SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2012 • THE BULLETIN
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T S N B Children beheaded in Afghanistan KABUL, Afghanistan — The decapitated bodies of a 7-year-old girl and a 12year-old boy found Friday in the country’s south and east continued a spate of grisly beheadings in Afghanistan this week. The body of the boy was discovered in the rural Panjwai district of Kandahar province in the south, where the Taliban retain command of some areas despite regular clearing operations by U.S. and Afghan forces. Local residents and officials said the Taliban had killed the boy because his brother and uncle were members of the local police. The Taliban denied killing him. There was no immediate explanation for the killing of the girl, whose body was found in a garden in the Tagab district of eastern Kapisa province, said the governor of Kapisa, Mehrabudin Safi.
3 dead in shooting at N.J. grocery OLD BRIDGE, N.J. — An ex-Marine who had suffered from depression and once tweeted about killing “everyone I see” opened fire in camouflage gear at a supermarket early Friday, gunning down two co-workers before he killed himself, authorities said. Terence Tyler, 23, left his night clerk shift at a Pathmark store in Old Bridge Township around 3:30 a.m., drove off and returned 20 minutes later to the closed store with a handgun and an assault rifle similar to an AK-47, Middlesex County prosecutor Bruce Kaplan said. Tyler fired more than 16 rounds from his rifle, shooting at an employee standing outside and firing as he entered the store, blowing out the front windows, authorities said. He shot at five other workers in an aisle, killing Christina LoBrutto, 18, and Bryan Breen, 24, Kaplan said.
S. Africans divided over mass killings JOH A N NESBU RG — South Africa’s justice minister Friday challenged the top prosecutor’s decision to charge 270 miners with the murders and attempted murders of 112 striking coworkers shot by the police, a development that indicates more divisions in the government over the killings that shocked the nation. The National Prosecuting Authority’s decision to charge the arrested miners under an apartheid-era law leaves the government open to accusations that it is acting like the former brutal white rulers. It appeared to be an attempt to shift the blame for the shootings from the police to the miners. The Aug. 16 shootings by police that killed 34 striking miners and wounded 78 near the Lonmin platinum mine were the worst display of state violence since apartheid ended in 1994.
Chinese dissident gets released SHANGHAI — The Chinese dissident who served 10 years after being convicted of state subversion on evidence provided by the U.S. Internet giant Yahoo is under sharp restrictions, his wife said Friday, after he was released and returned home. The dissident, Wang Xiaoning, 62, a former engineer, distributed pro-democracy writings using email and Yahoo forums, often anonymously. He was detained on Sept. 1, 2002, and later convicted of “inciting subversion of state power” using information the Chinese authorities received from Yahoo. — From wire reports
Fed chairman makes case U.S. poised to label for steps to spur growth Haqqani network
as a terrorist group
By Binyamin Appelbaum New York Times News Service
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, delivered a detailed and forceful argument Friday for new steps to stimulate the economy, reinforcing earlier indications that the Fed is on the verge of action. Calling the persistently high rate of unemployment a “grave concern,” language that several experts described as unusually strong, Bernanke made clear that a recent run of tepid rather than terrible economic data has not altered the Fed’s will to act, because the pace of growth remains too slow to reduce the number of people who lack jobs. The federal government said Wednesday that the economy expanded at an annual rate of 1.7 percent in the second quarter, slightly higher than its initial estimate of 1.5 percent but lackluster in normal times. A measure of consumer confidence hit a three-month high Friday, but that too was impressive only in comparison to the immediate past. The government will release a preliminary estimate of August job growth
By Eric Shmitt New York Times News Service
Ted S. Warren / The Associated Press
With the Teton Mountains behind them, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, left, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer walk together outside of the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium Friday at Grand Teton National Park near Jackson Hole, Wyo.
next week; it is expected to show that the unemployment rate remains above 8 percent. Bernanke said the Fed’s efforts over the last several years had helped to hasten economic recovery, that there was a clear need for additional action, and that the likely benefits of new steps to stimulate growth outweighed the potential costs.
“It is important to achieve further progress, particularly in the labor market,” Bernanke said. “Taking due account of the uncertainties and limits of its policy tools, the Federal Reserve will provide additional policy accommodation as needed to promote a stronger economic recovery and sustained improvement in labor market conditions in a context of price stability.”
WASHINGTON — Risking a new breach in relations with Pakistan, the Obama administration is leaning toward designating the Haqqani network, the insurgent group responsible for some of the most spectacular assaults on U.S. bases in Afghanistan in recent years, as a terrorist organization. With a congressional reporting deadline looming, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and top military officials are said to favor placing sanctions on the network, which operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to half a dozen current and former administration officials. A designation as a terrorist organization would help dry up the group’s fundraising activities in countries like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, press Pakistan to carry out long-promised military action against the insurgents and sharpen
the administration’s focus on devising policies and operations to weaken the group, advocates say. But no final decision has been made. A spirited internal debate has U.S. officials, including several at the White House, worried about the consequences of such a designation not only for relations with Pakistan but also for peace talks with the Taliban and the fate of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only U.S. soldier known to be held by the militants. Perhaps the most important consideration, administration and congressional officials say, is whether the designation would make any difference in the group’s ability to raise money or stage more assaults as the U.S.-led NATO force draws down in Afghanistan. Several Haqqani leaders have already been designated individually as “global terrorists,” so the issue now is what would be gained by designating the entire organization.
Pentagon threatens legal action against Navy SEALs author By Elisabeth Bumiller and Julie Bosman New York Times News Service
Michael Appleton / New York Times News Service
Jill Frisard carries her friend’s dog, Buddy, from her flooded home in Slidell, La., Friday. On Monday, President Barack Obama will visit the Gulf Coast to tour the damage from Hurricane Isaac and meet with officials about the recovery efforts.
Isaac causes floods en route to Midwest By Jack Healy and Bret Schulte New York Times News Service
ST. LOUIS — As Gulf Coast residents confronted a waterlogged landscape of flooded homes and debris-covered streets Friday, tatters of what had been Hurricane Isaac blew toward the parched Midwest, dumping more than a foot of rain, causing isolated flash floods and leaving thousands of people without power. Heavy rains overwhelmed drainage systems in parts of Arkansas, flooding roads and prompting some emergency rescues. But after a scorching summer, dry soil and lowflowing rivers and streams appeared to be absorbing much of the rain, officials said.
“We’ve been in a pretty bad drought, and a lot of this rain is being soaked up,” said Jayson Gosselin, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Weldon Spring, Mo., near St. Louis. “The ground can take a lot of rain, that’s for sure.” As the slow-moving storm curls its way northeast, emergency crews in Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois have been bracing for a weekend of heavy rains and lashing winds, sandbagging homes and businesses, and preparing to close roads. Meanwhile, officials canceled Labor Day fireworks shows and shooed other endof-summer festivals indoors. It was the messy denouement of a soaking storm that
had poured as many as two feet of water across parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. On Friday, officials in Plaquemines Parish, La., announced they had found the bodies of a middle-aged man and woman in the kitchen of their flooded home. As waters receded from some neighborhoods on the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, officials were slowly restoring electricity to the thousands left without power after the storm felled transmission lines and damaged power substations. And crews began punching holes in the parish’s brimming back levees, a process that could take a week to complete.
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Friday threatened legal action against the former member of the Navy SEALs who has written a first-person account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but the author’s lawyer and the book’s publisher, Penguin, said they were proceeding with publication Tuesday. The Pentagon press secretary, George Little, told reporters in a briefing Friday that the book’s author, Matt Bissonnette, was “in material breach of nondisclosure agreements he signed with the U.S. government” to not reveal classified information and to submit his book to the Pentagon for review. Little said the Pentagon was “reviewing all options” against Bissonnette, but he would not specify what those options might be and repeatedly declined to say whether the Pentagon had determined if there was classified information in the book. Bissonnette did not submit his book to the Pentagon for review. Bissonnette’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, responded in a letter to the Pentagon that the author, who wrote under the pseudonym Mark Owen, had “sought legal advice about his responsibilities before agreeing to
publish his book and scrupulously reviewed the work to ensure that it did not disclose any material that would breach his agreements or put his former comrades at risk.” “He remains confident that he has faithfully fulfilled his duty,” Luskin wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. The letter also said that the book was not subject to the nondisclosure agreement that the Defense Department said was violated. That agreement applied only to “specially identified Special Access Programs” that did not include the subject matter of the book, Luskin wrote. “Mr. Owen is proud of his service and respectful of his obligations,” the letter said. “But he has earned the right to tell his story.”
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Nonaligned nations back Iran on nuclear power, but not on Syria
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* By Thomas Erdbrink New York Times News Service
TEHRAN — The 120nation Nonaligned Movement handed its host Iran a diplomatic victory Friday, unanimously decreeing support for the disputed Iranian nuclear energy program and criticizing the U.S.-led attempt to isolate and punish Iran with unilateral economic sanctions. But the group’s communique, issued by Iranian state media at the end of its annual meeting, omitted any mention of support for Syria, Iran’s vital Middle East ally, which appeared to reflect a
view among many members that the Syrian government’s attempt to crush the uprising there was indefensible. The conspicuous omission of Syria from the document, called the Tehran Declaration, followed a dramatic day of maneuvering by Iran’s delegation to secure some kind of support for Syria’s government, diplomats said, as the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his aides were criticizing foreign backing of the Syrian insurgency. Nonetheless for Iran, the final result of the Nonaligned Movement’s meeting, the
biggest international gathering in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, amounted to the strongest expression of support for Iran’s nuclear energy rights in its showdown with the West. The unanimous backing of the final document undercut the U.S. argument that Iran was an isolated outlier nation. The Tehran Declaration document not only emphasizes Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy but acknowledges the right to ownership of a full nuclear fuel cycle, which means uranium enrichment — a matter of deep dispute.
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