Latest News

"This would mean there would no longer be any national policy regarding sexual orientation, and the chartered organizations that oversee and deliver Scouting would accept membership and select leaders consistent with each organization's mission, principles, or religious beliefs," a spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America, Deron Smith, said in a statement.

Mr. Smith added: "The Boy Scouts would not, under any circumstances, dictate a position to units, members, or parents. Under this proposed policy, the BSA would not require any chartered organization to act in ways inconsistent with that organization's mission, principles, or religious beliefs." He said that members and parents would be able to choose a local unit that best meets the needs of their families.

Scouting, with its three-fingered salute and oath of honorable conduct, has for generations of boys and leaders held itself out as a place of high moral conduct and quasi-military upright bearing. Outdoor skills and experience were bound up, the organization preached, with the values of character. But revelations about sexual abuse by scout leaders, which have increasingly emerged in recent years with some victims and parents saying the organization shielded predators and tarnished the group's reputation as always protective of youth.

The ban on gay leaders created a kind of crosswind of criticism: Would removing the ban alienate tradition-minded families who might fear gay leaders and see them as potential abusers or boys? Or would lifting the ban attract a new generation of scouts whose families no longer feared gay leaders?

Meanwhile, a pressure for change was coming from within. A California chapter of the Boy Scouts of America, Reuters reported on Monday, is directly challenging the ban on gays by formally recommending that an openly gay former scout be awarded the top rank of Eagle.

"The sole purpose of those AR-15s or AK-47s is to put a lot of lead out on the battlefield quickly, and that's what they do and that's what they did at Sandy Hook Elementary School," said the father, Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, was a victim. Mr. Heslin told lawmakers that he had grown up around guns and was the son of an avid hunter, but that he believed there was no reason any citizen should have an assault-style weapon like the one used to kill his son.

"That wasn't just a killing; that was a massacre," he said. "Those children and those victims were shot apart. And my son was one of them."

But opinions at the capital were split, with gun control proponents and opponents lining up by the hundreds to get into the hearing and holding competing news conferences. The families did not speak with one voice, either.

Mark Mattioli, whose son James, 6, was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, said: "I believe in a few simple gun laws. I think we have more than enough on the books. We should hold people individually accountable for their actions."

"The problem is not gun laws," he added. "The problem is a lack of civility."

Mr. Mattioli said he also thought some liberals were using the attack in Newtown to spread fear on gun issues.

The hearing, one of several scheduled by the legislature's Bipartisan Task Force on Gun Violence Prevention and Children's Safety, was scheduled to continue all day. More than 1,300 people, including family members, gun control advocates, gun rights advocates and gun industry representatives, had signed up to testify, although it was not clear how many would get the chance. The task force hopes to have legislation prepared for passage by the end of February.

Outside the building, people braved frigid temperatures and driving snow to wait for hours to pass through metal detectors, part of the heightened security measures for the hearing. Women from groups like March for Change and One Million Moms for Gun Control, which are calling for stricter gun laws, stood among burly men wearing hunting jackets and National Rifle Association hats. The crowd remained mostly civil except for occasional shouting matches when people had cut in line.

Gun rights supporters clearly outnumbered those in favor of more gun control. One man carried a sign reading: "Gun Control Does Not Make You Safer." Another wore a jacket that said "N.R.A. Empowerment Member."

David Gentry, a personal trainer from Stamford, wore a holster on his waist with a copy of the Constitution tucked in it. "I just feel that's where the conversation should start," he said.

Mr. Gentry, a father of two, said he was saddened by the Newtown massacre but also worried about "knee-jerk reactions" to it. Immediately after the attack, he said, he renewed his N.R.A. membership, which had lapsed, bought four N.R.A. T-shirts and decided to attend the hearing on Monday to oppose stricter gun proposals.

"There are things we can do in this country to help secure our children and improve firearms safety," he said. "Better training, securing firearms, yet not making them unaccessible to authorized owners."

He added that he was outraged that Nancy Lanza, whose son Adam killed her at home and the 20 children and 6 adults at the school, had not locked her weapons in a safe, keeping them out of his hands.

Kori Hammel, a musician and mother from Stratford, came with March for Change. For many, like Ms. Hammel, this was their first foray into the gun-control debate.

"Sandy Hook was 10 minutes from where I grew up," she said. "I just can't act like everything is O.K."

Wendy Skratt, who was also there with the group, looked around the line and noted how outnumbered they were, both as gun control advocates and women.

"I know I'm not in the minority when it comes to owning a gun," said Ms. Skratt, a Stamford mother of two. "Only 17 percent of people in Connecticut own a gun. Hopefully more non-gun owners will come out. Unfortunately, the N.R.A. is a powerful force."

Inside the hearing room, gun rights supporters wore round yellow stickers reading "Another Responsible Gun Owner." People on the other side of the issue wore green ribbons, which have become a symbol of the Newtown tragedy.

The announcement that no senior official in President Obama's second term will succeed Mr. Fried in working primarily on diplomatic issues aimed at repatriating or resettling detainees appeared to signal that the administration does not currently see the closing of the Guantánamo Bay prison as a realistic priority, despite repeated statements that it still intends to do so.

Mr. Fried will become the department's coordinator for sanctions policy and will work on issues including Iran and Syria.

The announcement came as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other Guantánamo Bay detainees facing death penalty charges before a military tribunal over the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made their first public appearance since October on Monday, sitting quietly in a high-security courtroom at the naval base in Cuba as pretrial hearings resumed. A closed-circuit feed of the proceedings was also shown at Fort Meade.

Mr. Mohammed, with a red-dyed beard and turban, wore a camouflage jacket over white garb. All five detainees spoke briefly in telling the judge, Col. James Pohl of the Army, that they understood their right not to attend future days of the hearing. Only one detainee, Walid bin Attash, spoke further, complaining through an interpreter that the defendants were not motivated to attend because "the prosecution does not want us to hear or understand or say anything."

The session mainly focused on technical matters like nuances in an order governing the handling of classified information. Toward the end of the day, the video feed was interrupted for nearly a minute. It was not clear why the censorship button had been pushed; Colonel Pohl appeared upset and said no classified information had been discussed. Later this week, he is scheduled to take up a defense motion asking him to order the government to preserve evidence at any still-existing "black site" prisons where the Central Intelligence Agency previously held and interrogated the detainees.

Mr. Fried's special envoy position was created by the Obama administration in early 2009, shortly after Mr. Obama took office and promised to close the military prison in his first year. Mr. Fried spent several years traveling the world overseeing the repatriation of low-level detainees and persuading other countries to resettle detainees who had been cleared for release but who could not be sent home.

But the flow of detainees out of Guantánamo has slowed almost to a halt as Congress has imposed a series of restrictions on transfers, leaving Mr. Fried with less to do. He was eventually assigned to work on resettling a group of Iranian exiles who were members of a group known as the M.E.K. in a refugee camp in Iraq, in addition to his Guantánamo duties.

Besides barring the transfer of any detainees into the United States for prosecution or continued detention, lawmakers prohibited transferring them to other countries with troubled security conditions, like Yemen or Sudan. In the most recent defense authorization act, enacted late last year, lawmakers extended those restrictions and expanded them to cover even detainees scheduled to be repatriated under a plea deal with military prosecutors.

Mr. Obama had threatened to veto the bill, but instead he signed it while issuing a signing statement claiming that he had the constitutional power, as commander in chief, to lawfully override such statutory restrictions on the handling of wartime prisoners. Mr. Obama's intentions were not clear, however, even to internal administration officials.

Last July, before the latest statute, the Pentagon repatriated a Sudanese man, Ibrahim al Qosi, after he pleaded guilty before a tribunal to conspiracy and supporting terrorism and served out his sentence as part of a deal. Another Sudanese man who pleaded guilty to similar charges, Noor Uthman Muhammed, is scheduled to be repatriated in about a year. There is now doubt, however, about whether the military can live up to its agreement with him.

In recent months, the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia has vacated guilty verdicts by tribunals against two other detainees convicted of similar charges — the only two detainees to date to be convicted after a trial, rather than through a plea deal — because the offenses were not international war crimes.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. decided to continue arguing in court that it was lawful to bring such charges before a military commission. That has led to a growing split between the administration and Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, the chief prosecutor of the tribunals, who objected to that decision and unsuccessfully sought permission to withdraw conspiracy from the list of charges against the Sept. 11 defendants.

On Sunday, on the eve of the hearing, General Martins addressed recent coverage of the split in The New York Times. He argued that any disagreement was a good thing because it showed that tribunal officials were not "moving in lock step," but rather were independent, which, he argued, "if anything bolsters, rather than undermines, confidence in the military commissions system."

DALLAS (Reuters) - Boy Scouts of America is discussing ending a longstanding ban on gay members and whether to allow local organizations to decide their own policy, a spokesman said on Monday.

The organization has been under attack from gay rights groups and some parents for discriminating against gay members and gay leaders.

"The BSA is discussing potentially removing the national membership restriction regarding sexual orientation," spokesman Deron Smith said in an email to Reuters.

"The policy change under discussion would allow the religious, civic or educational organizations that oversee and deliver Scouting to determine how to address this issue," the spokesman said.

(Writing by Greg McCune; Editing by Paul Thomasch)

The official accounts did not make clear how many journalists had been arrested, the precise nature of the accusations against them or when they might be formally charged. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a media advocacy group based in New York, said at least 11 journalists had been seized, calling it the largest crackdown on Iranian media since the unrest that swept the country four years ago.

Accounts by the Mehr news agency and other official news outlets said many of the journalists had been taken into custody on Sunday after the raids on the outlets, all of which are regarded as reform-minded. One of the newspapers, Etemad, is close to a former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and had been raided the previous day as well.

None of the arrests were reported by the raided organizations themselves. Some Iranian journalists said the omissions appeared to reflect fears of further antagonizing the Revolutionary Guards and affiliated security forces whose loyalties lie with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Mehr news agency said the arrested journalists had been accused of "collaborating with some of the Persian-language foreign media" — apparently an allusion to the Persian services of both the BBC and the Voice of America. The Fars news agency, without citing any sources, said the suspects had tried to contact the foreign media and had sought training on photography and filming with cellphone cameras. "Moreover, they wanted to learn how to assemble the pieces and send them to the BBC," Fars said.

The Iranian Students' News Agency quoted the culture minister, Mohammad Hosseini, as saying none of the accusations were media-related.

"We are investigating this issue and once we have more information, we will inform the media," he was quoted as saying. "It seems that these individuals have been arrested for security reasons."

But Sherif Mansour, the program coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa for the Committee to Protect Journalists, assailed the raids, saying, "With this wave of arrests, the authorities appear to be attempting to pre-emptively silence independent news coverage ahead of the presidential elections in June."

Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, an advocacy group based in New York, said the arrests came against the backdrop of increased political tensions in Iran over the upcoming presidential elections and Ayatollah Khamenei's wish to avoid a repeat of the mayhem that followed the disputed 2009 campaign, which reformist candidates said was rigged in favor of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Although the next vote is five months away, Ayatollah Khamenei and his subordinates have been warning that Iran's domestic and foreign enemies will use the campaign to foment discord in attempts to subvert the Islamist government that has been in power since the 1979 revolution.

"There is a lot of nervousness in the regime, including a lot of infighting," Mr. Ghaemi said. "This is the beginning of an attempt to have a very controlled and quiet election coming up, and not result in any popular outbursts."

News organizations in Iran that are regarded as reformist, he said, "were the easiest to quiet down."

Some political infighting in Iran broke into the open last week with the disputed dismissal of the central bank governor, a move that appeared to precipitate a roughly 10 percent drop in the value of the rial, the national currency, already weakened from what government critics call economic mismanagement and the effects of Western sanctions on Iran.

Cliff Kupchan, an Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm in Washington, said it appeared that Iran's acute economic problems have increasingly unsettled Ayatollah Khamenei by raising the possibility of instability. Mr. Kupchan said the ayatollah's worries may have been reflected in a Jan. 15 statement by the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Nasser Shabani, that economic troubles could cause regional unrest.

"Currently, the state of the economy is a national security issue, and it is very likely that Khamenei and his apparatus, the office of the leader, have become directly involved in major economic decisions," Mr. Kupchan wrote Monday in an advisory to clients. He wrote that Mr. Khamenei's goals are likely twofold: "broker elite compromise and unity, and protect the poor who have been hit hard by inflation and a possible source of unrest."