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After Militant Is Killed, Car Bomb Targets Yemen Minister

September 11, 2012, 4:00 pm
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

Video showing the aftermath of a car bomb attack in Sanaa, Yemen

At least 12 people were killed in a car bombing in the capital of Yemen on Tuesday, in what appeared to be an attack targeting the country's defense minister. The bombing came after a top Al Qaeda leader in Yemen, and six people traveling with him, were killed in what Yemeni officials said was an airstrike by an American drone.

As my colleagues Nasser Arrabyee and Alan Cowell reported, the car bomb exploded alongside a convoy of vehicles used by the minister, Maj. Gen. Mohammed Nasser Ahmed, on a street between the cabinet office and the state radio building in downtown Sana, th e capital. At least seven of the dead were bodyguards and five were civilians. The minister remained unharmed, government and hospital officials said.

In Twitter messages, journalists based in Yemen who quickly arrived at the site of the blast described the carnage.

Adam M. Baron, a freelance reporter in Yemen, wrote about a chaotic scene of casualties, with damaged storefronts and vehicles.

Joe Sheffer, a cameraman and journalist, wrote that clean-up crews scooped human remains into bags, and security forces tried to clear the area of onlookers by firing into the air.

While Yemeni authorities were quoted as saying there had been no immediate claim of responsibility for the car bomb on Tuesday, the killing of Saeed Ali al-Shihri, the second in command for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, places the timing and target of the blast into context.

Witnesses in the region said Mr. Shihri escaped an initial drone attack and made off into the desert on Monday, but the remotely piloted aircraft tracked him down, Mr. Arrabyee and Mr. Cowell reported.

Two senior American officials confirmed Mr. Shihri's death, The Associated Press reported, but not any involvement in it. Reuters reported there were conflicting versions of his death: that he was killed W ednesday in a drone strike or on Monday in a Yemeni Army operation.

Mr. Shihri spent six years at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, before being released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and later making his way to Yemen. As my colleague Robert F. Worth wrote in a story about the complications of his release, American officials suspected his involvement in the 2008 car bombings outside the American Embassy in Sana that killed 16 people, including six attackers.

Reporters raised the possibility that Tuesday's bomb attack was in retaliation for Mr. Shihri's killing and assessed the significance of the two events for Yemen and for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Still, Yemen has not escaped the turmoil behind the protest movements sweeping other Arab countries. The country's president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, assumed power in February after its former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, agreed to step down last November following a year of antigovernment demonstrations calling for his removal.

Katherine Zimmerman, an analyst for the American Enterprise Institute, wrote on her blog that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula still had room to maneuver in Yemen after Mr. Shihri's death.

The group took advantage of the unrest in Yemen during the Arab Spring to expand its network, and despite territorial advances against AQAP's insurgent arm in the south, its operational network is largely intact.



Three Tips for Better Google Searching

September 11, 2012, 1:25 pm
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Want to improve your Google search skills?

Here are the three tips - basic, intermediate and advanced - from Dan Russell at Google. He studies how people use the search engine and teaches classes on how to do it better, including a free online course this month, for which registration started Tuesday. He promises these tips will make you happy, and he cares a lot about that - his official title at Google is über tech lead for search quality and user happiness.

Basic tip:
Say you know you were mentioned in an article online, so you search to read what was said about you. But when you click on the link, you get the entire article and no idea where to find your name. The solution is simp le: control F. Typing that on your keyboard allows you to enter a term to find it anywhere it appears on the Web page. Ninety percent of United States Internet users do not know how to find the word they are looking for on a Web page, according to Mr. Russell's studies. “Control F changes the way you read anything.”

Intermediate tip:
You tried to snowboard and ended up back at your computer with a possibly broken arm. Instead of typing “What do I do with a busted arm” into Google, try to use words that you imagine someone else would have written about broken arms, Mr. Russell said. “Put yourself in the mind of the author of a perfect Web page,” he said. “Emulate the language of the person you want to read the answer from.” But do not take that too far, by making up words that you think are expert, but are not real words. “Don't overdo it using words you think are medical, like ‘fracturated,' because you will find results, at which point you'll be in even bigger trouble,” Mr. Russell said. Which leads us to his final tip.

Advanced tip:
Before you ask Google what to do with a “fracturated” arm, look up the word, or any word, by typing “define:” followed by the word. Mr. Russell advises promiscuous use of the word “define” followed by colon. “Before you search, make sure you're searching the right word. The worst thing you can do is to search for something you think means one thing but in fact means something else, but you believe the answer when you asked the wrong question.”



Qaeda Leader Confirms Death of His Deputy

September 11, 2012, 12:33 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda's leader, confirmed the death of his deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, in a video message posted on jihadist Internet forums late Monday, The Associated Press reports.

Al Qaeda's leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, confirming the death of his deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, in a video message posted online this week.

As my colleagues Declan Walsh and Eric Schmitt reported, American officials said in June that the senior militant had been killed by a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike in Pakistan's tribal belt, along the Afghan border.

Mr. Libi, a charismatic, Libyan Islamist who escaped from an American military prison in Afgh anistan in 2005, was considered a particularly important figure because of his use of video messages to spread Al Qaeda's ideology. In a Foreign Policy article on Mr. Libi's importance in 2009, Jarret Brachman, the former director of research at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, explained that Mr. Libi had formed his impressions of Americans firsthand. At Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Mr. Brachman reported, Mr. Libi “passed time by intimately studying his American captors as they aimlessly surfed the Internet or complained to him about their dysfunctional childhoods.”

The Qaeda leader statement on “the martyrdom of the lion of Libya,” came in a 42-minute video, according to SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization in Washington that tracks militant Web sites. (SITE, or the Search for International Terrorist Entities, was founded by Rita Katz, an Arabic-speaking Israeli researcher who was born in Iraq and now lives in Washington.)

The video was apparently recorded during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended in August, Reuters reports. In the message, Mr. Zawahri calls President Obama a “liar” who “is trying to fool Americans into believing that he will defeat Al Qaeda by killing this person or that person.”

As Agence France-Presse reports, Mr. Zawahri “also mentions Warren Weinstein, an elderly U.S. aid worker kidnapped in Pakistan by Al Qaeda just over a year ago, vowing to keep him in captivity until U.S.-led forces release Qaeda followers held in Afghanistan.”

In an interview with CNN in Cairo broadcast on Tuesday, the Qaeda leader's brother, Mohamed, suggested that he could broker a truce between the Islamist militants and the West. Mohamed al-Zawahri, who was released from prison after the Egyptian revolution in 2011, also suggested that Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted of conspiring to blow up New York City landma rks in 1995, should be freed by the United States as part of the truce agreement.



How the iPhone 5 Could Bolster the Economy

September 10, 2012, 7:15 pm
By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Forget QE3. Maybe the way to stimulate the economy is to force Apple to release more new iPhone models.

O.K., that's not exactly right. But Michael Feroli, the chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase, did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and estimated that the upcoming release of what is expected to be the iPhone 5 could add one-quarter to one-half of a percentage point to the annualized growth rate of America's gross domestic product next quarter.

From the note he sent to clients today:

Our equity analysts believe around 8 million iPhone 5's will be sold in the US in Q4, even while sales of previous generation iPhones are maintained at a solid pace. While we have no idea how much these will retail for, if it is similar to previous launches it would be around $600. Likewise, if the imported cost component is similar to previous leading generation phones it would imply around a $200 per phone addition to imports (which is a subtraction from GDP). The difference between these two figures, $400, would represent the trade margins, which figure into GDP. Thus, calculated using the so-called retail control method, sales of iPhone 5 could boost Q4 GDP by $3.2 billion, or $12.8 billion at an annual rate. This would boost annualized GDP growth in Q4 by 0.33%-point. If hedonically adjusted constant quality prices of phones declined due to newer or better features - a reasonable conjecture - then the lift would be even greater, though past iPhone releases don't bear a visible impact on the relevant CPI components. The third of a percentage point lift would limit the downside risk to our Q4 GDP growth projection, which remains 2.0%.

This es timate seems fairly large, and for that reason should be treated skeptically. However, we think the recent evidence is consistent with this projection. The last iPhone launch was at a similar time last year. In October of last year, when the iPhone 4S first became widely available, overall retail sales that month significantly outperformed expectations. Essentially all iPhone sales occur either on-line or in retail stores. Over half of the 0.8% increase in core retail sales last October occurred in two categories: on-line sales and computer and software sales, which combined had their largest monthly increase on record. The incremental growth of Q4 sales at those stores over Q3, if due to the iPhone, would have added between 0.1% to 0.2%-point to Q4 growth, after subtracting the import drag. Given the iPhone 5 launch is expected to be much larger, we think the estimate mentioned in the first paragraph is reasonable.



The F.A.A. Flip-Flop on Electronics Continues

As the Federal Aviation Administration approves iPads in the cockpit and may soon start allowing flight attendants to use tablets, passengers still must turn off their devices.

Palestinians Borrow Chant From Syria to Vent Rage at Their Leaders

September 10, 2012, 7:29 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

Video of a West Bank protest on Monday showed Palestinians using a borrowed tune from Syria to call on their prime minister to step down.

During protests in the West Bank on Monday, Palestinians adapted a protest anthem made popular by their neighbors in Syria last year to call for their president and prime minister to step down.

The original song, “Yalla Erhal Ya Bashar,” or “Come on Bashar, Leave,” calling for the departure President Bashar al-Assad, was written last year in Syria. At a protest in the West Bank on Monday, protesters changed the words of the tune, to target President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

As Yousef Munayyer, the director of The Palestine Center in Washington, observed on Twitter, the borrowing completed a circle in a way.

Another striking image of the day's protests in Hebron was the demonstrators hurling their shoes at a large banner of the Palestinian Authority's prime minister.

Palestinain protesters hurled their shoes at an image of their prime minister on Mondya in Hebron.

As Reuters reports, the protesters were frustrated at the Palestinian Authority's management of the economy in the parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank it administers. In the evening, there were clashes between the Palestinian Authority's security forces and demonstrators in Hebron, Bethlehem and Nablus.

The Israeli-American journalist Joseph Dana, who is based in Ramallah, noted that video of the security forces hurling rocks at protesters looked quite a bit like images from Egypt recorded last year.



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