Washed It!

Raggle-taggle of ‘household names’ presented large sums in direction of WikiLeaks founder’s failed bail plea

The already curious situation of Julian Assange took another bizarre twist yesterday when the courtroom realized that a raggle-taggle of “household names” have been ready to stake their reputation in his case, offering sureties to the courtroom with a whole value of £180,000.

Regardless of claiming to not know Assange, the film-maker Ken Loach and the socialite and charity fundraiser Jemima Khan stood just before Westminster magistrates and provided large  sums towards Assange’s bail, even though bail was  later refused.

Offering £20,000, Loach stated he didn’t know Assange other than by reputation, but additional: “I feel the work he has completed continues to be a public service. I believe we’re entitled to know the dealings of these that govern us.”

Khan supplied an extra £20,000, “or much more if will need be”.

Inside a assertion later, she mentioned: “I make no judgment of Julian Assange as a person as I have by no means met him. I’m providing my assist to him as I imagine in the universal right to freedom of knowledge and our correct to become advised the reality.”

On her Twitter feed very last month, Khan requested if Assange was “the new Jason Bourne”, a reference to the fictional action hero designed by the thriller writer Robert Ludlum. The publish has since been deleted.

The journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, who also supplied £20,000, mentioned he knew Assange as being a journalist and personalized good friend and had a “very substantial regard for him”.

The largest donation of £80,000 was offered by an unknown American relation who did not desire to be named simply because of worry for his safety.

Patricia David, a professor, along with the prime lawyer Geoffrey Sheen each supplied up £20,000 surety on grounds that they had spent their lives fighting for human rights.

Exterior court Pilger said: “This business in Sweden is often a travesty; an innocent man has a proper to be totally free.

“Having his freedom taken absent is outrageous. Sweden should be ashamed. This is not justice – this is outrageous.”

He added: “Behind this he has made plenty of enemies, the principal 1 being the warmonger, the us.”

Howard Riddle, the judge in the courtroom in Horseferry Street, London, commended four of the sureties for his or her willingness to assist “out of concern for human rights” and with out individual information of Assange.

The Beatles are finally coming to the Internet.

Apple Inc. said Tuesday its iTunes service will start selling music from the Fab Four, in an agreement with the Beatles’ recording label, EMI, and its management company, Apple Corps Ltd.

As of Tuesday, Apple will sell 13 remastered Beatles studio albums, the two-volume “Past Masters” set and the classic “Red” and “Blue” collections. People can download entire albums or buy individual songs.

For $149, Apple is also selling a special digital box set that includes a download of the 41-minute movie of the Beatles first U.S. concert, “Live at the Washington Coliseum, 1964.”

The Beatles had been the most prominent holdout from iTunes and other online music services. Apple Corps had resisted, and the situation was exacerbated by a long-running trademark dispute between Apple Inc. and Apple Corps. It was resolved in 2007 when the companies agreed on joint use of the apple logo and name, and many people saw that as paving the way for an agreement for online access to Beatles songs.

Until now, to listen to Beatles songs on iPods, you’d have to obtain a CD and “rip” an online version of it — or find someone who already has, legalities aside.

Apple swapped out its home page design for a black and white image of the Beatles in silhouette.
Apple says iTunes will sell music from Beatles

Police detained eight unlicensed welders Tuesday in connection with Monday’s deadly apartment fire in Shanghai that left 53 people dead and at least 70 injured, city officials said.

Investigators believe that the welders may have been using their equipment improperly, sparking a blaze that engulfed a 28-story building in the heart of the sprawling Chinese metropolis.

About 17 people remain in critical condition, said Shanghai Deputy Mayor Shen Jun.
Family members were reportedly scouring local hospitals for any information on missing loved ones, and aiming their frustration at authorities.

“It is hard to believe the government now. The drills on TV are successful, but when a fire truly happens, it’s just useless. We feel helpless,” a woman who gave only her surname, Liu, told the Associated Press. Her mother lived on the ninth floor of the building and died in the fire.

Chen Fei, director of the city’s firefighting bureau, said the blaze erupted on the building’s 10th floor.

Survivors either had to scamper down stairs or descend scaffolding that surrounded the tower. The apartment block, which housed 440 people, was undergoing renovations to add insulation at the time of the fire.

Firefighters facing difficulty reaching the upper levels set up hoses on top of an adjacent building to finally contain the blaze, which raged for more than four hours.

Rescuers were seen carrying survivors out of the building. Earlier attempts to airlift people off the roof with helicopters had to be called off because of thick smoke.

One resident said he and his wife climbed down to safety on the scaffolding from the 23rd floor, where their apartment was, according to the Xinmin Evening Post, a local newspaper.

The man, who identified himself as a retired teacher with the surname Zhou, said he was napping when he was awakened by smoke. He said he rushed through his front door into the hallway and uncoiled a fire hose to extinguish flames next to a window by a stairwell. He and his wife were then able to flee, the newspaper said.

Another survivor, Li Xiuyun, 61, said she hurried down stairs inside the building with her husband, son and granddaughter from their home on the 16th floor, cutting her feet on shattered glass along the way.

“The smoke was very strong and the glass from the windows was scalding,” she told the Agence France-Presse news service.

“My son took off his socks and soaked them with water, and we used them to cover our noses. I stumbled on people on the floor when walking,” she said at one of the nine hospitals that took in victims.

China’s minister of public security, Meng Jianzhu, rushed to Shanghai and called for a thorough investigation through the State Council, the country’s Cabinet, the New China News Agency said.

Although China has been undergoing a construction boom for many years, building safety has remained controversial.

Last year, firefighters could do little to stop a massive blaze in a nearly completed Beijing skyscraper housed in the same complex as China’s state television headquarters. The building, slated to be a luxury hotel, burned after being set alight by an illegal fireworks show.

Critics also point to substandard construction practices as a major source of safety problems.

They cite the collapse of thousands of buildings, including many shoddily built schools, during the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake as a prime example of the poor construction common in much of China.

The following year, a nearly completed 13-story apartment tower in Shanghai toppled, killing one worker in a high-profile incident that attracted stunned onlookers for days because the building remained largely intact on its side.

Chinese have come to call buildings constructed poorly for the sake of cutting costs “tofu dregs,” a reference to the mushy curds left behind in the tofu-making process.

david.pierson@latimes.com

Tommy Yang of The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.
8 welders detained in deadly Shanghai high-rise blaze

Prince William is engaged to longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton, Britain’s royal family announced Tuesday.

The 28-year-old heir to the throne and his fiancee will marry next year, royal aides said.
Announcement of the engagement had been rumored for weeks, as palace watchers looked ahead on the royal calendar and speculated that a marriage would have to take place sometime in 2011, sandwiched between other official royal activities.

Announcing the engagement now gives Buckingham Palace time to prepare for the most highly anticipated royal event since the lavish wedding of William’s parents, Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, in 1981.

The marriage will end bachelorhood for William and the hopes of young women around the world who have followed his every move and been charmed by his good looks and affable manner.

The prince and Middleton, who is also 28, met as students at the University of St. Andrews near Edinburgh, Scotland. Their relationship has been minutely dissected in the British tabloids, which have gleefully picked on Middleton’s middle-class background.

With no royal or aristocratic pedigree, Middleton will be the first commoner to marry an heir to the throne in centuries. Her parents are entrepreneurs who became millionaires from a mail-order party-supplies business, which has prompted some ridicule in a society where snobbishness can still be a prized trait.

Middleton’s mother, Carole, has been especially sneered at as a social climber who once worked as a flight attendant and who was caught on camera chewing gum during William’s graduation ceremony from military academy.

The couple have reportedly split up at various times over the years, but their closeness in recent times has led to speculation that marriage was imminent. Middleton’s parents were recently invited for a shooting party at the royal residence in Scotland, which was taken as a sign that a blending of the two families was in the offing.

William is second in line to the British throne, after Prince Charles. His low-key style and resemblance to his mother have made him a popular figure for a family battered by tragedy and scandal.

The prince’s aides said the pair became engaged while on vacation in Kenya last month. The wedding is expected to take place sometime in the spring or summer of next year. Royal watchers said that Westminster Abbey, where William’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, was married, is a likely venue.

After their wedding, the couple will live in northern Wales, where William will continue to serve in Britain’s air force.

Congratulations quickly began pouring in. British Prime Minister David Cameron said he was passed a note with news of the engagement during a Cabinet meeting and that, when he informed his colleagues, a cheer went up around the table.

Cameron later spoke with the prince by telephone — though whether he thanked William for providing some good news at a time when the British government is imposing a sweeping austerity plan is not known.

henry.chu@latimes.com
Prince William engaged to longtime girlfriend

General Motors Co. is set to reemerge as a public company this week in one of the year’s hottest initial public stock offerings, but many American taxpayers who helped rescue the company won’t be going along for the ride.

That’s because most Americans won’t have access to the new shares of the Detroit automaker. And many of those who do are likely to be well-heeled customers at big Wall Street firms.

The situation is not much of a surprise on Wall Street, where little guys often are shut out of deals, especially coveted ones where demand far outstrips supply and where fast-rising prices usually provide quick profits to anyone getting IPO shares.

But some experts said an opportunity to reward average Americans is being wasted, even though the Treasury Department said two months ago that individuals would have “ample opportunity” to participate in the IPO.

“Wall Street thumbed its nose at” individual investors, said David Menlow, president of research firm Ipofinancial.com. “We continue to help Wall Street out, and Wall Street seldom feels the need to say thank you.”

Concern about small investors getting a piece of the action underscores the nation’s outrage over the massive bailouts of banking and auto companies during the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Even the four major banking companies handling the IPO deal were bailed out by taxpayers.

The federal government put nearly $50 billion into GM to rescue it and usher it through Bankruptcy Court last year, ending up with a 61% ownership stake in the company.

On Thursday, when the offering goes public, the new owners are likely to include a wide swath of investors from large U.S. mutual funds to foreign entities, such as sovereign wealth funds and China’s largest car company, SAIC Motor Corp.

The major underwriters are JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. — all of which received billions of taxpayer dollars to rescue them during the severe credit crunch in the recession.

In one twist from the ordinary IPO, a number of female- and minority-owned brokerages are involved in the deal. Among them are Loop Capital Markets in Chicago and Williams Capital Group in New York. Helping to market shares overseas are China International Capital Corp. and two Brazilian banks, Itau and Bradesco.

“There is just an inordinate amount of foreign companies in this considering this is taxpayer money,” said Bill King, president of female-owned M. Ramsey King brokerage outside Chicago. He said his firm didn’t receive the customary request for information from the Treasury Department asking it to participate.

The IPO is garnering such demand that underwriters reportedly are expected to boost the price of initial shares to more than $30 from the stated range of $26 to $29.

The automaker plans to sell 365 million shares, or roughly one-quarter of the company, in a deal currently worth about $10.6 billion.

The Treasury Department is expected to sell $7 billion to $8 billion of its holdings, reducing its position to as little as 43%. GM has repaid $7.4 billion to the government and agreed last month to repay an additional $2.1 billion by repurchasing preferred stock from the government once the IPO closes.

By some measures, individual investors could fare better than they normally do in coveted IPOs.

Underwriters are expected to allocate about 20% of the shares to so-called retail investors, more than the 15% that’s normal in IPOs, said Scott Sweet, senior managing partner at IPO Boutique.

However, Sweet said, there were rumors last week that as much as 30% of the deal would go to individuals before demand rose among large institutional investors, forcing the retail amount to be scaled back.

Discount brokerage firms such as Charles Schwab Corp. and TD Ameritrade aren’t getting shares to allocate to their customers. Those firms sometimes get IPO shares, though it varies from deal to deal.

“In general, the hotter the IPO the harder it is to get an allocation of shares,” said Ram Subramaniam at TD Ameritrade. “We’d have loved to have gotten GM’s IPO. We just don’t have it.”

Access to General Motors stock offering won’t include many of its rescuers

Fire engulfed a high-rise apartment building under renovation in China’s business center of Shanghai on Monday, killing at least eight people, injuring more than 90 and sending some residents racing down scaffolding to escape.

A witness said building materials caught fire, and the blaze spread to scaffolding and then to the 28-story building, which houses a number of retired teachers, the official New China News Agency reported.

More than 80 fire trucks were called to battle the blaze, Shanghai state television said, and streams of water could be seen flowing into the building, which appeared to be gutted.

The fire appeared to have been put out about six hours later, and firefighters could be seen taking bodies from the building.

Photos posted online showed a man clinging to the scaffolding. A building resident identified as Mr. Zhou told Hong Kong broadcaster Phoenix TV that he and his wife were napping in their 23rd floor apartment when they smelled smoke. He said they climbed down the scaffolding four stories before being rescued by firefighters.

At one point helicopters could be seen hovering over the building, and witnesses said at least one resident was rescued, but thick smoke hampered further efforts. By evening the helicopters were gone.

The city government said in a statement that 100 people were rescued, but it was not clear if that included the 90 people the news agency said were hurt.

A doctor at Shanghai’s Jing’an Hospital surnamed Zhang said more than 20 seriously hurt people had been admitted for treatment.

The state-run news website Eastday.com cited a construction worker surnamed Qian who escaped from the 28th story as saying crews were installing energy-saving insulation when the fire occurred.

Qian said thick, rolling smoke clouds surrounded the building and the room she was in filled with smoke, making it difficult to breathe, the report said. She said she called the city’s emergency hot line and then used a wet towel to cover her mouth and nose as she ran down a fire escape.
Shanghai high-rise fire kills at least 8, injures 90

A plume of chromium-tainted groundwater is once again bearing down on residents of Hinkley, Calif., where more than a decade ago an underdog battle with Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spawned a multimillion-dollar settlement and the Oscar-winning film “Erin Brockovich.”

The border of the plume has shifted 1,800 feet beyond a containment boundary set by PG&E in 2008, spreading higher levels of hexavalent chromium, a cancer-causing heavy metal isotope linked to stomach cancers and other health hazards, according to state water officials. The isotope also has been discovered in a lower aquifer that, until recently, PG&E believed was protected from contaminated groundwater above it by a thick layer of clay, the officials added.

In 1997, PG&E paid 660 Hinkley residents $333 million to settle lawsuits alleging injuries including intestinal tumors and breast cancer from chromium-laced waste water that had seeped from the utility’s disposal ponds between 1951 and 1966, winding its way into the community’s drinking wells.

PG&E’s handling and reporting of the migrating plume is under investigation by the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, the state regulatory agency responsible for protecting the area’s water.

“We definitely know there are violations, and that what PG&E is doing right now to contain the plume is not enough,” said Lauri Kemper, assistant executive officer for the water board. “We have the authority to impose fines of up to $5,000 per day for each day the plume exists outside of the boundary set in 2008.”

Kemper said the water board has retained a state water attorney to help prepare a legal case against the utility, a process that could take six months.

Utility officials acknowledge that parts of the plume have spread but say it is being controlled by ongoing cleanup efforts. They deny that its spread has violated any legal agreements and said more scientific research is needed to determine whether spikes in concentrations of hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium 6, detected in many local wells could be linked to the plume or to natural occurrences.

“These concentrations remain within the realms of naturally occurring background concentrations,” said Robert C. Doss, PG&E principal engineer. “There is no way to determine whether our plume is having an impact or not.”

A hearing on the matter has been scheduled for May 2011.

Doss said he understands that the situation “represents a worry about the health of Hinkley families and their investments.” But he also suggested that critics have exaggerated the health hazards posed by contamination in the plume’s outer edges and have mistakenly interpreted its constantly changing shape as “overall growth.”

The amoeba-like plume is about 2 1/2 miles long and a mile wide, and advancing west and northwest at a rate of about a foot a day, officials said.

“In some places the plume grows and then shrinks, in others it might sprout a lobe as it responds to hydrological pressures,” Doss said.

As for PG&E’s remediation efforts in Hinkley, Doss said, “It’s fair to say what we are doing now needs to be supplemented to bring it up to a final cleanup. But we take exception to any assertions that the measures we’ve taken have not had a positive effect on the problem.”

Many property owners in this dusty agricultural town about five miles west of Barstow in San Bernardino County are frustrated with PG&E’s efforts to contain the plume and the water board’s apparent hesitation to charge the utility with civil violations.

“Obviously, the community would be happy to see us file civil liability complaints against the company,” Kemper said. “We are considering that internally. But we haven’t yet because we are busy every day trying to stay on top of the situation to ensure they are continuing to clean up this plume.”

“They’ve had 23 years to fix this problem,” said Carmela Gonzalez, 44, a lifelong resident who was not part of the original Hinkley lawsuit. “Instead, they’ve allowed the contamination plume to grow and put fear in the hearts of Hinkley residents that they are still not safe and that their property is worthless.”

Added Gonzalez: “People around here no longer trust the water board to do right by Hinkley. PG&E should be helping residents get out of here if they want to by giving them reasonable compensation for their losses.”

Some of the hundreds of plaintiffs in the earlier case are exploring their options, given that they signed agreements barring them from discussing details of their settlements. Some residents, who were not involved in that case, talk of launching another class-action lawsuit.

Lillie Stone and her husband, Jim, who is disabled, live on fixed incomes and want PG&E to buy their property at a reasonable price, or pay to help them relocate. Neither received any settlement money from the original Hinkley case.

Tainted PG&E groundwater plume again threatens residents of Hinkley, Calif.

With their eyes on the 2012 election, Republicans are preparing to maximize conflict with Democrats over healthcare in the new Congress and minimize potential compromises, according to GOP strategists, lawmakers and lobbyists.

That strategy is setting the stage for a bitter stalemate on Capitol Hill over the next two years as the president and senior congressional Democrats dig in to defend their signature achievement.

But Republican leaders and strategists think a renewed battle over healthcare will help the party expand its electoral gains and drive President Obama from the White House.

“Republicans have successfully challenged the healthcare legislation once,” said GOP strategist Frank Luntz. “They’ll do it again.”

Luntz, a leading architect of the Republicans’ successful campaign to cast the healthcare legislation as a ” Washington takeover,” said Democrats would suffer further if they tried to defend the law. “Democrats have more to lose,” he said.

In practical terms, the GOP approach will probably mean little congressional input over how the law is actually implemented. The Obama administration will retain broad authority to refine the law on its own, working with businesses, consumer groups, healthcare providers and state regulators, healthcare experts say.

While lawmakers deadlock on Capitol Hill, GOP leaders already have a target list of Democratic senators who are up for reelection in two years in traditionally red states including Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Virginia.

“The next couple of years, in some ways, become about the 2012 elections,” Republican healthcare lobbyist Dean Rosen said last week at an Alliance for Health Reform briefing in Washington.

The GOP tactics mirror those deployed by Democrats after their 2006 electoral sweep.

Then, Democratic House and Senate leaders who had won majorities on a promise to challenge President George W. Bush’s Iraq war strategy bullied congressional Republicans by repeatedly forcing them to vote to support the unpopular war.

The Democrats’ legislative campaign ultimately collapsed. Bush used his veto pen to block legislation mandating troop withdrawals. Within a year, the Bush administration’s effort to stabilize Iraq with a troop surge showed signs of success.

Many Democrats think they too will be vindicated as the public sees more of the benefits of the new healthcare law.

Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, warned that Republicans risked a backlash if voters perceived them as more interested in scoring political points than in responding to voters’ concerns.

“There is no particular love for the Republican Party in the electorate,” he said at a recent Health Affairs forum. “Republicans are going to have to earn [voters'] support and earn their respect, and the way you do that is by governing responsibly.”

Most of the healthcare law’s major benefits — including its guarantee of coverage to all Americans — do not go into effect until 2014. And there are few signs the law is getting more popular.

In the interim, Republicans, who think the law was crucial to their electoral gains, are increasingly confident they can showcase its shortcomings and further weaken already tepid public support for Democrats.

“They are looking for ways to be very aggressive,” said Michael Franc, who works closely with congressional Republicans as head of government relations for the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Republicans provided a preview of their strategy before the midterm election as House GOP leaders forced Democrats to vote in June and September on proposals to repeal provisions of the healthcare law.

GOP leaders have indicated they intend to do more when they control the flow of legislation in the House next year, with likely votes to defund the law and excise controversial parts such as cuts in Medicare spending and a new mandate requiring Americans to get health insurance.

Republicans are spoiling for a healthcare fight

At Sami Abu Hossein’s cramped bookstore, the hundred or so book titles listed on a wall aren’t bestsellers. They’re banned.

And the cheery Abu Hossein can you get you any of them, sometimes in the few minutes it takes to sit down and drink a cup of thick-brewed Turkish coffee.

“There are three no-nos,” the owner of Al Taliya Books explains with a big smile. “Sex, politics and religion. Unfortunately, that’s all anyone ever wants to read about.”

He laughs uproariously.

“These are all the banned ones,” he says, gesturing to the list taped to the wall above the store entrance, books on sexuality to ones that critically examine the life and times of the prophet Muhammad, the most taboo topic in the Arab world.

“We have them,” he says, grinning broadly, “but don’t tell anyone.”

The tubby father of five seems to get a tremendous kick out of bucking the rules. (Not that they’re strictly enforced; he’s never been arrested or even summoned by the authorities.)

His partner in thought crime is Hossein Yassin, a self-described Marxist in a worn beige linen suit. Abu Hossein summons his wiry 48-year-old comrade in for the really tough jobs.

Yassin jokes that he’s the Special Forces for getting banned or hard-to-find books. He makes allusions to a murky past as an underground revolutionary. He says he calls upon a network that stretches across the Middle East to locate and transport hard-to-find titles.

“I can get any book,” he boasts. “But don’t ask how I get them.”

The most widely requested banned book remains “The Satanic Verses,” the 1988 novel that suggested some parts of the Koran weren’t God’s words and thereby earned its author, Salman Rushdie, a fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the hatred of pious Muslims worldwide.

Other top requests include “23 Years,” by the Iranian scholar Ali Dashti, which questions miracles ascribed to Muhammad in the Koran; and “The Joke in the Arab World,” by the Egyptian writer Khaled Qashtin, a sarcastic view of the Middle East, its rulers and customs.

Abu Hossein’s shop, in the capital’s rambling but lively downtown, also sells nonblacklisted books. His shelves are filled with titles from serious political studies about the Middle East to romance novels and pirated software manuals.

But his shop is known as the place in Amman to get forbidden fruits of knowledge.

Censoring books in the age of the Internet may seem like a quaint idea. Even the government official in charge of restricting them recently announced in a newspaper article that “stopping books from reaching the people is a page we’ve turned.”

The censor, Abdullah Abu Roman, occasionally stops by the bookstore to hobnob with Abu Hossein. So do plainclothes security officials. Abu Hossein serves them his Turkish coffee. They very politely ask him for the copies of the forbidden books. He hands them over. It’s all very civilized.

“Allah maakon,” he bids them farewell. God be with you.

“They are very sensitive to politics and criticism of politicians,” says Abu Hossein, who has been working at his family shop for decades. “But there are some books that are banned arbitrarily. Sometimes a censor will ban a book for a sentence he doesn’t like.”

A thickly bearded man wearing a headdress and flowing white dishdasha walks in. He’s one of the regulars, a Saudi religious scholar named Thaer Balawi who perhaps enjoys the challenge of subjecting his puritanical Salafist beliefs to the scrutiny of critical intellects. “You can’t stop an idea by censoring it,” he says.

“Mamnoueh maqroubieh,” goes the Arabic proverb. All that is forbidden is desired.

Abu Hossein recalls a memoir by a former interior minister that the censors immediately forbade for its sensitive revelations. It became a bestseller. But later, the political sands shifted, and the book was removed from the blacklist. Now it hardly sells.

In walks Raed Toguj, iPod ear buds firmly in place, a Web designer in his 20s with a penchant for philosophy and social theory. Censorship, he says, is a product of political ideology. “What I see as the solution is critical thinking,” he says.

Toguj acknowledges that the Internet has made his task superfluous. Many banned books are already available for download, and those with money can order copies from online bookstores abroad.

But Abu Hossein and his customers insisted that there’s something special about holding a book in your hand, feeling its pages, gabbing with the bookseller and fellow seekers of knowledge, like Carol Kaplanian, a 29-year-old doctoral student writing a thesis on honor killings of women in the Middle East, picking through a pile of books on gender relations.

The afternoon wears on. Abu Hossein keeps serving cups of coffee for his guests, the Salafist, the communist, the feminist and the Web dude with a passion for philosophy. They sift through titles and chat quietly, their murmurs softened by the stacks of books surrounding them.

daragahi@latimes.com
In Jordan, a bookstore devoted to forbidden titles

His white shirt pressed, the chef glides through the crowd like a ship in full sail, checking tables, nodding to waiters. His world is full of hurry but he is not rushed. He sits down in the shade, wiping his brow amid a lunchtime crowd of gunrunners, clan elders, beggars and bankers.

They drift down unnamed roads toward his tables, the air sweet with meat, crushed vegetables, sprigs of spearmint. Scores of diners at a time cram elbow to elbow slurping and scooping at the edge of town, where big trucks haul white stone down from the mountains.

They know Abdulkarim Harazi has three wives, 18 children, a worn dagger and the humor of a man not done in by adversity. When he speaks, his customers, sopping broth with soft bread, listen, knowing that no matter how circuitous or embellished the tale, there’ll be wisdom waiting at the end.

“You handle a big family with justice,” says Harazi, pausing the way he does, eyes bright with mischief. “Justice means sleeping with one wife one night and another wife the next. This brings balance. Justice can’t control some things, though, like the passion of the heart.”

Harazi’s fires spit blue flames and hum like storms, searing blackened bowls filled with a traditional meat dish called fasha and a stew known as saltah. Thick with chilies, herbs, onions, potatoes, coriander and maybe a speck of cilantro, the meals bubble and cool beneath conversations of impatient men.

“Quality and cleanliness are the keys” to a fine meal, Harazi says.

His waiters have blistered fingers and gold-trimmed caps. From sunrise to just before dusk, they serve 1,300 pounds of beef and 660 pounds of vegetables to 4,000 diners at the Fakhi restaurant. Nobody rests, not the ladle men, nor the dicers, knives chopping, oil hissing at the culinary crossroads of the capital, where, for a brief moment and a few dollars, businessmen sit with junkmen for a taste that’s the same to everyone.

The main floor is shaded and dim, the tables long. Finding a seat requires cunning and swiftness and dodging men with quick hands. Some have guns, most have daggers. Outside, down steps faded by sunlight, more tables are lined beneath narrow shelters and there’s a feeling of an army encamped beneath the hills circling the city. From the road, amid clatter and the glow of fires, the word is that eating lunch anywhere else would be a pitiful miscalculation.

The men — not a woman in sight — speak of private misfortunes and national troubles. A land of deserts, rock ridges and sea coves, Yemen is both beautiful and tormented. Rebellions rattle north and south, Al Qaeda fighters roam the outlands and the Americans are talking about missile strikes and the cost of terror. Poorest country in Arab world, that’s what they keep saying, a place of thin wallets and drought. Here, though, you polish your spoon, stay away from the flame and eat.

“It’s simple,” says Harazi. “The cost of living is too high and the country is too unstable. It’s all about food and worry these days. There’s no hope because you can’t see anyone improving around you. I try to do the best for my children. Education, they must have that.”

He’s a solid man with thick hands and black stubble, settling into his chair like a priest hearing confessions. He knows that life needs places like this restaurant, reliable and intimate as home but without home’s predictability. You never know who might pull up on a motorcycle or amble in from the fringes. Harazi’s eyes gather them all, watching, ever watching.

By midafternoon the men are restless, waiting to dip into crinkly bags of shiny narcotic khat leaves that will mellow them out until way past sunset. It’s a ritual as common as sleeping or waking. Nearly everyone at the restaurant finishes lunch and chews khat, cheeks bulging, eyes calm, the world suddenly fixable.

“Khat makes you forget about things,” says Harazi. “Khat gives you many ideas, but behind them is no planning.”

He laughs.

Wheels spin through gravel; a tribal leader in an SUV arrives in the parking lot, draped by dust and a well-armed entourage. Diners pause. No shots fired. Spoons resume. The leader, kissing cheeks, slapping backs, finds a seat.

“Look at that,” Harazi says, “Barack Obama doesn’t have as many bodyguards.”

“How many employees do you have?” someone asks.

Harazi looks around and whispers.

“One hundred, but if the taxman comes, only 20.”

Food for thought at one culinary crossroads in Yemen