During a television interview last month, Rory Stewart, a foreign policy expert who has argued strenuously that President Obama should cut rather than increase the size of the American force in Afghanistan, used an arresting metaphor to describe what it was like to advise the American government on Afghan policy.

Mr. Stewart, who acquired his knowledge of Afghanistan the really old-fashioned way — by walking across it — told Lynn Sherr on PBS that he had spoken to both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the special representative to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, this year, even as the American military presence has steadily expanded. Asked to characterize these discussions, Mr. Stewart said this:

They listen politely, but in the end, of course, basically the policy decision is made. What they would like is a little advice on some small bit. I mean, the analogy that one of my colleagues used recently is this: It’s as though they come to you and they say, “We’re planning to drive our car off a cliff. Do we wear a seatbelt or not?” And we say, “Don’t drive your car off the cliff.” And they say, “No, no, no. That decision’s already made. The question is should we wear our seat belts?” And you say, “Why by all means wear a seat belt.” And they say, “O.K., we consulted with policy expert, Rory Stewart,” etc.

Mr. Stewart’s metaphor is strikingly similar to something Mr. Obama used to say about the decision to invade Iraq. On The Daily Show in November 2005, then-Senator Obama said: “Iraq is sort of a situation where you’ve got a guy who drove the bus into the ditch. You know, you obviously have to get the bus out of the ditch and that’s not easy to do — although you probably should fire the driver.”

Read more…

NASA An illustration from a NASA Web site of what should happen on Friday morning, as the space agency plunges a rocket and a satellite into the surface of the moon.

In what sounds like the plot of a Bruce Willis movie — but is in fact a real scientific experiment on a grand scale — NASA is preparing to plow a satellite and its booster rocket into the surface of the moon on Friday morning, to see if there is any sign of water in the two dust clouds created by the impacts.

The spacecraft rapidly approaching the moon right now — at 2,638 m.p.h. — is known as the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS. On Friday morning, as NASA explains in a blog post on the mission Web site:

Beginning at 6:30 a.m. C.D.T., the LCROSS spacecraft and heavier Centaur upper-stage rocket will execute a series of procedures to separately hurl themselves toward the lunar surface to create a pair of debris plumes that will be analyzed for the presence of water ice. The Centaur is aiming for the Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole, and scientists expect it to kick up approximately ten kilometers (6.2 miles) of lunar dirt from the crater’s floor.

As my colleague Kenneth Chang reported in June, the satellite will photograph the rocket’s impact in the polar crater:

If the plume of debris contains water ice, LCROSS should be able to detect it. It will then quickly send the data back to Earth before it, too, slams into the Moon four minutes later.

As an article on NASA’s Web site explains, the space agency will be streaming the impacts live on its Web video channel NASA TV and the dust plumes should be visible to anyone with a fairly serious telescope positioned on the right part of our planet:

The Hubble Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), and hundreds of telescopes great and small on Earth will scrutinize the two plumes, looking for signs of water and the unexpected. [...]

“We expect the debris plumes to be visible through mid-sized backyard telescopes—10 inches and larger,” says Brian Day of NASA/Ames. Day is an amateur astronomer and the Education and Public Outreach Lead for LCROSS. “The initial explosions will probably be hidden behind crater walls, but the plumes will rise high enough above the crater’s rim to be seen from Earth.”

The Pacific Ocean and western parts of North America are favored with darkness and a good view of the Moon at the time of impact. Hawaii is the best place to be, with Pacific coast states of the USA a close second. Any place west of the Mississippi River, however, is a potential observing site.

Being a modern spacecraft, LCROSS also has its own Twitter feed, and is sending out regular, chirpy updates about its kamikaze mission to thousands of followers on the social-networking site. Here, for instance, is a “status update” sent about an hour ago:

Where am I now? Travelin’ 1.18km/s (2638 mph). 76,435km from the Moon. … 21 hrs! RU Excited? I am! #lcross

Read more…

A photograph of Kamdesh, in the Afghan province of Nuristan, from Hayat Nooristani’s Flickr photostream.

Updated | Thursday | 9:07 a.m. Four days after a deadly attack on two American military bases in the Afghan province of Nuristan left eight American and four Afghan soldiers dead, the propaganda battle over the engagement continues.

As my colleague Elisabeth Bumiller reported on Tuesday, NATO posted a statement on its Web site claiming a victory of sorts in the fighting around the mountainous village of Kamdesh, since “a more detailed battlefield assessment following the Oct. 3 attack in Nuristan has determined that enemy forces suffered more than 100 dead during the well-coordinated defense — significantly higher losses than originally thought.”

The Taliban flag, from its Web site.

According to Reuters, the Taliban retaliated by claiming on their Web site, that “they had raised their flag in Kamdesh district of Nuristan province on Wednesday morning at a function attended by locals.”

Colonel Wayne Shanks, a senior press officer for American and NATO forces, told Reuters that, no matter what the Taliban claimed: “I can guarantee you we have not left Nuristan. We are there. We are doing the same operations we have been doing.”

Col. Shanks also told the news agency that American soldiers were still present at the two outposts that were attacked on Saturday, although both sites would eventually be abandoned, in accordance with a decision made well before the attack to redeploy international forces to more populated areas of Afghanistan.

The NATO statement also points to the remarkable fact that the American military is still not exactly sure who it was attacked by in Kamdesh. The statement notes that “the group responsible for conducting the attack was initially reported as ‘Nuristani tribal militia,’” but on further review it now seems that the Taliban may have been involved, along with another Afghan militia led by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who led a mujahedeen force against the Soviets in the 1980s.

Read the rest of this post or join the discussion on the At War blog …

Junji Kurokawa/Associated PressAt left, an ad for a new suit made by a Japanese company claims that it is able to repel influenza viruses; at right, Ryoji Tanaka, an executive with the men’s wear company selling the suit, tries one.

As our colleague Ariel Kaminer demonstrated recently, if you are really worried about catching the H1N1 swine flu, you can don a paper suit and wear a mask and goggles whenever you leave home — as long as you don’t mind being stared at. A lot.

This week a Japanese men’s wear company, Haruyama Trading, announced that it would soon start selling a far less obtrusive form of anti-flu armor: a business suit treated with a chemical which, the makers claim, has repelled the H1N1 virus in tests.

According to a news release from the company (available for download, in Japanese, on its Web site), the suit’s fibers are coated with the chemical titanium dioxide, commonly found in toothpaste. The compound acts as a photocatalyst, supposedly sparking a virus-destroying reaction when light hits the jacket or pants.

In 2006, our colleague Elisabetta Povoledo reported that titanium dioxide was already being used in self-cleaning coatings “because of its photocatalytic properties: sunlight sets off a chemical reaction that accelerates natural oxidation.”

A report from the business news agency Comtex explains:

Photocatalysts are known for breaking down bacteria and for helping fight against infections, eliminating odors. Haruyama says the photocatalyst broke down the spreading A H1N1 swine flu virus and was effective in warding off infection in in-house testing.

Read more…

Video shot this summer in Afghanistan by a British television crew near an American military base that was attacked on Saturday — in a battle that left eight Americans and four Afghan security officers dead — illustrates quite dramatically how tough the fight there is for soldiers trying to secure villages nestled in high mountains.

This video blog post was filed in August by Stuart Webb, a cameraman for Britain’s Channel 4 News, while he was embedded with American soldiers at a base in the Kamdesh District of Afghanistan’s Nuristan Province, which was attacked on Saturday:

The fact that Mr. Webb shot his video while standing next to the rusted remains of a Soviet personnel carrier is a graphic reminder that the United States is not the first great power to have trouble securing this mountainous country.

The Channel 4 News cameraman also shot the video report below, which also aired in August, and showed how vulnerable the American forces were at Forward Operating Base Keating in Kamdesh. As Nick Paton Walsh of Channel 4 News explained in the report, which shows an attack in progress, the base was located in a valley and was surrounded by steep mountains — allowing insurgents to shoot downhill at the Americans.

In a blog post accompanying the report last August, Mr. Paton Walsh reported that the Americans stationed there were aware of the paradox that the mountain valley was at once remarkably beautiful and incredibly dangerous:

“It’s a little slice of heaven,” one soldier told Mr. Paton Walsh. That, the reporter noted, “was after a day of about four separate Taliban attacks.”

The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, which preserves the memory of the young diarist who died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, posted the only known film footage of Anne Frank on a new YouTube channel launched last week. According to the museum, the film was shot on July 22, 1941, to record the wedding of a woman who lived next door to the Franks. About nine seconds in to the silent film embedded above, the camera tilts up from the bride and groom to show young Anne leaning out of the window of her house to see them.

In the five days since the channel was launched, the video has already been viewed more than 1.6 million times.

Adam Gabbatt of The Guardian reported on Friday: “A shorter, five-second version of the video was given to Otto Frank, Anne’s father, by the married couple in the 1950s. After Anne’s published diary became widely known in the 1950s the couple recognized her in the film and contacted Otto.” The couple, who are still alive, gave the museum the longer version of the clip in the 1990s.

The video channel also includes this excerpt from a moving interview with Otto Frank, Anne’s father, filmed in 1967 in one of the rooms the family hid in during World War II:

Update | 1:39 p.m. A reader asks if Miep Gies, who helped hide the Franks and saved Anne’s diary, is still living. She is. According to a report from the German press agency DPA on the Web site of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Ms. Gies, who turned 100 earlier this year, “lives in relative seclusion in her house in the Dutch province of Friesland.” DPA reports that on Sunday an asteroid between the planets Mars and Jupiter “became known as Miep Gies, in honor of the Dutch woman who preserved the diary of Anne Frank that later became an international bestseller. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) said it wanted to draw attention to the steadfast courage of the now 100-year-old last surviving helper of the Frank family.”

Poulet avec Clé Anglaise anyone? A wrench. A knife. A tooth. These are some of the items Costco customers found in packages of processed food and subsequently sent to the company’s food safety division in Seattle.

During an interview for an article and video report tracing the path of meat infected with E. coli, Craig Wilson, a Costco assistant vice president for food safety, told The Times that bacteria is not all that some food manufacturers fail to spot in their products: “We serve the public, and we think it’s really important that if we know something then we share that with our members. Most people think of food safety as E. coli, salmonella, all of those other things. One of the biggest food safety issue that we have is something I like to call ‘Stuff in Foods.’”

On Friday, as my colleague Isabel Kershner reports, Israel obtained a “proof of life” video from the captors of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was seized in June, 2006, in a cross-border raid by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza.

Here is the complete video, which was shown on Israeli television on Friday, and posted on YouTube by the French magazine Le Point (an English translation of the Hebrew-language statement, from the BBC, follows):

During the video, the camera zooms in to show the date on the newspaper held by Sergeant Shalit, now 23, and zooms back at the end to show that he is able to stand and walk.

Here is the BBC’s translation:

Hi, I am Gilad Shalit, son of Aviva and Noam Shalit, brother of Hadas and Yoel, from Mitzpe Hilla, ID number 300097029. Today is Monday 14 September 2009.

As you can see, I’m holding in my hand today’s Palestine newspaper, 14th September 2009, which is published in Gaza. I’m reading the newspaper in order to find information about myself, and I hope to find information about my release and return home soon.

I have been waiting and yearning a long time for the day I will be released.

Read more…

This post was compiled by Sergio Peçanha, Tanzina Vega and Ken Belson.

Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times Brazilians at Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro celebrated the I.O.C. announcment on Friday.

The announcement that Rio de Janeiro had been awarded the 2016 Olympic Summer Games was met with an explosion of emotion from Copenhagen, where the I.O.C. vote took place, to the thousands who gathered on the sands of Copacabana beach in Brazil.

The Brazilian online media, who for months had been giving extensive coverage to Rio de Janeiro’s bid, showed images of President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, soccer superstar Pelé, the Olympic gold medalist Cesar Cielo and tennis player Gustavo Kuerten hugging and jumping for joy in Copehagen.

At Copacabana beach, a huge flag proclaimed “Rio Loves You,” and the crowd that started gathering hours before the vote celebrated with Brazilian TV and music stars. Read more…

Update | 1:05 p.m. Rio de Janeiro was awarded the 2016 Summer Games on Friday, besting Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge made the announcement that sent crowds in Rio de Janeiro into celebration.

Update | 11:33 a.m. In the first round of voting by the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen, Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Summer Games was rejected. Tokyo was eliminated in a second round of voting. The I.O.C. members will now decided between Rio de Janeiro and Madrid as host for the Olympic Games.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters President Barack Obama conferred with Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago before speaking in Copenhagen on Friday.

The International Olympic Committee will begin hearing presentations from the four cities competing to host the 2016 Summer Games on Friday at 8:50 a.m. in Copenhagen (2:50 a.m. Eastern time). Each city will make a 45-minute presentation to the I.O.C. members, with another 15 minutes for questions and answers. Chicago, which has the backing of President Barack Obama, will present its case first. Tokyo goes next, followed by Rio de Janeiro and Madrid. Read more…

As my colleagues Peter Gelling and Mark McDonald report, the death toll from two earthquakes near the Indonesian city of Padang has climbed past 500 on Thursday. If readers see more first-hand accounts of the earthquake’s impact — in the form of text, video or photographs — please share them with us by writing a comment or posting links in the comments thread below.

Update | 9:36 a.m. Bloomberg News has an ominous report on the earthquakes in Indonesia, suggesting that “a bigger tsunami-triggering temblor in the same area” is “likely” to occur in the future. Bloomberg News reports:

The 7.6-magnitude temblor in the city of Padang is part of a cycle of earthquakes that started in 2007 in a 700-kilometer (435 miles) fault line off Sumatra called the Mentawai patch, said Kerry Sieh, a Singapore-based professor of geology from the California Institute of Technology. The cycle may include a quake with a magnitude of as much as 8.8, Sieh said. [...]

“There’s no city on earth that’s had more wake-up calls than Padang,” Sieh said today. “They’ve had five or six major earthquakes in the last 10 years, and a bigger one to come.”

Update | 9:14 a.m. According to a report from the Catholic relief agency Caritas, an official on the ground there, Fr. Agustinus Mudjihartono, “says that while the situation in Padang for survivors is critical, the situation 50 km [30 miles] north in the town of Pariaman is much worse.” The Caritas report, published on the Alert Net Web site, explains:

Pariaman is home to about 80,000 residents and means “safe haven” in Indonesian. Fr. Mudjihartono says the entire town has been destroyed by the quake.

This video report from the Indonesian broadcaster TV One shows the impact of the earthquake in Pariaman.

Update | Thursday | 8:30 a.m. This video report from the Britain’s Channel 4 News includes recent images from Indonesian television showing the impact of the two earthquakes on the coastal city of nearly one million people:

On the BBC’s Web site, Karishma Vaswani filed this video report on the desperate effort to pull survivors from the rubble in the Sumatran capital.

This amateur video was uploaded to YouTube on Thursday by a user who said that it shows damage from the earthquake in Padang:

Read more…

Map from U.S. Geological Survey.

On Wednesday The Lede is tracking news about the deadly tsunami waves that struck the islands of American Samoa and Samoa, killing at least 89 people. If readers see firsthand accounts of the tragedy or the recovery effort online, in the form of text, video or photographs, please share them with us by using the comments thread below this post or send photographs to pix@nyt.com.

Update | 5:59 p.m. A reader points out that the Samoa News Web site has more updates on the recovery effort in American Samoa and photographs, like this one, of the damage:

Update | 2:32 p.m. Joey Cummings, the general manager of a radio station in Pago Pago, American Samoa who shot video of the second tsunami wave flooding the harbor there, was interviewed by Britain’s Channel 4 News for this video report on the disaster:

Update | 12:44 p.m. A reader points us to this blog post by a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa, which features updates on the initial hours of the disaster and photographs of people evacuating to higher ground. Read more…

Jeff Overs/Reuters British Prime Minister Gordon Brown being questioned on the BBC on Sunday by Andrew Marr.

On live television in Britain on Sunday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain was asked if there is any truth to a rumor circulating on British blogs that he takes “pills” to combat depression. Mr. Brown immediately said “No,” and took issue with what he called “the sort of questioning that is all too often entering the lexicon of British politics.”

The BBC published video of the excruciating exchange, between Mr. Brown and Andrew Marr, the host of the BBC’s Sunday morning politics show, on its Web site. Since the question was framed as one about his health, Mr. Brown shifted the focus of the conversation to his ability to cope with what he called “the handicap” of having lost the sight in one eye, and nearly lost the sight in the other, as a young man.

On Monday the BBC was forced to defend Mr. Marr’s decision to ask a question apparently based on the speculation of a single British blogger, a retired advertising executive named John Ward, who wrote in early September that he had heard at a cocktail party that Mr. Brown does not eat certain types of food that people taking one class of antidepressants are counseled to avoid.

While defending his right to speculate, and claiming that he “broke the story,” Mr. Ward admitted to Britain’s Channel 4 News on Monday that he has no proof that Mr. Brown takes medication and cannot even be certain that his source is well-informed about Mr. Brown’s diet. In the interview embedded below, Mr. Ward said:

The fact of the matter is, I still have no more proof, and I stress proof, than anyone else that Gordon Brown is actually taking antidepressants. All I can say is that I was given a verbal list of foods he allegedly cannot have by a very senior civil servant at a social gathering. And as an occasional depressive myself in the past I recognised the contraindications immediately from many years ago to be those of an antidepressant of the MAOI type that I have taken. [...]

I am not saying that I have any kind of smoking gun to say he does take these things and the guy may have been spreading a pernicious rumor. [...]

I may well have been a dupe, it’s perfectly possible.

Read more…

Iranian bloggers and opposition Web sites posted video and photographs of a student protest on Monday at Tehran University, suggesting that the unrest that broke out after the disputed June 12 presidential election is not yet at an end.

The Iranian student Web site Advar News reported that hundreds of university students chanted slogans against Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, including “Death to dictator!” and “Ahmadi, Ahmadi, this is the last message, the green movement is ready for uprising!” Another reformist Web site, Norooz, estimated that about a thousand students took part in the demonstration, according to Reuters.

A photograph the Iranian Web site Mowjcamp said was shot on Monday at Tehran University during a protest.

A report on the Web site of The Human Rights Activists News Agency about Monday’s protest was illustrated with dozens of photographs of protesters, many of them carrying green ribbons, banners or balloons. Several more images of what appeared to be a student march were published in a report on the opposition Web site Mowjcamp.

The Web site Mowjcamp reported that Iranian student protesters identified themselves with the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi’s green movement on Monday at Tehran University.

Mr. Ahmadinejad was scheduled to appear at Tehran University but reportedly did not show up or offer an explanation for his absence. Authorities had voiced concerns about student protests at universities as the new school year began and had warned students to refrain from political activities.

Iranian bloggers said that several short snippets of video posted on YouTube showed that a smaller group of students chanted “Death to dictator!” one day earlier, on Sunday, at the philosophy faculty of Tehran University during an appearance by a former speaker of Iran’s parliament, Gholam Ali Hadad Adel. Mowjcamp reported that among the other slogans chanted during the appearance were “Shame! Shame! Representative who is against the people!” and “Don’t be scared, we are not thugs!” referring to the Basij militia members who have attacked opposition supporters at protests since June. Read more…

Updated (below) | 6:07 p.m. In the immediate aftermath of the devastation caused by Tropical Storm Ketsana, which hit the Philippines in force on Saturday, the country’s government blamed victims for not heeding its warnings and suggested that its disaster relief efforts were not as bad as those of the American government during Hurricane Katrina. The storm, also called Ondoy in the Philippines, has killed at least 140 people and displaced about 150,000, according to the latest report.

The American disaster was invoked by critics of the government response as soon as images of Filipinos stranded on rooftops started circulating on Saturday — on television, on YouTube, in slide shows, on newly-created blogs and through social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

On Sunday The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported that Prisco Nilo, who runs the national weather agency, told President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in a briefing that the storm had dropped nearly 17 inches of rain on the country, “compared to the [10 inches] of rain that Hurricane Katrina brought to New Orleans in Louisiana in the United States in 2005.” In a subsequent interview with the newspaper, Mr. Nilo said of citizens who did not heed his agency’s warning about the storm: “Instead of just watching the soap operas on TV, they should also watch the news.” Read more…