Wwe SuperStars 27-5-2010

Sex and the City 2 (2010)

The first “Sex and The City” movie, which came out two years ago, qualifies as a comedy both because it is somewhat funny and because, according to a more classical definition, it ends, after some reversals and delays, with a wedding. The sequel — which should have borrowed a subtitle from another picture opening this week and called itself “Sex and the City: The Sands of Time” — begins with a wedding and never seems to end. Your watch will tell you that a shade less than two and a half hours have elapsed, but you may be shocked at just how much older you feel when the whole thing is over.

The wedding, the characters frequently remark, with the mixture of insouciant mockery and cosmopolitan self-congratulation that seems to have become the hallmark of this weary franchise, is a gay one. Stanford (Willie Garson) and Anthony (Mario Cantone) have made honest men of each other, giving the four main female characters, their male companions and the director, Michael Patrick King, a chance to wink, nod and drag out Liza Minnelli to perform “All the Single Ladies.” Her version is in no way superior to the one in “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel,” and it is somehow both the high point of “Sex and the City 2” and a grim harbinger of what is to come. The number starts out campy, affectionate and self-aware, but at some point turns desperate, grating and a little sad.

Come to think of it, the possibility of sadness, which shadowed this movie’s precursor and the long-running HBO series (if not the Candace Bushnell column in The New York Observer that is the source of it all), has been banished this time out. Happy endings, once achieved, cannot be undone. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Harry (Evan Handler) are the loving parents of two young daughters. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) has settled in Brooklyn with her husband, Steve (David Eigenberg), and son, Brady. Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is, as ever, the proudly promiscuous publicist, while Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Big (Chris Noth) dwell in a plushly feathered uptown nest. She’s still a writer, he’s still a master of Wall Street, and the real-world knocks that their professions have taken barely register outside an occasional pasted-in line of recession-conscious dialogue. (One of which is spoken by Penélope Cruz.)

Not that everything is perfect. Samantha frets about the onset of menopause, and doses herself with hormones and lotions. Miranda has a mean, sexist boss at the law firm, and Charlotte worries that her buxom young nanny (Alice Eve) may have caught her husband’s eye. She’s also stressed out by parenthood.

Carrie and Big, meanwhile, endure barbed pity from other couples because of their decision to remain childless. “You mean it’s just the two of you?” a fellow guest at Stanford and Anthony’s wedding asks, incredulous. Yes, it is, and after two years the Prestons — as Mr. and Mrs. Big are more officially known — may be in something of a marital rut.

All of which could be perfectly interesting. Good movies have been made of smaller crises, and over the years all of these characters — Carrie and Big in particular — have earned and repaid our interest. At its best the series, a swift half-hour at a time, distilled and defanged the world it represented, giving HBO subscribers a fantasy picture of New York they could both aspire and relate to.

The clothes were fabulous, the social pressures and professional ambitions intense, the names aggressively dropped, but at the heart of every episode were four friends who, while they could be competitive, judgmental and mean, could also be relied upon when it really counted to be loyal and supportive. Sex was the tease, the city was the packaging, but the real selling point was always the love among those four wonderful women.

If they seem less wonderful now, it isn’t because of slackened effort or diminished charm on the part of the actresses who play them. It is that the movie itself, and perhaps the culture it stands in for, has lost interest and can’t figure out what to do with them as they tiptoe toward middle age. Samantha is the exception, but the whole point of her character is a steadfast resistance to change. So Ms. Cattrall dutifully reprises her trademark outrageousness, come-hithering guys of all ages and sponsoring a decadent girls week out in Abu Dhabi.

Is Manhattan really that over? Maybe it is for Carrie and her friends. Time does not stand still on that island, where the party girls of yesteryear are tomorrow’s Ladies Who Lunch. But rather than trying to find a place for Carrie and company on their native ground — which has shifted a little in the recessionary, politicized interval between the series’s heyday and now — “Sex and the City 2” flees into a never-never land that manages to be both an escape from contemporary reality and an off-key, out-of-touch mirror of it.

The Emirate to which the four friends repair is an oasis of gilded luxury in a world that has grown a little ambivalent about unbridled commodity fetishism. The longest segment of “Sex and the City 2” consists of a drooling, gawking deluxe tour that would not be out of place in a high-end travel magazine or a hip-hop video. Four white Maybachs greet the ladies at the airport. (The production could not obtain four white Maybachs in time for the shoot, so black versions had to be wrapped in white vinyl and delivered to Marrakesh, which stood in for Abu Dhabi.) They are led through ever more lavish rooms, oohing and ahhing at their amazing good fortune, and assuming you will do the same.

Maybe. But the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense. Over cosmos in their private bar, Charlotte and Miranda commiserate about the hardships of motherhood and then raise their glasses to moms who “don’t have help,” by which they mean paid servants. Later the climactic crisis raises the specter either of Samantha going to jail or the friends having to fly home in coach, and it’s not altogether clear which prospect they regard as more dreadful.

That might depend on the in-flight movie. This one is grueling, especially when the action moves to the Middle East. There are some gestures toward a plot — a stolen kiss, a lost passport, the appearance of a former lover (Aidan, played by John Corbett) — but remarkably little happens, even when Samantha runs into trouble with the local mores.

The attempt to be both piously respectful of a foreign culture and to stand up for sexual liberation against repressive tradition may be admirable in principle, but in practice it’s silly and strained. And the trademark quips, never as witty as they might have been, would be unlikely to make you chuckle even if your best friend said them. “Inter-friend-tion”? “Bedouin bath and beyond”? “Lawrence of my labia”?

Yes, it’s supposed to be fun. And over the years audiences have had the kind of fun that comes from easy immersion in someone else’s career, someone else’s sex life, someone else’s clothes. But “Sex and the City 2” is about someone else’s boredom, someone else’s vacation and ultimately someone else’s desire to exploit that vicarious pleasure for profit. Which isn’t much fun at all.

“Sex and the City” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has the expected, and not terribly fresh, sexual references and situations.

SEX AND THE CITY 2

Opens on Thursday nationwide.

Written and directed by Michael Patrick King, based on the television series created by Darren Star and characters from the book by Candace Bushnell; director of photography, John Thomas; edited by Michael Berenbaum; music by Aaron Zigman; production designer, Jeremy Conway; costumes by Patricia Field; produced by Mr. King, Sarah Jessica Parker, Mr. Star and John Melfi; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 27 minutes.

WITH: Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie Bradshaw), Kim Cattrall (Samantha Jones), Kristin Davis (Charlotte York-Goldenblatt), Cynthia Nixon (Miranda Hobbes), John Corbett (Aidan Shaw), Chris Noth (Mr. Big), David Eigenberg (Steve Brady), Evan Handler (Harry Goldenblatt), Jason Lewis (Smith Jerrod), Willie Garson (Stanford Blatch), Mario Cantone (Anthony Marantino), Alice Eve (nanny), and Liza Minnelli and Penélope Cruz.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/movies/27sex.html?src=me&ref=movies

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)

First the United States invaded the Middle East, and now Hollywood has swooped in to finish the job: one day after the “Sex and the City” ladies landed in the Abu Dhabi doo-doo, setting off a dust storm of critical hate, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” seems primed to raise huffy hackles with a swords-and-sandals-style spectacular in ancient Iran. Based on a gulf-war-era video game, “Prince of Persia” stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the titular warrior who, scrambling up walls and vaulting across roofs amid camels, pomegranates and whirling dervishes, helps lead the search in wartime for, Praise Bruckheimer, weapons of not-quite-mass destruction.

As an example of the new pop-cultural crusades “Prince of Persia” is at once generically insulting and relatively innocuous. Set in the sixth century, the story involves Dastan (Mr. Gyllenhaal), the adopted son of King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup), who plucked the wee boy out of the streets to raise the child alongside his royal spawn, Tus (Richard Coyle) and Garsiv (Toby Kebbell). The film, directed by Mike Newell and written by Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, pays dutiful if cursory attention to the family angle. The father imparts wise words, and the brothers clasp hands and lock gazes, but the fraternal bonds are shredded after they invade a holy city and Dastan is ensnared in a palace intrigue.

Cut and chiseled, his pumped-up pectorals flashing, Mr. Gyllenhaal offers an updated spin on the mysterious Oriental lover of cinematic yesteryear. More butch than the silent-screen god Valentino (best known for playing the Sheik, an Arab rather than a Persian heartbreaker), Mr. Gyllenhaal instead follows — and runs and leaps — in the robustly muscular and acrobatic tradition of Douglas Fairbanks, the silent-film star whose Middle Eastern exploits were aggressively masculine. Granted, the resurrection of a sexpot Middle Eastern hero (even one played by a non-Persian actor) might not seem like progress. But given the strained relations between the United States and Iran, it’s a representation worth noting, particularly since Dastan’s worth is finally measured by his more peaceable actions.

This topical hook doesn’t sink very deep, admittedly; like a lot of action flicks, “Prince of Persia” exploits the headlines for familiar genre high jinks. Dastan hooks up with a pouty princess (an unfortunate Gemma Arterton) and engages in some funny business with a shady wise-cracking sheik (Alfred Molina, fortunately). Ben Kingsley shows up as Basil Rathbone, or rather Nizam, the king’s silky, suspicious brother. Shot in Morocco and in Pinewood Studios in Britain, the film is crammed with swirling sand, milling crowds, computer-generated cities and assorted narrative bits and pieces, some borrowed from the studio playbook (everyone speaks in a British accent, even, alas, Mr. Gyllenhaal), others recycled from the video game series by Jordan Mechner, who has a story credit.

The movie’s video game roots are most evident in the mechanized feel of many of the whiplash camera movements, which sharply zig and zag as if created by algorithms. Considering that he made the move from the art house to the blockbuster a few years ago with “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” Mr. Newell surely knew what he was getting himself into when he signed on with the producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Save for Michael Bay, who parted company with Mr. Bruckheimer a while ago, no director ever gets to put his own fingerprints on a Bruckheimer production. As usual, the talent in “Prince of Persia” is generally top notch — from the cinematographer John Seale to the parkour expert David Belle — but the ingredients have been masticated so heavily the results are mush.

For the most part this is perfectly painless mush. The movie is irrepressibly silly — what were you expecting? — but a few hours of Mr. Gyllenhaal jumping around in leather and fluttering his long lashes has its dumb-fun appeal, as does the sight of Mr. Molina planting a kiss on an ostrich in a big-screen spectacle that’s as much indebted to newfangled technologies as to old-fashioned Hollywood narrative strategies. If nothing else, it’s entertaining to think about how this mash-up of ancient Persian heroics and headline news might sit with the Iranian powers that be. In March 2009 a spokesman for the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, demanded an apology from Hollywood for “insults and accusations against the Iranian nation” over the last 30 years. Clearly, they had no idea they were about to be Bruckheimer-ed.

“Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Squeaky-clean carnage.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Opens on Friday nationwide. Directed by Mike Newell; written by Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, based on a screen story and the video game series created by Jordan Mechner; director of photography, John Seale; edited by Michael Kahn, Mick Audsley and Martin Walsh; music by Harry Gregson- Williams; production designer, Wolf Kroeger; costumes by Penny Rose; produced by Jerry Bruckheimer; released by Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes.

WITH: Jake Gyllenhaal (Dastan), Gemma Arterton (Tamina), Ben Kingsley (Nizam), Alfred Molina (Sheik Amar), Steve Toussaint (Seso), Toby Kebbell (Garsiv), Richard Coyle (Tus), Ronald Pickup (King Sharaman) and Reece Ritchie (Bis).

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/movies/28prince.html?src=me&ref=movies

U.N. Official Set to Ask U.S. to End C.I.A. Drone Strikes

WASHINGTON — A senior United Nations official is expected to call on the United States next week to stop Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes against people suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda, complicating the Obama administration’s growing reliance on that tactic in Pakistan.

Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said Thursday that he would deliver a report on June 3 to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva declaring that the “life and death power” of drones should be entrusted to regular armed forces, not intelligence agencies. He contrasted how the military and the C.I.A. responded to allegations that strikes had killed civilians by mistake.

“With the Defense Department you’ve got maybe not perfect but quite abundant accountability as demonstrated by what happens when a bombing goes wrong in Afghanistan,” he said in an interview. “The whole process that follows is very open. Whereas if the C.I.A. is doing it, by definition they are not going to answer questions, not provide any information, and not do any follow-up that we know about.”

Mr. Alston’s views are not legally binding, and his report will not assert that the operation of combat drones by nonmilitary personnel is a war crime, he said. But the mounting international concern over drones comes as the Obama administration legal team has been quietly struggling over how to justify such counterterrorism efforts while obeying the laws of war.

In recent months, top lawyers for the State Department and the Defense Department have tried to square the idea that the C.I.A.’s drone program is lawful with the United States’ efforts to prosecute Guantánamo Bay detainees accused of killing American soldiers in combat, according to interviews and a review of military documents.

Under the laws of war, soldiers in traditional armies cannot be prosecuted and punished for killing enemy forces in battle. The United States has argued that because Qaeda fighters do not obey the requirements laid out in the Geneva Conventions — like wearing uniforms — they are not “privileged combatants” entitled to such battlefield immunity. But C.I.A. drone operators also wear no uniforms.

Paula Weiss, a C.I.A. spokeswoman, called into question the notion that the agency lacked accountability, noting that it was overseen by the White House and Congress. “While we don’t discuss or confirm specific activities, this agency’s operations take place in a framework of both law and government oversight,” Ms. Weiss said. “It would be wrong to suggest the C.I.A. is not accountable.”

Still, the Obama administration legal team confronted the issue as the Pentagon prepared to restart military commission trials at Guantánamo Bay. The commissions began with pretrial hearings in the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian detainee accused of killing an Army sergeant during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002, when Mr. Khadr was 15.

The Pentagon delayed issuing a 281-page manual laying out commission rules until the eve of the hearing. The reason, officials say, is that government lawyers had been scrambling to rewrite a section about murder because it has implications for the C.I.A. drone program.

An earlier version of the manual, issued in 2007 by the Bush administration, defined the charge of “murder in violation of the laws of war” as a killing by someone who did not meet “the requirements for lawful combatancy” — like being part of a regular army or otherwise wearing a uniform. Similar language was incorporated into a draft of the new manual.

But as the Khadr hearing approached, Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, pointed out that such a definition could be construed as a concession by the United States that C.I.A. drone operators were war criminals. Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department general counsel, and his staff ultimately agreed with that concern. They redrafted the manual so that murder by an unprivileged combatant would instead be treated like espionage — an offense under domestic law not considered a war crime.

“An accused may be convicted,” the final manual states, if he “engaged in conduct traditionally triable by military commission (e.g., spying; murder committed while the accused did not meet the requirements of privileged belligerency) even if such conduct does not violate the international law of war.”

Under that reformulation, the C.I.A. drone operators — who reportedly fly the aircraft from agency headquarters in Langley, Va. — might theoretically be subject to prosecution in a Pakistani courtroom. But regardless, the United States can argue to allies that it is not violating the laws of war.

Mr. Alston, the United Nations official, said he agreed with the Obama legal team that “it is not per se illegal” under the laws of war for C.I.A. operatives to fire drone missiles “because anyone can stand up and start to act as a belligerent.” Still, he emphasized, they would not be entitled to battlefield immunity like soldiers.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a Notre Dame University law professor who has criticized the use of drones away from combat zones, also agreed with the Obama administration’s legal theory in this case. She said it could provide a “small modicum” of protection for C.I.A. operatives, noting that Germany had a statute allowing it to prosecute violations of the Geneva Conventions, but it does not enforce domestic Pakistani laws against murder.

In March, Mr. Koh delivered a speech in which he argued that the drone program was lawful because of the armed conflict with Al Qaeda and the principle of self-defense. He did not address several other murky legal issues, like whether Pakistani officials had secretly consented to the strikes. Mr. Alston, who is a New York University law professor, said his report would analyze such questions in detail, which may increase pressure on the United States to discuss them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/world/asia/28drones.html?ref=global-home

Obama Offers Regret Mixed With Resolve

WASHINGTON — President Obama uttered three words on Thursday that many of his 43 predecessors twisted themselves into knots trying with varying degrees of success to avoid: “I was wrong.”

He strode into the East Room to mount a robust defense of his handling of the largest oil spill in American history, reassuring the nation that he was in charge and would do “whatever is necessary” to stop and clean up the BP leak in the Gulf of Mexico. But by the time he walked out an hour later, he had balanced that with a fairly unusual presidential self-critique.

He was wrong, he said, to assume that oil companies were prepared for the worst as he tried to expand offshore drilling. His team did not move with “sufficient urgency” to reform regulation of the industry. In dealing with BP, his administration “should have pushed them sooner” to provide images of the leak, and “it took too long for us” to measure the size of the spill.

“In case you’re wondering who’s responsible, I take responsibility,” Mr. Obama said as he concluded the news conference. “It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen right away or the way I’d like it to happen. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to make mistakes. But there shouldn’t be any confusion here. The federal government is fully engaged, and I’m fully engaged.”

The mix of resolve and regret served to erect a political berm that advisers hope may contain the damage from a five-week-old crisis that has challenged Mr. Obama’s presidency. Amid deep public frustration and criticism from both sides of the political aisle, the president sought to assert leadership in response to a slow-motion disaster emanating from a mile beneath the sea.

But critics were not mollified, and Republicans kept up their efforts to equate Mr. Obama’s problems in the gulf with President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A Web video posted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee spliced Mr. Obama’s own “never again” words about Katrina together with liberal commentators demanding that he do something about the oil spill.

“And he just looks like he is not involved in this,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist and television pundit, said from Louisiana in the video. “Man, you got to get down here and take control of this and put somebody in charge of this thing and get this thing moving. We’re about to die down here.”

Mr. Obama brushed off the Katrina comparisons, arguing that the government has made “the largest effort of its kind in U.S. history” and was in charge of BP’s response. “Those who think we were either slow in our response or lacked urgency don’t know the facts,” he said. “This has been our highest priority since this crisis occurred.”

Indeed, he said, he too is “angry and frustrated” about the spill, and thinks about it as he wakes up in the morning and as he goes to sleep at night. As he shaved on Thursday morning, he said, his 11-year-old daughter, Malia, popped into the bathroom. “Did you plug the hole yet?” she asked.

Still, there were uncomfortable echoes of Katrina. Just as Mr. Bush cast aside Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mr. Obama addressed reporters just hours after S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, his director of the Minerals Management Service, resigned under pressure.

Just as Mr. Bush was criticized for being on vacation in Texas when Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Mr. Obama has been criticized for golfing, fund-raising and, on Thursday night, heading to Chicago for a holiday weekend while oil laps up in the marshes and beaches of Louisiana.

Mr. Obama will try to defuse that by interrupting his Chicago homecoming on Friday for his second day trip to Louisiana. And he pointed a finger at the Bush administration for allowing the Minerals Management Service to get too close to the oil industry, citing an inspector general’s report on activity before 2007 “that can only be described as appalling.”

But the president’s concessions of missteps were striking. Admitting fault, after all, is not a common presidential habit, and happens only under great duress. The passive voice has been a favorite technique. President George Bush said “mistakes were made” during Iran-contra. President Bill Clinton said “mistakes were made” during campaign finance scandals. And President George W. Bush said “mistakes were made” during the firing of federal prosecutors.

When the younger Mr. Bush accepted responsibility for the response to Katrina, he did so by saying that the “results are not acceptable” and vowed “to address the problems.” Within hours, he modified his assessment by saying he actually was “satisfied with the response” if not “with all the results.”

Mr. Obama has shown a willingness to admit mistakes before. When his first nominee for secretary of health and human services, Tom Daschle, withdrew because of unpaid taxes, the president said with bracing bluntness, “I screwed up.”

He chose his words more carefully on Thursday, but he ticked off a list of ways his administration had not performed adequately. At one point, he suggested the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers and touched off the leak might have been avoided had his administration cleaned up what he called the cozy and corrupt relationship between regulators and industry sooner.

“I take responsibility for that,” he said. “There wasn’t sufficient urgency in terms of the pace of how those changes needed to take place.” He added: “Obviously they weren’t happening fast enough. If they were happening fast enough, this might have been caught.”

As for his drive before the spill to expand off-shore drilling, he said he still thinks he was right and that more oil will be needed until enough alternative fuels can be developed. “Where I was wrong,” he said, “was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.”

On that, at least, he and his critics could agree.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/us/28obama.html?hp

Maoist Rebels Suspected as Indian Train Derails

NEW DELHI — At least 65 people were killed and at least 200 injured on Friday after a high-speed train derailed in eastern India and was struck by a cargo train traveling on a nearby track.

Officials in West Bengal said they believe Maoist rebels sabotaged the tracks, causing the accident. Local television news channels showed footage of broken rail track, which appeared to have a foot-long section missing. Police told reporters they found Maoist leaflets and posters at the accident site.

“It appears to be a case of sabotage where a portion of the railway track was removed,” Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said in a statement. “Whether explosives were used is not yet clear,” he said.

The railways “are a soft target,” Mamata Bannerjee, the railway minister, said. The Maoists have attacked them in the past, “and, it seems, even now,” she said.

Police believe a bomb blast caused the incident, she told television news station NDTV. Samar Ghosh, the home secretary for West Bengal, said 65 people were confirmed dead and at least 200 injured.

For more than 40 years, Maoist rebels, also known as Naxalites, have been active in the resource-rich states of eastern and central India, where they claim to represent the rights of tribal groups, and broadcast plans to overthrow the government. Attempts to put mines and factories in these areas have been thwarted by violence, and roads, schools and bridges have been attacked.

The insurgency has gained in strength in recent years, with the Maoist presence spreading to 20 of India’s 28 states, and fatal strikes against police and government escalating.

On May 17, a passenger bus carrying civilians and police rolled over a homemade bomb in the state of Chhattisgarh, killing more than 20 people. In April, more than 70 military officers were ambushed by Maoists and killed in the same area.

Early Friday morning, thirteen cars of the Mumbai-bound passenger train the Gyaneshwari Express derailed in a rural area about 90 miles south of Kolkata. Several cars which spilled onto a nearby track were hit by a cargo train that passed minutes later. Many passengers were trapped for hours in overturned railway cars.

Railways in the area are on alert, Ms. Bannerjee said, after Maoists declared the last four days in May “black days,” when they are expected to commit violent acts.

India’s federal government says containing the Maoist presence is a priority. “Naxalism remains the biggest internal security challenge facing our country,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Monday. “The chief ministers understand that it is imperative to control Naxalism for the country’s growth,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/world/asia/29india.html?hp

BP Resumes Work to Plug Oil Leak After Facing Setback

HOUSTON — BP on Thursday night restarted its most ambitious effort yet to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to revive hopes that it might cap the well with a “top kill” technique that involved pumping heavy drilling liquids to counteract the pressure of the gushing oil.

BP officials, who along with government officials created the impression early in the day that the strategy was working, disclosed later that they had stopped pumping the night before when engineers saw that too much of the drilling fluid was escaping along with the oil.

It was the latest setback in the effort to shut off the leaking oil, which federal officials said was pouring into the gulf at a far higher rate than original estimates suggested.

If the new estimates are accurate, the spill would be far bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 and the worst in United States history.

President Obama, who planned to visit the gulf on Friday, ordered a suspension of virtually all current and new offshore oil drilling activity pending a comprehensive safety review, acknowledging that oversight until now had been seriously deficient.

Mr. Obama said at a news conference in Washington that he was angry and frustrated about the catastrophe, and he shouldered much of the responsibility for the continuing crisis.

“Those who think we were either slow on the response or lacked urgency, don’t know the facts,” Mr. Obama said. “This has been our highest priority.”

But he also blamed BP, which owns the stricken well, and the Bush administration, which he said had fostered a “cozy and sometimes corrupt” relationship between oil companies and regulators at the Minerals Management Service.

The chief of that agency for the past 11 months, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, resigned on Thursday, less than a week after her boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, announced a broad restructuring of the office.

“I’m hopeful that the reforms that the secretary and the administration are undertaking will resolve the flaws in the current system that I inherited,” she said in a statement.

Mr. Obama plans on Friday to inspect the efforts in Louisiana to stop the leak and clean up after it, his second trip to the region since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. He will also visit with people affected by the spreading slick that has washed ashore over scores of miles of beaches and wetlands.

Even as Mr. Obama acknowledged that his efforts to improve regulation of offshore drilling had fallen short, he said that oil and gas from beneath the gulf, now about 30 percent of total domestic production, would be a part of the nation’s energy supply for years to come.

“It has to be part of an overall energy strategy,” Mr. Obama said. “I mean, we’re still years off and some technological breakthroughs away from being able to operate on purely a clean-energy grid. During that time, we’re going to be using oil. And to the extent that we’re using oil, it makes sense for us to develop our oil and natural gas resources here in the United States and not simply rely on imports.”

In the top kill maneuver, a 30,000-horsepower engine aboard a ship injected heavy drill liquids through two narrow flow lines into the stack of pipes and other equipment above the well to push the escaping oil and gas back down below the sea floor.

As hour after hour passed after the top kill began early Wednesday afternoon, technicians along with millions of television and Internet viewers watched live video images showing that the dark oil escaping into the gulf waters was giving way to a mud-colored plume.

That seemed to be an indication that the heavy liquids known as “drilling mud” were filling the chambers of the blowout preventer, replacing the escaping oil.

In the morning, federal officials expressed optimism that all was going well. “The top kill procedure is going as planned, and it is moving along as everyone had hoped,” Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the leader of the government effort, told CNN.

And Robert Dudley, BP’s managing director, said on the “Today” program on NBC that the top kill “was moving the way we want it to.”

It was not until late afternoon that BP acknowledged that the operation was not succeeding and that pumping had halted at 11 p.m. Wednesday.

After the resumption, Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, struggled to offer guidance on whether the latest effort was likely to succeed.

“It’s quite a roller-coaster,” Mr. Suttles said. “It’s difficult to be optimistic or pessimistic. We have not stopped the flow.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/us/28spill.html?hp

10 victims of air crash ‘had fake passports

DUBAI // Ten passengers on the ill-fated Air India Express flight from Dubai were using fraudulent passports, it was revealed last night.

Police in Mangalore in southern India, where the plane crashed last Saturday killing 158 passengers and crew, have now launched an investigation into every travel document used on the flight.

India’s ambassador to the UAE, MK Lokesh, said 10 passports had been “tampered with”. Irregularities included false addresses and photos that did not match the user.

The investigation was initiated when a Dubai resident registered a complaint with the Indian consulate after his passport number and other personal details, including his address, were listed as belonging to one of the crash victims. Shanavas Mammed Koya, 27, said: “It is not a small issue. I had to lodge the complaint to make my side clear. I still do not know how this will affect me and my family.”

Mr Koya said he raised the alarm when relatives and friends began calling to ask about him. “All my friends here got calls from my relatives in India worried that I had died. Fortunately, I had spoken to my wife in the morning, before the news of the crash emerged, so she knew I was all right,” he said.

He said he checked with Air India Express and the travel agency that booked tickets for the crash victim using his passport number, identified as Abdul Samad. The agency said there might have been a clerical error and the airline insisted that no one else had travelled on his passport number.

Gopal Hosur, the inspector general of Western Ring police based in Mangalore, said: “We are trying to acquire the passport numbers from Air India’s flight manifest. The details of the passports are what the investigation will be based upon. We are going to look into the genuineness of each and every passport.

“The investigation will seek to find out the racket behind forged and fake passports. We are looking into two towns in particular, Kasargod and Kannur.”

Cases of forged passports have been reported before from the Kasargod district of Kerala, a problem that Indian immigration authorities have been looking into closely.

Valayar Ravi, the Minister of Overseas Indian Affairs, who is on an official visit to the UAE, said passport fraud was a serious issue that had been encountered before in the region.

“We have seen cases of people pasting their pictures in other’s passports. This is something that the Kerala government must to look into in detail,” he said.

UAE authorities expressed doubt that forged documents had been used to board the aircraft.

“We request the Indian authorities to provide us with the passport to conduct forensic tests to determine if it was forged,” said Major General Mohammed al Merri, head of Dubai General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs.

About a dozen people who died in the crash have not yet been identified. Officials warned that the process would be difficult because of the condition of the remains.

“Because of the charred bodies, identification has been difficult. There have been cases where someone has claimed a body that is not theirs, but that is not because of the passports,” Mr Hosur said. “We are doing DNA analysis on the bodies to determine the right families.”

That, combined with the allegations of passport fraud, have further complicated compensation claims for the families of those killed in the crash.

“This is not good news for the families. This will no doubt complicate the compensation claims,” said Sanjay Verma, the consul general of India.

In July 2008, a former Indian ambassador to the UAE urged the state of Kerala to address the “casual approach” towards citizens who used fraudulent passports to travel to the Gulf. At the time, Talmiz Ahmed called for stricter laws by the state government.

The Air India incident comes as UAE officials try to tighten passport checks at borders, saying forged documents present a wide-ranging security problem for the country. Concern has grown since fake passports were used by the suspected Mossad hit squad who assassinated the Hamas official Mahmoud al Mabhouh in Dubai in January.

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100528/NATIONAL/705279821/1133