Imam's Wife Tells of Death Threats - New York Times

On his blog, Paul Krugman explains the economic theories others have been using – and how their predictions differ from his own.

The fiasco of the Commonwealth Games shattered illusions of the country’s progress, Pankaj Mishra writes.

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Verizon Wireless to Pay Millions in Refunds - New York Times

WASHINGTON — Verizon Wireless said on Sunday that it would pay up to $90 million in refunds to 15 million cellphone customers who were wrongly charged for data sessions or Internet use, one of the largest customer refunds by a telecommunications company.

The announcement came in a statement from Verizon Wireless as the company held talks with the Federal Communications Commission about complaints of unauthorized charges and in response to questions about a possible settlement of an F.C.C. investigation into the issue.

Verizon said in its statement that the customers would receive credits from $2 to $6 on their October or November bills or, in the case of former customers, refund checks.

The refunds will be paid to customers who did not have data access plans but who were nevertheless assessed one or more charges of $1.99 because of data exchanges initiated by software built into their phones, or because of charges for inadvertently going online on the phones.

The F.C.C. is likely to press Verizon to pay a penalty for failing to notify customers of the problem, which has been occurring since at least 2007, according to people close to the talks.

Michele Ellison, the chief of the F.C.C. enforcement bureau, said in a statement that the agency was “gratified to see the repayment, but for millions of Americans it’s a day late and a $1.99 short.”

“Getting consumers repaid is just the first step; ensuring this doesn’t happen again comes next,” Ms. Ellison said.

In the last three years, the F.C.C. has received hundreds of complaints from Verizon Wireless customers who said they were charged for data use or Web access at times when their phones were not in use or when they mistakenly pushed a button that activated the phone’s Web browser.

Beginning in 2009, The New York Times and The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, among other publications, reported that customers had been complaining of the charges but had often been ignored by Verizon Wireless. On certain flip phones sold by Verizon, a directional arrow, when pushed, automatically would initiate the phone’s Web browser.

Even if customer immediately canceled the action, they were often charged $1.99 for Internet access, according to the complaints, some of which were detailed by David Pogue of The Times on his blog, Pogue’s Posts.

Customers who contacted Verizon about the charges said that the company had often refused to reverse the charges or discouraged them from blocking the data service on their phones.

Verizon maintained that it had responded appropriately. “Verizon Wireless values our customer relationships, and we always want to do the right thing for our customers,” Mary Coyne, deputy general counsel for Verizon Wireless, said in a statement. “When we identify errors, we remedy them as quickly as possible. Our goal is to maintain our customers’ trust and ensure they receive the best experience possible.”

But Verizon initially played down the issue, telling the F.C.C. in December 2009 that it did not charge customers who had inadvertently started their phone’s Web browser and immediately ended the session.

That month, the F.C.C. formally asked Verizon about news reports detailing the charges. In a letter, Kathleen Grillo, a senior vice president for federal regulatory affairs at Verizon, wrote that, “In order to protect customers from minimal, accidental usage charges, Verizon Wireless does not charge users when the browser is launched, and opens to the Verizon Wireless Mobile Web homepage.”

That statement seems to be contradicted by Verizon’s latest statement. “As we reviewed customer accounts, we discovered that over the past several years, approximately 15 million customers who did not have data plans were billed for data sessions on their phones that they did not initiate,” the company said on Sunday.

“These customers would normally have been billed at the standard rate of $1.99 per megabyte for any data they chose to access from their phones,” the statement said. “The majority of the data sessions involved minor data exchanges caused by software built into their phones; others involved accessing the Web, which should not have incurred charges. We have addressed these issues to avoid unintended data charges in the future.”

The F.C.C. began a formal investigation into the unauthorized charges in January. Formal F.C.C. investigations, in which the agency can seek sworn testimony, are usually not disclosed publicly. The F.C.C. said on Sunday that it began looking into the Verizon issue 10 months ago.

In recent weeks, the company and the commission staff have been wrangling over how long the company had been aware of the problem and whether the F.C.C. would initiate a Notice of Apparent Liability, as formal enforcement charges are known.

As an alternative to formal enforcement, the company and the F.C.C. could enter into a consent decree, in which the company would neither admit nor deny the charges, but would agree to make a voluntary payment to settle the issue.

As settlement talks proceeded last week, Verizon indicated to the F.C.C. that it expected that the total amount of the refunds that it would pay to consumer would be about $50 million, according to people close to the settlement talks.

On Sunday, Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, declined to comment on whether the company could narrow the range of $30 million to $90 million in potential payments.

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Hungary sludge flood called 'ecological disaster' - The Associated Press

Hungary sludge flood called 'ecological disaster'By BELA SZANDELSZKY and PABLO GORONDI (AP) – 43 minutes ago

KOLONTAR, Hungary — A lethal torrent of toxic red sludge from a metal refinery engulfed towns in Hungary, burning villagers through their clothes and threatening an ecological disaster Tuesday as it swept toward the Danube River.

The flood of caustic red mud triggered a state of emergency declaration by Hungarian officials. At least four people were killed, six were missing and 120 injured, many with burns.

Hundreds were evacuated in the aftermath of the disaster Monday, when a gigantic sludge reservoir burst its banks at an alumina plant in Ajka, a town 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of Budapest, the capital. The torrent of sludge inundated homes, swept cars off roads and damaged bridges.

Named for its bright red color, the material is a waste product in aluminum production that contains heavy metals and is toxic if ingested.

In Kolontar, the town closest to the plant, Erzsebet Veingartner was in her kitchen when the 12-foot-high wave of red slurry hit, sweeping away everything in its path.

"I looked outside and all I saw was the stream swelling like a huge wave," the 61-year-old widow said Tuesday as she surveyed her backyard, still under 6 feet of noxious muck.

"I lost all my chickens, my ducks, my Rottweiler, and my potato patch. My late husband's tools and machinery were in the shed and it's all gone," sobbed the woman, who gets by on a $350 monthly pension. "I have a winter's worth of firewood in the basement and it's all useless now."

Emergency workers wearing masks and chemical protection gear rushed to pour 1,000 tons of plaster into the Marcal River in an attempt to bind the sludge and keep it from flowing on to the Danube some 45 miles away. Nearby, desperate villagers waded through the toxic mud trying to salvage possessions with little more than rubber gloves as protection.

The 1,775-mile-long Danube passes through some of the continent's most pristine vistas from its origins as a Black Forest spring in Germany to its end point as a majestic stretch of water emptying into the Black Sea.

Now a murky green — not blue as immortalized in the Strauss waltz — the river flows through four former communist nations. One of the continent's greatest treasuries of wildlife, it has been the focus of a multibillion dollar post-communist cleanup. Cormorants, swans and other birds are now common sights on the river.

Still, high-risk industries such as Hungary's Ajkai Timfoldgyar alumina plant are still producing waste near some of its tributaries, posing a threat to the waterway.

By Tuesday, about 35.3 million cubic feet of sludge had poured from the reservoir, flooding a 16 square mile area, Environmental Affairs State Secretary Zoltan Illes told the state news wire MTI. He called the spill an "ecological catastrophe."

Dozens of villagers were burned when the caustic material seeped through their clothing. Two women, a young man and a 3-year-old child were killed, and health officials said two of the injured were in critical condition.

Because chemical burns can take days to emerge, seemingly superficial injuries can turn deadly as they penetrate deeper tissue, Dr. Peter Jakabos of Gyor Hospital told state TV.

In nearby Devecser, the sea of muck in Tunde Erdelyi's house was 5 feet high Tuesday and rescue workers had to use an ax to cut through her living room door to let it flow out. Her car had been swept into the garden and her husband's van straddled a fence.

"When I heard the rumble of the flood, all the time I had was to jump out the window and run to higher ground," she said tearfully, adding that she was grateful the family's pet rabbit and cat were safe.

Her husband, Robert Kis, said his uncle was flown by helicopter to Budapest after the sludge "burned him to the bone."

Firefighters and soldiers wearing masks, rubber boots and other protective gear waded through the stricken area Tuesday, flushing away the sludge with hoses, aided by dozens of bulldozers, their loaders scraping the polluted ground.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban acknowledged that authorities were caught off guard by the disaster, telling reporters the alumina plant and reservoir had been inspected two weeks earlier and no irregularities had been found.

Red sludge is a byproduct of the refining of bauxite into alumina, the basic material for manufacturing aluminum. Representatives from industry organizations in the U.S. and London could not explain why the Hungarian victims were burned by the material, saying if it is properly treated it is not hazardous.

It is common to store treated sludge in ponds where the water eventually evaporates, leaving behind a dried red clay-like soil, the officials said.

However, Hungarian environmentalist Gergely Simon said the sludge involved in the disaster had been accumulating in the reservoir for decades and was extremely alkaline, with a pH value of about 13 — nearly equivalent to lye — and that is what caused the burns.

MAL Rt., the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company that owns the Ajka plant, said that according to European Union standards, red sludge is not considered hazardous waste.

The company also denied that it should have taken more precautions to shore up the reservoir, a huge structure more than 1,000 feet long and 500 yards wide, and high enough to dwarf trees that survived the torrent.

Clearly angered by the company's suggestions that the substance was not hazardous, Interior Minister Sandor Pinter, snapped: "They should take a swim in it and then they'll see."

This week's spill threatened to eclipse the environmental damage caused 10 years ago, when huge amounts of cyanide poured from a gold mine reservoir in a Romanian town near the Hungarian border into the Danube and four smaller rivers, destroying plant and animal life. Romania, what was then Yugoslavia and Ukraine also were affected.

___

Gorondi reported from Budapest. Associated Press Writer George Jahn in Vienna and Business Writer Jon Fahey contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS New approach. Corrects spelling of Kolontar. AP Video.)

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Americans Warned to Be Vigilant in Europe After Terror Threat - Bloomberg

Police in Paris evacuated the Eiffel Tower on Sept. 28 for the second time in two weeks after bomb threats. Photographer: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. warned Americans traveling in Europe to be vigilant following weeks of discussion within the Obama administration about threats of an attack by an al- Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group, officials said.

“Terrorists may elect to use a variety of means and weapons and target both official and private interests,” the U.S. State Department said in a travel alert for Europe issued in Washington yesterday.

The State Department didn’t issue a higher level “Travel Warning” for the continent. A warning would have cautioned Americans to avoid Europe, their most popular foreign travel destination, with the potential for a much larger impact on airlines and hotels. Twelve million Americans traveled to Europe last year, spending more than $20 billion, according to Commerce Department data.

“There may be a little dip in bookings, especially on the leisure side,” Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition in Radnor, Pennsylvania, said in an interview after the alert was issued. “All bets are off if the threat is more specific or, God forbid, something happens.”

The State Department has been monitoring the threats in Europe for weeks and made the decision to issue the advisory this weekend based on the “cumulative effect of all types of information” it had, Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy told reporters.

Tourists Targeted

Terrorists often target tourist attractions, subways and rail systems, and travelers should “take every precaution” to protect themselves, the alert said. French police have evacuated the Eiffel Tower in Paris twice in the past three weeks because of threats.

The U.S. is “not, not, not” advising Americans to delay or cancel visits to Europe, Kennedy said. Instead they should take “common-sense precautions,” and also register with the consular offices in countries they visit. The alert is set to expire at the end of January.

U.S. airlines “are operating their business as usual, with the same continued security vigilance in the interest of safe travel,” David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, said in an e-mail. The Washington-based group represents airlines such as Delta Air Lines Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co.

While U.S. airlines are continuing normal flight operations, they likely have stepped up security, and won’t tell the public about it, George Hamlin, president of Hamlin Transportation Consulting in Fairfax, Virginia, said in an interview.

More Security Likely

“They may be on a higher state of alert, they may be making more random security checks, they may be even looking more closely at specific flights, but they aren’t going to tell us that,” he said.

Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs said it is “closely monitoring the situation in Europe,” and urged its citizens to “be aware of their surroundings.” The United Kingdom upgraded its terrorism warning for France and Germany.

“As we have consistently made clear, we face a real and serious threat from terrorism,” British Home Secretary Theresa May said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. “Our threat level remains at severe -- meaning that an attack is highly likely.”

Coordinated Attacks

Militants based in Pakistan are planning coordinated attacks in the U.K., France and Germany, prompting the recent increase in U.S. drone strikes in the region, Sky News reported, citing U.S. officials it didn’t name. Reports have focused on attacks similar to the 2008 ones by the Pakistani-based Lashkar- e-Taiba on a hotel in Mumbai that left 166 people dead.

In the attacks in Mumbai militants armed with grenades and rifles stormed into the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel and the Oberoi Trident complex, singling out foreign nationals and taking hostages in a three-day siege.

Pakistan’s intelligence services are acting on information from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to try to foil any terrorism plots against Europe, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” yesterday.

ABC News, citing U.S. and European officials, said the tipoff came from a German terror suspect held in Afghanistan who told interrogators that teams of attackers with European passports have been dispatched.

“Security agencies are investigating closely all information and are continually monitoring security measures,” Markus Beyer, a German Interior Ministry spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement.

France sees the U.S. alert as “in line with the general recommendations we ourselves make to the French population,” foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said in an e-mail.

To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Drajem in Washington at mdrajem@bloomberg.net Jeff Bliss in Washington at jbliss@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva in Washington at msilva34@bloomberg.net

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Google Goggles Hits the iPhone - PC Magazine

Google on Tuesday released a version of its Google Goggles feature for Apple's iPhone.

Goggles lets you search by taking photos of things with your mobile phone. Take a photo of a landmark to get more details about its origins, or snap a pic of a DVD cover to find out more about the movie. Users can also speak commands to get location-based results. Saying "best Italian restaurants," for example, will return places in your immediate location.

Google has added the feature to its Google Mobile App for iPhone; the newest version is available now in the App Store. It is currently only available for the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4 running iOS 4 or above because Goggles requires an auto-focusing camera.

To activate Goggles, tap on the camera button within the app. Goggles will analyze the image and highlight the objects it recognizes; click on them to find out more.

Google stressed that Goggles is still a Labs project, so it won't work with everything. "It works well for things such as landmarks, logos and the covers of books, DVDs and games," Google said in a blog post. "However, it doesn't yet work for some things you might want to try like animals, plants or food."

An Android version of Goggles was released in December.

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Funeral protests could upend common view of free speech - Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Williamsburg, Va. —

More than 500 mourners walked quietly through rows of flags and into a white chapel on a recent Saturday afternoon to honor a dead soldier.

Army Lt. Todd Weaver was remembered as a scholar, athlete and born leader. He served in Iraq after high school, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the College of William and Mary two years ago and was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan on Sept. 9. He left behind a wife and a 1-year-old daughter.

But before entering the church parking lot, the mourners drove past an unusual demonstration. Scores of flag-waving bikers and students stood near the corner, surrounding three women holding brightly colored signs. They read: "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," "God Hates Fags" and "You're Going to Hell."

Shirley Phelps-Roper and her two daughters are determined to go where they are not wanted and to spread their message that U.S. soldiers are fighting to promote tolerance of homosexuality. Their funeral pickets have prompted new laws across the nation to keep them away from grieving families.

When the Supreme Court opens its new term this week, the justices will be confronted with a potentially momentous question. Are vile and hurtful words always protected as free speech, even when the target is a private person, not a public figure?

The case of Snyder vs. Phelps, in which a jury in Maryland awarded the father of a dead Marine almost $11 million in damages against the Phelps family after a funeral incident in 2006, is one of two major 1st Amendment issues to be heard this fall.

The justices also will decide whether California and other states can limit the sale of violent video games to minors. So far, such laws have been struck down on free-speech grounds.

And the court will rule on other major issues, including whether employees can be forced to reveal their private lives in order to work on government jobs and whether states can punish employers who hire illegal immigrants.

The ruling on the funeral protesters could upset the common view that the Constitution protects wide-open free speech on the streets and on the Internet. In the past, the high court's great pronouncements on the 1st Amendment have protected protesters and publishers who clash with the government or with public officials.

The Phelps case poses a different issue. They have not gone just to the Pentagon or the White House to protest the sending of soldiers to war. Instead, they have picketed grieving families and derided the parents for having raised their young men to "serve the devil."

"We are saying you must obey God," Phelps-Roper said amid the counter-protesters last week. "He is punishing you for disobeying."

Her elderly father, Fred Phelps, founded the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., and in recent years, his daughters and granddaughters have traveled the country to spread his "fire and brimstone" message.

Albert Snyder, the father of the dead Marine, admitted he did not see the protesters or their signs on the day of his son's funeral, except in the television coverage. A few weeks later, however, he read a screed posted by Phelps-Roper on her website that denounced "satanic Catholicism" — the Snyders are Catholics — and accused Snyder and his wife of raising their son Matt to "defy his creator."

Snyder sued and alleged an intentional infliction of emotional distress. The trial judge upheld the jury's verdict, but reduced the $10.9 million damages to $5 million.

Last year, however, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the entire verdict and said the Phelpses' signs and messages were "constitutionally protected" speech.

To the surprise and dismay of 1st Amendment champions, the Supreme Court voted to hear the father's appeal and to decide whether a private figure can sue if he is the "target of hateful speech."

"It would be a sweeping change" if the court were to uphold Snyder's lawsuit, said Robert Corn-Revere, a 1st Amendment lawyer in Washington. "Where do you draw the line between public and private?" he asked, if protesters on a public street can be sued because their message is hurtful.

A ruling in favor of the Marine's father also could have a big effect on the Internet, because bloggers often attack non-public figures with mean and hurtful comments.

Nonetheless, Stanford University law professor Michael McConnell thinks the court will say the Constitution does not shield the Phelps family. Snyder "is not a public figure. He is a private person" who was the target of a hateful protest, McConnell said.

Stephen McAllister, former dean of the University of Kansas School of Law, says he too thinks the high court will lean in favor of upholding the lawsuit. "This is not just about punishing an offensive message. It is about their methods and tactics. They chose a private funeral and a grieving family to publicize their message," he said. "It is targeted to cause severe emotional distress."

The case will be heard Wednesday.

Taylor Reveley, president of the College of William and Mary, spoke at the funeral for Weaver. He described the protest as troubling but best left ignored. "They had no impact. They were kept well away from the church," he said.

He compared the protesters to the Florida minister who gained worldwide attention for threatening to burn the Koran. "If these people didn't get any publicity, they would go away. But we are much better off as a society if we let people protest, even if their views are abhorrent," he said.

david.savage@latimes.com

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Failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad gets life in prison sentence - Los Angeles Times

An artist's rendering of convicted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad during his sentencing hearing in New York. (Reuters / October 5, 2010)

During his sentencing Tuesday to life in prison, Faisal Shahzad — a Pakistani immigrant who gave up a secure suburban life in America to become a terrorist for Islam — was unapologetic about his botched attempt to kill dozens of people in Times Square last spring.

After a federal judge declared that he would never leave prison, Shahzad smiled faintly, held up an index finger and declared, "Allah Akbar."

U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum did not bother to review parole possibilities because she said there were none.

"You appear to be someone who was capable of education," she said later, "and I do hope that you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people."

As he did throughout the half-hour sentencing, Shahzad, 31, interrupted her to press his religious viewpoint: "The Koran gives us the right to defend, and that's what all I'm doing."

On May 1, on a bustling corner of Broadway in the theater district, Shahzad parked an SUV loaded with three homemade bombs and tried to set them off. When his attempt fizzled, he returned by train to suburban Connecticut, where he'd been living off and on since he moved to America to attend college. Authorities tracked Shahzad through the vehicle and the keys he left dangling from the ignition, and two days later he was arrested at JFK International Airport aboard a plane that was about to take off for the Middle East.

At one point Tuesday, Cedarbaum asked whether Shahzad hadn't taken an oath of allegiance to the United States when he became an American citizen a year before the bombing attempt.

"I did swear, but I did not mean it," Shahzad said. "Human-made" laws, he elaborated, were corrupt and meant nothing to him because he abided by "sharia," or Islamic law.

"I see," the judge said, "You took a false oath?"

"Yes," Shahzad said.

Shahzad's beard and hair, spilling out from under a white prayer cap, had grown long and bushy since he last appeared in court in late June and announced his desire "to plead guilty 100 times over." Again, Shahzad lectured the judge and a packed courtroom about his guilt: "If I am given 1,000 lives, I will sacrifice them all for the sake of Allah fighting this cause, defending our lands, making the word of Allah supreme over any religion or system."

He went on to explain how Muslims would never accept having Western forces in their countries fighting on a "pretext for your democracy and freedom." The past nine years of war, he said, had achieved nothing except to awaken Muslims to defend their "religion, people, honor and land."

The son of a retired Pakistani air force marshal, Shahzad grew up mostly in a secular, upper-middle class neighborhood in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city. He came to the United States in 1998 as an undergraduate student, and over the years attained many of the trappings of what many here consider a successful life — two university degrees, a wife and two small children, a house in the suburbs, credit cards and a job as a junior financial analyst.

But the U.S. military presence in Muslim countries and perceived insults by Westerners toward Islam apparently had begun plaguing Shahzad, according to reports of what he told investigators, and he became increasingly religious. He returned last winter to his native Pakistan, first to spend time with family in Peshawar and later to attend terror camp in the volatile Waziristan region, where he learned to make bombs.

After he returned to America, he left his job, allowed a house he owned in Shelton, Conn., go into foreclosure and sent his young family to live in Pakistan with his parents. Living in a rundown neighborhood in Bridgeport, Conn., he began monitoring via the Internet a crowded corner in Times Square where he planned to blow up his vehicle. He told police he'd hoped to kill at least 40 people on the first try, and that if hadn't been caught he would have kept trying to blast through crowded areas in New York City until he was arrested or killed.

Toward the end of the hearing Tuesday, the judge, who had commented with obvious disgust on Shahzad's lack of remorse, explained the appeal process to him. He nodded and again smiled at her before plainclothes officers handcuffed him and escorted him out of the courtroom.

geraldine.baum@latimes.com

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Jewish voters don't reflexively back Rahm Emanuel for Chicago mayor - Chicago Tribune

Some might assume that the idea of a Rahm Emanuel candidacy for mayor would be cause for celebration along Devon Avenue, the longtime rialto of Chicago's Jewish community.

After all, Emanuel attended an Orthodox synagogue before going from Chicago to the White House, and his family is highly respected in West Rogers Park, where his father, Benjamin, was a pediatrician. The numbers of those who say Dr. Emanuel took care of their kids is roughly similar to the legion that claimed to have witnessed Babe Ruth point to the Wrigley Field bleachers and hit that famed home run.

But Rahm Emanuel, who begins his Chicago "listening tour" this week, is about to discover that all politics aren't local.

In the Jewish neighborhoods on the Far North Side, Rahm Emanuel is more associated with what he did in Washington than what he might do in Chicago's City Hall.

"There are questions about his positions on Israel," said Chesky Montrose, 32, who was wearing a skull cap and pushing one child in a stroller while keeping an eye on two others bicycling down Devon. "It's not logical that international policy would influence a race for mayor. But there is some resentment here, no doubt."

There was rejoicing along Devon on Friday because it was Simchat Torah, a festive celebration of the divine laws Moses received on behalf of the ancient Israelites. But there also were questions about Emanuel timing his White House farewell announcement for that day.

"On yontif?" said Montrose, using the Yiddish for the holiday.

During the run-up to Simchat Torah, it's traditional for Jews to take their meals in a sukkah, an improvised hut like their ancestors dwelled in during their wandering years in the deserts of Sinai. A fast-food restaurant on Devon provides customers with a sukkah.

With rituals marking their forebears' exiles, it's hardly a wonder Jews fret over modern-day Israel. Obama got a huge percent of Jewish voters, many of whom assumed Emanuel would give voice to their concerns as chief of staff, noted Cheryl Jacobs Lewin, Chicago co-chair of Americans for a Safe Israel.

"That has not happened, judging by the White House's heavy-handedness toward Israel," Lewin said in an e-mail.

A spokeswoman for Emanuel said Sunday he is a strong backer of Israel.

"Rahm's support for Israel is well known, and he had many supporters in the Jewish community when he represented a half-million Chicagoans in Congress. But he takes nothing for granted and will work to earn the support of every voter in communities across the city," said Lori Goldberg, Emanuel's spokeswoman.

Another person leery of Emanuel on the Israel issue is Norm Levin, who said, "I used to be a devout Democrat."

Levin is president of the Great Vest Side Club, an alumni association of the West Side neighborhood that was once the epicenter of Chicago's Jewish community. (The pronunciation "vest" commemorates the immigrant accent of members' parents.)

"I like to vote for Jewish people," Levin said. "But if they're sort of negative on Israel, they lose me."

Yet that very quality could be a plus for Emanuel among lakefront liberals, many of them secular Jews uncomfortable with a right-leaning Israeli administration.

"I'm sort of hostile to Israel," said James Alter, a founding father of independent politics in Chicago.

He and his late wife, Joanne Alter, also Jewish and a Metropolitan Water Reclamation District trustee, made their Lakeview home a longtime clubhouse for anti-machine activists.

Even so, there are other issues on which liberals clash with Emanuel, said political consultant Don Rose, who is Jewish, a reigning guru of the independent movement.

"We progressives found him unresponsive as a congressman when we wanted him to speak out against the Iraq war," Rose said.

Then there could be a linguistic problem attached to an Emanuel candidacy. Jews think of a Jew in the public eye as representing all of them with his or her behavior, said Chayim Knobloch, a rabbi and proprietor of the Kol Tuv supermarket on Devon.

Emanuel is famous for peppering his conversations with swearing, while Jews have a longstanding caution: "Don't make a shandah for the goyim" — be aware of your behavior in gentile company.

"So I have a small request," Knobloch said. "Rahm should watch his language."

rgrossman@tribune.com

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Israeli settlers respond to mosque burning allegations - Christian Science Monitor

Tel Aviv

A day after a mosque was torched in a village near Bethlehem, Jewish settlers' reaction to assertions that one of their own had carried out the attack was a mix of annoyance and contrition.

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The mosque in the Palestinian village of Beit Fajar became the fourth in the last two years to be the target of arson. Many Israelis assume the attack was the work of a small group of Jewish extremists who have embarked on a campaign of vigilante violence – known as "price tag" – to derail the peace process and deter the government from evacuating settlements.

On Tuesday, a delegation of settler rabbis visited the torched mosque and made statements that implied that they, too, assumed that an extremist was responsible.

"This is not the way of the Torah or of Judaism,'' said Rabbi Shlomo Brin, from the nearby settlement of Alon Shvut, according to Israeli news website Ynet News. "This incident does not add anything to the settlements."

On Monday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak condemned the attack as inspired by Jews.

But some in the settler community see the finger-pointing as an attempt to slander Israeli settlers in the West Bank ahead of a possible new settlement freeze and the resumption of peace talks.

They argue that despite many arrests and interrogations, the Israeli police have yet to indict anyone in the previous cases of mosque arson.

"The immediate hand-pointing is irresponsible. [Mr. Barak] is trying to achieve political goals," says David Ha'Ivri, a resident of the settlement of Kfar Tapuach, referring to Israeli's left-leaning politicians who want to restart the peace process and stop settlement expansion.

"It's productive of them to give a bad image of the residents of Judea and Samaria (the biblical names for the areas making up the West Bank), and by doing that they smear an entire community," he says.

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