Negative Blogs

After months of debate, President Barack Obama will spell out a costly Afghanistan war expansion to a skeptical public Tuesday night, coupling an infusion of as many as 35,000 more troops with a vow that there will be no endless U.S. commitment. His first orders have already been made: at least one group of Marines who will be in place by Christmas.

Obama has said that he prefers “not to hand off anything to the next president” and that his strategy will “put us on a path toward ending the war.” But he doesn’t plan to give any more exact timetable than that Tuesday night.

The president will end his 92-day review of the war with a nationally broadcast address in which he will lay out his revamped strategy from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He spent part of Monday briefing foreign allies in a series of private meetings and phone calls.

Before Obama’s call to Britain’s Gordon Brown, the prime minister announced that 500 more U.K. troops would arrive in southern Afghanistan next month — making a British total of about 10,000 in the country. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose nation has more than 3,000 in Afghanistan, said French troops would stay “as long as necessary” to stabilize the country.

Obama’s war escalation includes sending 30,000 to 35,000 more American forces into Afghanistan in a graduated deployment over the next year, on top of the 71,000 already there. There also will be a fresh focus on training Afghan forces to take over the fight and allow the Americans to leave.

He also will deliver a deeper explanation of why he believes the U.S. must continue to fight more than eight years after the war was started following the Sept. 11 attacks by al-Qaida terrorists based in Afghanistan. He will emphasize that Afghan security forces need more time, more schooling and more U.S. combat backup to be up to the job on their own, and he will make tougher demands on the governments of Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.

“This is not an open-ended commitment,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. “We are there to partner with the Afghans, to train the Afghan national security forces, the army and the police so that they can provide security for their country and wage a battle against an unpopular insurgency.”

On a few of the bigger questions most on the minds of increasingly restive members of Congress and the public, such as how much the additional $30 billion to $35 billion cost will balloon the already skyrocketed federal deficit, how long the U.S. commitment will continue and how it will wind down, Obama was expected to make references without offering specifics.

Gibbs said detailed discussions on costs would be held later with lawmakers.

Even before explaining his decision, Obama told the military to begin executing the force increases. The commander in chief gave the deployment orders Sunday night, during an Oval Office meeting in which he told key military and White House advisers of his final decision.

At least one group of Marines is expected to deploy within two or three weeks of Obama’s announcement and will be in Afghanistan by Christmas, military officials said. Larger deployments will begin early next year.

The initial infusion is a recognition by the administration that something tangible needs to happen quickly, officials said. The immediate addition of Marines will provide badly needed reinforcements for those fighting against Taliban gains in the southern Helmand province, and also could lend reassurance to both Afghans and a war-weary U.S. public.

Obama’s overall review was launched Aug. 31, when Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the newly minted top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, delivered to Pentagon brass his assessment of the situation on the ground and what was needed to turn it around. McChrystal produced a separate resource request, first seen by Obama on Oct. 1. The president’s review was anchored by 10 extensive war council meetings, starting on Sept. 13, that featured a debate between a counterinsurgency strategy focused on protecting the local population and building up the Afghanistan government or a more limited counterterrorism strategy. Hard money training.

A suspect in the slaying of four police officers gunned down in a suburban coffee shop was in a Seattle house early Monday, wounded and possibly dead, police said.

Negotiators were trying to communicate with Maurice Clemmons, 37, using loudspeakers and explosions to try to prod him from hiding. At one point, gunshots rang through the neighborhood, which is some 30 miles from the original crime scene.

“We have determined that in fact he has been shot,” said Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff. “He may be deceased from his gunshot wound.”

NBC News reported Monday that police had not been able to make contact with Clemmons.

Authorities had speculated early Sunday that the gunman might have been wounded at the coffee shop by one of his victims. Troyer said interviews with others detained in the investigation confirmed that theory.

Police surrounded the house late Sunday, and a negotiator used a loudspeaker early Monday to call him out by name, saying: “Mr. Clemmons, I’d like to get you out of there safely. I can tell you this, we are not going away.”

Any response from inside the house was inaudible from the vantage of a photographer for The Associated Press. But shortly thereafter, police began using sirens outside the house, and there were several loud bangs before the negotiator resumed speaking, saying: “This is one of the toughest decisions you’ll make in your life, but you need to man up.”

By 3 a.m. Pacific time, the loudspeakers and explosions had fallen silent.

Clemmons, 37, who had a lengthy prison sentence commuted by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee nearly a decade ago, became the prime target Sunday in the search for the killer of Lakewood Police Sgt. Mark Renninger, 39; and Officers Ronald Owens, 37; Tina Griswold, 40; and Greg Richards 42.

Clemmons is believed to have been in the area around the time of the shooting, but Troyer declined to say what evidence might link him to the shooting.

On Sunday, Huckabee deflected blame with a statement on his Web site.

“Should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State,” he wrote.

Investigators say they know of no reason that Clemmons or anyone else might have had to open fire on the four as they sat working on their laptops early Sunday morning, catching up on paperwork at the beginning of their shifts. Hard money training.

Three women and a child in bed were shot to death during a family Thanksgiving gathering in South Florida and a male relative was being sought early Friday.

Police said 17 relatives were in the house when the shootings were reported around 10 p.m. Thursday in Jupiter, a small, well-off beach town about 90 miles north of Miami that is best known as a home to celebrities including Michael Jordan and Burt Reynolds.

Jupiter Police Sgt. Scott Pascarella said officers were looking for Paul Michael Merhige, 35, of Miami. Merhige is a cousin of the 6-year-old victim, Makayla Sitton, and has no criminal record, police said.

The others killed were Merhige’s twin sisters, Carla Merhige and Lisa Knight, 33, and an aunt, Raymonde Joseph, 76, according to police.

Authorities said a fifth victim, Merhige’s brother-in-law Patrick Knight, was being treated at a hospital. His condition was not available. Another man, Clifford Gebara, 52, was grazed by a bullet and was treated by paramedics on the scene and released.

Police across South Florida and the U.S. Marshals Service were searching for Merhige. Pascarella said Merhige is believed to be driving a blue 2007 4-door Toyota Camry with Florida license plate W42 7JT.

Pascarella said police received a 911 call from a neighbor shortly after 10 p.m. Police then received a second 911 call from someone within the home.

Pascarella said the shootings took place inside the house. He said that sometime after Thanksgiving dinner, Merhige left the residence and returned shortly afterward with a handgun.

“What led to this incident, we’re not quite sure,” said Pascarella. “It did not appear there was any altercation prior to this shooting.”

Pascarella said there was an “ongoing resentment” in the family, but didn’t know the nature of the problem or whether the victims were specifically targeted.

Police said the home was owned by Jim Sitton, a photojournalist for WPTV-TV and father of the little girl killed. Sitton told WPTV his daughter was in bed when she was shot. He was at the party at the time of the shooting but was not wounded.

Yellow crime scene tape was stretched around Sitton’s salmon-colored house, located in a well-kept subdivision of stucco homes. Several cars were parked in the driveway, and a crime scene van sat in front.

Sitton told local media that his daughter was supposed to perform Friday in a holiday production of “The Nutcracker.”

“God packed a lot of sweetness into that little body,” Sitton said. “She’s just our life. I don’t know how we are ever going to recover.”

The relationship between Sitton and Paul Merhige was unclear, police said.

Phone calls to a number listed for Paul Merhige were not answered. A phone call to Sitton was also not returned.

Neighbors in the Palm Beach County community were shocked.

“Our kids walk the streets by themselves,” said 67-year-old Nicole Kemp, who did not know any of the victims. “I thought it was the safest place to live. I guess it doesn’t matter, if there’s a maniac here.” Hard money training.

The outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday his probe of Iran’s nuclear program is at “a dead end” and that trust in Tehran’s credibility is shrinking after its belated revelation that it was secretly building a nuclear facility.

Mohamed ElBaradei’s blunt criticism of the Islamic Republic — four days before he leaves office — was notable in representing a broad convergence with Washington’s opinion, which for years was critical of the IAEA chief for what it perceived as his softness on Iran.

Iran also came in for censure from another quarter at the opening session of the IAEA’s 35-nation board, with the introduction of a resolution taking Tehran to task on a broad range of issues linked to international concerns that it may be seeking to make nuclear weapons. Significantly, diplomats at the meeting said the resolution was endorsed not only by Western powers — the U.S., Britain, France and Germany — but also by Russia and China.

For strategic and economic reasons, Moscow and Beijing have sided with Tehran in the past. They have prevented several Western attempts to slap new U.N. sanctions on Iran for its nuclear defiance or succeeded in watering down their severity.

They did not formally endorse the last IAEA resolution critical of Iran in 2006. Their backing for the document at the Vienna meeting Thursday thus reflected broad international disenchantment with Tehran.

It also appeared to signal possible support for any new Western push for a fourth set of Security Council sanctions, should Tehran continue shunning international overtures meant to reach agreements that reduce concerns about its nuclear ambitions. Hard money training.

A man stuck upside-down in a cave for more than a day died early Thursday, despite the efforts of dozens of rescuers, authorities said.

John Jones, 26, of Stansbury Park, died about 12:30 a.m., nearly 28 hours after he became stuck 700 feet into the cave known as Nutty Putty, about 80 miles south of Salt Lake City, Utah County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Sgt. Spencer Cannon said.

Rescuers were next to Jones for much of the day but he was wedged in a small hole too tightly to pull him out or even reach through to assist him, Cannon told The Associated Press.

“Over the past several hours he was experiencing difficulty maintaining consciousness and breathing. With whatever other factors there were, he did not survive,” Cannon said.

The 6-foot-tall, 190-pound spelunker got stuck with his head at an angle below his feet about 9 p.m. MST Tuesday. At times more than 50 rescuers were involved in trying to free him.

The crevice where Jones was trapped was about 150 feet below ground in an L-shaped area of the cave known as “Bob’s Push,” which is only about 18 inches wide and 10 inches high, Cannon said.

The process was slow throughout the day Wednesday with rescuers chipping away with air-powered tools in the narrow tunnel. Hard money training.

Putting his prestige on the line, President Barack Obama will personally commit the U.S. to a goal of substantially cutting greenhouse gases at next month’s Copenhagen climate summit. He will insist America is ready to tackle global warming despite resistance in Congress over higher costs for businesses and homeowners.

Obama will attend the start of the conference Dec. 9, a week from next Wednesday, before heading to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. He will “put on the table” a U.S. commitment to cut emissions by 17 percent over the next decade, on the way to reducing heat-trapping pollution by 80 percent by mid-century, the White House said.

Cutting U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by one-sixth in just a decade would be likely to hike energy bills, but the administration says there would be important health trade-offs.

Carol Browner, Obama’s assistant for energy and climate change, cited a $173-per-year estimated cost in a briefing Wednesday — a figure for a family of four calculated by the Congressional Budget Office. Republicans say costs would be higher.

But slashing carbon dioxide emissions could save millions of lives, mostly by reducing preventable deaths from heart and lung diseases, according to studies published this week in The Lancet British medical journal.

The White House said Obama’s decision to attend the international conference in Denmark was “a sign of his continuing commitment and leadership to find a global solution to the global threat of climate change.”

But Obama’s stopover on the conference’s second day — instead of later when negotiations will be most intense and when most other national leaders will take part — disappointed some European and U.N. climate officials, as well as some environmentalists.

Others said Obama’s personal appeal will resonate with the delegates from more than 75 countries and help reset the U.S. image on the climate issue after eight years in which the Bush administration staunchly opposed mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases.

Yvo de Boer, the United Nations climate chief, said it is important for the United States to establish emissions reduction targets and a financial commitment to helping developing countries address climate change.

“If he comes in the first week to announce that, it would be a major boost to the conference,” de Boer told The Associated Press. He said Obama’s participation was critical because delegates “are looking to the United States to come forward.”

The president’s first trip to Copenhagen — just last month — was less than fruitful. He made an unsuccessful pitch for the 2016 Summer Olympics to be held in Chicago.

Obama’s participation had been in doubt since it became clear that the Dec. 7-18 conference was unlikely to produce a binding agreement, The original goal of the conference was to produce a new global climate change treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. But in recent weeks it became clear that delegates were likely to produce at best an outline for an agreement to be considered late next year.

The White House said Obama’s commitment to a 17 percent emissions cut from 2005 levels by 2020 would be the first step toward an 80 percent reduction outlined in legislation before Congress. It said Obama is expecting “robust mitigation contributions” from China and other emerging nations as part of any final agreement. Hard money training.

Philippine security forces found 11 more bodies Wednesday at the site of an election-related massacre in the south of the country, taking the toll to 57 dead, officials said.

Not all have been identified, but 22 of them were believed to be journalists, making Monday’s attack the deadliest ever on the media anywhere in the world. Thirty-three of the victims were men and 24 were women, police said.

The government has clamped emergency rule on the province of Maguindanao, where the killings took place, and in adjoining Sultan Kudarat province and Cotabato City. Truckloads of troops were brought to the area Wednesday and armored cars were parked along highways.

“The perpetrators will not escape justice,” President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo told reporters. “The law will hunt them until they are caught.”

The army disbanded a 200-member paramilitary force under the control of local officials in Maguindanao and sent an extra 500 soldiers, pulled out from a central island in the Philippines, to reduce tension in the area.

Investigators have said they will probe allegations that some members of the paramilitary force participated in the killings.

The massacre has been condemned around the world. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it a “heinous crime.”

“The Secretary-General extends heartfelt condolences to the families of the victims and hopes that no effort will be spared to bring justice and to hold the perpetrators accountable,” a U.N. statement said.

The journalists were accompanying several women of the powerful Mangudadatu clan to file the candidacy of one of the family for the provincial governor’s post in elections next year.

No men from the family were present, since they believed that women would not be attacked by rivals.

Their convoy was stopped by about 100 armed men, who herded them to a remote hillside and attacked them with M-16 rifles and machetes. Two of their vehicles and many bodies were thrown into a freshly-dug pit and covered with earth by an excavator.

A Reuters photographer at the scene said the vehicles were buried with dead men at the wheel.

Clan feuds are common in the southern Philippines and the Mangudadatus have been at loggerheads with the Ampatuans, another local family, for months. Datu Andal Ampatuan, the patriarch of the family, has been elected governor of Maguindanao in three previous elections.

The Mangudadatus have blamed supporters of the Ampatuans for the massacre, but no arrests have been made and government officials were guarded in their comments.

“We expect to file criminal complaints as soon as we finish documentation and the investigation process,” Ricardo Blancaflor, a justice department undersecretary, told Reuters.

“We’re looking for direct evidence to pin down those behind these gruesome murders. We’re now getting statements and waiting for the medico-legal reports needed for filing the complaints.” Hard money training.

President Barack Obama will announce his decision on whether to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan “within days” after he held a final strategy session with top aides, the White House said on Tuesday.

Obama’s announcement, expected to come in a presidential television address next Tuesday evening, comes after weeks of study that some critics have denounced as “dithering.”

The president on Monday evening held a two-hour meeting in the White House Situation Room with officials including Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. It was their ninth such meeting on the topic.

Obama’s decision focuses on whether to add as many as 40,000 troops to an eight-year-old war that began after the September 11 attacks and has begun to try the patience of Americans.

“After completing a rigorous final meeting, President Obama has the information he wants and needs to make his decision and he will announce that decision within days,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement.

A picture of the meeting released by the White House showed budget director Peter Orszag also participated — a sign that the cost of sending more troops is also being discussed.

Obama’s announcement was widely expected to come before a NATO meeting on December 7 in Europe in which alliance members could agree to send thousands of additional trainers.

There are about 110,000 foreign troops, including 68,000 U.S. soldiers, in Afghanistan fighting Taliban insurgents.

Obama has been reviewing war strategy in Afghanistan for the past two months after Army General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander there, said in a report that conditions were deteriorating and 40,000 additional troops were needed as the minimum to quell the insurgency. Hard money training.

Federal officials are investigating a radiation leak at Three Mile Island, scene of the worst U.S. nuclear power accident, but said on Sunday there was no threat to public health or safety.

Investigators were trying to determine the cause of radiological contamination inside the nuclear facility’s containment building on Saturday afternoon.

About 150 people were working in a TMI containment building when the contamination was detected and some were exposed to low levels of radiation, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman said.

“Based on the information that was provided to us by the company, the level of the dose they received was a small fraction of the NRC’s regulatory limit,” spokeswoman Diane Screnci said in a telephone interview.

The NRC sent a radiation specialist and a regional manager to the site on Sunday to review the company’s assessment. “There was no impact on public health and safety,” Screnci said.

Three Mile Island operator, Exelon, said no contamination was found outside the containment building.

One employee was found to have received 16 millirem of exposure and other workers were exposed to lower levels, Exelon said. The annual occupational dose limit for nuclear workers at Exelon nuclear plants is 2,000 millirem, the company said.

The containment building has been shut down since October 26 for refueling and maintenance, Exelon said in a statement.

The plant near the Pennsylvania state capital of Harrisburg created worldwide headlines in 1979 when one of its units partially melted down. The accident made Three Mile Island synonymous with the dangers of nuclear power and helped slow expansion of the U.S. nuclear industry.

Exelon the biggest nuclear power operator in the United States, did not own Three Mile Island at the time. Hard money training

Scientists moved Saturday to prepare the world’s largest atom smasher for exploring the depths of matter after successfully restarting the $10 billion machine following more than a year of repairs.

The nuclear physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider were surprised that they could so quickly get beams of protons whizzing near the speed of light during the restart late Friday, said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The machine was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault in September last year.

Some scientists had gone home early Friday and had to be called back as the project jumped ahead, Gillies said.

At a meeting early Saturday “they basically had to tear up the first few pages of their PowerPoint presentation which had outlined the procedures that they were planning to follow,” he said. “That was all wrapped up by midnight. They are going through the paces really very fast.”

The European Organization for Nuclear Research has taken the restart of the collider step by step to avoid further setbacks as it moves toward new scientific experiments — probably starting in January — regarding the makeup of matter and the universe.

CERN, as it is known, had hoped by 7 a.m. (0600 GMT) Saturday to get the beams to travel the 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border, but things went so well Friday evening that they had achieved the operation seven hours earlier.

Praise from scientists around the world was quick. “First beam through the Atlas!” whooped an Internet message from Adam Yurkewicz, an American scientist working on the massive Atlas detector on the machine.

“I congratulate the scientists and engineers that have worked to get the LHC back up and running,” said Dennis Kovar of the U.S. Department of Energy, which participates in the project.

“The LHC is a machine unprecedented in size, in complexity, and in the scope of the international collaboration that has built it over the last 15 years,” said Kovar.

The next step, possibly later Saturday, was to decide whether to collide beams in the detectors to get necessary measuring data or to try using the machine to accelerate the protons to higher energy than any machine has ever reached, said Gillies.

In the meantime CERN is using about 2,000 superconducting magnets — some of them 15 meters (50 feet) long — to improve control of the beams of billions of protons so they will remain tightly bunched and stay clear of sensitive equipment.

Gillies said the scientists are being very conservative.

“They’re leaving a lot of time so that the guys who are operating the machine are under no pressure whatsoever to tick off the boxes and move forward,” he said.

Officials said Friday evening’s progress was an important step on the road toward scientific discoveries at the LHC, which are expected in 2010.

“We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way,” CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said. Hard money training