Greece’s money managers are warning of damage to an already crippled economy should European leaders move to restructure the country’s debt. Greek bond yields and the cost of insuring the country’s debt against default rose to all-time highs amid speculation about a debt write-off or an extension of repayment timelines. Standard & Poor’s yesterday cut Greece’s long-term sovereign credit ratings two levels to B, five notches below investment grade. The ratings may be lowered further, S&P said. “Right now a restructuring shouldn’t and can’t happen,” Aris Xenofos, president of the Hellenic Fund & Asset Management Association representing 36 firms, said in an interview before the cut. “It would be devastating for the Greek economy, and detrimental for the rest of the European Union and the euro.” Greece is relying on its 110 billion-euro ($157 billion) bailout last year from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, as well as Treasury bill sales, to meet its funding needs through 2011. As part of the package, Greece is supposed to regain access to markets next year and refinance at least 75 percent of its maturing medium- and long-term debt. The government is cutting state jobs and reducing debt at nationally owned enterprises as well as overhauling the country’s tax and pension system to boost revenue. “The key issue is not a restructuring, but the extent to which the economy and Greek society will manage to produce and deliver results following the structural reforms,” said Xenofos, who also is managing director of EFG Eurobank Mutual Fund Management Co., part of Greece’s second-largest bank. Euro Partners Euro-region officials said that Greece needs “a further adjustment program” after an unscheduled meeting over the weekend with Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, chair of the group of finance ministers. A restructuring would hurt more than providing the country with additional help, the senior finance spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party said yesterday in Berlin. Yields on two-year Greek notes increased 25 basis points to 25.58 percent yesterday after hitting a record last month. The 10-year yield rose 22 basis points to 15.73 percent, up from 12.4 percent at the start of the year. Credit-default swaps on Greek debt jumped 19 basis points to a record 1,360, according to CMA, signaling a 68 percent probability of default within five years. The markets should wait until next year to see if there are signs Greece’s economy is returning to growth, Xenofos said at his Athens office on April 29. “We need to wait until at least the earlier part of 2012 to see where we are and whether we need to start discussing more serious scenarios for a restructuring and the conditions and nature such a restructuring would take,” Xenofos said. Greece’s economy, juicy couture outelt in its third year of a recession, is forecast by the government to shrink 3 percent this year before returning to growth in 2012. The country’s debt is projected to peak at 59 percent more than economic output in 2012. The country plans 76 billion euros of austerity measures and state-asset sales through 2015 that aim to cut the budget deficit to close to 1 percent of gross domestic product from a targeted 7.4 percent this year. “Greece’s problems won’t be solved by restructuring its debt but by restructuring the country,” Prime Minister George Papandreou said April 15.

Gold may extend gains for a second day on speculation that investors will return to commodity markets as concerns over the global economic recovery eased and the dollar weakened versus major currencies. Silver advanced. Immediate-delivery gold was little changed at $1,495 an ounce at 8:53 a.m. in Singapore after rallying 1.4 percent on May 6, paring last week’s loss to 4.4 percent. Cash silver rose as much as 1.2 percent to $36.0413 an ounce before trading at $35.77. Silver futures jumped 1.7 percent. The Standard & Poor’s GSCI Index of 24 commodities declined 11 percent last week, the most since December 2008, and erased all the gains since mid-March, led by a 27 percent plunge in silver futures. The dollar fell as much as 0.4 percent against six major currencies today. “Gold and silver may regain strength as traders perceive last week’s commodities washout to be excessive and it isn’t viewed as a trend reversal,” said Park Jong Beom, Seoul-based trader with Tongyang Futures Co. air max 2011 “There’s no change in the outlook for a weaker dollar as well.” The value of all 24 commodities tracked by the S&P GSCI index was about $805 billion on May 6, compared with $891 billion on April 29, according to data compiled by Bloomberg on the number of outstanding contracts and prices of futures closest to delivery. Combined holdings of exchange-traded products backed by precious metals fell to $119 billion from $132 billion, the data show. American employers added more jobs than forecast in April and previous monthly gains this year were revised up, easing concern the economy is cooling.juicy couture outelt Payrolls expanded by 244,000 last month, the biggest gain since May 2010, after a revised 221,000 increase the prior month, the Labor Department said on May 7 in Washington. “We see no reason to panic about recent price declines,” Monty Guild, chief executive officer at Guild Investment Management Inc., wrote in a note last week. “Nothing has changed, except for the fact that some highly-leveraged speculators have been forced to sell. After the panic has ended, buying opportunities at low prices will abound.” Immediate delivery palladium fell 0.4 percent to $718 an ounce, while platinum rose 0.2 percent to $1,789.50 an ounce.

Report: Hamas agrees in principle to new proposal; Hamas expected to compromise in order to gain popularity ahead of Palestinian elections. By Avi Issacharoff and Jack Khoury Hamas has agreed in principle to a new proposal aimed at securing the release of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, Al Jazeera television reported on its website Sunday. The report said the plan was forumated by Egypt. Egyptian sources told Haaretz Sunday that although Egypt has renewed efforts to promote a deal for Shalit's release, no actual negotiations have begun. Egypt is trying to exert pressure on Hamas to soften its stance so that a deal can be concluded, which would include the release of Palestinian prisoners. The Egyptians are aware that if there are Palestinian elections, Hamas would need to present accomplishments to the Palestinian public. Palestinian sources said Egypt has been working hard to advance a deal to free Shalit, who has been in Hamas captivity since June 2006, since Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation agreement last week, according to the report. "Reliable" sources quoted in the report said the Egyptians intend to present their plan to an envoy who is due to arrive in Cairo shortly. It was not immediately clear whether this was a reference to David Meidan, who was recently appointed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's negotiator on the Shalit issue. Meidan is due in Egypt shortly, as Haaretz reported last week. Senior Egyptian officials expressed optimism about the chances for a deal on Shalit's release. The Egyptians have resumed mediating Shalit negotiations and have made it clear to Hamas that they want an agreement on the issue wrapped up quickly. Netanyahu referred to Shalit at a Memorial Day ceremony on Jerusalem's Ammunition Hill last night. Not a day passes in which his government is not working to bring home Israel's captive and missing soldiers, "including Gilad Shalit, who is being held by a cruel enemy," Netanyahu said. (See Memorial Day coverage, Page A4. ) Prior to the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Hamas was suspicious of his intentions on the matter,2011 air max suspecting that he did not want a deal concluded because it would complicate matters for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. More than a week ago, two leaders of the Hamas military wing visited Egypt, where they reportedly made contact with Egyptian intelligence officials on the Shalit case. The Al Jazeera website reported that Egyptian officials also discussed the Shalit case with Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal while Meshal was in Cairo last week for the signing ceremony. So far the Hamas military wing has been standing in the way of a deal, but observers expect that it will be willing to compromise because political issues will garner increased attention with elections coming up. In addition, the military wing is currently seen as relatively weak. Such a compromise could include willingness to accept Israel's release of Hamas prisoners to Gaza, rather than the West Bank. The Egyptian officials responsible for maintaining ties with the Hamas leadership are Murad Muwafi, Egypt's new intelligence chief, and one of his deputies, Mohammed Ibrahim. Muwafi has the trust of Hamas and Ibrahim has been involved in Shalit negotiations from the beginning. Since German mediator Gerhard Conrad has failed to get Israel and Hamas to agree on the terms for Shalit's release, Egypt has in effect taken over as the primary intermediary. Noam Shalit, the captive soldier's father, told Haaretz yesterday that he had not been provided any new information on negotiations for his son's release and said Netanyahu's remarks yesterday were nothing new. What's important is the results, he said, and by that measure, the bottom line is that his son has been in captivity for nearly five years.

For 76 years, the bankers, catfish farmers, and corn and soybean growers who make up the Delta Council have gathered to talk crops and politics, and listen to speeches by governors, senators and, on one occasion, William Faulkner. The regular crowd was no different on Friday morning, full of seersucker and smiling politicians, but the conversation was overwhelmed by one topic. “Water can be a wonderful and dangerous thing,” said Albert Santa Cruz, the state public safety commissioner. “If it’s coming, get out. And it’s coming.” All eyes in the delta are on the Mississippi River and the bulge of water it is carrying southward, pushing back its tributaries into the towns along its banks, air max 2011 sending residents scattering toward higher ground and setting records all along the way. “This is historic,” said Col. Jeffrey R. Eckstein, commander of the Vicksburg District of the Army Corps of Engineers, who became the day’s keynote speaker at the last minute. “Things that have never happened, people here have never seen before, we are going to see.” Officials have already spent days fighting back the White River in Arkansas, where there have been two deaths and hundreds of homes have flooded. Hundreds of residents are being urged to evacuate certain areas in and around Memphis, where tributaries have swelled into parts of the city as well as suburbs and mobile home parks and inundated a small airport. The river is still a couple of weeks away from cresting in the delta, but experts are predicting all-time records here. As it bulges past Natchez around May 22, it is projected to be several feet above the height it reached in 1927, when the river broke its banks, flooded 27,000 square miles, killed hundreds and displaced thousands. The flood-control system that arose in the wake of that flood has never been put to such a test. “It will be pressured, there’s no question,” said John M. Barry, the author of “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.” “That’s about as close to the design capacity as I care to get.” Unlike in the 1927 flood, the levees along the Mississippi are not causing the greatest concern, officials and river watchers say. The anxiety is in the backwater, the tributaries that are carrying water from the heavy rains down to the Mississippi. The river is not only too high to take any more water, but is also pushing its own water up into the tributaries — and wherever else it can go. That is what has happened in Arkansas, where the White River, fattened from weeks of heavy rains, has forced the evacuation of towns along its course and the closing a stretch of busy Interstate 40 between Little Rock and Memphis. On Saturday night, the White River’s crest will be passing the little town of Des Arc, Ark., where a man has already been found dead. While the river is not expected to spill over the levees, said Davis Bell, the spokesman for the Prairie County emergency management agency, “it will be absolutely at the very tip top.” The engorged river is still several days away from cresting in Memphis but has already prompted the authorities to go door to door in areas that are likely to be affected, urging hundreds of residents to move to higher ground. Bob Nations, the director of the Shelby County Office of Preparedness, estimated that 3,000 homes and businesses would eventually be affected by the floodwaters. Meanwhile, those in the lower Mississippi Delta have been watching uneasily, as, in the phrasing of Gov. Haley Barbour, the pig comes down the python. All but one of the 18 casinos along the river in Mississippi will be closed by early next week. Evacuations have already begun in certain areas along the river and shelters have begun to open for the several thousand individuals the state expects will need a place to stay. Mr. Barbour himself spent last weekend taking the furniture out of his lake house, which he estimated would take in 10 feet of water. The anxiety here in the delta is concentrated on the Yazoo River, which forms the eastern border of the delta before joining the Mississippi just north of Vicksburg.

Pakistani officials say the Obama administration has demanded the identities of some of their top intelligence operatives as the United States tries to determine whether any of them had contact with Osama bin Laden or his agents in the years before the raid that led to his death early Monday morning in Pakistan. The officials provided new details of a tense discussion between Pakistani officials and an American envoy who traveled to Pakistan on Monday, as well as the growing suspicion among United States intelligence and diplomatic officials that someone in Pakistan’s secret intelligence agency knew of Bin Laden’s location, air yeezy and helped shield him. Obama administration officials have stopped short of accusing the Pakistani government — either privately or publicly — of complicity in the hiding of Bin Laden in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. One senior administration official privately acknowledged that the administration sees its relationship with Pakistan as too crucial to risk a wholesale break, even if it turned out that past or present Pakistani intelligence officials did know about Bin Laden’s whereabouts. Still, this official and others expressed deep frustration with Pakistani military and intelligence officials for their refusal over the years to identify members of the agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, who were believed to have close ties to Bin Laden. In particular, American officials have demanded information on what is known as the ISI’s S directorate, which has worked closely with militants since the days of the fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan. “It’s hard to believe that Kayani and Pasha actually knew that Bin Laden was there,” a senior administration official said, referring to Pakistani’s Army Chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the ISI director-general, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha. But, added the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue, “there are degrees of knowing, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we find out that someone close to Pasha knew.” Already, Pakistani news outlets have been speculating that General Pasha, one of the most powerful figures in Pakistan, may step down as a consequence of the Bin Laden operation. The increasing tensions between the United States and Pakistan — whose proximity to Afghanistan makes it almost a necessary ally in the American and allied war there — came as Al Qaeda itself acknowledged on Friday the death of its leader. The group did so while vowing revenge on the United States and its allies. Pakistani investigators involved in piecing together Bin Laden’s life during the past nine years said this week that he had been living in Pakistan’s urban centers longer than previously believed. Two Pakistani officials with knowledge of the continuing Pakistani investigation say that Bin Laden’s Yemeni wife, one of three wives now in Pakistani custody since the raid on Monday, told investigators that before moving in 2005 to the mansion in Abbottabad where he was eventually killed, Bin Laden had lived with his family for nearly two and a half years in a small village, Chak Shah Mohammad, a little more than a mile southeast of the town of Haripur, on the main Abbottabad highway. In retrospect, one of the officials said, this means that Bin Laden left Pakistan’s rugged tribal region sometime in 2003 and had been living in northern urban regions since then. American and Pakistani officials had thought for years that ever since Bin Laden disappeared from Tora Bora in Afghanistan, he had been hiding in the tribal regions straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. A former Pakistani official noted that Abbottabad, the site of the Pakistani equivalent of the West Point military academy, is crawling with security guards and military officials who established a secure cordon around the town, raising questions of how the officials could not know there was a suspicious compound in their midst. “If he was there since 2005, that is too long a time for local police and intelligence not to know,” said Hassan Abbas, a former Pakistani official now teaching at Columbia University.

Republican presidential hopefuls came out swinging in their first debate Thursday night, attacking President Obama's foreign policy despite his leadership in ordering an operation that killed Usama bin Laden this week. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty congratulated Obama for capturing the world's most wanted terrorist nearly 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks. "I tip my cap to him in that moment," he said. "But that moment is not the sum total of America's foreign policy. He's made a number of other decisions relating to our security here and around the world that I don't agree with." Pawlenty cited Libya as one example, saying he didn't agree with Obama's decision to defer to the United Nations on how to deal with Muammar Qaddafi's violent crackdown on rebels. "If he says Qaddafi must go, he needs to maintain the option to make Qaddafi go and he didn't do that," he said. Former Pennsylvania Sen. gucci outlet Rick Santorum said the only thing Obama has done right in his foreign policy is continue President George W. Bush's policies. "The decision he made with Usama bin Laden was a tactical decision," he said. "It wasn't a strategic decision.The strategic decision was made by President Bush to go after him. What President Obama has done on his watch, the issues that have come up while he's been president, he's gotten it wrong strategically every single time." Pawlenty and Santorum were among the five participants seeking to prove themselves to be more than the party's B-team as they try to catapult their White House bids into the national spotlight. Fox News and the South Carolina Republican Party sponsored the debate that also featured Texas Rep. Ron Paul, former New Mexico Gov. Gary John and businessman Herman Cain. They are the only candidates who met the sponsors' criteria to participate: forming a presidential exploratory committee, filing state GOP paperwork and paying $25,000 to get on the state primary ballot. The GOP field is still taking shape, with about a dozen Republicans considering a White House bid or taking initial steps toward full-fledged campaigns. Among the notable absences were Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich. They missed out on a chance to weigh in on the biggest issues of the day, including whether to release a photo of bin Laden's corpse, something that Obama has said he won't do. But four of the five participants said they would release the photo. Cain was the only one who opposed it. At one point, Johnson, a libertarian-leaning Republican who backs gay rights and legalizing some drugs, cried foul over not getting as many questions as his fellow debaters. Fox News' anchor Bret Baier said the moderators would be "fair and balanced" with the questions. Earlier Thursday, each participant toured the debate site. Cain, a former Federal Reserve banker and CEO of Godfather's Pizza, was the first to set foot on stage. Later came Pawlenty, who zinged those rivals who chose to skip the debate. "One of the things about leadership is that you've got to show up," he said. "And if you want to be president of the United States you've got to make a case to the American people that Barack Obama needs to be dismissed from his position." Santorum, who's spent more time in the early voting states than any other candidate this year, cast himself as the most ardent conservative in the White House race. "People that said, you know, put the moral issues aside, or, you know, don't talk about the families, they don't understand what makes America works, they don't understand the dynamic that is at play when that has made America the greatest country in the history of the world," Santorum said. Paul, who renewed his demand for U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan and Iraq Wednesday was the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 1988. His 2008 GOP-run inspired the modern Tea Party movement and he planned to address the marathon South Carolina Tea Party rally after Thursday's debate.

NATO said on Thursday that the alliance was making progress in Libya, but still has trouble hitting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's troops. "The difficulties are there, but we are systematically degrading Gaddafi forces," Italian Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola, president of NATO's Military Committee, said during a press conference at NATO headquarters. Di Paola said that NATO had difficulties in bombing Gaddafi's forces, which are still playing their tactics of "shoot and scoot" after withdrawing to the outskirts of Misrata, a rebel-held city near Tripoli. The general refused to predict how long the NATO mission in Libya would last. "What I can say, 2011 air max 28 nations of the alliance have said they will continue until preconditions for Gaddafi are met. So, it is up to Gaddafi to decide when it is to stop or not," he said. "Much like it has been near impossible to displace either Intel or Microsoft in the PC space, it is likely to be equally hard to displace ARM in these new device classes, because ARM is entrenched and the ecosystem around it is becoming more robust by the day," Enderle said. He said Intel desperately needs some very large design wins to get moving in the tablet and smartphone markets. And this 3D chip announcement is a strong place to start. "Intel has virtually nothing compelling in either the tablet or smartphone space in terms of a shipping product," he added. "[The new technology] is core, no pun intended. This is generally how they advance. But Intel needs to address technology and marketing requirements and, so far, they are only effective on technology."

Intel announced on Wednesday that it had made the production of 3-D transistors a commercially viable reality and further claimed that in so doing, the company would continue to meet or beat the promise of Moore's Law for years to come. Intel cofounder Gordon Moore realized that through various innovations in process, chemistry, and geometry, it was predictable that transistors would shrink and that products built on them would become more powerful, less costly, or both. But that doesn't mean that adhering to Moore's law is easy. It requires constant research and investment to find and commercialize innovations that allow for smaller and smaller transistors. As they're used in integrated circuits like microprocessors, transistors can be thought of as switches, when they're on, current flows, when they're off, no current flows. The goal of the transistor designer is to make the perfect switch, lots of power can flow when turned on, 2011 air max absolutely no power flows when turned off, and the switch can change states very quickly, requiring very little power to do so. Generally, the smaller the transistor, the less power it needs to do its thing, but as transistors get very small, you can think of them as behaving less like a switch, and more like a valve. Valves take time to close, they can be leaky, and the more stuff (water or whatever) that you want to flow through the valve, the bigger it has to be. Using the valve analogy, you can immediately understand some truisms about transistors. Leaky ones are bad, and smaller ones can usually open and close faster than bigger ones, but they let less water (or current in the case of transistors) through. Further, a valve that's designed to close very tightly can often be slower to close than one that's a little bit leaky. These are the sorts of trade-offs that integrated circuit transistor designers have to deal with. They chose the geometry of the transistor, the process for making it and the materials that will be used to meet speed, power consumption, and cost constraints. Online social networking poses new risks and challenges for IT Management. Address these risks with 7 simple steps. Chips in the first PC CPUs were designed in the early 1970s, had about 3,500 transistors, and used a 10-micrometer manufacturing process. Now, chips have north of 3 billion transistors on a chip and use a process closing in on 10 nanometers, making today's transistors almost a million times smaller than those from the 1970s. To make that happen, almost everything about chip making has changed in those 40 years, but one thing that hasn't--until now--is the planar nature of the process. Classical chip manufacturing starts with substrate, usually a wafer cut from a silicon ingot. To make transistors on that wafer, manufacturers go through processes of depositing very specialized materials and then etching some that material off. Each layer's material is different, and each etching uses a different mask to produce the desired geometry. The process results in a planer design--if you want more current to flow, you make a wider channel for it. If you want valves that close very quickly, you make them as small as possible, and so on. The valve or gate is a material that sits across the channel. Depending on the charge state of the gate, the channel material conducts better or worse. When a transistor is off (no electrical field present), some current still gets across the channel. This is referred to as leakage current, and even a little of it is very bad news. While leakage current is a tiny amount in one transistor, if you multiply it by a billion or so transistors, it adds up. In servers it results in heat and in handheld devices it results in reduced battery life. Basically, the smaller the channel, the more you have to worry about leakage current. So as manufacturers go to smaller gates, they have to be very careful to get the geometry right--meaning the etching process needs to be good, and they have to resort to more exotic materials to keep leakage current small--two of the techniques used to limit leakage include strained silicon and high-k dielectrics. Because the goal is to always pack more transistors on a chip, you can't make the channel wider, so as any New York City developer knows, the answer is to go vertical. Doing so creates more surface area between the channel and gate, and therefore allows better control of its characteristics. Besides allowing for better control of leakage current, going vertical also allows for faster operation of the gate. It can now close off the channel from three sides--hence the name tri-gate--rather than just one. Alternatively, operating voltage can be reduced, which further saves power when the transistor--and hence device--is in its active state. While conceptually elegant, the notion of going up has one big problem. It doesn't work all that well in the classic process of depositing and etching away material to create the integrated circuit. This, along with other materials challenges, is what Intel has apparently solved in a way that is commercially viable. So viable, that it says using its 3-D design incurs no more than a 3% increase in cost. Intel has a lead on this technology. It appears that competitors are a good 24 months behind in bringing it to market. With the new technology, transistor-operating voltages can go down thus saving power, while maintaining performance. Intel, like its competitors are driving toward 14 nm processes, which will almost certainly require 3-D transistor geometry to keep power dissipation low. All in all, 3-D transistors are an enabling technology for all chipmakers. The good news all-around is that Moore's law marches on.

There were 79 people on the assault team that killed Osama bin Laden, but in the end, the success of the mission turned on some two dozen men who landed inside the Qaeda leader’s compound, made their way to his bedroom and shot him at close range — all while knowing that the president of the United States was keeping watch from Washington. The men, hailed as heroes across the country, will march in no parades. They serve in what is unofficially called Seal Team 6, a unit so secretive that the White House and the Defense Department do not directly acknowledge its existence. Its members have hunted down war criminals in Bosnia, fought in some of the bloodiest battles in Afghanistan and shot three Somali pirates dead on a bobbing lifeboat during the rescue of an American hostage in 2009. The raid early Monday morning in Pakistan has nonetheless put a spotlight on a unit that has been involved in some of the American military’s most dangerous missions of recent decades. Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said the Seal commandos went into the mission with only a 60 percent to 80 percent certainty that Bin Laden was in the compound. Mr. Panetta said the commandos made the “split-second decision” to shoot him — the unarmed Qaeda founder had a rifle within reach, an American official said Wednesday — when they found him in his third-floor bedroom. There was no debate among former Seal members that whoever had shot Bin Laden had done the right thing. “It’s dark; there’s been a lot of bullets flying around, a lot of bodies dropping; your mission is to capture or kill Bin Laden; who knows what he’s got tucked in his shirt?” said Don Shipley, 49, a former Seal member who runs Extreme Seal Experience, a private training school in Chesapeake, Va. Mr. Shipley was reacting to earlier Obama administration accounts of an extended firefight at the compound, but on Wednesday, administration officials revised the narrative, saying that the only shots fired came at the beginning of the raid, from a courier. “It happens in an absolute blink of an eye for these guys,” Mr. Shipley said. “And there’s that target in front of you. Second chances cost lives.” Lalo Roberti, 27, a former Seal member who teaches at Mr. Shipley’s school and took part in a gruesome rescue mission in Afghanistan in 2005, concurred. “For us to take a shot, it has to be bad,” Mr. Roberti said. “Especially for the ‘6’ guys.” Inside the Navy, air yeezy there are regular unclassified Seal members, organized into Teams 1 to 5 and 7 to 10. Then there is Seal Team 6, the elite of the elite, or, as Mr. Roberti put it, “the all-star team.” Former Seal members said this week that the unit — officially renamed the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or Devgru — was chosen for the bloody Bin Laden raid, the most high-profile operation in the history of the Seals, because of the group’s skills in using lethal force intelligently in complex, ambiguous conditions. All Seal members face years of brutal preparation, including a notorious six months of basic underwater demolition training in Coronado, Calif. During “hell week,” recruits get a total of four hours of sleep during five and a half days of nonstop running, swimming in the cold surf and rolling in mud. About 80 percent of the candidates do not make it; at least one has died. For those who succeed, more training and then deployments follow. After several years on regular Seal teams, Team 6 candidates are taught to parachute from 30,000 feet with oxygen masks and gain control of a hijacked cruise liner at sea. Of those Seal members, about half make it. Ryan Zinke, 49, a former member of Seal Team 6 who is now a Republican state legislator in Montana, said members of Team 6 had a certain personality: “I would say cocky, arrogant.” Seals — the term stands for Sea-Air-Land teams — were created by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 as a way to expand unconventional warfare. Seal Team 6 came later as a reaction to the botched mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, when the Pentagon saw the need for what became today’s Special Operations Command, with a special Navy unit focused on counterterrorism. Seal Team 6 has historically specialized in war on the seas, but in the decade since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it has increasingly fought on land in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its size is classified, but Team 6 is thought to have doubled to nearly 300 since then. Over all, there are now about 3,000 active-duty Seal members, split between odd-numbered teams in Coronado and even-numbered teams in Virginia Beach.

Good conspiracy theories don't die — they simply adapt. Shortly after the White House released President Obama's long-form birth certificate earlier this week — intended to offer more proof that he is a natural-born United States citizen — conspiracy theorists were working hard to "debunk" the document from the state of Hawaii. By Thursday, members of the so-called "birther" movement was asking at least a dozen new questions about the president's first days in the world. First off, the document is labeled "Certificate of Live Birth," which is the same as the label on the shorter-form document that Obama released during the presidential campaign, when these issues first surfaced. 2011 air max The online magazine Slate quoted Sharon Guthrie, legislative director for a Texas state legislator who has introduced birther legislation, as saying, "What I've seen online, what they produced today, still says `certificate of live birth' across the top. ? We want to see a 'birth certificate.'" Others insist that the certificate is forged. They claim that by using photo-editing software to examine the PDF file the White House released, it becomes clear that the document consists of several separate layers, indicating that it has somehow been manipulated. Other quibbles get even more detailed: Why is the "Date Accepted" on the certificate four days later than the "Birth Date"? Obama's father's race is listed as "African," but many argue that in 1961 the more likely term would have been "negro." The word "Caucasian" under the listing for Obama's mother's race looks too perfect to have been done with a typewriter from that time. Speaking of typewriters, others ask, why are the entries on the form centered instead of left-justified? And, because every good conspiracy needs a mysterious death, isn't it oddly convenient that the doctor who signed the birth certificate died eight years ago and thus cannot answer any questions? Sorry, President Obama. You gave the birthers exactly what they were asking for. And, now, they're running with it.