Along the U Street corridor, her honor finds all the comforts of home

The Social Committee at the U Street corridor condo building was planning a “progressive” holiday dinner party for its residents. People on the ground floor would provide cocktails and snacks; hors d’oeuvres would be on the next floor; and courses 1 to 3 would be on the next three levels up. ¶ One person, at least, couldn’t make the original date but still wanted to pitch in. ¶ “Dear Neighbors,” the new woman on the third floor wrote to the building’s e-mail group. “I hate to miss this get together, but I understand that if everyone else can make it, you can’t change it for me. I will contribute a couple bottles of wine before I leave. Warm regards, Sonia Sotomayor.” ¶ Along the U Street corridor — a Northwest Washington hotbed of urban renewal — neighbors and take-out joints are embracing a relatively new arrival: Sotomayor, the nation’s first Hispanic and third female justice on the Supreme Court. ¶ Sotomayor, who moved first to staid Cleveland Park after her 2009 appointment, now lives side by side with members of the city’s diverse class of professionals in a hip, transforming Washington neighborhood once known as the cultural hub of black D.C.

When Sotomayor, a former federal judge in New York, lived in Manhattan’s West Village, she seized on her neighborhood’s offerings, going twice a week to a bakery on Bedford Street for coffee and breadsticks and hosting friends at her apartment for Spanish or Thai take-in.

Now, Sotomayor is trying to re-create some of those rhythms in Washington.

Near her sleek U Street area condo building, where prices for units range from $350,000 to a little more than $1 million, the staff at the “green eatery” chicken place knows whom to expect when the name on the take-out order is “Sonia.” At The Greek Spot, the owner says that Sotomayor sometimes swings by on her way home from work for the $9.75 gyro platter.

Other Supreme Court justices — who live in Fairfax and Montgomery counties, Georgetown, near Adams Morgan or at the Watergate building — have been fairly involved in their neighborhoods, too.

The court’s proceedings are not televised, so they can maintain some level of anonymity when they venture out. The big exception: Clarence Thomas, who’s been a recognizable figure ever since his contentious 1991 confirmation hearings.

Then there’s Sotomayor. Last month, she took center stage, swearing in Vice President Biden during the inauguration ceremonies. Also, she’s been busy plugging her new memoir, “My Beloved World,” on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and other TV shows.

Within her condo building, Sotomayor has already engendered such affection that last month another resident e-mailed the group list to remind everyone about her upcoming “60 Minutes” appearance:

“[M]ake sure to set your DVR’s to tape or watch 60 Minutes who will have our most famous and esteemed neighbor Justice Sotomayor on, speaking about her amazing life story from the Bronx to the Supreme Court. . . . 7 PM tomorrow! CBS.”

Slav Gatchev, 39, who is an emerging-markets finance specialist, said he occasionally runs into Sotomayor in the building. One recent night, Gatchev, dressed in sweatshirt and sweatpants, dropped off items for recycling in the garage and bumped into Sotomayor on her way home from work.

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N.Korea military meet hints at nuclear test

SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un chaired a top military meeting that discussed a looming "great turn" in military capability, state media said Sunday, fuelling expectations of an imminent nuclear test.

Kim made a "historic" speech at the Central Military Commission meeting, attended by the heads of the Korean army, the powerful National Defence Commission and the strategic rocket force, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.

The meeting discussed "bringing about a great turn in bolstering military capability", said KCNA, which gave no date or details of Kim's speech.

Experts and intelligence sources say North Korea has completed preparations for a third nuclear test, which Pyongyang threatened in response to UN sanctions imposed for a long-range rocket launch it carried out in December.

Over the past week, Pyongyang has issued a series of daily warnings threatening action over the UN sanctions, including a promise Saturday of the "toughest retaliation".

A number of observers in South Korea believe the nuclear test will come before the Lunar New Year on February 10.

In his "important" speech to the military commission, Kim Jong-Un issued specific guidelines for "defending the security and sovereignty of the country", KCNA said.

It did not elaborate but said participants vowed to "thoroughly implement the military tasks set forth".

The North insists its December rocket launch was a purely scientific mission to put a satellite into orbit.

But the US and its allies, including the South, viewed it as a disguised ballistic missile test that violated UN resolutions prompted by the North's past nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.

-AFP/ac

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Suicide bomber kills guard at U.S. embassy in Turkey

ANKARA (Reuters) - A far-leftist suicide bomber killed a Turkish security guard at the U.S. embassy in Ankara on Friday, officials said, blowing open an entrance and sending debris flying through the air.

The attacker detonated explosives strapped to his body after entering an embassy gatehouse. The blast could be heard a mile away. A lower leg and other human remains lay on the street.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said the bomber was a member of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), a far-left group which is virulently anti-U.S. and anti-NATO and is listed as a terrorist organisation by Washington.

The White House said the suicide attack was an "act of terror" but that the motivation was unclear. U.S. officials said the DHKP-C were the main suspects but did not exclude other possibilities.

Islamist radicals, extreme left-wing groups, ultra-nationalists and Kurdish militants have all carried out attacks in Turkey in the past. There was no claim of responsibility.

"The suicide bomber was ripped apart and one or two citizens from the special security team passed away," said Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.

"This event shows that we need to fight together everywhere in the world against these terrorist elements," he said.

In New York, the U.N. Security Council strongly condemned the attack as a heinous act.

Turkish media reports identified the bomber as DHKP-C member Ecevit Sanli, who was involved in attacks on a police station and a military staff college in Istanbul in 1997.

KEY ALLY

Turkey is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East with common interests ranging from energy security to counter-terrorism and has been one of the leading advocates of foreign intervention to end the conflict in neighboring Syria.

Around 400 U.S. soldiers have arrived in Turkey over the past few weeks to operate Patriot anti-missile batteries meant to defend against any spillover of Syria's civil war, part of a NATO deployment due to be fully operational in the coming days.

The DHKP-C was responsible for the assassination of two U.S. military contractors in the early 1990s in protest against the first Gulf War and launched rockets at the U.S. consulate in Istanbul in 1992, according to the U.S. State Department.

Deemed a terrorist organisation by both the United States and Turkey, the DHKP-C has been blamed for suicide attacks in the past, including one in 2001 that killed two police officers and a tourist in Istanbul's central Taksim Square.

The group, formed in 1978, has carried out a series of deadly attacks on police stations in the last six months.

The attack may have come in retaliation for an operation against the DHKP-C last month in which Turkish police detained 85 people. A court subsequently remanded 38 of them in custody over links to the group.

"HUGE EXPLOSION"

U.S. Ambassador Francis Ricciardone emerged through the main gate of the embassy shortly after the explosion to address reporters, flanked by a security detail as a Turkish police helicopter hovered overhead.

"We're very sad of course that we lost one of our Turkish guards at the gate," Ricciardone said, describing the victim as a "hero" and thanking Turkish authorities for a prompt response.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland condemned the attack on the checkpoint on the perimeter of the embassy and said several U.S. and Turkish staff were injured by debris.

"The level of security protection at our facility in Ankara ensured that there were not significantly more deaths and injuries than there could have been," she told reporters.

It was the second attack on a U.S. mission in four months. On September 11, 2012, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three American personnel were killed in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The attack in Benghazi, blamed on al Qaeda-affiliated militants, sparked a political furore in Washington over accusations that U.S. missions were not adequately safeguarded.

A well-known Turkish journalist, Didem Tuncay, who was on her way in to the embassy to meet Ricciardone when the attack took place, was in a critical condition in hospital.

"It was a huge explosion. I was sitting in my shop when it happened. I saw what looked like a body part on the ground," said travel agent Kamiyar Barnos, whose shop window was shattered around 100 meters away from the blast.

CALL FOR VIGILANCE

The U.S. consulate in Istanbul warned its citizens to be vigilant and to avoid large gatherings, while the British mission in Istanbul called on British businesses to tighten security after what it called a "suspected terrorist attack".

In 2008, Turkish gunmen with suspected links to al Qaeda, opened fire on the U.S. consulate in Istanbul, killing three Turkish policemen. The gunmen died in the subsequent firefight.

The most serious bombings in Turkey occurred in November 2003, when car bombs shattered two synagogues, killing 30 people and wounding 146. Part of the HSBC Bank headquarters was destroyed and the British consulate was damaged in two more explosions that killed 32 people less than a week later. Authorities said those attacks bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda.

(Additional reporting by Daren Butler and Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul, Mohammed Arshad and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Stephen Powell and Sandra Maler)

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Pictures We Love: Best of January

Photograph by Dieu Nalio Chery, AP

The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck near Port au Prince, Haiti, in January 2010 so devastated the country that recovery efforts are still ongoing.

Professional dancer Georges Exantus, one of the many casualties of that day, was trapped in his flattened apartment for three days, according to news reports. After friends dug him out, doctors amputated his right leg below the knee. With the help of a prosthetic leg, Exantus is able to dance again. (Read about his comeback.)

Why We Love It

"This is an intimate photo, taken in the subject's most personal space as he lies asleep and vulnerable, perhaps unaware of the photographer. The dancer's prosthetic leg lies in the foreground as an unavoidable reminder of the hardships he faced in the 2010 earthquake. This image makes me want to hear more of Georges' story."—Ben Fitch, associate photo editor

"This image uses aesthetics and the beauty of suggestion to tell a story. We are not given all the details in the image, but it is enough to make us question and wonder."—Janna Dotschkal, associate photo editor

Published February 1, 2013

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Gov's Handling of Sandusky Case Under Investigation

The newly-elected attorney general of Pennsylvania is going after the state's governor, Tom Corbett, who was attorney general when child sex allegations against Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky were first brought forward.

Kathleen Kane, a Democrat who was sworn in as attorney general on Jan. 15, said that she will name a special prosecutor in the coming days to investigate Corbett's handling of the Sandusky case. Corbett is a Republican.

The investigation will look specifically at why it took the attorney general's office three years to bring criminal charges against Sandusky while he continued to have access to children.

"Attorney General Kane will appoint a special prosecutor to lead the office's internal investigation into how the Sandusky child abuse investigation was handled by the Office of the Attorney General," Kane's office said in a statement released today.

Corbett's attorney general's office was first notified of the allegations against Sandusky in 2008 when a high school student told his mother and school that Sandusky had molested him. The local district attorney passed the allegation on to the attorney general, then Corbett. Corbett convened a grand jury.

Mario Tama; Patrick Smith/Getty Images

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It wasn't until 2011 that sex abuse charges were filed against Sandusky while Corbett had since become governor. Sandusky was convicted on 45 counts of sex abuse in June 2012.

The charges sent shockwaves throughout Pennsylvania, as Penn State's president, two top officials, and legendary coach Joe Paterno all lost their jobs over the scandal.

"Why did it take 33 months to get Sandusky off the streets? Was the use of a grand jury the right decision? Why were there so few resources dedicated to the investigation? Were the best practices implemented?" the statement from Kane's office read.

"At the end of this investigation, we will know the answers to these questions and be able to tell the people of Pennsylvania the facts and give them answers that they deserve," the statement said.

Describing an interview Kane gave the New York Times, the Times said Kane suggested that Corbett did not want to upset voters or donors in the Penn State community before his gubernatorial run in 2009.

Corbett has denied those suggestions. His office did not immediately return calls for comment.

Kane's office preemptively fought back against the idea that the investigation is politically motivated. Kane, a Democrat, defeated the incumbent attorney general, Linda Kelly, a Republican in November 2011. Corbett is a Republican.

"The speculation that this is about politics is insane," a staff member in Kane's office told ABC News today. "You go anywhere in Pennsylvania and anywhere across the country and you'll find individuals asking, 'why did it take three years? Why was there a grand jury? Why make these kids talk to 30 different people about what happened?"

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VA study finds more veterans committing suicide

Every day about 22 veterans in the United States kill themselves, a rate that is about 20 percent higher than the Department of Veterans Affairs’ 2007 estimate, according to a two-year study by a VA researcher.

The VA study indicates that more than two-thirds of the veterans who commit suicide are 50 or older, suggesting that the increase in veterans’ suicides is not primarily driven by those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“There is a perception that we have a veterans’ suicide epidemic on our hands. I don’t think that is true,” said Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist with the VA who did the study. “The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of it.” The number of suicides overall in the United States increased by nearly 11 percent between 2007 and 2010, the study says.

As a result, the percentage of veterans who die by suicide has decreased slightly since 1999, even though the total number of veterans who kill themselves has gone up, the study says.

VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said his agency would continue to strengthen suicide prevention efforts. “The mental health and well-being of our courageous men and women who have served the nation is the highest priority for VA, and even one suicide is one too many,” he said in a statement.

The study follows long-standing criticism that the agency has moved far too slowly even to figure out how many veterans kill themselves. “If the VA wants to get its arms around this problem, why does it have such a small number of people working on it?” asked retired Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist. “This is a start, but it is a faint start. It is not enough.”

Bossarte said much work remains to be done to understand the data, especially concerning the suicide risk among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. They constitute a minority of an overall veteran population that skews older, but recent studies have suggested that those who served in recent conflicts are 30 percent to 200 percent more likely to commit suicide than their ­non-veteran peers.

An earlier VA estimate of 18 veterans’ suicides a day, which was disclosed during a 2008 lawsuit, has long been cited by lawmakers and the department’s critics as evidence of the agency’s failings. A federal appeals court pointed to it as evidence of the VA’s “unchecked incompetence.” The VA countered that the number, based on old and incomplete data, was not reliable.

To calculate the veterans’ suicide rate, Bossarte and his sole assistant spent more than two years, starting in October 2010, cajoling state governments to turn over death certificates for the more than 400,000 Americans who have killed themselves since 1999. Forty-two states have provided data or agreed to do so; the study is based on information from 21 that has been assembled into a database.

Bossarte said that men in their 50s — a group that includes a large percentage of the veteran population— have been especially hard-hit by the national increase in suicide. The veterans’ suicide rate is about three times the overall national rate, but about the same percentage of male veterans in their 50s kill themselves as do non-veteran men of that age, according to the VA data.

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British PM facing revolt on gay marriage

LONDON: British Prime Minister David Cameron is facing a serious revolt in his Conservative Party over plans to introduce gay marriage, newspapers reported Saturday.

Not only are backbenchers in the centre-right party, which governs in coalition with the smaller Liberal Democrats, likely to vote against the bill but grass-roots Tories are also turning away, newspapers said.

Reports suggested that between 130 and 200 of the 303 Conservative lawmakers will not back the bill when it is debated in parliament's lower House of Commons for the first time on Tuesday.

The Times said Conservative MPs told the newspaper that activists were resigning or refusing to renew their membership in large numbers in protest at the government's plans.

A ComRes poll of just over 2,000 people who voted Conservative at the 2010 general election, found that 20 percent of them agreed that they "would have considered voting Conservative at the next election but will definitely not if the coalition government legalises same-sex marriage".

The poll in The Daily Telegraph newspaper found that a further fifth of Conservative voters said they were unsure whether they would vote Tory again if the measures become law.

The survey also found that 62 percent of voters overall thought Cameron's chief motivation was trying to make the Conservatives seem "trendy and modern".

"This is a wake-up call to just how damaging an issue gay marriage is for the Conservative Party," former children's minister Tim Loughton was quoted as saying.

"Many stalwart Conservative supporters are feeling pretty bruised by this issue which came out of nowhere, didn't feature in the manifesto and is now being forced through by the government that seems to want to pick a fight with its own supporters."

He said grass-roots Conservatives were telling the leadership that it would not be a vote-winner at the 2015 general election.

"We need to sort the economy out in order to win the next election and gay marriage isn't up there," he said.

Meanwhile backbench Tory lawmaker David Burrowes said: "Conservative supporters did not expect the government to divide the party, divide the nation, divide church and state and divide marriage. And they won't easily forget it."

The prime minister's Downing Street office said Cameron would be encouraging colleagues to vote for the bill.

"It is a free vote but clearly the prime minister is in favour of the legislation," said a spokesman.

"He firmly believes that it is the right thing to do and of course he will encourage others to vote for it."

Cameron has also made clear that tax breaks would not be included in next month's budget -- a move some would see as appeasing malcontent backbenchers -- but would be introduced later in this parliament.

In plans unveiled in December, the government said it was proposing to allow same-sex couples to marry, but would explicitly ban the established Churches of England and Wales -- which are opposed -- from conducting ceremonies.

Other religious institutions can "opt in" if they wish.

Gay couples in Britain have had the right to enter into a civil partnership since 2005.

Civil partnerships offer identical rights and responsibilities to civil marriage, although campaigners point to some differences such as international recognition which applies to marriage but not partnerships.

-AFP/ac

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