Egypt State Media Says Suleiman, Former Mubarak Official, Dies

By ROD NORDLAND and KAREEM FAHIM

Published: July 19, 2012

CAIRO — Omar Suleiman, the once-powerful head of Egypt’s intelligence service who represented the old regime’s last attempt to hold onto power, died in an American hospital early Thursday, according to the state-owned Middle East News Agency.

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Nasser Nasser/Associated Press

Omar Suleiman in 2009.

Egyptian critics immediately saw his death in the United States as emblematic of his close ties with America’s Central Intelligence Agency, which he helped to establish the practice of extraordinary rendition and, critics say, the torture of terrorism suspects.

When the C.I.A. asked Mr. Suleiman if he could provide a DNA sample from a brother of the Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mr. Suleiman offered to send the agency the brother’s entire arm instead, Ron Suskind, the author of “The One Percent Doctrine,” told ABC News.

Mr. Suleiman’s supporters, however, mourned the loss of a moderate regime figure who might have served as a buffer between military rule on the one hand and a growing Islamic dominance on the other.

In 18 years as the head of the powerful General Intelligence Directorate, a domestic and international intelligence agency better known as the Mukhabarat, Mr. Suleiman became, in the view of many, the most powerful spymaster in the Middle East. He was often referred to as Mr. Mubarak’s “black box.”

As Mr. Mubarak was buffeted by months of street protests and calls for his resignation, he turned to Mr. Suleiman to lead negotiations with his critics. Later he charged him with a last-ditch effort to reorganize the government, appointing him to the long-vacant post of vice president. The move was widely ridiculed by revolutionaries, however, and 13 days later, on Feb. 11, 2011, it was Mr. Suleiman who announced that Mr. Mubarak was standing down and handing over interim power to the military. Another figure took over the Mukhabarat as well.

Mr. Suleiman was the first head of the powerful intelligence service whose identity became publicly known. He played a crucial role in Egyptian diplomatic efforts to forge a reconciliation between Palestinians from Hamas and Fatah, although releases of diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks showed that he had worked with the Israelis to try to deny Hamas its electoral victory in Gaza, because he viewed the organization as an extension of Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood.

“I think a lot of secrets will die with him,” said Nabil Fahmy, the former Egyptian ambassador to the United States. “He had a unique ability of being in a very sensitive, often controversial position as head of intelligence but at the same time preserving the respect of people toward him. He was a professional.”

Mr. Suskind had a more trenchant view. “He’s a charitable man, friendly,” Mr. Suskind told ABC. “He tortures only people that he doesn’t know.”

Under Mr. Suleiman’s tenure, his agency was widely accused of involvement in the torture of dissidents. He was considered a staunch opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood and an architect of the long ban on that organization’s participation in political life, which ended with its victory in this year’s presidential elections. He was also deeply involved in the C.I.A.’s program of extraordinary rendition, in which terrorism suspects were sent to countries where they could be tortured, according to an article in The New Yorker and a number of books.

The first known case of rendition, that of Talaat Fuad Qassem, was to Egypt in 1995, according to Omar Ashour, a visiting scholar at the Brookings Doha Center.

Mr. Suleiman’s public speeches during the Tahrir Square revolution, denouncing protesters as agents of foreign governments and claiming that Egypt was unready for democracy, eroded public support for him. As a former lieutenant general in the Egyptian military, he would be entitled to burial with military honors, but some critics here were already arguing against that.

At the same, many moderate Egyptians looked to Mr. Suleiman, and later Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, as an alternative to Islamist leadership.

“For pro-revolution and pro-change Egyptians, he was the brains behind Mubarak’s regime survival and a brutal torturer-murderer,” said Mr. Ashour. “For pro-Mubarak he is a source of stability in the country and a bulwark against Islamist advance.”

As the most prominent regime figure other than Mr. Mubarak himself, Mr. Suleiman’s death comes at a symbolic moment. The former president was returned earlier this week to prison, after the relative comfort of a military hospital, and the new Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, was due to meet Thursday with Khaled Meshal, the top political leader of Hamas.

There had been no public reports that Mr. Suleiman was ailing or that he had gone to the United States for medical care, so the news of his death came as a surprise.

Reuters news agency said that he died suddenly “while he was undergoing medical examination,” while Al Ahram, the state-owned newspaper, said he died at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. There was no indication of the cause of death.

Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

Putting a Megawatt Smile on a Simmering Problem

Duraid Adnan/The New York Times

From billboards in Baghdad, an unauthorized image of Ms. Couric beams out at passers-by in an advertisement for a daily news bulletin about electricity.

By TIM ARANGO

Published: July 11, 2012

BAGHDAD — With average temperatures hovering around 110 degrees this week, Iraqi officials have decided to try to head off the kind of huge public protests that have arisen in years past over their failure to provide adequate electric service.

But officials are not just trying to upgrade power lines and generators. They are also looking to Katie Couric to help keep people cool.

At more than two dozen locations around this city, officials have posted giant billboards of Ms. Couric, billed as “America’s Sweetheart” during her time as a host of the “Today” show on NBC. From high above the steamy streets, or from the side of blast walls, Ms. Couric beams out at passers-by in an advertisement for a daily news bulletin about electricity that is produced by the government and is shown on 11 satellite television channels.

“It doesn’t give me hope about electricity, but I like to see her beautiful face,” Habib Harbi, who sells watermelon in the summer and sweets in the winter, said as he looked across the street at the billboard from his fruit stand.

People point to many markers here as evidence that life has gotten better since the very dark days after the occupation began. Safety is still a concern, with bombings and shootings taking lives randomly. But it has improved. Yet one of the harshest reminders that Iraq is still a wounded nation is the inability to provide adequate electricity. Soon it will be Ramadan, when the faithful cannot eat or drink during the long daylight hours, a challenge made all the more difficult by the hot, still air. No power — no fan, no air-conditioning.

The Electricity Ministry is making only halting progress in solving the country’s power woes, so it is trying to burnish its image with a public relations campaign that demonstrates a degree of Madison Avenue sophistication, not to mention a disregard of copyright law.

“We were looking for a bright and optimistic face that inspires the people to imagine a better future for electricity,” said Musaab al-Mudarrs, the spokesman for the Electricity Ministry, who said designers had plucked Ms. Couric’s image from the Internet.

Mr. Mudarrs oversees a bustling media office at the Electricity Ministry that produces the daily five-minute news bulletin, a longer weekly program, the advertising campaign that features Ms. Couric and, soon, a magazine called People and Power. He said the goal behind the effort was to counter the populace’s perception of the ministry as “only bribes and corruption.”

Mr. Mudarrs said the face of an American woman was sought for the campaign because showcasing an Iraqi woman would violate cultural taboos. And Ms. Couric, he said, was dressed appropriately in the picture — she was wearing a brown Max Mara blazer — and was the right age. “We didn’t want someone to be very old or very young, and she was in the middle,” he said. Mr. Mudarrs did say he was a bit worried that “when she finds out, maybe she will file a lawsuit against us.”

But in a telephone interview, Ms. Couric took the news in stride. “I’m calling my lawyer,” she said, adding quickly, “I’m kidding.”

Ms. Couric, who has reported from Iraq, said the billboards were “bizarre and slightly amusing” but reminded her of her experiences here. “It is illustrative of a serious problem, because when I was in Iraq, at the height of the war, it was a huge hardship for families, especially in the summers,” she said. “It did remind me of how serious the situation still is there.”

For years, the Electricity Ministry has borne the anger of citizens over electricity shortages that defied nine years of American efforts and many dollars to fix. Two hot summers ago, street protests over power shortages forced the minister of electricity to resign. Last year, as the Arab Spring blossomed, thousands of Iraqis rallied for better services and were greeted by bullets. Now giant billboards featuring Ms. Couric stand out in a city dotted with placards of bearded and turbaned religious men.

One of the billboards is affixed to the blast walls that protect an Electricity Ministry office near a busy central market. Across the street merchants hawk everything from fish to bootleg DVDs to plastic children’s pools.

  It is unclear what effect the public relations campaign is having on people’s sentiments. The daily program about electricity has not stirred a national conversation. But while complaints about power are still frequent, there are few rumblings about street protests.

The ministry says that electricity is improving, and some residents agree, especially those who live near ministry offices. Murtada Khassim, who sells cologne and bars of soap from a wooden cart near another billboard of Ms. Couric’s smiling face, and who lives in an apartment nearby, said he had had 10 straight hours of power the previous night, a substantial improvement from last summer, when most residents had just a few hours each day.

“Whoever comes here says, ‘What a beautiful face,’ ” Mr. Khassim said. “She’s smiling. She gives us hope.”

But others, like Mr. Harbi, the watermelon seller, who lives in another neighborhood, said his electricity had not noticeably improved. “Things are bad,” he said. “Three to four hours a day. It’s very bad.”

Near the watermelon stand, Abu Asil displayed stacks of children’s clothing atop a cardboard box. “They say this is news about electricity,” he said. “But where is the electricity?” He lives in Adhamiya, a Sunni enclave in the capital, and he said he received four hours of electricity each day.

As he spoke, one of the double-decker buses that recently began operating here passed by.

“Anything that gives us hope in Baghdad is good,” he said. “Just like these red buses with air-conditioning. For 500 dinars, I can reach home without being in the heat.” That is less than 5o cents.

The woman who actually presents the electricity show on television is Vivienne Ghanim, a former broadcast journalist. The ministry also films the segments using a male host, for distribution to channels that forbid women to appear on the air without their head covered. Ms. Ghanim said the ministry initially considered using her image on the billboards.

“Of course, my family was against it,” she said. “My family said the security situation was bad, and that they didn’t want my photo all over the place.”

So it was Ms. Couric who unwittingly became the public face of one of Iraq’s most implacable problems. (The backup choice, for those wondering, was Laurie Dhue, a former anchor for Fox News.)

“The face was very nice, her smile,” said Marwan al-Bayatti, the Web producer at the ministry who designed the billboards. “It was perfect for us.” 

Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.

Austerity Reaches the Hollande Government in France

By STEVEN ERLANGER

Published: July 12, 2012

PARIS — With his first Bastille Day approaching on Saturday, François Hollande and his government have had a good start to his presidency, impressing the French with a down-to-earth style. Mr. Hollande, a Socialist, and his prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, have ordered downgrades in official luxury that have set a tone self-consciously different from that of the supposedly “bling bling” presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.

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Pool photo by Kenzo Tribouillard

François Hollande has given up the presidential Citroën C6 for a smaller Citroën DS5 diesel hybrid and reduced the ranks of his official drivers.

In politics, symbols are also substance, and the changes range from the large to the small. Mr. Hollande has actually taken the train to Brussels, without a state jet following him, and his ministers have been ordered to hit the rails when possible (with a free pass on the national railway system). When they fly, they are encouraged to travel in coach class on commercial airlines. (Upgrades on Air France are probably a given for ministers, in any case.)

Official cars have been diminished in size and in luxury. Mr. Hollande has given up the presidential Citroën C6 for a smaller but hardly shabby Citroën DS5 diesel hybrid. He has reduced the ranks of his official drivers to two from three, and they are now supposed to stop at red lights. Mr. Ayrault gave up his C6 for a cheaper Peugeot 508. Cabinet ministers have also traded down, and the housing minister, Cécile Duflot, an ecologist who was criticized for wearing jeans to an Élysée Palace meeting, has ordered four official bicycles.

Champagne at receptions has largely been replaced by Muscadet, a considerably cheaper white wine, and prices at the official cafeterias for ministerial employees, always a bargain, have been raised modestly.

Even security has been put to the knife, at least a little. Junior ministers no longer get bodyguards, and the number of security workers attached to the presidency has been reduced by a third.

In general, Mr. Ayrault has ordered his ministers to reduce their official budgets sharply, by 7 percent in 2013 and by an additional 4 percent in each of the next two years.

As he promised during the campaign, Mr. Hollande has cut ministerial salaries by 30 percent (including his own, to $18,000 a month from $26,000). And for the first time, the salaries of ministers cannot exceed the prime minister’s salary, which is about $16,000 a month. Pierre Moscovici, the finance minister, told L’Express that “my salary is lower than that of my chief of staff, 12,000 euros, and of a few hundred of the civil servants” at the ministry. That is about $14,600 a month.

There has, of course, been criticism, especially from the center-right and from business leaders. Valérie Pécresse, the budget minister in Mr. Sarkozy’s government, has ridiculed these efforts as nearly meaningless in the face of France’s budget crisis, with total debt nearly 90 percent of gross domestic product and debt service alone costing more than $60 billion a year. “The austerity of the left is hypocritical,” she said. “Who will believe that the budget can be balanced by doubling the annual direct wealth tax and by lowering the salaries of ministers?”

But the symbolism is also meant to prepare the French for tougher times ahead, for some sacrifices to their own way of life and to the social-welfare system in the face of high deficits and demographic change.

Even more startling is the government’s intention to limit the remuneration of the bosses of major state-owned companies, to about 20 times that of the lowest-paid employee, or about $550,000 a year — part of an effort to end what Mr. Moscovici has called “intolerable hyperinequalities.” Henri Proglio, the chief executive of Électricité de France, reportedly earns $1.9 million a year — 64 times that of the company’s lowest-paid employee — and he could be paid about a third of what he gets now if the law goes through.

Luc Oursel, who recently took over the nuclear power company Areva, could see his salary halved to $400,000 from about $825,000. Jean-Paul Bailly, the chief of La Poste, could lose 41 percent of his $775,000 salary.

Given that French executives of state-owned companies already make less money than many of their European counterparts, there is concern that the restrictions, while essentially ideological and of little consequence for the economy, would mean that companies vital to the nation would attract fewer qualified managers. That atmosphere is enhanced by Mr. Hollande’s plans to tax those making more than $1.25 million a year at 75 percent, which, together with the revived wealth tax, could mean an effective tax rate of 90 percent.

Laurence Parisot, the head of the main business lobby, Medef, warned that the government risked making France less competitive by restricting salaries and piling more taxes onto an already heavily taxed private sector. “We fear a programmed strangulation,” she said, warning Mr. Hollande, “Be careful not to turn our country into a sort of enclave disconnected from the rest of the world.”

There are few Socialist ministers with any business experience. Ms. Parisot said that their plans instilled “a palpable anxiety and an immense worry for every entrepreneur,” because they are “disconnected from company life, from what a company can bear,” especially in a period of minimal growth and high unemployment.

In two days of discussions this week with business and labor leaders, Mr. Ayrault and his key ministers made an effort to prepare the unions for changes to come, especially next year, when sharp budget cuts will be necessary to go along with still-higher taxes. The government has been urged by independent state auditors and by the influential Cercle des Économistes to reduce the tax burden on the private sector, especially for social benefits, to improve French competitiveness in a globalized world.

Mr. Ayrault hinted that some of that burden might be moved toward income taxes, rather than the corporate tax. He also said that there should be a larger study of how to finance and even to reform France’s generous social welfare programs.

But consultations take time, and Ms. Parisot remained unhappy with the lack of progress on liberalizing a labor market hampered by generous mandated benefits and rigorous job protections. She was also troubled by suggestions that union leaders could be present during decisions about compensation.

The government got a taste of reality on Thursday, when the French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën, hit by the European recession, announced that it would cut 8,000 more jobs in France. The social affairs minister, Marisol Touraine, said, “We cannot accept something like this,” and the government promised to study the problem.

But for Bastille Day, Mr. Hollande is sticking with the symbolism.

The traditional July 14 garden party, which used to be a way to honor distinguished people from all walks of life from all over France, was canceled by Mr. Sarkozy in 2010 to symbolize belt tightening. Mr. Hollande will not dare resurrect it, although the Élysée gardens will be open to the public on Saturday afternoon.

Mr. Hollande has decided, however, to maintain the July 14 military parade, with jet overflights, armored vehicles and hundreds of military personnel, an extraordinarily costly affair. And like a good politician, he has decided to restore a nationally televised presidential interview on Bastille Day. But given the low viewership expected on a Saturday evening in mid-July, he will do it at lunchtime. 

Elvire Camus contributed reporting.

The Chatty Cathys of the Prehistoric World

‘Ice Age: Continental Drift,’ With Ray Romano

Blue Sky Studios/20th Century Fox

Scrat, voiced by Chris Wedge, in "Ice Age: Continental Drift."

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: July 12, 2012

Fans of 20th Century Fox animation, you have cause to rejoice. A charming 3-D cartoon arrives in theaters on Friday, witty and touching and marvelously concise, part of a series that has managed to stay fresh and inventive after many years in the pop-culture spotlight.

There is one catch, though. If you want to see this little picture — a four-and-a-half-minute dialogue-free delight called “The Longest Daycare,” in which Maggie Simpson stands up for what’s right at a preschool named after Ayn Rand — you must also buy a ticket to “Ice Age: Continental Drift.”

The Simpsons short cleverly blends the bright-colored flatness of the television show with the gimmickry of 3-D. It also upholds (more than the TV series itself) one of the golden rules of animation: no talking. With the important exception of Scrat — the obsessive rodent whose Sisyphean pursuit of an acorn is one of the great love stories of our time — the “Ice Age” movies go in the opposite direction. They come close to inspiring a new theory of prehistoric extinction: All those species clearly died from the hot air that gathered in the atmosphere as a result of their inability to shut up for even a minute.

The principle guiding the “Ice Age” franchise seems to be that you can’t have too many celebrity voice-overs. This is not entirely unpleasant. During the “Continental Drift” end credits (if you can endure a dreadful song about how we’re all one big happy family), you can match various animals with their human impersonators.

Drake and Nicki Minaj are mammoths, part of a cool-kid pack that supplies this plot-stuffed adventure with its teen-movie subplot. Wanda Sykes — no mistaking her voice — is the elderly sloth who provides genuine comic relief amid a lot of forced jollity. And that villainous pirate primate whose diction you spent nearly 90 minutes trying to identify (or maybe that was just me)? Peter Dinklage! Six-year-old “Game of Thrones” fans will be giddy with joy.

You want more? Aziz Ansari! Joy Behar! Patrick Stewart! Also John Leguizamo, of course, returning as the sloth equivalent of Eddie Murphy’s “Shrek” Donkey.

As you may have gathered, there is a lot going on here. Visually, there is quite a bit of slipping and sliding and falling and careening in a landscape of jagged rocks, spiky ice floes and state-of-the-art computer-generated water.

The Blue Sky animation studio’s house style is enjoyably antic, with a playful but never sloppy disregard for the laws of physics. An early sequence in which Scrat accidentally causes the breakup of the earth’s single landmass sets a high mark for cleverness that the rest of the film sometimes tries to match. Among the busy, chaotic set pieces, a few stand out, notably a haunting and absurd encounter with shape-shifting sirens who lure mariners to their doom.

Mariners? In the Pleistocene era? The problem is not that “Continental Drift,” directed by Steve Martino and Michael Thurmeier from a screenplay by Michael Berg and Jason Fuchs, takes liberties with the scientific record. (The movie makes fun of a previous episode’s use of dinosaurs, which never coexisted with mammoths.) The problem is that its sense of fun is essentially parasitic. Those pirates, those cool kids, that mass of cute, squeaky, nonverbal creatures (hamsters? chipmunks?) — all of them try to entertain you by reminding you of things you’ve seen before.

And the stories — again, with the heroic and necessary exception of Scrat, a character with whom I identify perhaps more than is healthy — are warmed-over hash. Manny (Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah) must deal with the adolescence of their daughter, Peaches (Keke Palmer), who must learn a lesson about true friendship and being yourself. Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary) falls into a love-hate romance with a feisty female named Shira (Jennifer Lopez). Also, Manny must rescue his family from disaster and fight off bad guys.

It may be too much to expect novelty — then again, why shouldn’t we? — but a little more conviction might be nice. “Continental Drift,” like its predecessors, is much too friendly to dislike, and its vision of interspecies multiculturalism is generous and appealing.

But it is not my impression that the “Ice Age” movies have inspired the kind of devoted affection that clings to some other recent animated entertainment. Which may make it a bit cruel of Fox to lead with that instantly, durably lovable Simpsons short.

“Ice Age: Continental Drift” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Danger and fighting.

Ice Age

Continental Drift

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Steve Martino and Michael Thurmeier; written by Michael Berg and Jason Fuchs, based on a story by Mr. Berg and Lori Forte; music by John Powell; produced by Ms. Forte and John C. Donkin; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.

WITH THE VOICES OF: Ray Romano (Manny), John Leguizamo (Sid), Denis Leary (Diego), Jennifer Lopez (Shira), Queen Latifah (Ellie), Seann William Scott (Crash), Josh Peck (Eddie), Nicki Minaj (Steffie), Drake (Ethan), Peter Dinklage (Captain Gutt), Aziz Ansari (Squint), Joy Behar (Eunice), Patrick Stewart (Ariscratle), Wanda Sykes (Granny), Keke Palmer (Peaches) and Kunal Nayyar (Gupta).

A version of this review appeared in print on July 13, 2012, on page C10 of the New York edition with the headline: The Chatty Cathys of the Prehistoric World.

In Simply Meeting, Egyptian and Saudi Leaders Open New Era

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: July 12, 2012

CAIRO — In his first foreign visit as Egypt’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood met Thursday with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, a signal that the two intended to set aside their profound ideological enmity in favor of pragmatic mutual interests.

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Egyptian Presidency, via European Pressphoto Agency

Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood met Thursday with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

It was a meeting freighted with symbolism. The Saudi Arabian monarchy is the conservative anchor at the center of the authoritarian order that prevailed across the Middle East. It was a close ally of the former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, and in both Washington and Cairo, Saudi envoys pushed hard to rally support for his government and then to protect him from trial, Western and Egyptian diplomats say.

Mr. Morsi owes his election to the popular uprising that finally cracked the old order, which the Brotherhood struggled for decades to overturn. The Islamist movement has long opposed the Saudi monarchy as a decadent, hypocritical and undemocratic tool of Western interests in the region. Though founded in Egypt, the Brotherhood has a sizable underground franchise in Saudi Arabia, despite a legal ban on its existence and deep animosity from the kingdom’s rulers.

But Egypt desperately needs Saudi Arabian financial support to weather an economic crisis brought on by its 18 months of turmoil. In May, Saudi Arabia reportedly deposited $1 billion in Egypt’s central bank to help the country stay afloat until it can work out a proposed $3.2 billion loan package from the International Monetary Fund, and it has pledged still more. Egypt is believed to need about $9 billion to avoid an economic calamity.

Saudi Arabia also employs hundreds of thousands of Egyptians — including one of Mr. Morsi’s sons, a urologist — whose remittances home are a major support for the Egyptian economy.

Various points of friction complicate the relationship. At the moment, Saudi Arabia is holding in jail an Egyptian lawyer, Ahmed el-Gizawi, whose detention has become a major cause here. He was arrested three months ago on charges of smuggling antidepressants in Saudi Arabia, but he had come to the attention of the authorities because he filed a lawsuit demanding that the kingdom release other Egyptians held without charges.

Mr. Gizawi’s arrest set off protests outside Saudi consulates here, which prompted the brief recall of the Saudi ambassador. Securing Mr. Gizawi’s release would be a major boost to Mr. Morsi’s popularity.

For its part, Saudi Arabia needs Egypt, the most populous Arab state and home to the most formidable Arab army. Both countries are anxious to counter Iranian influence in the region, and the Saudi-dominated Gulf Cooperation Council has even floated the idea of enlisting Egypt as some sort of auxiliary member to help firm up its military alliance.

What is more, the Saudi monarchy may fear that the Islamists in Cairo could potentially exercise a subversive influence in support of Brotherhood allies inside Saudi Arabia.

But Mr. Morsi made clear in his inaugural address that he shared Saudi Arabia’s opposition to the situation in Syria, where the Iranian-backed government of Bashar al-Assad has been crushing his opponents in what is nearing civil war.

Rayed Krimly, an official with the Saudi Arabian Foreign Ministry, said Mr. Morsi had made clear “that he doesn’t interfere in the internal politics of another country.” Mr. Morsi had made the same point in his inaugural address, reassuring neighbors that Egypt had no intention to export revolution.

As for Mr. Morsi’s history with the Brotherhood, Mr. Krimly said, “We deal with Egypt as a state and with the institutions of Egypt, not its internal politics, so it doesn’t affect us.”

Mr. Krimly said there had been “attempts by other countries” to raise tensions in the relationship. He might have been referring to bogus reports recently circulated by a semiofficial Iranian news agency that Mr. Morsi or others in Egypt sought close ties to Iran. Such a development would unnerve both Saudi Arabia and Israel.

But Mr. Krimly said the meeting reinforced “the strong and solid relationship” between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as “the importance of each country to the other one.”

He said that Saudi Arabia was now Egypt’s most important source of critical financial support. “And we will continue to support Egypt,” he said. “Egypt is important.”

Medvedev Says Leader Plan Was Studied

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

Published: October 15, 2011

MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev struck a defensive note in a speech on Saturday about the system for choosing Russia’s leaders, insisting that he and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin had not decided to switch places during a fishing trip, as some commentators have suggested.

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In fact, he said, the decision was hardly so casual and came about as a result of a “sufficiently long analysis” in discussions between the two men, weighing, among other things, Mr. Putin’s higher public approval ratings.
“You know, people say they met somewhere in the woods, on a fishing trip, and changed everything, worked out this configuration and then came out with it at the convention — it’s not that way at all,” Mr. Medvedev said, referring to pictures of the two men fishing together on the Volga River this summer.
The pair later announced, on Sept. 24 at a convention of the United Russia party, that Mr. Putin would run for president in elections next March and appoint Mr. Medvedev as prime minster if he won.
It is widely believed that Mr. Putin will easily win the elections, , in part because he has shown little hesitation in repressing opposition parties and candidates.
Still, discontent has simmered among urban professionals, some of whom Mr. Medvedev spoke to on Saturday at a town-hall-style meeting at Digital October, a converted space for technology startups in the former Red October chocolate factory in Moscow.
Mr. Medvedev’s speech seemed intended to address the disillusionment of a segment of the urban middle class. Some had earnestly supported Mr. Medvedev, as if he were an independent political figure espousing reform.
But they learned last month that he and Mr. Putin had decided in secret that Mr. Putin would remain in charge both in name and in truth.
“I know that when we announced the decision at the convention of United Russia, a part of my supporters, those people, who said change is necessary, felt some disappointment,” he said.
But, using some of the starkest language yet about his loyalty to Mr. Putin, Mr. Medvedev said he was never willing to turn on his patron to retain power. “For some reason, a lot of people think that whoever becomes president should hammer everybody around him, destroying those who helped his political career, and life,” Mr. Medvedev said. “I wasn’t raised that way.”
Mr. Medvedev suggested his stepping down from the presidency did not signal the end of support for the causes he has championed, such as curbing official corruption and diversifying the economy away from petroleum dependence.
Mr. Medvedev promised a government of fresh faces to carry out this agenda — presumably with the exception of himself and Mr. Putin.
Adopting a tough tone, he threatened to fire older bureaucrats, in this case those who do not learn to use digital documents. Transforming Russia through technology has been a consistent theme of his.
Mr. Medvedev told his supporters he had “no right to divest myself of responsibility for anything that is happening in our country.”

Bahrain Protesters Clash With Police Near Capital After Teenager’s Funeral

Hasan Jamali/Associated Press

A Bahraini man carries a youth overcome by tear gas in Abu Saiba, Bahrain, west of the capital, Manama.

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

Published: October 7, 2011

Security forces clashed with demonstrators along a central highway west of Bahrain’s capital, Manama, on Friday, in what appeared to be among the largest protests in months.

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The Interior Ministry acknowledged that security forces had moved to clear the area, but it blamed “vandals” for blocking the highway after the funeral of a teenager who activists said was killed by police officers the day before. “This led to interference of security forces to bring the situation to normal,” it said in a statement.
The clashes, which did not lead to any deaths, followed a week in which the government of Bahrain took steps to present a less punitive approach to antigovernment protesters. On Wednesday, the government’s top prosecutor nullified harsh prison terms, handed down last week, for medical workers accused of antigovernment activities, ordering those in custody to be freed pending retrials.
The prosecution of the medical workers had become a symbol of the government’s tough response to a wave of protests in the spring and had attracted negative international attention.
The protest appeared, from video posted online by Shiite activists, to be much larger than the small demonstrations that have occurred regularly since March, and it was the second time in two months that activists blamed the police for the death of a teenager.
In late August, a 14-year-old-boy died as security forces in Sitra, a restive village to the south of the capital, broke up a small protest. Witnesses said he had been hit in the chest by a tear gas canister.
The authorities identified the teenager killed on Thursday as Ahmed Jaber, 16, and said they had opened an investigation into his death, according to a report by the official Bahrain News Agency.
Rights activists said he had been part of a protest near the capital on Thursday when he was shot in the chest at close range by police officers with birdshot — used to contain crowds — and killed. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights posted a graphic image on its Web page that was said to show Ahmed just after his death, his chest riddled with small, round wounds.
The state news agency said the Interior Ministry would investigate conflicting accounts of his death, including “a report by forensic experts of the Public Prosecution indicating that the death was the result of an injury by a police birdshot” — similar to what the activists described — and another report from the Bahrain International Hospital, where he had been taken, which attributed his death “to a severe drop in the blood circulation and the respiratory system that led to heart failure.”
The mourners accompanying the body on Friday, members of the country’s Shiite majority, pumped their fists and chanted slogans against the Sunni-led government, according to video images posted online. Many carried the red and white flags of Bahrain, an important American ally and host to the United States Fifth Fleet’s naval base.
After the funeral had broken up, activists said the police began using tear gas and sound grenades to disperse the crowd, as protesters lingered on the central highway. Al Jazeera reported that at least four people were injured. There were also reports of gunfire, though it was unclear what type of bullets were being used.
Video posted by LuaLua TV, an independent Arabic-language station in Bahrain, showed protesters massing near security forces as a gaseous haze hung over the highway. Other video, posted by activists, showed young men, holding stones, heading in the direction of security forces firing tear gas.

Among 3 Women Awarded Nobel Peace Prize, a Nod to the Arab Spring

Amira Al-Shariff for The New York Times

Tawakkol Karman is a leading member of Yemen's largest Islamist party, Islah. Her selection was widely seen as an endorsement of the revolts in the Arab world.

By LAURA KASINOF and ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: October 7, 2011

SANA, Yemen — She is only 32 years old, an outspoken human rights activist and mother of three who was unknown outside her own country until she began leading anti-government protests this year.

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Yet when Tawakkol Karman was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, she became a standard-bearer for the Arab Spring and for the role of women across the Middle East. And as a liberal Islamist who stopped wearing the full facial veil three years ago, she appears to represent something else, too: the hope in the West that Islamic movements might someday play a positive role in rebuilding Arab societies.
“Giving it to a woman and an Islamist? That means a sort of re-evaluation,” said Nadia Mostafa, a professor of international relations at Cairo University. “It means Islam is not against peace, it’s not against women, and Islamists can be women activists, and they can fight for human rights, freedom and democracy.”
Ms. Karman was one of three women awarded the prize on Friday, alongside President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and the Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee. They were the first women honored by the committee since 2004, and the Nobel citation made clear that female empowerment was the primary message.
“We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society,” it read.
Ms. Karman seemed stunned by the award as she sat surrounded by admirers in the worn blue tent where she has lived in a sprawling protest camp for nine months. Many expected the award to go to one of the protest leaders in Egypt or Tunisia, where the revolts have succeeded in toppling authoritarian leaders. Yemen’s rebellion is far from over, and many fear that it could still devolve into civil war. And for all her activism, Ms. Karman remains a controversial figure here as a leading member of the nation’s largest Islamist party, Islah.
For these reasons and others, her selection by the Oslo-based Nobel committee seemed more an expression of hope for the future — what some commentators called wishful thinking — than a recognition of past achievements, much like the Nobel Peace Prize granted to President Obama in 2009. In both cases, the committee appeared intent on recognizing potential and hoping that its imprimatur might help drive events in its desired direction.
“It sounds churlish to say this, but it seems premature because she’s quite young and has been active for only a few years,” said Nesrine Malik, who writes on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs in London, mainly for The Guardian. “There’s an element of, ‘We’re being hopeful,’ and it’s almost irrelevant what’s been achieved.”
Yet Ms. Karman’s selection was also widely seen in the Middle East as an endorsement of the revolts that broke out across the Arab world early this year, where popular uprisings have challenged entrenched leaders and empowered the disenfranchised. Ms. Karman made clear that she saw the prize that way.
“This is a victory for Arabs around the world,” she said on Friday afternoon, her brown eyes wide, a red flowered veil around her head. “And it will end the dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh,” Yemen’s longtime president.
The award offered a brief respite for a people, and a nation, that are bogged down in a protracted standoff that Ms. Karman helped to start. Mr. Saleh refuses to leave power. Protesters refuse to leave the streets. And lethal gun battles often break out between forces loyal to the president, and defectors who have joined the opposition. Supporters gathered around Ms. Karman’s tent excitedly, chanting “God is great” and “This is the biggest prize in the world!” Even the government, which has in the past cast Ms. Karman as a villain, offered congratulations.
Although Ms. Karman is well known here for her bravery and early leading role in the protests — she acquired the nickname “Mother of the Revolution” — many of the more independent protesters resent the dominating influence of Yemen’s main Islamist party, known as Islah, and Ms. Karman’s role in it. She was seen by some as domineering and selfish, and her influence in the protests has waned in recent months.
Yet Ms. Karman’s Islamist politics are central to her role here. In a sense, she stands as an exemplar of the complexity of Islamic political movements, which are often misperceived in the West as monolithic and menacing, and are likely to play a powerful role in any governments that emerge from the Arab revolutions of 2011. Islamist parties are expected to do well in Tunisia and Egypt, which plan to hold parliamentary elections soon. 

Ms. Karman has repeatedly clashed with the leaders of Islah. But instead of leaving the party, as many others have, she has tried to reshape it in a more open and tolerant direction. She has openly challenged hard-liners such as Abdel Majid al-Zindani, a cleric and party leader who has been labeled a terrorist by the United States Treasury Department.
Three years ago she stopped wearing the full facial veil, shocking many of her colleagues. Her father and uncle are prominent figures in Islah, and she has used that lineage to help push her reformist agenda.
Women like Ms. Karman have played roles across the Arab world in the protests of 2011, raising hopes that their contributions would translate into broader social and political rights. But that too, remains an aspiration, and women appear to have lost their voices in the new orders taking shape in Egypt and elsewhere.
Even in person, Ms. Karman flouts stereotypes: she speaks in a strident, passionate voice, hands jabbing the air as she defends her views on the Yemeni revolution (do not try calling it a mere rebellion). She seems as comfortable talking politics with men as she is with women, and — unlike many opposition figures — she has long been willing to criticize the Yemeni president directly.
Her face has become a common sight on television screens and newspapers in recent months, despite frequent attempts by the government and its allies to smear her as a traitor and an ideologue. She has received countless death threats, and for months she has not dared to visit her own home except in disguise. But after the award was announced, even the government joined in the general celebration. A Web site that belongs to Yemen’s ruling party published a statement congratulating Ms. Karman.
Sitting in her tent on Friday night after a day of manic celebration, Ms. Karman reminisced about her path to politics. She founded an advocacy group in 2005 called Women Journalists Without Chains. In 2007, she began staging sit-ins in front of Yemen’s Parliament and cabinet buildings, demanding greater press freedoms and more humane treatment for marginalized groups. She only gained national recognition when she took to the streets in January with a few dozen other young people to call for Mr. Saleh’s resignation. She was arrested, and her detention drew large crowds onto the streets for the first time, in what is now seen as the start of the Yemeni uprising.
“Martin Luther King has inspired me the most because he sought change peacefully,” Ms. Karman said. “Also Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, but really to the largest extent it’s Martin Luther King. We try for change using his same methods.”
Later in the evening, Ms. Karman finally took a break to chat by phone with her mother, who had called to congratulate her on the prize. She sat on the thin mattress where she has slept for months, next to her only piece of furniture, a flimsy wooden table with a TV on it. Her own children were absent: they are living with their grandparents, far from the tumult and danger of the tent city.
But Ms. Karman did have one companion. A small boy, whose father was killed by a sniper’s bullet during the protests, clung to her side.

10 Years Into Afghan War, a Thunderous Duel

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

American forces fired 105-millimeter artillery toward an insurgent rocket position near the Pakistan border after being attacked on the 10th anniversary of the Afghan war.

By C. J. CHIVERS

Published: October 7, 2011

FORWARD OPERATING BASE TILLMAN, Afghanistan — The sun had been up less than a half-hour on the 10th anniversary of the start of the American-led war in Afghanistan when the first rocket struck. Flying in from near the border with Pakistan, it shook this outpost with an explosion that hinted at the long day ahead.

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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The attacks caused minimal damage.

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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Soldiers fought back as insurgents conducted a coordinated attack on four outposts near the border with Pakistan in Paktika province on the 10th anniversary of the start of the war.

Soon insurgents near the border were firing on four Afghan-American outposts simultaneously — a coordinated barrage and assault that included dozens of 107-millimeter rockets, and at one post, a suicide truck bomber, American military officers said.
Only one American soldier was wounded in the insurgent attack, which the American regional command called the largest in Paktika Province since 2009. His wounds were not life-threatening. But the events on Friday demonstrated that as the war begins its second decade and the Pentagon plans to start sending tens of thousands of soldiers home after a buildup that since last year has made significant gains, the United States remains bedeviled by a bold, resilient foe.
Most of the high-explosive rockets striking the outposts were fired from just inside Afghanistan, suggesting that the attack had been prepared and launched from Pakistan, and the rocket crews withdrew to sanctuaries there as the Americans fired back.
And the relative weakness of Afghan soldiers and police officers living and working on the American-built bases was equally clear.
As the attacks escalated in the morning, only the American military possessed the firepower, communications and skills to fight back in what developed into a long-range, artillery-and-rocket duel — raising once more the familiar questions about how Afghan forces, underwritten at tremendous expense, will fare when the United States pulls back.
While the American soldiers organized and coordinated their part of the battle on the outpost here, the Afghan soldiers did not participate. Some simply sat and watched.
Forward Operating Base Tillman is itself a symbol of the long war. It is named for Sgt. Pat Tillman, an Army Ranger killed by friendly fire not far from here in April 2004. Sergeant Tillman had played professional football for the Arizona Cardinals. He enlisted after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks that prompted the initial American-led assault on the Taliban.
On Friday, the first rocket landed near Forward Operating Base Tillman shortly after 6 a.m., beginning the anniversary with a crunching roar. It had been fired a few hundred yards from the border, on the Afghan side, soldiers said. It wounded no one.
But more rockets followed, including one that narrowly missed the base’s entrance, and the Americans began to return artillery fire.
At about 9:35 a.m., another rocket hurtled toward the base.
“Incoming!” one of the soldiers shouted, as others flinched and waited for the blast. The rocket sailed overhead and struck an Afghan home.
“Hit the town,” a soldier said, flatly, at his post in the operations room.
“Killing their own people,” another answered.
Soon, Afghans emerged from the compound. No one had been hurt.
By that time, rockets were falling on three other bases as well — Forward Operating Base Orgun-E, Forward Operating Base Boris and Combat Outpost Margah, said Capt. William P. Hoffman, executive officer of Company C, Third Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment.
The company, originally a tank unit, is assigned to provisional infantry duties at Forward Operating Base Tillman as part of the Second Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, which occupies and patrols from several outposts along the border routes trafficked by the Pakistan-based Haqqani insurgent network.
The outpost at Margah was the hardest hit.
At least 22 107-millimeter rockets struck on or near the post, officers said; other official estimates put the number of rockets at several times that. And as the attack escalated, a man drove a vehicle toward the base’s walls and the vehicles exploded. The base was also hit with small-arms fire, officers said.
The soldiers prepared to repel a ground attack intended to breach the walls, but with American artillery and aircraft firing, any raid was thwarted, the soldiers said.
More rockets, meanwhile, struck this base, prompting the soldiers to fire back with 105-millimeter howitzers.
After the barrage, a fresh rumbling could be heard. It was thunder. Rain began to fall. “That’s good,” said Staff Sgt. Henry E. Pettigrew, 25, the artillery platoon’s gunnery sergeant. “Now they won’t fire anymore.”
Rocket crews from the Taliban or the Haqqani network, Sergeant Pettigrew and other soldiers said, typically stop firing when it rains, perhaps because their makeshift launchers do not work as well when the soil is wet and slick.
After lunch, the sky briefly cleared, and the firing resumed. A rocket slammed to earth beside the base. Sirens wailed anew.
At the gun line, the soldiers in the howitzer platoon loaded their tubes again and returned fire with 18 rounds.
At that point, the platoon had fired more rounds than they had on any day since arriving in Afghanistan in the summer — 142 in all, half of them air-bursting, high-explosive rounds and half white phosphorus (“Willie Pete” to soldiers) with so-called point-detonating fuses, which cause the rounds to explode upon striking the ground.
White phosphorus is not forbidden in Afghanistan, though American and NATO rules restrict its use only to when its burning effects are deemed necessary and cannot be replicated by other munitions.
In this case, soldiers said, the white phosphorus rounds were intended to set fire to any Taliban rockets at the firing positions, causing them to explode and preventing them from being fired on the American outposts.
“Willie Pete is really effective at rockets sitting on pods,” said, the artillery platoon sergeant.
The battle had settled into a duel that appeared familiar to both sides, facing each other near the border, exchanging long-range fire. The insurgents would fire first, and the Americans would reply.
As the soldiers dealt with technical matters, politics was not far from their minds. One noncommissioned officer pulled aside a reporter and vented about the origins of the attacks.
“You know where it all comes from,” he said, and nodded toward a nearby ridge. “Pakistan.”
He swore, and went back to the business of making sure the return barrages landed within the Afghan side. He asked that his name be withheld.
The American military command in eastern Afghanistan declared the insurgent attack “a failure.”
It claimed that at least 25 insurgents had been killed, and that their deaths were verified by aircraft and a Predator drone watching the battle. The death count could not be independently confirmed.

Prize or Not, Liberian Faces Tough Race to Keep Office

Jane Hahn for The New York Times

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, is lionized by the outside world as the woman who calmed a country ravaged by years of civil war.

By ADAM NOSSITER

Published: October 7, 2011

MONROVIA, Liberia — The day began in this battered seaside capital with shouts and drumming for a leading Liberian politician — but not the one honored with a Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

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Jane Hahn for The New York Times

A women's group organized by Leymah Gbowee prayed and fasted on Friday in Monrovia, Liberia, calling for peaceful elections.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Nobel winner, is lionized by the outside world as the woman who calmed a country ravaged by years of brutal civil war. But she is viewed more skeptically at home by a population still mired in poverty and official corruption, and struggling with little electricity. Its attention is fixed on something much closer to home than the Nobel committee in Olso: a closely contested presidential campaign involving a popular former soccer star.
While Liberians widely acknowledge that peace and security have improved markedly during her tenure, Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf’s success in securing forgiveness for billions of dollars in Liberian debt and the transformation she has effected in the nation’s once infamous international image are often less appreciated here than abroad.
Indeed, as the world absorbed the news of her prize, Monrovia was virtually shut down by a previously scheduled rally to energize the opposition before the presidential election on Tuesday. The early-morning shouting reverberating through the city was for the former sports hero, George Weah, one of Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf’s opponents.
In Oslo, though, she was honored as a peacemaker, along with two women who share the prize with her this year, Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen.
“Three women receiving the Nobel Peace Prize is really overwhelming,” Ms. Gbowee said.  “It’s finally a recognition that we can’t ignore the other half of the world’s population.”
Ms. Gbowee led a grass-roots women’s protest movement credited with helping to end the 14-year war in Liberia in 2003. She was at the forefront of mass open-air demonstrations at a Monrovia fish market in defiance of the warlords who ruled the country, shaming them into heeding the women’s demands.
About 250,000 people were killed in the war, and the country’s infrastructure, institutions, and economy were ruined. With its accounts of mass killings, rape and cannibalism, Liberia — the first independent republic in Africa — had become a poster child for Africa’s ills.
The country has been at peace since then, roads have been built, children in uniform again attend classes, the country’s $4.6 billion in foreign debt has been wiped out, and Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf is credited with presiding over the change. In 2005, she became the first woman elected as a head of state in Africa, and the Nobel committee, in highlighting the gender of this year’s recipients, acknowledged the central role that the Liberian war’s most brutalized victims — women — have played in healing the country.
“We are now going into our ninth year of peace, and every Liberian has contributed to it,” Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf said Friday in Monrovia after the Nobel announcement. “We particularly give this credit to Liberian women, who have consistently led the struggle for peace, even under conditions of neglect.”
But peace may not be enough to guarantee re-election. The gap between expectation and accomplishment, like that between international perceptions of Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf and domestic ones, is wide, especially in a nation that ranked 162nd out of 169 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index in 2010.
The Nobel award was dropped into the midst of a heated re-election campaign in which Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf is given only an even chance. Her campaign billboards — “Monkey Still Working, Let Baboon Wait Small” — plead with voters in Liberian patois to let her finish the job. But a potent opposition slogan plastered through Monrovia — “Too old to hold” — sums up the counterview of the 72-year-old president: that she has not tackled the country’s myriad problems with sufficient energy.
“She gave out a lot of promises, that she would bring water and light,” said Napoleon Bloe, an unemployed man in a shack-lined waterfront slum of dirt streets in the capital. “The people are suffering.”
Mrs. Sirleaf Johnson’s opponents dismissed the prize and its potential impact on the race. “I don’t think there are many Liberians who pay attention to the pronouncements of the Nobel committee,” said Robert Tubman, a spokesman for the nominal head of Mr. Weah’s ticket, Winston Tubman.

The frenzy here all week has been for the former soccer star, and on Friday Monrovia was mobbed by supporters of the Weah-Tubman ticket. Traffic was paralyzed and streets were jammed in the final pre-election rally. 

“Let the international community know that we are tired with this woman,” said Nathaniel Eastman, an unemployed man. “In fact, a woman cannot be the head. Man will always be the head.”
Mr. Weah, who lost to Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf in the 2005 election, brings traffic to a standstill wherever he appears, leaning out of his olive green Hummer.
“That man is my life,” said Salia Konneh, a self-employed businessman, beaming as Mr. Weah passed this week. “He’ll electrify this country, because we live in darkness.”
At Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf’s residence on Friday, several hundred supporters showed up to celebrate, though the atmosphere was considerably more subdued than at the rally for Mr. Weah. Many on the streets here said they knew nothing of the announcement from Oslo, though some expressed obvious pride.
“Since she got in the chair, for me, we are experiencing peace; so I think she deserved it,” said Emmanuel Ogbodu, a teacher. “Through her, peace came. Before, we were in the chaos of fighting.”
Nobody disputes that the political atmosphere in Liberia, once a byword for repression, has lightened beyond recognition under Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf. A veteran of Liberian politics, she has a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard, once served as minister of finance in a government overthrown in a bloody coup, and later spent years in political exile.
“You hear that noise?” said a doctor who lived here through the years of turmoil, Moses Massaquoi, gesturing out the window at the din from an opposition political rally. “In America, people talk like that, too,” he said, suggesting that Liberia had reached a level of democracy in which government opponents could campaign openly, even boisterously.
But analysts say more tangible benefits are harder to pin down. Corruption “remains pervasive at all levels” amid “widespread claims of malfeasance in government circles,” a recent report on Liberia by the International Crisis Group noted.
A leading anticorruption official was not reappointed, and Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf has ignored a report by a commission set up to investigate crimes committed during the war. It recommended that she be banned from office for 30 years because of her early involvement with the warlord Charles Taylor, which she later said she regretted. There have been no prosecutions, rankling many voters.
“If people are not penalized, other people might have similar mind to do the same thing,” said Agrippe Nyanti, a pastor.
This mixed picture dampened expressions of enthusiasm for the newest Nobel laureate.
“Progress, generally, yes — we’re not at war,” said John Kollie, head of Liberia Media Initiative, a good-governance organization. But he adds that Mr. Weah’s camp “have the people behind them,” and it will be “tough” for the president.
Those who support her insist that the scale of her task — putting a country in ruins back together — makes the yardstick unfair.
“No one ever lives up to expectations,” said Christopher Blattman, a Liberia expert at Yale University. “She doesn’t seem to be an effective president in some ways. She’s very mired in the details.” Still, Mr. Blattman added: “I don’t think there’s a serious possibility of Liberia going back to war. That’s a big change.”
One of the biggest boons she has brought to this small coastal nation of just under four million people is invisible on the ground and appears to be largely a matter of indifference to the impoverished citizens here.
“Liberia was a fearful, frightful, violent place,” said the American ambassador here, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. “She’s changed that image. She’s made Liberia a country that’s respected.”

The Unvanquished

Windows on the World

ALAA AL ASWANY and MATTEO PERICOLI

A series in which writers from around the world describe the view from their windows.

I open my window and this is the house, in the depths of central Cairo, that looks back at me.

The people who live in the city’s working-class neighborhoods are not ashamed of being poor. Instead, in this house I look at from my window, I see heroic efforts in the fight against poverty. For the most part the residents are tradesmen or public employees. There was a time when they earned enough to enjoy a comfortable life, but the waves of hardship rose suddenly and they drowned.

Originally the window on the house’s first floor was ornate glass. It was broken and repaired more than once. The last time, to keep costs down, the house’s owner put up a piece of wood in place of the glass.

In prosperous times the members of the family would pass pleasant evenings in the open air in the house’s entryway, relaxing on fine wicker chairs. The chairs broke and the father did not have the money for a new set, but he kept the shattered ones along the walls inside the entrance nevertheless. Another dream postponed, never to be realized. Just nearby is an opening in the wall for an air-conditioner. The house’s owner sealed it up and painted it over because he knows that he will never be able to buy an air-conditioner.

The most beautiful thing in this scene are the housedresses hanging on the second-floor clothesline. The cloth is plain and humble, but their owner did not give in. She put simple designs on their bodice and sleeves ... they certainly seem more beautiful ... and this is something I admire about resistance in the face of poverty. Poverty is wretched, but resistance to it brings forth a certain nobility. I have only to open the window and see this house to be overcome with a fierce compassion.

Despite the poverty creeping without pause or pardon, I see dozens of instances of humanity. A teenager writes his first love letter and hides it in a chemistry textbook so his mother won’t see it. A girl locks her bedroom door and dances naked in front of the mirror. Young lovers exchange urgent kisses in the darkness on the roof. Nights of clumsy lovemaking in the first days of marriage. A baby’s startled scream upon entering life and a haggard old man’s voice shuddering a final time before he dies.

All windows, no matter the variety of scenes, convey to us nothing other than life.

— Alaa Al Aswany

Alaa Al Aswany is the author of the novels “Chicago” and “The Yacoubian Building.” Matteo Pericoli, an artist, is the author of “The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York.” This article was translated by Geoff D. Porter from the Arabic.