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US Announces New Iran Sanctions

Posted by Aam February 6, 2013 0 comments
The United States blacklisted Iran's state broadcasting authority, Internet-policing agencies and a major electronics producer on Wednesday, an action that widened the American sanctions effort to pressure the Iranian government over not only its disputed nuclear program but also over the stifling of domestic dissent and access to information.
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A statement by the Treasury Department also announced the formal start of tightened restrictions, under a law passed last year, meant to severely inhibit Iran's already weakened ability to repatriate earnings from the sale of oil, its most important export.
David S. Cohen, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, who oversees the sanctions effort, said the actions were meant to "intensify the economic pressure against the Iranian regime."
He said, "We will also target those in Iran who are responsible for human rights abuses, especially those who deny the Iranian people their basic freedoms of expression, assembly and speech."
The new sanctions targeted Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, which is responsible for broadcast policy in Iran and oversees production at Iranian television and radio channels. Its director, Ezzatollah Zarghami, was included in the action.
Also targeted were the Iranian Cyber Police, which the Treasury Department described as an authority created three years ago to filter Web sites, monitor Internet behavior and hack into e-mail accounts of Iranians deemed to be subversive; and the Communications Regulatory Authority, which the Treasury Department described as an enforcer of Internet filtering and the blocking of Web sites deemed objectionable by the Iranian government.
In addition, the Treasury targeted Iran Electronics Industries, a producer of electronic systems and products, which the Treasury said was responsible for "goods and services related to jamming, monitoring and eavesdropping."
Under American sanctions laws, any United States property held by blacklisted companies and individuals is impounded, and they are prohibited from engaging in any transactions with American citizens.
Iran has been hurt by the accumulation of economic sanctions over the nuclear program, which the Iranians contend is for peaceful purposes despite suspicions by others, notably the United States, European Union and Israel, that the program is intended to give Iran the ability to make nuclear weapons. Talks on resolving the dispute, which have been stalled for more than six months, are set to resume in Kazakhstan on Feb. 26.
Iranian rights activists have a mixed view on the sanctions, which have halved Iran's oil exports, frozen the country out of the international banking system and caused a steep slide in the value of Iran's currency, the rial. Some activists worry that the consequences are hurting ordinary Iranians more than the country's leaders.
"While we are very much concerned about comprehensive economic sanctions that impact the livelihoods and well-being of average Iranian citizens, we welcome targeted sanctions against human rights violators and entities engaged in implementing repressive policies and censorship," said Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based advocacy group. "In particular, the sanctions against IRIB are important because this entity is a leading institution in restricting flow of information and is directly implicated in human rights abuses."

Postal Service Plans to End Saturday Delivery

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Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A postal worker delivered mail in San Francisco last year.


WASHINGTON — The Postal Service is expected to announce on Wednesday morning that it will stop delivering letters and other mail on Saturdays, but continue to handle packages, a move the financially struggling agency said would save about $2 billion annually as it looks for ways to cut cost.
The agency has long sought Congressional approval to end mail delivery on Saturdays. But Congress, which continues to work on legislation to reform the agency, has resisted. It is unclear how the agency will be able to end the six-day delivery of mail without Congressional approval.
News of the move was first reported by CBS News.
The announcement, which is expected at a Wednesday morning news conference, comes as the agency continues to lose money, mainly due to a 2006 law which requires it to pay about $5.5 billion a year into a future retiree health benefit fund. Last year, for the first time, the agency defaulted on two payments after it had reached its borrowing limit from the Treasury Department. The Postal Service also continues to see a decline in mail volume as more people shift to electronic forms of communication like e-mail and online bill paying services. Packaging is one of the few areas where the agency is seeing growth.
While many business and postal unions have generally opposed ending Saturday delivery, most Americans support the move.
A New York Times/CBS News poll last year found that about 7 in 10 Americans say they would favor the change as a way to help the post office deal with billions of dollars in debt. The Postal Service continues to suffer losses of $36 million a day and is headed for projected losses of about $21 billion a year by 2016. Last year, the Postal Service had a net loss of $15.6 billion.
The American Postal Workers Union, which represents about 220,000 workers and retirees, said the plan to end six-day delivery will add to the agency's financial problems.
"The A.P.W.U. condemns the Postal Service's decision to eliminate Saturday mail delivery, which will only deepen the agency's congressionally manufactured financial crisis," said Cliff Guffey, president of the union.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 6, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the news organization that first reported the Postal Service's plans to end Saturday service. It was CBS News, not The Associated Press.

Boy Scouts Delay Decision on Admitting Gays

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The Boy Scouts of America put off a decision Wednesday on whether to lift its ban on gay members and leaders, saying the question will be taken up at the organization's national meeting in May.
"After careful consideration and extensive dialogue within the Scouting family, along with comments from those outside the organization, the volunteer officers of the Boy Scouts of America's National Executive Board concluded that due to the complexity of this issue, the organization needs time for a more deliberate review of its membership policy," Deron Smith, the BSA director of public relations, said in a statement.
Smith said the organization's national executive board will prepare a resolution for the 1,400 voting members of the national council to consider. The annual meeting will take place in May, 2013, in Grapevine, Texas.
BSA announced last week it was considering allowing troops to decide whether to allow gay membership. That news has placed a spotlight on executive board meetings that began Monday in Irving, Texas, where scouting headquarters is located.
Smith said last week that the board could take a vote Wednesday or decide to discuss the policy, but that the organization would issue a statement either way. Otherwise, the board has remained silent, with reporters barred from the hotel where its meetings are taking place.
At nearby BSA headquarters, a handful of Scouts and leaders delivered petitions Monday in support of letting gay members join. The conservative group Texas Values, meanwhile, had organized a Wednesday morning prayer vigil urging the Scouts to keep their policy the same.
President Barack Obama, an opponent of the policy, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, an Eagle Scout who supports it, both have weighed in.
"My attitude is that gays and lesbians should have access and opportunity the same way everybody else does in every institution and walk of life," said Obama, who as U.S. president is the honorary president of BSA, in a Sunday interview with CBS.
Perry, the author of the book "On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For," said in a speech Saturday that "to have popular culture impact 100 years of their standards is inappropriate."
The board faces several choices, none of which is likely to quell controversy. Standing pat would go against the public wishes of two high-profile board members — Ernst & Young CEO James Turley and AT&T Inc. CEO Randall Stephenson — who run companies with nondiscrimination policies and have said they would work from within to change the Scouts' policy.
Conservatives have warned of mass defections if Scouting allows gay membership to be determined by troops. Local and regional leaders, as well as the leadership of churches that sponsor troops, would be forced to consider their own policies. And policy opponents who delivered four boxes of signatures to BSA headquarters Monday said they wouldn't be satisfied by only a partial acceptance of gay scouts and leaders.
"We don't want to see Scouting gerrymandered into blue and red districts," said Brad Hankins, campaign director of Scouts for Equality.

Raids in Britain, France and Belgium Focus on Smugglers of People

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Immigration authorities in Britain, Belgium and France carried out coordinated raids at scores of addresses on Wednesday to round up people suspected of being members of gangs that smuggle people across or under the English Channel as stowaways in long-haul trucks.
The raids by 150 law enforcement officials in Britain alone represented "one of the biggest operations of its kind ever undertaken," said Chris Foster, a senior investigator with the United Kingdom Border Agency.
People-smuggling offers organized gangs potentially rich pickings as desperate migrants from troubled lands including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan pay up to $10,000 each to be spirited past Britain's strict border controls and across physical barriers, particularly the 22-mile-wide English Channel.
Trucks cross the channel by ferry or through a tunnel leading from Calais in France to near Folkestone in England. Such is the desire to cross the channel that migrants, some of them children, face huge hardships.
The conservative Daily Mail reported this week, for instance, that four young people ages 9 to 16 from Afghanistan and Iran tried to enter Britain in the back of a refrigerated truck carrying cheese and were treated for hypothermia when they were discovered at a port in France.
Much of continental Europe is covered by the Schengen agreement permitting free passage across the internal frontiers of the European Union. But Britain is not a member of the agreement, and anti-immigration politicians say migrants brave restrictions and hardships to gain access to social payments, work and contact with networks of friends and relatives already in the country.
Mr. Foster said British border agents raided 35 addresses in 8 British cities on Wednesday, as French and Belgian officials carried out another 40 raids.
"My officers have been working closely with their counterparts in France and Belgium as well as other law enforcement agencies in the U.K. in the buildup to today's operation," Mr. Foster said in a statement.
"We believe we have successfully disrupted a significant organized network suspected of being involved in a systematic attempt to evade the U.K.'s immigration controls."
Britain's Immigration Minister, Mark Harper, said organized criminal gangs were "a major factor involved in illegal immigration to the U.K."
Immigration is a delicate political issue in Britain since the dominant Conservatives, led by Prime Minister David Cameron, face a nagging political insurgency by the United Kingdom Independence Party which seeks to exploit suspicion of foreigners among rank-and-file voters to increase its support.
But, just this week, a scientific advocacy group warned that government efforts to curb some categories of legal immigrants will damage the economy.
In an open letter to immigration authorities, the Campaign for Science and Engineering, said Britain was not training enough skilled people to fill available jobs in medical, engineering, nuclear and educational institutions.
"The skilled immigrants in these occupations help drive economic growth," the letter said. "They keep Britain's lights on by working in our nuclear industry. They save lives in our hospitals, and they educate our children."
John F. Burns reported from London and Alan Cowell from Paris.

Boy Scouts Postpone Decision on Gays

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The Boy Scouts of America, which reconfirmed last summer its policy banning openly gay people from participation, then said last week it was reconsidering the ban, said on Wednesday that it would postpone a decision once more, until May, as talk of gays in the ranks has roiled a storied organization that carries deep emotional connection and nostalgia for millions of Americans.
An end to the national ban on gays, which the United States Supreme Court said in 2000 was legal free speech by a private organization, would create a huge new moment of risk, experimentation and change people on both sides of the issue said. The proposal floated last week would allow local scouting councils to decide membership rules for themselves.
The proposed change created multiple fracture lines of its own. Some supporters of the ban said they feared a wave of departures by conservative church-sponsored troops, while supporters of the change said that scouting, with fewer boys every year donning the tan uniform to work for merit badges, would be revitalized. Scout leaders who favored a complete about-face on gays — prohibiting discrimination everywhere in the organization — said the compromise position by the Executive Board would still leave scouting open to accusations of homophobia by its critics, since discrimination on the basis of gender orientation would still be allowed locally.
Other scout leaders and parents said a fracture between conservative scout councils and liberal ones could create walls — troops still banning gays disdaining gay-led troops, and vice versa — or could open the door to a new dialogue about difference and diversity.
The Boy Scouts said in a statement e-mailed to reporters that it had received "an outpouring of feedback from the American public" over the proposed change.
"It reinforces how deeply people care about scouting and how passionate they are about the organization," the statement said. "After careful consideration and extensive dialogue within the scouting family, along with comments from those outside the organization, the volunteer officers of the Boy Scouts of America's National Executive Board concluded that due to the complexity of this issue, the organization needs time for a more deliberate review."
The debate over the issue, according to scout leaders and parents, was shaped by two great historic forces that have defined scouting for decades: The huge role played by churches in sponsoring scout troops, and the tradition of local control that scout chapters, or councils, have had in shaping the flavor of scouting, which can differ greatly from urban downtowns to rural farm country, and from roughing-it-in-the-woods to environmental cleanup on the beach.
Maintaining local control became a crossroads of the debate. Although many of the church sponsors — almost 70 percent of local scout units are backed by a religious-based group — are culturally conservative, and might in some cases be opposed to open acceptance of gays in society, they also hugely cherish the right to make scouting a cultural adjunct of their respective belief systems. In Mormon-led scout troops, a Mormon prayer usually opens and closes a troop's meeting, while in a Catholic group, it might be the Lord's Prayer.
"In a free society, organizations fail or flourish according to the private choices of innumerable families," the Boy Scouts said in a brief to the United States Supreme Court in the 2000 case. "A society in which each and every organization must be equally diverse is a society which has destroyed diversity," the Boy Scouts argued.
Jay L. Lenrow, who grew up in scouting as a Jewish boy in New Jersey, and stayed involved as an adult scout volunteer in Baltimore, where he works as a lawyer, said he thought that religious diversity was a huge strength in scouting's past. He said he hoped that eventual acceptance of opposing views about gay leaders — troops and families and churches choosing different paths, to allow gay volunteers or not — will become an enriching element of the scouting experience going forward.
Mr. Lenrow called the decision to defer a vote on the proposed change, "hugely disappointing."
"As a youth in scouting, I sat in tents during the night after lights out with my Catholic friends and my Protestant friends, and kids who were Armenian Orthodox or Greek Orthodox, and we would tell each other what it meant to us to be a member of our religious grouping and what the principles were and what we were taught," he said. "What that led to is, first of all, an understanding of what made my friends tick and, second of all, an appreciation for their feelings and their religious beliefs."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 6, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the color of the uniform worn by Boy Scouts. It is tan, not green.

Obama Chooses REI Executive to Lead Interior Dept.

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President Obama has selected Sally Jewell, the chief executive of Recreational Equipment Inc., to lead the Interior Department, White House officials said Wednesday.
If confirmed, Ms. Jewell, a former oil company official and longtime advocate for conservation and outdoor recreation, will take over a department that has been embroiled in controversy over regulation of oil and gas on public lands and waters in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Arctic Ocean. She also will assume responsibility for the stewardship of hundreds of millions of acres of public lands, from the Everglades of Florida to the Cascades of Washington State.
Ms. Jewell, who also worked as a banker, took over REI in 2005, when the company was one of the most successful outdoor outfitters in the country. The company has grown rapidly under her tenure and now boasts roughly $2 billion a year in sales.
She will replace Ken Salazar, who has led the department since the beginning of the Obama administration. Mr. Salazar, a Colorado Democrat, entered the Senate in 2004, the same year as Mr. Obama.
Ms. Jewell, a native of the Seattle area and a graduate of the University of Washington with a degree in mechanical engineering, has been a lifelong outdoors enthusiast. As a child she sailed in Puget Sound and camped throughout the Pacific Northwest, according to a 2005 profile in the Seattle Times.
In 2011, she introduced President Obama at the White House conference on "America's Great Outdoor Initiative," noting that the $289 billion outdoor-recreation industry is the source of 6.5 million jobs.
She received the 2009 Rachel Carson Award for environmental conservation from the Audubon Society; the 2008 Nonprofit Director of the Year award from the National Association of Corporate Directors, and The Green Globe — Environmental Catalyst Award from King County, Wash., among others.
She is expected to face vigorous questioning during confirmation hearings about her approach to resource development on public lands. Republicans in Congress have criticized the Obama administration for holding back public lands from oil and gas leasing and from imposing overly restrictive regulations on hydraulic fracturing and other extraction methods.
White House aides said that Ms. Jewell's engineering background and experience as a Mobil Oil executive could help blunt some of that criticism.
Ms. Jewell will also face scrutiny from environmental and conservation advocates who will want to know her approach to preservation of public lands. Just Tuesday, Bruce Babbitt, the interior secretary under President Bill Clinton, criticized Mr. Obama as favoring oil and gas leasing over protection of government-owned lands.
"So far under President Obama, industry has been winning the race as it obtains more and more land for oil and gas," Mr. Babbitt said. "Over the past four years, the industry has leased more than 6 million acres, compared with only 2.6 million acres permanently protected."
"This lopsided public land administration in favor of the oil and gas industry cannot continue," he said.
The Interior Department post has traditionally gone to a politician from the Western United States, like Mr. Salazar and Mr. Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona. Under President George W. Bush Gale A. Norton, a former attorney general of Colorado, and Dirk Kempthorne, a former governor and senator from Idaho, served in the position. Ms. Jewell, if confirmed, would represent a different model, a corporate executive with experience in two of the major missions of the department, resource development and conservation.

Those Pictures Really Mozart?

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Mozarteum Foundation
A family portrait of the Mozarts from 1780 or 1781 by Johann Nepomuk della Croce. Wolfgang, center, with his sister Maria Anna (known as Nannerl), and father, Leopold. The painting at center depicts the children's mother, Anna Maria, who died in 1778.


In the impossible search to know exactly what the face of musical genius looked like, researchers in Salzburg, Austria, have made progress. Their subject was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a local boy.
One portrait long thought to be of Mozart turned out to be someone else. A suspect image was confirmed to be of him. And a third portrait, deemed incomplete, was actually found to consist of a finished piece grafted onto a larger canvas.
The International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Mozart's birthplace, announced the findings last month in conjunction with an exhibition of Mozart portraits that opened on Jan. 26 and runs through April 14. One goal, the foundation said, was to burn away idealized conceptions of Mozart — a white-wigged, red-jacketed, romanticized figure — and focus attention on what he might really have looked like.
Fourteen images created in Mozart's lifetime are known to exist, sometimes reproduced in different mediums, like oil paintings, engravings or medallions. The Mozarteum holds examples of nine and has borrowed three others for the show. The remaining lifetime portraits were not available, said Gabriele Ramsauer, director of the foundation's museums and of the Mozart birthplace.
The exhibition speaks to a yearning within the living to know the past, by knowing the face of someone whose work lives on so powerfully in our own time.
"It's an emotional question," Ms. Ramsauer said. "Mozart is such a universal genius. Everybody knows him. Everybody takes part of his life."
Research done before the show altered assumptions held for decades.
In 1924 a British art dealer sold the Mozarteum a portrait of a boy in a long brown jacket holding a bird's nest, standing in front of a round table with an open book on it. When the foundation bought the painting, "W. A. Mozart 1764" was inscribed on a page of the book. An engraving of the portrait commissioned by the art dealer and now in the Vienna Museum included the name. The initials stand for Wolfgang Amadeus.
Curators determined that this portrait does not depict Mozart.
Mozarteum Foundation
Curators determined that this portrait does not depict Mozart.

But doubts lingered about the authenticity of the identification, Ms. Ramsauer said, in part because Mozart rarely used"Amadeus"in his lifetime; "Gottlieb," the German form, was his preferred usage.
"We always wrote 'Mozart' with a little question mark," Ms. Ramsauer said.
When curators examined the painting recently, the name was missing from the book page. A search of the Mozarteum archives found a 1928 restoration report that said all overpainting had been removed, including the "W. A. Mozart inscription."
"Now we are sure that one of the former owners had made these overpaintings, and had published this engraving in 1906, to sell this portrait," Ms. Ramsauer said. "We were always wondering why Mozart should be painted with a bird's nest in his hand."
An image of Mozart painted about 1783 by Joseph Maria Grassi.
Mozarteum Foundation
An image of Mozart painted about 1783 by Joseph Maria Grassi.

An opposite conclusion was reached regarding a miniature painting on ivory set on a tortoise shell snuffbox. It shows a cherubic face surrounded by curly hair, with dark, serious eyes. The Mozarteum acquired the snuffbox in 1956. An inscription inside said, "Johann Mozart, 1783," using the composer's first given name. Was it really Mozart? "We always doubted it a little bit," Ms. Ramsauer said.
A rummage through the archives found a document showing the object's provenance, she added.
The document said Mozart had owned the snuffbox for 10 years and gave it as a gift to Anton Grassi, a sculptor friend in Vienna. Letters from Mozart indicate that Grassi's brother Joseph, also an artist, painted a miniature of Mozart. Joseph acquired the snuffbox from his brother and attached the miniature, Ms. Ramsauer said.
"For us now the time has come to say there is no doubt," she said. The find is considered important, because no other head-on portraits of Mozart exist after 1781.
One of the most famous portraits — and the one Mozart's wife, Constanze, considered the most true to life — has long been considered unfinished. It is by Joseph Lange, Mozart's brother-in-law, and shows him in profile, looking down, his face emerging from a dark background, with a triangle of torso surrounded by scratched white space. The painting, dating from 1789, without doubt looks unfinished, like a classical symphony of two movements.
A portrait by Joseph Lange, Mozart’s brother-in-law.
Mozarteum Foundation
A portrait by Joseph Lange, Mozart's brother-in-law.

X-ray and infrared analysis performed at the Doerner Institute in Munich, an art research institution, last December showed that a small completed painting of Mozart's head and shoulder had been trimmed and mounted at some point on a larger canvas, with paint added around the edges to smooth out the surface.
The enlargement was unfinished, not the original.

Clashes Erupt in Damascus, Shattering Lull, as Prospects for Talks Dim

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Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
A building in the Damascus suburb of Zamalka was hit by a mortar shell fired by the Syrian Army on Wednesday.


BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian insurgents attacked military checkpoints and other targets in parts of central Damascus on Wednesday, antigovernment activist groups reported. The fighting shattered a lull there as prospects for any talks between the antagonists appeared to dim, a week after the opposition coalition leader first proposed the surprise idea of a dialogue aimed at ending the war.
Some antigovernment activists described the resumption of fighting, which had lapsed for the past few weeks, as part of a renewed effort by rebels to seize control of central Damascus, the Syrian capital, although that depiction seemed highly exaggerated. Witness accounts said many people were going about their business, while others noted that previous rebel claims of territorial gains in Damascus had almost always turned out to be embellished or unfounded.
Representatives of the Military Council of Damascus, an insurgent group, said that at least 33 members of President Bashar al-Assad's security forces in Damascus had surrendered, while others had fled central Al Abasiyeen Square, and that other forces had erected roadblocks on all access streets to the area to thwart the movement of rebel fighters.
Salam Mohammed, an activist in Damascus, described Al Abasiyeen Square as "on fire," and a video clip uploaded on YouTube showed a thick column of black smoke spiraling over the area while the sound of shelling could be heard. A voice is heard saying the shelling had started a fire. The Local Coordination Committees, an anti-Assad activist network in Syria, also reported gunfire in nearby streets.
Firas al-Horani, a military council spokesman, said fighters of the Free Syrian Army, the main armed opposition group, were in control of Al Abasiyeen Square. He also said, "The capital, Damascus, is in a state of paralysis at the moment, and clashes are in full force in the streets."
It was impossible to confirm Mr. Horani's assertions or the extent of the fighting because of Syrian government restrictions on foreign news organizations. But Syria's state-run media said insurgent claims of combat success in Damascus were false. "Those are miserable attempts to raise the morale of terrorists who are fleeing our valiant armed forces," said SANA, the official news agency.
Deadly violence also was reported in the Homs Province town of Palmyra, the site of a notorious prison where Mr. Assad's father, Hafez, ordered the summary execution of about 1,000 prisoners during an uprising against his family's grip on power in the 1980s.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group with a network of contacts inside Syria, said two booby-trapped cars exploded near the military intelligence and state security branches, killing at least 12 members of the security forces and wounding more than 20. The observatory said government forces deployed throughout Palmyra afterward, engaging in gun battles with insurgents that left at least eight civilians wounded in the cross-fire.
SANA also reported an attack but said it was caused by two suicide bombers who had targeted a residential part of the town, killing an unspecified number of civilians.
The new mayhem came as discord appeared to grow within the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the umbrella anti-Assad group, over a proposal made on Jan. 30 by Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, its leader, to engage in talks with Mr. Assad's government aimed at ending the nearly two-year-old conflict, which has left more than 60,000 people dead. Although Sheik Khatib's proposal contained a number of conditions, it broke a longstanding principle that Mr. Assad must relinquish power before any talks can begin.
Many of Sheik Khatib's colleagues grudgingly agreed to go along with the proposal after it had been made, but critical voices have been rising, especially among the coalition's more militant elements.
In a new video uploaded on YouTube, a cleric from the Nusra Front, an anti-Assad Islamist militant group that the Obama administration has classified as a terrorist organization, said in a prayer speech that brute force against Mr. Assad and his disciples was the only solution.
"We will cut their heads, we swear to kill them all, and they will see our worst war," said the cleric, who spoke in Libyan-accented Arabic at a mosque in the contested northern city of Aleppo, holding a sword in his right hand. "No for the negotiations, no for the talks, no retreat in a jihad for God's sake."
Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Antakya, Turkey.

Two Parties Map Strategy on Automatic Budget Cuts

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Congressional Democrats, sensing a shift in political momentum, said Wednesday that they were closing in on legislation to temporarily head off deep across-the-board spending cuts, convinced that once federal furloughs and layoffs begin next month, political pressure on Republicans to accept more tax increases will become irresistible.
At a closed-door retreat in Annapolis, Md., this week, Senate Democratic leaders struck a populist tone, urging the party to stand its ground in the battle over nearly $1 trillion in military and domestic cuts over 10 years, set to begin March 1. Democrats want a temporary reprieve from those cuts, financed by a mix of spending cuts and tax loophole closings that they believe will rally public support.
A presentation by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who spoke along with Senators Max Baucus of Montana and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, ran through the huge income gains of the richest 1 percent, amid rising poverty and stagnating middle-class incomes.
"Democrats need to keep fighting," Ms. Murray, the Senate Budget Committee chairwoman, concluded.
Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said, "Republicans ultimately have to choose whether they are more interested in protecting tax breaks for Big Oil and other special interests, or protecting defense spending and the economy."
Republican leaders are no less firm that the cuts — known as sequestration — will come into force in three weeks unless Democrats agree to equivalent spending cuts elsewhere in the budget, without tax increases.
"At some point, Washington has to deal with its spending problem," Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio said Wednesday, his voice rising in frustration. "Now I've watched them kick this can down the road for 22 years since I've been here. I've had enough of it. It's time to act."
With the clock ticking and President Obama calling for some action, both parties are showing some cracks in their resolve. Some Republicans with large military installations in their districts said they could support a postponement in the military cuts while negotiations continued on a broader deficit reduction plan. Fearing for Hill Air Force Base, Representative Rob Bishop, Republican of Utah, did not rule out supporting a Senate bill that closes tax loopholes and pares spending to stave off the cuts.
"It would depend on what the details are," he said.
The Republican leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees proposed Wednesday to cancel the military cuts for 2013 by roping off savings from a 10 percent cut in the federal work force over the next decade. Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, met on Tuesday with the commandant of the Marine Corps, General James F. Amos, who told him that he could maintain Marine Corps readiness this year, but that training and equipping Marines would drop off sharply in 2014 if the cuts went forward.
"These cuts are very harmful to the Department of Defense, especially to the Marine Corps," Mr. McKeon said.
House Democrats produced legislation that would stave off the cuts through Sept. 30 by ending direct subsidy payments to agriculture businesses, eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas companies, and establishing a minimum 30 percent effective tax rate on annual income over $1 million. Senate Democrats hope to produce a similar plan by the end of next week, aides at the Senate retreat said.
The targets include poll-tested, time-honored marks like limiting tax incentives for oil and gas exploration, "carried interest" that allows private equity titans to pay a low 20 percent capital gains rate on much of their income, and tax deductions for the cost of moving business functions overseas.

Gunman Who Wounded Guard at D.C. Lobbyist's Offices Pleads Guilty

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A gunman who wounded a guard at a conservative Washington lobbying group's offices last year pleaded guilty to terrorism and other charges on Wednesday, admitting to a bizarre plan to kill people there and rub sandwiches in their faces because the group opposed gay marriage, authorities said.
Reuters
Floyd Corkins II, 28, of Herndon, Virginia, told investigators he sought to kill as many people as possible at the Family Research Center offices and then shove sandwiches from the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain into their faces, the Justice Department said in a statement.
The 1,600-store Chick-fil-A chain made headlines in July after its president, Dan Cathy, said he opposed same-sex marriage.
Corkins' planned assault on the downtown Washington offices was thwarted by a security guard who subdued him despite being shot in the arm.
Corkins, a former volunteer at a Washington gay community center, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Washington to committing an act of terrorism while armed as well as assault and weapons-transportation charges, the statement said.
His conviction is the first under a local 2002 anti-terrorism law.
A statement of offense signed by Corkins and prosecutors said that Corkins targeted the Family Research Council because of its views, including its stance against gay marriage.
Corkins shot the guard with a 9 mm handgun he pulled from a backpack that also held 50 rounds of ammunition and 15 wrapped sandwiches from Chick-fil-A.
Sentencing is set for April 29. The terrorism and assault charges each carry maximum sentences of 30 years and the weapons-related charge has a maximum of 10 years in prison.
(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Gary Hill)

Tool Kit: Protecting Your Privacy on the New Facebook

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Facebook is a personal vault that can contain photos of your firstborn, plans to bring down your government and, occasionally, a record of your indiscretions.

It can be scoured by police officers, partners and would-be employers. It can be mined by marketers to show tailored advertisements.
And now, with Facebook's newfangled search tool, it can allow strangers, along with "friends" on Facebook, to discover who you are, what you like and where you go.
Facebook insists it is up to you to decide how much you want others to see. And that is true, to some extent. But you cannot entirely opt out of Facebook searches. Facebook, however, does let you fine-tune who can see your "likes" and pictures, and, to a lesser extent, how much of yourself to expose to marketers.
The latest of its frequent changes to the site's privacy settings was made in December. Facebook is nudging each of its billion subscribers to review them. The nudge could not have been more timely, said Sarah Downey, a lawyer with the Boston company Abine, which markets tools to help users control their visibility online. "It is more important than ever to lock down your Facebook privacy settings now that everything you post will be even easier to find," she said.
That is to say, your settings will determine, to a large extent, who can find you when they search for women who buy dresses for toddlers or, more unsettling, women who jog a particular secluded trail.
What can you do? Ask yourself four simple questions.
QUESTION 1 How would you like to be found?
Go to "who can see my stuff" on the upper right side of your Facebook page. Click on "see more settings." By default, search engines can link to your timeline. You can turn that off if you wish.
Go to "activity log." Here you can review all your posts, pictures, "likes" and status updates. If you are concerned about who can see what, look at the original privacy setting of the original post.
In my case, I had been tagged eating a bowl of ricotta with my fingers at midnight near Arezzo. My friend who posted the picture enabled it to be seen by anyone, which means that it would show up in a stranger's search for, I don't know, people who eat ricotta with their fingers at midnight. I am tagged in other photos that are visible only to friends of the person who posted them. The point is, you want to look carefully at what the original settings are for those photos and "likes," and decide whether you would like to be associated with them "I don't get this Facebook thing either," said one woman whose friend request I had accepted in January 2008. "But everyone in our generation seems to be on it."
If you are concerned about things that might embarrass or endanger you on Facebook — Syrians who endorse the opposition may not want to be discovered by government apparatchiks — comb through your timeline and get rid of them. The only way to ensure that a post or photo is not discovered is to "unlike" or "delete" it.
Make yourself a pot of tea. This may take a while. The nostalgia may just be amusing.
QUESTION 2 What do you want the world to know about you?
Go to your profile page and click "About me." Decide if you would like your gender, or the name of your spouse, to be visible on your timeline. Think about whether you want your birthday to be seen on your timeline. Your date of birth is an important piece of personal information for hackers to exploit.
A tool created a couple of weeks ago by a team of college students offers to look for certain words and phrases that could embarrass other college students as they apply for internships and jobs. It is called Simplewash, formerly Facewash, and it looks for profanity, references to drugs and other faux pas that you do not necessarily want, say, a law school admissions officer to see. Socioclean is another application that scours your Facebook posts. It is selling its service to college campuses to offer to students.
QUESTION 3 Do you mind being tracked by advertisers?
Facebook has eyes across the Web; one study found that its so-called widget — the innocuous blue letter "f" — is integrated into 20 percent of the 10,000 most popular Web sites.
This is how it works. I browsed an e-commerce site for girls' dresses. When I logged back on to Facebook several days later, I was urged to buy dresses for "my darling daughter." Facebook says that this kind of "retargeting" is a lucrative source of revenue. If that is annoying, several tools can help you block trackers. Abine, DisconnectMe and Ghostery offer browser extensions. Once installed on your Web browser, these extensions will tell you how many trackers they have blocked.
If you see an ad on the right rail of your Facebook page based on your Web browsing history, you can also opt out directly on Facebook. Hover over the "X" next to the ad and choose from the drop-down menu: "Hide this ad," you could say. Or hide all ads from this brand. Facebook does not serve the ads itself, so to opt out of certain kinds of targeted ads, you must go to the third party that Facebook works with to show ads based on the Web sites you have browsed.
QUESTION 4 Whom do you want to befriend?
Now is the time to review whom you count among your Facebook friends. Your boss? Do you really want her to see pictures of you in Las Vegas? And the woman you met in Lamaze class: do you want the apps she has installed to know who you are? Privacyfix.com, a browser extension, shows you how to keep your friends' Facebook applications from sucking you into their orbit. It is preparing to introduce a tool to control what it calls your "exposure" to the Facebook search engine.
Secure.me offers a similar feature. Depending on your privacy settings, that photo-sharing app that your Lamaze compatriot just installed could, in one click, know who you are and have access to all the photos that you thought you were sharing with "friends."
One of Facebook's cleverest heists is the word "friend." It makes you think all your Facebook contacts are really your "friends." They may not be.

Postal Service to Cut Saturday Mail to Trim Costs

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Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A postal worker delivered mail in San Francisco last year.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Postal Service will stop delivering mail on Saturdays but continue to deliver packages six days a week under a plan aimed at saving about $2 billion, the financially struggling agency says.
In an announcement scheduled for later Wednesday, the service is expected to say the Saturday mail cutback would begin in August.
The move accentuates one of the agency's strong points — package delivery has increased by 14 percent since 2010, officials say, while the delivery of letters and other mail has declined with the increasing use of email and other Internet use.
Under the new plan, mail would still be delivered to post office boxes on Saturdays. Post offices now open on Saturdays would remain open on Saturdays.
Over the past several years, the Postal Service has advocated shifting to a five-day delivery schedule for mail and packages — and it repeatedly but unsuccessfully appealed to Congress to approve the move. Though an independent agency, the service gets no tax dollars for its day-to-day operations but is subject to congressional control.
It was not immediately clear how the service could eliminate Saturday mail without congressional approval.
But the agency clearly thinks it has a majority of the American public on its side regarding the change.
Material prepared for the Wednesday press conference by Patrick R. Donahoe, postmaster general and CEO, says Postal Service market research and other research has indicated that nearly 7 in 10 Americans support the switch to five-day delivery as a way for the Postal Service to reduce costs.

Monopoly Fans Vote to Add Cat, Toss Iron Tokens

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Steven Senne/Associated Press
The newest Monopoly token, a cat, at Hasbro Inc. headquarters in Pawtucket, R.I.

PAWTUCKET, R.I. (AP) — Scottie dog has a new nemesis in Monopoly after fans voted in an online contest to add a cat token to the property trading game, replacing the iron, toy maker Hasbro Inc. announced Wednesday.
The results were announced after the shoe, wheelbarrow and iron were neck and neck for elimination in the final hours of voting that sparked passionate efforts by fans to save their favorite tokens, and by businesses eager to capitalize on publicity surrounding pieces that represent their products.
The vote on Facebook closed just before midnight on Tuesday, marking the first time that fans have had a say on which of the eight tokens to add and which one to toss. The pieces identify the players and have changed quite a lot since Parker Brothers bought the game from its original designer in 1935.
Rhode Island-based Hasbro announced the new piece Wednesday morning.
Other pieces that contested for a spot on Monopoly included a robot, diamond ring, helicopter and guitar.
Fans from more than 120 countries voted.
"We put five new tokens out for our fans to vote on and there were a lot of fans of the many different tokens, but I think there were a lot of cat lovers in the world that reached out and voted for the cat to be the new token for Monopoly," said Jonathan Berkowitz, vice president for Hasbro gaming marketing.
The Scottie Dog was the most popular of the classic tokens, and received 29% of the vote, the company said. The iron got the least votes and was kicked to the curb.
The cat, which has no name, received 31% of votes for new tokens.
The online contest to change the tokens was sparked by chatter on Facebook, where Monopoly has more than 10 million fans. The initiative was intended to ensure that a game created nearly eight decades ago remains relevant and engaging to fans today.
"Tokens are always a key part of the Monopoly game ... and our fans are very passionate about their tokens, about which token they use while they play," Berkowitz said.
Monopoly's iconic tokens originated when the niece of game creator Charles Darrow suggested using charms from her charm bracelet for tokens. The game is based on the streets of Atlantic City, N.J., and has sold more than 275 million units worldwide.
To make the game relevant to fans abroad, the names are changed to well-known streets in when it is introduced to a new country.
The other tokens are a racecar, a shoe, thimble, top hat, wheelbarrow and battleship. Most of the pieces were introduced with the first Parker Brothers iteration of the game in 1935, and the Scottie dog and wheelbarrow were added in the early 1950s.
"I'm sad to see the iron go," Berkowitz said. "Personally, I'm a big fan of the racecar so I'm very relieved it was saved but it is sad to see the iron go."
The social-media buzz created by the Save Your Token Campaign attracted numerous companies that pushed to protect specific tokens that reflect their products.
That includes garden tool maker Ames True Temper Inc. of Camp Hill, Penn., that spoke out in favor of the wheelbarrow and created a series of online videos that support the tool and online shoe retailer Zappos which pushed to save the shoe, Berkowitz said.
"We've even had some companies like Jolly Time Pop Corn reach out and petition to have a popcorn token added to the game, even though that's not one of the new five tokens," he said.
Versions of Monopoly with the new token will come out later this year.

As Unit Pleads Guilty, R.B.S. to Pay $612 Million Over Rate Rigging

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LONDON – The Royal Bank of Scotland on Wednesday struck a combined $612 million settlement with American and British authorities over accusations that it manipulated interest rates, the latest case to emerge from a broad international investigation.
In an embarrassing blow to the bank, its Japanese subsidiary also pleaded guilty to criminal wrongdoing in its settlement with the Justice Department. The R.B.S. subsidiary, a hub of rate-rigging activity, agreed to a single count of felony wire fraud to settle the case.
The settlement reflects the Justice Department's renewed vigor for punishing banks ensnared in the rate manipulation case. In December, a Japanese subsidiary of UBS pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud as part of a larger settlement, representing the first unit of a big bank to agree to criminal charges in more than a decade.
As authorities built the R.B.S. case, they seized on a series of incriminating yet colorful e-mails that highlighted an effort to influence the rate-setting process, a plot that spanned multiple currencies and countries from 2006 to 2010. One senior trader expressed disbelief at reaping lucrative profits from the scheme, saying "it's just amazing" how rate "fixing can make you that much money," according to the government's complaint. Another trader, after pressuring a colleague to submit a certain rate, offered a reward of sorts: "I would come over there and make love to you."
In a statement on Wednesday, the American regulator leading the case slammed the bank for manipulating benchmarks like the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. The regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, noted that R.B.S. employees "aided and abetted" other banks in the rate-rigging scheme and continued to run afoul of the law, though more covertly, even after learning of a federal investigation.
"The public is deprived of an honest benchmark interest rate when a group of traders sits around a desk for years falsely spinning their bank's Libor submissions, trying to manufacture winning trades. That's what happened at R.B.S.," David Meister, the enforcement director of the commission, said in the statement.

Libor Explained

The settlement represents the latest setback for Royal Bank of Scotland, which has struggled to shake the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis. The British firm already has put aside $2.7 billion to compensate customers who were inappropriately sold loan insurance over recent years. On Jan. 31, British regulators also called on the bank and other local rivals to review the sale of interest-rate hedging products after more than 90 percent of a sample were found to have been sold improperly.
The broader rate-rigging case has centered on how much the Royal Bank of Scotland and a dozen other banks, including Citigroup and HSBC, charge each other for loans. Such benchmarks, including Libor, help determine the borrowing costs for trillions of dollars in financial products like corporate loans, mortgages and credit cards.
But the Royal Bank of Scotland, like many of its competitors, corrupted the process. Government complaints filed over the last year outlined a scheme in which banks reported false rates to lift trading profits and deflect concerns about their health during the crisis.
Authorities filed the first Libor case in June, extracting a $450 million settlement with the British bank Barclays. In December, UBS agreed to a record $1.5 billion settlement with European regulators, the Justice Department and the American regulator that opened the case, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Justice Department's criminal division, which secured the guilty plea from the bank's Japanese unit, also filed criminal charges against two former UBS traders.
Some of the world's largest financial institutions remain caught in the cross hairs of the case. Deutsche Bank has set aside an undisclosed amount to cover potential penalties.
While foreign banks have received the brunt of the scrutiny to date, an American institution could be among the next to settle. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are under investigation.
The Royal Bank of Scotland case represents the second-largest fine levied in the multiyear investigation into rate manipulation.
The Justice Department imposed a $150 million fine as part of a deferred-prosecution agreement with R.B.S., while the trading commission's financial penalty reached $325 million. The Financial Services Authority, the British regulator, also levied a £87.5 million ($137 million) fine against the firm, one of the largest financial penalties ever from British authorities.
R.B.S., based in Edinburgh, had aimed to avert the guilty plea for its Japanese subsidiary. But the Justice Department's criminal division declined to back down, and the bank had little leverage to push back. If it had balked at a plea deal, the Justice Department could have moved to indict the subsidiary.
"Like with Barclays and UBS, the settlement with R.B.S. is much more than a slap on the wrist," said Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the trading commission who is a critic of soft fines on big banks.
In the wake of the settlement, Royal Bank of Scotland is shaking up its management team as it moves to repair its bruised image. John Hourican, the firm's investment banking chief, resigned on Wednesday, and agreed to forgo some of his past compensation.
Royal Bank of Scotland, in which the government holds an 82 percent stake after providing a $73 billion bailout in 2008, also plans to claw back bonuses totaling $471 million to help pay for the rate-rigging penalty.
"We condemn the behavior of the individuals who sought to influence some Libor currency settings at our bank from 2006 to 2010. There is no place at R.B.S. for such behavior," Stephen Hester, the bank's chief executive, said in a statement on Wednesday. "Libor manipulation is an extreme example of a selfish and self-serving culture that took hold in parts of the banking industry during the financial boom."

Ipswich Journal: Paul Mason Is One-Third the Man He Used to Be

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Paul Nixon Photography
Paul Mason in 2012, two years after gastric bypass surgery stripped him of the unofficial title of "the world's fattest man."


IPSWICH, England — Who knows what the worst moment was for Paul Mason — there were so many awful milestones, as he grew fatter and fatter — but a good bet might be when he became too vast to leave his room. To get him to the hospital for a hernia operation, the local fire department had to knock down a wall and extricate him with a forklift.

Excess skin makes exercise difficult for Mr. Mason, who once weighed 980 pounds.
That was nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Mason weighed about 980 pounds, and the spectacle made him the object of fascinated horror, a freak-show exhibit. The British news media, which likes a superlative, appointed him "the world's fattest man."
Now the narrative has shifted to one of redemption and second chances. Since a gastric bypass operation in 2010, Mr. Mason, 52 years old and 6-foot-4, has lost nearly two-thirds of his body weight, putting him at about 336 pounds — still obese, but within the realm of plausibility. He is talking about starting a jewelry business.
"My meals are a lot different now than they used to be," Mr. Mason said during a recent interview in his one-story apartment in a cheerful public housing complex here. For one thing, he no longer eats around the clock. "Food is a necessity, but now I don't let it control my life anymore," he said.
But the road to a new life is uphill and paved with sharp objects. When he answered the door, Mr. Mason did not walk; he glided in an electric wheelchair.
And though Mr. Mason looks perfectly normal from the chest up, horrible vestiges of his past stick to him, literally, in the form of a huge mass of loose skin choking him like a straitjacket. Folds and folds of it encircle his torso and sit on his lap, like an unwanted package someone has set there; more folds encase his legs. All told, he reckons, the excess weighs more than 100 pounds.
As he waits to see if anyone will agree to perform the complex operation to remove the skin, Mr. Mason has plenty of time to ponder how he got to where he is. He was born in Ipswich and had a childhood marked by two things, he says: the verbal and physical abuse of his father, a military policeman turned security guard; and three years of sexual abuse, starting when he was 6, by a relative in her 20s who lived in the house and shared his bed. He told no one until decades later.
After he left school, Mr. Mason took a job as a postal worker and became engaged to a woman more than 20 years older than him. "I thought it would be for life, but she just turned around one day and said, 'No, I don't want to see you anymore — goodbye,' " he said.
His father died, and he returned home to care for his arthritic mother, who was in a wheelchair. "I still had all these things going around in my head from my childhood," he said. "Food replaced the love I didn't get from my parents." When he left the Royal Mail in 1986, he said, he weighed 364 pounds.
Then things spun out of control. Mr. Mason tried to eat himself into oblivion. He spent every available penny of his and his mother's social security checks on food. He stopped paying the mortgage. The bank repossessed their house, and the council found them a smaller place to live. All the while, he ate the way a locust eats — indiscriminately, voraciously, ingesting perhaps 20,000 calories a day. First he could no longer manage the stairs; then he could no longer get out of his room. He stayed in bed, on and off, for most of the last decade.
Social service workers did everything for him, including changing his incontinence pads. A network of local convenience stores and fast-food restaurants kept the food coming nonstop — burgers, french fries, fish and chips, even about $22 worth of chocolate bars a day.
"They didn't deliver bags of crisps," he said of potato chips. "They delivered cartons."
His life became a cycle: eat, doze, eat, eat, eat. "You didn't sleep a normal sleep," he said. "You'd be awake most of the night eating and snacking. You totally forgot about everything else. You lose all your dignity, all your self-respect. It all goes, and all you focus on is getting your next fix."
He added, "It was quite a lonely time, really."
He got infections a lot and was transported to the hospital — first in a laundry van, then on the back of a truck and finally on the forklift. For 18 months after a hernia operation in 2003, he lived in the hospital and in an old people's home — where he was not allowed to leave his room — while the local government found him a house that could accommodate all the special equipment he needed.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 6, 2013
The headline on an earlier version of this article misstated Paul Mason's current weight relative to what he weighed nearly a decade ago. He is now about one-third, not two-thirds, the weight he was then.

Tunisian Opposition Leader Killed Amid Tensions, Party Says

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TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) — A Tunisian opposition leader critical of the Islamist-led government and violence by radical Muslims was shot to death Wednesday, according to the government. The killing is likely to heighten tensions in a country whose path from dictatorship to democracy has been seen as a model for the Arab world.
The secretary-general of the Unified Democratic Nationalist Party, Chokri Belaid, was shot as he left his house in the capital, Tunis, the state news agency TAP reported. It said he was taken to a nearby clinic and died.
Government spokesman Samir Dilou called the attack against Belaid an "odious crime." The Interior Ministry gave no immediate details about the attack.
The reason for the killing is unclear. It comes as Tunisia is struggling to maintain stability and revive its economy after its longtime dictator was overthrown in an uprising two years ago. That revolution set off revolts across the Arab world and unleashed new social and religious tensions.
Belaid had been critical of Tunisia's leadership, especially the moderate Islamist party Ennahda that dominates the government. He had accused authorities of not doing enough to stop violence by ultraconservatives who have targeted mausoleums, art exhibits and other things seen as out of keeping with their strict interpretation of Islam. Radicals disrupted a recent rally Belaid led in northern Tunisia.

Chokri Belaid, Tunisian Opposition Figure, Is Killed

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A leading Tunisian opposition politician who had been critical of the Islamist-led government was fatally shot outside his home in Tunis Wednesday, the government news agency said.

Chokri Belaid in Tunis in 2010.
Chokri Belaid was shot just as he was leaving his house in the capital city, the state news agency TAP said.
Mr. Belaid, the general secretary of the Democratic Patriotic Party, was one of the leaders of the opposition Popular Front, which had been formed in October to counter the government.
Mr. Belaid has emerged as a chief critic of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that leads the government in a coalition with two secular parties. While Ennahda has tried to reassure Tunisians that it would respect liberal democratic values and not impose a strict Muslim moral code, it has faced criticism with an indulgent attitude toward the ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis.
In recent days, Mr. Belaid accused the Islamists of carrying out an attack on a meeting of its members on Saturday. "At the end of our meeting, a group of Ennahda mercenaries and Salafists attacked our activists," Mr. Belaid said.
Samir Dilou, a government spokesman, was quoted as calling the killing an "odious crime."
No group immediately took responsibility for the shooting and its cause remained unclear.
It came as Tunisia faces profound social and religious uncertainties following the ouster of a dictatorial regime two years ago that set off what came to be known as the Arab Spring.





Ally of Ahmadinejad Freed Amid Political Fight, Reports Say

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TEHRAN — As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad escalated a bitter political fight this week with Iran's most influential political family by disclosing secret film recordings of what he purported were fraudulent business deals, Iran's political maneuvring took a new turn Wednesday when an imprisoned associate of the president was reported to have been freed.
The release of Saeed Mortazavi, reported by two Iranian news agencies, came as the latest chapter in several days of political drama playing out with prominence in the public eye.
During a Sunday session of Parliament, broadcast on state radio, Mr. Ahmadinejad singled out the head of the Parliament, Ali Larijani, a political rival with strong links to influential Shiite Muslim clerics and one of several brothers who have held top positions in the Iranian government.
His younger brother Sadegh, 52, heads Iran's judiciary, while his oldest brother, Mohammad Javad, a Berkeley-educated mathematician, is also a judiciary official.
On Monday, a conservative newspaper, Kayhan, hinted that the nation's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been forced to step in to prevent both men from giving potentially damaging news conferences, which were both canceled at the last minute.
This was not the first time Ayatollah Khamenei has been forced to intervene in this feud. In October, he issued an edict aimed at stopping the infighting, saying that those creating divisions before the June 14 presidential elections "betray" the country.
Mr. Ahmadinejad, who went to the Parliament in a failed attempt to head off the impeachment of his labor minister, Abdolreza Sheikholeslami, said Mr. Larijani and his fellow lawmakers had obstructed the government, stepped beyond their constitutional boundaries and written letters ordering the annulment of government decisions.
Instructed by Mr. Larijani to stick to the subject of the impeachment, Mr. Ahmadinejad said, "Don't order me to close my mouth because you say it's the law."
With that, Mr. Ahmadinejad, who for years has threatened to reveal the names of corrupt officials, played a video clip of a conversation in which another of Mr. Larijani's brothers, Fazel, appeared to discuss the purchase of a state company under favorable terms, the semiofficial Tabnak Web site reported. While Fazel Larijani used to head a medical association in Iran, his current position is unclear.
The public accusation, rare in Iran, could signal a new phase in an already intense conflict between Mr. Ahmadinejad, who represents a powerful group of young, ambitious politicians, and Mr. Larijani, who is the official representative of the holy city of Qum, the center of Shiite scholarship in Iran.
Mr. Ahmadinejad said his associate, Mr. Mortazavi, 45, was also at the taped meeting. In January, Mr. Mortazavi was dismissed as the head of Iran's enormous social welfare organization under pressure from Parliament. Some days later, however, he was rehired by the president in the same position, this time as official caretaker.
During the conversation, read out in part by Mr. Ahmadinejad to astonished lawmakers, Fazel Larijani appears to try to use his family connections to buy a factory from the social welfare organization. He promises leniency for Mr. Mortazavi, the former Tehran prosecutor who faces several criminal proceedings over accusations that he played a role in the deaths of three protesters in a substandard prison in 2009.
Mr. Mortazavi was arrested Monday evening, the Fars news agency reported, though no reason was given. But, in a new turn to what is likely to be a protracted saga, he was freed on Wednesday, news reports quoted Iranian media as saying. The terms of his release were unclear.
In Parliament on Sunday, the Iranian Students' News Agency said, Mr. Ahmadinejad declared: "These are audio and video, and the tape is clear."
He added: "If the honorable Parliament speaker sees fit, we can turn over the 24 to 25 hours to you," he said of the recordings. On Monday, Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency, a mouthpiece for Mr. Ahmadinejad, deepened the split by publishing the audiotape on its Web site.
Ali Larijani, cheered on by the Parliament, which has lost nearly every serious political battle with the president, silenced the room, saying: "Let him tell his words. If there is anything about my family, then let him talk about it."
Mr. Larijani called the video a "mafia film" and recalled how he had a meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad's estranged brother, Davoud. "He said many things against you," Mr. Larijani told the president, "about economic corruption, about your inner circle and your relations with foreign countries."
For his part, Fazel Larijani strongly denied any wrongdoing, saying that while he did appear in the clip, the words were not his, but rather had been added in a voiceover. Calling Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Mortazavi "mafialike individuals," he said he would sue them both for "spreading lies and disturbing public opinion."
On Monday, several officials criticized Mr. Ahmadinejad and Ali Larijani, accusing them of lacking self-control and bringing shame on the country. "They broke the leader's heart and gave the friends of the Islamic republic almost a seizure," said Mojtaba Zolnour, a special consultant to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, the semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency reported. "They provided ammunition for the foreign media on the eve of our election."
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.

NYT > Home Page: Ipswich Journal: Paul Mason Is One-Third the Man He Used to Be

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Ipswich Journal: Paul Mason Is One-Third the Man He Used to Be
Feb 6th 2013, 07:21

Paul Nixon Photography

Paul Mason in 2012, two years after gastric bypass surgery stripped him of the unofficial title of "the world's fattest man."

IPSWICH, England — Who knows what the worst moment was for Paul Mason — there were so many awful milestones, as he grew fatter and fatter — but a good bet might be when he became too vast to leave his room. To get him to the hospital for a hernia operation, the local fire department had to knock down a wall and extricate him with a forklift.

Excess skin makes exercise difficult for Mr. Mason, who once weighed 980 pounds.

That was nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Mason weighed about 980 pounds, and the spectacle made him the object of fascinated horror, a freak-show exhibit. The British news media, which likes a superlative, appointed him "the world's fattest man."

Now the narrative has shifted to one of redemption and second chances. Since a gastric bypass operation in 2010, Mr. Mason, 52 years old and 6-foot-4, has lost nearly two-thirds of his body weight, putting him at about 336 pounds — still obese, but within the realm of plausibility. He is talking about starting a jewelry business.

"My meals are a lot different now than they used to be," Mr. Mason said during a recent interview in his one-story apartment in a cheerful public housing complex here. For one thing, he no longer eats around the clock. "Food is a necessity, but now I don't let it control my life anymore," he said.

But the road to a new life is uphill and paved with sharp objects. When he answered the door, Mr. Mason did not walk; he glided in an electric wheelchair.

And though Mr. Mason looks perfectly normal from the chest up, horrible vestiges of his past stick to him, literally, in the form of a huge mass of loose skin choking him like a straitjacket. Folds and folds of it encircle his torso and sit on his lap, like an unwanted package someone has set there; more folds encase his legs. All told, he reckons, the excess weighs more than 100 pounds.

As he waits to see if anyone will agree to perform the complex operation to remove the skin, Mr. Mason has plenty of time to ponder how he got to where he is. He was born in Ipswich and had a childhood marked by two things, he says: the verbal and physical abuse of his father, a military policeman turned security guard; and three years of sexual abuse, starting when he was 6, by a relative in her 20s who lived in the house and shared his bed. He told no one until decades later.

After he left school, Mr. Mason took a job as a postal worker and became engaged to a woman more than 20 years older than him. "I thought it would be for life, but she just turned around one day and said, 'No, I don't want to see you anymore — goodbye,' " he said.

His father died, and he returned home to care for his arthritic mother, who was in a wheelchair. "I still had all these things going around in my head from my childhood," he said. "Food replaced the love I didn't get from my parents." When he left the Royal Mail in 1986, he said, he weighed 364 pounds.

Then things spun out of control. Mr. Mason tried to eat himself into oblivion. He spent every available penny of his and his mother's social security checks on food. He stopped paying the mortgage. The bank repossessed their house, and the council found them a smaller place to live. All the while, he ate the way a locust eats — indiscriminately, voraciously, ingesting perhaps 20,000 calories a day. First he could no longer manage the stairs; then he could no longer get out of his room. He stayed in bed, on and off, for most of the last decade.

Social service workers did everything for him, including changing his incontinence pads. A network of local convenience stores and fast-food restaurants kept the food coming nonstop — burgers, french fries, fish and chips, even about $22 worth of chocolate bars a day.

"They didn't deliver bags of crisps," he said of potato chips. "They delivered cartons."

His life became a cycle: eat, doze, eat, eat, eat. "You didn't sleep a normal sleep," he said. "You'd be awake most of the night eating and snacking. You totally forgot about everything else. You lose all your dignity, all your self-respect. It all goes, and all you focus on is getting your next fix."

He added, "It was quite a lonely time, really."

He got infections a lot and was transported to the hospital — first in a laundry van, then on the back of a truck and finally on the forklift. For 18 months after a hernia operation in 2003, he lived in the hospital and in an old people's home — where he was not allowed to leave his room — while the local government found him a house that could accommodate all the special equipment he needed.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 6, 2013

The headline on an earlier version of this article misstated Paul Mason's current weight relative to what he weighed nearly a decade ago. He is now about one-third, not two-thirds, the weight he was then.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 6, 2013, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Two-Thirds the Man He Used to Be, and Proud of It.
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