At War Blog: General Allen's Tenure in Afghanistan

Most Americans probably know of him only as a secondary character in the sweeping drama of David H. Petraeus’s affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. But Gen. John R. Allen, who announced Tuesday that he would retire from the Marine Corps rather than become the top commander of NATO, was for more than a year and a half the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. And when he said farewell to the job recently, he made clear that he wanted to be remembered for more than his bit role in that scandal.

After receiving a medal for his service, just before turning over his command to a fellow Marine, Gen. Joseph Dunford, General Allen surprised some in the audience by declaring unequivocally: “This campaign is successful. We are winning. We are winning.”

During a news conference with a small group of reporters later, General Allen expanded on his confident description of the war – one, polls suggest, that is not shared by many Americans.

“There is no, in the Napoleonic sense, there is no decisive battle,” he said. But he said he saw daily evidence that the Afghan National Security Forces, or A.N.S.F., were getting better. “I see it contributing to the end state, which ultimately is the A.N.S.F. moving into the lead and creating space ultimately for the government of Afghanistan to get up on its feet,” he said.

“We’re not done,” he added. “But I’m comfortable that the trajectory is moving us in the direction we ultimately want to go.”

Asked if widespread corruption by the Afghan government had irreparably undermined its credibility with the people and pushed them toward the Taliban, General Allen acknowledged concerns.

“I think we all have to recognize the limits of the capacity of the Afghan people and the government at this particular moment,” he said. “We’re coming out of 33 years of conflict. Coming out of an environment where the school system was largely decimated or devastated, whichever D-word you want to apply to it.”

The key to the government’s continued stability – and to an international willingness to continue providing it aid – will be its ability to hold a safe and credible presidential election in 2014, General Allen said.

“We’ve reached the point where the rhetoric, while it was encouraging, isn’t enough anymore,” he said. “The rhetoric has to be accompanied by action. The rhetoric has to be accompanied by real and meaningful reform. Reform that reduces the capacity of the criminal patronage networks to grip and weaken institutions of state. Reform that genuinely takes care of the rights of minorities, and particularly the rights of women.”

During his tenure, General Allen had more than his share of crises: a video of Marines urinating on Taliban corpses; the burning of Korans by American soldiers; civilian deaths in allied airstrikes; the massacre of 16 civilians, in which an American soldier has been charged; and a spate of insider attacks by Afghan forces on NATO troops.

He also had to work hard to repair frayed relationships with President Hamid Karzai, who clashed openly with Mr. Petraeus, General Allen’s predecessor as head of international forces in Afghanistan. As The Times’s Matthew Rosenberg noted in a recent article, General Allen established an amicable enough relationship that Mr. Karzai called him to offer condolences while the general was on home leave in Virginia last year for his mother’s funeral.

As Mr. Rosenberg tells it, General Allen had not told anyone in the Afghan government before flying home to bury her. Then, while eating with his family in the Shenandoah Valley, he got a phone call from President Karzai.

“So I’m in the parking lot, it’s just surreal,” General Allen said. “Talking to the president of Afghanistan, who is gripped with emotion saying words to the effect that our mothers are so precious to us.”

A transcript of the interview that accompanied that article, in which General Allen described how he dealt with the Koran burnings, the Panjwai massacre and other crises, can be found here.

As if juggling all that were not enough, General Allen’s reputation came under a cloud when e-mails between him and a socialite in Tampa, Fla., Jill Kelley, emerged during the investigation of General Petraeus’s affair with Ms. Broadwell. After a lengthy review of those e-mails, the Defense Department’s inspector general cleared General Allen of any wrongdoing. The decision allowed President Obama’s nomination of General Allen to become the top NATO commander and head of the United States European Command to proceed.

But during his farewell at his headquarters in Kabul on Feb. 10, General Allen sent what might have been a signal about his plans to retire. He closed his remarks with generous praise of his wife, noting that many generations of her family had served in the military and that she had patiently endured 29 moves with him during 35 years of marriage. General Allen told The Washington Post that he was retiring to help his wife, Kathy, cope with chronic health problems.

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Pistorius: Thought lover an intruder in shooting

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — Oscar Pistorius wept Tuesday as his defense lawyer read the athlete's account of how he shot his girlfriend to death on Valentine's Day, claiming he had mistaken her for an intruder.

Prosecutors, however, told a packed courtroom that the double-amputee known as the Blade Runner intentionally and mercilessly shot and killed 29-year-old Reeva Steenkamp as she cowered inside a locked bathroom.

Pistorius told the Pretoria Magistrate's Court at a bail hearing he felt vulnerable in the presence of an intruder inside the bathroom because he did not have his prosthetic legs on, and fired into the bathroom door.

The Valentine's Day shooting in Pistorius' home in Pretoria shocked South Africans and many around the world who idolized him for overcoming adversity to become a sports champion, competing in the London Olympics last year in track besides being a Paralympian. Steenkamp was a model and law graduate who made her debut on a South African reality TV program that was broadcast on Saturday, two days after her death.

In a major point of contention emerged even during Tuesday bail hearing, prosecutor Gerrie Nel said Pistorius took the time to put on his prostheses, walked seven meters (yards) from the bed to the enclosed toilet inside his bathroom and only then opened fire. Three of the bullets hit Steenkamp of the four that were fired into the door, Nel said.

Pistorius said in his sworn statement that after opening fire, he realized that Steenkamp was not in his bed.

"It filled me with horror and fear," Pistorius said. The 26-year-old Olympian said he put on his prosthetic legs and tried to kick down the door before finally bashing it in with a cricket bat. Inside, he said he found Steenkamp, slumped over. He said he lifted her bloodied body into his arms and tried to carry her downstairs to seek medical help.

But by then, it was too late.

"She died in my arms," the athlete said.

Nel charged Pistorius with premeditated murder and said the athlete opened fire after the couple engaged in a shouting match and she fled to the bathroom.

"She couldn't go anywhere. You can run nowhere," Nel said. "It must have been horrific."

A conviction of premeditated murder carries a mandatory sentence of life in jail.

Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair ruled that Pistorius must face the harshest bail requirements available in South African law. That means Pistorius' lawyers must offer "exceptional" reasons for the athlete to be free before trial, besides simply giving up his two South African passports and posting a cash bond.

Pistorius sobbed softly as his lawyer, Barry Roux, insisted the shooting was an accident and that there was no evidence to substantiate a murder charge.

"We submit it is not even murder," he said. "There is no concession this is a murder."

Pistorius' emotional outbursts again played a part in how the hearing progessed, as it did during an initial hearing Friday. At one point, Nair stopped the hearing after Pistorius wept as Roux read a portion of the athlete's statement describing how Steenkamp bought him a Valentine's Day present, but wouldn't let him open it the night before.

"Maintain your composure," the magistrate said. "You need to apply your mind here."

Pistorius' voice quivered when he answered: "Yes, my lordship."

Affidavits from friends of Pistorius and Steenkamp described the two as a charming, happy couple. The night before the killing, they said, Pistorius and Steenkamp had canceled separate plans in order to spend the night before Valentine's Day together at his home, in a gated neighborhood.

Outside the court, several dozen singing women protested against domestic violence and waved placards urging that Pistorius be refused bail. "Pistorius must rot in jail," one placard said.

As details emerged at the dramatic court hearing in the capital, Steenkamp's body was being cremated Tuesday at a memorial service in the south-coast port city of Port Elizabeth. Six pallbearers carried her coffin, draped with a white cloth and covered in white flowers, into the church for the private service.

South Africa has some of the world's worst rates of violence against females and the highest rate in the world of women killed by an intimate partner, according to a study by the Medical Research Council. Professor Rachel Jewkes of the council said at least three women are killed by a partner every day in this country of 50 million.

Steenkamp campaigned actively against domestic violence and had tweeted on Twitter that she planned to join a "Black Friday" protest by wearing black in honor of a 17-year-old girl who was gang-raped and mutilated two weeks ago.

What "she stood for, and the abuse against women, unfortunately it's gone right around and I think the Lord knows that statement is more powerful now," her uncle Mike Steenkamp, the family's spokesman, said after her memorial.

He said the family had planned a big get-together at Christmas but that had not been possible. "But we are here today as a family and the only one who's missing is Reeva," he said, breaking down and weeping.

Pistorius has lost several valuable sponsorships estimated to be worth more than $1 million a year.

On Tuesday, the athlete was ousted from a pro-gay campaign being launched in Cape Town, organizers said. In a video axed from the campaign, Pistorius says: "You don't have to worry. You don't have to change. Take a deep breath and remember, 'It will get better.'"

And Clarins Group, which owns Thierry Mugler Perfumes, said in an email that "out of respect and compassion for the families involved in this tragedy, Thierry Mugler Perfumes have taken the decision to withdraw all of their advertising campaigns featuring Oscar Pistorius."

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DealBook: In the Year of the Snake, Challenges for the Chinese Economy

China is back to work after a weeklong holiday to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Most business shut for the entire week and the scale of human migration was awesome. This year, the Chinese made 440 million trips during the lunar holiday.

Chinese people spend a lot of money during this period, shoot off a lot of fireworks and increasingly travel overseas. Retail sales in the period were $86 billion, up 14.7 percent from last year though the growth rate was down from 16.7 percent pace in 2012. The government’s frugality campaign may be to blame, as well as the increase in foreign travel. China UnionPay reported that overseas bank card transactions increased 33 percent from last year.

Firework sales were off 45 percent in Beijing this year. This was my seventh consecutive Spring Festival in Beijing, and while there were still a lot of explosions, the pyrotechnics were noticeably more restrained than in prior years. The good news is that “no deaths or cases of eyeball extraction were reported” in Beijing and fireworks-induced air pollution was relatively light.

We are now in the Year of the Snake. Snake years unfortunately may be bad for stocks. According to Sam Stovall, chief equity strategist at S&P Capital IQ:

Since 1900, the S.&P. 500 posted its only average calendar-year decline during the Year of the Snake, falling 3.8 percent, and rising in price just 33 percent of the time, which was the worst price performance and frequency of advance of all 12 years.

THE CHINESE STOCK MARKETS reopened Monday to a small gain but on Tuesday dropped the most in five weeks. The proximate cause of Tuesday’s decline was a report that Beijing is so concerned by the resurgent property market it may impose additional real estate restrictions between now and the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress in early March. The markets here have had a good run since December and a few of my punter friends have decided to take some profits.

This column has repeatedly noted the doubts about the reliability of Chinese economic statistics. Stephen Green of Standard Chartered has published a new report in which he questions the official gross domestic product data for the last two years. Mr. Green writes:

Our guesstimates for the past two years look considerably weaker than the official estimates: our guesstimates for 2011 and 2012 are 7.2% and 5.5%, respectively, compared with the official prints of 9.3% and 7.3%.

Most economists still seem to believe China’s G.D.P. growth rate is closer to the official figures. In early February, an official of the Reserve Bank of Australia gave a speech titled “Reflections on China and Mining Investment in Australia” in which he said that China’s G.D.P. growth has stabilized around 8 percent. Australia’s economy is heavily dependent on China, and the Australian central bank still maintains a relatively bullish view about China’s future demand for commodities.

The stakes are high, especially for economies like Australia that are heavily reliant on commodities exports to China. One observer argues that at least in the short-term, Chinese commodity demand will be strong, maybe not because the Chinese economy is “healthy” but rather because total lending in January 2013 grew 15 percent faster than it did at the peak of China’s credit boom in 2009.

PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT CHALLENGE for the Chinese economy is how quickly it can rebalance from credit to consumption-driven growth. Michael Pettis, a Wall Street refugee who teaches at Peking University, has been one of the most prominent foreign voices on this topic. He has just written a new book, “The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy,” and is now giving interviews on his book tour, including “weaning China off credit-fueled growth” and how to spot early signs of economic reform.

Eswar Prasad, a former International Monetary Fund official with responsibility for China, seems a bit more optimistic than Mr. Pettis about the rebalancing efforts and wrote on Tuesday that Beijing was making progress toward rebalancing:

New data suggest that it is time to revise the view that China’s growth is driven largely by exports and investment. Private and government consumption together accounted for more than half of China’s output growth in 2011-12, signaling a big shift in the composition of domestic demand. Physical capital investment, the main driver of growth over the previous decade, is no longer the dominant contributor to growth. As for exports, a shrinking trade balance has in fact dragged down growth these past two years.

In January, an “airpocalypse” across much of China led to plenty of hacking coughs, including for yours truly. But a different kind of hacking in China is noticeable in February.

BusinessWeek Magazine’s cover article last week was “A Chinese Hacker’s Identity Unmasked.” On Tuesday, The New York Times reported on its front page that “China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.” The Chinese government responded that it opposes the hacking allegations.

A week ago, President Obama signed an executive order about protection against cyber attacks, and according to The New York Times article, “The United States government is planning to begin a more aggressive defense against Chinese hacking groups, starting on Tuesday.”

The article does not specify what is entailed in a more aggressive defense, but if the United States wants concrete results then naming and shaming people and groups in China may be just one piece of a much broader response.

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Burger King plans apology after Twitter hack

Somebody hacked Burger King‘s Twitter account on Monday, posting obscene messages and changing its profile picture to a McDonald‘s logo.

The tweets stopped after a little more than an hour, and Burger King said it had reached out to Twitter to suspend the account. A Twitter spokesman did not immediately respond to a phone message left on Monday.

Burger King, which usually tweets several times a week, said it was working to get the account back up. Typical tweets promoted sales on chicken sandwiches, or asked how many bites it takes to eat a chicken nugget.

But just after noon EST on Monday, someone tweeted via Burger King’s account, “We just got sold to McDonalds!” They also changed the icon to rival McDonald Corp.‘s golden arches and the account’s background picture to McDonald’s new Fish McBites.

About 55 tweets and retweets followed over the next hour and a quarter, including some that contained racial epithets, references to drug use and obscenities. The account tweeted: “if I catch you at a wendys, we’re fightin!”

Monday’s appropriation of Burger King’s Twitter account was a relatively mild example of cybersecurity problems, which are causing increasing concern in Washington and for industry. Media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have all said this year that their computer systems were breached, while several NBC websites were briefly hacked in November. White House officials and some lawmakers are pursuing legislation that would make it easier for the government and industry to share information on how to defend against hacking.

Burger King didn’t know who hacked the account, and no other social media accounts were affected, said Bryson Thornton, a spokesman for Miami-based Burger King Worldwide Inc. Its social media team and an outside agency manage the Twitter account, but Thornton declined to say how many people knew the account’s password. He said they hope to have it working again soon, and will post a statement on Facebook later Monday apologizing for the tweets.

Twitter acknowledged on Feb. 1 that cyber attackers may have stolen user names and passwords of 250,000 users. It said at the time that it notified users of the breach.

Competitors were sympathetic.

McDonald’s responded on Twitter that it empathized with its Burger King counterparts. “Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking.”

“My real life nightmare is playing out” on Burger King’s twitter feed, wrote Wendy’s social media worker Amy Rose Brown.

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Mikhail Pakhomov’s Body Is Found Near Moscow in Cement-Filled Barrel

MOSCOW — The body of a missing city legislator and construction tycoon has been found in a private basement garage on the city’s outskirts, inside a rusted metal barrel filled with cement, the police said Monday.

Russian television showed investigators removing the body of the man, Mikhail Pakhomov, 36, on Sunday evening from the garage, 20 miles east of Moscow, where the police said he had been tortured and killed over an outstanding $80 million loan.

The killing recalled the brutal violence that routinely emerged from business disputes in the 1990s. Mr. Pakhomov, who was reported missing last Tuesday, was a promising young star in United Russia, the ruling party founded by President Vladimir V. Putin, and had served as head of a construction company that was reported to have won large contracts to develop utilities and infrastructure in several cities.

Sergei B. Ivanov, Mr. Putin’s chief of staff, last year called housing and utilities services one of Russia’s most corrupt sectors. Many lucrative contracts are doled out on the municipal level, and large sums of money are at stake.

Politicians who have tried to battle graft in the system have met with violence. In 2011, Yevgeny Dushko, the mayor of Sergiyev Posad, was gunned down in his driveway in a contract killing that investigators said was most likely linked to his disputes with the city’s utility contractors.

The police have identified the likely mastermind of Mr. Pakhomov’s killing as Yevgeny Kharitonov, a former deputy minister for housing and utilities services in the Moscow region. . They said Mr. Kharitonov had Mr. Pakhomov followed since last November and was pressing the legislator to repay a debt of $80 million. Mr. Kharitonov has been arrested, but so far, he has been charged only with kidnapping. Seven other people were also arrested.

Mr. Pakhomov was reported missing on Feb. 12 from Lipetsk, an industrial city 270 miles southeast of Moscow, where he served as a regional lawmaker. Witnesses said three men had dragged him from his car, and the police said they found traces of blood at the scene.

The search continued for almost a week, until people questioned by the police led investigators to the body.

“A similar event has never happened with a V.I.P. in our city,” read an editorial published in Gorod48, a news Web site based in Lipetsk. “Even in the ‘evil ’90s’ nobody disappeared: businessmen were killed right where they lived or worked, and bandits from competing groups shot or blew each other up wherever they happened to be.”

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Jerry Buss, Lakers' flamboyant owner, dies at 80

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jerry Buss, the Los Angeles Lakers' playboy owner who shepherded the NBA team to 10 championships from the Showtime dynasty of the 1980s to the Kobe Bryant era, died Monday. He was 80.

He died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said Bob Steiner, his assistant.

Buss had been hospitalized for most of the past 18 months while undergoing cancer treatment, but the immediate cause of death was kidney failure, Steiner said. With his condition worsening in recent weeks, several prominent former Lakers visited Buss to say goodbye.

"The NBA has lost a visionary owner whose influence on our league is incalculable and will be felt for decades to come," NBA Commissioner David Stern said. "More importantly, we have lost a dear and valued friend."

Under Buss' leadership since 1979, the Lakers became Southern California's most beloved sports franchise and a worldwide extension of Hollywood glamour. Buss acquired, nurtured and befriended a staggering array of talented players and basketball minds during his Hall of Fame tenure, from Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal and Dwight Howard.

"He was a great man and an incredible friend," Johnson tweeted.

Few owners in sports history can approach Buss' accomplishments with the Lakers, who made the NBA finals 16 times during his nearly 34 years in charge, winning 10 titles between 1980 and 2010. With 1,786 victories, the Lakers easily are the NBA's winningest franchise since he bought the club, which is now run largely by Jim Buss and Jeanie Buss, two of his six children.

"We not only have lost our cherished father, but a beloved man of our community and a person respected by the world basketball community," the Buss family said in a statement issued by the Lakers.

"It was our father's often-stated desire and expectation that the Lakers remain in the Buss family. The Lakers have been our lives as well, and we will honor his wish and do everything in our power to continue his unparalleled legacy."

Buss always referred to the Lakers as his extended family, and his players rewarded his fanlike excitement with devotion, friendship and two hands full of championship rings. Working with front-office executives Jerry West, Bill Sharman and Mitch Kupchak, Buss spent lavishly to win his titles despite lacking a huge personal fortune, often running the NBA's highest payroll while also paying high-profile coaches Pat Riley and Phil Jackson.

Always an innovative businessman, Buss paid for the Lakers through both their wild success and his own groundbreaking moves to raise revenue. He co-founded a basic-cable sports television network and sold the naming rights to the Forum at times when both now-standard strategies were unusual, further justifying his induction to the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010.

Buss was a "cornerstone of the Los Angeles sports community and his name will always be synonymous with his beloved Lakers," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. "It was through his stewardship that the Lakers brought 'Showtime' basketball and numerous championship rings to this great city. Today we mourn the loss and celebrate the life of a man who helped shape the modern landscape of sports in L.A."

Johnson and fellow Hall of Famers Abdul-Jabbar and Worthy formed lifelong bonds with Buss during the Lakers' run to five titles in nine years in the 1980s, when the Lakers earned a reputation as basketball's most exciting team with their flamboyant Showtime style.

The buzz extended throughout the Forum, where Buss used the Laker Girls, a brass band and promotions to keep Los Angeles fans interested in all four quarters of their games. Courtside seats, priced at $15 when he bought the Lakers, became the hottest tickets in Hollywood — and they still are, with fixture Jack Nicholson and many other celebrities attending every home game.

Worthy tweeted that Buss was "not only the greatest sports owner, but a true friend & just a really cool guy. Loved him dearly."

After a rough stretch of the 1990s for the Lakers, Jackson led O'Neal and Bryant to a three-peat from 2000-02, rekindling the Lakers' mystique, before Bryant and Pau Gasol won two more titles under Jackson in 2009 and 2010. The Lakers have struggled mightily during their current season despite adding Howard and Steve Nash, and could miss the playoffs for just the third time since Buss bought the franchise.

"Today is a very sad day for all the Lakers and basketball," Gasol tweeted. "All my support and condolences to the Buss family. Rest in peace Dr. Buss."

Although Buss gained fame and fortune with the Lakers, he also was a scholar, Renaissance man and bon vivant who epitomized California cool his entire public life.

Buss rarely appeared in public without at least one attractive, much younger woman on his arm at USC football games, high-stakes poker tournaments, hundreds of boxing matches promoted by Buss at the Forum — and, of course, Lakers games from his private box at Staples Center, which was built under his watch. In failing health recently, Buss hadn't attended a Lakers game this season.

Buss earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at age 24 and had careers in aerospace and real estate development before getting into sports. With money from his real-estate ventures and a good bit of creative accounting, Buss bought the then-struggling Lakers, the NHL's Los Angeles Kings and both clubs' arena — the Forum — from Jack Kent Cooke in a $67.5 million deal that was the largest sports transaction in history at the time.

Last month, Forbes estimated the Lakers were worth $1 billion, second most in the NBA.

Buss also helped change televised sports by co-founding the Prime Ticket network in 1985, receiving a star on Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006 for his work in television. Breaking the contemporary model of subscription services for televised sports, Buss' Prime Ticket put beloved broadcaster Chick Hearn and the Lakers' home games on basic cable.

Buss also sold the naming rights to the Forum in 1988 to Great Western Savings & Loan — another deal that was ahead of its time.

Born in Salt Lake City, Gerald Hatten Buss was raised in poverty in Wyoming before improving his life through education. He also grew to love basketball, describing himself as an "overly competitive but underly endowed player."

After graduating from the University of Wyoming, Buss attended USC for graduate school. He became a chemistry professor and worked as a chemist for the Bureau of Mines before carving out a path to wealth and sports prominence.

The former mathematician's fortune grew out of a $1,000 real-estate investment in a West Los Angeles apartment building with partner Frank Mariani, an aerospace engineer and co-worker.

Heavily leveraging his fortune and various real-estate holdings, Buss purchased Cooke's entire Los Angeles sports empire in 1979, including a 13,000-acre ranch in Kern County. Buss cited his love of basketball as the motivation for his purchase, and he immediately worked to transform the Lakers — who had won just one NBA title since moving west from Minneapolis in 1960 — into a star-powered endeavor befitting Hollywood.

"One of the first things I tried to do when I bought the team was to make it an identification for this city, like Motown in Detroit," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2008. "I try to keep that identification alive. I'm a real Angeleno. I want us to be part of the community."

Buss' plans immediately worked: Johnson, Abdul-Jabbar and coach Paul Westhead led the Lakers to the 1980 title. Johnson's ball-handling wizardry and Abdul-Jabbar's smooth inside game made for an attractive style of play evoking Hollywood flair and West Coast sophistication.

Riley, the former broadcaster who fit the L.A. image perfectly with his slick-backed hair and good looks, was surprisingly promoted by Buss early in the 1981-82 season after West declined to co-coach the team. Riley became one of the best coaches in NBA history, leading the Lakers to four straight NBA finals and four titles, with Worthy, Michael Cooper, Byron Scott and A.C. Green playing major roles.

Overall, the Lakers made the finals nine times in Buss' first 12 seasons while rekindling the NBA's best rivalry with the Boston Celtics, and Buss basked in the worldwide celebrity he received from his team's achievements. His womanizing and partying became Hollywood legend, with even his players struggling to keep up with Buss' lifestyle.

Johnson's HIV diagnosis and retirement in 1991 staggered Buss and the Lakers, the owner recalled in 2011. The Lakers struggled through much of the 1990s, going through seven coaches and making just one conference finals appearance in an eight-year stretch despite the 1996 arrivals of O'Neal, who signed with Los Angeles as a free agent, and Bryant, the 17-year-old high schooler acquired in a draft-week trade.

Shaq and Kobe didn't reach their potential until Buss persuaded Jackson, the Chicago Bulls' six-time NBA champion coach, to take over the Lakers in 1999. Los Angeles immediately won the next three NBA titles in brand-new Staples Center, AEG's state-of-the-art downtown arena built with the Lakers as the primary tenant.

After the Lakers traded O'Neal in 2004, they hovered in mediocrity again until acquiring Gasol in a heist of a trade with Memphis in early 2008. Los Angeles made the next three NBA finals, winning two more titles.

Through the Lakers' frequent successes and occasional struggles, Buss never stopped living his Hollywood dream. He was an avid poker player and a fixture on the Los Angeles club scene well into his 70s, when a late-night drunk-driving arrest in 2007 — with a 23-year-old woman in the passenger seat of his Mercedes-Benz — prompted him to cut down on his partying.

Buss owned the NHL's Kings from 1979-87, and the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks won two league titles under Buss' ownership. He also owned Los Angeles franchises in World Team Tennis and the Major Indoor Soccer League.

Buss' children all have worked for the Lakers organization in various capacities for several years. Jim Buss, the Lakers' executive vice president of player personnel and the second-oldest child, has taken over much of the club's primary decision-making responsibilities in the last few years, while daughter Jeanie runs the franchise's business side.

Jerry Buss still served two terms as president of the NBA's Board of Governors and was actively involved in the 2011 lockout negotiations, developing blood clots in his legs attributed to his extensive travel during that time.

Buss is survived by six children: sons Johnny, Jim, Joey and Jesse, and daughters Jeanie Buss and Janie Drexel. He had eight grandchildren.

Arrangements are pending for a funeral and memorial services.

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Associated Press writer Andrew Dalton contributed to this report.

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Well: Susan Love's Illness Gives New Focus to Her Cause

During a talk last spring in San Francisco, Dr. Susan Love, the well-known breast cancer book author and patient advocate, chided the research establishment for ignoring the needs of people with cancer. “The only difference between a researcher and a patient is a diagnosis,” she told the crowd. “We’re all patients.”

It was an eerily prescient lecture. Less than two months later, Dr. Love was given a diagnosis of acute myelogenous leukemia. She had no obvious symptoms and learned of her disease only after a checkup and routine blood work.

“Little did I know I was talking about myself,” she said in an interview. “It was really out of the blue. I was feeling fine. I ran five miles the day before.”

Dr. Love, a surgeon, is best known as the author of the top-selling “Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book” (Da Capo Press, 2010) now in its fifth edition. She is also president of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, which focuses on breast cancer prevention and research into eradicating the disease. But after decades of tireless advocacy on behalf of women with breast cancer, Dr. Love found herself in an unfamiliar role with an unfamiliar disease.

“There is a sense of shock when it happens to you,” she said. “In some ways I would have been less shocked if I got breast cancer because it’s so common, but getting leukemia was a world I didn’t know. Even when you’re a physician, when you get shocking news like this you sort of forget everything you know and are scared the same as everybody else.”

Because Dr. Love’s disease was caught early, she had a little time to seek second opinions and choose her medical team. She chose City of Hope in Duarte, Calif., because of its extensive experience in bone marrow transplants. At 65, Dr. Love was startled to learn she was considered among the “elderly” patients for this type of leukemia.

She was admitted to the hospital and underwent chemotherapy. Because her blood counts did not rebound after the treatment, her stay lasted a grueling seven weeks.

She went home for just two weeks, and then returned to the hospital for a bone-marrow transplant, with marrow donated by her younger sister, Elizabeth Love De Graci, 53, who lives in Mexico City.

Although the transplant itself was uneventful, the next four weeks were an ordeal. Dr. Love developed pain and neuropathy from the chemotherapy drugs. Dr. Love’s wife, Dr. Helen Cooksey; daughter, Katie Love-Cooksey, 24; and siblings offered round-the-clock support. Ms. Love-Cooksey slept in the hospital every night. “I wasn’t very articulate during that time, but I always had my family there,” Dr. Love said. “They were great advocates for me.”

The transplant “is quite an amazing thing,” Dr. Love said. Her blood type changed from O positive to B positive, the same type as her sister. She also has inherited her sister’s immune system, and a lifelong allergy to nickel has disappeared. “I can wear cheap jewelry now,” she said. She returned to work last month.

Dr. Love has been told her disease is in remission, though her immune system remains compromised and she is more susceptible to infection. So she avoids crowds, air travel and other potential sources of cold and flu viruses.

While Dr. Love has always been a strong advocate for women undergoing cancer treatment, she says her disease and treatment has strengthened her understanding of what women with breast cancer and other types of cancer go through during treatments.

“There are little things like having numb toes or having less stamina to building muscles back up after a month of bed rest,” she said. “There is significant collateral damage from the treatment that is underestimated by the medical profession. There’s a sense of ‘You’re lucky to be alive, so why are you complaining?’ ”

Dr. Love says her experience has emboldened her in her quest to focus on the causes of disease rather than new drugs to treat it.

“I think I’m more impatient now and in more of a hurry,” she said. “I’ve been reminded that you don’t know how long you have. There are women being diagnosed every day. We don’t have the luxury to sit around and come up with a new marketing scheme. We have to get rid of this disease, and there is no reason we can’t do it.”

People who remain skeptical about the ability to eradicate breast cancer should look to the history of cervical cancer, she said. Decades ago, a woman with an abnormal Pap smear would be advised to undergo hysterectomy. Now a vaccine exists that can protect women from the infection that causes most cervical cancers.

“We need to focus more on the cause of breast cancer,” she said. “I’m still very impressed with the fact that cancer of the cervix went from being a disease that robbed women of their fertility, if not their lives, to having a vaccine to prevent it.”

Dr. Love, who wrote a book called “Live a Little!,” said illness has also made her grateful that she didn’t put off her “bucket list” and that she has traveled the world and focused on work she finds challenging and satisfying.

“It just reminds you that none of us are going to get out of here alive, and we don’t know how much time we have,” she said. “I say this to my daughter, whether it’s changing the world or having a good time, that we should do what we want to do. I drink the expensive wine now.”

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The Media Equation: In Omaha Manhole Fire Photo, Logging Off in Search of Some Clues

Stephanie Sands

This image, which was taken after an underground fire cut power in half of downtown Omaha, captivated the Web last month.

When photographs of spontaneous events miraculously appear on the Web, it generally prompts two responses: wonder and skepticism.

Matt Miller/Omaha World-Herald

Matthew Hansen, a columnist at The Omaha World-Herald, showed how to follow a trail. 

So it was with an image of exploding manhole covers in Omaha that took over the Web last month. On Sunday, Jan. 27, an underground fire cut power in half of downtown. A vivid photograph of unknown provenance, showing fire shooting out of manholes on a city street, began popping up on Reddit, where it had 1.5 million views, and Gawker.

The photo — an indifferently composed shot of an event that looks very far away — would not win any Pulitzers, but something incredible seems to be under way at the precise moment it was taken. You can almost hear the sequential explosions emanating below the street: boom, boom, boom as flames appear to shoot up from hell itself.

In this age of Photoshop, it wasn’t long before the debates cropped up, on the Web and in Omaha, about the picture’s authenticity.

Matthew Hansen, a columnist at The Omaha World-Herald, wondered the same thing, and one night found himself in a bar engaged in the real-versus-fake debate. Like many photos on the Web, this one came from everywhere — forwarded, tweeted and blogged — and nowhere — there was no name on the image nor any text to indicate its origin.

Mr. Hansen, intrepid journalist that he is, solved the mystery and wrote a column about it. The photo was real, it turned out, but not in the way people thought. (More on that later.) So, did Mr. Hansen use deep photo analytics or examine metadata to peel back the truth?

Nope. There was a notebook involved, a lawyer, some phone calls, a cursory digital investigation and some street reporting, which included an interview with a man with no pants.

Shoe leather never looked or smelled so good.

Mr. Hansen’s first step in solving what he called the “Great Omaha Manhole Fire Photo of 2013” was to determine from the angle of the photo that it could have been taken from only one apartment building — called the Kensington Tower. He then used an architectural detail to conclude that it was shot from the top floor, on the west side.

He managed to gain entry to the building — that is, he sneaked in — and made his way to the top floor, where he began knocking on doors.

Mr. Hansen found a man named Kenneth who would not let Mr. Hansen in because he was indisposed — he became “Pantsless Kenneth” in the column — but said that he knew the photo in question and thought his neighbor had taken it.

But the neighbor wasn’t home, so Mr. Hansen stuck his business card in the door jamb and left.

When he returned to the office, Mr. Hansen jumped onto Reddit, found the person who had originally posted the photo there and through him found the person, Gwendolyn Olney, who had posted the photo on her Facebook page, the source for the Reddit posting.

Ms. Olney happened to be the associate counsel for The World-Herald. “Omaha is indeed a small town,” Mr. Hansen wrote in his column. He began to follow the pixilated bread crumbs.

“Gwen didn’t take the photo,” he added. “She got it from Rebecca, who didn’t take the photo. She got it from Brandon, who didn’t take the photo. They led me to Gwen’s friend Andrea, who didn’t take the photo, who led me to ... well, she couldn’t remember who she had gotten the photo from.”

Reading the column, you could almost hear his sigh when he wrote, “Dead end.”

Then his phone rang. “I took that photo,” the voice said.

The caller was Stephanie Sands, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She said that the day after she took the photo, which she had no idea had become a sensation, she learned from her friends that a reporter was asking about it.

“I was impressed that he had sneaked upstairs and put a card in my door, so I called him,” she said in an interview by phone.

Ms. Sands agreed to meet Mr. Hansen and told him that she had heard the explosion and took two photos with her phone. She sent one to friends and thought nothing more of it.

“I was actually disappointed in how it turned out,” she told me. “Because I was shooting at a distance with an iPhone, it didn’t really capture the severity of what I saw and heard.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 17, 2013

An earlier version of this column misquoted Matthew Hansen, a columnist at The Omaha World-Herald, about the author of a profile on Edna Buchanan, a crime writer. Mr. Hansen said the writer of the profile was Calvin Trillin, not Gay Talese. 

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Play puts Russian justice system in dock over lawyer’s death

MOSCOW (Reuters) – In a poorly lit basement theatre in central Moscow, actors play out a symbolic trial of Russia‘s justice system over its failure to protect an anti-corruption lawyer who died in custody.

Without costumes or a set, the actors in “One Hour and Eighteen Minutes” take on the roles of judges, an investigator, doctor and medical assistants, reciting lines cobbled together from legal documents, media and public pronouncements on the case of Sergei Magnitsky.

His death in 2009, while awaiting trial on charges of tax evasion and fraud, has outraged human rights campaigners who see it as an example of arbitrary justice in Russia, and contributed to a rift in U.S.-Russian relations.

A nervous giggle runs through the audience, perched on wooden chairs and benches, when an actor playing a judge says that the justice system is the only thing that is still working in Russia.

The audience is visibly taken aback when a second judge, who prolonged Magnitsky‘s detention four days before his death, dismisses accusations of acting inhumanly when she says the judge’s role is not to act like a human being but as an executor of the state’s authority.

“The most horrifying moment for me was this judge saying she is not a human because she is a judge. This is very frankly put and how things really are,” said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a veteran Russian human rights campaigner.

“Nowadays, theatre based on documents, on real life here, is more telling and, unfortunately, more scary than thrillers.”

No one has been convicted over the death of Magnitsky, who was arrested after accusing Russian police of stealing $ 230 million from the state in 2007 through fraudulent tax refunds.

But Russia is now pressing ahead with plans to stage a posthumous trial of the lawyer, putting a dead man in the dock.

This prompted Mikhail Ugarov, the director of Teatr.doc, to revive a play first staged in 2010 because it seemed to him that true justice was now more distant than ever.

“In the very heart of Russia a man is killed, and not by thieves and bandits, but by doctors and prison workers, people who are in general obliged to safeguard the lives of those arrested,” Ugarov told Reuters.

“We used to think there would at least be some justice done, but it turned out completely the other way, it went horribly wrong. So our logic was that if they were not able to give justice to Magnitsky, we will instead.”

SEEKING JUSTICE

Rights campaigners and critics of President Vladimir Putin say the Russian judiciary is weak and open to abuse by politicians, and suggest that the Kremlin uses it to intimidate or persecute adversaries.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied those accusations, saying the judiciary is completely independent and that the government does not intervene in legal cases.

“Judges are independent and subject only to the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the federal law,” the Russian Justice Ministry said in response to a request to comment on the play.

The Kremlin also denies that there has been a crackdown on dissenters since Putin returned to the presidency last May, facing the largest protests since he first rose to power 13 years ago.

Magnitsky’s prison death has, however, damaged Russia’s image and, for critics of the Kremlin, come to symbolize what they see as the impunity of the Russian authorities and the dangers faced by those who challenge them.

It has also resulted in a political spat with Washington. The United States, in response to Magnitsky’s treatment, passed legislation late last year that is designed to punish officials linked to his case as well as other Russians deemed rights violators.

Russia hit back with a law to punish Americans it suspects of similar abuses.

The play’s title, “One Hour and Eighteen Minutes”, alludes to the time just before Magnitsky died when he was left without medical help in his cell despite repeated complaints about his health deteriorating while in custody.

Putin said in December that Magnitsky died of a heart attack, but the head of the Kremlin’s own human rights council had earlier said he was probably beaten to death.

Putin called the death a tragedy but said the late lawyer, who had two sons, was not tortured.

All the defendants in the symbolic court in the play deny any responsibility, saying it was not their job to help Magnitsky, that they were busy with other cases, or were paid too poorly to care. Some suggest he was asking for trouble.

In the play, the first judge at a pre-trial hearing denies a glass of water to Magnitsky, saying such requests are not his concern.

Later on, an investigator involved in the case laughs with contempt at the lawyer’s repeated complaints about the conditions of Magnitsky’s detention and lack of medical care, saying a prison is not meant to be comfortable.

One actor exclaims ironically: “A dead man is good for being tried, and should be, just like someone who is alive – or is even better for being tried.”

(Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska, editing by Paul Casciato)

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IHT Rendezvous: Taming the Runaway U.S. Budget

WASHINGTON — If Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on a deficit reduction plan, in two weeks automatic budget cuts will kick in that could severely weaken the U.S. economy and the American military.

As I write in my latest Letter From Washington, there are sensible ways to avoid this, though it is far from certain dysfunctional Washington can achieve them.

One reason is that so much of spending is now hard-wired into the system.

Representative John Dingell of Michigan is the only current member of Congress who served in 1962. Yet he would hard-pressed to recall the federal budget of a half century ago.
In those days, more than two-thirds, 67.5 percent, of spending was discretionary, meaning it had had to be appropriated annually. Almost half the budget went to defense and about 18 percent went to discretionary domestic programs.
Mandatory spending, or entitlements, was only a little more than a quarter of the budget, and more than half of that went for Social Security.
That picture is turned upside down in the current fiscal year. Almost 60 percent of the budget is mandatory spending with one $1 of every $5 going to Social Security and $1 in $7 to Medicare and Medicaid. Defense is almost 19 percent, a fraction of what it was in 1962, and domestic discretionary programs, at a little more than 16 percent, takes a smaller proportional bite out of the federal budget than they did a half century ago despite the creation of so many new initiatives.
This isn’t going to change. “Regardless of who is president, what will be spent in any given year will be determined by laws that are already set, some decades earlier,” says Stan Collender, an expert on the federal budget.
Despite the large budget deficits in recent years, interest on the debt payments, at 6.5 percent this year, is almost precisely what it was a half century ago. These payments, however, are expected to climb steadily over the next 50 years. Under current projections, Mr. Collender says, they are on track to become the fastest-growing area of the federal budget.

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