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In early March, as tens of thousands of people were calling for revolution, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been the President of Yemen for the past thirty-three years, staged an enormous celebration of himself. Uprisings across the Middle East had already swept away two of Saleh's peers and were threatening to bring down his own regime. In the capital, Sanaa, thousands of Yemenis filed into the Stadium of the Revolution, their loyalty insured by the promise of payments after the rally. Some climbed into the bleachers; others gathered on the field, where an array of blue and white plastic lawn chairs faced an elevated stand reserved for the President and his men. Outside the stadium, about a mile away, protesters, who had been gathering for weeks, condemned Saleh, chanting "Leave!" For an hour, Yemenis in the stadium held newspapers over their heads to protect themselves from the sweltering heat. Then the loudspeakers blared, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of all the Yemeni people, the Preserver of Unity, Savior of the Nation, peace be upon him, His Excellency Ali Abdullah Saleh!"
The crowd cheered, and thousands of people raised their arms, some holding up posters. Men blew kisses; women, wearing jet-black chadors, clapped their gloved hands. Saleh, dressed in a dark business suit and Ray-Bans, lowered himself onto a hand-carved chair inlaid with ivory. Applause rolled for several minutes; every moment or two, Saleh lifted his right hand. Then the crowd, led by a man on the viewing stand, began to repeat, "Our blood, our souls, we'll sacrifice for you!"
Before the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Iraqis chanted an identical paean to Saddam Hussein, who was Saleh's mentor and friend. Yemenis used to call Saleh "Little Saddam." In 1990, when the United Nations Security Council voted to expel Saddam's forces from Kuwait, Yemen was the only Arab state to vote no. In retaliation, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states kicked out a million Yemenis, depriving the country of remittances—one of its primary sources of money. Yemen's economy collapsed, and it never fully recovered. Nearly every aspect of Saleh's rally echoed the parades once staged for Saddam—even the posters, which depicted a leader far more youthful and virile than he actually is.
While Yemenis offered adoring testimonials, Saleh fidgeted in his chair, repeatedly turning to chat, first with his Prime Minister and his Vice-President, then with a group of aides behind him. Saleh is said to possess a savvy intelligence and the attention span of a teen-age boy. Finally, after glancing at his watch, a bejewelled square of violet glass, he rose to speak.
Saleh is a short, stout man, with a thick-necked demeanor and a sandpapery voice. In a speech weeks earlier, he had practically spat at the people assembled before him, vowing to fight the protesters "with every last drop of blood." During a subsequent speech, he laid blame for the protests on the United States and Israel. "There is a control room in Tel Aviv for destabilizing the Arab world," Saleh said. "It is managed by the White House." It was the sort of remark that used to serve him well.
But this time Saleh's tone was soft. "My fellow-citizens,'' he began—a concession remarkable in itself. He thanked the Yemenis who had gone into the streets to support him and even those who denied the legitimacy of his government. Saleh said that he had ordered Yemeni security forces to continue to protect demonstrators on both sides. The word "continue" made the sentence a lie: since the start of the protests, gangs of men, sometimes joined by police and soldiers, had attacked demonstrators with sticks, truncheons, and guns.
Now Saleh seemed to be offering a truce. He outlined several proposed changes to the Yemeni constitution, promising to transfer many of his powers to the parliament. This was the second time that he had offered concessions since the troubles in the Middle East began. In early February, when the demonstrations were just starting to attract international attention, Saleh announced that he would retire at the end of his term, in 2013, and promised that his son Ahmed, the chief of the Republican Guard, would follow him out the palace door. Now he said, "I ask God to guide all of us in the interest of our nation."
At this, the Yemenis streamed out to board their buses and pick up their money.
Yemenis had been debating for weeks whether Saleh would fight like Qaddafi or go peacefully like Mubarak. The consensus seemed to be that Saleh would fall between these extremes, but nobody knew exactly where. He wasn't crazy, but he wasn't a tired old man, either.
In response to the speech in the stadium, John Brennan, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, issued a statement from the White House praising Saleh and declaring, "All sectors of the Yemeni opposition should respond constructively to President Saleh's call to engage in a serious dialogue to end the current impasse."
No deal was struck. Opposition leaders rejected the President's initiatives and called on him to resign.
The following morning, police and soldiers attacked a group of anti-government protesters at Sanaa University, firing tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. The protesters threw rocks at the soldiers. When the clash was over, four Yemenis were dead and more than three hundred were wounded, nearly all of them protesters. The next day, police and soldiers rushed the demonstrators again, killing two and wounding more than a hundred. The revolt in Yemen had entered its bloody phase.
The White House says that Brennan's statement was not intended to grant Saleh permission to attack the protesters. But, since the unrest began, the Saleh regime has received unusually strong support from the Obama Administration. The White House has made clear it believes that in Yemen abrupt change must be avoided, even at the cost of Yemeni lives. Brennan, a former C.I.A. station chief in the Middle East, maintains a close relationship with Saleh, and has visited Sanaa four times since taking the counterterrorism post, in 2009. After the lurid speech blaming Israel and the United States for the protests, Saleh called Brennan to apologize. The Obama Administration scolded Saleh after the attack on the Sanaa University protesters, but it didn't urge him to step down. A senior American military officer explained why: "If Saleh goes, the two likeliest outcomes are anarchy or a government that is not as friendly."
Either result, U.S. officials believe, could embolden Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has established a foothold in Yemen. A senior Administration official said that between a hundred and two hundred hard-core Al Qaeda fighters are in Yemen, and that hundreds of Yemenis provide them with support. Along with Pakistan's tribal areas and Somalia, Yemen is now considered one of the most likely places from which Al Qaeda could mount an attack on America. Two recent failed plots appear to have originated with Al Qaeda members in Yemen: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to set off an in-flight bomb, on Christmas Day, 2009, and the loading of explosive printer cartridges onto America-bound cargo planes, in October, 2010. U.S. officials say that they have linked Abdulmutallab to Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric who is now the most prominent spokesperson for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Last spring, President Obama authorized the killing of Awlaki, who is believed to be hiding in Yemen.
America's relationship with Saleh was once tense. In 2000, after Al Qaeda's bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in the port city of Aden, American officials complained that Saleh's government had all but stymied their investigation, and that senior members of his government seemed to be aligned with the terrorist group. Saleh himself, however, is not considered to be an Islamist, or even particularly religious; like Saddam before him, he is most interested in maintaining power. Indeed, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Saleh, dependent on Saudi and Western aid, promised to coöperate with the war on terror.
Since then, he has allowed the U.S. to fire missiles at suspected militants, ordered his forces to detain terrorist suspects at the behest of the U.S., and facilitated intelligence-gathering operations, including surveillance by Predator drones. The U.S. jointly mans a military-command center in Yemen.
In recent years, the U.S. has dramatically increased its aid to Saleh's regime. The focus has been on training and equipping Yemeni counterterrorism troops with modern weapons, night-vision cameras, and helicopters. This program, which was negligible as recently as 2008, had a budget last year of a hundred and fifty million dollars. The U.S. has also substantially increased its economic and development assistance to Yemen, most of it intended for areas populated by extremists.
As officials in both Washington and Sanaa repeatedly reminded me, Yemen is not Egypt: it has virtually no middle class, a weak civil society, a marginal intelligentsia, and no public institutions that operate independently of Saleh. The Yemeni opposition includes notable Islamists, among them Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, a cleric whom the U.S. has designated a terrorist.
A Western diplomat in Yemen said, "O.K., fine, Saleh goes. Then what do you do? There is no institutional capacity—in the bureaucracy, in the military, or in any other institutions in this society—to really step in and pick up the pieces and manage a transition." A failed state in Yemen, coupled with an already anarchic situation in Somalia, could provide Islamist militants with hundreds of miles of unguarded coastline, disrupting the shipping lanes that run from the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean.
The senior Administration official put it bluntly: "Our goal is to help prevent a coup or a usurpation of power by Muslim Brotherhood types or by Al Qaeda."
Even in a state of turmoil, Yemen is a place of austere beauty. In Sanaa, the grand Ottoman gate at the entrance to the old quarter leads to a maze of alleys and stone tower houses studded with akmar, or "moons"—crescent-shaped windows filled with multicolored glass. The alleys give Sanaa an almost medieval feel. Men walk the streets carrying jambiyas, curved two-sided daggers tucked into bright-colored sheaths and worn directly over the stomach. The women, in flowing black chadors, sometimes wear conical straw hats, giving them the profile of witches.
After a few hours of activity in the morning, the tempo in Sanaa ebbs, as Yemenis sit down with their daily bag of khat—a narcotic evergreen shrub whose softest leaves are stuffed into the cheeks. Until the early evening, many of the city's residents enter a collective haze. Ali Saeed al-Mulaiki, a Yemeni journalist, joked to me that Saleh should be grateful for the phenomenon: "If the Yemeni people didn't chew khat, they would think about their future and about their lives, and there would be a revolution." Not only is khat sapping Yemen's work ethic; it is sucking the country dry. Each daily bag requires about five hundred litres of water to produce, and some scientists predict that Sanaa will begin to run dry in the next decade, around the same time as its oil disappears.
Outside the cities, the landscape unfolds in wadis, ravines, and escarpments, from which treeless stone villages appear to rise without a break. In the rural areas, the government's writ runs out, and tribal tradition takes over. Skirmishes erupt regularly among the tribes, with some tribal armies wielding machine guns and mortars. Indeed, Yemen has essentially been at war with itself since 1962, when a group of Army officers overthrew the monarchy that presided over what is now the northern part of the country. The southern realm, much of which was under British rule until 1967, became a satellite of the Soviet Union before merging with the north, in 1990.
Saleh has presided over the Yemeni states—first the north, then the unified nation—since 1978, when, as a young lieutenant colonel with virtually no formal education, he seized power after the assassination of President Ahmed al-Ghashmi, who was killed by an exploding briefcase. (The bomb was planted by an envoy from South Yemen.) At the time, Saleh was stationed in Yemen's commercial capital, Taiz, where he commanded the local garrison. When he heard the news, he flew immediately to Sanaa. Within days, he had persuaded the Yemeni parliament and the Army to approve his ascension.
Over lunch, an aide told me the unofficial version of Saleh's rise: "The story is, the generals decided to give him power because he was the only one who was willing to take charge." The aide went on, "Look, he's a nobody. He's this guy from the village with no education. But his personality is very strong." Posters of Saleh from the time, which still adorn Sanaa's streets, show a confident young man with a large mustache and bushy hair bulging from his officer's hat, looking remarkably like Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who had taken power in Libya nine years earlier. Since assuming control, Saleh has survived several assassination attempts and fought and won a civil war; he is currently battling an insurgency in the south and a rebellion in the north mounted by the Houthis, Yemen's Shiite minority.
Saleh, who is in his sixties, is considered a master at keeping Yemen's tribes away from one another and, more important, away from him. "The President's emotional intelligence is off the scale,'' a Western official in Yemen who regularly meets with him said. "He balances all the forces, works all the personal connections, manages somehow to keep it from spinning out of control. He has no fixed positions. His character is entirely situational."
American officials described Saleh to me as unsophisticated, brilliant, and erratic. He appears to be focussed only when he's talking. "Generally speaking, he's more interested in transmitting than in receiving,'' the Western diplomat in Yemen told me. Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last year document Saleh's mercurial temperament, which seems to simultaneously reassure, entertain, and terrify American officials. One cable described Saleh as "bored and impatient"; another said that he veered from being "disdainful and dismissive" to "conciliatory and congenial." On one occasion, General David Petraeus, then the head of the Central Command, spoke with Saleh on the subject of smuggling from Djibouti, which is across the Red Sea. Saleh told Petraeus to send a message to Djibouti's President: "I don't care if he smuggles whiskey into Yemen—provided it's good whiskey."
Saleh has consistently told Americans that Yemen is dangerously close to being taken over by Al Qaeda. "I have given you an open door on terrorism,'' Saleh warned John Brennan during a meeting in 2009. "If you don't help, this country will become worse than Somalia.'' In the WikiLeaks cables, Saleh is depicted as constantly asking the U.S. for money, and unsatisfied with what he gets. He is quoted saying that "the Americans are hot-blooded and hasty when you need us" but "cold-blooded and British when we need you."
Saleh has dominated Yemen for so long that he has vitiated whatever independent institutions used to exist, largely through cronyism. In addition to Ahmed, the son who runs the Republican Guard, at least two dozen family members hold key government positions. They oversee the oil ministry; run the national airline, Yemenia; occupy jobs such as Deputy Prime Minister and Ambassador to the United States; and head security agencies that help quell internal dissent.
Saleh has held Yemen together largely through bribery—a nationwide system of direct payoffs to tribal leaders. American and Yemeni officials say that the regime hands out tens of millions of dollars a year. Tribal leaders receive even more money from the Saudi government, which is determined to maintain stability in Yemen, its southern neighbor. Abdullah Rashed al-Jumaili, a sheikh in the Baqil tribe, told me, "I take a salary from the Saudis as well as from the Yemeni government. Well, it is not so much a salary as a gift." Jumaili said that he received about twenty-seven hundred dollars a month from the Saudis and twenty-three hundred dollars from the Yemeni government. The typical Yemeni earns less than three dollars a day. "All of the sheikhs receive this money,'' Jumaili said. "It's the system."
Little is expected in exchange for these payments except peace—and, when the time comes, votes. The payments have helped Saleh win reëlection in contests that many Yemenis consider farcical. Abdul Rehman Ali Barman, a lawyer with the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, one of Yemen's few non-governmental organizations, said, "In 2006, the European Union came with their observers and declared that the vote was fair and open. But by the time they got here the result had already been assured. People had been paid."
Though Saleh has proved deft at maintaining power, he has accomplished little else. Forty per cent of Yemeni adults are illiterate, and more than half the country's children are malnourished. In addition to the bribes—one of Yemen's largest expenditures—there is corruption. The government in Sanaa makes even the Karzai regime, in Afghanistan, seem like a model of propriety. Mohamed Ali Jubran, an economist at Sanaa University, told me, "Any resources that the government is able to get its hands on are siphoned off by the people around the President. What is left over is not enough to meet the demands of the Yemeni people."
Jubran cited the oil industry, which now provides about seventy per cent of Yemen's revenues. Members of the Saleh family own most of the businesses that provide transportation and other services to the companies that extract and process oil. One of the largest oil-services firms, for instance, is controlled by the President's nephew Yahya Mohamed Abdullah Saleh. According to Jubran, the firm charges the Yemeni government extraordinarily high fees for routine services. "So Yahya's firm charges the government twelve hundred dollars a month for a truck driver, while paying the driver himself only about two hundred dollars,'' Jubran said. "The company takes the rest." (Yahya Saleh did not respond to requests for an interview.)
The Saudi government is apparently aware of the Yemeni government's corruption, and has tried to work around it. According to a diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks, in 2009 Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi deputy interior minister, told the U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke that Saudi assistance to Yemen was rarely "in the form of cash. . . . Cash tended to end up in Swiss banks."
Since the upheavals in the Middle East began, Saleh has raised the salaries of most civil servants, police, and soldiers. Jubran told me that government spending in 2011 is projected to exceed revenues by a perilous margin. Saleh has also begun boosting his payments to tribal leaders, in an attempt to keep them from bolting to the opposition. "It's money season,'' a Saleh adviser told me.
Even if this rash of spending helps Saleh survive his immediate crisis, an economic catastrophe appears inevitable. "The wheels are going to come off," the Western diplomat in Yemen told me.
What happens then? Jumaili, the leader of the Baqil tribe, said that few tribal leaders would remain loyal to Saleh after the cash ran out—if that long. "Buying is forever,'' Jumaili told me. "Renting is just temporary."
On the evening of January 15th, the day after Tunisia's dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country, Tawakkol Karman—a thirty-two-year-old woman who runs an organization dedicated to protecting journalists—decided to seize the moment. She enlisted several of her friends to meet in the square in front of Sanaa University, and they soon collected around a modernist statue called "The Wisdom of the Yemeni People." Karman and the others cheered the Tunisian revolution.
The next night, more Yemenis showed up, and they marched to the Tunisian Embassy, calling on Saleh to resign. After a week, Karman had become the movement's leader, and hundreds of Yemenis—mostly students and recent graduates—stood with her in the square, calling for Saleh's downfall. (It was a convenient time for the students, who were finishing their midterm examinations.) Karman felt exhilarated; revolution seemed to be spreading across the Middle East.
On the evening of January 22nd, as Karman was driving home from work, her car was forced to the side of the road by unmarked vehicles. A group of men, with no uniforms or I.D. cards, got out and took her away. But the demonstrations at Sanaa University kept going. After thirty-six hours, Karman was released unharmed—but not without a warning. Saleh spoke to Karman's brother Tariq. "Control your sister,'' the President said. "Anyone who disobeys me will be killed."
The first time I saw Karman, she was climbing onto a makeshift stage that the demonstrators had erected in the square. She wore a head scarf and a long-sleeved gown instead of a chador. It was a warm evening in mid-February, and she had just returned from Taiz, where the demonstrations were larger than those in Sanaa. On this night, perhaps two thousand protesters had assembled, still mostly students and other young people. Most of them were men.
As Karman grabbed a microphone and began speaking, a pair of young Yemeni men standing next to me began to whisper to each other. Karman was a spectacle in Yemen—a woman in an ocean of men, presuming to lead. Even at the gates of its premier university, Yemen is a deeply conservative society. But Karman did not hesitate. "The Yemeni people have had enough!" she cried, to roars of approval. She began to chant—"The people want an end to the regime!"—and the crowd followed her.
A few days later, I visited Karman's house, in central Sanaa. On the mantel in the sitting room were framed photographs of four people: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Hillary Clinton. Karman had met Clinton in January, just before the uprising began. Her organization, Women Journalists Without Chains, receives funding from the U.S. government. The meeting with Clinton was arranged by the U.S. Embassy, she said. Looking at the picture of Clinton, she added, "I don't want to be foreign minister, but she is my role model."
Karman's face, framed by a bright-pink head scarf, betrayed no fatigue. A few days earlier, at Friday prayers, some of the imams in Sanaa, presumably at the government's urging, had singled her out, accusing her of degrading the morals of Yemeni women. Karman laughed off the criticism. She said, "My husband encourages me, so does my father—most of the time! Sometimes my husband tells me to stop, my father also. They are worried about me. I ignore them, of course."
The few grass-roots women leaders in the Middle East tend to be a combination of willfulness, education, and high social standing, which provides them with the confidence required to challenge tradition, and the connections to keep them safe. Karman, a mother of three, is the daughter of Abdul Salam, who was the minister for legal and parliamentary affairs in an earlier Saleh government. (He resigned in 1994, when Saleh used military force to crush a secessionist movement in the south.) Her brother Tariq is a poet; until he delivered the message to his sister, he was a Saleh supporter.
Karman, who has a degree in public administration from Sanaa University, learned her halting English in a four-month course there. She found intellectual inspiration in Mandela's memoir, "Long Walk to Freedom," and in Gandhi's autobiography. In 2005, with the help of grants from foreign governments and aid organizations, she founded Women Journalists Without Chains.
By the time she started calling for Saleh's downfall, she had become a familiar nuisance in Yemen. In 2006, she set up a text-messaging system that disseminated political news and messages to thousands of people. After a year, the regime shut it down. Karman and other Yemenis began picketing in Liberty Square, across the street from the Presidential Palace, where they demanded democracy and human rights.
"On some days, it was just my friends and I," she said. "Sometimes it was thousands."
The revolution in Tunisia galvanized her. Before then, she had always sought incremental improvements in Yemen: more press freedom, more licenses for newspapers, the release of jailed journalists. "Tunisia was our solution—it hit me just like that,'' she said. "The problem in our society is the regime, just as in Tunisia. The whole regime has to go."
In January, when the protest movement was still very small, Karman and her compatriots were beaten repeatedly by pro-government thugs. As her movement grew, she was disappointed by the wary reactions of many Westerners. After her release from prison, Karman said, European Union officials and friends at the U.S. Embassy beseeched her to halt the protests. Karman said of one E.U. official, "He told me, 'Tawakkol, this will be bad for Yemen, this will bring chaos.' ''
I asked about Saleh and the forces arrayed against her. At the time, the protests outside Sanaa University were impressive but hardly large enough to threaten the regime. She responded with bracing overstatement. "We are in the final stages now," she said. "You will see! It will take a little longer. But we will make our revolution. We will make it, or we will die trying."
I brought up the promise Saleh had made, a week or so earlier, to leave office in 2013. What, exactly, was there left to fight for?
"No one believes him,'' Karman said. "He has lied before. We cannot rely on the opposition parties, either. They have compromised too much. No change is possible as long as Saleh remains. Our first demand, and our last demand, is that Saleh step down."
Karman was referring to the last time Saleh announced his intent to retire—in 2005, just before a Presidential election. He ran anyway and won, with seventy-seven per cent of the vote. Karman worried that if Saleh did not leave office immediately he might later insist on staying beyond the end of his term, or transfer power to his son, or arrange for a handpicked successor to take over.
Karman's freewheeling attacks on Saleh highlighted one of the central curiosities of the Yemeni regime: it is not uniformly repressive. Karman had been detained, but she had not been killed or even left to languish in jail. Newspapers have been closed, and political opponents tortured or killed, especially in the south. But the Yemeni state has been relatively tolerant of dissent. This past winter, Saleh, in contrast to some other Middle Eastern leaders, did not execute opposition leaders or block access to the Internet. When I raised this point with Karman, she scolded me. "Please do not compare us to other countries in the Middle East," she said. "When you do that, you will conclude that Yemen is not so bad, because we are better than Saudi Arabia. I reject that. We need more freedom here, more democracy."
Yemen, unlike some Arab countries, has an official opposition. It is a coalition united under the banner Joint Meeting Parties, or J.M.P. The J.M.P.'s two main components are Yemen's Islamist party, known as Islah, and the Yemeni Socialist Party.
In the months before the protests began, the J.M.P. had been negotiating with Saleh's party, the General People's Congress, to enter his government or to secure limits on his powers. The talks had not yielded clear results. Then revolution broke out in Egypt and Tunisia. The uprisings took the J.M.P.'s leaders by surprise, as did the demonstrations within Yemen. Yet, instead of joining the movement, the opposition attempted to outflank it, by trying anew to cut a deal with the regime. In this effort, the J.M.P. had the backing of the Obama Administration.
The J.M.P.'s leaders apparently feared that an abrupt end to Saleh's rule would bring anarchy, and they did not seem to believe that they were cohesive enough themselves to run the Yemeni state. Their fears were echoed by many Yemenis in the merchant class. One day in February, at the protest site outside Sanaa University, I spotted a well-dressed man standing at the edge of the scene, frowning. His name was Yahiya Ali al-Habbari, and he was the chairman of a large Yemeni food-importing company. "This will not work,'' Habbari said. "There will be chaos here. We can't have this, not in Yemen."
For a while, that worry helped to limit the size of the demonstrations. In the first six weeks, the protests in Sanaa, a city with a population of two million, drew no more than ten thousand people. Even on Fridays, when the demonstrations tended to peak in size, they did not affect everyday life in the capital.
Some Yemenis were concerned that, if Saleh was thrown out, the opposition coalition's Islamist leaders would dominate the next government. Most of the anxiety focussed on Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, the Islamist whom the U.S. has called a terrorist. Zindani is a senior leader of Islah and the head of Yemen's largest association of Sunni clerics. American officials say that he has been a mentor to Osama bin Laden, has recruited Yemenis into Al Qaeda training camps, and has helped the group buy weapons. Yet many Yemenis consider Zindani a mainstream politician. After all, before the protests began, Zindani had been one of Saleh's most reliable supporters.
By the end of February, the crowds outside Sanaa University had grown considerably. On March 1st, word went around that Zindani was going to speak. Until then, the demonstrations had been dominated by relatively secular Yemenis, and the fact that Zindani was to speak seemed to mark a turning point in the revolt. A group of men with guns mounted the stage. Then Zindani appeared, his beard dyed orange with henna, and his hand grasping the same microphone that Karman had held a few weeks earlier.
"The caliphate is coming!'' Zindani cried. "The caliphate is coming!" He noted that, as an Islamist and a member of the official opposition, he was a latecomer to the movement. "You shamed the old people like me,'' he told the protesters. "You shamed all the people who said they wanted change but weren't willing to do what they had to do to make it happen."
He went on, "Our Prophet predicted that, one day, a ruler will oppress his people, and the people will take the power from him. We are now living with a leader who rules by force, and we need to get him out. After we get rid of this oppressor, there will be justice—and the caliphate."
The crowd cheered, though it was impossible to say whether it was for all of Zindani's remarks or just some of them. Zindani climbed down from the stage and departed with his gunmen.
A few minutes later, I spotted Karman, and we ducked inside a tent next to the stage. She was furious. "We had a big argument about Zindani—about whether to allow him," she said. "I was opposed. This is a youth movement, not a religious one."
The demonstrators who had gathered outside Sanaa University faced a dilemma: on their own, they did not represent the aspirations of Yemen's twenty-three million people, but, the more the movement grew, the more Islamist it threatened to become. Seventy per cent of Yemenis live in rural areas, and most are deeply religious.
Karman speculated that Zindani had volunteered to speak at the demonstration at the behest of the Saleh regime, in order to discredit the movement. The assertion, though conspiratorial, seemed plausible. For all the zeal in Zindani's speech, he did not call for Saleh to resign. Karman considered it absurd that Westerners had branded Zindani as particularly Islamist. "The real Islamists are in the government," she said. "Saleh keeps Al Qaeda alive because it gets the attention of the Americans. He meets with Al Qaeda. He helps them. Saleh and Zindani are so close it is disgusting! What has the government been saying about me for the past six weeks? That I'm ruining the morals of Yemen's women—that I am going against God's law. You want Islamists in office? You already have them."
Until his death, in 2007, Abdullah al-Ahmar was the head of Yemen's most powerful tribal confederation, the Hashids, whose members live primarily in the north. For decades, Ahmar, known as the "sheikh of sheikhs," acted as a shadow President, working with Saleh to pacify tribal leaders. Most Yemenis assumed that Ahmar had received millions from the Saudis to help keep Yemen quiet. In some respects, he had been as powerful as Saleh—he was the speaker of the parliament for more than a decade—but he purposely remained in the President's shadow. As a prominent northerner, he was wary of tipping the balance of power between the north and the south, which could lead to civil war.
Since Ahmar's death, his nine sons have taken on leadership roles in the tribe, and they do not appear to feel restrained by their father's traditions. When the revolt in Yemen began, two of the sons, Hussein and Hameed, threw their support to the protesters and joined the call for Saleh to resign.
The son who harbors the deepest ambitions is Hameed, the third-eldest, who is thirty-nine. In February, I visited him at his house in Sanaa. It looked like a warlord's lair in Afghanistan: a brick-and-marble villa surrounded by twenty-foot-high sandstone walls and a hundred men with guns. Guards stationed outside the house were encircled by an outer perimeter of guards with mounted machine guns. Only a week before our meeting, Hameed's guards had driven by the home of Noman Dowaid—the governor of Sanaa and a Saleh ally—and machine-gunned his house. Violence always lingers at the edge of Yemeni politics.
An aide led me into a cavernous stone mafraj—the traditional hall where Yemeni men gather to confer and chew khat. The floor was marble, and my steps echoed as I crossed the hall. After a few minutes, Hameed appeared in a turban and a white thawb, the customary Yemeni male robe; a massive jumbiya sword, in a brilliant-green sheath, had been tucked into a yellow sash. Hameed's traditional appearance, I had been told, could be deceptive. He is an avowed Islamist, but he also speaks perfect English, having spent summers in London as a boy. He is one of Yemen's few billionaires. Not only are he and his tribe thought to receive enormous subsidies from the Saudis; he has built, with the help of the Egyptian communications giant Orascom, Yemen's most successful cellular-phone network. (Hameed eventually expelled Orascom's people from Yemen and terminated the partnership.) One Yemeni political leader told me that Hameed might become Yemen's equivalent of Rafik Hariri—the construction magnate who helped rebuild Lebanon after its civil war.
It was late afternoon, the time of day when khat is traditionally chewed, and Hameed's right cheek bulged. Sitting next to me, he spoke carefully about his ambitions. "It is not my goal to be President,'' he said. That job, he said, should be reserved for someone from the south, to insure that Yemen didn't split apart again. His main political goal was to help build "a strong democracy, with real institutions and the rule of law."
When the conversation turned to Saleh, though, Hameed's reserve dissolved into florid psychoanalysis. "This man, Saleh, he never had any sort of strategic thinking or vision—his strategy from Day One was to remain in power," Hameed said. "His cleverness was to make the tribes always need him, to make them fight each other, so that they would need his weapons. This tribe against the other tribe, and Saleh the only one who can help them. So clever."
A courtier set down a platter of almonds and baklava. The food was for me; Hameed's mouth was still occupied with khat, which suppresses the appetite. He went on, "I believe the President had a very unhappy childhood—perhaps the most unhappy childhood in history. And he has spent his entire life taking revenge on people for this miserable childhood. This explains Saleh's character. Saleh is never so happy as when he has a powerful person before him, on his knees, begging for his life. This is what makes Saleh truly happy."
Hameed's excoriations seemed to reveal more about himself than they did about Saleh. "When you sit with him, he is a nice guy, you have good relations with him,'' Hameed continued. "He's a nice character. He likes to enjoy himself—he likes to go to a place where he can have fun. He drinks. He's in his sixties, but if he travels abroad he always carries Viagra in his pocket."
Soon, he said, he would not be able to keep members of the tribe from coming to the defense of the Yemenis in the streets. (A couple of days later, Hameed's brother Hussein spoke before thousands of tribesmen at a rally in Amran, a town northwest of Sanaa, calling on them to go to Sanaa to protect the demonstrators.)
"It's not easy to push people to want to be killed, but the President has done that,'' Hameed said. "When the President starts making chaos in the streets, that will be the point of no return."
In Yemen, the most common assumption about Hameed is that he would try to become Vice-President or Prime Minister, a post that could allow him to wield immense power from behind the scenes. Whatever the case, Hameed seemed to be preparing himself for change. "You don't know how things will move,'' he said. "There could be a sudden vacancy. And a need for a strong leader."
On December 17, 2009, in the lawless terrain of southern Yemen, the village of Al Majalah was destroyed by a series of military strikes. In a statement released the same day, the Yemeni government declared that its Air Force had carried out attacks against suspected Al Qaeda camps, killing thirty-four militants. The government noted that the U.S. had shared intelligence with the Saleh government, but acknowledged no other American involvement.
In the following months, the Yemeni statement was exposed as a deception. In fact, the strikes had been carried out by Tomahawk cruise missiles. Moreover, survivors of the attack insisted that the victims were nearly all civilians.
The bombing of Al Majalah was one of a number of American operations against Al Qaeda that were carried out under a secret understanding with the Yemeni government. An American official with knowledge of the attack confirmed that, in 2009 and 2010, the U.S. conducted at least four air strikes in Yemen. These operations, two of which occurred the same month as the failed Christmas Day bomb plot, were the first significant U.S.-led strikes in Yemen since November, 2002, when Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a suspected Al Qaeda leader, was killed in his car by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone.
Meanwhile, about a thousand Yemenis are being trained in the American program designed to help the Saleh regime fight terrorism. Yemeni officials say that they are proud of their government's efforts in the fight against Al Qaeda. Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, the Yemeni foreign minister, told me that in the past year the Yemeni security forces had lost seventy people in fights against Al Qaeda. "We are suffering real losses,'' he said.
The exact terms of the agreement between the American military and the Yemeni government are murky. According to one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, in early 2010 Saleh met with General Petraeus and told him that he would continue to misrepresent operations such as the one in Al Majalah. "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,'' he said.
Yet, despite Saleh's promises of coöperation, he appears to have quietly reversed his position. This change can be traced to last May, after an air strike targeting Al Qaeda fighters killed Jabir al-Shabwani, the deputy of the Marib governorate, in central Yemen. According to Yemeni press accounts, Shabwani was killed in a village near his home, where he was meeting with Al Qaeda fighters.
At the time, the Yemeni government claimed to have participated in the operation and promised to launch an investigation. It has been silent ever since. Shabwani's death so angered members of his tribe, the Abeida, that they fought several gun battles with Yemeni security forces.
The senior Administration official told me that Shabwani's presence at an Al Qaeda meeting suggested that he had deep ties to the group: "We know that a number of local officials have maintained relationships to Al Qaeda and have given them safe haven."
No U.S.-led operations have been undertaken since then. The Western official said that such efforts "basically stopped.'' The senior Administration official told me, "We are trying to assess, in the current political turmoil there, how we can prosecute counterterrorism operations in a way that will not create more problems and more turmoil." He added, "The concern is that the government is losing control in the outlying areas."
Meanwhile, Saleh's own counterterrorism units, for all the money and training they receive, are accomplishing very little, the Western official told me: "The problem is, they are really bad. It's basically one group of thugs versus another group of thugs." The senior Administration official said of the Yemeni forces, "They are not doing as much as they should," but emphasized that the effort was still new. "This takes time," he said. "It takes training and prodding and encouragement."
This relative inactivity by American and Yemeni forces means that, for the past year, there have been almost no major military operations against Al Qaeda threats—at least, none that have been publicly disclosed. As for the seventy dead Yemeni troops cited by the foreign minister, the Western official said that most of the casualties occurred during Al Qaeda attacks on Yemeni forces.
Some observers of Yemen fear that Saleh's real intention is to use the U.S.-trained counterterrorism forces against his domestic opponents, including nonviolent protesters. As an American military officer put it, Saleh is less interested in "going after the bad guys" than he is in "protecting the warden."
In March, I spoke with several survivors of the attack on Al Majalah. We met in Aden at the Mercure Hotel, a seaside resort with panoramic views of the Arabian Sea. The hotel is owned by the bin Laden family, and is just around the bend from the spot where the U.S.S. Cole was bombed.
Hussein Abdullah, a herdsman, told me that he had been tending a herd of goats and camels when Al Majalah was hit. He recalled lying in his tent at sunrise, half-awake, when there was an enormous flash. "The sky turned white,'' Abdullah said. "Everything suddenly disappeared." He was knocked unconscious, and when he came to, he told me, he saw his wife running toward him. "And when she threw her arms around me I felt blood all over me," he said. She died, as did his daughter; only his infant son survived.
I also met a fifteen-year-old named Fatima Ali, who rolled up the sleeve of her chador, revealing hideous burns. Another girl showed me her hand, which was missing a finger. She had lost her mother in the raid.
Six months afterward, Amnesty International released photographs of Al Majalah showing an American cluster bomb and a propulsion unit from a Tomahawk missile. A subsequent investigation by the Yemeni parliament found that fourteen Al Qaeda fighters had been killed in the attack, along with forty-one civilians, including twenty-three children.
Saleh bin Farid al-Aulaki, a member of the parliamentary commission, told me that he later met with Saleh, who apologized for the disaster. "He told me that the government had bad information,'' Aulaki said.
The American official said that aerial surveillance had confirmed that Al Majalah was a training camp for militants. "I am very comfortable with that,'' he said. But he was troubled by the civilian casualties. "It's a terrible outcome,'' the official said. "Nobody wanted that."
Shortly after the strike, Abdulelah Hider Shaea, a journalist for the state-run news service, Saba, questioned the initial statements by the government. Appearing on Al Jazeera, Shaea claimed that civilians had been killed and that the strike had likely involved American cruise missiles. He made similar charges on subsequent broadcasts.
Last August, Yemeni authorities surrounded Shaea's house and took him away. For a month, there was no information about his whereabouts. Finally, the government revealed that Shaea had been charged with being a member of Al Qaeda.
Shaea had published many articles about Al Qaeda, including an interview with Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric. (His questions were direct and betrayed no sympathies for the group.) Saeed Thabit, the Sanaa bureau chief for Al Jazeera, said that Shaea had maintained contacts with Al Qaeda operatives but was not an extremist: "He was just a good journalist.''
After a very short trial, Shaea was convicted, and was sentenced to five years in prison. According to his lawyer, Abdul Rehman Ali Barman, and to several journalists who attended the proceedings, the evidence used to convict him was thin. Prosecutors claimed that they had found on Shaea's laptop the transcript of a conversation in which he and an Al Qaeda member discussed helping recruits from Somalia. The court was also presented with photographs taken inside walled compounds, allegedly by Shaea; according to the prosecutors, the images confirmed that he had been casing places for Al Qaeda to bomb.
Members of the Yemeni journalistic community began demanding the release of Shaea, who, according to Barman, had been beaten in prison. In January, Barman said, he received unexpected good news: Saleh intended to pardon Shaea.
A month later, after Saleh announced that he was going to step down in 2013, President Obama called Saleh to wish him well. According to a White House statement, Obama also expressed "concern" about Shaea's potential release. The statement offered no more details. Shaea remains in prison.
The American official familiar with the Al Majalah incident said that U.S. and Yemeni officials had worked together to assemble a case against Shaea. Classified evidence, the former official said, indicated that Shaea had indeed been coöperating with Al Qaeda. "I was persuaded that he was an agent,'' the American official said. But this evidence was not introduced in court. The Shaea case may be the most disturbing example of the shorthand that exists between the Obama Administration and the Saleh regime.
Compared with events in Egypt and Tunisia, the climax in Yemen was slow in coming. From the beginning, the demonstrators mimicked the embracing attitude of their counterparts in Cairo: on the edge of the protest area, young men politely patted down anyone who wished to take part. The square outside Sanaa University was given a new name: Change Square. The protesters started using the word "revolution," predicting—naïvely—that Yemen would lose its dictator in the manner of Egypt: peacefully, easily, and quickly.
For the first several weeks, the protesters did little more than sit around and chat. One day in February, I heard one of them idly ask his friends, "Has he resigned yet?'' Every afternoon, young men brought wheelbarrows filled with khat for the protesters. Someone set up a trampoline just off the square.
But the demonstrators didn't give up, and, eventually, the crowds grew—in Sanaa, in Taiz, in Aden, in Ibb. Attendance spiked after the week of February 13th, when police in Aden killed at least ten protesters. Over the next two weeks, thirteen members of parliament, all from Saleh's party, resigned in protest.
One of them was Abd al-Bari Dughaish, a neurologist from Aden. In late February, I met him for tea at the Sheba Hotel, in Sanaa. Dughaish had grown up in what was then South Yemen, coming of age when it was a socialist state. He'd gone to medical school in East Germany, and witnessed the collapse of Communism. "I'm still a socialist,'' he said. He was wearing a suit and tie.
For years, Dughaish had felt that representing Saleh in parliament was essentially corrupt. "I was a member of the fake democracy,'' Dughaish said. "Whenever there was something to vote on, we would vote yes. Most of the other members didn't care—they just picked up their salaries. I hated myself for it, but I did it anyway."
Dughaish told me that he was possibly more sensitive to the brutalities of Saleh's regime because he came from the south, where many Yemenis have pushed to secede, and because his experience in East Germany let him witness another autocratic regime desperately clinging to power. Despite his membership in the ruling party, Dughaish sometimes wrote opinion pieces for Al Ayyam, a daily in Aden that often pointedly criticized Saleh.
For years, Dughaish told himself that he was making the regime more humane. "I was one of those people who try to bring change inside the house where you are living," he said. "But the truth is, I am not a brave man. I am a coward."
A chain of events transformed him. In May, 2009, Al Ayyam was shut down by the government, and seven months later its publisher, Hisham Basharheel, was arrested on murder charges. The charges, Dughaish said, were widely believed to have been concocted by the government. In July, 2010, Dughaish's brother, Mohammed, was murdered near Aden. Mohammed had been a critic of Saleh. Although Dughaish could not prove it, he believed that his brother had been killed by the regime.
Then the citizens of Tunisia revolted, and the protests outside Sanaa University started. At first, Dughaish watched them on television—not on the official state channel but on Al Jazeera and TV Suhail, a station owned by Hameed al-Ahmar, the billionaire Islamist, and beamed in from India. (Throughout the upheaval, state television ran panel discussions and wildlife documentaries.) "The young people gave me courage,'' Dughaish said. "They brought us a new reality."
On February 16th, riot police in Aden killed two protesters. Dughaish was enraged. But he was not yet ready to quit. Then he was summoned by the Vice-President, Abdo Rabo Mansour Hadi, who is also a southerner. Hadi asked Dughaish to go to Aden to help calm people down. "When I got to Aden, I saw what the regime had done with my own eyes,'' Dughaish told me. "I saw people who had been killed. I saw their families. I saw burned-out buildings."
Two days later, the police killed four more protesters in Aden. On the nineteenth, Dughaish submitted his resignation and braced himself for a wave of criticism. Instead, he told me, he was overwhelmed with praise, receiving hundreds of phone calls and thousands of e-mails saluting him. "People said, 'Bari, we have been waiting for you. You were not in a good place.' "
The size of the crowds outside Sanaa University began to surge—from one to three thousand, from ten to thirty thousand. Saleh began sending in plainclothesmen with sticks, truncheons, and, eventually, guns. Protesters were beaten, stoned, and shot. But the brutality backfired, infuriating large numbers of Yemenis and sending them into the streets.
In late February, eleven young Yemenis were invited to visit Saleh at the palace and share their complaints. One of the guests was Shatha al-Harazi, a twenty-five-year-old reporter for the Yemen Times, an English-language newspaper. At a café in Sanaa, I met Harazi and two others who had attended the meeting.
Harazi seemed as modern and effusive as Tawakkol Karman. At first, she said, she hadn't wanted to meet Saleh, thinking that it would be futile. After much discussion with friends, she decided to go, but she swore to herself that if she got a chance to speak directly to the President she would tell him exactly what she thought.
At the start of the meeting, Saleh was charming and self-deprecating. Then the visitors began to speak, and each of them gave the President the same message: his regime was corrupt, brutal, and unrepresentative, and young people had no prospects. At first, Harazi told me, Saleh said that he agreed with the protesters—too many of his officials took bribes, too few young Yemenis could find jobs. But as the discussion went on Saleh grew visibly annoyed. Harazi, who spoke third, was undaunted. "I told him that he should resign," she said.
After the sixth speaker presented the same litany of complaints, Saleh seemed to snap. "O.K.!" the President cried. "I am corrupt. Everyone around me is corrupt. I like corrupt people!" He suddenly stood up. "I'm not changing anything," he said. "Everything stays the way it is."
But Saleh was losing control. Even his favored tactic—payoffs—began to fail him. One night in March, as I walked among the demonstrators, I went into a large tent and sat down with a group of tribal leaders. They had come to Sanaa from Marib. Their presence indicated that the protests were no longer drawing only the young, urban, and educated. Saleh and people close to him claimed that the tribesmen streaming into Sanaa had been paid by wealthy benefactors—in particular, by Hameed al-Ahmar.
Ahmed al-Zaidi, a leader of the Bin Jaber tribe, said, "I am here because there has been no development in my district—no electricity, no schools, no water, nothing.'' Marib is one of Yemen's main oil-producing regions. "Where does all the money go?" he asked.
Zaidi sat in a semicircle with about a dozen followers. Though his group was small, it was a symbol of wider discontent, and it frightened the authorities. A day earlier, he told me, an emissary from Saleh's office had called and offered him ten million rials—about fifty thousand dollars—to leave the capital. He refused. The next day, he was approached in the square by another emissary; this time, the offer was half a million dollars. "I told him I wasn't for sale,'' Zaidi said.
Zaidi said that some of the elders in his tribe still received large payments from Saleh and from the Saudis. But taking money from the government was increasingly frowned upon. Zaidi explained, "The tribal leaders who do this are no longer respected by the people."
On the other side of the tent, young Yemenis had gathered around an elegantly dressed man seated on the floor. He was an Army colonel named Murad al-Muradi, and he had defected just thirty minutes earlier. Saleh, he said, had been in power too long.
One of the most worrying possible outcomes if Saleh departs is the splintering of the Yemeni Army into rival factions, which could cause an all-out civil war. Colonel Muradi declared that cracks were already visible. "A lot of the officers are still with Saleh, but more and more are turning,'' he told me. "The wheels of history are turning.'' The Yemenis around him nodded. "The people will not go back."
On March 18th, about a week after Saleh gave his speech in the Stadium of the Revolution, snipers carried out a massacre in the square in Sanaa, killing at least fifty-two people and wounding two hundred. Saleh supporters raced through the square, setting fire to the protesters' tents. The snipers had taken up positions in buildings on one of the streets leading into the square. When the gunfire erupted, the crowd surged—toward the shooting.
Adel al-Shami, a protester who was wounded in his torso, said of the snipers, "They were shooting people in the head, neck, and eyes.''
I found Shami, who is twenty-seven, inside the university's mosque, where he was resting alongside other wounded protesters. Some of the shooters, Shami said, wore the uniforms of Yemen's security agencies. "They were so professional,'' he said. "They were so close I could look into their eyes."
In the U.S., Brennan condemned the killings by the Yemeni government in "the strongest terms," but he still did not call on Saleh to step down. Secretary of State Clinton told reporters, "With regard to Yemen, our message remains the same: the violence needs to end, negotiations need to be pursued in order to reach a political solution."
But the White House, like Saleh, was being overtaken by events. At the beginning of March, the opposition finally went into the streets. The leaders of the J.M.P. stopped asking to join Saleh's government and instead demanded that he quit. The American plan to defuse the demonstrations through political accommodation had collapsed.
Yassin Noman, the leader of the Socialist Party, told me, "Now Saleh is just maneuvering. The revolution cannot be stopped."
In the days after the March 18th massacre, public support for Saleh plummeted and he was abandoned by the central pillars of Yemen's political establishment: the Sunni clerics, the leaders of the largest tribes, even members of his own cabinet. The biggest blow came from the military, the foundation of Saleh's rule. In a speech on March 21st, General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, the country's most influential officer, who has been a partner of Saleh's for thirty years, renounced the President, saying, "According to what I'm feeling, and according to the feelings of my partner commanders and soldiers . . . I announce our support and our peaceful backing of the youth revolution."
Within hours, Army units loyal to the General had surrounded Sanaa University, in order to protect the protesters from attacks. Meanwhile, soldiers still loyal to Saleh, some of them driving tanks, took up positions around the palace. On March 25th, a hundred thousand Yemenis came together at Sanaa University—and perhaps a million others gathered in other cities—for a rally called Departure Friday.
Saleh opened discussions with the opposition and then promptly broke them off. "I will turn power over to safe hands,'' he said in a speech. Three days later, he declared in another speech that he had the support of ninety-five per cent of Yemenis. "Who should leave?" he said. "Of course, the minority that threatens the nation.'' He seemed tormented—aware that his grip on power was slipping, but unable, after three decades, to let go. In late March, he ordered most of his security forces into Sanaa to protect him, including the American-trained counterterrorism units.
Saleh's ambivalence was mirrored in Washington. The senior Administration official told me that he was pushing Saleh to present a detailed plan for transferring power and then quit. "We have made it clear that transition needs to occur, and must begin now," the official said. The Americans' preferred scenario, the official said, was that Vice-President Hadi would succeed Saleh, as provided for in the Yemeni constitution.
It was hardly certain that Hadi would be strong enough to hold off Zindani, the Islamist cleric; or Ahmar, the Islamist billionaire; or an empowered Al Qaeda. "There is a potential power vacuum,'' the senior Administration official said. "We want to make sure that this is not an abdication."
In late March, anarchy began to spread across Yemen, and the government started pulling out of violent areas. In the southern town of Jaar, a group of Islamist gunmen briefly took over a government building after security forces departed; Yemeni officials later claimed that the gunmen were members of Al Qaeda, but that wasn't clear. In the north, Houthi rebels took control of the city of Saada after the provincial governor and his aides fled. In the most spectacular incident, a government ammunition factory in Khanfar exploded after security forces retreated and looters descended on it; more than a hundred people were killed. Meanwhile, Yemen's economic crisis appeared to deepen. The Western official told me that Saleh's regime was no longer able to secure credit to import food.
It was difficult to tell how much of the chaos was real and how much of it was being assisted by the government, in order to arouse international concern. Saleh increasingly invoked the spectre of Somalia. "We are a tribal society,'' he told the satellite channel Al Arabiya. "Everyone will side with his tribe, and we will then end up with a destructive civil war." But there was little hard evidence that Yemen's tribes were preparing for battle, or that Al Qaeda was taking advantage of Saleh's collapse. The government would surely be weaker without Saleh, but it was weak to begin with.
In one sense, the revolt in Yemen has been extraordinarily peaceful. The Yemenis protesting Saleh's rule have not, by and large, turned to violence, even after they were provoked, wounded, shot, and killed. One day in late March, I went to the square at Sanaa University to visit Tawakkol Karman. I found her sitting outside a tent where she'd been living for the past three weeks. Her husband was sitting with her.
"Saleh is very dangerous now,'' Karman told me. "We thought he was going to resign last week"—on Departure Friday. "The American Embassy thought so—they told us. But he didn't. The young people are very frustrated, very angry."
On Departure Friday, the protest leaders had considered staging a march on the Presidential Palace—a blunt attempt to force Saleh's hand. Many observers, including the Americans, worried that such a march would result in extensive bloodshed, so the protesters called it off. Now Karman and her compatriots were feeling that an opportunity had passed.
"We will escalate by all peaceful means," she promised. "But no violence."
Change Square now had a deflated feel. The crowds had thinned. A dust storm had settled over the city, covering everything in a dirty haze. People blamed the Saudis for the storm; they blamed the Saudis for many things, especially for propping up Saleh.
The talk turned to the Americans. "We are disappointed in Obama,'' Karman told me. "We need a strong statement from him." It was now ten weeks into the uprising, and the Obama Administration had still not publicly called on Saleh to leave.
Even if Karman and her comrades succeeded in pushing Saleh from power, it seemed likely that they would be pushed aside themselves by Yemenis better equipped to exploit uncertainty. "We have a plan for the transition,'' she said, but it wasn't terribly specific. She told me that she had no real interest in political power.
On Friday, April 1st, anti-government protesters drew their largest crowd to date, with tens of thousands of Yemenis pouring into Change Square to call for an end to Saleh's rule. Just across town, Saleh staged a rally in his own honor, much like the Stadium of the Revolution event a month earlier. Participants were bused in from around the country and received a typical day's wages, in the form of a meal, a handful of cash, and a bag of khat. (The Western official said that the government had spent as much as fourteen million dollars to stage a Saleh rally the previous week.) One Yemeni, when asked why he had travelled from the city of Al Mahwit to cheer the President, just shrugged. "Money,'' he said.
For all the artifice, Saleh was said to be deeply moved by the event, which convinced him that he is still the object of Yemenis' love. "He was leaning toward quitting," the Western official said. "But he's started to change his mind.''
One day during the uprising, I met one of Saleh's advisers for lunch at Zorba's, a bistro in Hadda, a wealthy neighborhood in Sanaa. It was a busy time at the palace and I felt lucky to have secured the appointment. The adviser, who'd spent time in the U.S., ordered a platter of broiled shrimp and a Diet Coke.
President Saleh, he told me, had lost his desire to be Yemen's leader. It was only his sense of duty that kept him in office. "He doesn't want the job anymore,'' the adviser said. "He's tired."
The adviser said that he was unimpressed by the demonstrations. "One million people doesn't represent the will of the people," he said. "The people don't want Saleh to leave."
A platter of shrimp arrived. The adviser looked at his food, but he did not touch it.
The adviser said he was gravely worried that Yemen would break up. He sketched out the scenario: the south would secede first, then the Houthis would leave; in the east, the Saudis would persuade some opportunistic tribesmen to break away, finally giving Saudi Arabia a land route to the Arabian Sea.
"The opposition wouldn't last ten days,'' the adviser told me. "Yemen would descend into civil war. And that's what the Islamists want. Hameed al-Ahmar would drive straight into the palace."
We returned to Saleh and his predicament. "He's under pressure,'' the adviser said. "The question is: how much can he stand?"
We walked out together. The shrimp were in a box. As we headed toward his car, he told me, "Only Saleh can hold Yemen. Remember that." Then he drove back to the palace. ♦


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Located in the heart of the busy bustling streets of Hollywood lies a hidden gem,Aventine Trattoria in Hollywood. Where old school romance is intertwined with impeccable architecture, and decadent bites. Aventine provides an elite, romantic, setting complete with a chic alley way that will give you an experience that will leave you feeling like you're in the streets of Lady and The Tramp!
Recently Aventine celebrated its one year anniversary. Guests were able to fast a variety of flavorful food prepared by Chef Adolfo Veronese. Aventine is a joint partnership between San Francisco brothers Gian-Paolo Veronese and accomplished Chef Adolfo Veronese with Los Angeles restaurant specialists Sylvain Bitton and JT Torregiani.
Sponsored by Caymus Wines and Azunia Tequila, the one year anniversary was a celebration of not only success, but a celebration of breathing a fresh, chill, yet upscale vibe that is refreshing to Hollywood.
Too Short, Shahs of Sunset star GG Gharachedaghi stopped in for the celebration. As well as Macy Gray, who showed off her DJ'ing skills by holding it down on the 1s and 2s for the evening.
The first year is always the hardest, but Aventine has effortlessly made its mark in Hollywood! Be sure to check it out for yourself!

subset: commoncrawl


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Jewelweed Herb
Veterinarian Reviewed on June 15, 2012 by Paulina Nelega, RH
Posted in Uncategorized
Jewelweed Herb
Jewelweed herb (Impatiens capensis) is a flowering plant which is distributed in the Northern Hemisphere and in the regions of the tropics. Other names of the Jewelweed herb are impatiens, balsams and touch-me-nots which are common in European countries and in North America.
The leaves of the Jewelweed herb are smooth in texture and the flowers may look like little trumpets that may hang from the Jewelweed plant like a beautiful necklace. There are several varieties of the Jewelweed herb and some flowers may be colored pale yellow and orange with red dots.
The Jewelweed herb is known to have an antipruritic effect and is used in many herbal remedies.
History and Origin
The Jewelweed herb is cultivated as a garden plant because of the pretty variety of flowers. The name Jewelweed herb is mainly derived from the colorful flowers that hang from the plant. There are many medicinal uses of the Jewelweed and it is found to be most effective in the treatment of insect bites and sever itching due to various skin allergies.
Ancient Uses
The use of the Jewelweed herb during ancient times was for the treatment of stings and insect bites. It was also used as a poultice to treat wounds and boils, reducing infection and inflammation of cuts and other skin disorders.
Modern Uses
The Jewelweed herb is considered to be a very effective home remedy in the treatment of insect stings and bites. Bee stings, stinging nettle and poison ivy are easily treated by the Jewelweed herb due to its antipruritic effect.
Jewelweed herb also contains chemicals like quinine that acts as an anti-inflammatory agent and as a fungicide that can treat fungal infections of the skin and nails. Other skin healing properties of the Jewelweed herb is seen in the treatment of rashes due to skin allergies. There are also poultices and salves that can be prepared with Jewelweed herb and are very effective to remedy bruises, cuts, burns, sores, sprains and parasitic infections of the skin such as ringworms.
Jewelweed herb is also an ingredient in Henna which is used in hair coloring and in skin coloring or tattoos. In fact, Jewelweed herb mixed with rose and orchid petals are used as nail polish in China.
Side Effects
Jewelweed is not advised to be taken orally as a decoction, tincture or as Jewelweed herb tea. This may cause a bad reaction with alcohol and may also be very toxic. Jewelweed can be infused and preserved for later use. Although there are no side effects for the use of Jewelweed herb as a topical treatment of many skin irritation and skin infections, pregnant and lactating women are cautioned against the use of this herbal remedy.
Although it is best to use Jewelweed herb as a home remedy for skin illnesses but it is still better to consult a dermatologist for any skin disorder to get the most appropriate treatment and accurate diagnosis. Wash the skin with soap and water before applying Jewelweed herb preparations on wounds, cuts and boils. Never apply Jewelweed herb on infected skin or in open cuts with oozing blood or pus. Always have a doctor diagnose wounds for infection before applying any herbal remedy.
Our Expert
Paulina Nelega, RH, has been in private practice as a Clinical Herbalist for over 15 years. She has developed and taught courses in herbal medicine, and her articles on health have appeared in numerous publications. She is very passionate about the healing power of nature. Ask Dr. Jan


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- Rear auto-focus 8MP camera with LED flash, 5-element lens, large F/2.2 aperture and back illuminated CMOS sensor for crystal clear shots
- Super IPS+ panel for ultra bright outdoor readability with 178° wide viewing angles
- Corning® Gorilla® Glass 2 provides improved impact resistance
The slimmest and lightest 1920x1200 resolution Full HD Android Tablet
Feeling unsatisfied with the quality of an average screen? An upgrade to a FHD screen is what you need. The 1920x1200 resolution is more exquisite and offers more details for a Full HD visual experience. The Super IPS+ offers 600nits of ultra bright backlight so it can be read easily, even under sunlight, at angles up to 178° wide. Screen toughness is also not a problem. As the 1st tablet with the latest generation Corning® Gorilla® Glass 2 , the Infinity offers improved screen impact resistance so it'll look great even after extended usage. Get immersed in entertainment on the Transformer Pad Infinity!
The Fastest NVIDIA® Tegra® 3 CPU Ever
Powered by the fastest NVIDIA® Tegra® 3 4-Plus-1™ chip around, the world's 1st quad-core mobile CPU blazes at 1.6GHz, providing the Transformer Pad Infinity the power to browse the web and play 1080p HD video at lightning fast speeds. The snappier response time and better multi-tasking performance make the Transformer Pad Infinity a true mobile entertainment powerhouse.
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Designed for the next generation of mobile games. More realism with dynamic lighting, physical effects and high resolution environments.
Incredible audio experience with ASUS Sonicmaster Technology
Tuned by the ASUS Golden ears team, audio on the Transformer Pad Infinity is delivered with the most precise processing protocols and codecs, superior speaker construction and large resonance chambers for unforgettable audio enjoyment.
Transform to notebook mode
with a full QWERTY chiclet keyboard mobile dock and up to 14 hours* of battery life. Admit it! You miss the touch and feel of a real QWERTY keyboard. The Transformer Pad Infinity offers you a choice to enjoy both notebook and tablet mode and flexible data transfer or storage with the built-in SD card reader and USB port in the optional mobile dock .
The mobile dock offers a full QWERTY keyboard with touchpad and USB port, while also extending battery life to an incredible 14 hours* for all day computing on the go.
Steps of update:
- Check the software version of your ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity TF700T *
- Download the ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity TF700T Firmware: V10.6.1.14.4 (for US SKU version only) and Update version of SOP (from "Manual" Item)
*Please note that the firmware update cannot do *SKU conversions* or downgrades of your current software version. Using the wrong SKU may cause an update failure. You can only update your software version if you use the same SKU. To check the software version of your ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity TF700T, please go to: [Settings] -> [About tablet] -> Build number Example: You should be able to see the build number WW_epad-9.X.X.X._2012xxxx, where "WW" means SKU.
- June 3, 2013
- Windows (all)
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- July 18, 2012
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text:
tanyama needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
2 winners were selected from 60 designs submitted by 23 freelance designers.
Looking for a complete logo design including logo, letter head, business card, flyer and brochure. Looking for upbeat, contemporary look.
Fitness Fellowship
Shaping God's Temples
Desired Color Scheme:
Main color purple.
Desired Style:
Fresh, clean, upbeat, contemporary look.
Accepted File Formats:
PDF, jpeg
This is a Christian based exercise program for ladies. The exercise program includes using light weights, exercise ball, and cardio. The program will be primarily marketed to churches.
This contest was originally listed in multiple categories:
- Logo Design
- Stationery Design
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


text:
Modeling and rating executives at the 2017 Rendez-Vous de Septembre conference in Monte Carlo, Monaco, assess the long-term costs of recent U.S. storms.
September 13, 2017
Register to be notified of new A.M. BestTV episodes.
Loss Estimates Fall Short in Gauging Post-Event CostsSeptember 13, 2017
Reinsurance Panel: Recent Cats Will Affect Markets in Different WaysSeptember 13, 2017
JLT Re's Reynolds: Europe Repositioning Slowed Ahead of Political ResolutionSeptember 13, 2017
Aon Benfield's Van Slooten Sees a Modest Upturn in Demand for ReinsuranceSeptember 12, 2017
Asta's Holm: Entrepreneurial Opportunities Driving Surge in MGAsSeptember 12, 2017
Barbican's Reeves Sets Sights on African, Southeast Asian MarketsSeptember 12, 2017
RMS' Pritula: Data is Plentiful; The Challenge is Drawing Economic ValueSeptember 12, 2017
A.M. Best's Outlook for Reinsurance: Negative, but Possible UpsidesSeptember 11, 2017
LMG's Beazley: London Gaining the Components to Become an ILS CenterSeptember 11, 2017
Gen Re's Toffanello: UK, Italy, South Africa See Major Risk DevelopmentsSeptember 11, 2017
PwC's O'Hearn: The More Things Change, the More They Need Change ManagementSeptember 11, 2017
Reinsurers: Protection Gap Is Also a First-World ProblemSeptember 11, 2017
A.M. Best's Mosher: Methodology Update Could Affect Small Number of RatingsSeptember 11, 2017
Aon Benfield's Andersen: Focus on Paying the Claims First, Pricing LaterSeptember 11, 2017
CoreLogic's Botts: Most Harvey Flood Losses Were Outside 100-Year ZonesSeptember 11, 2017
Mazars' Skeels: Broking, Lloyd's Attract Most M&A InterestSeptember 11, 2017
Swiss Re's Karl: Catastrophe Claims Response Will Put Sectors in the SpotlightSeptember 11, 2017
Hamilton's Brown: Next Wave of Competitors Will Tie Tech to New CapitalSeptember 11, 2017
Qatar Re's Saacke: Machine Learning Will Help Manage the Data DelugeSeptember 11, 2017
IGI's Jabsheh: Middle East Insurers Eye Expansion in Africa, AsiaSeptember 11, 2017
Perils' Held Explains Why Modelers' Loss Estimates ChangeSeptember 11, 2017
ICMIF's Tarbuck: Mutuals Taking First Steps in ILS MarketSeptember 11, 2017
Munich Re's Kuczinski: Traditional Re Shrinking; New Risks ExpandingSeptember 11, 2017
Bermuda's Kading: Island In Midst of Fifth Wave of Capital FormationSeptember 11, 2017
Axis' Benchimol: Novae Acquisition Should Put Us in Lloyd's Top 10September 11, 2017
Clyde & Co.'s Konsta: Insurance M&A Hits the Slowdown PhaseSeptember 11, 2017
Lloyd's Beale on CII Role: Let's Build Trust Through ProfessionalismSeptember 11, 2017
Africa Re's Karekezi: Market Fragmentation Challenges Africa's Insurers September 11, 2017
Axa Investment's Price: Insurers Shift Assets to Counter Low-Rate EnvironmentSeptember 11, 2017
Lloyd's Beale: We're Set for Catastrophe ClaimsSeptember 11, 2017
Global Reinsurers See More Than Catastrophe Risk on HorizonSeptember 10, 2017
Tokio Millennium's Ruoff: Current Cats Likely to Spur Alternative CapitalSeptember 10, 2017
JLT's Flandro: Reinsurance Sector Still "Two or Three Iterations" From RecapitalizationSeptember 10, 2017
Hamilton Re's Reardon: Microinsurance Yields Lessons in Closing Protection GapSeptember 10, 2017
Willis' Dubinsky: Devastating Storm Losses Could Trigger One-Third of Cat ILSSeptember 10, 2017
AIR's Churney: It's Not Just the Cyberrisk, It's the Interconnected RisksSeptember 10, 2017
Willis Re's Cavanagh and Kent: Fewer Companies Means Brokers Cast Wider NetsSeptember 10, 2017
TigerRisk's Crawley: MGAs May Be the Flavor of the Day, But Little Is NewSeptember 10, 2017
Hannover Re's Wallin: ILS Growth Limited by Shorter TailSeptember 10, 2017
Hurricane Irma Is 'Either the Day of Reckoning or the Day of Glory' for ILS MarketSeptember 10, 2017
Facing Slim Returns, Reinsurers Look to New Sectors, VenuesSeptember 5, 2017


text:
Even when they are flush? On 1/9/06 1:11 AM, "Rogers, Tony" <email@example.com> wrote: > You really have to watch the Canadian spellings, too - most English-speaking > countries have "straits", but they have "straights" - any bets that their > "straights" are narrow? > > :-) > > > From: firstname.lastname@example.com on behalf of David Hull > Sent: Mon 09-Jan-06 17:08 > To: David Orchard > Cc: email@example.com > Subject: Re: Visitors Guide to Vancouver > > Dave, > > Thanks for the writeup, and particularly the native's perspective. A few > questions come to mind: > * Do people speak mainly Canadian there, or will they understand English? > * I notice that public parks are measured in hectares and speed limits in > km/h, but seawalls are measured in miles. Are there any other interesting > non-metric measurements in use? > * Will my CDs still play in Canada, or will they have to be converted to > metric? > * Do Canadians consider themselves American, and if not, what continent do > they claim to live on? > Seriously though, I still remember an incident from fifteen years or so ago at > a service counter somewhere in the bowels of YYZ. I was coming back from the > Netherlands and had plenty of time to make my connection. The gentleman ahead > of me, also from the US, was not so fortunate. Growing ever more irate, he > told the clerk that he had been at the gate N minutes before departure (I > forget what value of N). The clerk informed him that he had need to be there > N+k minutes before departure. "No," the gentleman said, "the FAA regulations > say N minutes." "Sir," the clerk said, "it's N+k minutes," and then, with a > perfectly timed pause and icy politeness, "You're in a different country, > sir." > > David Orchard wrote: >> I've written up a Visitor's Guide to Vancouver at >> http://www.pacificspirit.com/VancouverGuide.html. >> >> >> >> Hopefully this will provide some useful information for visitors. Let >> me know if you have any comments, criticisms, suggestions. Bear in mind >> I've been somewhat time constrained of late :-) >> >> >> >> Huge, Mark, can we get this linked to from the w3c wsa registration >> pages? >> >> >> >> Cheers, >> >> Dave >> >> >> > >Received on Wednesday, 18 January 2006 00:27:42 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Friday, 17 January 2020 19:28:31 UTC


text:
Family Matters : A History of Genealogy
As a popular history of the subject, rather than yet another 'how to' guide, Family Matters puts the study of family history itself into a historical and social context. The book traces the rise of genealogy from an esoteric interest of gentlemen and scholars to a mainstream hobby enjoyed by millions. It describes in vivid detail the landmark events and the personalities behind them, telling the story of the evolution of family history through the eyes of those involved. It also looks forward to some of the challenges facing family history in the future, as a result of factors such as commercialisation, legislation and new technologies. This original and highly readable work offers a fresh perspective on an activity that is not just a fast-growing leisure pursuit but also a rapidly expanding business sector and an important field for public policy.
Family Matters will be fascinating reading for family and local history enthusiasts, providing them with an engaging account of the development of their favourite pastime. It will also appeal to social historians and to everyone who is interested in the role of public information and archives in popular culture.


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Financial aid administrators (FAAs) took to Capitol Hill Tuesday to advocate against the standardization of award letters and for support of Federal Student Aid funding.
FAAs lobby Congress at the Committee on Education and the Workforce in DC Tuesday. From left to right: NASFAA Policy Director Megan McClean, University Financial Aid at University of Chicago Executive Director Amanda Fijal and Montclair State University Associate Director of Student Financial Aid Lucy Candal-Fernandez
The congressional meetings were part of NASFAA's Leadership and Legislative Conference, which provides intensive preparation for state and regional association members in leadership positions or about to assume such positions. Leaders representing financial aid offices throughout the country took the time Tuesday morning to seek out their area representatives and express the dire need for long-term solutions - versus short-term Band-Aids - for federal student financial aid programs that are critical to ensuring U.S. competitiveness and college access and affordability for low-income students.
Though most lawmakers and their staff were well aware of the more pertinent financial aid issues dominating the agenda, ears perked at news of how a certain proposal to standardize award letters might affect institutions and students. This past fall, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in partnership with ED, collected consumer feedback on a standardized "shopping sheet" to help students and their families compare cost of attendance, student aid packages and possibly even estimated student loan debt and repayment rates.
FAAs told lawmakers that improvements to award notifications are of course desirable and a certain level of defined terminology would be welcome, but the regulation of award letters could interfere with an institution's ability to meet the specific needs of its unique student body.
Some FAAs noted that schools need the flexibility to provide a cost estimate that allows for students and parents to make adjustments based on cost of living choices. Standardization in such cases could result in cost estimates that are too high and subsequently lead students to take on bigger debt loads.
Administrators said their concerns seemed to resonate with most lawmakers.
July 2012 Interest Rate Hike
Financial aid administrators also discussed with lawmakers the President's proposal that Congress stop the Federal Direct Subsidized loan interest rate for undergraduates from doubling in July 2012.
The current 3.4 percent interest rate is set to return to 6.8 percent, as stipulated in the 2007 College Cost Reduction and Access Act. The bill was designed to relieve some of the burden of student loan debt on borrowers, but the plan was too costly, so lawmakers decided to phase in the cuts from 6 percent in 2008-09, to 5.6 percent in 2009-10, 4.5 percent in 2010-11 and 3.4 percent in 2011-12. Unsubsidized Stafford loans and all graduate level Stafford loans have remained at a fixed 6.8 percent rate.
While lawmakers expressed support for a low federal interest rate, many told FAAs that to temporarily prevent the interest rate from doubling would cost an estimated $4 billion, a price tag that would likely come at the expense of other student aid programs. Others congressional members and staff noted that it was unlikely Congress would act quickly enough to pass such a provision before July 2012.
Pell Grant Support
Though some Republicans expressed to FAAs their concerns over the rising cost of the Pell Grant program, nearly all lawmakers agreed that support for Pell was a vital investment in the nation's students and the economy.
Of seemingly growing concern to some lawmakers, however, was the intermittent practice of administering Pell and other financial aid in multiple disbursements, or as a "paycheck." Lawmakers expressed concern over the propensity for fraud in these scenarios.
Some financial aid administrators pointed out that their schools used certain software programs that aggregate and divide financial aid disbursements (grants, scholarship and loans) between education-related expenses and the leftover funds often disbursed to students for living expenses.
Financial aid administrators from different states, such as Michigan and Illinois, said how the funds are disbursed varies by institution and by software program. Some schools also struggle with a lack of resources to bring their software programs up-to-date.


text:
Facebook unveiled a software suite on Thursday that stakes out a "home" on Android smartphones as it steps up its challenge to Apple and Google in the booming mobile market.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the software weaves the social network into the homescreen of HTC (宏達電) and Samsung phones powered by the latest versions of Android to focus experiences on "people and not apps."
"We're not building a phone and we're not building an operating system, but we are building something that's a lot deeper than an app," Zuckerberg told a gathering at the company's headquarters in Silicon Valley.
Facebook called Home "a new way to turn your Android phone into a great, living, social phone."
The software, which allows users to see Facebook's "Cover Feed" when they turn on their phones, will be available for download from Google's online Play shop in the US starting on Friday next week.
A version should be available in Europe in the coming months, according to Facebook, which said it was in the process of tailoring Home for tablet computers.
Home will be available through HTC, which will launch its Facebook homescreen smartphone called HTC First, to be released on Friday next week through US carrier AT&T at a price of US$100.
"It is the only phone that has Facebook Home preloaded and optimized," HTC chief Peter Chou (周永明) said while joining Zuckerberg at the event.
"Mobile is fundamentally social; it is all about connecting with other people... This is a great opportunity to bring mobile and social together even closer," he said.
Home became HTC's latest attempt to jump into the fast-growing social networking market. In February 2011, the company unveiled the HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa phones, both of which have an exclusive button to connect with Facebook. However, the two devices received a lukewarm response from the public when they went on sale.
On Thursday, Zuckerberg demonstrated how a user would start with Facebook on the homescreen and be able to navigate and switch back and forth between apps, as well as simultaneously send and receive messages through "chat heads" overlaid on the screen.
"I think this is a really big deal for Facebook," Peter Corbett of the research firm iStrategyLabs said.
"Now that they have what will essentially be a native branch of the Android operating system that they control and build upon, this is the future of Facebook," he said.
Corbett added that "Apple should be worried to a certain extent" because Facebook will "put this in front of millions and millions of the world's youth who may decide 'I want a Facebook phone instead of an iPhone.'"
Analyst Trip Chowdhry said the new software is a potentially "groundbreaking experience" that could help Facebook compete with Google in the mobile advertising market.
"Since Facebook is not imitating, they will carve a leadership position," he said, adding: "Google missed a huge opportunity in social mobile phones."
Facebook said no ads will be woven into social network feeds that appear automatically as homescreen or lock-screen scenes, but that they may in the future.
Facebook customized Home for Android-powered smartphones because the operating system made available free by Google can be openly tweaked by hardware makers as opposed to the tight grip Apple keeps on iPhone innards.
Zuckerberg was careful not to throw down overt challenges to Apple or Google.


text:
NETGEAR for
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The NETGEAR LTE Modem LB1120 is a simple LTE connectivity solution for all your devices and equipment. Simply connect this LTE Modem directly to your router, switch or computer to provide an automatic 4G LTE or 3G fallback broadband connection, with download speeds of up to 150 Mbps. It has a Gigabit Ethernet WAN port so you can plug in your wireless router and share connection with all your WiFi and wired devices.
Designed for simple connectivity, the LTE modem is compact, convenient, and easy to setup. Simply connect your existing wire line broadband connection to this modem to provide instant 4G LTE or 3G broadband backup connection.
NETGEAR, the NETGEAR Logo, and AirCard are trademarks of NETGEAR, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Mac and Mac OS are trademarks of Apple Inc. Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective holder(s). Information is subject to change without notice. ©2016 NETGEAR, Inc. All rights reserved.
©2016 NETGEAR, Inc. All rights reserved.
This product comes with a limited warranty that is valid only if purchased from a NETGEAR authorised reseller.
* 90-day complimentary technical support following purchase from a NETGEAR authorised reseller.
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text:
PassGuide enables candidates like you to pass their certification exams with ease. From IT certification exams to language proficiency tests like TOEFL to other industry-focused exams, PassGuide carries updated practice tests and simulation exams that run on a stable and professionally developed testing engine. These factors contribute to candidates' overall exam success and excellent pass rate among the PassGuide customers.
PassGuide carries over 1,800 certification exams for a variety of fields, from different vendors and various testing approaches. Offering free discounts and 120 days of free exam updates, this is an excellent resource for reliable exam preparation.
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- Self-paced training where you need it
- FREE demo version of the software
- Over 1,800 certification exams from a variety of vendors:
With PassGuide you are GUARANTEED to pass your IT certification exams from the FIRST TRY.


text:
UN experts to visit alleged chemical attack site Monday
Syria promises to provide 'necessary cooperation' and avoid shelling of area during inspection
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Syria reached an agreement with the United Nations on Sunday to allow a team of international experts to visit the site of alleged chemical weapons attacks last week outside Damascus, state media and the UN said.
A statement on Syrian state television said Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem and UN disarmament chief Angela Kane struck the deal during talks in Damascus, and that the two sides are working to finalize the date and time of the visit.
The world body said that a team of UN experts already in Syria has been instructed to focus on investigating the purported attack on Wednesday. The mission "is preparing to conduct on-site fact-finding activities'" on Monday, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said in a statement.
Anti-government activists and Doctors Without Borders say that more than 300 people were killed in the alleged toxic gas attack on the eastern suburbs of the Syrian capital. Images purporting to show the aftermath of the attack are filled with people gasping for breath and dead children unmarked by any wounds.
The eastern Ghouta area where the attack took place is under opposition-control, which makes arranging a trip across the front lines difficult. Rebels and the main Western-back opposition group have said they would guarantee access and the safety of a UN team to facilitate an investigation.
Nesirky said the Syrian government "affirmed that it will provide the necessary cooperation, including the observance of the cessation of hostilities at the locations related to the incident."
He added that UN chief Ban Ki-moon "would like to reiterate that all relevant parties equally share the responsibility of cooperating in urgently generating a safe environment for the mission to do its job efficiently and providing all necessary information."
The deal appeared to meet the demands of the world powers, including the US, Britain, France and Russia, all of whom called on the Syrian government to cooperate with the UN and grant inspectors access to the sites.
Confirming whether chemical weapons were indeed used carries enormous stakes, and could play a large role in determining the future course of a Syrian conflict. It has reinvigorated debate about the possible use of foreign military action in Syria's civil war.
Last week, France said that if an independent investigation confirms that chemical weapons were indeed employed, then military force could be used in Syria.
The UN team arrived in Syria last week to investigate three earlier purported chemical attacks. The mission is led by Swedish expert Ake Sellstrom.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.


text:
Pictured: Patrick Lapage, bronze medalist for Great Britain in seat 3 and Josh Hicks, silver medalist for Australia in the bow, make their way back to the dock in mixed lineups at the U-23 World Championships.
TRAKI, Lithuania - With five medalists amidst seven competitors, Harvard rowers had a successful week at the U-23 World Championships in Trakai, Lithuania.
Incoming freshman Jay Ditmarsch '16 finished on the podium for Australia in Men's Quad Sculls with a bronze medal behind the Ukraine and Italy. In a fluctuating race Australia was fourth through 1000m, before improving to second with only 500m remaining, before settling for bronze in 6:01.00, just 0.13 of a second behind Italy.
Fellow freshman Vincent Breet '16 was part of a South African team that placed second in Men's Pairs with a time of 6:46.34, just behind the gold-winning British team with a time of 6:44.85.
Among 21 crews to earn spots on the U.S. team, Harvard's Austin Meyer and teammate Nick Trojan had a distinct Harvard connection as the pair was coached by Linda Muri. They narrowly missed a spot in the podium in the men's lightweight doubles, finishing fourth in the final event with a time of 6:54.33. The duo recorded the best-ever finish for an American boat by coming back from a sixth place in the middle 1000m of the race. In the end, Harvard's pair could not pick off the defending World Champions and record holder, Germany, which finished in third.
Harvard had three medalists in the Men's Four. Junior Josh Hicks helped the Australian side to a silver medal with a time of 6:28.67, just less than a second ahead of Great Britain's time of 6:29.62 with Harvard sophomore Andrew Holmes and senior Patrick Lapage.
Also narrowly missing the podium for Harvard was incoming freshman Adam Janes '16, who helped the British Eight to a fourth place finish.


text:
★20 Million Sluggers battling in 300 million match-ups!!★
Hit homeruns and become the hero of the arena!
*** Over 10 MILLION players in more than 300 MILLION match-up games!
*** The Best of the Best Apps Awards Winner
*** Nominated as IMGA's Best Game
Are you prepared to be the next batter up?
Real-time Online Matchup Homerun Battle 3D!!
Play ONLINE MATCHUP & go Head-to-Head against millions of Homerun Battle sluggers around the world.
- 4 Extra Modes : Online Match up, Arcade, Training, and Classic
- Over 100 Items : Uniforms, hats, equipment and other customizable features
- Exclusive Baseball Wear : Includes the official DeMarini CF4, Voodoo and other M2M bat equipment.
- This game supports English
### Com2uS Hub Connection Notice ###
- Your play data will automatically be saved in server when you login to Com2uS hub in Homerun Battle.
- Enjoy a game of Homerun Battle in many different kinds of devices with the same ID, and save all data in your personal hub account.
- GUEST PLAY allows you to play a game without a Com2uS hub account. Game data will automatically be transmitted to the server once you join or login to your hub account. (Homerun Battle play data in the previous account cannot be transmitted.)
OTHER FUN and EXCITING GAMES BY COM2US
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< Homerun Battle 2 > Become The Homerun LEGEND!!
< 9 Innings: 2013 Pro Baseball > The Ultimate Baseball game!
< Derby Days > Most Fabulous Horse game on mobile
< Inotia4 > Finest of Inotia series, Best RPG Ever!
< Tower Defense > The One and only Tower Defense!
< Aqua Story > Your very own mobile Aquarium
< Ovenbreak > Run Gingerman Run!
< Slice It! > Once you start Slicing, YOU CAN'T STOP!
< The World of Magic > A magic world of full-featured MMORPG!
< Minigame Paradise > World of delight right at the tip of your fingers!
< Puzzle Family > Action and excitement in 8 delightful puzzle games
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