Latest News

Mr. Brennan, who has wielded tremendous power as the president's top White House counterterrorism adviser, is expected to face occasionally sharp questioning on a range of topics: from the drone campaign in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere to his role in the Bush administration's detention and interrogation program carried out while he was a top official at the C.I.A.

The hearing comes just days after the leak of a Justice Department document explaining the legal rationale for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who had joined Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was killed in Yemen in September 2011. Mr. Brennan, a former C.I.A. station chief in Saudi Arabia, has been central to the Obama administration's clandestine war inside Yemen.

Pressured by members of Congress in the days before the hearing, the White House on Wednesday ordered the Justice Department to provide the Congressional Intelligence Committees with the formal, classified memos that provide the legal justification for the killing of Mr. Awlaki and other American citizens overseas who are considered terrorists. The Obama administration had previously refused to give lawmakers the full memos, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

Because so much of the targeted killing program remains shrouded in secrecy, however, it is unclear how much the Senate Intelligence Committee will press Mr. Brennan for detailed answers about the program during the public session, or whether it will wait until the additional "closed hearing" that is routine for the confirmation hearings of C.I.A. directors.

If he returns to the C.I.A. as its director, he will inherit an agency that has changed drastically in the years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with a new focus on hunting down terrorists that has led some to say that the agency has strayed too far from its traditional mission of foreign espionage and analysis.

In his responses to questions posed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in advance of the hearing, Mr. Brennan hinted that he shared some of these concerns. For instance, he said that the agency's performance in anticipating and analyzing the tumult in the Arab world since 2011 shows "that the C.I.A. needs to improve its capabilities and its performance still further."

Mr. Brennan is widely expected to be confirmed by the Senate, as senators from both parties have expressed their support for his candidacy and lawmakers have generally approved of the Obama administration's aggressive use of drone strikes overseas.

Mr. Brennan, 57, was first exposed to the Middle East while he was a student at Fordham University and spent a year abroad at the American University of Cairo studying Arabic. His 1980 master's thesis at the University of Texas was called "Human Rights: A Case Study of Egypt." That year, after spotting a newspaper ad recruiting for the C.I.A., he joined the agency.

He served as a Middle East analyst, as a briefer for President Bill Clinton and as station chief in Saudi Arabia from 1996 to 1999, forming relationships with Saudi officials whom he would later consult constantly about Yemen. By the end of the 1990s, he was serving as chief of staff to the director, George J. Tenet, and when terrorists struck in 2001 he was deputy to the agency's third-ranking official.

He was in charge of the creation of the agency now called the National Counterterrorism Center, founded at the urging of the national commission on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He left the government in 2005 for a lucrative job running an intelligence contracting firm, the Analysis Corporation, that worked closely with his government security agencies.

Mr. Brennan was an early supporter of Mr. Obama in 2008, though the men did not meet until after the election. Though he was a leading candidate for C.I.A. director, he withdrew from consideration for the post, citing what he considered to be unfair criticism from human rights advocates for his role as a senior agency official when it was using brutal interrogation methods.

The shooting happened early Thursday morning in the Los Angeles suburb of Corona. The wounded officer is in surgery. A third officer suffered a graze wound.

Two Newton station officers on security duty in the same area were also involved in a shooting overnight, but they weren't hurt, police said.

Former Los Angeles police officer Christopher Jordan Dorner is the suspect who's wanted in the killings of Monica Quan and her fiancé, Keith Lawrence, who were found shot to death in their car at a parking structure Sunday night, Irvine police Chief David L. Maggard said at a news conference Wednesday night.

Dorner, 33, implicated himself in the killings with a multi-page "manifesto" that he wrote that included threats against several people, including members of the LAPD, police said. They gave no further details on the document or its contents.

Autopsies showed that Quan and Lawrence were killed by multiple gunshot wounds in the parking structure at their condominium in Irvine, Orange County sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino said earlier Wednesday.

Quan, 28, was an assistant women's basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton. Lawrence, 27, was a public safety officer at the University of Southern California.

The killings brought mourning and disbelief at three college campuses, Fullerton, USC, and Concordia University, where the two met when they were both students and basketball players.

Police do not know Dorner's whereabouts, and authorities were seeking the public's help in finding him.

"We have strong cause to believe Dorner is armed and dangerous," Maggard said, adding that the LAPD and FBI are assisting in the case.

Police said the U.S. Navy reservist may be driving a blue 2005 Nissan Titan pickup truck. His last known address was in La Palma in northern Orange County near Fullerton.

Dorner was with the department from 2005 until 2008, when he was fired for making false statements.

Quan's father, a former LAPD captain who became a lawyer in retirement, represented Dorner in front of the Board of Rights, a tribunal that ruled against Dorner at the time of his dismissal, LAPD Capt. William Hayes told The Associated Press Wednesday night.

Randal Quan retired in 2002. He later served as chief of police at Cal Poly Pomona before he started practicing law.

According to documents from a court of appeals hearing in October 2011, Dorner was fired from the LAPD after he made a complaint against his field training officer, Sgt. Teresa Evans. Dorner said that in the course of an arrest, Evans kicked suspect Christopher Gettler, a schizophrenic with severe dementia.

Following an investigation, Dorner was fired for making false statements.

Richard Gettler, the schizophrenic man's father, gave testimony that supported Dorner's claim. After his son was returned on July 28, 2007, Richard Gettler asked "if he had been in a fight because his face was puffy" and his son responded that he was kicked twice in the chest by a police officer.

The first sign of trouble is likely to be flurries early Friday morning. That is when a large low pressure system will be making its way north, gathering moisture as it moves toward the Northeast.

In 1974 Thomas Nagel published "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?," a short essay arguing that the subjective experience of consciousness — what philosophers call the "qualia" — could not be fully reduced to the physical aspects of the brain.

That essay framed a landmark challenge to the materialist view of the mind that was then prevailing and helped cement Mr. Nagel's reputation as one of the most incisive and imaginative of contemporary philosophers.

But since the late October release of his latest book, "Mind and Cosmos," reviewers have given Mr. Nagel ample cause to ponder another question: What is it like to be an eminent (and avowedly atheist) philosopher accused of giving aid and comfort to creationist enemies of science?

Advocates of intelligent design have certainly been enthusiastic, with the Discovery Institute crowing about Mr. Nagel's supposed "deconversion" from Darwinism. The book, subtitled "Why the Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False," has also drawn appreciative notice from conservative publications that might normally disdain Mr. Nagel's liberal writings in moral and political philosophy.

The response from scientists and most of his fellow philosophers, however, has ranged from deeply skeptical to scorching.

Before publication the philosophers Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg set the tone with a long demolition in The Nation, prompting the Harvard psychologist (and arch-Darwinian) Steven Pinker to dismiss the book on Twitter as "the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker." More measured but no less critical reviews have followed, including assessments last month in The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books. The Guardian named "Mind and Cosmos" the "most despised science book of 2012." Even the more tolerant responses have tended to come with headlines like "Thomas Nagel Is Not Crazy."

So far Mr. Nagel, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University and a fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has not responded publicly to his critics, and declined to answer questions about the book and its reception submitted via e-mail. But some of his supporters paint him as the victim of an ideological pile-on.

"He is questioning a certain kind of orthodoxy, and they are responding in the way the orthodox respond," said Alva Noë, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, who gave the book a rare positive, if not uncritical, notice on NPR's Web site.

To others, however, the vigorous response reflects the fact that even the best-supported science, empirically speaking, is still enmeshed in unsettled metaphysical questions.

"Nagel always make a formidable arguments, even when he's wrong," said Jim Holt, the author of "Why Does the World Exist?," a recent best seller about efforts by philosophers and cosmologists to explain the origins of the universe. "Here he's pointing out that there are important things in the world we live in, as opposed to the scientific image of the world, that science pretends to have a grasp of but doesn't."

"Mind and Cosmos," weighing in at 128 closely argued pages, is hardly a barn-burning polemic. But in his cool style Mr. Nagel extends his ideas about consciousness into a sweeping critique of the modern scientific worldview, which he calls a "heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense." Consciousness, meaning and moral value, he argues, aren't just incidental features of life on earth, but fundamental aspects of the universe. Instead of random evolution Mr. Nagel sees the unfolding of a "cosmic predisposition."

Such ideas are anathema to modern evolutionary theorists. Mr. Nagel calls for an entirely new kind of science, one based on what he calls "natural teleology" — a tendency for the universe to produce certain outcomes, like consciousness, but without any help from a Godlike agent.

To many reviewers, however, including some who have themselves been critical of efforts to find Darwinian explanations for all aspects of human behavior, Mr. Nagel's own arguments fail to grapple with some well-established scientific facts.

After all, they argue, the evolutionary record shows plenty of lineages moving from complex structures to simpler ones, to say nothing of extinction — both of which throw cold water on the notion of teleology. As for Mr. Nagel's "untutored reaction of incredulity" (as he himself puts it in the book) that random evolution could have produced conscious beings capable, say, of doing science and philosophy in the 3.8 billion years since life on earth began, some point out that he fails to consider the vast size and age of the universe and the likelihood that consciousness might have emerged somewhere, at some time.

"I wouldn't criticize him for not knowing a lot of details about evolutionary biology," said Elliott Sober, a philosopher of biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was highly critical of "Mind and Cosmos" in Boston Review. But Mr. Nagel's arguments, he continued, are marred by flawed reasoning about probability: "He sees the origins of life and consciousness as remarkable facts which had to have had a high probability of happening. I don't buy that."

The fiercest criticism, however, has come from people who fault Mr. Nagel not just for the specifics of his arguments but also for what they see as a dangerous sympathy for intelligent design.

"The book is going to have pernicious real-world effects," said Mr. Leiter, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, who has frequently chided Mr. Nagel on his widely read blog. He added, "It's going to be used as a weapon to do damage to the education of biology students."

It's a charge Mr. Nagel has met with before. In 2009 he caused a furor when he praised Stephen C. Meyer's "Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design" in The Times Literary Supplement of London. This came hot on the heels of Mr. Nagel's 2008 scholarly article criticizing the federal court decision, in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, banning the teaching of intelligent design in public school biology classes. ("The political urge to defend science education against the threats of religious orthodoxy, understandable though it may be," Mr. Nagel wrote, "has resulted in a counter-orthodoxy, supported by bad arguments.")

Mr. Nagel's depiction of a universe "gradually waking up" through the emergence of consciousness can sound oddly mystical — the atheist analytic philosopher's version of "spiritual, not religious." And even some readers who admire Mr. Nagel's philosophical boldness see a very fuzzy line between his natural teleology and the creator God of theists like the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (who reviewed Mr. Nagel's book favorably in The New Republic, throwing more red meat to his detractors).

In his conclusion Mr. Nagel declares that the present "right-thinking consensus" on evolution "will come to seem laughable in a generation or two." But few of his colleagues seem to see much sign that a radical paradigm shift is imminent, let alone necessary.

"It's perfectly fair game for philosophers to say scientists are wrong about stuff," Mr. Sober said. "Everything depends on whether the arguments are good."

"Tom is a provocative philosopher, and his book will interest people," he continued. But when it comes to changing actual science, he said, "it's a hiccup."

Federal regulators said on Wednesday that they had approved one flight of a Boeing 787, with a flight crew but no passengers, as the company's engineers study possible changes to the plane's electrical systems that could reduce the risk of another battery fire.

The flight would be the first for a 787 since aviation authorities grounded the innovative aircraft last month after two incidents with its lithium-ion batteries. The Federal Aviation Administration said it would let Boeing return one 787 from a painting plant in Fort Worth to its plant near Seattle. It has not yet approved flights to conduct tests on the batteries.

The flight, scheduled for Thursday, will come as the National Transportation Safety Board is expected to raise questions about how the F.A.A. certified the 787's battery before it began flying passengers in 2011. The safety board, which has been performing tests of its own as part of its investigation into the battery problems, is seeking to find out why weaknesses with the batteries were not picked up in Boeing's original testing program.

The safety board is looking at whether the F.A.A. fully understood any potential issues with the volatile new batteries before it approved their use under special conditions.

Deborah Hersman, the safety board's chairman, told reporters on Wednesday that it would probably take investigators several more weeks to determine what happened with the Boeing batteries.

Boeing engineers are working on a range of possible technical overhauls. These include making the battery cells more resistant to shocks to keep excess heat from spreading from one cell to another, causing the kind of thermal runaway that occurred in the two recent events. Boeing officials have said they are also working on building more solid containment cases and better venting mechanisms in the event of overheating.

None of this has been tested or approved yet, a process that could take months. And until more is known about the cause of the recent incidents, the grounding order is unlikely to be lifted soon.

The 787 is the first commercial airplane to use large lithium-ion batteries for major flight functions. All 50 of Boeing's 787s that were delivered to airlines have been grounded since mid-January.

"I would not want to categorically say that these batteries are not safe," Ms. Hersman said during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday. "Any new technology, any new design, there are going to be some inherent risks. The important thing is to mitigate them."

Boeing officials said that they were exploring numerous ways to strengthen the batteries and that it was premature to think any of those would be approved by regulators without more information.

Boeing officials said they remained confident that they could keep using the lithium-ion batteries, and they hoped that finding a way to strengthen the batteries might allow them to do so. But officials said the company also had a team of engineers working on alternatives involving more conventional batteries in case regulators banned them.

Boeing picked the new lithium-ion technology because it provided more power than traditional batteries of the same size. But battery experts have questioned their use because, under certain conditions, they can overheat and ignite.

The F.A.A.'s decision to certify the batteries has come under scrutiny in recent weeks. While the federal regulator is stretched thin with too few inspectors, and typically relies on testing data from Boeing, lithium batteries are an area where the agency has some expertise. It has had to deal for years with fires involving lithium-ion batteries shipped as cargo or carried by passengers in their computers or cellphones.

Ms. Hersman will provide an update on Thursday on the investigation's process. But while she said the safety board was in a position to rule out some problems, it was unlikely to be able to say what happened for some time.

She said that she would not rule out the use of lithium batteries "categorically," but insisted that the safeguards Boeing had put in place failed when a Japan Airlines plane experienced a fire while parked at Logan Airport in Boston.

"Obviously what we saw in the 787 battery fire in Boston shows us there were some risks that were not mitigated, that were not addressed," she said. She added that the fire was "not what we would have expected to see in a brand-new battery in a brand-new airplane."

The safety board, she said, was also examining the special conditions the F.A.A. ordered Boeing to follow in using the batteries and whether they should have been updated later.

The F.A.A.'s conditions were fairly general, and required Boeing to create the means to contain any fire or vent any smoke to keep it from spreading into the cabin and putting the plane at risk if a battery failed.

"What happens is that when an aircraft is certified it basically gets locked into the standards that were in existence at the time," Ms. Hersman said.

The fleet's grounding is not affected by the one-time F.A.A. permit and no one except crew members will be allowed on board the plane from Fort Worth. The plane, which still belongs to Boeing, was scheduled to be delivered to China Southern Airlines.

The F.A.A. said that before takeoff, the Boeing crew should perform a number of inspections to verify that the batteries and cables showed no signs of damage. While airborne, the crew must also "continuously monitor the flight computer for battery-related messages, and land immediately if one occurs," the F.A.A. said.

The White House announcement appears to refer to a long, detailed 2010 memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel justifying the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who had joined Al Qaeda in Yemen. He was killed in a C.I.A. drone strike in September 2011. Members of Congress have long demanded access to the legal memorandum.

The decision to release the legal memos to the intelligence committees came under pressure, two days after a bipartisan group of 11 senators joined a growing chorus asking for more information about the legal justification for targeted killings, especially of Americans. The announcement also came on the eve of the confirmation hearing scheduled for Thursday for John O. Brennan, President Obama's choice to be director of the C.I.A. As Mr. Obama's counterterrorism adviser, Mr. Brennan has been the chief architect of the drone program, and he is expected to be closely questioned about it at the hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Critics noted that in 2009, Mr. Obama had ordered the public release of the classified memos governing C.I.A. interrogations under President George W. Bush and accused Mr. Obama of hypocrisy. Administration officials replied that the so-called enhanced interrogations had been stopped, while drone strikes continue.

Until Wednesday night, the administration had refused to even officially acknowledge the existence of the documents, which have been reported about in the press. This week, NBC News obtained an unclassified, shorter legal memo, described as a "white paper," that officials said described the legal framework that officials follow in using the drones.

Administration officials said Mr. Obama had decided to take the action — which they described as extraordinary — out of a desire to involve Congress in the development of the legal framework for the use of drones. Aides noted that Mr. Obama had made a pledge to do that during an appearance on "The Daily Show" last year.

"Today, as part of the president's ongoing commitment to consult with Congress on national security matters, the president directed the Department of Justice to provide the congressional Intelligence committees access to classified Office of Legal Counsel advice related to the subject of the Department of Justice White Paper," the administration official said.

The official said that members of the intelligence committees would now get "access" to the documents. It remained unclear what kind of access that would be.

Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the president's move "a small step in the right direction." But he noted that the legal memo or memos were not being shared with either of the armed services committees, which have jurisdiction over Pentagon strikes, or the judiciary committees, which oversee the Justice Department.

The public should be permitted to see at least a redacted version of the relevant memos, Mr. Anders said. "Everyone has a right to know when the government believes it can kill Americans and others," he said.

The Congressional intelligence committees were created in the late 1970s to exercise oversight after a series of scandals at the spy agencies. The law requires that the committees be kept informed of intelligence activities. But most administrations withhold at least some legal opinions, treating them as confidential legal advice to the president and agency officials.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, had proposed a clause for the annual intelligence authorization bill requiring that legal opinions on relevant matters be routinely shared with the committees. But the White House objected, and the measure was dropped from the bill.

Four secretaries of defense served as enlisted men before being promoted. Chuck Hagel, left, would be the only Pentagon chief to have served his entire military career as an enlisted man.

The problem is that at least four other American defense secretaries — Melvin R. Laird, Elliot L. Richardson, Caspar W. Weinberger and William J. Perry — served part of their military careers as enlisted men.

According to the Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Laird, who was President Richard M. Nixon's first defense secretary, entered the Navy as an enlisted man before serving as a junior officer on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II. Mr. Richardson, who served four months as Nixon's second defense secretary, enlisted in the Army as a private in 1942. He was subsequently commissioned as an officer, and as a first lieutenant landed with the Fourth Infantry Division in Normandy on D-Day.

Mr. Weinberger, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of defense, entered the Army as a private in 1941, was commissioned and served in the Pacific, and by the end of World War II was a captain on Gen. Douglas A. McArthur's intelligence staff.

According to biographies on the Web site of Stanford University, Mr. Perry, who was defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, served in the Army Corps of Engineers from 1946 to 1947 and was in Japan during the American occupation after World War II. He later became an officer in the Army Reserves. Today, Mr. Perry is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford.

Mr. Obama's omission of the four other defense secretaries was first reported by Robert Burns of The Associated Press.

White House officials insisted that Mr. Obama was not in error. "President Obama was precise and accurate in referring to the fact that Senator Hagel would be the 'first person of enlisted rank' to go on to serve as secretary of defense, and that experience on the front lines is part of the reason why President Obama chose him," said Marie Harf, a White House spokeswoman who is working on Mr. Hagel's nomination.

As Ms. Harf explained it, the use of the formulation "first person of enlisted rank" was meant to signal that Mr. Hagel had remained enlisted throughout his entire military career and to separate him from the other men, who had retired as officers. Mr. Hagel, who was wounded twice in Vietnam, would be the first defense secretary to have served in combat while enlisted. To Mr. Obama that distinction, at least, is crucial.

"Chuck knows that war is not a distraction," Mr. Obama said in nominating Mr. Hagel. "He understands that sending young Americans to fight and bleed in the dirt and mud, that's something we do only when it's absolutely necessary."