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Taliban to open Qatar office in step toward peace talks BY MATTHEW ROSENBERG New York Times Service
KABUL — Giving its first major public sign that it may be ready for peace talks, the Taliban announced Tuesday that it had struck a deal to open a political office in Qatar for peace negotiations. The step was a sharp reversal of the Taliban’s longstanding public denials that it was involved or interested in any talks to end its insurgency in Afghanistan, and a major step to revive efforts for talks that stalled in September, with the assassination of a government official helping lead efforts to reconcile with the Taliban. In a statement, Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, said that along with a preliminary deal to set up the office in Qatar, the group was asking that Taliban detainees held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be released. Mujahid did not say when the Qatar office would be opened, or give specifics about the prisoners the Taliban wanted freed. “We are at the moment, besides our powerful presence inside the country, ready to establish a political office outside the country to come to an understanding with other nations,” the statement said, citing “an initial agreement with Qatar and other related sides.” U.S. officials have said in recent months that the opening of a Taliban mission would be the single biggest step forward for peace efforts that have been plagued by false starts. The most embarrassing came in November 2010, when it emerged that an impostor had fooled Western officials into thinking he represented the Taliban and then had disappeared with hundreds of thousands of dollars used to woo him. The official killed in September, Burhanuddi Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, had been greeting a supposed Taliban negotiator when the man detonated a bomb in his turban. The opening of an office in Qatar is meant to give Afghan and Western peace negotiators an “address” where they can openly contact legitimate Taliban intermediaries. That would open the way for confidencebuilding measures that Washington hopes to push forward in the coming months. Chief among them, U.S. officials said, is the possibility • TURN TO TALIBAN, 2A
INTERNATIONAL EDITION
BY ELISABETH BUMILLER AND THOM SHANKER
New York Times Service
WASHINGTON — U.S. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is set this week to reveal his strategy that will guide the Pentagon in cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from its budget, and with it the Obama administration’s vision of the military that the United States needs to meet 21st-century threats, according to senior officials. In a shift of doctrine driven by fiscal reality and a deal last summer that kept the United States from defaulting on its debts, Pa-
netta is expected to outline plans for carefully shrinking the military — and in doing so, make it clear that the Pentagon will not maintain the ability to fight two sustained ground wars at once. Instead, he will say that the military will be large enough to fight and win one major conflict, while also being able to “spoil” a second adversary’s ambitions in another part of the world while conducting a number of other smaller operations, like providing disaster relief or enforcing a no-flight zone. Pentagon officials, in the meantime, are in final deliberations
about potential cuts to virtually every important area of military spending: the nuclear arsenal, warships, combat aircraft, salaries, and retirement and health benefits. With the war in Iraq over and the one in Afghanistan winding down, Panetta is weighing how significantly to shrink the United States’ ground forces. There is broad agreement on the left, right and center that $450 billion in cuts over a decade — the amount that the White House and Pentagon agreed to last summer — is acceptable. That is about 8 percent of the Penta-
gon’s base budget. But there is intense debate about an additional $500 billion in cuts that may have to be made if Congress follows through with deeper reductions. Panetta and defense hawks say a reduction of $1 trillion, about 17 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget, would be ruinous to national security. Democrats and a few Republicans say that it would be painful but manageable; they add that there were steeper military cuts after the Cold War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. • TURN TO U.S. MILITARY, 2A
PETROS GIANNAKOURIS/AP
A storekeeper clears out his shop in central Athens. Even as one in four small businesses are forced to close in Greece, pawnshops are springing up like mushrooms.
IN GREECE, PAWN RULES PAWNBROKERS PROSPER AS COUNTRY STRUGGLES WITH HARD TIMES BY NIKI KITSANTONIS
New York Times Service
ATHENS — With all the contraction in the Greek economy, with employees laid off en masse and one in four small businesses forced to close, it might seem odd that new shops are springing up like mushrooms in Athens and other cities. But the stores — pawnshops and gold dealers — are thriving as cash-strapped Greeks give
up jewelry and other valuables to make ends meet and pay new taxes. The authorities reported an explosion in the sector, with 90 percent of the nation’s 224 officially registered pawnshops having opened in the past year. While these entrepreneurs insist that their services are legitimate, the Greek authorities contend that many of the shops are concealing a rapidly expanding illicit trade in gold, and that
BY MEERA SELVA AND GREGORY KATZ Associated Press
much of it is being smuggled out of the debt-racked country, confounding efforts to curb rampant tax evasion. Similar trends have been reported in other countries that were hit by recession. In the United States and Britain, weakening economies and turmoil in credit markets have helped gold dealers thrive. A decade ago, the same happened in Argentina, after its economic meltdown.
McClatchy News Service
AP
British police are treating the discovery of a body on the queen’s Sandringham estate, above, as murder. area cordoned off by police. Most of the senior royals were at the sprawling estate, where the queen loves to celebrate Christmas with her husband, children and grandchildren. The royals’ New Year’s celebration marked a milestone in the recovery of Prince Philip, the
queen’s 90-year-old husband, who made his first public appearance since recovering from a heart procedure over Christmas. So far, there are more questions than answers about the strange • TURN TO ESTATE, 2A
BOYCOTT BY REFORMERS COULD UNDERMINE ELECTIONS IN IRAN, 6A
In Greece, new outlets are springing up on streets where bankrupt stores have been boarded up. Competing with oldschool pawnbrokers who work out of tiny stores on side streets, the new professionals lease central locations, taking advantage of falling rents. They advertise in newspapers and on television, and slip promotional leaflets • TURN TO GREECE, 6A
Possible U.S. showdown with Iran sends oil prices soaring BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY AND KEVIN G. HALL
U.S. OFFICIALS ALERTED L.A. AUTHORITIES IN ARSON CASE, 5A
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109TH YEAR I ©2012 THE MIAMI HERALD
Panetta to offer vision of reduced U.S. military
Murder most foul on U.K. queen’s estate LONDON — It’s a case that Sherlock Holmes would have loved to unravel: British police say a woman’s body has been found at the vast rural estate in Norfolk where Queen Elizabeth II and her family celebrated New Year’s. Police are treating the case as a murder, and an autopsy was being conducted Tuesday to learn more about the cause of death and the identity of the victim. The body was found on New Year’s Day three miles from the elegant country home of Sandringham in eastern England where the royals held a New Year’s Day celebration in rural splendor. Parts of the nearly 20,000-acre estate are open to the public, and the body was found in a forest at Anmer, a hamlet of several dozen people 115 miles northeast of London on the estate. Forensics investigators in white outfits were seen walking through nearby woodlands Tuesday, examining the ground in an
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2012
believed to be secretly developing nuclear weapons, but Tehran denies the charge. The Iranian currency, the rial, plunged to a record low against the U.S. dollar, reportedly triggering a run on banks by Iranians anxious to protect their savings by buying the U.S. currency before the exchange rate worsened. Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, which advises corporations on foreign policy risks, said he thought that the Iranian threat amounted to bluster because of the impact a confrontation with the United States would have on Iran’s own struggling economy. “It would be economic suicide for them, but they are absolutely willing to push the needle here because the stakes are high and they are being squeezed,” he said. Gen. Ataollah Salehi, the Iranian army chief, was quoted by
WASHINGTON — The possibility of a confrontation between the United States and Iran appeared to rise Tuesday after the Obama administration declared that it would disregard an Iranian warning against moving a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group into the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The potential for a crisis that could disrupt Gulf tanker traffic that carries some 40 percent of the world’s seaborne oil sent international petroleum prices soaring more than $4 a barrel, a potential threat to the struggling U.S. and global economies. The rise in tensions comes as the Iranian economy is beginning to suffer serious impacts from a raft of U.S. and European sanctions imposed on Tehran for rejecting repeated U.N. demands to halt a nuclear program. Iran is widely • TURN TO CONFRONTATION, 2A
U.S. AUTO INDUSTRY SET TO POST ANOTHER GOOD YEAR, BUSINESS FRONT
OREGON POWERS PAST WISCONSIN IN ROSE BOWL, SPORTS FRONT
INDEX NEWS EXTRA .............3A THE AMERICAS ............4A OPINION........................7A COMICS & PUZZLES ...6B
1/4/2012 3:01:48 AM
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