The euro and the endgame

Greece's PM Papandreou (left) hopes for a second EU bail-out deal at Thursday's crisis meeting

It has not taken long, but increasingly attention is turning to the endgame of the eurozone crisis.

The scenarios fill the comment columns and seep into conversations, even with EU commissioners.

Everyone seems to accept that "the centre cannot hold, things fall apart". So every idea is in play: a break-up of the eurozone, Greece leaving, fiscal and political union, European bonds, a European treasury etc. It is at last being recognised that papering over and pretending cannot continue.

Firstly, the short term. Greece is in all but name insolvent. The first bail-out delivered in May 2010 did not work. Loans of 110bn euros (£96bn) failed. In the past year Greece's debt mountain has only grown. Its economy has slumped.

European leaders believed they were dealing with a liquidity crisis. They weren't. At its core they faced a sovereign debt crisis. So a second Greek bail-out of 125bn euros is being drawn up.

The funds are available. But that is not the issue. The Germans in particular - but backed by others - have insisted that private investors take some of the pain. Why? Politics.

Avoiding the D-word

The taxpayer, the voters, the people do not see why, once again, they should bail out other countries. It was never supposed to happen. As the Austrian finance minister put it, "you can't leave the profits with the banks and make the taxpayer shoulder the losses".

What has divided officials in the past few weeks is this: how do you get banks and pension funds to take a hit without it being declared a default? For if any rolling over of debt or extending of maturity dates is seen as a default then the fear is that it will spread to other countries and roil Europe's banking system. In one corner have been the Germans, in the other the European Central Bank. The ECB questions why inflicting losses on banks will help.

What has changed is a recognition that Greece needs some debt relief. Almost every economist believes that at some stage Greece will default. It can be now or later. The debt-to-GDP ratio is heading for 170%. There is no way a country can escape that trap, particularly with an economy in recession. So a way has to be found to write off part of the value of the debts.

So a dozen schemes have been on the table. There is now talk of private investors writing off 25-30% of Greek debt, either through a buy-back or a debt swap. It would need to be voluntary and somehow avoid being declared a default.

The ECB remains opposed, but the view in Germany is that it is unavoidable that investors will have to take a hit, forfeiting some repayments. Politically Chancellor Merkel has made private sector involvement in a second bail-out a condition.

If a solution is found a second Greek bail-out will be launched at a eurozone summit on Thursday. Of course the question will be asked: if Greece gets debt relief why shouldn't other countries? Steps may well be taken to extend the period of the bail-out loans already given to Portugal and the Republic of Ireland - as well as Greece - and reduce the interest rates.

Building confidence

All of this may buy some time, some relief, but it won't address the wider issue: how to convince markets and investors that Europe has a plan to address its debt mountains at a time of low growth.

Take Italy. How will it find the growth to reduce its debt-to-GDP, which currently stands at 120%? Italy stands perilously close to the edge. All it takes is a 2% rise in its borrowing costs for it to struggle to pay its way.

Which is why so many people leap forward to the endgame.

Some say there is a choice. Europe could take a giant leap towards integration and so all debt would become European debt. It could only do this with fiscal union - and that almost certainly would need the backing of political union.

Whatever happens German voters will have to be persuaded that it is in their interest to give more money to Greece. It will be a tough call. There is huge resistance in Germany to the idea of joint eurozone bonds - eurobonds. Jens Weidmann, the head of the German central bank (Bundesbank), said would be unfair to Europe's taxpayers.

Or: Greece is shown the door, offering it a sabbatical from the eurozone, allowing it the flexibility to default and devalue. A couple of other countries may have to follow too, but the core of the eurozone would be protected, and ringfenced. All of these countries could rejoin the single currency later. Nobody pretends it would be easy, but it might be preferable to risking the single currency.

Redefining Europe?

Some are now openly advocating political union as the solution to the crisis. The former EU Commissioner Emma Bonino was refreshingly candid when I met her in Rome last week. She believes that a United States of Europe is the answer. She accepted that political union would have to be put to the voters.

The outcome would be uncertain, although the voters no doubt would be told they were voting to save the European Union.

Of course such a move would deepen the chasm between those in the eurozone and those outside. For countries like Britain it would be an immense opportunity to redefine its relationship with Brussels. Almost certainly if other countries were voting on a new relationship within the EU there would be pressure for Britain to hold a referendum too on what the British people want.

Even though the UK Parliament has just passed the European Union Act 2011, giving the people a referendum lock on further powers going to Brussels, there are still many in the Conservative Party who are looking for an in/out vote.

It could just be - with imaginative leaders - that a more flexible European emerges from the eurozone crisis. So much conflict and argument revolves around those seeking closer integration and those resisting.

In reality both integrationists and pragmatists are all pro-European. Their differences are over the role and influence of the EU and its institutions. If there was fiscal/political union for some countries others could adopt a much looser relationship.

The crisis might just be an opportunity for both integrationists and pragmatists to finally accept there are different, equally valid, visions for Europe that can exist side-by-side.

This is a time when what only recently would have been unimaginable is being debated.

By: bbc News

Egypt Military Aims to Cement Muscular Role in Government

Maj. Gen. Mamdouh Shaheen, left, and Maj. Gen. Mahmoud Hegazy, center, at a news conference last week. (Ed Ou for The New York Times)

CAIRO — The military council governing Egypt is moving to lay down ground rules for a new constitution that would protect and potentially expand its own authority indefinitely, possibly circumscribing the power of future elected officials.

The military announced Tuesday that it planned to adopt a “declaration of basic principles” to govern the drafting of a constitution, and liberals here initially welcomed the move as a concession to their demand for a Bill of Rights-style guarantee of civil liberties that would limit the potential repercussions of an Islamist victory at the polls.

But legal experts enlisted by the military to write the declaration say that it will spell out the armed forces’ role in the civilian government, potentially shielding the defense budget from public or parliamentary scrutiny and protecting the military’s vast economic interests. Proposals under consideration would give the military a broad mandate to intercede in Egyptian politics to protect national unity or the secular character of the state. A top general publicly suggested such a role, according to a report last month in the Egyptian newspaper Al- Masry Al- Youm. The military plans to adopt the document on its own, before any election, referendum or constitution sets up a civilian authority, said Mohamed Nour Farahat, a law professor working on the declaration. That would represent an about-face for a force that, after helping to oust President Hosni Mubarak five months ago, consistently pledged to turn over power to elected officials who would draft a constitution. Though the proposed declaration might protect liberals from an Islamist-dominated constitution, it could also limit democracy by shielding the military from full civilian control.

The military is long accustomed to virtual autonomy. Its budget has never been disclosed to Parliament, and its operations extend into commercial businesses like hotels, consumer electronics, bottled water and car manufacturing.

Some are already criticizing the military’s plans as a usurpation of the democratic process. Ibrahim Dawrish, an Egyptian legal scholar involved in devising a new Turkish constitution to reduce the political role of its armed forces, said the Egyptian military appeared to be emulating its Turkish counterpart. After a 1980 coup, the Turkish military assigned itself a broad role in politics as guarantor of the secular state, and in the process, contributed to years of political turbulence.

“The constitution can’t be monopolized by one institution,” he said. “It is Parliament that makes the constitution, not the other way around.”

Jurists involved in drafting the text say the Egyptian military told them to draw from several competing proposals that are circulating in Cairo. At least one assigns only a narrow, apolitical role to the military as guardian of national sovereignty. But others grant it sweeping authority and independence or a writ to intercede in civilian politics similar to the Turkish model.

Mr. Farahat said he was unsure of the wisdom of granting the armed forces a role in Egyptian politics, but he said he supported shielding the defense budget from public scrutiny as a guarantee of national security and military independence.

Others picked by the governing council to draft the declaration have argued publicly for a broad, Turkish-style role for the Egyptian armed forces in post-revolutionary politics. “The military in Egypt is unlike militaries in other countries where the military is isolated from the political life,” said Tahani el-Gebali, a judge involved in the drafting. “The military’s legacy gives it a special credibility, and hence it is only normal that the military will share some of the responsibility in protecting the constitutional legitimacy and the civil state.”

She said that she would prefer the governing council submit the declaration for up-or-down approval in a referendum, but that if it did not pass as expected, the document would derive its legitimacy from the authority of the governing military council.

The announcement of the declaration is a setback for the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group considered Egypt’s best-organized and most formidable political force. It was poised to win a major role in the new Parliament, and thus in the writing of the new constitution. The group has opposed liberal proposals to draft a constitution before parliamentary elections expected this fall or to postpone the elections long enough to let liberals catch up in organizing.

Liberals — most notably Mohamed ElBaradei, the former United Nations diplomat who is now running for president of Egypt — have advocated a code of agreed-upon universal rights as a compromise in the increasingly bitter debate between Islamists calling for an early election and liberals demanding a constitution first. Mr. ElBaradei, whose own proposal includes a provision that narrowly defines the military’s role guarding national security, said the declaration “really should be put to a referendum so it would have some legitimacy.”

That is especially relevant now, because the military council has come under mounting criticism for its opaque and inaccessible decision-making, occasionally heavy-handed tactics against civilian protesters, continued trials of civilians in military courts and intimidation of journalists who criticize it. Many have grown especially impatient with the pace of legal action against Mr. Mubarak and other former officials.

Demonstrators have returned to Tahrir Square with increasing frequency to voice their demands, culminating in a weeklong sit-in rivaling the days of the revolution. The military-led government, in turn, has appeared to respond to public demands with repeated concessions — including replacing an interim prime minister with the handpicked choice of the Tahrir protest leaders, arresting Mr. Mubarak and his two sons and releasing jailed activists. Last week, the government offered concessions, removing hundreds of senior police officers accused of killing protesters during the uprising. It also announced “the declaration of basic principles.”

This time, however, the demonstrators refused to budge. On Saturday afternoon, Gen. Tarek Mahdy, a member of the governing council, attempted to speak in Tahrir Square and was chanted off a stage, witnesses said. Many say they have grown increasingly cynical about the military. “They do comply with our demands, but within limits that they put on it themselves,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the organizers of the revolution.

The protests are increasingly taking aim at the military. On Thursday, a coalition of 24 political groups and five presidential contenders endorsed a call by the young leaders of the protests for the military to cede more power to a civilian government now rather than wait for elections.

The military leaders are sounding increasingly exasperated. In a news conference, Major General Mamdouh Shaheen, the council member who reportedly suggested a Turkish-style military role, recalled the military’s support for the revolution and its pivotal decision not to help uphold Mr. Mubarak.

The military would not give up “until there is an elected civil authority,” he said, but “the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces “does not want to stay in power.”

By: David Kirkpatrick (ny times magazine)

In Sierra Leone, New Hope for Children and Pregnant Women

Sven Torfinn for The New York Times

Clinics like this one in Tumbu have been jammed since Sierra Leone ended some fees in 2010

WATERLOO, Sierra Leone — The paramedic’s eyes were bloodshot, his features drawn. Pregnant women jammed into the darkened concrete bunker, just as they had yesterday and would tomorrow. The increase in patients had been fivefold, or tenfold. The exhausted paramedic had lost count in a blur of uninterrupted examinations and deliveries.

The word was out: it was no longer necessary to give birth at home and risk losing a baby or dying in childbirth. Hadiatou Kamara, 18, waited in the crowd. She had already lost a baby boy and girl. “They both died,” she said quietly.

Now, for her third pregnancy, she was at this rural health clinic outside Freetown, the capital. The Sierra Leone government has eliminated fees for pregnant women and children, and Ms. Kamara, like thousands of women in a country where surgery has been performed by the light of cellphones and flashlights, could afford trained medical staff to oversee her pregnancy for the first time.

At the Waterloo Community Health Center here, the women were spilling out the door, as they have consistently since the fees were lifted last year.

Sierra Leone is at the vanguard of a revolution — heavily subsidized for now by international donors — that appears to be substantially lessening health dangers here in one of the riskiest countries in the world for pregnant women and small children.

Country after country in sub-Saharan Africa has waived medical fees in recent years, particularly for women and children, and while experts acknowledge that many more people are getting care, they caution that it is still too early to declare that the efforts have measurably improved health on the continent.

In Sierra Leone, though, it seems clear that lives are being saved, providing an early and concrete lesson about the impact of making health care free for the very poor and vulnerable.

By waiving the requirement for payments — which sometimes amount to hundreds of dollars and clearly represent the main barrier to using health facilities — the government here appears to have sharply cut into mortality rates for pregnant women and deaths from malaria for small children.

The results in Sierra Leone have been “nothing short of spectacular,” said Robert Yates, a senior health economist in Britain’s Department for International Development, which is paying for almost 40 percent of the $35 million program, with most of the rest coming from donors like the World Bank. Since waiving the fees, Sierra Leone has seen a 214 percent increase in the number of children under 5 getting care at health facilities, a 61 percent decrease in mortality rates in difficult pregnancy cases at health clinics, and an 85 percent drop in the malaria fatality rate for children treated in hospitals, according to figures Mr. Yates supplied.

“We have signs that there are positive results,” said Vijay Pillai, the World Bank country manager in Sierra Leone.

In recent years, Zambia, Burundi, Niger, Liberia, Kenya, Senegal, Lesotho, Sudan and Ghana have gone to some form of free care, particularly for pregnant women and young children, Mr. Yates noted two years ago in the health journal The Lancet. Rwanda has been offering nominal rates for health insurance for over a decade, and after fees were dropped in Burundi in 2006, average monthly births in health facilities rose by 61 percent and Caesarean sections went up by 80 percent, he found.

“It’s absolutely common sense that if we increase the consumption of the services,” improvements in health follow, he said. “It’s blindingly obvious. We know these medicines work.”

Still, the hurdles loom large. Here in Sierra Leone, the health minister, Zainab Bangura, says her country needs 54 gynecologists but has only 4. Likewise, she says, there are only two pediatricians in a nation of over five million people. “We lost 10 years” to civil war, Ms. Bangura said of the impetus behind increasing access to health care. “We needed to embark on a drastic measure.”

But donors will not finance the program forever, and the hope is that revenues from the mining of diamonds and minerals, shaky for now, will replace them. Beyond that, Unicef recently discovered that drugs equivalent in value to 14 percent of what it had donated were missing. The agency has demanded an investigation.

Given how recent, untested and strained some of the efforts to provide free health care are, some researchers are reluctant to make an automatic correlation between better access and better health. The outcomes are “not very straightforward,” said Sophie Witter, a senior research fellow at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, who has studied the elimination of fees in Africa.

Lucy Gilson, a professor of Health Policy and Systems at the University of Cape Town, agreed: “I wouldn’t be prepared to say specifically it’s had x or y in terms of health outcomes.”

But Sierra Leone, still scarred by a brutal decade-long civil war — men whose limbs were chopped off by rebels play soccer, using their prosthetic ones on a beach in the capital — hovered at or near the bottom in maternal and infant mortality tables.

It had nowhere to go but up, which may be why there appears to have been an immediate benefit from the lifting of fees. The nihilistic rebels of the Revolutionary United Front deliberately took aim at health care facilities, as symbols of government authority.

“This was about stopping it from being the worst place in the world,” said Dominic O’Neill, a British official who until recently headed the Department for International Development’s office in Sierra Leone. “It’s an emergency response to what was a humanitarian crisis. It was about stopping people dying.”

Although the worn-out community health officer here in Waterloo, Jimmy Jajua, complained that demand was so high he had “no time to go off duty,” he noted that maternal deaths had dropped “drastically” now that his rudimentary clinic, still without electricity, charged no fees.

Women at the clinics said they felt safer, having traded risky home births for at least some medical care.

On a recent morning at Freetown’s main maternity hospital, about 80 women crowded into the prenatal examination waiting room, filling benches that doctors said had been sparsely populated in the past. Most of the women raised their hands when a nurse asked how many had been able to come to the hospital simply because the fees had been eliminated. The mood was upbeat. In unison they sang, “We are the pregnant women, and we are saying good morning.”

Up in the spartan wards of the 1920s hospital, with its whitewashed walls and rolling metal-frame cots, there was little nostalgia for home births. “They don’t take proper care of you at home,” said Fatamatou Touray, 39, who had previously lost three children.

And doctors said that while they were swamped, the more patients they saw, the bigger the difference they made.

“I’m the only surgical hand here, seven days a week, and nights as well,” said Dr. Ibrahim Bundu, chief medical officer at the hospital in Makeni, northeast of Freetown. “It’s only patriotism that keeps me going.”

As the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose foundation, the Africa Governance Initiative, has helped set up the program, said, “For many in Sierra Leone, this is literally the first time they’ve had something like this.”

By: Adam Nossister (Ny Times magazine)

Tunisia protests: Boy shot dead in Sidi Bouzid

Many Tunisians are growing disillusioned with the pace of change since Ben Ali left

A 14-year-old boy has been killed during protests in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, police say.

He was killed by a stray bullet after police broke up the protests overnight, the official Tap news agency reports.

Police chief Samir al-Meliti said the security forces opened fire after protesters threw petrol bombs. There were reports of rioting in other parts of Tunisia on Sunday, including Tunis.

Sidi Bouzid is where Tunisia's revolution began last December.

Local street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest at being harassed by local officials.

This led to nationwide protests, which forced longtime leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to flee in January.

Six months on, many Tunisians are growing frustrated at the lack of progress under the new government, correspondents say.

Police fired tear gas in the capital, Tunis, on Friday at protesters calling for the resignation of ministers.

The government has blamed the latest violent protests on Islamist extremists.

Elections are due in October.

By BBC News

Japan's women stun USA in World Cup final

Japan's players are set to return home as heroes after coming from behind twice to win on penalties [Getty]

Against all the odds, Japan announced themselves to the world as a new force in women's football by defeating the USA in the World Cup final on Sunday.

The exciting final in front of a sell-out crowd in Frankfurt was a great showcase for the women's game with the Americans and Japanese battling their way into a penalty shootout.

With the score tied at 2-2 after added time, Japan went on to win the shootout 3-1 when Saki Kumagai slotted the final shot high past goalkeeper Hope Solo.

While the Americans lashed out from the spot the Japanese showed a calm that has been one of their trademarks throughout the tournament.

Japan's passing skills and teamwork has led to people comparing the team to Barcelona and they lived up to this praise in the final stages of the match.

Although it certainly was not easy.

Japan survived an early onslaught from the United States and then had to twice come from behind to ensure it was a penalty shootout that would decide the victors on the day.

Never giving up

Japan were outplayed in the first 20 minutes and it looked like the United States would soon be adding another World Cup trophy to their 1991 and 1999 wins.

However, it wasn't until the 69th minute that Alex Morgan put the US ahead with a stunning solo effort, stylishly directing the ball into the net.

Against the run of play, Japan scored a goal out of nothing in the 81st minute when American defenders Rachel Buehler and Alex Krieger failed to clear a ball, allowing star Japan player Aya Miyama to sneak in and slot home from close range past Solo.

Japan came back into the game late in regulation time, but the Americans kept hustling and pressuring and it finally paid off when Alex Morgan sent a pinpoint cross to the towering Wambach in the 104th minute.

The forward didn't even have to lift a foot to send her header past goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori from six yards.

The goal gave Wambach four for the tournament, and it looked good enough for the title. She had scored in the last minute of extra time with a header against Brazil, setting up the shootout win in the quarter-finals, and a goal against France in the semi-finals.

But in this thrilling final it turned out there was much more to come.

With three minutes of extra time left, 32-year-old Japan captain Homare Sawa flicked a corner through a jumble of players and past Solo to equalise and set up the shootout.

After coming so far in a tournament they were never expected to feature heavily in, it seemed destined to be that Japan would walk away as champions.

As well as fighting to become the first Asian nation to win the women's tournament the team were also fighting to bring some joy to their earthquake-striken nation.

"We ran and ran. We were exhausted but we kept running," said Sawa, the top scorer in the tournament with five goals.

"Not one of the players gave up,'' coach Norio Sasaki said.

It was a fairy tale victory for Japan who have been spurned on in the tournament by the devastation caused to their country by the March earthquake and tsunami.

Japan coach Norio Sasaki had shown the players photos of the damage to heighten their focus and determination before they met the hosts Germany in the quarter-finals.

It did the trick then, and it seemed to have focused Japan on producing performances that would lift their supporters back at home.

The Japanese team have been fighting for much more than a trophy, they have been playing for pride and hope.

And after defeating the well-fancied hosts Germany and the USA - a superpower in women's football - they will deservedly return back to Japan as heroes.

By, agencies (aljazeera.com)

Syrian Activists: Many Killed in 24 Hours

A wounded Syrian man rests in a medical tent in a regugee camp in Hatay Province, Turkey, June 15, 2011 (Osman Orsal / Reuters)

(BEIRUT) — Syrian activists say up to 30 people have been killed in the past 24 hours as tensions between supporters and opponents of President Bashar Assad's exploded into violence.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday the killings started over the weekend after three regime supporters were found dead in Homs, their bodies mutilated.

The observatory and a Syrian activist in Homs put the death toll at 30 and said they have the names of the victims. Another activist in Homs said he's not certain if the death toll was as high as 30. He suggested the real number may be about half.

The activists in Homs spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

By Associated Press (for Times magazine)

Global Spread: More People Think 'Fat People Are Lazy'

Phil Walter/Getty Images

Thin may be the American ideal, but that view appears to have gone global, a new study finds.

Negative attitudes toward fat people have taken root in several other cultures around the world, even in countries where chubbiness was once considered attractive, anthropologists at Arizona State University report.

Why that's so isn't entirely clear, but some experts suggest it might be the unintended byproduct of global efforts to curb obesity. Health campaigns about the risks of being overweight may be seen as criticizing and casting blame on individuals — you eat too much and don't exercise enough! — rather than on environmental and social factors, leading people to adopt the same perspective.

For their study, published in the journal Current Anthropology, the ASU researchers asked people to answer true or false to a variety of statements, each with a varying degree of fat stigma: "Fat people are lazy" or "Some people are fated to be obese" or "A big woman is a beautiful woman."

They got responses from 700 people in 10 countries or regions, including American Samoa, Argentina, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Tanzania, two sites in Arizona and London.

Fat stigma existed everywhere, but was highest in Paraguay, researchers found, followed by American Samoa, a place where big used to be considered beautiful. Negative attitudes were also found in Puerto Rico, another culture that once celebrated rotundity. Surprisingly, the U.S. rated among the lowest for fat stigma.

"We believe that in sites where people have held fat-stigmatizing views for a longer time, people may have developed social norms about the importance of masking beliefs that are viewed as impolite," explained co-author and cultural anthropologist Amber Wutich in a statement.

"People from sites that have adopted fat-negative attitudes more recently seem to be more strident. The late adopters were more likely to agree with the most judgmental statements like 'Fat people are lazy,'" she noted.

Although the current survey didn't address the possible social fallout of fat stigma, the potential for harm is great, the authors say. Negative attitudes can lead to emotional suffering on the part of the large-bodied as well as social and workplace discrimination. against the large-bodied along with emotional suffering on the part of overweight people.

By: Meredith Melnick (time magazine)

Anxiety Roils Libyan Capital Amid Top-Level Defections

Moises Saman for The New York Times

A woman carried a portrait of Colonel Qaddafi during a rally in his support in front of the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli on Thursday.

TRIPOLI, Libya — Anxiety seized the Qaddafi government on Thursday over the second defection in two days of a senior official close to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, stirring talk of others to follow and a crackdown to stop them.

And, on Friday British news reports on the BBC and in The Guardian newspaper said Mohammed Ismail, a senior aide to one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, had traveled to London for talks with British officials in recent days. But there was no immediate confirmation of those reports. A Foreign Office spokesman, who spoke in return for anonymity under departmental procedures, said: “We are not going to provide a running commentary on our contact with Libyan officials.”

As rebels challenging pro-Qaddafi forces struggled to regroup around the oil port of Brega, and the roar of allied warplanes was heard again over the capital, residents reacted in shock at the defection of Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa, a close ally of Colonel Qaddafi’s since the early days of the revolution, who once earned the nickname “envoy of death” for his role in the assassinations of earlier Libyan defectors.

And then came the defection to Egypt of another senior official, Ali Abdussalam el-Treki, a former foreign minister and a former United Nations ambassador who had worked closely with Colonel Qaddafi for decades.

Soon rumors swirled of a cascade of high-level defections. The pan-Arab news channel Al Jazeera reported without confirmation that the intelligence chief and the speaker of Parliament had fled to Tunisia. Other rumors, like the exit of the oil minister, were quickly shot down. But taking no chances, Libyan officials posted guards to prevent any other officials from leaving the country, two former officials said.

The defections and ensuing speculation underscored the increasing tension in the capital as allied air strikes crippled the military machine that Colonel Qaddafi deployed almost exclusively as a bulwark against his own population. Even though the rebels were retreating in the east, allied airstrikes showed no sign of relenting, fuel shortages were worsening, and Qaddafi loyalists were talking increasingly openly about the possibility of the leader’s own exit.

Western leaders hailed Mr. Koussa’s departure, in particular, as a turning point. “Moussa Koussa’s decision shows which way the wind is blowing in Tripoli,” said Tommy Vietor, a national security spokesman at the White House.

Musa Ibrahim, a government spokesman who huddled behind closed doors until well after midnight on Wednesday struggling to confirm Mr. Koussa’s departure, said in a news conference on Thursday: “This is not like a happy piece of news, is it? But people are saying, ‘So what, if someone wants to step down? That is their decision. The fight continues.’ ”

Asked if Colonel Qaddafi and his sons were still in Libya, Mr. Ibrahim smiled. “Rest assured, we are all still here,” he said. “We will remain here until the end.”

Aside from Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, the most important ally remaining at his side — rivaled in influence only by Mr. Koussa — is his brother-in-law, Abdullah Senussi, a top security adviser. “He is the right hand and the left hand of the regime,” said Ali Aujali, who was the Libyan ambassador to the United States until he defected a few weeks ago.

In a speech in London on Thursday, Foreign Secretary William Hague said Mr. Koussa, who is believed to have helped orchestrate the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, had fled to London “of his own free will” with no offer of immunity from British or international justice.

“He is voluntarily talking to British officials, including members of the British Embassy in Tripoli now based in London, and our ambassador, Richard Northern.”

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said on March 3 that he would investigate “alleged crimes against humanity committed in Libya since 15 February, as peaceful demonstrators were attacked by security forces.” He placed Mr. Koussa second after Colonel Qaddafi on a list of “some individuals with formal or de facto authority, who commanded and had control over the forces that allegedly committed the crimes.”

Mr. Ibrahim, the Qaddafi government spokesman, said Mr. Koussa had been granted a leave of a few days to receive medical care in Tunisia, a common practice among the Libyan elite. But Mr. Ibrahim said Mr. Koussa had not contacted the Qaddafi government since the day after he crossed the border. “I don’t think his sick leave included London,” Mr. Ibrahim said.

The panic in the capital bore no relation to the success of the Qaddafi forces in eastern Libya battling the rebels, who in the end are likely to present a much less immediate threat to Colonel Qaddafi than a breakdown of his military or a more generalized uprising.

After beating a chaotic retreat to the city of Ajdabiya on Wednesday, the rebels on Thursday morning realized that the loyalist advance had crested for the moment, and they tried to mount a renewed push southwest down the coastal road, hoping to recapture some of their losses.

Near the entrance to the oil port of Brega, however, they were met by resistance, and their counterattack was halted. The day passed with the two sides separated by an expanse of open desert, with Colonel Qaddafi’s forces occasionally shelling clusters of rebels, who answered with rockets and ineffective bursts of machine-gun fire.

Coalition aircraft could be heard overhead a few times during the day, but airstrikes were neither visible nor audible from rebel-held ground.

Stalled on the shoulders of the road, the rebels said they were seeking alternative routes overland into the city. “We are going on this side and that side,” said Jamal Saad Omar, 45, a weathered fighter who gestured toward Brega as artillery or rockets landed in the distance.

Some of the rebels also expressed fears of booby traps and land mines, which Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had left behind after occupying Ajdabiya.

The loyalist forces’ tactics apparently unnerved some of the fighters, who said that in the morning fighting the pro-Qaddafi militias did not fight from conventional military vehicles, but from civilian cars, which made them both harder to detect and less vulnerable to foreign air strikes.

“There were many civilian cars coming toward us,” said Fisky Iltajoury, a 31-year-old fighter. “They started to shoot us.”

By evening there had been no breakthrough. The day passed without a change in the lines.

In a display intended perhaps to show the government’s strength, government officials escorted foreign journalists for a late-night trip to the Qaddafi compound. A few hundred supporters in green bandanas and scarves were cheering a giant television screen showing the face of Shokri Ghanem, the Libyan oil minister, who had given an interview on Thursday to dispel rumors that he, too, had defected.

But at the hotel that houses foreign reporters, the government officials usually found in the lobby cafe smoking cigarettes and drinking tea until late at night were nowhere to be seen on Thursday. Usually accessible figures no longer answered their phones.

Mr. Aujali, the former ambassador to Washington, said more officials were seeking to defect. “I think anybody who has a chance to get out of the country will do the same as Moussa Koussa,” he said. “They have to do it soon, or it won’t mean very much.”

But Mr. Ibrahim, the Qaddafi spokesman, said that the government had already proved its resilience in the face of conditions that were “extremely ripe for a popular rebellion.”

“The skies are afire, the bombardment is everywhere, the rebels are in the east, there are shortages of fuel,” Mr. Ibrahim said. “Where is the popular uprising? Where are the tribes coming out to say he must go?”

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Tripoli, and C. J. Chivers from Ajdabiya, Libya. Alan Cowell and Marlise Simons contributed reporting from Paris. (for Ny Times)

Girl, You are So Not Fat! Does 'Fat Talk' Make Anyone Feel Better?

Ting Hoo / Taxi via Getty Images

The overwhelming majority of college women — 93% — engage in "fat talk." You know, in the "Ugh, I feel so fat in these jeans" vein of griping. Many women say they think fat talking with their friends makes them feel better about their bodies, but a new study suggests the opposite may be true.

For the new paper [PDF], published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University surveyed 186 undergraduate women about whether and how often they participated in fat talk. Researchers measured the participants' level of dissatisfaction with their own bodies and how strongly they agreed with the model-thin body ideal perpetuated by the media. Self-reports of height and weight were used to calculate the participants' BMI (a measure of overweight and obesity).

The researchers found that nearly all women engaged in fat talk with their friends, and that about a third of them did so frequently — regardless of whether they were actually overweight or not. Why? Mostly, women complained to their friends about feeling fat or bloated, or about feeling guilty for not going to the gym or eating too much. For many, it was a way to reassure or to be reassured that in fact they weren't fat at all.

As part of the experiment, researchers asked women to write down how a typical fat-talk session might unfold. Here's an example, between two women who are not overweight:

Friend 1: "Ugh, I feel so fat."
Friend 2: "OMG. Are you serious? You are NOT fat."
Friend 1: "Yes I am, look at my thighs."
Friend 2: "Look at MY thighs."
Friend 1: "Oh, come on. You're a stick."
Friend 2: "So are you."

Sound familiar? "The predictable back-and-forth argument between two women where each denies that the other is fat was the most typical content of fat talk conversations," the authors write. When asked how they felt about fat talk, the majority of women indicated that it made them feel better about themselves — that "it helps to know that I'm not the only one who feels bad about my body."

Yet the study showed that women who complained about their weight more often — even if they were thin — were more likely to have greater dissatisfaction with their bodies. They were also more likely to buy into the media's thin ideal. Of course, it could be that it isn't fat talk that makes women feel worse; rather, it's that people who feel badly about their bodies to start are simply more likely to complain about them.

Still, the habit doesn't appear to help women improve self-esteem or change their underlying attitudes about body weight. The authors write:

Although social support and empathy are usually viewed as psychologically healthy constructs, constant reminders that one's normal-weight or underweight friends also feel fat may not be helpful in the long run. Such fat talk simply serves to reinforce the thin body ideal and the notion that disliking one's body is normative for women. Women come to expect this type of talk from their peers and likely feel pressured to engage in it.

Indeed, the researchers found, despite the fact that so many women used fat talk to seek reassurance from friends, "several women in our sample remarked ... that they do not believe their friends when the friends tell them that they are not fat."

If there's any upside to women's constant kvetching about weight, it's that it could help some of them actually get in better shape. "Nearly a quarter of participants indicated that fat talk discussions would lead to plans between the two friends to support each other with a specific weight-loss strategy (e.g., going to the gym together or planning a diet together)," the researchers write. Whether they follow through with those plans, however, is another matter (past research suggests it's unlikely).

Our advice is, if you're going to talk fat, put your money where your mouth is.

By: Meredith Melnick (times magazines)

6 U.S. Soldiers Die in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — Six American soldiers have been killed in a single operation in eastern Afghanistan over the past two days, a spokesman for the international coalition said on Friday.

“I can confirm that six coalition soldiers have been identified as U.S. soldiers, and were all killed as part of the same operation, but in three separate incidents,” said Maj. Tim James. The deaths took place from late Wednesday through Thursday.

The operation, a helicopter-borne assault into a remote part of Kunar Province close to the Pakistani border, was continuing. The area is frequently used to infiltrate fighters from Pakistan. The purpose of the operation, Major. James said, was to “disrupt insurgent operations.”

By: Rod Nordland (for times magazines)