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In December, 2002, a year after the Taliban had been driven from power in Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld gave an upbeat assessment of the country's future to CNN's Larry King. "They have elected a government. . . . The Taliban are gone. The Al Qaeda are gone. The country is not a perfectly stable place, and it needs a great deal of reconstruction funds," Rumsfeld said. "There are people who are throwing hand grenades and shooting off rockets and trying to kill people, but there are people who are trying to kill people in New York or San Francisco. So it's not going to be a perfectly tidy place." Nonetheless, he said, "I'm hopeful, I'm encouraged." And he added, "I wish them well."
A year and a half later, the Taliban are still a force in many parts of Afghanistan, and the country continues to provide safe haven for members of Al Qaeda. American troops, more than ten thousand of whom remain, are heavily deployed in the mountainous areas near Pakistan, still hunting for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-backed President, exercises little political control outside Kabul and is struggling to undercut the authority of local warlords, who effectively control the provinces. Heroin production is soaring, and, outside of Kabul and a few other cities, people are terrorized by violence and crime. A new report by the United Nations Development Program, made public on the eve of last week's international conference, in Berlin, on aid to Afghanistan, stated that the nation is in danger of once again becoming a "terrorist breeding ground" unless there is a significant increase in development aid.
The turmoil in Afghanistan has become a political issue for the Bush Administration, whose general conduct of the war on terrorism is being publicly challenged by Richard A. Clarke, the former National Security Council terrorism adviser, in a memoir, "Against All Enemies," and in contentious hearings before the September 11th Commission. The Bush Administration has consistently invoked Afghanistan as a success story—an example of the President's determination. However, it is making this claim in the face of renewed warnings, from international organizations, from allies, and from within its own military—notably a Pentagon-commissioned report that was left in bureaucratic limbo when its conclusions proved negative—that the situation there is deteriorating rapidly.
In his book, Clarke depicts the victory in Afghanistan as far less decisive than the Administration has portrayed it, and he sharply criticizes the Pentagon's tactics, especially the decision to rely on airpower, and not U.S. troops on the ground, in the early weeks. The war began on October 7, 2001, but, he wrote, not until seven weeks later did the United States "insert a ground force unit (Marines) to take and hold a former al Qaeda and Taliban facility. . . . The late-November operation did not include any effort by U.S. forces to seal the border with Pakistan, snatch the al Qaeda leadership, or cut off the al Qaeda escape."
Clarke told me in an interview last week that the Administration viewed Afghanistan as a military and political backwater—a detour along the road to Iraq, the war that mattered most to the President. Clarke and some of his colleagues, he said, had repeatedly warned the national-security leadership that, as he put it, "you can't win the war in Afghanistan with such a small effort." Clarke continued, "There were more cops in New York City than soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. We had to have a security presence coupled with a development program in every region and stay there for several months."
In retrospect, Clarke said, he believes that the President and his men did not respond for three reasons: "One, they did not want to get involved in Afghanistan like Russia did. Two, they were saving forces for the war in Iraq. And, three, Rumsfeld wanted to have a laboratory to prove his theory about the ability of small numbers of ground troops, coupled with airpower, to win decisive battles." As of today, Clarke said, "the U.S. has succeeded in stabilizing only two or three cities. The President of Afghanistan is just the mayor of Kabul."
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Collins, a Pentagon expert on Afghanistan, acknowledged that it was only in the past several months that "significant money began to flow" into Afghanistan for reconstruction and security. "We found in the security area we were doing the right thing, but not fast enough," he told me. The resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Collins said, did not begin until early last year. "They began to realize at the end of 2003 that the key is not to fight our soldiers but U.N. officials and aid workers." In the long run, Collins added, "these tactics are self-defeating—in Afghanistan and in Iraq."
Clarke's view of what went wrong was buttressed by an internal military analysis of the Afghanistan war that was completed last winter. In late 2002, the Defense Department's office of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (solic) asked retired Army Colonel Hy Rothstein, a leading military expert in unconventional warfare, to examine the planning and execution of the war in Afghanistan, with an understanding that he would focus on Special Forces. As part of his research, Rothstein travelled to Afghanistan and interviewed many senior military officers, in both Special Forces and regular units. He also talked to dozens of junior Special Forces officers and enlisted men who fought there. His report was a devastating critique of the Administration's strategy. He wrote that the bombing campaign was not the best way to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Al Qaeda leadership, and that there was a failure to translate early tactical successes into strategic victory. In fact, he wrote, the victory in Afghanistan was not, in the long run, a victory at all.
Last month, I visited Rothstein in his office at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, where he is a senior lecturer in defense analysis. A fit, broad-shouldered man in his early fifties, he served more than twenty years in the Army Special Forces, including three years as the director of plans and exercises for the Joint Special Operations Command, at Fort Bragg, before retiring, in 1999. His associates depicted him as anything but a dissident. "He puts boots on the ground," Robert Andrews, a former head of solic, told me, referring to Rothstein's missions in Central America, for which he earned a decoration for valor, and in the former Yugoslavia. Rothstein agreed to speak to me, with some reluctance, only after I had obtained his report independently, and he would not go into details about his research. "They asked me to do this," he said of the Pentagon, "and my purpose was to make some things better. All I want people to do is to look at the paper and not at me. I'll tell you the good and the bad."
The report describes a wide gap between how Donald Rumsfeld represented the war and what was actually taking place. Rumsfeld had told reporters at the start of the Afghanistan bombing campaign, Rothstein wrote, that "you don't fight terrorists with conventional capabilities. You do it with unconventional capabilities." In December, the Taliban and Al Qaeda retreated into the countryside as the armies of the Northern Alliance, supported by American airpower and Special Forces troops, moved into the capital. There were many press accounts of America's new way of waging war, including well-publicized reports of American Special Forces on horseback and of new technologies, like the Predator drones. Nonetheless, Rothstein wrote, the United States continued to emphasize bombing and conventional warfare while "the war became increasingly unconventional," with Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters "operating in small cells, emerging only to lay land mines and launch nighttime rocket attacks before disappearing once again." Rothstein added:
**{: .break one} ** What was needed after December 2001 was a greater emphasis on U.S. special operations troops, supported by light infantry, conducting counterinsurgency operations. Aerial bombardment should have become a rare thing. . . . The failure to adjust U.S. operations in line with the post-Taliban change in theater conditions cost the United States some of the fruits of victory and imposed additional, avoidable humanitarian and stability costs on Afghanistan. . . . Indeed, the war's inadvertent effects may be more significant than we think. **
By the end of 2001, the Afghan war had essentially become a counterinsurgency. At this point, it was important to turn to a specific kind of unconventional warfare: "The Special Forces were created to deal with precisely this kind of enemy," Rothstein wrote. "Unorthodox thinking, drawing on a thorough understanding of war, demography, human nature, culture and technology are part of this mental approach. . . . Unconventional warfare prescribes that Special Forces soldiers must be diplomats, doctors, spies, cultural anthropologists, and good friends—all before their primary work comes into play."
Instead, Rothstein said, "the command arrangement evolved into a large and complex structure that could not (or would not) respond to the new unconventional setting." The result has been "a campaign in Afghanistan that effectively destroyed the Taliban but has been significantly less successful at being able to achieve the primary policy goal of ensuring that al Qaeda could no longer operate in Afghanistan."
Rothstein wrote that Rumsfeld routinely responded to criticism about civilian casualties by stating that "some amount" of collateral damage "is inevitable in war." It is estimated that more than a thousand Afghan civilians were killed by bombing and other means in the early stages of the war. Rothstein suggested that these numbers could have been lower, and that further incidents might have been avoided if Special Forces had been allowed to wage a truly unconventional war that reduced the reliance on massive firepower.
The Administration's decision to treat the Taliban as though all its members identified with, and would fight for, Al Qaeda was also a crucial early mistake. "There were deep divisions within the Taliban that could have been exploited through a political-military effort which is the essence of unconventional warfare," Rothstein said. "A few months of intensive diplomatic, intelligence and military preparations between Special Forces and anti-Taliban forces would have made a significant difference."
Instead, Rothstein wrote, the American military campaign left a power vacuum. The conditions under which the post-Taliban government came to power gave "warlordism, banditry and opium production a new lease on life." He concluded, "Defeating an enemy on the battlefield and winning a war are rarely synonymous. Winning a war calls for more than defeating one's enemy in battle." He recalled that, in 1975, when Harry G. Summers, an Army colonel who later wrote a history of the Vietnam War, told a North Vietnamese colonel, "You never defeated us on the battlefield," the colonel replied, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
Rothstein delivered his report in January. It was returned to him, with the message that he had to cut it drastically and soften his conclusions. He has heard nothing further. "It's a threatening paper," one military consultant told me. The Pentagon, asked for comment, confirmed that Rothstein was told "we did not support all of his conclusions," and said that he would soon be sent notes. In addition, Joseph Collins told me, "There may be a kernel of truth in there, but our experts found the study rambling and not terribly informative." In interviews, however, a number of past and present Bush Administration officials have endorsed Rothstein's key assertions. "It wasn't like he made it up," a former senior intelligence officer said. "The reason they're petrified is that it's true, and they didn't want to see it in writing."
The high point of the American involvement in Afghanistan came in December of 2001, at a conference of various Afghan factions held in Bonn, when the Administration's candidate, Hamid Karzai, was named chairman of the interim government. (His appointment as President was confirmed six months later at a carefully orchestrated Afghan tribal council, known as a Loya Jirga.) It was a significant achievement, but there were major flaws in the broader accord. There was no agreement on establishing an international police force, no procedures for collecting taxes, no strategy for disarming either the many militias or individual Afghans, and no resolution with the Taliban.
Then came Iraq. In interviews with academics, aid workers, and non-governmental-organization officials, I was repeatedly told that, within a few months of the Bonn conference, as the United States began its buildup in the Gulf, security and political conditions throughout Afghanistan eroded. In the early summer of 2002, a military consultant, reflecting the views of several American Special Forces commanders in the field, provided the Pentagon with a briefing warning that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were adapting quickly to American tactics. "His decision loop has tightened, ours has widened," the briefing said, referring to the Taliban. "He can see us, but increasingly we no longer see him." Only a very few high-level generals listened, and the briefing, like Rothstein's report, changed nothing. By then, some of the most highly skilled Americans were being diverted from Afghanistan. Richard Clarke noted in his memoir, "The U.S. Special Forces who were trained to speak Arabic, the language of al Qaeda, had been pulled out of Afghanistan and sent to Iraq." Some C.I.A. paramilitary teams were also transferred to Iraq.
Meanwhile, the United States continued to pay off and work closely with local warlords, many of whom were involved in heroin and opium trafficking. Their loyalty was not for sale but for rent. Warlords like Hazrat Ali in eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border, and Mohammed Fahim had been essential to America's initial military success, and, at first, they had promised to accept Karzai. Hazrat Ali would be one of several commanders later accused of double-crossing American troops in an early, unsuccessful sweep for Al Qaeda, in 2002. Fahim, now the defense minister, is deeply involved in a number of illicit enterprises.
The Bush Administration, facing a major war in Iraq, seemed eager to put the war in Afghanistan behind it. In January of 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, made a fifteen-hour visit to Kabul and announced, "We're clearly moving into a different phase, where our priority in Afghanistan is increasingly going to be stability and reconstruction. There's no way to go too fast. Faster is better." There was talk of improving security and rebuilding the Afghan National Army in time for Presidential and parliamentary elections, but little effort to provide the military and economic resources. "I don't think the Administration understood about winning hearts and minds," a former Administration official told me.
The results of the postwar neglect are stark. A leading scholar on Afghanistan, Barnett R. Rubin, wrote, in this month's Current History, that Afghanistan today "does not have functioning state institutions. It has no genuine army or effective police. Its ramshackle provincial administration is barely in contact with, let alone obedient to, the central government. Most of the country's meager tax revenue has been illegally taken over by local officials who are little more than warlords with official titles." The goal of American policy in Afghanistan "was not to set up a better regime for the Afghan people," Rubin wrote. "The goal instead was to get rid of the terrorist threat against America." The United States enlisted the warlords in its war against terrorism, and "the result was an Afghan government created at Bonn that rested on a power base of warlords."
One military consultant with extensive experience in Afghanistan told me last year, "The real action is at the village level, but we're not there. And we need to be there 24/7. Now we are effectively operating above the conflict. It's the same old story as in Vietnam. We can't hit what we can't see." He added, "From January, 2002, on, we were in the process of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory."
Last summer, a coalition of seventy-nine human-rights and relief organizations wrote an open letter to the international community calling for better security in Afghanistan and warning that the Presidential elections there, now scheduled for September, were imperilled. The letter noted, "For the majority of the Afghan people, security is precarious and controlled by regional warlords, drug traffickers or groups with terrorist associations. The situation is getting worse, and there is no comprehensive plan in place to halt the spiral of violence." Statistics compiled by care International showed that eleven aid workers were murdered in four incidents during a three-week period ending early last month, and the rate of physical assaults on aid workers in Afghanistan more than doubled in January and February compared with the same period in the previous year. Such attacks, a care policy statement suggested, inevitably led to cutbacks in Afghan humanitarian and reconstruction programs. In early 2003, for example, according to the Chicago Tribune, there were twenty-six humanitarian agencies at work in Kandahar, the main Afghan city in the south. By early this year, there were fewer than five.
Even one of the most publicized achievements of the post-Taliban government, the improvements in the lives of women, has been called into question. Judy Benjamin, who served as the gender adviser to the U.S. Agency for International Development mission in Kabul in 2002 and 2003, told me, "The legal opportunities have improved, but the day-to-day life for women, even in Kabul, isn't any better. Girls are now legally permitted to go to school and work, but when it comes to the actual family practice, people are afraid to let them go out without burkas." Conditions outside Kabul are far worse, she said. "Families do not allow females to travel—to go to jobs or to school. You cannot go on many roads without being held up by bandits. People are saying they were safer under the Taliban system, which is why the Taliban are getting more support—the lack of safety."
Nancy Lindborg, the executive vice-president of Mercy Corps, one of the major N.G.O.s at work in Afghanistan, had a similar view. Outside of Kabul, she said, "everywhere I go, from Kunduz to Kandahar, I see no change for most women, and security for everybody has fallen apart since November of 2002." The Pentagon's announcements of increased commitments to security and reconstruction were increasingly seen "as a big charade," Lindborg said. "The United States has left Afghanistan to fester for two years."
The humanitarian community is not alone in its concern. In February, Vice-Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, acknowledged during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that the growing Taliban insurgency was targeting humanitarian and reconstruction organizations. Over all, he said, Taliban attacks had "reached their highest levels since the collapse of the Taliban government."
Heroin is among the most immediate—and the most intractable—social, economic, and political problems. "The problem is too huge for us to be able to face alone," Hamid Karzai declared last week in Berlin, as he appealed for more aid. "Drugs in Afghanistan are threatening the very existence of the Afghan state." Drug dealing and associated criminal activity produced about $2.3 billion in revenue last year, according to an annual survey by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a sum that was equivalent to half of Afghanistan's legitimate gross domestic product. "Terrorists take a cut as well," the U.N. report noted, adding that "the longer this happens, the greater the threat to security within the country."
The U.N. report, published last fall, found that opium production, which, following a ban imposed by the Taliban, had fallen to a hundred and eighty-five metric tons in 2001, soared last year to three thousand six hundred tons—a twentyfold increase. The report declared the nation to be "at a crossroads: either (i) energetic interdiction measures are taken now . . . or (ii) the drug cancer in Afghanistan will keep spreading and metastasise into corruption, violence and terrorism—within and beyond the country's borders." Afghanistan was once again, the U.N. said, producing three-quarters of the world's illicit opium, with no evidence of a cutback in sight, even though there has been a steady stream of reports from Washington about drug interdictions. The report said that poppy cultivation had continued to spread, and was now reported in twenty-eight of the nation's thirty-two provinces.
Most alarmingly, according to a U.N. survey, nearly seventy per cent of farmers intend to increase their poppy crops in 2004, most of them by more than half. Only a small percentage of farmers were planning any reduction, despite years of international pressure. Many of the areas that the U.N. report identified as likely to see increased production are in regions where the United States has a major military presence.
Despite such statistics, the American military has, for the most part, looked the other way, essentially because of the belief that the warlords can deliver the Taliban and Al Qaeda. One senior N.G.O. official told me, "Everybody knows that the U.S. military has the drug lords on the payroll. We've put them back in power. It's gone so terribly wrong." (The Pentagon's Joseph Collins told me, "Counter-narcotics in Afghanistan has been a failure." Collins said that this year's crop was estimated to be the second largest on record. He added, however, that the Afghan government is planning to "redouble" its efforts on narcotics control, and that the Pentagon is "now putting more money into it for the first time"—seventy-three million dollars.)
The easy availability of heroin also represents a threat to the well-being of American troops. Since the fall of 2002, a number of active-duty and retired military and C.I.A. officials have told me about increasing reports of heroin use by American military personnel in Afghanistan, many of whom have been there for months, with few distractions. A former high-level intelligence officer told me that the problem wasn't the Special Forces or Army combat units who were active in the field but "the logistical guys"—the truck drivers and the food and maintenance workers who are stationed at the military's large base at Bagram, near Kabul. However, I was also told that there were concerns about heroin use within the Marines. The G.I.s assigned to Bagram are nominally confined to the base, for security reasons, but the drugs, the former intelligence officer said, were relayed to the users by local Afghans hired to handle menial duties. The Pentagon's senior leadership has a "head-in-the-sand attitude," he said. "There's no desire to expose it and get enforcement involved. This is hard shit," he added, speaking of heroin. The Pentagon, asked for comment, denied that there was concern about drug use at Bagram, but went on to acknowledge that "disciplinary proceedings were initiated against some U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan for suspected drug use." Asked separately about the allegations against marines, the Pentagon said that some marines had been removed from Afghanistan to face disciplinary proceedings, but blamed alcohol and marijuana rather than heroin.
The drug lords traditionally processed only hashish inside the Afghan borders, and shipped poppies to heroin-production plants in northern Pakistan and elsewhere. A senior U.N. narcotics official told me that in the past two years "most of the heroin has been processed in Afghanistan, as part of a plan to keep profits in-country." Only a fraction of what is produced in Afghanistan is used there, the officer said. Nonetheless, a U.S. government-relief official told me, the "biggest worry" is that the growth in local production will increase the risk of addiction among G.I.s. A former C.I.A. officer who served in Afghanistan also said that the agency's narcotics officials have been independently investigating military drug use.
Afghanistan is regaining the Bush Administration's attention, in part because the worsening situation in Iraq has increased the need for a foreign-policy success. State Department and intelligence officials who have worked in Kabul said that it is widely understood that Afghanistan's Presidential and parliamentary elections, which had already been rescheduled, must be held before the American Presidential elections, on November 2nd. The upside to the political timetable has been a new commitment of American reconstruction funds—more than two billion dollars, a fourfold increase over the previous year—for schools, clinics, and road construction in Afghanistan. Richard Clarke wrote in his memoir that initially the aid funds were "inadequate and slowly delivered," and far below the thirteen hundred and ninety dollars per capita that was spent in the first years of the rebuilding effort in Bosnia and the nearly twenty billion dollars now earmarked for Iraq. At one point in 2002, American aid funds for Afghanistan came to only fifty-two dollars per person. "Why are we getting aid money now?" the U.S. government-relief official said to me, with a laugh. "We've been asking for two years and no one in their right mind thought about getting all this."
In insisting on holding elections by the fall, the Administration is overriding the advice of many of its allies and continuing to bank heavily on Hamid Karzai. (As of this spring, an estimated ten per cent of eligible voters were registered.) Last week, the international conference in Berlin bolstered Karzai's regime, and his election prospects, by promising to provide more than four billion dollars in aid and low-cost loans in the next year—although that figure includes more than a billion dollars previously pledged. Half of the contributions came from the Bush Administration. Secretary of State Colin Powell praised Karzai for having turned Afghanistan from "a failed state, ruled by extremists and terrorists, to a free country with a growing economy and emerging democracy."
Nonetheless, in interviews for this article, Hamid Karzai was consistently depicted by others as unsure of himself and totally dependent on the United States for security and finances. One of Karzai's many antagonists is his own defense minister, Mohammed Fahim. Last year, the Bush Administration was privately given a memorandum by an Afghan official and American ally, warning that Fahim was working to undermine Karzai and would use his control over money from illegal businesses and customs revenue to do so. Fahim was also said to have recruited at least eighty thousand men into new militias.
The United States' continuing toleration of warlords such as Fahim and General Abdul Rashid Dostum—an alleged war criminal and gunrunner who, after being offered millions of dollars by Washington, helped defeat the Taliban in the fall of 2001—mystifies many who have long experience in Afghanistan. "Fahim and Dostum are part of the problem, and not the solution," said Milt Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.'s Afghan operations during the war with the Soviet Union. "These people have the clever gene and they can get us to do their fighting for them. They just lead us down the path," Bearden said. "How wonderful for them to have us knock off their opposition with American airplanes and Special Forces."
The wild card in the election planning may be the Taliban. The former Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, who spent months in American custody, has repeatedly offered to open a channel to the Taliban leadership for extended talks. "But the Administration only wants to get help in finding Osama bin Laden," a Democratic Senate aide said. "Its only concern is tactical information." Meanwhile, the Taliban's influence has grown throughout the south and east of Afghanistan, in defiance of—or, perhaps, because of—continued American air and ground assaults, which inevitably result in civilian casualties.
In an effort to strengthen Karzai, the American military command has tried to reduce its own reliance on some regional warlords. The most recent target was Ismail Khan, the popular independent governor of Herat, a large province in western Afghanistan, adjacent to Iran. Khan, a bitter enemy of the Taliban, supported the initial American invasion of Afghanistan after September 11th. He has since defied the central government and refuses to hand over to Kabul most of the tax and customs revenue. (Herat is an ancient trade center.) Kahn personifies how difficult it is for the U.S. to separate its enemies from its allies in Afghanistan. "If Mohammed Fahim is a government minister and Ismail Khan is a warlord," one American official told me, "you're abusing the language." The official's point was that Khan has provided better security and more stability for the local population than is found in other Afghan provinces, and international observers believe that he would probably win a provincial election. But he treats Herat as a private fiefdom, and has alarmed many in the Bush Administration with his vocal support of Iran; last fall, he was quoted as calling it "the best model of an Islamic country in the world."
One regional expert told me that Karzai—who was always apprehensive about Ismail Khan—raised the question of how to remove him last spring, during a brief visit by Donald Rumsfeld to Kabul. "He asked Rumsfeld for his support," the expert recalled. "Rumsfeld wished him good luck but said the United States could not get involved. So Karzai got cold feet." The issue was revisited again in February, a former C.I.A. consultant told me, by the American military command at Bagram. Sometime that month, the American command put out a request to its intelligence components for a new operational plan for Khan. The former C.I.A. consultant learned from within the intelligence community that there was agreement that Khan had to be neutralized. Asked what that meant, he said that he was told "Khan had to be eliminated—we've got to end his influence." (The Pentagon denied that there was such a plan.)
On March 21st, an armed conflict erupted in Herat between Khan's forces and those loyal to the central government. Accounts of what happened vary widely; it was not immediately clear who started what. According to an account by U.N. workers in Afghanistan, filed to headquarters in New York, tensions had been mounting between Khan and one of his bitter rivals, General Abdul Zaher Naibzadah, over control of the Afghan military's Herat garrison. Khan's son heard reports that there had been an assassination attempt on his father, and drove to the General's house, where Naibzadah's bodyguards gunned him down, along with others. According to the U.N. dispatch, Ismail Khan took violent revenge on his attackers, burning down the local headquarters of the Afghan militia and killing scores. Some press accounts put the death toll of the subsequent daylong battle at a hundred or more; other accounts, emanating from Kabul, said that fewer than two dozen were killed. The U.N. account included reports that a personal phone call from Karzai to Khan was necessary to defuse the situation. In the next days, a division of the Afghan National Army, sent by the central government, moved into Herat to restore order.
There is no evidence that the American commanders were involved in any attempt on Khan's life, the former C.I.A. consultant told me. But, according to some officials, Americans were attached to Afghan military units that were present in Herat. "We clearly had embedded American trainers and advisers with the Afghan troops," the consultant said. "They knew what was going on." The result, the U.N. reported, was that Khan "may become even more intractable in his dealing with the central government." The American-endorsed plan to challenge Khan's leadership and strengthen Karzai's national standing inside Afghanistan, it seemed, had served to make Khan a more determined enemy.
The U.S. government-relief official told me of spending weeks last year travelling through Afghanistan—including the south and the east, areas with few ties to the central government in Kabul. "They'd say, 'We don't like the Taliban, but they did bring us security you haven't been able to give us,' " the official said. "They perceived that we were allied with the bad guys—the warlords—because of our war on terrorism." The official recalled being asked constantly about the American war in Iraq. "They were concerned about Iraq, and wanted to know, 'Are you going to stay?' They remembered how we left"—after the American-sponsored defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. "They'd say, 'You guys are going to leave us, like you did in 1992. If we had confidence in the staying power of America, we'd deal with you.' " The official concluded, "Iraq, in their mind, meant that America had bigger priorities."
One U.N. worker who is helping to prepare for elections in Afghanistan told me that American aid funds now headed into Afghanistan, whatever the Administration's motives, are essential for the country's future. "We've got a golden window of opportunity that will close on November 2nd." It's a cynical process, he added. "A key factor in holding the election will be the non-interference of the various drug-dealing warlords around the nation, and stemming the drug trade will not be a priority." The message he's getting from the warlords, the U.N. worker said, was that if the U.S. attempted a "hard and heavy" poppy-eradication program, the warlords would disrupt the elections.
The U.N. worker said that President Karzai was perceived as "a weak leader with very little street credibility." He told me that, again and again, when he met with village elders, as part of his work, "the old people say, 'Hamid is a good man. He doesn't kill people. He doesn't steal things. He doesn't sell drugs. How could you possibly think he could be a leader of Afghanistan?' " ♦


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Dave Hamrick has answered the call now for six years for InfoCision Management Corp., and he has made and saved the company money doing it. This year, the large call center operation is on track for record sales and profits, thanks in large part to Mr. Hamrick's efforts. The 4,200-employee company posted gross revenues of $174 million in 2011. Mr. Hamrick has upgraded InfoCision's financial systems and procedures, reducing expenses, improving management information and all but eliminating the audit adjustments that predated his arrival. "He has built a departmental team that has elicited great confidence from all who work with them," the nomination said. Under Mr. Hamrick's watchful eye, InfoCision's accounting team has sliced in half the time it takes them to bill to four days from eight and has decreased the closing time of the financials by 75%. Mr. Hamrick's efforts have included the development of a more effective use of costing data, which created a more specific and detailed analysis for clients on an individual basis, allowing InfoCision to determine where to drive the highest volume of calls for each client, maximizing gross margins. Additionally, Mr. Hamrick was behind the utilization of real-time reporting in all facets of the company, which has enabled InfoCision to react quickly to the changing needs of the business environment. When InfoCision's founder and primary decision maker, Gary Taylor, fell ill in 2009, Mr. Hamrick not only guided InfoCision through tough economic times, but also assumed the added responsibility for the financial and operational management of several outside businesses owned by the Taylor family. He continues to coordinate all financial affairs of Mr. Taylor's foundation, personal wealth and financial management, according to the nomination. "Three years ago, during the perfect storm, comprised of a plummeting economy, the call center market's experiment with offshore locations, the collapse of the credit markets, and the tragic illness of the company founder and primary decision maker, Gary Taylor, InfoCision CFO Dave Hamrick not only guided InfoCision through the narrow channel to more stable financial waters, but also took on the additional responsibility for the financial and operational management of several outside businesses owned by the Taylor family," the nomination said. "Today, Dave continues to provide solid financial guidance as the economy and markets continue on their roller coaster ride." In addition to Mr. Hamrick's quarterbacking at InfoCision, he's coached baseball, wrestling and football for various organizations, including the city of Green and Ohio Storm Baseball, for which he is head coach.
InfoCision Management Corp., Akron
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Art Seen
Stroll and trolley around town on Thursday, May 5, taking a self-guided tour of gallery openings, artist demonstrations and receptions, live music and refreshments during First Thursdays Art Walk.
The event is free, as is the trolley service. At any gallery, pick up an Art Walk brochure that includes a map and features the evening's special events.
"Hop from gallery to gallery enjoying the artwork of featured artists along the way. It is a lot of fun," said First Thursdays Art Walk president Rebecca Barber.
See artists in action and sharing their insights, such as Anne Moore talking about printmaking at Sandstone Gallery, Louis Longi demonstrating the lost wax method to create sculpture at DeBilzan Gallery, resident artists at Studio 7 north and south painting, and photographer Clark Little at his eponymous gallery sharing his latest shots.
A multitude of galleries from downtown to Gallery Row to Bluebird to Laguna Canyon Road open their doors. At Studio Arts Gallery, view new ceramic paintings by Mike Tauber while listening to music by Jason Feddy. Stop by Seven-Degrees for an exhibition featuring painter Ron Pastucha. Jazz singer-songwriter Sam Curo performs at the Cottage Gallery. Laguna Art Museum features conceptual art of Laguna Beach artist Brad Coleman "Reproductions." More information can be found at www.firstthursdaysartwalk.com.
Saltfineart Juxtaposes Works of Three Photographers
Saltfineart presents "Panoramas," an exhibit showcasing the work of three female photographers who gently chide the idea of a panorama as an unbroken view. The images of Cecilia Paredes, Ana Mercedes Hoyos and Cinthya Soto, offer visions and vistas camouflaged, dimensions foiled, and cultures revealed. Panoramas runs May 5 through June 20, with an opening reception for the artists from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursday, May 5.
Saltfineart initiates a visual conversation between these impressive artists who have 20-, 30- and 50-year careers, respectively.
While each of these artists' images are a must-see on their own, it is the juxtaposition of the three that creates the most interesting view.
Saltfineart is located at 1492 S. Coast Highway, Unit 3, and is open daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call 949-715-5554 or visit www.saltfineart.com.
Sampling from the Salt Fine Art photo exhibition.
subhed: Artist Eye Gallery Celebrates 4th Anniversary
Artist Eye Laguna Gallery celebrates its fourth anniversary in Laguna Beach with receptions during First Thursdays Art Walk, on Thursday, May 5 and Saturday, May 14, both at 6 – 9 p.m., 1294-A So. Coast Highway.
The artist-owned and operated gallery showcases the works of 16 award-winning Southern California artists and in May will feature the works of local resident Chuck Joseph. The self-taught artist discovered his artistic talent at an early age and uses unconventional materials such as wood, stainless steel and vintage posters to create a unique style.
Photo: Chuck Joseph's work evokes vintage posters.
Sculptor at Water Color Gallery
Sculptor Stan Graves will display and discuss some of his creations at the Water Color Gallery from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. during First Thursdays Art Walk on Thursday, May 5, including the artist's rendition of Abraham Lincoln's presidential train, designed and built from a scratch, mainly from exotic woods and brass. Other pieces include wildlife creations from driftwood, and bronze castings from two original driftwood sculptures. Each subject is created and titled with a whimsical flair.
Water Color Gallery is located at 1492 S. Coast Highway, Unit 7. For more information, call 949-494-8838.
Photo: Sculptor Stan Graves and his creations.
subhed: Art Meets Sea Lions in Silk Dyeing Class
Laguna Outreach for Community Arts (LOCA) presents "Art and Sea Lions," a beginning class in silk dyeing at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 7.
Clothing artist Reem Khalil will lead the class in creating a sea lion on stretched silk, with water-based silk dyes and salt crystals to be used for bleeds and special effects. The finished piece can be used as a scarf, pillow cover, or wall display.
The cost for the class, which includes guided tour of the center and viewing of live sea lions, is $20 for adults, and $15 for kids aged six and up. Advance registration is required through LOCA: [email protected], 949-363-4700, www.LOCAarts.org.
Silk artist Reem Khalil shows off an example from her upcoming workshop.
subhed Artman Gallery Opens Temporary Exhibits
JoAnne Artman Gallery, 326 N. Coast Highway, which represents an eclectic mix of contemporary works, will exhibit next month in art fairs in New York and San Francisco.
In New York, at the 11th annual Affordable Art Fair, the gallery's exhibiting artists will include Martiros Adalian, Natalie "Miss Aniela" Dybisz, Jorge Fernandez, Peregrine Heathcote, America Martin, Denis Peterson, Brooke Shaden, James Strombotne, and James Verbicky.
At the San Francisco Fine Art Fair, the gallery will also exhibit Dybisz, Fernandez, Heathcote, Martin, Shaden, Verbicky, and Rimi Yang.
For more information, www.joanneartmangallery.com.
subhed: Local Artists Invited to Enter Banner Competition
Entries are now being accepted from local residents for Laguna Beach-themed banners, a competition sponsored by the Arts Commission.
An honorarium of $1,000 will be given for all completed banners selected.
For guidelines, contact cultural arts manager Siân Poeschl at (949) 497-0722 or [email protected].
subhed: CAP Exhibit Highlights Panoramic Images
Community Art Project (CAP) presents an all-media exhibit focusing on the theme of panoramic images in the second floor gallery at the Wells Fargo Bank, 260 Ocean Avenue, now through June 10.
Participating artists include Cheryl Cotman, Charles M. Murray, Roger Folk, Mark Chamberlin, Sandra J. Campbell, Bill Atkins, James Nordstrom, John S. Krill, Fred Hope, Tom Lamb, and Rick Graves.


text:
University City received its name from the University of California San Diego, and is made up of two areas divided by Rose Canyon. University Square is mostly made up of residential areas offering single family homes, while UTC is comprised of condos, apartment complexes, hotels, and office buildings. The community is home to many parks and trails, providing plenty of outdoor activity for its residents.
Residential, MLS# 190012599
Listing provided by Keller Williams Realty
Residential, MLS# 190006866
Listing provided by San Diego Brokerage
Residential, MLS# 190002448
Listing provided by Live Love San Diego Homes
Residential, MLS# 190011971
Listing provided by San Diego Home Search Realty
Residential, MLS# 190007263
Listing provided by Coldwell Banker Res Brokerage
Residential, MLS# 190011151
Listing provided by Century 21 Award
Residential, MLS# 190008754
Listing provided by Coldwell Banker Res. Brokerage
This information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed. You should rely on this information only to decide whether or not to further investigate a particular property. BEFORE MAKING ANY OTHER DECISION, YOU SHOULD PERSONALLY INVESTIGATE THE FACTS (e.g. square footage and lot size) with the assistance of an appropriate professional. You may use this information only to identify properties you may be interested in investigating further. All uses except for personal, non-commercial use in accordance with the foregoing purpose are prohibited. Redistribution or copying of this information, any photographs or video tours is strictly prohibited. This information is derived from the Internet Data Exchange (IDX) service provided by Sandicor®. Displayed property listings may be held by a brokerage firm other than the broker and/or agent responsible for this display. The information and any photographs and video tours and the compilation from which they are derived is protected by copyright. Compilation © 2019 Sandicor®, Inc.


text:
On April 21, 1816 Charlotte Brontë made her first appearance in the world. Born to an ordinary family, from inside the unremarkable surroundings of Haworth parsonage, she would go on to achieve extraordinary things.
Jane Eyre was a landmark of English literature, but one which Charlotte initially had to publish under the pseudonym of Currer Bell. The world of publishing wasn't meant for women like her and while she often struggled with her later fame and didn't fit easily into London's polite society she was determined that her voice and those of her sisters were heard.
Without Charlotte, there would have been no Wuthering Heights or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and while Emily, whose work is so tied to the landscape of Yorkshire, would have no doubt continued to write, her scores of poems would have likely died with her.
Like the best artists, Charlotte was a tortured soul. Her two older sisters contracted a fatal bout of consumption when she was just nine years old and later she would see her beloved sisters Emily and Anne and her brother die within nine months of each other.
Their deaths forced a retreat into her imagination, but the truth was Charlotte's heart had already been broken. During a spell in Brussels where she and Emily went to learn French with the plan of returning to Haworth to start their own school, she fell in love with her tutor. Monsieur Heger was intelligent, passionate and brooding - everything Charlotte thought she wanted in a man. Unfortunately her love was unrequited and she returned to Yorkshire bereft.
That heartache was channeled into Jane Eyre, where she was finally able to give her heroine the happy ending which she felt she had been so cruelly denied. Shirley and Villette followed, but it is Jane Eyre for which Charlotte is rightly remembered.
It's a staple on the GCSE and A-level syllabus, but more than that it has provided inspiration for successive generations of artists and writers.
Today, Haworth will hold a special birthday party in honour of its most famous resident and the 200th anniversary of her birth, but that will just be the start as the town prepares for the impact of Brontë-mania.
"They are a massive part of Haworth and a lot of people know Haworth simply because of the Brontës," says Claire Foster, who runs the arts and crafts shop Hawksbys with her husband Barry. It has not only brought visitors here but investment too. "I would say we've seen about 10 or 12 new shops opening in the last year or so and most of them are independents which has helped freshen the place up."
There's a mini industry built up around the Brontës and while it would perhaps be easy for Haworth to become a tacky tourist trap, it keeps its literary heritage understated, and is all the more attractive for it.
Want to know more about the Bronte's? Here are links to the many Bronte features that we have produced this week...
Haworth gearing up for Charlotte Bronte's big anniversary
Exploring Brontë country from the back seat of a bus
True story of house on the hill that inspired Wuthering Heights
Brontë authors on what Yorkshire's literary sisters mean to them
Hall story on home with Bronte links
'Exciting new chapter' at Brontë Society as Dame Judi Dench announced Honorary President
Behind the scenes of Northern Ballet's new production of Jane Eyre
From Haworth to New York. How the 200th birthday of Charlotte Brontë will be celebrated
My Yorkshire: The Brontë Parsonage's Amy Rowbottom on her favourite people and places
Ian McMillan: Why it's the Bronte legend not the books that fascinate me most


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Path of the Pros: Ryan Howard
Future MVP's career really took flight in Double-A Reading in '04
By Benjamin Hill / MLB.com | September 21, 2009 2:40 PM
Few could have predicted the extent of Howard's early success -- his 58 homers in '06 established a new Phillies single-season record -- but by that point the first baseman had substantial experience in the field of shattering expectations. After being selected by Philadelphia in the fifth round of the 2001 Draft, Howard embarked upon a methodical ascent of the organization's farm system. He put up impressive numbers every step of the way, but it was with Double-A Reading in 2004 that he really started to raise some eyebrows.
Over just 374 at-bats in Reading, Howard bashed 37 homers and drove in an Eastern League-leading 102 runs. His .647 slugging percentage also led the circuit, while his .297 average proved he was more than just a one-dimensional masher. Howard's manager that season was Greg Legg, who now serves as the hitting coach for the Class A Lakewood BlueClaws. To say that Legg was effusive in his praise would be, if anything, an understatement.
"He was just awesome," he said. "With [Howard] on our team we were never out of the game, because there was always that possibility of a three-run home run. It was just incredible how hard he could hit the ball, and he could go the other way, too. ... He was just the ultimate pro, and I'm glad I got the chance to work with him."
Double-A is considered to be a crucial stop in any player's professional career, as it is at this juncture that the wheat is separated from the chaff (so to speak). Putting up gaudy numbers on the lower rungs of the Minor League ladder is commendable, but Double-A success is a signifier of legitimate Major League potential.
"He was a man on a mission, you could tell he could smell [the Major Leagues]," said Legg, who played in the Phillies system for 13 seasons before embarking on a coaching career. "[In Double-A], the pitchers are on the plate more, and they're going to challenge you. [Howard] took advantage of that and just put on a show. He put on a show that year and he's been putting on a show ever since."
Howard's ability to put on a show in '04 quickly got him to "The Show." On July 30, he received a promotion to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, where he hit nine homers and drove in 29 runs over 29 games. This gave him 46 home runs and 131 RBIs on the season, marking just the fifth time since 1956 that a Minor League player has been able to post such lofty numbers. But Howard wasn't quite done as he received a September callup to Philadelphia and hit .282 with a pair of dingers.
And while Howard was impressing on the field in 2004, he was impressing in the clubhouse as well. Reading is just 60 miles from Philadelphia, and media interest increased right along with his power numbers (particularly due to the fact that the Phillies had superstar slugger Jim Thome entrenched at first base at the time). R-Phils media relations coordinator Rob Hackash has served as a liaison between Reading prospects and the press for the past 13 seasons, and he could not recall a player who handled the attention better than Howard.
"I remember asking Ryan towards the end of a particularly busy media week how he was holding up. He smiled and said 'great,'" Hackash said. "He was at a point where I thought answering the same questions every day should have been getting to him and I was planning on building a break into his schedule. It wasn't getting to him, though. ... He was just going with the flow, taking it all in stride, focusing on the right things at the right time, managing his time perfectly and enjoying his role. He was living it.
"I'm not at all surprised today to see him be such a fan favorite or a successful national pitch man on top of his MVP-caliber play. He has maximized every opportunity he's had and you can't do that by only being a great baseball player. You have to be great, period."
Howard spent a total of five seasons in the Minor Leagues, hitting .299 with 11 home runs and 393 RBIs over 507 games.
|2001: After being selected in the fifth round of that season's First-Year Player Draft, Howard made his professional debut with Class A Short-Season Batavia. He hit .272 with six home runs and 35 RBIs over 48 games, while his slugging percentage of .456 remains a career low. Howard was the only member of the '01 Batavia ballclub to later spend time in the Majors.
|2002: As a member of the Class A Lakewood BlueClaws, Howard made his presence felt on the South Atlantic League leaderboard. He ranked third in the circuit in games played (135) and home runs (19), while his 87 RBIs and 145 strikeouts ranked fourth (yes, Howard has always been prone to the strikeout). Howard returned to Lakewood in 2007 while on a rehab assignment, and he drove in four runs over two games. This gave him 91 RBIs as a member of the BlueClaws, catapulting him into a first-place tie with Randy Ruiz for the most in franchise history.
|2003: Howard's .304 average, 23 home runs and 82 RBIs might not seem particularly imposing, but in the offense-deprived Florida State League these numbers made him a Triple Crown challenger. Howard did lead the circuit in home runs and average, but his 84 RBIs fell five short of the league-leading mark. Nonetheless, Howard was voted league MVP, marking the first of three he has won on the professional level. "To me, Ryan is still the same kid I had in Clearwater," said long-time Phillies coach Roly deArmas, who managed Howard that season. "He has not forgotten his roots from the Minor Leagues and all of us who worked with him. ... Being in the game a long time, I remember when Ryan reported to mini-camp after the Draft in a coat and tie. I still remember Larry Rojas [a veteran Phillies coach who passed away in 2008] saying 'This kid is going to make it!'"
|2004: The breakout: 46 home runs and 131 RBIs over 131 Minor League games. His 37 home runs with Reading surpassed the previous single-season record of 33 (set by Greg Luzinski in 1970). Howard was named Eastern League MVP and also garnered the Paul Owens Award for the second straight season (given annually to the best player in the Phillies farm system).
|2005: Howard had nothing left to prove in the Minors, but started the year with Scranton/Wilkes-Barre due to the presence of Jim Thome on the big league club. He hit a scorching .371 with 16 homers and 54 RBIs over 61 games in Triple-A, and an injury to Thome led to an opportunity to play every day in Philadelphia. Serving as the Phillies' regular first baseman from July 1 through the end of the season, Howard hit 22 homers and drove in 63 runs over 88 games and was named the National League's Rookie of the Year. Thome was traded to the White Sox that November, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Benjamin Hill is a reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues or its clubs.View More


text:
WFExec123 needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 55 designs submitted by 11 freelance designers.
I am looking for ideas to get a site up very soon. I have a reference site that I like in terms of colors and layout.
Desired Style:
I like the look of http://www.reportonbusiness.com
Accepted File Formats:
Standard Web Formats (.jpg, .gif or .png); Vector Formats (.eps, .pdf or .ai); Layered Formats (.psd or .tiff)
This site is going to be a resource for a nontraditional means of buying and selling real estate. The site will need to have the ability to link numurous news articles from around the web. It will have our formulas for appreciation, depreciation, as well as scenario comparisons. Site will also need ability to embed youtube videos into site.
 Logo design: Would like something creative for the Trump the Slump title. Also, the company name is United Investor Resources which we need a logo for.Â
This contest was originally listed in multiple categories:
- Logo Design
- Web Page Design (Coded)
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


text:
Darvin wrote:The problem with making them cost more as a balancing factor is Translocation Seal. You could make them cost a 1,000,000 gold and it wouldn't really matter. It still helps, but it isn't a foolproof solution.
Translocation Seal doesn't work on shops where you can select one item from a list of choices
Oh, hah I guess I misread your suggestion. Still, I'd rather see it a separate prep, rather than add on to one I find quite good already.
Extra Elites isn't bad, Apothocary is better. I'd rather replace quest items.
Agreed. Shop scroll isn't so great either now that we have extra shops from the upgraded Bezar.
My problem with Extra Elites is that it fills up your shops with a bunch of stuff you can't afford to buy. Though, to be fair, I haven't tried it with the extra shops yet.
Quest Items would be just as bad, if it wasn't for the fact that Agnostic's Collar, Midas Gloves Crystal Ball, and Whurgarbl didn't fit into that category!
Extra Shop is a nice simple prep that everything else should be balanced around. As silly as it sounds, I think Apothecary needs to be nerfed to one shop. I never thought I'd say that prep needed a nerf


text:
Lufthansa Systems said it will provide a package of aeronautical IT solutions to Meridiana under a five-year contract that also covers Eurofly. Solutions include Lido RouteManual navigation charts, the Lido FMS navigational database and the Lido OC flight planning solution.
Subscribe to Access this Entire Article
"Other News - 03/26/2009" is part of ATW Plus, our online premium membership. Subscribing will provide you access to exclusive news, carefully researched airline financial, fleet and traffic data, plus the option to receive our popular, award-winning print magazine. To learn more, click here. If viewing via ATW Mobile, please login and click "Read web article" to view fully. Questions? firstname.lastname@example.com.


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text:
An interdisciplinary project
that features transportation,
planning, and stormwater mitigation
The Cape Cod Commission, in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) District 5, conducted a "Living Streets" study of Route 6A between Brewster and Orleans to create initial designs for a retrofit that improves safety, provides amenities, and increases connections between different modes of transportation. The Living Streets concept accommodates bicyclists, pedestrians, disabled patrons, and automobiles while also serving to help clean air and water.
The 1.7-mile portion of Route 6A that was studied connects Nickerson State Park and the adjacent Cape Cod Rail Trail with the shopping, banking, and services in Orleans village center.
Click on the image at right
to see a map of the study area »
« Click to open a gallery of photos
of stormwater problems in the study area
For this pilot study, the project team:
- developed ranking criteria based on site attributes (for example, sidewalk condition, safety information, land uses, vegetation characteristics, topography, culverts, etc.) and mapping analysis to set priorities and guide future siting decisions, and
- produced a final report and public presentation of conceptual design plans, standard details for design elements, a recommendation for future phases, and an implementation guide for design and construction.
For more information, see the Scope of Work. The Living Streets pilot project was Task 3.4 of the FY2012 Unified Planning Work Program for the Cape Cod Commission.
The pilot study wrapped up in September, and the project team presented the preferred alternative conceptual plan at a public meeting in mid October 2012.
Download the
presentation » Living Streets Corridor Pilot Study Potential Alternatives
Download the
final report » Living Streets Corridor Project - Final Report (December 2012)
Sample schematic from the study:
Sample illustrations from the study:
Illustrations by Tabitha Harkin/CCC
Martha Hevenor
The Cape Cod Commission staff hosted an April 26, 2012, meeting, making a presentation about street design 'best management practices', site inventory, and opportunities, and taking feedback on traffic safety, pedestrian and bike accessibility, historic considerations, and community character. Resources from the meeting include:
- Slide show/presentation
- FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) about Living Streets
The Commission staff next hosted a meeting on Tuesday, October 16, 2012, to identify a preferred alternative for the project. The meeting included a presentation of street design 'best management practices' and conceptual design plans from the Commission, and addressed public comment and feedback on traffic safety, pedestrian and bike accessibility, historic considerations, and community character:
- Living Streets Corridor Pilot Study Potential Alternatives
The staff finalized a report on the project in December 2012:
- Living Streets Corridor Project - Final Report
National Complete Streets Coalition
American Society of Landscape Architects
Charles River Watershed Alliance
MassDOT (GreenDOT)
EPA Green Infrastructure


text:
For experienced attorneys looking to build their practice through challenging and innovative work in a leading firm...
Because our lawyers, and in many cases our clients, rely on BakerHostetler staff members for support...
BakerHostetler has a long and proud history of representing U.S. businesses in their dealings with organized labor. Our relationships with many clients and the unions that represent their workers span several decades in industries including manufacturing, transportation, media, healthcare, hospitality and sports.
We believe that the best labor relations policies are those that prevent the need to battle with the government, unions or employees. Our focus is always on helping our clients maintain positive relationships with their workforce, and our reputation for credibility, integrity and results is well established in the labor-management community. Protecting our client's credibility as an employer is our number one concern.
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We have negotiated labor contracts on behalf of clients in every state in the continental United States and with every major union. In organizational drives, our clients have maintained a 95 percent win record involving some of the largest election campaigns in the private sector, including more than 15 drives involving 2,000 or more employees and one drive involving 20,000 employees. Since 2003, we have handled more than 200 arbitrations. We have deep experience helping our clients devise contingency plans for strike preparedness, including all aspects of operating the business under strike conditions.
While our practice group is comparable in size and depth to that of top employment law boutiques, we also work closely with colleagues in our more than 900 lawyer firm who concentrate their practice in other areas of law that affect relations with workers, including healthcare, taxation, mergers and acquisitions and bankruptcy. We are well equipped to counsel management on labor issues arising from mergers and acquisitions, shutdowns, relocations and other business reorganizations. In the public sector, we have extensive experience navigating the intricacies of municipal finance as they impact contract negotiations.


text:
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text: Built of solid brick with wood supporting beams hewn from solid fir, the Argonaut Hotel on Fishermen's Wharf in San Francisco is an example of the durability of 19th century construction. For over a century the 60,000-square-foot building served as a cannery and storage facility for the booming West Coast fishing industry, withstanding the devastating earthquake of 1906 and dozens of other minor quakes and tremors. The National Park Service acquired the land on which the building stands in the 1980's and the Haslett Warehouse began its transformation into a historic landmark hotel. Unfortunately, just before the painting and decorating were about to begin, the fourth floor of the building caught fire. Although the inferno was doused in a relatively short period of time, the damage was devastating: the atrium, fourth floor and roof were completely gutted. The first, second and third floors were intact, although badly damaged by smoke and the thousands of gallons of water needed to extinguish the flames. George E. Masker Painting – one of the Bay Area's oldest and largest painting contracting firms – was selected to complete the final phase of the restoration and it was no small task! "We had to sandblast the interior surfaces of the brick walls and the exposed wood beams to remove the extensive soot and smoke damage caused by the fire", said project manager, Jeff Fuchs. While the brickwork did not significantly absorb the acrid odor caused by the fire, the wood beams certainly did. The project designers wanted to preserve the natural beauty of the wood but were concerned that the fire odor would eventually seep out and permeate the hotel. SealCoat Enhances Wood's Natural Beauty - and Seals in Fire Odors Jeff Fuchs was unwilling to take any chances and after consulting with his local paint supplier decided to use shellac-base Bulls Eye® SealCoat™ Universal Sanding Sealer. Shellac is a natural odor barrier and two full coats will completely and permanently block any odor – no matter how strong. "We liked the fact that SealCoat dries quickly and since it's compatible with all finishes, we could use the same product to seal all the affected surfaces," said Jeff. "We spray applied two coats over the exposed beams, the plywood subfloors and even the drywall ceilings. I figure we must have used about 3,000 gallons of SealCoat to complete the job." According to Jeff, the project managers wanted the beams to have a matte appearance, "so we topcoated them with two coats of flat-finish lacquer. They looked absolutely beautiful when we were finished." The restored Argonaut is now a beautiful hotel and tourist attraction. Thanks to the fine work of the contractors at George E. Masker Painting and SealCoat, the delicate scent of freshly cut flowers in the atrium is the only fragrance that greets guests when they arrive.


text:
Starbucks (SBUX) is offering its employees a brand new perk: full tuition reimbursement to complete a bachelor's degree.
The coffee company is partnering with Arizona State University to provide all part- and full-time U.S. workers with the opportunity to receive reimbursement on tuition expenses for their junior and senior years of undergraduate education, Starbucks announced Monday.
The Starbucks College Achievement Plan is an effort to close the gap in college achievement. Nearly 50% of college students in the U.S. today fail to complete their degree, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
"There's no doubt, the inequality within the country has created a situation where many Americans are being left behind," Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, said in a statement. "Everyone who works as hard as our partners do should have the opportunity to complete college, while balancing work, school and their personal lives."
The plan also offers freshmen and sophomores partial tuition scholarships and need-based financial aid, as well as resources to help employees balance their work-life needs. Starbucks will provide working students with a dedicated enrollment coach, financial aid counselor and academic advisor to support them through graduation.
All U.S. employees working an average of 20 hours per week at any company-operated store — including Teavana, La Boulange, Evolution Fresh and Seattle's Best Coffee stores –are eligible to choose from more than 40 undergraduate degree programs at ASU, and they will earn full tuition reimbursement for each semester of full-time coursework completed.
Any worker that takes advantage of the program has no commitment to remain at the company past graduation.
The alliance grew out of Schultz's and ASU president Dr. Michael Crow's participation in the Markle Economic Future Initiative, a program committed to expanding opportunities that help Americans succeed in today's global and digital economy.
"This is a break-through in using online learning backed by the financial resources that make it possible to participate," Zoë Baird, president of Markle, said. "America urgently needs leadership to help people successfully transition to today's economic realities."
WATCH: Starbucks latest employee perk?


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We offer a robust, yet easy to use text and graphic verification software called the Text Verification Tool®. The Text Verification Tool is able to compare files within seconds.
This allows our customers to save time, increase productivity and prevent errors.
We strive to provide high quality, user friendly text and graphic verification software that meets the needs of our customer's and the industry.


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Congratulations to those awarded the first ever IBM Destination z Scholarships. They were just announced by zJournal and the sponsors of the program.
The Destination z scholars are the following talented individuals:
- Adam Norwood, University of Arkansas, Management Information Systems master's program
- Sandeep Basnet, Illinois State University, Information Systems master's program, mainframe specialization
- Scott Wetter, Marist College, Computer Science undergraduate program
- Bob Molerio, Marist College, On-Demand with Enterprise Systems certificate program
Each of them has been awarded $1,000 to continue their academic pursuits. Again, congratulations to each of them.
Visit zJournal for more information on the scholarship.
We are working to build another scholarship program for the Fall 2009 semester, and we will announce it formally at the zJournal and Destination z web sites.[Read More]


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2003 Avalanche Off Road Buggy - 2008 Top Truck Challenge FinalistPosted in Project Vehicles on November 1, 2008
Jeremy Naeger runs his own thriving 4x4 business, Custom Differentials, and is renowned among Midwest wheelers for his private off-road park, which we've had the privilege to visit. This year, Jeremy drove out from Missouri to join us at TTC, and to see if his custom Avalanche buggy wasn't the baddest 4x4 in this year's field. Our response? "Show me," of course.
Owner name/city: Jeremy Naeger/Bloomsdale, MO
Occupation: President, Custom Differentials and J-N Off-Road Park
Vehicle model: 2003 Avalanche buggy
Estimated value: $66,000
Engine/aspiration: 350ci Chevy Ramjet V-8, NOS nitrous, Hooker headers, Flowmaster mufflers
Transmission: Trans-To-Go TH400 with reverse manual valve body, Hurst pistol grip, Steff's pan
Transfer case: NP203/205 doubler
Suspension (f/r): Four-link, 16-inch King three-rate coilovers/Four-link, 16-inch King three-rate coilovers
Axles (f/r): 21/2-ton Rockwell/21/2-ton Rockwell; OEM billet lockers, Wilwood pinion brake kit; full hydro front and rear steer
Axle ratio: 6.72:1
Wheels: 20x13 TrailReady beadlocks
Tires: 54-inch cut Interco Boggers
Heck, this setup's so clean, we could live in here. Unless it rains. Regardless, we like the handy hydro-steering toggle mounted next to the Grant steering wheel and the Painless console, and a full complement of Auto Meter gauges-fuel, air, temp, tach, and oil-keep Jeremy up to date on underhood activity. A Hurst pistol-grip shifts the Trans-To-Go-prepped TH400 with reverse manual valve body, and that little red toggle switch labeled "NOS"...yeah, it's nice to hit the bottle when you need a little more oomph every now and then.


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Mortgage Rates Rise to 14-Month High, and More
What's News: Mortgage rates rise climb to 3.98%, a 14-month high. Dozens injured as explosion rocks chemical plant in Louisiana. Ben & Jerry's founder is giving away money. Joanne Po reports. Photo: Getty Images
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
... it's going to cross the to buy a home this is what's news I'm WS J live I'm Joann Co ... mortgage rates are rising for the sixth week in a row Freddie Mac reports that the average rate for a thirty year fixed mortgage ... climbed to three point nine eight percent from three point nine one percent last week ... that's the highest level in fourteen months ... mortgage increase has slowed refinancing but applications for loans to purchase homes ... are still up fourteen per cent ... from a year earlier ... dozens are injured in Louisiana after an explosion ripped through a Williams Companies chemical plant igniting a fire ... the plant is located about twenty miles south of baton Rouge ... extent of the injuries is not yet known ... people within two miles of the plant were ordered to stay indoors as a precaution ... early test did not indicate teachers levels of any chemicals around the planet and authorities are still investigating the cause of the explosion ... and in case you're in Washington D C next Tuesday and then Collin ... the co-founder of Ben Jerry's ... will be giving away money to the public at Union station ... Mr. Cohen is giving away dollar bills to raise awareness for his push ... for an amendment to the U S Constitution to get corporate money out of politics ... the dollar's he's giving away ... will be staffed with messages like ... not to be used for bribing politicians ... his account says the public can also set their own belts which can then be turned into free ice cream cones at Ben and Jerry's stores ... bookie keep us anomaly this is about Mr upbeat and what's news I'm WS J last ...


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June 14, 2012 5:49 AM
Greg Somogyi was already 7 foot and 3 inches tall when he arrived at UCSB in 2008, but his view from up there will be very different when he walks graduation on Sunday.
It's been changed even from the last basketball season when he averaged just 11.8 minutes, 3.1 points and 3.3 rebounds per game.
At his height, you register on the NBA radar when you can run, catch and shoot in a coordinated fashion.
"I've been pleasantly surprised with the things that have been going on," he said of the attention he's been receiving from several NBA teams. "During the season, I wasn't sure what I'd even be doing this spring."
Somogyi, a sociology major who was stuck behind athletic center Jaime Serna during all four of his Gaucho seasons, opened a few scouts' eyes during a tryout session at UCSB three weeks ago. The NBA forbids them from talking publicly about prospective draft picks, but one leaned toward his club's general manager during a 3-on-3 session and said, "Watch ... he's going to block Ezeli."
Sure enough, Somogyi swatted shot after shot attempted by Festus Ezeli, a 6-11 and 255-pound center from Vanderbilt who has been projected as a late first-round pick in the June 23 NBA Draft.
"I've worked out with him before up in Sacramento," Somogyi said. "He's a really good player, and really physical, and I wanted to prove that I can play against physical guys.
"I always take it as a challenge when someone is considered better than me."
A different scout leaned toward one of UCSB's assistant coaches and said, "We'd like to draft Somogyi, but we don't think he'll be around when we pick in the second round."
Somogyi has already had workouts with the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors. The Denver Nuggets will try him out on Monday and the Dallas Mavericks will do the same the following week.
"It's been crazy for me ever since the season ended - even the process of finding an agent," said Somogyi, who settled on Entersports' Daniel Moldovan. "He's been great about spreading the word about me."
The Lakers were so intrigued that their scouting guru, Bill Bertka, kept him for 30 minutes after their workout.
"He gave me some very good insight and said he'd like to keep working with me," Somogyi said. "I was going to play for the Utah Jazz in the NBA summer league they hold in Orlando and then go play for the Lakers in the Las Vegas league, which starts a week later, but the Lakers asked me to change my plans.
"They want me to come to their mini-camp a week before that league."
But those decisions could all be made for Somogyi if he's selected on draft day. One scout described him as a "sleeper" pick, as in sleeping giant.
"You don't see many kids who are 7-3 with a 7-foot-9 wingspan," he said. "He's got good hands, too, and he can run the floor and he actually has a good shooting touch.
"On draft day, some team may say, 'He's got what we can't teach, so let's take a shot and see if we can make him a player.' A lot of people are intrigued with him, especially those seeing him for the first time."
Somogyi said he's prepared to take the long road to the NBA if no short cut appears on June 28.
"I understand a lot of people don't know too much about me and that it would be a gamble to pick me," he said. "It's probably a long shot that I'll get drafted, so I'm focusing more on other paths to the NBA, through the summer league and training camps and possibly playing in Europe for a year or two.
"But it's already been a dream come true."
And now it just becomes a matter of awakening a sleeper giant.


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Dine. Earn. Redeem.
The perfect gift of taste.
We take customer feedback very seriously. We welcome all comments and review each response in detail.
To start, please click on the restaurant logo below to which your feedback is in reference.
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Certain activities provided by this website may be covered by U.S. Patent No. 5,930,474


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Click to Play:
Recorded: Thursday, March 24, 7 pm @ Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario
Duration: 01:23:22
Amin Jaffer spoke about western luxury goods made for Indian princes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The talk explored the superb and extraordinary commissions made for maharajas by western luxury houses Cartier, Chaumet and Boucheron. Jaffer contextualized this appetite for luxury goods within the broader historical context of shifting taste and power between India and the West.
Dr. Amin Jaffer is International Director of Asian Art at Christie's and specialises in Indian art in the age of European influence. For thirteen years a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Jaffer authored Furniture from British India and Ceylon (V&A, 2001), Luxury Goods from India (V&A, 2002) and Made for Maharajas: a design diary of Princely India (2006). Jaffer was co-curator of the V&A's blockbuster 2004 exhibition Encounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500-1800, which explored the artistic and cultural encounter between Europe and Asia following the discovery of a sea route to India by Vasco da Gama in 1498. He lectures frequently in Europe, America and India and contributes regularly to journals and major newspapers.


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Contact the Editor
Current Editor
In addition to being the Editor of Women Grow Business, Tinu rescues web sites from obscurity and shows business people how to generate leads and traffic from the web. Co-founder and current CEO of Leveraged Promotion, she also runs Free Traffic Tips and Ask Tinu.
She's been widely published online as an ever effective, end-to-end website promotion specialist — on Web Pro News, Search Engine Guide, and more. Ready to engage on Twitter as @tinu, she's known to say: "You can't knock my hustle."
To submit your news or a guest post, please follow the instructions on the Be Featured page, where you'll find her direct email address.
Past Editors
Shonali Burke is editor of Women Grow Business and one of the country's leading business communicators, who was named to PRWeek's inaugural top "40 Under 40″ list of US-based PR professionals. She specializes in creating and implementing integrated (online and off), results-based, measurable communication programs for clients both large and small at Shonali Burke Consulting.
An accredited business communicator, she is also Adjunct Faculty at Johns Hopkins University's M.A. in Communications program and active in the local communications community as President of IABC/Washington. She is frequently invited to speak on public relations and integrated communications-related topics, including measurement, effective integrated public relations, cause marketing, PR on a budget, and social media. Talk to her via her blog, Waxing UnLyrical, or Twitter.
Jill Foster is founding editor of Women Grow Business.
Named by Forbes Magazine as one of 30 women entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter, she teaches communications through social media tools and community engagement in the Washington, DC area.
Co-founder of DC Media Makers, she's addicted to learning digital tech and helping professional women put their most authentic self forward both online and onstage. She was awarded the Apps for Democracy Social Citizen Award in 2009 for her co-produced mobile media report on how technology could better serve communities in Washington, DC. Her work has been in conversation at The Washington Post, Guardian UK, Huffington Post, and a range online outlets.
She looks forward to talking more on Twitter (@JillFoster) or at her brand new online home, Live Your Talk.Google+
[...] Check out WomenGrowBusiness.com, and let me know what you think! And, if you're a woman with a business experience to share, please contact Editor Jill Foster. [...]
[...] WomenGrowBusiness – This is a unqiue blog that is run by recently named DC Tech Titan. Jill Foster has assembled an all-start cast of small business female entrepreneurs that regularly contribute [...]


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'Overwhelming' sand clogs region
Like all big storms, the winds and waters of Hurricane Sandy swirled through the region with a unique mix of flooding, destruction and debris in its wake.
True to its name, sand - tons and tons of it - was one of the signature legacies of Hurricane Sandy, so much that it buried roads, driveways, decks, mailboxes and benches and found its way inside garages in some coastal neighborhoods. It almost seemed like Sandy was pushing shoreline beaches inland and overtopped whatever human artifacts might be in the way, perhaps to make more room for the rising seas.
"It's a little overwhelming," said Laura Trinks Tuesday, as she and her husband Paul tried to dig about a foot of heavy, wet sand out of the garage near one of their two cottages at Hawk's Nest Beach in Old Lyme. Nearby, a small bulldozer attempted to find the pavement of a roadway all but lost under about 3 feet of sand, a necessity before utility trucks could get to the neighborhood to restore power.
Brian Thompson, director of the Office of Long Island Sound Programs for the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said the amount of sand carried onshore by Sandy seems unprecedented.
"In some areas, it's piled like snowbanks," he said Wednesday. "It seems like there's a lot more sand that's been moved and it's more widespread" than previous big storms.
In recognition of the need to remove all the sand as quickly as possible, DEEP on Tuesday issued an emergency authorization allowing sand to be removed back to the beach, near the mean high water line, without the usual required coastal permits. The authorization, which expires April 30, applies only to sand not contaminated by oil or other substances or mixed with substantial amounts of debris. If the debris is screened out first, it could be dumped back on the beach.
"We expect it will be put back on the closest beach," Thompson said. "If one side of the beach is particularly depleted, it's fine to put the sand there. We don't expect people to know where it came from."
If sand is believed to be contaminated, it would need to be tested before a determination can be made about whether it can be recycled or disposed at a permitted facility, Thompson said.
In Groton City, about 2 feet of sand blocked Beach Pond Road and plugged culverts in two nearby ponds, Groton City Mayor Marian Galbraith said. Tuesday night, city public works crews manned payloaders to begin clearing the road and moving the sand to Eastern Point Beach, which was badly scoured by the storm, she said. Crews also helped dig out at least one resident whose driveway was impassible because of sand, she said.
The task, Galbraith said, is somewhat like clearing roads after a big snowstorm - only sand doesn't melt, and it's heavier.
At the Old Lyme Shores neighborhood Wednesday afternoon, crews hired by the beach association had cleared the roads and were spreading mountains of the piled sand on the beach.
Tina DeLeo and her husband, Carl, cleaning up the flooding and damage to their two beach houses, said they felt weary to be faced with making repairs again just a year after the last big storm. Still, they were grateful that at least relatively quick progress had been made to clear the road, even if a pile of sand still covered part of their front lawn.
"This is nothing compared to yesterday," she said.
At the Crescent Beach neighborhood in East Lyme, town road crews had succeeded in clearing about 2 feet of sand from Atlantic Avenue, reopening the road to traffic Wednesday afternoon. Huge mounds of sand were piled in the parking lot at McCook Point Park next door to the neighborhood, apparently to be spread on the town beach.
About an hour after the road reopened, Randy Sturm was powerwashing his driveway, having just cleared away about an inch of sand that had covered it.
"This is getting to be a yearly thing," he said.
Stories that may interest you
Vying for a chance at 'The Price is Right'
Amy Prevost, left, of Ivoryton shrugs her shoulders after her audition Tuesday while her sister, Cathy Hilt, right, of Niantic finishes hers during the open casting call for CBS's "The Price is Right" game show at Mohegan Sun.
Navy outlines plan to test private drinking wells around base for chemicals
As a first step in investigating the potential exposure from chemicals found in firefighting foam used over the years, the Navy is requesting to sample private drinking wells in certain areas around the Naval Submarine Base.
Meeting of Tigers' owner and faith leaders left 'unresolved' issues
Muslims who met Sunday with Connecticut Tigers' owner E. Miles Prentice could not get him to denounce policies of the conservative think tank he chairs.
Early reaction to state's wind deal positive in New London
Plans for major upgrades at State Pier in New London to accommodate the offshore wind industry were met with optimism and a hint of skepticism from the public on Tuesday.
Democratic hopefuls call for Kavanaugh's impeachment after new allegation


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The IUCN Centre for Mediterranean Cooperation (IUCN-Med) has organized on 10 -11 March, at the Historical-Botanical Garden "La Concepcion" in Málaga, a regional training workshop on the global initiative of the IUCN Green List with the participation of three Mediterranean regional groups representing Spain, France and Italy.
The IUCN Green List seeks to recognize and reward good governance and effective and equitable management of protected areas, as well as examine and report on progress in national systems of protected areas and the implementation of the Aichi commitments (Target 11). To do this, IUCN with the active participation of several partner countries, is carrying out various actions to develop, evaluate, and finally present a new model of global quality standards for the management and effective and equitable governance of protected areas. This standard is known as the IUCN Green List of Protected Areas.
Several countries including Australia, China, Colombia, South Korea, France, Georgia, Italy, Kenya, and Micronesia, are currently participating in the pilot phase of the Green List to define and enhance this standards model through the creation of national and regional working groups . The Green List will subsequently be applied to several pilot national parks in these countries during 2014 and it will be officially presented at the next IUCN World Parks Congress to be held in Sydney (Australia) in November 2014.
The Malaga workshop aims to clarify the procedure and criteria for the Green List and define the framework of joint collaboration between the three Mediterranean regional groups. The Spanish institutions that support the process are the National Parks Autonomous Agency (OAPN in its Spanish acronym;)Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment), the Ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning (regional Government of Andalusia), and Europarcs-Spain. From the Italian side, the project is supported by Ministry of Environment, along with the Italian IUCN National Committee and IUCN experts from the Species Survival Commission; and from France, the French IUCN National Committee which is coordinating the initiative with several French ministries and institutions. In the workshop the IUCN North Africa programme coordinator will be participating to explore ways of effective regional collaboration.
The meeting coordinated by IUCN-Med is financially supported by the National Parks Autonomous Agency of Spain (OAPN
For further information Carla Danelutti


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The Ceremony
Tammy Wynette And George Jones
(Billy Sherrill, Jenny Strickland, Carmol Taylor)
George Jones And Tammy Wynette Super Hits
Transcriber: email@example.com
(man speaks):
Dearly beloved, we are gathered together,
In the presence of God, and these witnesses,
To join this man and this woman in the bonds,
Of holy matrimony
Do you Tammy, take this man, George
To be your lawfully wedded husband,
To love and to cherish until death do you part?
(T.W.) sings:
I'll take this man and by him I'll stand
I promise that we'll never part
To him, I'll be true
There'll be no one new
From now, till death do us part
(man speaks)
And do you, George, take this woman, Tammy
To be your lawfully wedded wife,
To love and to cherish, until death do you part?
Yes I'll take this woman
She'll be mine forever
And I'll love her, with all of my heart
To have and to hold
My love won't grow cold
I promise, till death do us part
(both sing)
We'll take each other
From this day forward
Together, in sickness or health
United with love
We'll face life together
If we're poor or if we have wealth
For better or worst
You'll always come first
And no one can keep us apart
Yes, we take each other
Forsaking all others
Together, till death do us part
(man speaks)
I now pronounce you, man and wife.