US News:
WASHINGTON ? The Obama administration scrambled to halt a sharp deterioration in its troubled relationship with Pakistan on Wednesday, offering Pakistani officials multiple apologies for a helicopter strike on a border post that killed three Pakistani soldiers last week.
But even as the White House tried to mollify Pakistan, officials acknowledged that the uneasy allies faced looming tensions over a host of issues far larger than the airstrike and the subsequent closing of supply lines into Afghanistan.
American pressure to show progress in Afghanistan is translating into increased pressure on Pakistan to crack down on terrorist groups. It is also running up against Pakistan?s sensitivity about its sovereignty and its determination to play a crucial role in any reconciliation with the Taliban.
American and NATO officials said privately that the Pakistani government?s closing of a crucial border crossing might have made it easier for militants to attack backed-up tanker trucks carrying fuel through Pakistan to Afghanistan to support the American war effort.
Still, the unusual apologies, officials and outside analysts said, were intended to clear away the debris from the explosive events along the border, in hopes of maintaining Pakistani cooperation.
?We have historically had astonishing sources of resilience in our relations with Pakistan,? said Teresita Schaffer, a South Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ?One should not too quickly assume we?re in a breakpoint. But having said that, the time we?re in right now, the intensity of anti-American feeling, the antipathy of militants, all of these things make new crises a little more complicated to get through than the old ones were.?
The overall commander of forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, has been pulling out all the stops ? aggressively using the American troop buildup, greatly expanding Special Operations raids (as many as a dozen commando raids a night) and pressing the Central Intelligence Agency to ramp up Predator and Reaper drone operations in Pakistan.
He has also, through the not-so-veiled threat of cross-border ground operations, put pressure on the Pakistani Army to pursue militants in the tribal areas even as the army has continued to struggle with relief from the catastrophic floods this summer.
The fragility of Pakistan ? and the tentativeness of the alliance ? were underscored in a White House report to Congress this week, which sharply criticized the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and other insurgents and noted the ineffectiveness of its civilian government.
American officials lined up to placate Pakistan on intrusions of its sovereignty. General Petraeus offered Pakistan the most explicit American mea culpa yet for the cross-border helicopter strikes, saying that the American-led coalition forces ?deeply regret? the ?tragic loss of life.?
Anne W. Patterson, the American ambassador to Pakistan, quickly followed suit, calling ?Pakistan?s brave security forces? an important ally in the war. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered a private, but official, apology to Pakistan?s military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, in a telephone call on Wednesday afternoon.
Both American and Pakistani officials said that they expected that Wednesday?s apologies would be effective, at least in the short term, and that Pakistan would soon reopen the border crossing at Torkham, a supply route for the NATO coalition in landlocked Afghanistan that runs from the port of Karachi to the Khyber region. The Pakistani government closed that route last week to protest the cross-border strikes.
?It?s obvious that the situation right now ain?t good,? said a senior NATO official, who agreed to speak candidly but only anonymously. ?The best thing we could do is to strip away as many of the relatively smaller things as possible so we can focus on the big issues. And crazy as it may seem, the border crossing is a relatively small issue, compared to the others.?
Those other issues were flagged in the latest quarterly report from the White House to Congress on developments in the region. The assessment, first reported in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, takes aim at both the Pakistani military and the government.
For instance, ?the Pakistani military continued to avoid military engagements that would put it in direct conflict with Afghan Taliban or Al Qaeda forces in North Waziristan,? the report said. It also painted Pakistan?s president, Asif Ali Zardari, as out of touch with his own populace, a disconnect that the report said was exacerbated by Mr. Zardari?s ?decision to travel to Europe despite the floods.? The overall Pakistani response to the catastrophic floods this summer, the report said, was viewed by Pakistanis as ?slow and inadequate.?
Frustration with Pakistan is growing in the United States in part because ?we?re living in the post-Faisal Shahzad era,? said Daniel Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to the Pakistani-American who was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday for the attempted Times Square bombing.
Mr. Markey said that tensions among counterterrorism officials had also mounted because of the unspecified threats of terrorist attacks in Europe. ?Frustration has really mounted, so the drumbeat is getting louder,? he said.
Making things worse, the administration is expected to brief Congressional officials on an Internet video, which surfaced last week, that showed men in Pakistani military uniforms executing six young men in civilian clothes, underscoring concerns about unlawful killings by Pakistani soldiers supported by the United States.
A prominent House Democrat warned on Wednesday that American aid to Pakistan could be imperiled. ?I am appalled by the horrific contents of the recent video, which appears to show extrajudicial killings by the Pakistani military,? Representative Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.
?The failure of Pakistani officials to punish those responsible could have implications for future security assistance to Pakistan,? he said.
A joint Pakistan-NATO inquiry on the helicopter strike concluded on Wednesday that Pakistani border soldiers who initially fired on NATO helicopters were ?simply firing warning shots after hearing the nearby engagement and hearing the helicopters flying nearby,? said Brig. Gen. Timothy M. Zadalis, a NATO spokesman, in a statement.
?This tragic event could have been avoided with better coalition force coordination with the Pakistani military,? he said.
World News:
KOLONTAR, Hungary ? Just before he raced for refuge in the attic of his family?s home here on Monday at lunchtime, Krisztian Holczer called his mother at her job at a school near here.
?You won?t believe what is happening,? Mr. Holczer said he told her.
A wave of caustic red sludge had just poured in over the back fence and was descending rapidly over the backyard, smothering chickens and hares as well as a garden of flowers, peppers, grapes and tomatoes. It rose up until it covered the tiled front porch and leached in through the front door, dyeing the pristine white lace curtains red. Mr. Holczer, 34, escaped with burns on his feet from the dangerous muck.
The origin of the liquid was a nearby sludge reservoir holding the leftovers of the process that converts bauxite to aluminum. For more than 25 years, residents say, a Hungarian manufacturer, MAL Rt., the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company, has stored such waste at several artificial storage ponds in the region. Once a state-owned company, it was privatized in the 1990s like much of Communist-era industry in Eastern Europe.
Just after noon on Monday, a corner of the sludge reservoir broke, sending the goo into the surrounding countryside, turning four prosperous, picturesque villages into red-tinged towns out of science-fiction horror films.
The mud drowned at least four people and sent more than 100 to hospitals with burns, caused by a highly alkaline caustic substance. Sixteen square miles are covered in the muck, hundreds of residents suffered mild burns or lung irritations, and many animals were killed.
Residents here are still waiting for officials to release their analysis of the sludge?s chemical content. A dangerous pollutant at best because of its corrosive nature, red mud from the aluminum production process can contain heavy metals and low-level radioactivity, ingredients that can cause health problems like cancer, and in the long term it can contaminate the environment.
The sludge poured into local streams, which now all appear to be tinted with henna, and is moving downstream at about a mile an hour. It is headed for the Raba River, which empties into the Danube. It has already killed all the river life in the local rivers and streams but now threatens a broad international environmental disaster if high concentrations of the sludge get downstream.
So far the damage is limited to Hungary, which has not asked the European Union for assistance in responding to the catastrophe, but Joe Hennon, the European Commission?s spokesman for environmental issues, said that the organization was concerned about the sludge or its elements moving where it could affect other countries.
?There is potential for widespread environmental damage,? Mr. Hennon said. ?Right now, they?re trying to contain it, to stop it from reaching the Danube.?
The mud is normally regulated as a pollutant in Europe but can be classified as a hazardous substance if levels of toxic elements are high, he said.
There are more than a dozen sludge storage ponds in this area, which used to be home to a thriving mining industry, for bauxite and coal. Today, the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company is the only one of three aluminum factories still in operation. But sludge ponds from various aging or even shuttered industries dot the landscape in Europe and the United States, often poorly maintained, and posing a threat to health and the environment.
The broken wall of the sludge pond has been repaired, but the cleanup has just started. Police officers, firefighters and soldiers have descended on the towns, evacuating residents. Brigades of government workers and residents, wearing thick boots and surgical masks, are shoveling the red muck into trucks and hosing down homes and roads.
Hungary?s top investigative agency is looking into the spill. A case has been opened to consider possible criminal negligence, although it was not clear whether the investigation was aimed at the company or individual employees.
Jozsef Deak, a company engineer, said that ?the company is not shying away from responsibility.?
Heavy rains may have raised the sludge level, although company officials say it was within permitted limits before this week?s spill.
The sludge reservoirs that dot the area are often poorly maintained, said Gabor Figeczky, acting C.E.O. of WWF-Hungary, a conservation group. The sludge reservoirs, in theory, have a sealed base and are supposed to be closed once they are full, but some, like the one that broke this week, are large, and filling them can take decades.
In the meantime, they are subject to regular inspections. The European Commission said that it had been told that the company had received its most recent permit in 2006 and that it had no recorded history of violations or accidents. The sludge ponds in the region were scheduled to be inspected again this month, WWF-Hungary said.
?There used to be three of these aluminum factories, and all were on flood plains, and two were next to the Danube,? said Csaba Vaszko, project officer for WWF-Hungary, who said that in some ways sludge ponds of closed factories were more worrisome than those of operating companies.
?These old factories were supposed to maintain the sludge ponds and keep them safe,? Mr. Vaszko said, ?but it is a huge problem in Eastern Europe because these companies didn?t set aside enough money for that.?
Because this is the first large-scale accident involving aluminum sludge, experts are feeling their way in the cleanup. In the long term, the region?s topsoil will have to be totally replaced, because it is irretrievably alkaline and possibly contaminated with heavy metals, environmental groups say.
Residents have been promised that their homes will be decontaminated, although it is not yet clear who is responsible for the decontamination and who will pay for the cleanup. And many residents say that is not satisfactory.
Nikolett Fekete said she was mowing her lawn when the dog began to ?bark like mad? and she heard a ?strange moving sound like horses running in a field,? announcing the red mud?s arrival. At the height of the spill, there was more than a meter of muck in her house, she recalled, displaying the burns on her hands.
?No, no, no, I don?t want to come back,? she said. ?Who would want to stay here after something like this??
Politics:
VILLA PARK, Ill. ? The prospect of seizing the United States Senate seat here, the one that once belonged to President Obama, is so delicious to Republicans that a party leader found himself dreaming aloud in this Chicago suburb one recent afternoon.
?Isn?t that something that would just make your day, to read the headlines on the morning of Nov. 3: ?We took back that U.S. Senate seat??? Dan Cronin, chairman of the DuPage County Republicans, hollered to an expo center filled with Republicans.
?Oh my God!? Mr. Cronin went on. ?I?d have to lie down! I?m telling you; it would be a remarkable experience.?
More is at stake in the race here than merely the balance of power in the Senate. Senator Roland W. Burris, a Democrat who was appointed to the post and is not seeking election, may hold this seat for the moment, but it remains, in the minds of loyalists of both parties, Mr. Obama?s.
And that is adding a layer of intensity and ferocity ? and the attention of the president himself ? in the final weeks of a campaign that has been punctuated by unexpected developments.
Representative Mark Steven Kirk, the Republican who has long represented a north suburban Congressional district, and Alexi Giannoulias, the Democrat and Illinois treasurer, remain locked in a close fight, some polls suggest.
A large chunk of voters ? 17 percent in one recent Chicago Tribune/WGN television poll ? is undecided, despite seemingly endless, harsh television advertising and a constant run of news coverage. To hear some voters tell it, left to decide is a basic question that has taken a central, often ugly, role in this race: Who can one actually believe?
Mr. Kirk, 51, was once seen by some as having an upper hand. He had years of experience and a voting history that could appeal to a state that has, historically, elected moderate Republicans. But then came a string of questions about his descriptions of his own history, and he ended up acknowledging misleading statements about his record as a Naval Reserve intelligence officer.
Despite his relative inexperience, Mr. Giannoulias, 34, has pulled off a statewide election once before, and was expected to benefit from his party alliance. These days, Republicans hold no statewide offices in Illinois, and Democrats control both chambers in the state legislature.
But Mr. Giannoulias?s campaign, too, was upended by events: This year, federal regulators seized the bank his family owned, where he had once been a senior loan officer. Reports that the bank had made loans to people with connections to organized crime did not help. Mr. Giannoulias has insisted that the struggles of his family?s bank were not unlike those of many Americans whose businesses were devastated by the recession.
The questions and revelations have had an effect on the images of both candidates.
?I don?t trust either one of them,? said one voter, Nancy Melin, as she ate lunch Wednesday in downtown Chicago, ?so I wouldn?t feel good about voting for either of them.?
When the Chicago Tribune poll, conducted Sept. 24-28, asked which candidate was more honest and trustworthy, the results were mixed: 35 percent said Mr. Giannoulias; 30 percent said Mr. Kirk; 16 percent said neither; and 18 percent did not know. Ms. Melin, who said she often voted for Democrats, said she was considering not voting in this race.
Mr. Obama?s relationship to Mr. Giannoulias has drawn special notice on all sides. Although the White House initially encouraged at least one other Democrat to run for the seat, Mr. Obama is making his second visit home on Mr. Giannoulias?s behalf. On Thursday, he is to appear at two fund-raising events (one is a small dinner party). Next week, Michelle Obama is scheduled to come. And others in the administration have offered encouragement, too; on Saturday, Arne Duncan, the education secretary, played in a basketball tournament here with Mr. Giannoulias and told reporters he was a ?big, big fan of Alexi.?
Republicans (who note that Mitt Romney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Senator Scott P. Brown and others have come here to help Mr. Kirk) often point to Mr. Giannoulias?s ties to the president as a rallying cry for their own candidate and as a way to dismiss Mr. Giannoulias.
Mr. Cronin, for example, offered this description of Mr. Giannoulias before his Republican rally: ?A basketball buddy and a pal of Barack Obama, and that?s his resume, period.?
Republicans, too, are pleased to remind voters that the seat in question was at the center of a corruption scandal that enveloped the former governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat. Mr. Blagojevich, who is awaiting a second trial on charges that he tried to sell an appointment to complete Mr. Obama?s Senate term, appointed Mr. Burris.
If voters here are talking about their doubts about the candidates, the candidates are talking about the economy. ?Why would we want to put the same people who created this mess in charge and give them a promotion to the United States Senate?? Mr. Giannoulias said in an interview on Wednesday, referring to Congressional Republicans.
Mr. Kirk said he believed the race would turn on the economy. ?I?ll give it to you short and sweet,? he told the crowd here. ?I?m the candidate who would spend less, borrow less and tax less to fix our economy.?
As if this Senate seat were not wrapped in enough unusual circumstances, there is another one. Voters will be asked to vote twice in this race on Nov. 2: once for the six-year term to start in 2011, and a second time for the few remaining weeks (yes, weeks) of Mr. Obama?s term, which, a court has ruled, must be filled in a simultaneous special election.
Sports:
The N.H.L. season opens Thursday on the heels of an electrifying Olympic tournament, the continuing rise of charismatic young stars and a third straight postseason dominated by teams from hockey-steeped American cities. There will be challenges, but rather than symptoms of a league?s struggles, they seem to be signs of growing strength.
A rash of concussions was addressed over the summer by a new rule banning blindside hits to the head.
?We?ve seen a couple of blindside hits ? shoulder to shoulder and shoulder to chest,? Colin Campbell, the N.H.L.?s chief disciplinarian, said after a preseason in which there was a clear drop in such checks. ?Hopefully, the players are avoiding it.?
The players union, long rudderless and riven by internal strife, seems united again and close to ratifying the nomination of the former baseball union chief Donald Fehr, perhaps the most successful labor leader in sports in the last three decades. With Fehr in place, union and management can negotiate on relatively equal terms in talks to replace the collective bargaining agreement that expires in September 2012.
?Don has really brought the players together,? said John Tavares, the Islanders? second-year star.
All teams are grappling with difficult personnel decisions dictated by the league?s salary cap. But despite dire projections in the economic downturn, the N.H.L. has had a slight rise in revenue. Without the associated rise in the cap, general managers would now be making far more draconian personnel decisions.
The results of this bright news? Corporate sponsorship is up, and American television has come calling after two decades of indifference.
HBO is fueling the run-up to the Jan. 1 Winter Classic by following the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Washington Capitals in only its second nonboxing ?24/7? series. And ESPN and Fox are expected to bid for cable rights against Versus, the rights-holder from 2005 through this season. The league?s TV revenue is expected to rise, perhaps substantially, from the roughly $75 million a year it gets from Versus.
And then there is the hockey.
The N.H.L.?s 93rd season begins with five games Thursday, most notably the Carolina Hurricanes? matchup against the Minnesota Wild in Helsinki; the Penguins? opening of their new building, the Consol Energy Center, against the Philadelphia Flyers; and a clash of the league?s oldest teams, the Montreal Canadiens and the Maple Leafs in Toronto.
The Blackhawks were the feel-good story last season. Led by Jonathan Toews, 22, and Patrick Kane, 21, they made hockey the hottest ticket in Chicago and won their first Stanley Cup title in 49 years.
But within days, salary-cap issues forced them to begin jettisoning Dustin Byfuglien, Kris Versteeg, Brent Sopel, Ben Eager, John Madden, Cam Barker and Marty Reasoner, as well as both goalies, Antti Niemi and Cristobal Huet. It is perhaps the biggest turnover a Cup-winning team has experienced since World War II ravaged the roster of the 1942 Maple Leafs.
Pittsburgh and Washington are the league?s glamour teams. The Penguins, led by Sidney Crosby, who scored Canada?s Olympic gold-medal-winning goal, and Evgeni Malkin, are hoping to get back to the Stanley Cup finals, which they lost in 2008 and won in 2009.
Alex Ovechkin, the 48th-most powerful man in Washington, according to GQ magazine, will try to move on from the disappointing end to last season.
Ovechkin scored 50 goals and 109 points as the attack-minded Capitals won the Presidents? Trophy as the top regular-season team. But he was also suspended twice for reckless hits, left the Olympics early when Canada trounced Russia, crashed out of the first round of the playoffs when the Capitals blew a three-games-to-one lead against Montreal, and committed the turnover that cost Russia the world championships final against the Czech Republic.
?We have to improve our mentality ? we know we can play good offensively, but we have to play good defensively if we want to win,? Ovechkin said of the Capitals, although he might as well have been speaking about himself.
The Rangers begin their 85th season Saturday at Buffalo. Last season they missed the playoffs for the first time in five years, when they lost a shootout at Philadelphia in the last game. The Flyers went all the way to the Stanley Cup finals. That made Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh the only cities involved in the last three finals, a big reason playoff TV ratings have been so high after years of teams like Carolina, Anaheim and Ottawa.
But what if Olli Jokinen, now gone from New York, had hit his last shot in Philadelphia last April? Could the Rangers have wound up in the finals?
?You can?t think that way,? Coach John Tortorella said.
The Devils, who have made three straight first-round exits, have been wrestling with the salary cap after signing Ilya Kovalchuk to a 15-year, $100 million deal. The Devils, who host Dallas on Friday, were $3 million over the cap on Wednesday before making roster moves that left them with the minimum 20 players rather than the customary 23.
The Islanders open Saturday at home, also against Dallas. They cannot seem to escape the dark cloud that has followed them since 1993, the last time they advanced beyond the first round. Mark Streit, their workhorse defenseman, is out at least six months with a shoulder injury.
Business Day:
NBC Universal and Microsoft, the parents of msnbc.com, are holding high-level talks about changing its name, an unusual and potentially risky endeavor for the third most popular news Web site in the United States.
The two parents have not yet agreed on what to call the site. But according to internal memorandums obtained by The New York Times this week, the parents have concluded that the brand known as msnbc.com, a strictly objective news site, is widely confused with MSNBC, the cable television channel that has taken a strongly liberal bent in recent years.
Charlie Tillinghast, the president of msnbc.com, wrote in one of the memos, ?Both strategies are fine, but naming them the same thing is brand insanity.? The channel and Web site are already separate companies.
Under the current plan, the msnbc.com Web address would become a site exclusively for the cable channel, fulfilling the channel?s desire to have an independent site to promote its TV programs. The existing news site, called the ?blue site? internally, would move to a new and as-yet-undetermined Web address. There is a subsection on msnbc.com for the cable channel.
The network of Web sites under the msnbc.com umbrella are visited by almost 50 million Internet users each month, according to the measurement firm comScore. Only two news brands, Yahoo and CNN.com, are bigger.
Andrew Heyward, a former CBS News president and an adviser to media companies on digital strategy, said the renaming idea had merit. ?It?s incredibly important in this media cacophony for brands to be consistent, for brands to stand for something,? said Mr. Heyward, who has advised NBC in the past. ?And those two brands, each strong in their respective areas, are increasingly standing for different things.?
Corporations change their names from time to time (Andersen Consulting became Accenture, Philip Morris became Altria, Blackwater became Xe) but giving up a Web address as popular as msnbc.com is highly unusual. It is akin to a business closing a bustling storefront and posting a sign that asks customers to visit its new location.
For a Web site, at least, the new location is only a click away. ?You can quickly redirect people who might be confused,? Mr. Heyward said. Nonetheless, msnbc.com risks sacrificing years of brand loyalty by coining a new name.
NBC, which is in the process of being sold to Comcast, and Microsoft have been conducting research about potential new names for the last few months. ?Consensus in this case is a tall order,? Mr. Tillinghast wrote in one of the memos.
A board meeting that had been scheduled for the end of October to talk about the change was delayed until mid-November.
One of the new names under consideration is NBCNews.com ? something that NBC would seem to favor ? but the companies are testing entirely new names, as well, the memos show. The question seems to be: Should they go with a trusted and recognized name like NBCNews.com or try to build a fresh new brand?
In a statement Wednesday, Mr. Tillinghast said, ?We have an enviable portfolio of news brands and routinely have strategic conversations about how to maximize them.?
(The Times and msnbc.com have an agreement to share some articles and video.)
The change is being contemplated because MSNBC and msnbc.com are on somewhat divergent paths.
They were founded together in 1996 by NBC and Microsoft, with the cable television channel based in New Jersey and the Web site based at Microsoft?s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. In 2005, NBC bought Microsoft?s stake in the cable channel, but the two parents remained together for the Web site, which is a crucial provider of content to Microsoft?s MSN.com portal.
Employees at msnbc.com work closely with employees of MSNBC and NBC News. But the Web site has its own reporters, editors, producers, photographers and advertising sales staff. And those employees have at times felt as if they were stuck in the shadow of the cable channel.
In recent years, MSNBC?s shift to the left, with hosts like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, has further complicated the TV/Web relationship. This week, the channel introduced a splashy ad campaign and a new tagline, ?Lean Forward? that reinforces the opinionated nature of the programming.
The cable channel has been looking for a way to distinguish itself online; the channel?s president, Phil Griffin, briefly discussed the acquisition of The Huffington Post earlier this year, but was rebuffed by its co-founders, as first reported by New York magazine this week.
Meanwhile, msnbc.com has remained what Mr. Tillinghast called in Tuesday?s memo an ?impartial news product.?
He wrote that the ?Lean Forward? announcement ?only exacerbates the brand misalignment problem? that he had been trying to solve. He envisions a ?brand family,? with the to-be-renamed Web site positioned at the head of the table, joined by two existing spinoff sites, one for NBC?s ?Today? show and one devoted to breaking news alerts. But first msnbc.com?s family has to agree on a new name.
Richard Krajicek (NED)
She has a mom. 
A fairly comprehensive birthday day, weighted in favour of the South Americans and led by the formerly missing in action Juan Martin del Potro.
The first match will probably tell us more.
Mark Woodforde (AUS), 45
In 2008, Mantilla was hired by Tennis Australia to be a full-time consultant to help its highly-regarded prospects master the vagaries of clay-court tennis. He was to be based in Barcelona.
Gretzky thrilled the hockey world by tying Marcel Dionne for the scoring title as a teenager "in his first NHL season", leading the (so-called) expansionist Oilers to a shock playoff berth. His reaction to losing the Art Ross on a technicality - the Little Beaver had 2 more goals, the Kid 2 more assists - was both classy and classic: "My dad always taught me an assist is as good as a goal." The youngest player in the league was voted its MVP, as Wayne copped his first of an astonishing eight consecutive Hart Trophies.
