Across the Nation, Politicians Speak About 9/11

Perhaps more than any other day during the year, the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks elicits dozens of comments from politicians about the same issue. Below is a small sample of statements released Tuesday:

“When the history books are written, the true legacy of 9/11 will not be one of fear or hate or division. It will be a safer world; a stronger nation; and a people more united than ever before.” – President Obama

“On this most somber day, those who would attack us should know that we are united, one nation under God, in our determination to stop them and to stand tall for peace and freedom at home and across the world.” - Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for President and former Massachusetts governor.

U.S. Missile Defense Strategy Is Flawed, Expert Panel Finds

After two years of study, a panel of top scientists and military experts working for the National Research Council has concluded that the nation’s protections against missile attack suffer from major shortcomings, leaving the United States vulnerable to certain kinds of long-range strikes.

In a report, the panel suggested that President Obama shift course and expand a system inherited from President George W. Bush, setting aside parts of an antimissile strategy he initiated in 2009. By doing so, the panel said, the nation’s defenses would be better prepared to defeat the long-range missiles that the report suggests Iran may be developing.

It is the first time that the research council — an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, chartered by Congress to give scientific and technical advice to the government and considered the nation’s preeminent group of scientists — has weighed in on the nation’s overall plans for defeating missile attacks.

“For too long, the U.S. has been committed to expensive missile defense strategies without sufficient consideration of the costs and real utility,” said L. David Montague, the panel’s co-chairman and a retired president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space. The Pentagon must strengthen its technical analyses, he added, so it “can better evaluate new initiatives.”

Mr. Montague, an engineer by training, is an independent consultant and one of the few members of the 16-person panel whose roots lie in the defense industry. The others are scientists, engineers, and weapons experts from universities, think tanks and national laboratories, including the nuclear weapons lab at Livermore, Calif.

In its highly technical, 260-page report, the panel recommends an overhaul that would make the antimissile system “far more effective,” including new sensors and interceptors, as well as an additional base for interceptors in Maine or New York; existing ones are in California and Alaska.

The report calls the plan affordable, saying it could fit within current antimissile spending -- which runs about $10 billion a year -- if the military eliminated what the panel describes as costly and unneeded systems.

The assessment is a major blow to President Obama’s strategy of playing down the long-range defenses he inherited from President Bush and focusing instead on defenses in Europe against shorter-range Iranian missiles. He articulated the shift in September 2009, calling the envisioned system “stronger, smarter and swifter.”

But the report, released Tuesday, faults the results of this strategy as weak. It says the domestic defenses currently in place can probably handle crude missiles fired from North Korea but criticizes the antimissile arms as “fragile” and full of “shortcomings that limit their effectiveness against even modestly improved threats.”

The report gives Mr. Obama’s European shift conditional approval if planned advances materialize. But it recommends that the plan’s final phase -- intended to protect the United States from long-range Iranian missiles -- be scrapped in favor of the panel’s proposal for a stronger domestic system.

In short, the panel would undo part of Mr. Obama’s shift and strengthen Mr. Bush’s antimissile approach, creating more of a hybrid.

Philip E. Coyle III, a former national security official in the Obama White House and former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon, said the panel’s report revealed an antimissile proclivity for “producing and fielding hardware rather than facing up to physical realities.”

The report comes as worries rise over Iran’s nuclear program and fears that Tehran might one day decide to develop warheads for its rapidly growing fleet of missiles. Today, its missiles are short and medium range. The new report looks ahead a decade or more to what it calls the “likely development” of Iranian missiles designed to rain warheads down on the United States.

Since the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan began the modern hunt for defenses against long-range missiles, Washington has spent more than $200 billion devising ways to zap incoming enemy warheads that move at speeds in excess of four miles per second. Critics have long ridiculed the aim as delusional, saying that any country smart enough to make intercontinental ballistic missiles could also make simple countermeasures sure to foil any defense.

In a nod to critics, the new report identifies enemy countermeasures as the main obstacle of the domestic antimissile system, with many of its recommendations aimed at creating improved technologies to meet the challenge.

Israeli Leader Sharpens Call on U.S. to Set Limits on Iran

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel harshly criticized the Obama administration on Tuesday over recent statements that the United States would not set deadlines or draw “red lines” for Iran over its disputed uranium enrichment activities, calling such comments a signal to the Iranians that they could build atomic bombs with impunity.
Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks laid bare the underlying tensions between the United States and Israel over how to deal with Iran, and they threatened to elevate the Iranian uranium enrichment program as a virulent campaign issue less than two months before the American presidential election.

In what appeared to be a further sign of escalating tension in the American-Israeli relationship, Israeli news media reported Tuesday night that the Obama administration had rejected a request from Mr. Netanyahu’s office for a meeting with Mr. Obama when the Israeli leader visits the United States this month to attend the United Nations General Assembly. There was no immediate confirmation from either government on the Israeli reports.

Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks were among the strongest he has made over the Iranian enrichment activities, which the Israelis have repeatedly called part of a clandestine Iranian plan to build nuclear weapons despite Tehran’s denials. Mr. Netanyahu’s government, which considers Iran to be Israel’s most dangerous enemy, has threatened to bomb suspected Iranian enrichment sites.

He appeared to be reacting on Tuesday in particular to an assertion by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in an interview with Bloomberg Radio on Sunday in which Mrs. Clinton was asked if the administration would articulate explicit consequences for Iran’s refusal to halt its enrichment program, as the United Nations Security Council has repeatedly requested. Mrs. Clinton said “we’re not setting deadlines.”

On Monday, the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, reiterated President Obama’s commitment not to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and said “it is not useful to be parsing it, to be setting deadlines one way or the other, red lines.”

Addressing reporters here in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu unequivocally rejected those comments and slapped back at the United States. Speaking in English, he said, “The world tells Israel: ‘Wait, there’s still time.’ And I say, ‘Wait for what? Wait until when?’ Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

In his remarks, made at a joint news conference with the visiting prime minister of Bulgaria, Boyko Borisov, Mr. Netanyahu also said: “Now if Iran knows that there is no red line, if Iran knows that there is no deadline, what will it do? Exactly what it’s doing. It’s continuing, without any interference, toward obtaining nuclear weapons capability and from there, nuclear bombs.”

He criticized the litany of economic sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and the European Union as ineffective in stopping the enrichment program. “The fact is that every day that passes, Iran gets closer and closer to nuclear bombs,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Mr. Netanyahu has said that Israel and the United States were in talks on setting what he has called a “clear red line’ for when Iran’s nuclear program surpasses a threshold of tolerance that would be met with a military response. But Obama administration officials have been more circumspect about those talks, and Mrs. Clinton’s comments on Sunday appeared to contradict Mr. Netanyahu.

The Israelis first signaled their displeasure over the American comments on Monday. An Israeli government official, who was not authorized to respond publicly to Mrs. Clinton, said: “without a clear red line Iran will not cease its race toward a nuclear weapon. These statements will not stop Iran’s centrifuges from spinning. Unfortunately the opposite could be true.”

Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, echoed those comments in an interview in Washington on Monday night, asserting that the Israeli leadership wanted Mr. Obama and the international community to set clear “red lines” for Iran. “We know that the Iranians see red,” Mr. Oren said. “We know they can discern the color red. We know that the redder the line, the lesser the chance that they will pass it.”

The Israeli government’s worries about Iran were further elevated last month when the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear monitor of the United Nations, reported that Iran had sharply increased its capacity to enrich uranium with centrifuges assembled at a subterranean site in the holy Iranian city of Qum. The site may be impervious to a bombing attack because it is so deep underground.

Israel has not publicly specified what its red lines should be, and there may not be one single view.
  

Records Missing on Afghan Army Fuel Costs

KABUL, Afghanistan — The American and NATO training missions in Afghanistan have told United States government investigators that more than four years of financial records covering about $475 million worth of fuel purchases for the Afghan National Army may have been shredded, raising concerns about potential fraud.

Additionally, the agency also says that American and NATO forces have no proper system in place for estimating the Afghan Army’s future fuel requirements, a critical point now because control over the budget on fuel spending is about to be increased and handed over from United States and NATO authority to the Afghan government.

The findings come out of a report to be published Monday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the government agency charged with accounting for how billions of dollars in American reconstruction funds are being spent.

Warning about the potential for theft and waste, the agency recommended that future fuel spending for Afghan forces, proposed to rise to about $555 million in 2014, should be reduced and frozen at 2012 levels, about $306 million annually, until proper methods for accountability and estimating the Afghan Army’s fuel requirements are established.

In a letter to Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta and senior military officials including Gen. John R. Allen, the top commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the agency’s new inspector general, John F. Sopko, said he had opened an investigation into the apparent destruction of the documents covering payments from October 2006 to February 2011.

Officials in Afghanistan were also unable to supply records for a current audit covering the period March 2011 to March 2012, he said.

“The destruction of records and the unexplained failure to provide other records violate DOD and Department of the Army policies,” Mr. Sopko wrote in the letter.

The agency’s report on fuel purchases said the training missions’ methods for estimating finance requirements did not include “basic information such as the actual number and capacity of Afghan National Army storage locations, the inventories of vehicles and generators in active use, and fuel consumption at each A.N.A. location.”

A spokeswoman for the NATO and American commands responsible for equipping and training the Afghan security forces did not reject the inspector general’s findings, but said both commands would be looking into the agency’s conclusions and cooperating with its investigation.

The spokeswoman, Lt. Lenaya Rotklein, said in an e-mailed statement that the training missions had methods in place to work out the fuel needs of the Afghan forces, but that they would work with the agency to make them better. “We make funding recommendations based on military requirements,” she said. “We are committed to stewardship of our taxpayer dollars and take seriously the responsibility entrusted to us by the Department of Defense.”

The American Embassy in Kabul and coalition officials declined to comment.

The inspector general’s agency, known by its acronym, Sigar, was created in 2008 and has had a troubled few years. In 2011, a former inspector general, Arnold Fields, a retired major general, resigned after he was criticized by some members of Congress who said that he had not been aggressive enough in tracking how American money had been spent in Afghanistan. Now, Mr. Sopko has told his staff he wants to bring a new aggressiveness to oversight of spending in Afghanistan.

Last month in another report, the inspector general criticized lack of progress by the Afghanistan Infrastructure Fund in building American-financed infrastructure projects. A handful of these projects were meant to build popular support for the Afghan government, but the inspector general found that in most cases no significant construction work had yet begun.

More Young Adults Have Insurance After Health Care Law, Study Says

WASHINGTON — The share of young adults without health insurance fell by one-sixth in 2011 from the previous year, the largest annual decline for any age group since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began collecting the data in 1997, according to a new report released on Monday.

The estimates are drawn from a federal survey of about 35,000 households. It did not ask how the newly insured obtained coverage, but the study’s author, Matthew Broaddus, a research analyst at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the increased coverage for young people was almost certainly due to a provision in the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act that allows children to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until their 26th birthday.

Joseph Antos, a health care policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed that the provision of the new law was the only plausible explanation for the increase. He pointed out that young people have been among the hardest hit in the recession and would otherwise have been expected to be less likely to be insured. “Nothing else went well for this age group,” he said.

The share of people ages 19 to 25 who lacked health insurance fell to 27.9 percent, down from 33.9 percent in 2010, or about 1.6 million fewer uninsured people, according to the data from the federal study, known as the National Health Interview Survey. For the next age group — those 26 to 35 years old — the share of the uninsured rose, a further sign, Mr. Broaddus said, that the health care law was driving the decline among the younger group.

The dependents’ provision of the health care law took effect in September 2010, and the number of uninsured young adults declined that year, too, though by a smaller amount. Obama administration officials said that drop showed that the law, which was broadly opposed by Republicans, was having an effect.

The decrease in the number of young adults without health coverage helped drive an overall decline in the share of uninsured people in the country, the first since 2007, before the recession.

The share of all Americans without health insurance stood at 15.1 percent in 2011, or about 46 million people, the center reported, down from 16 percent in 2010. It remained above the level in 2007, when 14.5 percent of Americans lacked health insurance.

Before the dependents’ provision took effect, young adults were typically forced off their parents’ plans at 18 or 21, after high school or college. The C.D.C. data for 2011 captured the first full year that the provision allowed young people to stay on their parents’ policies.

The report comes two days before the Census Bureau is to release its annual report detailing changes in health insurance coverage for the nation. That report, based on data from the Current Population Survey, is considered the standard because it includes information from about 100,000 households, a very large sample.

The C.D.C. data is drawn from a smaller sample, and Mr. Antos said it was likely to indicate the direction of the Census Bureau’s report, though that is not always the case. The C.D.C. says its numbers are preliminary and subject to revision.

Children under the age of 18 are far more likely to be insured than adults, according to the C.D.C. Just 7 percent of children lacked health insurance in 2011. The poor are among the least likely to have coverage. Forty percent of poor Americans under age 65 lacked health coverage last year — still high, but an improvement over the 42 percent who were uninsured in 2010, according to C.D.C. estimates.

The findings are in line with those of another study, released in June by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that young adults were a third more likely to be on their parents’ employer policies since the provision on dependents went into effect.

That study, based on a different data set, the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which tracks individual households over time, allowed researchers to pinpoint the details of the change in coverage for young adults.

Kosali Simon, a professor of health economics at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a co-author of the study, said that only half of that increase was made up of dependents who did not have any coverage to start. The other half, she said, had some form of coverage but switched to their parents’ policies.

To Smuggle More Drugs, Traffickers Go Under the Sea

KEY WEST, Fla. — For more than 24 hours last September, a Coast Guard helicopter and speedboat pursued drug traffickers and their contraband across the Caribbean Sea. Finally they caught up with the improbable vessel, the latest innovation in the decades-old drug war. It was a submarine.

The low-slung, diesel-propelled vessel, painted a dark shade to blend with the water, was believed to be carrying several tons of cocaine. But after the submersible’s crew scuttled the vessel and abandoned ship, the Coast Guard was able to salvage only two 66-pound bales of narcotics.

This is the new challenge faced by the United States and Latin American countries as narcotics organizations bankroll machine shops operating under cover of South America’s triple-canopy jungles to build diesel-powered submarines that would be the envy of all but a few nations.

After years of detecting these craft in the less trafficked Pacific Ocean, officials have seen a spike in their use in the Caribbean over the last year. American authorities have discovered at least three models of a new and sophisticated drug-trafficking submarine capable of traveling completely underwater from South America to the coast of the United States.

The vessel involved in the September chase was an older model that was only semi-submersible. That model presents a silhouette above water barely larger than a kitchen table, but requires a snorkel to bring in air for the diesel engine, which has a range of about 3,000 miles. The three newer, fully submersible vessels already captured were capable of hauling 10 tons of cocaine and, by surfacing at night to charge their batteries off the onboard diesel engine, could sail beneath the surface all the way from Ecuador to Los Angeles.

With the use of these craft on the rise, American officials say they fear that the trafficking networks are moving away from so-called fast boats, the high-powered fishing and leisure boats that can carry about a ton of cocaine and are easier to spot, to semi-submersible and fully submersible vessels that can surreptitiously carry many more tons of drugs, which are unloaded in shallow waters or transported to shore by small boats.

More troubling for American officials is their belief that these vessels could be used by terrorists to transport attackers or weapons, though they emphasize that no use of submersibles by militants has been detected.

Drug networks historically were organized to combine the tasks of production, transportation and distribution, and they have seen little reason to cooperate with terrorists. But these new advanced submarines are built in some cases by independent contractors who may be more willing to sell the vessels to anybody offering the right price.

“These vessels are seaworthy enough that I have no doubt in my mind that if they had enough fuel, they could easily sail into a port in the United States,” said Cmdr. Mark J. Fedor of the Coast Guard, who commands the cutter Mohawk, the 200-foot vessel whose fast boat and helicopter interdicted the submersible in the Caribbean last September.

In addition to the Coast Guard ships and aircraft patrolling the seas, the American effort includes a sophisticated command center that combines intelligence from across the United States government and from nations in the region, which are increasingly cooperating to battle cocaine trafficking.

This growing American counternarcotics effort is part of a larger shift to new missions for the nation’s security and intelligence agencies after a decade spent focused on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That mission to sort and analyze intelligence on drug trafficking and then coordinate the response occurs around the clock behind the walls of an interagency task force in Key West, which sent the intelligence report to Commander Fedor’s ship and coordinated its response.

The intelligence report, based on surveillance from a Coast Guard plane over the Caribbean and intelligence tidbits from nations in Latin America, said the submersible had left Colombia headed for Honduras.

Although the craft was 300 miles away, the Mohawk was the closest American vessel to it. So Commander Fedor immediately ordered his 100 crew members to direct the ship off Honduras to intercept the craft.

Cocaine-filled submarines and semi-submersible crafts “are the Super Bowl of counternarcotics,” Commander Fedor said. “When you hear one is moving, you say: ‘Wow. Game on.’ ”

After a day’s travel, the cutter got within a few miles of the craft and deployed the cutter’s fast boat and a helicopter.

A New Kind of Warfare

Cybersecurity efforts in the United States have largely centered on defending computer networks against attacks by hackers, criminals and foreign governments, mainly China. Increasingly, however, the focus is on developing offensive capabilities, on figuring out how and when the United States might unleash its own malware to disrupt an adversary’s networks. That is potentially dangerous territory.

Such malware is believed to have little deterrent value against criminals who use computers to steal money from banks or spies who pilfer industrial secrets. But faced with rising intrusions against computers that run America’s military systems and its essential infrastructure — its power grid, for instance, and its telecommunications networks — the military here (and elsewhere) sees disruptive software as an essential new tool of war. According to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the 15 countries with the biggest military budgets are all investing in offensive cyber capabilities.

The latest step occurred last month when the United States sent out bids for technologies “to destroy, deny, degrade, disrupt, corrupt or usurp” an adversary’s attempt to use cyberspace for advantage. The Air Force asked for proposals to plan for and manage cyberwarfare, including the ability to launch superfast computer attacks and withstand retaliation.

The United States, China, Russia, Britain and Israel began developing basic cyberattack capabilities at least a decade ago and are still figuring out how to integrate them into their military operations. Experts say cyberweapons will be used before or during conflicts involving conventional weapons to infect an adversary’s network and disrupt a target, including shutting down military communications. The most prominent example is the Stuxnet virus deployed in 2010 by the United States and Israel to set back Iran’s nuclear program. Other cyberattacks occurred in 2007 against Syria and 1998 against Serbia.

Crucial questions remain unanswered, including what laws of war would apply to decisions to launch an attack. The United States still hasn’t figured out what impact cyberweapons could have on actual battlefield operations or when an aggressive cyber response is required. Nor has Washington settled on who would authorize an attack; experts see roles for both the president and military commanders. There is also the unresolved issue of how to minimize collateral damage — like making sure malware does not cripple a civilian hospital.

Another big concern is China, which is blamed for stealing American military secrets. Washington has not had much success persuading Beijing to rein in its hackers. There is a serious risk of miscalculation if, for example, there is a confrontation in the South China Sea. China could misinterpret a move, unleash a cyberattack and trigger a real cyberwar. What’s clearly needed are new international understandings about what constitutes cyber aggression and how governments should respond. Meanwhile, the United States must do what it can to protect its own networks.

Forgotten Neighborhood’ Underscores the Poverty of an Isolated Enclave

GAZA CITY — In the Forgotten Neighborhood, houses have walls but no floors: people sit, eat and sleep on the sand.

One resident, Maliha Hjila, is not sending her 14-year-old twin daughters to school this year because she has no money for books or backpacks. Sameer Malaka’s 7-year-old son, Saqer, started first grade last week, but without a new shirt, pants or shoes. “There is no word to describe how difficult it is when your kid asks for something and you can’t,” said Mr. Malaka, who has not worked for years.

During Ramadan last month, several neighborhood families slaughtered a lame horse and used its meat for kebabs because they could not afford beef or lamb; some mornings, Reem al-Ghora did not wake her daughters for the predawn, prefast meal, she said, “because there was no food.”

A report issued Aug. 27 by the United Nations mission in Gaza questioned whether the 139-square-mile area will be “a livable place” in 2020, citing shortages of food, water, electricity, jobs, hospital beds and classrooms amid an exploding population in what is already one of the most densely populated patches of the planet. But for thousands of Gaza’s poorest residents, like those who live in the forlorn crop of cinder-block or rusted-zinc shacks built illegally on government land and known as the Forgotten Neighborhood, “It’s unlivable before then — even today,” as Ms. Hjila put it.

There are certainly less-livable slums in Africa, South Asia or in Delhi, India’s financial center, or Cairo, just across the desert, but here in Gaza poverty is a particular kind of political football. Some see it as a sure sign that Israeli restrictions on trade, fishing and travel make the place a concrete prison. Others say Gaza already attracts far more attention and international aid than other impoverished regions of the world, and that it is corruption, mismanagement and infighting among Palestinian factions that repress Gaza’s living standards.

The Forgotten Neighborhood, where about 40 families have settled over the past four years near a municipal slaughterhouse in southern Gaza City, is an extreme case. Much of the strip has seen a building boom since Israel eased its blockade two years ago, and the smuggling tunnels from Egypt are thriving once again after being closed briefly last month because of a terrorist attack on the border.

But despite these increased economic opportunities, the report by the United Nations office in Gaza says the situation is worse now than in the 1990s and due to deteriorate further as the population surges to 2.1 million over the next eight years. The United Nations report found that gross domestic product per capita was down (to $1,165 in 2011 from $1,327 in 1994, adjusted for inflation) and unemployment up (near 30 percent over all now, and much higher for women and young people).

Israeli officials have been harshly critical of the United Nations operation in Gaza, which they view as pro-Palestinian and hostile to Israel’s security concerns. In the 2009 Gaza war, Israeli shells killed 40 people at a United Nations-run school in Gaza, which created severe strains between Israel and the organization’s bureaucracy.

Whatever the reasons for Gaza’s economic woes, there is little doubt that some in the territory are suffering.

Last weekend, a desperate 18-year-old who could not find work beyond peddling potato chips set himself on fire outside Al Shifa Hospital and later died of his burns.

Al Shifa, the largest of Gaza’s six public hospitals, is overcrowded and lacking in resources, with 2,000 patients a day for 750 beds; chronic shortages of antibiotics, anticoagulants and even formula for premature newborns; and intubation kits that expired in November 2011. “The only thing available enough here is patients,” mused Dr. Nidal Moussa, a surgeon, during a tour the other day.

Many in the Forgotten Neighborhood and throughout Gaza blame Israel, which captured the territory in 1967 and occupied it until a unilateral withdrawal in 2005, but still controls utilities and regularly strikes people and places it suspects are connected to terrorism. But many also fault the Hamas government, which wrested control of the strip in 2007, for failing to reconcile with the Fatah faction that runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and for failing to address the problems that plague daily life.

Hamas itself is at a critical crossroads. Hopes for improved relations with Egypt’s new Islamist government, including a proposed free-trade zone, have yet to yield fruit. Attempts at a cease-fire with Israel are constantly thwarted by rogue militant groups. And longstanding support from Syria has disappeared amid that country’s chaos.

 That the situation is not far worse is due largely to aid from overseas and, especially, the United Nations, which still provides food aid to some 1.1 million of the 1.64 million residents who remain classified as refugees generations after their families left what became Israel in 1948.  

A Tight Election May Be Tangled in Legal Battles

The November presidential election, widely expected to rest on a final blitz of advertising and furious campaigning, may also hinge nearly as much on last-minute legal battles over when and how ballots should be cast and counted, particularly if the race remains tight in battleground states.
In the last few weeks, nearly a dozen decisions in federal and state courts on early voting, provisional ballots and voter identification requirements have driven the rules in conflicting directions, some favoring Republicans demanding that voters show more identification to guard against fraud and others backing Democrats who want to make voting as easy as possible.

The most closely watched cases — in the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania — will see court arguments again this week, with the Ohio dispute possibly headed for a request for emergency review by the Supreme Court.

In Wisconsin, the home state of the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, the attorney general has just appealed to the State Supreme Court on an emergency basis to review two rulings barring its voter ID law. But even if all such cases are settled before Nov. 6 — there are others in Florida, Iowa and South Carolina — any truly tight race will most likely generate post-election litigation that could delay the final result.

“In any of these states there is the potential for disaster,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “You have close elections and the real possibility that people will say their votes were not counted when they should have been. That’s the nightmare scenario for the day after the election.”

In the 2000 presidential election, a deadlock over ballot design and tallying in parts of Florida led the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, to stop a recount of ballots, which led to George W. Bush defeating Al Gore. Since then, both parties have focused on voting procedures.

The Obama campaign, for example, brought suit in Ohio over its reduction of early voting weekends used more by blacks than other groups.

Republicans have expressed concern over what they call voter integrity. They say they fear that registration drives by liberal and community groups have bloated voter rolls with the dead and the undocumented and have created loose monitoring of who votes and low public confidence in the system. They have instituted voter identification rules, cut back on early voting and sought to purge voter lists by comparing them with others, including those of the Department of Homeland Security.

Judicial Watch, a conservative organization aimed at reducing voter fraud, says it has found that voter rolls last year in 12 states seemed to contain an ineligible number of voting-age residents when compared with 2010 census data. It is suing both Indiana and Ohio for failing to clean up their rolls in keeping with their obligations under the National Voter Registration Act.

Democrats worry about what they call voter suppression. They say that voter fraud is largely a myth and that the goal of the Republican-led laws and lawsuits is to reduce voting by minorities, the poor and the young, who tend to vote more for Democrats.

At the Democratic National Convention in North Carolina on Thursday, Representative John Lewis of Georgia expressed his party’s view on voter-related Republican-led laws when he compared them to poll taxes and literacy tests used to prevent blacks from voting in an earlier era.

“Today, it is unbelievable that there are Republican officials still trying to stop some people from voting,” he said. “They are changing the rules, cutting polling hours and imposing requirements intended to suppress the vote.”

Courts have taken a mixed view of the two sides’ claims. Voter ID laws have been both upheld as fair and struck down as discriminatory. In Pennsylvania, a state judge upheld the voter ID law, and the State Supreme Court will hear appeal arguments on Thursday.

Elsewhere recently, Democrats have won more than they have lost, but appeals are forthcoming. A federal court agreed with the Justice Department that Texas’ voter ID law was discriminatory and also struck down the state’s curtailment of voter registration; in Ohio, early voting has been restored and rules restricting voter registration drives have been struck down. The Ohio case is under appeal to the Federal Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit under expedited review. Texas will also appeal but not in time to affect this election. A Justice Department challenge to South Carolina’s voter ID law is in federal court.

In Florida, a federal court ruled last month that a year-old state law that reduced the number of early voting days to 8 from 12 could not be enforced in 5 of the 67 counties that are covered under the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the court suggested that extending the hours of voting over the eight-day period in those five counties would satisfy the federal requirements. Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, was able to persuade election officials in four of the counties to extend their daily hours, but the supervisor of elections in Monroe County, which includes the Florida Keys, refused, saying that the county would maintain an early voting period of 12 days.

One issue that is likely to lead to lawsuits after Election Day is that of provisional ballots. Under federal law, anyone whose identity or voting precinct is in doubt can ask for a provisional ballot at any polling station and then has a number of days to return with the required documentation to make that vote count.

With No Contract Deal by Deadline in Chicago, Teachers Will Strike

CHICAGO — Union leaders for this city’s public schoolteachers said that they would strike on Monday morning after negotiations ended late Sunday with no contract agreement between the union and the nation’s third largest school system, which have been locked for months in a dispute over wages, job security and teacher evaluations.

Coming as the school year had barely begun for many, the impasse and looming strike were expected to affect hundreds of thousands of families here, some of whom had spent the weekend scrambling to rearrange work schedules, find alternative programs and hire baby sitters if school was out for some time.

Chicago Public Schools officials, visibly frustrated after talks broke off late Sunday night, expressed concern for the estimated 350,000 students the strike could affect.

“We do not want a strike,” David J. Vitale, president of the Chicago Board of Education, said late Sunday as he left the negotiations, which he described as extraordinarily difficult and “perhaps the most unbelievable process that I’ve ever been through.”

Union leaders said they had hoped not to walk away from their jobs, but they said they were left with little choice.

“This is a difficult decision and one we hoped we could have avoided,” said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

The political stakes now may be highest for Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic mayor in a city with deep union roots. He took office last year holding up the improvement of public schools as one of his top priorities, but now faces arduous political terrain certain to accompany Chicago’s first public schools strike in 25 years.

Late Sunday, Mr. Emanuel told reporters that school district officials had presented a strong offer to the union, including what some officials described as what would amount to a 16 percent raise for many teachers over four years — and that only two minor issues remained. “This is totally unnecessary, it’s avoidable and our kids do not deserve this,” Mr. Emanuel said, describing the decision as “a strike of choice.”

For days, even as talks went on, Chicago had been bracing for the possibility of a teachers strike — the first since a 19-day stoppage in 1987. In recent days, hundreds of people have called the city’s 311 system and the Chicago Public Schools central offices with questions about whether a strike was coming, and what it would mean. A strike was not expected to affect the 45,000 students in the city’s charter schools, officials said.

The school system, which employs about 25,000 teachers, announced contingency plans in the event of a strike, including a program to open 144 of its 675 schools with half-days of activities supervised by people other than unionized teachers. Officials said that program would also include meals — no small concern since 84 percent of the city’s public school students qualify for the free and reduced meals program.

Ms. Lewis deemed the contingency proposal, which was expected to be able to accommodate at least 150,000 students, “a mess,” and suggested that school officials were expecting families to “put their children with random folks.” For its part, the union on Saturday opened a strike headquarters where members could begin collecting picket signs and other materials to prepare for a walkout.

Negotiations have taken place behind closed doors since November, concerning wages and benefits, whether laid-off teachers should be considered for new openings, extra pay for those with more experience and higher degrees, and evaluations. District officials said the teachers’ average pay is $76,000 a year.

School officials, who say the system faces a $665 million deficit this year and a bigger one next year, have worked to cut costs even as Mr. Emanuel has pressed for what he considers much-needed “comprehensive reform,” including a longer school day.

Teachers have said they are being neglected on issues like promised raises, class sizes and support staff in the schools. By June, about 90 percent of teachers voted in favor of authorizing a strike if a new agreement could not be reached during the summer.

While negotiators handled the private talks, Chicagoans watched what appeared to be a contentious, sometimes personal fight between two blunt and resolute personalities: Mr. Emanuel and Ms. Lewis, who has described the mayor in recent days as a “bully” and a “liar,” and in a recent interview added, “I think the whole idea of an imperial mayoralty where you wave a magic wand or cuss someone out and things happen is untenable.”

Some parents said they were ultimately hopeful about the prospect of improvement in their children’s schools and eager for the changes advocated by Mr. Emanuel, whose own children attend private school. But others said that they thought teachers had been pushed hard, and that a standoff seemed inevitable.

“He has a vision for what he wants,” Jacob Lesniewski, a parent, said of Mr. Emanuel, “and he’s not going to let anything get in his way.”

For the moment, though, parents seemed most worried about something else entirely: how to juggle their way through Monday with no school.

Tornadoes Touch Down in Brooklyn and Queens

A tornado ripped through a beach club in Queens on Saturday, one of several outbursts of severe weather across the New York region that flooded roads, felled power lines and forced the delay of the United States Open.

A second tornado touched down in Canarsie, Brooklyn, the National Weather Service said.

The swirling columns of wind and water in Queens, captured by dozens of people on cellphones and almost instantly posted on the Internet, lasted only minutes, according to witnesses. But in that short time the tornado tore down walls, lifted roofs off homes and tangled power lines as it cut a path through the Rockaways, near Breezy Point.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who arrived in Breezy Point on Saturday afternoon to assess the damage, said there had been no reports of injuries.

Helen Vesik, 58, was in her cabana at the Breezy Point Surf Club when she saw a white waterspout form over the ocean around 11 a.m. — speeding in her direction.

“I was afraid, and I knew I had to go,” she said.

Ms. Vesik ran to the main clubhouse just as the tornado hit the club’s pool, sending streams of water into the air.

She said she crouched on the bathroom floor until the wind eased.

When she emerged, part of a concrete wall near the pool had been toppled. Barbecue grills and beach chairs had been flung across the grounds, hundreds of feet from where they had been when the storm hit.

The Queens tornado hit land with winds of about 70 miles an hour, Ross Dickman, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said at a news conference at the Breezy Point Surf Club on Saturday. It was a weak tornado, Mr. Dickman said, measuring a zero out of five on the enhanced Fujita scale, which is used to gauge tornado strength.

It was 50 feet across and touched ground for only 600 feet, Mr. Dickman said.

David Dempsey, 49, of Chatham, N.J., who watched the tornado from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, said, “This big, black cloud started going toward the ground and then I saw the funnel.”

“It was kind of neat,” he added. “I’d never seen one before. It was cool to watch it developing.”

The second tornado struck Brooklyn about 11:30 a.m. with a speed of 110 miles an hour and traveled about half a mile, the Weather Service said. The severe weather was expected to continue into the night as a cold front moving in from the west made its way into the area, meeting up with the warm, moist air ahead of it and causing instability in the atmosphere.

The storm delayed the start of the United States Open and forced the women’s singles final to be postponed until Sunday. Late in the afternoon, another approaching storm prompted the suspension of the semifinal match between Novak Djokovic and David Ferrer.

The Weather Service issued several tornado warnings throughout the day, including into Saturday evening, covering parts of Queens, Westchester County and Rockland County in New York and Fairfield and New Haven Counties in Connecticut.

In addition to high winds, people could expect severe thunderstorms, heavy rains in some places and even the possibility of hail, the Weather Service said.

The storm system stretched from northern Vermont to parts of Georgia, the Weather Service said, and there were reports of high winds causing damage from Scranton, Pa., to Buffalo.

Christopher R. Miller, a spokesman for the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said there had been reports of minor damage elsewhere in Queens and in Canarsie. There were also sporadic power failures, he said.

Donna Sullivan, who lives in Breezy Point, said she had watched the spout lift kayaks 40 feet out of the water. Elsewhere in Queens, as water rushed into the lobby and basement of an apartment building at 68-12 Yellowstone Boulevard in Forest Hills, a porter, Herbert Dieguez, said he heard screams.

In the basement, Mr. Dieguez, 38, found a tenant trapped in an elevator, the water up to her neck and rising.

He pried open the doors, he said, and swam her to safety.

“She almost died,” Mr. Dieguez said. “I had to go into the elevator to save her life.”

Space Tourism Is Here! Wealthy Adventurers Wanted

WEDGED between a strip-mall chiropractor and a cluster of optometrists in Rochester, N.Y., the offices of the DePrez Group of Travel Companies hardly seems like the kind of place where someone would begin a journey to the stars.
WEDGED between a strip-mall chiropractor and a cluster of optometrists in Rochester, N.Y., the offices of the DePrez Group of Travel Companies hardly seems like the kind of place where someone would begin a journey to the stars.

Five Crucial Factors to Watch, Just 58 Days From the Election

WASHINGTON — Two months before the election, President Obama and Mitt Romney agree on one thing: the collection of states where the race will be decided.

As Mr. Obama opened a two-day bus tour of Florida on Saturday, Mr. Romney set his sights on trying to put Virginia back in the Republican column. Television advertisements from both sides were filling the airwaves in those two vital states and six others from Nevada to New Hampshire, while outside groups supporting the candidates tested for traction elsewhere.

With the political conventions over, the battle to determine whether Mr. Obama will win re-election or Mr. Romney will become the 45th president of the United States is fully engaged. The race has been deadlocked, according to many measures, and each side was predicting that it would see no lift from its convention. That seems to have been true in Mr. Romney’s case, while Mr. Obama’s aides were hopeful that new polls due out this week would prove them wrong.

But for now, Mr. Obama may hold a slight edge because the race remains essentially tied, which means voter disappointment has not turned into a resounding call for his defeat despite the challenging economic climate.

“Now, our friends at the other convention were more than happy to talk about what was wrong with America but not talking about what they’d do to make it right,” he told supporters on Saturday in Seminole, Fla., only a few miles from the site of the Republican convention.

Mr. Romney, speaking to veterans in Virginia Beach on Saturday, referred to the disappointing jobs report released a day earlier. “This week has not been a lot of good news,” he said. “But I’m here to tell you things are about to get a lot better.”

Presidential races take place on many levels, some easily visible, others more shrouded. As the clock runs down, both sides make tough decisions about which states to compete in and which to abandon. Advertising themes get tested and changed as strategists hunt frantically for the right appeals, and get-out-the-vote teams target wavering voters with tailored messages.

Behind closed doors, the candidates are preparing for the most crucial remaining events, the debates. And in courtrooms, lawyers are battling over who is on the ballot and who can vote.

Unforeseen events, economic or otherwise, could also still have a significant impact on the outcome of the race, much as the financial crisis did four years ago this fall.

Here are a few things to watch in the 58 days ahead:

Electoral Map

The roster of battleground states has not changed much, but one that Republicans had dearly hoped to put in play appears to have broken decisively: Pennsylvania. Mr. Romney spent time and money in the state, which voted Democratic in the last five presidential elections, but Republican strategists now say it seems out of reach.

Wisconsin, which has 10 electoral votes and is home to Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, may offer Mr. Romney the best chance to expand his options. Republicans have not won there since 1984, despite fighting hard in almost every election. Wisconsin was not one of the eight states where the Romney campaign placed its first flight of general election ads late last week, but one party strategist said, “Keep watching.”

By this point, Mr. Romney had hoped to put at least a few more states into safer Republican territory. North Carolina, which Mr. Obama narrowly carried in 2008, is at the top of the list. But the state is still competitive enough that Mr. Romney and Republican groups feel compelled to keep advertising there, complicating their hopes of making Wisconsin and Michigan more competitive.

Some Democratic strategists say that winning Florida remains a reach for Mr. Obama, but his visit this weekend suggests that the White House has not given up and at a minimum will make Mr. Romney spend a lot more time and money in the state.

Potential for a Mining Boom Splits Factions in Afghanistan

KALU VALLEY, Afghanistan — If there is a road to a happy ending in Afghanistan, much of the path may run underground: in the trillion-dollar reservoir of natural resources — oil, gold, iron ore, copper, lithium and other minerals — that has brought hopes of a more self-sufficient country, if only the wealth can be wrested from blood-soaked soil.
But the wealth has inspired darker dreams as well. Officials and industry experts say the potential resource boom seems increasingly imperiled by corruption, violence and intrigue, and has put the Afghan government’s vulnerabilities on display.

It all comes at what is already a critically uncertain time here, with the impending departure of NATO troops in 2014 and old regional and ethnic rivalries resurfacing, raising concerns that the mineral wealth could become the fuel for civil conflict.

Powerful regional warlords and militant leaders are jockeying to widen their turf to include areas with mineral wealth, and the Taliban have begun to make murderous incursions into territory where development is planned. In the capital, Kabul, factional maneuvering is in full swing, including disputes over lucrative side contracts awarded to relatives of President Hamid Karzai.

Further, a proposed mining law vital to attracting foreign investment is up in the air, with the delay threatening several projects. The cabinet rejected it this summer, saying it was too generous to Western commercial interests. But some Western officials fear other motives are at work, too, including an internal fight for spoils, and perhaps an effort by some neighboring countries to sway sympathetic officials to keep Indian and Chinese state mining companies out.

“If you were to pick a country that involves high risk in developing a new mining sector, Afghanistan is it,” said Eleanor Nichol, campaign leader at Global Witness, a group that tries to break the link between natural resources, corruption and conflict. “But the genie is out of the bottle.”

Already this summer, the China National Petroleum Corporation, in partnership with a company controlled by relatives of President Karzai, began pumping oil from the Amu Darya field in the north. An investment consortium arranged by JPMorgan Chase is mining gold. Another Chinese company is trying to develop a huge copper mine. Four copper and gold contracts are being tendered, and contracts for rare earth metals could be offered soon.

The Ministry of Mines has also requested bids for a richer oil concession in the Afghan-Tajik basin, and American officials are optimistic it could come online soon.

And in the shadow of the Black Mountain, here in the Kalu Valley in remote Bamian Province, villagers hope that Indian and Canadian mining operations can turn buried iron ore into new lives for struggling families, breaking a cycle of poverty in this high place cut off by snow for six months of the year.

When the digging begins, Abbas Ali, a 30-year-old farmer here, will have to give up the four-acre potato field his family has worked for generations. He is more than ready.

“Our life will change 180 degrees,” Mr. Ali said this summer, staring up with fervent brown eyes at the bowed wooden roof beams in the white-walled madrasa where he teaches for extra income. “We support any effort to make it happen quickly.”

That hope, and the prospect of more self-sufficiency as international aid ebbs, is driving Afghan officials like the minister of mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, as he tries to get more projects going. The World Bank estimates that if things go very well, mining and agriculture together could raise annual growth rates by 3 to 4 percentage points between now and 2025.

But Mr. Shahrani is concerned about striking the right balance between generating revenue for the Afghan government and drawing in international investors, saying that getting contracts wrong would jeopardize critical development timelines.

“This is all about the credibility of the country,” he said.

There are other concerns, too. Some officials are worried about a swath of small mines — for gemstones, marble, chromite and other resources — that are out of the state’s control and might be fueling the insurgency.

A recent Defense Department analysis said criminal mining syndicates were smuggling chromite over the border, paying protection money to the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani insurgent network.

In the border province of Khost, the director of mines, Laiq Muhammad, said more than half the chromite there had been extracted illegally and smuggled to Pakistan, with no benefit to Afghanistan. “Not even one afghani has been added to national income from chromite mining,” he said. Senior Pentagon officials say they are trying hard to bring the mines into the legitimate economy by finding international buyers for the chromite.

Debt Collectors Cashing In on Student Loan Roundup

At a protest last year at New York University, students called attention to their mounting debt by wearing T-shirts with the amount they owed scribbled across the front — $90,000, $75,000, $20,000.

On the sidelines was a business consultant for the debt collection industry with a different take.

“I couldn’t believe the accumulated wealth they represent — for our industry,” the consultant, Jerry Ashton, wrote in a column for a trade publication, InsideARM.com. “It was lip-smacking.”

Though Mr. Ashton says his column was meant to be ironic, it nonetheless highlighted undeniable truths: many borrowers are struggling to pay off their student loans, and the debt collection industry is cashing in.

As the number of people taking out government-backed student loans has exploded, so has the number who have fallen at least 12 months behind in making payments — about 5.9 million people nationwide, up about a third in the last five years.

In all, nearly one in every six borrowers with a loan balance is in default. The amount of defaulted loans — $76 billion — is greater than the yearly tuition bill for all students at public two- and four-year colleges and universities, according to a survey of state education officials.

To get the money back, the Department of Education last fiscal year paid more than $1.4 billion to collection agencies and other groups to hunt down defaulters.

Hiding from the government is not easy.

“I keep changing my phone number,” said Amanda Cordeiro, 29, from Clermont, Fla., who dropped out of college in 2010 and has fielded as many as seven calls a day from debt collectors trying to recover her $55,000 in overdue loans. “In a year, this is probably my fourth phone number.”

Unlike private lenders, the federal government has extraordinary tools for collection that it has extended to the collection firms. Ms. Cordeiro has already had two tax refunds seized, and other debtors have had their paychecks or Social Security payments garnisheed. Over all, the government recoups about 80 cents for every dollar that goes into default — an astounding rate, considering most lenders are lucky to recover 20 cents on the dollar on defaulted credit cards.

While the recovery rate is impressive, critics say it has left the government with little incentive to try to prevent defaults in the first place.

Though there are programs in place to help struggling borrowers, the companies hired to administer federal student loans are not paid enough for lengthy conversations to walk borrowers through the payment options, critics say. One consequence is that a government program called income-based repayment has fallen short of expectations. Under the program, borrowers pay 15 percent of their discretionary income for up to 25 years, after which the rest of their loan is forgiven. But participation has lagged because borrowers are either not aware of the program or are turned off by its complexity.

“If people were well informed, how many defaults could be averted?” asked Paul C. Combe, president of American Student Assistance, a loan guarantee agency based in Boston. “We are hurting people here.”

For borrowers, the decision to default can be disastrous, ruining their credit and increasing the amount they owe, with penalties up to 25 percent of the balance.

Ms. Cordeiro, a single mother, dropped out of Everest College, a profit-making school, 16 credits shy of a bachelor’s degree. She said she could not get any more loans to finish. “I get these letters about defaulting, and I get them and throw them in the bin,” she said.

Jake Brock, who graduated in 2008 from Keuka College, a private liberal arts school in upstate New York, defaulted in May on a federally guaranteed loan of $8,000. With penalties and accumulated interest, the loan balance is now $13,000, he said. “I just fell behind and couldn’t dig myself out,” said Mr. Brock, who is 29 and owes a total of $100,000 in student loans.

There is no statute of limitations on collecting federally guaranteed student loans, unlike credit cards and mortgages, and Congress has made it difficult for borrowers to wipe out the debt through bankruptcy. Only a small fraction of defaulters even tries.

“You are going to pay it, or you are going to die with it,” said John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education at SmartCredit.com, a credit monitoring service.

The New Oil Well?

Business is booming at ConServe, a debt collection agency in suburban Rochester. The company recently expanded into a neighboring building. The payroll of 420 is expected to double in three years.

“There is great opportunity,” said Mark E. Davitt, the company’s president and founder.

Where some debt collection firms have made their fortunes collecting on delinquent credit cards or hospital bills, ConServe is thriving because of overdue student loans, a large majority of its business.

With an outstanding balance of more than $1 trillion, student loans have become a silver lining for the debt collection industry at a time when its once-thriving business of credit card collection has diminished and the unemployment rate has made collection a challenge. To recoup unpaid loans, the federal government, private lenders and others have turned to collection agencies like ConServe.

Mark Russell, a mergers and acquisition specialist, writing in the same trade publication as Mr. Ashton, the consultant at the N.Y.U. protest, suggested student loans might be a “new oil well” for the accounts receivable management industry, or ARM, as the industry is known.

“While the Department of Education debt collection contract has been one of the most highly sought-after contracts within the ARM industry for years, I believe it is now THE most sought-after contract within this industry, centered within the most sought-after market — student loans,” Mr. Russell wrote last October.