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.

Ian Tomlinson death: Simon Harwood cleared of manslaughter

Met police officer cleared over death of bystander hit with baton and pushed to the ground

Peter Walker and Paul Lewis

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 July 2012 16.20 BST

  Footage from CCTV cameras, broadcasters, protesters and bystanders retraces the movements of PC Simon Harwood and Ian Tomlinson on 1 April 2009 
Link to this video 

  A policeman has been acquitted of killing Ian Tomlinson during G20 protests in London by striking the 47-year-old bystander with a baton and pushing him to the ground as he walked away from police lines.
The jury at Southwark crown court on Thursday cleared PC Simon Harwood, 45, a member of the Metropolitan police's elite public order unit, the Territorial Support Group, of manslaughter following one of the most high-profile cases of alleged police misconduct in recent years.
Harwood told the court that while in retrospect he "got it wrong" in seeing Tomlinson as a potentially threatening obstruction as police cleared a pedestrian passageway in the City on the evening of 1 April 2009, his actions were justifiable within the context of the widespread disorder of that day.
Speaking outside the court, the Tomlinson family said: "It's not the end, we are not giving up for justice for Ian." They said they would now pursue a civil case.
The jury's verdict, after four days of deliberations, brings about something of a legal contradiction: 14 months ago another jury, at the inquest into Tomlinson's death, ruled that he was unlawfully killed by Harwood. The inquest ruling was made on the same standard of proof as a criminal trial, that is, beyond reasonable doubt.
Neither jury heard details of Harwood's prior disciplinary record, which can only be reported now. This includes how he quit the Met on health grounds in 2001 shortly before a planned disciplinary hearing into claims he illegally tried to arrest a driver after a road rage incident while off duty, altering his notes to retrospectively justify the actions. Harwood was nonetheless able to join another force, Surrey, before returning to serve with the Met in 2005.
He allegedly punched, throttled, kneed or threatened other suspects while in uniform in other alleged incidents.

 


PC Simon Harwood leaves court The verdict will come as a huge disappointment to Tomlinson's family, following a saga that began when the father of four, who was stepfather to his wife's five other children, collapsed as he tried to make his way home through police lines. It followed a day of protests connected to the meeting in London of leaders from the G20 group of nations. He died shortly afterwards.
Tomlinson had been an alcoholic for some years and was living in a homeless hostel. It was initially presumed he died from natural causes, a conclusion supported by an initial postmortem examination, which gave the cause as heart failure.
But six days later the Guardian published video footage, shot by an American in London on business, which showed a policeman in riot gear striking Tomlinson on the leg with a baton before shoving him violently to the pavement, minutes before his final collapse.
Three pathologists involved in two further postmortem examinations said Tomlinson instead died from internal bleeding associated with his liver and consistent with being pushed to the ground. While the officer was soon identified as Harwood, prosecutors initially decided against charging him, changing their mind only after the inquest verdict.
The trial hinged on two key questions: firstly, whether Harwood's actions amounted to a criminal assault; then, whether they directly led to Tomlinson's death.
The first issue was simple, the prosecution argued: Harwood carried out "a gratuitous act of aggression", Mark Dennis QC told the jury. Harwood had recklessly abandoned the police van he was designated to drive to arrest a man seen writing graffiti on another vehicle. Humiliated when the man wriggled free, he opted to join a line of other officers clearing a pedestrian passageway by the Royal Exchange complex.
But in his evidence Harwood said he had been separated from his van by a threatening crowd before following orders to clear the passage. He insisted his actions towards Tomlinson were correct at the time, a version of events supported by two other officers at the scene called as defence witnesses.
The issue of cause of death saw the testimony of the first pathologist, Dr Freddy Patel, who reasserted his belief that Tomlinson died from heart failure, placed against that of Dr Nat Cary, who told the court that even a relatively small amount of internal bleeding would have caused death. The jury was not told that Patel has twice been suspended by medical authorities for mistakes in other postmortem examinations and is no longer on the Home Office's register of approved pathologists.
No police officer has been convicted for manslaughter for a crime committed while on duty since 1986.

Who was Bush House's tycoon founder?

12 July 2012 Last updated at 09:26 GMT

By Vincent Dowd Arts correspondent, BBC World Service

 

Bush House was the brainchild of Irving T Bush who wanted to link it to another of his buildings in New York to create two pillars of international trade

After 70 years BBC World Service radio is leaving its home at Bush House. In World War II the BBC colonised the large London office building created by the US business tycoon Irving T Bush. But who was he? And what was he doing in London?

New York's hectic theatre district harbours an unexpected connection to the BBC World Service. Bush House has a cousin - a little bit older and a lot taller.
A few moments from Times Square stands a 30-storey building which when it opened in 1918 was called the Bush Terminal Sales Building. These days 130 West 42nd Street is known as Bush Tower.
A striking example of so-called Girder Gothic, the skyscraper isn't physically like Bush House. But the two buildings share an architect (Harvey W Corbett) and were financed by the same man - the hugely rich Irving T Bush.
Bush hoped the two buildings would become twin pillars of international trade, permanently joining the old world to the new. Today still the inscription above the main entrance to Bush House in London reads "To the Friendship of English Speaking Peoples".
Bush was born in Michigan in 1869 to a wealthy family originally called Bosch. There's no link to the presidential family. His father Rufus died young and left a fortune.
Irving looked at the site in New York occupied by his father's oil interests and decided to squeeze more profit out of 200 acres of the Brookyln shore.

Irving T Bush wanted an impressive NY building as a mark of his success

He built the huge Bush Terminal, which from the early 20th Century supplied goods to New York and beyond. At its peak the terminal boasted 123 warehouses, 30 miles of rail lines and thousands of employees.
Most of the buildings survive though these days they're known as Industry City. The elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway thunders past on one side; on the other the waters are a lot quieter than in Bush's day.
Bruce Federman of Industry City Associates says Bush's ambition was limitless. "He exploited benefits of scale and efficiency in a way his rivals couldn't. These buildings were busy bringing in steamer-ships full of tobacco, canned goods, clothing, raw materials..."
Federman is now revitalising the warehouses, bringing in creative industries and medium-size start-ups.
"You have to admire what Bush achieved: he took a fee on everything which passed through. So though he'd never exactly been poor he became a whole lot richer…"
The architect Paul Stoller has studied what Irving Bush did with his shipping millions: "He decided he needed a building in the heart of Manhattan to prove he was now one of America's leading businessmen.
"Possibly the Woolworth Building (1913) had shown the value of having your name on a prominent New York landmark. But Bush decided he could do better than that: he wasn't interested in just offices."
Bush planned a great centre for international trade - much of it to be transported by his companies - and got the architect Harvey Corbett to incorporate unusual features in the skyscraper he commissioned.
The first three floors were clubrooms for traders and guests in which to relax. The rest of the building housed flexible spaces where goods could be displayed and deals struck. Bush allowed Corbett to spend money on elaborate detailing inside and out.
'Heart of city' Paul Stoller says even as the building opened Bush and Corbett were turning their attention across the Atlantic.
"A lot of the money had come from shipping stuff to and from Europe, not least in World War I. So England was the obvious place to go. Except that in 1920s London you couldn't just build a skyscraper."

The BBC arrived at Bush House almost by accident as it needed accommodation in a hurry

Instead Bush took a 99-year lease on a big empty plot near the Strand. (The site had been earmarked for new offices for Britain's colonies, but the idea had come to nothing.)
As in New York the plan was for an international business centre, with club facilities. Harvey Corbett designed a group of mid-size, neo-classical buildings, adopting an idiom more Washington DC than Manhattan.
Though a publicity brochure of March 1920 still worked hard to make the New York comparison:
"If you put your finger on the centre of the map of London, you strike the site of the Bush Building. It is not only the geographic centre, but the commercial and business centre, and the heart of the newest and most modern part of the city.
"It is located at the intersection of the Strand, Aldwych and Kingsway. The Strand is the Broadway of London: Kingsway is its 42nd Street".
The Bush Building was to open in phases from 1922 (becoming Bush House in the process). Early tenants included legal firms and advertising agencies. Yet by then its US cousin was in trouble: too few businesses had bought into Bush's concept.
Moving on Nicholas Ghattas thinks a combination of factors killed off Bush's ambitious plans for international trade.
"From 1929 there was the Depression. And the whole 42nd Street area went downhill badly. By the '40s the tower was known as the Wurlitzer Building after the manufacturer of pianos and organs which moved in".
Mr Ghattas rolls his eyes when he recalls what the place was like when 30 years ago the Dalloul family from Lebanon bought the building.
"It was a dump. Some of our tenants were terrible. We worked hard to get back to something Irving Bush might recognise. A lot of the internal detail has disappeared but these days it's a much nicer building."
The Depression meant that in London too Bush's ideas were scaled back: plans to incorporate a theatre and cafes were dropped. The first illustrations for the building show an enormous central tower which was never built.
Bush died in 1948 and it's unclear if he managed to visit the building which bore his name after the BBC started to move in six or seven years earlier.
The BBC came to Bush House almost by accident. In need of emergency accommodation, it "borrowed" the recording studio of advertising agency J Walter Thompson and then simply took root. Seventy years on, the lease has been dropped and the World Service is moving to Broadcasting House.
Bush failed to turn his buildings in New York and London into twin centres of international commerce. Instead Bush House became a centre of international communication.
After a major refurbishment its owners seem likely to return the building to what it was before World War II - an office building with a variety of tenants.
And no longer will millions of people around the world recognise Irving T Bush's surname on air - even if few knew in the first place exactly who he was.

BBC World Service leaves Bush House

12 July 2012 Last updated at 11:41 GM

The final bulletin was read by Iain Purdon at midday (BST) on Thursday 12 July

The BBC World Service has broadcast from Bush House in central London for the last time.

The final news bulletin was read at 1200 BST from the building that has been the broadcaster's home for more than 70 years.
It included a special dispatch recorded by the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson.
The service, which has programmes in 28 languages, is moving to another London building with the rest of BBC News.
The BBC's foreign language broadcasting servic began in 1938 from Broadcasting House in Portland Place.
After the building was bombed during the Second World War, the service re-located to Bush House in 1941.

The BBC World Service has broadcast from Bush House since 1941

It will now return back to Broadcasting House, which has recently completed a major extension.
Described by the BBC as a "quintessentially British building", Bush House was originally commissioned as a symbol of Anglo-American trade.
When it opened in 1925, it was considered the most expensive building in the world, with a cost estimated at £2m.
From its location on the Strand, it has been the location of numerous historic moments.
King George V addressed the Empire from the building in 1932, while General Charles de Gaulle used the facilities to send daily support messages to the Free French movement after France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940.
However, the BBC has never owned Bush House and when its lease expires at the end of this year, it will return to its current Japanese owner.

Facebook 'likes' and adverts' value doubted

By Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent

Suspected fake profiles have prompted some marketers to become wary of Facebook adverts

A BBC investigation suggests companies are wasting large sums of money on adverts to gain "likes" from Facebook members who have no real interest in their products.

It also appears many account holders who click on the links have lied about their personal details.
A security expert has said some of the profiles appeared to be "fakes" run by computer programs to spread spam.
Facebook said it had "not seen evidence of a significant problem".
"Likes" are highly valued by many leading brands' marketing departments.
Once a user has clicked on a link the company it belongs to can then post content on their news feed, send them messages and alert their friends to the connection.
Facebook makes money by charging companies a fee to show adverts designed to attract new "likes".
Some companies have attracted millions of "likes".
But the BBC has been contacted by one marketing consultant who has warned clients to be wary of their value, and carried out an experiment that backed up his concerns.
The vast majority of Facebook's revenues come from advertising and its performance will be scrutinised when it releases its financial results on 26 July - the first such report since its flotation.

Some Facebook profiles contain details that are obviously untrue

Puppet masters Earlier this year Facebook revealed that about 5-6% of its 901 million users might be fake - representing up to 54 million profiles.
Graham Cluley of the security firm Sophos said this was a major problem.
"Spammers and malware authors can mass-produce false Facebook profiles to help them spread dangerous links and spam, and trick people into befriending them," he said.
"We know some of these accounts are run by computer software with one person puppeteering thousands of profiles from a single desk handing out commands such as: 'like' as many pages as you can to create a large community.
"I'm sure Facebook is trying to shut these down but it can be difficult to distinguish fake accounts from real ones."
A spokesman for the social network said: "We don't see evidence of a 'wave of likes' coming from fake users or 'obsessive clickers'."
But Mr Cluley said it was in the firm's interest to downplay the problem.
"They're making money every time a business's advert leads to a phoney Facebook fan," he said.
'Suspicious' fans Michael Tinmouth, a social media marketing consultant, ran Facebook advertising campaigns for a number of small businesses, including a luxury goods firm and an executive coach.
At first, his clients were pleased with the results. But they became concerned after looking at who had clicked on the adverts.
While they had been targeting Facebook users around the world, all their "likes" appeared to be coming from countries such as the Philippines and Egypt.
"They were 13 to 17 years old, the profile names were highly suspicious, and when we dug deeper a number of these profiles were liking 3,000, 4,000, even 5,000 pages," he said.
Mr Tinmouth pointed out a number of profiles which had names and details that appeared to be made up.

• Read and watch Rory's VirtualBagel experiment

One, going by the name Agung Pratama Sevenfoldism, showed his date of birth as 1997 and said he had been a manager at Chevron in 2010.

Mr Tinmouth said this seemed "unlikely".
An experiment by the BBC appears to have confirmed this was not a one-off issue.
The BBC created a Facebook page for VirtualBagel - a made-up company with no products.
The number of "likes" it attracted from Egypt and the Philippines was out of proportion to other countries targeted such as the US and UK.
One Cairo-based fan called himself Ahmed Ronaldo and claimed to work at Real Madrid.
Payment dispute Mr Tinmouth asked Facebook to investigate the issue of questionable profiles after one of his clients refused to pay for his adverts on the basis they had not reached "real people".
The company told him that the majority were authentic, and refused to meet him to discuss a refund.
Facebook told the BBC that Mr Tinmouth appeared to have sent out scattergun advertising to a global audience without specifying a target group.
"We would never recommend that anyone conduct business in this way," a spokesman said.
The BBC also spoke to a social marketing executive at one of the UK's biggest companies who said he was increasingly sceptical about the value of advertising on the social network.

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"Any kind of investment in Facebook advertising has brought us very little return on sales," he said.

The executive, who did not want to be named, added that his company had found it could increase engagement with customers via the social network without buying adverts.
"The fans you get from advertising may not be genuine, and if they are genuine are they people who will engage with your brand?" he asked.
"The answer, more and more, appears to be no."
Detecting fakes Facebook played down the issue of fake profiles.
"We've not seen evidence of a significant problem," said a spokesman.
"Neither has it been raised by the many advertisers who are enjoying positive results from using Facebook.
"All of these companies have access to Facebook's analytics which allow them to see the identities of people who have liked their pages, yet this has not been flagged as an issue.
"A very small percentage of users do open accounts using pseudonyms but this is against our rules and we use automated systems as well as user reports to help us detect them."

Yahoo acknowledges attack by hackers

July 13, 2012 12:15 am

By Paul Taylor in New York

Yahoo has become the latest internet company to be forced to acknowledge a security breach and apologise to users after hackers posted the logon details of more than 453,000 accounts on a public website.
The attack coincided with Yahoo’s annual meeting on Thursday at which the company had been expected to announce a successor to Scott Thompson, the chief executive who left under a cloud in May. No such announcement was made.

A group of hackers calling themselves the D33Ds Company posted user names and passwords which mostly belonged to Yahoo users but reportedly also included some logons belonging to users of other services.
The hackers, who claimed to have stolen the passwords using a technique called an SQL injection, which inserts malicious code into server-based software, said they had posted the details to highlight the vulnerability of the files. “We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call and not as a threat,” they said.
Yahoo subsequently confirmed that an older file from Yahoo Contributor Network, previously Associated Content, containing about 450,000 names and passwords for Yahoo and other companies’ systems had been compromised on Wednesday. It claimed that less than 5 per cent of the account passwords were still valid.
Yahoo apologised to affected users and urged them to change their passwords on a regular basis and follow the company’s security and safety tips.
“Yahoo takes security very seriously and invests heavily in protective measures to ensure the security of our users and their data across all our products,” the company said. “We are taking immediate action by fixing the vulnerability that led to the disclosure of this data, changing the passwords of the affected Yahoo users and notifying the companies whose users’ accounts may have been compromised.”
The security breach at Yahoo comes just a month after hackers posted 6.5m passwords belonging to members of LinkedIn, the online social network for professionals. Other sites including eHarmony, Last.fm and Formspring have reported similar attacks.
Security industry professionals said the attacks highlighted the continuing vulnerability of some sites. “SQL injection attacks have become the method of choice among hackers seeking to exploit weaknesses in IT infrastructures but with solutions readily available that are capable of blocking these threats, it’s frustrating that these attacks are still so successful,” said Chris Hinkley, senior security engineer at Firehost, a secure cloud hosting company.

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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.