Israeli Forces Kill Unarmed Palestinian JERUSALEM ? Israeli forces shot to death an unarmed Palestinian man early on Thursday at the edge of a Jewish settlement in the northern West Bank, Israeli military and Palestinian officials said. The Palestinian Authority government condemned the killing, calling it a "breach of the rule of law." The Israeli military said that soldiers saw three Palestinians approaching the settlement of Barkan before dawn. Suspecting that one was armed, the military said, the soldiers opened fire, killing one man. The two others fled. It initially reported that there had been only one other man. In a statement, the military said that it had set up a night watch by the settlement because there had been numerous attempts to infiltrate it in recent weeks, and settlers had complained of a rise in thefts. Ghassan Khatib, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, criticized the shooting of the man the man killed, identified as Bilal Abu Libdeh from the West Bank city of Qalqilya. . ?Israel must hold its soldiers accountable for illegal and unjustified killings,? he said. He continued, ?The Israeli practice of shooting first and asking questions later has become the norm when dealing with Palestinians? in the West Bank. There has been a sharp reduction in violence in the West Bank over the last few years, with greater cooperation between the Israeli army and Palestinian security forces, but the relative calm is occasionally punctuated by attacks on Israelis, vandalism or attacks against Palestinian property or fatal encounters between Israeli forces and Palestinians. Such episodes deepen tensions and complicate the environment for peace talks. Four Palestinian youths were killed by Israeli forces in two separate episodes in March in the northern West Bank. After investigating the shootings, the military said operational mistakes were made and the deaths could have been prevented. The military said on Thursday it had called on the Palestinian authorities to conduct a joint investigation into the latest death and a Palestinian representative had visited the site
When the Trifle Turns Serious, Experience Counts LENOX, Mass. ? When a new team of conductors was announced to fill the many vacancies in the Tanglewood Festival season left by the withdrawal of James Levine, who is still recovering from back surgery, some may have been surprised to see Christoph von Dohnanyi assigned to an opera: the Tanglewood Music Center production of Strauss?s ?Ariadne auf Naxos.? Mr. Dohnanyi is known in the United States chiefly as an orchestral conductor, especially for his two decades with the Cleveland Orchestra. He was, in fact, already scheduled to conduct concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra here at Tanglewood this weekend. Ariadne auf Naxos Audrey Elizabeth Luna as Zerbinetta and Emalie Savoy as Ariadne at Tanglewood. The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion. But he is also an opera conductor of vast experience. I first encountered him in 1969 in Chicago, where he was conducting Wagner?s ?Flying Dutchman? at the Lyric Opera. He has worked in several notable productions of ?Ariadne,? including one at the Salzburg Festival in 2001 and another at the Zurich Opera in 2006 (available on DVD and for download; naxosdirect.com). Experience counts for much in this work. The complexities and absurdities of plot ? an opera seria and a farce to be given successively for a rich patron are, at the patron?s command, conflated at the last minute and performed simultaneously to save time ? are reflected in mercurial shifts of musical style. It fell to Ira Siff, another experienced hand and Mr. Levine?s choice as director, to make sense of the staging of the two disparate scenes: the Prologue, set backstage in the patron?s mansion, and the Opera, set on a stage within the stage. He mostly did so, and if his comedy, filled with deft touches, occasionally went over the top, this opera had only itself to blame. Mr. Siff purposely avoided high concept, he wrote in a director?s note. Working with young singers like the fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, he explained, ?it becomes far more essential to mine the characterization that abounds in this rich texture of music and text, and create characters that speak and feel, than it is to find a konzept in which to frame the piece, thereby imprisoning it, the performers and the audience within that frame.? The singers, at any rate, seemed to thrive in the production at the first performance on Sunday evening. Emalie Savoy, a sterling young soprano from Schenectady, just across the Hudson River Valley, has been making her way in New York recently and is about to join the Metropolitan Opera?s young artists program. With good reason: as the Prima Donna in the Prologue and Ariadne in the Opera, she displayed a good, clear, strong voice, well supported technically, as she did in concert performances last spring. Her counterpart, Ta?u Pupu?a as the Tenor and Bacchus, was something else again. A football hero at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, he flirted briefly with the N.F.L. before succumbing to an injury. To judge from his singing, he has not abandoned his iron-pumping regimen. He seems to have limitless power, so far not entirely tamed. But the voice has real gold in its best moments, with none of the blowsiness we have had to settle for in so many recent ?heldentenors.? The threat to any Ariadne and Bacchus, even singers as strong as these, is that inveterate show-stopper Zerbinetta. And Audrey Elizabeth Luna, in that soubrette role, very nearly did steal the evening. Her vocal athleticism was of a very different sort from Mr. Pupu?a?s: nimble and daringly acrobatic. She delivered some of her most altitudinous and treacherous coloratura lying flat on her back. Other standouts among many fine performers were Cecelia Hall, a mezzo-soprano, who ranged widely and well as the beleaguered Composer, though not without a touch of strain at times; Elliot Madore, a baritone, who proved himself first as a character actor, as the Music Master, and then as a robust and attractive vocalist, as Harlekin; and Hans Pieter Herman, highly engaging in the speaking role of the Major-Domo. Mr. Dohnanyi drew a vital and fluent performance from the instrumentalists in the pit, mostly also young fellows of the center.
European Markets, Awaiting Data, Are Mixed European shares were mixed on Wednesday after more disappointing economic reports reinforced concerns about a recovery in the United States. Investors are also started to look ahead to Friday and the crucial jobs report in the United States. In London, the FTSE 100 was down 32.89 points, or 0.6 percent, while the DAX in Frankfurt rose 16.55 points, or 0.3 percent. The CAC 40 in Paris was down unchanged. Earlier, stock markets in Asia were mixed. While Japan?s Nikkei 225 closed down 204.67 points, or 2.1 percent, to 9,489.34, the Shanghai Composite Index added 0.4 percent to 2,638.52 and Hong Kong?s Hang Seng advanced 0.4 percent to 21,549.88. Wall Street was poised for modest declines at the open after slipping Tuesday following downbeat figures on pending home sales, factory orders and consumer spending. The disappointing reports were a fresh reminder that the recovery is weakening. They tempered the excitement seen Monday when an Institute for Supply Management manufacturing index did not show as much of a slowdown as forecast. Cautious investors continued to move their money into Treasuries, which drove interest rates lower in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, fell to 2.89 percent from 2.92 percent late Tuesday. Its yield is often used as a benchmark for rates on mortgages and other consumer loans. Stocks dipped Tuesday after reports showed personal income and spending were flat in June and factory orders and pending home sales both fell in June. All four readings fell below economists? expectations, which added to the worries about the slowing pace of recovery. Before the markets opened on Wall Street, the payroll company ADP said private employers ramped up hiring slightly in July. ADP saidprivate employers added 42,000 jobs last month. That was slightly better than the 40,000 new jobs predicated by economists polled by Thomson Reuters. High unemployment remains the biggest obstacle to a stronger recovery. The data follows the trend seen over the past few months that the economy continues to expand, but at a sluggish pace. Economic reports over the past couple of days have begun to again overshadow quarterly earnings, which were mostly upbeat and drove stocks higher in July. Results that beat forecasts have largely been welcomed by investors in recent days because it provides reassurances that while a recovery might be slow, the economy isn?t falling back into a second recession. The ADP report is often used as a gauge for the Labor Department?s monthly employment report. The government report, which is broader and includes government jobs as well as private sector employment, is due out Friday. ?The potency of data for the market is particularly strong at the moment,? an analyst at Credit Agricole, Daragh Maher, said. ?In part, this is due to talk of a double-dip in the U.S. which has lent any soft data particular prominence but it is also because there is a new sense of urgency as to what this might mean for policy.? If Friday?s payrolls data come in below expectations for an increase in jobs of around 100,000, then the markets will be on the lookout for additional money-boosting measures from the Federal Reserve, though many economists doubt that the rate-setting panel will decide to get anything done so quickly. If the Fed turns on the taps once again, then most currency strategists think the dollar will be undermined further, after falling to a four-month low against the euro on Tuesday. The euro was down slightly at $1.3206. On Tuesday, it went as high as $1.3261. While the dollar has been pressured by the evidence showing the American economy is losing momentum, the euro has recovered its poise as the government debt crisis has eased and the economic reports out of the 16 countries that use the currency has generally outperformed expectations. ?What is clear is that the focus of concerns has moved very clearly from the euro zone towards the U.S.? said Simon Derrick, senior currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon. One sector that stubbornly fails to match the improvements seen elsewhere, though, is consumer spending. Eurostat, the European Union?s statistics office, said retail sales in the euro zone were flat in June from May, down from a 0.4 percent rise booked in May. June?s outcome was in line with expectations after figures showed that sales in Germany and France fell sharply, and means retail sales were only 0.4 percent higher in June than the year before. The figures came out a day ahead of the European Central Bank?s expected decision to leave its key interest rate unchanged at 1 percent. Though its president, Jean-Claude Trichet, is expected to sound a more optimistic tone in his news conference after the announcement, he is likely to point to the hurdles the euro zone economy faces, not least the fact that consumers are holding back from major purchases even though separate figures last week showed consumer confidence running at a 26-month high. The worry is that consumer spending may get pressured by the austerity measures being enacted across the euro zone in response to the government debt crisis.
Seven Banks in Europe Fail ?Stress Test? for Scant Capital FRANKFURT ? Seven of Europe?s 91 largest banks would struggle to survive an unexpected decline in economic growth or a sharp deterioration in the value of European government bonds, and will need to raise more capital, regulators said Friday in releasing results of closely watched bank stress tests. Banks to flunk were Hypo Real Estate, a bank based in Munich that is already government-owned after a bailout, ATEBank of Greece and five Spanish savings banks. Several other banks passed the test, but narrowly enough that they may also face market pressure to increase their reserves. That group included Postbank, one of Germany?s biggest publicly traded banks, which is 25 percent owned by Deutsche Bank. Governments in the countries affected, or the banks themselves, said they were ready with measures to raise more money for banks whose reserves were considered too low to withstand the worst-case outlooks. After months of turmoil in markets caused by Europe?s sovereign debt crisis and its effects on the banking system, governments and investors alike were looking to the tests to see if Europe could demonstrate that it was finally confronting the problems and dealing with them head on. Whether the tests succeed in reviving confidence depends on whether investors and analysts believe they were severe enough to expose vulnerable banks. ?The stricter the better for the euro,? said Adam Cole, global head of foreign exchange strategy at RBC Capital Markets. Nicolas Veron, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, called the level of detail released ?disappointing.? ?Investors cannot reverse-engineer the results and apply their own assumptions,? he said. Bank regulators and central bankers insisted that the tests were rigorous and that fears about the stability of European banks were overblown. ?It is a very serious test,? Franz-Christoph Zeitler, a member of the executive board of the Bundesbank, Germany?s central bank, said at a news conference in Frankfurt. ?All this criticism was absolutely premature.? The stress tests, similar to an exercise conducted in the United States last year, were intended to rebuild confidence in European financial institutions that has been shaken by the sovereign debt crisis. Uncertainty about which banks may be sitting on piles of Greek debt and other potentially toxic assets has made institutions reluctant to lend to each other as well as to businesses, and acted as a drag on economic growth. Some banks had already moved to raise capital ahead of the results. National Bank of Greece, which passed the test, said Friday that it sold ?450 million, or $580 million, of 10-year bonds to bolster its regulatory capital. ?The sale process was completed within just four days, reflecting the investment community?s confidence in N.B.G.,? the lender said. Banca Civica, a merger of three smaller savings banks in Spain, failed the test. But it said ahead of the results that it had signed an agreement with J.C.Flowers, a U.S. buyout firm, to place ?450 million in convertible bonds. Hypo Real Estate said the stress test had ?limited relevance? because it was already in the process of transferring troubled assets to a so-called bad bank underwritten by the German government. Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez, governor of the Bank of Spain, told a new conference that the stress test results vindicated the recent push to force the savings banks, or cajas, to consolidate, as well as the regulatory overhaul to open up their capital to more investors. The tests were evidence of ?the enormous means? of the Spanish banking sector to overcome a crisis, he said. ?When there are doubts, you have to be absolutely transparent, and this is what we have done.? In addition to Banca Civica, four other unlisted Spanish savings banks failed: Diada, Unnim, Espiga and CajaSur, which was bailed out by the Bank of Spain in May. In a potential blow to the tests? credibility, regulators did not examine whether banks could withstand a debt default by Greece or any other European country. European authorities ? in contrast to many economists ? consider such a possibility unthinkable. In a compromise, banks were scheduled to detail their holdings of Greek, Spanish, Portuguese and other sovereign bonds. But a report released by the European bank supervisors did not contain that information, which would clear up intense speculation about which banks are most exposed. To pass the tests, a bank?s Tier 1 capital, a measure of reserves, had to not drop below 6 percent of assets in the face of a new recession and a sovereign debt crisis.
Oil Giant Fined for Shipping Sludge to Ivory Coast A Dutch court on Friday imposed the maximum fine of 1 million Euros, or $1.28 million, on the oil trading company Trafigura for illegally exporting highly toxic sludge that ended up dumped in Ivory Coast. The stinking waste was eventually linked to the deaths of 16 people and thousands of illnesses in 2006. The court also found the company guilty of covering up the hazardous nature of the waste when it first tried to unload its unusually toxic slops, which included high levels of caustic soda, sulfur compounds and hydrogen sulfide, in the port of Amsterdam. The nauseating sludge was pumped back on board after the company balked at treatment costs, and the ship, the Probo Koala, left with its load. The ship then headed to Ivory Coast, where the sludge was dumped in several areas of Abidjan, the capital. Trafigura has denied wrongdoing, but in separate settlements it paid $200 million to the Ivory Coast for clean-up and $50 million to close to 30,000 victims and their families. The ruling of the Amsterdam court marks the first time Trafigura has been criminally convicted in the sludge scandal. Another criminal lawsuit in the case is still before a court in The Hague.
Man Will Appeal Prison Term for Lying During Seduction in Jerusalem Sabbar Kashur, a married Palestinian man who was convicted of ?rape by deception? by an Israeli court this week, for telling a Jewish woman that he was a Jewish bachelor interested in a long-term relationship before they had consensual sex, will appeal an 18-month prison sentence, according to CNN. As The Lede explained on Wednesday, Mr. Kashur admitted that he lied about his identity when he met the woman, who has not been identified, but continues to insist, after two years of house arrest, that consensual sex ?is not rape.? The Israeli court ruled that his deception about his identity was like a previous case of an Israeli man convicted of rape for posing as a government official and promising to reward women with apartments if they slept with him. This CNN video report on the case, which includes part of an interview with Mr. Kashur from Israeli television, explains that he chatted with the woman for about 15 minutes after they met on a Jerusalem street before she agreed to go into a nearby building and have sex with him: A translation of an article on the case from Maariv, an Israeli newspaper, posted online by Noam Sheizaf, a journalist and blogger in Tel Aviv, explains that the woman changed her account of what transpired between the two that day in 2008 during the trial. Maariv reported: The prosecution first claimed that the complainant actively and significantly objected to the events, but in the course of the trial the young woman testified that she had agreed to the action because she had thought that the person in question was a Jew. In light of that the indictment was amended, and the defendant was accused of rape and indecent actions by way of fraud. While representatives of Israeli rape crisis centers have insisted that lying during seduction is a form of rape, some Israelis have argued that the man would not have been convicted if he had not been an Arab. In a commentary on the case published on Thursday in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Gideon Levy noted that Mr. Kashur had long ago adopted an Israeli-sounding nickname, Dudu: Sabbar Kashur wanted to be a person, a person like everybody else. But as luck would have it, he was born Palestinian. It happens. His chances of being accepted as a human being in Israel are nil. Married and a father of two, he wanted to work in Jerusalem, his city, and maybe also have an affair or a quickie on the side. That happens too. He knew that he had no chance with the Jews, so he adopted another name for himself, Dudu. [...] No longer a youth, Sabbar/Dudu worked as a deliveryman for a lawyer?s office, rode his scooter around Jerusalem and delivered documents, affidavits and sworn testimonies, swearing to everyone that he was Dudu. Two years ago he met a woman by chance. Nice to meet you, my name is Dudu. He claims that she came on to him, but let?s leave the details aside. Soon enough they went where they went and what happened happened, all by consent of the parties concerned. One fine day, a month and a half after an afternoon quickie, he was summoned to the police on suspicion of rape. [...] Now the respected judges have to be asked: If the man was really Dudu posing as Sabbar, a Jew pretending to be an Arab so he could sleep with an Arab woman, would he then be convicted of rape? And do the eminent judges understand the social and racist meaning of their florid verdict? Don?t they realize that their verdict has the uncomfortable smell of racial purity, of ?don?t touch our daughters?? That it expresses the yearning of the extensive segments of society that would like to ban sexual relations between Arabs and Jews?
