Excitement and optimism were in the air yesterday as Daniel Donovan held a rally at his New Dorp field office celebrating a recent poll showing him trailing his Democratic opponent by just four points in the race for state Attorney General.
According to SurveyUSA’s latest pre-election tracking poll for WABC-TV in New York City, Eric Schneiderman is narrowly leading Donovan, the Republican and Conservative nominee, by 44 to 40 percent. A previous Quinnipiac poll showed the Manhattan state senator with a wider lead of 43 percent to Donovan’s 32.
About 100 people attended the spirited event, which included speeches by Donovan, currently Staten Island’s District Attorney, City Councilman Vincent Ignizio and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.
“This is my hometown. Not only is it refreshing and exciting, it’s heartwarming to see that so many people are supporting me,” Donovan told reporters. “This,” he continued referring to local support, “may make the difference in the race.”
People cheered “Danny!” as he made his way to the front of the crowd. During his speech — which he made before he caught a plane to Buffalo — Donovan focused on the cornerstones of his campaign, which include cleaning up corruption in Albany.
With a little over two weeks to go before Election Day, he talked about the differences between himself and Schneiderman, who has been involved in Albany politics as a state senator for 12 years. “Then, you have someone like myself who has been a District Attorney for seven years,” Donovan said.
“He’s not from the Albany culture,” said local businessman Bob Cutrona of Emerson Hill. “All we’ve seen coming out of Albany is dysfunction and corruption. That needs to change.” Cutrona added that he believes it will be a tight race come Nov. 2.
Fred Guinta of Todt Hill, a member of several local civic associations and Community Board 2, did not seem concerned about Donovan’s chances of winning despite poll numbers.
“In two weeks from Tuesday, we’ll have a new Attorney General and it will be Dan Donovan,” he said.
Before the event ended, Sliwa addressed the crowd, launching a verbal attack against Donovan’s opponent and other state politicians.
“Who’s going to take on all these thieves and crooks who are sucking the life blood out of New York City taxpayers?” Sliwa asked, answering: “It’s Dan Donovan.”
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(Source: SI Live)
Seven thousand cubic meters of concrete were poured this week to form the base of the world’s largest underground hospital. For 36 hours running, shifts of 70 workers and 80 cement mixers worked to lay the foundation of the emergency facility, which is designed to withstand conventional, chemical, and biological attacks.
The night of Saturday October 9, 2010 marked the start of a crucial phase of construction at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, Israel. More than 70 workers at the site began to pour roughly 7,000 cubic meters of concrete, which will form the concrete base of Rambam’s protected emergency underground hospital – the largest facility of its type in the world – and underground parking lot. The pouring, which continued for more than 36 hours straight, involved 80 cement mixers that completed 1,000 rounds of mixing. To meet the deadline, four Haifa area concrete plants supplied materials around the clock.
According to Rambam Department of Engineering Director Aryeh Berkovitz, for two days following this effort, no concrete was poured in central to northern Israel. This is due to the fact that all related facilities, tools and personnel in the region were involved in the huge Rambam project.
RHCC Director Prof. Rafi Beyar commented, “This is a historic moment, not only for Rambam, but for the entire State of Israel. For a period of two years, we have coped with unexpected, difficult and weighty logistic problems regarding this construction. We overcame the obstacles, and with the help of our friends – donors and Ministry of Health officials – we are on the right path.”
This project is slated for completion by May 2012, at which time the three-floor parking lot will provide much-needed parking space for some 1,500 Rambam workers and visitors. In times of emergency, the lot can be transformed at short notice into a 2,000-bed hospital that is secure from conventional, chemical and biological weapons.
Not only underground, the emergency hospital will also sit eight meters below sea level. Designed to be self-sufficient, the hospital will be able to generate its own power and can store enough oxygen, drinking water and medical supplies for up to three days. Due to its special location, the facility’s construction has demanded unusual measures. Pumps have operated throughout construction – and will continue to the project’s end – 24 hours a day, moving millions of cubic meters of brackish groundwater to the sea, enabling the workers to carry out their mission.
The next major step in the Rambam complex construction – the concrete pouring for the foundation of the Ruth Rappaport Children’s Hospital – will begin on October 30, 2010. After that, work will begin on the new oncology and cardiology hospitals.
“Work is proceeding in a very ordered and professional manner,” says Aryeh Berkovitz, who reports that all construction is proceeding according to plan. Due to the project’s enormous scope and special nature, it has been making headlines. The recent cement pouring has received coverage on all major radio stations, TV channels and in the printed and online media throughout Israel.
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(YWN Israel Desk)
First you make the granola…if you aren’t a big coconut fan, don’t use it in the cookies also.
½ cup margarine, softened
½ cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
2-1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon baking powder
2 cups granola
1 cup coconut
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream together margarine, shortening and sugars. Beat in eggs and vanilla. On low speed, add flour, baking soda and baking powder. Beat in granola and coconut. Drop by tablespoonfuls on greased cookie sheets. Bake for 15 – 18 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool on cookie sheets 2 minutes before removing to wire rack to finish cooling.
By Emuna Braverman and Elizabeth Kurtz, of www.gourmetkoshercooking.com
www.gourmetkoshercooking.com is a new and exciting site where you will find over 900 great kosher recipes – with particular emphasis on ideas for Shabbos and holidays, the best new kosher products, gorgeous table top decor, articles on kosher wine and healthy eating, featured giveaways, travel, cooking with kids and much more. Content is updated weekly so visit us often. Your family will be glad you did!
A four-alarm fire in a junkyard that began late Saturday night continues to burn this morning, sending smoke drifting to parts of Brooklyn, authorities said.
Four stories of scrap metal was still engulfed in flames as of this morning, the Jersey City Fire Department reported.
Firefighters have been battling the four-alarm blaze on Linden Avenue since 11 p.m. Saturday.
Officials in New York City issued an advisory early this morning, alerting residents of Brooklyn & Queens that they may see or smell smoke from the fire.
There have been no reports of injuries.
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(Source: NJ Star Ledger)
If you needed more proof that texting is on the rise, here’s a stat for you: the average teenager sends over 3,000 texts per month. That’s more than six texts per waking hour.
According to a new study from Nielsen, our society has gone mad with texting, data usage and app downloads. Nielsen analyzed the mobile data habits of over 60,000 mobile subscribers and surveyed over 3,000 teens during April, May and June of this year. The numbers they came up with are astounding.
The number of texts being sent is on the rise, especially among teenagers age 13 to 17. According to Nielsen, the average teenager now sends 3,339 texts per month.
There’s more, though: teen females send an incredible 4,050 text per month, while teen males send an average of 2,539 texts. Teens are sending 8 percent more texts than they were this time last year.
Other age groups don’t even come close, either; the average 18 to 24-year-old sends “only” 1,630 texts per month. The average only drops with other age groups. However, in every age bracket, the number of texts sent has increased when compared to last year. Texting is a more important means of communication than ever.
In 2008, the main reason anybody got a phone was for safety, even among teenagers. That’s not true anymore. 43 percent of teenagers now say texting is the #1 reason they get a cell phone. Safety is #2 with 35 percent, while 34 percent of teenagers say they get cell phones to keep in touch with friends.
Texting is also supplanting voice calls — 22 percent say SMS is easier than a phone call and another 20 percent say it’s faster. Voice usage has decreased by 14 percent among teens and is decreasing in all age groups under 55. 18 to 24 year olds use the most minutes, but every age group between 18 and 55 talks on the phone more than the average teenager.
While voice may be on the decline, data and app usage is on the rise. According to Nielsen, data usage among teens has quadrupled, from 14 MB to 62 MB per month.
In a role reversal, teen males use more data than their female counterparts: 75 MB vs. 53 MB of data. App and software downloads also increased by 12 percent among teens in the last year.
These stats are eye-popping, but what’s even more amazing is that these numbers only keep rising. Texting, data usage and app downloads are nowhere near their peak, but one has to wonder: how many texts is the average teenager actually capable of sending? What’s the limit?
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(Source: CNN / Mashable)
Miami Beach Mayor Matti Herrera Bower won’t face reelection until November 2011, but has already drawn a challenger.
Dave Crystal, a director of the Miami Beach Leadership Academy Alumni Association, has filed to run for Bower’s seat, said City Clerk Robert Parcher.
Crystal, 33, said he wants to correct fiscal policies that will eventually bleed the city, recently telling commissioners Miami Beach has become “the poster child” for increasingly burdensome pension costs.
“What they’ve done essentially on Miami Beach, repeatedly, is put Band-Aids on wounds instead of cauterizing and stopping the gangrene,” said Crystal, who wants to end police overtime pay except in extreme circumstances to decrease pension costs, create an independent police internal affairs division and start a ferry service to downtown Miami.
Crystal is a registered Republican and runs Crystal Clear Tutors. Crystal also is associated with Legal Revenge, which sells anti-Obama T-shirts on the Internet, but said the business is no longer active.
The Beach mayoral seat is nonpartisan.
Bower has not yet filed to run, but says she intends to pursue a third and final term.
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(Read More: Miami Herald)
Two Israelis, a 24-year-old woman and her 60-year-old father were murdered in their apartment in Mexico City over the weekend, according to ZAKA representatives in the Mexico capital, who said marks of serious violence were found in the bodies.
According to ZAKA, the Israeli Embassy in Mexico City received the police announcement and has yet to release details on the identity of the two victims, whose bodies were turned over to the city’s Forensic Medicine Institute.
“The apartment was a mess and appeared to have been the scene of a struggle,” a ZAKA representative, who arrived at the apartment with police investigators, told Ynet.
A 12-year-old relative of the victims arrived at the apartment at 3 pm Friday but could not get in because the door was locked. She knocked on the door for a long time but got no answer. For an unknown reason, the police were only dispatched to the place on Saturday evening and broke into the flat.
A ZAKA representative speaking to Ynet added that the Forensic Medicine Institute in Mexico City was expected to deliver the autopsy report, which would shed light on the cause of the death, later in the day. The police investigation is ongoing.
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(Source: Ynet)
Bouncers will be waiting in the wings in case things get out of control tomorrow night when seven gubernatorial candidates take to the stage for a live, televised debate that has the potential to devolve into a three-ring circus.
It falls to News 12 Long Island veteran reporter and debate moderator Doug Geed to keep a tight rein when Democrat Andrew Cuomo; GOP candidate and Tea Party favorite Carl Paladino; former madam Kristin Davis; radical City Councilman Charles Barron; and three fringe candidates take to the stage, said producer Michelle Murphy.
But if the debate starts to turn into an episode of “Jersey Shore,” producers will call on security to intervene, Murphy said.
“We are going with the expectation that [the debaters] will be gentlemen and ladies,” she stressed. “But we don’t have any control [over them], so we are prepared for anything.”
Producers have also prepped moderators to step in if the verbal sparring gets too nasty.
“We’ve decided it has to be severe, a severe personal attack, where our moderators at their discretion could intervene,” said Murphy. “Obviously, we can’t prepare or control what any of these people are going to say, but we would like to keep them to the issues.”
The candidates will be seated across a wide stage, with a small table for writing placed between each of them.
Aside from Cuomo and Paladino, and Davis on the Anti-Prohibition Party and Barron from the all-black Freedom Party, participants include Jimmy McMillan from the Rent is 2 Damn High Party, Warren Redlich from the Libertarian Party, and Howie Hawkins, of the Green Party.
The crowded debate, a joint production by News 12, Newsday and Hofstra University, has producers working overtime to make sure candidates know the rules.
Each candidate will get a walk-through of the debate stage beforehand, and all of them got letters outlining in detail the format for time limits and the rules for rebuttals.
Time limits will be strictly enforced, said Murphy, and a light system will alert a candidate if they’re going to be cut off.
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(Source: NY Post)
The money woes keep growing for a developer of the Ground Zero mosque.
Valley National Bank is suing Sharif El-Gamal and his real-estate company, Soho Properties, seeking $95,778 plus interest for an unrepaid loan. The firm took out a $100,000 line of credit, guaranteed by El-Gamal, from the bank in 2008, but defaulted in early 2009, according to court papers.
A spokesman for El-Gamal declined to comment yesterday.
El-Gamal moved from the firm’s offices in September after his landlord initiated eviction proceedings over $39,000 in back rent.
He also failed to pay his city taxes in January and July, but agreed to a payment plan in September for $270,000, including interest.
El-Gamal has been a leader in the controversial proposal to build a mosque and community center on Park Place, two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
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(Source: NY Post)
An Iranian judge has sentenced a man accused of stealing chocolate and cocoa from a candy shop to have his hand cut off, the semi-official Fars News Agency reported Saturday.
“Considering the confession of the defendant and the fact that he was found guilty of breaking and entering, according to the Quran, he deserves to have his hand cut off,” Fars quoted the judge as saying as he ordered the sentence.
The 21-year-old man, whose name was withheld by the court, was arrested in May while driving in a suspicious manner, Fars reported. During the arrest, police recovered cash as well as chocolates and cocoa.
“After the man was taken to a police station, a report of a robber at a candy store was received by police,” Fars said.
Police told Fars that the man later confessed to robbing the store. In addition to the amputation sentence, the man was ordered to spend six months in prison for destruction of property and an additional six months for resisting arrest, according to Fars.
Such an amputation sentence is often handed down to habitual thieves in Iran who have prior convictions for theft and robbery.
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(Source: CNN)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed Sunday reports that the negotiations to secure the release of kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit have been renewed.
“There have been renewed talks with the German mediator’s involvement,” the prime minister said in an Army Radio interview. “Efforts are ongoing in many directions, the majority of which is left undisclosed – at they should be.”
Netanyahu further qualified, telling his interviewer: “You see the headlines. We don’t see them because we are working on Gilad’s issue on a daily basis. We are constantly trying to find various new ways to secure his return.
“One of these ways – the main avenue – is the negotiations, which indeed have been renewed several weeks ago.”
Still, he continued, “I don’t think the talks would benefit from being conducted over the airwaves, even if this is Army Radio’s 60th anniversary. There has been renewed contact with the German mediator, who asked to become involved when I took office,” Netanyahu concluded.
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(Read More: Ynet)
US President Barack Obama is likely to visit the places attacked by terrorists during the 26/11 assault on Mumbai, in what may strongly symbolize the burgeoning cooperation between the two countries against terrorism.
Official sources indicated that during his visit starting on November 5, Obama may visit places where “shootouts occurred” during the 26/11 attack.
There are indications that Obama, who has chosen to stay at the iconic Taj Mahal Hotel, which was ravaged by the 26/11 attackers but has since been restored, is likely to visit Chabad House, the Jewish centre also known as Nariman House, and Leopold Cafe. There is also a possibility of his going to see the Oberoi Trident, another Mumbai hotel targeted as part of a plot scripted by ISI and executed by the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Clarity on the details, including the possibility of his going to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus where terrorists struck first on the night of November 26, 2008, will emerge after a meeting that officials of central and US agencies are scheduled to have with Mumbai cops on October 25.
“His presence at the places attacked on 26/11 will be seen as a statement of solidarity,” said a source, adding that India was keen on Mumbai’s inclusion in the US president’s itinerary.
Obama’s visit takes place against the backdrop of growing conviction in the US that terror groups like Lashkar, reared by ISI, have moved beyond their India-centric focus to meld with the wider web of jihadi terror and pose a threat to other countries as well.
The Mumbai attack was crucial in sensitizing the global community to the danger facing India. The recognition, belated according to many counter terror officials here, was the reason the Obama administration agreed to give access to US-born Lashkar jihadi David Coleman Headley who receed targets for Ajmal Kasab and his companions.
The heightened awareness of Pakistan’s unwillingness and inability to rein in terror groups has also cleared the way for very close cooperation among the counterterror authorities, as evident during the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games.
Top sources in the government speak of a perfect tandem between Indian and foreign counterterror agencies, American as well as others, that helped nip the terror threat to the Games. Intercepts with domestic agencies had pointed to the anxiety of ISI-Lashkar combine to launch terror attacks on India during the Games.
Their desperation to stage a spectacular attack, intercepts showed, had led the plotters to seek to rope in a whole range of potential accessories — from the Mumbai underworld to Khalistani and Kashmiri terror groups to Naxalites and criminals.
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(Source: Times Of India)
One Palestinian was killed and two other injured in an IDF strike in northern Gaza on Sunday, Palestinian sources report.
A statement by the Israel Defense Forces said that Israel Air Force attacked a terrorist cells planning to launch Qassam rockets or mortar bombs at Israel.
The statement reads as follows:
“Earlier this morning, the IAF targeted and identified hitting a squad of terror operatives who were preparing to fire rockets from the Northern Gaza strip into Israel.
More than 165 rockets and mortars have been fired at Israeli territory since the beginning of 2010, and over 440 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel since the end of Operation Cast Lead.
The IDF remains committed to protecting the citizens of Israel and will continue to act against terror. The IDF holds Hamas solely responsible for terror emanating from the Gaza Strip.”
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(YWN Israel Desk)
YWN regrets to inform you that the body of 62-year-old Steven Mayer Z”L was found over Shabbos.
Sources tell YWN that his body was found in a wooded area of Riverhead Long Island. His body is currently at the Suffolk County Medical Examiners Office, and Misaskim has been notified.
Thousands of volunteers from Hatzolah, Chaverim, Shomrim, and Misaskim had been searching Riverhead by land, air, and water in the hopes of finding Mr. Meyers, a Great Neck man who has been missing since October 4 – as was reported first by YWN.
Steven Mayer was supposed to be on his way to work as a metals trader in Huntington when he vanished. Family members say Mayer’s cell phone used reception from a tower in Riverhead at around 3 p.m. that day.
Further details will be posted as they become available to us.
Boruch Dayan Emmes…
(Yehuda Drudgestein – YWN)
Students at Al-Quds University in the Gaza Strip were surprised to see an unusual guest at their lecture room on Saturday – a chimpanzee who had escaped from a nearby zoo, Palestinian news agency Maan reported.
University sources said the chimp entered the lecture hall through a window left open and even listened to the lecture.
One of the university workers told the French news agency, “We were very surprised to see the chimpanzee who escaped from the zoo right next to us. It entered the university lecture hall and jumped into the meeting room. It caused shock, but also surprise, among the students.”
According to reports in Gaza, some of the university’s female students screamed as they spotted the ape in the room.
The chimp will not be able to take any courses, however, after being captured by zoo workers with the help of the campus’ security officers and returned to its cage.
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(Source: Ynet)
A man was found shot dead on a side street just blocks away from the scene of a shooting a few hours earlier that sent two men to the hospital – one in critical condition – but police are not sure if the two incidents are related.
Justin A. Williams, 20, whose last known address was on Whitesville Road in Jackson, was found shot to death after police received a 911 call at 2:19 a.m. Friday from a Westwood Avenue area resident reporting a body with blood around it on the road, according to Capt. Thomas Hayes of the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office.
Westwood Avenue is a narrow street off Ridge Avenue with a few vacant houses on one side of the street and new home construction on the other side. The neighborhood consists mostly of abandoned and boarded-up homes with several new homes under construction.
Police received no reports from anyone hearing gunshots, Hayes said. The caller was coming home from work when he saw the body on Westwood Avenue, Hayes said.
Hayes said “one of the focuses of the investigation” is another shooting in Lakewood hours earlier, but it was undetermined whether the two are related.
Gunshots were fired in the 500 block of East Fifth Street about 7:50 p.m. Thursday as township resident Luis Lozada, 37, tried to make a Mexican food delivery at the home of Gregory Castro, 23, police said.
As Lozada got out of the delivery car with the food he and Castro were accosted by two men, and the shots were fired by one of the robbers who had a handgun, Detective Sgt. John Stillwell said.
Lozada was shot in the abdomen. He was listed in critical condition at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune after undergoing emergency surgery Thursday night, Stillwell said. Castro was shot in the buttocks, and was listed in stable condition, he added.
“They were robbed of money and the food,” Stillwell said.
The two male robbers, who fled on foot, were described only as wearing dark clothing.
Williams, the homicide victim, had had contact with police in the past.
He was arrested around midnight on Sept. 11 in Lakehurst on weapons charges after police found him possession of brass knuckles, and being under the influence of a controlled dangerous substance, according to police there. He was taken to Ocean County Jail in Toms River, and later released after posting $2,500 bail.
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(Source: Asbury Park Press)
The APP reports:
A deputy state attorney general has told a judge that New Jersey officials “looked the other way” while a rabbi buried truckloads of bagged religious artifacts on a property in Ocean County.
And they only took serious legal action when a similar illegal landfill was dug in another town a year later, the deputy said during a court hearing Friday.
The comments came after hours of wrangling over a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the state Department of Environmental Protection. It seeks the cleanup of burial sites in Lakewood and Jackson, claiming they violate state law and pose potential public health risks.
The case appears likely to go to trial in mid-February, after state Superior Court Judge Craig L. Wellerson denied DEP’s request to order that the cleanups be done immediately.
The burials have sparked controversy over what the limits should be regarding leniency for religious customs.
The buried material, including texts and clothing, called shaimos, is considered holy by Orthodox Jews and therefore cannot be discarded in the usual ways. The sites, however, are near a water well and protected wetlands.
Wellerson at one point asked the deputy attorney general, Daniel A. Greenhouse, if it was “really” the state’s argument that the DEP allowed a project it knew was illegal.
Greenhouse initially acknowledged that DEP officials were present at the Jackson site during construction and had even given approval. He then backed off from these comments, saying the officials “looked the other way” because they saw the burial as a one-time event and planned to settle the issue with citations.
“(The DEP) can’t prosecute every tiny, little violation it sees,” Greenhouse said. “Then the following year, (the rabbi) did it again at twice the volume.”
Lawyers for the five defendants questioned why, if the DEP saw the burials as an environmental risk, it let one stay underground for more than a year.
“If it’s a public health hazard, the DEP’s not doing its job,” said Steven Secare, who is representing the rabbi, Chaim Abadi.
Wellerson said he was not “satisfied that there’s any immediate health hazard.”
Abadi has found a new place for the material in a Lakewood Jewish cemetery, but needs the DEP to approve it first and 45 days to make the move, according to defense lawyers. But an agreement could not be reached.
Cemeteries have long been a place to bury shaimos.
Based on court discussions Friday, the trial will likely focus on whether the material qualifies as solid waste, and therefore should be moved to a licensed landfill, and will include testimony from several DEP officials.
The DEP said it was alerted to the Jackson site off Frank Applegate Road in April 2009 and the Lakewood site off Vermont Avenue in March 2010.
In addition to Abadi, others named as defendants in the suit are Hard Maple Realty LLC, Vincenzo W. Mettee, Champion Subcontracting and Congregation Minyan Shelanu.
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(Source: APP)
Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David C. Headley, was plotting an attack.
It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.
Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed he was a member of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.
Despite those warnings by two of his three wives Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving training in small-caliber weapons and countersurveillance, scouting targets for attack, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless northwestern frontier.
Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.
An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements in the years before the bombing, based on interviews in Washington, Pakistan, India and Morocco, shows that he had overlapping, even baffling, contacts among seemingly disparate groups — Pakistani intelligence, terrorists, and American drug investigators.
Those ties are rekindling concerns that the Mumbai bombings represent another communications breakdown in the fight against terrorism, and are raising the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A.
More significantly, they may indicate American wariness to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.
The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.
It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley — who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities — or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by their strained relations with their husband.
Federal officials say that the State Department and the F.B.I. investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley at the time, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. D.E.A. officials have said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training. But some Indian officials say they suspect that Mr. Headley’s contacts with the American drug agency lasted much longer.
The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American ex-wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar.
On Saturday, Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement, “The United States regularly provided threat information to Indian officials in 2008 before the attacks in Mumbai.” He also said, “Had we known about the timing and other specifics related to the Mumbai attacks, we would have immediately shared those details with the government of India.”
Mr. Headley’s American wife was not the only one to come forward. The Moroccan wife described her separate warnings in an interview with The New York Times. Other interviews illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI.
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(Read More: NY Times)
