Still, some officials and analysts hold out hope that Mr. Assad's departure would bring greater stability to the region. Many Lebanese, particularly from the Sunni and Christian sects who together make up a majority of the shop online 2011population, would welcome the end of Syrian intervention. "Lebanon has a democratic process for changing the balance of power," said Nadim Shehadi, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London. "Sometimes this process collapses and violence happens, but in many such cases it's something that Syria had a hand in. So the departure of Assad would be a stabilizing factor for Lebanon.""If Syria disappears from the scene in Lebanon, it will increase the risk of civil conflict," said Ghanem Nuseibah, a partner at Cornerstone Global Associates and head of Middle East risk at Political Capital. "Even politicians who are not pro-Syrian will be feeling a lot of unease about what's happening in Syria because it upsets the equilibrium and the stability that the Syrian regime has provided."If Syria's clout in Lebanon weakens, analysts say, the intricate alliances that hold rival sectarian groups together could break apart, leading to a new civil war.One possibility is that Hezbollah could grow even closer to Iran, creating new friction with other Lebanese parties and—as in the 1970s—turning Lebanon into an arena for broader regional rivalries.Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser under former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, suggested this optimistic scenario: "If at the end of the day, it might turn to be a reasonable secular democratic state, and a state that coach outlet storeneeds U.S. assistance, then this state might be a partner for a [peace] arrangement."In Lebanon as recently as January, Syria helped forge a new government after the collapse of a coalition joining Hezbollah and the pro-Western prime minister, Saad Hariri. As a result, Lebanon is now led by an alliance of Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that rules southern Lebanon and enjoys material support from both Iran and Syria.
The Giants did — for a day. Defensive tackle Chris Canty wanted to work out, and the team let him. But the next day, no doubt after some arm twisting from the league, the position changed. Their doors were closed, just like the other 32 power balanceteams. Crazy prevailed, yet again. And will look crazier the longer this dispute lasts. Already, the attention leading into this draft has been less about Cam Newton’s likelihood as the No. 1 pick, and more about the labor dispute. One of its premier events has already been overshadowed, and soon, there will be nothing to distract fans from what’s happening. If this threatens the season, there won’t be enough straitjackets in the world for all the people involved. The draft is the foundation of the league. Eliminating it would be a disaster in almost every way, a free-for-all with league officials chasing prospects onto their campuses. Players become stars before they sign their shop online 2011contracts, in no small part, because of the attention gained at the draft. Plus, fans love the draft — that’s why the league turned it into a prime-time event last year. Smith has to know that. He had his court victory. He could have scored another victory in the court of public opinion if he acknowledged that the players just want a fair deal, not the complete destruction of the current system.See if you can follow the logic here: The NFL is paying its players billions to knock people over. The stronger they are, the better they can perform this task. So when the lockout was lifted this week, the owners responded exactly the way you would expect: They locked the doors to their weight rooms. They used the excuse of “liability concerns,” but NFL weight rooms have the best equipment in the world. Wouldn’t it have been a positive gesture to let the players — their players, remember — use the dumbbells if they wanted? Especially when an alternative, as it was with the Jets, is having two players work out with Sal Alosi, the trainer the team fired last season?Item: Players Union Targets the NFL Draft The players, of course, are doing little to dispel any of the nonsense. They had their victory in court and now they’re dancing in the end zone, knowing the league can’t flag them for excessive power balancecelebration. Start with this: Lawyers for the players are attacking the annual draft in their suit against the NFL. It might be a bargaining ploy — so much of this stuff is. But in an interview with Pro Football Talk, Smith was asked directly if the draft that begins today will be the last one.
The government said its soldiers moved into the city in response to an appeal by residents to prevent violence by “radical terrorists.” Assad has said foreign-led conspirators are seeking to exploit legitimate expressions of popular demands. Protest power balanceorganizers say the demonstrators were unarmed.Demonstrations were held yesterday in Banias and the port city of Latakia, Razan Zaitouneh, a Damascus-based human rights lawyer and activist, said on her Facebook page. Security forces were deployed around the cities of Jableh, Homs, Moadamya and Hama and the Damascus suburb of Douma, according to Rami Nakhle, a Syrian dissident who lives in Lebanon.The latest Syrian crackdown on demonstrations, mostly in the southern region of Daraa, in the past five days has brought the nationwide death toll since mid-March to at least 400, according to Syria’s National Organization for Human Rights. Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, called yesterday for the possible prosecution of Syrian leaders for crimes against humanity.The Syrian protests are part of a wave of Middle Eastern popular movements that have unseated rulers in Egypt and Tunisia this year, forced violent crackdowns in Libya and Bahrain, and helped push oil prices up more than 20 percent this year. President Bashar al-Assad’s decision to end the emergency rule in place for half a century, and his pledges of future political and economic measures, have failed to halt the unrest.“The regime is very worried,” Joshua Landis, a Syria specialist who directs the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “This opposition protest movement has been snowballing, and clearly the military element is saying we have to get control of the situation.”Tanks in DaraaAssad’s government sent tanks and armored carriers to storm Daraa on April 25, and activists and witnesses say at least 25 people were killed as security forces fired on protesters. Yesterday, the troops were strafing the streets with machine guns, and water, electricity and telephone lines were cut.DSyria’s increasingly violent suppression of anti-government shop online 2011protests prompted United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to call for an external inquiry as the U.S. and European Union consider sanctions.“There should be an independent, transparent and effective investigation,” Ban told reporters in New York, where the UN Security Council failed to agree on a European proposal to condemn the Syrian attacks. The debate is due to resume today.
That attitude was common among carriage trade jewelers. "Tiffany, Cartier, they all told me watches are a pain in the neck. It's 1%, 2% of the business."Grinberg convinced Arpels that he should give his movado bold a chance. He let Grinberg put them in the store window and do some advertising. Van Cleef prepared the ad, highlighting the colored stone dials with a palette of colors. "That put Piaget on the map," Grinberg says. "Sales went from $205,000 to $433,000 in one year.""In New York, I didn't have any customers. Nobody." Every sale was a victory. "One day Pilet and I went to see C.D. Peacock in Chicago and they bought three Piagets at $1,000 each. Pilet and I had a party!"Two turning points altered Piaget's and Grinberg's fortunes. One was advertising. Grinberg managed to convince The New Yorker that his watch was worthy of a small ad. What happened next didn't seem like a great moment in watch advertising at the time. But it was."The guy who was preparing my little ad asked, 'What copy do we put?'" Grinberg recalls. He answered, "Everybody tells me it's the most expensive watch in the world. Put that."The other turning point was Claude Arpels, head of Van Cleef & Arpels. At the suggestion of an American jeweler who specialized in colored stones, Piaget developed a collection of watches with colored stone dials. When Grinberg saw the watches, he knew he had hit pay dirt. He had something that might interest Van Cleef & Arpels. He called on the firm and by sheer good fortune was taken to see Claude Arpels himself. As it happened, Arpels wanted to learn how to speak Spanish, took a shine to the young Cuban, and took him to lunch. "I was so impressed," Grinberg remembers. "He is Mr. Arpels and I am nobody from Cuba. He was very nice, very polite. He told me, 'Why do I need watches? I have to fix watches. Jewelry I don't have to fix.'""At that time, Mr. Rockefeller was wearing an $18 Timex. The 1960s was a time of polyester suits for $40 and watches for $18. Timex controlled the market. Omega was an expensive watch at a couple of hundred dollars! Werner Sonn, the head of Patek Philippe at that time, will tell you if he sold 20 watches a year, it was a lot. It was horrible, selling one watch at a time. Patek was respected because it was in Tiffany. I was not respected at that time."That point was driven home painfully when Grinberg tried to place an watches 2011ad in The New Yorker. The magazine wouldn't take it. "They told me I am not good enough for The New Yorker," he remembers.
Attention swiftly turned to grainy pictures captured by surveillance cameras of a balding man with a mustache who was spotted leaving the area at the time of the attempted bombing. Investigators were not able to identify him until Sunday.It remained unclear whether Moore was still in Colorado. In a statement, the FBI said it was conducting a nationwide hunt and asked the media to distribute images of Moore. The shop online 2011agency said Moore is about 6 feet tall, weighs 200 to 220 pounds and has a gray mustache and multiple tattoos, including one of a viking. His aliases include Earl Buchanan, Morelli Buchanon, John Lindzy, Donald Morelli and Gary Steele.Authorities found a pipe bomb and two propane tanks while extinguishing a small fire in the Southwest Plaza food court. The mall is less than two miles from Columbine High School, where in 1999 two students killed 13 people before turning guns on themselves. The mall, which can have as many as 10,000 shoppers at its busiest, was evacuated for hours.There was no explicit link to the high school massacre, but the timing made people suspicious and anxious. The local school district restricted access to 25 schools as a precaution.The FBI identified a 65-year-old man with a raft of aliases as the suspect in the attempted bombing of a suburban shopping mall on the anniversary of the Columbine massacre and issued a nationwide alert Sunday, warning that he is probably armed and dangerous.Earl Albert Moore is the lone suspect in the case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said. It listed five aliases for him and said he had an "extensive" criminal power balancebackground.One week before Wednesday's attempted bombing, the FBI said, Moore had been released from federal prison after serving a sentence for armed bank robbery in West Virginia.
A Koran burning in March at Mr. Jones’s church in Gainesville, Fla., caused protests in Afghanistan that killed more than a dozen people. The Wayne County prosecutor, Kym Worthy, said fears that Mr. Jones could incite violent counterprotests led them to court. Mr. Jones represented himself and told the jury that the mosque, one of the largest in the country, was chosen because his protest was against “a radical element of Islam.” “All we want to do is walk, demonstrate, protest on an area that already belongs to you, to the city,” he said. “We are not accusing this power balancemosque. We are not accusing the people of Dearborn. We are not accusing all Muslims.”Mr. Jones had planned a demonstration Friday outside the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the nation. Prosecutors worried that the protest would lead to violence, and asked Judge Mark Somers of 19th District Court in Dearborn to intervene. Judge Somers conducted a one-day jury trial to determine whether Mr. Jones posed a threat to peace. The jury concluded that he did, and the judge then ordered Mr. Jones and an associate to post the bond to cover the cost of police protection. The bond also prohibited Mr. Jones from going to the mosque or the adjacent property for three years. Robert Sedler, a constitutional law professor at Wayne State University, said the United States Supreme Court has ruled that it is the police’s job to protect speakers at such events and said it is unconstitutional to require protesters to post a bond for police protection. A Florida pastor at the center of a Koran-burning controversy was jailed briefly for refusing to pay what the authorities called a “peace bond” for a planned demonstration outside a mosque. The pastor, Terry Jones, whose remarks against Muslims have inflamed anti-Western sentiment in Afghanistan, said he refused to pay the $1 bond because doing so would violate his shop online 2011freedom of speech. He was released from jail hours later after paying the $1.