subsidies and the fracturing of the bullet train project into pieces, whereas the law describes it as a unified effort. Kopp believes the failure to guarantee a single-seat ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco in the early years is a key legal liability, though transit officials disagree with him.
Mehdi Morshed, a former chief executive of the rail project, said the reduction in the number of trains represents a major setback. The blended approach may reduce the number of train departures to as few as two per hour at peak times, while the law calls for up to 12 trains per hour.
“Why would we spend billions of dollars to get two trains per hour?” Morshed said. “We were telling people the system would have essentially unlimited capacity. If you don’t have frequent service, you are not going to have a profitable system.”
Meanwhile, a suit brought by Kings County and two of its residents alleges that the plan to start construction in the Central Valley is also illegal. “It is just a conventional rail line,” attorney Michael Brady said. “It will not be electrified. There are no trains in the funding.”
Indeed, those issues were debated by the authority board in December 2010. Former deputy Atty. Gen. George Spanos warned the board at the time that the Central Valley track was not “in our view a usable segment” under the law. Since then, the authority has created a new vocabulary and deemed the track an “initial construction section,” rather than an operating segment. Authority spokesman Lance Simmens said the agency has an internal legal opinion that the Central Valley plan complies with the law.
Whether a court would actually stop the project because of such alleged violations is not clear, said UC Berkeley assistant law professor Bertrall Ross, an election law expert. The conditions in the law, he added, were not in the ballot summary that voters saw at the polls, and judges often attach more importance to that than the underlying statute. On the other hand, some of the conditions were in voter pamphlets, and a judge could rule against the plan on that basis, Ross said. “It could go either way.”
But the legal issues, even if they are decided in favor of the authority, threaten to further delay a project that is already slipping months behind schedule and leaving legislators little time to carefully consider major changes in the plan.
“No one wants to feel like they are in a car showroom being told this is a one-time offer and we have to make up our mind now,” Simitian said.
ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com
dan.weikel@latimes.com
With healthcare law at stake, Supreme Court rolls up sleeves
A Republican-led challenge to the Democrats’ most ambitious social legislation in a generation goes before the Supreme Court on Monday, with President Obama’s healthcare law hanging in the balance.
The court’s ruling, expected by the end of June, may decide whether the Constitution puts any limit on Congress’ power to regulate not just healthcare, but the entire economy.
The arguments begin with a technical discussion of whether the proposed penalty for not buying health insurance amounts to a tax. If the justices find that it is, under an old law they may have to postpone ruling on most of the issues until after the penalty goes into effect in 2014.
On Tuesday, the justices will get to the heart of the matter, debating whether Congress has the authority to make people purchase a product: health insurance.
On Wednesday, they will talk about whether the rest of the law can stand on its own even if the insurance mandate is struck down, and the separate issue of whether the federal government’s plan to fund a massive expansion of state Medicaid programs violates states’ rights under the Constitution.
Since 1936, the justices have not struck down a major federal regulatory law on the grounds that Congress went too far. The court’s forbearance on matters touching Congress’ authority to regulate commerce has allowed Washington’s power to grow, to protect civil rights and the environment, to ensure safer automobiles and drugs, and to help boost the wages and benefits of workers.
All the while, however, conservatives and business groups have insisted there must be a limit. Otherwise, they say, an all-powerful federal government would be free to write its own rules.
Such a limit — if the Constitution indeed sets one — is at the heart of the healthcare case.
Legal scholars on the right and the left see the case as momentous.
“It goes to who we are as a people and what kind of government we have,” said Ilya Shapiro of the libertarian Cato Institute.
The court “is at a crossroads,” said Doug Kendall, president of the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center. If the court “strikes down the law, we’re back to the New Deal era with a progressive president at war with a conservative court.”
To Obama and the Democrats in Congress, the need for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was obvious. Nearly 50 million Americans lack health insurance. When they go to hospitals, the costs are borne by others, including the taxpayers. And all face a loss of insurance if they lose jobs or have serious illnesses or other preexisting conditions.
The only way to prevent those problems was to bring everyone into the system, Obama argued, guaranteeing coverage for all, prohibiting insurance companies from excluding people they didn’t want to cover and requiring, in exchange, that everyone get insurance. Those who could not pay the full cost would be offered subsidies.
Critics, however, say the “government mandate” to buy insurance goes too far. It crosses a line, they say, from reasonable regulation of commerce to a dictate from Washington to engage in commerce.
“This reaches into the living room of a guy who is healthy and doesn’t want to buy health insurance,” said Paul D. Clement, the former George W. Bush administration solicitor general, who represents Republican officials from 26 states. He will try to persuade a conservative-leaning high court that it should break with decades of precedent and void the entire law.
The Supreme Court, signaling the extraordinary nature of the case, agreed to hear six hours of arguments over three days, rather than the usual single hour. The court agreed to also consider Clement’s claim that Congress exceeded the Constitution when it pressed the states to expand the Medicaid program.
Progressives, not surprisingly, see the court’s intervention as ominous. They say the Constitution created a national government to “promote the general welfare.” It did not authorize the court to veto laws that regulate business and commerce in the public interest, they say.
The issue also poses a dilemma for the court’s conservative majority: Just what type of conservatives are they? Do they seek to reimpose conservative principles on the two elected branches of government, or do they hew to the idea of a limited, restrained role for the courts?
Since at least the Ronald Reagan era, conservatives have argued that elected lawmakers, not unelected judges, should decide the major issues of government. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. echoed this theme when he told senators during his confirmation hearings that he saw a modest role for judges, more like an “umpire calling balls and strikes” than a star player.
As conservative Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in upholding the healthcare law in November, the Constitution left Congress “free to forge national solutions to national problems.”
Officer engaged in racial profiling, LAPD probe finds
A white police officer targeted Latino drivers for traffic stops because of their race, a Los Angeles Police Department investigation concluded — marking the first time the agency has found one of its officers guilty of racial profiling.
For decades, the question of racial profiling — “biased policing,” in LAPD jargon — has bedeviled the LAPD. Accusations that the practice was commonplace in minority neighborhoods throughout the 1970s and ’80s helped earn the LAPD a reputation for bias and abuse of power.
And, despite dramatic reforms that have boosted the department’s image over the last 10 years, the persistence of profiling claims has prevented the agency from shaking its dark past altogether. With hundreds of officers accused of profiling each year, department officials have cleared all of them of wrongdoing, telling exasperated critics that it was all but impossible to determine whether a cop was motivated by racial bias.
The investigation into Patrick Smith, a 15-year veteran who worked alone on a motorcycle assignment in the department’s West Traffic Division, found he was stopping Latinos based on their race and deliberately misidentifying some Latinos as white on his reports — presumably in an effort to conceal the fact that the people he pulled over were overwhelmingly Latino, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case who requested that their names not be used because police personnel issues are confidential.
At a meeting last month, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck reviewed the evidence against Smith and heard from members of his command staff who recommended that the officer be found guilty. Beck signed off on the investigation’s findings and ordered Smith sent to a disciplinary hearing, where the department will attempt to have him fired, the sources said. In Los Angeles, the police chief cannot fire an officer unilaterally but instead must let a three-person board hear the case and decide if firing is warranted. Smith had been relieved of duty during the investigation, sources said.
Smith did not respond to an email seeking comment, and the Police Protective League, which represents rank-and-file officers, declined to comment.
John Mack, a member of the department’s civilian oversight board who has pushed in recent years for reforms in how profiling investigations are conducted, said the case signaled “a giant step forward,” when informed of the findings by The Times.
“It represents a confirmation of the seriousness with which the department is now considering the issue,” he said. “It means we’ve come a very long way.”
Profiling complaints typically arise from traffic or pedestrian stops, in which the officer is accused of targeting a person solely because of his or her race, ethnicity or other form of outward appearance.
State of the Art: NetZero, Clearwire and Other Ways to Get a Hot Spot to Go
If you’re like most people, you know perfectly well. Once you’re out of the house and on the road, you’re out of Wi-Fi range. You’re either offline completely, or you peek at the Internet through the tiny screen of a smartphone.
There is another way. You could get a broadband cellular hot spot, like the MiFi, a tiny, self-powered base station that creates a Wi-Fi bubble from your pocket or purse. Nearby laptops, iPads and iPod Touches can get online, wherever you happen to be.
These cellular hot spots are fantastic companions on long car rides, offsite meetings, movie shoots on location, trade show booths, hotel rooms, beaches, airplanes stuck on runways and anywhere else where Wi-Fi is costly or nonexistent.
Unfortunately, the hot spots from Verizon or ATT cost at least $50 a month.
As of this week, there’s a new option from NetZero. It may not change the game, but it does change some of the rules.
You buy the NetZero 4G HotSpot — an attractive black plastic slab with a small gray screen — for $100. You get wireless Internet free for the first year, and pay as little as $10 a month after that. That’s an amazing number. If you do the math, it turns out that $10 a month is a lot less than $50.
To make matters juicier, this is a 4G hot spot. And that means that, in big cities, you get extremely fast Internet. In my tests in Boston, New York and San Francisco, downloads come in at 5 to 10 megabits a second. It’s about what you’d get at home with a basic cable modem.
Now, if you recognize the name Net-Zero, you may remember the company’s original service about 15 years ago: free home Internet, brought to you by onscreen ads.
Unfortunately, over time, NetZero made the deal worse and worse. First it started charging fees if you were online more than 40 hours a month, then 10 hours a month. Virgin Mobile’s $40 unlimited MiFi of 2010 suffered a similar fate.
The point is that these plans can change at any time. That’s the first worry.
The second is that the NetZero hot spot may be 4G, but it’s only 4G. As soon as you leave one of the areas served by its 4G network, you’re offline. The Net-Zero doesn’t drop down to 3G as a backup.
That’s a problem, because NetZero’s hot spot devices and coverage are both provided by Clearwire, which has been building a nationwide 4G cellular network for a few years now. (The NetZero HotSpot is just a relabeled Clear Apollo.)
Clearwire’s national 4G “footprint” is available in only 70 cities. Don’t dive in until you check the coverage maps at clear.com/coverage; you might wind up spending $100 for a machine that does absolutely nothing for you.
Finally, NetZero’s amazing prices include not-so-amazing amounts of Internet use. You know that first year, when you pay nothing for service? You’re getting only 200 megabytes of data a month, which is about enough for daily e-mail checks and the occasional Web page. Once you start downloading apps or watching videos, it’s all over.
Then there’s the $10 plan. That one buys you only 500 megabytes — again, not a whopping lot if you’re an active user.
NetZero also offers plans for $20 (1 gigabyte), $35 (2 gigabytes) and $50 (4 gigabytes). So at the $50 level, Net-Zero’s gadget is actually a worse deal than Verizon’s ($50 for 5 gigabytes).
That’s not to say that the NetZero is worthless. It has two advantages over the Verizon/ATT deals: First, there’s no two-year contract. With a call to 1-800-NET-ZERO, you can activate or deactivate the service monthly, as you need it. For example, you might turn it on only during the summer months when you’re traveling.
Second, you can buy smaller, less expensive chunks of service. You’re paying more per megabyte of use, but you don’t have to buy as many of them. It’s as though NetZero were giving you the option to buy one Q-tip at a time instead of 500-packs.
Even so, NetZero is only one possibility in a world full of them. It’s worth knowing your options:
E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com
Australia Bars Huawei From Broadband Project
CANBERRA — Australia has blocked Huawei Technologies of China from bidding on contracts in the $38 billion Australian National Broadband Network, citing security concerns, Huawei said Monday.
“We were informed by the government that there is no role for Huawei” in the network, said Jeremy Mitchell, a spokesman in Australia for Huawei, one of the world’s largest suppliers of telecommunications equipment.
The Australian plan is the largest infrastructure project in the country’s history. It is intended to connect 93 percent of homes and workplaces with fiber-optic cable, providing broadband service in urban and rural areas.
It was announced in 2009 by the Australian government with a committed investment of as much as $38 billion. The network is expected to be ready by 2020.
The Australian Financial Review newspaper said in a report Monday that Huawei had sought to secure a supply contract worth as much as 1 billion Australian dollars, or $1.05 billion, as part of the project, but had been blocked by the Australian attorney general on the basis of advice from the Australian Security Intelligence Organization.
The office of the attorney general said in a news release, “This is consistent with the government’s practice for ensuring the security and resilience of Australia’s critical infrastructure more broadly.”
The network is “a strategic and significant government investment,” the attorney general’s office told Bloomberg News. “We have a responsibility to do our utmost to protect its integrity and that of the information carried on it.”
The government declined to comment on its specific discussions with companies, which are confidential, the office said.
The security agency declined to comment on the report.
On the sidelines of a nuclear security summit meeting in South Korea, Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia said the government had made the correct decision.
“You would expect as a government that we make all of the prudent decisions to make sure that the infrastructure project does what we want it to do, and we’ve taken one of those decisions,” she said.
Huawei was founded by its chief executive, Ren Zhengfei, a former officer of the People’s Liberation Army in China. That has led to claims that it has too cozy a relationship with the Chinese government.
The company. based in Shenzhen, China, has been struggling to expand its business in the United States, which has blocked its equipment deals, citing national security concerns and allegations that Huawei had violated sanctions by supplying Iran with banned equipment.
“While we’re obviously disappointed by the decision,” the company said, referring to the Australian rejection, “Huawei will continue to be open and transparent and work to find ways of providing assurance around the security of our technology.”
Mr. Mitchell told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.: “We have never been told by the Chinese government to do a certain thing. If we would, that would be to our detriment, and we would lose the market share that we have.”
A former Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, who is an independent director on the board of Huawei’s Australian unit, rejected the government’s security concerns.
“This sort of whole concept of Huawei being involved in cyberwarfare, presumably that would just be based on the fact that the company comes from China,” he said on ABC Radio on Monday. “This is just completely absurd.”
Mr. Mitchell told Bloomberg that “the bar is set higher” for the company because of where it is from.
He said Huawei was working on eight broadband networks similar to the Australian plan in Benin, Britain, Brunei, Cameroon, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
F.T.C. Seeks Privacy Legislation
The agency, the Federal Trade Commission, called on Congress to enact legislation regulating so-called data brokers, which compile and trade a wide range of personal and financial data about millions of consumers from online and offline sources. The legislation would give consumers access to information collected about them and allow them to correct and update such data.
The agency also sent a cautionary signal to technology and advertising companies regarding a “Do Not Track” mechanism that allows consumers to opt out of having their online behavior monitored and shared. It warned that if companies do not voluntarily provide a satisfactory Do Not Track option, it will support additional laws that mandate it.
The recommendations, part of a sweeping set of guidelines in an F.T.C. report on Monday, represent the government’s latest move to address the issue of consumer privacy.
On one side of the debate are data brokers like Experian and Acxiom, which collect and sell information, and the huge ecosystem of technology and online advertising companies — including Google, Microsoft and Facebook — that target consumers based on their personal preferences.
On the other side are consumer groups and privacy advocates that are concerned about the volume of data being collected and how little control consumers have over that information.
The government’s Do Not Track efforts are likely to collide with the desire of companies to continue the lucrative business of collecting, using and sharing information about the people who use their services. Although these businesses say they support limits on using this information, they generally still want to be able to collect it.
One official from a prominent technology company, who declined to be named because the discussions with the government were continuing, said that “do not collect is basically death for online advertising.”
But the trade commission said unequivocally that it believes consumers who say they do not want to be tracked mean just that — no tracking at all. It said it would support legislation to require it.
“Do Not Track from our perspective certainly means ‘do not collect’ — not ‘do not advertise back,’ “ said Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the F.TC. “If a real do not track option doesn’t come to fruition by the end of the year, there will be, I don’t want to say a tsunami of support for Do Not Track legislation next Congress, but certainly a lot of support.”
The F.T.C. said it intends to work with the White House and the Commerce Department on proposals they unveiled last month to develop voluntary industrywide codes of conduct that the F.T.C. can enforce.
Mr. Leibowitz said the commission did not endorse any specific Congressional legislation, but he mentioned a bill introduced in the Senate in April 2011 by John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona. That bill seeks to require companies to tell consumers what data are being collected and allow them to opt out of the practice.
At least two other bills have been introduced in Congress. But none of that legislation is likely to make it into law in this Congressional session, however, given the heavy schedule of pending matters and re-election campaigns.
Many data broker companies say much of the information they collect is available from public documents like property and voter registration records. Companies can sell their data to a variety of clients, including marketers, telecommunications companies, retailers and political campaigns.
Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, the chief privacy officer for Acxiom, said the focus on data brokers in the F.T.C. report was not a surprise. “It’s not an unreasonable request to have more transparency among data brokers,” Ms. Barrett Glasgow said. The company collects data from public records, surveys and consumer purchasing behavior both online and offline.
According to Ms. Barrett Glasgow, a little more than 15 percent of the company’s overall revenue is based on data sales.
Memo From Africa: Africa’s Steady Steps Toward Democracy
That is the most obvious lesson from the sharply contrasting experiences of two West African nations over the past week: Senegal, where power is being transferred peacefully after a fair election on Sunday, and Mali, where after two decades of relative success, democracy was snuffed out in a military coup on Thursday.
Across the region, democracy, even amid setbacks, seemed to inch forward. In Niger and in Guinea, military rulers gave up power to the people over the last 18 months, while any subsequent encroachments were vigorously resisted. In Ivory Coast, a power grab provoked a citizen uprising, later amplified by foreign firepower. In Liberia, a losing opposition candidate cried foul last fall after an election widely seen as credible, hoping that citizens would follow him, but few did. And in Nigeria, even the chaotic and bloody election of last spring is celebrated as an improvement.
What remained constant is both the aspiration and the discernment of the people. The ordinary citizens wanted a voice, and seemed to know — even in the most depressed slums of Conakry, Niamey, Bamako or Dakar — that democracy was the best way to get it.
Once glimpsed, democracy was vigorously fought for; once achieved, it was jealously guarded. African countries that had seemed immobile in relation to the Arab Spring in the Middle East were bubbling, just beneath or sometimes above the surface. Even the coup leaders in Mali felt obliged to repeat that they would soon call elections, though there was skepticism that they would do so. And Mali notwithstanding, coups are in steady decline from their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.
On Monday, a thousand citizens turned out in Bamako, the capital of Mali, calling for a return to democracy. And international condemnation of the coup was swift. In Washington, the Obama administration announced that it was suspending its nonhumanitarian aid to Mali and urged the leaders of what it termed “a mutiny” to return the country to civilian rule.
“We want to see the elected government restored as quickly as possible so that we can get to the elections, which are scheduled to go forward shortly,” said the State Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke by telephone with President Alassane Ouattara of Ivory Coast, who is leading efforts to negotiate a settlement in Mali. Ms. Nuland said American officials were also in discussion with the coup’s leader, Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo. The ousted president, Amadou Toumani Touré, was believed to be safely in hiding with loyalists, Ms. Nuland said.
“This is an unacceptable situation, where democracy is being undermined in Africa, and it’s got to be restored,” Ms. Nuland said.
Meanwhile, the cheering crowds that packed downtown Dakar, the Senegalese capital, late Sunday night were celebrating not so much the victory of the winner, Macky Sall, as the upholding of an ideal that appeared threatened by the maneuverings of the incumbent, President Abdoulaye Wade.
“The defeat of Wade,” Le Quotidien, a daily newspaper in Dakar, wrote on its front page Monday, “has transformed itself into a victory for the people, and for Senegalese democracy.”
Over the course of several years, a slow boil of resentment against Mr. Wade built. He was blamed for installing his son in positions of power, with an eye to a possible takeover; for trying to change the constitution to make re-election easier; and for seeking a third term when Senegalese law limits the president to two. What the country achieved over 50 years — a chief executive with some accountability at the ballot box — appeared to be under assault.
In the streets here was a sense of offense. The president was breaking the rules. “We put him in power, and we had hope,” said Lamine Diop, who was waiting to vote in the first round last month. “But he’s tried to force things, and that’s it.”
He added, looking at the long lines of voters, “We’ve never seen this kind of mobilization before.”
Mr. Wade, with his limousines and his grandiose projects, was seen as setting himself above the people who had put him in office. “Abdoulaye Wade was living in an ivory tower,” Le Quotidien wrote on Monday. “He had lost all sense of the reality being lived by his fellow citizens.”
Three times over the last 10 months, the Senegalese pushed back against Mr. Wade.
First, there was a large-scale demonstration in Dakar in June that forced him to retreat on his constitutional changes; next came voting in which he finished with a humiliating 34 percent of the vote, after months of boasting that he would easily win a first-round knockout; and Sunday, he suffered what appeared to be a crushing defeat in the runoff at the hands of Mr. Sall, his former prime minister.
“A victory on the order of a plebiscite,” Mr. Sall said early Monday, savoring its scale.
Senegal, with its long tradition of voting and respect for the rules, was often seen as an exception on the continent.
Having experienced the satisfactions of democracy, citizens here were more fervent in its defense. Senegal’s democracy has hardly functioned perfectly. A one-party state for a sizable portion of its history, the country’s rubber-stamp Parliament and weak judiciary offer no checks on the powerful executive.
Still, the emotional attachment of the Senegalese to the democratic ideal can be found even in some of the continent’s most oppressed spots. In Equatorial Guinea, for example, where the same dictator has ruled for more than three decades, courageous citizens can be found whispering their longings for the ballot box.
The Senegalese know what the people of Mali have rediscovered, that democracy must be arduously built and fiercely protected. Otherwise, it is as close to extinction as an autocrat’s pen or a junior officer’s gun barrel.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington.
Raúl Castro Greets Pope Benedict at Start of Closely Watched Visit
The pope’s visit is weighted with anticipation that he will press for more religious freedom and an easing of the authoritarian grip here. It comes 14 years after the historic first papal visit to Cuba by his predecessor, John Paul II, which yielded an era of greater religious expression in the country.
The pope, who is often criticized as somewhat distant with his flock, left Mexico after three days there that may best be remembered for his appeal to curb the drug-war violence that has killed 50,000 in the past six years, and for the big black sombrero he wore as he rode to Mass on Sunday in the Popemobile.
It was an unusual personal touch for the pope, who works in the shadow of John Paul II, who was especially popular and beloved in Latin America.
The pope plans to seek a connection with ordinary Cubans by visiting the Virgin of Charity of Cobre, a tiny wooden icon revered by Cubans of all faiths as a source of good fortune, and he is expected to celebrate and advocate for greater religious freedom in the country.
Since Cuba loosened restrictions on religious practice in the early 1990s, the Catholic Church has emerged here as a powerful voice pressing for political and economic reform, including religious freedom.
While more than half of Cubans identify as Catholic, though, relatively few regularly attend Mass. Meanwhile, evangelical and Pentecostal churches have grown rapidly here, and Santeria, a belief system mixing African, Caribbean and other religious elements, remains very popular.
The highlight of the pope’s trip is expected to be large Mass for tens of thousands of people on Wednesday in Revolution Square in Havana, an event that will bear some resemblance to carefully orchestrated political demonstrations.
It was not clear how far the pope would go in criticizing the political system here, which he is known to have no taste for, judging by speeches he made as a cardinal denouncing Marxism and authoritarian regimes.
Asked about Cuba on his plane on the way to Mexico, he delivered a pointed critique, saying, “Today it is evident that Marxist ideology, in the way it was conceived, no longer corresponds to reality.”
Cuban officials brushed off his critique, while Cubans on the streets knew nothing about it because it was not reported in the Cuban press.
More so than in Mexico, the pope will be wading into a complicated political picture in Cuba, and face expectations from all sides.
The Cuban government will expect him to denounce the four-decade-long American embargo of Cuba, which they blame for much of their economic misery, contrary to what a range of independent economists say about the situation. Human rights groups are pushing for the pope to meet with Cuban dissidents. Religious leaders hope that he will press the case for more liberty, such as giving churches permission to run their own schools and broadcast on radio and television. American officials anticipate that he will raise the case of a jailed American government contractor when he meets President Raúl Castro on Tuesday.
The pope is also expected to greet Fidel Castro, Raúl’s brother, who led the country for decades. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who has lately embraced Catholicism, arrived in Cuba suddenly on Saturday night for medical treatment, but Vatican officials have said that there were no plans for the pope to see him.
“It’s an odd coincidence that puts the pope in an uncomfortable position,” Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a research group in Washington, said of Mr. Chavez’s sudden appearance. “A meeting with Chavez would also distract from the pope’s main reason for going to Cuba, which is to strengthen the role and influence of the Catholic Church on the island. It would be very strange and awkward for the pope to meet with Chavez but not any Cuban dissidents.”
Such considerations appeared far from the minds of people putting the finishing touches on sites that the pope will visit in Santiago.
Victoria Burnett reported from Santiago, Cuba, and Randal C. Archibold from Havana.
Support for Afghan War Falls in U.S., Poll Finds
The survey found that more than two-thirds of those polled — 69 percent —thought that the United States should not be at war in Afghanistan. Just four months ago, 53 percent said that Americans should no longer be fighting in the conflict, more than a decade old.
The increased disillusionment was even more pronounced when respondents were asked their impressions of how the war was going. The poll found that 68 percent thought the fighting was going “somewhat badly” or “very badly,” compared with 42 percent who had those impressions in November 2011.
The latest poll was conducted by telephone from March 21 to 25 with 986 adults nationwide. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
The Times/CBS News poll was consistent with other surveys this month that showed a drop in support for the war. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 60 percent of respondents said the war in Afghanistan had not been worth the fighting, while 57 percent in a Pew Research Center poll said that the United States should bring home American troops as soon as possible. In a Gallup/USA Today poll, 50 percent of respondents said the United States should speed up the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Negative impressions of the war have grown among Republicans as well as Democrats, according to the Times/CBS News poll. Among Republicans, 60 percent said the war was going somewhat or very badly, compared with 40 percent in November. Among Democrats, 68 percent said the war was going somewhat or very badly, compared with 38 percent in November. But the poll found that Republicans were more likely to want to stay in Afghanistan for as long as it would take to stabilize the situation: 3 in 10 said the United States should stay, compared with 2 in 10 independents and 1 in 10 Democrats.
Republicans themselves are divided, however, over when to leave, with a plurality, 40 percent, saying the United States should withdraw earlier than the end of 2014, when under an agreement with the Afghan government all American troops are to be out of the country.
The poll comes as the White House is weighing options for speeding up troop withdrawals and in the wake of bad news from the battlefield, including accusations that a United States Army staff sergeant killed 17 Afghan civilians and violence set off by the burning last month of Korans by American troops.
The poll also follows a number of high-profile killings of American troops by their Afghan partners – a trend that the top American commander in Afghanistan suggested on Monday was likely to continue.
“It is a characteristic of this kind of warfare,” Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, told reporters at a Pentagon news conference. He said that in a counterinsurgency conflict like the one in Afghanistan, where American forces are fighting insurgents while training Afghan security forces, “the enemy’s going to do all that they can to disrupt both the counterinsurgency operation, but also disrupt the integrity of the indigenous forces.” American commanders say that the Taliban have in some cases infiltrated Afghan security forces to attack Americans, but that most cases are a result of personal disputes between Afghans and their American trainers.
In follow-up interviews, a number of poll respondents said they were weary after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, and impatient with the slow progress of Afghan security forces. “I think we should speed up when we’re bringing our troops home,” said Melisa Clemmons, 52, a Republican and a coordinator for a wireless carrier system from Summerville, S.C. “If we’ve been there as many years as we’ve been there, what’s another two years going to get us?” she asked, adding, “These Afghanistan people are turning around and shooting our people. Why is it taking this long for the Afghan troops to be policing themselves?”
Paul Fisher, 53, a Republican from Grapevine, Tex., who works in the pharmaceutical business, said the United States should no longer be involved in the war, although he opposed setting a specific timetable. “After a while enough is enough, and we need to get out and move on and let Afghanistan stand on its own merits,” he said.
Peter Feaver of Duke University, who has long studied public opinion about war and worked in the administration of President George W. Bush, said that in his view there would be more support for the war if President Obama talked more about it. “He has not expended much political capital in defense of his policy,” Mr. Feaver said. “He doesn’t talk about winning in 2014; he talks about leaving in 2014. In a sense that protects him from an attack from the left, but I would think it has the pernicious effect of softening political support for the existing policy.”
The drop in support for the war among Republican poll respondents mirrors reassessments of the war among the party’s presidential candidates, traditionally more hawkish than Democrats. Newt Gingrich declared this month that it was time to leave Afghanistan, while Rick Santorum said that one option would be to withdraw even earlier than the Obama administration’s timeline. Mitt Romney has been more equivocal, although he said last summer that it was “time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can, as soon as our generals think it’s O.K.”
Michael E. O’Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution who is close to American commanders in Afghanistan, said that the opinion polls reflected a lack of awareness of the current policy, which calls for slowly turning over portions of the country to Afghan security forces, like the southern provinces, where American troops have tamped down the violence.
“I honestly believe if more people understood that there is a strategy and intended sequence of events with an end in sight, they would be tolerant,” Mr. O’Hanlon said. “The overall image of this war is of U.S. troops mired in quicksand and getting blown up and arbitrarily waiting until 2014 to come home. Of course you’d be against it.”
Among poll respondents, 44 percent said that the United States should withdraw sooner than 2014, while 33 percent said the administration should stick to the current timetable, 17 percent said the United States should stay as long as it would take to stabilize the current situation and 3 percent said the United States should withdraw now.
Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington, and Allison Kopicki from New York. Marjorie Connelly and Marina Stefan contributed reporting from New York.
Investigator: Martin family "will get answers"
(CBS News) There was another huge rally Monday night in Sanford, Florida, where a neighborhood watch captain shot and killed an unarmed teenager one month ago.
Thousands have gathered outside a city commission meeting to demand an arrest in the case.
CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann reports that the civic center room where the city commission met holds 600 people, but it was not big enough. So the city set up a jumbotron outside for the overflow crowd, who showed up to demand answers in the shooting that set off a national firestorm.
Trayvon Martin’s parents met for the first time on Monday with investigators working with the special prosecutor appointed by Florida’s governor.
Angela Corey is a Florida state attorney with a reputation being a tough prosecutor and an expert in homicide cases. She’s charged with reviewing what critics complain was a botched, racist investigation by the Sanford Police Department.
“This is what we’re experienced in and this is what we do,” Corey said.
Her investigation mandate “includes the power to arrest, to empanel the grand jury to hear evidence and the power to handle this case in all of its relevant aspects.”
George Zimmerman, a crime watch captain, says he fatally shot Martin in self-defense. He remains free.
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No witness actually saw their deadly confrontation. Carey told CBS News her team plans to hire a voice recognition expert to figure out whether Zimmerman or Martin was yelling for help on a 911 tape.
“We intend to do everything we possibly can. The family will get answers,” Corey said.
Zimmerman has hired a defense lawyer and authorized friends to speak on his behalf. One of them is Joe Oliver, who says Zimmerman told him this weekend he has cried repeatedly about taking Martin’s life.
“We don’t know what happened from the time George got out of his vehicle and the time the gun went off, but I can tell you race had nothing to do with it,” Oliver said.
Right before his death, Martin’s Miami-area high school had suspended him for two weeks. His family reluctantly confirmed the reason: a baggie, found in his book bag, had marijuana residue. Martin’s parents say it’s irrelevant and blame Sanford Police for leaking the information.
“They’ve killed my son and now they’re trying to kill his reputation,” Trayvon’s mother said.
The same leak reported that in their fight, Martin knocked Zimmerman to the ground with one punch, and began bashing his head against the sidewalk. That’s when Zimmerman fired his nine-millimeter.
Sanford Police say the leak was unauthorized, and have started an internal investigation.
Zimmerman friend: Shooting not a racial incident
Race and justice re-examined in Martin killing
Fla. police chief slammed amid public outcry
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