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Highly Skilled May Wait Less for Visas

In a rare show of bipartisan comity on the angrily contested issue of immigration, the House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that tweaks the visa system to allow more highly skilled immigrants from India and China to become legal permanent residents.
The bill, originally offered by Representatives Jason Chaffetz,Moncler outlet a conservative freshman Republican from Utah, and Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sailed through by a vote of 389 to 15. Joining as sponsors were several Democrats who are outspoken liberals on immigration, including Representatives Luis V. Gutierrez of Illinois and Zoe Lofgren of California.

Mr. Chaffetz said he had tried to find a sweet spot,Moncler spaccio even if small, where lawmakers from both parties could come together to fix the legal immigration system, which is widely acknowledged to be broken. The bill does not address illegal immigration, nor does it add any new visas to the system, which many Republicans, including Mr. Smith, are reluctant to do.

“I campaigned in Utah on the idea that we can never solve our illegal immigration woes without fixing legal immigration,” Mr. Chaffetz said Tuesday.

The bill seemed likely to pass easily in the Senate,Sito ufficiale moncler said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a leading Democrat on immigration.

Its main impact will be to reduce visa backlogs that meant,Moncler piumini for example, that some Indians with science or technology skills who were approved recently for permanent resident visas, known as green cards, would face waits of 70 years before they would actually receive the documents.

The bill eliminates limits on the number of green cards based on employment that is available annually to each country. Currently, 140,000 green cards are available each year for immigrants based on their job skills, with each country limited to 7 percent of those visas. Under the bill, after a three-year transition, all employment-based green cards will be issued on a first-come-first-served basis, with no country limits.

The legislation also includes a measure that will more than double the green cards based on family ties available for Mexicans and Filipinos, the two national groups facing the longest backlogs on the family side of the system. It raises the country limit for 226,000 family green cards each year to 15 percent from the current 7 percent.

The fix in the family visas helped to persuade Democrats like Mr. Gutierrez to sign on to the bill.

By far, the main beneficiaries will be highly skilled immigrants from India and China, including many with master’s degrees and doctorates in science and engineering. Because they come from populous countries that send many people to work here who have advanced science and technology skills, immigrants from those two nations had been forced by the country limits into lines that were many years long and growing much longer.

In most cases, Indians and Chinese who will now receive their permanent green cards more quickly have been working in the United States for years on temporary visas. The immigrants and their employers have passed labor market tests showing that qualified Americans were not available for jobs they hold.

“This legislation makes sense,” Mr. Smith said before the vote. “Why should American employers who seek green cards for skilled foreign workers have to wait longer just because the workers are from India or China?”

American technology companies have been clamoring for Congress to offer more green cards for their foreign employees, arguing that the United States was losing out in global competition by forcing those immigrants to leave.

Some countries will lose under the legislation. During the next three years, many more employment green cards will be set aside for Indians and Chinese than for others languishing in backlogs, particularly Filipinos and South Koreans.

And because the law would add no new visas, backlogs would be redistributed but not eliminated. The wait in the most severely clogged employment visa categories will even out over time to 12 years for all countries, said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, which conducts research on immigration.

Mr. Gutierrez said: “We need bigger fixes to our legal immigration system so that employers and families use official channels, not black-market ones. We want people to go through the system, not around it.”

Infographic: Gen Y Insists on Social Media Acess at Work

Look out world, here comes the next generation. And in case you’re wondering what they care about, Cisco’s just-released Connected World Technology Report offers some clues. The company surveyed 2,800 college students and recently employed grads to find that a third of them “consider the Internet to be as important as air, water, food, and shelter,”Tods Borse according to the report. More than half say they could not get along without the Internet, and some consider it more important than dating or having a car. More than 40 percent reported that they had not bought a physical book (other than a textbook) in the past two years.Tods
If you’re considering hiring from this age group, their thoughts on workplaces might be instructive: One third said social media freedom, the freedom to use the device of their choice, and work mobility were more important than salary. And 70 percent believe it is unnecessary to actually work at the office.Tods Shoes

In India, Tibetans Set Foot on a Smuggled Piece of Home

Many Tibetans living in exile have long harbored the desire to set foot on Tibetan soil. On Wednesday morning, Tibetans based in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala did just that. And they didn’t have to go very far: Tibetan soil was brought to their doorstep, courtesy of Tenzing Rigdol, a New York-based artist.

Mr. Rigdol arranged for 20 tons of soil to be smuggled from Chinese-controlled Tibet to the Dharamsala area, where it was stored in a secret location. By Wednesday morning, in a surprise stunt, the soil had been laid out on a stage in a basketball court, ready to be walked over by Tibetan exiles
This, the artist hopes, will elicit emotions comparable to them actually setting foot in their homeland. “It can’t equate with actually going to Tibet but it can be compared to that kind of feeling, to how they may actually feel if they went to Tibet,” Mr. Rigdol said in an interview.

The installation, inspired by the Tibetan sun flag, was inaugurated by Lobsang Sangay, the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile. After the opening, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, asked Mr. Rigdol to bring him a sample of Tibetan soil for him to bless.

Called “Our Land, Our People,” the installation is expected to stay in place for two days, after which Tibetans are encouraged to take the soil home with them as small souvenirs of Tibet.
Getting the soil to Dharamasala wasn’t easy. “It was difficult from day one,” said Mr. Rigdol, who declined to disclose the route it took and the logistics involved to get it there. “It was a crazy thing,” is how he sums it up.

For the elder generation of exiled Tibetans, these could’ve been their first steps on Tibetan soil in decades. For many younger Tibetans, it could be their first ever. A large number of the 150,000-strong exiled Tibetan community, including the Dalai Lama, made Dharamsala their home after China took control of the region in the 1950s.

It’s with them in mind, and his father in particular, that Mr. Rigdol came up with the idea of the site-specific installation. “He used to say that before he died he wanted to visit Tibet. But that never happened,” said Mr. Rigdol, who described the installation as a tribute to his late father. The artist, now 29, was born in Nepal and spent a few years in India before moving to the U.S., a passage that is not uncommon for Tibetan refugees.

Once the installation opened to the public Wednesday, Tibetans, some carrying their babies, made their way to the stage. An elderly man, with the help of friends or relatives, was seen kneeling so that he could touch the soil with with his hands.
Exiled Tibetans hope news of this event will reach Chinese authorities, who in recent months have been grappling with an unprecedented wave of resistance from nuns and monks in the country’s Tibetan regions. China has blamed the exiled Tibetan administration of inciting the unrest, something it has denied.

“To have this amazing amount of soil taken from under their nose and reclaim it as Tibetan” sends a “strong and resilient message to the Chinese government that they are not invincible,” Tenzin Dorjee, president of Students for a Free Tibet, an activist group, said in an interview.

Mr. Rigdol doesn’t want to dwell on his work’s heavy political overtones. He says he’s more interested in seeing how Tibetan refugees will respond to it. “Hopefully it will connect to their personal story.”

Grade school test scores rise, while high school scores slip to a low

About half of Illinois public high school students flunked state exams in reading, math and science this year, the worst performance in the history of the 11th-grade Prairie State Achievement Examination, statewide test results show.

The record-low results, scheduled to be released Thursday, come after Illinois closed loopholes that kept academically weak juniors from taking the exams, a practice revealed in a 2009 Tribune analysis. Some local school officials attributed their declines in part to the larger testing pool that included less-prepared students.

At the same time, grade schools posted the highest passing rate in a decade this year — 82 percent across all Illinois Standards Achievement Tests given in third through eighth grades — revealing a disconnect between elementary and high school performance that has not gone unnoticed by educators.

"Basically, the ISAT is too easy and the PSAE is too hard," said Steve Cordogan, director of research and evaluation for Township High School District 214, where half of schools saw drops in Prairie State passing rates. The two-day Prairie State examination includes the rigorous ACT college entrance test.

Passing state exams is important not only to gauge how well students are doing, but also to judge schools and districts under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The federal standards require increasingly higher percentages of students to pass the exams to avoid sanctions. This year, 85 percent of students from varied demographic groups had to pass reading and math tests, a figure so high that state school Superintendent Chris Koch earlier predicted that a "major increase" is likely in the number of schools and districts not making what is called adequate yearly progress.

Koch and other top state education officials will be discussing adequate yearly progress and statewide test scores Thursday morning, with individual local school results being made public Oct. 31. But for weeks now, local administrators have been sharing scores with school board members and the public.

Some districts already are posting their Illinois School Report Cards for 2011, which include statewide test results. The Tribune used that data, and other information already available at the Illinois State Board of Education, to piece together statewide performance trends over the decade.

Maine Township High School District 207 has released data showing all three of its high schools failed federal standards, as has Lemont High School, which also missed the federal bar. Evanston Township High School has reported its Prairie State test results, which also fell short of meeting federal standards for another year.

Judith Levinson, Evanston's director of research, assessment and evaluation, said her high school scores did not appear to be impacted by the issue of students not taking the Prairie State. Perplexing is that Evanston's average ACT score has risen over the years, Levinson said, so it's difficult to pinpoint why PSAE scores would be going down given that ACT is a component of the Prairie State.

"It's really hard to take the scores apart and try to really understand the impact of all that's happened because it is not transparent," she said.

But there is no doubt that many more students took the junior-year exam this year.

Previously, about 8 percent of Illinois 12th-graders skipped the Prairie State assessment when they were in their third year of high school, according to a review by the U.S. Department of Education last year.

Trying to resolve the problem, Illinois state officials now require students to sit for the Prairie State before they can officially become seniors. The new regulations took aim at a practice used by some high schools to keep academically weak juniors from taking the high-stakes exam.

Overall, 50.5 percent of students passed the high school-level Prairie State exams last spring, down from 53 percent in 2010, and 55.8-percent in 2001, when the PSAE was launched to capture the performance of teens nearing the end of their high school careers. In science, the passing rate dropped to 49.2 percent this year — falling below 50 percent for the first time.

In contrast, overall passing rates on elementary-level ISAT exams have risen from 63.1 to 82 percent since 2001, though some of that increase stems from testing changes. For example, the state lowered the passing bar on the eighth-grade math test in 2006 as part of a revamp of ISAT exams, and passing rates shot up in that grade.

The diverging results stick out most in K-12 school districts that test both grade school and high school students.

In DuPage County's Elmhurst Community Unit School District 205, the Prairie State passing rate at York Community School High School dipped from 73.7 to 72.7 percent this year, and the school for another year failed to meet federal academic standards, a trend expected be seen statewide in Illinois high schools.

In contrast, already-high ISAT scores got even higher at District 205's grade schools, with the passing rate across all tests increasing from 94.1 to 94.8 percent this year.

For the first time in at least 10 years, Elmhurst's Conrad Fischer Elementary School posted a 90 percent passing rate, though it faces challenges uncommon in some other affluent school districts. Fischer has the highest percentage of low-income students among District 205 schools. And because of its Hispanic population — also the highest percentage in the district — Fischer has to work to prepare students with limited English skills to take ISAT exams.

Whatever their backgrounds, students are made to feel special. "I treat every child in this school as if they were my own," said Principal Jane Bailey. "Kids should feel success."

The success this year came from a number of efforts, she said, including putting more attention on improving students' English skills, involving more parents at school, and focusing on data to track exactly how students are progressing.

For high school educators, progress made by students in elementary and junior high schools is critical.

In Rich Township High School District 227, Superintendent Donna Simpson Leak puts more emphasis on whether eighth-graders coming into her district excel, rather than simply pass ISAT exams. Meeting the higher bar of "exceeds standards" shows that a student is ready for high school material, she said.

Last year, 35.9 percent of students passed Prairie State exams across high schools in the Rich district, but the figure dropped to below 30 percent this year, she said, in part because more than 200 upperclassmen who had previously not taken the test in 11th grade were included in the results.

"At this particular juncture, those young people did not score as well as they could have for a variety of reasons," she said.

In Arlington Heights-based High School District 214, three of six high schools showed Prairie State declines this year, including Buffalo Grove High School, where the Prairie State passing rate dropped from 72.1 to 65 percent.

Cordogan, the district's research director, linked the decline to how well prepared eighth-graders graders were when they came into the school.

Sze LaiShan helps the poor trapped in tiny 'coffin' and 'cage' tenements

The cloying odor of damp clothes and sweat from the five men crammed into the small room in a tenement block in Tai Kok Tsui, a rough-and-tumble Hong Kong neighborhood, makes the sticky summer night almost unbearable.
Squatting at the entrance to the 16-square-foot steel mesh cage that demarcates his world, Jeung Yingbin, says he pays nearly $150 a month to live in a space no larger than the inside of a small car.

The men share a grubby toilet and shower. There's no air conditioning, and a weak strip light shines onto peeling walls streaked with rust from the pipes overhead.

RELATED: Think you know Asia? Take our geography quiz.

"I would like to live somewhere else, but it's too late. I am too old to live by myself, so I will stay here," Mr. Jeung says, his thin arms slung over his knees.

He relies on an energetic community organizer, Sze LaiShan, for help with his basics: food, clothes, and filling out welfare payment forms. But he also turns to her for friendship and support.

"Everything he owns is inside that cage," Ms. Sze says, gesturing toward a small heap of shirts and trousers and the scuffed plaid nylon bag he uses as a pillow.

"It makes me angry," she says. "The world looks at Hong Kong and sees the big office towers and rich people eating at expensive restaurants. They do not see that this city is also extremely poor, and many people are struggling to survive."

Since 1995, Sze (pronounced "see") has worked for the Society for Community Organization (SoCO), a nonprofit group that provides food, clothing, education, and advocacy for 10,000 of Hong Kong's poorest and most vulnerable: the elderly, migrants, people with physical or mental disabilities, and children in poverty.

SoCO also runs outreach programs for unfashionable causes, including those of ex-offenders and drug addicts. Volunteers brought in by Sze give free classes in everything from English and painting to computer skills.

Sze, who displays a disarming directness and a ready laugh, clearly enjoys spending time with her clients – so much so, says Jack Yan, a SoCO volunteer who has known her for a decade, that she remembers all of their contact numbers.

"She keeps them in her head, just like you do with your close friends," he says. "That's how she views the people she sees. Sze loves her work. She never stops.... It's incredible. She cares about people in need, and they are part of her life."
The city's poor need all the friends they can get. Densely populated and intensely competitive, Hong Kong is a notoriously unforgiving city. Its low-tax, free-market ethos draws investors from around the world, driving up property prices and rents to eye-watering levels.
Those who succeed here often make it very big, including "Superman" billionaire property developer Li Kashing, who is held up as an example of what hard work in an open economy can achieve.

Yet for Sze there are too many being left behind. A 2010 United Nations Devel­opment Program report ranks Hong Kong as having the world's greatest disparity between its rich and poor.

Many of Sze's clients live in "cage," "coffin," and "cubicle" homes – cheap, squalid spaces that put a different complexion on the glitzy face of this city of 7 million.

Hidden from view, their ranks are swelling. SoCO puts their number at 100,000, many paying landlords a higher rent per square foot of space than people living in the city's most desirable areas.

Through persistent lobbying, Sze helps hundreds of people each year move from substandard units to public accommodations – or at least get on the waiting list.

"These people don't feel part of society here. That's a sad and dangerous thing," Sze says. "It's important they know there are ways to make themselves heard."

Recently she led a group of cage-home dwellers to the city's seat of government – the Legislative Council – to deliver a petition calling for more low-cost housing.

She wants to make Hong Kong's power brokers tackle the causes of poverty, Sze says. "We can provide food, clothes, and support ... but really we need political action to get to the roots of why there are so many poor here," she says.

Her empathy for the urban poor stems from her own experiences. In 1981 Sze arrived in then British-run Hong Kong from China's hardscrabble Fujian Province. Her impoverished family found housing in a dormitory in a tenement block.

"Hong Kong was very poor then, but there was social mobility ... you could work your way up and hope for more," she explains. "That poverty is still here ... just with less opportunity to escape it."

Lee Pakshun, a young migrant from mainland China, is one of those trapped near the bottom of the ladder. Living in another shabby Tai Kok Tsui block, Mr. Lee says his hopes of making a good life in Hong Kong have been suspended for the four years that he has lived in a cramped 54-square-foot cubicle.

"I feel a lot of pressure in here. It is so small. I eat and sleep on the same bed," he says. "But Sze has taught me that I have a voice and must fight for my rights. That makes me feel positive ... like I can change my future."

Rick Perry to unveil far-reaching energy plan

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is set to unveil a far-reaching energy plan Friday that would dramatically expand oil and gas exploration — and, he may hope, also reboot his presidential campaign.
In the first major policy address since he jumped into the race in August, Perry will propose expanded energy production on federal lands and offshore, rolling back clean-air regulations, ending many incentives for development of renewable energy, and curtailing the ability of critics to mount court challenges.

The speech will focus attention on a key part of the economy familiar to the Texas governor and on efforts to create jobs, perhaps the strongest part of his résumé.

And with that, he could move past reviews panning his performance in debates, including the most recent one in New Hampshire on Tuesday, and controversies that have cost him his lead in national polls as businessman Herman Cain has surged.

"Getting the energy industry back to work is the quickest way to spark 1.2 million good, well-paid American jobs, and at the same time reduce our dependence on energy from nations that are all too often hostile to the United States," Perry said in a telephone interview Thursday with USA TODAY previewing the speech at a Pittsburgh steel mill.

He vowed to reverse many of the energy policies pursued by President Obama, saying "the radical environmental movement" had been "sitting in the front of the train, being the engineer" during Obama's tenure.

The plan is sure to draw fire from environmental activists. "This proposal is Bush and Cheney gone wild," says Daniel Weiss of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, a reference to the industry-friendly policies of President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney.

As president, Perry says, he would move to:

•Open federal lands to more energy exploration and production, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and lands in the Mountain West. More offshore drilling would be permitted in the Gulf of Mexico and off the southern Atlantic coast.

He would continue to bar drilling in the Florida Everglades, a fragile ecological area located in what happens to be a key primary and general-election state.

•Approve pipelines to facilitate new energy fields, including the Keystone XL Pipeline. The controversial project, which would carry crude oil from Canada to refineries as far south as Texas, is now stalled in a State Department review.

•Suspend and reconsider many of the Environmental Protection Agency's recent mandates and regulations, including rules designed to improve air quality. He would repeal the EPA's authority over CO2 and other greenhouse gases linked to climate change.

•Curb the ability of environmentalists and others to slow down projects through the courts. He would establish firm litigation deadlines to expedite lawsuits and consider establishing special federal environmental courts with expertise that presumably would allow them to reach decisions more quickly.

•End the practice of federal agencies reaching consent decrees with advocacy groups, forcing them to pursue lawsuits instead.

•Phase out subsidies and tax incentives that benefit specific kinds of energy. Some favor the oil and gas industry; others were devised to encourage development of such renewable energy sources as wind power. He would retain a research and development tax credit available to all types of energy producers.

"It's leveling the playing field," Perry said. States would be free to encourage particular forms of alternative energy themselves, he said, as he did with a wind energy program in Texas.

He called the energy speech "phase one" of detailing his policy proposals, to be followed by the end of the month by a plan on taxes and federal spending.

"Eight weeks now and the fundraising side of it was exceptional," he said, saying his campaign was "on track." He reported raising $17 million by Sept. 30. "Americans are now starting to really look at the substance … and at the end of the day I'm confident they'll make the right decision. They'll want a president who can put America back to work."

Clashes Between Christians, Police Rock Cairo

CAIRO—Clashes between Muslims and Christians in downtown Cairo on Sunday night left at least 24 people dead, including three Egyptian military police officers, in one of the worst incidents of sectarian violence since a revolution in February toppled Egypt's former regime.

Thousands of mostly Christian protesters armed with Molotov cocktails and rocks clashed with several hundred military police officers who were guarding the Nile River-side state-television building, witnesses said.

Soldiers charged the protesters with armored cars, running over several people before a group of several hundred men, thought to be from a nearby neighborhood, Maspero, joined the riot on the side of the military. At least 183 people were injured, state television reported.
Sunday evening's violence marks the latest flare-up of sectarian tensions in Muslim-majority Egypt, where a law-enforcement void has exposed communal tensions in the Arab world's most-populous nation.

Egyptians have long prided themselves on a shared sense of citizenship that straddles religious boundaries. But sectarian violence in postrevolutionary Egypt has isolated a Christian minority that makes up about 10% of the population.

The vast majority of Egyptian Christians belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church, which largely escaped violence under the regime of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

In the early days of the uprising, Coptic leaders sided openly with the embattled regime, expressing support for a president many Christians saw as a bulwark against the Muslim radicals who bore the brunt of Mr. Mubarak's political repression.

Egypt's postrevolutionary political ferment has ushered in a powerful contingent of Muslims who adhere to the fundamentalist Salafi school of Islamic thought widely practiced in Saudi Arabia. The Salafis were largely absent from prerevolutionary political life, and their rapid ascent to the political mainstream—and widely suspected role in past incidents of sectarian violence— has alarmed liberal Egyptians and religious minorities.

"People are burning churches!" said Nasser Abdel Mohsen, a Muslim who said he had joined the Christian protesters out of solidarity. "That's never happened before. We always used to live peacefully as Copts and Muslims."

Sunday's events began in the early afternoon when thousands of Coptic Christians marched from the Cairo suburb of Shubra to the television building to protest what they said was the reluctance of the interim ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to prosecute radical Islamists who recently attacked two churches in Upper Egypt.

In the most recent church attack late last month, a mob led by fundamentalist Muslims burned and defaced a church near the city of Aswan. Gangs of local Muslims had objected to renovations to the church, which they said was built without a permit.

The attacks occurred even after church officials had acquiesced to demands from local Salafis to remove bells and crosses from the church's facade.

Egyptian law requires official permission for the construction or renovation of any house of worship, but in practice, authorities rarely award permits to build or make improvements to churches.

In the aftermath of the attacks near Aswan, Coptic officials said they had secured proper permission to renovate the Church of St. George.

Several people who witnessed Sunday night's violence said the majority-Christian protesters arrived at around 4:30 p.m. Accounts differ as to who started the attacks.

Mohammed Abdullah, a 22-year-old Muslim who said he witnessed the violence, said about 3,000 Christian youth attacked the military with sticks and Molotov cocktails. He said the military responded by shooting live ammunition into the air as protesters burned two armored military cars, a bus and severalprivate cars.

Mr. Abdullah said Christians were to blame for both the violence in Cairo and the church attacks in Upper Egypt. "It was against the law. They were building their church on land that belonged to a guesthouse," he said.

Mr. Mohsen said the military and fewer than a dozen "bearded men" who he said he suspected were Muslim radicals convened a group of men from local neighborhoods to assault the protesters with iron bars.

"It's a stupid thing that the army is coordinating with the thugs and Salafis," said Mr. Mohsen. "These are people who want to burn down the country, which will lead to burning down the region and then the whole world."

By about 9 p.m., the rock-throwing protesters had splayed across downtown Cairo's waterfront area. Fighting between police and protesters continued late into the evening in Tahrir Square, several blocks from the television building and the epicenter of the 18-day uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in February.

Statements from Mr. Mohsen and several witnesses keyed into growing popular suspicions that the interim military leadership will use this latest violence as a pretext to extend draconian law enforcement methods and control over the media.
The attacks came several hours after the SCAF conceded to demands from protesters and political parties to halt military trials for civilians except when civilians violate military law by attacking military personnel.

Rights groups say about 12,000 civilians, including activists and ordinary criminals, have faced the perfunctory military trials since the revolution.

Criticism against the SCAF has gathered in the past several months, with Egyptians blaming the military council for the chaotic transition to democratic rule.

The military's perceived reluctance to prosecute members of the former regime and cleanse public institutions of former regime members has sparked suspicions that the SCAF is colluding with the ousted leadership to start a counter-revolution by perpetuating a state of violent uncertainty.

"It seems that the military council is using the sectarian strife the same way as Mubarak was using it," said Monir Megahed, the head of Egyptians Against Religious Discimination, a Cairo-based advocacy group.

Mr. Megahed said the protest was peaceful throughout the afternoon. He left before the violence began.

"I have no doubt that it was fabricated and staged to give the impression that these were unpeaceful people," Mr. Megahed said.

Top StoriesHide me * * * * * * * * * * * * * The loner president iPhone 4S: Should I upgrade? German brewers may have to depend on (gulp)... Can monarch butterflies make it through Texas? Message from on high What are they teaching at a North Korea university Tigers eliminate Yankees, advance to ALCS What is Sarah Palin’s next act? Rare albino alligator at the National Aquarium Sports major could be major gain Romney, his Mormonism a campaign issue again, condemns religious bigotry

The first time he ran for president, Mitt Romney chose again and again to confront the suspicions and prejudices held by many in the Republican Party’s evangelical base about his Mormon faith.

This time, Romney is focusing relentlessly on the economy and is conspicuous in how rarely he talks about God. He no longer tries to convince evangelical voters that he is as Christian as they are, that Jesus Christ is his personal savior and that he, too, reads the Gideon Bible
And when the politically uncomfortable issue of his religion boiled over this weekend in the most pronounced way yet in the 2012 contest, Romney pursued his new strategy of not directly addressing his faith.

At a gathering of Christian conservative voters in Washington on Friday, evangelical megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, chosen to introduce Texas Gov. Rick Perry, attacked Romney by telling reporters the Mormon Church is “a cult” and “Mormonism is not Christianity.” Perry quickly distanced himself from that view, telling reporters in Iowa that he did not agree with the remarks.

When Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, addressed the same summit Saturday, he never uttered the word “Mormon.” He spoke of the nation’s “heritage of religious faith and tolerance,” but not of his own faith.

Romney did, however, feel compelled to denounce religious bigotry and take on those who inject what he called “poisonous language” into the political arena.

“The blessings of faith carry the responsibility of civil and respectful debate,” Romney said. “The task before us is to focus on the conservative beliefs and the values that unite us. Let no agenda narrow our vision or drive us apart. We have important work to accomplish.”

Mark DeMoss, a prominent evangelical strategist and senior adviser to Romney, said Romney is “largely ignoring” the subject of his religion. He said this is “in part because it’s an old line of attack by now and also in part because I think more people are going to reject that kind of campaigning that was represented by Jeffress.” In a poll, most Republican-leaning voters said they don’t care whether a candidate is Mormon.

Jeffress is a longtime Perry supporter and partnered with Perry for “The Response,” an August prayer event at a Houston football stadium.

Perry’s campaign said the governor does not agree with the Baptist preacher’s comments about Romney’s religion but stopped short of condemning them. Perry spokesman Robert Black told reporters Friday: “The governor does not believe Mormonism is a cult. He is not in the business of judging people. That’s God’s plan.”

Before Romney took the podium at the Values Voter Summit, conservative commentator Bill Bennett upbraided Jeffress by name. “Do not give voice to bigotry,” Bennett said.

Backstage, Romney thanked Bennett for what he said, and Romney began his speech with an acknowledgment: “Speaking of hitting it out of the park, how about that Bill Bennett?”

Bennett was one of the few speakers at the summit to publicly condemn the attacks on Romney’s religion, something Romney’s advisers said was disappointing. Romney himself was aware of Jeffress’s comments, advisers said, and was not particularly bothered by them.

'Occupy Wall Street': If protesters don't list demands, will they get anything?

On the eve of a huge solidarity rally planned Thursday for Freedom Plaza in Washington, and with new recruits emerging daily across the nation, the emphatically diverse “Occupy” protest movement is already facing a Shakespearean-level dilemma: To be or not to be specific about its demands.
If it refuses to spell out actionable agendas, will it get anything at all? Ay, there’s the rub.

“Occupy Wall Street” has listed virtually every progressive concern of the early 21st century in its current manifesto – from environmental degradation and corporate greed to animal rights and gender, race, and age equality, as well as collective bargaining rights. Now a new item has emerged, listing access to higher education as a basic human right, perhaps not surprising considering the youthful face of the movement.

IN PICTURES: Wall Street (and beyond) protests

Such idealism is all well and good for a protest moment, but not enough for a genuine movement, says Professor Ted Morgan of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, author of “What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Failed American Democracy.”

“For this to move from a colorful, attention-grabbing protest, they are going to have to reach into communities, connect with workplaces, churches, schools,” he says. “That’s how you build organizations that create change.

“It takes a long time, and it’s not as exciting or dramatic as camping out in front of City Hall,” he adds with a laugh, “but that’s how grassroots change happens.”

The team behind “Occupy Los Angeles” is finding its own way. They just have their own way of going about it. Taking a page from the Wall Street playbook, the dozens of Angelenos hunkered down Wednesday in the first big rain of the season say they meet every night at 7:30 on the steps of City Hall.

“Everyone is welcome,” says Lisa Clapier, who directs media for the group from a small tent with tables filled with laptops, coffee makers, donated donuts, coolers, and a small generator. But, she adds, “They have to come as an individual. They may not come as a group with their own agenda.”

She notes that a local activist ensemble tried to press its concerns on the group at the Tuesday night meeting. “We kicked them out as a group,” she says, adding, “but let them know they were welcome to voice their individual issues any time.”

As unions and other traditionally Democratic groups have joined marches and expressed support for the Occupy movement, many original members have shared their concern that the movement will be co-opted by these organizations with strong political ties.

“We’re happy to have them be in solidarity with us,” says Ms. Clapier, “but we don’t want to be tied to their positions.”

Interviews with those at the “Occupy Los Angeles” encampment outside City Hall – the 300 or so people who spend the nights here pitch their tents on the sidewalk to comply with “don’t sleep on the grass” ordinances – show most participants feel this movement is just beginning and getting more structured every day.
Whereas a march by members of New York’s “Occupy Wall Street” to the Brooklyn Bridge last Saturday resulted in hundreds of arrests, this encampment is peaceful and trying to work with city officials.
The group assembles every night at 7:30 on the steps nearby and holds a general council. Joe Briones, a 27-year-old film major at nearby LA City College, lives at the site and still attends classes via subway.

“We feel we are working hand-in-glove with the city here,” says Mr. Briones. He explained how volunteers Googled the term, “general assembly formats” and have copied one used in Spain.

“This is direct democracy,” he says. “People propose ideas and if the group doesn’t like it, it gets thrown out.”

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa visited Wednesday after a City Council hearing that was streamed live on websites, with council-invited speakers stepping up to the mike for a minute each, distilling what each thinks the council can do to meet the group’s list of broad goals.

“Four city council members came out and talked to us yesterday and shook our hands and told us they are in solidarity with our goals,” says Clapier, who acknowledges that at the moment the goals are focused on the big picture. She says the group is whittling down a list of some 50 goals to 12 by next week.

Margot Paez, a director, writer, and actor, is attending the encampment as both a protester and a journalist for insightoutnews.org.

“I am watching these developments from the inside and am really struck by how the mainstream media has tried to write this off as a bunch of hippies,” she says. “I consider it my contribution to help correct that misconception.”

The challenge for many protest movements as they try to evolve is that “building more formal organizations will necessarily exclude some participants and issues,” says Marc Dixon, assistant sociology professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

It is important to recognize that the protesters have succeeded in one significant way already by bringing some of these issues to the public, he says, “be it economic inequality, the undue influence of Wall Street, or enlivening the democratic process.”

Bringing attention to neglected issues is one thing protest movements do well, he notes. But they run the risk of not putting forth a more explicit program or demands while media and public attention is greatest.

“As media attention wanes, their leverage with policymakers also declines and the potential for significant political change diminishes,” he points out. “It is hard to imagine a more opportune time than now.”

HOPE VI program to renovate housing projects faces cuts

NASHVILLE – Annie Mai Finney looks out on the porch of her John Henry Hale Homes house in Nashville at streets on which, just a few years earlier, she didn't feel safe at night.
"There used to be drug addicts. You couldn't sit on your porch," she says, cane in hand. But today? "It's better. It's nice. Children can play out here and you don't worry about being shot."

Finney, 75, is living in the results of a $20million HOPE VI project, a federal program that tears down distressed housing projects and rebuilds them to improve quality of life, and which is facing severe cuts in the 2012 budgeting process.

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      STORY: New Orleans unveils fresh model for housing the poor

Finney's perception that the streets are safer is backed up by newly released research by the Urban Institute Justice Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank that does non-partisan economic and social policy research.

The analysis, done in 2010 and released in August, found that in addition to improving intangibles such as taking ownership of one's community and a feeling of pride, HOPE VI reconstruction projects decrease crime in low-income housing projects and surrounding areas.

When done right, HOPE VI works, said the study's author, Meagan Cahill.

"Revitalizing the sites themselves actually helped to improve public safety and to reduce crime in the surrounding areas as well," said Cahill, a research associate with Urban Institute. "HOPE VI has definitely seen a lot of success in the places where we looked."

In her blog on the Institute website, Cahill says the study included two developments in Southeast Washington — Capitol Gateway (formerly East Capital Dwellings/Capital View Plaza) and Arthur Capper/Carrollsburg. Both were built in the 1950s, she writes, and had long suffered from violence and concentrated poverty. Both were also home to redevelopment beginning in the early 2000s. The study shows that crime fell during the reconstruction and stayed lower afterward, by as much as 60%, she writes.

Such major renovation projects are now at risk as Congress works to slash the federal deficit. The House Transportation and Housing Appropriations subcommittee didn't include Hope VI funding in its 2012 recommendations.

The House bill will "improve the oversight and transparency of taxpayer dollars while setting priorities and reducing spending," Tom Latham, R-Iowa, the House subcommittee's chairman, said in a statement.

Massachusetts Rep. John Olver, the ranking Democratic member, disagreed. "Unfortunately this bill … includes completely inadequate funding levels" he said.

Projects such as Hale in Nashville would be impossible without it, says Phil Ryan, executive director of Nashville's Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency.

Nashville Metro Police Sgt. James Warren remembers the old Hale days well. Now a member of a Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency task force that focuses on Nashville's low-income housing projects, he said that criminals would naturally congregate at Hale.

"You had all these places to hide," Warren said. "That's what we're trying to get away from."

Warren, who sometimes still walks the beat at Nashville's public housing properties, said Hale has made a complete turnaround.

"This is a neighborhood anybody would like to live in; it's well maintained," he said. "I definitely feel that this neighborhood is very safe, and I'm sure the residents and businesses around the area would say it's a big impact."

The HOPE VI program was created in 1992 as a way to revitalize distressed public housing projects through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Since then, the federal government has pumped nearly $7billion to plan, refurbish, demolish and rebuild housing projects in need across the nation, according to HUD records.

But funding has been on the decline in recent years. In 2003, HUD had $450million available for such projects nationwide. In 2010, that amount had dwindled to about $150 million.

The Urban Institute study looked at a handful of properties in Wisconsin as well as in Washington, to determine whether the program simply shifted crime to surrounding areas. Cahill said that instead, the research showed that it lowered crime in the entire area surrounding the project.

It's a phenomenon that many housing project managers have known anecdotally, said Paul Williams, spokesman for the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, which manages the HOPE VI communities Highland Gardens and Highland Homes.

"We're able to essentially create a new center of stability for our community, not just the development, but the surrounding community as well," he said. "The investments are paying off in so many different ways."

Cassandra Morris sees that payoff at her home in Washington at Capitol Gateway. The old buildings were drab, brick blocks that resembled outdated army barracks, she said.

"Before, it was a mess. There was a lot of criminals," she said. "It just seems like the whole community has turned around."

In Egypt, a dreamer continues lonely protest

CAIRO — Rasha Azb, tired and disheveled, walked up a dimly lighted, winding staircase to the three-bedroom apartment she shares with her mother, brother and sister. She quickly grabbed some clothes, ate, kissed her nieces and prepared to leave again.

Azb, a 28-year-old activist, hadn’t been home in 10 days. But there was another protest to attend, and Azb felt the familiar pull — a blend of exhilaration and obligation. There is always another protest.
For 18 days this winter, hundreds of thousands of Azb’s fellow Egyptians joined her in demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that accomplished the unthinkable, forcing the ouster of the country’s autocratic leader of nearly 30 years, Hosni Mubarak.

But in the months since the revolution, Azb’s struggle has gone back to what it was before the uprising: a lonely fight that few in Egypt are inclined to join against a seemingly implacable foe. The youths who once were hailed for leading the revolution as national saviors and true voices of the Arab street are now seen by many as a nuisance, clogging traffic and spoiling the economy. Even Azb’s brother tells her she’s wasting her time.

And yet to Azb, the stakes remain every bit as high as they were in February, when Mubarak fell. With the military in charge and elections on the way, this is the moment when Egypt will either live up to the ideals of those who fought and died for freedom, or revert to the old ways.

“Why are you silent?” she screams at passersby during demonstrations in the streets of the capital. “Do we have human rights yet?”

Her call is met with shrugs, or worse.

Azb is a dreamer, not a realist. She swears incessantly but is moved to tears by injustice. She screams for the end of military rule and for compensation and justice for the families of slain protesters. But when pressed on what exactly would satisfy her, she has no answer.

‘Time to come home’

In the family’s small apartment, with cracked walls and laundry hanging from the balcony, Ahmed Azb watched with resignation one recent day as his sister repacked her orange backpack in preparation for a return to Tahrir.

He was worried about her but also annoyed. The protests disrupt daily life, hurting the family business — a car repair shop that brings in about $500 a month. Now that Mubarak is gone and on trial, Ahmed Azb doesn’t understand what more demonstrations will achieve.

“Tahrir is the center of the city, and if it stops life, it’s not a good thing,” he said. “We’re going to suffer, and freedom can’t come from vandalism and destruction.”

Rasha’s mother is frustrated but proud of her stubborn daughter. She doesn’t understand why her daughter won’t get married and have children, why she won’t fix her curly hair, which is always pulled into a tight bun, or exchange her uniform of jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers for a dress. She never knows whether Rasha will come home bruised or perhaps end up in jail again.

“It's enough. It’s time to come home,” Sabr Azb told her daughter. “You can’t change everything.”

Rasha Azb rolled her eyes. In her mind, people flowing into the streets, civil disobedience and, in some cases, rock-throwing are all necessary to force the hand of authority.
“If the revolution stops now, we’ll take 100 steps back,” she said, sitting in her childhood bedroom, where the sheets are covered with cartoon hearts. “I have to keep my eyes open all the time so no one steals this revolution.”

Her walls are adorned with Che Guevara portraits and posters in support of Palestinian rights. Bookcases sag under the weight of hundreds of books, and an armoire overflows with newspaper clippings that recount important events in her life of activism.
Before she became involved in politics in 1997, she convinced her tradition-minded family that, although a woman, she would strike her own path in life. She stopped donning a head scarf in high school, though the rest of the women in her family wear one.

Azb spends her days with other activists, many of them the children of upper-crust families who learned about socialism and injustice in college classes. She learned about those concepts in her neighborhood, where the poor don’t have the money or the government connections to right the wrongs against them. She makes fun of the elite, saying they are too soft and out of touch in a country where millions live at or below the poverty line.

Azb shares her views in a column she writes for the al-Fagr independent news weekly. Her pieces are harshly critical of the nation’s military leaders; sometimes her editor tries to tone down her work.

She prints fliers to publicize protests. She has thrown rocks at the country’s former security chief as he was being carted off from yet another postponed trial, where he faces charges of killing protesters. And she has spent nights in the morgue to help the family of a slain protester obtain their loved one’s body without signing papers that called the death accidental.

Many Egyptians, eager for stability, treat Azb and the others disrupting traffic as a bother. She dismisses those people as members of the “party of the couch” — those who never act but reap the benefits of others’ sacrifices.

“My brother is like most Egyptians. He wants to work, eat, sleep and raise his children,” she said while driving away from home in her beat-up Fiat, the side mirror dangling, the fender smashed and the interior filled with protest fliers and posters. “He thinks freedom will come to his door. He doesn’t know that people are dying for that freedom.”

‘A long journey’

Rasha Azb is among those who have risked everything.

During parliamentary elections in 2005, she tried to enter a polling station to monitor suspected fraud. When state security forces refused her admission and confiscated her ID card, she swore at them and threw stones — unthinkable defiance at the time. Security agents followed her, but neighborhood residents who were impressed by her bravery at the polling station protected her.

“By herself she had a mini-uprising,” said her friend Diana al-Assi, recalling the episode. “She acts completely from her soul, because her mind is scared and her heart hurts.”

Azb was first moved to activism in 1998, when she distributed leaflets that criticized a four-day U.S. bombing campaign against Iraq.

Housing Debate Unfolds in Shadow of a Living Wall

VERNIER, Switzerland — Alexa Magalhaes has no plans to move from the apartment building where she has lived for the last six years, and why should she? As one of the largest such buildings on earth, it provides for just about all her needs, she says.
“I love this building; it’s a little village, you have everything here — school, medical center, families with children,” said Ms. Magalhaes, a woman in her 30s who shares a bright three-and-a-half-room apartment with her young daughter.

Her sentiments are not universally shared.

“It’s a monster,” said Jean Paul Laurent, 53, whose work for the local public utility occasionally brings him to the area. “I’m from a small village, I live in a three-story house, I call that a human scale,” he said. Yet he admitted that tenants of Ms. Magalhaes’s building, known as Le Lignon, after a river in nearby France, praised their apartments as large and bright, with splendid views and many conveniences.

The debate over Le Lignon is pertinent because the behemoth, with its 2,780 apartments, more than 10 million square feet of floor space and about 6,800 tenants, was thrown up four decades ago largely as a response to an acute housing shortage in the region around Geneva, including towns like Vernier. With immigrants streaming into the area every year, it faces a similar housing shortage today.

The question is whether to build another monster project like Le Lignon or to go the more accepted route these days of lower density housing.

If larger cities take pride in the height of their skyscrapers, Vernier, population 34,000, has long boasted about the length of Le Lignon, which at nearly seven-tenths of a mile, was for years thought to be the longest residential building anywhere. There were celebrations to mark the anniversary, and the canton of Geneva, the larger region in which Vernier lies, bestowed landmark status on the huge building.

In point of fact, Le Lignon is not the longest apartment building in the world. That distinction seems to go to one called Bymuren, which snakes 1.5 kilometers, or more than 4,800 feet, just west of Copenhagen; two other apartment buildings, in Vienna and Berlin, are roughly the same size as Le Lignon.

“It was the product of the period after the war, the baby boom, when the region needed to build because of demographic growth, and it had to be done fast,” said Justin McMahon, 34, an artist specializing in murals who grew up in Le Lignon, the son of English parents.

The idea, he said, was derived from the work of Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born French architect famed for his huge projects of affordable housing for the residents of crowded cities. Yet so controversial was the project that some thought it might be temporary housing.

“It was totally economical,” Mr. McMahon said. “Some actually thought it would be destroyed 25 years later.”

Louis Payot was one of the team of architects who designed Le Lignon. Now 89, he has never lived there but has spent the past 50 years in a pleasant chalet he designed on the north shore of Lake Geneva. “The idea was for a place in the country, with apartments extending through the building with views on both sides,” he said.

It was built on what had been a 70-acre farm, and the narrow, wall-like design allowed much of the greenery to be preserved. At the topping out ceremony, showgirls from a Geneva nightclub called Don Quichotte were bused out to dance. If he had the chance, he would build another. “Absolutely,” he said. “It is an epic poem.”

Le Lignon resembles nothing more than an immense wall, 12 to 14 stories high, snaking across a ridge above the Rhone. On one end stand two high-rise towers with additional apartments. Between the building and the river are a shopping center, Protestant and Catholic churches and a cluster of schools. Four huge underground garages provide parking for tenants.

Where Mr. Payot saw epic poetry, others saw bad prose. Almost from the start, upscale Genevans peered down their noses at the monster of Vernier. They called Le Lignon “the rabbit hutch,” and in the 1990s its reputation sank as the number of immigrants living there soared, along with the youth unemployment and crime rates.

Unemployment remains high today and graffiti still abounds, but over the last decade the crime rate has dropped, thanks to increased police protection but also to programs that have put unemployed youths to work painting the garages or putting murals on outdoor wall space. Some young people organize afternoon tea dances for elderly tenants.

To be sure, architects, not only in Switzerland, continue to plan kilometer-sized buildings.

Thierry Apothéloz, 40, a social worker who has been mayor of Vernier for the last eight years, is not overly impressed with plans recently disclosed by Saudi Arabia to build a skyscraper for mixed residential and office use that would be roughly as tall, at one kilometer, or 3,280 feet, as Le Lignon is long.

“It’s not the same; I prefer horizontal,” said Mr. Apothéloz, who for 12 years has shared an apartment with his wife in Le Lignon. “Here you have the impression you are in shared space.”

Adrien Munch, 58, a computer technician who resides in a village near Le Lignon, will have neither. Two or three times a week he jogs along the Rhone past the farm buildings that remained standing on the property when their elephantine neighbor went up. The old farm house, with its clay tile roof and lovely wrought iron balcony, is now a music school; the barn is being restored to accommodate paying guests. An outbuilding is kept by a Portuguese family that has surrounded it with vegetable and flower gardens.

Mr. Munch, asked whether he could imagine living in Le Lignon, replied, with a wave of his hand toward the quaint farm buildings: “Personally, no. I prefer the country.”

Israelis Happy at Home but Glum About Peace

JERUSALEM — With the start of the Jewish New Year at sunset on Wednesday, a traditional time for stock-taking in Israel, the public mood seemed paradoxical: a growing disillusionment with the prospect of Middle East peace yet a marked sense of satisfaction with life here.
That gap, reflected and discussed in news media commentaries, was evident in a survey of Israeli Jews published on Wednesday in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. Two-thirds of the respondents said there was no chance — ever — of achieving peace with the Palestinians. But asked if Israel was a good place to live, 88 percent said yes.

In an article accompanying the poll results, the survey’s director, Mina Zemach of the Dahaf Institute, was quoted as saying that she could not remember a time when skepticism about the possibility of peace ran so high.

She also noted that in response to another question, 45 percent said they feared for the survival of Israel as a Jewish state. As Sima Kadmon, a political columnist at the newspaper, wrote, “In other words, nearly half of the Jewish public lives with a feeling of existential threat, doesn’t believe there will ever be peace, and despite that, is feeling good.” The poll, in which 500 adults were surveyed by telephone, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.

The contradiction may partly reflect a momentary sense of relief. For months Israelis were told that September would be catastrophic: the Palestinians would achieve statehood recognition at the United Nations, leaving Israel isolated and under tremendous international and legal pressure. Some spoke of a “diplomatic tsunami,” others of a “train wreck.”

Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned from New York on Monday to a country that believed that it had dodged a bullet. The Palestinians did request full United Nations membership through the 15-member Security Council. But not only has the United States promised to veto the bid, Israeli officials also say that the Palestinians may not have the nine votes needed to even prompt such a move.

“It turns out that the tsunami predicted to hit Israel in the month of September went the way of so many other predictions that have been made about the Middle East in recent years,” Moshe Arens, a former defense minister who is on the right of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote in the newspaper Haaretz.

Moreover, the sense over the past two years that President Obama was growing angry with Israel and steering American policy away from its interests subsided last week. The parts of Mr. Obama’s United Nations speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could have been written by any official here. It said nothing about Israeli settlements, the 1967 lines, occupation or Palestinian suffering, focusing instead on Israel’s defense needs.

Avigdor Lieberman, the hawkish foreign minister, said afterward that he would be happy to sign Mr. Obama’s speech “with both hands.”

A Jerusalem Post online poll published on Wednesday showed the turnaround in the public mood about the president. The survey found that 54 percent of Israelis considered Mr. Obama to be pro-Israel compared with 19 percent who said he was pro-Palestinian. While the results could not be directly compared with earlier surveys because the poll was conducted online and was not a telephone survey, the reversal was unmistakable. Four months ago, when The Post asked a similar question in a telephone survey, 12 percent of Israelis considered Mr. Obama to be pro-Israel and 40 percent saw him as pro-Palestinian.

The fact that Mr. Obama’s re-election prospects seem threatened by Republican candidates whose views of the conflict mirror those of the governing Likud party is also much discussed.

Mr. Netanyahu’s aides suggested to reporters that the isolation that Israel was said to be suffering after the attack on its Cairo embassy and Turkey’s expulsion of its ambassador was less than met the eye.

They noted that the statement issued last week by the so-called quartet — the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — was a far closer reflection of Israeli goals than of Palestinian desires. It called on the two sides to resume negotiations without preconditions, which is Israel’s official policy. The Palestinians say that such talks are pointless without a freeze in Israeli settlements on the land captured in the 1967 war.

The Palestinian leadership is scheduled to meet in the coming days and is expected to reject the quartet’s statement and restate its demand for an end to settlement construction before talks can resume. A recent survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shows that the Palestinian public also has little faith in negotiations.

Both Israelis and Palestinians seem to believe that time is on their side.

The Israeli left continues to warn that such a belief is a dangerous illusion. Haaretz, which serves as a leftist forum, published an editorial with the headline “This new year, the clouds are gathering.”

“Curled up in our justice and our justifications,” it said, “isolated as we never were before, shedding one ally after another, devoid of any hope and vision aside from ensuring the continued growth of West Bank settlements, the ‘state of the Jews’ under the leadership of Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman is striding toward a new year that will also not be simple from an objective standpoint: The global economic crisis is not letting up, the Iranian nuclear threat continues to hover over us, the ‘Arab Spring of Nations’ is darkening into a radical Islamist storm, and a hostile Palestinian state is being born, without peace, to the sound of the world’s applause.”

The editorial said the one bright spot was the social and economic protests in Israel over the summer. What began as concern over high prices could turn into a revival of the political left, starting with social issues, the Haaretz editorial argued.

Polling data certainly suggest that the protests have revived the prospects of the much diminished Labor Party, especially under its new leader, Shelly Yachimovich, a former journalist and crusader for economic and social equality.

Several recent polls suggest that if elections were held today Labor would gain the most votes after Likud, and that issues of socioeconomic equality would edge out security concerns.

In Yediot, the commentator Raanan Shaked summed up the feelings of many Israelis after the protests, in which ordinary voices took on a new significance and the issues of war and peace were largely ignored.

“Upon the new year’s arrival,” he wrote, “let’s wish for the pie to be divided into shares that are a little more equal, a little more humane, and mostly, for a change, a little more satisfying.”