Neil Macfarquhar’s scientific contributions

UNITED NATIONS — The fact that Haiti was mired in dysfunction well before the earthquake, despite having received more than $5 billion in aid over about two decades, is fueling a contentious debate on whether a grand reconstruction plan can finally fix the country or would be doomed to repeat previous failures. One side argues that Haiti should be temporarily taken over by an international organization, which would govern it and oversee its rebuilding. On the other extreme, minimalists fervently believe that years of failed, foreign-imposed aid projects underscore that this time Haitians need to develop and implement their own plans. And in between are those who argue for a joint Haitian-international reconstruction agency to administer a kind of Marshall Plan. Such is the scale of day-to-day demands now, however, that even medium-term reconstruction efforts seem distant. Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist, proposed that boatloads of aid include at least one ship crammed with fertilizer to jump-start the planting season in March — the country desperately needs to grow more food and to encourage those fleeing the devastated capital to farm. But there were no immediate takers in the official aid flotilla, leaving Mr. Sachs lobbying private shippers. Indeed, the international aid effort is failing to meet the earliest goals pronounced by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. Mr. Ban said repeatedly that by the end of last week, the World Food Program and related organizations would have delivered food to one million Haitians; just half of the two million he said needed help. On Friday, the number fed stood at 600,000, well short of his goal. "It has been slower than anyone hoped or expected," said John Holmes, the United Nations humanitarian aid coordinator. Mr. Ban also promoted a cash-for-work program to help bring stability, with jobs clearing the rubble at$4 to $5 per day. The organization's$575 million emergency appeal for Haiti included $41 million for that program, but by Friday the jobs program had attracted only$4.3 million in donations and had employed more than 12,000 Haitians out of an anticipated 200,000, the United Nations Development Program said. The United Nations is supposed to excel as ringmaster during international disasters, but rebuilding Haiti may test its limits. Mr. Ban had appointed Bill Clinton as his special envoy to Haiti months before the earthquake, and the former president met some success in attracting outside investors with his "I honeymooned in Haiti and you should too" mantra. This year, Haiti had anticipated its first economic growth in years, projected to be 4 percent. But there were still hurdles, not least that the country lacked basics like dependable electric and water supplies. A donor conference last April attracted $402 million in pledges but only$61 million in actual payments, according to the United Nations. Mr. Ban is expected to announce any day that Mr. Clinton will take on an expanded role in coordinating United Nations efforts to resurrect Haiti. Indeed, the former president's high profile has fueled suggestions that he become the Haiti reconstruction czar.

With violence across the Middle East fixing Islam smack at the center of the American political debate, an organization partly financed by donors closely identified with wealthy Persian Gulf governments has emerged as the most vocal advocate for American Muslims — and an object of wide suspicion. The group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, defines its mission as spreading the understanding of Islam and protecting civil liberties. Its officers appear frequently on television and are often quoted in newspapers, and its director has met with President Bush. Some 500,000 people receive the group's daily e-mail newsletter. Yet a debate rages behind the scenes in Washington about the group, commonly known as CAIR, its financing and its motives. A small band of critics have made a determined but unsuccessful effort to link it to Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department, and have gone so far as calling the group an American front for the two. In the latest confrontation yesterday, CAIR held a panel discussion on Islam and the West in a Capitol meeting room despite demands by House Republicans that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, not allow the event. The Republicans called its members "terrorist apologists." Caley Gray, a spokesman for Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., a New Jersey Democrat who helped book the room, rejected that label in a phone interview and said CAIR held similar meetings when Congress was controlled by Republicans. Still, Mr. Gray called back to specify that Mr. Pascrell did not endorse all of the group's positions. Last fall, Senator Barbara Boxer of California issued a routine Certificate of Appreciation to the organization representative in Sacramento, but she quickly revoked it when critics assailed her on the Web under headlines like "Senators for Terror." "There are things there I don't want to be associated with," Ms. Boxer said later of the revocation, explaining that her California office had not vetted the group sufficiently. CAIR and its supporters say its accusers are a small band of people who hate Muslims and deal in half-truths. Ms. Boxer's decision to revoke the Sacramento commendation provoked an outcry from organizations that vouch for the group's advocacy, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the California Council of Churches. "They have been a leading organization that has advocated for civil rights and civil liberties in the face of fear and intolerance, in the face of religious and ethnic profiling," said Maya Harris, the executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Northern California. Government officials in Washington said they were not aware of any criminal investigation of the group. More than one described the standards used by critics to link CAIR to terrorism as akin to McCarthyism, essentially guilt by association. "Of all the groups, there is probably more suspicion about CAIR, but when you ask people for cold hard facts, you get blank stares," said Michael Rolince, a retired F.B.I. official who directed counterterrorism in the Washington field office from 2002 to 2005. Outreach to all Muslims via groups they support is an important aspect of ensuring that extremists cannot get a foothold here as they have in Europe, Mr. Rolince said. The cloud kicked up by the constant scrutiny is such that spokesmen at several federal agencies refused to comment about the group and some spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 24 — During Friday prayers at San Francisco's largest downtown mosque, Sevim Kalyoncu, a young Turkish-American writer, used to resent that the imam never addressed the women, as if his message was not intended for them. But the sermons underwent a sudden change when the Islamic Society of San Francisco took the controversial step of tearing down the barrier separating male and female worshippers. "He was always addressing the brothers during the Friday sermon," Ms. Kalyoncu said. "Now we hear 'brothers and sisters' because he can see us. Before, I felt very distant, but now it seems that women are part of the group. It's a first step." Even after the slapdash, 8-foot wall across the back of the Darussalam mosque was demolished as part of a renovation last fall, however, the 400-member congregation remained divided. After the demolition, a small knot of veiled women marched in brandishing a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read "We Want the Wall." Several men who pray at the mosque — on the third floor of an old theater in a particularly sleazy stretch of the city's Tenderloin district — are still grumbling, and some of them even decamped for a rival mosque. But the wall stayed down. The norm in the United States and Canada — not to mention in the larger Muslim world — is to separate the women, if not bar them entirely. A small if determined band of North American Muslims, mostly younger women, have been challenging the practice, however, labeling the separation of men and women imported cultural baggage rather than a fulfillment of a religious commandment. They argue that while Muslims brag that Islam grants more rights to women than other religions do, the opposite is true.

DEARBORN, Mich. — Twice recently, vandals have shattered windows at three mosques and a dozen businesses popular among Shiite Muslims along Warren Avenue, the spine of the Arab community here. Although the police have arrested no one, most in Dearborn's Iraqi Shiite community blame the Sunni Muslims. "The Shiites were very happy that they killed Saddam, but the Sunnis were in tears," Aqeel Al-Tamimi, 34, an immigrant Iraqi truck driver and a Shiite, said as he ate roasted chicken and flatbread at Al-Akashi restaurant, one of the establishments damaged over the city line in Detroit. "These people look at us like we sold our country to America." Escalating tensions between Sunnis and Shiites across the Middle East are rippling through some American Muslim communities, and have been blamed for events including vandalism and student confrontations. Political splits between those for and against the American invasion of Iraq fuel some of the animosity, but it is also a fight among Muslims about who represents Islam. Long before the vandalism in Dearborn and Detroit, feuds had been simmering on some college campuses. Some Shiite students said they had faced repeated discrimination, like being formally barred by the Sunni-dominated Muslim Student Association from leading prayers. At numerous universities, Shiite students have broken away from the association, which has dozens of chapters nationwide, to form their own groups. "A microcosm of what is happening in Iraq happened in New Jersey because people couldn't put aside their differences," said Sami Elmansoury, a Sunni Muslim and former vice president of the Islamic Society at Rutgers University, where there has been a sharp dispute. Though the war in Iraq is one crucial cause, some students and experts on sectarianism also attribute the fissure to the significant growth in the Muslim American population over the past few decades. Before, most major cities had only one mosque and everyone was forced to get along. Now, some Muslim communities are so large that the majority Sunnis and minority Shiites maintain their own mosques, schools and social clubs. Many Muslim students first meet someone from the other branch of their faith at college. The Shiites constitute some 15 percent of the world's more than 1.3 billion Muslims, and are believed to be proportionally represented among America's estimated six million Muslims. Sectarian tensions mushroomed during the current Muslim month of Muharram. The first 10 days ended on Tuesday with Ashura, the day when Shiites commemorate the death of Hussein, who was the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad and who was killed during the bloody seventh-century disputes over who would rule the faithful, a schism that gave birth to the Sunni and Shiite factions. The Shiites and the Sunnis part company over who has the right to rule and interpret scripture. Shiites hold that only descendants of Mohammad can be infallible and hence should rule. Sunnis allow a broader group, as long as there is consensus among religious scholars. Many Shiites mark Ashura with mourning processions that include self-flagellation or rhythmic chest beating, echoing the suffering of the seventh-century Hussein. As several thousand Shiites marched up Park Avenue in Manhattan on Jan. 28 to mark Ashura, the march's organizers handed out a flier describing his killing as "the first major terrorist act." Sunnis often decry Ashura marches as a barbaric, infidel practice.

CAIRO — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi sounded a resonant warning, exhorting his dwindling supporters toward civil war. "At the appropriate time, we will open the arms depots so all Libyans and tribes will be armed," he shouted into a handheld microphone at dusk Friday, "so that Libya turns red with fire!" That is indeed the fear of those watching the carnage in Libya, not least because Colonel Qaddafi spent the last 40 years hollowing out every single institution that might challenge his authority. Unlike neighboring Egypt and Tunisia, Libya lacks the steadying hand of a military to buttress a collapsing government. It has no Parliament, no trade unions, no political parties, no civil society, no nongovernmental agencies. Its only strong ministry is the state oil company. The fact that some experts think the next government might be built atop the oil ministry underscores the paucity of options. The worst-case scenario should the rebellion topple him, and one that concerns American counterterrorism officials, is that of Afghanistan or Somalia — a failed state where Al Qaeda or other radical groups could exploit the chaos and operate with impunity. But there are others who could step into any vacuum, including Libya's powerful tribes or a pluralist coalition of opposition forces that have secured the east of the country and are tightening their vise near the capital. Optimists hope that the opposition's resolve persists; pessimists worry that unity will last only until Colonel Qaddafi is gone, and that a bloody witch hunt will ensue afterward. "It is going to be a political vacuum," said Lisa Anderson, the president of the American University in Cairo and a Libya expert, suggesting that chances are high for a violent period of score-settling. "I don't think it is likely that people will want to put down their weapons and go back to being bureaucrats." There is a short list of Libyan institutions, but each has limits. None of the tribes enjoy national reach, and Colonel Qaddafi deliberately set one against the other, dredging up century-old rivalries even in his latest speeches.

UNITED NATIONS — With memories still fresh of food riots set off by spiking prices just two years ago, agricultural experts on Friday cast a wary eye on the steep rise in the cost of wheat prompted by a Russian export ban and the questions looming over harvests in other parts of the world because of drought or flooding. Food prices rose 5 percent globally during August, according to the United Nations, spurred mostly by the higher cost of wheat, and the first signs of unrest erupted as 10 people died in Mozambique during clashes ignited partly by a 30 percent leap in the cost of bread. "You are dealing with an unstable situation," said Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "People still remember what happened a few years ago, so it is a combination of psychology and the expectation that worse may come," he added. "There are critical months ahead." The F.A.O. has called a special session of grain experts from around the world on Sept. 24 to address the supply question. Given that the fields stretching out from the Black Sea have been the main source of a huge leap in wheat trade over the past decade, the fluctuating weather patterns and unstable harvests there will have to be addressed, he said. It is an issue not limited to Russia alone. Harvest forecasts in Germany and Canada are clouded by wet weather and flooding, while crops in Argentina will suffer from drought, as could Australia's, according to agricultural experts. The bump in prices because of the uncertainty about future supplies means the poor in some areas of the world will face higher bread prices in the coming months. Food prices are still some 30 percent below the 2008 levels, Mr. Abbassian said, when a tripling in the price of rice among other staples led to food riots in about a dozen countries and helped topple at least one government.

As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted from needy people to a web of corrupt contractors, radical Islamist militants and local United Nations staff members, according to a new Security Council report. The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times by diplomats, outlines a host of problems so grave that it recommends that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Program's Somalia operations. It suggests that the program rebuild the food distribution system — which serves at least 2.5 million people and whose aid was worth about $485 million in 2009 — from scratch to break what it describes as a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors. In addition to the diversion of food aid, regional Somali authorities are collaborating with pirates who hijack ships along the lawless coast, the report says, and Somali government ministers have auctioned off diplomatic visas for trips to Europe to the highest bidders, some of whom may have been pirates or insurgents.