THE RESULT THE PPV WWE Over The Limit 2010

HERE WE WILL HAVE THE RESULT THE PPV

WWE Over The Limit 2010






R-Truth vs. Ted DiBiase

WINNWER : R-TRUTH

Divas Champion Eve vs. Maryse

WINNER : EVE STILL DIVAS CHAMPION

Unified Tag Team Champions The Hart Dynasty vs. The Miz & Chris Jericho

WINNER : THE HART DYNASTY



Randy Orton vs. Edge

[
NO WINNER

Rey Mysterio vs. CM Punk
(S.E.S. Pledge vs. Hair Match)


WINNER : REY MEYSTERIO

Intercontinental Champion Drew McIntyre vs. Kofi Kingston

WINNER : KOFI KINGSTON BECOME ANEW ICC



World Heavyweight Champion Jack Swagger vs. Big Show

WINNER : BIG SHOW BECOME ANEW WORLD HEAVY WEIGHT CHAMPION

WWE Champion John Cena vs. Batista
("I Quit" Match)

WINNER : JOHN CENA STILL WWE CHAMPION

Soderling serves early marker a

Robin Soderling sent out a strong message yesterday to the rest of the French Open field that he means business in his attempt to match last year’s shock run to the final.

The big-serving Swede had shown no previous pedigree on clay before last year’s tournament, where he became the first man to beat Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros on his way to the final, where he eventually lost to Roger Federer.

The fifth seed started his bid in impressive fashion on the opening day of the French Open, convincingly saw off French player Laurent Recouderc 6-0, 6-2, 6-3 in their first-round match.

The match proved one-sided as Soderling won the first nine games and when Recouderc finally got a game on the board by winning the 10th game, he gave a mock celebration to the Court Philippe Chatrier crowd.

The canter in the French sunshine suited Soderling, who was pleased to have had things so easy.

“It’s always nice to have a quick match in the early rounds,” he said in the post-match press conference.

“I got to hit a few balls. We had a few rallies. So it was a good match.”

The 25-year-old denied that he felt under pressure to match last year’s form in Paris.

He added: “I have to start over again. But of course it’s always nice to come back to a place where you did well last year. It gives you good feelings.”

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100524/SPORT/705239832/1004

Lorenzo ready for title race

Jorge Lorenzo underlined his credentials as a serious challenger to his Yamaha teammate Valentino Rossi by racing to his second successive victory yesterday as he won the French Grand Prix.

The Spaniard extended his lead in the championship standings to nine points as he out-raced Rossi, the seven-time world champion, for the second race in a row at Le Mans.

He passed the Italian on lap 10 to take the lead and then pulled clear to triumph by almost six seconds and follow up his win in Spain earlier in the month. He put his impressive form down to new-found maturity.

“I now feel much more confident; now I can be more calm and ride better. Today was good for that,” he said in the post-race television press conference.

“I was patient, I understood that Valentino would brake so late, so I waited for one mistake from him.

“He doesn’t do many mistakes, so I just waited, and tried to exit the corners as close to him as possible. When I made it, it was easier than I expected.”

Rossi got off to a flying start from pole position, leading into the first turn ahead of the Honda of Dani Pedrosa and Lorenzo.

Lorenzo quickly moved into second and set his sights on Rossi.

Casey Stoner, who was behind the leading pair on lap two, slid out of contention at Turn Six on his Ducati, the Australian failing to complete for the second time this year.

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100524/SPORT/705239856/1004

Egyptian aid debate raises larger questions

The government of the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is crossing its fingers. If a debate currently underway in the US Congress goes in its favour, it should soon be adding a neat sum to its coffers.

After more than three decades and $50 billion in military aid to Egypt, Washington is debating whether it should establish an endowment to give Cairo $4 billion in economic aid over the next 10 years. As we reported yesterday, the outlines of the proposed endowment were leaked to the American journal Foreign Policy, making public the details of a debate launched by US lawmakers late last year.

Proponents of the proposed trust fund argue that Egypt’s historic alliance with the US demands some sort of recompense; opponents argue it is an ingratiating gesture to a brittle regime that continues to violate human rights and democratic principles. While the debate over sending additional economic largesse to Egypt winds through Congress, we are more curious about the future of the aid that is uncontested – namely, the $1.3 billion that goes to the Egyptian military each year.

Foreign military aid is frequently a controversial affair, but until recently, such aid to Egypt has largely passed unscathed through the funding pipeline. Washington has traditionally subsidised Egypt for a variety of reasons, most of all to keep peace with Israel and support US policies in the region. Given that Mr Mubarak’s government recently extended the emergency rule that has been in place since 1981, it is a difficult time, indeed, to be discussing additional economic aid. Along with regularly tranches of military aid, it will undoubtedly be seen by Mr Mubarak’s government as an endorsement. Such a blank check undermines any incentive for Cairo to change.

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100524/OPINION/705239911/1006/rss

A Gamer’s World, but a Dramatist’s Sensibility

every one in the world wait the history file prience of persia the royal film

THE producer Jerry Bruckheimer likes to say that he can make a movie from almost anything. In his long and box-office-friendly career, he has conjured movies from books (“Black Hawk Down”), from magazine articles (“Coyote Ugly” and “Top Gun”), from the real-life story of a woman who was both a welder and a stripper (“Flashdance”), from a notion tossed around the office (“Hey, let’s make a movie about submarines!” which led to “Crimson Tide”). Most famously, and most lucratively, he has made not just a movie but a franchise, “Pirates of the Caribbean,” from a theme-park ride.

By that standard, Mr. Bruckheimer’s newest picture, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” which is directed by Mike Newell and stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Ben Kingsley, doesn’t seem much of a stretch. “Prince of Persia,” which opens Friday, is based on a popular video game. You could even argue that video games are what most Bruckheimer movies yearn to be: nonstop action, without the distractions of too much plot or complicated characters. But except for the two “Lara Croft” movies, which may owe their success more to Angelina Jolie than to their Tomb Raider provenance, the track record of movies based on video games is not uplifting. “Street Fighter” was notoriously unwatchable. The official Nintendo magazine said of the film based on Super Mario Brothers: “Yes, it happened. Let us speak no more of it.”

If “Prince of Persia” does buck the odds then part of the credit should go to Jordan Mechner, who created the video game on which the movie is based and wrote the first draft of the screenplay. Mr. Mechner is also a blogger, with his own Web site (http://jordanmechner.com/), and a graphic novelist, with two books coming out at roughly the same time as the movie: “Solomon’s Thieves,” illustrated by LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland, the first volume in a projected trilogy about the Knights Templar; and “Prince of Persia: Before the Sandstorm,” illustrated by several different artists, which is a prequel to both the film and the game that inspired it.

He is a sort of a nerd’s nerd, in other words — a Renaissance man in the overlapping worlds of games and comics and now movies. He is the first video game creator to be involved in a subsequent movie version, and he pitched the project to Mr. Bruckheimer by showing him a “trailer” he had put together of clips from PlayStation 2 game footage: lots of wall-jumping and ledge-walking interspersed with shots of a scantily clad princess. Keith Boesky, a video game agent and intellectual property lawyer who helped broker the deal with Mr. Bruckheimer, said recently, “Everybody these days is talking about transmedia, but Jordan is the first guy to actually do it.”

If Mr. Mechner is a pioneer, however, he is also, by video game standards, a bit of a relic. His main claim to fame is two games — Karateka and the original Prince of Persia — that he created by himself back in the 1980s using an Apple II computer, which is practically Stone Age technology. Sitting recently in the basement of Jim Hanley’s Universe — a comic book store in Midtown Manhattan — he explained that he developed Karateka, a martial arts game, while still an undergraduate at Yale. His model was his mother’s karate teacher, whom he filmed in Super 8; using an old technique called rotoscoping, he then traced stills from the movie onto his computer.

“I wanted to create stories that the player would experience by playing instead of watching; it became a bit of an obsession,” he said in a way suggesting that, obsessionwise, he probably hasn’t changed that much. Mr. Mechner, who is 45 and divorced, with two children, is small, intense, a little awkward; his sentences sometimes consist of hesitations followed by bursts of information.

The original Prince of Persia, which came out in 1989, now seems almost touching in its primitiveness, closer to Pong than to Gungrave or Steel Battalion. It’s in only two dimensions, and the animation is jerky and sketched in. (Mr. Mechner’s model this time was his brother, whom he filmed jumping off walls near their home in Chappaqua, N.Y.) But, unusual at the time, the game had a plot of sorts, beyond the usual overcoming of obstacles that gets the player to the next screen, and in the prince it had a character Mr. Mechner hoped the player would actually care about. “I wanted a game where if you missed and fell too far, it would really hurt,” he said, adding that where characters like the Super Mario Brothers were weightless and stylized, he wanted his to be flesh and blood.

Mr. Mechner, who when he wasn’t programming took some courses in film history at Yale, compares the early days of video games to the days of silent film and says that he had to learn some of the same storytelling lessons as, say, Georges Méliès, the French special effects pioneer.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, on which the movie is based, came out in 2003 and was a reimagining of the whole franchise, which in the age of Halo and Grand Theft Auto had come to seem antique. Instead of just Mr. Mechner at his computer there was now a whole team of animators, actors, programmers. The game has a clever do-over feature, an important element in the movie plot, in which the player gets to stop time and rewind it, and what Mr. Mechner calls a “Double Indemnity”-like narration, which doesn’t become entirely clear until the very end.

Mr. Mechner’s greatest asset as a moviemaker, in fact, may be that his sensibility is as much a dramatist’s as a gamer’s. Mr. Boesky, who was also involved in the “Tomb Raider” deal, said the original movie proposal included just a single paragraph of back story, while Mr. Mechner had a 20-minute pitch of new, nongame-related narrative. It could have been a story from “1001 Nights,” with an aging king; a Shakespearean relationship among three princes, one of them adopted; an evil vizier; a beautiful, tart-tongued princess; and a magic dagger. “We’ve had other game people come to us, but Jordan had a nice, worked-out story and interesting characters,” Mr. Bruckheimer said from London, where he was promoting the film.

“What appealed to me,” he added, “was the whole arena. There haven’t been very many movies set in that period.”

The movie imagines a medieval, pre-Islamic Persia — part historical, part fantasy — and centers on the prince’s quest to expose his father’s assassin, win the trust of the suspicious princess Tamina and keep the mysterious sands of time, which control history itself, from falling into the wrong hands.

“Jordan has gobbets of really cool detail,” Mr. Newell, the director, said. “He knows all about the ancient Persian texts; he can tell you what the Silk Road was like and how it felt going from the desert to a great river valley.”

Mr. Newell, best known for “Donnie Brasco” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” is not the first person who comes to mind when you think of big-budget action directors. “I’ve worked with huge numbers of people before, but they were all schoolchildren,” he said, referring to one of his more recent projects, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” When Mr. Bruckheimer first approached him, he added, he deliberately did not mention that “Prince of Persia” was based on a video game, which was probably just as well, because Mr. Newell had never played one. “I tried to do it,” he said about the Prince of Persia game, “but I kept falling into the bloody revolving knives.” So he asked some of his assistants to play the game for him, and, he recalled, “they would spend half the time sneering at my incompetence.”

From the script Mr. Bruckheimer sent him, Mr. Newell said, it was clear that the movie wanted to be “a great three-ring circus of entertainment,” and that’s what “Prince of Persia” tries to be. The movie, especially in the trailer, does not disguise its video game origins: there are lots of scenes of a very buff Mr. Gyllenhaal running, jumping and climbing as if embarked on a rigorous parkour workout. And yet, game elements aside, “Prince of Persia” is almost a throwback, a swashbuckling yarn that owes something to the “Indiana Jones” movies and even more, perhaps, to “The Thief of Baghdad.” It’s a movie so old-fashioned that if it didn’t have a video game tie-in, no one would make it nowadays.

Mr. Newell said that he “cherry-picked” from the game, especially from its visual details. “I’d say, ‘That armor is really good, let’s talk to the costume designer,’ or ‘Those swords are really cool, let’s have some of those.’ But the notion of a characterless, emotionless, mechanistic story, which is what you almost inevitably get in a video game — that was never in the cards for me.”

In making the movie, he explained, he found himself drawing a lot on films that had meant a lot to him when he was young, especially “Ben Hur” and “Bad Day at Black Rock.”

He quickly added: “Of course, everyone’s taste is omnivorous, and that’s by no means the only kind of movie I liked. I’m the kind of guy who’s only really happy when it’s Hungarian, in black and white, with subtitles.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/movies/23persia.html?ref=movies

The Joys of Jumpology

When the photographer Philippe Halsman said, “Jump,” no one asked how high. People simply pushed off or leapt up to the extent that physical ability and personal decorum allowed. In that airborne instant Mr. Halsman clicked the shutter. He called his method jumpology.

The idea of having people jump for the camera can seem like a gimmick, but it is telling that jumpology shares a few syllables with psychology. As Halsman, who died in 1979, said, “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping, and the mask falls, so that the real person appears.”

A wonderful exhibition of nearly 50 jumps that Halsman captured on film from the late 1940s through the ’50s — sometimes on commission from Life magazine — can be seen at the Laurence Miller Gallery at 20 West 57th Street in Manhattan, through Friday. The photographs feature stars of stage, screen and television; national leaders; a prima ballerina; writers; and other creative types. Except for a few earthbound choreographers, nearly everyone cooperates.

Some images involved a bit more stage direction than others, as with Halsman’s collaboration with the Surrealist Salvador Dalí from the late 1940s. The most famous of these images, “Dalí Atomicus,” shows the madcap Dalí aloft, brush and palette in hand. He is flanked by a chair and two easels (holding Dalí canvases) — all elevated, and seemingly floating, above the floor, which heightens the sense of suspension. But the main event is the great curve of water arcing across the image, along with three flying (or flung) cats in damp, disconcerted disarray. For once Dalí’s characteristic look of exaggerated surprise makes sense.

The show also includes six failed attempts at this shot, their flaws carefully noted by Halsman. I was startled to see that in these attempts the center easel holds only an empty frame. It prompted me to look more closely at the published photograph: the image on the center easel is a quite accurate depiction of the flying cats, spiky wet fur and all. It was drawn (or painted) and seamlessly inserted after the fact; the empty frame shadow is still visible on the floor. Dalí didn’t miss much when it came to Dalíesque moments.

There is a sublime silliness to Halsman’s images that can make you laugh or at least smile regardless of how often you see them. They may offer incontrovertible proof of Schiller’s claim that “all art is dedicated to joy.” Evidently the simple act of getting off the ground requires giving in to something like joy. You have to let go.

One of the purest examples of this joy is an image of Halsman himself, holding hands with a smiling Marilyn Monroe several feet off the ground. Facing his partner, he seems ecstatic, as if he cannot believe his luck. He will hang with one of the world’s most photogenic beauties for eternity. The two are caught in nearly matching, tucked-knees positions. Only a few other subjects, including Murray Kempton and Bridget Bardot, achieved a similar sense of height and compactness. (Ms. Bardot is in a one-piece bathing suit on a rocky bluff, making you wonder how she landed.)

Some images juxtapose motion and stasis to great effect. In one, Martha Graham remains seated as Merce Cunningham flies toward her in a superb vaulting leap, almost as if aiming for her head. In another, Gisele MacKenzie does a perfect “Sound of Music” leap — arms outstretched, mouth open — next to an upright piano. Her exuberance registers not at all with the drowsy dachshund ensconced on top of the instrument.

Audrey Hepburn, shot in a hedged garden, goes aloft with legs apart in an enthusiastic cheerleader manner that seems to fit her tightly wound, perfect-girl persona. But it is surprising to find a similar pose and abandon achieved by a debonair-looking man. He turns out to be Aldous Huxley, though at first he looks like Fred Astaire.

Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Ed Sullivan, both in suits, jump with button-down aplomb and surprising verve. Sullivan’s arm is raised as if he were introducing the next act; when J. Robert Oppenheimer makes a similar gesture, it seems more symbolic, as if he were reaching for the heavens.

Old habits, it seems, die hard. The retired boxer Jack Dempsey, also in a suit, goes straight up, legs together, hands positioned as if jumping rope. Harold Lloyd seems to dive downward, as if he had finally fallen from his clock.

It is important that the subjects of Halsman’s images are famous, so we can contrast the general vibe of the images — body language, energy and facial expression — with previous impressions of the subjects, as when Grace Kelly hikes her skirt in a strikingly coquettish way. Halsman’s simple device ensures that we see something we haven’t quite seen before.

It is perhaps not coincidental that he devised jumpology in the era of Action Painting, as Abstract Expressionism was sometimes called, which sowed the seeds that would soon grow into performance art. He pushed his own form, the studio portrait, to extremes, exaggerating its basic components in ways that make us more aware of them: the trust that must exist between photographer and subject; the split-second “performance” that any still camera captures; the uncontrollable revelations of character; the way we all try to rise, as it were, to the occasion of a photograph.

All these elements are distorted, possibly parodied, but also intensified. As is our understanding of how we look at a photograph, read its parts, decipher its message and draw its energy into ourselves.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/arts/design/24halsman.html?hp

U.S. Implicates North Korean Leader in Attack

WASHINGTON — A new American intelligence analysis of a deadly torpedo attack on a South Korean warship concludes that Kim Jong-il, the ailing leader of North Korea, must have authorized the torpedo assault, according to senior American officials who cautioned that the assessment was based on their sense of the political dynamics there rather than hard evidence.

The officials said they were increasingly convinced that Mr. Kim ordered the sinking of the ship, the Cheonan, to help secure the succession of his youngest son.

“We can’t say it is established fact,” said one senior American official who was involved in the highly classified assessment, based on information collected by many of the country’s 16 intelligence agencies. “But there is very little doubt, based on what we know about the current state of the North Korean leadership and the military.”

Nonetheless, both the conclusion and the timing of the assessment could be useful to the United States as it seeks to rally support against North Korea.

On Monday, South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, who has moved cautiously since the assault, is expected to call for the United Nations Security Council to condemn the attack and is likely to terminate the few remaining trade ties between North and South that provide the North with hard currency.

But those steps have little chance of proving meaningful unless China, which hosted Mr. Kim two weeks ago, agrees to join the condemnation and refuses to make up whatever revenue North Korea loses from any trade embargoes. China, North Korea’s last true ally, has traditionally been reluctant to pressure the North too much, even when the North Koreans conducted nuclear tests, for fear of toppling the government and sending a flood of refugees across its border.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be in Beijing when the South Korean action is announced, leading a delegation of 200 American officials, including roughly half of the Obama administration’s cabinet, in an annual “strategic dialogue” with Chinese leaders on a variety of economic and political issues.

So far, at least in public, both American and South Korean leaders have been careful never to link Mr. Kim to the sinking of the Cheonan in March, which killed 46 sailors. Officials said that was in part because of the absence of hard evidence — difficult to come by in the rigidly controlled North — but also largely because both countries were trying to avoid playing into Mr. Kim’s hands by casting one of the worst attacks since the 1953 armistice as another piece of lore about the Kim family taking on South Korea and the West.

The North’s state propaganda surrounding that imagery has been used by the Kim family to sustain two generations of leaders since the end of World War II. Under the leading theory of the American intelligence agencies, Mr. Kim ordered the attack to re-establish both his control and his credentials after a debilitating stroke two years ago, and by extension reinforcing his right to name his son Kim Jong-un as his successor.

North Korea has denied any involvement in the attack, despite the presentation of forensic evidence on Thursday — including parts of the torpedo found in the wreckage — that experts from three countries said established that the torpedo was launched from a North Korean submarine.

Although the American officials who spoke about the intelligence assessment would not reveal much about what led them to conclude that Mr. Kim was directly involved, one factor appeared to be intelligence that he appeared on April 25, the anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army, with a military unit that intelligence agencies believe to have been responsible for the attack.

Mr. Kim used the event to praise the group, Unit 586, the officials said, and around that time a fourth star appears to have been given to Gen. Kim Myong-guk, who officials believe may have played a crucial role in executing the attack. General Kim is believed to have been demoted to a three-star general last year, perhaps in response to the humiliation that took place after a North Korean ship ventured into South Korean waters. The North Korean ship was all but destroyed, and some analysts believe the attack on the Cheonan, which was in South Korean waters, was planned as retribution.

“Nobody is going to take overt credit for the sinking,” said Jonathan Pollack, a professor at the Naval War College and an expert on North Korea’s military. “But Kim’s visit to this unit has all the hallmarks of congratulating them for a job well done.”

The senior American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the intelligence assessment is classified, said they ruled out the idea that General Kim or another military officer decided on his own to attack, but they did not explain how they reached that conclusion.

Victor Cha, a North Korea expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a former official in the National Security Council during President George W. Bush’s second term in office, noted that when Mr. Kim was on the rise three decades ago, “there were similar incidents designed to build his credibility” as a leader.

The Cheonan episode has posed some difficult choices for the Obama administration at a time when its national security team is preoccupied with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

In an intense series of back-channel discussions with Mr. Lee, senior administration officials, including President Obama, have praised South Korea for its calm response. Like the South Koreans, American officials fear that any military retaliation against the North could quickly escalate, leading to rocket attacks on Seoul, major casualties and a panic among investors in South Korea. At the same time, they worry that if North Korea gets through the episode without paying a price — one that American officials decline to define — it could embolden the North Korean military.

The North Korean defense commission, which rarely issues public statements, turned out a fiery-sounding warning last week, saying it would respond to any military retaliation with “all-out war.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/asia/23korea.html?ref=world

Japanese Leader Gives In to U.S. on Okinawa Base

TOKYO — Apologizing for failing to fulfill a prominent campaign promise, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama told outraged residents of Okinawa on Sunday that he has decided to relocate an American air base to the north side of the island as originally agreed with the United States.

On his second visit to Okinawa this month, Mr. Hatoyama for first time conceded what Japanese media had been reporting for weeks: that he would accept Washington’s demands and honor a 2006 agreement to move the United States Marine Air Station Futenma to the island’s less populated north.

The decision is a humiliating setback for Mr. Hatoyama on a problem that has consumed his young government and could prove its undoing. Before last year’s historic election victory, he had vowed to move the base off of Okinawa or even out of Japan. But his apparent wavering on the issue helped drive his approval ratings below 25 percent.

In the end, he seemed to decide it was more important to keep good ties with the United States, Japan’s longtime protector, at a time when his nation faces a nuclear-armed North Korea and an increasingly assertive China. Washington had consistently demanded that Tokyo honor the 2006 agreement to move Futenma and its noisy helicopters to a new facility to be built in Camp Schwab, near the northern Okinawan fishing village of Henoko.

But Mr. Hatoyama’s decision was met with anger on Okinawa, where 90,000 residents rallied last month to oppose the base. On Sunday, irate crowds greeted his arrival with bright yellow signs that said, “Anger,” and showered him with jeering cries of “Go Home!”

Mr. Hatoyama explained his decision by saying that since taking office, he had learned to appreciate the role that the Marines play as a deterrent in the region, and that Okinawa was the most strategic location for them.

“We came to the conclusion that we have to ask local residents to accept the base in an area near Henoko,” Mr. Hatoyama said during a meeting with Okinawa’s governor.

He also said he had opted for the original plan of moving the base to Camp Schwab in order to quickly get it out of its current location in the middle of the city of Ginowan, where residents have long complained of the noise and potential for accidents.

Mr. Hatoyama called it a “heartbreaking” decision, and said he extended his “heartfelt apology for causing much confusion” among islanders.

Okinawa’s governor, Hirokazu Nakaima, said after the meeting with Mr. Hatoyama, “It is regrettable that he built up our expectations over the past half year.”

The announcement was also met with a deluge of criticism back in Tokyo. Opposition leaders and even members of his own ruling coalition blasted Mr. Hatoyama for having turned Futenma’s relocation into a huge political issue, only to go back to the original agreement.

Mr. Hatoyama had promised to change the 2006 agreement during his campaign for last summer’s election, in which his Democratic Party ended a half-century of nearly unbroken rule by the Liberal Democrats. But since taking office, he failed to take a clear stand on the issue, at times saying he wanted the base off Okinawa, but at other times saying he wanted to heed Washington’s concerns.

This apparent flip-flopping fed criticism of Mr. Hatoyama as indecisive and aloof. There is growing speculation among political observers that he may be forced to step down if his Democrats fair poorly in Upper House elections scheduled for July 11.

On Okinawa, local leaders on Sunday vowed to fight the decision, raising the specter of protests that could further delay the new base’s construction and cause further political embarrassment to Mr. Hatoyama and his ruling party.

The base’s relocation was first agreed between Washington and Tokyo in 1996, after the rape of a 12-year-old schoolgirl, but was long delayed as Japan struggled to find a community to accept the Marines.

Helped by offers from Tokyo of generous public works projects, the city of Nago, where Camp Schwab is located, finally agreed to host the replacement facility. In January, however, the city’s pro-base mayor was defeated by an anti-base opponent, who rode a wave of voter expectations that the base would be moved off Okinawa.

In a meeting on Sunday with the prime minister, Nago’s new mayor, Susumu Inamine, told a grim-faced Mr. Hatoyama that he was not welcome. After the meeting, the mayor denounced Mr. Hatoyama for “betraying” his city and Okinawa. He warned that local opposition meant that “there is zero chance” of the base being built.

“I cannot hide my rage,” Mr. Inamine said. “Nago needs no new base.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/world/asia/24japan.html?ref=world

Obama Offers Strategy Based in Diplomacy

WEST POINT, N.Y. — President Obama previewed a new national security strategy rooted in diplomatic engagement and international alliances on Saturday as he essentially repudiated his predecessor’s emphasis on unilateral American power and the right to wage pre-emptive war.

Eight years after President George W. Bush came to the United States Military Academy to set a new security doctrine after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Obama used the same setting to offer a revised vision vowing no retreat against enemies while seeking “national renewal and global leadership.”

“Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system,” the president told graduating cadets. “But America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation. We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don’t.”

Mr. Obama said the United States would “be steadfast in strengthening those old alliances that have served us so well,” while also trying to “build new partnerships and shape stronger international standards and institutions.” He added: “This engagement is not an end in itself. The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times.”

The president’s address was aimed not just at 1,000 young men and women in gray and white uniforms in Michie Stadium who could soon face the perils of Afghanistan or Iraq as Army lieutenants, but also at an international audience that in some quarters grew alienated during the Bush era.

While the president never mentioned his predecessor’s name, the contrast between Mr. Bush’s address in 2002 and Mr. Obama’s in 2010 underscored the ways a wartime America has changed — and the ways it has not. This was the ninth West Point class to graduate since hijackers smashed planes into New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Most of those commissioned on Saturday were 12 at the time.

When Mr. Bush addressed their predecessors, he had toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan and was turning attention to Iraq. “If we wait for threats to fully materialize,” he said then, “we will have waited too long.” As Mr. Obama took the stage on a mild, overcast day, the American war in Iraq was winding down, but Afghanistan had flared out of control and terrorists were making a fresh effort to strike inside the United States.

“This war has changed over the last nine years, but it’s no less important than it was in those days after 9/11,” Mr. Obama said. Recalling his decision announced here six months ago to send 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan, Mr. Obama said difficult days were ahead, but added, “I have no doubt that together with our Afghan and international partners, we will succeed in Afghanistan.”

Mr. Obama all but declared victory in Iraq, praising the military, but not Mr. Bush, for turning it around. “A lesser Army might have seen its spirit broken,” he said. “But the American military is more resilient than that.”

At home, Mr. Obama attributed the failure of efforts to blow up an airplane over Detroit and a car packed with explosives in Times Square to the intense American pursuit of radical groups abroad. “These failed attacks show that pressure on networks like Al Qaeda is forcing them to rely on terrorists with less time and space to train,” he said.

And he defended his revised counterterrorism policies that critics say have weakened America’s defenses. “We should not discard our freedoms because extremists try to exploit them,” he said. “We cannot succumb to division because others try to drive us apart.”

The speech offered a glimpse of his first official national security strategy, to be released this week, including four principles: to build strength abroad by building strength at home through education, clean energy and innovation; to promote “the renewed engagement of our diplomats” and support international development; to rebuild alliances; and to promote human rights and democracy abroad.

But even as he tried to distinguish his strategy from Mr. Bush’s, Mr. Obama faced the same daunting realization and expressed it with a line Mr. Bush used repeatedly: “This is a different kind of war,” he said. “There will be no simple moment of surrender to mark the journey’s end, no armistice or banner headline.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/us/politics/23obama.html?ref=world

A 16-Year-Old Amateur Trails by 6, but Fans Treat Him Like a Champion

IRVING, Tex. — There was a deafening roar on the first hole at the T.P.C. Four Seasons resort Saturday, the ground practically quaking under Kenny Perry’s feet as he stood at the second tee box.

Perry, 49, was playing in the group in front of the 16-year-old amateur Jordan Spieth, whose gallery was gargantuan. Figuring the roar could only be for the hometown headliner, Perry asked Spieth what he had done at No. 1.

“He said, ‘I just holed it out of the bunker,’ ” Perry said. “He said it just like that, real casually.”

The winds that bent the flagsticks at the Byron Nelson Championship might as well have been a breath of fresh air heralding the arrival of Spieth, the reigning United States Junior Amateur champion, who carded a three-under-par 67 that rocketed him up the leader board.

His 54-hole total of six-under 204 left him tied for seventh, six shots behind the leader, Jason Day. Day, who fired a 67, takes a two-stroke lead over Blake Adams into the final round.

Spieth is one shot behind a group of three in fourth that included his 50-year-old playing partner, Tom Pernice Jr., and Perry, who said, “I’ve got underwear older than him.”

Pernice, the oldest player in the field, and Spieth, the youngest, made the oddest of partners. “We got a chuckle right off the bat about that,” Pernice said.

Spieth said he was not sure how to address his playing partner “because he has a daughter that’s my age and I don’t call my friends’ parents by their first name, so I was kind of going back and forth.”

He added, “It was like playing a round with your dad, a little more talented golfer than my dad, but, you know.”

Once during the round, Spieth referred to Pernice, who posted a 66, as Mr. Pernice, to which Pernice said he replied, “Tom’s fine.”

Asked what they talked about during the round, Pernice, who has daughters ages 15 and 16, said with a laugh: “It’s like with my 16-year-old daughter. What do you talk about? It’s tough.”

The talk going in was how the tournament had dimmed since the death in 2006 of Byron Nelson, its genial host. This year’s event had no Tiger Woods, no Phil Mickelson and no buzz until Spieth blew in.

“He’s really fired up the whole Dallas metro area and I think it’s wonderful,” Pernice said, adding, “It proves you don’t always need the biggest and best names to have an exciting and a great week.”

The tournament, in a nod to Spieth, announced Saturday that anybody 16 or younger would gain free admittance to the final round.

Before this week, Spieth, who has been wearing a Texas Longhorns baseball cap, considered it a given that he would attend college before turning pro. And now?

“It is hard because you realize that you can compete out here and make a lot of money out here,” he said. “I think right now if it ended right now, it would be a pretty big check. I stick by where I am right now, and I think that I need to learn and grow as a person and learn to control distractions and that kind of stuff better, and I think college is the place to do that.”

WIE IS ELIMINATED Top-ranked Jiyai Shin knocked out Michelle Wie in the Sybase Match Play Championship quarterfinals, winning by 2 and 1 on another hot, humid day at hilly Hamilton Farm in Gladstone, N.J.

Shin will play Sun Young Yoo — a 2-and-1 winner over fourth-seeded Yani Tseng — in the semifinals Sunday morning. In the other quarterfinals, 10th-seeded Angela Stanford beat Catriona Matthew, 5 and 3, and No. 30 Amy Yang edged Haeji Kang, 1-up. (AP)

WOOD LEADS IN ENGLAND Chris Wood of England shot a four-under 67 to take a two-shot lead over Robert Karlsson of Sweden, who had a course-record 62 in the third round of the European Tour’s BMW PGA Championship in Wentworth, England. Karlsson was at six-under 207, despite a quick turnaround from his home in Monaco after he thought he had missed the cut. (AP)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/sports/golf/23pga.html?ref=sports

Celtics Leave No Doubt, Overwhelming Magic

These are the determined limbs that have buzz-sawed through the playoffs and now sit one victory away from carrying the Boston Celtics to their 21st N.B.A. finals appearance.

The primed Celtics wiped the parquet floor with the Magic and swiped nearly all lingering doubt of an Orlando resurrection with a demoralizing 94-71 rout to take a 3-0 lead in the Eastern Conference finals. The Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers appear headed toward a rematch of the N.B.A. finals of 2008.

Boston has been there before and apparently remembers the route. Their purpose was never clearer than during Saturday’s rout. Through the jubilation, Celtics Coach Doc Rivers made one stern declaration:

“We haven’t scratched what we did in ’08,” he said. “All we’ve done is win some playoff games.”

They have done more than nearly anyone expected entering the postseason. The crowd jeered more at two fans in Lakers jerseys shown on the video screen than at anything the Magic did on the court. The fourth quarter started with the Celtics leading by 75-47 and the audience chanting “Beat L.A.” The chorus grew when Wallace hit two 3-pointers early in the fourth, swelling Boston’s lead to 32 points.

“There weren’t a lot of ‘my faults’ tonight,” Garnett said. “Everybody was where they were supposed to be.”

No team in N.B.A. history has rallied from a 3-0 deficit, and the Magic offered few hints Saturday that it would become the first. For the second game in the series, Boston led buzzer to buzzer with little intrigue or suspense in between. The Celtics led by double digits from 3 minutes 25 seconds of the first quarter until the final buzzer.

Probably to deflect criticism from his players, Orlando Coach Stan Van Gundy repeated that he was most disappointed in himself.

“I didn’t have our team better ready to play,” Van Gundy said. “That was the most disappointing. It starts with me. It’s my job. I’m the coach of this team. It starts with me, and I’m not happy with where I had our team tonight.”

Boston possessed an answer for every potential problem from the Magic. Meanwhile, Orlando piled its own problems with more problems.

Boston point guard Rajon Rondo guided the attack with 11 points, 12 assists and several hustle plays. The reserve forward Glen Davis had 17 points and 6 rebounds. No starter scored more than Paul Pierce’s 15 points in their spread-out attack.

Pick a player on the Magic’s roster, and Boston probably neutralized him with its maniacal defense: Jameer Nelson, Orlando’s point guard, scored 15 points but had only one assist and 4 turnovers. Vince Carter also scored 15 points, but missed 4 of his 5 3-point attempts. Dwight Howard managed only 7 points after scoring 30 in Game 2, and Garnett’s defense has made Rashard Lewis all but disappear in the series.

Game 3 followed the rhythm of the series’ first two games, with Boston staked to a large early lead and Orlando forced to hopelessly claw back the rest of the game. During most of the game, it appeared that Orlando had forgotten one of basketball’s most basic principles: the entry pass to the post. The Magic had attempt after attempt into Howard poked aside and stolen.

On Saturday, the Celtics went ahead by as many as 24 points in the first half and led at halftime, 51-34.

“They were a step ahead of us in every play,” Van Gundy said. “I thought they worked harder than we did, I thought they outcompeted us.”

Rondo put the Celtics ahead, 36-17, with two dazzling plays in the second quarter. He drew a 3-point play by pulling the ball out of the paint and, when Orlando’s Marcin Gortat relaxed, sprinting past him for a layup. On the next possession, Rondo raced Orlando’s Jason Williams for a loose ball. As Williams, who had a head start, bent to pick the ball up, Rondo dived and trapped the ball. Williams’s momentum carried him past Rondo, who laid the ball in the rim.

“I told him afterward, that was probably the play of the playoffs to me,” Garnett said. “He’s showing the world what he can do.”

Howard followed with a dunk that Boston nonchalantly shrugged off with 7 straight points from Davis. The lead ballooned to 43-19 with Orlando discombobulated on both ends of the court.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/sports/basketball/23celtics.html?ref=sports

Obama eyes 'international order'

WEST POINT, N.Y. – In a commencement address at the storied United States Military Academy on Saturday, President Barack Obama detailed a broad revision of America’s role on the international stage.

Fighting terrorism is the military’s primary challenge, Obama said, but it is not a war the United States will win in the traditional, historical sense of the word. Rather, it will be an enduring factor in the future world order.

“Our campaign to disrupt, dismantle, and to defeat al Qaeda is part of an international effort that is necessary and just, but this is a different kind of war,” Obama told the West Point class of 2010. “There will be no simple moment of surrender to mark the journey’s end – no armistice, no banner headline.”

Obama told the roughly 1,000 cadets – most of whom will become second lieutenants and go on to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan – that “a long and hard road awaits” them as they graduate at this pivotal moment in American history.

“Time and again, Americans have risen to meet, and to shape, moments of change. This is one of those moments – an era of economic transformation and individual empowerment, of ancient hatreds and new dangers, of emerging powers and global challenges,” he said. “I stand here humbled by the knowledge that many of you will soon be serving in harm’s way, and I assure you that you will go with the full support of a proud and grateful nation.”

On a stage in the legendary Michie Stadium, Obama acknowledged the poignancy of his wartime speech.

“This is the ninth consecutive commencement that has taken place at West Point with our nation at war,” he said, advocating the pursuit of “a strategy of national renewal and global leadership.”

The U.S. military will “remain the cornerstone of our national defense, and the anchor of global security,” Obama said. But the United States’ focus must go beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, “because unlike a terrorist whose goal is to destroy, our future will be defined by what we build.”

The United States, as envisioned by Obama, draws its strength from its values and stability at home and takes a lead-by-example approach to foreign policy. The president tied the United States’ military strength to its economic strength, saying “we must first recognize that our strength and influence abroad begins with the steps we take at home.”

“Because at no time in human history has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy,” he said.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37640.html

Signs of a Cover-Up After Killings in a Haitian Prisone world

LES CAYES, Haiti — When the earth shook violently on Jan. 12, the inmates in this southern city’s squalid prison clamored to be released, screaming: “Help! We’re going to die in here.”

Elsewhere in Haiti, inmates were fleeing largely undeterred. But here, where the prison itself sustained little damage, there was no exit. Instead, conditions worsened for the inmates, three-quarters of them pretrial detainees, arrested on charges as petty as loitering and locked up indefinitely alongside convicted felons.

After the earthquake, guards roughed up the noisiest inmates and consolidated them into cells so crowded their limbs tangled, former prisoners said. With aftershocks jangling nerves, the inmates slept in shifts on the ground, used buckets for toilets and plotted their escape.

The escape plan, set in motion on Jan. 19 by an attack on a guard, proved disastrous. With Haitian and United Nations police officers encircling the prison, the detainees could not get out. For hours, they rampaged, hacking up doors and burning records, until tear gas finally overwhelmed them.

In the end, after the Haitian police stormed the compound, dozens of inmates lay dead and wounded, their bodies strewn through the courtyard and crumpled inside cells. The prison smoldered, a blood-splattered mess.

Haitian officials here say they did not use lethal force but rather found lifeless bodies when they entered the prison. They attribute the killings to a prison ringleader who, they say, slaughtered his fellow inmates before hopping over the wall and disappearing.

But an investigation by The New York Times casts doubt on the official version of events and instead indicates that Haitian authorities shot unarmed prisoners and then sought to cover it up. Many of the bodies were buried in an unmarked grave.

Kesnel Jeudi, a recently released inmate, said in an interview that nobody was dead when the police rushed the prison. “They shouted: ‘Prisoners, lie down. Lie down. Lie down,’ ” he said. “When the prisoners lay down — while the prisoners were lying down — they began firing.”

Mr. Jeudi, 28, said the police shootings involved some settling of scores: “There were people they selected to kill.”

Four months later, the death toll remains unknown. But most accounts place it between 12 and 19, with up to 40 wounded. The local morgue attendant, Georges Raymond, said that he initially registered 11 dead detainees, with several more arriving later after they died of bullet wounds at the adjacent hospital.

Prison officials would not allow The Times to enter the walled prison compound, which sits directly behind the police station in the heart of town. But reporters interviewed six witnesses to the disturbance as well as five others who visited the prison either immediately after the shootings or the next day. None saw inmates firing weapons or any evidence that inmates killed inmates. Instead, witnesses said the police shot unarmed prisoners, some in the prison yard, others in their cells. Afterward, the authorities failed to notify inmates’ relatives of the deaths, buried bodies without conducting autopsies and burned the surviving prisoners’ bloodstained clothing and shoes.

Myrtil Yonel, a human rights leader here, said, “For us, we consider this to be a massacre.”

Under a bare bulb in his office beside the prison, Olritch Beaubrun, the superintendent of the antiriot police unit, scoffed at this accusation. He said that a detainee nicknamed Ti Mousson had slaughtered inmates who resisted his escape plan.

“Ti Mousson put down the 12 detainees,” Superintendent Beaubrun said. “We did not. We never fired our guns.”

This assertion is at odds with what The Times found after reviewing confidential Haitian and United Nations reports and conducting interviews with former detainees, guards, prison cooks, wardens, police officials, judicial officials and relatives of dead prisoners.

Among other things, United Nations police officers noted that day in an internal incident report that the Haitian police had used firearms. The cooks, three women trapped inside during the riot, said that the detainees did no shooting. No weapons were recovered. Ti Mousson — whose real name is Luguens Cazeau — escaped. And the authorities did not treat the prison as the crime scene of what they portrayed as a mass murder by Mr. Cazeau, who was awaiting trial on charges of stealing a satellite dish.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/americas/23haiti.html?hp