URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1225 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 2, 2008 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

Days of Rage in Pakistan Leave Lingering Cloud of Uncertainty
BYLINE: By SOMINI SENGUPTA; Salman Masood contributed reporting.
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1236 words
DATELINE: KARACHI, Pakistan
The highway that leads from Benazir Bhutto's ancestral village to this, her hometown, is one long road of ruin. Here and there along a stretch of 200 miles lie twisted hulks of tractor-trailers, their contents spilling out on the highway, casualties of the riots that broke out after Ms. Bhutto's assassination last Thursday.

On New Year's Eve, as the last light of 2007 fell from the sky, piles of coal still smoldered on the pavement. Rotten oranges littered the road. A consignment of pickup trucks that the United States had bought for Pakistani law enforcement officials fighting militants had been picked clean; brakes, steering wheels, batteries had been carted away.

The truck drivers, most of them ethnic Pashtuns from the faraway tribal areas of the northwest, waited in vain for rescue here in the southern ethnic Sindhi heartland. One of them had his left ear caked with blood; the mobs had pelted him with stones and then burned his coal truck, costing him his only source of income.

The road was a perfect emblem of the mood of this country, as it ushered in a new year under a thick shroud woven of rage and uncertainty.

''You don't know what the next day is going to bring,'' is how Sheena Hadi, 27, put it on New Year's morning here in Karachi. ''We are in a gray area right now.''

The gray pervades everything here, from the big, abstract questions about where the country is headed to the smallest, most mundane details of life.

Shops in Karachi, the city worst hit by the post-assassination violence, had been shuttered since Thursday evening. They opened for a few hours on Monday, only to close again amid rumors of another assassination. Those proved false, but under the present circumstances, when anything seemed possible, panic spread quickly, and residents scurried inside.

And so, as 2008 dawned and shops and restaurants opened, Seema Ahmed stepped out to do what she had never done in her 40 years in Karachi: stock up on food grains, in the event of another upheaval. Munizeh Sanai, a radio disc jockey, made sure to wear flat shoes in case she had to make a run for her life. And the family of Shoaib Umer, stranded here after its train home to Lahore was canceled Monday, spent the afternoon at the mausoleum of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, eating oranges.

The unknown had forced people to rethink their personal and professional calendars.

Ms. Hadi, a former teacher in Brooklyn who returned home four years ago to work for a reproductive health organization, said she had no idea whether the streets would be calm enough for her to go to work the next day. She feared for what she called ''a complete breakdown in security,'' and was faced with a quandary: How to balance her craving for safety somewhere else with her loyalty to this country?

Hasan Zaidi, 38, a filmmaker, said he did not know when he could start shooting his picture. ''It's a thriller, actually, but maybe it should've been a farce,'' he said. Already, he had postponed a film festival that he organizes in November every year, canceled an annual New Year's Eve ball and decided not to go ahead with his daughter's birthday party next weekend. There was no telling what could happen between now and then. She would be turning 2, and he hoped she would not feel the difference.

Sumaila Palla, 23, went shopping in search of an outfit to wear to her college graduation party in two weeks. ''Hopefully,'' she said of the timing of her party, and then shrugged it off as normal. ''People who live here, they're accustomed,'' she said. ''They've succumbed.''

Down the street, in a cafe that had opened for the first time in four days, a pair of entrepreneurs, laptops open, were busy at work on a marketing plan for an anti-littering campaign in Karachi. It was a strange enterprise at a time when the city was littered with hollowed, charred cars.

But Tooba Zarif Husain, 26, and Salman Yaqoob Raja, 25, were unbowed. They said they hoped things would return to normal in a few months, once the elections were over. Theirs were rare voices of confidence in the ability of President Pervez Musharraf to restore order.

''It is the history of Karachi that things go up and down, but people have a short memory,'' Mr. Raja said brightly. ''They forget and get on with their lives.''

By midafternoon, in the buzzing aisles of a supermarket called Agha, Bushra Zaidi was filling her cart with ingredients for enchiladas and Waldorf salad. Ms. Zaidi, the host of a cooking show on television, said her recording schedule had been thrown off by the violence of last week. She would have to tape 30 shows in five days.

In the same aisle, Sherry Rehman, a spokeswoman for Ms. Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party, was stocking up on rations to take back to Naudero, where senior party officials have huddled in Ms. Bhutto's country house since her death. Her cart was piled high with dried cherries and candles, mint tea and Pakistani pickles. She was looking for hairspray.

The party's central executive committee was to meet Wednesday evening in Naudero to discuss how to proceed on elections. It had pressed for holding the balloting next Tuesday, as scheduled, but government officials said the elections would be postponed till February. A new date is expected to be announced Wednesday.

As evening drew close and the sky turned golden, on the eighth floor of a Karachi office tower Munizeh Sanai, the disc jockey, put on her headphones and readied herself for her daily show, ''The Rush Hour'' on City FM 89.

''Hello, hello everybody,'' she crooned fast and sweet. ''Strap on that seat belt, put on a smile, let me drive you home.''

Ms. Sanai, 26, deliberated about what music would feel right tonight. ''I want to keep it mellow but happy,'' she said. ''People deserve a break.''

She opened with a song by Belle and Sebastian, called ''The Blues Are Still Blue.''

For the last four days, it had been impossible to talk about anything but the assassination and the countless conspiracy theories it had spawned, and the subsequent ascension of Ms. Bhutto's 19-year-old son as the titular head of her party. ''Do I really live in a place where politicians are that ridiculous?'' she wondered aloud, as she picked out songs. ''Yes, I do.''

Ms. Sanai, who came home after graduating from Bennington College in Vermont, said she had already grown weary of trying to explain it to friends abroad.

Text messages came into the station. Someone wanted Led Zeppelin. ''Hey M, we will get through this,'' said another. ''Please don't stop the music.''

She played ''Don't Stop the Music,'' by Rihanna, a track from the latest Robbie Williams album and ''The Waiting'' by Tom Petty. Someone requested a song by Frou Frou called ''Let Go.'' Someone else wrote: ''Happy New Year. Please Play 'Long Road to Ruin.'''

She shook her head. ''That's not nice,'' she said off the air. ''That's not positive. No. It's loud. I'm not playing it.''

The assassination coincided with one of the biggest rituals in her own life: her best friend's wedding, a multi-day event that began Tuesday evening. Ms. Sanai had selected a medley of songs to which a dance had been choreographed. Security had been increased. Earlier in the day she had tried on the outfit she had chosen for the wedding, stared at the mirror and wondered whether it was the most sensible choice. ''Can I run if I need to?'' she asked.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: TRUCK DRIVERS (77%); RIOTS (77%); MOTOR VEHICLES (70%); LAW ENFORCEMENT (70%); SPECIAL FREIGHT TRUCKING (70%); RESTAURANTS (64%); RETAILERS (64%)
PERSON: BENAZIR BHUTTO (92%)
GEOGRAPHIC: KARACHI,PAKISTAN (94%); NEW YORK, NY, USA (79%) NEW YORK, USA (79%) PAKISTAN (94%); UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: January 2, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: A slum in Karachi, the city worst hit by violence since Benazir Bhutto was assassinated last week, was relatively calm on Tuesday. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. A1)

In Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, markets and restaurants re-opened and shoppers and traffic returned. Much of the city had been shuttered since Thursday night. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. A10) MAP: Sindh Province is the home base of the Bhutto family. Map of Karachi in Pakistan.

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1226 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 1, 2008 Tuesday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final
In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm
BYLINE: By JOHN TIERNEY
SECTION: Section F; Column 0; Science Desk; FINDINGS; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1172 words
I'd like to wish you a happy New Year, but I'm afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You're in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change -- and that these images are a mere preview of what's in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can't be more specific. I don't know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there's bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn't ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah's sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today's interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year's end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record -- it was actually lower than any year since 2001 -- the BBC confidently proclaimed, ''2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.''

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm -- by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades -- the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).

The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what's called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we've seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don't have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn't make for memorable images on television or in people's minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an ''availability cascade,'' a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and ''The China Syndrome,'' minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

''Many people concerned about climate change,'' Dr. Sunstein says, ''want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people's minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don't doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there's a danger that any 'consensus' on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.''

Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there's not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting -- or why the globe's other pole isn't melting, too.

Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they're also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention -- and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.

Guess which paper jibed with the theory -- and image of Katrina -- presented by Al Gore's ''Inconvenient Truth''?

It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December -- by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn't dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to ''stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,'' and focused on other kinds of disasters, like ''massive droughts'' and ''massive flooding.''

''In the last few months,'' Mr. Gore said, ''it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.'' But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: WEATHER (90%); CLIMATE CHANGE (89%); GLOBAL WARMING (89%); ENVIRONMENTAL ACCIDENTS & DISASTERS (89%); EARTH & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE (89%); HURRICANES (89%); DROUGHT (89%); EMISSIONS (77%); JOURNALISM (77%); TRENDS (76%); HURRICANE KATRINA (75%); TROPICAL STORMS (74%); MODELING & SIMULATION (73%); SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (70%); SCIENCE NEWS (70%); HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCE (65%); METEOROLOGY (77%); CLIMATOLOGY (90%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (74%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW ORLEANS, LA, USA (79%) LOUISIANA, USA (79%); CALIFORNIA, USA (50%); ARCTIC OCEAN (79%) ANTARCTICA (91%); UNITED STATES (79%); ARCTIC (79%); UNITED KINGDOM (69%)
LOAD-DATE: January 1, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
CORRECTION-DATE: January 4, 2008

CORRECTION: The Findings column in Science Times on Tuesday, about the way severe weather is tied to predictions of global warming, gave an outdated academic affiliation for Timur Kuran. He is a professor of economics and political science at Duke University; he is no longer a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California.
GRAPHIC: ILLUSTRATIONS (ILLUSTRATIONS BY AMELIA BAUER)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1227 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 1, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

Fewer Killings in 2007, but Still Felt in City's Streets
BYLINE: By CHRISTINE HAUSER; Christian Hansen, Nate Schweber and Mathew R. Warren contributed reporting.
SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 2
LENGTH: 876 words
A man was shot in the face in front of his wife and children on a street near his home. A teenager in the Bronx died from stab wounds. And in a Brooklyn apartment, two men were found dead seated at a card table, still clutching their playing cards. Each had been shot in the head.

In the final two days of 2007, the toll of reported killings continued to rise.

But as of Monday evening, one grim benchmark had not yet been passed. The police said that there were 494 recorded homicides in 2007, meaning that the city had so far logged fewer than 500 for the first time since reliable statistics became available 44 years ago. Last year, there were 596 homicides.

Continuing a 15-year trend, the murder rate in New York City has gone lower than many would have imagined. ''It's dramatic,'' said Joseph A. Pollini, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. ''It's phenomenal. It's sort of unheard of.''

Some credit a four-year-old program called Operation Impact, in which recent graduates of the police academy are paired with seasoned officers in the neighborhoods where they are most needed. City officials recently announced that crime in almost every major category had declined again this year.

But it may be days, or even longer, before the final number of people slain in New York City in 2007 is known.

If deaths that occurred in 2007 are investigated and determined to be homicides, they are added to the overall tally until Jan. 15, said a police spokesman, Paul J. Browne. However, if somebody is stabbed in 2007, or even earlier, and dies from his wounds in 2008, he would be assigned to the 2008 tally, Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Browne cited two other ways in which police work had helped to significantly drive down crime rates again in 2007: A real-time crime database, used since 2005, which quickly provides information on suspects and crimes to detectives on the streets; and an increased focus on domestic violence offenders since 2003 that has reduced domestic violence homicides.

The murder rate may be down, but the familiar rituals of mourning could still be seen around the city on Monday: A makeshift memorial of flower bouquets, one of them tied with yellow police tape, was arranged around the trunk of a slender tree in front of 462 Central Avenue in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, and candles were arrayed around the tree along the edge of the curb. In the street, a smear of blood was still visible, marking a gruesome tableau of one of the city's last recorded homicides of 2007.

The man who was killed there on Sunday was Lesley Prosper, 37, the police said. The medical examiner's office said Mr. Prosper had been shot in the face.

Neighbors and acquaintances said that Mr. Prosper had been shot as he made his way toward his apartment building at 464 Central Avenue with his wife and two children.

''He looked out for the neighborhood,'' said the Rev. Emanuel Coleman, 48, who knew Mr. Prosper from when he ministered at a church that used to be on the street where Mr. Prosper lived and died. ''If there were drug dealers on the block, he would talk to them and tell them not to do that here.''

''Who did this to my brother?'' screamed Mr. Prosper's sister when she pulled up outside of the apartment building and collapsed to the ground in tears. ''I want my brother back!''

In the Bronx, a 16-year-old boy with stab wounds was found at 545 East 183rd Street on Sunday, the police said, and on Monday he had died. The boy, German Delgado, had been in and out of foster care, said a woman whose family he had been living with two months ago.

The woman, Ninosca Rosario, 24, said she had been told that German was on his way to visit his mother in St. Barnabas Hospital when someone tried to steal his phone, but he would not give it up.

Two teenagers were arrested and charged with the murder on Monday night, the police said: Rudolph Keitt, 19, and Trenton Johnson, 16, both of the Bronx.

German, a ninth grader at the Academy for Scholarship and Entrepreneurship, had taken odd jobs, as a D.J. at parties and in the mailroom at a law firm. He liked to play street football, Ms. Rosario said. ''He was not a bad kid,'' she said. ''He was just trying to help his family.''

At another crime scene in Brooklyn, there was vivid detail of a double murder.

Mr. Browne said on Monday that two men, Owen Butler and Carlton Anderson, both of whom had criminal records and were marijuana dealers, were found dead on Sunday in an apartment at 5417 Kings Highway.

Mr. Butler's girlfriend found them seated at a card table. One had been shot in the right side of the head, the other in the left side. The police said they found 9-millimeter shell casings, believed to be from the murder weapon, in the apartment. They said they also found two handguns and drugs.

The men were still holding their cards, and both were wearing jewelry, the police said. There was $235 on the table and no sign of forced entry.

''We think they were playing cards with at least one other, maybe two, known to them,'' Mr. Browne said.

Monday night, the police said, a 35-year-old man was fatally shot in a dispute around 7 p.m. near East 168th Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The killer fled the scene, the police said.

Download 3.51 Mb.

Share with your friends: