Monday, January 10, 2005
January 10, 2005
Investigators Questioning Crew's Role in Train CrashBy MATTHEW L. WALD
GRANITEVILLE, S.C., Jan. 9 - Investigators seeking the cause of a train crash early Thursday that released clouds of chlorine gas and killed nine people said Sunday night that they were looking into whether a train crew was distracted or fatigued when it was time to reset a railroad switch.
The train carrying the chlorine ran off a through track and onto a side track, hitting a local train that had parked there about seven hours earlier. Investigators said Sunday night that the crew of the local train had reported back to the railroad dispatcher and "cleared their track warrant," which should have meant that they left the switch set to allow through traffic, said Debbie Hersman, the member of the National Transportation Safety Board assigned to the field investigation here. The switch showed no sign of tampering, she said, meaning that the crew that parked the train on Wednesday evening was apparently the last to touch it.
Investigators said that two of the three members of that Wednesday evening crew carried keys to the switch, and that investigators were seeking to determine whether the crew had conducted the required job briefing, discussing how tasks would be divided among them. Ms. Hersman said, "We're looking at whether there were any indications of distraction, whether or not there were rest issues."
Also on Sunday, emergency workers used plastic sheeting to stop up a leak in a chlorine tank car three days after the train crash ruptured the car and sent billowing green gas through the center of this town.
The plastic was a stopgap because the chlorine will eat through it, but technicians were unable to apply a steel patch because the tank car surface is warped by the wreck, said a spokesman for Norfolk Southern, which operated the train. "It has stopped the leak and enabled us to get to work," said Robin Chapman, the spokesman.
After they closed the hole, workers pumped in another chemical, sodium hydroxide, to convert the chlorine to a very strong bleach, which they then began pumping out to waiting tanker trucks. When enough is pumped out, Mr. Chapman said, they will roll the car 90 degrees to put the hole near the top and try to attach a plate made of lead, putty and steel.
Experts said it would take many days until all the chlorine could be removed from the scene. Officials hoped that late Sunday evening they could begin emptying two other cars filled with chlorine, one of them damaged. Each carries about 90 tons.
A crucial problem is that before the leaking car can be securely patched it must be rotated, and rotating the damaged car raises the risk of tearing the tank. New leaks are a possibility, said the Aiken County sheriff, Michael Hunt, who said that most of the 5,400 people ordered out of the area would have to stay out until at least Wednesday.
People exposed to chlorine continued to trickle into hospitals, complaining of coughs, eye irritation and difficulty breathing. The textile mill next to the crash scene said it had now accounted for all its employees, raising hopes that the death toll would not rise.
Discovery of a ninth body was announced late Saturday. Asked if there were more casualties still to be discovered, one Norfolk Southern emergency worker silently raised a hand with crossed fingers.
Some of the people coming to emergency rooms had not sought medical attention before, but others had been previously treated and released. Dr. Kenneth Grotz, an emergency room physician at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, Ga., across the Savannah River from the accident site, said that getting over the symptoms depended on the health of the patient and the extent of exposure. He also said people with respiratory symptoms were becoming fearful.
"They are saying, 'Oh my gosh, have I been poisoned?' " Dr. Grotz said. "People who got a good hit could have a cough that lingers for weeks." They are being treated with drugs to reduce inflammation and suppress coughing, he said.
At Doctors Hospital the number of inpatient victims is down to 4, from 12 on Friday, but 3 of those were still in critical condition. Patients with asthma or other lung problems before their exposures are the most likely to have permanent effects, said Dr. Grotz, as are children and the elderly. Some will have a permanent loss of ability to absorb oxygen, and some will have chronic hypersensitivity, he said.
At M.C.G. Health Systems, the hospital of the Medical College of Georgia, a spokeswoman, Deborah Humphrey, said, "We are seeing people return." But of the nine patients initially admitted for reasons related to the crash, only three remained hospitalized, and they were in good condition.
Thom Berry, a spokesman for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, said that a car carrying a second hazardous chemical, another form of sodium hydroxide, was no longer believed to have leaked.
After the wreckage is cleared, a contractor will remove the soil that was contaminated with chlorine and diesel oil from the locomotives, Mr. Berry said.
Investigators Questioning Crew's Role in Train CrashBy MATTHEW L. WALD
GRANITEVILLE, S.C., Jan. 9 - Investigators seeking the cause of a train crash early Thursday that released clouds of chlorine gas and killed nine people said Sunday night that they were looking into whether a train crew was distracted or fatigued when it was time to reset a railroad switch.
The train carrying the chlorine ran off a through track and onto a side track, hitting a local train that had parked there about seven hours earlier. Investigators said Sunday night that the crew of the local train had reported back to the railroad dispatcher and "cleared their track warrant," which should have meant that they left the switch set to allow through traffic, said Debbie Hersman, the member of the National Transportation Safety Board assigned to the field investigation here. The switch showed no sign of tampering, she said, meaning that the crew that parked the train on Wednesday evening was apparently the last to touch it.
Investigators said that two of the three members of that Wednesday evening crew carried keys to the switch, and that investigators were seeking to determine whether the crew had conducted the required job briefing, discussing how tasks would be divided among them. Ms. Hersman said, "We're looking at whether there were any indications of distraction, whether or not there were rest issues."
Also on Sunday, emergency workers used plastic sheeting to stop up a leak in a chlorine tank car three days after the train crash ruptured the car and sent billowing green gas through the center of this town.
The plastic was a stopgap because the chlorine will eat through it, but technicians were unable to apply a steel patch because the tank car surface is warped by the wreck, said a spokesman for Norfolk Southern, which operated the train. "It has stopped the leak and enabled us to get to work," said Robin Chapman, the spokesman.
After they closed the hole, workers pumped in another chemical, sodium hydroxide, to convert the chlorine to a very strong bleach, which they then began pumping out to waiting tanker trucks. When enough is pumped out, Mr. Chapman said, they will roll the car 90 degrees to put the hole near the top and try to attach a plate made of lead, putty and steel.
Experts said it would take many days until all the chlorine could be removed from the scene. Officials hoped that late Sunday evening they could begin emptying two other cars filled with chlorine, one of them damaged. Each carries about 90 tons.
A crucial problem is that before the leaking car can be securely patched it must be rotated, and rotating the damaged car raises the risk of tearing the tank. New leaks are a possibility, said the Aiken County sheriff, Michael Hunt, who said that most of the 5,400 people ordered out of the area would have to stay out until at least Wednesday.
People exposed to chlorine continued to trickle into hospitals, complaining of coughs, eye irritation and difficulty breathing. The textile mill next to the crash scene said it had now accounted for all its employees, raising hopes that the death toll would not rise.
Discovery of a ninth body was announced late Saturday. Asked if there were more casualties still to be discovered, one Norfolk Southern emergency worker silently raised a hand with crossed fingers.
Some of the people coming to emergency rooms had not sought medical attention before, but others had been previously treated and released. Dr. Kenneth Grotz, an emergency room physician at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, Ga., across the Savannah River from the accident site, said that getting over the symptoms depended on the health of the patient and the extent of exposure. He also said people with respiratory symptoms were becoming fearful.
"They are saying, 'Oh my gosh, have I been poisoned?' " Dr. Grotz said. "People who got a good hit could have a cough that lingers for weeks." They are being treated with drugs to reduce inflammation and suppress coughing, he said.
At Doctors Hospital the number of inpatient victims is down to 4, from 12 on Friday, but 3 of those were still in critical condition. Patients with asthma or other lung problems before their exposures are the most likely to have permanent effects, said Dr. Grotz, as are children and the elderly. Some will have a permanent loss of ability to absorb oxygen, and some will have chronic hypersensitivity, he said.
At M.C.G. Health Systems, the hospital of the Medical College of Georgia, a spokeswoman, Deborah Humphrey, said, "We are seeing people return." But of the nine patients initially admitted for reasons related to the crash, only three remained hospitalized, and they were in good condition.
Thom Berry, a spokesman for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, said that a car carrying a second hazardous chemical, another form of sodium hydroxide, was no longer believed to have leaked.
After the wreckage is cleared, a contractor will remove the soil that was contaminated with chlorine and diesel oil from the locomotives, Mr. Berry said.
COMMENTARY
Russia's Downhill Slide to Dictatorship
Putin's regime parallels Weimar Germany.By Niall FergusonNiall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard University and a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, is the author of "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire" (Penguin, 2004January 9, 2005In an amateurish way, I am a Russophile. It was reading "War and Peace" as a schoolboy that convinced me I should study history at university. My favorite film of all time is still the Soviet-era adaptation of Tolstoy's masterpiece. Throughout my 20s, I was a Dostoevsky devotee. Even today I can think of few pleasures to match reading the short stories of Chekhov. And then there is the music. For me, Shostakovich's chilling, haunting Piano Quintet will always be the signature tune of the 20th century.Yet it was always possible to love Russia and to hate the Soviet Union. And it is possible today to love Russia and to hate what Vladimir V. Putin is doing to her. I seldom agree with the New York Times, but Nicholas Kristof was pretty much on target. "The bottom line," he wrote, "is that the West has been suckered by Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin. Rather, he's a Russified Pinochet or Franco."Correct — except that Russia is not Chile or Spain. Neither of those countries was ever in a position to pose a serious threat to Western security. But Russia is different. According to Goldman Sachs, its economy could be bigger than Britain's and even Germany's by 2030. It remains the world's No. 2 nuclear superpower. If Putin's government is indeed turning it into a fascist regime, we should look elsewhere for parallels.In 1997, I published an academic article — co-written with the Russian economic expert Brigitte Granville — titled "Weimar Germany and Contemporary Russia." I can still remember being teased by one of my brightest undergraduates — himself a German — that this was excessively pessimistic, at a time when Russia's economic recovery appeared to be gathering momentum. I had to remind him just how long the Weimar Republic took to dissolve into Adolf Hitler's dictatorship.Born in 1919 in the wake of Germany's humiliating defeat in World War I, the Weimar Republic suffered hyperinflation, an illusory boom, a slump and then, starting in 1930, a slide into authoritarian rule, culminating in 1933 with Hitler's appointment as chancellor. Total: slightly less than 14 years.Born in 1991 in the wake of the Soviet Union's humiliating defeat in the Cold War, today's Russian Federation has suffered a slump, hyperinflation and is currently enjoying a boom on the back of high oil prices. Its slide into authoritarian rule has been gradual since Putin came to power in 1999. Is it going to culminate — 14 years on — with a full-scale dictatorship in 2005? It is beginning to look more and more likely.Hitler's power was consolidated after 1933 by the emasculation of both parliamentary and federal institutions. Putin has already done much to weaken the Russian Duma. His latest scheme is to replace elected regional governors with Kremlin appointees. And Russia's judges look to be next on his list for what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung — "synchronization."Hitler's regime also rested on the propaganda churned out by state-run media; Putin already controls Russia's three principal television channels. And Hitler believed firmly in the primacy of the state over the economy. The Kremlin's systematic destruction of the country's biggest oil company, Yukos, suggests that Putin takes the same view and that, like Hitler, he regards both private property rights and the rule of law with contempt. Hitler's arbitrary rule made him a mortal danger to many Germans. But what made Hitler such a threat to the rest of the world was his desire to extend Germany's power beyond its own borders. Here too Putin fits the bill. Just ask Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian presidential candidate opposed by Moscow, whose poisoning is widely suspected to have been the work of the Russian secret service.Nor is this the only example of attempted Russian intervention in the affairs of former Soviet republics. Putin opposed, vainly, Belarussian President Alexander G. Lukashenko's campaign for a third term in office. And he was hostile to the so-called "Rose Revolution" in Georgia that replaced the old Soviet autocrat, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, with the pro-Western Mikheil Saakashvili. Putin has not hesitated to play the separatist card. He has sought to encourage Abkhazia to secede from Georgia. In Moldova, he has favored autonomy for the enclave of Trans-Dnestr. This is where the resemblance between Russia now and Germany in the 1930s seems especially apt. Back then, it was possible for Hitler to point to large German populations in Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland to justify his demands for territorial expansion. Today, the Kremlin can, if it chooses, play much the same game with the Russian minorities in Kazakhstan (where Russians are 30% of the population), Latvia (just under 30%), Estonia (28%), Ukraine (17%), Moldova (13%) and Belorus (11%). Somewhere in that list could lurk the Sudetenland crisis of 2010.With its hands full in Iraq, the Bush administration generally has been reluctant to lean on Putin. At times, the White House has even seemed willing to accept the Kremlin's claim that its brutal five-year war against Chechen separatists is analogous to the American "war on terror." It hardly needs saying that appeasing dictators is a strategy with a dismal historical track record. Yet Washington needs to proceed with caution; rubbing Putin's nose in the failure of his Ukrainian meddling might simply encourage him to become still more of a dictator. But the Weimar parallel is not encouraging. Germany's descent into dictatorship went in stages; there were three more or less authoritarian chancellors before Hitler, each of whom sought to rule Germany by presidential decree.The question that remains open is whether Putin is just a more successful version of one of these authoritarian warm-up acts or a fully fledged Russian Fuhrer. Either way, he is fast becoming as big a threat to Western security as he is to Russian democracy.
Russia's Downhill Slide to Dictatorship
Putin's regime parallels Weimar Germany.By Niall FergusonNiall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard University and a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, is the author of "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire" (Penguin, 2004January 9, 2005In an amateurish way, I am a Russophile. It was reading "War and Peace" as a schoolboy that convinced me I should study history at university. My favorite film of all time is still the Soviet-era adaptation of Tolstoy's masterpiece. Throughout my 20s, I was a Dostoevsky devotee. Even today I can think of few pleasures to match reading the short stories of Chekhov. And then there is the music. For me, Shostakovich's chilling, haunting Piano Quintet will always be the signature tune of the 20th century.Yet it was always possible to love Russia and to hate the Soviet Union. And it is possible today to love Russia and to hate what Vladimir V. Putin is doing to her. I seldom agree with the New York Times, but Nicholas Kristof was pretty much on target. "The bottom line," he wrote, "is that the West has been suckered by Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin. Rather, he's a Russified Pinochet or Franco."Correct — except that Russia is not Chile or Spain. Neither of those countries was ever in a position to pose a serious threat to Western security. But Russia is different. According to Goldman Sachs, its economy could be bigger than Britain's and even Germany's by 2030. It remains the world's No. 2 nuclear superpower. If Putin's government is indeed turning it into a fascist regime, we should look elsewhere for parallels.In 1997, I published an academic article — co-written with the Russian economic expert Brigitte Granville — titled "Weimar Germany and Contemporary Russia." I can still remember being teased by one of my brightest undergraduates — himself a German — that this was excessively pessimistic, at a time when Russia's economic recovery appeared to be gathering momentum. I had to remind him just how long the Weimar Republic took to dissolve into Adolf Hitler's dictatorship.Born in 1919 in the wake of Germany's humiliating defeat in World War I, the Weimar Republic suffered hyperinflation, an illusory boom, a slump and then, starting in 1930, a slide into authoritarian rule, culminating in 1933 with Hitler's appointment as chancellor. Total: slightly less than 14 years.Born in 1991 in the wake of the Soviet Union's humiliating defeat in the Cold War, today's Russian Federation has suffered a slump, hyperinflation and is currently enjoying a boom on the back of high oil prices. Its slide into authoritarian rule has been gradual since Putin came to power in 1999. Is it going to culminate — 14 years on — with a full-scale dictatorship in 2005? It is beginning to look more and more likely.Hitler's power was consolidated after 1933 by the emasculation of both parliamentary and federal institutions. Putin has already done much to weaken the Russian Duma. His latest scheme is to replace elected regional governors with Kremlin appointees. And Russia's judges look to be next on his list for what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung — "synchronization."Hitler's regime also rested on the propaganda churned out by state-run media; Putin already controls Russia's three principal television channels. And Hitler believed firmly in the primacy of the state over the economy. The Kremlin's systematic destruction of the country's biggest oil company, Yukos, suggests that Putin takes the same view and that, like Hitler, he regards both private property rights and the rule of law with contempt. Hitler's arbitrary rule made him a mortal danger to many Germans. But what made Hitler such a threat to the rest of the world was his desire to extend Germany's power beyond its own borders. Here too Putin fits the bill. Just ask Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian presidential candidate opposed by Moscow, whose poisoning is widely suspected to have been the work of the Russian secret service.Nor is this the only example of attempted Russian intervention in the affairs of former Soviet republics. Putin opposed, vainly, Belarussian President Alexander G. Lukashenko's campaign for a third term in office. And he was hostile to the so-called "Rose Revolution" in Georgia that replaced the old Soviet autocrat, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, with the pro-Western Mikheil Saakashvili. Putin has not hesitated to play the separatist card. He has sought to encourage Abkhazia to secede from Georgia. In Moldova, he has favored autonomy for the enclave of Trans-Dnestr. This is where the resemblance between Russia now and Germany in the 1930s seems especially apt. Back then, it was possible for Hitler to point to large German populations in Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland to justify his demands for territorial expansion. Today, the Kremlin can, if it chooses, play much the same game with the Russian minorities in Kazakhstan (where Russians are 30% of the population), Latvia (just under 30%), Estonia (28%), Ukraine (17%), Moldova (13%) and Belorus (11%). Somewhere in that list could lurk the Sudetenland crisis of 2010.With its hands full in Iraq, the Bush administration generally has been reluctant to lean on Putin. At times, the White House has even seemed willing to accept the Kremlin's claim that its brutal five-year war against Chechen separatists is analogous to the American "war on terror." It hardly needs saying that appeasing dictators is a strategy with a dismal historical track record. Yet Washington needs to proceed with caution; rubbing Putin's nose in the failure of his Ukrainian meddling might simply encourage him to become still more of a dictator. But the Weimar parallel is not encouraging. Germany's descent into dictatorship went in stages; there were three more or less authoritarian chancellors before Hitler, each of whom sought to rule Germany by presidential decree.The question that remains open is whether Putin is just a more successful version of one of these authoritarian warm-up acts or a fully fledged Russian Fuhrer. Either way, he is fast becoming as big a threat to Western security as he is to Russian democracy.
From Behind the Scenes She Recruits Bush's Team
Dina Powell, the White House's top headhunter, is the youngest person to ever hold the job. And she's more than happy to stay in the shadows.By Johanna NeumanTimes Staff WriterJanuary 10, 2005WASHINGTON — As President Bush puts the finishing touches on his second-term team, one of the most powerful — and purposely least known — White House figures in the effort is a 31-year-old, Egyptian-born woman who is the administration's chief headhunter and recruiter.Dina Powell, assistant to the president for presidential personnel, may be the most important White House aide who is rarely photographed, and that's how she likes it.Keenly aware that her job requires an under-the-radar approach to publicity, Powell declines most interviews as she goes about the business of recruiting hundreds of political appointees for the administration — including high-profile Cabinet officials and members of obscure commissions.In a rare interview, Powell talked about the challenges of assembling a team to advance the interests of a president who has made it clear he has grand ambitions for his second term."When I recruit people I say, 'You don't want to be on the sidelines when the president accomplishes the agenda he was reelected on,' " she said. "And I tell them, 'When that's happening, you want to be on his team.' "Bush is involved in selecting members of his senior leadership team, she said. "We make the recommendations, the president makes the decisions."Noting a record of diversity among Bush's top appointments, Powell points with pride to the recent White House recruitment of Kellogg Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Carlos M. Gutierrez as Commerce secretary. She revels in his career trajectory, from selling Frosted Flakes to running the company."It says so much about the individual and about America," she said. "Our country is a meritocracy."She should know. Powell, the youngest person ever to hold her job, is an immigrant and the highest-ranking Middle Eastern American in the White House.Born Dina Habib, she came to the U.S. from Egypt at age 4 with two parents who had dreams for her and her younger sister. They settled in Dallas near her grandmother, Nora, whom she adored. Powell learned English. She noticed that the other kids brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch while she and her sister brought moussaka. The family all became naturalized citizens.Powell helped pay for college at the University of Texas by working at the Legislature, where she was an aide to two state legislators. She planned to be a lawyer.But then George W. Bush was elected governor, and she admired what she saw as his results-oriented approach, which got her thinking about public service. Deferring law school, she grabbed at a chance to come to Washington — serving as an intern for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and later as a staffer to then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas).In 1999, she headed the congressional office at the Republican National Committee, part of the team that worked to elect Bush president.After the campaign, she came to work in the presidential personnel office under Clay Johnson III, now deputy director for management in the Office of Management and Budget.Six months after Powell started working at the White House, her parents came for a visit and watched a presidential arrival ceremony on the South Lawn. After the helicopter landed, Bush shook hands along the rope line. When she introduced her parents, the president told them how delighted he was to have their daughter on his staff. Then he was gone. She turned to look at her parents. They were both crying."You have to understand," she said. "It was overwhelming. It affirmed for them the tough decision to leave everything they knew behind. In what other country could an immigrant family go from risking it all to one day having their daughter work for the president of the United States?"Married to a senior public affairs executive, Powell now has her own daughter, a 3-year-old she describes as a "peanut." Acknowledging the difficulties of being a working mother, she praises both her husband, "an unbelievably supportive partner," and the president, whom she described as running "a family-friendly White House."She admits that the hours are long and that she sometimes rushes home to have dinner with her family before returning to the White House to finish the day's work.Few of the 4,000 presidential appointees left the administration during Bush's first term, but some are leaving now, requiring successors. Even as the vacancies are filled, she is aware that more will soon be leaving — a never-ending conveyor belt of personnel changes.Observers who have spent their lives watching the presidential personnel process give her high marks for running a professional operation and for being conscientious about reflecting Bush's preferences."She has gone about this in a very business-like way, drawing on the best practices that top search firms use," said Patricia McGinnis, president and chief executive of the Council for Excellence in Government, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group of former government executives. "I have been impressed."Bob Tuttle, who served as President Reagan's presidential personnel director, said he appreciated Powell's "passion for personnel."Tuttle said he was astonished when his first meeting with Powell — "what I thought would be a grip and grin" — went well beyond the scheduled 15 minutes. "We were like two kids talking baseball," he said. "She's an incredibly bright and energetic individual."Despite the flap over Homeland Security nominee Bernard Kerik — a setback that Powell, ever discreet, declined to discuss — Tuttle said that the recruitment of fresh talent for Bush's second administration was "perhaps the smoothest transition in history, and she deserves the credit."Noting President Theodore Roosevelt's rueful remark that with every appointment he made 10 enemies, Tuttle observed that "modern presidents have gotten a lot smarter — they've delegated the job."On a trip last year to Egypt — her first since high school — Powell met with the newest Cabinet officers in President Hosni Mubarak's government, discussed economic reform and called on the president's wife.She also took the opportunity, at a lecture at the Al Ahram Strategic Center in Cairo, to defend Bush's Mideast policies. Quoting Bush's remark that "freedom is not America's gift to give to the world, it's God's gift to humanity," she praised the president for reaching out to Muslims and for his stance against racial profiling.As a daughter of Egypt, she said, she fervently believes that "the president's vision of freedom and opportunity for the region is the right approach."With Palestinians and Iraqis going to the polls this month, ushering in a new era of citizen participation, Powell was asked about her own future. "Like all presidential appointees," she said, smiling, "I serve at the pleasure of the president
Dina Powell, the White House's top headhunter, is the youngest person to ever hold the job. And she's more than happy to stay in the shadows.By Johanna NeumanTimes Staff WriterJanuary 10, 2005WASHINGTON — As President Bush puts the finishing touches on his second-term team, one of the most powerful — and purposely least known — White House figures in the effort is a 31-year-old, Egyptian-born woman who is the administration's chief headhunter and recruiter.Dina Powell, assistant to the president for presidential personnel, may be the most important White House aide who is rarely photographed, and that's how she likes it.Keenly aware that her job requires an under-the-radar approach to publicity, Powell declines most interviews as she goes about the business of recruiting hundreds of political appointees for the administration — including high-profile Cabinet officials and members of obscure commissions.In a rare interview, Powell talked about the challenges of assembling a team to advance the interests of a president who has made it clear he has grand ambitions for his second term."When I recruit people I say, 'You don't want to be on the sidelines when the president accomplishes the agenda he was reelected on,' " she said. "And I tell them, 'When that's happening, you want to be on his team.' "Bush is involved in selecting members of his senior leadership team, she said. "We make the recommendations, the president makes the decisions."Noting a record of diversity among Bush's top appointments, Powell points with pride to the recent White House recruitment of Kellogg Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Carlos M. Gutierrez as Commerce secretary. She revels in his career trajectory, from selling Frosted Flakes to running the company."It says so much about the individual and about America," she said. "Our country is a meritocracy."She should know. Powell, the youngest person ever to hold her job, is an immigrant and the highest-ranking Middle Eastern American in the White House.Born Dina Habib, she came to the U.S. from Egypt at age 4 with two parents who had dreams for her and her younger sister. They settled in Dallas near her grandmother, Nora, whom she adored. Powell learned English. She noticed that the other kids brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch while she and her sister brought moussaka. The family all became naturalized citizens.Powell helped pay for college at the University of Texas by working at the Legislature, where she was an aide to two state legislators. She planned to be a lawyer.But then George W. Bush was elected governor, and she admired what she saw as his results-oriented approach, which got her thinking about public service. Deferring law school, she grabbed at a chance to come to Washington — serving as an intern for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and later as a staffer to then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas).In 1999, she headed the congressional office at the Republican National Committee, part of the team that worked to elect Bush president.After the campaign, she came to work in the presidential personnel office under Clay Johnson III, now deputy director for management in the Office of Management and Budget.Six months after Powell started working at the White House, her parents came for a visit and watched a presidential arrival ceremony on the South Lawn. After the helicopter landed, Bush shook hands along the rope line. When she introduced her parents, the president told them how delighted he was to have their daughter on his staff. Then he was gone. She turned to look at her parents. They were both crying."You have to understand," she said. "It was overwhelming. It affirmed for them the tough decision to leave everything they knew behind. In what other country could an immigrant family go from risking it all to one day having their daughter work for the president of the United States?"Married to a senior public affairs executive, Powell now has her own daughter, a 3-year-old she describes as a "peanut." Acknowledging the difficulties of being a working mother, she praises both her husband, "an unbelievably supportive partner," and the president, whom she described as running "a family-friendly White House."She admits that the hours are long and that she sometimes rushes home to have dinner with her family before returning to the White House to finish the day's work.Few of the 4,000 presidential appointees left the administration during Bush's first term, but some are leaving now, requiring successors. Even as the vacancies are filled, she is aware that more will soon be leaving — a never-ending conveyor belt of personnel changes.Observers who have spent their lives watching the presidential personnel process give her high marks for running a professional operation and for being conscientious about reflecting Bush's preferences."She has gone about this in a very business-like way, drawing on the best practices that top search firms use," said Patricia McGinnis, president and chief executive of the Council for Excellence in Government, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group of former government executives. "I have been impressed."Bob Tuttle, who served as President Reagan's presidential personnel director, said he appreciated Powell's "passion for personnel."Tuttle said he was astonished when his first meeting with Powell — "what I thought would be a grip and grin" — went well beyond the scheduled 15 minutes. "We were like two kids talking baseball," he said. "She's an incredibly bright and energetic individual."Despite the flap over Homeland Security nominee Bernard Kerik — a setback that Powell, ever discreet, declined to discuss — Tuttle said that the recruitment of fresh talent for Bush's second administration was "perhaps the smoothest transition in history, and she deserves the credit."Noting President Theodore Roosevelt's rueful remark that with every appointment he made 10 enemies, Tuttle observed that "modern presidents have gotten a lot smarter — they've delegated the job."On a trip last year to Egypt — her first since high school — Powell met with the newest Cabinet officers in President Hosni Mubarak's government, discussed economic reform and called on the president's wife.She also took the opportunity, at a lecture at the Al Ahram Strategic Center in Cairo, to defend Bush's Mideast policies. Quoting Bush's remark that "freedom is not America's gift to give to the world, it's God's gift to humanity," she praised the president for reaching out to Muslims and for his stance against racial profiling.As a daughter of Egypt, she said, she fervently believes that "the president's vision of freedom and opportunity for the region is the right approach."With Palestinians and Iraqis going to the polls this month, ushering in a new era of citizen participation, Powell was asked about her own future. "Like all presidential appointees," she said, smiling, "I serve at the pleasure of the president
3 Killed as Unrelenting Storms Batter Southland
Flooding and mudslides close roads and damage houses. Rain is expected to last through Tuesday.By Jia-Rui Chong, Amanda Covarrubias and Richard FaussetTimes Staff WritersJanuary 10, 2005A fourth day of thrashing thunderstorms began to take a heavier toll on Southern California on Sunday with at least three deaths blamed on the rain, as flooding and mudslides forced road closures and emergency crews carried out harrowing rescue operations.In Elysian Park, a 42-year-old homeless man was killed and another injured when a mudslide swept away their makeshift encampment. Another man was killed on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu when his SUV skidded into a mud patch and plunged into the Pacific Ocean. Ventura County officials reported Sunday that a 20-year-old man died north of Ojai as he tried to cross a rain-gorged creek Saturday, wearing a harness attached to a wire.For others it was a day of close calls.Dozens of people fled threatened neighborhoods from Santa Clarita to San Dimas. In the Hollywood Hills, a family narrowly survived as their multistory home collapsed, apparently in a torrent of mud. Hundreds of motorists skidded into minor traffic accidents.A Highland man remained stranded but safe in a San Bernardino County cave as raging waters outside prevented rescuers from reaching him. "The only way to get to the cave is to cross this water, [but] it's flowing too heavily. It's too dangerous," said Cindy Beavers, a spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.The storms had stalled over an area of the Pacific Ocean on Sunday evening, a few hundred miles off the coast of Point Conception, west of Santa Barbara, said Bruce Rockwell, a specialist with the National Weather Service."It's stationary off the coast and constantly pumps in moist water from the south," he said.Forecasters had originally said that some areas of Southern California might receive more than 20 inches of precipitation over the weekend. Although they later reduced that estimate, a campground near Mt. Wilson, Opids Camp, received 20.82 inches of precipitation between 4 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday.In that same time period, downtown Los Angeles received 4.49 inches of rain, Beverly Hills 7.79 inches, Santa Monica 4.7 inches, Chatsworth 5.81 inches, Claremont 7.51 inches and Lancaster 2.36 inches.Continued downpours were expected through Tuesday, when the jet stream airflow from the north was expected to start pushing the storm inland toward Nevada.Southern California has been drenched by a string of storms that began in late December and have been only sporadically interrupted by clear skies.The current dousing, which began Thursday, has been the heaviest. More than 15 inches have fallen in Los Angeles in the first nine days of 2005, as much as the average annual rainfall downtown.All across the Southland, residents dealt with rockslides, debris flows, downed trees, power outages and mandatory evacuations, though there were few serious injuries.Mudslides, a sinkhole and other water damage forced Metrolink and Amtrak to cancel some train routes serving Los Angeles and Ventura Counties today.In Orange County, a combination of storm runoff and big surf caused health officials to close Corona del Mar State Beach in Newport Beach and Capistrano County Beach in Dana Point because of sewage pipe leaks.More than 300 miles away in the Eastern Sierra, skiers and snowboarders glided atop 48 inches of snow that has fallen on Mammoth Mountain since Friday. "We've just been pounded," said Joani Lynch, a Mammoth Mountain spokeswoman. Some ski runs were closed at Big Bear Mountain Resorts because of heavy rains.In Los Angeles County, the Department of Water and Power reported thousands of power outages in homes from Echo Park to Bel-Air. A rain-related accident on Mt. Wilson tore down transmission lines, interrupting the broadcast of the Indianapolis Colts and Denver Broncos playoff game on KCBS for two hours. In addition, at least half a dozen radio stations went off the air for more than an hour, including KIIS-FM (102.7) and KCBS-FM (93.1).And in Arcadia, eight of nine horse races at Santa Anita Park were canceled for the first time in 10 years because of rain. As heavy rain fell in other parts of California, but the storms in the Southland presented the biggest challenges.Los Angeles CountyThe 42-year-old homeless man who died in Elysian Park had been living with a younger acquaintance in a tent on top of a hill on the 1700 block of Stadium Way, just north of the Pasadena Freeway.The man, identified as Jeffrey Lynn Earwood, was trapped under hundreds of pounds of thick mud, according to Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey. When rescue workers arrived, they said, only one of his limbs was visible. Humphrey said firefighters dug him out in less than 10 minutes, but he died at the scene.The other man, who was unidentified, received minor injuries.The victim in the Malibu traffic accident died after the SUV he was traveling in skidded off the road in the 19700 block of PCH. Los Angeles County fire rescue workers recovered the man's body about 500 feet from where the vehicle went into the water off La Tuna Canyon Beach, said Lt. Randall Dickey of the Malibu Lost Hills Sheriff's Station.Four passengers in the car sustained minor injuries, Dickey said. Names and ages of the victims were not released.On Laurel Canyon Boulevard, three people were safe after their 5,000-square-foot house collapsed, apparently the result of a mudslide. An unidentified motorist helped the father pull his 5-year-old daughter out of the debris, authorities said. Firefighters rescued the man's 10-year-son. The family was hospitalized with minor injuries.Humphrey said this was one of a number of areas where mudslides caused problems. Around 4 p.m., "tons of mud" from a hillside slid into the third floor of a home in Silver Lake, trapping a man inside, he said. Firefighters had to break a window in the home in the 1900 block of North Lucile Avenue to reach the man, who was uninjured. The Fire Department also evacuated three other nearby homes.In Tujunga, five people were evacuated from the 6200 block of Gyral Drive after a mudslide near the Angeles National Forest, Humphrey said. No one was injured, though one house was damaged and nearby residents were advised to leave. Humphrey estimated that more than 100 roads in Los Angeles had seen flooding or mudslides or downed trees. "Most of the incidents are minor, and people do their civic duty with shovels in the mud."Other accidents were life threatening. In Norwalk, a car plunged into the swollen Coyote Creek from the northbound Santa Ana Freeway shortly before 4 p.m. Two women were quickly rescued but a man rode atop the car before falling into the swiftly moving water. He was pulled to safety by Los Angeles County Fire officials.In Santa Clarita, officials had been keeping an eye on the flood-prone Polynesian Mobile Home Park for days.By Sunday morning, they had evacuated more than 150 residents when the nearby Newhall Creek broke through a wall, sending fast-moving water gushing through the streets and toppling at least two trailers.No serious injuries were reported, but residents of the low-lying park scrambled to pack their clothes and grab their cats and dogs as they abandoned their homes for higher ground.Men, women and children — some clutching pets bundled in blankets and carrying trash bags full of clothing — grasped a rope set up by emergency crews to help residents traverse a muddy hill in the pouring rain."The wall broke and water just came crashing down, said Rebecca Hayes, 16. "It destroyed my friend's house completely."A neighbor, Jesus Ceja, 22, said his entire street was flooded and water had risen to the windows of his mobile home by 7:30 a.m. "It looked like a river," Ceja said.His brother, Rodrigo, jumped from a window of the mobile home they share to rescue a woman caught in the tumult. "A truck floating by almost hit her," Ceja said.San Bernardino CountyThe storms spread havoc through parts of San Bernardino County. Freeways and tiny mountain roads were closed, plugging access to rural foothill communities.An evacuation was called for about 60 homes in the remote mountain community of Forest Falls, about 19 miles east of Redlands, where the Snow Canyon Creek had backed up. Rescuers were worried that whatever was holding back the creek's flow could let go, releasing a torrent of water and debris.Beavers, the Sheriff's Department spokeswoman, said the man in the cave, who is in his 50s, frequently camps in the Bonita Canyon area and had been there several days. He called a friend on his cellphone around 11:30 a.m. and said he was worried about the rising water outside.Rescuers tried to find a way to reach the cave using heavy equipment and then reached the man — who had equipment and supplies for several days — on his cell phone."We told him that conditions were too dangerous, and we weren't going to be able to get anyone to him, and he'd have to stay overnight," Beavers said. A successful rescue occurred at the KOA campground in Devore. An unidentified man's car got stuck in a muddy road, and water began to rise before county Fire Department rescuers were able to free him at around 7:30 a.m., said Tracy Martinez, spokeswoman for the county's Fire Department.Water, silt and rocks were shooting off the wildfire-denuded hillsides above flood-prone Greenwood Avenue in Devore, making the road difficult to maneuver for even four-wheel-drive trucks and SUVs.On Saturday, rescue workers freed more than 170 motorists from cars that had been stuck in deep snow, a problem exacerbated by a broken-down bus that blocked both lanes of California Highway 18. On Sunday, a number of motorists remained at a Big Bear church, and sections of the highways 18 and 330 remained closed, said Janis Shucard, dispatcher for the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department.Ventura CountyA 6-foot wall of mud oozed across California 126 on Sunday morning, forcing the highway's closure between Fillmore and the Los Angeles County line and cutting off residents in the farm town of Piru.All roads in and out of the tiny community were closed by mid-afternoon, according to sheriff's department spokesman Eric Nishimoto.He said the mudslide, in an area scarred by wildfire, blocked traffic in both directions. He said officials did not know how long it would take to reopen the highway, which cuts through the citrus-rich Santa Clara Valley.Flooding and mudslides also damaged or threatened homes in Camarillo and the Casitas Springs area north of Ventura. And the threat of high water and flooding triggered the evacuation of hundreds of mobile home park residents in Fillmore and Moorpark, as well as an RV park at the mouth of the Ventura River.Residents were being sent to emergency evacuation centers set up by the Red Cross.Several people were trapped by rising water. Six people, apparently homeless and camping on the banks of the Ventura River, were airlifted to safety Sunday morning by a Sheriff's Department helicopter as the river rose above flood stageOn Saturday, Andrei Natali apparently drowned after slipping and falling into the fast-moving waters of Matilija Creek. Natali's family's home had apparently been hemmed in by flooding, and the wire strung across the water was the only way to get to the nearest road, Ventura coroner's officials said.Train ServiceIn Ventura, Metrolink service north of Moorpark was canceled today because of rain-related problems. Trains will not operate from stations at Camarillo, Oxnard or Montalvo.Passengers who usually board trains at Oxnard or Camarillo will be taken by bus to Moorpark Station. Montalvo station passengers should drive to Oxnard station to catch the bus, officials said.Metrolink trains 900 and 901, which run between Burbank and Los Angeles, also were canceled today, as is the Amtrak/Metrolink shared service train 108/A768. Amtrak canceled all Pacific Surfliner service today and abbreviated service on Coast Starlight routes between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara because of a sinkhole.The Coast Starlight trains will originate and terminate in San Luis Obispo instead of Los Angeles until further notice.*(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)Road closuresAfter rainstorms pummeled Southern California for the fourth day in a row Sunday, flooding, snow and slides forced the California Highway Patrol to close numerous roads and highways. Officials said they may remain closed today because cleanup efforts could take time, and conditions may worsen since more rain is expected this week. Here are some closures that may cause trouble for travelers today:Los Angeles CountySanta Clarita area: California 126 is closed near San Martinez Grande Canyon Road.Wrightwood area: Big Pines Highway is restricted between Largo Vista Road and California 2; snow tires and chains are required.Palmdale: Palmdale Boulevard is closed between 70th Street East and 90th Street East.Angeles National Forest: Lake Hughes Road is closed at the 13-mile marker; Glendora Ridge Road is closed from Glendora Mountain Road to Mount Baldy Road.Encino: Burbank Boulevard is closed from Hayvenhurst Avenue to the San Diego Freeway.Val Verde: Hasley Canyon Road is closed at Del Valle Road.Sepulveda Pass: The two left lanes of the northbound San Diego Freeway at Bel-Air Crest Road are closed until Tuesday or later.For more information about Los Angeles County road closures, go to http://www.chp.ca.gov . Ventura CountyFillmore area: California 126 between Fillmore and the Los Angeles County line is closed indefinitely.Santa Paula area: California 150 about half a mile west of Thomas Aquinas College is closed because of a 75-foot-wide sinkhole.Camarillo area: California 118 is closed at Somis Road; University Drive at Lewis Road, leading to Cal State Channel Islands, is closed. Motorists must use Potrero Road to enter or exit the campus.For more information about Ventura County road closures, go to http://www.vcsd.org . San Bernardino, Riverside countiesBig Bear Lake area: California 18 is closed at the Snow Valley ski area.San Bernardino: California 330 is closed from Highland Avenue to Running Springs; the northbound lanes of Interstate 215 are closed from Palm Avenue to Interstate 15.Lake Elsinore: Ortega Highway is closed at Grand Street.For more information about Inland Empire road closures, go to http://www.dot.ca.gov . Source: California Highway Patrol
Flooding and mudslides close roads and damage houses. Rain is expected to last through Tuesday.By Jia-Rui Chong, Amanda Covarrubias and Richard FaussetTimes Staff WritersJanuary 10, 2005A fourth day of thrashing thunderstorms began to take a heavier toll on Southern California on Sunday with at least three deaths blamed on the rain, as flooding and mudslides forced road closures and emergency crews carried out harrowing rescue operations.In Elysian Park, a 42-year-old homeless man was killed and another injured when a mudslide swept away their makeshift encampment. Another man was killed on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu when his SUV skidded into a mud patch and plunged into the Pacific Ocean. Ventura County officials reported Sunday that a 20-year-old man died north of Ojai as he tried to cross a rain-gorged creek Saturday, wearing a harness attached to a wire.For others it was a day of close calls.Dozens of people fled threatened neighborhoods from Santa Clarita to San Dimas. In the Hollywood Hills, a family narrowly survived as their multistory home collapsed, apparently in a torrent of mud. Hundreds of motorists skidded into minor traffic accidents.A Highland man remained stranded but safe in a San Bernardino County cave as raging waters outside prevented rescuers from reaching him. "The only way to get to the cave is to cross this water, [but] it's flowing too heavily. It's too dangerous," said Cindy Beavers, a spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.The storms had stalled over an area of the Pacific Ocean on Sunday evening, a few hundred miles off the coast of Point Conception, west of Santa Barbara, said Bruce Rockwell, a specialist with the National Weather Service."It's stationary off the coast and constantly pumps in moist water from the south," he said.Forecasters had originally said that some areas of Southern California might receive more than 20 inches of precipitation over the weekend. Although they later reduced that estimate, a campground near Mt. Wilson, Opids Camp, received 20.82 inches of precipitation between 4 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday.In that same time period, downtown Los Angeles received 4.49 inches of rain, Beverly Hills 7.79 inches, Santa Monica 4.7 inches, Chatsworth 5.81 inches, Claremont 7.51 inches and Lancaster 2.36 inches.Continued downpours were expected through Tuesday, when the jet stream airflow from the north was expected to start pushing the storm inland toward Nevada.Southern California has been drenched by a string of storms that began in late December and have been only sporadically interrupted by clear skies.The current dousing, which began Thursday, has been the heaviest. More than 15 inches have fallen in Los Angeles in the first nine days of 2005, as much as the average annual rainfall downtown.All across the Southland, residents dealt with rockslides, debris flows, downed trees, power outages and mandatory evacuations, though there were few serious injuries.Mudslides, a sinkhole and other water damage forced Metrolink and Amtrak to cancel some train routes serving Los Angeles and Ventura Counties today.In Orange County, a combination of storm runoff and big surf caused health officials to close Corona del Mar State Beach in Newport Beach and Capistrano County Beach in Dana Point because of sewage pipe leaks.More than 300 miles away in the Eastern Sierra, skiers and snowboarders glided atop 48 inches of snow that has fallen on Mammoth Mountain since Friday. "We've just been pounded," said Joani Lynch, a Mammoth Mountain spokeswoman. Some ski runs were closed at Big Bear Mountain Resorts because of heavy rains.In Los Angeles County, the Department of Water and Power reported thousands of power outages in homes from Echo Park to Bel-Air. A rain-related accident on Mt. Wilson tore down transmission lines, interrupting the broadcast of the Indianapolis Colts and Denver Broncos playoff game on KCBS for two hours. In addition, at least half a dozen radio stations went off the air for more than an hour, including KIIS-FM (102.7) and KCBS-FM (93.1).And in Arcadia, eight of nine horse races at Santa Anita Park were canceled for the first time in 10 years because of rain. As heavy rain fell in other parts of California, but the storms in the Southland presented the biggest challenges.Los Angeles CountyThe 42-year-old homeless man who died in Elysian Park had been living with a younger acquaintance in a tent on top of a hill on the 1700 block of Stadium Way, just north of the Pasadena Freeway.The man, identified as Jeffrey Lynn Earwood, was trapped under hundreds of pounds of thick mud, according to Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey. When rescue workers arrived, they said, only one of his limbs was visible. Humphrey said firefighters dug him out in less than 10 minutes, but he died at the scene.The other man, who was unidentified, received minor injuries.The victim in the Malibu traffic accident died after the SUV he was traveling in skidded off the road in the 19700 block of PCH. Los Angeles County fire rescue workers recovered the man's body about 500 feet from where the vehicle went into the water off La Tuna Canyon Beach, said Lt. Randall Dickey of the Malibu Lost Hills Sheriff's Station.Four passengers in the car sustained minor injuries, Dickey said. Names and ages of the victims were not released.On Laurel Canyon Boulevard, three people were safe after their 5,000-square-foot house collapsed, apparently the result of a mudslide. An unidentified motorist helped the father pull his 5-year-old daughter out of the debris, authorities said. Firefighters rescued the man's 10-year-son. The family was hospitalized with minor injuries.Humphrey said this was one of a number of areas where mudslides caused problems. Around 4 p.m., "tons of mud" from a hillside slid into the third floor of a home in Silver Lake, trapping a man inside, he said. Firefighters had to break a window in the home in the 1900 block of North Lucile Avenue to reach the man, who was uninjured. The Fire Department also evacuated three other nearby homes.In Tujunga, five people were evacuated from the 6200 block of Gyral Drive after a mudslide near the Angeles National Forest, Humphrey said. No one was injured, though one house was damaged and nearby residents were advised to leave. Humphrey estimated that more than 100 roads in Los Angeles had seen flooding or mudslides or downed trees. "Most of the incidents are minor, and people do their civic duty with shovels in the mud."Other accidents were life threatening. In Norwalk, a car plunged into the swollen Coyote Creek from the northbound Santa Ana Freeway shortly before 4 p.m. Two women were quickly rescued but a man rode atop the car before falling into the swiftly moving water. He was pulled to safety by Los Angeles County Fire officials.In Santa Clarita, officials had been keeping an eye on the flood-prone Polynesian Mobile Home Park for days.By Sunday morning, they had evacuated more than 150 residents when the nearby Newhall Creek broke through a wall, sending fast-moving water gushing through the streets and toppling at least two trailers.No serious injuries were reported, but residents of the low-lying park scrambled to pack their clothes and grab their cats and dogs as they abandoned their homes for higher ground.Men, women and children — some clutching pets bundled in blankets and carrying trash bags full of clothing — grasped a rope set up by emergency crews to help residents traverse a muddy hill in the pouring rain."The wall broke and water just came crashing down, said Rebecca Hayes, 16. "It destroyed my friend's house completely."A neighbor, Jesus Ceja, 22, said his entire street was flooded and water had risen to the windows of his mobile home by 7:30 a.m. "It looked like a river," Ceja said.His brother, Rodrigo, jumped from a window of the mobile home they share to rescue a woman caught in the tumult. "A truck floating by almost hit her," Ceja said.San Bernardino CountyThe storms spread havoc through parts of San Bernardino County. Freeways and tiny mountain roads were closed, plugging access to rural foothill communities.An evacuation was called for about 60 homes in the remote mountain community of Forest Falls, about 19 miles east of Redlands, where the Snow Canyon Creek had backed up. Rescuers were worried that whatever was holding back the creek's flow could let go, releasing a torrent of water and debris.Beavers, the Sheriff's Department spokeswoman, said the man in the cave, who is in his 50s, frequently camps in the Bonita Canyon area and had been there several days. He called a friend on his cellphone around 11:30 a.m. and said he was worried about the rising water outside.Rescuers tried to find a way to reach the cave using heavy equipment and then reached the man — who had equipment and supplies for several days — on his cell phone."We told him that conditions were too dangerous, and we weren't going to be able to get anyone to him, and he'd have to stay overnight," Beavers said. A successful rescue occurred at the KOA campground in Devore. An unidentified man's car got stuck in a muddy road, and water began to rise before county Fire Department rescuers were able to free him at around 7:30 a.m., said Tracy Martinez, spokeswoman for the county's Fire Department.Water, silt and rocks were shooting off the wildfire-denuded hillsides above flood-prone Greenwood Avenue in Devore, making the road difficult to maneuver for even four-wheel-drive trucks and SUVs.On Saturday, rescue workers freed more than 170 motorists from cars that had been stuck in deep snow, a problem exacerbated by a broken-down bus that blocked both lanes of California Highway 18. On Sunday, a number of motorists remained at a Big Bear church, and sections of the highways 18 and 330 remained closed, said Janis Shucard, dispatcher for the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department.Ventura CountyA 6-foot wall of mud oozed across California 126 on Sunday morning, forcing the highway's closure between Fillmore and the Los Angeles County line and cutting off residents in the farm town of Piru.All roads in and out of the tiny community were closed by mid-afternoon, according to sheriff's department spokesman Eric Nishimoto.He said the mudslide, in an area scarred by wildfire, blocked traffic in both directions. He said officials did not know how long it would take to reopen the highway, which cuts through the citrus-rich Santa Clara Valley.Flooding and mudslides also damaged or threatened homes in Camarillo and the Casitas Springs area north of Ventura. And the threat of high water and flooding triggered the evacuation of hundreds of mobile home park residents in Fillmore and Moorpark, as well as an RV park at the mouth of the Ventura River.Residents were being sent to emergency evacuation centers set up by the Red Cross.Several people were trapped by rising water. Six people, apparently homeless and camping on the banks of the Ventura River, were airlifted to safety Sunday morning by a Sheriff's Department helicopter as the river rose above flood stageOn Saturday, Andrei Natali apparently drowned after slipping and falling into the fast-moving waters of Matilija Creek. Natali's family's home had apparently been hemmed in by flooding, and the wire strung across the water was the only way to get to the nearest road, Ventura coroner's officials said.Train ServiceIn Ventura, Metrolink service north of Moorpark was canceled today because of rain-related problems. Trains will not operate from stations at Camarillo, Oxnard or Montalvo.Passengers who usually board trains at Oxnard or Camarillo will be taken by bus to Moorpark Station. Montalvo station passengers should drive to Oxnard station to catch the bus, officials said.Metrolink trains 900 and 901, which run between Burbank and Los Angeles, also were canceled today, as is the Amtrak/Metrolink shared service train 108/A768. Amtrak canceled all Pacific Surfliner service today and abbreviated service on Coast Starlight routes between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara because of a sinkhole.The Coast Starlight trains will originate and terminate in San Luis Obispo instead of Los Angeles until further notice.*(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)Road closuresAfter rainstorms pummeled Southern California for the fourth day in a row Sunday, flooding, snow and slides forced the California Highway Patrol to close numerous roads and highways. Officials said they may remain closed today because cleanup efforts could take time, and conditions may worsen since more rain is expected this week. Here are some closures that may cause trouble for travelers today:Los Angeles CountySanta Clarita area: California 126 is closed near San Martinez Grande Canyon Road.Wrightwood area: Big Pines Highway is restricted between Largo Vista Road and California 2; snow tires and chains are required.Palmdale: Palmdale Boulevard is closed between 70th Street East and 90th Street East.Angeles National Forest: Lake Hughes Road is closed at the 13-mile marker; Glendora Ridge Road is closed from Glendora Mountain Road to Mount Baldy Road.Encino: Burbank Boulevard is closed from Hayvenhurst Avenue to the San Diego Freeway.Val Verde: Hasley Canyon Road is closed at Del Valle Road.Sepulveda Pass: The two left lanes of the northbound San Diego Freeway at Bel-Air Crest Road are closed until Tuesday or later.For more information about Los Angeles County road closures, go to http://www.chp.ca.gov . Ventura CountyFillmore area: California 126 between Fillmore and the Los Angeles County line is closed indefinitely.Santa Paula area: California 150 about half a mile west of Thomas Aquinas College is closed because of a 75-foot-wide sinkhole.Camarillo area: California 118 is closed at Somis Road; University Drive at Lewis Road, leading to Cal State Channel Islands, is closed. Motorists must use Potrero Road to enter or exit the campus.For more information about Ventura County road closures, go to http://www.vcsd.org . San Bernardino, Riverside countiesBig Bear Lake area: California 18 is closed at the Snow Valley ski area.San Bernardino: California 330 is closed from Highland Avenue to Running Springs; the northbound lanes of Interstate 215 are closed from Palm Avenue to Interstate 15.Lake Elsinore: Ortega Highway is closed at Grand Street.For more information about Inland Empire road closures, go to http://www.dot.ca.gov . Source: California Highway Patrol
Indonesia Asks for Names of Aid Workers
Mon Jan 10, 6:07 PM ET
By JOCELYN GECKER, Associated Press Writer
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - Indonesia's military asked aid groups in tsunami-stricken areas Monday to draw up a list of international relief workers — and to report on their movements — as fears arose for the safety of foreigners helping survivors in a region wracked by rebellion long before the waves hit.
AP Photo
Reuters
Slideshow: Asian Tsunami Disaster
U.S. Relief Copter Crashes in Banda Aceh(AP Video)
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Indonesia Asks for Names of Aid Workers AP - 24 minutes ago
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The request underlined the unease with which Indonesia has faced the growth of the biggest aid operation in history, replete with foreign soldiers and civilian humanitarian workers.
Indonesian authorities have long been wary of foreigners' presence in the tsunami-stricken Aceh province, where separatists have been fighting government troops for more than 20 years. Foreigners were banned from the province at the northern tip of Sumatra island until the earthquake hit Dec. 26, touching off the tsunami.
Although the government has portrayed the rebels as ruthless killers willing to attack aid convoys and use refugee camps as hideouts, the military has yet to offer evidence to back its claims. Clashes between Indonesian troops and separatists have subsided since the disaster.
However, security concerns have also been heightened by the appearance of an Islamic extremist group with alleged links to al-Qaida. The group, Laskar Mujahidin, which has been involved in armed clashes with Christians in other parts of Indonesia, is distributing aid and has promised not to attack foreigners.
United Nations (news - web sites) staff in Aceh are on high alert and armed guards patrol their compounds.
Joel Boutroue, head of the U.N. relief effort in Aceh, said he did not believe Indonesia was trying to impede aid efforts with its request for information.
"It's normal they want to know where people are," he said. "I think it's a legitimate concern for the security of relief workers, considering the environment in which we're working."
In the hard-hit village of Meulaboh, residents watched the landing of U.S. troops bringing aid with wonder and relief.
"We have lost everything. We can't think about the future," said Rajadin Amkar, who lost his wife and newborn daughter. "They can think about these things. It's reassuring."
Only about 10 Marines landed Monday, because of Indonesian government concerns about security and the presence of foreign troops. U.S. military helicopters have been bringing in aid for more than a week.
About 100 Marines also went ashore in southern Sri Lanka for the first time, bringing heavy machinery to clear devastated areas. Dozens of residents converged on the palm-tree studded beach in Koggala town to watch as the Americans — most of them loaded down with heavy rucksacks — waded through the surging waves.
President Bush (news - web sites) said Monday the United States has a duty to continue helping the tsunami's victims but he did not put any more money behind his commitment for long-term assistance. After hearing Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites)'s firsthand report of damage in the region, Bush told reporters "we'll see" if the United States will give more than the $350 million in relief already pledged.
Canada, meanwhile, increased its funding for tsunami relief from $65 million to $345 million Monday, following criticism that Ottawa had given too little, too late. The new funding includes $215 million in emergency aid and $130 million over five years for reconstruction.
In Indonesia, fears of epidemic increased after medical teams detected two unconnected cases of measles and quickly vaccinated more than 1,000 people in nearby villages. Altogether, UNICEF (news - web sites) is vaccinating some 600,000 survivors in Sumatra's devastated regions.
Relief supplies to Aceh province were halted briefly by the crash of a U.S. Seahawk helicopter. The chopper went down in a rice paddy about 500 yards from the airport in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital and the hub of the aid effort.
Lt. Cmdr. John M. Daniels, a U.S. military spokesman aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, said one person fractured an ankle and another suffered a dislocated hip. The other eight sailors on board suffered "no significant injuries," he said.
He blamed the Monday morning crash on a "possible mechanical failure." U.S. authorities said there was no indication the helicopter had been shot down.
Meanwhile, Indonesia's government promised to intensify efforts to recover — and bury — tens of thousands of victims of the tsunami, which killed more than 150,000 people in 11 countries. Workers dug into the soft earth in the driving rain, hoisting the corpses into water-filled pits and heaping dirt over them.
Welfare Minister Alwi Shihab said 58,281 bodies had been buried in the shattered northern tip of Sumatra and some 50,000 more were "scattered" around the region.
Soldiers in gas masks moved debris in an effort to clear rubble and free corpses entombed in flattened buildings. Their stench still hangs over some areas of the provincial capital.
In Thailand, by contrast, forensics experts exhumed hundreds of bodies to extract DNA samples amid concerns they may include Westerners misidentified as Thais. The bodies had initially been buried in sandy trenches north of Khao Lak because there were not enough refrigerated containers to hold them.
Mourners in Sweden, one of the Western countries hardest hit, gathered in solidarity and sadness.
In Stockholm's City Hall, King Carl XVI Gustaf addressed the grief experienced in the Scandinavian country of 9 million. "Just imagine if I, like a king in the fairy tales, could put everything right again and end this by saying that they lived happily ever after," the king said. "But I am just another mourner."
Sweden has 637 people confirmed missing in Thailand. Fifty-two Swedes have been confirmed dead.
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Associated Press Writers Chris Brummitt in Banda Aceh, Tini Tran in Sri Lanka, Denis Gray aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and Matt Moore in Sweden contributed to this report.
Historical Events in January
1959 - Fidel Castro assumes power in Cuba
1971 - US Congress bans all smoking ads on radio & TV
1925 - Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini takes dictatorial control of Italy
1961 - President Eisenhower breaks off diplomatic ties with Cuba
1971 - The use of DDT is outlawed by U.S. Court of Appeals
1991 - PanAm files for bankruptcy and closes its doors
1967 - PBS goes on the air
1929 - Martin Luther King's birthdate - January 15th
1991 - The Gulf War begins
1778 - English navigator Captain James Cook discovers the Hawaiian Islands
1946 - The CIA is established by President Truman
1977 - President Carter pardons Viet Nam War draft evaders
1905 - The Russian Revolution begins in St. Petersburg
1986 - Space shuttle Challenger explodes at take-off
1995 - The O.J. Simpson trial begins
1904 - The first Boy Scout troop is established in England by Lord
1959 - Fidel Castro assumes power in Cuba
1971 - US Congress bans all smoking ads on radio & TV
1925 - Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini takes dictatorial control of Italy
1961 - President Eisenhower breaks off diplomatic ties with Cuba
1971 - The use of DDT is outlawed by U.S. Court of Appeals
1991 - PanAm files for bankruptcy and closes its doors
1967 - PBS goes on the air
1929 - Martin Luther King's birthdate - January 15th
1991 - The Gulf War begins
1778 - English navigator Captain James Cook discovers the Hawaiian Islands
1946 - The CIA is established by President Truman
1977 - President Carter pardons Viet Nam War draft evaders
1905 - The Russian Revolution begins in St. Petersburg
1986 - Space shuttle Challenger explodes at take-off
1995 - The O.J. Simpson trial begins
1904 - The first Boy Scout troop is established in England by Lord
this day in history On January 10
1776
Thomas Paine's 50-page pamphlet,Common Sense, is published.
1840
The penny post, whereby mail was delivered at a standard charge rather than paid for by the recipient, began in Britain.
1863
The "Metro," the world's first underground railroad/subway, opens to the public in London.
1878
California Senator A.A. Sargent introduces the Susan B. Anthony (women's suffrage) Amendment to Congress. The amendment won't be signed into law for another 42 years.
1911
Major Jimmie Erickson took the first photograph from an airplane while flying over San Diego, CA.
1946
The first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly took place with 51 nations represented.
1951
Donald Howard Rogers piloted the first passenger jet on a trip from Chicago to New York City.
1969
The final issue of The Saturday Evening Post appeared after 147 years of publication.
1971
"Masterpiece Theatre" premieres on PBS.
1986
The uncut version of Jerome Kern’s musical, "Showboat", opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
1998
Michelle Kwan wins the ladies' U.S. Figure Skating Championship, Tara Lipinski finishes second. A month later the two skaters will compete again in the Nagano Winter Olympics with different results: Lipinski wins the gold medal, Kwan the silver.
2000
It was announced that AOL and Time Warner were merging. It was the largest media deal in U.S. history priced at $111 billion. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved the deal on December 14, 2000.
2001
American Airlines agreed to acquire most of Trans World Airlines (TWA) assets for about $500 million. The deal brought an end to the financially troubled TWA.
2002
In France, the "Official Journal" reported that all women could get the morning-after conraception pill for free in pharmacies.
2003
North Korea announced that it was withdrawing from the global nuclear arms control treaty and that it had no plans to develop nuclear weapons.
1776
Thomas Paine's 50-page pamphlet,Common Sense, is published.
1840
The penny post, whereby mail was delivered at a standard charge rather than paid for by the recipient, began in Britain.
1863
The "Metro," the world's first underground railroad/subway, opens to the public in London.
1878
California Senator A.A. Sargent introduces the Susan B. Anthony (women's suffrage) Amendment to Congress. The amendment won't be signed into law for another 42 years.
1911
Major Jimmie Erickson took the first photograph from an airplane while flying over San Diego, CA.
1946
The first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly took place with 51 nations represented.
1951
Donald Howard Rogers piloted the first passenger jet on a trip from Chicago to New York City.
1969
The final issue of The Saturday Evening Post appeared after 147 years of publication.
1971
"Masterpiece Theatre" premieres on PBS.
1986
The uncut version of Jerome Kern’s musical, "Showboat", opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
1998
Michelle Kwan wins the ladies' U.S. Figure Skating Championship, Tara Lipinski finishes second. A month later the two skaters will compete again in the Nagano Winter Olympics with different results: Lipinski wins the gold medal, Kwan the silver.
2000
It was announced that AOL and Time Warner were merging. It was the largest media deal in U.S. history priced at $111 billion. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved the deal on December 14, 2000.
2001
American Airlines agreed to acquire most of Trans World Airlines (TWA) assets for about $500 million. The deal brought an end to the financially troubled TWA.
2002
In France, the "Official Journal" reported that all women could get the morning-after conraception pill for free in pharmacies.
2003
North Korea announced that it was withdrawing from the global nuclear arms control treaty and that it had no plans to develop nuclear weapons.
Sunday, Jan. 09, 2005Race Against TimeAs global charity surges, aid workers hit the ground in Asia. An inside look at the rush to beat disease, hunger and the destruction of the tsunamiBy NANCY GIBBS
Yusniar still hears the roaring in her head, the waves thunderously loud. The sea that was supposed to be a mother, protecting, sustaining, became a fury, sweeping two of her children away.
Compared with some people, she was lucky. Yusniar, 50, was able to find them and bury them herself, before retreating to the hills where she can keep an eye on the ocean, keep it in its place, from her tent made of blue plastic sheets and Styrofoam fished out of the swamps. Neither she nor the 150 others camping with her near Banda Aceh, capital of the Indonesian province that suffered the worst destruction, are ready to come down. The relief workers haven't yet discovered them, like untold numbers of others. "The water took away everything," she says. "We're afraid the waves may come back and try to take the rest of us."
The most experienced soldiers in the modern wars against catastrophe call this the greatest challenge of their lifetime. The arrival of aid to the battered region offered the first promise of relief to the storm's survivors, but many questions remain: How quickly can $4 billion go toward saving 5 million people when the U.N. is warning that disease could kill as many as the tsunami did, a number now reaching upwards of 150,000? How do thousands of rescuers, from hundreds of agencies, from dozens of countries, speaking different languages, coordinate their efforts so that relief workers in need of antibiotics don't find that the truck they are unloading carries only biscuits and blankets? How do they resettle a port town when residents look at the ocean and see a grave, refuse to eat fish for fear it has fed on the lost? How do they calculate human nature in countries where government soldiers fight with rebels over who gets the credit for feeding people who are close to starving?
As if to rebalance some cosmic scale, another wave is washing over South Asia like none the world has ever seen. The worst disaster in memory has evoked the greatest outpouring of charity. "Just as we see the power of nature to destroy, we have seen the power of human compassion to build," said Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. The pledges coming in to the U.N. for tsunami relief already surpass all the relief money received in 2004 for the top 20 disasters combined. The politics of pity is never pure, so there was a kind of global competition in generosity, especially after the U.S. increased an early pledge of aid tenfold, to $350 million. Japan offered $500 million, Germany topped that with a $660 million pledge, and Australia weighed in with $810 million. Arab commentators engaged in some self-criticism, asking why Norwegians and Belgians offered so much more than Arabs to help Asia's suffering Muslims. During his visit to Indonesia, the hardest-hit country and the world's most populous Muslim nation, Secretary of State Colin Powell could not let pass an opportunity for self-congratulation. "I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action," he said.
But for all the strutting and spitting, the overwhelming response was one of mercy. The money came so fast it crashed the website of Catholic Relief Services. Save the Children was logging more than 10 times the normal volume of calls, so that everyone from the CEO to the custodians was recruited to man the phones. Some groups, like M??decins Sans Fronti??res (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF), actually announced that they had taken in all the money they could use for tsunami relief and began directing donors to their general disaster funds, because other places in the world still need help even if they don't make headlines. But the charity toward the tsunami victims was unrelenting. Kids in Michigan sold hot chocolate; in North Carolina they sold lemonade; students in an eighth-grade class in Wenatchee, Wash., voted unanimously to give their class-trip money, which they had been raising for more than a year, to the Red Cross. There was Sandra Bullock pledging $1 million, Willie Nelson scheduling a benefit concert, NBA players offering $1,000 for every point they scored during games played late last week, and Helen E. McKenna, 88, a widow in San Francisco, donating her whole month's Social Security check. "My family was saying I was getting too old to handle my own money and that I should get a financial adviser," she said. "But it's my money. I can do whatever I want with it."
The same technology that has made this the most intimate of modern horrors has vastly increased the size and speed of the response. Relief organizations that used to have to wait for the check to come in the mail were receiving 80% to 90% of their donations online and moving the money out into the field faster than ever before. A dollar donated in the U.S. to Action Against Hunger, for example, is wired from New York City to the headquarters in Paris, where it buys water tanks, pumps, pipes, testing kits or chlorine tablets. Those supplies are shipped to international staging grounds in Igualada, Spain, near Barcelona, flown to Colombo, Sri Lanka, then trucked to a place like Batticaloa, on the island's northeast coast. Time elapsed from donation to distribution: 48 hours.
Raising the money is just the beginning. Delivering the supplies to the people who need them turned out to be the greater challenge. That meant confronting a practical, political and cultural obstacle course that slowed down aid to the most desperate areas while everyone learned the shortcuts. In many places, the roads that were bad to begin with are gone now and the ports swallowed whole. With bulldozers scarce, elephants have been enlisted to help clear debris. When pilots try to fly into a small airport, they find that the maps are suddenly wrong because the landscape has been rubbed away. Precious hours were lost when the lone airstrip in Banda Aceh was closed after a 737 hit a water buffalo while trying to land. "We need to make small, damaged airstrips some of the busiest airports in the world," says the U.N.'s Jan Egeland. In some Sumatran villages, it was impossible to deliver any goods at all until the U.S. and the Australian military showed up with amphibious vehicles that could stage beach landings. Sari Galapo, a U.N. volunteer in Batticaloa, was worried about the people on an island no one had heard from since the bridge to the mainland was washed out, so she set off by canoe. "The boat was barely above the water level, and I didn't want to look at the water," Galapo says. When she arrived, she discovered that the local government official had lost most of his family to the tsunami, become depressed, poisoned himself, and was hospitalized. In the meantime, no aid had got through until Galapo sounded the alarm.
When the physical hurdles are conquered, the political ones remain. In India, where 10,000 died and 6,000 are missing, the government was determined to portray itself as an advanced nation that can manage its troubles and made a point of dispatching its own relief workers to aid other countries in the region. The government was especially sensitive about foreigners invading the Nicobar islands, where the military keeps a secret electronic-listening post. Sparsely populated and almost impossible to reach in normal times, the islands are home to some of the world's last Stone Age tribes--five groups, with populations of 30 to 250, of Pygmy Africans and Mongol hunter-gatherers who stalk wild pig in the rain forest with bows and arrows. They were believed to have been wiped out by the tsunami, until a relief helicopter attempting to assess the damage was fired on by tribesmen shooting poison arrows.
Across the Nicobars, the International Red Cross estimates a death toll of 30,000 out of a population of 50,000. Meghna Rajsekhar, 13, saw the ocean swallow her mother and father, and after floating at sea for two days on a wooden door, she washed up on a Car Nicobar beach that was swarming with snakes. Newspapers wrote of refugees in Great Nicobar fending off crocodiles as they trekked through the jungle in search of water. For Aisha Majid, the tribal leader of Nancowry, an island filled with the homeless, the government's actions make no sense. She asks, "When the government can help other countries, why are they letting us down?" Says fellow survivor Aslam Majid, 22, who went five days without water: "People aren't dying from the tsunami. They're dying of thirst and hunger."
Elsewhere, relief workers have found themselves caught up in civil wars that have been raging for years. In Sri Lanka, there were hopes for some kind of peace, however temporary, between government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels who have waged a 21-year war for independence in the northern part of the country. Scores of displaced Tamil families taking refuge in a school in Kudathanai had gratefully accepted food and water brought by government soldiers. But when soldiers arrived with a specially cooked New Year's meal, refugees refused it on orders from a rebel. That night part of the school was set on fire. "We are stuck between the army on one side and the [Tigers] on the other side," says K. Jayakumar, 29, a fisherman. "Please tell them both that we deserve some peace after all we have been through."
In all the worst-hit areas, the most immediate enemy is infection. Thousands of people were essentially attacked by their own flimsy homes, sliced up and gashed by falling planks of wood, shards of glass and jagged pieces of corrugated tin. So many wounds went untreated or were badly treated in local clinics that gangrene and tetanus have set in; amputation is the most common operation in field hospitals.
Among the first international aid workers to reach ground zero on the Indonesian island of Sumatra were the doctors and nurses of MSF. When they arrived at the one functioning hospital in Sigli, on the east coast, there was only a single, volunteer surgeon on hand. "Our hospital was crippled," says Dr. Taufik Mahdi, director of the 35-bed unit. "Most of our doctors and nurses were too traumatized to work or left to look for loved ones missing after the tsunami." That first day the MSF team performed six operations, and it hasn't stopped since. "The minute we sew one up," says Dr. Claire Rieux, a general practitioner from Paris, "another gets wheeled in."
Spending a day at the hospital with the MSF team reveals the scope of the crisis. "Oh, man, this one is really bad," an Australian doctor shouts as he approaches the operating theater. He's holding up the arm of a man whose limb looks like a shank of lamb. The elbow is essentially gone, and the lower and upper arm is barely held together by a few sinewy strings of muscle and flesh. Though paint is peeling off the walls and a layer of grime covers many of the hospital's windows, Sigli's only hospital is fairly clean compared with many others in Indonesia's remote provinces. There are small victories. A young girl is wheeled in for surgery, her left foot severed at the heel. The doctors fear they may have to remove her leg at the calf to stop the infection from spreading, but after a massive cleaning and huge doses of antibiotics, her foot is reattached.
Fran??ois Gillet, MSF's logistics coordinator in Sigli, is desperately trying to find extra beds, plugs and lightbulbs, which no one seems to have. "It's the little things that often get overlooked and are hardest to find," he says. The group has relied on satellite phones for most of its communications, but even they have been less than reliable. "This is why we have to be as organized as possible," says Belgian Alexis Moens, the field coordinator. "You have to put up a structure that is strong enough on both the medical and logistical sides. Otherwise, things just won't work."
Other relief workers operate as a mobile triage unit, moving through the refugee camps that have sprouted across Sumatra's now barren landscape. Some 50,000 people are camped in local mosques and schools. Most of the refugees are still using rivers for washing their dishes and bathing--a recipe for cholera and typhoid. As the advance teams uncover unsanitary conditions in the camps, they report them to MSF water and sanitation units working in the area. "We work until midnight every day at the earliest, but we're always running behind," says Moens. "We just don't have the time or people to be everywhere."
In a crisis of this scale, some tasks require the kind of muscle only a superpower has. The U.S. Navy has 21 ships and 12,600 crew members working on rescue and relief operations in the waters off Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Seahawk helicopters--their blades filling the air with a fluttering rumble--sidle in and touch down on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln's 4 1/2-acre flight deck. Since sunrise on Jan. 1, the carrier's Seahawks have been flying from 13 to 17 missions a day. "We're going nonstop from dawn until sunset. Then the commanders meet, talk about what we've learned that day and map out what needs to be done tomorrow," says Captain David Lausman, the ship's executive officer.
The sailors and pilots are trying as best they can to coordinate with private groups to set up a smooth supply line. A host of aid organizations flies in supplies on U.S. C130 cargo planes to the tiny runway of the airport at Banda Aceh. Once unloaded, the planes must take off immediately to clear space for the next plane. The Seahawks, meanwhile, are landing on a converted football field a few hundred yards away, and the pilots are managing the transfer of supplies from the C130s to the helicopters. "It was like the Wild West down there when we first flew in," says Lieut. Dave Moffet, "but it's getting better." The helicopters head off for the villages, each one delivering 2,000 to 3,000 lbs. of food, medical supplies, communications equipment and even a few toys and some candy for the children. Along the way, their crews scour the countryside, looking for isolated hamlets that have yet to receive help and for displaced people straggling along roads. When they come across those who are sick or wounded, they ferry as many as possible to the field hospital. "We're seeing a lot of dehydration, diarrhea, lacerations and people missing limbs," says Kenny Rowe, a petty officer on a Seahawk. "We've got people with gangrene and other infections that could be fatal that haven't been treated for a week." Back at the airport, a few C-2 Greyhound transport planes load up with rice and carry it in. "Right now rice is gold to these people," says Rowe.
But like the doctors on the ground, the pilots encounter frustration. "We land in villages, and we can't understand what they're telling us," Moffet says. "People tell us there's a village 6 kilometers away that needs food, and then we go out looking for it and can't find it, and we have to go back two or three times looking for it." Desperate people rush the helicopters and risk being sliced by the blades. "We're lucky most of them are pretty short," he says with a wan smile. Now they try to get a translator off the choppers first to keep villagers back. "We try and fly different routes every day to find villages we're missing. We found one today because they had laid out an H in a field with white stones."
The Lincoln will eventually have to be relieved, perhaps by the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk. But for now, no one is in a hurry to see this tour of duty end. "Frankly, I don't care how long we're here," Moffet says. "We're not going to leave these people hanging." Sailors on the Lincoln receive constant emails from buddies elsewhere offering to pitch in.
The true test will come when attention wanes and the world moves on to some other preoccupation. The people in this region will need help for some time to come--and not just food, water and medicine. "They've lost everything. You'd be surprised--they need little things we don't even think about in our daily lives," says Gail Neudorf, deputy director of emergency and humanitarian relief for CARE USA. "Things like soap, washing powder, buckets, bottles for water so you have a clean container to keep water in, cooking utensils, sleeping mats, clothing, blankets, diapers, sanitary pads, matches, candles, lanterns, cooking fuel. In time, we'll look at getting books for kids out there, school kits." Then the survivors will need another army of donors to piece together the lives they have lost. --Reported by Aravind Adiga/ Kudathanai; Denis Giles/aboard the relief ship MV Sentinel; Robert Horn/ aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln; Carolina A. Miranda and Deirdre van Dyk/ New York; Alex Perry/ Port Blair; Eric Roston/ Washington; and Jason Tedjasukmana/ Banda Aceh
Yusniar still hears the roaring in her head, the waves thunderously loud. The sea that was supposed to be a mother, protecting, sustaining, became a fury, sweeping two of her children away.
Compared with some people, she was lucky. Yusniar, 50, was able to find them and bury them herself, before retreating to the hills where she can keep an eye on the ocean, keep it in its place, from her tent made of blue plastic sheets and Styrofoam fished out of the swamps. Neither she nor the 150 others camping with her near Banda Aceh, capital of the Indonesian province that suffered the worst destruction, are ready to come down. The relief workers haven't yet discovered them, like untold numbers of others. "The water took away everything," she says. "We're afraid the waves may come back and try to take the rest of us."
The most experienced soldiers in the modern wars against catastrophe call this the greatest challenge of their lifetime. The arrival of aid to the battered region offered the first promise of relief to the storm's survivors, but many questions remain: How quickly can $4 billion go toward saving 5 million people when the U.N. is warning that disease could kill as many as the tsunami did, a number now reaching upwards of 150,000? How do thousands of rescuers, from hundreds of agencies, from dozens of countries, speaking different languages, coordinate their efforts so that relief workers in need of antibiotics don't find that the truck they are unloading carries only biscuits and blankets? How do they resettle a port town when residents look at the ocean and see a grave, refuse to eat fish for fear it has fed on the lost? How do they calculate human nature in countries where government soldiers fight with rebels over who gets the credit for feeding people who are close to starving?
As if to rebalance some cosmic scale, another wave is washing over South Asia like none the world has ever seen. The worst disaster in memory has evoked the greatest outpouring of charity. "Just as we see the power of nature to destroy, we have seen the power of human compassion to build," said Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. The pledges coming in to the U.N. for tsunami relief already surpass all the relief money received in 2004 for the top 20 disasters combined. The politics of pity is never pure, so there was a kind of global competition in generosity, especially after the U.S. increased an early pledge of aid tenfold, to $350 million. Japan offered $500 million, Germany topped that with a $660 million pledge, and Australia weighed in with $810 million. Arab commentators engaged in some self-criticism, asking why Norwegians and Belgians offered so much more than Arabs to help Asia's suffering Muslims. During his visit to Indonesia, the hardest-hit country and the world's most populous Muslim nation, Secretary of State Colin Powell could not let pass an opportunity for self-congratulation. "I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action," he said.
But for all the strutting and spitting, the overwhelming response was one of mercy. The money came so fast it crashed the website of Catholic Relief Services. Save the Children was logging more than 10 times the normal volume of calls, so that everyone from the CEO to the custodians was recruited to man the phones. Some groups, like M??decins Sans Fronti??res (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF), actually announced that they had taken in all the money they could use for tsunami relief and began directing donors to their general disaster funds, because other places in the world still need help even if they don't make headlines. But the charity toward the tsunami victims was unrelenting. Kids in Michigan sold hot chocolate; in North Carolina they sold lemonade; students in an eighth-grade class in Wenatchee, Wash., voted unanimously to give their class-trip money, which they had been raising for more than a year, to the Red Cross. There was Sandra Bullock pledging $1 million, Willie Nelson scheduling a benefit concert, NBA players offering $1,000 for every point they scored during games played late last week, and Helen E. McKenna, 88, a widow in San Francisco, donating her whole month's Social Security check. "My family was saying I was getting too old to handle my own money and that I should get a financial adviser," she said. "But it's my money. I can do whatever I want with it."
The same technology that has made this the most intimate of modern horrors has vastly increased the size and speed of the response. Relief organizations that used to have to wait for the check to come in the mail were receiving 80% to 90% of their donations online and moving the money out into the field faster than ever before. A dollar donated in the U.S. to Action Against Hunger, for example, is wired from New York City to the headquarters in Paris, where it buys water tanks, pumps, pipes, testing kits or chlorine tablets. Those supplies are shipped to international staging grounds in Igualada, Spain, near Barcelona, flown to Colombo, Sri Lanka, then trucked to a place like Batticaloa, on the island's northeast coast. Time elapsed from donation to distribution: 48 hours.
Raising the money is just the beginning. Delivering the supplies to the people who need them turned out to be the greater challenge. That meant confronting a practical, political and cultural obstacle course that slowed down aid to the most desperate areas while everyone learned the shortcuts. In many places, the roads that were bad to begin with are gone now and the ports swallowed whole. With bulldozers scarce, elephants have been enlisted to help clear debris. When pilots try to fly into a small airport, they find that the maps are suddenly wrong because the landscape has been rubbed away. Precious hours were lost when the lone airstrip in Banda Aceh was closed after a 737 hit a water buffalo while trying to land. "We need to make small, damaged airstrips some of the busiest airports in the world," says the U.N.'s Jan Egeland. In some Sumatran villages, it was impossible to deliver any goods at all until the U.S. and the Australian military showed up with amphibious vehicles that could stage beach landings. Sari Galapo, a U.N. volunteer in Batticaloa, was worried about the people on an island no one had heard from since the bridge to the mainland was washed out, so she set off by canoe. "The boat was barely above the water level, and I didn't want to look at the water," Galapo says. When she arrived, she discovered that the local government official had lost most of his family to the tsunami, become depressed, poisoned himself, and was hospitalized. In the meantime, no aid had got through until Galapo sounded the alarm.
When the physical hurdles are conquered, the political ones remain. In India, where 10,000 died and 6,000 are missing, the government was determined to portray itself as an advanced nation that can manage its troubles and made a point of dispatching its own relief workers to aid other countries in the region. The government was especially sensitive about foreigners invading the Nicobar islands, where the military keeps a secret electronic-listening post. Sparsely populated and almost impossible to reach in normal times, the islands are home to some of the world's last Stone Age tribes--five groups, with populations of 30 to 250, of Pygmy Africans and Mongol hunter-gatherers who stalk wild pig in the rain forest with bows and arrows. They were believed to have been wiped out by the tsunami, until a relief helicopter attempting to assess the damage was fired on by tribesmen shooting poison arrows.
Across the Nicobars, the International Red Cross estimates a death toll of 30,000 out of a population of 50,000. Meghna Rajsekhar, 13, saw the ocean swallow her mother and father, and after floating at sea for two days on a wooden door, she washed up on a Car Nicobar beach that was swarming with snakes. Newspapers wrote of refugees in Great Nicobar fending off crocodiles as they trekked through the jungle in search of water. For Aisha Majid, the tribal leader of Nancowry, an island filled with the homeless, the government's actions make no sense. She asks, "When the government can help other countries, why are they letting us down?" Says fellow survivor Aslam Majid, 22, who went five days without water: "People aren't dying from the tsunami. They're dying of thirst and hunger."
Elsewhere, relief workers have found themselves caught up in civil wars that have been raging for years. In Sri Lanka, there were hopes for some kind of peace, however temporary, between government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels who have waged a 21-year war for independence in the northern part of the country. Scores of displaced Tamil families taking refuge in a school in Kudathanai had gratefully accepted food and water brought by government soldiers. But when soldiers arrived with a specially cooked New Year's meal, refugees refused it on orders from a rebel. That night part of the school was set on fire. "We are stuck between the army on one side and the [Tigers] on the other side," says K. Jayakumar, 29, a fisherman. "Please tell them both that we deserve some peace after all we have been through."
In all the worst-hit areas, the most immediate enemy is infection. Thousands of people were essentially attacked by their own flimsy homes, sliced up and gashed by falling planks of wood, shards of glass and jagged pieces of corrugated tin. So many wounds went untreated or were badly treated in local clinics that gangrene and tetanus have set in; amputation is the most common operation in field hospitals.
Among the first international aid workers to reach ground zero on the Indonesian island of Sumatra were the doctors and nurses of MSF. When they arrived at the one functioning hospital in Sigli, on the east coast, there was only a single, volunteer surgeon on hand. "Our hospital was crippled," says Dr. Taufik Mahdi, director of the 35-bed unit. "Most of our doctors and nurses were too traumatized to work or left to look for loved ones missing after the tsunami." That first day the MSF team performed six operations, and it hasn't stopped since. "The minute we sew one up," says Dr. Claire Rieux, a general practitioner from Paris, "another gets wheeled in."
Spending a day at the hospital with the MSF team reveals the scope of the crisis. "Oh, man, this one is really bad," an Australian doctor shouts as he approaches the operating theater. He's holding up the arm of a man whose limb looks like a shank of lamb. The elbow is essentially gone, and the lower and upper arm is barely held together by a few sinewy strings of muscle and flesh. Though paint is peeling off the walls and a layer of grime covers many of the hospital's windows, Sigli's only hospital is fairly clean compared with many others in Indonesia's remote provinces. There are small victories. A young girl is wheeled in for surgery, her left foot severed at the heel. The doctors fear they may have to remove her leg at the calf to stop the infection from spreading, but after a massive cleaning and huge doses of antibiotics, her foot is reattached.
Fran??ois Gillet, MSF's logistics coordinator in Sigli, is desperately trying to find extra beds, plugs and lightbulbs, which no one seems to have. "It's the little things that often get overlooked and are hardest to find," he says. The group has relied on satellite phones for most of its communications, but even they have been less than reliable. "This is why we have to be as organized as possible," says Belgian Alexis Moens, the field coordinator. "You have to put up a structure that is strong enough on both the medical and logistical sides. Otherwise, things just won't work."
Other relief workers operate as a mobile triage unit, moving through the refugee camps that have sprouted across Sumatra's now barren landscape. Some 50,000 people are camped in local mosques and schools. Most of the refugees are still using rivers for washing their dishes and bathing--a recipe for cholera and typhoid. As the advance teams uncover unsanitary conditions in the camps, they report them to MSF water and sanitation units working in the area. "We work until midnight every day at the earliest, but we're always running behind," says Moens. "We just don't have the time or people to be everywhere."
In a crisis of this scale, some tasks require the kind of muscle only a superpower has. The U.S. Navy has 21 ships and 12,600 crew members working on rescue and relief operations in the waters off Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Seahawk helicopters--their blades filling the air with a fluttering rumble--sidle in and touch down on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln's 4 1/2-acre flight deck. Since sunrise on Jan. 1, the carrier's Seahawks have been flying from 13 to 17 missions a day. "We're going nonstop from dawn until sunset. Then the commanders meet, talk about what we've learned that day and map out what needs to be done tomorrow," says Captain David Lausman, the ship's executive officer.
The sailors and pilots are trying as best they can to coordinate with private groups to set up a smooth supply line. A host of aid organizations flies in supplies on U.S. C130 cargo planes to the tiny runway of the airport at Banda Aceh. Once unloaded, the planes must take off immediately to clear space for the next plane. The Seahawks, meanwhile, are landing on a converted football field a few hundred yards away, and the pilots are managing the transfer of supplies from the C130s to the helicopters. "It was like the Wild West down there when we first flew in," says Lieut. Dave Moffet, "but it's getting better." The helicopters head off for the villages, each one delivering 2,000 to 3,000 lbs. of food, medical supplies, communications equipment and even a few toys and some candy for the children. Along the way, their crews scour the countryside, looking for isolated hamlets that have yet to receive help and for displaced people straggling along roads. When they come across those who are sick or wounded, they ferry as many as possible to the field hospital. "We're seeing a lot of dehydration, diarrhea, lacerations and people missing limbs," says Kenny Rowe, a petty officer on a Seahawk. "We've got people with gangrene and other infections that could be fatal that haven't been treated for a week." Back at the airport, a few C-2 Greyhound transport planes load up with rice and carry it in. "Right now rice is gold to these people," says Rowe.
But like the doctors on the ground, the pilots encounter frustration. "We land in villages, and we can't understand what they're telling us," Moffet says. "People tell us there's a village 6 kilometers away that needs food, and then we go out looking for it and can't find it, and we have to go back two or three times looking for it." Desperate people rush the helicopters and risk being sliced by the blades. "We're lucky most of them are pretty short," he says with a wan smile. Now they try to get a translator off the choppers first to keep villagers back. "We try and fly different routes every day to find villages we're missing. We found one today because they had laid out an H in a field with white stones."
The Lincoln will eventually have to be relieved, perhaps by the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk. But for now, no one is in a hurry to see this tour of duty end. "Frankly, I don't care how long we're here," Moffet says. "We're not going to leave these people hanging." Sailors on the Lincoln receive constant emails from buddies elsewhere offering to pitch in.
The true test will come when attention wanes and the world moves on to some other preoccupation. The people in this region will need help for some time to come--and not just food, water and medicine. "They've lost everything. You'd be surprised--they need little things we don't even think about in our daily lives," says Gail Neudorf, deputy director of emergency and humanitarian relief for CARE USA. "Things like soap, washing powder, buckets, bottles for water so you have a clean container to keep water in, cooking utensils, sleeping mats, clothing, blankets, diapers, sanitary pads, matches, candles, lanterns, cooking fuel. In time, we'll look at getting books for kids out there, school kits." Then the survivors will need another army of donors to piece together the lives they have lost. --Reported by Aravind Adiga/ Kudathanai; Denis Giles/aboard the relief ship MV Sentinel; Robert Horn/ aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln; Carolina A. Miranda and Deirdre van Dyk/ New York; Alex Perry/ Port Blair; Eric Roston/ Washington; and Jason Tedjasukmana/ Banda Aceh
CBS Fires Four Executives
By Howard KurtzWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, January 10, 2005; 11:48 AM
An outside panel said today it had found "considerable and fundamental deficiencies" at CBS News in its reporting of a disputed story on President Bush's National Guard service, prompting the network to dump three top executives and Mary Mapes, Dan Rather's producer on the September story.
Rather has already announced that he plans to step down as anchor in March.
CBS President Leslie Moonves accepted the panel's findings, saying in a statement that "there were lapses every step of the way--in the reporting and the vetting of the segment and in the reaction of CBS News in the aftermath of the report." He also said that "Mapes presented half-truths as facts to those with whom she worked."
The highest-ranking person let go was Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervises CBS's prime-time programs. Also jettisoned were Josh Howard, executive producer of "60 Minutes Wednesday," and his deputy, Mary Murphy. Left untouched was CBS News President Andrew Heyward, who approved the piece before it aired.
"We deeply regret the disservice this flawed 60 Minutes Wednesday report did to the American public, which has a right to count on CBS News for fairness and accuracy," Moonves said.
Moonves said in his statement that Rather "asked the right questions initially, but then made the same errors of credulity and over-enthusiasm that beset many of his colleagues. . . . He defended the story overzealously afterward. . . . The panel has found that his unwillingness to consider that CBS News and his colleagues were in the wrong was a mistake."
Since Rather is giving up the anchor chair, however, Moonves said further action "would not be appropriate."
The panel, headed by former attorney general Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief executive Louis Boccardi, said it could not definitively prove that the 30-year-old memos said to have been written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Bush's late squadron commander in the Texas Air National Guard, were bogus. But it said there had been a "failure" by CBS to authenticate any of the documents and that "60 Minutes" had aired the "false" statement that an expert had verified the documents when all he did was authenticate one signature on one document.
CBS also failed to interview the person who provided the suspect memos to its source, former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett, and never established Rather's claim that the papers "were taken from Colonel Killian's personal files."
Mapes's call to Joe Lockhart, then a senior adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, in which she asked him to speak with her source Burkett, was "a clear conflict of interest" that "created the appearance of a political bias," the report said.
The panel did not find, however, that those involved in the report on Bush had a political bias.
Taken together, the Thornburgh-Boccardi findings amount to a repudiation of the newsgathering process of CBS News and the midweek spinoff of one of its crown jewels, "60 Minutes." It also tarnished the reputation of Rather, the CBS News anchor since 1981, who would have faced considerable pressure to step down if he had not set a retirement date before the report was issued. Rather plans to continue as a correspondent for "60 Minutes."
The panel was equally tough on CBS's decision to doggedly defend the National Guard story for nearly two weeks after the authenticity of the documents came under fire.
The report assailed the "strident defense" made without "any adequate probing whether any of the questions raised had merit." CBS should not have allowed many of the same people involved in reporting the flawed Sept. 8 story to handle the follow-up pieces on the "CBS Evening News," some of which were "misleading," the report said.
CBS News also made "inaccurate press statements" that the then-secret source of the documents was "unimpeachable" and that numerous experts had vouched for their authenticity, the panel found. Instead, CBS aired stories to support the segment "instead of providing accurate and balanced coverage of a raging controversy."
Moonves reserved his harshest words for Mapes, saying that "her basic reporting was faulty and her responses when questioned led others who trusted her down the wrong road. Her confidential source was not reliable and her authenticators were unable to authenticate the documents, yet she maintained the opposite."
Mapes's accounts in some cases are "radically different" from those of her sources and colleagues, Moonves said.
Moonves named CBS executive Linda Mason to the newly created post of senior vice president for standards and special projects
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
'
By Howard KurtzWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, January 10, 2005; 11:48 AM
An outside panel said today it had found "considerable and fundamental deficiencies" at CBS News in its reporting of a disputed story on President Bush's National Guard service, prompting the network to dump three top executives and Mary Mapes, Dan Rather's producer on the September story.
Rather has already announced that he plans to step down as anchor in March.
CBS President Leslie Moonves accepted the panel's findings, saying in a statement that "there were lapses every step of the way--in the reporting and the vetting of the segment and in the reaction of CBS News in the aftermath of the report." He also said that "Mapes presented half-truths as facts to those with whom she worked."
The highest-ranking person let go was Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervises CBS's prime-time programs. Also jettisoned were Josh Howard, executive producer of "60 Minutes Wednesday," and his deputy, Mary Murphy. Left untouched was CBS News President Andrew Heyward, who approved the piece before it aired.
"We deeply regret the disservice this flawed 60 Minutes Wednesday report did to the American public, which has a right to count on CBS News for fairness and accuracy," Moonves said.
Moonves said in his statement that Rather "asked the right questions initially, but then made the same errors of credulity and over-enthusiasm that beset many of his colleagues. . . . He defended the story overzealously afterward. . . . The panel has found that his unwillingness to consider that CBS News and his colleagues were in the wrong was a mistake."
Since Rather is giving up the anchor chair, however, Moonves said further action "would not be appropriate."
The panel, headed by former attorney general Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief executive Louis Boccardi, said it could not definitively prove that the 30-year-old memos said to have been written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Bush's late squadron commander in the Texas Air National Guard, were bogus. But it said there had been a "failure" by CBS to authenticate any of the documents and that "60 Minutes" had aired the "false" statement that an expert had verified the documents when all he did was authenticate one signature on one document.
CBS also failed to interview the person who provided the suspect memos to its source, former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett, and never established Rather's claim that the papers "were taken from Colonel Killian's personal files."
Mapes's call to Joe Lockhart, then a senior adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, in which she asked him to speak with her source Burkett, was "a clear conflict of interest" that "created the appearance of a political bias," the report said.
The panel did not find, however, that those involved in the report on Bush had a political bias.
Taken together, the Thornburgh-Boccardi findings amount to a repudiation of the newsgathering process of CBS News and the midweek spinoff of one of its crown jewels, "60 Minutes." It also tarnished the reputation of Rather, the CBS News anchor since 1981, who would have faced considerable pressure to step down if he had not set a retirement date before the report was issued. Rather plans to continue as a correspondent for "60 Minutes."
The panel was equally tough on CBS's decision to doggedly defend the National Guard story for nearly two weeks after the authenticity of the documents came under fire.
The report assailed the "strident defense" made without "any adequate probing whether any of the questions raised had merit." CBS should not have allowed many of the same people involved in reporting the flawed Sept. 8 story to handle the follow-up pieces on the "CBS Evening News," some of which were "misleading," the report said.
CBS News also made "inaccurate press statements" that the then-secret source of the documents was "unimpeachable" and that numerous experts had vouched for their authenticity, the panel found. Instead, CBS aired stories to support the segment "instead of providing accurate and balanced coverage of a raging controversy."
Moonves reserved his harshest words for Mapes, saying that "her basic reporting was faulty and her responses when questioned led others who trusted her down the wrong road. Her confidential source was not reliable and her authenticators were unable to authenticate the documents, yet she maintained the opposite."
Mapes's accounts in some cases are "radically different" from those of her sources and colleagues, Moonves said.
Moonves named CBS executive Linda Mason to the newly created post of senior vice president for standards and special projects
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
'
January 10, 2005
California Seeks Footing as Sky Keeps Falling
ALIBU, Calif., Jan. 9 - So much for sunny California.
Since just after Christmas, the balmy climes of a state known for clear blue skies and swaying palm trees have given way to almost relentless, pounding rain, producing landslides, flooding and chaos on the highways.
At higher elevations, the snowfall has broken records, delighting skiers but stranding many on mountain roads before they could get to the slopes.
Wicked weather across the United States was blamed for several deaths over the weekend from Southern California to Pennsylvania.
A man drowned Sunday morning after the sport utility vehicle in which he was riding skidded on the mud-drenched Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, hit a utility pole and plunged off the side of the road onto the rocky beach below. Three other passengers clambered onto the vehicle's roof as waves crashed around them.
Another man drowned when he was swept into a swollen stream north of here, in Ventura County. In Glendale, northeast of downtown Los Angeles, a car accident on a slippery road claimed two lives.
In the east, flooding along a wide swath of the Ohio River in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio forced many residents to evacuate.
In Industry, Pa., northwest of Pittsburgh, three members of a tugboat crew were killed on Sunday when the boat and three barges sank after being pushed through a dam on the Ohio River by currents made stronger by heavy rains, The Associated Press reported. One person was missing. Rescue crews arriving on the scene determined the swift water was too dangerous to enter, said Chuck Ward, the assistant fire chief in Industry.
"The worst thing was, you could see two people in the boat screaming for help," Chief Ward told The A.P.
The Ohio River normally flows about 3 to 4 miles an hour, but the current was running about 10 to 15 miles an hour on Sunday because of the rains, said John Anderson, the lockmaster. After the accident, the Coast Guard restricted traffic along five miles of the river near the dam.
In Louisville, Ky., officials scrambled to address meteorologists' predictions that the Ohio River would rise this week to about five feet above flood stage, its highest level in eight years. By Cincinnati the river was more than 2 feet above its 52-foot flood stage on Sunday, with forecasts calling for a crest at 57.5 feet.
In parts of western and northern Ohio, about 66,000 people remained without electricity on Sunday. In Pennsylvania, the number was about 37,000.
In Utah, along the eastern edge of the western storms, two people were killed on Saturday in separate avalanches.
In Nevada, officials in Reno, which was lashed by a severe storm on Dec. 30, closed the airport for a second time in two weeks and only the third time in 40 years. Dozens of Sunday church services and all weekend high school sporting events were canceled.
Ben Moyer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard, Calif., said that from Friday morning to Sunday evening in Los Angeles County, 3 to 7 inches of rain fell on the coast and in the valleys and 10 to 21 inches of rain fell in the mountains. The storm was not expected to clear up until Tuesday afternoon, he said.
Almost no part of California escaped the violent weather.
Residents of a mobile home park in Santa Clarita, northwest of Los Angeles, were evacuated after a surging creek ruptured an eight-foot retaining wall. In the Studio City area of Los Angeles, a two-story hillside house collapsed; a man and his two children were pulled from the rubble with minor injuries.
In Malibu, rocks tumbled from hills sodden with rain, closing four fog-shrouded mountain roads. On beachfront Malibu Road, residents warily eyed a hill above that shifted visibly on Sunday morning, threatening at least two houses.
"This is a mess," one of the homeowners, Lynne Kern, said as she watched firefighters pile sandbags across her driveway, the rain falling in sheets.
In eastern California, heavy snow across the Sierra Nevada closed three mountain highways. More than 220 people spent Saturday night in an Amtrak train stuck in deep snow west of Donner Summit; the train returned to Sacramento on Sunday, The A.P. reported.
On Malibu Road, Oliver Damavandi, a sophomore at the University of San Diego, said he was watching television in his living room on Sunday morning when he heard what sounded like a gust of wind. Then the large eucalyptus tree in the yard, its root system unhinged by the sodden, shifting ground, fell on the house.
"It went 'boom!' and the glass shattered in the big window," Mr. Damavandi said. "It was scary. I thought I was going to go with it. Now we've got a hole in the roof. It's a bummer because my dad just got done remodeling the place."
January 10, 2005WASHINGTON MEMO
Hot Topic: How U.S. Might Disengage in IraqBy DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 - Three weeks before the election in Iraq, conversation has started bubbling up in Congress, in the Pentagon and some days even in the White House about when and how American forces might begin to disengage in Iraq.
So far it is mostly talk, not planning. The only thing resembling a formal map to the exit door is a series of Pentagon contingency plans for events after the Jan. 30 elections. But a senior administration official warned over the weekend against reading too much into that, saying "the Pentagon has plans for everything," from the outbreak of war in Korea to relief missions in Africa.
The rumblings about disengagement have grown distinctly louder as members of Congress return from their districts after the winter recess, and as military officers try to game out how Sunni Arabs and Shiites might react to the election results. The annual drafting of the budget is a reminder that the American presence in Iraq is costing nearly $4.5 billion a month and putting huge strains on the military. And White House officials contemplate the political costs of a second term possibly dominated by a nightly accounting of continuing casualties.
By all accounts, President Bush has not joined the conversation about disengagement so far, though a few senior members of his national security team have.
A senior administration official said in an interview this weekend that Mr. Bush still intended to stick to his plan, refining his strategy of training Iraqis to take over security duties from Americans, but not wavering from his promise to stay until the job is done. "We are not in the business of trying to float timetables," the official insisted. "The only metric we have is when we can turn more and more over to local forces."
But all over Washington, there is talk about new ways to define when the mission is accomplished - not to cut and run, but not to linger, either. Several administration officials acknowledge that Mr. Bush will face crucial decisions soon after Jan. 30, when it should become clearer whether the election has resulted in more stability or more insurgency.
Already, the president found himself in a rare public argument last week with one of his father's closest friends and advisers, Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser. The election "won't be a promising transformation, and it has great potential for deepening the conflict," Mr. Scowcroft declared Thursday, adding, "We may be seeing incipient civil war at this time."
Mr. Scowcroft said the situation in Iraq raised the fundamental question of "whether we get out now." He urged Mr. Bush to tell the Europeans on a trip to Europe next month: "I can't keep the American people doing this alone. And what do you think would happen if we pulled American troops out right now?"
In short, he was suggesting that Mr. Bush raise the specter that Iraq could collapse without a major foreign presence - exactly the rationale the administration has used for its current policy.
Mr. Bush, asked Friday whether he shared Mr. Scowcroft's concerns about "an incipient civil war," shot back, "Quite the opposite."
"I think elections will be such an incredibly hopeful experience for the Iraqi people," he said.
But the president's optimism is in sharp contrast, some administration insiders say, to some conversations in the White House Situation Room, the Pentagon and Congress. For the first time, there are questions about whether it is politically possible to wait until the Iraqi forces are adequately trained before pressure to start bringing back American troops becomes overwhelming.
Some senators are now openly declaring that Iraqi military and police units are not up to the job.
Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, said last week after meeting with top Pentagon officials, "In my judgment, a great deal of work needs to be done to achieve the level of forces that will allow our country and other members of the coalition to reduce force levels."
Before the recess, other Republican senators, including Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John McCain of Arizona, voiced skepticism about the Iraq policy. And on "Fox News Sunday," Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, said "we are now digging ourselves out of a hole" in Iraq.
Few in Washington missed the significance of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's decision last week to send a retired four-star general, Gary E. Luck, to Iraq to assess military operations and Iraqi security forces. It was driven, administration officials say, by an urgent need to determine what has gone wrong with the training of Iraqi troops.
In an interview with a Dallas radio station last week, Mr. Rumsfeld said he did not want to send more American troops to Iraq "because then we'd look more and more like an occupying force."
In classified strategy sessions, other administration officials say they are asking whether the sheer size of the American force, now 150,000 troops, is fueling the insurgency.
By last fall, the Pentagon had drafted contingency plans to begin reducing the American presence in Iraq as early as July 2005. But senior military officers say no one's picking a date now, and that any withdrawal depends on what happens after the elections, the security situation in Iraq, and the ability of Iraqi forces to secure the country.
One possibility quietly discussed inside the administration is whether the new Iraqi government might ask the United States forces to begin to leave - what one senior State Department official calls "the Philippine option," a reference to when the Philippines asked American forces to pull out a decade ago.
Few officials will talk publicly about that possibility. But in a speech on Oct. 8, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, who had just completed a tour as commander of all marines in Iraq, said, "I believe there will be elections in Iraq in January, and I suspect very shortly afterward you will start to see a reduction in U.S. forces - not because U.S. planners will seek it, rather because the Iraqis will demand it."
General Conway, who is now the director of operations for the military's Joint Staff, was traveling this weekend, and it could not be determined if he still stood by his comments.
Even if the new government wants the American forces to remain, some officials say there is a growing undercurrent of talk about whether to press the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own defense by giving them a rough timetable for gradual American withdrawal.
"It's clear to everyone that this has to become an Iraqi show, and it has to happen this year," a senior administration official said.
Military officers say actual security conditions, not schedules, will dictate any American troop reductions beyond a temporary increase of 12,000 troops for election security that is to end by early March.
"It's truly hard to say what anyone might regard as a realistic date," one general in Iraq said in an e-mail interview on Saturday.
Even as military planners at the Pentagon and in the Middle East draft possible withdrawal schedules, other Pentagon officials and retired officers are projecting long American troop commitments in Iraq.
Army officials here are still drawing up plans to sustain future rotations of troops at today's levels, plans that can be adapted, they said.
Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who commanded the invasion of Iraq, said on the NBC News program "Today" on Dec. 9: "One has to think about the numbers. I think we will be engaged with our military in Iraq for, perhaps, 3, 5, perhaps 10 years."
Hot Topic: How U.S. Might Disengage in IraqBy DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 - Three weeks before the election in Iraq, conversation has started bubbling up in Congress, in the Pentagon and some days even in the White House about when and how American forces might begin to disengage in Iraq.
So far it is mostly talk, not planning. The only thing resembling a formal map to the exit door is a series of Pentagon contingency plans for events after the Jan. 30 elections. But a senior administration official warned over the weekend against reading too much into that, saying "the Pentagon has plans for everything," from the outbreak of war in Korea to relief missions in Africa.
The rumblings about disengagement have grown distinctly louder as members of Congress return from their districts after the winter recess, and as military officers try to game out how Sunni Arabs and Shiites might react to the election results. The annual drafting of the budget is a reminder that the American presence in Iraq is costing nearly $4.5 billion a month and putting huge strains on the military. And White House officials contemplate the political costs of a second term possibly dominated by a nightly accounting of continuing casualties.
By all accounts, President Bush has not joined the conversation about disengagement so far, though a few senior members of his national security team have.
A senior administration official said in an interview this weekend that Mr. Bush still intended to stick to his plan, refining his strategy of training Iraqis to take over security duties from Americans, but not wavering from his promise to stay until the job is done. "We are not in the business of trying to float timetables," the official insisted. "The only metric we have is when we can turn more and more over to local forces."
But all over Washington, there is talk about new ways to define when the mission is accomplished - not to cut and run, but not to linger, either. Several administration officials acknowledge that Mr. Bush will face crucial decisions soon after Jan. 30, when it should become clearer whether the election has resulted in more stability or more insurgency.
Already, the president found himself in a rare public argument last week with one of his father's closest friends and advisers, Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser. The election "won't be a promising transformation, and it has great potential for deepening the conflict," Mr. Scowcroft declared Thursday, adding, "We may be seeing incipient civil war at this time."
Mr. Scowcroft said the situation in Iraq raised the fundamental question of "whether we get out now." He urged Mr. Bush to tell the Europeans on a trip to Europe next month: "I can't keep the American people doing this alone. And what do you think would happen if we pulled American troops out right now?"
In short, he was suggesting that Mr. Bush raise the specter that Iraq could collapse without a major foreign presence - exactly the rationale the administration has used for its current policy.
Mr. Bush, asked Friday whether he shared Mr. Scowcroft's concerns about "an incipient civil war," shot back, "Quite the opposite."
"I think elections will be such an incredibly hopeful experience for the Iraqi people," he said.
But the president's optimism is in sharp contrast, some administration insiders say, to some conversations in the White House Situation Room, the Pentagon and Congress. For the first time, there are questions about whether it is politically possible to wait until the Iraqi forces are adequately trained before pressure to start bringing back American troops becomes overwhelming.
Some senators are now openly declaring that Iraqi military and police units are not up to the job.
Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, said last week after meeting with top Pentagon officials, "In my judgment, a great deal of work needs to be done to achieve the level of forces that will allow our country and other members of the coalition to reduce force levels."
Before the recess, other Republican senators, including Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John McCain of Arizona, voiced skepticism about the Iraq policy. And on "Fox News Sunday," Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, said "we are now digging ourselves out of a hole" in Iraq.
Few in Washington missed the significance of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's decision last week to send a retired four-star general, Gary E. Luck, to Iraq to assess military operations and Iraqi security forces. It was driven, administration officials say, by an urgent need to determine what has gone wrong with the training of Iraqi troops.
In an interview with a Dallas radio station last week, Mr. Rumsfeld said he did not want to send more American troops to Iraq "because then we'd look more and more like an occupying force."
In classified strategy sessions, other administration officials say they are asking whether the sheer size of the American force, now 150,000 troops, is fueling the insurgency.
By last fall, the Pentagon had drafted contingency plans to begin reducing the American presence in Iraq as early as July 2005. But senior military officers say no one's picking a date now, and that any withdrawal depends on what happens after the elections, the security situation in Iraq, and the ability of Iraqi forces to secure the country.
One possibility quietly discussed inside the administration is whether the new Iraqi government might ask the United States forces to begin to leave - what one senior State Department official calls "the Philippine option," a reference to when the Philippines asked American forces to pull out a decade ago.
Few officials will talk publicly about that possibility. But in a speech on Oct. 8, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, who had just completed a tour as commander of all marines in Iraq, said, "I believe there will be elections in Iraq in January, and I suspect very shortly afterward you will start to see a reduction in U.S. forces - not because U.S. planners will seek it, rather because the Iraqis will demand it."
General Conway, who is now the director of operations for the military's Joint Staff, was traveling this weekend, and it could not be determined if he still stood by his comments.
Even if the new government wants the American forces to remain, some officials say there is a growing undercurrent of talk about whether to press the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own defense by giving them a rough timetable for gradual American withdrawal.
"It's clear to everyone that this has to become an Iraqi show, and it has to happen this year," a senior administration official said.
Military officers say actual security conditions, not schedules, will dictate any American troop reductions beyond a temporary increase of 12,000 troops for election security that is to end by early March.
"It's truly hard to say what anyone might regard as a realistic date," one general in Iraq said in an e-mail interview on Saturday.
Even as military planners at the Pentagon and in the Middle East draft possible withdrawal schedules, other Pentagon officials and retired officers are projecting long American troop commitments in Iraq.
Army officials here are still drawing up plans to sustain future rotations of troops at today's levels, plans that can be adapted, they said.
Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who commanded the invasion of Iraq, said on the NBC News program "Today" on Dec. 9: "One has to think about the numbers. I think we will be engaged with our military in Iraq for, perhaps, 3, 5, perhaps 10 years."
'2 Former AOL Execs Named in Fraud Indictment
By Alec KleinWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, January 10, 2005; 5:06 PM
A grand jury today indicted two former America Online Inc. officials and four former executives of a business partner on conspiracy and fraud charges in connection to an alleged scheme between the two Internet companies to prop up each other's financial results just as the dot-com market was beginning to collapse.
In the indictment, the executives are accused of inflating revenue and lying to investors about the true nature of the companies' financial results. According to court documents, some of the executives forged and back-dated contracts and lied to auditors -- and then attempted to cover up the scheme by destroying documents and e-mails and lying to federal authorities. The indictment also alleges that some executives of the AOL business partner, PurchasePro.com Inc., personally benefited from the scheme with millions in bonuses and stock options.
When the alleged scheme first took place in late 2000 and early 2001, AOL was in the critical stages of consummating its acquisition of Time Warner, the largest merger in U.S. history. PurchasePro, a software maker based in Las Vegas, was scrambling to shore up its balance sheet just as its business was evaporating.
Kent D. Wakeford, a former executive director in AOL's business affairs, and John P. Tuli, a vice president in its Netbusiness unit, become the first two former AOL employees to be charged in the Justice Department probe, which began more than two years ago and includes the FBI, the U.S. attorney's office and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Justice Department previously said that "six or more" unidentified AOL executives were involved in the scheme with PurchasePro, in which both companies overstated ad revenue. Wakeford and Tuli are no longer with AOL; the company declined to discuss the nature of their departure.
Also indicted today was Charles E. Johnson Jr., the former PurchasePro chief executive and chairman. Johnson, in his first interview since the scandal broke in mid-2002, said he was innocent, laying the blame on what he described as rogue employees and his belief that the Justice Department has a political agenda to go after him.
"I didn't do anything wrong," he said.
Before today's indictment, six former executives of PurchasePro had already pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the investigation. Two have been sentenced to prison terms. Today's indictment brings to a dozen the number of AOL and PurchasePro officials who have been charged in the scandal.
The FBI launched a criminal investigation into AOL's relationship with PurchasePro and other business partners in July 2002, days after a Washington Post report that detailed several unusual business deals involving AOL and those business partners. Since then, several AOL and PurchasePro officials have been ousted, PurchasePro went bankrupt, and "AOL" was removed from its parent company's name, which was then called AOL Time Warner. In December, Time Warner agreed to pay $510 million to settle criminal and civil charges stemming from the accounting scandal.
"Today's announcement by the U.S. attorney's office is not unexpected," said Time Warner spokeswoman Tricia Primrose Wallace. "Pursuing individual prosecutions was the next logical step in the process that the DOJ [Department of Justice] laid out after settling with Time Warner in mid December."
By Alec KleinWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, January 10, 2005; 5:06 PM
A grand jury today indicted two former America Online Inc. officials and four former executives of a business partner on conspiracy and fraud charges in connection to an alleged scheme between the two Internet companies to prop up each other's financial results just as the dot-com market was beginning to collapse.
In the indictment, the executives are accused of inflating revenue and lying to investors about the true nature of the companies' financial results. According to court documents, some of the executives forged and back-dated contracts and lied to auditors -- and then attempted to cover up the scheme by destroying documents and e-mails and lying to federal authorities. The indictment also alleges that some executives of the AOL business partner, PurchasePro.com Inc., personally benefited from the scheme with millions in bonuses and stock options.
When the alleged scheme first took place in late 2000 and early 2001, AOL was in the critical stages of consummating its acquisition of Time Warner, the largest merger in U.S. history. PurchasePro, a software maker based in Las Vegas, was scrambling to shore up its balance sheet just as its business was evaporating.
Kent D. Wakeford, a former executive director in AOL's business affairs, and John P. Tuli, a vice president in its Netbusiness unit, become the first two former AOL employees to be charged in the Justice Department probe, which began more than two years ago and includes the FBI, the U.S. attorney's office and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Justice Department previously said that "six or more" unidentified AOL executives were involved in the scheme with PurchasePro, in which both companies overstated ad revenue. Wakeford and Tuli are no longer with AOL; the company declined to discuss the nature of their departure.
Also indicted today was Charles E. Johnson Jr., the former PurchasePro chief executive and chairman. Johnson, in his first interview since the scandal broke in mid-2002, said he was innocent, laying the blame on what he described as rogue employees and his belief that the Justice Department has a political agenda to go after him.
"I didn't do anything wrong," he said.
Before today's indictment, six former executives of PurchasePro had already pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the investigation. Two have been sentenced to prison terms. Today's indictment brings to a dozen the number of AOL and PurchasePro officials who have been charged in the scandal.
The FBI launched a criminal investigation into AOL's relationship with PurchasePro and other business partners in July 2002, days after a Washington Post report that detailed several unusual business deals involving AOL and those business partners. Since then, several AOL and PurchasePro officials have been ousted, PurchasePro went bankrupt, and "AOL" was removed from its parent company's name, which was then called AOL Time Warner. In December, Time Warner agreed to pay $510 million to settle criminal and civil charges stemming from the accounting scandal.
"Today's announcement by the U.S. attorney's office is not unexpected," said Time Warner spokeswoman Tricia Primrose Wallace. "Pursuing individual prosecutions was the next logical step in the process that the DOJ [Department of Justice] laid out after settling with Time Warner in mid December."
Baghdad's Deputy Police Chief Assassinated Roadside Bomb Kills Two U.S. Soldiers in Separate Attack
By Karl Vick and Fred BarbashWashington Post Staff WritersMonday, January 10, 2005; 12:25 PM
BAGHDAD, Jan. 10 -- Gunmen killed Baghdad's deputy police chief in the middle of rush hour Monday morning, the latest in a spate of high-profile assassinations in advance of Iraq's scheduled Jan. 30 election.
Separately Monday, two U.S. soldiers in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle were killed and four were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded while they were on patrol, the military announced. The Bradley was destroyed, yet another sign that the insurgents are deploying far more powerful explosives than ever before.
Last week, a roadside bomb exploded beneath a Bradley, killing everyone inside the heavily armored troop carrier.
The military also said Monday that a U.S. Marine died in Anbar province on Sunday during combat operations.
Meanwhile, Ukraine President Leonid Kuchma ordered his government to develop a plan for accelerating withdrawal of Ukraine's troops from Iraq within the first half of the year, a statement from the president's office said. Ukraine, whose 1,650 troops are the fourth-largest contingent in the U.S.-led military operation in Iraq, has previously expressed intentions to withdraw this year, but the order speeds up the apparent timetable.
The order, news services reported, came a day after eight Ukrainian soldiers died in an explosion at an ammunition dump in Iraq, which was reported as an accident rather than as the result of hostile action.
In all, 16 Ukrainian soldiers have died in Iraq, "The situation in Iraq has deteriorated and as a consequence we lost our men," acting Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency after meeting with Kuchma, adding that the withdrawal could begin as early as March. Incoming president Viktor Yushchenko has also promised a withdrawal.
A group led by al Qaeda ally Abu Musab Zarqawi said it was behind the killing of the deputy police chief, news services reported, and warned other Iraqi officials that they would face the same fate. The claim could not be authenticated, but the same group has claimed responsibility for dozens of prior killings and bombings.
The attack followed last week's killing of the governor of Baghdad by insurgents attempting to disrupt the election, in which Iraqis are set to vote for members of a 275-member National Assembly. In particular, violence in areas populated by Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority has prevented many people from registering to vote.
Brig. Amer Nayef, the deputy police chief, was gunned down Monday morning while riding in a car with his son, also a police officer. Police said that assailants sprayed machine gun fire from two cars that drove parallel with the deputy chief's vehicle, which was unprotected.
"Regretfully, we heard this sad news," said Interior Ministry spokesman Sabah Kadim as he confirmed the deaths. "He was with his son . . . on his way to work when armed men ambushed them and sprayed bullets on the car. They were both killed," he said. "They didn't have protection."
On Sunday, gunmen killed the deputy police chief of Samarra, Col. Mohammed Mudhafir, as he drove alone in the city about 65 miles north of Baghdad, police there told wire services.
Separately, a suicide bomber killed at least four police officers Monday when his car detonated inside the courtyard of a police station in southern Baghdad, police said.
Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said his government was intensifying raids on the homes and headquarters of various insurgent forces as the election approaches and has made a number of significant arrests, among them supporters of Saddam Hussein's former regime operating from outside of Iraq.
Saying there would be no "safe haven," Allawi vowed at a news conference that his commitment to holding the election would remain unwavering.
In another significant blow to Iraq's upcoming elections, the entire 13-member electoral commission in the volatile province of Anbar, west of the capital, resigned after being threatened by insurgents, a regional newspaper reported Sunday. Saad Abdul-Aziz Rawi, the head of the commission, told the Anbar newspaper that it was "impossible to hold elections" in the province, which is dominated by Sunni Muslims and where insurgent attacks already have prevented voter registration. The province includes the restive cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.
"They are kidding themselves," Rawi said about officials hopeful that the elections could take place in Anbar.
An Iraqi at the commission's office in Anbar said the members had resigned and had gone into hiding. Iraqi and U.S. officials have said Sunni participation in the elections is necessary for the vote to be considered legitimate. The largest political party representing Sunnis announced last month that it would drop out of the process, the country's first democratic elections in nearly half a century.
Barbash reported from Washington.
By Karl Vick and Fred BarbashWashington Post Staff WritersMonday, January 10, 2005; 12:25 PM
BAGHDAD, Jan. 10 -- Gunmen killed Baghdad's deputy police chief in the middle of rush hour Monday morning, the latest in a spate of high-profile assassinations in advance of Iraq's scheduled Jan. 30 election.
Separately Monday, two U.S. soldiers in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle were killed and four were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded while they were on patrol, the military announced. The Bradley was destroyed, yet another sign that the insurgents are deploying far more powerful explosives than ever before.
Last week, a roadside bomb exploded beneath a Bradley, killing everyone inside the heavily armored troop carrier.
The military also said Monday that a U.S. Marine died in Anbar province on Sunday during combat operations.
Meanwhile, Ukraine President Leonid Kuchma ordered his government to develop a plan for accelerating withdrawal of Ukraine's troops from Iraq within the first half of the year, a statement from the president's office said. Ukraine, whose 1,650 troops are the fourth-largest contingent in the U.S.-led military operation in Iraq, has previously expressed intentions to withdraw this year, but the order speeds up the apparent timetable.
The order, news services reported, came a day after eight Ukrainian soldiers died in an explosion at an ammunition dump in Iraq, which was reported as an accident rather than as the result of hostile action.
In all, 16 Ukrainian soldiers have died in Iraq, "The situation in Iraq has deteriorated and as a consequence we lost our men," acting Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency after meeting with Kuchma, adding that the withdrawal could begin as early as March. Incoming president Viktor Yushchenko has also promised a withdrawal.
A group led by al Qaeda ally Abu Musab Zarqawi said it was behind the killing of the deputy police chief, news services reported, and warned other Iraqi officials that they would face the same fate. The claim could not be authenticated, but the same group has claimed responsibility for dozens of prior killings and bombings.
The attack followed last week's killing of the governor of Baghdad by insurgents attempting to disrupt the election, in which Iraqis are set to vote for members of a 275-member National Assembly. In particular, violence in areas populated by Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority has prevented many people from registering to vote.
Brig. Amer Nayef, the deputy police chief, was gunned down Monday morning while riding in a car with his son, also a police officer. Police said that assailants sprayed machine gun fire from two cars that drove parallel with the deputy chief's vehicle, which was unprotected.
"Regretfully, we heard this sad news," said Interior Ministry spokesman Sabah Kadim as he confirmed the deaths. "He was with his son . . . on his way to work when armed men ambushed them and sprayed bullets on the car. They were both killed," he said. "They didn't have protection."
On Sunday, gunmen killed the deputy police chief of Samarra, Col. Mohammed Mudhafir, as he drove alone in the city about 65 miles north of Baghdad, police there told wire services.
Separately, a suicide bomber killed at least four police officers Monday when his car detonated inside the courtyard of a police station in southern Baghdad, police said.
Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said his government was intensifying raids on the homes and headquarters of various insurgent forces as the election approaches and has made a number of significant arrests, among them supporters of Saddam Hussein's former regime operating from outside of Iraq.
Saying there would be no "safe haven," Allawi vowed at a news conference that his commitment to holding the election would remain unwavering.
In another significant blow to Iraq's upcoming elections, the entire 13-member electoral commission in the volatile province of Anbar, west of the capital, resigned after being threatened by insurgents, a regional newspaper reported Sunday. Saad Abdul-Aziz Rawi, the head of the commission, told the Anbar newspaper that it was "impossible to hold elections" in the province, which is dominated by Sunni Muslims and where insurgent attacks already have prevented voter registration. The province includes the restive cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.
"They are kidding themselves," Rawi said about officials hopeful that the elections could take place in Anbar.
An Iraqi at the commission's office in Anbar said the members had resigned and had gone into hiding. Iraqi and U.S. officials have said Sunni participation in the elections is necessary for the vote to be considered legitimate. The largest political party representing Sunnis announced last month that it would drop out of the process, the country's first democratic elections in nearly half a century.
Barbash reported from Washington.
400 more UK troops to be sent to Iraq
Matthew Tempest, James Sturcke and agenciesMonday January 10, 2005
Guardian UnlimitedAn extra 400 British troops are to be sent to Iraq ahead of the planned January elections, the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, announced today.
The soldiers, who will be from First Battalion Royal Highland Fusiliers, are to be deployed from their Cyprus base to south-east Iraq. Mr Hoon said the deployment was being made on the recommendation of the British commanding officer on the ground, and would be "for a limited period of time".
The figure of 400 is less than the 650 troops some reports said Mr Hoon would send, but he was heckled by both Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs for announcing the deployment during Commons questions rather than making a formal statement.
Security is being stepped up across Iraq following a week of insurgent attacks in which the governor of Baghdad and three British civilians have been killed. Although the troops are likely to be based in southern Iraq, there could be requests for them to be deployed in Baghdad or Sunni strongholds in the north.
In Iraq, the deputy police chief of Baghdad and his son were today shot dead as violence continued across the country. Four policemen also died in a suicide car bombing, while two US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in the south-west of Baghdad.
News of the attacks came as the Iraqi authorities announced they had arrested the leader of an insurgent group and almost 150 suspected terrorists in a nationwide crackdown.
Brigadier Amer Ali Nayef and his son Lieutenant Khalid Amer, also a police officer, were assassinated in the south Dora district as they travelled to work by car, an interior ministry spokesman said. Police said the assassins had fired machine guns from two cars that were driving parallel with the police chief's vehicle. The victims had been alone in the car.
The assassinations were the latest in a series of attacks against senior Iraqi security officials, policemen and politicians in the run-up to the elections scheduled for January 30.
On Tuesday, gunmen killed the governor of Baghdad, Ali al-Haidari, and six of his bodyguards. Yesterday, Samarra's deputy police chief, Colonel Mohammed Mudhafir, was shot as he drove alone, Samarra police said.
In a separate incident, a suicide car bomb this morning exploded in the courtyard of a police station in southern Baghdad, killing at least four policemen and injuring 10 others, police and witnesses said. A fake police car packed with explosives was used in the attack.
The explosion took place at 8am local time (0500 GMT) in the Zafarniya district, police commissioner Abdul Khaleq Hussein said. Witnesses said it happened as policemen changed shifts.
Two US troops were killed and another four wounded in a roadside bomb attack which destroyed a heavily armoured Bradley fighting vehicle, the US military said.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi government today announced that it had detained 147 suspected terrorists, including an insurgent leader and a Saudi citizen, around the country.
Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said Raad al-Doury had been detained only days after taking over command of Jaish Muhammad - Arabic for Muhammad's Army - from Moayad Ahmed Yasseen, who was detained in November.
"Every day the terrorists name a new leader, we capture him and they will stand trial," Mr Allawi told a news conference.
A government statement identified the Saudi as Abdullah Hussein Ali, and said he had been captured along with three Iraqis in Mosul. It added that he had been found in possession of "leaflets that incite terrorism".
Iraqi army troops searched the Sumar mosque in Mosul and captured five suspected insurgents, the statement said. In the Mashtal area of Baghdad, 27 alleged terrorists were detained along with weapons.
The greatest number of arrests took place in the north-eastern town of Mansouriyat al-Jabal, where 79 suspects were captured and weapons and ammunition seized.
Over the weekend, a firefight between insurgents and US troops whose convoy was attacked south of Baghdad left at least eight people dead, according to hospital officials.
In other violence yesterday, a US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb, while a marine was killed in action in the volatile Anbar province.
Iraqi interior ministry spokesman Colonel Adnan Abdul-Rahman said a roadside bomb had hit the US convoy near a police checkpoint in Yussifiyah, nine miles south of Baghdad.
Troops opened fire, killing two police officers and three civilians. Dr Anmar Abdul-Hadi, of al-Yarmouk hospital, said eight people had been killed in the attack, with another 12 wounded.
However, US commanders today claimed that insurgent gunfire had killed the civilians. "Three other civilians were wounded, most likely from insurgents," a statement from the 1st Cavalry Division said.
Hours before the attack, the US admitted dropping a 227kg (500lb) bomb on the wrong house during a search for terror suspects in Aitha, outside Mosul. A statement said that five people had been killed in the blast.
Ali Yousef, the owner of the house, said that 14 people had died when the bomb hit at around 2am on Saturday. An Associated Press photographer at the scene said the victims included seven children and seven adults.
Eight Ukrainian soldiers and one from Kazakhstan died in an apparently accidental explosion at an ammunition dump south of Baghdad yesterday.
Few details were known, but the US military said the soldiers had been cleaning up the ammunition dump when the explosion happened. Eleven soldiers were wounded.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Matthew Tempest, James Sturcke and agenciesMonday January 10, 2005
Guardian UnlimitedAn extra 400 British troops are to be sent to Iraq ahead of the planned January elections, the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, announced today.
The soldiers, who will be from First Battalion Royal Highland Fusiliers, are to be deployed from their Cyprus base to south-east Iraq. Mr Hoon said the deployment was being made on the recommendation of the British commanding officer on the ground, and would be "for a limited period of time".
The figure of 400 is less than the 650 troops some reports said Mr Hoon would send, but he was heckled by both Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs for announcing the deployment during Commons questions rather than making a formal statement.
Security is being stepped up across Iraq following a week of insurgent attacks in which the governor of Baghdad and three British civilians have been killed. Although the troops are likely to be based in southern Iraq, there could be requests for them to be deployed in Baghdad or Sunni strongholds in the north.
In Iraq, the deputy police chief of Baghdad and his son were today shot dead as violence continued across the country. Four policemen also died in a suicide car bombing, while two US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in the south-west of Baghdad.
News of the attacks came as the Iraqi authorities announced they had arrested the leader of an insurgent group and almost 150 suspected terrorists in a nationwide crackdown.
Brigadier Amer Ali Nayef and his son Lieutenant Khalid Amer, also a police officer, were assassinated in the south Dora district as they travelled to work by car, an interior ministry spokesman said. Police said the assassins had fired machine guns from two cars that were driving parallel with the police chief's vehicle. The victims had been alone in the car.
The assassinations were the latest in a series of attacks against senior Iraqi security officials, policemen and politicians in the run-up to the elections scheduled for January 30.
On Tuesday, gunmen killed the governor of Baghdad, Ali al-Haidari, and six of his bodyguards. Yesterday, Samarra's deputy police chief, Colonel Mohammed Mudhafir, was shot as he drove alone, Samarra police said.
In a separate incident, a suicide car bomb this morning exploded in the courtyard of a police station in southern Baghdad, killing at least four policemen and injuring 10 others, police and witnesses said. A fake police car packed with explosives was used in the attack.
The explosion took place at 8am local time (0500 GMT) in the Zafarniya district, police commissioner Abdul Khaleq Hussein said. Witnesses said it happened as policemen changed shifts.
Two US troops were killed and another four wounded in a roadside bomb attack which destroyed a heavily armoured Bradley fighting vehicle, the US military said.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi government today announced that it had detained 147 suspected terrorists, including an insurgent leader and a Saudi citizen, around the country.
Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said Raad al-Doury had been detained only days after taking over command of Jaish Muhammad - Arabic for Muhammad's Army - from Moayad Ahmed Yasseen, who was detained in November.
"Every day the terrorists name a new leader, we capture him and they will stand trial," Mr Allawi told a news conference.
A government statement identified the Saudi as Abdullah Hussein Ali, and said he had been captured along with three Iraqis in Mosul. It added that he had been found in possession of "leaflets that incite terrorism".
Iraqi army troops searched the Sumar mosque in Mosul and captured five suspected insurgents, the statement said. In the Mashtal area of Baghdad, 27 alleged terrorists were detained along with weapons.
The greatest number of arrests took place in the north-eastern town of Mansouriyat al-Jabal, where 79 suspects were captured and weapons and ammunition seized.
Over the weekend, a firefight between insurgents and US troops whose convoy was attacked south of Baghdad left at least eight people dead, according to hospital officials.
In other violence yesterday, a US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb, while a marine was killed in action in the volatile Anbar province.
Iraqi interior ministry spokesman Colonel Adnan Abdul-Rahman said a roadside bomb had hit the US convoy near a police checkpoint in Yussifiyah, nine miles south of Baghdad.
Troops opened fire, killing two police officers and three civilians. Dr Anmar Abdul-Hadi, of al-Yarmouk hospital, said eight people had been killed in the attack, with another 12 wounded.
However, US commanders today claimed that insurgent gunfire had killed the civilians. "Three other civilians were wounded, most likely from insurgents," a statement from the 1st Cavalry Division said.
Hours before the attack, the US admitted dropping a 227kg (500lb) bomb on the wrong house during a search for terror suspects in Aitha, outside Mosul. A statement said that five people had been killed in the blast.
Ali Yousef, the owner of the house, said that 14 people had died when the bomb hit at around 2am on Saturday. An Associated Press photographer at the scene said the victims included seven children and seven adults.
Eight Ukrainian soldiers and one from Kazakhstan died in an apparently accidental explosion at an ammunition dump south of Baghdad yesterday.
Few details were known, but the US military said the soldiers had been cleaning up the ammunition dump when the explosion happened. Eleven soldiers were wounded.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Yahoo! Picks
Best of Photojournalism 2004The biggest news stories of the year are always accompanied by photographs. It's no surprise, then, that the collection of photos from the recipient of the Newspaper Photographer of the Year award include an image of Iraqis defacing a Saddam Hussein mural. Or that the second-place winner's entries feature photos of an Iraqi prison. But some of the best photos in newspapers, magazines, and on the Web don't accompany the big stories. The photojournalists featured in the National Press Photographers Association competition have captured amazing flights, local heroes, and heart-stopping rescues. The winning photographers in over two dozen categories offer thousands of pictures that are sure to move, amuse, and enlighten you. (in Photojournalism)
Recent Picks
Best of Photojournalism 2004The biggest news stories of the year are always accompanied by photographs. It's no surprise, then, that the collection of photos from the recipient of the Newspaper Photographer of the Year award include an image of Iraqis defacing a Saddam Hussein mural. Or that the second-place winner's entries feature photos of an Iraqi prison. But some of the best photos in newspapers, magazines, and on the Web don't accompany the big stories. The photojournalists featured in the National Press Photographers Association competition have captured amazing flights, local heroes, and heart-stopping rescues. The winning photographers in over two dozen categories offer thousands of pictures that are sure to move, amuse, and enlighten you. (in Photojournalism)
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'After Threats, Iraqi Electoral Board Resigns Head of Commission in Volatile Anbar Province Says Rebels Make Vote Impossible
By Jackie SpinnerWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, January 10, 2005; Page A12
BAGHDAD, Jan. 9 -- In another significant blow to Iraq's upcoming elections, the entire 13-member electoral commission in the volatile province of Anbar, west of the capital, resigned after being threatened by insurgents, a regional newspaper reported Sunday.
Saad Abdul-Aziz Rawi, the head of the commission, told the Anbar newspaper that it was "impossible to hold elections" in the province, which is dominated by Sunni Muslims and where insurgent attacks already have prevented voter registration. The province includes the restive cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.
"They are kidding themselves," Rawi said about officials hopeful that the elections, set for Jan. 30, could take place in Anbar.
An Iraqi at the commission's office in Anbar said the members had resigned and had gone into hiding.
Iraqi and U.S. officials have said Sunni participation in the elections is necessary for the vote to be considered legitimate. The largest political party representing Sunnis announced last month that it would drop out of the process, the country's first democratic elections in nearly half a century.
Insurgents have mounted a bloody campaign in the weeks leading up to the vote, targeting election workers, political party leaders and other participants. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has stepped up operations to stop the violence, but frequent attacks continue to grip the country.
At an elementary school in Tikrit, about 90 miles north of Baghdad, a rocket landed behind a school, narrowly missing a building crowded with children taking exams. The Um Omara school is a designated polling place, residents said.
"It was like an earthquake under my feet," said Kadhem Mohei, 57, a school guard. "The school walls cracked. It hit in the back yard." Mohei said his daughter, who was in the school, was slightly injured.
Meanwhile, in a village near the northern city of Mosul, where the U.S. military reported that it had mistakenly dropped a 500-pound bomb on the wrong target Saturday, residents said the Americans actually hit the correct house, killing an insurgent who they said had killed Iraqi security forces.
The residents of Aaytha, 30 miles south of Mosul, said the bomb hit the home of the Numan family, members of the prominent Sunni Muslim Jubori tribe, one of the largest in Iraq. Witnesses said the blast killed 14 members of the family, including 10 women and children. Neighbors said a toddler related to the family was the sole survivor.
Salem Jasem Jubori, who lives close to the house that was destroyed, said the head of the household was a middle-age man who "used to kill and cut" his victims, primarily Iraqi police and National Guardsmen, in front of villagers.
"He was ferocious, very fierce and wild," Jubori said.
The U.S. military said in a statement Saturday that five people were killed and that it "deeply regretted the loss of possibly innocent lives." The statement said the house struck by an F-16 fighter jet "was not the intended target. . . . The intended target was another location nearby."
The military had no immediate reaction to the villagers' account.
Ali Yussef Shahin, 42, a relative of the people killed in the house, said no insurgents were in the village of about 100 houses.
"I think they did make a mistake," said Shahin, who lives in Mosul. "They wanted to attack the house to provoke the people."
Residents said the village of Aaytha has been largely peaceful but harbors extremists who oppose U.S. forces in Iraq.
Jubori, the neighbor of the family that was killed, said U.S. soldiers raided the house before it was bombed but did not make any arrests. He said that about five minutes after the Americans left the village, he heard a huge explosion.
"All the local people left their houses and went running," he said. "Because I lived the closest, I was the first who reached the bombed house. It was totally destroyed. We hurried to save our distressed neighbors but we discovered no one survived. All of them were killed."
In a separate incident Sunday, the U.S. Army said two people were killed when soldiers fired on a vehicle that had approached a checkpoint in Duluiyah, near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. The vehicle swerved off the road and hit a telephone pole, the military said in a statement. The driver and a front-seat passenger were killed. A passenger in the back seat was treated for shock. The military said the incident was under investigation.
A civilian guard at Duluiyah Electrical Co., who said he witnessed the incident, disputed that account. He said a gunner manning a Humvee at the checkpoint appeared to fall asleep, setting off a spray of bullets that pierced the vehicle. "It looked like he fell down on his gun and fired," said the guard, Abu Sager.
"The American soldiers were apologizing to the people . . . and took the family to the hospital," he said.
At the Balad hospital, Wasam Talab, a physician, said he treated four members of the family. The driver and his sister died from gunshot wounds, he said, and the driver's wife and 2-year-old son were treated for minor cuts from glass.
In another incident Sunday, witnesses said a roadside bomb planted in a carton exploded near a group of Marines and U.S. soldiers on foot patrol in the village of Abu Ghraib. The Marines confirmed that an improvised explosive device detonated, injuring an unspecified number of Marines and soldiers. As a policy, the Marines do not discuss details of casualties.
Farhan Ali, 52, a shepherd from the village, said insurgents told him to clear out of an area on a busy dirt road from Abu Ghraib to Smailat because they had planted a bomb in a cardboard carton that was set to blow up next to the foot patrol. "All the people in the area knew about it," he said. "The insurgents asked us to stay out of the road."
Ali's account, if accurate, shows how entrenched insurgents have become in local communities, where they target U.S. forces in broad daylight.
"All of us were just watching," Ali said. "There were a bunch of kids standing away from the road expecting and watching to see an explosion."
A U.S. soldier assigned to Task Force Baghdad was killed in a roadside bomb explosion Sunday, the military said, without indicating where the attack occurred. In a separate incident, a Marine assigned to 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action in Anbar province, the military said.
Seven Ukrainian troops and a Kazakh soldier also were killed Sunday when a bomb they had seized exploded accidentally.
On Monday, gunmen assassinated Baghdad's deputy police chief, Brig. Amer Nayef, and his son outside their home, the Reuters news agency reported.
And in Seoul, the Foreign Ministry said it was checking reports that one or two South Koreans may have been kidnapped in Iraq, the Associated Press reported. The kidnapping was reported on the Web site of a militant group that demanded the withdrawal of South Korea's 3,600 troops in Iraq. A South Korean, Kim Sun Il, was beheaded in June by insurgents who made similar demands.
By Jackie SpinnerWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, January 10, 2005; Page A12
BAGHDAD, Jan. 9 -- In another significant blow to Iraq's upcoming elections, the entire 13-member electoral commission in the volatile province of Anbar, west of the capital, resigned after being threatened by insurgents, a regional newspaper reported Sunday.
Saad Abdul-Aziz Rawi, the head of the commission, told the Anbar newspaper that it was "impossible to hold elections" in the province, which is dominated by Sunni Muslims and where insurgent attacks already have prevented voter registration. The province includes the restive cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.
"They are kidding themselves," Rawi said about officials hopeful that the elections, set for Jan. 30, could take place in Anbar.
An Iraqi at the commission's office in Anbar said the members had resigned and had gone into hiding.
Iraqi and U.S. officials have said Sunni participation in the elections is necessary for the vote to be considered legitimate. The largest political party representing Sunnis announced last month that it would drop out of the process, the country's first democratic elections in nearly half a century.
Insurgents have mounted a bloody campaign in the weeks leading up to the vote, targeting election workers, political party leaders and other participants. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has stepped up operations to stop the violence, but frequent attacks continue to grip the country.
At an elementary school in Tikrit, about 90 miles north of Baghdad, a rocket landed behind a school, narrowly missing a building crowded with children taking exams. The Um Omara school is a designated polling place, residents said.
"It was like an earthquake under my feet," said Kadhem Mohei, 57, a school guard. "The school walls cracked. It hit in the back yard." Mohei said his daughter, who was in the school, was slightly injured.
Meanwhile, in a village near the northern city of Mosul, where the U.S. military reported that it had mistakenly dropped a 500-pound bomb on the wrong target Saturday, residents said the Americans actually hit the correct house, killing an insurgent who they said had killed Iraqi security forces.
The residents of Aaytha, 30 miles south of Mosul, said the bomb hit the home of the Numan family, members of the prominent Sunni Muslim Jubori tribe, one of the largest in Iraq. Witnesses said the blast killed 14 members of the family, including 10 women and children. Neighbors said a toddler related to the family was the sole survivor.
Salem Jasem Jubori, who lives close to the house that was destroyed, said the head of the household was a middle-age man who "used to kill and cut" his victims, primarily Iraqi police and National Guardsmen, in front of villagers.
"He was ferocious, very fierce and wild," Jubori said.
The U.S. military said in a statement Saturday that five people were killed and that it "deeply regretted the loss of possibly innocent lives." The statement said the house struck by an F-16 fighter jet "was not the intended target. . . . The intended target was another location nearby."
The military had no immediate reaction to the villagers' account.
Ali Yussef Shahin, 42, a relative of the people killed in the house, said no insurgents were in the village of about 100 houses.
"I think they did make a mistake," said Shahin, who lives in Mosul. "They wanted to attack the house to provoke the people."
Residents said the village of Aaytha has been largely peaceful but harbors extremists who oppose U.S. forces in Iraq.
Jubori, the neighbor of the family that was killed, said U.S. soldiers raided the house before it was bombed but did not make any arrests. He said that about five minutes after the Americans left the village, he heard a huge explosion.
"All the local people left their houses and went running," he said. "Because I lived the closest, I was the first who reached the bombed house. It was totally destroyed. We hurried to save our distressed neighbors but we discovered no one survived. All of them were killed."
In a separate incident Sunday, the U.S. Army said two people were killed when soldiers fired on a vehicle that had approached a checkpoint in Duluiyah, near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. The vehicle swerved off the road and hit a telephone pole, the military said in a statement. The driver and a front-seat passenger were killed. A passenger in the back seat was treated for shock. The military said the incident was under investigation.
A civilian guard at Duluiyah Electrical Co., who said he witnessed the incident, disputed that account. He said a gunner manning a Humvee at the checkpoint appeared to fall asleep, setting off a spray of bullets that pierced the vehicle. "It looked like he fell down on his gun and fired," said the guard, Abu Sager.
"The American soldiers were apologizing to the people . . . and took the family to the hospital," he said.
At the Balad hospital, Wasam Talab, a physician, said he treated four members of the family. The driver and his sister died from gunshot wounds, he said, and the driver's wife and 2-year-old son were treated for minor cuts from glass.
In another incident Sunday, witnesses said a roadside bomb planted in a carton exploded near a group of Marines and U.S. soldiers on foot patrol in the village of Abu Ghraib. The Marines confirmed that an improvised explosive device detonated, injuring an unspecified number of Marines and soldiers. As a policy, the Marines do not discuss details of casualties.
Farhan Ali, 52, a shepherd from the village, said insurgents told him to clear out of an area on a busy dirt road from Abu Ghraib to Smailat because they had planted a bomb in a cardboard carton that was set to blow up next to the foot patrol. "All the people in the area knew about it," he said. "The insurgents asked us to stay out of the road."
Ali's account, if accurate, shows how entrenched insurgents have become in local communities, where they target U.S. forces in broad daylight.
"All of us were just watching," Ali said. "There were a bunch of kids standing away from the road expecting and watching to see an explosion."
A U.S. soldier assigned to Task Force Baghdad was killed in a roadside bomb explosion Sunday, the military said, without indicating where the attack occurred. In a separate incident, a Marine assigned to 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action in Anbar province, the military said.
Seven Ukrainian troops and a Kazakh soldier also were killed Sunday when a bomb they had seized exploded accidentally.
On Monday, gunmen assassinated Baghdad's deputy police chief, Brig. Amer Nayef, and his son outside their home, the Reuters news agency reported.
And in Seoul, the Foreign Ministry said it was checking reports that one or two South Koreans may have been kidnapped in Iraq, the Associated Press reported. The kidnapping was reported on the Web site of a militant group that demanded the withdrawal of South Korea's 3,600 troops in Iraq. A South Korean, Kim Sun Il, was beheaded in June by insurgents who made similar demands.
