Fleeing North Africa and Landing in an Italian Limbo

Perhaps they could have just walked.

“Oh, let them go,” a plainclothes officer standing near the camp’s gate said loudly, his metal badge visible on his breast pocket.

The Italian government hastily built this camp in the Puglia region, the heel of Italy’s boot, last weekend to help hold immigrants evacuated from Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island south of Sicily that is jammed with thousands of immigrants from North Africa who have crossed the Mediterranean in fishing boats and are now sleeping in the open air.

The Puglia center, which holds about 1,300 people, is an example of the logistical challenges that Italy — and Europe — face as they prepare for thousands of immigrants fleeing the unrest in North Africa. So far, most of them have been Tunisians seeking work, but last weekend the first boats arrived from Libya carrying Somalis and Eritreans who had been working there.

To some Italians, the tent camp is as much a political statement as a humanitarian reality, the product of a center-right government intent on demonstrating that the immigration situation has become an emergency that requires a coordinated European response. If the authorities wanted to dramatize the problem, some say, what better way than with photographs of immigrants escaping from crowded holding areas?

Others see the camp as a bargaining chip in a diplomatic standoff between Italy and France, the former colonial power in Tunisia and the place where most of the Tunisians say they want to go.

Under European Union law, the country where immigrants arrive is responsible for determining their status. Italy has argued that it should not bear the brunt of the new arrivals just because it is so close to North Africa. In a television interview on Wednesday, the Italian foreign minister, Franco Frattini, criticized France for its “lack of solidarity” after it returned more than 500 immigrants to Italy after they were caught trying to cross the border into France.

“It’s a political statement to France: ‘You want to start the war in Libya? We’ll give you immigrants,’?” said Tonio Tondo, a journalist following the immigration situation for the daily La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno. Italy, which colonized Libya in the early 20th century, stands to lose billions in investments there because of the allied intervention. Italy is taking part in the mission, but it was championed by France.

Here in Manduria, officials seem nonchalant about the escapes. Asked why the Italian authorities appeared to do so little to stop the immigrants’ jumping the fence, Giuseppe Caruso, the police chief of Palermo and the special commissioner for the immigration emergency, asked rhetorically: “What should we do? Should we shoot them?”

But the camp is rapidly emerging as a problem. The town’s residents protested on Wednesday, calling for it to be closed because so many immigrants had escaped. Then both the mayor and Italy’s deputy interior minister, Alfredo Mantovano, tendered their resignations after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said in a visit to Lampedusa on Wednesday that an additional 1,400 immigrants would be brought to Manduria. On Monday, Mr. Mantovano had pledged that the camp would not hold more than 1,500 people.

With its neat rows of blue tents on freshly laid gravel, and dozens of uniformed officials, the camp shows the power of the Italian state. But it also reveals its fissures. The camp is a legal no-man’s land. The new arrivals’ status — are they illegal immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers? — is uncertain, making it nearly impossible for the Italian authorities to process, repatriate or detain them.

Before the influx began in January, bringing about 18,000 people through Lampedusa, the immigrants who arrived there were held on the island for a few days before being sent to formal immigration or asylum centers on the mainland. The Interior Ministry says those centers are now almost full as Italy struggles with a bureaucratic backlog.

Under Italian law, immigrants can be held for up to 180 days to determine their status, and much longer if they are seeking asylum. If their arrival is deemed to be illegal, and they would not be subject to persecution in their home countries, they can be sent home. But Italy’s repatriation accords with Tunisia and Libya have broken down.

“We’re waiting for a directive,” said Antonio Calcagni, the chief of the immigration office at the Police Department in the nearby port city of Taranto, as he stood outside the Manduria camp. “Different countries are working on it,” he added.

The immigrants have grown frustrated, too. “We’ve been here for three days,” said Omar Naim, 24, a Tunisian, as he peered through the fence. “They haven’t done anything for us.”

Italian officials traveled last week to Tunisia, which still lacks a functioning government, to persuade the authorities there to honor the repatriation accords.

“What’s the legal status of the camp? That’s a good question,” said Nichi Vendola, the president of the Puglia region and a leading member of the center-left opposition. “Is it a place for determining who is an illegal immigrant? A place to receive asylum seekers? A hybrid place?” He added, “The confusion is the fruit of the ideological prejudices of the Northern League, which dominates the Berlusconi government.”

That party, the most powerful in the governing center-right coalition, has long drawn on fears of illegal immigration. Asked on Tuesday what should be done about the immigrants, the Northern League’s colorful leader, Umberto Bossi, used a phrase that politely translates as “get them out of our faces.”

The interior minister, Roberto Maroni, a member of the Northern League, has been more diplomatic, but has repeatedly said the European Union has abandoned Italy. The Italian government is not alone in seeking a more coordinated European response. Laura Boldrini, spokeswoman for the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy, said it was important to distinguish between the “economic migrants” from Tunisia who were seeking work in Europe and those fleeing the fighting in Libya.

“In the event of a mass influx of asylum seekers from Libya, the U.N.H.C.R. recommends that member states receive them and give them temporary protection,” Ms. Boldrini said. “It would be good to have a positive sign from Europe,” she added. “That could also help reduce tensions and calm down tones in Italy.”

Back in Manduria, as bulldozers worked the ground and trucks carted in generators, the camp seemed increasingly less temporary. Mr. Calcagni, the immigration chief for the Taranto police, looking resigned, cited an often-used Italian saying: “There’s nothing more definitive than something provisional.”

Yankees Bracing for Cold in Opener and in April

 

It sounded like a complaint — well, it was, actually — but then Swisher, who is probably the Yankees’ leading enthusiast about life in general, grinned. “But hey, no better place than the Bronx, man.”

March is not going out quite as lamblike as the adage would have it, which makes the prospect of opening day in New York just a tad less idyllic than one might hope. When the Yankees face the Tigers on Thursday afternoon, the occasion is likely to be chilly, with temperatures in the 40s, and possibly very wet, with rain in the forecast.

As both teams ran through perfunctory workouts Wednesday, the Yankees made the unsurprising announcement that Brett Gardner would lead off and Derek Jeter would bat second against the Tigers right-hander Justin Verlander, though Jeter will lead off against lefties. Luis Ayala, the former Met, will take the final bullpen slot to start the season, replacing Pedro Feliciano, another former Met, who is on the disabled list. And it was still uncertain whether Curtis Granderson, recuperating from an injury to an oblique muscle, would start in center field.

Also, A. J. Burnett has a nasty head cold. “Don’t get too close to me, man,” he warned at one point.

Without a lot to discuss, talk naturally, or perhaps with a little prompting, turned toward the weather, long underwear, insulated batting gloves and sitting near the heaters on the bench. Asked how he prepared for playing in the cold, Jeter laughed.

“More clothes, man,” he said.

The idea of playing in a chilly rain did not excite Mark Teixeira. The good thing, he said, was that both teams have to play in it.

“But anyone who’s ever played golf when it’s raining and windy, you take it inside and play cards in the clubhouse,” Teixeira said, adding that cold weather is much tougher on hitters than pitchers. “The ball doesn’t carry as well, you’re not going to be as loose, and every time you hit the ball off the end of the bat you feel like your hands are broken.”

Teixeira and his teammates may have to get used to it. The forecast for the next several days does not call for much higher temperatures, and the team’s quirky early-season schedule is frontloaded with home games. Twelve of the Yankees’ first 15 games are in the Bronx, the only interruption being a weekend series in a potentially chillier clime: Boston.

Through May 1, only 8 of the team’s first 28 games are on the road, and the 20 home games equal the number the Yankees are scheduled to play in August and September combined.

Manager Joe Girardi said that so many late-season away games did not matter much — “Our club in the past has played well on the road, so that’s not a huge concern,” he said — but the early-season home games can create a problem if weather forces many cancellations.

Swisher raised an eyebrow over the schedule.

“We’re home the whole month of April, but then we have, like, nine home games in August?” Swisher said with an incredulous shrug. “Why would you do that? Why would you not start us off in warmer climates, and then once the Midwest and the East start warming up, play us there. Send us out west, send us down south, send us anywhere. But you’re going to put us here for a whole month?”

The main difficulty for pitchers in the cold is maintaining a feel for the ball, so it does not begin to feel slippery, in Swisher’s phrase, “like a cue ball.”

Phil Hughes, who will start the third game of the season on Sunday, acknowledged that the cold could be a factor in his using the pitch he worked hardest on in spring training: the changeup.

“The first week of the season the adrenaline warms you up a little,” he said, “but it is a feel pitch, and if you can’t feel the baseball as well as you can in warm weather, it might be affected. That’s what these next couple of days are for, to get used to it, and hopefully by Sunday I’ll be all right.”

Cue ball effect aside, generally the players seem to regard cold weather as a boon for pitchers as opposed to hitters.

“Definitely pitchers,” Jeter said, “because pitchers are always moving.”

Joba Chamberlain, the Yankees reliever, agreed.

“Pitchers, we dictate everything that’s going on,” he said. “You can get in on people’s hands.”

He also made the point that before a pitcher enters the game, he warms up. “Even when it’s cold you’re working up a sweat,” he said. “We get hot just to come in.” Both starting pitchers, Verlander and the Yankees’ C. C. Sabathia, responded the same way — with a smile and a four-word sentence — when asked about playing in the cold. “Hitters don’t like it,” they said.

Sabathia, the former Cleveland Indian, added: “I’m used to it, from pitching in Cleveland. I kind of like it.”

Jeter said his least favorite of the elements was wind. “Windy is the toughest,” he said. “Wind makes it colder, plus you’ve got to throw into the wind, and hit into the wind. Wind complicates things.”

Russell Martin, beginning his first season with the Yankees after playing in relatively sunny Los Angeles, said nobody had an advantage in the cold. It was bad for both the hitter and pitcher, he said.

And then there was Mariano Rivera. You’d think, perhaps, that as a native Panamanian, Rivera, the Yanks’ nonpareil closer, would disdain low temperatures and say so. But asked if he preferred pitching in warm weather, what he disdained was the question.

“What I prefer or don’t prefer, it don’t matter,” he said, speaking with characteristic quietude and gravitas. “It’s not going to change anything. We’re here. Whether it’s cold or warm, we have to live with it. We’re ready.”

Odd Alliance: Business Lobby and Tea Party

 

But a Tea Party group in the United States, the Institute for Liberty, has vigorously defended the freedom of a giant Indonesian paper company to sell its wares to Americans without paying tariffs. The institute set up Web sites, published reports and organized a petition drive attacking American businesses, unions and environmentalists critical of the company, Asia Pulp & Paper.

Last fall, the institute’s president, Andrew Langer, had himself videotaped on Long Wharf in Boston holding a copy of the Declaration of Independence as he compared Washington’s proposed tariff on paper from Indonesia and China to Britain’s colonial trade policies in 1776.

Tariff-free Asian paper may seem an unlikely cause for a nonprofit Tea Party group. But it is in keeping with a succession of pro-business campaigns — promoting commercial space flight, palm oil imports and genetically modified alfalfa — that have occupied the Institute for Liberty’s recent agenda.

The Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government. Yet an examination of the Institute for Liberty shows how Washington’s influence industry has adapted itself to the Tea Party era. In a quietly arranged marriage of seemingly disparate interests, the institute and kindred groups are increasingly the bearers of corporate messages wrapped in populist Tea Party themes.

In a few instances, their corporate partners are known — as with the billionaire Koch brothers’ support of Americans for Prosperity, one of the most visible advocacy groups. More often, though, their nonprofit tax status means they do not have to reveal who pays the bills.

Mr. Langer would not say who financed his Indonesian paper initiative. But his sudden interest in the issue coincided with a public relations push by Asia Pulp & Paper. And the institute’s work is remarkably similar to that produced by one of the company’s consultants, a former Australian diplomat named Alan Oxley who works closely with a Washington public affairs firm known for creating corporate campaigns presented as grass-roots efforts.

For the institute, the embrace of a foreign conglomerate’s agenda is a venture into new territory — and distinguishes it among Tea Party advocacy groups. The issue, Mr. Langer asserted, is important to working Americans who might have to pay more for everything from children’s books to fried-chicken buckets made of coated paper from Asia. He said the institute had not accepted money directly from Asia Pulp & Paper, though it was possible the company had paid others who then contributed to the institute.

“I suppose it could be,” he said, but added, “I don’t know about anybody else who may have gotten money from Asia Pulp & Paper who’s given money to us.”

Those on the receiving end of the institute’s attacks — strange bedfellows like Greenpeace, Staples and Asia Pulp & Paper’s American competitors — are unified in their skepticism of its motives.

“If you can spend as much money as you want and remain anonymous, then it doesn’t matter if you’re an overseas company or the Koch brothers, you pay the same network of anti-regulatory front groups,” said Scott Paul, director of Greenpeace’s forest campaign.

Seeing Tea Party Potential

Like many other nonprofit organizations on the Tea Party bandwagon, the Institute of Liberty predates the movement. It was created in 2005 by Jason Wright, an author of best-selling inspirational novels who had worked for Frontiers of Freedom, a conservative policy group.

In his three years at the institute, Mr. Wright said in an interview, he was often approached by public relations consultants pitching projects for clients. Typical, he said, were overtures from two consultants who wanted him to advocate for opposing positions on the regulation of “payday” loans, widely criticized for usurious terms that hurt low-income borrowers.

“A P.R. firm in D.C. offered me a ton of money to take the wrong side of that issue,” he said. “I did end up taking some corporate donations from the side of the issue I believed in — that the industry had completely lost control and had to be reined in.”

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Antitrust Cry From Microsoft

Microsoft plans to file a formal antitrust complaint on Thursday in Brussels against Google, its first against another company. Microsoft hopes that the action may prod officials in Europe to take action and that the evidence gathered may also lead officials in the United States to do the same.

In Europe, Microsoft is joining a chorus of complaints, but until now they have come mainly from small Internet companies saying that Google’s search engine unfairly promotes its own products, like Google Product Search, a price comparison site, over rival offerings.

The Internet and smartphones are the markets where energy, investment and soaring stock prices reside. Microsoft, still immensely wealthy, is pouring billions into these fast-growing fields, especially Internet search. Yet the champion of the PC era trails well behind Google.

“The company that was the 800-pound gorilla is now resorting to antitrust, where it is always the case that the also-rans sue the winners,” said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management who has studied Microsoft.

The Microsoft complaint, Professor Cusumano notes, is also a reminder of the comparative speed with which fortunes can shift in fast-moving technology markets. “It doesn’t happen instantly, but it does happen faster than in most industries,” Professor Cusumano said. “It took Google about a decade to really turn the tables on Microsoft.”

For years, the swaggering giant of personal computer software battled competitors and antitrust regulators in America and abroad, parrying their claims that it had bullied rivals and abused its market muscle. In the United States, it suffered rulings against it and in 2001 reached a settlement that prohibited Microsoft from certain strong-arm tactics. In Europe, Microsoft absorbed setbacks and record fines from regulators and judges.

Still, irony has no place in antitrust doctrine. Microsoft’s complaint must be weighed on the merits, as part of a wide-ranging antitrust investigation of Google, begun last year and led by Europe’s competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia.

The litany of particulars in Microsoft’s complaint, the company’s lawyers say, includes claims of anticompetitive practices by Google in search, online advertising and smartphone software. But a central theme, Microsoft says, is that Google unfairly hinders the ability of search competitors — and Microsoft’s Bing is almost the only one left — from examining and indexing information that Google controls, like its big video service YouTube.

Such restraints, Microsoft contends, undermine competition — and thus pose a threat to consumer choice and better prices for online advertisers.

When told of the Microsoft claims, Adam Kovacevich, a Google spokesman, denied that the company had done anything wrong and said its practices did not deny Microsoft access to Google technology and content.

Though it is making an antitrust claim, Microsoft is also claiming a bit of hypocrisy on Google’s part. In an interview, Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, cited Google’s stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

“That is a laudable goal,” Mr. Smith said. “But it appears Google’s practice is to prevent others from doing the same thing. That is unlawful and it raises serious antitrust issues.”

Google’s strategy, he adds, seems to be to “wall off content so that it cannot be crawled and searched by competing companies.”

In smartphones — sources of increasing volumes of search traffic — Microsoft says Google is withholding technical information needed to let phones using Windows Phone 7 software have a rich, full-featured application for YouTube. That technical information, Microsoft says, is available not only in Google’s Android software but also Apple iPhones, as part of a deal dating back to when Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, was on the Apple board. (He resigned in 2009, after the Federal Trade Commission raised questions about the arrangement.)

Mr. Kovacevich said that about two years ago, the company decided to make an improved version of YouTube available for all mobile devices instead of tailoring it to each company on smartphone applications, as it did earlier with Apple.

Microsoft also contends that Google has set up what amount to technical roadblocks so that Microsoft’s Bing search service cannot examine and index up to half of the videos on YouTube.

Another Microsoft claim focuses on Google’s ad contracts. Its contracts prohibit advertisers and online agencies from using third-party software that could instantly compare results and move advertisers’ data from one ad platform to another — from Google’s Adwords to Microsoft’s Adcenter, for example.

Tests Show Irish Banks Still Ailing

Just months after a banking collapse forced an 85 billion euro ($120 billion) rescue package for the country, the Irish central bank is expected to announce on Thursday that the latest round of stress testing shows that the nation’s banks may need 13 billion euros to cover bad real estate debt. On top of the 10 billion euros already granted by Europe and the International Monetary Fund for the banks, that would bring the total bill for Ireland’s banking bust to about 70 billion euros, or more than $98 billion.

Some specialists say the final tally could be closer to $140 billion, an extraordinary amount for a country whose annual output is $241 billion. Trading in shares of Irish Life and Permanent, the only domestic bank to have avoided a state bailout, was suspended Wednesday after reports that it might have to seek government aid as well.

Dermot O’Leary, chief economist for Goodbody Stockbrokers in Dublin, says that Ireland can no longer afford to shoulder the still-growing burden of its banks. The nation’s interest payments are set to rise to 13 percent of government revenue by 2012 — a figure that trails only Greece’s 18 percent, Mr. O’Leary wrote in perhaps the most definitive report to date on Ireland’s financial ills.

“The Irish stress tests will be an important call to arms that shows that it cannot keep putting up the cost for recapitalizing its banks,” he said. “You need burden-sharing with the bondholders. Without that, the debt becomes unsustainable.”

Many proposals have been put forward to deal with the issue, including requiring bondholders to share in losses, as Mr. O’Leary and the new Irish government suggest, and a United States-style stress test with teeth, which would name and shame front-line banks and require them to raise capital.

But European governments have stuck to their position that such measures would further fuel investor fears, rather than calm them.

The second stress test of European banks now under way is beginning to be regarded as too weak, much as the first one was. In the meantime, the condition of the banks is worsening.

In Spain, which is having a brutal housing bust like Ireland’s, fresh data shows that problem loans are growing at their fastest level in a year.

And Portuguese and Greek banks, with their Irish counterparts, have become dependent on short-term financing from the European Central Bank for their survival as their economies deteriorate and doubts increase about their ability to repay their debts.

“Europe hesitates to deal with the banking problem for two reasons,” said Daniel Gros, the director for the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels.

“Our policy makers saw Lehman and want to avoid a repeat of the experience at any cost,” he said, referring to the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. “And the weak banks in Germany and elsewhere are too politically connected to fail.”

Irish taxpayers have been left responsible since the government guaranteed all the liabilities of its banks two years ago.

The European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund have refused to accept the notion that investors who bought the bonds of Irish banks, in effect financing their reckless lending, should share the pain with some loss on their holdings.

But a newly elected government has become more vocal in arguing that $29 billion in unsecured senior debt — which is not tied to an asset and as a result is deemed riskier from the start — is ripe for restructuring because the banks that issued it, like Anglo Irish, have essentially failed and been taken over by the government.

So the government should not be obligated to keep paying interest.

It is not clear who owns the senior Irish debt; analysts guess it is a mix of European banks and bargain-hunting hedge funds.

What is clear is Europe’s opposition to imposing reductions in the value of these bonds, often called haircuts. That view was reaffirmed this week when a central bank board member, Jürgen Stark of Germany, described such a move as populist and one that could feed a wider investor panic.

Should investors respond by driving down the value of government bonds from the weaker euro zone economies, the pain would most likely be felt by all. The Continent’s big banks in particular would suffer because many have large piles of sovereign debt, which has yet to be marked down to its market value.

According to Goldman Sachs, European banks hold $270 billion in Greek, Irish and Portuguese bonds.

Greek banks are the most exposed, with $87 billion, mostly in Greek debt, but German banks hold $62 billion in total and French banks $26 billion. Hypo Real Estate, a commercial lender now wholly owned by the German government, is the largest holder of Irish sovereign debt, with $14.5 billion.

With bank lending growth negligible and capital levels thin, especially in the weaker euro zone economies, a fresh round of write-offs is the last thing governments want.

The problem is compounded because banks account for a much larger share of national economies in Europe than they do in the United States.

In Ireland, bank assets are 2.5 times the size of its economy. A recent review of the European banking sector by Morgan Stanley shows that the rest of Europe is also heavily reliant on the health of its banks.

The five largest banks in Britain are 3.5 times the size of the country’s economy, 4.4 times in the Netherlands, 3.25 times in France and two times in Spain. In Germany, the figure is 1.5 times gross domestic product, but that excludes the biggest, Deutsche Bank, which is mainly an investment bank. (The comparable figure for the United States is 60 percent of economic output.)

Spain has managed to separate itself from the malaise surrounding Portugal and others this year by undertaking some aggressive deficit cuts.

But, according to a report this week by Marcello Zanardo, an analyst in London for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, Spain’s problem loans rose 3.3 percent in January from December, the biggest increase in a year. That brought its bad loans to a 17-year high of 6.06 percent of its portfolio. Nonperforming loans jumped 48 percent in 2009 and 15 percent last year, Mr. Zanardo’s data show, driven by the continuing weakness in Spanish home prices.

While Spanish banks are not in as bad shape as their Irish peers, the government has not yet convinced investors that it has addressed the problem despite steps to force local savings banks to raise capital.

Veterans of the three-and-a-half-year bank crisis in Ireland say that the hardest part is accepting how bad things really are, then taking definitive action.

“We need to accept once and for all that Ireland has 100 billion euros in irrecoverable bank loans,” said Peter Matthews, a financial consultant and recently elected member of Parliament who has long argued that Ireland and Europe are underestimating the scope of the country’s debt problem. “People do not relish a write-down but it is the right way to deal with this.”

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Workers Give Glimpse of Japan’s Nuclear Crisis

of March 15. Hundreds of firefighters, Self-Defense Forces and workers from Tokyo Electric Power convened at the sports training center, arguing long and loudly about how best to restore cooling systems and prevent nuclear fuel from overheating. Complicating matters, a lack of phone service meant that they had little input from upper management.

“There were so many ideas, the meeting turned into a panic,” said one longtime Tokyo Electric veteran present that day. He made the comments in an interview with The New York Times, one of several interviews that provided a rare glimpse of the crisis as the company’s workers experienced it. “There were serious arguments between the various sections about whether to go, how to use electrical lines, which facilities to use and so on.”

The quarreling echoed the alarm bells ringing throughout Tokyo Electric, which has been grappling with an unprecedented set of challenges since March 11, when the severe earthquake and massive tsunami upended northeastern Japan. It is also an insight, through interviews, e-mails and blog posts, into the problems faced by the thousands of often anxious but eager Tokyo Electric Power employees working to re-establish order.

Many of them — especially the small number charged with approaching damaged reactors and exposing themselves to unusually high doses of radiation — are viewed as heroes, preventing the world’s second-worst nuclear calamity from becoming even more dire.

But unlike their bosses, who appear daily in blue work coats to apologize to the public and explain why the company has not yet succeeded in taming the reactors, the front-line workers have remained almost entirely anonymous.

In the interviews and in some e-mail and published blog items, several line workers expressed frustration at the slow pace of the recovery efforts, sometimes conflicting orders from their bosses and unavoidable hurdles like damaged roads. In many cases, the line workers want the public to know that they feel remorse for the nuclear crisis, but also that they are trying their best to fix it.

“My town is gone,” wrote a worker named Emiko Ueno, in an email obtained by The Times. “My parents are still missing. I still cannot get in the area because of the evacuation order. I still have to work in such a mental state. This is my limit.”

At the top, a manager who circulated her note urged his workers to “please think about what you can do for Fukushima after reading this e-mail.”

Tokyo Electric keeps a tight lid on its workers under normal circumstances, and workers say they risk censure for speaking out. Some, however, have become lightning rods. Soon after the crisis began, Michiko Otsuki, who worked at the Daiichi plant after the earthquake, wrote on a social media site called Mixi that Tokyo Electric workers were trying hard and risking their lives to repair the plant.

She apologized for the confusion and the insecurity that people felt as a result of the nuclear accident. But Ms. Otsuki soon removed the post from her site because, she said, people had misinterpreted what she meant to say. It was too early, she added, to ask people to stop being critical of Tokyo Electric.

In the early days after the earthquake and tsunami, many Tokyo Electric workers had little time to speak out. An explosion had blown the roof off one of the reactor buildings in Fukushima, heightening fears of large-scale radiation exposure. To stabilize the reactors and restart cooling systems, the company rushed to reconnect the power plant to the electric grid.

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C.I.A. Agents in Libya Aid Airstrikes and Meet Rebels

While President Obama has insisted that no American military ground troops participate in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help bleed Colonel Qaddafi’s military, the officials said.

In addition to the C.I.A. presence, composed of an unknown number of Americans who had worked at the spy agency’s station in Tripoli and others who arrived more recently, current and former British officials said that dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces and missile installations, the officials said.

American officials hope that similar information gathered by American intelligence officers — including the location of Colonel Qaddafi’s munitions depots and the clusters of government troops inside towns — might help weaken Libya’s military enough to encourage defections within its ranks.

In addition, the American spies are meeting with rebels to try to fill in gaps in understanding who their leaders are and the allegiances of the groups opposed to Colonel Qaddafi, said United States government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the activities.? American officials cautioned, though, that the Western operatives were not directing the actions of rebel forces.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.

The United States and its allies have been scrambling to gather detailed information on the location and abilities of Libyan infantry and armored forces that normally takes months of painstaking analysis.

“We didn’t have great data,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, who handed over control of the Libya mission to NATO on Wednesday, said in an e-mail last week. ? “Libya hasn’t been a country we focused on a lot over past few years.”

Several weeks ago, President Obama signed a secret finding authorizing the C.I.A. to provide arms and other support to Libyan rebels, American officials said Wednesday. But weapons have not yet been shipped into Libya, as Obama administration officials debate the effects of giving them to the rebel groups. The presidential finding was first reported by Reuters.

In a statement released Wednesday evening, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, declined to comment “on intelligence matters,” but he said that no decision had yet been made to provide arms to the rebels.

Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday that he opposed arming the rebels. “We need to understand more about the opposition before I would support passing out guns and advanced weapons to them,” Mr. Rogers said in a statement.

Because the publicly stated goal of the Libyan campaign is not explicitly to overthrow Colonel Qaddafi’s government, the clandestine war now going on is significantly different from the Afghan campaign to drive the Taliban from power in 2001. Back then, American C.I.A. and Special Forces troops worked alongside Afghan militias, armed them and called in airstrikes that paved the rebel advances on strategically important cities like Kabul and Kandahar.?

In recent weeks, the American military has been monitoring Libyan troops with U-2 spy planes and a high-altitude Global Hawk drone, as well as a special aircraft, JSTARS, that tracks the movements of large groups of troops.? Military officials said that the Air Force also has Predator drones, similar to those now operating in Afghanistan, in reserve.

Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint eavesdropping planes intercept communications from Libyan commanders and troops and relay that information to the Global Hawk, which zooms in on the location of armored forces and determines rough coordinates. The Global Hawk sends the coordinates to analysts at a ground station, who pass the information to command centers for targeting. The command center beams the coordinates to an E-3 Sentry Awacs command-and-control plane, which in turn directs warplanes to their targets.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who recently retired as the Air Force’s top intelligence official, said that Libya’s flat desert terrain and clear weather have allowed warplanes with advanced sensors to hunt Libyan armored columns with relative ease, day or night, without the need for extensive direction from American troops on the ground.

But if government troops advance into or near cities in along the country’s eastern coast, which so far have been off-limits to coalition aircraft for fear of causing civilian casualties, General Deptula said that ground operatives would be particularly helpful in providing target coordinates or pointing them out to pilots with hand-held laser designators.

?The C.I.A. and British intelligence services were intensely focused on Libya eight years ago, before and during the successful effort to get Colonel Qaddafi to give up his nuclear weapons program. He agreed to do so in the fall of 2003, and allowed C.I.A. and other American nuclear experts into the country to assess Libya’s equipment and bomb designs and to arrange for their transfer out of the country. ?

?Once the weapons program was eliminated, a former American official said, intelligence agencies shifted their focus away from Libya. But as Colonel Qaddafi began his recent crackdown on the rebel groups, the American spy agencies have worked to rekindle ties to Libyan informants and to learn more about the country’s military leaders.

A former British government official who is briefed on current operations confirmed media reports that dozens of British Special Forces soldiers, from the elite Special Air Service and Special Boat Service units, are on the ground across Libya. The British soldiers have been particularly focused on finding the locations of Colonel Qaddafi’s Russian-made surface-to-air missiles.

A spokesman for Britain’s Ministry of Defense declined to comment, citing a policy not to discuss the operations of British Special Forces.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting from London, and David E. Sanger from Washington.

Political Memo: An Arizona Senate Race Waits to See if Giffords Emerges to Run

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These supporters say they do not want to get too far ahead of themselves, and make clear that Ms. Giffords, who was shot in the head, is still relearning basic tasks and might emerge from the hospital with neither the same political abilities nor aspirations that she had before. And publicly, her closest aides say the only thing they care about is her health.

“Our focus is on her recovery and what comes after that comes after that,” said Pia Carusone, Ms. Giffords’s chief of staff.

Despite such protestations, several of Ms. Giffords’s longtime aides are whispering behind the scenes that she just might recover in time to run for the seat that Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican, is vacating next year.

While it might be wishful thinking, Ms. Giffords’s noncampaign is already having a major effect on Arizona politics; other prospective Democratic candidates say they feel compelled not to jump in unless she bows out, allowing Republicans to get a head start organizing their campaigns.

“I’m in but only if she’s not,” said one prospective Democratic candidate, who spoke of his deliberations but insisted that he not be named given the fluid nature of the race. “A Democrat running against her would be doomed.”

Ever so quietly, Ms. Giffords’s political allies are laying the groundwork just in case. Friends and allies held a fund-raiser for her on March 15 in Washington — trying to supplement her Congressional campaign war chest, which totaled about $285,000 at year’s end and could be tapped for a Senate bid. Her former campaign manager, Rodd McLeod, has been brought on staff, to fill in for an aide who is also recovering from the Jan. 8 shooting that left 6 people dead and 13 injured.

While these efforts might be normal for a member of Congress in a competitive district like hers, other Democrats see them as signs that those around her want to keep her political options open.

Ms. Giffords herself is not available to raise her own profile, so her Congressional staff does it for her, responding to constituents, issuing news releases and appearing at public events in her stead. Ms. Carusone said she expected Ms. Giffords to appear in Houston next month when her husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, lifted off for a two-week space shuttle mission.

A Democrat in her third term, Ms. Giffords had expressed interest in running for the Senate before a gunman opened fire at one of her signature “Congress on Your Corner” events here. Ms. Carusone said she informed her boss after Mr. Kyl announced his retirement and told her that her name had come up as a potential replacement. The response, Ms. Carusone said, was a smile.

With a question mark beside her name in the Senate race, other Democratic hopefuls are working behind the scenes as carefully as they can, lining up support in case Ms. Giffords decides to stay out while taking care not to appear disrespectful to the candidate that the Democratic establishment here believes would have the best chance of winning.

“We are all rooting for Gabby to recover and run,” said Don Bivens, a former party chairman who himself is interested in the Senate seat. “She would be a great senator for Arizona. But we also need a Plan B.”

Ms. Giffords’s intentions also have an impact on the Democrats who are considering her House seat. They are engaged in an especially delicate process, quietly calling key Democratic donors to gauge support while trying to remain invisible.

“Whether she’ll be ready to run or interested in running nobody can say,” said Andrei Cherny, chairman of the state Democratic Party who is trying to coordinate all the behind-the-scenes machinations. “But there is a sense that she should make that decision and that she should have options once she’s ready to make it.”

Fred DuVal, a member of the state Board of Regents, is one who is considering a Senate run if Ms. Giffords, a friend of his, opts out. He visited her in Houston last week but refused to discuss whether he left more or less convinced that she would enter the race. “If anybody can recover from this, Gabby Giffords can,” Mr. DuVal said.

There is no looming deadline for the Senate race, which is more than a year and a half away, but running as a Democrat is no easy task in Arizona, so time is an asset. Mr. Kyl announced his decision to retire on Feb. 10, and Representative Jeff Flake, a Republican, jumped into the race four days later. As Mr. Flake piles up endorsements, raises money and awaits Republican primary challengers, including the expected entrance of Representative Trent Franks, Democrats are in a holding pattern.

Among the Democratic names being floated are Representative Ed Pastor, who is in his 11th term representing the Phoenix area, as well as a handful of lesser-known hopefuls.

Ford Burkhart contributed reporting.

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Letter: Letter to Our Readers: Times Begins Digital Subscriptions

As I have said previously, the introduction of digital subscriptions is an investment in our future. It will allow us to develop new sources of revenue to strengthen our ability to continue our journalistic mission as well as undertake digital innovations that will enable us to provide you with high-quality journalism on whatever device you choose.

As you may know, on March 17, we introduced digital subscriptions in Canada. The Canadian launching allowed us to test our systems and fine-tune the user interface and customer experience. On Monday, we launched globally.

If you are a home delivery subscriber of The Times, you will continue to have full and free access to our news, information, opinion and other features on your computer, smartphone and tablet. International Herald Tribune subscribers will also receive free access to NYTimes.com.

If you are not a home delivery subscriber, you will have free access to 20 articles (including slide shows, videos and other features) each month. If you exceed that limit, you will be asked to become a digital subscriber. On our smartphone and tablet apps, the Top News section will remain free of charge. For access to the other sections within the apps, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber.?

Here is how it will work:

? The Times is offering three digital subscription packages, including an all-access option, so you can choose a plan that is right for you based on the devices you own (computer, smartphone, tablet). ?For more information or to purchase one of these plans, go to www.nytimes.com/access.

? Again, all New York Times home delivery subscribers will continue to have free access to NYTimes.com and to all content on our apps.? If you are a home delivery subscriber, go to http://homedelivery.nytimes.com to sign up for free access.

? Readers who come to Times articles through links from search engines, blogs and social media will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.? This allows new and casual readers to continue to discover our content on the open Web. On all major search engines, users will have a daily limit on free links to Times articles.?

? The home page at NYTimes.com and all section fronts will remain free to browse for all users at all times.?

For more information, go to www.nytimes.com/digitalfaq.

As you have seen during this recent period of extraordinary global news, The Times is uniquely positioned to keep you informed. The launching of our digital subscription model will help ensure that we can continue to provide you with the high-quality journalism and substantive analysis that you have come to expect from The Times.

Thank you for reading The New York Times, in all its forms.

Sincerely,

ARTHUR SULZBERGER Jr.

Publisher, The New York Times

Signs of Strain as Taliban Gird for More Fighting

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The killings, coming just as the insurgents are mobilizing for the new fighting season in Afghanistan, have unnerved many in the Taliban and have spread a climate of paranoia and distrust within the insurgent movement, the Afghans said.

Three powerful Taliban commanders were killed in February in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, well known to be the command center of the Taliban leadership, according to an Afghan businessman and a mujahedeen commander from the region with links to the Taliban. A fourth commander, a former Taliban minister, was wounded in the border town of Chaman in March, in a widely reported shooting.

There have also been several arrests in Pakistan of senior Taliban commanders, including those from Zabul and Kabul Provinces, and the shadow governor of Herat, Afghan officials said. Mullah Agha Muhammad, a brother of Mullah Baradar, the former second in command of the Taliban who was arrested by Pakistan security forces over a year ago to stop him negotiating with the Afghan government, was also detained briefly to send out the same warning, said the chief of the Afghan border police in Kandahar, Col. Abdul Razziq.

While the arrests have been conducted by Pakistan security forces, no one seems to know for sure who is behind the killings. Members of the Taliban attribute them to American spies, running Pakistani and Afghan agents, in an extension of the American campaigns that have used night raids to track down and kill scores of midlevel Taliban commanders in Afghanistan and drone strikes to kill militants with links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Others, including Pakistani and Afghan Parliament members from the region, say that the Pakistani intelligence agencies have long used threats, arrests and killings to control the Taliban and that they could be doing so again to maintain their influence over the insurgents.

Afghan officials in Kabul denied any involvement in attacks on the Taliban inside Pakistan, as did American and NATO military officials. “We’ve heard of infighting that reportedly has led to internal violence at several points in recent months,” one senior American military official said of the Taliban, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of discussing events in Pakistan. Military forces were not involved, he added.

Whatever the case, Taliban commanders and fighters, who used to be a common sight in parts of Quetta, have now gone underground and are not moving around openly as before. Two members of the Taliban, including a senior official, declined to talk about the issue of killings on the telephone, saying it was too dangerous. Many will not answer their phones at all.

The Taliban have been under stress since American forces doubled their presence in southern Afghanistan last year and greatly increased the number of special forces raids targeting Taliban commanders. Yet they still control a number of remote districts and in those areas the insurgents can still muster forces to storm government positions, as demonstrated by their capture of a district in Afghanistan’s eastern Nuristan Province this week.

While there is still some debate over the insurgents’ overall strength, Pakistanis with deep knowledge of the Afghan Taliban say that they have suffered heavy losses in the last year and that they are struggling in some areas to continue the fight.

“The Afghan Taliban have, I think, run into problems,” said Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former Pakistani interior minister who served as ambassador in Afghanistan after 2001 and as a peace negotiator with the Taliban.

“So many of them have been killed in the last one to one and a half years as a consequence of targeted assassinations,” he said in an interview. “That has depleted the strength, capacity and ability of the Taliban.” Commanders were without communications and resources and were struggling to find recruits to replace those killed, he said.

One Taliban commander from Kunar Province said losses had been so high that he was considering going over to the side of the Afghan government in order to get assistance for his beleaguered community. “This does not mean the Taliban will stop fighting, but maybe it will be at a reduced level,” Mr. Mohmand said.

Carlotta Gall reported from Kabul, and Islamabad, Pakistan. Employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kabul, and from southern Afghanistan.

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Retreat for Rebels; Libyan Foreign Minister Quits

The government advance appeared to return control of eastern Libya’s most important oil regions to Colonel Qaddafi’s forces, giving the isolated government, at least for the day, the east’s most valuable economic prize. The rout also put into sharp relief the rebels’ absence of discipline and tactical sense, confronting the United States with a conundrum: how to persuade Colonel Qaddafi to step down while supporting a rebel force that has been unable to hold on to military gains.

But the defection of Moussa Koussa, the foreign minister, showed that at least one longtime confidant seemed to be calculating that Colonel Qaddafi could not last. The news of Mr. Koussa’s defection sent shockwaves through Tripoli on Wednesday night after it was announced by the British government. Mr. Koussa had been a pillar of his government since the early days of the revolution, and previously led the fearsome intelligence unit.

Although American officials suspected him of responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Mr. Koussa also played a major role in turning over nuclear equipment and designs to the United States and in negotiating Libya back into the good graces of Western governments.

Presumably, he is now in a position to talk about the structure of Mr. Qaddafi’s remaining forces and loyalists. What is unclear is whether his defection will lead to others. “We think he could be the beginning of a stream of Libyans who think sticking with Qaddafi is a losing game,” one senior American official said. “But we don’t know.”

Having abandoned Bin Jawwad and the oil port of Ras Lanuf on Tuesday, the rebels fled helter-skelter before government shelling from another oil town, Brega, and stopped for the night at the strategic city of Ajdabiya. As the rebels retreated in disarray, a senior rebel officer, Col. Ahmaed Omar Bani, pleaded for more weapons. He conceded that rebel fighters had “dissolved like snow in the sand” but framed the retreat as a “tactical withdrawal.”

Vowing that “Ajdabiya will not fall,” he claimed that rebels were still fighting on the east and west sides of Brega, suggesting that pockets of resistance persisted even if the main force had fled.

He acknowledged that the rebels had no answer to the artillery pushing them back unless foreign governments provided parity in arms. “The truth is the truth,” he said. “Even if it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”

The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, released a statement responding to a report of a presidential finding authorizing covert support for the rebels. It said: “No decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya. We’re not ruling it out or ruling it in.”

Whether more weapons or longer-range weapons would make a difference is an open question, however. Leadership and an appreciation for tactics were noticeably missing in the rebels’ battle lines.

Faced with fire, the rebels seemed not to know how to use the relatively simple weapons they had in any coordinated fashion, and had almost no capacity to communicate with one another midfight. Throughout the spontaneous retreats on Wednesday, not a single two-way tactical radio was visible.

The rout put civilians to flight as well. By Wednesday evening, Ajdabiya’s hospital patients were evacuated and a long stream of vehicles packed with forlorn residents filled the road north to Benghazi, the rebel capital.

Abdul Karim Baras, a young man with a crackling bullhorn, tried to buoy their spirits. “God will rescue Libya from this moment!” he shouted repeatedly as he stood on the highway median.

A few of the displaced — many of whom made the same trek a week ago, before the allied airstrikes that reversed the loyalists’ first push — smiled or gave desultory victory signs as they passed through rebels’ disoriented ranks.

There were few signs of renewed airstrikes. But an American military spokesman said coalition warplanes resumed bombing pro-Qaddafi units on Wednesday, without specifying where. “The operation is continuing and will continue throughout the transition” to NATO command, Capt. Clint Gebke said.

C. J. Chivers reported from Brega and Ajdabiya, Libya, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Tripoli. David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington; Kareem Fahim from Benghazi, Libya; and Edward Wong from Beijing.

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