Karzai to Forbid His Forces to Request Foreign Airstrikes

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that he would issue a decree forbidding his military forces from turning to NATO or American forces to conduct airstrikes, and he condemned the use of torture on detainees by his security forces.

He made his comments in a speech at the Afghan National Military Academy in Kabul. It was the first time he had dwelt at such length and with such passion on human rights.

His proposed ban on Afghan troops from calling in airstrikes came after a joint Afghan-NATO attack last week in Kunar Province, in eastern Afghanistan, that killed four women, one man and five children, all of them civilians, according to local officials.

Mr. Karzai said Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the commander of the international coalition forces fighting the Taliban and other insurgents in Afghanistan, told him that the airstrike had been requested by the National Directorate of Security, the country’s intelligence service. The attack took place in the Shigal district, an area where two known Taliban commanders were visiting family members, Afghan officials have said.

“Our N.D.S. in their own country calls foreigners to assist them and bombard four or five Al Qaeda or Taliban,” Mr. Karzai said.

“It is very regrettable to hear this,” he added. “You are representing Afghan pride. How do you call for an airstrike from foreigners on your people?”

Civilian casualties in the war on the Taliban has long vexed Mr. Karzai and has been a major point of contention with American and NATO troops. New rules instituted by commanders from the International Security Assistance Force have minimized the loss of life, and the coalition has all but stopped air attacks on populated areas and on homes. The result has been a dramatic drop in civilian casualties caused by foreign forces.

Nevertheless, Afghan troops, who lack their own air support, still turn to foreign forces for help during pitched battles with the Taliban and other insurgents. It was not clear whether there would be exceptions to Mr. Karzai’s decree, but he was clearly dismayed that his own forces would be employing the very techniques he had worked so hard to persuade the West to abandon.

In an unusual move, the Afghan president also publicly acknowledged that torture was a problem in Afghan detention centers and pledged to halt it. In the past, the government has largely deflected charges of torture raised by human rights organizations, contending that any abuse was the work of a few bad actors.

But after a United Nations report released in January detailed abuses or torture at a number of detention sites around the country, Mr. Karzai took a closer and more independent look at the complaints.

He appointed a delegation to investigate the report’s validity, and when the inquiry confirmed many of the allegations, he ordered the security ministries to implement the team’s recommendations. He reiterated that order on Saturday. The recommendations include prosecuting perpetrators of torture, giving detainees access to defense lawyers, providing medical treatment for detainees who are ill or have been beaten, and videotaping all interrogations.

“Not only have foreigners tormented and punished Afghans, but our people have been terrorized and punished by our own sons too,” Mr. Karzai said. “The U.N. report showed that even after 10 years, our people are tortured and mistreated in prisons.”

The United Nations’ human rights office here emphasized the importance of Mr. Karzai’s attention to the issue.

“It is encouraging that the president appears to be personally taking the issue of human rights of all Afghans seriously,” said Georgette Gagnon, the office’s director of human rights. She added that the government should act immediately on the delegation’s recommendations. “We urge them to do so without delay,” she said.

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Hunter voted out as head of NBA players' union

HOUSTON (AP) — Billy Hunter was ousted unanimously as executive director of the union by NBA players who said Saturday they will "no longer be divided, misled, misinformed."

"This is our union and we have taken it back," players' association president Derek Fisher said.

Fisher said it was a day of change for the union, which has seemed inevitable since a review of the union last month was critical of Hunter's leadership and urged players to consider whether they wanted to keep him.

They didn't.

"We want to make it clear that we are here to serve only the best interests of the players," Fisher said. "No threats, no lies, no distractions will stop us from serving our memberships."

In brief remarks, Fisher said a new executive committee was elected and he will remain as president. The Spurs' Matt Bonner is vice president, Miami's James Jones is secretary-treasurer and the Nets' Jerry Stackhouse the first vice president. The Clippers' Chris Paul, Golden State's Stephen Curry, Denver's Andre Iguodala, the Hornets' Roger Mason, Jr. and the Clippers' Willie Green are vice presidents.

Hunter had led the union since 1996, guiding the players through three collective bargaining agreements and helping bring their average salaries to more than $5 million, highest in team sports. But Fisher pushed for the review after a falling out between the two leaders, and though it found Hunter wasn't guilty of any criminal activity involving union funds, it cited him for a number of conflicts of interests and poor choices that led the players to remove him.

Released in January, the review conducted by the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP criticized Hunter for hiring family members and friends. It said he knew his 2010 contract extension wasn't properly ratified by union rules, and raised questions about everything from travel expenses to the amount he spent on gifts.

Players acted quickly, putting Hunter on a leave of absence on Feb. 1. He hoped to be invited to Saturday's annual meeting, which included about 35 players, superstar LeBron James among them.

But Hunter's attorneys said their client was told he wouldn't be welcomed. They said his contract was legal and indicated there could be a lawsuit if the players removed him and attempted to withhold the more than $10 million that remains on his salary.

"We do not doubt that this process will possibly continue in an ugly way," said Fisher, who then reminded reporters that there are three ongoing government investigations into Hunter, likely the reason he didn't take questions after his remarks.

It's a swift fall for the 70-year-old Hunter, a former athlete who was well-respected by many players. But agents didn't like him, questioning his bargaining strategies and frustrated they didn't have a bigger role in his union.

Hunter's family did, and that was another central issue of the report. He had since fired his daughter and daughter-in-law, and cut ties with a financial institution that employed his son. He also instituted an anti-nepotism policy at the NPBA.

Fisher, Paul, Bonner, Mason and Jones were holdovers from the previous executive committee. Stackhouse, who along with James was vocal during the meeting, joins Iguodala, Curry and Green among the newcomers.

Fisher and Hunter clashed during the 2011 lockout and their fractured relationship divided the union. Hunter originally persuaded the executive committee to vote to request Fisher's resignation last year. Fisher did not resign and instead pushed for the outside review, which lasted more than eight months and cost the union more than $4 million.

The law firm reviewed NBPA documents and emails, and interviewed more than three dozen witnesses. It found that Hunter spent more than $100,000 on gifts for executive committee members — including a watch worth more than $20,000 for Fisher before their falling out — and accepted a payout of $1.3 million for unused vacation time when records made it unclear how his time off was kept.

Fisher remains president even though he isn't on an NBA roster, having asked the Dallas Mavericks for his release after a brief stint earlier this season. He gave no update on what would happen to the executive director position. Union attorney Ron Klempner was appointed to the position on an interim basis when Hunter was placed on leave.

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The Education Revolution: In China, Families Bet It All on a Child in College

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Wu Caoying studied English under her father’s watchful eye in 2006. She is now a sophomore in college. More Photos »

HANJING, China — Wu Yiebing has been going down coal shafts practically every workday of his life, wrestling an electric drill for $500 a month in the choking dust of claustrophobic tunnels, with one goal in mind: paying for his daughter’s education.

His wife, Cao Weiping, toils from dawn to sunset in orchards every day during apple season in May and June. She earns $12 a day tying little plastic bags one at a time around 3,000 young apples on trees, to protect them from insects. The rest of the year she works as a substitute store clerk, earning several dollars a day, all going toward their daughter’s education.

Many families in the West sacrifice to put their children through school, saving for college educations that they hope will lead to a better life. Few efforts can compare with the heavy financial burden that millions of lower-income Chinese parents now endure as they push their children to obtain as much education as possible.

Yet a college degree no longer ensures a well-paying job, because the number of graduates in China has quadrupled in the last decade.

Mr. Wu and Mrs. Cao, who grew up in tiny villages in western China and became migrants in search of better-paying work, have scrimped their entire lives. For nearly two decades, they have lived in a cramped and drafty 200-square-foot house with a thatch roof. They have never owned a car. They do not take vacations — they have never seen the ocean. They have skipped traditional New Year trips to their ancestral village for up to five straight years to save on bus fares and gifts, and for Mr. Wu to earn extra holiday pay in the mines. Despite their frugality, they have essentially no retirement savings.

Thanks to these sacrifices, their daughter, Wu Caoying, is now a 19-year-old college sophomore. She is among the growing millions of Chinese college students who have gone much farther than their parents could have dreamed when they were growing up. For all the hard work of Ms. Wu’s father and mother, however, they aren’t certain it will pay off. Their daughter is ambivalent about staying in school, where the tuition, room and board cost more than half her parents’ combined annual income. A slightly above-average student, she thinks of dropping out, finding a job and earning money.

“Every time my daughter calls home, she says, ‘I don’t want to continue this,’ ” Mrs. Cao said. “And I say, ‘You’ve got to keep studying to take care of us when we get old’, and she says, ‘That’s too much pressure, I don’t want to think about all that responsibility.’ ”

Ms. Wu dreams of working at a big company, but knows that many graduates end up jobless. “I think I may start my own small company,” she says, while acknowledging she doesn’t have the money or experience to run one.

For a rural parent in China, each year of higher education costs six to 15 months’ labor, and it is hard for children from poor families to get scholarships or other government financial support. A year at the average private university in the United States similarly equals almost a year’s income for the average wage earner, while an in-state public university costs about six months’ pay, but financial aid is generally easier to obtain than in China. Moreover, an American family that spends half its income helping a child through college has more spending power with the other half of its income than a rural Chinese family earning less than $5,000 a year.

It isn’t just the cost of college that burdens Chinese parents. They face many fees associated with sending their children to elementary, middle and high schools. Many parents also hire tutors, so their children can score high enough on entrance exams to get into college. American families that invest heavily in their children’s educations can fall back on Medicare, Social Security and other social programs in their old age. Chinese citizens who bet all of their savings on their children’s educations have far fewer options if their offspring are unable to find a job on graduation.

The experiences of Wu Caoying, whose family The New York Times has tracked for seven years, are a window into the expanding educational opportunities and the financial obstacles faced by families all over China.

Her parents’ sacrifices to educate their daughter explain how the country has managed to leap far ahead of the United States in producing college graduates over the last decade, with eight million Chinese now getting degrees annually from universities and community colleges.

But high education costs coincide with slower growth of the Chinese economy and surging unemployment among recent college graduates. Whether young people like Ms. Wu find jobs on graduation that allow them to earn a living, much less support their parents, could test China’s ability to maintain rapid economic growth and preserve political and social stability in the years ahead.

Leaving the Village

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Venezuela Releases First Pictures of Chávez

CARACAS, Venezuela — Amid a heated national debate over the state of the health of President Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan government on Friday released photographs of him for the first time since his cancer surgery in Cuba more than nine weeks ago.

Officials also provided a rare glimpse into the sequestered world of the convalescing leader, saying he has difficulty breathing and speaking but writes notes to aides while making all government decisions. Sometimes, there is music in his hospital room and it is like a party, one official said.

The four photographs released by the government show Mr. Chávez lying in bed and smiling, with two of his daughters, Rosa Virginia and María Gabriela, on either side.

Jorge Arreaza, the minister of science and technology, who is married to María Gabriela, said the pictures were taken Thursday. In three of the them, Mr. Chávez is holding a copy of what Mr. Arreaza said was Thursday’s edition of the Cuban newspaper Granma.

“There he is with his family, always attentive to the people of Venezuela, always attentive and in charge of his functions, working tirelessly,” Mr. Arreaza said.

The Venezuelan information minister, Ernesto Villegas, said that doctors had controlled a severe lung infection, but added that the president was breathing with a “tracheal tube,” making speech difficult.

In the photographs, Mr. Chávez wore what appeared to be a white and blue jacket, which covered his throat. No tube was visible.

Mr. Chávez, 58, has had four cancer operations in Cuba since June 2011. The latest was on Dec. 11. But in contrast to his previous absences from the country, Mr. Chávez has remained out of sight and has not even telephoned a government television program, which he often did before. That has led to widespread speculation about the severity of his illness, especially after he could not return from Cuba in time to be sworn in for the start of his new term on Jan. 10.

Government officials have repeatedly insisted that Mr. Chávez is continuing to run the government from his hospital bed in Havana, but the political opposition has long challenged that assertion, questioning how he could manage the country but be too sick to communicate with the public directly.

As Mr. Chávez’s absence has dragged on, the opposition has consistently demanded that the government provide proof that he is well enough to lead the nation. Some have even questioned whether he was still alive.

On Friday, an opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, posted on Twitter: “A few days ago, the liars said they talked with the Pdt., now they say he can’t talk! They make fun of their own people.”

Mr. Arreaza said later in a television interview that Mr. Chávez “does not have his characteristic voice” and sometimes writes notes when meeting with aides.

“He has difficulty expressing himself verbally,” Mr. Arreaza said. “Nevertheless, he makes himself understood. We are with him. You have to pay attention, and he perfectly communicates his decisions.”

Mr. Arreaza said in Spanish that Mr. Chávez was undergoing “palliative treatments,” which he described as strong and hard. He did not say what those treatments were but did say that Mr. Chávez had undergone the same treatments previously in the course of his illness. He has had both chemotherapy and radiation since his cancer was diagnosed.

In its Spanish definition, the word “palliative” refers especially to treatments used to relieve pain or slow the progress of an incurable disease. Mr. Villegas, the information minister, described Mr. Chávez on Friday as being in “delicate circumstances.”

Mr. Arreaza said that Mr. Chávez was keeping his spirits up. “There are days in which the commander practically has a party there in his room,” he said, “with his music from his beloved plains and with jokes and laughter.”

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Different looks for Heat, Lakers at All-Star break

HOUSTON (AP) — If Kobe Bryant's season seems tough, imagine what Dwyane Wade went through five years ago.

"I came to All-Star weekend one year, I think we had won nine games. Seriously," Wade said Friday. "I was looking for my 10th win at the All-Star game."

Things sure have changed for his Miami Heat.

Back where they first teamed up as All-Stars in 2006, Wade, LeBron James and Chris Bosh return as NBA champions who will start together for the Eastern Conference on Sunday night.

Now the misery belongs to Bryant, Dwight Howard and the Los Angeles Lakers, whose season has been so disappointing that Bryant was asked Friday if the All-Star weekend was a "retreat" for him.

"I don't know if it's a retreat, it's just more of an opportunity to get some rest, regroup, put the first half of the season behind us and move on," he said.

As Wade knows, the All-Star break can be just that — a break — from a forgettable season.

He arrived for the 2008 All-Star game with a 9-43 record after the Heat lost on Valentine's Day to the Chicago Bulls, on their way to a 15-win debacle just two years after they won the NBA title.

"I put all that aside though, and I came and I enjoyed the weekend, and when I went back to Miami, it was like, 'Oh my God, we're back in it,'" Wade said. "But All-Star weekend, you just enjoy being an All-Star. You enjoy being around the guys. You can kind of forget about that a little bit, unless you have the cameras and the microphones in front of you asking you questions about it, but besides that you try to enjoy it."

This time, the Heat celebrated Valentine's Day in Oklahoma City with a 110-100 victory over the Thunder, the team they beat in five games last summer for the title. They have won seven in a row, James is playing arguably the best basketball of his career, and they can relax and reminisce as they return to Houston.

"It's really indescribable," Bosh said, "just to not only win a championship with great guys, be in a great locker room, and just to have fun doing it, but just to be an All-Star every year, play with great teammates, I mean to play in front of a lot people in arenas every night. I don't take those things for granted."

James, Wade and Bosh were in their third NBA seasons when they were chosen for the 2006 game, which turned out like so many Heat games these days. James was voted MVP after scoring 29 points and leading a huge East comeback that was wrapped up when Wade made the go-ahead basket with 16 seconds left.

Think about that: James was already the best player that night, and he was nowhere near the player he is today.

"I'm a better player. At that point in time, I wasn't a complete basketball player. I couldn't shoot as well as I can now, I never posted up back then," James said. "More games, more playoff games, more knowledge. You continue to learn each and every day, it makes you a better player. That's what you want, to become a better player. That's what I want. I want to be the greatest of all-time. I try to do whatever it takes to get me in that position.

"Seven years, I've tried to improve each and every year."

He's gotten to the point now where he ran off an NBA-record six straight games with at least 30 points and 60 percent shooting from the field, and seems to be distancing himself from anyone else that can take the MVP award he won last year for the third time in four years.

"He's doing well," Bosh said in a Texas-sized understatement. "That's the best way to put it."

Bosh was chosen as a starter Friday by Heat coach Erik Spoelstra, who will lead the East. He replaces Boston guard Rajon Rondo, who pulled out with a torn ACL.

Bryant and Howard are still here, away from a Los Angeles season that's been anything but a Hollywood story.

Considered a title contender after acquiring Howard and Steve Nash in the summer, the Lakers fell to 25-29 after they were blown out Wednesday by the rival Clippers, who opened a 13-game lead over them in the Pacific Division standings.

Smiling as he sat with his daughter, Natalia, Bryant laughed that he wished the All-Star break was a chance for the Lakers to "hit the reset button" on what he's said has been a most difficult season.

"Hopefully there's an easy button like in the commercial when we come back in the second half of the season and things are a little easier for us," he said.

Howard has battled injuries to his back and shoulder and has been nothing like the player who has been the NBA's dominant big man in recent years. He said at times he hasn't been having fun and has tried to ignore all the bad news around the team.

"You just try to stay away from the tube and do as much as I can to rehab my back and my shoulder and my mind, and really just get away from everything when I'm not playing basketball," he said.

If he's looking for a chance to enjoy himself this season, it may get no better than the next few days.

"It's a great weekend, it's an unbelievable weekend for the fans to be able to put all their favorite players together in one venue," James said. "We have a great time with it."

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Follow Brian Mahoney on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Briancmahoney

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Income Gains After Recession Went Mostly to Top 1%

WASHINGTON — Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of earners during the economic recovery, but barely at all for everybody else, according to new data.

The numbers, produced by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, show overall income growing by just 1.7 percent over the period. But there was a wide gap between the top 1 percent, whose earnings rose by 11.2 percent, and the other 99 percent, whose earnings rose by just 0.4 percent.

Mr. Saez, a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, an economic laurel considered second only to the Nobel, concluded that “the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s.”

The disparity between top earners and everybody else can be attributed, in part, to differences in how the two groups make their money. The wealthy have benefited from a four-year boom in the stock market, while high rates of unemployment have continued to hold down the income of wage earners.

“We have in the middle basically three decades of problems compounded by high unemployment,” said Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center research group in Washington. “That high unemployment we know depresses wage growth throughout the wage scale, but more so for the bottom than the middle and the middle than the top.”

In his analysis, Mr. Saez said he saw no reason that the trend would reverse for 2012, which has not yet been analyzed. For that year, the “top 1 percent income will likely surge, due to booming stock prices, as well as retiming of income to avoid the higher 2013 top tax rates,” Mr. Saez wrote, referring to income tax increases for the wealthy that were passed by Congress in January. The incomes of the other “99 percent will likely grow much more modestly,” he said.

Excluding earnings from investment gains, the top 10 percent of earners took 46.5 percent of all income in 2011, the highest proportion since 1917, Mr. Saez said, citing a large body of work on earnings distribution over the last century that he has produced with the economist Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.

Concern for the declining wages of working Americans and persistent high levels of inequality featured heavily in President Obama’s State of the Union address this week. He proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $9 from $7.25 as one way to ameliorate the trend, a proposal that might lift the earnings of 15 million low-income workers by the end of 2015.

“Let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty,” Mr. Obama said in his address to Congress.

Mr. Obama’s economic advisers say that he has been animated by the country’s yawning levels of inequality, and the administration has put forward several proposals to address the gap. Those include higher taxes on a small group of the wealthiest families and an expansion of aid to lower- and middle-income families through programs like the Affordable Care Act.

The data analyzed by Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez’s shows that income inequality — as measured by the proportion of income taken by the top 1 percent of earners — reached a modern high just before the recession hit in 2009. The financial crisis and its aftermath hit wealthy families hard. But since then, their earnings have snapped back, if not to their 2007 peak.

That is not true for average working families. After accounting for inflation, median family income has declined over the last two years. In 2011, it stagnated for the poorest and dropped for those in the middle of the income distribution, census data show. Median household income, which was $50,054 in 2011, is about 9 percent lower than it was in 1999, after accounting for inflation.

Measures of inequality differ depending on whether they are measured after or before taxes, and whether or not they include government transfers like Social Security payments, food stamps and other credits.

Research led by the Cornell economist Richard V. Burkhauser, for instance, sought to measure the economic health of middle-class households including income, taxes, transfer programs and benefits like health insurance. It found that from 1979 to 2007, median income grew by about 18.2 percent over all rather than by 3.2 percent counting income alone.

In an interview, Mr. Burkhauser said his numbers measured “how are the resources that person has to live on changing over time,” whereas Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez’s numbers measure “how are different people being rewarded in the marketplace.”

“That’s a fair question to ask, but it’s a very different question to ask than, ‘What resources do Americans have?’ ” Mr. Burkhauser said. Notably, many of the Obama administration’s progressive policies have been aimed at blunting the effects of income inequality, rather than tackling income inequality itself.

Mr. Saez has advocated much more aggressive policies aimed at income inequality. “Falls in income concentration due to economic downturns are temporary unless drastic regulation and tax policy changes are implemented,” Mr. Saez said in his analysis.

The recent policy changes, including tax increases and financial regulatory reform, he wrote, “are not negligible but they are modest relative to the policy changes that took place coming out of the Great Depression. Therefore, it seems unlikely that U.S. income concentration will fall much in the coming years.”

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Pakistani Political Parties Call for Talks With Taliban

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Representatives from many of Pakistan’s political parties Thursday called on their government to engage in peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban, on a day when continuing militant violence in the country’s northwest killed at least 18 people.

The call for a “peace through dialogue” was spearheaded by the Awami National Party, a secular political party that rules the restive northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, where Taliban violence has been most concentrated since 2007. The initiative followed recent overtures from the Pakistani Taliban that suggested it was ready for talks.

The proposal is entirely separate from efforts in Afghanistan, supported by the Western alliance, to draw the Afghan Taliban — a related but separate group — into negotiations.

Following daylong deliberation at a luxury hotel in Islamabad, representatives from 27 political parties issued a joint, one-page statement. But there is widespread skepticism about whether the Pakistani Taliban, which aims to overthrow the state, is really open to negotiations. It is equally unclear whether the powerful military is fully behind the process.

Two opposition political parties, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which is led by Imran Khan, and Jamaat-e-Islami, considered the most organized Islamic party, declined to attend the meeting on Thursday.

The meeting came after a decade of domestic conflict that has cost thousands of civilian lives, and that many Pakistanis blame on their government’s difficult alliance with the United States. Political opinion is increasingly wary of using force against insurgents and many instead advocate holding talks.

“Time has come for Pakistani government to withdraw from United States-led war,” said a meeting participant, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, an extremist religious leader, who leads an alliance of far-right political parties and banned militant groups.

At the same time, political parties are under pressure to curry favor with right-wing voters or demonstrate their effectiveness in combating militancy in advance of the coming national election, due to take place by May.

Cyril Almeida, a columnist for Dawn, the country’s leading English daily, said the Awani National Party was being driven by its own electoral needs in the northwest, and predicted that the calls for peace with the Taliban would go nowhere.

“The A.N.P. is pushing a seemingly vague agenda: keep the door to talks open while trying to build consensus for punitive actions,” Mr. Almeida said, “in the likely scenario of the Taliban reverting to type and continuing down their path of violence.”

Despite the tentative signs of reconciliation, militants have not slowed down their attacks.

On Thursday the police in Hangu district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa said they had killed six suicide bombers, probably of Uzbek origins, who had assaulted a police station. Elsewhere in the same district, a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a police checkpoint, killing seven people, including four policemen.

In the neighboring Orakzai tribal region, at least eleven people were killed when a roadside bomb targeted a bus carrying members of an anti-Taliban militia. As people gathered for rescue work, another explosion went off, wounding at least 19 people.

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Amputee Olympic star Pistorius charged in slaying

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee sprinter dubbed the Blade Runner, was charged Thursday in the Valentine's Day slaying of his girlfriend at his upscale home in South Africa, a shocking twist to one of the feel-good stories of last summer's Olympics.

Pistorius buried his face in the hood of his workout jacket as officers escorted him from a police station after his arrest in the shooting death of Reeva Steenkamp, a 30-year-old model who had spoken out on Twitter against rape and abuse of women.

Police said she was shot four times in the pre-dawn hours at Pistorius' villa in a gated community in the capital, Pretoria. Officers found a 9 mm pistol inside the home and arrested Pistorius on a murder charge.

What sparked the shooting remained unclear, but police said they had received calls in the past about domestic altercations at the home of the 26-year-old athlete, who has spoken publicly about his love of firearms.

A police spokeswoman, Brigadier Denise Beukes, said the incidents included "allegations of a domestic nature."

"I'm not going to elaborate on it, but there have been incidents," Beukes said. She said Pistorius was home at the time of Steenkamp's death and "there is no other suspect involved."

Pistorius made history in the London Games when he became the first double-amputee track athlete to compete in the Olympics. He didn't win a medal but did make the semifinals of the 400 meters and became an international star.

Thursday, companies quickly removed billboards and advertising featuring Pistorius, a national hero in South Africa who also inspired fans worldwide with the image of his high-tech carbon-fiber blades whipping through the air.

Kenny Oldwage, Pistorius' lawyer, told reporters the athlete was "emotional" after his arrest, "but he is keeping up." He said he planned to seek bail for Pistorius at a preliminary hearing Friday.

Pistorius has had troubles in the past in his personal life, which often featured fast cars, cage fighters and women.

In February 2009, he crashed a speedboat on South Africa's Vaal River, breaking his nose, jaw and several ribs and damaging an eye socket. He required 180 stitches to his face. Witnesses said he had been drinking, and officers found alcoholic beverages in the wreckage, though they did not do blood tests.

In November, Pistorius was involved in an altercation over a woman with a local coal mining millionaire, South African media reported. The two men involved the South African Police Service's elite Hawks investigative unit before settling the matter.

Pistorius' father, Henke Pistorius, said Thursday: "We all pray for guidance and strength for Oscar and the lady's parents."

A spokeswoman for Pistorius at Fast Track, an international sports marketing agency in London, said the athlete was assisting with the investigation and there would be no further comment "until matters become clearer."

The sprinter's former coach, Andrea Giannini, said he hoped the shooting was "just a tragic accident."

"No matter how bad the situation was, Oscar always stayed calm and positive," Giannini told The Associated Press in Italy. "Whenever he was tired or nervous, he was still extremely nice to people. I never saw him violent."

Firearms captivated Pistorius, the subject of an online Nike advertisement that featured him with the caption: "I am a bullet in the chamber." In November 2011, he posted a photograph on Twitter of himself at a shooting range, bragging about his score. "Had a 96% headshot over 300m from 50shots! Bam!" he wrote.

Linked to a number of women by the South African media, Pistorius and Steenkamp were first seen together publicly in November. She was named one of the world's 100 Sexiest Women for two years running by the men's magazine FHM.

The leggy blonde with a law degree also appeared in international and South African ads and was a celebrity contestant on "Tropika Island of Treasure," a South African reality show filmed in Jamaica.

While known for her bikini-clad, vamping photo spreads, she tweeted messages urging women to stand up against rape. Her tweets also focused on Pistorius, with one of her last messages noting her excitement over Valentine's Day.

"What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow?" she wrote. "It should be a day of love for everyone."

Police have not publicly named Steenkamp as the victim, saying only that a 30-year-old woman was killed. Steenkamp's publicist, however, confirmed in a statement that the model had died.

"Everyone is simply devastated," the publicist, Sarit Tomlinson, said. "She was the kindest, sweetest human being; an angel on earth and will be sorely missed."

Police arrived at Pistorius' home after 3 a.m., and paramedics tried unsuccessfully to revive Steenkamp, police spokeswoman Lt. Col. Katlego Mogale said.

Officers later took Pistorius to a hospital so doctors could collect samples for DNA testing and check his blood alcohol content.

Pistorius had both legs amputated below the knee before his first birthday because of a congenital condition, and campaigned for years to be allowed to compete against able-bodied athletes.

He was initially banned because of his carbon fiber blades — which critics said gave him an unfair advantage — before being cleared by sport's highest court in 2008.

He was a last-minute selection to South Africa's Olympic team, competing in the 400 meters and the 4x400 relay. He later retained his Paralympic title in the 400 meters.

South Africa's Sports Confederation, its Olympic committee and the International Paralympic Committee all had no comment on the shooting.

Shock rippled across South Africa, a nation of 50 million where nearly 50 people are killed each day, one of the world's highest murder rates. U.N. statistics say South Africa also has the second highest rate of shooting deaths in the world, behind only Colombia.

"The question is: Why does this story make the news? Yes, because they are both celebrities, but this is happening on every single day in South Africa," said Adele Kirsten, a member of Gun Free South Africa.

"We have thousands of people killed annually by gun violence in our country. So the anger is about that it is preventable."

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Gerald Imray reported from Cape Town, South Africa. Associated Press writers Michelle Faul and Ed Brown in Johannesburg contributed to this report.

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Jon Gambrell can be reached at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP.

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Doctor and Patient: Afraid to Speak Up to Medical Power

The slender, weather-beaten, elderly Polish immigrant had been diagnosed with lung cancer nearly a year earlier and was receiving chemotherapy as part of a clinical trial. I was a surgical consultant, called in to help control the fluid that kept accumulating in his lungs.

During one visit, he motioned for me to come closer. His voice was hoarse from a tumor that spread, and the constant hissing from his humidified oxygen mask meant I had to press my face nearly against his to understand his words.

“This is getting harder, doctor,” he rasped. “I’m not sure I’m up to anymore chemo.”

I was not the only doctor that he confided to. But what I quickly learned was that none of us was eager to broach the topic of stopping treatment with his primary cancer doctor.

That doctor was a rising superstar in the world of oncology, a brilliant physician-researcher who had helped discover treatments for other cancers and who had been recruited to lead our hospital’s then lackluster cancer center. Within a few months of the doctor’s arrival, the once sleepy department began offering a dazzling array of experimental drugs. Calls came in from outside doctors eager to send their patients in for treatment, and every patient who was seen was promptly enrolled in one of more than a dozen well-documented treatment protocols.

But now, no doctors felt comfortable suggesting anything but the most cutting-edge, aggressive treatments.

Even the No. 2 doctor in the cancer center, Robin to the chief’s cancer-battling Batman, was momentarily taken aback when I suggested we reconsider the patient’s chemotherapy plan. “I don’t want to tell him,” he said, eyes widening. He reeled off his chief’s vast accomplishments. “I mean, who am I to tell him what to do?”

We stood for a moment in silence before he pointed his index finger at me. “You tell him,” he said with a smile. “You tell him to consider stopping treatment.”

Memories of this conversation came flooding back last week when I read an essay on the problems posed by hierarchies within the medical profession.

For several decades, medical educators and sociologists have documented the existence of hierarchies and an intense awareness of rank among doctors. The bulk of studies have focused on medical education, a process often likened to military and religious training, with elder patriarchs imposing the hair shirt of shame on acolytes unable to incorporate a profession’s accepted values and behaviors. Aspiring doctors quickly learn whose opinions, experiences and voices count, and it is rarely their own. Ask a group of interns who’ve been on the wards for but a week, and they will quickly raise their hands up to the level of their heads to indicate their teachers’ status and importance, then lower them toward their feet to demonstrate their own.

It turns out that this keen awareness of ranking is not limited to students and interns. Other research has shown that fully trained physicians are acutely aware of a tacit professional hierarchy based on specialties, like primary care versus neurosurgery, or even on diseases different specialists might treat, like hemorrhoids and constipation versus heart attacks and certain cancers.

But while such professional preoccupation with privilege can make for interesting sociological fodder, the real issue, warns the author of a courageous essay published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine, is that such an overly developed sense of hierarchy comes at an unacceptable price: good patient care.

Dr. Ranjana Srivastava, a medical oncologist at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, Australia, recalls a patient she helped to care for who died after an operation. Before the surgery, Dr. Srivastava had been hesitant to voice her concerns, assuming that the patient’s surgeon must be “unequivocally right, unassailable, or simply not worth antagonizing.” When she confesses her earlier uncertainty to the surgeon after the patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava learns that the surgeon had been just as loath to question her expertise and had assumed that her silence before the surgery meant she agreed with his plan to operate.

“Each of us was trying our best to help a patient, but we were also respecting the boundaries and hierarchy imposed by our professional culture,” Dr. Srivastava said. “The tragedy was that the patient died, when speaking up would have made all the difference.”

Compounding the problem is an increasing sense of self-doubt among many doctors. With rapid advances in treatment, there is often no single correct “answer” for a patient’s problem, and doctors, struggling to stay up-to-date in their own particular specialty niches, are more tentative about making suggestions that cross over to other doctors’ “turf.” Even as some clinicians attempt to compensate by organizing multidisciplinary meetings, inviting doctors from all specialties to discuss a patient’s therapeutic options, “there will inevitably be a hierarchy at those meetings of who is speaking,” Dr. Srivastava noted. “And it won’t always be the ones who know the most about the patient who will be taking the lead.”

It is the potentially disastrous repercussions for patients that make this overly developed awareness of rank and boundaries a critical issue in medicine. Recent efforts to raise safety standards and improve patient care have shown that teams are a critical ingredient for success. But simply organizing multidisciplinary lineups of clinicians isn’t enough. What is required are teams that recognize the importance of all voices and encourage active and open debate.

Since their patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava and the surgeon have worked together to discuss patient cases, articulate questions and describe their own uncertainties to each other and in patients’ notes. “We have tried to remain cognizant of the fact that we are susceptible to thinking about hierarchy,” Dr. Srivastava said. “We have tried to remember that sometimes, despite our best intentions, we do not speak up for our patients because we are fearful of the consequences.”

That was certainly true for my lung cancer patient. Like all the other doctors involved in his care, I hesitated to talk to the chief medical oncologist. I questioned my own credentials, my lack of expertise in this particular area of oncology and even my own clinical judgment. When the patient appeared to fare better, requiring less oxygen and joking and laughing more than I had ever seen in the past, I took his improvement to be yet another sign that my attempt to talk about holding back chemotherapy was surely some surgical folly.

But a couple of days later, the humidified oxygen mask came back on. And not long after that, the patient again asked for me to come close.

This time he said: “I’m tired. I want to stop the chemo.”

Just before he died, a little over a week later, he was off all treatment except for what might make him comfortable. He thanked me and the other doctors for our care, but really, we should have thanked him and apologized. Because he had pushed us out of our comfortable, well-delineated professional zones. He had prodded us to talk to one another. And he showed us how to work as a team in order to do, at last, what we should have done weeks earlier.

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DealBook: Blackstone Keeps Most of Its Money With SAC

The Blackstone Group, the largest outside investor in the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, said it would keep most of its $550 million with the hedge fund for three more months while it monitors developments in the government’s insider trading investigation.

The move by Blackstone comes as SAC’s clients faced a regularly scheduled quarterly deadline on Thursday to decide whether to continue investing with the hedge fund giant run by Steven A. Cohen.

Despite posting one of the best investment track records on Wall Street — returning 30 percent annually over the past two decades — SAC has been fighting to keep investors’ money amid an intensifying investigation into criminal conduct at the fund. In November, since prosecutors brought its most recent case against Mathew Martoma, a former SAC employee, clients have been weighing whether to continue their relationship with the fund. Mr. Martoma has denied the charges.

Large hedge fund investors like Blackstone rarely make public pronouncements about their intentions, but given the heightened interest in SAC, the investment firm issued a statement explaining the rationale for its decision.

The money that Blackstone did withdraw was done in the normal course of business and unrelated to any of SAC’s problems. Blackstone, which runs the world’s largest so-called fund of funds, placing nearly $50 billion with outside managers, is seen as a bellwether in the hedge fund industry.

“While we submitted redemptions for certain accounts as appropriate, BAAM successfully preserved flexibility for our clients by extending our decision time line,” Peter Rose, a Blackstone spokesman, said in a statement, referring to Blackstone Alternative Asset Management, the segment that invests with hedge funds. “We will use this period of time to evaluate all additional information which becomes available.”

It is unclear what the total amount of money that SAC’s clients redeemed on Thursday. The Stamford, Conn.-based hedge fund had warned its employees that it expected it could face at least $1 billion of withdrawals. A Citigroup unit that manages money for wealthy families has already disclosed that it was withdrawing its $187 million investment.

While several other former SAC employees have previously been charged with insider trading crimes, the Martoma prosecution has changed clients’ calculus because the trades at the center of the case involve Mr. Cohen. In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission warned SAC that it might file a civil fraud lawsuit against the fund related to the trades. Mr. Cohen has not been charged and has said that he has acted appropriately at all times.

Federal prosecutors are also nearing a decision whether to bring criminal charges against Michael Steinberg, a longtime SAC portfolio manager, related to trading in the technology stocks Dell and Nvidia. A lawyer for Mr. Steinberg, Barry Berke, said in a statement that his client did absolutely nothing wrong.

Unlike other hedge funds that can be forced to shut down after a wave of client withdrawals, SAC is in a slightly unusual situation. Only about 40 percent of the $14 billion managed by SAC, or about $6 billion, comes from outside clients. The balance belongs to Mr. Cohen and his well-paid staff.

In addition, SAC has policies in place that limit the amount of money a client can withdraw during any one quarter. Clients can only withdraw 25 percent of their investment every three months. That means if a client put in a so-called redemption request on Thursday, it would receive its money back in quarterly installments beginning March 31, and getting its last dollar out on Dec. 31.

Blackstone negotiated a way to buy itself some time without delaying its ability to withdraw it investment from the fund. SAC agreed to a new redemption policy that it will extend to its other clients, allowing them to keep their money with SAC for another quarter. If after three months, clients then decide to end their relationship with SAC, the fund would return their money in three installments.

Under the new policy, SAC is permitting clients to take a wait-and-see approach, monitoring the investigation for developments that could damage the fund. And if they withdraw, they would still have all of their money returned by year-end.

SAC recent investment results have been solid, though it has lagged behind the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. The fund returned about 13 percent last year and 2.5 during the first month of 2013.

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