Syrian War Closes In on the Heart of Damascus

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Fighters from the Free Syrian Army's Tahrir al Sham brigade look at a Syrian Army base in the Arabeen neighborhood of Damascus.

DAMASCUS, Syria — Unkempt government soldiers, some appearing drunk, have been deployed near a rebel-held railway station in the southern reaches of this tense capital. Office workers on 29th of May Street, in the heart of the city, tell of huddling at their desks, trapped inside for hours by gun battles that sound alarmingly close.

Soldiers have swept through city neighborhoods, making arrests ahead of a threatened rebel advance downtown, even as opposition fighters edge past the city limits, carrying mortars and shelling security buildings. Fighter jets that pounded the suburbs for months have begun to strike Jobar, an outlying neighborhood of Damascus proper, creating the disturbing spectacle of a government’s bombing its own capital.

On Sunday, the government sent tanks there to battle rebels for control of a key ring road.

In this war of murky battlefield reports, it is hard to know whether the rebels’ recent forays past some of the capital’s circle of defenses — in an operation that they have, perhaps immodestly, named the “Battle of Armageddon” — will lead to more lasting gains than earlier offensives did. But travels along the city’s battlefronts in recent days made clear that new lines, psychological as much as geographical, had been crossed.

“I didn’t see my family for more than a year,” a government soldier from a distant province said in a rare outpouring of candor. He was checking drivers’ identifications near the railway station at a checkpoint where hundreds of soldiers arrived last week with tanks and other armored vehicles.

“I am tired and haven’t slept well for a week,” he said, confiding in a traveler who happened to be from his hometown. “I have one wish — to see my family and have a long, long sleep. Then I don’t care if I die.”

For months, this ancient city has been hunched in a defensive crouch as fighting raged in suburbs that curve around the city’s south and east. On the western edge of the city, the palace of the embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, sits on a steep, well-defended ridge.

In between, Damascus, with its walled Old City, grand diagonal avenues and crowded working-class districts, has remained the eye of the storm. People keep going to work, even as electric service grows sporadic and groceries dwindle, even as the road to the airport is often cut off by fighting outside the city, and even as smoke from artillery and airstrikes in suburbs becomes a regular feature on the horizon.

But after rebels took the railway station 10 days ago in a city district called Qadam and attacked Abassiyeen Square on an approach to the city center on Wednesday, a new level of alarm and disorder has suffused the city. Rebels have pushed farther into the capital than at any point since July, when they briefly held part of a southern neighborhood.

Near the Qadam railway station last week, many of the government soldiers, their hair and beards untrimmed, wore disheveled or dirty uniforms and smelled as if they had not had showers in a long time. Some soldiers and security officers even appeared drunk, walking unsteadily with their weapons askew — a shocking sight in Syria, where regimented security forces and smartly uniformed officers have long been presented as a symbol of national pride.

The deployment appeared aimed at stopping the rebels from advancing past Qadam, either across the city’s ring road and toward the downtown or to suburbs to the east to close a gap in the opposition’s front line.

But even stationed here in Damascus, the heart of the government’s power, the soldier at the checkpoint — who was steady on his feet — said he felt vulnerable.

“It is very scary to spend a night and you expect to be shot or slaughtered at any moment,” he said. “We spend our nights counting the minutes until daytime.”

The government has hit back hard, striking Qadam with artillery and airstrikes. It has also made pre-emptive arrests in Midan, the neighboring district, closer to downtown, where rebels gained a temporary foothold in July and which they said was their next target.

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, Lebanon.

Read More..

No. 4 Duke holds on to beat Boston College 62-61

BOSTON (AP) — Mason Plumlee had 19 points and 10 rebounds, hitting the game-winning free throw with 26 seconds left on Sunday to help No. 4 Duke rally from early and late deficits to beat Boston College 62-61.

Seth Curry added 18 points for the Blue Devils, who watched the three teams above them in the AP Top 25 lose to unranked opponents this week — and then nearly joined them.

Olivier Hanlan scored 20 points for Boston College (10-13, 2-8 Atlantic Coast Conference). The Eagles led by five points with 2:15 left and had a chance to win it after Plumlee made one of two free throws but Hanlan's jumper was wide and the rebound popped out of bounds as the buzzer sounded to end the game.

Duke (21-2, 8-2) won its fifth straight game.

The Eagles entered the day tied for last in the conference, but they jumped to an eight-point lead midway through the first half and held onto a tie at halftime. Duke quickly erased the deficit as the second half began and opened a six-point lead but then went cold again, scoring just one free throw over a 4 1-2 minute span and allowing BC to make it 61-56 with 2:15 to play.

But Quinn Cook made his third 3-pointer of the game, then Plumlee hit a pair of free throws with 47 seconds left to tie it 61-all. BC's Joe Rahon put a 3-point attempt off the top of the backboard and Plumlee was brought down hard as he grabbed the rebound.

The Blue Devils forward misses the first foul shot but made the second to make it a one-point lead.

After a timeout, Hanlan dribbled down the clock, before faking the drive and pulling up for an open shot inside the foul line that was wide. Ryan Anderson grabbed the rebound but lost control as he fell to the floor and the ball popped out of bounds as the buzzer sounded to end the game.

Plumlee celebrated from his back as the Blue Devils improved their chance to move up from the No. 4 ranking after losses for the top three teams: Indiana, Florida and Michigan — all to unranked teams. The Blue Devils have been ranked No. 1 five weeks during the regular season, the last on Jan. 21.

Fans dug themselves out after the weekend's blizzard to watch the Eagles play their best game of a season that includes losses to Harvard and Bryant. BC had lost six of seven, including a 22-point loss to No. 8 Miami on Tuesday.

Duke went scoreless for the first five minutes of the game and trailed by as many as eight points, 13-5, in the first half, and it led 21-14 before scoring 11 of the next 14 points, taking its first lead of the game on Plumlee's three-point play with 1 minute left in the first half.

It was 27-all at the half before Curry and Cook hit 3-pointers and Curry followed with a four-point play that gave Duke a 39-34 lead.

Read More..

For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

Read More..

Advertising: Self Magazine Widens Its Focus for a Younger Audience

WHAT’S the point of having Michelle Obama’s triceps if you can’t show them off in a smart sleeveless sheath?

That seems to be the thinking behind a remake of Self magazine, the Condé Nast publication best known for teaching women how to crunch their abs, tone their thighs and eat the right foods.

Self is broadening its tight focus on exercise and wellness to become a more general lifestyle magazine infused with more beauty and fashion, an effort that will include editorial changes, a new look for the cover and logo and licensing agreements.

“We think there’s a shift in how women think of their bodies and beauty,” said Laura McEwen, the vice president and publisher of Self. “Being fit and fashionable are really one.”

According to Ms. McEwen, the magazine’s typical reader is in her mid-30s with a median household income of $75,000 a year; the rebranded magazine is meant to appeal to the generation of women 18 to 30 who are obsessed with social media. “The magazine is being edited for the women who think in 140 characters,” she said, referring to the character limit of a Twitter post.

That editorial shift can be most felt in the chatty headlines created for subsections in the magazine and its bolder, fashion-focused images. One section, “It’s a Thing,” highlights new trends (in March, the color will be lemon yellow). Others include “You Look Awesome in That,” featuring fashion coverage, and “Just Shoot Me Now,” which doles out advice to readers in embarrassing situations.

Self finds itself between two of its biggest competitors in women’s fitness magazines.

The magazine, which has a total print circulation of 1.5 million readers, had a slight increase in advertising dollars, but not ad pages, last year. Advertisers spent $163.2 million on ads in the magazine in 2012, a 1.8 percent increase from 2011, when they spent $160.2 million.

Total ad pages declined 2.3 percent to 905.4 in 2012 from 926 in 2011, according to data from the Publishers Information Bureau. Online, the magazine has 6.9 million unique visitors a month, executives said, with a fifth of that traffic coming from the social media content sharing site Pinterest.

Shape magazine, which is owned by American Media, claims a similarly strong print circulation of 1.63 million readers, but has had a tough time sustaining advertising dollars. The fitness and lifestyle magazine suffered an 18.4 percent decrease in advertising revenue from 2011, when advertisers spent $206.8 million, to 2012, when they spent $168.8 million on the magazine. The total number of ad pages in the magazine decreased 22.7 percent from 2011 to 2012.

Women’s Health, which is owned by Meredith, showed a 12.3 percent increase in paid advertising from 2011 to 2012, and a 6.8 percent increase in ad pages for the same period. In 2011 the magazine reported a circulation of 1.6 million.

Self magazine, its Web site and its mobile site will be divided into three main sections that focus on body, looks and lifestyle. The new look, which will make its debut this week, includes a larger font for the title and a clean white background. The changes will be consistent across all platforms.

Readers will also be able to download a new mobile application, called Self Plus. When users hover their phones over pages tagged with icons promoting the app, they can watch videos and skim through photo galleries and other content.

Millennial women, said Lucy Schulte Danziger, the editor in chief of Self, have “this sense that you want to be really healthy, but you also want to go drink martinis with your friends.” (To that end, the March issue will include a calorie-counting game on matching cocktails with bar food without blowing your diet.) “It’s trying to have fun. It should be fun; this is not rocket science,” she said.

Self’s last makeover was in 2010, when it overhauled its design, updated its logo and tweaked section headlines.

Beyond the latest editorial changes is a range of marketing efforts to get the word out. Print and digital ads will run in Condé Nast magazines like Allure, Glamour and Lucky and on taxi tops in New York City. Digital ads will also run on DailyCandy.com and Refinery29.com.

The March issue of Self, featuring the dancer Julianne Hough on the cover, will be available in print on Feb 19. Ms. Hough is the lead actress in the new film “Safe Haven.” Self will also be the co-host at a premiere party for the film on Monday in New York City.

The brand has also licensed its name to a new line of fitness gear including yoga mats and kettlebells and is considering extending that to healthy food products. Self is also capitalizing on its annual event, “Self Workout in the Park,” by announcing a college-themed contest, “Self Workout on the Quad,” where college students who participate most heavily with the Facebook “Workout in the Park” social game can win an event at their school.

Sponsors for the event include Garnier, Reebok, Calvin Klein, LaRoche-Posay, LeSportsac, Luna Bar and Club Med. Ads promoting the contest will be shown on HerCampus.com.

“This is clearly a strategy not only to reach young women readers where they’re at right now, but also to be more attractive to advertisers,” said Laura Portwood-Stacer, a visiting assistant professor of media, culture and communication at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University. “It seems to tap into this trend of fitness lifestyle consumption that you see a lot now.”

One new advertiser is LeSportsac, which in addition to sponsoring the workout events, will advertise in the April issue of Self.

“Seeing where the consumer is going today is very much lifestyle,” said Paula Spadaccini, the marketing director for LeSportsac. “They don’t just aspire to wear Christian Louboutin and be very fashionable. They also aspire to be fit and cook healthy recipes.”

Walter Coyle, the president of Pedone, an independent advertising agency, said that some of his clients like Burt’s Bees, the beauty product line, and Essie, the nail polish brand, will continue to advertise in Self, and that other clients including Clarins and Lacoste were considering it. “Whenever a formidable magazine like Self reimagines its position in the marketplace, it’s something everyone is going to look at,” he said.

Read More..

Israeli Says Syria Twisted Comments by Rebel Supporter

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A public relations controversy erupted Saturday after a leading Israeli newspaper published comments from a brief interview with the leader of Syria’s main exile opposition group.

The news media outlets of the Syrian government, and its ally Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, reported that the opposition leader had declared that Israel had “nothing to fear” from a rebel-led Syrian government. Moreover, the reports said, the opposition was working with other countries to keep Syria’s chemical weapons away from Hezbollah, which he called a “son of the devil.”

But the opposition leader, Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, never said any of that, according to the article in the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, and its author, a prominent Israeli defense expert, Ronen Bergman.

Sheik Khatib was quoted in the article reiterating the opposition’s promise to keep Syria’s chemical arsenal out of “the hands of unauthorized elements,” and it was the international community, he said, not Israel, that had “nothing to fear.”

When Sheik Khatib realized that Mr. Bergman was an Israeli — after glancing at his business card — he abruptly ended the conversation, Mr. Bergman said in a Skype interview, repeating what he had written.

The original article was published only in Hebrew — and only in print — so it was the Arabic and English versions put out by the Syrian government and Hezbollah that raced around the Internet on Saturday, provoking outrage from government supporters and opponents at Sheik Khatib, who posted a message on his Facebook page denying that he had given the interview.

Yet the episode appeared to have been more than a simple misunderstanding. Syria’s conflict is not only a shooting war but also a propaganda war. Pro-government media apparently could not resist the chance to bolster their contention that the rebellion had been promoted by Israel and the West to punish Syria and its president, President Bashar al-Assad, for taking uncompromising positions against Israel.

“Unfortunately, the original text was less exciting,” Mr. Bergman said. “I would be happy if he would say something like, ‘Yes, we will make peace with Israel’ — then I would get the front page.” As it was, the article elicited little reaction in Israel.

But misrepresentation of the article suggested that it hit a nerve on one issue. An unnamed opposition member, not Sheik Khatib, called Hezbollah “sons of the devil,” according to Mr. Bergman, and said the rebel coalition was working with other countries to ensure that “not one piece of military equipment, not chemical weapons and not any other item, will pass into their hands.”

Syria is Hezbollah’s main conduit for arms, and Hezbollah has backed Mr. Assad’s bloody crackdown at great cost to its popularity in the wider Arab world.

Although Mr. Bergman said the opposition member was offering his own opinion and not presenting official policy, his comments bolstered the widely held view that a rebel-led government might halt the shipment of Iranian arms through Syria to Hezbollah. Hezbollah, a Shiite group and political party, is also concerned about the rise within the rebel movement of extremist Sunni jihadists who view Shiites as apostates.

The misleading reports appeared to be an attempt to further divide the opposition. Sheik Khatib found himself fending off critics from within the anti-Assad movement who objected to his even speaking with an Israeli reporter, though by all accounts he did not initially realize that Mr. Bergman was an Israeli.

It was the second time in a month that Sheik Khatib found himself on the defensive. He recently proposed talks with members of Mr. Assad’s government, but had not built political support for the proposal.

On Friday, Syria’s information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, gave the first official response to the proposal, saying that the government would negotiate with any opposition members who agreed to lay down their arms.

On Saturday, Mr. Assad named new cabinet ministers for oil, finance, social affairs, labor, housing, public works and agriculture, as Syria faces growing economic problems and shortages of electricity, fuel and bread.

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut.

Read More..

Wisconsin beats No. 3 Michigan 65-62 in OT

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — When Ben Brust tied the game at the end of regulation with a shot just from just inside midcourt, his teammate Mike Bruesewitz looked over at Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan and saw something unusual.

His coach had both his arms in the air.

"You know when he shows some emotion, you've done something pretty special," Bruesewitz said.

Brust hit a tiebreaking 3-pointer with less than 40 seconds left in overtime as Wisconsin beat No. 3 Michigan 65-62 on Saturday.

"It was awesome, something I'll remember forever, and I'm sure a lot of people will," Brust said of the game, which ended with students storming the court and Bruesewitz taking the public address announcer's microphone to thank the crowd as students celebrated around him.

The Wolverines became the third top three team to lose this week as No. 1 Indiana lost to Illinois and No. 2 Florida was beaten by Arkansas. This should be the sixth straight week with a different No. 1 in The Associated Press' Top 25.

Brust's shot at the end of regulation was a dramatic turn of events for Wisconsin (17-7, 8-3 Big Ten) and a soul crusher for Michigan (21-3, 8-3).

Just moments earlier, Tim Hardaway Jr. hit a contested 3-pointer to put the Wolverines up 60-57 with less than 3 seconds left in regulation.

Following a timeout, Bruesewitz passed up his first option in the inbounds play and hit Brust in stride. The guard took one dribble across halfcourt and launched the shot, which hit nothing but net.

Ryan said the play was drawn up to see how Michigan defended the first cutter, Brust read the defense and reacted.

"The best thing was Mike's pass on the dime on the run, didn't have to reach back for it, able to catch it all in one motion," Ryan said.

Michigan still had fouls to give before the shot, and coach John Beilein said the order coming out of the timeout was to foul. He also put Caris LeVert on Brust to bolster the defense.

"We were definitely fouling, wanted to keep everyone in front of us and (Brust) turned the corner on (LeVert) just enough that he couldn't foul him," Beilein said. "I thought we had them once they couldn't get their initial guy.

"With Caris' quickness, we thought he could get there, but he didn't."

For all the fireworks in the final 3 seconds, the teams only managed seven points in overtime, including Brust's winning 3-pointer.

Following Brust's shot, Hardaway couldn't connect on his drive to the hoop on the next Michigan possession, and Glenn Robinson III fouled Jared Berggren on the rebound.

The Wolverines went to a full-court press with two more fouls to give. But the Badgers broke the press, and Michigan had to foul twice more to finally put Ryan Evans on the free throw line.

Evans, who shoots less than 43 percent from the line, missed the front end of a 1-and-1, and Burke couldn't connect in a rushed final possession for the Wolverines.

It was another grinding win for the Badgers keyed by their defense. Michigan came in as one of the top scoring teams in the country at almost 78 points per game. But Wisconsin held Michigan to less than 40 percent shooting from the field, including 5 of 18 from beyond the 3-point line.

Michigan was 1 for 7 from the field in overtime, and the offensive futility was highlighted by one sequence in which Mitch McGary stole the ball outside the 3-point line and drove the other way only to miss the layup with Berggren defending the rim.

Beilein said the Wolverines missed out on 14 points thanks to missed layups.

"I'm not talking about when they're really contesting," Beilein said. "I'm talking about we had the ball, the basket and us, and it didn't go in."

Brust scored 14 points for the Badgers, while Berggren added 13 and eight rebounds. Sam Dekker scored 12 points, while Evans finished with 11 points and nine rebounds.

Burke scored 19 points to lead Michigan, but needed 21 shots to do it. Hardaway added 18, and McGary had 12 points and eight rebounds.

It was the second straight game for both teams to go past regulation after the Badgers beat Iowa 74-70 in double overtime on Wednesday and Michigan downed Ohio State 76-74 in overtime on Tuesday.

Several Wisconsin players said consecutive overtime games exemplified their will to win even as critics contend they're not talented enough, not fast enough and, as Bruesewitz said he's seen on Twitter, not good-looking enough.

"We have a group of guys in that locker room that believe and is going to fight until the end until you tell us we can't play any more basketball," Berggren said. "We just find a way to get it done."

Read More..

In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

Read More..

Israeli Says Syria Twisted Comments by Rebel Supporter

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A public relations controversy erupted Saturday after a leading Israeli newspaper published comments from a brief interview with the leader of Syria’s main exile opposition group.

The news media outlets of the Syrian government, and its ally Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, reported that the opposition leader had declared that Israel had “nothing to fear” from a rebel-led Syrian government. Moreover, the reports said, the opposition was working with other countries to keep Syria’s chemical weapons away from Hezbollah, which he called a “son of the devil.”

But the opposition leader, Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, never said any of that, according to the article in the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, and its author, a prominent Israeli defense expert, Ronen Bergman.

Sheik Khatib was quoted in the article reiterating the opposition’s promise to keep Syria’s chemical arsenal out of “the hands of unauthorized elements,” and it was the international community, he said, not Israel, that had “nothing to fear.”

When Sheik Khatib realized that Mr. Bergman was an Israeli — after glancing at his business card — he abruptly ended the conversation, Mr. Bergman said in a Skype interview, repeating what he had written.

The original article was published only in Hebrew — and only in print — so it was the Arabic and English versions put out by the Syrian government and Hezbollah that raced around the Internet on Saturday, provoking outrage from government supporters and opponents at Sheik Khatib, who posted a message on his Facebook page denying that he had given the interview.

Yet the episode appeared to have been more than a simple misunderstanding. Syria’s conflict is not only a shooting war but also a propaganda war. Pro-government media apparently could not resist the chance to bolster their contention that the rebellion had been promoted by Israel and the West to punish Syria and its president, President Bashar al-Assad, for taking uncompromising positions against Israel.

“Unfortunately, the original text was less exciting,” Mr. Bergman said. “I would be happy if he would say something like, ‘Yes, we will make peace with Israel’ — then I would get the front page.” As it was, the article elicited little reaction in Israel.

But misrepresentation of the article suggested that it hit a nerve on one issue. An unnamed opposition member, not Sheik Khatib, called Hezbollah “sons of the devil,” according to Mr. Bergman, and said the rebel coalition was working with other countries to ensure that “not one piece of military equipment, not chemical weapons and not any other item, will pass into their hands.”

Syria is Hezbollah’s main conduit for arms, and Hezbollah has backed Mr. Assad’s bloody crackdown at great cost to its popularity in the wider Arab world.

Although Mr. Bergman said the opposition member was offering his own opinion and not presenting official policy, his comments bolstered the widely held view that a rebel-led government might halt the shipment of Iranian arms through Syria to Hezbollah. Hezbollah, a Shiite group and political party, is also concerned about the rise within the rebel movement of extremist Sunni jihadists who view Shiites as apostates.

The misleading reports appeared to be an attempt to further divide the opposition. Sheik Khatib found himself fending off critics from within the anti-Assad movement who objected to his even speaking with an Israeli reporter, though by all accounts he did not initially realize that Mr. Bergman was an Israeli.

It was the second time in a month that Sheik Khatib found himself on the defensive. He recently proposed talks with members of Mr. Assad’s government, but had not built political support for the proposal.

On Friday, Syria’s information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, gave the first official response to the proposal, saying that the government would negotiate with any opposition members who agreed to lay down their arms.

On Saturday, Mr. Assad named new cabinet ministers for oil, finance, social affairs, labor, housing, public works and agriculture, as Syria faces growing economic problems and shortages of electricity, fuel and bread.

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut.

Read More..

An Exhibition on Turkey’s Past Resonates

ISTANBUL — Two galleries in this city’s old European quarter recently opened exhibitions that showcase the political violence that convulsed the country in the 1970s. The echoes for contemporary Turkey were unmistakable.

On one wall are rows of old newspapers that chronicled through blaring headlines and grainy photographs the bloody street fighting and chaotic demonstrations that culminated in a military coup in 1980.

“Socialist revolution can only be achieved in Turkey through armed victory,” is how one newspaper of the time described the aims of a radical left-wing group that promised to use “revolutionary terror” and “urban chaos” to realize Marxist rule.

That bloody past burst violently into the present with last week’s suicide bombing of the American Embassy in the Turkish capital of Ankara. Initially assumed by many to be the work of Islamic extremists, the attack was quickly traced by the authorities to a man who sneaked into the country by boat from a Greek island in the Aegean Sea and was linked to a homegrown left-wing extremist group whose roots lie in the tumult of the ’70s.

As such, the bombing — even though it struck an American target and was motivated in part by American policy in the Middle East — revealed more about modern Turkey, its violent past and potential for instability than it did about the United States’ war on terror.

“This was no Benghazi,” wrote Ross Wilson, a former American ambassador to Turkey, in an online column for the Atlantic Council, referring to last year’s attack by Islamic extremists on a diplomatic outpost in Libya that resulted in the death of the American ambassador and three others.

For Turkey, the attack was an unpleasant reminder that despite a decade of reforms under the current ruling party, which is rooted in political Islam and headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has yet to fully emerge from its dark past. Coming at a time when Turkey, with its prosperous economy and political stability, is trying to present itself as a model for countries convulsed by the Arab Spring revolutions, the attack served for many Turks as a reminder of the work left to put their own house in order.

“I think what people have forgotten, because of what happened here in the last 10 years, was how violent Turkish politics used to be,” said Gerald Knaus, of the European Stability Initiative, a policy research organization based in Istanbul. “In the last 10 years Turkey tried to emerge from this period of political violence and confront the skeletons in its closet. But we’ve forgotten how many skeletons there were.”

The attack also underscored how Turkey’s rulers sometimes use those skeletons to justify a growing crackdown on dissent, particularly with a campaign against the news media that has Turkey as the world’s leading jailer of journalists — more even than China or Iran.

“If the activist who blew himself up today had possessed a press card, they would have called him a journalist,” Mr. Erdogan said in comments broadcast on Turkish television shortly after the bombing last week that were immediately condemned by the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.

Before the attack, Turkish security forces rounded up nearly 100 people accused of ties to the outlawed Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front, the organization the perpetrator belonged to, among them journalists, lawyers, even members of a rock band. The arrests were condemned by human rights groups as another example of Turkey’s broad use of antiterrorism laws to crack down on domestic opponents, particularly journalists and human rights lawyers, with no links to violent activities.

“Turkey’s overbroad antiterrorism laws have been used against an ever-widening circle of people charged for nonviolent political activities and the legitimate exercise of freedom of expression, association and assembly,” Human Rights Watch wrote in a report condemning many of the arrests.

Efkan Bolac, a member of the Contemporary Lawyers Association, was detained in that roundup but was released for lack of evidence.

“A lawyer doesn’t become a rapist if he represents one, or a drug dealer if he represents one,” Mr. Bolac said. “They claim we are members of a terror group, but how is that possible when we spend our entire time at courthouses?”

This week the American ambassador to Turkey, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., said the F.B.I. was investigating the attack and suggested that the Justice Department might prosecute the group that carried out the bombing.

Yet the attack seemed out of another time and carried a whiff of cold-war-era intrigue, when links between the C.I.A. and Turkey were central to efforts by the United States to counter Soviet influence in the region. It also upended the conventional narrative about modern terrorism. “You’d think 10 years after the war on terror things would be clearer rather than more obfuscated,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

In his column in The Hurriyet Daily News, Nihat Ali Ozcan, a security specialist at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara, likened the attack to a “cold-war-style proxy war” that he speculated was the work of Syria, given the historical links between the group and Syrian intelligence. His observation was reminiscent of the paranoia of a bygone era. At one of the art galleries here, newspapers chronicled the 1977 May Day celebration in Istanbul, when leftist groups gathered for a demonstration that turned bloody.

“This attack is a provocation that links all the way to the C.I.A.,” one headline shrieked.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.

Read More..

Super Bowl blackout was caused by electrical relay

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The company that supplied electricity to the Super Bowl says the blackout that halted the big game was caused by a device it installed specially to prevent a power failure.

But the utility stopped short of taking all the blame and said Friday that it was looking into whether the electrical relay at fault had a design flaw or a manufacturing defect.

The relay had been installed as part of a project begun in 2011 to upgrade the electrical system serving the Superdome in anticipation of the championship game. The equipment was supposed to guard against problems in the cable that links the power grid with lines that go into the stadium.

"The purpose of it was to provide a newer, more advanced type of protection for the Superdome," Dennis Dawsey, an executive with Entergy Corp., told members of the City Council. Entergy is the parent company of Entergy New Orleans, the city's main electric utility.

Entergy officials said the relay functioned with no problems during January's Sugar Bowl and other earlier events. It has been removed and will be replaced.

All systems at the Superdome are now working, and the stadium was to host a major Mardi Gras event Saturday night, said Doug Thornton, an executive with SMG, the company that manages the stadium for the state.

The relay was installed in a building near the stadium known as "the vault," which receives a line directly from a nearby Entergy substation. Once the line reaches the vault, it splits into two cables that go into the Superdome.

Sunday's power failure cut lights to about half of the stadium, halting play between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers and interrupting the nation's most-watched sporting event for 34 minutes.

Not long after the announcement, the manufacturer of the relay, Chicago-based S&C Electric Co., released a statement saying that the blackout occurred because system operators had put the relay's so-called trip setting too low to allow the device to handle the incoming electric load.

The equipment was owned and installed by Entergy New Orleans.

"If higher settings had been applied, the equipment would not have disconnected the power," said Michael J.S. Edmonds, vice president of strategic solutions for S&C.

In a follow-up statement, Entergy said that tests conducted by S&C and Entergy on the two relays at the Superdome showed that one worked as expected, the other did not.

Entergy spokesman Mike Burns said both relays had the same trip setting.

Entergy's announcement came shortly before company officials went before a committee of the City Council, which is the regulatory body for the company.

During the committee hearing, council member Susan Guidry asked Entergy executives whether they were "fairly certain" that the relay was faulty.

"That is correct," Dawsey said.

However, when asked if the outage was caused by the design or a defect in a part of the equipment, Entergy New Orleans CEO Charles Rice said that had not been determined.

"The equipment did not function properly," Rice said. "At this particular time, based upon our analysis, we cannot say definitively that there was a defect in design. What we do know is that the equipment for some unknown reason, at this particular time, did not react the way that it should have."

Asked if Entergy and SMG still plan to hire a third-party investigator to get to the bottom of the cause, Rice said that possibility remains open.

"We'll work closely with SMG, and if there is a need for a third-party investigation, we will do that," Rice said, adding that Entergy was also working with the relay manufacturer.

Shabab Mehraeen, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Louisiana State University, said relays are common electrical fixtures in businesses and massive facilities such as the Superdome.

"They are designed to keep a problem they sense from becoming something bigger, like a fire or catastrophic event," he said.

The devices vary in size. Mehraeen, who was not familiar with the relay at the Superdome, said he "wouldn't be surprised if it was bigger than a truck."

The reasons the devices fail are the subject of much academic research into the interaction of relays with the complex electrical systems they regulate.

"It's not unusual for them to have problems," Mehraeen said. "They can be unpredictable, despite national testing standards recommended by manufacturers."

Entergy and SMG had both upgraded lines and equipment in the months leading up to the Super Bowl. Rice said the new gear, with the faulty relay, was installed as part of a $4.2 million upgrade by Entergy that included a new power line dedicated solely to the stadium.

In a separate project, SMG replaced lines coming into the stadium after managers expressed concerns the Superdome might be vulnerable to a power failure like the one that struck Candlestick Park during an NFL game in 2011.

Thornton stressed Friday that the dome was drawing only about two-thirds of its power capacity Super Bowl night. He said typical NFL games in late August or September can draw a little more.

Friday's announcement appeared to absolve Superdome officials of any missteps in the blackout.

City officials had worried that the Super Bowl outage might harm New Orleans' chances of getting another NFL championship game.

But NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell downplayed that possibility, saying the league planned to keep New Orleans in its Super Bowl plans. Mayor Mitch Landrieu said the city intends to bid for the game again in 2018.

___

Associated Press Writer Michael Kunzelman in New Orleans contributed to this report.

Read More..