In Turnaround, Cuba Agrees to Talks With U.S.
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, May 31, 2009; 12:44 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/31/AR2009053101078.html?hpid=topnews
Cuba has agreed to open talks with the United States on issues ranging from immigration to anti-narcotics cooperation and direct mail service , a senior State Department official said today, in a sign that the island's communist government is warming to President Obama's call for a new relationship after decades of tension.
The breakthrough came shortly before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton left on a trip to Latin America, where she is expected to face pressure to make further gestures to Cuba, including allowing it into the Organization of American States.
A senior State Department official, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity, called the Cuban moves "a very positive development" and added: "It's our hope this will be understood in the region in a positive way."
In an initial bid to launch a new relationship with Cuba, President Obama last month scrapped restrictions on Cuban Americans traveling to the island and sending money there. But he has said the United States will not lift its economic embargo until the government of Raul Castro improves its human-rights record and makes democratic reforms.
Cuba had given mixed signals about how willing it was to respond to the Obama administration's overtures. But on Saturday, the State Department official said, the head of the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, Jorge Bolaños, formally accepted a U.S. offer, made this month, to re-open talks on immigration that the Bush administration had halted in 2003. Those were the highest-level talks between the two sides.
Bolaños also expressed interest in an earlier U.S. proposal to work toward resuming direct U.S. mail service to the island, the official said. It has been years since such service existed.
In addition, the Cubans indicated they would like to explore the possibilities of additional dialogue on counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism and disaster response, the official said. The U.S. and Cuban governments currently work together in an informal basis to stop drug runners.
No date was set yet for the talks, the official said.
Clinton is making her third trip to Latin America in four months, an indication of the Obama administration's attention to an area where U.S. influence has waned in recent years.
Clinton's visit, which includes high-level regional meetings and attendance at the inauguration of a new president in El Salvador, comes amid a dramatic shift. Once dominated by the United States, Latin America has diversified its trade, and the presidents of a few countries have taken a strong anti-Washington stance. Even pro-U.S. politicians in the region complain that they were ignored during much of the Bush administration as the United States concentrated on Iraq and Afghanistan. Clinton recently expressed concern about the growing role in the area played by China, Russia and Iran, and she is focusing intently on the region.
"We've had a big leadership push into Latin America. . . . there's been a real focus on engaging, there's been a real focus on filling space," a senior State Department official said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity before the trip.
President Obama sought to repair relations with Latin America at a summit in Trinidad and Tobago last month in which he pledged to seek "an equal partnership" and not dictate to the region. But that display of goodwill is being put to the test over Cuba. Most Latin American countries would like to lift a 47-year-old ban on Cuba's membership in the Organization of American States at the group's annual assembly in Honduras on Tuesday, but Clinton has resisted.
The disagreement threatens to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies in the OAS, the main forum for political cooperation in the hemisphere. Clinton has said the OAS would violate its charter on democratic rights if it accepted the return of the communist-ruled nation unconditionally.
"They have to be willing to take the concrete steps necessary to meet those principles. We've been very clear about that -- move toward democracy, release political prisoners, respect fundamental freedoms," Clinton told Congress recently.
Obama has reversed some Bush administration decisions on Cuba, lifting restrictions on visits by Cuban Americans and offering to re-open immigration talks after a five-year hiatus. But he is moving cautiously, wary of domestic pressure.
The move to re-admit Cuba to the OAS is strongly opposed by Cuban American groups and by some key U.S. senators. One of them, Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), has threatened to cut off the U.S. contribution to the OAS, about 60 percent of its budget. Last week, three former Bush administration officials who occupied senior posts dealing with Latin America -- ambassadors Lino Gutierrez, Roger F. Noriega and Otto J. Reich -- appealed to Clinton not to give in.
"Now more than ever, any actions that confer legitimacy on the unelected regime in Havana would be a betrayal of our Cuban brothers and sisters," they wrote.
Clinton's trip starts today in El Salvador with a meeting of Pathways to Prosperity, a Bush administration initiative to encourage greater commerce with its 11 free-trade partners in the region. The group was formed last fall, after Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez started assembling a bloc opposed to free-trade pacts with the United States. It includes Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba and Dominica.
On Monday, Clinton attends the inauguration of El Salvador's president, the first from the party formed by guerrillas who battled a U.S.-backed government in the the 1980s. The new leader, Mauricio Funes, is the latest sign of the "pink tide" that has washed over Latin America. He has said he will emulate moderate leftists like those governing Brazil and Chile, rather than populists like Chavez.
Clinton's trip wraps up with the OAS meeting.
Many members of the group say the ban on Cuba is outdated because it denounces the island's alignment with a "communist bloc" that disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Several countries, however, have indicated they are willing to require Cuba to fulfill some democratic requirements before it fully returns to the OAS.
In the end, lifting the ban would mainly be symbolic, because Cuba has said it has no plans to rejoin a group that it sees as U.S.-dominated. But the debate indicates the emotional punch Cuba still packs across Latin America.
Clinton's trip follows a March visit to Mexico and a swing last month through Haiti and the Dominican Republic on her way to the Summit of the Americas. Several top Obama administration military and political officials also have traveled to the region recently.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Geithner Calls for More Economic Ties With China
Geithner Calls for More Economic Ties With China
Copyright By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/31/world/AP-AS-Geithner-China.html?ref=global-home
BEIJING (AP) -- After years of acrimonious economic relations with China, the U.S. insists it wants to turn the page and develop closer ties with the world's third largest economy.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who arrived Sunday in Beijing for two days of talks with Chinese leaders, said he wanted to foster the same kind of working relationship with China that the United States has enjoyed for decades with European economic powers.
On his first visit to China as treasury secretary, Geithner said the Obama administration was committed to forging a new relationship with China after trade disputes with the U.S. over the past decade.
Those fights have reflected record U.S. trade deficits with China. U.S. critics of China's economic policies say they have contributed to the loss of millions of American manufacturing jobs.
But China is America's biggest creditor, holding $768 billion in Treasury securities. The U.S. also hopes China will play a positive role in resolving a tense dispute with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program.
Ahead of his meetings, Geithner played down long-standing areas of disagreement such as China's undervalued currency.
''We would like to build with China the kind of relationship we built with the G-7 over the last several decades,'' Geithner told reporters traveling with him to Beijing. The Group of Seven includes the traditional economic powers -- the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada.
Geithner said that the U.S. economy, mired in its longest recession since World War II, was beginning to stabilize. ''We are seeing more durable stability in the economy and the financial system is in substantially better shape,'' Geithner said.
But he said much more needed to be done in the U.S. and in other major economies to make a sustainable recovery possible.
Geithner could not escape the fallout from the recession even as he crossed the globe. He took a military aircraft with the latest in communications equipment that allowed him to be in frequent contact with Steven Rattner, head of the administration's auto task force, and Obama economic aide Lawrence Summers, who phoned with updates on the pivotal weekend negotiations with General Motors Corp.
Geithner spent the trip in a private cabin at the back of the plane that was equipped with a desk and a bed. Most of the time he was either working the phones, huddled with aides or revising the speech he was to give Monday.
China, with 1.3 billion people, ranks as the third largest economy after the U.S. and Japan. Geithner said China's new status should be recognized with a bigger voice in such institutions as the International Monetary Fund.
President Barack Obama and other leaders of the Group of 20 major industrial countries and emerging economic powers, which includes China, Brazil and India, pledged in April to work cooperatively on overhauling the IMF and other global institutions. The goal is to give them greater resources to deal with the current crisis and provide China and other emerging countries with more say in how the institutions are run.
''We are committed to reforming the international system and our interests are best served by giving China a stake in that process,'' Geithner told reporters.
Geithner planned a speech Monday at Peking University assessing the global economy and U.S.-China relations. He spent two summers at the university as a college student learning Mandarin Chinese.
At a briefing previewing the trip for Asian journalists, Geithner referenced those ties, saying he had taught Chinese while in college and had a ''long personal interest'' in the country. But he insisted that while he had worked very hard at his Chinese language studies, he was not proficient.
''I cannot actually speak Chinese with competence,'' he said. ''I did study though for a long time, very hard. I practiced my characters very carefully.''
In addition to meeting with some of his former professors on Monday, Geithner was scheduled to visit an economist training program set up by his father when the elder Geithner was in charge of Ford Foundation programs in Asia.
The Obama administration and China have come out with two massive economic stimulus plans while European countries have resisted Obama's calls to do more. They say they do not want to face the same deficit problems that the U.S. has.
China has turned its huge trade surpluses with the U.S. into the largest holdings of Treasury debt, but has raised concerns about America's commitment to deficit reform. Financial markets in recent weeks have sent long-term interest rates higher, a move that some attribute to worries about the U.S. budget deficits.
The administration projects that the deficit for this year will hit $1.84 trillion, a record and four-times higher than the previous mark set last year.
Geithner said that the administration had a credible program to reduce the deficits once the economy begins to recover. ''No one is going to be more concerned about future deficits than we are,'' he told reporters.
Copyright By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/31/world/AP-AS-Geithner-China.html?ref=global-home
BEIJING (AP) -- After years of acrimonious economic relations with China, the U.S. insists it wants to turn the page and develop closer ties with the world's third largest economy.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who arrived Sunday in Beijing for two days of talks with Chinese leaders, said he wanted to foster the same kind of working relationship with China that the United States has enjoyed for decades with European economic powers.
On his first visit to China as treasury secretary, Geithner said the Obama administration was committed to forging a new relationship with China after trade disputes with the U.S. over the past decade.
Those fights have reflected record U.S. trade deficits with China. U.S. critics of China's economic policies say they have contributed to the loss of millions of American manufacturing jobs.
But China is America's biggest creditor, holding $768 billion in Treasury securities. The U.S. also hopes China will play a positive role in resolving a tense dispute with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program.
Ahead of his meetings, Geithner played down long-standing areas of disagreement such as China's undervalued currency.
''We would like to build with China the kind of relationship we built with the G-7 over the last several decades,'' Geithner told reporters traveling with him to Beijing. The Group of Seven includes the traditional economic powers -- the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada.
Geithner said that the U.S. economy, mired in its longest recession since World War II, was beginning to stabilize. ''We are seeing more durable stability in the economy and the financial system is in substantially better shape,'' Geithner said.
But he said much more needed to be done in the U.S. and in other major economies to make a sustainable recovery possible.
Geithner could not escape the fallout from the recession even as he crossed the globe. He took a military aircraft with the latest in communications equipment that allowed him to be in frequent contact with Steven Rattner, head of the administration's auto task force, and Obama economic aide Lawrence Summers, who phoned with updates on the pivotal weekend negotiations with General Motors Corp.
Geithner spent the trip in a private cabin at the back of the plane that was equipped with a desk and a bed. Most of the time he was either working the phones, huddled with aides or revising the speech he was to give Monday.
China, with 1.3 billion people, ranks as the third largest economy after the U.S. and Japan. Geithner said China's new status should be recognized with a bigger voice in such institutions as the International Monetary Fund.
President Barack Obama and other leaders of the Group of 20 major industrial countries and emerging economic powers, which includes China, Brazil and India, pledged in April to work cooperatively on overhauling the IMF and other global institutions. The goal is to give them greater resources to deal with the current crisis and provide China and other emerging countries with more say in how the institutions are run.
''We are committed to reforming the international system and our interests are best served by giving China a stake in that process,'' Geithner told reporters.
Geithner planned a speech Monday at Peking University assessing the global economy and U.S.-China relations. He spent two summers at the university as a college student learning Mandarin Chinese.
At a briefing previewing the trip for Asian journalists, Geithner referenced those ties, saying he had taught Chinese while in college and had a ''long personal interest'' in the country. But he insisted that while he had worked very hard at his Chinese language studies, he was not proficient.
''I cannot actually speak Chinese with competence,'' he said. ''I did study though for a long time, very hard. I practiced my characters very carefully.''
In addition to meeting with some of his former professors on Monday, Geithner was scheduled to visit an economist training program set up by his father when the elder Geithner was in charge of Ford Foundation programs in Asia.
The Obama administration and China have come out with two massive economic stimulus plans while European countries have resisted Obama's calls to do more. They say they do not want to face the same deficit problems that the U.S. has.
China has turned its huge trade surpluses with the U.S. into the largest holdings of Treasury debt, but has raised concerns about America's commitment to deficit reform. Financial markets in recent weeks have sent long-term interest rates higher, a move that some attribute to worries about the U.S. budget deficits.
The administration projects that the deficit for this year will hit $1.84 trillion, a record and four-times higher than the previous mark set last year.
Geithner said that the administration had a credible program to reduce the deficits once the economy begins to recover. ''No one is going to be more concerned about future deficits than we are,'' he told reporters.
Moses and Jesus Golf
Moses and Jesus Golf
Moses and Jesus have teed up at a very long hole, and Jesus is sizing up his golf bag. Unexpectedly, he pulls out a seven iron.
"Jesus, it's a long hole," says Moses, "You'll never make it with a seven iron. Better use a driver."
Jesus smiles and replies, "Arnold Palmer does it." Then he hits the ball with a resounding thwack, and it lands right in the middle of a big water hazard. Moses generously offers to shag the ball and give his friend another crack at it. So Moses saunters over to the water hazard and with great aplomb, parts the waters and picks out the ball. Jesus tees up again, and again he takes the seven iron.
Moses laments, "Jesus, you already tried that iron. Believe me, the hole is too long. Here's a driver."
Jesus patiently shakes his head and steps up to the ball. "Arnold Palmer does it," he says. Then he hits the ball smartly, and it
sails high and short, landing once again in the same hazard. This time Jesus goes off to shag the ball himself. He approaches the hazard, walks across the water, and picks out the ball.
Meanwhile, the next foursome of players has caught up from behind and is looking on, astonished.
"Who does he think he is," says one man, "Jesus Christ?"
"No," says Moses sadly. "Unfortunately, he thinks he's Arnold Palmer."
Moses and Jesus have teed up at a very long hole, and Jesus is sizing up his golf bag. Unexpectedly, he pulls out a seven iron.
"Jesus, it's a long hole," says Moses, "You'll never make it with a seven iron. Better use a driver."
Jesus smiles and replies, "Arnold Palmer does it." Then he hits the ball with a resounding thwack, and it lands right in the middle of a big water hazard. Moses generously offers to shag the ball and give his friend another crack at it. So Moses saunters over to the water hazard and with great aplomb, parts the waters and picks out the ball. Jesus tees up again, and again he takes the seven iron.
Moses laments, "Jesus, you already tried that iron. Believe me, the hole is too long. Here's a driver."
Jesus patiently shakes his head and steps up to the ball. "Arnold Palmer does it," he says. Then he hits the ball smartly, and it
sails high and short, landing once again in the same hazard. This time Jesus goes off to shag the ball himself. He approaches the hazard, walks across the water, and picks out the ball.
Meanwhile, the next foursome of players has caught up from behind and is looking on, astonished.
"Who does he think he is," says one man, "Jesus Christ?"
"No," says Moses sadly. "Unfortunately, he thinks he's Arnold Palmer."
Six Are Killed in West Bank as Fatah Moves Against Hamas
Six Are Killed in West Bank as Fatah Moves Against Hamas
By ETHAN BRONNER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: May 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/world/middleeast/01mideast.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
JERUSALEM — Palestinian Authority forces clashed with Hamas militants in the West Bank early Sunday, leaving six dead, in the bloodiest such encounter in two years.
The violence came days after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas assured President Obama in Washington that his troops were imposing order on the area. In Gaza, Hamas reacted by arresting Fatah activists and hinting of further revenge.
The clashes and threats show that Fatah, which dominates in the West Bank, and Hamas, which runs Gaza, remain in a tense standoff, and that the Palestinian unity needed for creation of a state is far off. Both sides said unity talks mediated by Egypt were imperiled.
A spokesman for Mr. Abbas’s West Bank forces told a news conference in Ramallah that a patrol in the city of Qalqilya had come under fire Saturday night from a house, leading to a curfew and hours-long negotiations. A grenade was thrown from the house killing three security officers, the house was stormed, two Hamas militiamen, including the city commander, were killed along with the owner of the house, a bystander.
He said weapons and documents were found on the men and added that Palestinian Authority forces had found similar caches in recent months, including inside a mosque. Some 200 Hamas-affiliated men were in jail in the West Bank awaiting trial, he said but insisted they were charged with specific violations, not for Hamas affiliation.
“In the last two years, we have proved our ability to impose law and order,” the spokesman, Adnan Dameiri, told the news conference. “We will continue our campaign to dismantle armed groups.”
Hussein a Sheikh, a West Bank Fatah leader, told Israel Radio: “Whoever wants now to come in and disrupt the security and order of the Palestinian residents, to have a militia here, gangs here and there and an underground below, we won’t agree.”
The United States and European Union train and support Mr. Abbas’s troops in the hope of creating a strong enough force to prevent Hamas from challenging its West Bank rule and ultimately perhaps helping Mr. Abbas back into Gaza.
Hamas officials accused the West Bank authorities of being quislings for Israel and the West and betraying the Palestinian national cause. Israeli officials, not wanting to besmirch the Palestinian Authority among its public with a bear hug, pointedly declined comment. But Israeli soldiers control the West Bank, and Palestinian security forces coordinate their actions with them. On Thursday in the south Hebron hills, Israeli officials killed a long-wanted Hamas militant said to have been involved in planning two suicide bombings of Israelis in the 1990s.
After Hamas, an Islamist group that rejects Israel’s existence, won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, it and Fatah tried to put together a unity government. But tensions were high and street fights in Gaza common between forces loyal to the two movements. Two years ago the skirmishes broke out into a four-day war, and Hamas took over Gaza entirely leaving Fatah in power only in the West Bank, supported by Israel.
Abu Obaida, spokesman for the Hamas military wing known as the Qassam Brigade, said at a Gaza news conference on Sunday, “We are confronting two enemies, the Israeli occupier and the agency that serves the agenda of Washington and Tel Aviv.” He added, “This spark reminds us of what happened in Gaza two years ago.”
A Fatah leader in Gaza said some of his men had been arrested on Sunday following the Qalqilya clash. Hamas leaders said that unless their men were released in the West Bank, unity talks would not proceed.
In other developments on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet rejected a bill aimed at Israel’s Arab minority that would have required a loyalty oath for citizenship. This means the bill, championed by the Yisrael Beiteinu Party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, has little chance of passing legislative scrutiny. It can still be presented as a private bill but without the government’s backing.
A second Yisrael Beiteinu bill that has been highly controversial was watered down by the ministers. It was aimed at barring any marking of Israel’s Independence Day as Nakba Day, meaning the day that Palestinians suffered a catastrophe. Enacting such a ban was widely viewed as a violation of the country’s free speech laws.
The ministers changed the draft of the law so that it bars the expenditure of state money to mark the Nakba. This version will still have to pass three votes in parliament and its chances are considered poor.
Israel started a five-day civil defense exercise on Sunday aimed at the possibility of coping with multiple missile attacks, the largest ever of its kind. The drill will stage mock disasters and test emergency crews in their ability to evacuate buildings. On Tuesday, sirens will sound requiring everyone to go into a secure space.
At the start of the Sunday cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of the drill and of the death on Saturday of Ephraim Katzir, who was president of Israel from 1973 to 1978 and a noted biophysicist at the Weizmann Institute. He was 93.
Khaled Abu-Aker contributed reporting from Ramallah, and Taghreed el-Khodary from Gaza.
By ETHAN BRONNER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: May 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/world/middleeast/01mideast.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
JERUSALEM — Palestinian Authority forces clashed with Hamas militants in the West Bank early Sunday, leaving six dead, in the bloodiest such encounter in two years.
The violence came days after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas assured President Obama in Washington that his troops were imposing order on the area. In Gaza, Hamas reacted by arresting Fatah activists and hinting of further revenge.
The clashes and threats show that Fatah, which dominates in the West Bank, and Hamas, which runs Gaza, remain in a tense standoff, and that the Palestinian unity needed for creation of a state is far off. Both sides said unity talks mediated by Egypt were imperiled.
A spokesman for Mr. Abbas’s West Bank forces told a news conference in Ramallah that a patrol in the city of Qalqilya had come under fire Saturday night from a house, leading to a curfew and hours-long negotiations. A grenade was thrown from the house killing three security officers, the house was stormed, two Hamas militiamen, including the city commander, were killed along with the owner of the house, a bystander.
He said weapons and documents were found on the men and added that Palestinian Authority forces had found similar caches in recent months, including inside a mosque. Some 200 Hamas-affiliated men were in jail in the West Bank awaiting trial, he said but insisted they were charged with specific violations, not for Hamas affiliation.
“In the last two years, we have proved our ability to impose law and order,” the spokesman, Adnan Dameiri, told the news conference. “We will continue our campaign to dismantle armed groups.”
Hussein a Sheikh, a West Bank Fatah leader, told Israel Radio: “Whoever wants now to come in and disrupt the security and order of the Palestinian residents, to have a militia here, gangs here and there and an underground below, we won’t agree.”
The United States and European Union train and support Mr. Abbas’s troops in the hope of creating a strong enough force to prevent Hamas from challenging its West Bank rule and ultimately perhaps helping Mr. Abbas back into Gaza.
Hamas officials accused the West Bank authorities of being quislings for Israel and the West and betraying the Palestinian national cause. Israeli officials, not wanting to besmirch the Palestinian Authority among its public with a bear hug, pointedly declined comment. But Israeli soldiers control the West Bank, and Palestinian security forces coordinate their actions with them. On Thursday in the south Hebron hills, Israeli officials killed a long-wanted Hamas militant said to have been involved in planning two suicide bombings of Israelis in the 1990s.
After Hamas, an Islamist group that rejects Israel’s existence, won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, it and Fatah tried to put together a unity government. But tensions were high and street fights in Gaza common between forces loyal to the two movements. Two years ago the skirmishes broke out into a four-day war, and Hamas took over Gaza entirely leaving Fatah in power only in the West Bank, supported by Israel.
Abu Obaida, spokesman for the Hamas military wing known as the Qassam Brigade, said at a Gaza news conference on Sunday, “We are confronting two enemies, the Israeli occupier and the agency that serves the agenda of Washington and Tel Aviv.” He added, “This spark reminds us of what happened in Gaza two years ago.”
A Fatah leader in Gaza said some of his men had been arrested on Sunday following the Qalqilya clash. Hamas leaders said that unless their men were released in the West Bank, unity talks would not proceed.
In other developments on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet rejected a bill aimed at Israel’s Arab minority that would have required a loyalty oath for citizenship. This means the bill, championed by the Yisrael Beiteinu Party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, has little chance of passing legislative scrutiny. It can still be presented as a private bill but without the government’s backing.
A second Yisrael Beiteinu bill that has been highly controversial was watered down by the ministers. It was aimed at barring any marking of Israel’s Independence Day as Nakba Day, meaning the day that Palestinians suffered a catastrophe. Enacting such a ban was widely viewed as a violation of the country’s free speech laws.
The ministers changed the draft of the law so that it bars the expenditure of state money to mark the Nakba. This version will still have to pass three votes in parliament and its chances are considered poor.
Israel started a five-day civil defense exercise on Sunday aimed at the possibility of coping with multiple missile attacks, the largest ever of its kind. The drill will stage mock disasters and test emergency crews in their ability to evacuate buildings. On Tuesday, sirens will sound requiring everyone to go into a secure space.
At the start of the Sunday cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of the drill and of the death on Saturday of Ephraim Katzir, who was president of Israel from 1973 to 1978 and a noted biophysicist at the Weizmann Institute. He was 93.
Khaled Abu-Aker contributed reporting from Ramallah, and Taghreed el-Khodary from Gaza.
Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack?
Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack? Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter the president’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.
By FRANK RICH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/opinion/31rich.html?th&emc=th
AFTER watching the farce surrounding Dick Cheney’s coming-out party this month, you have to wonder: Which will reach Washington first, change or the terrorists? If change doesn’t arrive soon, terrorists may well rush in where the capital’s fools now tread.
The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.
Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.
The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch. “No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,” Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama’s “half measures” were leaving Americans “half exposed.” The new president, he said, is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.” In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault. A new ad shouting “We told you so!” awaits only the updated video.
The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party — Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney — have variously cemented the G.O.P.’s brand as a whites-only men’s club by revoking Colin Powell’s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a “reverse racist.” Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.
Yet even before Cheney spoke, Congressional Democrats were quaking in fear, purporting with straight faces that the transfer of detainees to “supermax” American prisons constituted a serious security threat. Many of the same senators who signed on to the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002 joined the 90-to-6 majority that put a hold on Obama’s Gitmo closure plans.
The déjà vu in the news media was more chilling. Rather than vet the substance of Cheney’s fulmination, talking heads instead hyped the split-screen “dueling speeches” gimmick of the back-to-back Obama-Cheney scheduling. Time magazine’s political Web site Photoshopped Cheney and Obama’s faces atop prize fighters’ bodies.
Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”
One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney’s supposed TKO this way: “The key to Cheney’s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.” But the facts, as usual, were wrong.
At the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.
You can find a link to the complete Landay-Strobel accounting of Cheney’s errors in the online version of this column. The failure of much of the press to match their effort has a troubling historical antecedent. These are the same two journalists who, reporting for what was then Knight Ridder, uncovered much of the deceit in the Bush-Cheney case for the Iraq war in the crucial weeks before Congress gave the invasion the green light.
On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that “the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.” It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein’s “quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.” In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the “lack of hard evidence” of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco.
Another reporter who was ahead of the pack in unmasking Bush-Cheney propaganda is the author Ron Suskind. In his 2006 book on the American intelligence matrix, “The One Percent Doctrine,” Suskind wrote about a fully operational and potentially catastrophic post-9/11 Qaeda assault on America that actually was aborted in the Bush years: a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. It was halted 45 days before zero hour — but not because we stopped it. Al-Zawahri had called it off.
When Bush and Cheney learned of the cancellation later on from conventional intelligence, they were baffled as to why. The answer: Al-Zawahri had decided that a rush-hour New York subway attack was not enough of an encore to top 9/11. Al Qaeda’s “special event” strategy, Suskind wrote, requires the creation of “an upward arc of rising and terrible expectation” that is “multiplied by time passing.” The event that fits that bill after 9/11 must involve some kind of nuclear weapon.
“What are the lessons of this period?” Suskind asked when we spoke last week. “If you draw the wrong lessons, you end up embracing the wrong answers.” They are certainly not the lessons cited by Cheney. Waterboarding hasn’t and isn’t going to save us from anything. The ticking time-bomb debate rekindled by Cheney’s speech may be entertaining on “24” or cable-news food fights, but is a detour from the actual perils before the country. “What we’re dealing with is a patient foe who thinks in decades while we tend to think more in news cycles,” Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.”
The reality is that while the Bush administration was bogged down in Iraq and being played by Pervez Musharraf, the likelihood of Qaeda gaining access to nuclear weapons in a Taliban-saturated Pakistan was increasing by the day. We know that in the month before 9/11, bin Laden and al-Zawahri met with the Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. That was the real link between 9/11 and nuclear terror that the Bush administration let metastasize while it squandered American resources on a fictional link between 9/11 and a “nuclear” Saddam.
And where are we now? On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, David Sanger reported in The Times that military and nuclear experts agree that if “a real-life crisis” breaks out in Pakistan “it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan’s weapons were — or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists.”
Pakistan is the time bomb. But with a push from Cheney, abetted by too many Democrats and too many compliant journalists, we have been distracted into drawing the wrong lessons, embracing the wrong answers. We are even wasting time worrying that detainees might escape from tomb-sized concrete cells in Colorado.
What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.” It’s not for nothing, after all, that Powell, Gen. David Petraeus and Robert Gates, the secretary of defense — among other military minds — agree with Obama, not Cheney, about torture and Gitmo.
The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.
By FRANK RICH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/opinion/31rich.html?th&emc=th
AFTER watching the farce surrounding Dick Cheney’s coming-out party this month, you have to wonder: Which will reach Washington first, change or the terrorists? If change doesn’t arrive soon, terrorists may well rush in where the capital’s fools now tread.
The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.
Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.
The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch. “No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,” Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama’s “half measures” were leaving Americans “half exposed.” The new president, he said, is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.” In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault. A new ad shouting “We told you so!” awaits only the updated video.
The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party — Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney — have variously cemented the G.O.P.’s brand as a whites-only men’s club by revoking Colin Powell’s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a “reverse racist.” Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.
Yet even before Cheney spoke, Congressional Democrats were quaking in fear, purporting with straight faces that the transfer of detainees to “supermax” American prisons constituted a serious security threat. Many of the same senators who signed on to the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002 joined the 90-to-6 majority that put a hold on Obama’s Gitmo closure plans.
The déjà vu in the news media was more chilling. Rather than vet the substance of Cheney’s fulmination, talking heads instead hyped the split-screen “dueling speeches” gimmick of the back-to-back Obama-Cheney scheduling. Time magazine’s political Web site Photoshopped Cheney and Obama’s faces atop prize fighters’ bodies.
Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”
One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney’s supposed TKO this way: “The key to Cheney’s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.” But the facts, as usual, were wrong.
At the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.
You can find a link to the complete Landay-Strobel accounting of Cheney’s errors in the online version of this column. The failure of much of the press to match their effort has a troubling historical antecedent. These are the same two journalists who, reporting for what was then Knight Ridder, uncovered much of the deceit in the Bush-Cheney case for the Iraq war in the crucial weeks before Congress gave the invasion the green light.
On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that “the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.” It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein’s “quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.” In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the “lack of hard evidence” of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco.
Another reporter who was ahead of the pack in unmasking Bush-Cheney propaganda is the author Ron Suskind. In his 2006 book on the American intelligence matrix, “The One Percent Doctrine,” Suskind wrote about a fully operational and potentially catastrophic post-9/11 Qaeda assault on America that actually was aborted in the Bush years: a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. It was halted 45 days before zero hour — but not because we stopped it. Al-Zawahri had called it off.
When Bush and Cheney learned of the cancellation later on from conventional intelligence, they were baffled as to why. The answer: Al-Zawahri had decided that a rush-hour New York subway attack was not enough of an encore to top 9/11. Al Qaeda’s “special event” strategy, Suskind wrote, requires the creation of “an upward arc of rising and terrible expectation” that is “multiplied by time passing.” The event that fits that bill after 9/11 must involve some kind of nuclear weapon.
“What are the lessons of this period?” Suskind asked when we spoke last week. “If you draw the wrong lessons, you end up embracing the wrong answers.” They are certainly not the lessons cited by Cheney. Waterboarding hasn’t and isn’t going to save us from anything. The ticking time-bomb debate rekindled by Cheney’s speech may be entertaining on “24” or cable-news food fights, but is a detour from the actual perils before the country. “What we’re dealing with is a patient foe who thinks in decades while we tend to think more in news cycles,” Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.”
The reality is that while the Bush administration was bogged down in Iraq and being played by Pervez Musharraf, the likelihood of Qaeda gaining access to nuclear weapons in a Taliban-saturated Pakistan was increasing by the day. We know that in the month before 9/11, bin Laden and al-Zawahri met with the Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. That was the real link between 9/11 and nuclear terror that the Bush administration let metastasize while it squandered American resources on a fictional link between 9/11 and a “nuclear” Saddam.
And where are we now? On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, David Sanger reported in The Times that military and nuclear experts agree that if “a real-life crisis” breaks out in Pakistan “it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan’s weapons were — or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists.”
Pakistan is the time bomb. But with a push from Cheney, abetted by too many Democrats and too many compliant journalists, we have been distracted into drawing the wrong lessons, embracing the wrong answers. We are even wasting time worrying that detainees might escape from tomb-sized concrete cells in Colorado.
What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.” It’s not for nothing, after all, that Powell, Gen. David Petraeus and Robert Gates, the secretary of defense — among other military minds — agree with Obama, not Cheney, about torture and Gitmo.
The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.
Shooting to Software Stardom on the iPhone
Shooting to Software Stardom on the iPhone
By RANDALL STROSS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/business/31digi.html?th&emc=th
MITCHELL WAITE could think of only one reason that Apple’s legal department would leave a voice message last February asking him to call back: he was about to be sued. Mr. Waite has a tiny software company bearing his name — it has no full-time employees — whose principal product is a field guide to birds called iBird Explorer, which runs on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
He called back and discovered that his life was about to change no less than if the lottery authority had told him he’d won the big prize: Apple had decided to feature iBird in a television commercial.
IBird was one of three applications that appeared in the spot, and while it got only about seven seconds, that was all it needed to become the No. 1 “reference” app in the iPhone App Store, a software star among the 35,000-plus applications now crowding the store’s shelf. The iBird Explorer is offered in different versions, priced from $4.99 to $29.99.
“I look at it like Apple paid me $10 million to show my application on every single major network, every major television show — no, I can’t even put a figure on it,” Mr. Waite said.
It’s a delightful story, not only because it does not involve a lawsuit, but also because it does not involve promotion fees. Apple does not accept money from companies whose products are placed in its commercials or in the other prime real estate, the “Featured” section of the App Store.
This has earned Apple applause from software developers and backers. “Apple doesn’t want the money. It’s a level playing field,” said Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. If Apple likes the app, he added, “it doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person or a 10,000-person company; they’ll put it in ‘New’ or ‘What’s Hot.’ ”
A developer easily gains entrance to that level playing field, by paying a nominal $99-a-year fee for the iPhone Developer Program. A completed app must secure Apple’s approval before it is put on sale in the App Store. It’s often a slow process and has drawn the ire of many developers. But the worst that Apple has been accused of is maddening opacity, not discrimination.
Apple takes a 30 percent cut of App Store sales, a paltry slice compared with that exacted by other online stores in the past. Those that distributed software for the Palm Pilot, for example, took 50 to 70 percent of sales as their cut, according to Jeff Scott, founder of 148Apps.com, a Web site offering in-depth reviews of iPhone apps.
Apple also makes buying and downloading a snap; the app is dispatched wirelessly from the store to the iPhone and is ready to run in a few seconds.
The App Store’s very appeal, bringing in so many developers, has intensified a perennially vexing problem: How can a new software title come to the attention of prospective customers?
“For 99 bucks a year, Apple gives you the ability to sell software to millions,” Mr. Scott said. “They solved the distribution problem, but they did not solve the marketing problem for developers.”
Mr. Scott’s site, 148Apps.com, offers a partial solution, but it reviews only hundreds of apps, not tens of thousands.
Apple can feature only a few apps, of course; “featuring” all would mean featuring none. The unfeatured are stuck in crowded quarters, placed into one of 20 categories. Only five apps can be displayed on the phone’s small screen at a time; unless an app clambers up the equivalent of a best-seller list to appear among the five visible on the first screen, the casual browser will probably not see it. As the number of apps grows, it becomes ever harder to break into even the top 100 in a category.
Neil Young, C.E.O. of Ngmoco, a publisher of iPhone games, said his company watched closely what happened to the 5,000 titles added after the App Store passed the 25,000-title milestone.
“Only 40 of 5,000 made it into the top 100,” Mr. Young said. “It’s very difficult for an app to rise above the noise.”
He credited recommendations among gaming enthusiasts, from one friend to the next, as important to the success of his company’s titles.
In April, Apple celebrated the one billionth download from the App Store in only nine months. For all of its success with the store, however, Apple remains most interested in using third-party software to sell its hardware. Mr. Waite said an Apple liaison told him, “We pick apps not for how well they’re selling — we pick apps that will sell more iPhones and iPod Touches because they show off the best features or are something you can’t get elsewhere.”
Fitting that bill is Mr. Waite’s iBird application, which turns the iPhone into an always-in-hand field guide replete with bird calls that a printed field guide cannot provide.
Tens of thousands of iPhone App developers will never get that life-changing call from Apple and will never get within sight of a top-five list.
“In many ways, developing a program is like writing a book,” said Jeffrey Tarter, the founding editor of a developers’ newsletter, Softletter. “You say, ‘I’m going to make something first of all that I like. Then I’ll worry about how to make money.’ ”
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
By RANDALL STROSS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/business/31digi.html?th&emc=th
MITCHELL WAITE could think of only one reason that Apple’s legal department would leave a voice message last February asking him to call back: he was about to be sued. Mr. Waite has a tiny software company bearing his name — it has no full-time employees — whose principal product is a field guide to birds called iBird Explorer, which runs on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
He called back and discovered that his life was about to change no less than if the lottery authority had told him he’d won the big prize: Apple had decided to feature iBird in a television commercial.
IBird was one of three applications that appeared in the spot, and while it got only about seven seconds, that was all it needed to become the No. 1 “reference” app in the iPhone App Store, a software star among the 35,000-plus applications now crowding the store’s shelf. The iBird Explorer is offered in different versions, priced from $4.99 to $29.99.
“I look at it like Apple paid me $10 million to show my application on every single major network, every major television show — no, I can’t even put a figure on it,” Mr. Waite said.
It’s a delightful story, not only because it does not involve a lawsuit, but also because it does not involve promotion fees. Apple does not accept money from companies whose products are placed in its commercials or in the other prime real estate, the “Featured” section of the App Store.
This has earned Apple applause from software developers and backers. “Apple doesn’t want the money. It’s a level playing field,” said Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. If Apple likes the app, he added, “it doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person or a 10,000-person company; they’ll put it in ‘New’ or ‘What’s Hot.’ ”
A developer easily gains entrance to that level playing field, by paying a nominal $99-a-year fee for the iPhone Developer Program. A completed app must secure Apple’s approval before it is put on sale in the App Store. It’s often a slow process and has drawn the ire of many developers. But the worst that Apple has been accused of is maddening opacity, not discrimination.
Apple takes a 30 percent cut of App Store sales, a paltry slice compared with that exacted by other online stores in the past. Those that distributed software for the Palm Pilot, for example, took 50 to 70 percent of sales as their cut, according to Jeff Scott, founder of 148Apps.com, a Web site offering in-depth reviews of iPhone apps.
Apple also makes buying and downloading a snap; the app is dispatched wirelessly from the store to the iPhone and is ready to run in a few seconds.
The App Store’s very appeal, bringing in so many developers, has intensified a perennially vexing problem: How can a new software title come to the attention of prospective customers?
“For 99 bucks a year, Apple gives you the ability to sell software to millions,” Mr. Scott said. “They solved the distribution problem, but they did not solve the marketing problem for developers.”
Mr. Scott’s site, 148Apps.com, offers a partial solution, but it reviews only hundreds of apps, not tens of thousands.
Apple can feature only a few apps, of course; “featuring” all would mean featuring none. The unfeatured are stuck in crowded quarters, placed into one of 20 categories. Only five apps can be displayed on the phone’s small screen at a time; unless an app clambers up the equivalent of a best-seller list to appear among the five visible on the first screen, the casual browser will probably not see it. As the number of apps grows, it becomes ever harder to break into even the top 100 in a category.
Neil Young, C.E.O. of Ngmoco, a publisher of iPhone games, said his company watched closely what happened to the 5,000 titles added after the App Store passed the 25,000-title milestone.
“Only 40 of 5,000 made it into the top 100,” Mr. Young said. “It’s very difficult for an app to rise above the noise.”
He credited recommendations among gaming enthusiasts, from one friend to the next, as important to the success of his company’s titles.
In April, Apple celebrated the one billionth download from the App Store in only nine months. For all of its success with the store, however, Apple remains most interested in using third-party software to sell its hardware. Mr. Waite said an Apple liaison told him, “We pick apps not for how well they’re selling — we pick apps that will sell more iPhones and iPod Touches because they show off the best features or are something you can’t get elsewhere.”
Fitting that bill is Mr. Waite’s iBird application, which turns the iPhone into an always-in-hand field guide replete with bird calls that a printed field guide cannot provide.
Tens of thousands of iPhone App developers will never get that life-changing call from Apple and will never get within sight of a top-five list.
“In many ways, developing a program is like writing a book,” said Jeffrey Tarter, the founding editor of a developers’ newsletter, Softletter. “You say, ‘I’m going to make something first of all that I like. Then I’ll worry about how to make money.’ ”
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
Deep Cuts Threaten to Reshape California
Deep Cuts Threaten to Reshape California
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/31calif.html?th&emc=th
LOS ANGELES — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not get the election results he sought. Now he seems determined to show California voters the consequences.
In a special election on May 19, voters rejected a batch of measures on increasing taxes, borrowing funds and reapportioning state money that were designed to close a multibillion-dollar budget gap. The cuts Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed to make up the difference, if enacted by the Legislature, would turn California into a place that in some ways would be unrecognizable in modern America: poor children would have no health insurance, prisoners would be released by the thousands and state parks would be closed.
Nearly all of the billions of dollars in cuts the administration has proposed would affect programs for poor Californians, although prisons and schools would take hits, as well.
“Government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.” He added: “You have to cut where the money is.”
In less than two weeks, the administration has gone from warning residents that a vote against the budget measures would send the state — some $24 billion in the red — into utter turmoil to sanguine acceptance that “the people have spoken” and that the government must move on.
And so it is that administration officials have been sent off to talk to the Legislature and hold conference calls about the latest proposed blows to state programs, while Mr. Schwarzenegger largely tends to other aspects of governing. He was in Livermore on Friday dedicating the world’s largest laser system (for sustaining nuclear fusion), and has updated his Twitter feed. “Backstage at the Tonight Show,” one tweet said.
The measures proposed by the administration to balance the budget, including the $2.8 billion in cuts outlined on Friday, are unlike any proposed to the state’s social services in a generation.
Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is threatening to eliminate the Healthy Family Program, the state’s health insurance program that covers over 900,000 children and is financed with state and federal money, as well as the state’s main welfare program, known as Cal-Works, which provides temporary financial assistance to poor families and a caregiver for the severely disabled.
The $1 billion in cuts to programs for the poor would be met with $680 million in new cuts to education and a 5 percent salary reduction for state employees, many of whom are already enduring furloughs.
These proposals, as well as those that would make cuts to state parks, the prison system and other state agencies, are winding their way through Sacramento now, where they will be voted on by committees and eventually the full Legislature.
Some of the proposed cuts are clearly saber rattling on the governor’s part, but there is a nervous acceptance among lawmakers, advocates for the poor and outside budget experts that the state is out of money and time.
If lawmakers sign off on closing the health insurance program for children whose families make too much to qualify for Medicaid, California would be the first state in the nation to close the popular program. Begun in 1997, the program, known as S-CHIP, reimburses states at a higher rate than for Medicaid to deliver health insurance to children and teenagers. With the cuts to Medicaid, the state would probably increase its number of uninsured people by nearly 2 million, the California Budget Project says.
“As the nation is debating how to move forward to provide broader health care coverage,” said Diane Rowland, the executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, “for a state to be scaling back coverage for children would be a major challenge. This program means a lot to working families. It is well run and well liked by people on both sides of the aisle.”
Further, the governor has gone after some spending not covered by mandates enacted by voters through ballot measures, a quirk of California budgeting that has helped create the mess the state is in.
“Certainly the programs that were targeted are not protected by the California Constitution or required by federal law,” said Jean Ross, the executive director of the California Budget Project, a left-leaning policy organization that analyzes the budget.
The Democratic-controlled Legislature has been uncharacteristically silent on most of the cuts, most likely because lawmakers know that tax increases are not politically palatable, that huge cuts in some form are in the offing no matter what, and that any program they wish to spare will quite likely have advocates among their ranks.
“There is no drawing lines in the sand,” said Alicia Trost, the spokeswoman for State Senator Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat and president pro tem. “Everyone knows we’re the majority, and we all know where we stand.”
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/31calif.html?th&emc=th
LOS ANGELES — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not get the election results he sought. Now he seems determined to show California voters the consequences.
In a special election on May 19, voters rejected a batch of measures on increasing taxes, borrowing funds and reapportioning state money that were designed to close a multibillion-dollar budget gap. The cuts Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed to make up the difference, if enacted by the Legislature, would turn California into a place that in some ways would be unrecognizable in modern America: poor children would have no health insurance, prisoners would be released by the thousands and state parks would be closed.
Nearly all of the billions of dollars in cuts the administration has proposed would affect programs for poor Californians, although prisons and schools would take hits, as well.
“Government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.” He added: “You have to cut where the money is.”
In less than two weeks, the administration has gone from warning residents that a vote against the budget measures would send the state — some $24 billion in the red — into utter turmoil to sanguine acceptance that “the people have spoken” and that the government must move on.
And so it is that administration officials have been sent off to talk to the Legislature and hold conference calls about the latest proposed blows to state programs, while Mr. Schwarzenegger largely tends to other aspects of governing. He was in Livermore on Friday dedicating the world’s largest laser system (for sustaining nuclear fusion), and has updated his Twitter feed. “Backstage at the Tonight Show,” one tweet said.
The measures proposed by the administration to balance the budget, including the $2.8 billion in cuts outlined on Friday, are unlike any proposed to the state’s social services in a generation.
Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is threatening to eliminate the Healthy Family Program, the state’s health insurance program that covers over 900,000 children and is financed with state and federal money, as well as the state’s main welfare program, known as Cal-Works, which provides temporary financial assistance to poor families and a caregiver for the severely disabled.
The $1 billion in cuts to programs for the poor would be met with $680 million in new cuts to education and a 5 percent salary reduction for state employees, many of whom are already enduring furloughs.
These proposals, as well as those that would make cuts to state parks, the prison system and other state agencies, are winding their way through Sacramento now, where they will be voted on by committees and eventually the full Legislature.
Some of the proposed cuts are clearly saber rattling on the governor’s part, but there is a nervous acceptance among lawmakers, advocates for the poor and outside budget experts that the state is out of money and time.
If lawmakers sign off on closing the health insurance program for children whose families make too much to qualify for Medicaid, California would be the first state in the nation to close the popular program. Begun in 1997, the program, known as S-CHIP, reimburses states at a higher rate than for Medicaid to deliver health insurance to children and teenagers. With the cuts to Medicaid, the state would probably increase its number of uninsured people by nearly 2 million, the California Budget Project says.
“As the nation is debating how to move forward to provide broader health care coverage,” said Diane Rowland, the executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, “for a state to be scaling back coverage for children would be a major challenge. This program means a lot to working families. It is well run and well liked by people on both sides of the aisle.”
Further, the governor has gone after some spending not covered by mandates enacted by voters through ballot measures, a quirk of California budgeting that has helped create the mess the state is in.
“Certainly the programs that were targeted are not protected by the California Constitution or required by federal law,” said Jean Ross, the executive director of the California Budget Project, a left-leaning policy organization that analyzes the budget.
The Democratic-controlled Legislature has been uncharacteristically silent on most of the cuts, most likely because lawmakers know that tax increases are not politically palatable, that huge cuts in some form are in the offing no matter what, and that any program they wish to spare will quite likely have advocates among their ranks.
“There is no drawing lines in the sand,” said Alicia Trost, the spokeswoman for State Senator Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat and president pro tem. “Everyone knows we’re the majority, and we all know where we stand.”
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